Whistling Straits GR (Straits, Irish, Blackwolf Run River & Meadow Valleys Courses) @ The American Club

Kohler, WI  (halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay, 2.5 hours from Chicago)

www.whistlingstraits.com

  Whistling Straights #3

Golf Digest, 5/10

Golf Magazine

T&L Golf, July 2004, July/Aug 2008

Straits: 1998, Alice, Pete, & P.B. Dye
Black 7288, 76.7, 151, 72
Blue 6894, 74.2, 144, 72
Green 6450, 71.9, 78.1, 137, 146, 72
White 6144, 70.5, 76.4, 134, 142, 72

Irish: 2000, Pete Dye
Black 7201, 75.6, 146, 72
Blue 6750, 73.5, 141, 72
Green 6414, 72.0, 77.4, 137, 142, 72
White 6038, 70.3, 75.2, 133, 137, 72
Directions: From Sheboygan, I-43 to Exit 128, turn R, proceed to Dairyland Rd, turn L, go 4 mi., turn R on County Rd FF, 1 mi. to the course.

'10 Greens fees:  $340 include cart or $50 caddie fee, gratuity extra.

Rankings: Named 2005 #1 Best Golf Resort and #1 Buddy Trip Resort in the Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic, by T&L Golf

Straits Course named 2007 #8 Toughest Course in America by Golf Digest: "Dire Straits would be a better name. Given the opportunity to transform an abandoned Army bombing range along Lake Michigan, Pete Dye produced a blend of Ballybunion and Beirut, with ragged 70-foot-high faux dunes peppered with a million bunkers, some the size of your golf bag, others the size of the clubhouse. When Pete's wife, Alice, urged him to create harder holes that even the pros would double bogey, he added more bunkers and some railroad ties. So much for Alice being the gentler half of the team. "

Herb Kohler, head of the plumbing fixtures company, turned his personal fortune, a friendship with Pete Dye, and the Irish-like linksland on Lake Michigan into likely the 3rd most authentic destination in American golf (behind Pebble and Bandon Dunes).

Fat Guy Notes:  My buddy Kevin W. says, "“I’ve played a bunch of courses in the Top 100, and I can say that Straights is unlike any other course I’ve ever played. There’s just nothing else like it. Hard to believe the place was flat when Pete Dye showed up, or that he could create Straights with just some bulldozers and his imagination. It’s brutal. 141 slope. A tough day. Walking only, you’ll drop $4 Bones for a round with a caddy. All day long you’re up and down these dunes, searching for balls. The caddies definitely earn their keep. Not a level lie on the lot. Our round stretched to 5-1/2 hours (albeit with some hackers and essentially non-golfers in our corporate foursome). Then there’s the wind. It was blowing a steady 30-something-MPH the day we played. The famed par-3 12th hanging out over the lake measured 110-yards the day we were there, but it played more like 170. Any balls bending one direction or the other are just gone with the wind, and it’s not like there’s another fairway to play from over there, it’s all just shit on either side of the fairway (but you gotta be really bad to put it into the lake anywhere). I wouldn’t bring a senior golfer here unless they were a regular walker used to hilly courses and very fit. I wouldn’t bring an impatient golfer here, or a guy who’s very used to shooting his handicap on a 125 slope course, because they’ll just get worn out and frustrated. But if you like to be tortured, this is definitely the place.”

“I also played the Irish Course, and it was only slightly easier than Straights, but basically still as brutal. I only shot one stroke better on the Irish.”

“Food and resort are great too, just a great experience all around.”

Away Game

Hitting It Straits

By Matt Ginella, Golf Digest
June 2010

It seems like the stuff of strange male fantasies: two major-championship venues, a five-diamond resort, a porcelain museum displaying a wall of toilets and the Bentley of bathtubs (fully loaded, it's $12,000, and it comes with colored lights and an underwater sound system). Wait...it gets better: two females -- four hands -- administering an exfoliating water massage. I kid you not, these are just some of the realities that make up the American Club in Kohler, Wis., owned and operated by the plumbing-fixtures titan Herb Kohler. Clearly, golf's governing bodies are convinced "Destination Kohler" is special, and not just for its tricked-up toilets and tubs. They see the courses, an hour north of the Milwaukee airport, along the shore of Lake Michigan, as a perfect place to test the best.

