San Antonio CC (Findlay-Tillinghast-Finger-Moorish)

[Steve_ Shaffer]

San Antonio Country Club gets renovations
 
 
 By Raul Dominguez Jr.  
12/2/2004  
   
 
 
 
 

Source: San Antonio Express-News (Texas)

The San Antonio Country Club will close its course for about nine months beginning in January for a major renovation.  

Brian Silva, who was GolfWorld's Architect of the Year for 1999, will redesign the greens and bunkers at San Antonio's oldest private facility.  

"It will give our members a different look," S.A. Country Club head pro Chuck Westergard said of the redesign.  

"It's going to give us more of an old-style golf course. It had been modernized through some of new renovations. (Silva) is bringing it back to more of an old style as far as the green and bunker complexes are concerned."  

Silva also renovated the Donald Ross-designed Hope Valley Country Club in Durham, N.C., among other properties.  

The S.A. Country Club opened in 1907 under the design of Alex Findlay. The course has since undergone three renovations of varying degrees - by A.W. Tillinghast in the late 1920s, Joe Finger in 1957 and Jay Morrish in 1986.  

Tee boxes will be added on the third and fourth holes and the tee boxes will be moved back on other holes, giving the course an additional 100 to 150 yards once the redesign is completed.  

TifEagle, a Bermuda grass hybrid, will be used on the redesigned greens.  

The fairways will maintain their design, but the common Bermuda will be replaced with TifSport. In addition, the course's irrigation system will be replaced.  

"We are improving the technology as far as the grasses is concerned and the irrigation," Westergard said. "It really hadn't been done before. We have done some minor work, but we really hadn't done anything to the course in 50 years, so technology passed it up.  

"The main thing is it's going to make maintenance a lot easier."  

The facility began eliminating the common Bermuda on its fairways in August through maintenance procedures.  

[Jeff_Mingay]

Most interesting is, Alex Findlay was in San Antonio, Texas in 1907 laying out a golf course. Amazing.

[CHrisB]

It will definitely be a renovation as opposed to a restoration, but the course will definitely be much improved, with much sterner fairway bunkering and better strategic angles introduced.

Conditioning has always been an issue at SACC. Common bermuda with dark clay base just isn't a fun playing surface. It is a pretty good routing over a square-shaped property, with quite a bit of elevation change. Three of the par 5's are routed up the hills, so that they play much longer than the yardage, but otherwise technology has caught up with the course like seemingly everywhere else. Tree growth has pinched in the holes in places; this combined with some sloping fairways makes it tough to keep it in the fairway.

As long as I've known it, SACC is a course that looks like it can be taken easily, but in every competition I've played there the scores are always higher than everyone would predict. Whether that is the conditioning or just a tricky course is hard to say.

SACC also has a really nice opening tee shot--the 1st is a 165-yard par-3 with a small green and the clubhouse forming an "L" around the first tee, so that people can gather all around and watch rounds start or bets get settled at the 19th. The back side is the original nine, with the 2nd nine added later and the nines flipped. This explains the unusual par 3-4-3 opening stretch.

[Craig Van Egmond]

Jeff,

   Alex got around, he laid out the first golf course in Oklahoma, a 9 holer located in Guthrie in 1900. The course is still there.

[TEPaul]

"Most interesting is, Alex Findlay was in San Antonio, Texas in 1907 laying out a golf course. Amazing."

Jeff:

Not really. Read Alex Findlay's bio. Findlay got to this country really early--in the early 1880s, believe it or not. C&W say he laid out a golf course in Nebraska in 1885!!! Imagine that. He then plied the boom corridors of golf and early development for the Florida East Coast Railroad that was really opening up the east coast corridor---and later he worked for some notable sporting goods companies that were supplying the booming popularity of the game.

Findlay was a real pioneer and popularizer of golf. He tried to sell the Pope on the game with a six hole course at the Vatican for Christ's sake!  

One of the principles of the restoration at San Antonio C.C. after being at my course called me up a few years ago and asked for some advice on restoration architects to interview to do their course. I supplied him with the usual half dozen suspects including Brian Silva. At that time it sort of looked to me from what I heard like Bobby Weed would do their course. But not that long ago I heard from both the club and from Brian that they were both happy I put them together. I don't remember doing anything like that except supplying the names and telephone numbers of the usual half dozen restoration architects I knew back then.

But I wish San Antonio C.C. well. When they called they told me they were a Tillinghast course but it looks like its Findlay (1908) with a Tillinghast redesign phase in the 1920s.

I hope whatever restoration they're into goes well but in a year or more we can probably look forward to a critique of the course from Tom MacWood claiming they ruined everything and that they should've gone back to exactly the way the course was in 1908 from Findlay. Maybe he'll say, though, that they should've done the course's "high water mark" in the 1920s from Tillinghast because at least at that point Tillinghast hadn't competely sold out his architectural principles to the PGA of America!

[Mike_Cirba]

That Findlay was a travelling maniac.

One of the largest gaps, in my estimation, in the chronology of golf in this country, is that it's missing a definitive book on FIndlay's life and works.

Maybe when I retire...

[CHrisB]

TEPaul,
It will definitely not be a restoration in any sense. The routing will be the same, but the holes will essentially be renovated rather than restored, with new bunker schemes, altered water hazard boundaries, and some new tees to create different angles of play.

[Jeff_Mingay]

Chris,

Sounds like perhaps this is a cases where there may not be much to truly restore?

I'm sure Brian will be faithful to the Findlay/Tillinghast heritage at San Antonio, though.

[TEPaul]

ChrisB:

What do you think of the course? What would you  recommend they do to it?

[Jason Mandel]

From what Chris described it sounds very similar to what we did at White Manor.

Jason

[Jeff_Mingay]

Jason,

Next time I get to the Phila. area, I'm excited to see the Weed/Sherman redo of White Manor. When I looked at their plans for the course a few years ago, at their office in Fla., the proposed work seemed very interesting.