The ASU Karsten Golf Course holds a special place in my heart. When I was in my sophomore year at Arizona State University, I really fell in love with the game. I played most, if not all of my rounds at one of two courses: Rolling Hills or Karsten. Rolling Hills is a little Par 62 Executive Course. Karsten is a 7,000-yard Pete Dye design that will eat your lunch if you don’t put the ball where you’re supposed to. ASU faculty, staff, and students could play the course for just $20 year-round, and in the summer, when it was blazing hot, my buddies and I used to walk it for less than $15 with a Student ID.
Since the course opened in September of 1989, more than one million rounds have been played. The ASU Men’s and Women’s Golf Teams also play here, and I watched Lorena Ochoa make a hole-in-one on the Par 3 12th hole on her way to winning the 2001 Pac-10 Championship. Phil Mickelson played here in the early 90s, and his brother Tim is currently the Men’s Golf coach. No tax dollars or university funds were used to build the golf course, only private funds. The largest single contributor to the project was Karsten Solheim, founder of PING, and that’s how the course got it’s name.
A few years ago, I heard rumblings that Karsten was closing to make room for more parking lots and student housing. Eventually, ASU will move the Men’s and Women’s Golf Teams over to Papago Golf Course in Phoenix. If Mr. Solheim were still alive, I guarantee you this wouldn’t be happening, but as it stands, Karsten sits on some very valuable land that the university thinks it can use for other things. The folks I spoke to in the golf shop told me they’ve been told that the move will happen in 2-4 years time, but that until the bulldozers are rumbling outside, no one will be holding his breath. You hate to see any course destroyed, much less a Pete Dye course.
This course has some real teeth to it. Well-placed water hazards, grass bunkering, and railroad ties all serve as a friendly reminder that you’re playing a Dye. Surprisingly, there are only four sets of tees out here, and the discrepancy between the Professional Tees at 7,002 yards and the Champion Tees at 6,288 yards is over 700 yards. That extra yardage makes a huge difference, and I wish there were one more set of tees to split the difference. Either way, Par is 70, the course rating is 73.8, and the slope is 131. Here are some of the highlights of the round:
Holes Worth Writing Home About
Par is 34 on the front nine. There are no Par 5s, and there are back-to-back Par 3s that make up holes 6 and 7. My favorite hole on the outward side is the Par 4 2nd. It measures just 323 yards from the Professional Tees, and depending on the wind, you can hit it pretty close. You can also choose to lay back of the big-mouth bunker guarding the right side of the fairway with a 3-wood or a hybrid and still have a wedge in. What a great hole!
But the two toughest holes on the golf course share the same body of water: Hole No. 9 is a dogleg right with water on the right, and Hole No. 18 is a dogleg left with water on the left. The finishing hole is by far the toughest hole on the golf course despite its Handicap Rating of 6. When the wind is blowing, the tee shot will make you pucker up. And then you have to hit your approach shot, over water, to a green guarded by grass bunkers. Many balls have gone to die in the water short and right of the green when the pin is in the front.
Quiet Please
Karsten is exactly how I remember it from my college days. The pro shop is great and has a lot of ASU logo apparel for sale if you’re a Sun Devil fan like I am. I had to get myself a ball marker while I was there. No one really wants to talk about the move and the closure that’s eventually coming, but you can tell that it hangs in the air around here. I still can’t believe it myself.
The driving range at Karsten has a lot of targets to hit to, but if you don’t catch the range on the right day, you’ll find yourself hitting from a long sheet of mats. I don’t like to hit off mats if I can help it, but especially at Karsten. The bermudagrass fairways out here have strong roots, and you don’t hit divots as much as you do explosions. It’s really different from all of the other courses I’ve played in the Valley.
They recently sanded and verticut the greens, and they were still sandy, slow, and peppered with ball marks in spots. Nothing you can do now but wait for them to heal.
Fore!
My best shot of the day came at the short Par 4 2nd hole. I hit a 3-wood to lay up short of the bunker on the righthand side of the fairway and stuffed a wedge from 81 yards out for an easy, tap-in birdie. I have, and always will, love a good, short, risk-reward Par 4. I think it gives plays of all skills levels a chance to have a little fun.
While We’re Young
We skipped around the course in three hours and 45 minutes. We ran into some slow play as we made the turn, and never seemed to recover. But if you catch this place on the right day, you can get around in a little over three hours. As a general rule, expect to play a four hour round.
Blogger’s Note:
My partner and I played in the final round of the Golf Academy Match Play Championship this morning at ASU Karsten and closed out two of our other 2nd Semester classmates 3&2 for the victory. There are some sticks in 2nd Semester! Because it was match play, we had the option of playing the course from any set of tees, so we chose to play Champion, one up from the back. To give you an idea of how well we all played, the match had a total of 11 birdies, and no one lost a hole to par the entire match.
The match was all square on the 13th hole when I dropped a 35-footer for birdie to put us 1 Up. On the 15th hole, with our opponents looking to get back to All Square, I pitched in from just short of the green. They missed their birdie putt. 2 Up. And then on the 16th hole, which is a long Par 3 over water, my partner stuck it to within tap-in distance to seal the deal. It was a really fun match. Time to head to the bank, or in this case, the PGA Tour Superstore next door, to collect our prize. Turns out it’s just $160 to the winning team ($80 each), not $300 like I thought. Either way, the match was a lot of fun.