Doug Wood, a former director of golf at the Banff Springs Golf Course, recalls the day in the early 1990s when an elderly Bob Hope arrived from his California home to play the world-famous mountain layout.
"Heavy winds chased him into the clubhouse after six holes, but Hope was exhilarated by the experience," Wood says. "His old friend Bing Crosby had told him that Banff was one of the courses he had to play before he died."
Of Canada's nearly 2,100 public courses, only a few are considered so beautiful or architecturally unique that avid golfers would travel great distances to find out what all the fuss is about.
From the sand dunes of Prince Edward Island to the mountain valleys of Alberta and British Columbia, a roundup of acclaimed Canadian courses every golfer must play at least once - or regret it forever:
The Links at Crowbush Cove, Prince Edward Island
Few courses in the history of Canadian golf have equalled the sudden impact of PEI's the Links at Crowbush Cove.
Voted Golf Digest's best new Canadian course of 1994, the gorgeous Tom McBroom-designed North Shore layout ignited the local golf industry. More than a dozen new courses opened in Crowbush Cove's wake, while annual revenue from golf tourism in Canada's smallest province jumped to a high of around $80-million in 2005 from about $17-million in the mid-1990s.
Set beside the rolling dunes of a white-sand beach, Crowbush Cove features nine water holes, eight holes that skirt the lee side of the environmentally sensitive dunes, wide and undulating fairways, and green sites that are often severe, full of bumps and hollows and protected by deep-set bunkers.
But the most difficult obstacle to scoring well is the almost constantly howling wind. On a really blustery day, even low handicappers can struggle to break 90 at a seaside layout that has become synonymous with East Coast golf.
Highlands Links,
Nova Scotia
No less an authority than Canadian golf legend George Knudson raved about the almost unmatched natural splendour of Highlands Links, a Stanley Thompson-designed jewel set in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. "When you're driving up the road to the course, it's like driving up to heaven," Knudson said. "There's not a better walk in golf."
Nova Scotia's tallest mountains loom over wildly humped and slanting fairways that snake dramatically through terrain ranging from a pine-edged valley floor cut by the charging Clyburn River to rocky outcrops and seaside marshes. Thompson, the greatest of all Canadian golf architects, painstakingly sculpted views through the forest to reveal the ocean and the surrounding mountains. Especially memorable are green complexes left open at the front in the classic style, then made treacherous by the architect's distinctive hollows, run-offs and bumps.
Nearby, at the end of a long birch-lined drive, is Keltic Lodge, a provincially owned resort opened in 1940, a year before the launch of a course many still regard as Canada's best.
Glen Abbey Golf Club,
Ontario
World-famous as the host of 23 Canadian Open championships, Glen Abbey Golf Club offers amateurs the almost religious experience of playing in the spike prints of golf greats such as Tiger Woods, Greg Norman and Arnold Palmer.
After an absence of three years, Canada's premier tourney returns July 24-27 to the Jack Nicklaus-designed layout, located about 30 minutes west of Toronto in Oakville. With tight traps, fiendishly contoured greens and water hazards that come into play on 11 holes, the stadium-style course will challenge the world's top players in every sense.
Like a symphony conductor, Nicklaus builds momentum slowly, saving his best work for the valley holes, 11 through 15, before ending with a wallop on the par-five 18th. It was here that Woods sealed his victory in the 2000 Canadian Open with a 218-yard bunker shot to the green. So astonishing was the play that since then few golfers have been able to resist the temptation to drop a ball in the same bunker and try their luck.
Muskoka Bay Club, Ontario
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