GOLF COURSE REVIEW:
by Derek
Duncan
I admire what the architects did with this course. I believe if you’re stuck with a crap property and have to manufacture everything from the ground up, go ahead and turn the design loose.
The Atchafalaya at Idlewild is a little severe and anachronistic for when it was built—perimeter mounds, bulkheads lining water hazards, pot bunkers, a double green—but there’s no way to make this place look soft and old and heathery unless you’ve got an extra $10 or $20 million. There’s a reason why Coore and Crenshaw are so particular about the sites they work–they wouldn’t touch this with your bulldozer.
The property is shoehorned lengthwise between two dense bayous and a city park on the north on some of the only arable land in the immediate vicinity (it was formerly planted to…cotton? Soybeans? Sugarcane? I can’t remember). I’m told there are 175 acres underfoot but I’d be surprised if there are more than 125, and there isn’t much more than a foot of elevation change across most the site.
The design, especially the first nine holes, is as dark and murky as the surrounding Atchafalaya Basin, a massive swamp wilderness roughly 20 by 150 miles long vivisected by lakes, marshes, levees, canals, bayous, deltas, Cajuns, alligators, blood-sucking animals and of course the deep Atchafalaya River. This part of southern Louisiana is engaged in a perpetual war between the forces of such eerie, inhospitable nature and man’s attempts to engineer his way through it....
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Patterson/Lafayette
Architect: Robert von Hagge, Michael Smelek, Richard Baril
Year: 2006
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