How much credit Mike Strantz deserve at the Legends Parkland?

[Germain Pepin]

I am a huge fan of Mike Strantz. Just wondering how much credit Mike Strantz really deserve at the Legends Parkland. What i know is that he was responsable of the bunkering under the supervision of Tom Doak at the time. But has he done more than that? After designing the successful Heathland course, i have readed that Tom Doak was conscripted to be a bid bolder with his Parkland layout, which caused some amount of conflict with original ownership. In the end, Mike Strantz had a role in finishing the Parkland course. So i think that his contribution is greater than the bunkering on that course. Note that a recent renovation at Parkland focused on the bunkers, likely stripping the course of some of its Stantz character.

[Tom_Doak]

Germain:


You've got the story not quite right.  I didn't work with Mike on the project; he followed me.


Actually, Gil Hanse was working with me on the Parkland course.  We were trying to build something really subtle, and the client [Larry Young] was not liking it.  After a few holes of that, I had to go away for a few days, so I told him to go ahead and take the shapers and make the first hole more like what he wanted, so that I could understand.  And once he showed me, we had a problem. 


Mr. Young actually wanted to pay me to stick around and consult on finishing the course, but I knew that he had lost faith in us, and you can't do artistic work without good faith.  A lot of people thought I was crazy to resign from the project, and some insisted that I would never get another job, that I was being too much of a temperamental artist.   It wasn't that; I wasn't even angry about it.  It just didn't make sense to me to put my name on a course I wasn't on board with -- especially one right next door to a course I was very proud of.


At the time, Mike Strantz was in the area, waiting for his first project at Caledonia to get underway.  Larry Young had recommended him for the job, because he was personal friends with the owner of Emerald Creek, where Mike had worked for Tom Fazio.  So they asked Mike to finish the Parkland course.  Mike was happy for the work, but he felt the same way I did - that the course wasn't really his, either - so he didn't want his name put on it.  So, officially, it's a Larry Young design, and even though three pretty talented architects contributed to it, I'm not sure any of us were ever proud of it.


The one good thing that came of it was that a couple of the younger guys who had been shaping for us finished the job with Mike, and became integral parts of his crew going forward.

[Germain Pepin]

Thanks Tom for these important precisions on what really happened during the building of this course. I was aware of the contribution of Larry Young in this project. I understand now that Parkland is a joint effort (Doak-Strantz and Young mainly). In the summer of 2017, Parkland went under a massive bunker redesign project with the objective of improving playability. They removed more than 50 bunkers, reduced the depth and the reshaped the faces of the remaining bunkers. Mike Strantz has been responsible of the bunkering originaly. It was a deception for me to learn that the heritage of Mike Strantz disappeared with this bunker redesign project.