Eye on Design
10 sneaky influential golf courses that revolutionized modern design
Whistling Straits looks as if it was designed into dramatic dunescape right along Lake Michigan, but in fact, the site is an old, dead-flat Army air base that Pete Dye transformed.
PGA of America
Changes in historical direction can often be traced to concentrated and connected events that appear to occur suddenly, what historians call inflection points. A popular exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., this year examines an inflection point in painting: An insurgent, subcultural 1874 art display in Paris that, though a commercial and critical failure, set the stage for the Impressionist movement that would dominate art for the next 15 years.
A critical inflection point in contemporary golf design occurred over a roughly 18-month period between the spring and summer of 1998 and the end of 1999, when a collection of high-profile courses opened that would initiate another inevitable movement, this one toward naturalism, that continues to drives golf architecture 25 years later.
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These courses showcased a vivid and contrasting new aesthetic geared toward making the architecture look part of nature, aged and less artificial. They also ratified a growing intuition among developers that what traveling golfers wanted above lush green grass, ostentatious service and everything else was visceral excitement and a feeling of exploring uncharted territory.
The seeds for this naturalist movement were planted several years earlier in 1995 with the opening of Sand Hills Golf Club in the remote and difficult to get to Nebraska Sandhills. There, designers Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw and their crew had only to move earth “by the spoonful,” as one writer put it, to create what is now considered a masterpiece of minimalism and restraint in dunes that were perfectly suited for golf holes.
Now ranked eighth on America’s 100 Greatest Courses, Sand Hills introduced concepts and design elements that altered the way subsequent developers and architects approached their projects. These influences began to matriculate through a new wave of course openings beginning in 1998. The themes manifested differently and in different combinations at each course (just as Impressionist painters had individual styles and subject matter), but collectively these openings signified a shift in architectural tone and presentation.
Specifically, they each worked hard to make the hazards look naturalized and for the holes to blend into their wild environments, real or created. This was a departure from mainstream golf designs that typically emulated the pristine and proudly manicured look of Augusta National, the industrial shaping of Pete Dye, or were otherwise ambivalent about appearing manufactured.
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Most were also site-driven, with developers choosing them for the unique potential of the land rather than their ease of access—people would join or travel for the golf, if for no other reason. The new paradigm showed that if the setting and golf were exotic and exciting, players would find it.
Taken together, these 10 courses reset, rather suddenly, the direction of golf design and advanced a broader movement toward naturalism and destination architecture: The majority of courses that came before them did not possess the same look or raison d'être; afterwards, aspects of this new style infiltrated architecture with momentous regularity.
THE GOLF CLUB AT CUSCOWILLA (1997)
Consider Cuscowilla a prologue. It opened for preview play in 1997, a season before the onset of the new naturalist courses. But Cuscowilla, located on the shoreline of Lake Oconee in central Georgia, was the first course Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw opened after Sand Hills. Here they transplanted concepts employed effortlessly at Sand Hills—wide fairways, firm playing surfaces, naturalized bunkers—onto a much tougher site of clay. The deep, red-sand bunkers with ragged-ripped edging, built by Jeff Bradley, were instantly dazzling. They were also original, especially compared to the formal bunkering of Jack Nicklaus, Bob Cupp and Tom Fazio at the neighboring Reynolds Lake Oconee resort, and proved that a version of their natural blowout style could work anywhere.
Cuscowilla was one among the first group of jobs Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw took on after the opening of Sand Hills, the number eight course on America's 100 Greatest Courses ranking and a design that vaulted the duo to the top of the profession. The site's couldn't be more different. Cuscowilla is located on the shore of Lake Oconee, a large manmade reservoir that's home to the five courses of Reynolds Lake Oconee. To give an example of how Coore and Crenshaw think differently than other archtiects, they recommended the developer of Cuscowilla use the majority of the shoreline for homesites. Most architects would fight for water holes, but they prefered the more rolling uplands for golf rather than the flatter land on the water.
Explore our full review of The Golf Club of Cuscowilla here.
VICTORIA NATIONAL (1998)
Victoria National, in rural Indiana, wasn’t the first golf course to be built on a former mining site, but it was one of the most artistically flamboyant to that point. And also the toughest, due to an imposing site with terrorizing holes that sweep along and over a chain of lakes and waterways (Victoria National has one of the highest Challenge scores among America’s 100 Greatest Courses). The strip mine spoils and deep-cut ravines provided a severely brutalist canvas, but the trick here was how Tom Fazio’s team transformed the site into something that resembles a prairie preserve with holes that tie seamlessly into the aggressive landforms. No one will confuse the design with Sand Hills, but the use of native grasses and the way the course blends into the surrounding landscape felt like a major step forward, even if it’s all the hand of man and machine.
