Putting Golf Back on Course

For people who love golf and consider it fun, everything starts with the Old Course at St. Andrews. Golfers have been playing and enjoying the game there for over 500 years. Ben Crenshaw, one of golf’s finest practicing architects, has written, “Every course worth playing retains some small element or spirit of the Old Course at St. Andrews. She is the original.”

Tom Doak, the 46-year-old erstwhile golf outsider crowned golf’s “It Architect” by Sports Illustrated this summer, caddied at St. Andrews after college. During his two months at the Old Course, Doak “looped” for both scratch golfers and a couple of novices who had never played 18 holes before teeing it up at St. Andrews. Doak noticed that the course allowed every player, regardless of ability, to design his own way around the course. In effect, each player got to serve as his own architect. And everyone had fun.

Golf architecture in America had a golden age in the first 30 years of the 20th century. Masters like Donald Ross, Alistair MacKenzie, A.W. Tillinghast, and Seth Raynor designed and built courses across the country (and indeed around the world) that like St. Andrews stirred the golfer’s soul and were fun to play.

But there followed several decades of golf architecture dreck. Architects like Robert Trent Jones and his regrettably prolific scions dotted the American landscape with courses that were difficult and unpleasant to play–largely because they deviated from the tradition born in St. Andrews. Instead of letting each player figure out his own route from hole to hole, they funnelled all into a single narrow path.

Rees Jones, Robert Trent Jones’s son, is still one of golf’s most prominent architects. He describes his theory of golf architecture as follows: “My style emphasizes definition. I work hard at giving the golfer a concept as he stands over the ball. I want him to see the intended target and be able to visualize the shot.” What Rees Jones omits from his reckoning is that some golfers, indeed most golfers, may be incapable of pulling off the shot that he compels them to see. Golfers have enjoyed finding their own way around St. Andrews for over 500 years. Speaking on behalf of the modern golf architecture establishment, Rees Jones in essence insists that he has discovered a better way: He will officiously preside over each and every golfer’s each and every shot.

Jones family members haven’t been the only architects guilty of committing affronts to golf history and ignoring the imperative that the game be fun. Perhaps the most serious offender has been Jack Nicklaus, arguably the greatest golfer ever. Nicklaus has had a hand in designing 207 courses. While some of his courses are picturesque, few are fun unless you’re able to play golf as well as Jack Nicklaus. On many of his courses, the average player will lose half a dozen balls a round, many of them having found a watery grave in one of the man-made water-hazards of which Nicklaus is so fond. As a player, Nicklaus probably wouldn’t even notice many of the water hazards that litter his courses. But the typical golfer does.

Worse still, Nicklaus the architect has often violated the most fundamental precept of golf course design: Put a golf course where nature intended there to be one. Let the shape of the land dictate the shape of the course. People began playing golf at St. Andrews because the terrain cried out for it. Five hundred years ago, eager proto-golfers had limited ability to alter what nature had done. The tools of the game were adapted to the challenges of the terrain.

Modern golf architects can move copious amounts of earth, and they’ve often abused this ability to create uninspiring golf courses on land better suited for strip malls. Some Nicklaus courses are jammed into almost ludicrously inhospitable spots. One can stand on many a Nicklaus-designed tee box thinking, “Start it at the Home Depot, and fade it to the Best Buy.”

In the 10 years of Tiger Woods’s ascendancy in golf, millions more Americans have watched the game on TV than ever did before. And yet the number of people playing golf has hardly moved. This is largely because golf architects have blighted the country with courses that make playing the most enjoyable game yet conjured by man about as much fun as sticking a tee in your eye. It’s said that the only two things men enjoy while being bad at them are golf and sex. Mid-to-late-20th-century golf architects seemed perversely determined to make the typical golf round so miserable that the mediocre golfer would choose clumsy love-making as his only hobby.

Happily, a golf architecture renaissance began in 1994. That’s the year Sand Hills Golf Club opened for business.

When Sand Hills opened, it created a stir in the golf world. Nebraska’s Sand Hills were perfectly geared for a golf course. Architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw hardly had to move any land to create the course. In addition to building what golfers instantly hailed as a classic, Coore & Crenshaw did it cheap.

Coore & Crenshaw’s masterpiece ushered in a new era in golf architecture that aficionados characterize with one word: minimalist. The guiding principle is deference to the land. Minimalism holds that a golf course developer should look for land that is ideal for a course, and the architects they hire should let the characteristics of the land dictate the nature of the course.

Sand Hills wasn’t only a proudly contrarian architectural statement; Sand Hills was also an audacious business undertaking. The Nebraska county that hosts Sand Hills is bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined and has a population of less than 1,000. Getting to Sand Hills is a chore–it is quite literally in one of America’s remotest spots. The nearest outpost of civilization is Mullen, Nebraska, a town of 600 roughly 15 miles away. The closest major city is Denver, over 350 miles to the southwest.

