From Eric Zorn at The Chicago Tribune:
Column: Give Jackson Park Golf Course a facelift — and forget Tiger Woods Jackson Park Golf Course in Chicago on June 21, 2017. Groundbreaking on an ambitious plan to build a tournament championship-quality golf course on the South Side has been postponed until at least next spring. (Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune)
Eric ZornContact ReporterChange of Subject Aw, go ahead, Chicago Park District, take a mulligan.
Like many of my tee shots, the notion of combining two scruffy municipal golf courses into one world-class course is magnificent in theory. The two Park District courses, the 18-hole Jackson Park layout and the South Shore nine-hole layout, wend intriguingly along urban streets and the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Connect them, with design assistance offered by
Tiger Woods himself, and you’ve got room for a course long enough and luxe enough to attract professional tournaments and wealthy tourists, but still cheap for locals and free for kids.
But, also like many of my tee shots, the reality is disappointing.
The cost, estimated at about $30 million when the project was announced in late 2016, is now estimated at around $60 million. Roughly half of that is supposed to come from private sources, but taxpayers will be on the hook for some $30 million in infrastructure improvements including pedestrian underpasses.
Jackson Park Watch, a community group that is opposed to the fancy combo-course, notes that construction will eliminate existing natural areas and non-golf recreational facilities. And Bill Daniels, founder of Golf Chicago magazine, is among those saying that replacing two beginner-friendly courses with a highly challenging course will discourage new players from taking up the game.
In golf lingo, a mulligan is a second chance at a bad shot with no penalty. It violates the rules, but many casual golfers allow their playing partners one per round in the sportsmanlike spirit of, “I’m sure you didn’t mean to mess up, so we’ll just pretend it never happened and try again.”
So how about a do-over?
Groundbreaking on the project, which is conceptually linked to the nearby Barack Obama Presidential Center, was supposed to have been in May 2017 — 15 months ago — and has now been postponed until at least next spring. Representatives of the Chicago Parks Golf Alliance, a not-for-profit organization tasked with raising $30 million from private donors, would not tell me this week how that effort is going other than to say that they’re “more confident now than ever” that they’ll reach the goal.
I know where the dreamers are coming from. I’m a golf fantasizer myself. In 1978, when I visited the site of 19th century author Henry David Thoreau’s cabin in Concord, Mass., a friend and I spent most of our time trying to imagine how a nice little executive course might wrap neatly around Walden Pond. In 1996, I wrote a column proposing that 91-acre Northerly Island, then a controversial lakefront airport named Meigs Field, be bulldozed into nine spectacular holes with water hazards everywhere.
And the idea of the PGA’s best dueling against a postcard backdrop of Lake Michigan and the downtown skyline in the background is appealing.
But more appealing — as well as far cheaper and less disruptive — is the idea of simply giving the existing Jackson Park Golf Course a facelift, with or without advice from Tiger Woods. Transform it from the relatively basic track it’s been since 1899, when it opened as the first public course west of the Allegheny Mountains, into a cleverly sculpted, well-groomed layout similar to rival suburban park district courses.
The Jackson Park site has “good bones,” in the estimation of course architect Greg Martin of Sugar Grove. Martin recently played the course with Daniels and Mike Benkusky of Homewood, a fellow golf architect, and said he came away impressed by “the fun and unique green complexes” as well as the “range of yardages and challenges.”
He compared it to Wrigley Field — “a gem sitting within a neighborhood” — and suggested that it be “reimagined” rather than bulldozed.
Benkusky said that “for $3 (million) to $5 million, they could update the greens, traps and the irrigation system, plant new grasses and trees, and pull back some of the tee areas to get more yardage out of the existing footprint.”
Both architects said championship-level courses, with their tricky, undulating greens and numerous sand traps, tend to frustrate the average player no matter how long the holes are from the closer tees. And they predicted that inevitably high maintenance costs will make it difficult to impossible for the course to be profitable if the Park District keeps to its pledge that greens fees on the new course will be under $50 for locals (fees at Jackson Park are now $35 on weekends) and free for those under 17.
Martin and Benkusky suggested it would be better for the future of golf on the South Side to turn the South Shore course into more of a training facility, with practice areas and a shorter course designed for beginners.
“Once the Tiger project is dead, which it will be, they should turn to making a well-restored, historic course accessible to all golfers,” Daniels said. “It will be a big value-add for the Obama center. For marketing purposes they could rename it ‘The Old Course at Jackson Park.’ ”
The Park District did not respond to my request for comment on the idea that officials take another swing at this one, but consider it teed up.
ericzorn@gmail.comTwitter @EricZorn