Architect Jeff Mingay broke into golf course architecture working projects for his mentor and fellow Canadian Rod Whitman. In 2009, after completing a trio of Canada’s most exceptional modern golf courses — Blackhawk, Sagebrush and Cabot Links — he opened his own design business and found immediate success renovating and restoring courses in British Columbia…
A favorite debate among golf architecture students and historians is about what courses constitute the most influential in the evolution of golf design. Most groupings would include St. Andrews, National Golf Links of America, Pine Valley, Augusta National, and Sand Hills. The PLAYERS Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass is often cited as another construction and cultural landmark. For better or worse (depending to…
Tim Liddy began his career working closely with Pete Dye in 1993, transitioning into golf course design following a career in landscape architecture. The two men have enjoyed a close collaboration for a quarter century, with Liddy becoming fluent in the Dye vernacular while also establishing his own independent firm responsible for highly acclaimed original…
I thought Southern Hills Plantation Club had a chance to win national acclaim when I first heard, around 2001, that Pete Dye was building a course in this part of west-central Florida. Being familiar with World Woods and the sand ridges that run through the Brooksville area, it seemed like the soils, the region’s big and graceful elevations…
Brad Klein has been one of the media’s foremost authorities on golf course architecture since he began writing for Golfweek Magazine in 1988. He created that publication’s highly influential ranking of America’s 100 greatest modern and classic courses, and he recently, after 30 years, moved on to a new position with Golf Advisor and the…
Keith Cutten is an integral player in golf design’s next generation who has worked alongside a variety of architects including Bill Coore, Jeff Mingay, Doug Carrick and, most importantly, his mentor Rod Whitman shaping features, drafting plans, developing budgets and running job sites. He’s also one of the leading young historians on golf course design and…
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,…
Dr. Michael Hurdzan was on golf’s center stage the summer of 2017 during the U.S. Open, contested at Erin Hills, the giant, rambling meadow course he designed with then partner Dana Fry and Ron Whitten. It was a well-deserved moment for the architect known as much for building some of the most artistically voluptuous courses…
One of my favorite stories of Pete Dye involves the construction of the Ocean Course in 1989. Hurricane Hugo had just come aground at Kiawah Island and Charleston, upturning everything he’d built to that point. With the site razed and most of the coast evacuated, Dye ventured out alone and began reshaping the course, pushing up dunes and moving the holes out…
Rod Whitman has been one of golf’s masters of construction for nearly 40 years and has designed a number of courses on his own. In 2010 he got the call every architect dreams of — an offer to design and build a course on one of the world’s great new seaside properties, in this case…