Being efficient is a redeemable trait and one likely never frowned upon by anyone. The frenetic existence associated with most everyone today makes us inclined to move swiftly and reflect rarely. Getting places, checking boxes and moving on is society’s pace du jour. Life advancement beyond just the biological is likely predicated on being proficient at not taking a lot of time to do anything. Golf has spent its existence trying to make the exercise faster and I’m here for ready golf and the abolition of aim pointers at the recreational level. However, there is a place which used to not exist 30 years ago in the golf universe that has made getting there the most rewarding thing to happen to my relationship with the game since Dad left this earth.
The next chapter for 5 Clubs includes special places and the people responsible for those places being special. My choice all along, when we were ready to embark on that next chapter was a place with very little history. Once CapRock Ranch is seen it will not take much time for it to be considered among the absolute finest and most memorable golf courses this country has to offer the world. Nestled on the northern edge of the Sand Hills region of Nebraska, CapRock is not around any corner. Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Nebraska is 65 miles south of CapRock Ranch and Sand Hills, the club, changed golf forever. Dick Youngscap, a rancher from Lincoln, had a dream and the realization of that dream shifted the dormant design industry into the cavalier, inventive and forward thinking force it is today. Build it and they will come. Golf took the ‘Field of Dreams” screenplay and made it real life one state over from baseball’s version. I always believed once I got there it would be all I was hoping it would be and it was. I just simply couldn’t have foreseen the fortifying qualities of the journey to get there.
One of the overarching themes of addiction and alcoholism is the constant pursuit of isolation. When the choice of fight or flight presented itself, I was more than ready to flee the scene. My life by the time alcohol had taken a death grip over me was a series of escapes. I was always running away from something. Fear, grief, shame, dread, or just being observed were the root causes but I never achieved freedom because I was imprisoned by my disease. Sobriety helps you run toward things and not away from everything. Engagement with others, with nature and with one’s self are reflexive with a full heart and a clear mind. A trip to golf’s new holy land was a gift to pursue all the things I used to avoid. I’m not suggesting two flight connections is a gift but my transition from cynic to pragmatist is a work in progress and there has been progress.
I purchased Dave Kindred’s new book, “My Home Team” which is the poignant memoir of a man who has spent his life writing about the most significant figures and events in the sports world for the last 50 years. My admiration for Kindred’s work and career are immense and his story of his love of writing, his wife and girls high school basketball is poignant and powerful. His reflections on his life filled me with appreciation and got my mind in the right place for a journey to the chop hills and desolate dunes of northern Nebraska.
A regional jet from Denver to North Platte, Nebraska is filled with people returning to where they are from, but it now includes golfers traveling with a purpose. A trip to Nebraska for golf is generally not made in haste and many making the journey understand the importance of adding the experience to their overall context of golf in America. Michael Chadwick, a young man from Los Angeles, sitting a row behind me introduced himself and told me he had read what I wrote earlier in the summer about Crystal Downs. That admission alone validated to me that my musings were all worth it! Michael had also played Crystal Downs for the first time this year and he was on his way to Sand Hills and CapRock Ranch for his maiden voyage around both courses. His depth of knowledge about many things underscores what is happening currently in the game. The care and commitment people are giving to their relationship with the game is cresting. After sharing our itineraries, I got in my rented black Toyota Camry for the three-hour drive to the edges of the Snake River Canyon.
The Sand Hills region of Nebraska is the largest sand dune formation in the western hemisphere. Moreover, the sandy soil is not conducive to growing crops so the twenty thousand square miles that make up this geologic wonderland have never been plowed. Endless waves of rolling sand dunes rising and falling as far as the eye can see accented by the regions primary tenant, black angus cattle. On a warm Saturday evening I was headed northwest on highway 97 into the most extraordinarily fertile 140-mile stretch of a golfer’s imagination. Enormous natural landforms with large swaths of native grasses torn away by erosion creating countless great hazards that only A.W. Tillinghast could envision. Yet I was seeing them as the light was softening despite driving from central time into mountain time. Only one green at Sand Hills golf club is manmade and that only amplifies the restraint Coore and Crenshaw showed in the course’s construction. I was being overrun by images of tilted greens on pushed up shelves of naturally formed bunkers. Expansive fairways, narrow corridors, majestic vistas from one area of the course across to another were all out in front of me, except they weren’t. It’s the world’s greatest, most vast, and virtually untouched golf canvas on earth. It’s also, more importantly, a place rich with something we all seem to have a lack of, peace and quiet. Losing cell reception should be required of each of us periodically to get back in touch with a diminishing commodity, solitude. As I passed the modest sign for Sand Hills Golf Club, I made my way into downtown Mullen and a quick stop at the Kwik Stop. Convenience stores in Nebraska are hearty like the land. In my former life the presence of every imaginable liquor where you also buy funyuns and fill up your car with gas would have been a more desired destination than Steak 48. The young lady in front of me in line with the worn ballcap, blue jeans and a six pack of Busch longnecks would have made for an effective poster for the beer, but I don’t think she was looking to post on the “Gram”. More likely just hoping to unwind after a full day of work. Mullen may not know how much affection the golf world has for Mullen but passing through was energizing. I was now pointed due north with the red and orange of the out of sight sun to my left and the last 70 miles of Highway 97 in front of me.
