In North America, links golf – the genuine article – is an exceedingly rare animal. By the standard applied by George Peper and Malcolm Campbell’s 2010 book, True Links, only Highland Links near the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the courses at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and the eponymous design at Cabot Links in Nova Scotia qualify.
As always, there are some quibbles: the excluded Chambers Bay in Tacoma, Washington, was built on a former mining site, much like Cabot, while a significant portion of a round at Long Island’s Maidstone Club in New York unfolds over arguably the purest links landscape in America.
Still, the broader point holds. On this side of the pond, it’s unusual to play on tight turf by the shore, flighting wind-cheaters and bouncing shots into greens, dodging wispy fescues along the way.
On the front nine of the Ocean Course at New Seabury – a sizable real estate community about an hour and a half south of Boston – this kind of compelling game has become possible thanks to a renovation by Michigan-based architect Bruce Hepner.
Hepner is not the kind of architect who’s big on self-promotion – his website consists of nothing more than a business card – but since departing the associate ranks at Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf (where he served as project lead on modern hits such as Ballyneal and Cape Kidnappers) he has carved out a niche as a busy restoration specialist, working at blue-chip clubs like Piping Rock in New York, Ekwanok in Vermont and Cape Arundel in Maine.
The plan for the two courses at New Seabury – the other eighteen is the Dunes –was a departure for him, though.
“I usually don’t do remodels,” Hepner said. “I went over there, and it was just bad. It was boring William Mitchell (the original architect, who designed both courses in the early 1960s). But I liked the super (Scott Nickerson), and I liked the opportunity.”
The pair collaborated with AgriScapes, a Memphis-based course-construction company, beginning their work on the Dunes in 2017, reasoning the membership could continue to play the Ocean, New Seabury’s premiere offering, while the second course was offline.
“It had been pretty bland, so they just overshaped it like you wouldn’t believe,” Hepner said, referring to a late-’90s renovation, “and it was basically unplayable. Good players didn’t want to play it because it was short, and the shaping and forced carries were so severe that a lot of women couldn’t finish on it.
“I thought I could make it feel like an old New England Ross course, like Salem or Worcester. So I just whaled on the place, deconstructed it and put it back together. It’s an elegant, rolling piece of ground. The bunkers are very simple and Ross-like, but I got rid of all the Humpty Dumpty mounding. You won’t be overwhelmed by it, but you’ll say, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty cool member’s course.’ Compared to what it was, though, it turned out better than I could have imagined.”
While it tips out at just 6,041 yards, the Dunes now has a sporty appeal. I’ve yet to meet a golfer who doesn’t enjoy a good short par 4, and the course is loaded with them. The question at the Dunes is whether this profusion is actually too much of a good thing. One recent Golfweek’s Best rater commented, “It’s nice to throw in a short 4 here and there which takes driver out of your hand, it gets old when it happens five holes in a row.”
The fourth (334 yards) is defended by a broad fairway cross-bunker that complicates the decision between driver and a long-iron layup, while the 12th (277 yards) presents a minefield of scattered bunkers and an almost irresistibly open green front. The 15th (301) and 16th (339) are draped across hilly terrain reminiscent of a small-town course in the English countryside. For those who haven’t been to New Seabury in recent years, the changes to the Dunes likely will come as quite a surprise.
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With the Dunes having reopened in 2019, the team turned its attention to the more prominent Ocean course. Hepner quickly recognized both its shortcomings and its upside.
“It was 20 steps from the water, and you could never see it,” he said. “Even on the entire first hole you never got a glimpse of the water. The primary dune along the golf course was eight to 10 feet high, and once you got into the interior it was cart path, green grass, oval bunkers. It looked like a Florida course.”
Hepner drew inspiration from Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw’s work at Maidstone to draw the ocean into the golf course, adding native vegetation to create “a seascape kind of feeling.” He also added “a lot of sand.”
Such expansive bunkering catches the eye, but less obvious is that the coastal portion of the course had essentially played across marshy terrain. Hepner and Nickerson sand-capped the area to raise the level of the fairways by several feet, which solved a number of drainage problems and allowed golfers to see over the primary dune. Views extend all the way across the water to Martha’s Vineyard.
The front nine at the Ocean today presents a believable simulacrum of links golf. Its fairways are dry bent grass rather than the fine fescues that maximize the ground game, but the ball still bounces and rolls out nicely. The recontoured greens offer their share of excitement, too – being above the hole on the par-3 eighth leaves a comebacker of the utmost finesse.
The Ocean’s back nine departs from the inland side of the clubhouse. Playing across wooded ground similar to that of the Dunes course, it’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed at having left the coast behind, but there are still good holes to be found – the finishing trio is especially sound. In this section of the Ocean course, Hepner focused on rebuilding greens with new root zone material, widening fairways and improving the cart path flow. Considering that five of the non-par-3 holes on this nine are pronounced doglegs, it was important to open up the playing corridors to allow the golfer a chance to secure advantageous approach angles.
Like many private clubs in 2020, New Seabury experienced unusually high levels of member play over the summer as many Bostonians opted to stay by the beach. This fall, both courses still had the conditioning feel of freshly completed work that needs an off-season to settle.
In an article for Golf Course Industry, Nickerson described the challenges of opening a newly renovated course in the midst of a pandemic. “It forced us to sideline our workers,” he wrote. “In some cases we couldn’t bring employees back as we have laborers out of the country. There was a lot of work to be done with some unexpected snags… we figured it out and got it done.”
After 29 years at New Seabury, Nickerson is retiring at the end of this season. An avid hockey player and coach, he plans to relocate to Canton, New York, to work with the St. Lawrence University team. He noted that the club was in the process of hiring a young superintendent who is “excited to promote firm and fast conditions.”
Not everyone enters retirement with the ability to say they left their workplace better than they’d found it, but Nickerson is among the fortunate ones who can.
This story originally appeared in Issue 5 of Golfweek magazine.
