Here is Ron Whitten's review of Tom Fazio's Dallas National Golf Club. I think this is Ron Whitten's best review in a while, he actually takes a stand and lets his true thoughts come out. He talks about the very high expectations of everyone involved with the course and whether he thinks it lives up to the hype.....
http://www.golfdigest.com/courses/critic/index.ssf?/courses/critic/dallasnational.htmlDallas National Golf Club, Dallas, Texas
Tom Fazio could be his own worst enemy.
He has designed courses at such a high level -- in terms of budgets, beauty and acclaim -- for such a long time that he has set a standard that even he can't possibly reach on every project.
Yet every client expects him to. That's why they give him the big bucks.
Worst yet, Tom seemingly expects it of himself and his company. Here's just one example: Four years ago, at the ground breaking of Dallas National Golf Club in Dallas, Texas, Fazio told the developers, "Whatever your expectations are, we'll exceed them."
I know that one of the developers envisioned a course that would ultimately be ranked among Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest. How in the world can you exceed that? By building a course that would make not just the 100 Greatest, but the top 10, I guess.
In 2002, Fazio talked with reporter Brad Townsend of the Dallas Morning News at the club's grand opening. They also discussed several other high-profile Fazio projects in Texas, including The Vaquero Club northeast of Fort Worth, Briggs Ranch in San Antonio and the refashioning of the Jackrabbit Course at Houston's Champions Golf Club (originally designed 40 years ago by Tom's uncle, George Fazio). Townsend brought up his newspaper's annual ranking of the best courses in Texas.
"It sounds facetious, it sounds bad, but there's no reason why they all wouldn't be in the top 10," Fazio told him. "It's certainly not fair, it's not logical. But it's a matter of opinion. I am super-charged about Texas. My goal is that [my] three new courses be 1, 2 and 3 in the state, and I'm not going to pick the order, obviously. We're going to let you and your compatriots pick."
The News conversation then turned to Golf Digest's biennial ranking of America's 100 Greatest, and Fazio hinted -- I emphasize, hinted -- that Dallas National was first among equals.
"If you look at the so-called top 100 golf courses," Fazio said, "other than maybe Seminole Golf Club in Florida, one of the common themes is definition of elevation change."
Dallas National, he told Townsend, has the sort of exciting changes in elevation found on 100 Greatest courses. "It's nothing like anyone around here has seen, that's for sure," he said. "It's top-100 caliber, no doubt about it."
Dallas National wasn't old enough to qualify for Golf Digest's most recent 100 Greatest. It finished second in our Best New Private Course survey in 2003. More recently, the course was ranked second in the state (behind Colonial in Fort Worth) in the Dallas Morning News poll and was ranked 17th nationally by the publication Golfweek. I have no doubt Dallas National will contend for Golf Digest's 2005 100 Greatest rankings, which, I should point out, I have no vote on. Nor do I personally evaluate courses using the criteria of our 100 Greatest survey.
I'm bothered a bit by all this rush to judgment. How much of this is fueled by the force of Tom Fazio's enthusiasm and personality, by the level of expectation he brought to Dallas? How much is based upon objective, disinterested evaluations of the golf course? To me, Dallas National doesn't make my own list of 100 Greatest courses.
I was lucky enough to tour Dallas National during an early stage of construction, and to play the completed course last fall. It is a very fine course on a special piece of property, an old limestone mine, with plateaus and canyons now covered with cedar trees just six miles south of downtown Dallas. It indeed has the dramatic elevation changes Fazio was talking about. It also has the usual Fazio blend of attractive features seemingly molded into the landscape and a comfortable playability for a wide range of golfers.
It has some great, memorable holes, exceptional conditioning and world-class practice areas, but that's true of every Fazio course. It moves forward from the pack, in my mind, in that it's secluded, with no homesites around it, offers some spectacular vistas of Dallas (including Texas Stadium in the distance) and has above-average bunkering.
But those benefits are offset, again in my mind, by a few deficiencies. Its four par 3s are just average. The best is the 225-yard fifth, over a deep ravine, with a cleverly contoured green. But I've seen the 13th, with its green hunkered down in a creek bed, on at least half a dozen other Fazio designs, and the 245-yard 17th is the blandest hole on the course. Early in construction of that hole, they started bulldozing down through limestone, intending to create some sort of Black Diamond-like quarry hole. But they quit digging after about 10 feet, and the result is something that looks like a Hill Country road cut.
The par-4 12th hole also seems awkward to me, uphill and around a hill on the left, then down slightly to a green squeezed between a barren hill on the left and a creek bed on the right. The green has already been rebuilt once, I've been told, after it slid some during heavy rains.
Dallas National has several terrific holes. The squiggly 610-yard par-5 tenth, from an elevated tee, with a strategic diagonal string of bunkers on the second shot, and the awesome 458-yard par-4 15th, where Fazio wisely filled in half a canyon to avoid a forced-carry second shot, are outstanding holes. But for a course to be on my personal 100 Greatest, every hole needs to be outstanding. There should be no weak links.
I had a developer ask me, after I'd played Dallas National, if I didn't agree that it was the best Tom Fazio design ever. Well, no, frankly. It still doesn't meet the creativity of Shadow Creek, or the integration into unusual surroundings found at Victoria National. Heck, the Fazio course that came to mind when I played Dallas National was Karsten Creek in Stillwater, Okla., in similar terrain, vegetation and turfgrass. I think Karsten Creek has a more stirring finishing three holes, down and around a lake.
So there you are. Tom Fazio has established such a recognizable, prestige brand that I find myself judging Dallas National not on its own merits, but instead by comparing it to other Fazio products. I'm demanding that it exceed expectations established by rounds on previous Fazio courses. That's probably not fair, but Fazio and his clients seem to be encouraging just such comparisons.
By that standard, Dallas National just isn't one of the 100 best courses in the nation, in my mind. I don't mean that as an insult, but since I'm a golf course critic, it will probably be taken as one.