Moving heaven and earth

The most important moment in any round of golf happens years before tee-time on the pages of a blueprint

By Chad Konecky

Mining the richest anecdotes from Beverly native Ron Kirby’s 40-year career as a golf course architect must approximate what it felt like to be that first person to actually shoot fish in a barrel. With Kirby, the hitch isn’t deciding which nuggets to retell. It’s choosing which ones to tell first.

Take, for example, the story of a client who approached him back in the mid-1970s. She-who-shall-not-be-named was the wife of an extremely recognizable figure in American history and wished to build a golf course. At this point, Kirby was becoming reasonably well known as a designer, both at home and abroad. He owned his own firm and he had recently completed a seven-year stint in the employ of Robert Trent Jones, regarded by many as one of the world’s most significant postwar golf course designers.

It's all in the design(er) For a breakdown of what styles and traits certain golf architects have become best known for during their careers, click here.

Kirby hadn’t seen it all, but he’d seen a lot. Then, this client walked through his door one bright June day. She asked Kirby if he could build a golf course for her husband’s birthday. His next birthday. In September.

Stifling the urge to laugh, Kirby politely declined. The client then asked if he could design and construct a 9-hole course in time. Again, the answer was no. Finally, she inquired about the possibility of building a single birthday hole.

“I said, ‘Oh sure, we can do one hole, no problem,’” recalls Kirby, now 73. “She said, ‘Fine. Then you hire nine separate contractors and design us a nine-hole course.’”

Once he realized the woman wasn’t auditioning to be the next Gracie Allen, Kirby did just what she asked. All in three surreal months.

The tale says a lot about that wafer-thin line between golf passion and golf lunacy. But it says everything about what’s required of a golf course architect. There are so many pitfalls inherent to turning a property into a playable track that architects surely spend half their professional lives feeling like they’ve drawn iceberg watch on the Titanic.

“It is an enormous challenge to find and acquire a suitable property, to get the proper permitting and to construct a championship-caliber course,” says Charlie Reed, 40, the former project manager for Ipswich’s Turner Hill Golf & Racquet Club and now a corporate officer with that course’s developers, the Raymond Property Company. “That process is only getting harder and the golf course architect plays a huge role every step of the way. They’re making constant adjustments and they do a lot of hand-holding.”

The fact that a business-savvy, left-brain guy like Reed, who wasn’t even born when Kirby drew his first paycheck in the business, grasps even a fraction of golf architecture’s seemingly boundless purview is noteworthy. This is one of those rare gigs in which the job title is dwarfed by the influence and responsibility of the position and by how unforgivably history can judge the execution of its duties.

About 60 million golfers populate the planet’s 30,000 or so golf courses. By comparison, the American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA) boasts 179 members. The European Institute of Golf Course Architects has 73. Relatively speaking, these folks are scarcer than a hit single by Kevin Federline.

“Architects are here for the average fella,” says 88-year-old Phil Wogan, a native of Manchester-by-the-Sea and the designer of multiple local and regional courses. “The pros don’t need us. They could play on any terrain. But for most golfers, this is a real game played on real ground and good course design offers a reasonable degree of success to a majority of golfers.”

Wogan isn’t saying golf courses should be easy or predictable. Far from it. They should be formidable and enjoyable, but not impenetrable.

“The chance for success should outweigh the severity of the punishment,” explains Wogan, whose father, Eugene, was an apprentice to world-renowned designer Donald Ross in the early 1900s. “Design should emphasize playability and give a decent golfer a chance to post a reasonable score by executing the various skills of the game.

“I don’t ever want someone to classify one of my golf courses as ‘hard,’” continues Wogan, whose design firm’s Montcalm Golf Club (N.H.) was named one of Golf Digest’s top 10 new private courses of 2005. “The best review reads something like, ‘Playable, but challenging.’”

Wogan’s childhood home abutted the fifth hole of Essex County Club. His father was the club pro there from 1913 to 1957 and Wogan knew what a golf course looked like before he knew what a backyard did.

A few miles south and a world away in so many ways, Kirby grew up in Beverly. But his Golden Rule is no different than Wogan’s.

“When somebody comes off your course, you don’t want them saying, ‘Where are we going to play next?’” says Kirby, who helped design Ireland’s internationally acclaimed Old Head layout in Kinsale, which opened in 1997. “You want them to come off saying, ‘When are we going to play that again?’”

‘Every church has pews’

When Scottish-born golfer Willie Park, Jr. unveiled his design for what is now England’s Sunningdale Old Course back in 1901, it marked the dawn of a new era. Park proposed considerable construction and earth-moving to create the course. Until that time, European courses typically were laid out by professional greens keepers, a process that involved setting greens, tees and hazards in natural locations, usually along the coast, with little or no alteration to the landscape. Park ultimately became an innovator in a new field – a profession in which designers used their skills and imagination to convert raw, intractable countryside into glorious golf courses.

