Chicago Public Golf

Vital Stats
Date Played: 5/12/2007
Tee Time: 10:20
Turn Time: 12:42
End Time: 3:10
Price: $64 (18 holes, cart)
Tees Played: Blue (back tees, 6,432 yards, 71.6/135)

My Hilldale GC photo set at Flickr.

Summary
Hilldale Golf Club is the only 18-hole public design in Chicagoland by late, famed American designer Robert Trent Jones, Sr. It’s a great layout with well-conditioned greens and fairways, but lacking in certain aesthetic and service aspects. The management (it’s privately owned) focuses on keeping the short grass in great shape but do little else to enhance the overall golf experience.

Golf Course
As you would expect from Jones, the design is solid. The par 71 course is challenging yet very playable and features a good variety of holes. The three par fives are especially interesting:

• #2, 550 yards - Mid-length hole with two lakes in a play; one on the left reachable from the tee and one on the right by the green. For me, it played as a double-dogleg.
• #11, 602 yards - Massive beast with an elevated tee and water in front of the green. The green is very shallow with OB behind making the approach very difficult.
• #14, 524 yards - Finally, some normalcy, but no cupcake. Straight with bunkers, a small pond, and a slightly elevated green. Unfortunately, it’s ruined by the expressway and the huge billboard for the course.

You get a yardage book on each cart and it contains plenty of information to plot your strategy on even the most difficult of Jones’ par fours. I loved the 421 yard 17th. It’s a gentle dogleg right with water in front of the green. The fairway is thin but if you hit the drive perfectly, you get the benefit of some roll off the downhill about 150 yards from the green. Decent risk/reward hole.

The greens (bent grass) are as good as it gets for Chicago area daily fee courses. They are smooth, fast, and well-conditioned. The fairways (bent grass) are also in great condition and I didn’t have one bad lie in them all day.

On the downside, the rough is generally thin and not very penal. Around the greens, the rough is patchy at times and I had a few green-side lies in ruts. The bunker maintenance was almost non-existent the day I was there. There were a lot of bunkers with too little sand and several bunkers were facing erosion. Hardly any of the bunkers were edged and it did not look they had the maintenance crew do a Saturday morning raking. The cart paths run most of the course but are very close to the fairways in a lot of places. All of these matters of sub-par conditioning are more noticeable when contrasted with the nice greens and fairways.

Facilities
This place has a great range. It’s bent grass and they keep it groomed very well; not mowed quite as tightly as the fairways, but close. It has flags marking the distances and you can hit drivers.

The clubhouse is dated and the pro shop is dark and cramped. I checked out the men’s locker room and it was also old and dark, but has a full wall of showers and looked pretty clean. There’s a restaurant on-site called CK Mulligan’s Bar and Grill. I didn’t check it out, but I did have a dog at the turn, which was good.

But for the range, nothing stands out with the facilities.

Service and Other Items
In general, the service was lacking. You get a receipt in the pro shop then just have to wander out and find your own cart. It’s mandatory cart on Saturday mornings and they don’t sell yardage books, so we took the cart. It would have been nice if somebody official-looking pointed at a cart said “take that one, it’s juiced,” but we had no such luck. Don’t get me wrong, I hate it when some youngster or senior citizen is prowling the parking lot looking to sell me a cart and his bag handling services, but I do need to at least know which cart I can use.

The ranger was pretty much non-existent and it was a long and arduous round. We played in 4 hours and 50 minutes and waited on every shot. We did see what looked like a ranger on 3 and 12, but he just waved. We got our tee time the night before and it didn’t look that crowded, so I was surprised by the almost five hour round. Plus, they use a much-advertised 10 minute tee time interval. Bottom line, they just aren’t doing anything proactive to speed play.

Finally, two points about the rating, slope, and tee positions. First, this didn’t feel like a place with a slope of 135 from the back tees. And second, they don’t even use the back tee box on the “signature” par five 11th. These are some of my pet peeves.

A slope of 135 should have the potential to beat me up, if not just kick the living crap out of me. I was getting off the tee as well as ever, so maybe that made it feel easier. But even the tight fairways are abutted by rough that is not that penal and trees that aren’t that numerous. I think it needs to be re-rated. And I really get mad when they dumb down the tees on long, tough holes to speed up play. When I noticed that the back tees were moved up on the 602 yard par five 11th, I trekked up the hill to real back tee box. It was mangled and unkempt, so they aren’t using it. Here’s my suggestion, if you want to speed up play, make the ranger do something about it. Pulling this tee box trickery is false advertising and probably has Jones turning over in his grave.

Rating
I will talk more about my rating system later. It’s in its infancy right now and I’m sorting through just how to describe it. Let me say that it’s a 100 point system, and a Golf Digest Places to Play 4-star rating (out of five) should be close to a score of 80 on my scale. I’m going to give this course a 65 rating. I disagree with the 4-star rating that it gets from Places to Play, so I’m giving it something akin to a 3.5-star rating, which is still good. As you will come to find out, a score of 80 is for a stellar course in all respects, and a score of 90 is reserved for the very best courses around.

The 65 probably doesn’t mean anything right now until you see how I rate other courses and you get the underlying theory on my rating system. Let me sum it up by saying that this a great course from tee to green, but it has conditioning and service issues that keep it from fulfilling its potential.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under Course Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.