{"id":809,"date":"2010-04-12T11:33:52","date_gmt":"2010-04-12T18:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffwallach.com\/?p=809"},"modified":"2011-12-07T13:57:31","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T20:57:31","slug":"signature-hole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/golf\/personalities\/809\/signature-hole","title":{"rendered":"Signature Hole"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

"Longfellow" at the Revere Golf Club.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you were anything like me in high school, you spent a lot of time during history class drawing impossibly difficult golf holes in your notebook.\u00a0 What avid golfer doesn\u2019t imagine he could design a great layout?<\/p>\n

Several years ago, Phoenix golf course architect Greg Nash– Billy Casper\u2019s partner, and designer of dozens of courses– offered me the chance to quit day-dreaming and step up to the drawing board.\u00a0 Nash agreed to build one golf hole of entirely my creation into a layout he was designing near Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

Nash was tired of golfers misunderstanding the difficult nature of course design.\u00a0 He was fed up with businessmen and surgeons proffering opinions about why the fourth hole was too narrow on one of his layouts, or complaining that he should have flattened that bunker by the twelfth green.\u00a0 In providing a writer with the chance to create one-eighteenth of a golf course, Greg hoped that I\u2019d communicate to folks what his profession is really like.\u00a0 He hoped I\u2019d express some of the intricacies, frustrations, and endless challenges faced by course architects.\u00a0 Because, as Greg says, \u201cA lot of people don\u2019t know spit from apple butter about golf course design.\u201d<\/p>\n

First Visit: January 29<\/span><\/p>\n

I met Greg in person on the morning of my first site visit, when he picked me up at the Las Vegas airport.\u00a0 I\u2019d expected a strapping, gray-haired statesman; instead, I was greeted by a slightly-grizzled rock star wearing jeans, dusty cowboy boots, a black leather jacket, and Kenneth Cole shades.<\/p>\n

As we drove to the future home of Del Webb\u2019s Anthem Golf Course, in nearby Henderson, Greg handed me a topo map and told me a little about the site, which he described as awesome.\u00a0 Although the course was being built amidst a subdivision, the golf holes played through the bottoms of a series of canyons.\u00a0 The houses were mostly confined to the mesa tops.\u00a0 Greg explained that most subdivision layouts force you to invent the entire topography; here, the canyon system provided challenging natural terrain that would allow us to be more creative and spontaneous.<\/p>\n

Greg suggested that I look at the land as it existed and think about what we\u2019d need to do to create a great golf hole, starting from the tees.\u00a0 Then he told me I\u2019d be designing the eleventh hole, a par five of approximately 620 yards.<\/p>\n

As we drove through the front gate, the site– a large swath of desert stripped clean of vegetation– struck me as bleak.\u00a0 Although the canyons were dramatic, the place depressed me.\u00a0 Greg had already routed the golf holes and erected stakes to mark the center lines of the fairways.\u00a0 As dust blew across the mesa, I wondered what was really left for me to do.<\/p>\n

Greg maneuvered his 4×4 across the golf course and explained how the builders would dozer off the topmost layer of rocky soil and eventually deposit six inches of fluffy fill dirt before grassing the holes.\u00a0 They\u2019d eventually plant sage, yuccas, and other natural desert vegetation to make the course blend in with its surroundings, and they\u2019d even edge a few fairways with stately Mondelle pines as aesthetic accents.\u00a0 He referred obliquely to dynamiting rock, laying irrigation pipe, moving dirt, engineering water features, and performing a dozen other processes I\u2019d never considered back in history class.\u00a0 And that was only a glimpse of the real work involved.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m not sure what our budget is, exactly, but it\u2019s at least ten million,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When we reached the deep pit that would someday become the eleventh hole, Greg excused himself to confer with a couple of his associates about cart path locations, sub-contractors, heavy machinery, and mowable slope angles.\u00a0 I was left to consider my artistic canvas and wait for the land to begin speaking to me.<\/p>\n

