Fairway bunkering isn’t nonexistent, but neither is it aggressive greens are large but not wildly contoured, so hitting the proper sections is crucial but sufficient. Art Hills wisely prioritized enjoyability over challenge (even from the tips, it stretches just 6,754 yards, and just under 6,100 yards from the white tees), but managed to weave holes of all shapes and demands into the course. The course is routed playfully among rolling - but not too dramatic - southwest Mississippi hills. It’s easy to see why Quail Hollow was an instant favorite after its mid-1990s debut. When did spite for the safety of our communities become a sign of patriotism? When did indifference toward the lives of our neighbors become a virtue? Even in an era of unmatched division, how the hell did this happen? But for untold millions, that bungling - the willful recklessness that has guided our national response to this tragedy - has somehow become a source of pride. And not just because the United States - the greatest nation in the world - has bungled through an unnecessarily negligent response, and cost 180,000 Americans their lives in the process. If the past four years have seen a nadir (and you’d be hard pressed to pick just one), our country’s struggle with the deadliest pandemic in a century surely would be it. Personal choice, it seems, is only legitimate when it bends toward the ravings of talk radio. It was a strictly personal account, not an argument that anyone else should act similarly. A few minutes before I hit I-55 for the 90-minute drive from Jackson to McComb, I published my choice: that I’d felt unsafe traveling for my annual golf trip and had abandoned the plan. And not just golf courses.Īmericans’ response to COVID-19, some people claim, should be a personal choice.
#QUAIL HOLLOW GOLF FULL#
Less than a quarter-century into its life, then, Quail Hollow is showing its age before its time - a place full of promise squandered through bad luck, mismanagement, neglect, and the reality that things worth preserving don’t preserve themselves. And all this happened during a decade in which Mississippi cut funding for state parks roughly in half. By 2017, the course saw fewer than 17,000 rounds in 2018, it nearly closed. The next year, a last-minute hiccup at the state legislature cost the park its share of a $9 million bond issue. In 2012, hurricane damage to a dam required draining the course’s main source of irrigation.
But slowly, the park began losing the course. The course never really lost the nematodes. Golf Digest named it one of the year’s best new public affordable courses (greens fees opened at $30), and 33,000 rounds were played the first year. When the Arthur Hills-designed course opened in 1996 after a $7 million build ($11.5 million in 2020 dollars, adjusted for inflation), it was the first of the small handful of Mississippi’s truly great, public golf courses: in the company of Dancing Rabbit (whose Azaleas course opened a year later), Grand Bear (which opened in 1999), and few others. Quail Hollow Golf Course, just south of town in nearby Percy Quin State Park, has become one of those familiar but unrecognizable places.
Still, every time I pass through, an unsettled feeling washes over me - like just around the corner, there’s a place or a person I’ll know but won’t recognize. Nearly all my family in McComb moved on or died years ago. I came along a few years later we moved to Jackson when I was 7. “We’ve found them all except one,” a police spokesman told reporters on the scene.
After a wave of bombings against Black homes and churches in 1964, Time magazine called McComb “the toughest anti-civil rights community in the toughest anti-civil rights area in the toughest anti-civil rights state in the Union.” Thirteen years later, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s airplane ran out of fuel overhead and crashed in a field about 10 miles southwest of town. My hometown is McComb, Miss., a railroad town tracing its origins back to the 1870s, and sitting about halfway between Jackson and New Orleans. Outside perhaps “The Rising,” Bruce Springsteen’s best song of the past 20 years is “ Long Walk Home.” It’s the story of someone returning to his hometown and not recognizing it the town, and even some of its people, have changed.
0 kommentar(er)
