Vegas on the Delta By Tom Chiarella I’m in the poker room at the Grand Casino in Gulfport, Mississippi, playing seven card stud. I’ve got pocket 7s and the bet is mine. I pause to gaze out the window at the sport fishing boats, punching through the afternoon chop toward the home marina in back of the Grand. The blond to my left thumps the table. I lay my bet and the action circles onward. I’m standing in the grass outside Beauvoir, post-war home of Confederate General Jefferson Davis in Biloxi, Miss. A rain has just fallen. The live oaks drip softly into the grass at my feet and a shaft of sunshine cuts through to lay a path of light across the front of the house. A docent hurries by. Rumors circulate that Jose Feliciano, booked for the night at a local casino, is coming in for a tour. “Is he here yet?” she asks, in an anxious voice, as if I would know. I shrug helplessly and she hurries away toward the action. I’m on the back nine at The Bridges, an Arnold Palmer-designed course in Bay St. Louis, Miss. The shot is simple enough: I need to carry a small stream with a long fade to set up what looks like an easy 9-iron. My partner, a cattle wholesaler from Arkansas, smiles. “At least you’ve got a natural target,” he says, nodding at a casino perched in the distance. “Just aim for the table you want to play tonight.” I line up, nail my drive and head toward the action. It’s really that way along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, one of the country’s best-kept vacation secrets. If you aren’t in the action, you’re headed for it. But pause for a look around—it’s impossible not to—and the action seems to come to you. Casinos of every shape sprout from the dunescape. And world-class restaurants sit alongside road trip-worthy burger joints, funky art galleries and legitimate historic masterpieces, not to mention crystal-white beaches and more recently, a gathering of impressive new golf courses. The Mississippi Gulf Coast is a convergence of sorts: New Orleans ambiance overlaying a Vegas-style development splurge. Most people who hear “Mississippi” picture the used-up movie clichés: chain gangs, cotton fields, little gas stations, shirtless men wearing oil-stained overalls. Mississippi, to the uninitiated, has its own soundtrack: the jew’s harp, the banjo, the warbling gospel singer. You know these tunes. You know this vision. Unless you’ve been there, you may even believe the myths. While you can never put history aside in Mississippi, you can always lay down outworn ideas. That sentiment has driven the Gulf Coast rebirth, and conjured visions of a new, multi-dimensional resort location. “We know what we’re up against,” says Steve Richer, executive director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. “But we haven’t got anything to hide.” Richer came to Mississippi after long stints as a promoter in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. “I’m a Jewish guy from New York and I’ve never been anywhere where I felt so comfortable and at-home as here in Mississippi,” Richer says with a laugh. “People warned me about the heat. But along the coast, even that’s not a big issue.” Indeed, seasonal temperatures on the coast are surprisingly moderate, ranging from 82 in high summer to a low of 51 in January. That said, it’s important to recognize that getting in trouble on a Mississippi golf vacation can be a constant indoor-outdoor proposition. From the moment you leave the airport in Gulfport, signs for casinos beckon. The “gaming industry”—to use the quaintest term available—leads the way in the growth and development of the region, with 12 casino resorts built since 1992. Since then, golf course development has followed close behind. What was once a reasonable smattering of mid-range courses concentrating on a local clientele has evolved in less than 10 years to the point where coastal Mississippi now rates as a mini-mecca, featuring more than two dozen fine layouts within short driving distance of Gulfport and Biloxi, including an instant classic from Jack Nicklaus, a new offering from Davis Love III and a versatile Arnold Palmer favorite. Combine these twin forces—gaming and golf—with the region’s built-in flavor and you start to see big possibilities. “We know gaming is a big draw,” says Richer. “And if that gets people down here, great. But we have more. It’s a combination of culture, food, gaming and golf. We try to stand on all these legs. That’s where we walk right by other gaming destinations.” Richer considers golf the region’s decisive growth factor. “At some level, golfers are outdoorsmen,” he says. “And you have to spend time outdoors to appreciate Mississippi. When that round of golf is over, we offer more than a good sandwich and a glass of beer. You can go play craps or shop for a lithograph, visit a historic site or a world-class art gallery.” The Gulf Coast of Mississippi features 26 miles of beaches from end to end. The region is cross-banded by Highway 90, which runs a close parallel with the shore, at times so close that the road and the beach seem one. The Mississippi mise en scéne dissolves as you head inland from overdeveloped tangle to complete wilderness within a mile or two. A barbecue shack nestles against a vacant lot, which is pressed up against an antebellum house, in turn girded by a car dealership. So it goes: Gulf Coast Mississippi is all about proximity and collision. Old money and new. Natives and tourists. Gambling and old-time religion. Golf and sometimes inaccessible wetland terrain. Out of these collisions has risen a successful set of alliances and chemistry, chief among them partnerships between master golf architects and their subject matter. The Bridges Golf Resort at Casino Magic sits outside the little town of Bay St. Louis on the western half of the coast. This Arnold Palmer design occupies a large casino complex, routing itself through a dozen legitimate scene changes—from the primordial bayous into the shelter of pine stands, past fishing shacks and modest suburban homes to the weirdly postmodern sprawl of the casino parking lot, with its showy glut of BMWs and RVs. The course features a longer front side dappled with inventive water hazards, and a back side that muscles itself into the woods, offering more significant terrain changes. The King’s tees set up nicely at 6,917 yards, but the course can be trimmed to play as short as 5,224 yards. “We want it to play in different ways on different days,” says Chris Altese, director of golf at The Bridges. “It’s