WHISTLING STRAITS (1998)
The Straits Course at Whistling Straits has more in common with Victoria National than Sand Hills as the course was entirely created by engineering. It’s also on the opposite side of the spectrum from minimalism—it’s a maximalist design that industrially transformed a flat farmland bluff into a dazzling, Irish-inspired links that steps down toward Lake Michigan. Despite the machinery required to shape it, the Straits achieves its goal of looking like a links course formed by the wind as it cycles up and down across terraced plateaus of dunes, fescue embankments and over 1,000 scraggly bunkers. It’s so effective at looking rough and natural that many golfers don’t realize Pete Dye built the whole thing.
BAY HARBOR—LINKS/QUARRY (1998)
Similar to Whistling Straits, the Links and Quarry nines at this northern Michigan resort are carved onto a plateau overlooking a vast body of water, in this case Little Traverse Bay (also part of Lake Michigan). Architect Arthur Hills did not implement the same degree of creative links-building as Pete Dye, but the goal was not to fashion an Irish-looking golf course—it was simply to get the site playable since major portions of it were covered in dozens of feet of tailings and slag from a mining operation. Simply to build and shape holes where grass could grow was an achievement, and the result, especially the Quarry nine, isn’t as much naturalistic as opportunistic. Despite significant downside obstacles, the upside of the lakefront vistas in a difficult to reach place made the effort to get here worthwhile. Bay Harbor is one of the most scenically powerful courses in the Midwest and has been ranked among America’s 100 Greatest Public Courses since 2003. It proved: Build it, and they will come.
INNISCRONE (1998)
Probably the least-known course on this list, Inniscrone illustrates how the dictates of naturalism, minimalism and Golden Age revivalism were working through the subcurrents of architecture in the middle and late 1990s. Located southwest of Philadelphia, near Wilmington, Del., this was one of the first original designs by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who took a tough property and attempted to build a course that would have been at home in the Philadelphia market in 1925, particularly with the use of wispy native roughs and hand-cut bunkers with the bushy fescue edging that has become a calling card. Like the work of many fledgling artists, the design was controversial, difficult and stuffed with ideas, and the course has subsequently suffered through changes in ownership, renovation and conditioning challenges. At its core, however, it revealed a quiet pronouncement by its architects, one shared by Bill Coore and Tom Doak, that golf architecture was ready to embrace its past and begin looking to history for precedent.
TOBACCO ROAD (1998)
No artistic upheaval comes without backlash. For years, at least in the eyes of many golfers, Tobacco Road was too radical, too unpredictable and unfair. Architect Mike Strantz had fiddled and head-faked with blind shots, bizarrely contoured greens and large menacing bunkers at courses like Stonehouse, Royal New Kent and True Blue, but it wasn’t until he got to work at Tobacco Road, on the site of an old sand mine 25 miles north of Pinehurst, that he was able to put all of his ideas to work on a piece of land that had the right soils, elevations and wasn’t compromised by real estate. On one hand, Tobacco Road is funhouse golf with strange twists and surprises around each corner, and on the other it’s a strategic Rubik’s cube, an homage to Alister MacKenzie with big fairways, risk-reward holes, segmented greens feeding and deflecting balls and scruffy hazards that melt into the scenery. As with many artistic movements, what was once seen as avant garde has now been culturally ingested and even become inspirational. Today The Road is far more beloved than cursed.
LOST DUNES (1999)
Tom Doak broke into the mainstream of golf design when Pacific Dunes opened at Bandon Dunes in 2001, but he’d been working steadily through the 1990s and opened three courses in 1999 alone. One of them, Lost Dunes in southwest Michigan, was completed as he was getting started on Pacific Dunes, and though the two sites are very different (the former is built on a sand quarry with limited routing options), there are ideas that connect the two designs. Lost Dunes showed a kind of naturalized British heathland style of bunker not yet common in modern American golf, with irregular grass lines and back edges that bled into native fescues. Doak also built old world greens that pushed the boundaries of contemporary contour and creativity at a time when high green speeds were standardizing slopes throughout the profession. The animated shapes stand out at Lost Dunes, but when he began getting great natural sites like Pacific Dunes, Ballyneal and Barnbougle Dunes he found ways to connect those bold contours to the shapes he found in the land. Bandon owner Mike Keiser, playing Lost Dunes for the first time, worried that Doak’s animated greens would be too extreme for his resort golfers but, like Lost Dunes, they toe the line between expressionistic and playable.