A composite 18 of the two courses at Blackwolf Run is where Se Ri Pak won the U.S. Women's Open as a 20-year-old in 1998. The Women's Open will be back in 2012. The Straits course at Whistling Straits was the site of Vijay Singh's 2004 PGA Championship victory and Brad Bryant's U.S. Senior Open title in 2007. The PGA returns in August and in 2015. The Ryder Cup will be played at the Straits in 2020.

Kohler partnered with the PGA of America to bring the PGA Championship and Ryder Cup to his resort, but he still has his heart set on a men's U.S. Open. "I can't control things from the grave, but I can assure you, it'll happen in the 2020s or '30s," says Kohler, 71.

I played five rounds at some of Wisconsin's best public courses last fall: three at the American Club, one at Erin Hills ($160), site of the U.S. Amateur in 2011 and scheduled to reopen in August after renovations. I also had time for a game at the Bog ($95), a Palmer design conveniently located between Kohler and the airport. Buyer beware: The week of the PGA (Aug. 9-15) the Bog will be raising prices ($150-$175) and running two shotgun starts Wednesday through Sunday. My favorite of the five courses was the Straits, but not because it was easy.

"Ready to do battle?" That's what starter Joel Slabe asked as I walked to the first tee. Battle? I dialed back my scoring expectations, moved up to the green tees (6,463 yards) and listened to my caddie.

The topography of the Straits gives the sense that the course has been there since Father Time was a freshman. Its immaculate fairways are bordered by the kind of wispy fescue that you typically see on a Links of Ireland calendar. There are no carts, just gravel footpaths. Its two miles of Lake Michigan shoreline are patrolled by a flock of 29 Scottish blackface sheep that spend the day on the course, eating, drinking and making an occasional mess. So we had that in common.

    #6

The Straits, especially in calm conditions and from the appropriate tees, can be considered fun. (Keep that between us, or designer Pete Dye might make it harder.) Dye, with his cantankerous charm and propensity for the impossible, recently added a head-deep pot bunker in the middle of the sixth green. "I compare it to the bunker at the Road Hole of the Old Course," says Kohler. "It makes the easiest hole [355 yards] at the beginning of the round more interesting."

That's one way to describe it. Get on the opposite side of the green from where the hole is cut and you might be forced to chip off the putting surface. I was in the bunker, and it took me three to get out. That was interesting.

  #18

How many times have you heard a course claim "four of the best finishing holes in golf"? The Straits is one of the few that delivers. And when you're done, you've earned a stop at the back deck of the stone clubhouse that overlooks the 18th green and out on the lake. It's a perfect spot for lunch and/or a beer after the round.

Dye has designed three of the top 10 in America's 100 Greatest Public. For my money, the Straits (No. 3) deserves its edge over the Ocean Course at Kiawah (No. 4) and the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass (No. 9).

All three need a kick in the shin for hefty green fees. The Straits charges $400, which includes a caddie but not the tip. Still, the resort is offering some reasonable stay-and-play packages through October. Try the "To Dye Four": In May you get four rounds of golf (Straits, Irish, the U.S. Women's Open course at Blackwolf Run and one additional round on the course of your choice) and three nights at the American Club, the first AAA Five-Diamond Resort in the Midwest, for $1,507 on weekends. July through September the price, based on double-occupancy, goes up to $1,803 a person.

Another cost-saving suggestion is to stay at the Inn on Woodlake, the Kohler lodging option down the street from the American Club. The Inn on Woodlake is clean and simple and ideal for a buddies trip. You get a bed, bathroom, space, free wireless, a flat-screen TV and a masculine motif. Staying at the Inn on Woodlake brings the price of the "To Dye Four" package down to $1,341 or $1,589, depending on when you go, and there's a putting green in the back, perfect for settling bets.