It was the German classicist Goethe who called architecture “frozen music,” and, without question, there’s a similarly elevated level of artistry associated with golf course design. Even the ASGCA brochure entitled “Selecting Your Golf Course Architect” likens a course designer’s job to that of “a symphony conductor.”

A golf course architect must be capable of overseeing and offering input on every aspect of taking a golf course project from concept to reality. That means market analysis, site selection, cost estimation, permitting, master planning, detailed design, construction and grow-in. Oh yeah, they should also know the game of golf better than Johnny Miller.

Clearly, this is not a job for the Scotts Turf Builder guru next door who has himself within a couple putts of being a scratch golfer.

As a boy in Framingham, Brian Silva fancied himself the second coming of Johnny Bucyk. Hockey was his passion and he reckoned he was pretty good. Then his father, John, a golf course architect, took him to Worcester’s now-defunct Eastern Hockey School.

“After 15 minutes on the ice with kids from Canada and other hockey hotbeds, I realized my hockey future was on the pond,” recalls Silva, 53, Golf World Magazine’s Architect of the Year in 1999.

In the case of Brian Silva, hockey’s loss was golf’s gain. The firm he’s a partner in, Cornish, Silva & Mungeam, Inc., designed both The Meadow at Peabody and the popular par-3 Middleton Golf Course. But Silva has showcased his design talents much further afield. Courses like Cape Cod National, Shaker Hills, Black Rock Country Club and Waverly Oaks have sprung from Silva’s mind.

His dizzying resume notwithstanding, Silva refuses to label himself an architect. The guy got his first job in course design 23 years ago, but he insists that the work he does is too much a work in progress to have earned such a title yet. This does not mean, however, that Silva lacks strong opinions about his vocation.

“It’s easy for this profession to be too superficial,” says Silva. “It’s not about the features. The bunker sand, the super-fast greens, the waterfalls and the stone walls: Those are the pews. Every church has pews. The overall structure and makeup of the golf course is what’s important. The skeleton. The muscles and skin may be gorgeous, but if you don’t get the skeleton right, you’re doomed to mediocrity.”

Keep Silva talking for more than an hour and he starts to sound like a bizarre hybrid of Darwin and Da Vinci. But what resonates more than anything else is his passion for the game of golf. He believes course designs that lack attention to golf strategy are course designs devoid of soul.

“A good course has to be correct structurally,” explains Silva.

“From the birds-eye view. Look at the tops of the tees, the fairways and the greens. Is there variety? Variance in the angles of play, the routes a golfer can take, the way players are given an opportunity to ‘fail positively.’ That’s attention to golf strategy.

“Producing a course is about doing layer upon layer of tasks and if you get one layer wrong, it all collapses,” he adds. “You can change external things fairly easily, but if the golf course isn’t correct structurally, it’s like a beautiful paint job on a car that doesn’t start six days out of seven.”

Wogan, whose parents were introduced to each other by Donald Ross, is of a similar mind on the subject.

“A lot of what’s wrong with golf course design today is that it’s not consistent with the essence of the game,” says Wogan, who designed local courses like Rowley Country Club, The Georgetown Club and New Meadows, among others.

Designers aren’t necessarily to blame for course design’s migration toward sizzle over steak. The vocal demands and powerful influences of course developers, equipment manufactures and (gasp!) the players themselves is pushing course design into a realm that’s a lot more vanilla than it is visionary.

Seven vernal pools

Golf course architects can’t afford to specialize. Sure, some guys are better than others at certain aspects of the job. But the best guys are capable of being profoundly abstract and concrete at the same time.

Any course designer worthy of his drafting table has a thorough knowledge of the game; its history, champions and design strategy. Familiarity with heavy construction, hydraulic engineering, soil science, geology and civil engineering is a must. Most architects also possess an advanced understanding of landscape architecture. Those with expertise in securing financing and navigating the state and local permitting process are highly sought after.

Such talents aren’t all living in Florida, Arizona and Scotland. They’re right here in our midst. Cabell B. Robinson, who lives in Marblehead, spent 20 years designing courses for Robert Trent Jones before hanging his own shingle in 1987. Robinson, 64, spearheaded European operations for Jones’ firm for 17 years and has since completed 20 golf courses of his own in Europe and North Africa. He is currently overseeing the construction of four golf courses in Spain and another in Morocco. Of course, design challenges across the pond differ from those stateside.

“America has a great tendency as a country for homogenizing things,” says Robinson, whose first site visit as an architect was as part of the Robert Trent Jones team that laid out Ipswich Country Club. “But your ability to do different things as a designer depends a lot on what your client has to spend. That’s true everywhere.

“In Europe, for example, the idea of a real estate golf course is far from the norm,” he continues. “It’s not even really allowed north of the Pyrenees. Obviously, it’s hard to finance and sell an idea when you can’t build something around it. Plus, land is an issue. Here, 200 acres is not uncommon for a site plan. In Europe, there’s typically not that much land to work with.”

