Recent Feb: A ‘good’ golf course.

Berlin doesn’t really winter under snow anymore. It doesn’t really even freeze that much. But it is cold enough for its more celebrated courses to be put to sleep in preparation for the coming season. This often means an attempt at golf includes winter greens and the tedium of putting in a cow field.

But this January and February, in pursuit of a course with summer greens and a practice facility, we have gravitated to the Stan Eby course at Bad Saarow. This course is the less famous sibling to the Faldo and Palmer courses, which are all part of a resort that has struggled in recent years with covid and a change of ownership, but the golf here is good and worth the trip. The Faldo course is styled as a links course, despite being 300 km from the sea, and the Palmer is a classic parkland course, where you can expect to spend time in the trees. The Eby, well, it’s on a bit of a hill, which is enough in Brandenburg to make it notable. At 50 minutes from Berlin and with an almost entirely blank midweek booking sheet (and €45 winter greenfee) this course is good not because it is hard, but because being there feels good for you. 

This course is not especially long, 5693 metres from the yellows, the fairways are wide and the rough is so short that I went 53 holes without losing a ball. For the first time ever I considered switching balls as the one I’d been using all that time was so scuffed it resembled a range ball from the driving range in Mariendorf. Now of course I didn’t actually switch balls, because my faith in a lucky ball will long outweigh my need (or ability to notice) for the improved performance of a new one. But this is just one reason this course is good. Because holding on to one ball for 53 holes is fun, and losing too many balls to thick rough or hazardous lakes isn’t. 

Too often a ‘good’ course is conflated with being hard. I have played a couple in Germany, the Faldo course at Bad Saarow being one, which can be a bloody slog. With 450 metre par 4’s, thick rough and narrow fairways, you’ve lost two balls before even playing your approach. The Stan Eby on the other hand is much more in the mould of the classic resort course, attractive enough to be good-looking, challenging enough to make you think about each hole, but playable enough that all levels of golfer can enjoy it. It is a cliché of course design that we prefer or value the courses we played well on, but worse is the deep resentment you can feel when playing badly on a bad course. You blame the course, the greens, the shitty fairways and tell yourself that it wasn’t you duffing your chips but the head greenkeeper. That doesn’t happen at Stan Eby. The greens are still slow (it is February) and on the front 9 in particular still baring the pockmarks of aeration, but the changes in elevation and variety of holes make for a good day out and a time efficient one too; as a two-ball we whipped round in three hours and twenty minutes - rare speed for these parts. 

Two holes are noteworthy; the par 3 ninth is a roughly 150 metres across water from an elevated tee, the green is pretty big, but runs off at front into a large and deep bunker and at the back into a swale of rough. Here the wind and indecisive club selection can make it much harder to hit than it first seems. The par 5 13th is not long at 465 metres, but narrows between trees between trees for the second shot, tempting you to go for the green but requiring a very straight long iron to the target.

Stan Eby (the man himself is worth a google for the moustache) is rarely mentioned in Berlin golf circles, but it is the ideal place to escape in winter when ‘better’ courses are closed or to visit in summer when the nearby lakes offer a post-round dip. Recent Golf head there in March for a meeting and hope to host tournament there too. Come join us there soon.

Golfclub Bad Saarow