Destination Ohio: OSU's Scarlet Course

September 3, 7:54 PMGolf ExaminerDave Seanor

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Rule No. 1 at the Scarlet: Avoid the bunkers.

(This is one in a series of occasional golf destination reviews.)

COLUMBUS, Ohio – It’s befitting one of the nation’s great institutions of higher learning that a visit to Ohio State University’s golf complex is a history lesson.

Before checking in at the golf shop, you pass the OSU Wall of Fame. Affixed to the masonry are plaques honoring seven decades of Buckeye All-Americans, Big Ten champions and NCAA champions.

Just to the right of the shop’s front door is a bronze plaque that reads:

The Ohio State University Golf Courses

Collegiate home of JACK NICKLAUS

The greatest golfer ever to play the game

And if you visit the clubhouse for post-round libations, you can view the original routing plan that architect Alistair MacKenzie – the genius behind Augusta National, Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne – submitted to OSU’s visionary athletic director, L.W. St. John, in 1931.

The OSU Golf Club is one of the treasures of college golf, consistently ranked among the top five university-owned facilities in the land. Its creation was no small feat. No one foresaw the Great Depression in 1927, the year St. John hatched his plan for a university golf course. After the Crash of ‘29, fundraising became nearly impossible. Moreover, MacKenzie died in 1934 and it wasn’t until the following year that the course gained approval as a Works Progress Administration project and Perry Maxwell, another icon from golf’s Golden Era of architecture, was hired to execute MacKenzie’s plan.

The championship Scarlet Course opened in 1938. It has hosted 13 NCAA Championship tournaments (10 men’s, three women’s) – including 1995, when a talented freshman named Tiger Woods and his Stanford Cardinal lost to Oklahoma State in a playoff. The Scarlet hosted the first (1941) and last (1982) Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women national championships, which were the precursor to the NCAA Women’s Championship. It also has been the venue for numerous U.S. Golf Association events and is home to the Nationwide Tour’s Nationwide Children’s Hospital Invitational.

In 2006, Nicklaus further attached himself to the Scarlet Course when his design firm completed an extensive, $4.2 million restoration of the storied layout. The course was lengthened 340 yards to 7,455 from the Buckeye tees; par changed from 72 to 71; trees were removed; bunkers relocated and reconfigured; and several greens were recontoured.

I played the Scarlet in June as part of a three-day media “fam trip,” hosted by Vienna, Va.-based Buffalo Communications, that showcased public golf in the Columbus area. Unlike our first two stops, Cumberland Trail GC and Longaberger GC, the Ohio State Golf Club technically isn’t open to the public.

Only Ohio State students, members of the Alumni Association, big university donors who belong to the Varsity Club or Presidents Club, faculty, university employees and a limited number of their guests can play OSU’s two courses, the Scarlet and the Gray. For those not affiliated with the university, “guest” is the operative word. If you want to take on the famed Scarlet Course, you need to befriend someone who is part of the OSU family – which shouldn’t be too difficult considering Ohio State has an enrollment of 53,000, employs 40,000 people and has more than half a million living alumni.

Before our group teed off on a cloudless but sticky mid-summer morning, I sent a text message to my friend Kevin Hall, who is honored on the OSU Wall of Fame. As a Buckeye senior in 2004, Kevin won the Big Ten individual championship.  He toils on the Hooters Tour these days, and I wanted to let him know I was on the first tee of his old home track.

“Stay out of the bunkers,” he replied. “Once you get in them, you can’t get out.”

It was sound advice. One of Nicklaus’ goals when he took on the OSU job was to restore the bunkering as MacKenzie presumably had intended. (He left no detailed drawings.) Nicklaus succeeded. The Scarlet’s bunkers are deep, steep-faced, strategically placed, and feature MacKenzie’s trademark irregular shapes.

I began the round riding in a cart, it not having occurred to me that a Mackenzie layout from the 1930s would feature greens and tees in close proximity. After the second hole I handed my cart off to another player in our threesome and hoofed it for 14 holes until the 95-degree heat (and a disastrous, snap-hook 7 at the short par-4 16^th) did me in. It was glorious fatigue, for walking is the only way to really appreciate the nuance of classic course architecture.

Conditioning at the Scarlet was superb. The greens were as slick as those at Cumberland Trail, which boasts of having the best greens of any public course in Ohio, and the movement on these smaller putting surfaces added to the challenge. 

OSU can’t match the Longaberger experience in terms of serenity. This is an urban setting, where golfers must block out the distraction of car traffic only a few yards from several greens and tees. But the design more than makes up for any aesthetic deficiencies.

Nicklaus’ work at the Scarlet generally earned good reviews, although changes to the par-5 fourth hole weren’t to everyone’s liking. Nicklaus essentially shifted what had been a 480-yard hole to the right, away from housing and bending it around water, and built a new green roughly100 yards right of the original, which extended the hole to 586 yards. On the day we played, the flag was up front, just a few paces behind a cavernous bunker.

“I think the hole turned out very nicely,” Nicklaus says in renovation notes on the OSU Golf Club Web site, which features before and after photos of each hole. “Definition-wise it's the best new hole out here."

For the record, I heeded Hall’s advice and managed to avoid all but four bunkers, including two on the par-4 ninth hole that led to a triple-bogey 7. I posted an 87, which I’ll argue was respectable for a 13-handicapper making his debut on the Scarlet.

More important, during my stay in Columbus I reconnected with an old friend who teaches at OSU. Next time I’m in town, we’ll definitely be playing golf.

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY GOLF CLUB

• Green Fees: $70 for affiliates/guests on the Scarlet Course, $40 on the Gray Course. Golf carts are extra: $34, which can be split between two riders.

• Layout: The Scarlet Course opened in 1938. Built by Perry Maxwell according to plans drawn by Alistair Mackenzie in 1931. Jack Nicklaus renovated the Scarlet in 2005-06, adding length and restoring MacKenzie design features.

Five sets of tees on the Scarlet range from 7,455 yards (76.1 rating, 142 slope) to 5,752 yards (73.4 rating for ladies, 126 slope). We played from the Gray tees, the third longest at 6,664 yards (71.9 rating, 134 slope).

• Claim to Fame: Designed and built by two of the greatest names in course architecture, MacKenzie and Maxwell, and restored by OSU alum Nicklaus. (Check out this detailed history.)  Links magazine ranks the Scarlet No. 4 among America’s top 25 college courses.

• Noteworthy: The Scarlet Course gets all the attention, but the Gray Course (circa 1940) offers a nice Mackenzie-lite experience and shouldn’t be dismissed. The bunkering and green complexes feature many of the same Mackenzie traits as the Scarlet. And at 5,311 yards or 5,800 yards, including five par 4s of 325 yards or shorter, it’s perfect for beginners and higher handicap players.

• Web site: www.ohiostategolfclub.com