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The Dominican Republic’s eastern shore is chasing the planet’s luxury golf-vacation spotlight with a little help from The Golden Bear, The Donald and homegrown ingenuity
F
rom an elevated tee box, looking down toward the
Caribbean Sea in the distance, Jack Nicklaus launches his shot on the second hole at the Punta Espada Golf Club. The ball soars skyward, straight ahead, and gets lost in the blue sky.
But it doesn’t matter. No one watching seems to care where the ball ends up because the Golden Bear’s drive is largely ceremonial. He’s not competing; he’s here to promote the golf course he created on the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic.
Besides, the view from the tee alone is enough to draw anyone’s attention away from a flying golf ball, even one teed off by a living legend.
The 600-yard hole begins atop a bluff. Below, massive waste
bunkers frame the manicured fairway until it narrows and curls to the right around a shimmering, aquamarine tidal pool. The green sits at the end of a point of land that juts into the frothing sea, so close to the surf that golfers waiting to putt get sprayed when a wave crashes particularly ferociously against the jagged, coral-lined shore.
“I think people will look at it and say, ‘Boy, what a sensational look. This is really hard,’” Nicklaus says of the entire course, although he could be speaking of the second hole alone. “Then they’ll play it [and say], ‘This is not so hard. This was fun.’”
Nicklaus, 68, his pro-competition days behind him, has fashioned a second great career as a course architect. He and Nicklaus Design, his globe-trekking company, have created more than 300 layouts in 30 countries, with another 60 currently under constuction, but it’d be difficult to find many in his portfolio that offer such a spectacular one-two punch of natural seaside splendour and
championship-calibre golf.
It wasn’t an assignment Nicklaus sought out. He was simply
invited by the owners of this paradise, the Dominican Republic’s powerful Hazoury family, and promptly accepted.
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Punta Espada opened in November 2006 and regulars already put it in the same league as the world’s other legendary seaside links, including Pebble Beach in California. Outside observers agree: Golfweek magazine rates it the third-best course in the
Caribbean and Mexico.
Anyone who hasn’t visited the course in person will get a chance to see it on TV early next month when it hosts the Champions Tour tournament. There will be no shortage of dramatic vistas for TV cameras to capture as the tour’s senior golfers, age 50 and up, play their way around Nicklaus’ creation.
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