By: James Colgan November 3, 2023 The dream-like Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot St. Lucia – GOLF/James Colgan

CAP ESTATE, St. Lucia — On a hilltop high above a remote corner of St. Lucia, a teenager in a sweat-stained shirt slowly loads food onto a flatbed. A glimpse at the rusty platform reveals the boy has done well: There are vacuum-sealed packages of fresh fish, baskets of vegetables and a few cases of cold Piton beer.

The contraption whirs to life, sending the goods on a slow descent into the arms of a small army of cooks waiting below. A steamy afternoon has given way to an idyllic Caribbean evening, and down at the bottom of the hill, a private beachside bungalow is prepping for a party.

It’s sunset at a little sliver of paradise called the Naked Fisherman, which is a hell of a strange place to see the future of golf. But some of that future is here — or a few miles from here, at a place named Cabot St. Lucia. And from the deck at the Naked Fisherman, Bill Coore tells me the moment he realized he’d discovered it.

It had happened just a day earlier, when Coore and his course-design partner, Ben Crenshaw, had found themselves on the 15th tee box at their latest Cabot design, Point Hardy Golf Club. Crenshaw was admiring the expanse at 15, the first of four cliffside stunners, when he stopped short. He turned to Coore and asked for a photo to send to Julie, Crenshaw’s wife. Coore didn’t bother trying to stifle a smile.

“In all these years, that’s never happened before,” he told me on the porch, the same smile plastered across his face. “He must think it’s pretty good.”

CRENSHAW WASN’T ALONE. I too found myself in St. Lucia in pursuit of something pretty good, and an oceanfront dinner was only the first glimpse of it. There would be a dazzling array of acts to follow — bottles, excursions, meals, and, of course, beaches — before we would see the main event: a golf course set into a stretch of cliffside so beautiful it would redefine our perception of Caribbean golf…and maybe regular golf, too.

As the scent of grill smoke wafted into the air, the movers and shakers at the Naked Fisherman began to take their place. In one corner of the deck was Crenshaw, the two-time Masters champion and long-time course designer, clutching a Tito’s and soda stuffed with a fat lemon wedge. In another was Ben Cowan-Dewar, the golf developer behind Cabot, peeling away clothing after arriving on a late-afternoon flight from Toronto. In a third corner still, seated on an old wooden bench far from the noise, was Coore, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried.