Cleary: Postcard from Sin City

There’s a lot of desert in the great state of Nevada, it’s a rugged and lunar landscape, and not far from the crazy lights of the Las Vegas strip.

If you’ve seen the movies, particularly Casino, which despite going for too long and having too much Sharon Stone - you wouldn't think that possible, but there it is - is a roughly historical biopic of Sin City which depicts a lot of room for Mafiosos to bury Mafiosos who transgressed upon the Mafioso code of ethics.

Today, though, with all the money from the pokies and the water from Hoover Dam and the electricity from so many solar panels, they build golf courses in and around Las Vegas.

And they are really, really good.

Our tour group, in town for the NRL’s attempt to wave to America, has played Rio Secco (cool, fun, colourful), Cascata (cool, fun, colourful, with long-horned sheep) and Wolf Creek (like Joondalup’s Quarry course as re-imagined by the animators of the landscape inhabited by Wile E. Coyote in his Quixotic quest to kill and eat the Roadrunner).

Wolf Creek is flat-out unbelievable. It is un-real. Remember those calendars of fantasy holes as imagined? It’s like that, in the desert. It’s Cape Wickham on the rugged Badlands of Tattooine. It's ridiculous.

Tee-boxes are perched upon mesas, greens are in arroyos (gullies), you hit over gorges, go up and down and around, and thread your golf ball through chasms and shutes and bubbling brooks.

You roll up to each hole thinking, How about that one? Only for the next one to be even more ridiculous. Jebus! How about this one? No – what about this one? 

Cascata may be a better golf course in terms of routing or playability or risk-reward, whatever, you could get into a very interesting chat with an architecture boffin about it.

Wolf Creek. Better in the flesh. PHOTO: Wolf Creek

But for sheer, gob-dangling, photos-can’t-do-it-justice-but-Iet’s-take-a-thousand-anyway wonder, Wolf Creek is the bomb. It's extraordinary. You’re like: how did they even think of creating THIS out of THIS?

It even has roadrunners.

Cascata? Pure, great fun, bit posh. Cracking golf course. Aesthetically pure. Jagged rocky formations frame velvet fairways and greens. It's really, really good.

Except that several greens had been attacked by fungi or long-horned sheep or something. A few of them were pretty rough, actually, and not befitting the otherwise sensational routing and overall aesthetic. They do need to fix them. Actually they need to rip a couple up and start again.

We had a caddie per group, ours was named Emilio, a Boulder City local with a bandit’s moustache. Good fellah.

We didn’t ask for him, however, he was just a man that came with the green fee, along with a “free” cart and “free” range balls, and even a tasty “free” taco after 10 holes.

Nice fellah, our man Emilio, but he was effectively just another person to tip, as if by rote, in the local culture of capitalism where things don’t cost what they cost, and it’s up to the consumer to pay them properly. It gives you the shits after a while, and I’m glad to be shot of it.

The tacos were very good, though.

And there was also this chipmunk.

Cute fauna at Cascata. PHOTO: Matt Cleary

Rio Secco? Really cool track, and only 20 minutes from the glitter strip. Colourful green fairways, wispy wheat-coloured ‘rough’, jagged rocky wasteland beyond that where the pro shop guys advised we didn’t venture, though we did a few times, returning with so many new, if scuffed Pro-V1s.

Don't know why it's called Rio or Secco. But top stuff, Rio Secco.

We didn’t play Shadow Creek, the 14th-ranked publicly-accessible golf course in the United States, according to Golf.com, because they wanted $1200 worth of their own muscular United States roubles to play it. And that’s before tipping people for pouring you a beer, and other services they should just be paid a proper wage to do.

But it does look quite nice.

They advise not to venture off the fairway at Rio Secco, but bounty awaits the adventurous. PHOTO: Matt Cleary

Anyway! Cracker of a trip. Outside all-time golf in Vegas, and also at Poppy Hills, Bayonet & Black Horse, Pebble Beach and Harding Park, host of the 2020 PGA Championship won by Collin Morikawa, we also:

• Backed winners at the races in Los Angeles
• Saw Steph Curry play for Golden State Warriors and obliterate Charlotte Hornets in San Francisco;
• Attended the Big Game on Ice between Las Vegas Golden Knights, possibly, and New Jersey Devils, which was 60 minutes of seagulls-fighting-for-a-chip-with-chop-sticks play-action interrupted by 18 minute breaks for one-third-time and other shorter breaks when the game just stops because of ads on the telly;
• Watched the mighty Canberra Raiders who were very impressive in their 30-8 knockout victory over New Zealand Warriors, a match, along with three others (one, perhaps two, too many) that we watched from a cracker of a suite at Allegiant Stadium where the spirits were self-pour and the donuts came with glaze and sprinkles, and the food never stopped.

Like the city of Vegas. You should go. It's quite tiring. But cool fun.

Whacked a bit of stuff on Insta if you're curious.