Story two: Rock Creek Cattle Company.
The person who had the biggest impact on my view of backdrops in recent years is Tom Devlin, a member of Rock Creek, who's a good friend of my client Bill Foley. Tom was also the developer of Flint Hills National in Wichita, a Tom Fazio course.
The ranch that Bill Foley bought included 80,000 acres, and it took several visits for me to decide what part of the site to use for the golf, even before I started trying to fit holes there. It was a long process and we went through a lot of options.
Early on, I had identified the site where the course is today as a good possibility, but when I first went to see it, I was turned off by the presence of a power line about a mile below the course, hanging over the valley at the bottom end. It was well away from any potential golf holes, but I could just hear someone saying, "You had 80,000 acres to work with, and you finished right on a view of a power line??"
So I looked at just about every other possibility we could. But a lot of the site is just too steep, and that part of the site had beautiful contours for golf. So, I went back to it, but I tried to avoid the power lines as backdrop . . . after the 14th hole, I doubled back to the right, and had the last two holes playing more east-west, as opposed to the main north-south orientation of the course.
At that point, Mr. Foley invited Tom Devlin up to walk the proposed routing, and Tom asked why I hadn't gone into the beautiful valley alongside the creek, where today's finishing holes are. I recounted my logic to him, and he said that the power lines might be noticed by the first-time visitor, but a member of the club would never be bothered by them after that. So why would I let my choice of golf holes be dictated by the small subset of people who were so stupid as to let a power line a mile away ruin their day's golf?
I agreed with his logic -- and importantly, Mr. Foley agreed, so I had a clear mandate from the client not to let those particular power lines make me shy away from the bottom end of the valley. It did not take long from there to come up with the routing for the 15th-18th holes at Rock Creek.
I have wondered occasionally if part of the reason the course had not made the rankings until this year was not just that it lacked an ocean view [compared to my four or five most highly-ranked courses], but whether the distant power line had affected the votes of a couple of panelists. But, as Tom Devlin would say, I shouldn't waste a minute thinking about those people. What matters to the one-and-done visiting panelist is NOT as important as what matters to the people who actually pay to play the course . . . which means it's maybe a different equation for a private club than it might be for a destination resort.
When I tell people the more I've been in the business, the less the rankings mean to me, this is the kind of thing that makes me feel that way.