By The Lake, Close to The Hills

Credit: All photography; exclusive additional images and text with thanks and copyright Mark Horyna, Depeche Golf Magazine.

“How’d you like it?” Mike is smilingly greeting us at the 18th after a more than six-hour round that saw us strolling along undulating fairways, losing multiple balls, replaying approach shots with reselected clubs into treacherously guarded greens, taking in spectacular views of the nearby lake, speaking to disinterested cows, wading through knee-high rough, and flying our small drone over some of the best bunkers and most interesting greens one can imagine.

A broad smile bordering on a wild grin appears on Paul’s face. “I played from the tips,” he laughs. “Must have shot something around 90. I loved every second of it! Every shot. It’s absolutely brilliant!” He plays off scratch.

“We’re actually closed on Thursdays this time of the year,” Mike West had said on the phone two days earlier. “But feel free to come by. You’ll have the course to yourself, apart from the cows. We have a herd of cows on the course. Greenkeeping.”

I could hardly believe my ears – not because of the cows. Course to ourselves? Course to ourselves!

We are, as I have been told by well-informed Kiwi friends, talking about one of the country’s most prestigious courses. Prestigious and tough and polarizing. The words people use to describe the place are manifold. We’re at The Kinloch Club, just a few miles outside of the lakeside town of Taupo.

Dashingly beautiful and brutally difficult probably sums up how I see it. Of course, everything you might have heard is true. It’s a spectacular, high-end resort course and definitely not your everyday Jack Nicklaus design.

It forces you to think, measure, rethink, remeasure, and think again. And it’s sometimes so deceiving that all the thinking and measuring won’t help at all. Because often, you will just not trust all the measuring and the thinking and go along with your original, albeit misled intuition.

There are said to be more than 170 bunkers scattered around the place. Most of them are either huge or deep. Some of them both. And yes, a lot of them come into play and are not mere optical design features. It looks like an inland links with all its scruffiness and bunkering, but it doesn’t play like one. It’s pure target golf and hitting the green on the wrong spot will get you in trouble.

Overall, it is way too tough for my liking, and not just around the edges.

Michael Donaldson, who co-authored the excellent NZ golf book Sweet Spot, points out that Nicklaus, who designed The Kinloch Club shortly after working with Tom Doak, might have been inspired by the experience.

Some of Doak’s design philosophy seems to have slipped into the Golden Bear’s work on the sloping land above the lake. But Nicklaus puts too much emphasis on length. From the tips, The Kinloch is absurdly long.

All that said, Paul just shakes his head as I bring forth my points. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think it might be the best course I’ve ever played…” Then again, he does love a stiff test.

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