Rave of the Day:
Gulf Shores, Alabama

Alabama's Gulf Shore is bristling with all sorts of razzle-dazzle development and beachside frolic, but you can find a majestic piece of the old glory.

When Southerners are polled regarding their favorite resorts, the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, always rates high, and it's not hard to see why. It's not the rooms, which are fairly standard, nor the food, which was good but not exceptional. It's the location. The three-story Grand is set on a point of land jutting out into Mobile Bay.

Perhaps because most bodies of water this size are edged by waves, the place seems surreally quiet. Between hotel and Bay is a tidy lawn, with massive live oaks spreading over it and a nine-hole putting green as its centerpiece. My room was about 10 yards from the water. I could sit on a wrought-iron bench and stare across the Bay at the city of Mobile, barely discernible through the soporific air.

Go out of your way to find 79-year-old Chester Hunt, who has worked at the Grand since 1941 and now serves as its historian. Chester carries a big leather briefcase in which he keeps a bundle of laminated newspaper and magazine stories about the Grand, its celebrity guests and the many honors he's been given. The original hotel, Chester told me in his gentle drawl, was a long rambling wooden hotel, first built in 1847. It was called the Gunnison House and was favored by card sharps and con men as well as antebellum society folk, who came over from Mobile by ferry.

Following the Battle of Vicksburg the place served as a Confederate Hospital, and roughly 300 soldiers are buried in a small, shady plot just off the 18th tee of the Azalea course.

The two golf courses at the Grand Hotel are called the Lakewood Golf Club. Lakewood had been a private and resort facility until this year, when it quietly became a daily fee course. The clubhouse feels distinctly different from the glittering clubhouses of other resort courses, older and warmer.

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People know each other here, and on most afternoons you'll find backroom games of gin and a dozen tables of golfers helping themselves to the hot dog and potato salad at the buffet that runs one side of the bar room. Lakewood's first 18 holes were built in 1946 by architect Perry Maxwell, whose two most famous designs were Southern Hills and Prairie Dunes. His first step was to send out two men with shotguns to kill every snake and gator they could find. "Took months and months," said Chester. "Worst swamp you ever saw." Only then did Maxwell begin laying out the original 18 holes, which now are evenly divided between the Azalea and Dogwood Courses. In 1965 Joe Lee added the rather uninspired holes that constitute the front nine of the Dogwood Course, and Ron Garl added nine to the middle of the Azalea in 1985.

Management recently decided to throw all of its resources into renovating the Azalea, hiring a tree surgeon to shape the fairways and open up a number of vistas, including that cemetary, which had been hidden by brush. "We're embracing our history," says Director of Golf David Clark.

From the first hole, a 580-yard par-5 that heads over a reedy pond then sweeps right up a long alley framed by huge live oaks, this is a tough, tough course. On many holes, your drive must travel 260 yards to clear a dogleg or gain sight of the green.

Even regional pro tournaments steer clear of the some of the back tees. Think you're tough? Here's a good place to find out how tough.