The Country Club of Charleston is a new and untested venue for most of the players competing in this week's U.S. Women's Open Championship, and many of them will likely have sought out in advance the advice of Charleston native Beth Daniel on how best to tackle the course.
LPGA and World Golf Halls of Fame member Daniel, a 33-time winner on the LPGA Tour, knows the par-71 layout designed by Seth Raynor as well as anyone and her father was a member at the Country Club of Charleston when she was growing up.
"I wouldn't call it the most difficult golf course in the world but it's fun to play," Daniel told LPGA.com. "This is going to be, I think, more of a fun U.S. Women's Open rather than one that will really brutalize you. For the Open to be held on the course where I learned to play golf makes this week really special, and it will be a great test for the competitors."
When Daniel thinks about the Country Club of Charleston and its sweeping vistas of South Carolina Lowcountry, the first thing that comes to her mind are the challenging green complexes.
"It's pretty generous off the tee but it's kind of a second-shot golf course," she said. "If you're not in the proper quadrant of the green, you could have some pretty tough two-putts. If you hit the ball in the correct quadrant, if your irons are on, you can give yourself some pretty easy birdie putts. But if your iron shots are off a little bit, you can have some tough putts up and down ridges and up and over humps on the greens.”
Daniel, a two-time runner-up at the U.S. Women's Open whose sole major title came at the 1990 Mazda LPGA Championship where she triumphed by one shot over Rosie Jones, feels that any type of player can win this week at the Country Club of Charleston.
"Obviously if the wind blows, that changes things but this time of year is typically not super windy," she said. "We have most of our wind in February and March. But if it gets windy, it can be very, very challenging.
“I really don't feel like this course favors any one kind of player because the greens are big enough where you can hit a variety of shots into hole locations but you have to pick the type of shot you're going to hit. If a pin is up on one of the little plateaus, you have to make a decision with your second shot. Are you going to try and bounce it and spin it up, or are you going to try and fly it up there and have enough spin to stop it? You really have to make that decision before you hit the shot.
"You can play this course in a lot of ways. You can play it in the air or you can play it on the ground. That's one of the things I love about this golf course. It has a touch of links golf to it. The first time I ever played in Great Britain, I was like, 'Wow, I love this kind of golf because it's kind of what I grew up on.' So I feel some of the foreign players, particularly the European players, are going to really like the look of the Country Club of Charleston this week."
A DEEP LOVE
Daniel learned to play golf at the Country Club of Charleston under the direction of teaching professionals Al Esposito and Derek Hardy and she quickly developed a deep love of the Seth Raynor design.
"There are several holes that I really like on this course but probably my two favorites are the par-three 11th and the par-four 16th," said Daniel, who hosts the Beth Daniel Junior Azalea each year at the Country Club of Charleston. "No. 11 is one of those holes where you either love it or hate it. It's a reverse Redan hole, designed a little bit after the 15th hole at North Berwick in Scotland, and you have to be able to hit a left-to-right shot off the tee, or a little bit of a hold shot to the green. The top is very narrow and it's guarded by bunkers on the right and left. The green is huge but the first 40 feet of it goes straight up hill, it's a false front, so you're not putting any pins there. It's unusable.
'When I played stroke-play tournaments on this golf course, I often laid up on 11. People laugh at me when I say that but if you don't have the perfect club in your hand to hit the first five or six yards of the top part of the green, then I used to lay up because then I knew the worst I was going to make was a bogey. It took big numbers out of the mix. If a player makes four threes there this week, then you are way ahead of the game on that hole.”
The 437-yard 16th is a gem of a hole with a huge punchbowl green that wraps around a menacing front bunker nicknamed the ‘Lion’s Mouth’.
"I just love the green on this hole," said Daniel, who is serving as an honorary co-chair of the 74th U.S. Women's Open Championship. "It's a pretty straightaway par 4, and there are some fairway bunkers that can catch an errant drive but the second shot is really tough. The back portion of the green is raised so the shot in there is to try and land something over the bunker, let it run up the back part and then run back down towards the pin. So it's a ricochet kind of a shot. You've got to bank it, and you've got to bank it off the back. It's very cool to watch shots in there. It's such a beautiful and unusual green."
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