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Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Sign
Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas Sign
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Sin City stands out for its smoke, mirrors and mirages, even on the golf course. Here’s the best layout in the area, on paper at least.

No place does elsewhere like Las Vegas. Looking across the skyline tells you that. So if it’s OK to put a Camelot between a wannabe Big Apple and a faux Egyptian pyramid of glass, it’s just as right to cobble together a mind-meld realm of another sort – this one of fairway and green, yip and chip.

Welcome to Sin City Fantasy Golf Club, with a par of 72 and a course rating that will fluster everyone at the USGA.

Badlands Golf Club, Diablo (No. 6)
Par 4 – 374/361/277 yards
What’s in a name? When your logo is a cow skull it makes sense that the three nines at Badlands are dubbed Outlaw, Desperado and Diablo. Diablo’s sixth tees off from a canyon rim to a fairway angled into the desert and from whence five things can happen, four not so good: A topper into the junk; a dart through the fairway into the junk; a block into the junk; a snapper taking the second ever farther from the green. If lucky enough for outcome No. 5, it all turns about 85 degrees starboard for an approach over more junk to a sand-pinched green. Be bold, hombre.

Coyote Springs Golf Club (No. 4)
Par 4 – 444/420/359/298 yards
Coyote Springs gets props for a number of reasons: It’s my favorite play in the region and puts a premium on driving acumen. This hole rises and kicks right around bunkers at the turn point. Take on one bunker too far – or better yet, go ahead, Macho Man, and play this course one set of tees behind where you should be – and you’re scratching out unseeing, a story or two below the fairway, with an acute angle in. Chicken out too far left and it’s up that hill with something beefy and an eyelet of sand situated short of the green.

Reflection Bay Golf Club (No. 15)
Par 5 – 544/527/512/497 yards
This beauty plunges toward the mirrored sheen of Lake Las Vegas and marble-hued mountains as players navigate two desert carries, an island fairway, a couple kinks, bunkers where a safe second likely lands and a pressed-up green with a chin stubbled white. Don’t let what is a lot of room numb your execution. And a key but often overlooked matter at Reflection Bay are tee differentials that are meaningful and not dumbed down at any ability level. (Anyone else sick of advertising copy where every course in existence is “playable for all”?)

Rio Secco Golf Club (No. 3)
Par 3 – 180/166/139/110 yards
It’s not just the views that extend over the Las Vegas Valley that pop eyes on this one-swinger. No, it’s that I have but a 7-iron in hand yet am staring into the abyss and quaking. A 7-iron, man, get a grip on yourself! Fill in the void with grass and it’s a no-brainer. And, of course, there’s a bailout area the size of Canada to the left. But with a thin lip of bunker fronting a shallow green, it’s best to take in the view, smile, swing and center-cut the green.

Paiute Golf Resort, Wolf (No. 14)
Par 4 – 492/452/438/413 yards
I’ve played hundreds of rounds in and around Las Vegas, and to this day Wolf’s 14th still bites like few other par-4s, and that’s bites as in extracting flesh, not sucking. An acute right-bender that allows some of its excessive yardage to be cheated does so only by forcing players to be adept at trigonometry and able to carry the calculated portion of waste area inside the big bend. After that it’s nothing more than a long iron to a tiered green robed in a half-dozen bunkers.

Shadow Creek Golf Club (No. 4)
Par 5 – 581/558/512 yards
A picture postcard in a setting full of picture postcards best describes this hole. As with all of Shadow, that it’s a fabricated world of coifed elegance – as if manicurists tended to the fairways instead of mowers – doesn’t cost the course one rung at the top of the American golf pantheon. This hole is a sweep of evergreen within a cathedral of pines, a water-arced par-5 anchored in the elbow by a perfect willow, and even when you snap one sharply into the crystalline blue, you really don’t care.

TPC Las Vegas (No. 4)
Par 5 – 544/518/471/429 yards
Not being long, particularly as it plays downhill and at a ball-flight-enhancing altitude, makes this knife’s edge par-5 extra tasty. The hole courses through one of the canyons from which this property derived its original name (TPC Canyons), so life outside the foul poles is penal for those inclined to go yard, and the green is nested at the end of a fast-running slot and anything long on approach is akin to hitting the express button on Hell’s elevator.

Conestoga Golf Club (No. 2)
Par 3 – 188/162/144/130 yards
Sure, it’s 80 miles to Mesquite, but you can get up north in an hour on the 15, so go you must, and once there you’ll find some of the best desert golf in the area. This short hole that drops flat-earth-style into a rock-strewn wash is cagey, with a riveted wall to the left and back that creates a peninsular effect on a huge putting surface that claims many three-jack victims. For the (rightly) slicers in the house, that miss here is greeted with a generous mantle of green stuff.