Number eleven began on the rim of a high, flat mesa, and descended 100 feet down a saddle into a winding canyon.\u00a0 In the distance, the Vegas skyline and a range of tall, notched mountains shimmered in the dusty sky.\u00a0 Not far from the future teeing areas, the mesa dropped over a sheer cliff that would have made for a fantastic tee box, but I saw the ropes and stakes marking it out as a housing site.\u00a0 I\u2019d encountered my first design limitation, and I began to understand the kinds of compromises that Greg must face.<\/p>\n

The very bottom of the canyon, which was crossed by a dry wash, flowed like an ancient river bed, winding from side to side.\u00a0 I liked this organic movement, except for where a slope descending on the left side of the hole cut off the view to where the green was located.<\/p>\n

My mind wrapped itself around launch angles and potential hazards.\u00a0 I tried to imagine what this wide expanse could look like as a golf hole.\u00a0 I wanted it to blend naturally into the landscape, but what kind of design elements would reflect this canyon topography while simultaneously expressing some of my own personal philosophies about golf– all without seeming hokey or tricked up?<\/p>\n

I knew that my hole called for a rugged western sort of styling, and I thought about the Grand Canyon, which lay not far from here to the southeast.\u00a0 I imagined a golf hole in which the fairways consisted of multi-level tiers, like mesas juxtaposed against each other– just like what I saw on the horizon, too.<\/p>\n

Looking out at the mountains, I also noticed a V-shaped notch, and wondered: why not cut a corresponding V out of the middle of that left slope, thereby allowing golfers to see and play toward the green, and simultaneously creating a desert island floating in the middle of the fairway?<\/p>\n

Later that afternoon, as we drove back toward the airport, I described my still-forming ideas to Greg.\u00a0 He offered a reserved consent, and told me he\u2019d fax me a sketch later in the week.\u00a0 When it arrived, it captured the essence of my vision.\u00a0 We tweaked it and discussed it, and Greg approved this preliminary plan.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Second Visit: February 20<\/span><\/p>\n

As soon as we drove out to the eleventh hole, we knew it didn\u2019t look anything like what I\u2019d described to Greg and what he\u2019d sketched in response.\u00a0 Where I\u2019d called for a steep cut that divided the fairway into flat upper and lower tiers, there was only a continuous slope.\u00a0 The notch in the left hillside had not been cut.\u00a0 Things looked much as they had on my first visit, except that the rocky cover material had been peeled off and hauled away.<\/p>\n

Greg was calm at first.\u00a0 He explained how things come up– you want to cut something but you hit solid bedrock; or the shapers have a different vision of what you describe to them.\u00a0 \u201cSometimes you just have to deal with it and compromise and be creative.\u00a0 Which is why an architect has to be out on the job,\u201d Greg said.\u00a0 I sensed he was trying to tell me why this golf hole would never look anything like I\u2019d planned.<\/p>\n

But then he picked up his cell phone, and his mild, professorial manner disappeared.\u00a0 \u201cThey got this all screwed up,\u201d he shouted at someone.\u00a0 \u201cHow are they saying what\u2019s drawn here is out there?\u201d\u00a0 He held up his sketch for emphasis.<\/p>\n

Soon, shapers and dozer drivers and construction foremen appeared out of the desert and converged on Greg\u2019s truck.<\/p>\n

Didn\u2019t anybody go over this with anyone,\u201d he yelled.\u00a0 he was livid, too, that someone had hauled away the dirt they\u2019d scraped off the fairway.\u00a0 Greg had intended to use that to build our tiers.<\/p>\n

It was clear that nobody had any idea what the hole was supposed to look like, but they each explained why things weren\u2019t their fault.\u00a0 Greg smiled.\u00a0 When he showed them the drawing and described my vision, the construction foreman said, \u201cWow.\u00a0 That\u2019ll look really cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

We drove up to the tees while the dozer operator started making the V-cut and someone arranged to have a bunch of dirt hauled back up the slope.\u00a0 Greg barked into his cell phone as he drove, dealing with a raft of other mistakes and miscommunications on other holes– all in a day\u2019s work, I understood.\u00a0 I also saw that he wasn\u2019t really angry, but how acting that way helped get things done.<\/p>\n

