Most people would say the state of Colorado’s best natural assets are the Rocky Mountains. When it comes to golf I’d argue the best thing going for it are the high prairies along the eastern Front Range. The mountain courses, visually dramatic and non-replicable anywhere else, are often difficult to build and unyielding to play…
Jay Blasi founded his own design company in 2012 after working for Robert Trent Jones II for over a decade. He gained notoriety as the lead associate on two high profile Jones courses: The Patriot Golf Club in Oklahoma, and Washington State’s Chambers Bay, host of the 2015 U.S. Open, where Blasi was instrumental in…
Mike Clayton is a throwback to a bygone tradition of golf figures such as Willie Park, Jr., Walter Travis and Max Behr, top players who later became both architects and men of letters. Clayton won the Australian Amateur in 1978 and played the European Tour from 1982 until 2000. He’s written extensively for golf publications…
Not since Hugh Wilson at Merion has an architectural career been launched as brightly as David McLay Kidd’s. As a young designer in his 20’s, Kidd was tabbed by Mike Keiser to build the first course at Bandon Dunes. Kidd followed that spectacular success with a series of prestigious designs across several continents, becoming arguably…
Brian Curley began his golf course architecture career working on a number of Pete Dye courses for Landmark Land Company. There he met another Dye protégé, Lee Schmidt, and the two combined forces to form the company Schmidt-Curley Golf Design. Since the 1990’s they’ve built courses all over the U.S. and throughout the world, and for…
The topic of how courses are judged in comparison to their neighbors comes up quite a bit here. Often it’s fair to make assessments about a property based on other proximate courses, but sometimes looking left and right instead of straight ahead makes for lazy analysis. In the case of Augusta Country Club, however, there’s just no way around it.…
With a lovely, forested site (though not one necessarily great for golf), recurring views of Lake Oconee and the surrounding development’s once deep pockets, you’d think The National’s 27 holes would comprise some of the most spectacular destination golf in the Southeast. In actuality, the National bats in the middle of Reynolds Lake Oconee’s (formerly Reynolds Plantation) lineup. That’s…
Depending on your view, having two courses as diverse as Mission Inn’s Las Colinas and El Campeón can either mean you have variety, or that you simply have an A course and a B course. Land planning concerns (read: selling houses) dictated that Las Colinas would be nothing like its older, tightly routed sibling, but the younger course does…
Few living architects are better than Steve Smyers at combining an understanding of golf shots and strategy with holes that possess immense visual flourish. Based in Florida, he’s designed courses and played in top-level amateur tournaments all over the globe. He joins Derek Duncan on the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss how he’s always evolving as a designer,…
At first glance it might look like Team Norman mailed this one in. There doesn’t appear to be much to the course, especially against the backdrop of the property’s two overlord hotels, a Ritz-Carlton and J.W. Marriott. Granted, Norman didn’t have great material to work with — essentially a flat, soggy wetland preserve in south Orlando’s Shingle Creek…