Garden City Golf Club
Played Garden City Golf Club in November 2019. They were doing quite a bit of maintenance when I went so you’ll see I rank this a lot lower than others in the Top Ones group but am hopeful to play again when it is in its usual great shape and am predicting it will move way up in my rankings. So I put my write-up here despite the maintenance and conditioning when I played.
Why am I confident? Well it does have the golf magazine cred – almost every major ranking puts this course in their Top 50. It has the history, the awe factor, and a great variety of holes. It is generally pretty flat but the green complexes are intriguing. Like Merion, GCGC is not blessed with an abundance of land but Emmet and later Walter Travis did a great job laying out a variety of good, solid golf holes with what they were given.
GCGC is a men’s club. Women are not allowed to join nor even play the course. Let’s talk about that for a second. I know some ladies (and their cuckolds) get really chapped about that. A men’s club is not my bag, I actually have female friends who range from plus/scratch to 25 handicaps and everything in-between that I enjoy playing with. I know some great cocktailers, some who love great tunes on the course, some who love to wager and some who would kick the asses of most guys I play with. The issue that some guys have with ladies on the course is pace of play but none of the females I play with exhibit any mopey traits (which I go over in length on my Oakland Hills write-up). BTW, the dude below had to be a GCGC member…
All that said, while I wouldn’t want my home course to be a men’s only club, if the 399 members at GCGC want their club to be men exclusive, then so be it. I heard if they go to 400 members they have to accept a woman member so they keep it under that number. Now that’s a determined all male club. Again, not my cup of tea, but to those feminist screamers out there, too fucking bad. These guys are in a private club, they could care less about any tourneys or whatnot and want a club with just men. If you want, go build a Top 100 club for just women. It would suck that I would never be able to play it but I doubt I’m ever getting on Augusta either, so I’d survive. But I digress.
Jackets are required to even enter the clubhouse here. It’s funny, you can wear shorts or whatever, as long as you have a jacket. Lunch here is a treat. The locker room manager is awesome and the morning bloodies sitting by the fireplace in the men’s locker room made the experience a musky man treat!
To the course. The regular tees here play to just under 6,600 yards and a 135 slope so this is no pushover. I like a benign opener and GCGC starts with a sub-300 yard par four. I love going driver, Lovett wedge from the fairway and having a tap-in par to start a round. The second is a par three with a quarry pit left of the green. Luckily I just stayed up and at even par through two. Three and four bring OB into play right and damn, that’s just where I went on both so the score keeping will stop here. Because of the consecutive OB’s, my score on the front was not great but overall played well here and finished with an 89 (a 42 on the back). The fairways are large and if I was a smart man I would’ve made sure I didn’t miss right on three and four and would have really scored well. Love the par-three 18th. Great finisher to the clubhouse. In all, this is a very different golf experience. Like or hate the all men’s thing, it is unique and made for a vastly different golf experience than you’d get on your average run-of-the-mill club.
Golf Scrapbook 