Wilmington MGC

Wilmington, NC

www.wilmingtonnc.gov/tabid/217/Default.aspx

From The Website:  The Wilmington Municipal Golf Course was designed by Donald Ross in 1926 to provide the public with a quality, championship 18 hole golf course at affordable prices. The course itself is host to both men's and women's City Championships.

In 1989 the golf course bunkers were restored and renovated to complete the visions Donald J. Ross began in 1926. In 2002, the course was named one of the top 10 public access golf courses in North Carolina by Golf Week Magazine.

From www.earthgolf.com founder Taylor Anderson, here's the skinny on Wilmington MGC and the rest of Wilmington NC's public golf scene (12/08):

"I had the opportunity to live in Wilmington, North Carolina over the summer and early fall. It allowed me to play many of the public golf courses in the greater Wilmington area. Being in the southeast corner of North Carolina, along the coast and not too far from the North Carolina sandhills, I had high hopes of what I would find there in terms of golf.

Unfortunately, I came away totally disappointed. The public golf is pretty bad. The best of the public accesible lot is undoubtedly the City of Wilmington’s Municipal Course. It’s an old Donald Ross course that underwent a renovation in the late 1990s. Golf Club Atlas’ profile of the course details how Ron Prichard, along with the Donald Ross Society, restored the bunkers to give the course a lot of life. I walked the course, which was a pretty easy walk, and really enjoyed many of the holes. It is incredibly affordable.

The other courses that I played included Echo Farms Golf Club, Beau Rivage Golf Club, Castle Bay Golf Club and Magnolia Greens Golf Club. The publicly accesible golf courses I did not play that are in the area were the Cape Golf Club, Belvedere Country Club, Olde Point Golf Club, Porters Neck Golf Club and Topsail Greens Golf Club. The Cape was undergoing a total renovation and was closed. What I saw from driving around the courses at Belvedere, Olde Point and Topsail Greens was totally uninspring. Portners Neck is a Tom Fazio design that I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to play. From what I saw of the few greens driving around the course, they did show some interesting contours that would have been fun to play. Magnolia Greens, which gets high marks in Golf Digest’s Places to Play (4 stars…) was about as boring and lifeless a golf course that I’ve ever played. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how or why people rank it as high as they do.

There are three private clubs that I never did get a chance to play. I was able to see some of Cape Fear Country Club, another Donald Ross layout. It was recently restored by Kris Spence and it looked fantastic. The day I was setup to play it, it poured and I never got a chance to get back to the course. The ultra-private Eagle Point by Tom Fazio is reportedly a really good tract. And there are two courses located inside a planned development called Landfall. One course by Jack Nicklaus and one by Pete Dye. I was able to see a little of the courses in Landfall - they looked in immaculate shape, but not very unique.

There is one course under construction - the terribly named Cape Fear National Country Club. It is part of a planned development already well under construction and with many homes already occupied. While it isn’t scheduled to open until late 2009, an article The Real Estate Channel caught my eye because of the comments made by Cape Fear National’s architect, Tim Cate."

Here's a good article I found on Golf Atlas, extolling the architectual virtues of this municipal Ross design:  http://golfclubatlas.com/courses-by-country/usa/wilmington-golf-course-nc-usa 

Fat Guy Notes:  Some good friends of mine live in the area, around Raleigh.  They have good friends who live in Wilmington, and they come down to the beach regularly for the weekend.  They said that overall, Wilmington has a bit of a slower pace, more Outer Banks than Jersey shore.  There's no boardwalk, and nightlife is fairly limited at the beach outside of a few good bars.  "It's the kind of place where you'd better be going with a group of good friends so you can entertain yourselves while you're there."

Where To Shop:  Fat Guy's Dad says there's a great BBQ store in Wilmington that features every dry rub, sauce, marinade, and grilling accessory you could ever want, but he's old enough to have forgotten the name even though he goes there every year, and for the life of me I couldn't find it on a Yahoo search.

Where To Grub: www.findyourspot.com recommends The Pilot House, an established landmark restaurant where local take in the open-air setting and savor delicious cuisine.

The North Carolina Barbecue Historic Trail is the brainchild of Jim Early, an attorney by profession and barbecue nut by avocation. The author of The Best Tar Heel Barbecue: Manteo to Murphy crisscrossed 22,000 miles of North Carolina blacktop researching his book. He ate in 228 barbecue joints, 140 of which made it into print. But the trail pays homage to just 25 establishments that prepare 'cue the old-fashioned way. They cook over open-pit fires, make their own sauce, offer sit-down dining, have been in business at least 15 years and, as Early puts it, "have the esteem of their community."

Which is no mean feat in a state as barbecue crazy as this one.

In the general vicinity of Wilmington, Early recommends:

At B's Barbecue and Grill in Greenville, customers are lining up outside the former gas station by 9 a.m. ("They eat barbecue for breakfast around here," says cook Dexter Sherrod.) As the lunch hour approaches, a trail of white- and blue-collar workers inches out the door. The owners post a "Closed" sign when they run out of 'cue — usually by 2 p.m. or so. But don't try to call ahead, because B's doesn't have a phone.

Fifteen miles south in Ayden, the Skylight Inn beams bright — or at least the aluminum capitol-style dome attached to its roof does. The billboard out front proclaims this "The Bar-B-Q Capital of the World," and to illustrate the point, the original owner, the late Pete Jones, added the dome to the single-story, 60-year-old restaurant. The menu went minimalist in the 1970s and has stayed that way: They serve barbecue with a side of slaw and a thick slab of cornbread. Period.

For more info on the North Carolina BBQ Trail, see the USA Today article at: http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2007-06-07-carolina-barbecue-trail_n.htm