All of the courses at the American Club are known for their pristine conditioning. The U.S. Women's Open course at Blackwolf Run ($230) comprises nine holes of the River course (tight, lots of undulations, cut among trees and streams) and nine holes of the Meadow Valleys course (flat and more open off the tee), both designed by Dye. The American Club closed those 18 championship holes in 2009 for a standard renovation of grass, greens and bunkers. The resort reopened it this year and closed the other 18 for the same update.

Caddies are required at the Straits, but they're optional at Blackwolf Run and the Irish course, which is next door to the Straits, and nine miles from the resort. It's a good inland complement to the Straits, more affordable ($170), with a memorable back nine.

I counted 50 pot bunkers on the 160-yard 13th hole. That's not interesting -- that's just silly.

[Fat Guy Note:  Golf Digest went back and counted every bunker on the Straights course... there are 967!]

Golf Magazine recommends the following long weekend itinerary for visiting Kohler:

Friday: Fly into Milwaukee or Chicago and drive the 1 to 2.5 hours north to Kohler. Grab lunch at the rambling Blackwolf Run log clubhouse, order the entree' salad. Hit a small bucket, then play 18 on the Meadow Valleys Course ($171+), a brilliant routing through glacially-formed ridges, hollows, and bluffs. This is the course Pete Dye likes to play when he's in town. Afterwards, check into your hotel before dinner.

Where To Stay: Go full boat at the 5-star American Club, with--big surprise--deluxe bathrooms (800-344-2838, Golf Magazine Gold Medal resort, summer/fall weekends $299 & up/night, 3 night/3 round packages for 2 from $2100). Better value at the Inn on Woodlake (800-344-2838, 2 night/3 round summmer/fall packages from $1600).

Saturday: Be sure to play the resort's marquee, walkers-only Straits course (site of the 2004 PGA Championship & #4 on Golf Magazine's 2000 Top 100 You Can Play, $270+) which could easily pass for the Emerald Isle. The land the Straits sits on was formerly a flatland military base, but Dye moved Heaven and earth to produce a pure lakeside linksland, featuring wide fescue fairways, evil bunkers, tricky greens, swirling winds, and complete with bleating sheep grazing the rough. One of Dye's all-time best collection of par-3's, each dangled above the shoreline. Eat lunch in the magnificent stone clubhouse, then kill the afternoon with a 17-mile bike trail ride along Old Plank Rd, canoe or fly-fish the Sheboygan River, or hike the River Wildlife preserve.

36 hole option: Tee it up at Whistling Straits' Irish Course ($198+), spread across a former military camp on low bluffs fronting the lake. A mish-mash of design styles, from links to parkland, that somehow falls together. Streams and ponds in play on 12 holes.

Sunday: Rise and shine for Blackwolf Run's River course ($171+), a brawny test guaranteed to steamroll pretenders, playing to a slope/rating as high as 151/74.9! Manage your ball tee to green, and you'll still likely face a slippery putt that breaks 3 ways. Gorgeous riverfront holes, but the best holes are on higher ground. No let-ups here; only Bethpage Black ranks better for parkland public golf. Lunch on the veranda overlooking the lazy river and 18th greens. Blackwolf was also named the #17 Toughest Course in America by Golf Digest 2007: "The winding Sheboygan River, in play on 10 holes, can tie you in knots. Plus, the club can flood the waste bunker on the 18th to create yet another water hazard--convenient for throwing your clubs into after a tough day. Or throwing yourself into instead." The 16th hole was named to Golf Digest's 2000 Modern Version of America's Best 18 holes: "Nobody does more risk-and-reward par-5 holes than Pete Dye, and in our judgment this is his best. It plays downhill and turns left off the tee, then it curves right, then comes back left again. The long fairway bunker left of the tee is deep and edged in tilted railroad ties-what else? Hug this off the tee or get past it, and you can see the green, but play down the right side, or even the center, and you can't. Now the green. It rests on a high bank of the Sheboygan River, and a railroad-tie bulkhead rambles all along the left side, dropping down into the water. Over on the right, a cavernous bunker. Aside from all this, a linden tree languishes at the inside corner of the last dogleg, just at the turn of the river, blocking the direct route to the green. Needless to say, you have plenty of options here. Additionally, you may want to heed the warning on the yardage-book diagram, which states: 'Be careful not to back off the green and into the river as you line up your putt.' "