Nevertheless, Sand Hills began a revolution. Right from its opening, golf enthusiasts properly hailed it as a work of genius. Perhaps more important, Sand Hills instantly became a viable financial enterprise. Eager golfers happily made the trek to the proverbial middle of nowhere to tee it up at Sand Hills. Intended as a private club, Sand Hills quickly filled its membership.

Sand Hills also established a new paradigm for destination golf courses. Even though its location is almost unimaginably bare for a vacation spot, Sand Hills deliberately offers almost nothing but golf. There is no spa. A masseuse is not on call. The place is without high-speed (or low-speed) Internet access. Cell phone use isn’t allowed on the property, and if it were you couldn’t get a signal. Sand Hills does have terrific food, complemented by a wonderful wine list. (Make sure to try the Grgich Hills Cabernet.) But there is little to do there besides eat, drink, and golf.

All of which makes it nirvana for the passionate golfer. You’d have better luck beating Tiger Woods in a $100 Nassau than finding a golfer who’s visited Sand Hills and doesn’t cherish the memories.

The large ripple that Sand Hills sent out across the golf world finally broke on the windswept coast of Oregon. There, near the tiny town of Bandon, golf course developer and greeting card magnate Mike Keiser discovered land that could accommodate golf courses reminiscent of the world’s most beloved oceanside “links” courses in Scotland. What would become the wildly popular golf resort of Bandon Dunes had it all: rolling terrain, Pacific cliffs with stunning views, bone-chilling winds, and, last, tons of gorse–the viciously prickly bush that grows like a weed along Scotland’s revered links and irretrievably swallows up errant golf balls.

The only thing Bandon Dunes lacked was accessibility. Bandon is nearly as tough to get to as Sand Hills. And it offers few other wrinkles for the normally pampered golf traveler. As at Sand Hills, there is little to do at Bandon besides eat, drink, and golf. And Bandon has a “walking only” policy. Unless you have a government-recognized disability, you will walk Bandon’s courses or you won’t play them.

And yet Bandon has thrived. Since opening in 1999, Bandon has used “Golf as it was meant to be” as its slogan and manifesto. The golf world has rallied around both the resort and its philosophy. In less than a decade of existence, Bandon Dunes has become the preferred resort of America’s golfing cognoscenti, eclipsing such mainstays as California’s renowned Pebble Beach.

If you visit Bandon Dunes, early in the evening you’ll see a pub full of golfers with wind-burned faces happily downing beers and huge slabs of Bandon’s famous meatloaf. Many of them have spent the past 10 hours walking 36 holes. Few of them are expert golfers. And yet they have all had fun, because the courses at Bandon allowed them to. Many of Bandon’s visitors are experiencing “golf as it was meant to be” for the first time, and they look like they’ll need the smiles surgically pried from their faces before they return to their workaday lives.

While the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort has three magnificent courses, the acknowledged gem is Pacific Dunes, designed by Tom Doak and opened in 2001. On Golf Magazine‘s list of the 100 best courses in America, Sand Hills ranks eighth and Pacific Dunes ranks ninth. They are the only courses in the top 20 that are younger than 70 years old.

Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982, already intent on becoming a golf course architect. He began his career as an iconoclast, more known for his writing than his course design. While still young and impolitic, Doak wrote books and articles that gleefully savaged the efforts of many of the era’s leading architects. He resented and rightly condemned the way those architects used their modern construction tools to create artificial environments where the typical golf round became an ordeal rather than a pleasure.

Although Doak had been producing stirring courses for over a decade before Pacific Dunes stunned the golf world, it was Pacific Dunes that made his reputation. It transformed the one-time outsider into one of golf’s most sought-after architects. But Doak wasn’t about to rest on his laurels. Shortly after Pacific Dunes debuted, Tom Doak journeyed to remote Holyoke, Colorado, where he would create what is perhaps the fullest expression yet of golf as it was meant to be.

The town of Holyoke sits in the northeast corner of Colorado, roughly 15 miles from the Nebraska border. The topography is flat, perfect for farming. In the center of Holyoke swings the town’s sole traffic light, ensuring that the roughly 2,300 locals and visitors passing through town govern their automobiles appropriately.

The Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club of Holyoke opened for business in July 2006 and has already won the highest accolades. While several publications release rankings of the top courses in America and the world, Golf Magazine‘s rankings are the industry’s gold standard. In its first year of operation, Ballyneal debuted as the 46th best course in America and the 83rd best in the world. Ballyneal is the youngest course on either list.