We spent about five minutes looking at tee boxes, half a dozen of which cascaded from the mesa top down the saddle.\u00a0 A few more lay across the wash that crossed in front of the fairway and would around to define the left side of the hole.\u00a0 I offered a couple of comments and Greg took notes, but we knew it was the terrain here that would dictate the best tee box locations.<\/p>\n

Just before we quit for the day, Greg mentioned that I should start thinking about the green.\u00a0 But I already had an idea of what I wanted.\u00a0 I handed him a copy of my first golf book, \u201cBeyond The Fairway,\u201d of which I\u2019d designed the cover.\u00a0 It depicted a golf green shaped into the Japanese yin\/yang symbol, conveying what I consider the Zen aspect of golf.\u00a0 I asked whether we might recreate the symbol, using the green as one half, and a bunker curled up against it as the other.<\/p>\n

Greg looked at the book and said, neutrally, \u201cWe could do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Third Visit: March 11<\/span><\/p>\n

Shane Whitcomb, Greg\u2019s design associate, was waiting for us in his truck when we arrived.\u00a0 We drove out to Number 11, past where a machine was screening dirt 24 hours a day for the 120,000 square yards they\u2019d need to plate the holes.\u00a0 As we approached my hole from behind the green, the fairway still looked wrong– mostly slope.\u00a0 When I mentioned this, Greg said, \u201cThat might be the part where we have to say we did the best we could.\u201d<\/p>\n

We drove right up to the future putting surface and consulted the diagram I\u2019d sent Greg, and he asked how I thought it looked.\u00a0 When I said that some of the bunker lines needed sharpening, Shane handed me a can of spray paint.\u00a0 I revised the shape and painted the turf island into the middle.\u00a0 With the bunker stepped below the green, the execution represented an abstract interpretation of my concept, and it looked very cool.<\/p>\n

Then we drove up to the tees, which had been mostly roughed in as we\u2019d decided, except for the left-most tee, which wasn\u2019t there.\u00a0 I\u2019d sited this tee to make the carry seem farther because of the angle to the fairway.\u00a0 We set stakes for this tee, and then looked out at the hole: from here, number eleven had begun to look like a golf hole– a beautiful and daunting par five.<\/p>\n

From this perspective, the fairway tiers also looked more pronounced, and I noticed a third tier way down to the left, just before the fairway fell off into the wash.\u00a0 Greg explained that this tier had appeared when they ran out of dirt.\u00a0 To me, it greatly enhanced the effect I was looking for, a happy accident.<\/p>\n

Greg and Shane drove down the future cart path, but I walked to the first landing area, where the fairway tiers converged into a swale.\u00a0 From this spot, you could hit to the left of the fairway island, through the V-cut, directly toward the amphitheater green, although you couldn\u2019t reach it yet.\u00a0 Once you passed through the cut, the hole was turfed all the way to the pin.\u00a0 You could also play a more conservative shot to the right of the island, to another tier that would offer a challenging third shot over a faced ridge lined with yuccas, and the yang of the bunker.\u00a0 If you mis-hit your second shot and landed too close to the island, you\u2019d have to knock out to one of the fairways to have an approach to the green.<\/p>\n

Three ridges on the hole– up on the mesa top; on the right side of the island; and fronting the right side of the green– unified the movement of the hole.\u00a0 Three arrangements of yuccas (separating the fairway tiers; atop the island; and fronting the green) added to the sense of flow.\u00a0 With luck, a small tier on the green would reiterate the tier theme established on the fairway.<\/p>\n

I offered a few recommendations for tweaking number eleven, and then Shane asked if I wanted to play my hole.\u00a0 While Greg feigned anger and amazement to his workers over various glitches throughout the golf course, Shane and I drove up to the tees to hit a few balls with beater clubs.\u00a0 I teed up on a pinch of desert sand and crushed my first drive down the center before hitting two more balls that caromed off to the right.\u00a0 Shane hooked a couple into the wash on the left, and we took off after them.<\/p>\n

