When he first saw the Dallas property that he and partner Ben Crenshaw would turn into the new Trinity Forest Golf Club—a drab, treeless, 165-acre tabletop city dump perched above the tree-lined Trinity River—golf architect Bill Coore ignored the abandoned refrigerators and scattered tires to focus on the flow of the land. It was a series of ridges and ripples formed as parts of the closed landfill settled over time. "It needed a good ironing," Coore joked. In the end his construction crew, though capping the site with a thick layer of sand in which to grow grass and create wasteland roughs, took pains to preserve every dip, trough, hump and hollow.
With firm, running L1F Zoysia fairways, Champion Bermuda greens and wisps of Buffalograss in the rough, Trinity Forest plays best in parched conditions. As with any Coore & Crenshaw layout, it's designed for lots of bump-and-run shots. When the private club hosts its first AT&T Byron Nelson Championship in May (the 50th anniversary of that event), the question will be whether the pros can adapt to that style. There's nothing else quite like it on the PGA Tour.
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