Before I played Shadow Creek, I barely knew it existed. The whole thing was set up by Sean Walsh and when he told me where we were going to play, I said I had never heard of it. Then he reminded me it was the course Tiger and Phil played “The Match” on and where the PGA Tour had just held a full tournament two weeks before we were going to play it.

This reminder got my heart racing a little and prompted some mild research on the old internet, where I found a quote from one of the PGA Tour professionals claiming the greens at Shadow Creek were the best he’d ever played outside of Augusta. There it was, that comparison to Augusta.

Any serious golfer has spent time watching The Masters on TV and spent time day dreaming about playing Augusta National. You can’t do either of those things without trying to imagine the smooth, pristine greens the Masters participants get to play on. The Masters and Augusta are the pinnacle of golf, widely considered the best place in the world to play golf. This may or may not be true, but it is the widespread notion given to us by the powerful medium of TV.

So, when a golf pro who plays courses all around the world for millions of dollars per year says Shadow Creek has the best greens outside of Augusta, that has to mean something. When I read that, I thought I was in for an unimaginable experience.

Early during our round at Shadow, I asked our caddy if the pros played faster greens than us during the tournament just a couple of weeks before.

“Slower,” he said. “They played them at 11 or 12 and you are playing at 13 (on the Stimp meter.)”

Were the greens everything I could have hoped they were? Yes. Were they mind blowing beyond all comprehension of what I knew a green to be before hand? No.

I didn’t know what to expect from the greens, but my final assessment is that they were just greens. They were perfect in every way. The ball rolled smoothly across them and it was glorious to watch, but not unlike anything I had seen before. I wasn’t disappointed to find this out, but I was surprised there wasn’t more wow factor. If that’s the best there is outside Augusta, then Augusta can’t be that much better than any other really good greens you might play. While they were perfect, they weren’t game-changing.

Some of the other nice courses I’ve been lucky enough to play are: Cherry Hills, Wolf Creek, Sand Hollow, Pronghorn, Coyote Springs and TPC Summerlin and I wouldn’t say the greens at Shadow Creek were that much better than any of those courses. Still, the overall experience was better and in future posts I’ll continue to write about why.