I'd like to echo the thoughts of everyone else who's already posted. My Dad and I had a great time getting to know you guys and experience Ballyhack. Congratulations to Tommy and Jim both!
Wade, thanks very much for all your hard work planning and for the creative and fun event format. I especially liked the format for the morning round, of course
but hope to get my driver going straight and my handicap down, and be less of a contender next year. Wish we had been able to make the Sunday match, too.
Aaron and the rest of the staff were very welcoming. Billy Bobbitt and the goats had the place in perfect condition: the greens were fast enough to keep us all on our toes, but just slow enough that nothing got silly, even on the most contoured greens like 3, 5, 9, 13, 14, and 15. And with regard to the goats and Jim Sherma's earlier comment: I hit plenty of balls into the thick stuff, but rarely lost one if I could get a line on it (and often found it, even if I couldn't see it down). Just nasty enough to penalize a poorly executed shot and make one try hard to avoid it, but not an automatic lost ball by any stretch.
Finally, I'd like to express my appreciation for Lester's work. I'm pretty familiar with the area around Roanoke, but I couldn't believe the severity of some of the property, particularly on the front nine, and came home so impressed with Lester's vision and his ability to pull it off. I've been thinking about what Carl said in the other thread (sorry, Carl, I think you were the only guy I failed to shake hands with) about Ballyhack being a difficult property. I think it would have been a difficult property on which to build an easy, or even a conventional, golf course. It demands something thrilling, whether it's the three clifftop par 5s or the drives over the ravines or the multiple-option holes or the "Cape", which looks like a straight hole until you see your ball bouncing down the fairway toward the creek... Look at the 11th, for another example of how Lester took advantage of the landscape presented rather than fighting it. To build a hole on such a severe slope takes courage, and by NOT leveling the playing ground he was able to create a memorable hole and also use less real estate/irrigation water than otherwise might be necessary to achieve a hole with similar scoring and strategy characteristics. Or the 13th, with its awesome green and setting that reminded me of a bigger version of the 18th at Pasatiempo. Instead of benching the green into the hillside, he let the green's contours approximate its surrounds. (I feel a bit like I did in college when writing a literary critique of an author I would later meet, so I hope Lester will correct me if I have any ideas wrong here.)
Thanks again, guys,
JB