I rode around following the last group of the 2011 TransMiss last summer with a friend who writes for the Kansas Golf Assn., and didn't think the course was anything special from a architecture standpoint.
But it's a really cool place nonetheless. Ewing Kaufman's old house is nearby and the place reeks of Midwestern old money, which I figure is different from Northeastern old money.
One of the points of fascination for me was that our super told me they'd IDed all the trees on the property and had an arborist program that addressed a quarter of them every year. Sure enough, a lot of the trees had metal tags on them--and for a heavily treed old course, they've done a decent job of keeping the trees trimmed up so you can play golf.
The fact that Amateur Champ to-be Kelly Kraft won it was a plus.
And the lunch was great....