WAVERLEY, New Zealand – Waverley Golf Club gives me butterflies. In an era in which you see great golf courses all day and every day on social media, it is refreshing to stumble upon a course that wows you in person.
Over the past 25 years, golf course architecture has become a subject of greater debate, and the number of outlets offering photography and research of courses has exploded. Almost every great golf course has been photographed, chronicled and celebrated in the public sphere.
As a golf course architect exposed to all of the various course profiles and scuttlebutt about new layouts and hidden gems, I have been very fortunate to see and play many of the world’s top layouts. And 98 times out of 100, I have a very good sense of what is to come because I have seen the course on TV, in magazines, on social media or through other outlets. I’ve likely heard about the course history, the designer, the agronomy and maybe even some construction stories.
When I visit these amazing venues, I often leave completely satisfied and holding the golf course in high regard. However, because of all the coverage and imagery, it is rare that I am caught off guard, blown away and infatuated with a course I see the first time.
Imagine my surprise when little Waverley Golf Club – where you put $20 in a drop box to play, where there are no formal bunkers, and where they have only one greenskeeper – was the course I think about most after an epic trip to New Zealand.
The trip featured rounds at Tara Iti (ranked among the top 10 courses outside the U.S.), Te Arai North and South (sandy coastal courses designed by Tom Doak and the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, respectively), Cape Kidnappers (with 400-foot cliffs above the ocean), Kauri Cliffs ($500 to play), Titirangi (designed by the famed Alister MacKenzie) and Paraparaumu Beach Golf Club (great links that has hosted New Zealand Opens). Each of the courses was wonderful with diverse and dramatic settings, first-class service and fabulous conditioning. If you could only play one of the courses, it would still be worth the trip to New Zealand because the country is so beautiful and the golf experiences are so special.
But Waverley stole the show. Yep, the little country course about three and a half hours southwest of Auckland.
I had heard about the course from Doak’s Confidential Guide, and we decided to add it to the itinerary to get a feel for a New Zealand country course. My friend Drew and I arrived late in the afternoon after playing Paraparaumu Beach in the morning. We threw seven clubs in the bag and stumbled into the small clubhouse to find a dozen or so locals hanging out, drinking beer. They could tell we were tourists, and a man named Denis got up to show us to the honor box and get us started. When I first caught a glimpse of the course from the back patio, I said to Denis, “Wow, this place is amazing.” He replied, “Yeah, that is what they tell us.”
After putting $20 in the drop box (up from $10 a few years ago), we were off. Over the next three hours we wandered over the rumpled landscape as the sun through shadows made everything pop. As we arrived at the next tee box or into a green site, we would look at each other and say, “You gotta see this.” The land was heaving in every direction. There were giant bowls, big ridges, sharp knuckles and everything in between. As we got to the fourth green, a flock of sheep jingled along. They assist the one greenkeeper in taking care of the course. We reached the 10th green, and Denis was waiting for us. We were terrified he was going to tell us we had to leave, as everyone else had gone home. Instead he welcomed us into the clubhouse, gave us a tour and shared some of the course history.
After our chat with Denis we continued on, and to our amazement, it got more exciting. Hole 12, Tom Thumb, is a short par 4 that plays into a volcano of a green setting. Nos. 14 and 15 are back-to-back par 5s with some of the most pronounced fairway undulations on earth. And as we hit our approaches into 18, a bowl atop a 20 foot hill, we saw two guys waiting on the patio. Denis was so taken by how infatuated we were with the course that he had driven into town and retrieved Wazza, the club captain, so he could meet us. Over the next two hours we became fast friends, and Drew and I tried to become the first international members of the club.
Since that day I think about the course often. Last year I was redesigning Poppy Ridge in California, and there was a spot on the property that reminded me of hole 12 at Waverley. I talked to the Northern California Golf Association (owner and operator of the course), showed a video of Waverley and explained how I wanted to create a hole inspired by the 12th. They went for it, and we built the sixth at Poppy Ridge as a fun hole with a volcano-type green complex. Many golfers at Poppy Ridge have described it as their favorite hole or one of the most unique holes they have seen in Northern California.
During construction of Poppy Hills, Wazza visited from New Zealand and was shocked when I shared that we were building something inspired by Waverley. I still think about Waverley often, and I am super excited to be going back in February (and I am going to take 16 Golfweek’s Best raters with me). I hope they have the same experience I did.
– Jay Blasi is a golf course architect based in California who writes occasional stories for Golfweek and hosts groups of Golfweek’s Best course raters around the world.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Waverley Golf Club in New Zealand wows American golf architect
