"IF YOU LIKE GOLF"
weekly online golf column
by
Chris Dortch

September 4, 2001

Here’s hoping Baylor golf star May Wood has a speedy recovery from ligament damage in her left wrist suffered in a car accident last Friday night after the Baylor-Notre Dame football game.

Wood, a senior, has won the last three Tennessee Division II championships, and her streak could be in jeopardy.

"It could be three weeks, it could be five, we just don’t know," Baylor coach King Oehmig said.

The Division II regionals are Sept. 24, and the state tournament is Oct. 1. That doesn’t leave Wood a lot of time to heal.

Oehmig, who has guided his girls teams to the last three Division II titles, had better hope Wood heals as quickly as Beth Felts, who injured an ankle playing soccer, missed a couple of matches and is already back. If Wood can’t play, Oehmig will go with a lineup of Felts, Catherine Hicks and Rachel Stuart. Even without Wood, that’s a better lineup than 95 percent of the girls golf programs in the state.

Wood, the nation’s top high school recruit, is expected to make a full recovery. She’s reportedly narrowed her college choices to Vanderbilt and North Carolina, but nearly every major program continues to knock on her door.

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Black Creek Club continues to earn rave reviews.

Designed by Brian Silva, Golf World's 1999 Architect of the Year, Black Creek has been open a litte more than a year. Since then, the national golfing media has heaped accolades on the course.

The latest praise comes from Ron Whitten, respected architecture editor for Golf Digest and the world's foremost golf course critic. Black Creek was designed by Silva to incorporate and pay homage to design characteristics of classic course architects Seth Raynor and his mentor, C.B. Macdonald. As Whitten tells it in his Golf Digest.com column, Course Critic, Silva hit his mark.

"But capturing the look of this particular architectural style would be of little consequence if Silva hadn't also captured the playing characteristics of it," Whitten wrote. "This is where he far exceeded expectations. Black Creek pulls us back to the past, where I often feel the game belongs. His design is all about lines of play and angles of approach, because that's what Macdonald and Raynor were all about."

In Course Critic, Whitten ranks courses on a scale of one to 10. He gave Black Creek a nine. Of the dozens of courses Whitten has rated in his column, only three have been rated higher than Black Creek: Pebble Beach, Harbour Town and Shadow Creek.

Whitten isn't the only national golf writer to rave about Black Creek. Every major golf publication has paid tribute to the course. And the golfing public has also taken note as Black Creek is becoming known as a player's course. It's home to some of Tennessee's finest amateurs, including the top-ranked high school girls player, May Wood, as well as the current Men’s and Women’s Chattanooga City Champions Pat Corey and Beth Felts.

The USGA and Tennessee Golf Association have already caught on, choosing Black Creek to play host to U.S. Mid-Amateur qualifying on Sept. 11 and the Tennessee Four-Ball championship earlier this summer.

As Whitten said in his review of Black Creek, there's a good reason the course has captured the fancy of golf associations and better players.

"Not since the debut of Sand Hills nearly eight years ago has there been a course that demands such a full range of shots, not just high and low, left and right, but also in the air and on the ground," Whitten wrote. "It's called shot making, a lost art in this age of super-sized sweet spots and gyroscopic golf balls. Black Creek’s course conditions- dry Bermuda fairways, firm bent-grass greens- enhance the shot making by propelling stingers and bump-and-runs toward their destinations." Black Creek's quick rise to prominence mirrors the amazing transformation of Chattanooga, which has revitalized its downtown and enhanced its reputation as an outdoor paradise.

Southern Living magazine recently featured Chattanooga, along with San Antonio and Charlottesville, Va., in an article entitled "10 Cool Reasons to Visit 3 Hot Cities." And Outside magazine recently chose Chattanooga, along with the likes of Santa Fe, N.M., Camden, Maine and Santa Barbara, Calif. as one of 10 Dream Towns.

"If life in a city reinventing itself sounds appealing, you won't get many chances like this," said the Outside article of Chattanooga and its natural wonders.

Black Creek is fast taking its place among those natural wonders. Black Creek is bordered on its back side by a designated land preserve, and wildlife is abundant in the beautiful landscape. But it’s the golf itself that is the real attraction, as Whitten and several of his peers in the golfing media have discovered.

"It's a genuine treat," Whitten concluded in his Course Critic column.