![]() No one can take that away from Contraband Bayou: it’s an actual golf course actually named Contraband Bayou. “My real goal is just to play a golf course named Contraband Bayou.” Kevin hails from Lake Charles and warned me that the golf course had seen better days. Three weeks later, with a Contraband Bayou tee time less than 24 hours away, I ran into Kevin McArthur at the Korn Ferry Tour event just outside Lafayette, Louisiana. ![]() “Today’s his day off.” It was a Saturday. That’s just a sixsome that met up with a fivesome.” I complained at the front desk, but the cashier corrected me: “Oh that’s not an elevensome. I arrived giddy, but 15 minutes before my tee time, the first fairway was slammed full with an elevensome - most of them surrounding a beverage cart to stock up on overpriced domestics. ![]() When I learned of Contraband Bayou’s existence in early March, I threw together a quick trip to Houston to play Memorial Park - with a plan to stop at Contraband Bayou on the way home. That knowledge was only the first of many disappointments that Contraband Bayou delivered. Contraband Bayou is, in other words, an actual place, and not a buzzword bonanza contrived during some sleep-starved marketing team’s fever dream. It twists between Lake Charles (the body of water, not the city) to the northeast and Prien Lake to the southwest - beyond which lie Moss Lake, Mud Lake, and eventually the world’s largest mud lake, the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Charles owes its Twentieth Century explosion to several factors, one of which was proximity of reliable oil fields to waterways - among which, I was disappointed to learn, is Contraband Bayou. Today, it’s the sixth-largest city in Louisiana. When the 1940s began, Lake Charles was home to just over 21,000 (about the size of Hammond today) by 1950, its population had nearly doubled. Then the refineries came: the Phillips 66 facility, which stretches over a full square mile along Interstate 10, came online in 1941 Citgo’s refinery - which today is one of America’s largest - followed just three years later. Tucked deep in the swamps of southwest Louisiana, Lake Charles was an afterthought for most of the Twentieth Century’s first half. It’s doubtful that the golf course, the casino that owns it, or many other of Lake Charles’ novelties ever should have been built here. Like the oil refineries that put its hometown on the map, Contraband Bayou is impressive until you look closely and consider the thing’s costs - after which bemusement at the novelty turns to horror, or worse, boredom. What is there to say about Contraband Bayou that I haven’t already written? Which is to say that, past Contraband Bayou’s name, there isn’t much to write.
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