70 million years ago sharks inhabited the inner seaways of what is now Nebraska. On a glorious clear September night, I was convinced 
that the ocean was just over the horizon of the last sand dune I could see in the westerly direction. There was literally nothing between me and the entrance to CapRock Ranch except the desolate road until a massive mule deer presented itself in front of the right side of my rental car at 65 miles an hour. The color of the land and the deer marrying each other coupled with the fading light didn’t present me with even a chance to hit the brake. As I hurled the steering wheel to the left the deer struck the right side of the car and was catapulted over the roof and onto the road behind me. The moment didn’t seem real and after stopping the car and determining that the deer did not survive the collision, I was left numb sitting on the now decimated hood of the black Camry with no one in sight. The right side of the car was obliterated yet still drivable, minus the front corner panel of the bumper and the headlight. I was able to continue my procession up highway 97 dazed by the moment and saddened by the result.
The northern edge of the Sand Hills region just south of Valentine and the end of the highway they call “97” is one you’d never associate with the Cornhusker state. The overall absence of corn and flat ground, replaced by the white facing of the Snake River Canyon and hurtling chop hills heaving themselves in all directions would be more closely associated with your image of Montana or Colorado. CapRock Ranch took a circuitous route to its creation, and we are humbled to share its story visually at 5 Clubs Golf very soon. The brilliant blending of holes played toward to the prairie and the infinity look of the Sand Hills to the east and south only compounds the sensory overload you experience as you turn toward the canyon holes looking north and west. Gil Hanse, Jim Wagner, with contributions from Geoff Shackleford and the Caveman team created a routing so shrewd and stimulating it leaves you wrestling with which among the countless fantastic holes is your favorite. The set of par 3 holes… 3,6,9,16, and 18 might be the five best on any course in the country. Yes, the best. The walk off the back of the 15th green on the closely mown area that blends the back of the green seamlessly into the 16th tee is your first look toward home with purpose. I promise you there are few sites in golf more breathtaking than the final three against, and over, the canyon.
There is a small sign behind the 18th green noting that “voices carry” across the canyon. You might hear a faint voice almost a mile away on the 5th green as you hit your tee shot on the 18th hole. Things are uninterrupted in northern Nebraska. From voices traveling across the canyon to the showering of radiant starlight after nightfall you find yourself penetrated by many things normally drowned out by the persistent noise of most of our lives. I spent time at first light and last light on different places to gather as wide a lens as I could of this prepossessing parcel of land. The blowout bunker left of the 12th tee at sunrise, the shadows created across the 3rd green late in the day and the enormity of the view from the 6th green looking down at the Snake River 250 feet below the putting surface and the white rock façade. In its infancy CapRock Ranch has immediately become one of the most captivating visuals in golf. It’s also a superior golf course that will be lauded by design aficionados as soon as they have time to digest the experience.
Going to a destination void of so many things we seem to rely on suggests we’d be deprived. On the contrary, northern Nebraska gave me so much of what we can’t find every day. Serenity, solitude and immense gratitude for the vastness of rivers, valleys, and sand dunes converging together. I drove north on Highway 97 ten miles upon my departure from CapRock Ranch to Valentine, population 2800. That is where Highway 97 ends on the northern side of things. I wanted to drive this unfiltered road from end to end back to North Platte. I was stopped south of the Merritt Reservoir because there was road work being conducted. In the 12 minutes I was stopped with one-way traffic for two miles not one car approached me from the rear. I pulled over at the mile marker where I struck the deer three days before and sat on the damaged hood of the Camry and looked out for miles and miles at the enormity of the landscape inhabited by so many living things. I stopped in Mullen, halfway back to North Platte, to see the football field of the Mullen High 7-man football team. Finally, I swung into the Sand Hills Golf Club, two miles off Highway 97 to say hi to the staff at one of the world’s greatest and historically most important clubs. As Highway 97 was coming to an end upon reaching the city limits of North Platte it felt like I was entering a city the size of Omaha and not one with a population of 27,000 people. Traffic, stop lights, congestion, air and light pollution all in abundance. It was like re-entering the atmosphere from another dimension. My 6 am flight the next morning on a regional jet full of people going somewhere included Michael Chadwick making his way home to California. His golf season effectively over with the impending birth of a second child with his wife. He shared his first impressions of Sand Hills and CapRock Ranch, and we discussed the unique landform that connects the 2nd and 14th greens at CapRock and exchanged contact information for a round of golf somewhere down the road. It’s what golfers do.