We’re all familiar with the line, “If you build it he will come,” and while that originated with a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa corn field on a movie set, it is a concept that has morphed into the world of remote golf destinations. Some 400 miles north of Lake County is the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort with four championship 18-hole golf courses as well as a gem of a 13-hole par-3 course. The architects at Bandon include David McLay Kidd, Tom Doak, Doak and Jim Urbina, and Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore.
Another example of a golf complex of international renown is located in Kohler, Wisconsin. All four of those courses were designed by Pete Dye with two links courses at Whistling Straits and two other great 18-holers at Blackwolf Run. Both Kohler and Bandon are in the proverbial middle of nowhere and yet all eight courses are of the highest quality, having hosted USGA, LPGA and PGA tourneys, including the Women’s U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, and the up-and-coming 2020 Ryder Cup.
I don’t believe I’m surprising any of our readers when I say that Lake County is a fairly remote area as well. In fact, with our proximity to the Bay Area and Sacramento, we’re a little bit farther than Kohler, Wisconsin is from Milwaukee, and we’re a whole lot closer than Bandon is to Portland.
With that in mind, there is a bevy of activity going on regionally with regard to big-name golf course architects, golf course sites, and Lake County golf. As a courtesy for the time being, I will not report about any of the aspects regarding the possible building of a pair of championship 18-hole golf courses at the Langtry complex on Butts Canyon Road east of Middletown. However, I will say there is a name golf course architect currently walking the premises to visualize possible golf hole locations.
In late December of 2014, I penned a column looking to the future of golf in Lake County. Along with Golf Week Magazine, I reported that there was talk of a Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore golf course north of Middletown in the area near the glider fields just east of Highway 29. The concept behind the facility, named The Brambles, was to design a classic model British golf club with private membership, but with an allowance for public play during non-prime time hours. Of course, my golfing friends at Adams Springs have been derisive during the past three-plus years about the concept of The Brambles, but it appears as if the project is getting closer to fruition. Crenshaw and Coore were on site last week, even to the extent they spoke with some of Lake County’s noted golf figures.
The Crenshaw-Coore name is golden in the world of golf course architecture. A noted golf historian, Ben Crenshaw is best known as a two-time Masters champion who captained Team USA to its iconic come-from-behind victory at The Country Club in the 1999 Ryder Cup Matches.
Coore and Crenshaw are big on the naturalist concept of golf course development and have a most impressive resume of great golf courses. The aforementioned Bandon complex features the Crenshaw-Coore design of Bandon Trails as well as the par-3 Bandon Preserve.
Crenshaw is from the world of competitive amateur and professional golf, having grown up in the Austin, Texas area. A noted junior golfer, Ben was a prodigy of legendary golf instructor Harvey Pennick. He also was a childhood friend of Tom Kite. Both Crenshaw and Kite played collegiately at the University of Texas and upon turning pro, Ben Crenshaw made an immediate splash by winning the first PGA Tour tournament he entered, the 1973 Texas Open. He won 13 times on the amateur level, including three NCAA titles, won 19 times on the PGA Tour, and added another 11 wins internationally.
Coore is very much from the world of golf course architecture. He grew up in western North Carolina and played a lot of his early golf at the Pinehurst Resort courses designed by the legendary Donald Ross. He attended Wake Forest University and upon graduation in 1972 went to work for Pete Dye. After spending 10 years with Dye, Coore set out on his own and began his own golf course design business. In 1986 he partnered up with Ben Crenshaw and they have formed one of golf’s more impressive partnerships during the past 32 years.
Coore has been quoted as saying that “traditional, strategic golf is the most rewarding, and the creation of courses that present this concept with the greatest artistry is the ultimate goal.” Showing their knack for golf history and architecture, the Coore and Crenshaw team often talk about the influences of the godfathers of American golf architecture, most notably Ross, Alister Mackenzie, C.B. Macdonald, Perry Maxwell and A.W. Tillinghast.
Crenshaw and Coore have a number of golf courses listed on the Top 100 lists, including Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia, Sand Hills in Nebraska, the Streamsong Resort courses in Florida, Barton Creek in Texas, and the Warren Golf Course at Notre Dame in Indiana. They also have been involved in some classic re-dos including Prairie Dunes in Kansas, Maidstone on Long Island in New York, and most notably, U.S. Open site Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina.
As a longtime Lake County resident, I still find this recent activity of high-end golf facilities to be somewhat of a head-scratcher. Perhaps our area is a new frontier where land is cheap and the ability to build golf courses and their needed infrastructure is easier to accomplish than in some of the more metropolitan areas of our state. Maybe foreign investment dollars are coming to our area because of the political instability in other parts of our world. And perhaps some of these ventures will take an extended period of time, meaning that golfers from my generation won’t be able to experience the great golf of the future as we age. Nonetheless, my current business model is “If you build it he will come.” I guess it’s simply a matter of only time will tell.
