The Modern Biarritz

Doak and Urbina offer here a resurrection of the Biarritz, executed with a violence of scale. The green is a vast rectangle, bisected by a swale deep enough to hide a small man. Unlike the Raynor interpretations where the front plateau serves as a fairway approach, Old Macdonald mows the entire complex to green height. The result is a putting surface of absurd length—seventy yards of turf that demands a specific geography. The question asks not if you can hit the green, but if you can hold the correct shelf.

The ancestry lies in the chasm hole at La Phare, yet this iteration proves the template survives the velocity of modern fescue. Critics feared the deep trough would become a carnival game under fast conditions; instead, the contours accept the ball, feeding it down rather than rejecting it. The hole sits exposed on a spine of dunes. The wind coming off the Pacific turns a routine iron shot into a calculus of trajectory and hope.

From the tee, the target looks like a runway. It seduces the player into complacency. “How can one miss?” the mind asks. The answer arrives when a putt from the front tier disappears into the hollow, reemerges with too much pace, and trundles off the back edge into the scrub. The strategy is defensive. If the pin is back, the shot must fly the valley. If the ball finds the bottom of the trench, ambition should be shelved. Lag the putt up the face, take the five, and walk to the next tee without speaking.