Great golf courses may be considered works of art, but their owners hardly treat
them as such. While adding even a single brush stroke to the Mona Lisa or
building another wing to the Taj Mahal would be considered unthinkable, their
counterparts in golf are constantly undergoing revisions, redesigns and
restorations.
No great course more reflects this trend than Augusta National
Golf Club, which, especially in recent years, has evolved to the point where the
original designers, Bobby Jones and Dr. Alister MacKenzie, may be hard pressed
to recognize it. In addition to adding 520 yards since 1998, the club has
narrowed landing areas by adding a “second cut” of grass as well as numerous
trees.The club has made these changes in response to the increasing distances that
today’s best players hit the ball. And while Augusta National has stood pat in
the past year, it has proved most willing of any club to
alter its
layout—both recently and over the years, during which numerous architects have
left their marks on the course.
There’s no reason to think this trend won’t
continue, and in that spirit, LINKS has asked several architects to provide
master plans of how they would redesign or restore Augusta National Golf Club.
In addition to their thoughts, several young architects—the future Doaks and
Fazios—even have offered drawings of their visions. These plans are similar to what the architects would
present to clubs’ green committees. They provide fascinating insight into
architects’ thinking processes and help better understand the holes’
strategies.
The plan
The idea of creating a long range or “master plan” has been a
recent trend in golf course design inspired by years of committee tampering at
some of the world’s great courses. The process is usually instigated by older
golf courses looking to reverse decades of change to a master architect’s work.
The selection process begins with presentations by the architects to a committee
of the club’s leadership. Once hired, the architects analyze the design and
receive golfers’ feedback.
Every architect handles the committee-driven
process of long-range planning differently. Some rely on communication skills
while others are not shy to break out PowerPoints and lavish drawings. “We
generally don’t do drawings in our consulting work,” longtime restorer Tom Doak
says. “Because we are trying to emphasize that our primary mission is to restore
old features and so it is more appropriate to work from old photographs rather
than new drawings.”
Now on his own, Mike Benkusky, a longtime associate of
Chicago-area renovation specialist Bob Lohman, has a consistent approach to
older layouts. “My philosophy is to throw out ideas on different plans and hope
that the committee likes certain ideas on different plans. We then gather all of
those ideas and put them onto one plan as our final master plan. I do not try to
sway the committee one way or another on the ideas, but lead them through the
process by pointing out the pros and cons of each idea and how it relates to the
overall design of the golf course.”
Augusta National presents a unique
challenge because of what happens in early April every year. “The difficulty
in formulating a successful plan lies in the need to accommodate both tournament
and member play,” says Bobby Weed, architect of several TPC courses. “We all
know that technology’s greatest impact is felt by the best players, and that the
gap between good and bad golfers is wider than ever. No other course in the
world must address that issue as directly as Augusta.”
It’s curious to note
that most of the architects polled recommended that instead of changing the
course, the Masters should develop a tournament ball to prevent future
obsolescence. In the meantime they offer a surprisingly consistent set of
suggestions for the club.
