How often is ONE golf resort the best golf resort in MULTIPLE states? See, you don’t even really understand the question, do you? The answer is “almost never.” That said, Delamar Greenwich Harbor and Pound Ridge Golf Club combine today to create arguably THE marquee golf resort in both New York and Connecticut.
Another “beauty and the beast” tale, you could say they were destin(ation)ed for each other from the start. Though her ancestry traces back to humble beginnings in 1961, the physically flawless European belle, Delamar Greenwich Harbor, was officially “born” in 2002. Six years her junior, the wild and chiseled American, Pound Ridge Golf Club, nonetheless clearly impressed, and the two struck up a long distance relationship (really only 15 miles) that has since become among the most marvelous of industrial matrimonies. One of the greatest love stories in golf.
Delamar Greenwich Harbor is a portside palace, an 82-room (and suite) boutique hotel on the waterfront in Greenwich, Conn., just 45 minutes from midtown Manhattan. With luxurious Old World style, nationally acclaimed French cuisine and contemporary technologies, it’s no wonder the Stamford and White Plains communities each consider this their crown jewel of hospitality.
The most brilliant crowns tend to be loaded with “rocks”, and Pound Ridge Golf Club provides plenty of those. Pete Dye took on the 172 acres of natural stonewalls, streams and hilly woodlands and left behind a dramatically challenging golf design that unapologetically both kicks your tail and gets in your head, hole after boulder-blasted hole. The combination of some of the area’s most scenic high points with some of your scorecard’s lowest points makes for quite the unforgettable round. There are holes like the par-5 13th, where Pete reportedly ran out of dynamite and just left the mammoth monoliths in your way, and the par-3 15th (Headstone) where a 9,000-square-foot green has a wall-lined marsh in front of it and a mountainous boulder backboard behind it. What an awesome round!
If you love challenges (me, me, me, I do, I do), Pound Ridge delivers them in punches. On the other hand, if you tend to flinch at 150-plus slope ratings, well, just remember this place is visually stunning too. So what’ve you got to lose?
NOTE: Some of my colleagues in the golf journalism industry hate this place. I don’t get that. Not at all. Pound Ridge is infinitely more playable than Shinnecock Hills was at this year’s US Open and at least eight times more scenic. While it’s debatable whether or not the USGA could physically make the course more challenging, just check your ego at the door and appreciate the opportunity to play a course that is ANYTHING BUT “cookie cutter.”