February 23rd, 2010
The Hills Golf Club, Gothenburg
Richard Gillis falls in love with one of Europe’s best, and strangest, new courses
Something happens between getting on a plane and it landing in Gothenburg. It might be something to do with the restorative air in Sweden’s second city, but everything and everyone seems just a little bit brighter. Healthier. More beautiful.
After about half an hour of wandering about, you want to be Swedish: look like an architect, drive a soft top Saab, wear garish roll neck sweaters, horn rimmed glasses and go around caring deeply about things. When they approach a subject, the Swedes do it with an endearing mixture of seriousness and smirking disregard for authority. And they play golf in the same way.
On the surface their players, such as Annika Sorenstam, Henrik Stenson or Robert Karlsson, can seem a bit dull and emotionless. But then, once you get on their wavelength, you realise they are funny, a bit odd and very, very good.
The Hills Golf Club, which sits just to the south of Gothenburg, is similarly difficult to pin down. It’s a basket case of a course – a bonkers mix, by turns beautiful, infuriating, impossibly difficult and enormous fun. It’s hard to think of anywhere else in the world that such a layout could exist.
One minute you are hitting out over rocky promontories, as though you’ve stumbled in to Arizona. Then, you turn a corner and there is deepest Surrey, so green and leafy and ordered, formal and classically English in feel. And just as you are getting your bearings, there is a pine forest to get around, or through, depending on your approach.
When The Hills opened in 2005, it received rave reviews, with many good judges rating it in the top ten of courses built in the world that year. The American architect Arthur Hills, from whom the course takes its name, threw the kitchen sink at it, building in six or seven different tee areas on each hole.
This flexibility means that hackers can play it at 6000 yards while the pros are set an almost ridiculous test of 7500 yards. The ambition is to hold regular European Tour events and ultimately, the Ryder Cup in 2018, the next time the circus is expected in continental Europe.
There are times that his approach seems wilfully eccentric, testing your patience as much as your shotmaking ability. For example, the back to back par threes on the front nine, which require players to hit the same shot, an 8 iron, on both holes. Or the par five 12th which stands over 500 yards, but requires even the longest hitters to take a five iron off the tee, due to a sharp dogleg over a swamp. The greens, despite being quite wet when we played, were up at 11 or 12 on the stimp meter. This makes two putting a heroic effort – four putts are commonplace.
From the first tee, the view is spectacular, looking over a natural amphitheatre of the 9th and 18th greens. Up on the hill, the landscape is dominated by a modern, sleek clubhouse, which looks for all the world like a Frank Lloyd Wright architectural experiment in 1950s California. Wood and stone are mashed together cleverly, and the locker rooms reek of leather and sandalwood. But here’s the thing. Although undeniably top of the range, The Hills clubhouse comes without the baggage of class and pomposity that can take the fun out of visiting elite golf clubs in England or north America. Overall, this is a fantastic course, a must for anyone travelling through this beautiful country with an afternoon to spare and their sense of humour at the ready.