One of the best golf experiences I’ve ever had took place in a water hazard.
This bold statement, I know, requires some explaining.
A couple of weeks ago, a couple of us played Wolfdancer, the course within the Hyatt Lost Pines resort near Bastrop, east of Austin. We dressed for the weather, of course, and hydrated like hippos in a river, and coated ourselves in SPF 1000, but the sun in Texas in July is as a convection oven, and we outdoorsmen and women were like pizza in it. A further drain—a pleasant one—was the effort to co-exist with if not solve the puzzle of Wolfdancer, which is not the usual play-it-and-forget-it resort course.
As a result of all this sweating and swinging and thinking, each head in our foursome inclined stage left when we reached the fifteenth tee. For there resides the Hyatt Lost Pines’ lazy river, a sort of-circular water course meandering through giant live oaks and lush-looking plantings of palms and pines. It’s not really a hazard, of course; an oasis, more like. Dotted here and there on the cool blue sea floated a flotilla of floats supporting people for whom the heat of the day was obviously merely a pleasant contrast to their liquid medium. Some of the floaters held drinks that could have been lemonade.
We seemed to hurry through the last four holes (two easy, two hard) and a sandwich (delicious) in the clubhouse. We proceeded purposefully to our (commodious, quiet) rooms, and thence, at last, to the lazy river.
There was a bar. The moment called for the muddled mint in a mojito or maybe a margarita. Mmmmm…make mine a mojito, I told Mike the barman. Thus armed, I left the shore, grabbed a big plastic doughnut as it floated past, wiggled in, and launched. Subsurface pumps produced a current that moved us slowly clockwise. Sunlight filtered through the trees, and shadows danced on the water. Fellow travelers bumped each other from time to time, but the mood on the concrete canal was so mellow that no one felt intruded upon. This, someone said slowly, is wonderful.
Floating and drinking with a few fleeting glimpses of the fifteenth tee led to a consideration of the golf course. Wolfdancer was designed by the estimable and perpetually underrated Art Hills, whose work is the equal of architects—Nicklaus, Norman, Jones—with more famous names. Hills’s triumph on Wolfdancer is variety. Sometimes on the back nine of a Nicklaus layout, you get the feeling that the hole in front of you is like several of the holes you’ve already played. But on land that is heavily treed and rolling for the first two thirds then fairly flat near the Colorado River, Wolfdancer keeps your interest.
For example: the serpentine green on the par five third hole is multi-leveled and protected in the front right by a deep sand pit. You may have only a 50- or 75-yard pitch for your third, but you better bear down on that pitch if you know what’s good for you. On the next hole, the challenge is totally different. Four is a long par three, 233 from the back, with a green as big as a hockey rink. Escape from the shallow bunker in front is not a strain.
Short shot/small target and long shot/big target is a time-tested formula, and sensible. But then Wolfdancer gives you the 13th, the first of the holes near the river, and the toughest hole on the course. It’s 470 if you want to play the black tees with me, a gentle dogleg right, and lined both sides with giant trees that remember the Hoover administration. The smallish green is perched like a plate into the side of a hill. It’s harder to hit than Ali in his prime, and harder to hold than a wiggling four-year-old. I parred the damn thing and pumped my fist.
After I braced myself for another lap around the lazy river with another mojito, another sweet memory—of dinner the night before—bubbled to the surface. Chef Norbert Roesch met us in the Hyatt’s fine dining restaurant, Stories. “Sustainability,” the native of Germany had said. “Carefully prepared, locally produced. The right food for the right reason.” The friendly chef chatted about his previous postings—among them Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Munich, Passau, South Africa, and Columbus, Ohio. At the Hyatt Regency in Curacao, he learned how to prepare iguana. “It’s best in soup,” he said. Good to know.
That night we ate outside in the informal restaurant in the hotel. We observed faces lit by firelight in the hot night: marshmallow roasters, prepping the key ingredient in the indispensable summer desert, the s’more.
Given the coziness of the campus and the quality of the food, the golf, the staff, and that crooked little river, I’d go back to the Hyatt Lost Pines. I’d go back tomorrow, if I could.
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