Even from where my tee-shot landed, it was a long<\/span> way to the hole.\u00a0 I aimed my second shot into the V-cut and airmailed it onto the desert island.\u00a0 Shane offered me a favorable ruling, and after dropping in the dirt beside the island, I knocked a five iron onto the green.\u00a0 Shane suggested we leave the ball buried there for posterity.<\/p>\n

I had– more or less– managed to par Anthem Golf Course\u2019s 620-yard eleventh hole by hitting driver, driver, five iron.\u00a0 I realized, happily, how tough this hole really played.<\/p>\n

Final Visit: June 24<\/span><\/p>\n

Greg called in the middle of June to suggest that I visit Anthem one last time before they started plating the holes with clean dirt.\u00a0 Driving in, the site looked completely different, with new roads laid out, housing foundations rising, and a forest of boxed trees awaiting planting.\u00a0 Two holes had already been grassed, and I could only imagine how much more work had occurred to bring them to that point.<\/p>\n

The first thing I noticed on number eleven was that the trees I\u2019d called for had been planted, but not quite how I\u2019d meant.\u00a0 I was happy to see that the mesa effect worked well now, except from the front-most tees, where the drop-off was mostly slope.\u00a0 You could see and feel the hole\u2019s shot values, and appreciate the drama of the island from the first landing area.<\/p>\n

We spent much of that day working on the green with Wayne Ward, Greg\u2019s expert shaper.\u00a0 Wayne wore a cap that said \u201cBetty Ford Clinic Outpatient,\u201d and handled a tractor like he\u2019d been born on it.\u00a0 Wayne\u2019s challenge was to level out the green so as to minimize unwanted sloping.\u00a0 While he pushed dirt around and surveyed the results, Greg and I drove up to the tees for a final look.\u00a0 From the daunting back tees, the slow river motion of the hole flowed beautifully and the fairway tiers and the desert island built anticipation for the approach to a green that would also startle and delight.\u00a0 Even without grass, Greg had already transformed this site into a crafted work of art.<\/p>\n

On our way back to the green, I mentioned that some of the trees seemed a bit off, and that I thought we could make the lines crisper with a couple more.\u00a0 Greg got on the phone and called for more pines, and they arrived in a tractor bucket, and we placed them in such a way that they moved your eye along the correct route for playing the hole.\u00a0 When we stepped back and looked, the entire aspect of the hole was improved.<\/p>\n

Wayne was gone when we returned to the green.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s either confident or afraid,\u201d Greg said.\u00a0 Then he added that he would put Wayne up against any tractor driver in the country.<\/p>\n

When we surveyed it, the green still dropped a bit strongly from the left edge, which would cause golf balls to roll toward the middle of the 6000 sq. ft surface.\u00a0 But knowing how far golfers would have traveled to reach this green– over some very rough terrain– that seemed the least we could do for them.<\/p>\n

Final Impressions<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time of this writing, the design and construction of Del Webb\u2019s excellent Anthem Golf Course is complete.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s all up to the grass, which has a few more months to grow itself before the official opening.<\/p>\n

As for my sense of whether I could really design great golf courses, I would say both maybe and no.\u00a0 I like to think that my eye is good and that I understand both landscape and golf well enough to blend them in smooth confluence.\u00a0 But I also understand that vision is the twinkly but minute part of course design.\u00a0 Far more time and energy goes into managing a team of supervisors and a crowd of workers, dealing with technology, solving intricate problems, compromising creatively,\u00a0 and occasionally yelling in just the right way to get things done.\u00a0 While Greg Nash is an inspired course designer, he\u2019s also an artist of another sort, and I recognize that I have little talent for that particular kind of wizardry.<\/p>\n

Now, it\u2019s up to the critics to judge how good a designer I am.\u00a0 But let me just mention that any surgeons or golf writers who have complaints about number eleven can keep their opinions to themselves.\u00a0 Or go have some apple butter.<\/p>\n

The Golf Road Warriors trip to Scottsdale makes for a great addition to a trip for golf in phoenix az<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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