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Chuck Brown

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Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« on: March 06, 2009, 03:08:54 PM »
I am going to a banquet tonight at Blackhawk CC in Madison WI.  I went to the club's website for the fun of it, and was startled to see that Tillinghast led a major renovation of the course in the late thirties.  I haven't yet had the pleasure of playing the course yet, and I am certain that nobody's playing in March, but I am intrigued by how much "Tillie" is in this golf course?

As an aside, I had long been under the presumption (misconception?) that Seth Raynor did the layout at nearby Maple Bluff CC.  Is that an erroneous attribution?

Brad Swanson

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Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #1 on: March 06, 2009, 03:52:40 PM »
Dave,
   How could an ultra-con like yourself stomach spending any time in the communist capital of the midwest?

Comrade Swanson

mark chalfant

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Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #2 on: March 06, 2009, 03:56:43 PM »
Chuck

I played  Maple Bluff 10-12 years ago.  it was a pleasant walk with some nice holes, but definitely  Not worth  a special trip. Ive been fortunate to play most of Raynor's  first and second tier courses. I did not see any vestiges  of Raynor at  Maple Bluff.

Phil_the_Author

Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #3 on: March 06, 2009, 05:35:16 PM »
Chuck,

I don't know how much "Tilly" remains, but this is what he did at Black hawk.

On May 6th, 1936, Tilly visited the Black Hawk CC during his PGA of America course consultation tour. That evening, in his letter to George Jacobus detailing what he recommended to the club, Tilly referred to the visit as being historic:

“Today I drove from Rochester, Minnesota to Madison, to examine the course of the Black hawk Country Club… My arrival at Madison marked a complete girdling of the United States for I was here [in Madison] last November and started my motor trip east, down the Atlantic coast to the tip of Florida; back along the Florida west coast; through New Orleans, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona into Southern California; through that state and up the Pacific coast as far north as Seattle; then eastward through Utah and Colorado to Kansas City and Omaha; into Minnesota and then Wisconsin again…”

Could you imagine taking that car ride today? What it must have been like back them WITHOUT an interstate highway system! Anyone care to guess how many courses he visited during that single 6 month period?

But I digress…

Tilly wrote, “Today at the Black Hawk club there was a fine gathering to accompany me… There queries were numerous. Unfortunately this course is crowded over but 94 acres. I gave them a new site for the first green to remove a blind approach; a new teeing ground, lengthening the second; a Master Pit on the left front of the third green; dog-legging and thus slightly lengthening the sixth to a rearranged green; cutting down the size of the seventh green with a Master pit on the left; locating and describing a new ribbon-like green for the 305 yard tenth, and rearranging and reducing the size of the eighteenth 145 yard hole…”

The club not only did this work, but contacted him after he left and he offered more advice for changes on other holes. The club’s website recognizes this and states, “After completion, eleven of the eighteen holes were changed to make the course layout more challenging, more playable, and above all, more beautiful…

Bill_McBride

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Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #4 on: March 06, 2009, 06:34:14 PM »
Ah Blackhawk, the greatest course for a 6-point scotch game on the planet.

I wasn't into architecture when that was a regular money game stop, and all the gambling degenerate regulars with cool nicknames like The Big Indian, Johnny Mac, Jocko, the Kingpin, and of course, The Rock 'N Roll Light Show used to basically live there in the pre-University Ridge era because it was closer,  more fun and made for better money games than Cherokee... 

Shivas, I have played several rounds at Cherokee with an old buddy from San Francisco who's been a member there for years. 

You had best be hitting your tee shots more or less straight at Cherokee!  How many holes have those swampy areas on both sides of the fairway?

Chuck Brown

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Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #5 on: March 06, 2009, 06:55:48 PM »
Chuck

I played  Maple Bluff 10-12 years ago.  it was a pleasant walk with some nice holes, but definitely  Not worth  a special trip. Ive been fortunate to play most of Raynor's  first and second tier courses. I did not see any vestiges  of Raynor at  Maple Bluff.
Mark, I think the reason that you rightly saw no vestiges of Mr. Raynor in Maple Bluff is because ther never were any.  I just Googled Maple Bluff and I see no evidence that Raynor ever had anything to do with it.  I can only presume that when I was told about Raynor at Maple Bluff, someone was perhaps mistaking Blue Mound.

Maple Bluff is, however, the course that PGA Tour player Jerry Kelly grew up on, right?  I seem to recall an episode of Playing Lessons With the Pros on Golf Channel, in which Kelly was filmed at Maple Bluff, and his first comment was that his goal was to break the course record (I imagine he has owned it many times) every time he plays the course.

Matthew Rose

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Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #6 on: March 07, 2009, 01:33:24 AM »
I love Blackhawk CC. There's quirk all over the place.

If you like making bogeys on 270 yard par fours, you'll love it.

American-Australian. Trackman Course Guy. Fatalistic sports fan. Drummer. Bass player. Father. Cat lover.

Phil McDade

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Re: Blackhawk CC, Madison WI - Tillinghast
« Reply #7 on: March 07, 2009, 12:57:53 PM »
Resident Madison/Wisconsin golf architecture nut weighing in here...

Blackhawk is Madison's west-side equivalent to the east side Maple Bluff (both are located in small suburbs of the city -- Shorewood Hills for Blackhawk, MB for MB). Oddly, both are technically owned by those local muni's, even though they are private clubs in all other ways, and thus local residents of SH and MB have very limited (as in, once or twice a year) playing rights to the courses.

Blackhawk is essentially built on top of, and importantly along the sides of, a small hill that overlooks Lake Mendota. It's a confined property, stuck between a major east-west road through town, an old neighborhood, and the lake, so the course routing is somewhat constrained, and produces a lot of odd-sized holes. Nearly all of the par 4s are under 400 yds, with six of the under 320 yds, and three of those @ 275 yds -- from the back tees. It's ultra-quirky -- the routing over and around and alongside the major hill leads to strange bounces, blind shots, and odd angles for shots, plus the greens for the most part are pretty small. The back nine has back-to-back par 5s (one uphill, one downhill), back-to-back par 4s @ 274 yds, and an uphill, blind, par 3 18th. As Shivas points out, it's one of the great match-play, gambler's paradise courses, because the course lends itself to risky and bold vs. strategic play, as it has a bunch of half-par holes. It's a real golfer's golfers club -- they don't have much in the way of amenities, like a pool or things like that, so it tends to draw a pretty hard-core golf crowd. A lot of Madison city golf tourney winners have come out of Blackhawk.

As for Maple Bluff, it has no apparent ties to Raynor that I've ever found, and I've been looking for awhile (although I don't have access to club records). Howard Tweedie is credited with the original routing and design; the course has been tweaked over the years, with Art Hills having done some work several years ago, but there is no Raynor work there that looks Raynor-esque in any way. The course is short by today's standards, and although it has some quirk as well, it's not as quirky at Blackhawk. It's pretty straightforward, with some very good and very tough greens that the club maintains very well and at good speed. It's THE old-money club in these parts, and PGA pro Jerry Kelly does have a house in MB and does get out there on occasion. (That GChannel episode with him was pretty funny, as part of it featured him chasing a golf ball in the bushes and hacking his way through at least one hole). Kelly's turf is both MB and University Ridge, which has a better practice facility and where his brother-in-law is the UW golf coach. Stricker hangs around Cherokee, run by his father-in-law. All in the family around here....

Bill McBride:

I'd say at least half, if not more, of Cherokee's fairways have marsh bordering both sides. One of the greatest driving rounds of my life came there -- I hit something like 12 of 14 fairways, and the other two were a foot or so in the rough. Which, is distinctly not my game...


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