Designer Bill Coore comes into the salon to discuss greens and putting surfaces with Jim Urbina and Derek Duncan. Topics include the importance of shaping greens and surrounds in relation to single holes or the entire golf course, the 14th and 2nd greens at Sand Hills, building “floating” greens and finding natural landforms, looking vs.…
Tripp Davis is arguably the most skilled amateur player among active architects. He helped the University of Oklahoma win a National Championship in the 1980s and has been a ranked amateur for most of his adult life, even reaching the quarter finals of the 2009 U.S Mid-Amateur. Fluent in both original design, remodels and historic…
Dave Axland and Rod Whitman, two of modern golf’s most skilled and admired construction men, met in the 1980s through Bill Coore. Axland has been an associate and project manager for numerous Coore-Crenshaw courses since the mid-1990s including Sand Hills, Talking Stick, Friars Head, Old Sandwich, Chechessee Creek plus numerous others, and has designed Wild…
Ah, it’s that time of year—the flowering trees, the treacly theme music, crippling pollen and the lamentation of everything Augusta National gets wrong with its golf course. For many historians and a large sector of architectural observers, criticism of all that Augusta National has lost or surrendered over the decades, including the original design intent…
There is no point in trying to “rate” Augusta National. Putting an evaluation or rating on the golf course would be like doing a contemporary movie review of “Star Wars.” It doesn’t matter. Commenting seriously on Mark Hamill‘s flat delivery, the anti-intellectualism of the “Force” or the cheapening effect of Han Solo‘s dues ex machina arrival in the…
Mike DeVries belongs to an elite class of golf architects working today who have been fortunate to work on properties that qualify as some of the best sites golf has seen since the 1920’s. His jaw-dropping design at Cape Wichkam Links on Kings Island in Tasmania, with wide holes rolling along the rocky ocean shore,…
Keith Rhebb is one of the leaders of a new generation of golf course architects who have learned the trade shaping courses for design-build luminaries like Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak, and Gil Hanse. He’s worked for Coore and Crenshaw at places like Lost Farm at Barnbougle Dunes, Cabot Cliffs and Streamsong…