Truth be told, the bulk of designers’ billable hours are not dispensed dreaming up layouts rich in angles, hazards and strategy. The design muse is on a tight leash. Much of an architect’s time is occupied by the bureaucratic day-to-day of shepherding a golf course from blueprint to hotspot. It’s what Silva calls the tug-of-war between “people who love the game and people who love the business of the game.”

Says Robinson, “We’re only as good as the last thing we turned out.”

Architects contend with the vagaries and politics of permitting as well as the whimsy of pleasing developers’ aesthetic sense, all while paying seat-squirming attention to the bottom dollar.

“The toughest part of our job is permitting,” says Silva. “After that, it’d be permitting. Then, No. 3 would be permitting.”

Once all state and local permits (governing every aspect of the project from basic zoning to environmental impact) are acquired, it is typical for an architect to subcontract a team of builders for course construction. In Massachusetts, there are three construction companies certified by the Golf Course Builders Association of America. All things being equal, the actual process of constructing a championship course that doesn’t involve extensive blasting should require 15 to 18 months.

The 311-acre site upon which Turner Hill now sits was purchased for golf development in June 1997. In part because the property features 70 acres of wetlands, including seven vernal pools, an arduous permitting process delayed construction until 2001. The full 18-hole course opened in June 2004. In the time it took to get a golf course built in Ipswich, the world lost Princess Diana, Monica Lewinsky became a household name, George Bush ran in two presidential campaigns and four U.S. Olympic teams were selected.

Golf course architecture is many things, but it is not tidy.

Is size everything?

If you ask Brian Silva, the actual design and construction of a course is the easy part; the craft within the art.
“We have bulldozers, we have sophisticated irrigation and drainage techniques and, hopefully, we have our wits about us,” says Silva. “Sure, it’s difficult. But issues like how do you get a dogleg around an existing water feature or how do you meet a new financial challenge or how do you build a course within the requested timeline – these are things within our control and means.

“Those things aren’t problems, they’re why the craft exists,” he continues. “If those issues didn’t arise, any guy who designs cemeteries could, with golf knowledge, design golf courses.”

Be that as it may, a predominant trend in the golf course design industry has put the profession in a major pickle. Recent and rapid advances in club and ball performance have imposed new standards on course dimensions and the positioning of playing elements in order to make layouts both accessible to recreational golfers and worthy of professionals.

The longest driver in the PGA a decade ago wouldn’t even crack today’s top 60. Hazards carefully placed by architects to challenge the best players without penalizing weaker ones – even on courses built within the last generation – are now failing on both counts. In 2000, the ASGCA published an open letter to the USGA requesting that the trend be addressed. You don’t need to be a golf fan to know that request fell upon deaf ears.

“Recent developers, particularly resort developers, tend to want their course designed so that it could someday host a PGA event or USGA/PGA qualifier,” says Kirby. “The course has got to be 7,500 yards from the back tees, but you’ve got to make it friendly, fun and playable for the average senior golfer who’s paying $300 a night to stay there, plus $200 a round. That’s a costly process and meeting all those needs definitely impacts design.”

The debate over technology’s adverse impact on the game is nothing new. John L. Low, an esteemed golf writer and official at the turn of the century, was on the case nearly 100 years ago when he wrote in 1908, “The game has been waging a battle against the inventor. The one aim of the inventor is to minimize the skill required for the game.”

Technological aids for players have long been cast as a golf villain, but the cumulative effect of a century of equipment evolution may finally be having a villainous impact. By and large and for a variety of reasons, architects are failing to balance their artistic sensibility with the challenges and features of a given site to produce courses with meritorious structure that are fair to players across a broad range of aptitudes.

Existing courses are retrofitting to adjust for the trampoline effect of the latest balls and drivers, but they have little room to expand and even fewer good solutions to the conundrum. New courses are becoming increasingly antiseptic from a design perspective due to what Silva calls golf’s “unyielding, headlong rush to make every golf course in America look the same.”

The trend of designing to the lowest common denominator – yet with enough length to keep courses from being over-exploited by pros – seems antithetical to the basic rules of golf. As Silva is all too happy to point out.

“Golf has the greatest equalizing system in all of sports: the handicap,” says Silva. “Because of it, I can play Tiger Woods in a round and have a chance. Why take the character out of all these courses – those unique, quirky, innovative touches that can only come from an architect – just to quadruple the impact of the handicap?”

With as many as 500 new U.S. courses projected to be built by the end of this decade, it remains unclear what the future holds for the changing face of golf course architecture. What is certain is that the profession will forever be a sanctuary where golf passion and golf lunacy can commingle.

“Let’s be honest, this is the greatest gig you could ask for,” says Silva. “You couldn’t hope to have a better job than this.”

Chad Konecky is an award-winning Senior Writer for SchoolSports Magazine and can be read on www.cnn/si.com.