The article says "Because of the routing, there will be a few of Doak’s holes used on the Coore/Crenshaw course, and vice-versa."
Does that mean that each group had their own 18 holes, but at the end of the day due to the routing's overlapping that they 'traded' a few holes to make each course's routing a little more natural?
Jason,
Tom should answer this more definitively, but I believe that both he and Bill Coore initially worked individually on-site and each came up with variations on 18-hole routings (one or the other was initially going to design a course on another lesser site away from the Streamsong site).
At some point they got together and realized they could get 36 holes on the sand piles at Streamsong and started working together to locate them. Doak found some, Coore found some, and together they found others. They finally had 36 holes but no clear idea who was going to build what. Then Doak actually routed them sequentially to make two 18-hole courses--the red pen/blue pen thing--so some of the holes Doak "found" ended up on the Red course and vice versa. Then there was the matter of who would build which course.
Well, some of that is kind of true.
Originally, the client wanted to build two courses in different styles in different locations, a couple of miles apart. Naturally, Bill and I both preferred the great site we are now on.
By the time I got a map to work with, Bill had already been doing his walk-arounds on the what was called the "Sand Piles" site for a while, working on an 18-hole routing with various options. He probably showed me 25 holes that he had considered, some of them overlapping, so you couldn't use all 25. So, I said I would take a shot at a 36-hole routing, to see if we could fit them in. The client's take was that the Sand Piles site wasn't quite big enough for that, or that the holes would be too close together and if it felt that way it would spoil the secluded nature of the place.
I think my first attempt at 36 holes that I showed Bill had about 34 holes jammed in there, but there were a lot of parallel holes running east and west, and we both agreed that some of the north-south holes that Bill had drawn [what are now Blue 4 and Blue 8] should definitely stay in the final plan for the sake of variety. So we were really at about 30 holes. After I left on that visit, Bill took a walk outside the confines of the land we'd been considering, and discovered his loop that are now Red 1-5 ... and we both were satisfied that 36 holes could fit.
On the first version of the 36-hole plan that I produced, with Bill's new starting loop for one course, the holes were slightly different and the two 13th greens were right together, so it was possible that Blue 1-13 could be joined with EITHER Blue 14-18 or Red 14-18 ... so the choice of who would build which course was not so clear-cut. I thought that Bill might want to build Blue 1-13 and Red 14-18, because that comprised more of the core of his original 18-hole plan ... but I also opined that I thought that would tilt the balance more in favor of one course over the other, and that keeping my sequence of Red vs. Blue was a more even split. Then, Bill suggested a tweak in the routing to the present version -- so that the 13th green of the Red was actually next to the 12th green of the Blue, meaning the two courses had to stay divided as I had divided them.
Neither Bill nor I really wanted to be the guy who declared which course he wanted ... we kept waiting for the other guy to say, and the other guy wouldn't say. I was a bit nervous about taking the Red course, because I was less familiar with Bill's first few holes on the Red routing, but I never said so. Finally, Bill said that while he'd be happy with either one, if I was going to make him choose, he would take the Red course, because his shaper Jimbo Wright told him to take the course which required more work, and those first few holes on the Red course were going to require more earthmoving than the rest. So, if it doesn't all work out to Bill's favor, it's Jimbo's fault.
Just after we started building the two courses, Mosaic removed the huge drag line that did most of the earthwork out there by walking it out the second fairway of the Red course and mining that strip for phosphate, which they hadn't done yet -- totally destroying the cool subtle features of the two holes that Bill had planned there. When Bill came back to the site, the first thing I told him was that I wasn't trading courses now ... I guess I said it even before I said hello. He likes to tease me about that.
P.S. I think that between the variations of his original routing and the starting loop for the Red course that he added later, Bill suggested well over half of the holes that made the final 36, including Blue 1 [which wasn't #1 originally but came between Blue 6 and Blue 18], and Blue 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 15 [we actually both found the same hole for Blue 15]. I suggested some of the outer loop of his Red course [Red 10, 11, 12], which ground Bill hadn't used, as well as Blue 9-10-11 on ground Bill had never considered. The finishing holes on the Blue course are different than any of Bill's plans because I went a different direction with Blue 16, and had more ground to cover coming home. I'm considering writing a small book on the process, if I can get Bill to collaborate, but the above is the abridged version.