# Links at Rainbow Curve: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/links-at-rainbow-curve-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Arkansas


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Here is a golf arrangement more courses should envy: the Links at Rainbow Curve is the chief amenity of an apartment complex in Bentonville, and residents get unlimited golf. Unlimited. The course is a nine-hole par 35 of 2,880 yards, which means a resident can walk out the door, play nine in about an hour, and be back before dinner goes cold. Most golfers spend their lives trying to live closer to golf. These tenants just signed a lease.

The course opened in 2009 and plays to a rating of 33.6 with a slope of 113 from the blue tees, numbers that translate plainly: it is short and it is not trying to hurt you. The mix is more interesting than the yardage suggests. Three par 3s, four par 4s and two par 5s fit into those nine holes, so a par 35 routing gives you two genuine par 5 chances in a quick loop, a better ratio than most executive courses bother with. Ponds come into play on four of the nine holes, which is the course's whole argument in miniature. The shots are short. The trouble is close. Hybrid Bermuda fairways and bent grass greens keep the surfaces honest, bent grass being a real commitment in Arkansas summers.

For non-residents it is simply a short public course in Benton County, and it should be judged that way too. Nine holes, four of them with ponds in play, surfaces kept in bent grass on the greens. A public nine lives or dies on whether a loop feels like golf or like a walk with occasional swings, and the par mix is what saves this one from the second category. Two par 5s in nine holes means two tee shots that matter, two layup decisions, two birdie putts that feel earned rather than automatic. Plenty of full-length courses offer less decision-making per hour than that.

## What a course like this is for

Not everything in golf has to scale up. We rank the state's serious tests in [the full Arkansas ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-arkansas/), and Rainbow Curve is not competing with them, which is exactly why it earned a mention on Golf Advisor's list of top courses in Arkansas per GolfNow. A nine-hole course next to your front door does the work the game actually needs done. It gives a beginner a place to learn without a five-hour public shaming. It gives a decent player a place to hit real shots on a Tuesday evening, water in play, instead of banging range balls into a net. It gives kids a first course that fits their legs.

The honest limits are obvious and worth stating. At 2,880 yards there is no room for the full game: no long iron approaches to speak of, no championship test hiding anywhere, and a strong player will shoot at every pin because the course gives him no reason not to. If you are passing through Bentonville with one afternoon and a full bag, this is a warm-up, not a destination. But destinations are common. A course woven into where people actually live, priced into the rent, open for a fast nine whenever the light allows, is a rarer and more useful thing. Golf spends a lot of money building places golfers visit twice a year. Rainbow Curve built one its golfers can play twice a day.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.