Left to Right #11: Lisbon
Pinehurst x Tobacco Road
It’s been over seven weeks since I last wrote to you, slightly less if you’re subscribed for free, and I can only apologise. Caddying full-time at JCB Golf and Country Club – still in the habit of using the full title first – has inevitably consumed the majority of my time and energy.
My golf is even suffering; the mad dash, if it’s worth it, on a Thursday to make a late afternoon tee at home for a weekly singles competition with my mates is frankly unworkable. If I do get there ‘on time’ it’s diminishing returns, golf-wise, and absolutely knackering. No lunch while working, no downtime, limited mental and physical bars left.
It sounds like I’m complaining – I’m not. I’m just getting used to the new schedule and demands of caddying. I go into work with high energy every day, and by the time I get home I’m quite tired, so playing in the evening afterwards, I’m slowly beginning to accept, is simply too much. It’s great to be out still and see my mates, and play after watching others do so all day.
The common irony, though, is that working in golf means I’m going to play less. A sacrifice I’m happy to make which I knew was likely before I started. I am loving the caddie life after only a few weeks and 13 loops, and long may it continue. Saturday morning competitions at home are cherished even more now.
My golf IQ is definitely getting better, mind. When there’s a Scramble at JCB for the day’s corporate invite competition and you’re asked to give a read on a putt on those greens, it better be bang on. If not, you’re quickly gonna get found out given a conversation and forensic analysis between the four players over the putt, and then as many attempts from the same spot by each player, will show you up. Not even “unlucky, it’s just pace…” is going to save you there.
Anyway, a lot has happened in the last few weeks, I’m not really sure where to start or what to prioritise. I know I can’t talk about much of the caddying stuff, sadly, but there’s plenty more to share and get into.
Mostly, I hope you are happy and healthy, and playing some golf. A couple of you have replied to say you’re now intending to start playing again which is amazing and, perhaps partly, the real point of this blog. Let me know how that is going, yeah?
In April, I watched Rory win the Masters with my son at a mate’s pizza restaurant into the early UK hours. I feel exhausted every time I think about it, what it must have taken out of him to finally get over the line. We actually left when it went to a play-off because I was so angry that he missed that putt on 18. Fraser and I listened to it on the radio in the car on the way home, beautifully described on the BBC, and then I pored over the highlights on TV.
I had a quick trip to Woburn to meet a couple of member mates to play the Duchess, and spend an hour with my buddy on their world class short game practice facility, the Tavistock, with Dan Grieve in my head the whole time. Weekly competitions at home have begun with mixed results but maximum fun, and I played a pro-am with my coach and two other Rushcliffe friends at Forest of Arden.
The excellent Golfing Days event felt like being invited into a community, which I hadn’t expected, and it elevated the experience. Seeing my coach up close was very cool, and it was his process over every shot, then snapping back into the carefree guy I recognised from lessons in between, which struck me most. Different breed, pros.
Now into May, I met a friend at Hadley Wood to check out his club’s newly renovated pristine white bunkers and reacquaint myself with their challenging, and now firm, MacKenzie greens. We would separately fly to Lisbon together three days later to play five days back-to-back north and south of the city along the coast, the highlight of which we knew already would be two days on Dunas at Terras da Comporta.
Comporta is a village an hour south of Lisbon. We stayed a few minutes away from the property in freshly built accommodation, of which there will doubtless be more in the coming years in the area. Dunas officially opened just over 18 months ago, with a second course, Torre, designed by Sergio Garcia, opening days after our trip. The David McLay-Kidd Dunas, though, is best described, by someone who has done both recently, as a mixture of Pinehurst and Tobacco Road.
It was unreal. And a real privilege to play so early in its short completed history since it was finally finished after a stormy development which stretches back to 2008. We saw the site for the foundations of the new clubhouse at the back of 18 and, if the temporary clubhouse is anything to go by, it will be spectacular. As anticipated, Dunas went straight to number one in Portugal and is comfortably inside the top 10 in Continental Europe. In its first eligible year.
From the moment we arrived for an early morning tee to the late afternoon when we left on the second day, Dunas constantly delivered. The practice range, the welcome, the setting and scale of the place, and then – oh boy – the course. The first tee only really gave a glimpse of what was to come despite having everything in front of you for the first hole. There are no filler holes, no surprises there, but the stretch at the end of the front nine, 7 and 8 in particular, holy shit that is something else.
The waste areas are unfathomably big, the whole place messes with your perspective and, to be honest, your reality. I’d no experience of waste areas like that before and, once we’d worked out what was a bunker and what was not after a couple of holes, it was as though an unspoiled, lush course had been constructed, then stretched and torn wildly at the seams to reveal the local flora and sandy ground underneath. The greens are genuinely immaculate, and vast – we had some big putts between us, my Arccos on-course tracking system tells me that one was well over 100ft.
Dunas is, to its credit, also immensely playable; invitingly large and wide fairways, which narrow towards the greens, offering big landing areas from often elevated tees with only a cursory glance of a course guide or instrument needed. We played off the whites our first day and had a great time, reds the second just to see what the course would play like from different angles and distances.
When you get over the Rolex clocks, the mint condition, the pines, the sand, the greens, the service, the feeling of being completely lost on the course and lapping up each hole – the playability of Dunas is a real feather in its cap. I would strongly, strongly recommend anyone vaguely interested to go and play it at the first available opportunity. I will certainly be back there before too long.
Remarkably, we weren’t paired with any other players on either days at Dunas, which added to the experience. The clubhouse was busier the second day but, on the course, we didn’t come across another group at any stage. We played next with other people at Praia D'El Rey, which was really fun, having some great shared moments on its impressive coastal back nine.
My companion, Simon, went full Scheffler that afternoon, foot firmly down on the throat of our 90-hole five-day Stableford. It’s fun when you can tell someone is in that kind of flow state and it was a stunning run of coast and holes in which to do so.
PDR is roughly an hour north of Lisbon, close to West Cliffs where we stayed for the remainder of the trip since leaving Comporta. The accommodation at West Cliffs was sensational, as is their clubhouse – comfortably the best I've had the pleasure of – and the course itself is highly rated, number three in Portugal. It was impressive, the finishing hole especially, but it was extremely tough, borderline a slog at times. You’re dead off the fairway, the greens are small and unhinged, and the sand in the bunkers is so deep it’s unplayable. I miss that apartment but not the golf course.
Finally, we were treated to Oitavos Dunes, down the coast towards Lisbon and on the most westerly tip of Europe, where surfers travel far and wide to tackle some of the biggest waves on the globe. Oitavos Dunes was just the tonic after West Cliffs, an instantly enjoyable links and woodland with all manner of views and birds, and my first experience of bermuda grass.
With the bermuda, you need to take the ball first off the fairway otherwise the thick, grabby grass, even when short, is going to snatch and do unhelpful things to your club and ball. On the greens, we had to first check the hole to see which edge was the fluffy, wispy side – this would then tell you the direction the grain was going, which, surprisingly, significantly affected the pace and direction of the ball.
We made time for dinner in central Lisbon on the last night, straight off the course from Oitavos Dunes, a city I’m very keen to visit again without golf clubs, which will be rather difficult given the opportunity to play Dunas et al again.