Thanks, Peter and Cory. It has been a long time in the making, but I think it’s going to be well worth the wait. I’m excited to hear what others have to say after playing a round or two next spring. One of the unintended but positive consequences of our lack of urgency to get it done quickly is that over time, Mike has only gained comfort and therefore the confidence to be bold…and it didn’t take him long! As I intimated above, this wasn’t a restoration, and to some architects, the temptation to design for a club’s current membership is the easiest path. But when I went out to see Mike’s work at Kingsley, as part of our Club’s due diligence, I concluded the chances of getting a namby-pamby result was a low probability. (…and this seems like one of the few times in my life that I can say I was right!)
But as to Mike’s original mandate for the golf course, I should briefly describe what the state of things were before his arrival. By the mid/late 1990s, pretty much all vestiges of Raynor, Travis and AWT were gone with most of the damage (probably) occurring during and possibly right after WWII. So when Mike first came to take a look around, he encountered a set of greens that had obviously lost contour and if I had to guess, had shrunk in size to perhaps 60 -70 percent of their original size. In addition, playing corridors (and vistas) were choked off by way too many trees. At the top of the thread, I talked about how good the property is, but back then the golf course was a very tired and a complete under-achiever.
So with little to no Golden Age architecture left, we put little to no constraints on Mike. Our message to him was here it is….assess the strengths and deficiencies in the routing, the same with the green complexes -- in essence the whole property -- but have at it and make the best use of this really cool land. The 1926 aerial revealed where the Raynor templates had been, and of interest, two of them, Biarritz and Alps/Punchbowl, had been removed many years ago as they were viewed as controversial…blindness, etc. Mike reinstated his own “tip of the cap” versions of each strategy where now the Alps green is only partially obscured, which is dependent upon from where in the fairway your second shot is played. In terms of square feet, this DeVries Biarritz green is the largest on the course (…although the 15th is pretty large too). But it’s a good three/four club difference from front to back and doesn’t feature the intense trademark swale (although a baby one does exist). But the golfer is offered both the long aerial approach and a really fun bump along the ground option. And as to the putting surface, I’ve heard it described as containing no tap-ins…and that’s due to the belief by many that all putts, no matter from where they’re struck, run downhill!
But back to the original question of our mandate to Mike, and I’m not sure this was ever formally discussed, we had this general overarching desire to make our course look old again, as in when you’re done, it should reflect its Golden Age pedigree established 98 years ago! And when Mike buttons everything up later this fall, and people ask us whether we will have a Raynor/Travis/ Tillinghast course, I for one will be proud to tell them it’s a DeVries design!
