Wales is joining Scotland and Ireland as British golf destinations

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MCT) - There was a time, like maybe up until this very moment, when you wouldn't have thought of Wales as a golf destination.

It's odd that a British country so close to Scotland and Ireland would not be known for golf. Certainly the game is a passion among the Welsh, as evidenced by their 200 golf courses in a nation the size of Massachusetts.

Yet Wales has never hosted a British Open or a Ryder Cup, and you'd have to look far and wide to find an everyday American golfer who could name a single course there.

But Wales has begun to come out of its cocoon. The awakening began in 2001 when Celtic Manor, a five-star resort in Newport, near the capital city of Cardiff, won a bid for the 2010 Ryder Cup. When that event takes place, the eyes of the golf world will be on Wales for the first time.

The country is dedicated to capitalizing on the opportunity. Some courses have received government grants to tidy themselves up in anticipation of more visits from foreign golfers.

"We've been hidden too long," said David Hancock, secretary of Tenby Golf Club on the southwest coast. "We've got tremendous golf courses to offer."

On an eight-day trip by rental car last month, I visited Wales' highest-rated course, its oldest club, two of its most scenic courses and the course where the Ryder Cup will be played at Celtic Manor in 2010. I also visited a plain little nine-hole course in western Wales so far off the beaten path, they could hardly believe I'd gone to the trouble to find it.

Celtic Manor's Twenty Ten Course is the first course ever built specifically for the Ryder Cup. Sitting in a lush valley, the course offers a stern test to visitors who care to challenge it before the professionals do.

Celtic Manor is the creation of billionaire Sir Terence Matthews, who made his fortune in telecommunications. Besides a 330-room, 32-suite resort hotel, Celtic Manor includes the 19th-century Manor House, offering 70 rooms.

Before Matthews bought it in 1982, the Manor House had been a maternity hospital _ in which Matthews was born.

The golf club opened in 1995, the resort hotel in 1999, and the Twenty Ten Course in 2007. Despite its youth, Celtic Manor won the bid for the Ryder Cup in part because of what the event could do to develop golf in Wales.

In South Wales, Royal Porthcawl generally is rated as the country's top course. Its status belies the appearance of the 109-year-old wood clubhouse affectionately known by members as "the Shack." They voted down a proposal to build a new clubhouse, so the club will continue to stake its reputation on the quality of its links.

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Royal Porthcawl is a true test of links golf, with its first three holes running along the seashore. With no tall sand dunes to block views, the club boasts that the sea is visible from every hole.

The wind was whipping on the day I visited.

"This is a Royal Porthcawl day," said David Watson James, a member who allowed me to join him and another member, John Evans, for 18 holes.

"Here, it's all about the wind. It amuses us when we watch a tournament on American TV and they get on about whether the wind is 5 miles per hour or 8 miles per hour. Here we get on about whether the wind is 20 miles per hour or 30."

When we reached the 18th, James related the story of when Tiger Woods, playing at Royal Porthcawl with the U.S. Walker Cup team in 1995, hooked his approach shot out of bounds on this hole and lost his match, helping the British win the cup.

Royal Porthcawl has hosted no significant international event since.

"This is my view completely," said Peter Evans, the fourth head professional in the club's 117 years. "I think an Open Championship will be played in Wales one day. There is only one Open Championship venue in Wales, and that's Royal Porthcawl."

Farther west along the coast, Tenby Golf Club, vintage 1888, is said to have been the first properly constituted golf club in Wales.

Tenby offers another opportunity for visitors who want an authentic British seaside links experience. Its fee of 37 pounds (about $68) was quite reasonable, given the exchange rate.

"Golf in Wales is still comparatively cheap," said Hancock, the club secretary. "I've had people say golf in Scotland and Ireland is getting too expensive.

"This club has often been called Wales' best-kept secret, and we don't want to be a secret. It's Wales' oldest golf club, and it's stood the test of time."

Arriving up the west coast at Newport Links Golf Club on a brilliant, sunny day, I came upon a setting as idyllic for a golf course as any I'd ever seen.

