worth playing, because unlike 18-holers there are numerous 9-holers you would be advised to avoid. Those that are just too basic and dull, often poorly conditioned. Evaluating and ranking our best 9-hole courses has been an interest of mine since I created the SA Top 100 Courses website and began driving around the country to explore our many far-flung facilities. Not being in a rush on these journeys I would pause at platteland dorps and seek out the local course. Some I could quickly dismiss, but others aroused my curiosity, and I began walking them. Senekal in the Free State was one of those. It was a long trek out to the far holes, the course deserted but for one fourball, and there were interesting holes to be admired. But what a grim- looking bolted-up clubhouse. It was then I determined that in any ranking of 9-holers, unlike the Top 100, the
WHALES & PENGUINS Simon’s Town is a quirky 9-holer where you can spot whales and penguins.
CLUBHOUSE: Must be an attractive building open most days of the week, have a welcoming 19th hole, and include basic facilities. AESTHETICS: The scenic values of the courses must add to the pleasure of the round. DESIGN VARIETY: How varied are the holes in differing lengths, configurations, hazards, and green shapes. INNOVATION: Creation of alternate greens, variety of tees from different angles, double pins, different pars for same holes. CHALLENGE: Does the course have length, hazards, rough, tight fairways, sloping greens? CONDITION: The quality of the fairways, tees, bunkers and greens relative to the club’s resources. 10 points are awarded for each criteria. millennium, has been an evolving work of design genius on the same footprint of land. With its latest routing it’s difficult to believe you’re not playing an 18-hole layout. On your second nine you find yourself playing several holes you hadn’t encountered the first time around. Metropolitan, one of SA’s oldest clubs, is another newish course, developed after half their original land was expropriated for the construction of Cape Town Stadium for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. A feature of the old Metropolitan 9-hole layout was its use of different greens branching off from the fairway of a hole. The opening three holes at the new Met each have two greens spaced some distance apart, making for entirely different holes. And the par-3 finishing hole has two greens virtually side by side. RANKING CRITERIA
clubhouse had to be awarded points in addition to the course and aesthetics. The clubhouse is the lifeblood of these rural 9-holers, and those that were attractively built and inviting to enter were the ones where you would find golfers. The club was in some cases a community hub. Courses with depressing clubhouse facilities were invariably devoid of life. The essential weakness of 9-holers for many is having to play them twice to get in your 18 holes, and the lack of variety becomes apparent if you play them often enough. I therefore took a keen interest in those courses where the club committee had reached the same conclusion and did something about it through some design innovation. This could mean anything from changing the angle of holes with tees spread far apart from each other, building additional greens, or playing holes at a different par from one nine to the other. At Mooi River in the KZN Midlands I was walking down a fairway to a distant green when I spotted a gap in the trees on my left. A fairway ran in there with an alternate green. Innovation thus became one of my six criteria for rating the 9-holers. The two best courses in this category I’ve seen are Kambaku in Mpumalanga and Metropolitan in Cape Town. Another used to be Gowrie Farm in the KZN Midlands, but the addition of seven new holes has turned Gowrie into an 18-hole course. With those 18 due to be opened in February-March it is no longer eligible for these 9-hole rankings. Also in that category is Vulintaba in Northern KZN. Kambaku, a newish layout opened this
BUSHVELD BEAUTY Kambaku’s short new par 4 (No 8 & No 17) on the banks of the Crocodile River.
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 59
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024
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