Bristol Golf Club

Detailed description of Bristol Golf Club

Bristol Golf Club is a Public, 9 hole golf course located in Bristol, Rhode Island. Bristol first opened for play in 1964

The course plays to 2,097 yards from the back tees. Par for this 9 hole course is 32.

The following was written by Charles McGrath, May 22, 2011, in The New York Time Golf Blog.

Bristol Golf Club… is of a worseness so extreme that you occasionally wonder if it’s not ironic. Maybe, like certain fashion trends, it’s bad on purpose

More likely, the course is the way it is because golf is not the highest priority here: something you sense when you to try to find the pro shop, and discover that all the golf business — paying for greens fees, buying a last-minute sleeve of balls — is done at one end of the bar. And Bristol has also been stuck — blighted, you could say — with some of the least likely golfing terrain imaginable. The course is in the middle of an industrial park, so that the opening hole, for example, an otherwise flat and forgettable 137-yard par 3, is enhanced by the sight of a blue metal warehouse building behind the green. When I played here recently, there was a guy out in back welding, and the sparks brightened a day otherwise overcast and dismal.

More warehouse buildings line the left side of No. 2, and if you have trouble finding the green here — it’s partly hidden by stumps and a fenced-in transformer — just aim down the power lines that straddle the fairway. The third, an uphill par 3 guarded by deep bunkers, is the best hole here, or would be if the green weren’t in bad shape.

“Hey, gimme a line here?” one of the guys I was playing with said, laughing. I bent over the putt behind him and suggested that he try to skip it over some bald spots and a rut. “And give it a whack,” I reminded him. The greens, which are just fairway grass cut short, hadn’t been mowed in a while, and on the Stimpmeter, they were rolling roughly as fast as shag carpeting in a basement rec room.

The fifth, sixth and seventh are the apogee — or maybe the perigee — of Bristol. I used to dream about them all the time, and in my dreams, the fairways were lined on the right side with old aircraft engines. What a surprise, then, to discover that where I remembered some scattered pieces of rusting steel, there was, in fact, a full-fledged junkyard, with two large orange cranes dipping and poking into mountains of metal and plastic pipe like giant prehistoric birds picking up straw. I also remembered or thought I remembered, an enormous crater in the sixth fairway, with a diesel pump laboring to suck water out, and I imagined unwary players sliding down in there and disappearing into a golfer’s underworld, lit by smoldering, kerosene-dipped golf balls. But the crater, if it ever existed, has been filled in, and the whole area now has a greenish, moonlike quality. Still not a good place to go with your shot. I lost a ball there right in plain sight.

The ninth, a 224-yard par 4, is actually a pretty good hole. It’s a severe dogleg left. You punch a mid-iron, and then have a short iron over a pond to the green, where it looks as if they may be adding a big bunker behind. You cross this last, watery obstacle with relief, sort of like Aeneas passing through the Gate of Sleep on his way out of the Underworld, and head quickly to the parking lot, lest you be tempted to go around again. You don’t need to play Bristol more than once, but that it’s there at all is sort of miraculous. Whoever designed it … deserves credit for stubbornness. He built a golf course where nobody else would have thought it possible.