Golfing on the Gulf Coast
Better known for its beaches, Alabama shore becoming a hit with duffers, too
ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Bill Kurtz can’t go more than a few months without wriggling his toes into white sugar-sand beaches.
Long before the first frost, he’ll map out the 15-hour drive from west suburban Oak Park to Gulf Shores, Ala.
(Photo courtesy of Dan Vukelich)
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If you’re up for a road trip, the Gulf Coast is about 940 miles from Chicago, most of it via Interstate 65.
MORE INFO: For travel information about the Alabama Gulf Coast area, visit gulfshores.com.
“We’ve been going down there for 40 years and I can tell you the beaches of L.A. and Hawaii don’t hold a candle to the beaches down there,” Kurtz says.
Atlantic beaches are closer; the Carolinas are two-thirds of the driving distance. But for Kurtz, there’s only one place that can guarantee warm water and white sand: the Gulf Coast. And in recent years, more visitors have been packing their golf clubs along with their bathing suits and sunscreen.
Just west of the Florida Panhandle, Alabama’s 32 miles of shoreline on the Gulf of Mexico is a magnet for sun-starved Midwest families who make up a whopping 20 percent of the area’s 255,000 annual visitors, according to the Alabama Gulf Coast Convention & Visitors Bureau.
The “Redneck Riviera,” an out-of-date pejorative, started as a downscale collection of beach cottages for southern vacationers. Some ramshackle wooden beachfront homes on stilts remain, but ever fewer survive each passing hurricane season. Replacing them are 10- and 12-story concrete condo towers and swanky beach houses.
Over the years, Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Ala., developed a reputation for summer and winter charter-boat fishing and water sports. In the mid 1990s, the area began developing as a shoulder-season golf destination, too.
The Gulf Shores Golf Association (not to be confused with the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail farther north) now boasts a diverse collection of 10 first-rate golf courses. Availability of some 22,000 condos and beach-house units can cut lodging costs drastically for road-tripping golf buddies. Each player can pay as little as $65 a night for foursomes or larger, says Duncan Millar, executive director of the association.
Once you’ve driven 900 miles to get there, it’s not likely you’ll want to spend much time in the car. The Gulf Coast’s courses are tightly clustered. None is more than a 40-minute drive from the other; most are about 15 minutes apart.
Best times to visit are March and April and September and October, when daytime highs are in the 70s. Gulf Shores’ annual National Shrimp Festival wrapped up this weekend. The nearby town of Fairhope, on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, attracts 300,000 for its arts and crafts festival in March.
Playing conditions along the Gulf compare favorably to those at other Southern golf destinations, and the variety of golf-course terrain will surprise players used to the ironing-board flatness of Florida.
Greens fees average $70 a round at designs by Arnold Palmer, Jay Morrish, Jerry Pate, Bruce Devlin, Earl Stone and Robert Van Hagge.
Choose from an easily walked track winding through an Audubon-certified marshland (Lost Key Golf Club), or courses that rise and fall over massive natural dunes (Kiva Dunes, Glenlakes Golf Club), or play through Loblolly-pine and magnolia forests evocative of Augusta or Pinehurst (The Golf Club at the Warf, Rock Creek, Peninsula, Timber Creek, Craft Farms).
If you gravitate to top-shelf golf, Craft Farms’ two 18-hole courses, Cypress Bend and Cotton Creek, and Kiva Dunes deliver superb conditions at peak rates of just $89.
Kiva Dunes just reopened after re-grassing its greens with a new Bermuda-grass variant that is less grainy. If you’ve come to view Bermuda as squirrely to putt on, you’re in for a pleasant surprise. Putts on the new Champion Ultra-dwarf roll about as true as they do on bent-grass greens.
Dan Vukelich, a former Chicagoan, is editor of Sun Country Golf magazine in New Mexico.
Information for this article was gathered on a research trip sponsored by the Gulf Coast Golf Association.
