Erin Hills and Lawsonia Links
The second leg of my Wisconsin golf trip tackles a big hitter and a local gem
After a great few days at Sand Valley, we packed up and headed over to Erin Hills. It’s worth noting that geographically, we should have gone to Lawsonia Links first but a tournament at Erin Hills necessitated a bit of back-and-forth driving.
That wasn’t the thing I was worried about - it was that Erin Hills is always described as very tough, a brutal walk and a serious challenge. As I’ve detailed here, I’m a decent golfer but not a great one (a 13 handicap on this trip) and I was worried I’d get so beaten up by Erin Hills I’d be miserable.
Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Erin Hills was an absolute delight. Yes, it’s a huge golf course - spread out on enough acreage to maybe house three courses - and therefore a good walk. But with a caddie (which isn’t necessarily required but in all other respects is mandatory), it’s not as brutal as folks made it out to be. It is HARD but I managed to play well and broke 90 with an 88 that felt like much better than that.
Despite being a huge golf fan, I didn’t remember the course all that well from the U.S. Open. I definitely didn’t remember that a defining feature of the course is that many of the greens are elevated so that a ball that doesn’t quite make the green, or rolls off it, often ends up nowhere near the green itself.
If I had a dollar for every shot we hit that ALMOST landed on the green but rolled back, I’d have … like ten or fifteen dollars. OK, so not a great story. But, there were some amazing holes. One of my favorite - which is also discussed in the Crash Course on Erin Hills - is the 15th hole. It’s a short par 4 (perhaps my favorite style of any golf hole) and any decent drive will have a very short iron in, depending on your tees.
I had about 125 yards in from this angle, and predictably yanked it so far left I was told I was in a bunker. Not the one you can see, or the other one that was visible to the left of it … but another bunker on the back of that hill. (It turned out I was NOT in the bunker, but just above it, and I had possibly the worst lie in my golfing life. Things didn’t go great from there.) It’s not a tough hole, but it’s so easy to make a mistake and get absolutely hammered. I love it.
The contours of some of the fairways are also bonkers, full fever dream “why can’t we do it like this?” kind of thinking.
Caddies may not be required, but in my opinion they are mandatory. Aside from helping with the walk, there are a ton of blind tee shots and getting a line (whether or not you can actually hit your ball there) is massive. Plus, they often helped find a ball in the rough or fescue (longer grass grown out that is NOT easy to hit out of).
We finished up with dinner there - keeping our “cheese curds every day” in tact - and were treated to an all-world sunset.
Yeah, that will do, pig.
We headed up to Green Lake to spend the night, and then woke up in the suddenly not-quite freezing temperature to head out to Lawsonia Links. This is a smaller, local golf course that has gotten a lot of attention due to folks like Andy Johnson at The Fried Egg talking up the course. His opinion on golf architecture is something I respect a lot, and others have joined in saying that it’s incredibly special. All the pictures below are taken from that link because - unfortunately - the morning was very cold, and misty at the start.
And I’m not gonna lie, the weather impacted how we felt about the course. The ball was flying NOWHERE and we were a bit miserable for most of the round, just trying to get warm. Just two days earlier, I’d sweat straight through my shirt at Mammoth Dunes, and here I was drinking hot cocoa, wearing a beanie, my thickest quarter-zip and wishing I had packed my hand warmers.
But in the meantime, it’s a pretty special course. In particular, the fairway bunkers are like nothing I’ve ever seen, with HUGE hills behind them acting as backstops. Some of these are “just” grass bunkers, others have sand - but both are truly penalizing.
Just after this is a signature hole, the par-3 7th which was built atop a boxcar - they threw dirt on it, seeded the grass and somehow came up with this:
You can see the fall off and several of us JUST missed the front of the green (the pin was tucked at the front). What’s menacing is that there’s a bunker at the back that’s only slightly visible here so make sure you hit the green.
I look at pictures like these, taken on a warm sunny day, and I think “if only…”
This is all to say that we had far from optimal conditions at Lawsonia, but it was still a lot of fun - and of all the courses we played on this trip, I think it’s the one that would easily lend itself to the “if you could only play one course for the rest of your life” as it’s super walkable and there are so many different ways to play almost every hole.
If only it had been warmer …
Next up: Destination Kohler.