How America’s hottest spot for new golf – right outside Augusta – just got even better

There are certain places in the world of golf that boast abnormal numbers of exceptional courses for their relatively small footprints, i.e. Melbourne in Australia, Westchester County in New York or Philadelphia. Less urban outposts like the Monterey Peninsula, the Hamptons, or the northern Michigan region surrounding Traverse City are other examples.

New hot spots arise periodically, most recently with the burst of new course development in Martin County, Florida, and the area around Austin in Texas. The most unexpected may be Aiken, South Carolina, where a newly announced design to be constructed by Rob Collins and Tad King will join two ambitious courses that opened in the northern autumn and a collection of established clubs that have turned a former winter retreat for the wealthy north-eastern equestrian set into one of the South’s biggest power stations.

The new outpost, 24 kilometres outside the small town (population 32,000), is called 21 Golf Club and will consist of two 18-hole courses. The first to be constructed is The Hammer, named for the match-play game showcased by Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth during “Full Swing”, the theme of the design. Collins and King, who have built genre-expanding, risk/reward sensations Sweetens Cove near Chattanooga, Landmand in north-eastern Nebraska and Red Feather in Lubbock, Texas, need little encouragement to construct audacious holes that haze the line between destruction and salvation. Their design at The Hammer promises more of the same with Siren-like shots that will attempt to lure players into pursuing more than they can handle.

The second course, to be constructed later, will be based on the original plans for Alister MacKenzie’s El Boquerón course he drafted in 1930 for Enrique Anchorena, a wealthy Argentinian. It was to be located on Anchorena’s estate in the coastal city of Mar del Plata with 18 temptation-inducing holes played to nine enormous double greens, but the course was never built. Like The Lido, recently resurrected at Sand Valley in Wisconsin, El Boquerón has lived in the imagination of architecture enthusiasts for several generations who have wondered what the course would look like if it realised form (the drawing of the course circulated in MacKenzie’s writings). Owner Wes Ferrell is giving Collins and King a chance to find out, and they are an ideal match as they’ve long experimented with holes that cross and play into shared greens.

Golf in Aiken began more than a century ago with two in-town courses, Palmetto Golf Club and Aiken Golf Club. Palmetto, founded in 1892, was primarily designed by Herbert Leeds, the builder of Myopia Hunt Club near Boston, with major amendments in 1932 by Alister MacKenzie who was working on Augusta National (just 50 kilometres away). It’s a polished, jewel-box design draped over up and down topography with one of America’s great sets of greens full of slick interior movements that slip away into a variety of undulating chipping areas.

Aiken is a public course that dates to 1912 when its first holes opened as an amenity to the Highland Park Hotel (closed during the Depression), with several running parallel to the rail line that transported guests in and out of town. Owned by the McNair family since 1959 and just steps from the historic downtown, it possesses the same assets as Palmetto though in less refined form with ocean-surge greens, eccentric bygone shaping, tantalising short par 4s and significant fairway movements across the hilly terrain. Very few places have more eclectic or expressive golf packed into a $26-$48 green fee. Jim McNair, who operates Aiken Golf Club, is also responsible for locating and building The Chalkmine, a nine-hole short course and practice area for The First Tee of Aiken on a defunct sand and chalk mining site that might have some of the most exciting holes in the USA.

Sage Valley, 30 kilometres to the north-west, represents the opulent opposite end of the golf spectrum from Aiken. This stand-alone golf club, designed by Tom Fazio and moulded in the image of Augusta National, rolls over an impressive pine-lined property with several lakes and creeks. Maintained to the highest standards, the fairways turn around crisp-edged white sand bunkers and rise into large greens surrounded by carved-out bunkers, fall-offs, water and pine straw boundaries. Once ranked as high as 78th on America’s 100 Greatest Courses by Golf Digest, Sage Valley now resides at No.153.