(Part one of four)
When Mike McGuire suggested this list a week ago, my first reaction was that nobody would really want to see a woulda-coulda-shoulda list. And I doubted that there were ten examples worth talking about.
Then I sat down and thought about it, and so many forgotten projects popped back into my mind! A handful of them are painful memories, either because we got stiffed on a big chunk of our fee, or just because it was frustrating to see a project die on the vine. I honestly believed that seven or eight of the courses I will list had the potential to be one of the top 100 courses in America or in the world, and I hate it that I didn't get to find out whether that was true. If we hadn't had a few successes to balance the scales, I'd probably have torn out all my hair by now.
I thought the list would be instructive for those of you not in the business to see just how many irons in the fire one has to keep in order to have some projects which DO get built. These aren't the only projects which failed to get built, by any means -- these are just the special ones! All together, I've had more signed contracts for courses that didn't get built, than for courses that did.
But now that the need for secrecy on these projects has expired, I think I can talk about what might have been, without my clients being upset about it. I will present the list in four parts, and in chronological order. (An asterisk indicates a project where we were paid for the routing work we did.) Here goes:
THE EIGHTEEN BEST COURSES I NEVER GOT TO BUILD
1. Karsten Creek GC, Oklahoma State University, 1991-92. Scott Verplank introduced me to his coach, Mike Holder, who had raised most of the money already for his golf course project but had become concerned that Tom Fazio, who he'd talked to about the course from the start, was now out of their price range. I can still remember the routing I did pretty well, 18 years later … there was a reachable par-5 hole I was particularly fond of, playing along the edge of one of the ravines. But, Coach Holder lost confidence in me after coming to visit High Pointe and Black Forest, and not liking the greens there. They actually hired Mark Hayes and Jerry Slack to design the course after a formal interview process, but then the coach went back and pleaded with Fazio to do the job, and he did. [Mike Holder, now the A.D. at Oklahoma State, has referred me for a job or two in recent years.]
Best hole: The second, a short par-5. The fairway played along the edge of a ravine, with open water down to the right. The green sat on the other side of a valley that fed down into the ravine diagonally back toward the tee, so the green would have almost come to a point in the front, and then had a swale along the left side and a cliff to the right. Still waiting to find another setting to build a hole like it. I have never been back to Stillwater, so I don't know exactly where this hole falls on the current course, but I did see a map of it and I saw they didn't use my green site.
2. High Pointe GC (third nine), 1992. When things were going well at High Pointe, I did a layout for a third nine holes to the east of the present back nine. It's very dramatic, sandy ground, more like the back nine than the front; but they never got around to acting on it.
Best hole: The drivable par-4 ninth. From a high tee, it played to a green on the next hilltop a bit below … the fairway ran up a narrowish valley running from right to left for those who didn't want to go for the direct carry.
3. Olde Kinderhook GC, NY, 1994. I tried pretty hard to get the job at this Rees Jones design south of Albany, NY. Made two trips to the site, and spent a lot of time with the owner trying to convince him my routing was better than Rees'. The client made a trip to Stonewall and Rees' Huntsville course near Scranton. He could not decide which one he liked better, so he said he hired the bigger name. There was a time when I got sick of hearing that ... the only solution is to become the bigger name.
Best hole: This is the only course in the list where I can't remember the holes individually now. The site had a lot of variety to it and what I liked most was the flow of the routing through the various landscapes.
4. Elk Neck Club, Elk Neck, MD, 1997. A Wall Street group was behind this project, at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay, and were trying to decide between me and Tom Fazio as their architect. Great piece of ground, with a lot of variety … woods, hills, open spaces, views, wetlands, and frontage on the bay. The last two were its downfall; the county told them it would be very difficult to get construction permits, so they abandoned plans to pursue the project.
Best hole: The par-4 third, about 420 yards. It played downhill and sidehill left to right, with the approach shot over a small ravine down to a green near a boathouse and the bay.
*5. Elm Charolais GC, Erin, WI, 1997. In 1997, we signed a contract to design and build a golf course on the site now known as Erin Hills. Our client spent a bunch of cash trying to pre-sell memberships for the course, but they just didn't know enough people to get the momentum to make it happen. Eventually, their option to buy the land expired. I looked at the project again with a second party, and was interviewed for the job by Bob Lang when he bought the ground in 2001 … but he decided to find his own design team instead.
Best holes: my par-4 second, with a long second shot to a green perched at the edge of a steep fall-off to the right … the hole started from the present eleventh tee, but the existing hole stops short of my green site. Also, the par-4 15th hole, a dogleg from somewhere near the current eighth tee, up the valley where Ron Whitten placed his Dell hole [the bank behind it was also part of my fairway], and then turning left to a green site in the hollow between the sixth tee and green. I really wish they had used that hole!