New golf course at Kingsbarns

Review extracted from Golf Odyssey, 24 December 2000

A few weeks before this year's British Open, which saw Tiger Woods treat the Old Course with impertinence, a new golf course opened some fifteen minutes down the coast from St. Andrews. Designed and built by a couple of Californians named Kyle Phillips and Mark Parsinen, it is called Kingsbarns Golf Links, after the tiny Fife village where it is located. Already, Kingsbarns can fairly lay claim to greatness.

What Phillips and Parsinen did was take 190 acres of cornfield and pasture along the sea and create, out of whole cloth, a truly magnificent - and natural looking - linksland, with dunes of various sizes; wrinkled fairways; a plethora of humps, hillocks, and hollows; and cunning, little, rough-cloaked mesas (tables) and promontories. This is magic on the grandest possible scale! Nature had essentially no hand in it, except to provide the entrancing setting beside the North Sea. Yet even the most experienced observer would swear that this is authentic linksland, its striking contours the product of receding seas and persistent winds over tens of thousands of years.

Not so. How about excavators, dumpers, bulldozers, and backhoes?

In late July of 1998, two years before the course was completed, GOLF ODYSSEY anonymously visited the site and toured it with Mark Parsinen in his mud-spattered black Range Rover. Solidly built and about fifty, Parsinen strikes you as the kind of man who would not hesitate to dig in - literally - to get the job done.

"The first time I got to Scotland was in 1969," he said. "I was studying at the London School of Economics, and every chance I got I'd head up to St. Andrews and Carnoustie or to Muirfield or Troon or Dornoch. In the late 1970s I was back in London, working, and it was the same thing all over again, only now I was finding my way over to Ireland as well, with its wonderful seaside courses. I made some money in Silicon Valley during the 1980s and 1990s, but I knew that this would never be as satisfying as building golf courses. So I teamed up with Kyle Phillips - he'd been designing courses with Robert Trent Jones, Jr., for sixteen years - and we did Granite Bay, outside Sacramento. Then came the chance to do Kingsbarns - not simply in Scotland and smack beside the sea, but practically on the doorstep of St. Andrews."

"We jumped at it. But I realized that if we were going to create a real links at Kingsbarns today - there was a nine-hole course here for more than a hundred years, but they had to give it up when war broke out in 1939, and that was the end of it - anyway, I figured I better learn a lot more about links courses than I know just from playing them."

"So I did several things right off. I read Robert Price's book Scotland's Golf Courses, which concentrates on how the landforms themselves have played such a critical role in the actual development of the Scottish courses, and then I hired Dr. Price to consult on Kingsbarns."

"Next, I went back to seven or eight of those great links I'd been play playing for nearly thirty years. I looked closely at their dune systems - they're not all the same, by any means - and I took a lot of photographs and notes and made sketches. I wanted to show the crew at Kingsbarns what those landforms actually look like. I even sent our two key shapers over to Troon and Turnberry and up to Cruden Bay to see for themselves what I was talking about."

"And then, to make sure we wound up with authentic links turf - the right kinds of grasses in sandy, linksland soil - I retained Walter Woods, who had just retired as head greenskeeper at St. Andrews, to consult with me on an ongoing basis."

Parsinen talked animatedly while he drove (also animatedly), stopping from time to time so we could jump out and he could explain the design strategy of a particular hole. The course stretches along the coast, with its rocky foreshore, for more than a mile and a half. The sea would never be out of sight, and six holes would actually skirt it.

When we returned in July of this year, within a month of the opening, Kingsbarns Golf Links was already a magnet. The world, as if peremptorily summoned by the golfing gods, was on hand. We were paired with a Swedish former professional skier ("I heard about Kingsbarns in Stockholm") and a French golf tour operator. "Already there is much talk about this course in France," he said. "I got over here as soon as I could to see whether it is that good."

Golf

Kingsbarns measures as much as 7,120 yards and as little as 5,142 yards. But because this is free-draining linksland, the course plays shorter than the card suggests. Fairways are firm and fast - in high summer, extraordinarily fast. The game on the ground is even more important than the game in the air. In addition to the pleasure of run-ups from as much as one hundred yards off the green, you also relish the special thrill of a three-wood shot chasing vigorously up a slope to gain a putting surface that may be 230 yards away.

The bunkers, many with revetted faces, are frequently deep. And because of the uncanny fairway contouring, they often tend to gather in, at the last instant, a ball that had seemed to be skimming clear of their clutches. As for the rough, it is the wispy golden fescue that lightly brushes your legs and is not lush, so balls are easily found and you have a wide choice of recovery shots.

With a superlative routing plan that takes advantage of the overall elevation change of seventy-five feet, no golf hole here is less than good, and at least six are genuinely great. To focus solely on the inbound nine, the outstanding holes are the 12th (566 yards, down at first, then up to a colossal green at the sea); 15th (185 yards, a forced carry across the sea-showered rocks to a green on a spit of land, Carnoustie dead ahead over the flagstick); 17th (432 yards, steeply uphill to a plateau green, ten unnerving pits along the way); and 18th (414 yards, the second shot spanning a deep swale with a narrow burn at the bottom to rinse the ball that fails to reach the elevated green).

It is all splendid stuff, exhilarating from start to finish, a triumph of ingenuity, artistry, and money over nature. Very probably the best course to open in Scotland since Turnberry was rebuilt after World War II, Kingsbarns is links golf of the highest order - and this time the links were man-made.

Golf Services

The attractive clubhouse, admittedly a bit cramped, is decorated with overstuffed furniture and takes full advantage of views of the links and sea.

The bar food - no orders after 6:30 p.m. - is tasty, but service can be slow. Locker and shower facilities are first-rate. The well-stocked pro shop is manned by a knowledgeable staff, and the spacious practice range is provided with good golf balls.

Lodging

Old Course Hotel Rusacks

Restaurants

Peat Inn Road Hole Grill Ciao Roma

Non-Golf Activities

Drive fifteen minutes up the coast from Kingsbarns and you are in the royal burgh of St. Andrews, with its ancient castle and cathedral, university (Prince William will matriculate next September), beguiling harbor, and beaches.

Six minutes down the coast is the royal burgh of Crail (see 'South of St. Andrews'), the most captivating East Neuk fishing village.

Golf Odyssey invites its members to submit their own reviews of courses they have played.

Here is the only entry for Kingsbarns Golf Links to date:

We played Kingsbarns in July during the British Open. I agree that it is a stunning golf course, and more important that it is a Fabulous Fraud, and that it is heresy to have this kind of golf course in Scotland.

When I go to the British Isles to play golf I want tradition and natural terrain and undisturbed golf courses, not courses where most of the construction budget was spent moving millions of tons of earth. We can get that in Florida or Arizona

Martin - Oct 31, 2000