I have absolutely no business getting involved in this thread for a whole variety of reasons. In fact, the one JN course I have played many times and really enjoy, Old Works, almost refutes the observation I am about to make. From what I’ve read and seen in photos, I’d personally like to see JN do an affordable, fun, and low budget course. I may very well be wrong in this observation, but it seems to me that his courses must reach a level in design, construction budget, maintenance, eye candy, and, of course, design fee before his firm would show much interest in being involved. A project must live up to these lofty standards of execution before Mr. Nicklaus would put his name on it in the past. Maybe that has changed more recently with what seems like more scaled-down, natural designs like Dismal. I don’t really know.
From my lowly position in the golf cosmos, golfers don’t want or need a lot more of these golf Zanadus or pleasure palaces. They do indeed “want to play more, not pay more.” Old Works is rather an outlier or a pound mutt in his portfolio. It did cost something like $25M to construct, a cost borne by a petrochemical giant to mitigate the site’s Superfund status, but there are some really interesting social and philosophical aspects in the evolution of the course since it opened. The basic premise was to use a beautiful golf landscape to clean up a toxic industrial wasteland and town dump. After the construction was complete, the course was donated to a dying western mining town of about 6,000 people and became the primary focal point for attracting much need tourist dollars. The fees to play have always been affordable to all (for many years less than $50), and it is fun to play. I could go on about the social, environmental, or philosophical aspects, but you get the idea: it’s a rather unique project. A Jack Nicklaus signature brand build for and played by average Joes. Well worth checking out and a mind boggling comparison in contrasts to it’s beautiful neighbor, RCCC, a few miles down the road. A brief glance at the architects’ perceived body of work, who out there would guess that the “people’s course” was a Nicklaus design and RCCC, a billionaire’s track for his millionaire pals, a Doak? Life, and our own biases, are rife with surprises.