The Big Picture

For all his talent, imagination and determination, Tom Doak wouldn't achieve a high point, in our surveys at least, until 2001, when his Pacific Dunes, a glorious romp along the Oregon coast, won Best New Upscale Public, only because we didn't have an All-World category. If we did, his subsequent, equally stunning work at Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand, and the Golf Club at St. Andrews Beach and Barnbougle Dunes in Australia, would be better known to our readers.

About the time Doak set out on his own, Bill Coore, another former Dye employee, partnered with Masters champion Ben Crenshaw to do what they called Early American design -- dry, firm, lay-of-the-land, bump-and-run architecture, like the kind that existed here in the 1920s. Coore and Crenshaw struggled for years to find clients willing to listen, but in the early 1990s they were given a thousand acres of central Nebraska, literally mowed out fairways and greens and scratched out a few bunkers. The result was the most natural design ever conceived in this nation, Sand Hills Golf Club, America's Best New Private Course of 1995.

Coore-and-Crenshaw is now a brand name, yet for all their subsequent masterworks -- Cuscowilla in Georgia, Friar's Head in New York and Bandon Trails in Oregon -- they've yet to win again in our Best New competition. Such are the vagaries of having handfuls of panelists evaluate different courses in different locales at different times.

Another minimalist, Gil Hanse, patterned his career after Doak's. He also attended Cornell, also used the Dreer Award to study architecture in Great Britain for a year, then worked as Doak's primary associate from 1989-'92. His first Best New win was the aptly named Rustic Canyon, 2002's Best New Affordable Public, in the hills northwest of Los Angeles, Hanse sharing design credit with his associate Jim Wagner and golf writer Geoff Shackelford. Rustic Canyon is as austere as it gets, expansive holes with hunkered-down greens, strategic routes defined by shaggy bunkers, shallow ravines and clusters of sagebrush. Augusta National it definitely is not.

The Original: Sawgrass (1980): Dye's design launched imitations over the past 25 years.
Illustration by Ester Pearl Watson

THE OPULENT LOOK

Which brings us to another really rich guy, casino owner Steve Wynn. In the late 1980s, Wynn wanted a luxurious golf course where he could entertain high rollers. He wasn't interested in just imitating Augusta National, with its cathedral corridors, postcard ponds and flawless turf. That had been done countless times before, most notably by Jack Nicklaus at Ohio's Muirfield Village in 1974. Wynn wanted the perfection of Augusta National in a place where it had little chance of succeeding: the barren desert north of Las Vegas.

Tom Fazio had the good fortune to be the architect hired by Wynn for the project. For 20 years, Fazio had done his share of low-budget layouts on lousy pieces of land, but when Wynn gave him a blank slate, Fazio told him he'd need a blank check to create a genuine environment for golf. Not a problem, said Wynn, who ended up spending $47 million building the course.

Earthmovers broke through the desert crust, carved out valleys 60 feet deep and pushed up hills 60 feet high, upon which were planted a forest of mature pines, each with individual drip irrigation. Fake creeks were fed an endless loop of water that tumbled over fiberglass boulders and garish waterfalls. It was opulent. It was exclusive. It was mysterious. It was Shadow Creek, our Best New Private winner in 1990.

During construction, Wynn, going blind, insisted on reviewing the position of every hole, the placement of every tree, the backdrop of every creek, bunker and green before anything was built, using models, tiny cameras and television monitors to aid his diminishing eyesight. That input led to what Fazio calls "the Shadow Creek look." Pines were planted right to the edge of ponds, so shadows would negate the glare of the sun off the water. Greens were encircled with bunkers and trees to create intimate atmospheres for each foursome of buddies. Cartpaths had to be entirely out of view, the restrooms buried. The practice range looked like side-by-side golf holes, not an open field.

Shadow Creek changed Fazio's approach to architecture forever. Now anything was possible, with enough cash. He no longer needed great topography to create a great course. He could create it himself, from a cornfield in Kansas (Flint Hills National) to swamps in South Carolina (Belfair and Berkeley Hall). Specimen trees at Sea Island Golf Club in Georgia need not be sacrificed.

Enormous tree spades could rearrange 150-year-old live oaks. At Old Overton in Vestavia Hills, Ala. (Best New Private 1994), Fazio could point to a mountainside and command that it yield to the fourth fairway. Six months later, the rock was gone, the fairway in place. The resulting road-cut might make minimalists like Doak and Hanse cringe, but it seems to fit the region's strip-mine topography.

It's a mind-set that's easy to debate, given the ever-escalating costs of the game, but hard to dispute. In 25 years, Fazio designs have won a dozen Best New titles, the most by any architect, by far.

Shadow Creek triggered myriad imitations. Gary Panks and David Graham tried it at the Raven at South Mountain in Phoenix, Johnny Miller at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, Utah, Fazio's brother, Jim, at Trump International in West Palm Beach. But none of the pretenders could match Wynn's original pile of chips, and thus never quite stacked up.

Even Fazio did a couple of blunt imitations, at Primm Valley Golf Club on the California-Nevada state line south of Vegas, and, just a few years ago, right on the Vegas Strip. In 2000, Steve Wynn lost Shadow Creek in a hostile takeover of his casino empire. (How hostile? The revised Shadow Creek club history on sale at the golf course makes no mention of Wynn.) But he got a ton of cash for his stock, so he bought the old Desert Inn, replaced it with a gleaming monolith hotel and asked Fazio to repeat their magic on an adjacent golf course, this time with tee shots aligned at the Stratosphere and Mirage instead of distant mountain peaks. Alas, Wynn Golf Club is but a shadow of Shadow Creek, and there's talk that its Strip frontage is too valuable for it to remain a golf course much longer.