Saint Louis Country Club, MO, USA

The deep Alps bunker that fronts the 18th green provides a fitting finish to a
course blessed with many classic features.

From the time that Charles Blair Macdonald hired Seth Raynor in 1907 as an engineer to oversee the construction of National Golf Links of America, the two men formed a lasting relationship born out of respect for one another's talents. Macdonald's sense of grandness and flair added artistry to Raynor's skills as an engineer and together they did better work than separate. 

Apart from the overall excellence of their designs, Macdonald and Raynor enjoy an almost cult standing for another reason: they often replicated strategic concepts from famous holes. To this day, the traveling golfer takes great delight in seeing how Macdonald and Raynor adapted such concepts from site to site. As much as anyone, Macdonald helped Americans gain a sense of just how engaging golf could be by letting them appreciate first hand many of golf architecture's most enduring dilemmas such as the Redan or Alps.  His strong sense of strategic purpose gave American golf architecture a huge push in the right direction during its infancy and helped it move quickly past the basic courses that the Scots built in this country pre-1900.

In the case of St. Louis Country Club, Macdonald and Raynor were blessed with ideally rolling terrain with only the first hole's fairway being comparatively flat. From this promising start, they gave St. Louis more than its fair share of the great versions of holes plus several original ones that are equally vexing in their own right. In fact, of the thirteen Macdonald/Raynor courses that the authors have seen, St. Louis CC has as many of Macdonald's favorite features as any of their other designs.

One man who beat the late 1990s rush to worship Macdonald and Raynor is St. Louis Country Club's Green Keeper Jack Litvay (or 'Grass Engineer' as his friends call him). From when he saw his first Raynor course in Minnesota in the 1959 (!) to when he realized similarities with its architecture and that at the Dunes Course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club in the late 1960s, Macdonald and Raynor have fascinated Litvay. When the job opportunity presented itself at St. Louis Country Club in 1977, he jumped at it.

Given his appreciation of the usual Macdonald/Raynor prototype holes, Litvay has helped to preserve many of the design's finest features as we see below.

Holes to Note

2nd hole, 225 yards; St. Louis Country Club possesses only three two shotters longer than 410 yards. However, its par of 71 to cover its 6,500 yards is anything but easy, thanks in large part to its difficult set of five one shot holes. The 2nd is a bear of an uphill Biaritz, which isn't ideal only in the sense that the golfer can't witness his ball disappear in the swale in the green before re-appearing on the back plateau. Nonetheless, this one shotter gives the course the kind of muscle that saw 282 as the winning score for the 1947 U.S. Open.

The full length Biarritz green with its three foot swale.

3rd hole, 205 yards; An unusually long Eden hole, the 3rd was selected as one of the greatest holes in George Peper's  The 500 World's Greatest Golf Holes. Many of the key features are present: deep bunkers cut into a ridge that the green sits on, a false front, a sharp back to front tilt, and death if you go over the green. The only attribute missing is that the green isn't a skyline one, a quality that is harder to achieve in the middle of the country than it is along a coastline.

As seen from the right, deep bunkers guard the front of the Eden green.

If you go over, the chance of recovery from the five foot deep back
bunkers is minimal as the green races away.

4th hole, 415 yards; The longest two shotter at St. Louis is appropriately the Road Hole, though this version has been tampered with as the Road bunker was moved to the right from its original, more central location. St. Louis Country Club is presently considering a Master Plan with Brian Silva and it is hoped that the bunker will be returned to its initial, more strategic spot.

This pair of bunkers replicates the road behind the 17th at The Old Course at St. Andrews.

5th hole, 505 yards; Macdonald and Raynor frequently combined an Alps approach with a Punchbowl green and such is the case here. Uniquely though, this time the hole is a three shotter. Also, a Principal's Nose bunker was relocated 80 yards shy of the green by Litvay to influence the layup shot for the good golfer.

Shockingly enough, this Punchbowl green was once relocated to the far hillside in the interest of
'fairness' but Silva and Litvay oversaw its return to its original spot. The cinders underneath the
ground were a helpful guide in recreating the size and slopes of the original green.

6th hole, 355 yards; An original drive and pitch hole of great merit, thanks to the site's rolling topography and the wild green contours. In 1915, the year after St. Louis opened, Raynor began designing courses on his own but by and large, his solo greens never achieved the same boldness of character as when Macdonald was present. The 6th green complex illustrates how well the two men worked together.

One of the game's great green complexes is the 6th at St. Louis. The golfer should never leave his
pitch short but rather use the bold green contours as a backboard.

7th hole, 155 yards; A superb Short Hole with its thumbprint or horseshoe green contours helping to make it more engaging than either the 4th at Brancaster or the 8th at St. Andrews.

The built-up green complex of the Short Hole makes it a hit-or-else proposition.

A tee ball that just fails to carry onto the 7th green will roll back into the 12 foot deep front bunker.

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