Impressive as those numbers are, they’re deceptively low. Ballyneal had been open for only a few months of play when the 2007 rankings were due. Therefore, relatively few of Golf Magazine‘s panelists had had the chance to play and rate the course. In other words, the legend of Ballyneal has only just begun.

The story of how one of the world’s greatest golf courses wound up in rural Colorado begins with a fit, youthful, and almost preternaturally energetic 47-year-old lifetime resident of Holyoke named Rupert O’Neal. As a boy, O’Neal and his younger brother Jim used to hit golf balls in an area of dunes known locally as the Chop Hills– a few thousand acres of dramatically rolling terrain that interrupts the hundreds of miles of surrounding flatness. Even though there was no golf course there, the O’Neal brothers “played golf” in the Chop Hills using the contours of the land and their own vivid imaginations.

Both O’Neals eventually went to college, but from there they followed different paths. While Rupert returned to Holyoke to tend the family’s 3,000 acre farm, the Chop Hills had given Jim an affection for golf that he couldn’t ignore. Jim became a golf professional, and today is the head pro of one of the San Francisco area’s top country clubs.

Over the years, the O’Neal brothers used to talk about the Chop Hills as the perfect setting for a golf course. Both remembered the fun of playing their homemade version of the game. Long after Rupert had put away his clubs, the discussions continued, always purely theoretical. The thought of actually putting a golf course in a locale that golf snobs would undoubtedly dismiss out of hand seemed unrealistic. But that changed with the success of Sand Hills and Bandon Dunes.

The O’Neals were smart. They brought Tom Doak into the project right after he finished Pacific Dunes. Had they waited, Doak’s services would have been beyond their budget. But in 2002, the stars aligned.

When he visited Holyoke, Doak saw that the O’Neal brothers were right: The Chop Hills were indeed a perfect place for a golf course. That fact shouldn’t diminish Doak’s accomplishment in creating one of the world’s finest golf courses there. It’s not as easy as Doak and Coore & Crenshaw make it look. After the success of the Sand Hills Golf Club, Jack Nicklaus attempted a “minimalist” golf course not far away on terrain almost identical to Coore & Crenshaw’s. Golf Magazine‘s 2007 rankings ignored the Nicklaus-designed course. The magnificent courses that Doak and Coore & Crenshaw have turned out in recent years are the product of long study, but also of aesthetic sensibilities that future golf architects will surely analyze for centuries.

Whenever Rupert O’Neal speaks about Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club, he does so with evident and justified enthusiasm. In addition to helping create one of the golf world’s most special places, O’Neal helped give his home town what is already Holyoke’s largest non-agricultural employer.

In many ways, O’Neal has stood on the shoulders of the men who produced Sand Hills and Bandon Dunes, refining their visions to suit his own sensibilities. Like Bandon Dunes, Ballyneal is walking only; that policy should ensure a membership that’s serious about its golf, rather than a group of dilettantes eager to crow about belonging to one of the world’s best golf courses. Yet Ballyneal supplements its magnificent golf course with supremely comfortable accommodations where you get not only a strong cell phone signal but also wireless high speed Internet and high definition television.

O’Neal clearly doesn’t welcome any kind of snobbery at Ballyneal. He is often to be seen dashing about his property in flip-flops, sipping a glass of homemade chocolate milk. O’Neal is looking for members who want to have fun, and who have fun playing golf. To make sure Ballyneal develops the right kind of membership, O’Neal personally plays at least nine holes with every potential member. Open now a little over a year, Ballyneal is still filling out its membership rolls, a fact that avid golfers will want to note.

There remains the pressing question of what long-term impact places like Sand Hills, Bandon Dunes, and Ballyneal will have on golf architecture and the game itself. The early attempts at golf-course design by Jack Nicklaus’s successor as king of golf, Tiger Woods, may offer a clue.

For his first project, announced in 2006, Woods took a commission to build a course on a piece of flat desert in Dubai. It was a move right out of the Nicklaus school: Put a golf course where nature didn’t intend there to be one, substituting one man’s limited imagination for nature’s infinite variety. The “Tiger Woods, Dubai,” its website says, “will feature 20 palaces, 75 mansions and 190 luxury villas that offer the perfect blend of exclusivity and luxurious community living”–about as far as conceivable from the austere fun to be had at a place like Sand Hills.

For his second commission, Woods undertook to build a golf course on a piece of rolling terrain outside of Asheville called the Carolina Preserve. When the project was announced a few months back, Woods insisted that the land is perfect for golf, and that no man-made lakes or waterfalls will blight his first American design. The course will be walking only.

So has Tiger undergone a conversion? Only the finished product will tell. But this much we know: When someone asked him to describe his design philosophy, Tiger Woods used the magic word: “I’m more of a minimalist,” he said.

Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.