a rich course that should offer all of our hotel guests a new challenge every day they play. It’s no surprise that we want them to play here, near the hotel and casino, and we try to make the golf strong enough to accomplish that.” The course features an 11-acre practice area and a lighted driving range, should practicality overtake you on your way to the craps table. The Casino itself is a smallish affair, one of the very first barge-concept casinos in the state. (To avoid gambling restrictions, Mississippi casinos are built on floating barges before being fixed to the shoreline. In this way they are classified as “boats” and fall under a separate regulatory aegis.) The tables here are ample and welcoming nonetheless. In Mississippi, you owe it to yourself to be an explorer. The town of Bay St. Louis, not more than a few minutes from the Bridges complex, offers all the funkiness of beer joints, live oak trees, folk art galleries, coffee houses, antique stores and city streets showcasing the truest Southern Gothic this side of New Orleans. This is a town made for walking. The streets are sandy and vaguely unkempt. The stores and restaurants offer a welcome respite from the thumping cacophony of the casinos. Bay St. Louis store owners greet a visitor warmly and the restaurants sweep you in with their local specialties—seafood gumbo, poboys, gulf-oysters and variations on the day’s catch. Try the oddball gift shop, like Ya-Ya’s, paw your way through the bizarre mixture of art treasure and pop culture at Fleur-De-Lis, or cross the street to examine the works of local artists at the Serenity Art Gallery, just three of the dozens of little storefronts dotting this ancient marina town. To the west of Bay St. Louis sits the bucolic town of Pass Christian (pronounced kris-chee-ANN), a traditional summer colony for well-to-do New Orleans families. Pass Christian is noted for its strip of elegant beachfront homes, some dating back 150 years. Be sure to take the scenic route, just parallel to the highway, before turning north toward The Oaks, a 7,200-yard gem of a course set in a densely wooded area and ripe for future development. One of the more quickly maturing courses in the area, The Oaks rumbles through a lush wooded environment with the beginnings of some elevation changes. Notch it back to the championship tees and the course offers a stern test for the wayward ball-striker, with treelines that provide a dense buttress to the rich fairways. The Oaks features an elegantly modest clubhouse, a large driving range and even picnic tables for families. It offers tie-in packages with the Beau Rivage, a $650 million resort featuring a 1,500-seat-theater, 12 different restaurant choices and a large shopping promenade. The casino floor at “The Beau” is much more than a standard riverboat, boasting more than 150 gaming tables at all price levels and a full complement of high-stakes game rooms. The newest course on the coast, a Davis Love creation called Shell Landing, sits at the eastern edge of the state (still 30 minutes from about any hotel). Having opened early this year, the 7,007-yard layout is just feeling its own muscle. Spread across a broad expanse of development-ready property, the front nine meanders around a gopher tortoise refuge, urging the golfer toward the stellar sixth, a 401-yard par-4 that presses laterally against a stunning wetland. An abandoned shrimp boat lists in the distance and the golfer, standing at the lonely end of this stimulating new course, has to think for a moment that it all looks like a movie set, beautiful and sad at the same time. Yet another Mississippi collision. Shell Landing features prime residential homesites, designed not to interfere with the flow of the course, and memberships at various levels for corporations and future residents. “We’re totally committed to building a golf community,” says general manager Kenny Hughes, “while at the same time offering the visiting golfer a challenging, top-level golf experience.” The course is closer to the Gulf than most existing properties, and it features a wider variety of flora and wildlife. Perhaps the best of the bunch is the Grand Bear, a Nicklaus design set deep in a forest preserve about 20 minutes from the coast. It’s a property of the Grand Casino Biloxi, and premium tee times require a stay at the Grand, but the experience at one end (the course) or the other (the casino and spa) surely makes this a small price to pay. The drive into the Grand Bear is worth the price of admission, wending through miles of untouched forest. The rolling terrain of this course is offset by these dramatic stands of native pine. Views down the expansive fairways along the back side—the roughs lined with blankets of pine needles, the mannered elevation shifts and the ever-subtle green complexes—offer a hint of Augusta. The clubhouse exudes the confidence and temperament of an age-old operation, though the 7,200 yard course opened in 1999. After a round at the Grand Bear, be sure to return to the Grand Casino Gulfport, which features a top-rank spa, Vegas-quality casino and even a waterpark for the kids. From there you are in easy driving distance to some of the region’s best restaurants and only a short walk to the beach, if you can get past the siren call of those felt tables. As you move up and down the coast it’s easy to see that this is a place where things are happening. The area features a family-style Mardi Gras in February (a plenitude of beads, sans shirt raising) that draws 120,000 to the region, including many who eschew Bourbon Street for the pace and relative sanity of the Biloxi-Gulfport event. In the coming year, ground will be broken for a museum designed by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry (whose work includes The Guggenheim). Sport fishing is accessible and affordable at all the ports. There’s even a seafood museum, should you be so inclined. Unlike some vacation spots, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi is not an echo of something better, or slicker or newer. The golf courses, unfolded in various spots throughout the region, don’t belly up against one another; they seem to grow out of the place, not out of the commerce. You feel a pulse of Vegas along the beach, but it does not overwhelm the local rhythms. As you throw the dice, as you drive the beach, as you head off in search of a new course or a memorable plate of ribs, feel certain of two things: You are in the action, and you are headed for more.