Escena Golf Club               Palm Springs, CA               www.escenagolf.com

A new nicklaus design with a traditional flare

For most Americans, the vast desert golf Mecca two hours east of Los Angeles is called Palm Springs. In reality, the area is called the Coachella Valley, and Palm Springs is actually just one of the nine incorporated cities which make up the Coachella Valley, sitting at the far west end of the valley in the shadow of the San Jacinto Mountains, some of the most striking and dramatic mountains in the world. Palm Springs isn't even the largest of the nine cities, and probably has the fewest golf courses of all of them, and there have been no new courses added in almost twenty years. Until now!

Escena Golf Club officially opened for business on Saturday, November 5, 2005. The course is a beautifully flowing, wide-open retro design by Nicklaus Design, and a new course like this is long overdue in the desert! Due to the many restrictions and realities of building a course in the desert, many designers have opted to create “target” golf courses, where a player is supposed to hit from one small area of turf to the next, sometimes paying a dear penalty if a shot misses the fairway by just a foot or two. These are certainly some of the more stunning courses you can imagine, but they can also be a real frustrating experience, even driving some players to give up the game after a particularly bad experience with a cactus. Escena is very different, and it is the type of course that will inspire many to take up the game or play it more often! That’s not to say it’s an easy course, because it’s not. It’s simply a great combination of challenging and fun.

In fact, the entire style and look of Escena is fun. The logo is made up of a contemporary design using modern colors which actually reflect back to the original Palm Springs style of the 50’s and 60’s. The clubhouse will be opening in late 2006, and will also reflect this original “mid-century modern” Palm Springs style of the last century, which incorporates a lot of the innovative and inviting use of open spaces, clean lines, patios, glass and a contemporary, casual elegance. You haven’t seen a new clubhouse design like this in many years, and it’s sure to be a wonderfully pleasant place to hang out on a cool desert night, enjoying a fine meal, a few martinis and the comfortable mood as the sun sets behind nearby 10,000 ft San Jacinto Mountain, which seems so close you could hit it with a six iron (it’s actually about ten miles away)!

Escena sits on a wonderfully located parcel of land that has mysteriously gone undeveloped as the vast majority of the area’s expansion took place to the east. It is as close to the airport as you could want, making it the most convenient golf course in the valley for most visitors, yet the runways are far enough away that the noise never interferes with a shot. Nicklaus Design brought the full arsenal of modern course philosophy and technology to Escena, then incorporated all of these wonderful improvements into a more traditional design. You won’t have any scary tee shots, as the fairways are wide open and long, but you will have some interesting lies and hazards to deal with, as there are plenty of undulating fairways highlighted with large, sculpted bunkers, and there are also several lakes and two streams coming into play on nine of the 18 holes.

The course starts out with a challenging, 611-yard par 5 where you will come face to face with 11 of the potentially troublesome bunkers, including 9 fairway bunkers and two protecting the green. There are also vast areas of smooth desert wasteland along and between several holes, but this area is very playable and there are only small shrubs and relatively thin palm trees to deal with – no giant cacti or jumping chollas in this part of the desert! There are also two beautiful new streams running along several holes, complete with several small waterfalls and rocky rapids, and their cooling and calming effect is very pleasant - as long as you don’t hit into them! One stream is crossed by a handsome rock bridge, and there are two very cool looking bright red wooden bridges along the final hole, including one you’ll cross to get to the very well protected 18th green (five bunkers around the green, plus the stream which runs along the right hand side and cuts across the fairway in front of the green, then flows along the left side of the fairway all the way to the tee). This short par 5 was my favorite hole, by the way.

Escena Golf Club is managed by Troon Golf, so you know the conditions are going to be among the best you’ll ever play throughout the year, but call ahead to check on the over-seeding schedule if you’re coming in the fall, which is something you should do any time you’re visiting the desert during September or October.

The original canvas of land Nicklaus Design was given to work with was quite flat, but you’d never know it after playing Escena. It looks like they had a lot of fun with the bulldozers, and the final product is a wonderfully satisfying course filled with plenty of gentle swales, large mounds, the easy flowing streams, lots of elevated greens, several large and inviting lakes, hundreds of Mexican fan palms, and some truly inspiring views of the nearby mountains, many of which are perfectly framed by the design of the course. The course stretches to almost 7,200 yards from the back tees, but with four sets of tees and virtually no forced carries from the forward tees, it will be playable and enjoyable by every level of golfer. The greens are larger than average, and each green has six pin placements, some of which will create some rather interesting and challenging putts. One of the great things Troon Golf does company-wide is provide a lot of useful information to their daily guests, and I’d strongly recommend using the yardage book and pin placement chart on every hole.

The course offers an interesting mix of 5 par 3’s, 5 par 5’s and 8 par 4’s. Four of the five par 3’s are quite long – measuring 199, 245, 223 and 240 yards, while three of the par 5’s measure 550 yards or less, including the 536-yard finishing hole where anything can and certainly will happen. This mix of holes makes for some very exciting scoring opportunities, and also requires you to play from the proper set of tees. This is a course on which you might even want to mix the tees up a little, moving up on the 3’s and back on the 5’s, or whatever makes the most sense for your game.

I think Escena is going to make a huge and immediate impact on the golf industry in the Coachella Valley, and will quickly become one of the valley’s favorite courses. The rates are going to be on the lower end of the scale, which is going to help attract a lot of traffic, but the real attraction is the quality and fun of the course. One of the key indicators of a course’s appeal is in the percentage of people who want to play it again, and according to Jeff Sauvage, the Club Manager of Escena, they were overwhelmed with golfers finishing their first round on the opening day who immediately headed back to the pro shop to book their next round at Escena.

I guess that says it all.