Alabama's golf trail hits prime time

The view from the first tee of the Judge, one of three courses at the Capitol Hill stop on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, is breathtaking: Spanish moss hanging from the tall oaks on the left, the Alabama River on the right, about 200 feet below. In the distance, a fairway lay silvered with the early morning dew. It's the kind of tableau that draws golfers from around the country.

In the past 15 years, Alabama has become an unlikely but increasingly popular destination for golf, with its combination of world-class courses and affordable greens fees at 11 sites on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail.

Top-ranked courses

The trail and its courses routinely place near the top in golf magazine rankings and not only for affordability, though they are always near the top in that category. Alabama's Grand National resort, in Opelika, and Capitol Hill, in Prattville, ranked at the top of Golf World magazine's 2009 readers' choice awards.

With good reason. The courses are beautiful and challenging, a combination of tough terrain, sand traps and water hazards that are a good but fun test for serious players and recreational golfers alike.

Over the years, I have been to seven of the trail's 11 stops, and I have yet to be disappointed. My favorite location: Grand National in Opelika, with its two courses, the Lake and Links, though the two courses at the Shoals in Muscle Shoals, in the northwest corner of the state, are a close second.

The trail offers more than affordable golf. There are the afternoons when, just as you are teeing off, a blue heron lifts off from the water, or you spot an eagle flying above the piney woods.

Great locations were part of the plan when David Bronner conceived of the golf trail. The head of Retirement Systems of Alabama, Bronner during the late 1980s and early 1990s was frustrated. The system was well-funded, his chief responsibility, but he wanted to accomplish more.

At the same time, controversy erupted over the site of the 1990 PGA Golf Championship -- the Shoal Creek Golf and Country Club, near Birmingham, which had not admitted any African-American members.

"What Alabama didn't understand was that it wasn't a sports-page story," Bronner said. "It was a front-page story. So what I wanted was to change Alabama."

Bronner lured famed course designer Robert Trent Jones to Alabama to design the trail. Now, golfers who might otherwise head to Florida or the Carolinas come to Alabama for a terrain of mountain, rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, a landscape that Bronner calls "especially blessed."

The result: Since the first trail stops opened in the early 1990s, tourism has seen healthy increases, rising by about 4 million visitors from 2000 to 2007, topping out at 22.4 million.

There are Marriott or Renaissance hotels at eight of the 11 sites on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, and I have yet to stay at one that is not very nice. At the Ross Bridge resort in Birmingham, the Renaissance is as stunning as the course.

My focus is often barbecue. In Birmingham that means Dreamland (1-205-933-2133), and at Capitol Hill that means Fat Boy's Bar-B-Que Ranch (1-334-358-4227). Also investigate what is offered beyond barbecue in the bigger cities -- Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile. Birmingham, in particular, is becoming known for its food scene.