Bear’s Best Las Vegas (No. 9)
Par 4 – 453/393/353 yards
In the land of architectural larceny, why not take the practice to the course? At Bear’s Best, it’s all from a place called Not Here, and I like this hole that replicates No. 6 at Scottsdale’s Geronimo Course at Desert Mountain. A semi-blind tee shot is best played skirting a bunker on the inside-left sweep of this downhiller. Bailing out increases the distance and puckers the approach strings by bringing more into play, and anything deep on the green leads to a putt best played with Velcro golf balls.

Coyote Springs Golf Course (No. 2)
Par 5 – 575/518/483 yards
Here we go again at Coyote Springs: Choose your teeing ground, line and reap or weep accordingly. Now that you’re in the fairway, it’s a huge blind poke uphill to a broad fairway counterbalanced with more folds and wrinkles than a Shar-Pei show and a liberal cratering of bunkers. Few can reach in two, though even a third-swing shot with a short club is to a greased saddle of a green pinched between water and more sand. And did I mention the views?

Cascata Golf Club (No. 6)
Par 4 – 379/364/339/259 yards
Design simplicity is this par-4’s shining attribute. On a layout bandied about in any conversation of the West’s best, and with any number of eye-candy holes before and after, this hole stands out because it’s a two-swinger that few can drive yet all can reach in regulation. Flirt with the desert outside the GOP-kink to the fairway and the green is open and inviting. Knock it too far right and you won’t see a thing coming in. Simple is good … and perhaps politically apt.

Wolf Creek Golf Club (No. 3)
Par 3 – 227/175/173 yards
In many ways, Mesquite’s Wolf Creek stood desert golf on its head. That’s what happens when you have, figuratively, a design team of Pink Floyd and the property shows up on a topography map with contours not unlike the interior of the Grand Canyon. Take this standard-on-paper par-3 that instead of plunging nicely downward decides to go straight up, wholly blind, toward the stratosphere. Good luck adding one, two or three clubs to the equation.

Paiute Golf Resort, Snow Mountain (No. 7)
Par 4 – 337/309/288 yards
A course without at least one short risk/reward par-4 is a course shorted, and in the modern era no one short of Tom Weiskopf does it better than Pete Dye. The obscured green sits beyond a hill dredged in bunkers and abutting the edge of the spiny Mojave. If you’re the type who heads to Las Vegas Motor Speedway for some laps in a Camry or who doesn’t double-down when you should at blackjack, tuck your tail and hit an iron or hybrid out to the left. Then go home.

Shadow Creek Golf Club (No. 17)
Par 3 – 154/151/140 yards
I’m usually down on faux waterfalls, those artificial constructs of rock and water that mostly exists to distract from a flawed design. Not so at Shadow, where the entire scene is utterly wrong yet so perfectly correct. This hole is a small amphitheater of high drama, a cute par-3 requiring a short iron over water to a slim ledge of green draped and cascaded in all matter of that gorgeous stuff that works here and few other places.

Primm Valley Golf Club, Lakes Course (No. 18)
Par 4 – 451/438/424 yards
Long referred to as Shadow Lite – for the water and foliage, contours and sideboarding, but mostly for the shared Tom Fazio lineage – Primm Lakes deserves its own renown (as does the sibling Desert Course). Coming home, this finishing hole fits together all the needed pieces: a defined driving angle, outward views and framing trees, lake and meandering stream in play on the way in, approachable but ambling green and enough distance to keep everyone honest.

Royal Links Golf Club (No. 18)
Par 5 – 515/495/450 yards
Vegas’ most egregious bit of lawful thievery is also its most enjoyable. I’m speaking of Royal Links, so don’t be fooled by the urban-industrial intrusions on the margins or the garish clubhouse and marketing propaganda. This is neither Scotland nor a golf abomination. But it works nicely because it’s Vegas, so have a go at this closing par-5 “inspired” by St. Andrews’ 14th. And if you get into one of those pots, you might just wish you were choking down a bowl of haggis.

Paiute Golf Resort, Snow Mountain (No. 16)
Par 3 – 198/182/150/119 yards
After all these years this remains my favorite par-3 near the Valley. A mid-long iron is needed to hit a runaway green bulk-headed by the bluest of blue lakes. Bunkers, mounds and humps buttressing behind are visual intimidators, which makes flag hunting scary, particularly when the hole is cut in back of the green. No houses, no noise, no anything, really. It’s just you and your group playing golf as intended, with a gorgeous desert mountain backdrop thrown in for good measure.

Reflection Bay Golf Club (No. 7)
Par 4 – 452/405/380/348 yards
When Reflection Bay recently reopened after a six-year nap, this hole most benefited from the tweaks and trims. A fall-away par-4 cut diagonally by an arroyo, the hole gives longer hitters a chance to carry right and cut down on approach length. The arroyo was scoured of foliage, making the shortcut more apparent from the tee, and the hard-to-hold green was pushed back toward the lake, with the real estate reclaimed at the expense of a crescent bunker.

Contrived, you say? It’s Las Vegas, so reality is suspended. And wouldn’t most of us love to suspend some of the reality we experience on any course?