"Underrated" is the laziest word in golf writing, so let me be specific about what I mean by it. Not obscure. Not cheap. I mean courses where the golf on the ground is better than the reputation attached to it — where you walk off the 18th slightly annoyed that nobody told you.
Every South African golfer has one of these. Here are five of mine, and I would happily be talked out of any of them, which is rather the point of putting them in public.
Selborne Golf Estate
Tree-lined coastal parkland on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, and the sort of place that gets under your skin quietly. The driving lines are tight enough to make you think, the tree line is not decoration, and the greens are good enough that the regulars bring them up before you have asked. It plays to a par of 71 off the yellows and a scratch golfer is expected to shoot over that, which should tell you something.
Here is the fact that started this whole list. Umdoni Park is the most-rated course on Pin High, and it is in Pennington. So is Selborne. They are a few minutes apart on the same beautiful stretch of coast, and golfers drive down for one of them and go straight past the other. Play both. You are already there, the road is lovely, and you will thank me.
Gonubie Golf Club
Just outside East London on the Eastern Cape coast, and a great deal more interesting than its billing. Eighteen tees and twelve greens, which sounds like a compromise until you play it — your back nine is not the front nine walked round again, it is a fresh set of angles into putting surfaces you have already had to read once. That is a cleverer piece of routing than plenty of clubs manage with twice the land and ten times the budget.
Compact coastal courses get written off before anyone has actually played one, and Gonubie is the case for the defence. Par 71 off the back, a sea wind that does not soften anything, and members who are rather fond of the fact that you have not heard of it. Prove them wrong.
White River Country Club
Lowveld parkland charm near the Kruger gates: tight fairways running under enormous old trees, birdsong you will actually notice, and the particular quality of light you only get in Mpumalanga at about five in the afternoon. Par 70 off the whites, and a proper old-fashioned pleasure to walk.
The trouble with White River is entirely geographical. It sits on the road everybody takes to somewhere else — the Kruger, Leopard Creek, a lodge with a name you have seen in a magazine. It has become a place people drive through rather than to. Stop. Book the late tee time, stay for a drink afterwards, and you will wonder why it took you this long.
Victoria Country Club
Pietermaritzburg parkland with a proud championship history and, off the yellows, the sternest test of the five. Par 71, and the kind of course where a good round feels earned rather than handed to you. Golfers on Pin High give it the highest layout mark of these five courses, which is a genuine compliment from people who paid to be there.
It is also the one where the ratings split in a way worth reading. The same golfers who love the layout mark it lowest of the five on value, and one of them said so plainly. "While this is a good course, I think it’s very overpriced relative to other courses of a similar stature," wrote Brian-James. "Far better value for money out there."
That is exactly the kind of thing a single panel visit never surfaces and a scorecard never shows, and it is useful in both directions — for the golfer deciding where to spend a Saturday, and for the club deciding what to charge. The golf, though, nobody is arguing about.
Mossel Bay Golf Club
A clifftop course above the Indian Ocean with sea views from very nearly every hole and whales in season, which is not a sentence you get to write about many golf clubs. It is the gentlest of these five at par 70, and that is part of the recommendation rather than a caveat. Not every round needs to be an examination. Some of them should just be a very good walk with a view.
It carries the best course-condition score of the five, too. The Garden Route is the densest run of good golf in the country — eleven courses between Mossel Bay and Plettenberg Bay — and every itinerary starts with the same three names. Mossel Bay is where the road actually begins, and it is the one people skip on the way to the ones they have heard of.
What these five have in common
Not one of them is a destination. All five are worth a detour. Between them they cover four provinces, a clifftop, a lowveld tree line, a coastal forest and a compact Eastern Cape layout above the sea, and the only thing genuinely wrong with any of them is that not enough people have said anything about them out loud.
That is the whole reason Pin High exists. A panel visits once and moves on. You played it last Saturday, in the wind, with the greens as they actually were, and you paid the green fee yourself.
So: played any of these? Rate it — six categories, about thirty seconds — and say what you actually thought. And tell me in the comments which course I have missed, because part two is coming and I would rather it came from you than from me.
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