Beyond the West: Stone Cold Lock

by Darin Bunch

Robert Trent Jones Jr.'s Kaluhyat is one of three golf courses at Turning Stone Resort near Syracuse, NY.

Every Indian tribe has two things these days — golf and gambling.

Or so it seems. From coast to coast, from Barona Valley Ranch to Foxwoods, courses are popping up alongside casinos, with a wink and a nod to Las Vegas and other locales powered by games of chance.

The tribes know, as Vegas has learned, that big players want to play big games. And happy players are often bigger spenders. So words like “upscale amenities” and “loss-leader” get thrown about as more high-rises hit the skies, many in the middle of nowhere on land few ever realized could house a course, resort or casino. Let alone all three.
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It’s a Tuesday night at Turning Stone Resort in Verona, N.Y., and the casino is crowded. Sure, there are a few groups in town for conferences, but for every out-of-stater there’s a local who’s made the trek from nearby Syracuse or another surrounding community in search of a little Lady Luck — or maybe some sucker who just watched Rounders and wants to try his hand at this new fad called “poker.” The diversity makes for a nice mix when it comes to winning money.

In the stylish, comfortable poker room, games of No-Limit Texas Hold ’Em — the en vogue card game of our day, for better or worse — are being played at multiple tables, with multiple limits. Money is changing hands at a brisk rate as river cards burn pre-flop favorites and big pots are raked and stacked by the winners.

On the casino floor, blackjack tables are running full speed, with cards in the air as quickly as possible, turning profit for both the Oneida Indian Nation and patrons on a roll.

For Turning Stone, it’s business as usual. For a vacationing golfer who enjoys a bit of gaming after a day of gambling on his inconsistent swing, it’s quite possibly paradise — with lots to capture your attention from sunrise until, well, sunrise the next day.

Above all, this expanse of rolling landscape in Central New York offers a whole lotta golf, plus an ultra-cool Golf Dome training facility where you can practice year-round — rain, snow or shine.

But two of the championship courses stand out as purely exceptional — Atunyote and Kaluhyat, and not necessarily in that order.
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As the shuttle pulls up to the gates of Atunyote (pronouned uh-DUNE-yote, although I doubt I ever said it correctly during my entire stay), it feels like something from a Tim Burton movie, the iron gate an intricate mix of intertwined branches. It’s a harbinger of good — a sign that they spared no expense in building this “high-end amenity” course.

Of course, the first sign of sparing no expense should have been the designer. Tom Fazio, one of the five best golf course architects in the world — and arguably the best — doesn’t come cheap these days. But if you’re looking to build a better casino course than anyone else, he’s the man for the job, having sculpted such gems as Shadow Creek and Wynn Golf Club in Las Vegas and Fallen Oak in Mississippi, just to name a few. And like those courses, Atunyote feels grand from the moment you drive inside the gate and travel the mile-and-a-half driveway. The clubhouse is classic, the service friendly, the caddies knowledgeable. Plus, there are whimsical touches that make you smile, like the red phone booths (for calling the clubhouse — a feature Fazio employs at other courses as well) that dot the green surroundings and a cool, crazy, red Coca-Cola beverage cart that definitely grabs your attention.

Simply put, Atunyote has that classic Fazio feel. Standing on the tee, you see nothing but green fairway, landing areas as big as a LaGuardia runway. But nothing with Fazio is ever as it seems from the teebox. Trouble lurks everywhere, from well-placed water hazards — including one lake that measures 13 acres and runs along three fairways) to deep bunkers to potato-chip greens that invite three- and even four-putts.

And while John Rollins went 19-under-par over four rounds en route to winning the 2006 B.C. Open, which Turning Stone stepped in and hosted at the last minute, there’s little doubt a windy week at Atunyote would be a great equalizer when the course hosts the newly named Turning Stone Resort Championship, Sept. 20-23.

We tested the course on a two-club day after pouring rain earlier in the week had substantially softened things, and the 7,315 yards played to about 8,000.

Or at least it felt that way.

One hole to watch for sure when the PGA Tour pros tee it up is the par-3 No. 11. Playing 230 yards, usually into the wind, I hit everything I had — driver, with a Dalyesque swing — to come up 10 feet short of the green. It’s the kind of short hole you want to see the best players in the world attempt to tackle, a spot where Fazio must have been chuckling to himself as he measured the back tees on a brisk, breezy morning.
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As good as Atunyote is — and we at FG are big Fazio fans — the Robert Trent Jones Jr.-designed Kaluhyat (ga-LU-yut; another name I doubt I ever pronounced correctly) might be even better. Certainly, it’s an exercise in contrast. It’s as classic Jones as Atunyote is classic Fazio. Carved out of tree groves and wound through wetlands, Jones makes the most of every inch of available landscape, turning the terrain into a track of shotmaking simplicity — if you can get out of your ego’s way.

I, of course, could not. After all, I seldom carry the “smart-iron” in my bag, as chronicled in the July-August 2007 issue of FG Magazine, when I played Kaluhyat from the red tees and barely broke 50.

But that brief taste left me wanting more, knowing I could play a better round of golf if only I could think like a designer rather than a titanium-wielding wacko. And that’s the beauty of Jones’ work, from Rancho San Marcos outside Santa Barbara (see Page 44) to his new, award-winning Osprey Meadows at Idaho’s Tamarack Resort — he makes you think. For every hole that you’ll play with the distance-and-recovery strategy at Atunyote (not that there’s anything wrong with that — it is, after all, my favorite strategy), you’ll find a hole of precision-and-accuracy on Kaluyhat, regardless of the teebox you choose. Perhaps that’s why the Oneida named the course the word for “the other side of the sky.”

Playing both tracks during a single stay is like an advance-level university course in golf design. So much of what Fazio and Jones do is similar, yet so much else is vastly different. And the end result is golf that will keep you thinking — and rethinking how you should tailor your game.

And if you’re going to stay and play both of these Turning Stone courses — or any of the others available, for that matter — we hear the Lodge, located between the casino and the Shenendoah-Kaluhyat clubhouse, is the place to hole up during the hours you’re not treading the fairways or dragging chips across the felt. We’ve yet to experience the all-suite Lodge first-hand, but it’s already stacking up honors such as the AAA Four-Diamond Award for its luxury accommodations and soothing Spa.

But in the end, we expect you’ll be hitting the tables much more than the room. After all, shouldn’t a place where everything is green outside be a good sign for gambling inside? Turns out, what happens at Turning Stone ... well, we want to tell everyone we can about it. FG