Kill the afternoon among the designer bathrooms at Kohler Design Center, or shop the boutiques at Woodlake Kohler.

Golfcourse.com Review: The Straits is a walking-only links-style course located along 2 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline. The land was previously used as an Army base, with leftover toxic storage tanks, dilapidated runways and empty sheds making up the landscape. Dye put the land to good use, however. The fairways are 40-50 yards wide, which helps when the wind kicks up off of the lake. All 4 par 3's sit along the coastline and are the most scenic holes on the course.

Fat Guy Research:

Best Bar Nearby: The tavern-like Horse & Plow @ The American Club (920-457-8888). Don't pass up the grilled Sheboygan County sausage sampler. Start or end at the Winery Bar, a cozy piano lounge with a wide selection of Wisconsin cheeses and fine wines by the glass.

Where To Grub: Wisconsin Room @ The American Club (800-344-2838). OR, try gourmet restaurant The Immigrant, beneath The American Club. Golf Channel likes Kuchina's on Wood Lake. For likely the only good wings in this area, head for Legend Larry's in Sheyboygan. After bitching with friends that they couldn't get a good wing anywhere in the area, Larry opened up his own shop. His wings have since won many local and regional awards, and compete annually at the Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo, NY with local wing stalwarts.

Budget:  The greens fees for the four resort courses with a round at Erin Hills thrown in run $1,100 alone, and resort rooms are $300+/night, so figure a minimum budget of $3,000-$3,500 for a 4-day weekend with good eats.

Play Away: American Beauty
From T&L Golf July 2004
by Bob Cullen

Great golf destinations sometimes must first be great acts of imagination. It took vision for the legendary first shepherd at St. Andrews to start knocking stones around the links with his crook. It took foresight for James W. Tufts to conceive of Pinehurst in a part of North Carolina that had never produced much besides tar, timber and turpentine. But in the vision department, both the Scottish shepherd and Mr. Tufts are two down at the turn to an eighteen-handicapper named Herbert V. Kohler Jr. In the mid-1980s, he took a look at the little Wisconsin company town where his family made faucets and tubs and saw that it could become one of the world's finest golf resorts. Part of Kohler's creation will be on display this summer when his Straits course hosts the PGA Championship. The rest of it is equally worth seeing—and playing.

ORIENTATION
In the heart of cheese-head country, the village of Kohler sits a few miles outside Sheboygan, about midway between Milwaukee and Green Bay. To get there, fly into Milwaukee's General Mitchell International Airport and steer your rental car fifty minutes north on I-43—or just drive two hours from Chicago. On the way, you'll see cows. You'll see silos. When you get to Kohler (pop. 1,989), you'll see metal sculptures along the streets, because the Kohler clan is a patron of the arts. You'll see neat brick bungalows. You'll see no litter. You'll understand why, when TV producers do nostalgia sitcoms (Happy Days, That '70s Show), they often use Wisconsin as a setting. This is the America of blessed memory, so wholesome it almost squeaks.

PLAYING
Kohler entrusted the design of his four golf courses to one man, Pete Dye. This, of course, is like entrusting the decor of your entire house to Picasso. There's genius on display, but sometimes genius can go over the top.