BANDON DUNES (1999)
At the time it opened, no course better demonstrated the shift in architectural direction than Bandon Dunes. Keiser’s concept of a remote, Scottish-style, walking-only links course had no precedent in American golf, but it was an immediate success. The David McLay Kidd design was not exactly minimalist as portions of the land had to be worked and many of the features created or enhanced, but it looked like a British links, and more importantly, played like one. Part of the thrill golfers experienced was hiking through dunes in a breathtaking new oceanfront setting along a cliff, the finest of its caliber since Cypress Point opened in the late 1920s. Just as important, the style of golf was different, with the wind and the hardened turf making it imperative that players bump the ball along the ground, teaching a generation to chip 7-irons from 40 yards off the green. Over the course of one magical summer in 1999, sand, wind, fescue and dunes became the new starring characters in every traveling golfer’s dreams.
WILD HORSE (1999)
If there was one course that was a direct offspring of Sand Hills, it was Wild Horse, located 80 miles southeast in Gothenburg. The property is on the edge of the Sandhills proper, and though the dunes are much smaller in scale the course plays like a miniature version of its big brother with expressive chunked-out bunkers, grand avenue fairways that roam the fescue fields and wavy greens sitting naturally in pockets and on crests and ridges. Wild Horse was designed by Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, who were instrumental in building and shaping Sand Hills for Coore and Crenshaw, and that minimalist spirit carried over into the architecture here. Interestingly, there are twice as many bunkers on second nine—Axland and Proctor built that side first (and did much of the shaping themselves), but became so exhausted by the time they moved to the front they cut the number of hazards in half, to no detrimental effect. For everyone who doesn’t have the connections to get on Sand Hills, Wild Horse is an easy to access must play in understanding this style of golf.
Dan Proctor and Dave Axland have been quasi-legends in the business of golf course construction for over 30 years now, individually and collectively. They've worked on many of Coore & Crenshaw’s prominent designs, including Sand Hills (Nebraska's premier layout, in the center of the state's vast sand hills) and Cabot Cliffs (Canada's premier layout these days). They even rated cameo appearances in Geoff Shackleford’s 1998 novel, The Good Doctor Returns. And they were also a talented course design team in their spare time, routing and building quality low-budget courses in the Coore & Crenshaw style. Their most prominent collaboration is Wild Horse in central Nebraska, a public “little brother” to Sand Hills, in slightly softer but still authentic sand hills, closer to civilization. Like at Sand Hills, Wild Horse is lay-of-the-land architecture routed without benefit of topographic maps, with natural-looking bunkers, native grass roughs and pitch-and-run shots galore. Total earth moved: 5,000 cubic yards. Total construction costs: a little less than $1 million.
Explore the full review from Golf Digest's Architecture Editor Emeritus Ron Whitten here.
THE BEAR’S CLUB (1999)
The inclusion of The Bear’s Club (a luxury private development in Jupiter, Fla.) into this group of course-altering architecture may surprise some. However, the design was a breakout for Jack Nicklaus and Nicklaus Design, who had spent most of the 1990s involved in large, lucrative projects throughout the world, though with relatively few critical successes. Nicklaus had built courses in beautiful natural settings before—like Castle Pines, Sherwood Country Club and Manele—but The Bear’s Club was the first time he and his associates went to pains to create a total golf environment, in this case transforming 370 acres of ordinary south Florida swamp and brush into a lush botanical forest laced with small dune ridges. Historically more focused on getting the left-brain golf strategies correct, Nicklaus’ work here is another level of artistry with holes that weave through a tapestry of sand, water, pine and palmetto, blurring the lines between golf and nature. The heightened focus on aesthetics, more sumptuous green contour and painting holes naturally would carry forth into the 2000s and contribute to a revived Nicklaus school of evocatively powerful courses that include The Concession Golf Club, May River at Palmetto Bluff, Mayacama and The Reserve at Moonlight Basin.
From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
The Bear’s Club marked a transition point in Jack Nicklaus’ design outlook when it opened in 1999. His architecture had typically been analytical and, while still lovely, oriented toward factoring how players might break down the features tactically. That strategic backbone is present in The Bear’s Club, but the team approached the design more holistically than they had previously, factoring in aesthetics to an unprecedented degree. Instead of building holes on a golf site, Jack and his associates created a golf environment, expanding and enhancing a dune ridge running through the low pine and palmetto scrub and anchoring large, sensuous bunkers into the native vegetation.
The course is part of an upscale residential development near the Intracoastal Waterway, but it blends so well you wouldn’t know it. The change in perspective that Nicklaus Design developed at The Bear’s Club pushed the firm toward similar successes in the 2000s like Sebonack (with Tom Doak), The Concession and Mayacama.
