New book salutes best nine-hole courses in the country

By Ruth Melville

A recently published book declares the Norfolk Country Club’s nine-hole golf course to be one of the finest such courses in the country.

“The Finest Nines: The Best Nine-Hole Golf Courses in North America,” by Middletown writer Anthony Pioppi, ranks the NCC course as number 11 out of 25 best courses.

Eighteen-hole courses are standard today, and have been since World War II, but as the author points out in his introduction, in our era of shorter attention spans and less leisure time, nine-hole courses are regaining their popularity. Pioppi, who is a golf writer and a historian, and a member of the St. Andrew’s Golf Club in Scotland, calls them “the hidden gems in the game of golf.”

At one time, Norfolk had two nine-hole golf courses. The original, one of the first public courses in the country, was called Norfolk Downs and was located between Tobey Pond and the current Curling Club. It was owned by Isabella Eldridge, the same woman who was responsible for building the Norfolk Library.

But the NCC wanted its own course—for one thing, Miss Eldridge didn’t allow golf to be played on Sundays—and in 1926 the club members hired A. W. Tillinghast, a celebrated course architect of the day, to design a course for them. The course we see today, which opened in 1928, is very little altered from Tillinghast’s design. Norfolk Downs was abandoned in the 1940s.

But Tillinghast’s role in designing the NCC course had been forgotten over time. In the book, Pioppi credits club historian Michael Kelly with having discovered the long-lost connection while doing research for his own book, “The Country Club Norfolk, Connecticut, 1912-2012.” (In his acknowledgments Pioppi thanks Larry Hannafin and Ron Pfaefflin, NCC golf pro, as well.)

Kelly also uncovered the fact that years later, in 1935, Tillinghast came back to Norfolk and drew up a plan for combining Norfolk Downs and the Country Club course into one 18-hole course. But that would have required the NCC to purchase the Downs, and in the end the idea came to nothing. Pioppi writes that there is a spot near the tee for the sixth hole where you can see traces of sand traps in the old Downs course, most of which has reverted to forest.

This is a book written not just for historians but for true golf enthusiasts. Pioppi ranks the courses solely by course architecture. He favors courses that pose challenges but also offer options for players with different skills. “Courses that allow for the ground game as well as the aerial routes stand above those that don’t,” he writes.

His hole-by-hole, shot-by-shot descriptions give the imaginative reader as sense of what it would be like to actually play the course. He concludes his tour through the NCC course with a description of its “delightful and quirky” ninth hole, illustrated by a photograph, taken by Christopher Little, of the “minuscule” ninth green, sitting just below the clubhouse.

Most of the courses in “The Finest Nines” are on the East Coast of the United States and Canada, where golf first became popular at a time when the nine-hole course was standard. Massachusetts, with five, has the largest number of “finest” courses, followed by Connecticut, with three. The Hotchkiss School Golf Course squeaks onto the list at number 25. Designed by Seth Raynor, another famous course designer of the day, the Hotchkiss course was completed in 1926, almost the same time as the Norfolk course, but it has not been as well preserved.

Photo, top, of the tiny ninth-hole green at the Norfolk Country Club, by Christopher Little.