You might want to start, as Dye did, with the two courses closest to the village, at the thirty-six-hole Blackwolf Run complex. It's a half mile or so from the gate to the Kohler headquarters (and nine miles from the two courses at Whistling Straits). The Sheboygan River winds through the property, and Dye brings it into play on no fewer than thirteen holes of the layout called, perhaps inevitably, the River course.

Two of the best of those holes are numbers nine and eleven. The ninth plays only 337 yards from the back tee, but it offers three different routes to the green. You can choose the blind tee shot well to the left of a towering pair of cottonwood trees; you can lay up with a precise iron short of a pit bunker and just left of the trees; or, if you're long and daring, you can take the short route that, like the road to Grandmother's house, leads over the river and around the trees. The 560-yard eleventh hugs a bend in the river and also rewards the daring. A good drive will leave you in a position to contemplate going for the green with a shot that must traverse the river's bend, avoid a seventy-foot-tall elm and not even think of fading.

The River course, with a slope of 151 from the back tees, might well be the finest of the four Kohler courses. It's classic. It's demanding. On almost every tee, the angle of the fairway or the bunkering requires thought from a player before he selects a line. All it lacks in comparison with the courses at Whistling Straits is Lake Michigan. Some players may find it a bit too demanding, and for them there is the Meadow Valleys course.

Not that Meadow Valleys is a pushover. When the USGA staged the 1998 U.S. Women's Open at Blackwolf Run, it used nine Meadow Valleys holes and nine River course holes to make a composite. Meadow Valleys has slightly more open terrain and a gentler attitude. Its final hole plays along the river, and the second shot is an iron across the water to a big double green shared with the eighteenth hole of the River course. But Dye obligingly built an alternate green on the fairway side of the river for golfers playing from the red tees.

The architect felt no such benevolence when the resort acquired a 560-acre parcel nine miles from Kohler, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, which was dubbed Whistling Straits. In building the Straits course there, Dye hauled in more than 13,000 truckloads of sand, enough to cover a football field with a pile more than twelve stories high. This transformed what had once been farmland into a craggy landscape of bluffs and dunes and more than a thousand bunkers. He had two miles of shoreline to work with, and he took brilliant advantage of it. The lake is a presence on every hole of the Straits course, which opened in 1998 and was awarded the PGA Championship only two years later. When the sun shines, the lake is gleaming and blue. When a fog rolls in, it can be ghostly, almost hidden.

Eight holes are snug against the water, and they rival the ocean holes at Pebble Beach. The par threes, in fact, may well be better than Pebble's seaside short holes. The twelfth features one pin position on an extremity jutting from the right side of the green, offering players a landing area roughly the size of a dining-room table. Miss right and you're in the lake. Bail left and you can't putt there from here. The longer lakeside holes require both muscle and resolve. From the new back tee on the 493-yard eighth, players see nothing but water, bunkers and gnarly dunes and must pick a target and carry the ball 260 yards to find short grass. The greens on all these holes are big. Most of them are subtle and difficult to read.

Dye did not have the Lake Michigan shoreline to work with when he turned to the last of the four Kohler layouts, Whistling Straits' Irish course, which opened in 2000. Instead he relied heavily on sand trucks and bulldozers. On the thirteenth, for instance, he built an enormous dune to hide the green of a par three. It's reminiscent of the "Dell Hole" at Lahinch or the fifteenth at Cruden Bay. Some players may find it different and charming; others may hear a cow mooing on their backswing and decide that, set against a landscape of silos and pastures, the hole is artificial.

Other holes on the Irish course just feel awkward. At the par-five eighteenth, for instance, the second shot for most will be a blind layup to a target bounded by woods and a bog. The hole is nicknamed "Black and Tan," after the combination of lager and stout that often concludes a round in Ireland. After playing the Irish course, a golfer may need one. Or two.

Both the Straits and the Irish course are walking only, and there is a full complement of caddies. It's wise to take one.