The course sits at the apex of C-shaped Newport Bay, about 500 yards above the beach. At one end of the bay, a promontory called Dinas Head juts into the sea. At the bay's other end, swatches of green grazing land, dotted by sheep, sit atop rugged cliffs.

The village of Newport (not to be confused with the city of Newport near Cardiff) is visible across the way, lying below Carningli Mountain and its expanse of vivid green criss-crossed by hedgerows.

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Golfers at Newport Links have a front-row seat to soak in this tranquil scene.

The club's original nine opened in 1928, and nine more holes opened this past spring. The links are more of a resort course than a championship layout, but it hardly matters with views like these _ at least on a sun-splashed afternoon.

"Pray for a nice day and you'll be playing with angels," said manager Julian Noott. "But on a rainy, windy day, you might rather be in Beirut."

Even with GPS in my rental car, finding Cwmrhydneuadd Golf Club was almost as difficult as spelling it. It sits deep in the woods off a road wide enough to accommodate just one car.

Cwmrhydneuadd (pronounced kum-rid-nayeth, meaning "the hall on the road in the valley" in Welsh), is a par-31 nine-hole course, measuring just over 2,000 yards.

"We have no ambitions of being a big club," club captain Dave Lippiat said. "We're just a nice local club."

After I'd asked Lippiat some questions, he asked me one. With all the courses in Wales, why had I come to Cwmrhydneuadd?

I explained that before my trip, looking at a list of Wales' courses, I was struck by the name _ the longest for a golf course I'd ever seen. I felt drawn to it for that reason only.

"That's pretty good," Lippiat said. "The smallest course, the biggest name."

If any photos can do justice to the beauty of Nefyn & District Golf Club on the Llyn Peninsula in northwest Wales, you can find them on the club's website, www.nefyn-golf-club.co.uk. The aerial shots capture the dramatic challenge of "the Point," a narrow finger of land that contains two strips of fairway in each direction, perched precariously above a jagged coastline.

Some consider Nefyn the most scenic course in Wales, if not all of Britain. It smacks of Pebble Beach and Torrey Pines, but with more panoramic views, with mountains of the Snowdonia range looming across the bay.

Someone had the sense in 1907 to build a golf course on this vast stretch of land, which attracts not only golfers but hikers. Those two groups co-exist on "the Point," with hikers using a path that takes them to the end of the peninsula.

The quirky aspect of Nefyn is that it consists of 26 holes. All golfers play the first 10, then branch off either to the New Course or the Old Course for the final eight.

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Oddly, Nefyn falls into the category of hidden gems. On the flight home, I met Roger Miles, an Englishman who was traveling to Kentucky for last month's Ryder Cup matches. Miles, a Ford executive, has played golf all over the world but never in neighboring Wales. He'd never even heard of Nefyn.

"I guess Wales really isn't on the radar screen," he said.

Brits going on golf trips tend to seek warmer climates, or, he said, they default to Scotland or Ireland.

"I don't think there's anything wrong with Wales. It's a hospitable place," he said. "Now that you've mentioned it, I might consider it for next year's trip."

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GPS KNOWS WALES, CAN FIND HEDGEROWS, TOO

On an eight-day driving trip around Wales, the GPS in my rental car was a quite useful and labor-saving device. I simply punched in the postal code of my destination, and GPS led the way.

Not that GPS and I didn't have a few spats along the way, such as when I took the wrong exit on a roundabout and received a reprimand, over and over: "Perform a U-turn when possible," it said.

But what truly almost ended our relationship was one of GPS' navigational quirks. GPS, it seems, operates by the theory that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. So in more rural western Wales, which lacks motorways (expressways), GPS often took me off the larger A roads (one lane in each direction) and onto claustrophobic roads that in some places were no wider than eight feet.

One road, lined on each side by hedges, was so narrow that the doors on my small Astra (pictured above) could not open fully on either side.

Admittedly, GPS got me where I was going, but it had a knack for raising my anxiety level.

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Ron Cobb: rcobb@post-dispatch.com

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