Old Faithful - Southern Dunes

March is high season for golf in Arizona. The weather is perfect and the prices used to be astronomical! With the recession and the advent of golf sites like golfnow.com and golfhub.com, the golf courses are scrambling for players and the green fees are pretty reasonable. It still costs well over $150 to play The Stadium Course at the TPC of Scottsdale, where the Waste Management Phoenix Open is played, or Superstition Mountain Golf Club, where the skins game was played for a few years, but there are a lot of great courses in the Phoenix metropolitan area that you can play for $75 or less in high season through internet specials.

Chad Feldheimer and I scoured the internet specials, but we ultimately decided to fall back to one of our favorite courses, Southern Dunes Golf Club. Southern Dunes is arguably in the Phoenix metropolitan area, but just slightly. It is a 45-minute drive from mid-town Phoenix, but it is well worth it! The course is a Scottish links design and in your mind's eye you can almost see the sheep grazing in the fairways keeping the grass closely cropped. Southern Dunes did not overseed the fairways this winter and the grass is just starting to green up and grow with all of the rain we have had this winter, but the lies are still very tight. Almost every hole on the course is interesting and challenging and the pin placements this weekend were more difficult than usual.

We play from the gold tees, which are 6,889 yards. The black tees are 7,307 yards and the tips are 7,517 yards! From the gold tees, the course rating is 72.6 and the slope rating is 131. From the tips, the course rating is 76.2 and the slope rating is 141. SO bought me a set of Ping G-10 irons for my birthday and this was my first chance to take them for a test drive. We started on hole no. 10 and I went par, par, bogey, par on the first 4 holes. I double-bogeyed the par-5 16th hole and the par-4 18th hole and shot a 44 on the back 9. From the gold tees there are 3 par-4s over 435 yards and the par-5s are both about 550 yards so I was hitting a lot of 1, 3 and 4-hybrids from the fairways (or rough), rather than my new Ping G-10 irons.

I started off the back 9 with a double-bogey on hole no. 1 and I was pushing the ball to the right. Chad Feldheimer said that my alignment was off (those were not exactly his words, but this is a PG blog!). Usually Chad waits until my drive on the last hole before providing any constructive advice so I decided to take this advice to heart. I focused on my alignment and opened up my front foot and I started hitting the ball where I was actually aiming! I went bogey, par, par, par, bogey, par on the next 6 holes. I was thinking about shooting an 85 at Southern Dunes. That was my big mistake, thinking! I went triple-bogey, double-bogey on the last two holes to finish with a 45 on the front 9 and an 89 for the round. Normally, I would be very happy with an 89, but the proverbial "woulda, coulda, shoulda" bit me on the butt.

Playing with Chad Feldheimer is very instructive for me. He played as poorly as I have seen him play and he shot an 80. He never double-bogeys a hole and he scrambles really well. On a par-4 hole, he pulled his drive into the gorse. He blasted out of the gorse and did not think he would be able to move the ball more than 20-30 yards, but the ball came flying out and landed in trouble across the fairway. He then hit a great shot out of the thick rough to the fringe of the green and two-putted for a bogey. On another hole he hit his approach shot into a greenside bunker and then hit a good blast shot out of the bunker but the ball trickled off of the green into the collection area. He chipped to about 5 feet and made the putt for a bogey. He could have made double-bogey or worse on either of those holes and ruined his round, but he held it together for no worse than a bogey.