STAYING
The premier lodging in Kohler is at the American Club, a hotel with a history. Herb Kohler's uncle, Walter, built its nucleus in 1918 to house laborers in his plumbing-fixtures factory. The workers paid $27.50 per month for room, board and laundry. Amenities included a bowling alley and a library. Most of the tenants were immigrants, and Walter Kohler encouraged them to learn English and study for citizenship—hence the hotel's name. Everything in the place has been carefully renovated, restored and expanded, and the spectacular Waters Spa added in 2000. The rooms are plush, if not large, and each is equipped with a whirlpool bath manufactured, of course, by Kohler. For the budget-conscious, the village has the Inn on Woodlake. Guests at either have complimentary access to the Sports Core health club. They also receive priority on tee times at all courses—a veritable necessity for securing access to the immensely popular Straits and Irish tracks.

WINING AND DINING
The resort has nine restaurants, counting those in the golf clubhouses, where the fare varies from hearty and simple Midwestern dishes to gourmet dining. As patrons eat, they can watch sheep graze on the dunes through the mullioned windows of the clubhouse at Whistling Straits or the river flowing by at Blackwolf Run. Options include formal dining at the Immigrant Room, hearty American fare at the casual Horse & Plow or, for those in the mood for tasty desserts and pastries, the charming Greenhouse solarium. If venturing off campus, Trattoria Stefano in Sheboygan offers outstanding Italian cuisine. Of course, if one happens to go during the first weekend in August, during Sheboygan's annual Brat Days, it's a good bet he'll want to sample the local homage to the sausage in Kiwanis Park.

OTHER ATTRACTIONS
The resort will arrange shooting, hunting, fishing, horseback riding, hiking, canoeing and kayaking excursions. But, hey—those can be found at a lot of resorts. What can't be found at Pebble Beach or the Greenbrier is a tour of the Kohler Design Center, a self-proclaimed "mecca for kitchen and bath design ideas." It features the "great wall of china," a stacked array of porcelain plumbing fixtures as imposing as the Green Monster at Fenway Park. After touring the design center, check out the sculptures that line the village's winding walkways. The pieces are made mostly of cast metal and many were created by various artists-in-residence in the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan. Indeed, they're almost as impressive as the four works of art Pete Dye has created nearby.

TRIP PLANNER: KOHLER
PLAYING
BLACKWOLF RUN (River), 800-344-2838. Yardage/Slope: 6,991/151. Greens Fees: $176-$199. Architect: Pete Dye, 1988. T+L GOLF Rating: *****
WHISTLING STRAITS (Straits), 800-344- 2838. Yardage/Slope: 7,362/151. Greens Fee: $272. Architect: Pete Dye, 1998. T+L GOLF Rating: *****
BLACKWOLF RUN (Meadow Valleys), 800-344-2838. Yardage/Slope: 7,142/143. Greens Fees: $141-$164. Architect: Pete Dye, 1990. T+L GOLF Rating: ****1/2
WHISTLING STRAITS (Irish), 800-344-2838. Yardage/Slope: 7,201/146. Greens Fees: $141-$191. Architect: Pete Dye, 2000. T+L GOLF Rating: ***1/2

STAYING
THE AMERICAN CLUB, Kohler; 800- 344-2838, destinationkohler.com. Rooms: $142-$520. Suites: $552-$1,040.
THE INN ON WOODLAKE, Kohler; 800-344- 2838. Rooms: $90-$266. Suites: $172-$327.
DINING
BRAT DAYS (German), Kiwanis Park, Sheboygan; August 5-7; sheboyganjaycees.com. $
THE GREENHOUSE (Dessert), the American Club; 800-344-2838. $
THE HORSE & PLOW (American), the American Club; 800-344-2838. $$
THE IMMIGRANT ROOM (Contemporary Gourmet), the American Club; 800-344- 2838. $$$$
TRATTORIA STEFANO (Italian), Sheboygan; 920-452-8455. $$$
OTHER ATTRACTIONS
KOHLER DESIGN CENTER, Kohler; Monday- Friday 8 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; 920-457-3699.