Sam Cooper’s road to golf architect started, literally, with a road trip
The pandemic was a strange time for all of us. But it was especially fruitful for Englishman Sam Cooper.
With his real estate business on hold, in October 2020 he embarked on a golf architecture nerd’s adventure of a lifetime. Call it a stroke of serendipity or the power of social media, but his quixotic journey also took him to new professions, both as an author and architect in the game he loves.
Cooper, 33, jokes that it was “his one-third-life crisis,” and marvels that his wife, Harriet, a non-golfer, didn’t file for divorce or check him into a mental hospital. When England’s lockdown loosened in the summer of 2020, the Coopers and their two Cocker Spaniels, Watson and Winnie, set off in a converted camper van to play as much links and coastal golf as Harriet would allow: He checked off 75 different courses that fall.
“We had everything that lockdowns had taken away—freedom, adventure, and a seemingly endless list of links courses to tackle,” he says.
Playing coastal courses had long been a life’s ambition; the pandemic accelerated his timeline, allowing him to indulge his passion and obtain a Ph.D. in links golf. It wasn’t lost on him that many of the architects he idolized—from Pete Dye to Tom Doak—had blazed similar trails in their salad days. Nor did it take long for Cooper to reframe his pursuit to becoming the first to play all of Great Britain’s links courses, a list that kept growing as he traveled, eventually topping out at 225.
By the end of 2021, Cooper had managed to play 175. He knocked off the remaining 50 courses in fits and starts in 2022, completing his outrageous goal that November at Elie in Scotland.
If that was the end of Cooper’s story, we’d give him a rousing golf clap and jealously think to ourselves, “wish we’d done that.” But a funny thing happened along the way as Cooper shared his quest on social media: He developed a following. Several readers recommended courses or invited him to play where they were members. The social media response prompted him to chronicle his journey in a series of 18 volumes titled Links from the Road, which will be published going clockwise around the coastlines of England, Scotland, and Wales. The first volume was released last November and begins with Royal Liverpool (Hoylake), his home course and source of his obsession with golf architecture; the second is now available.
“I want to give equal billing and shine a light on the courses that may have escaped people’s attention,” he says. “It’s not for everybody, but if you love golf and golf course architecture and history, it’s an unashamedly nerdy deep dive into all of these places.”
Among his followers was Australian Mike Clayton, the former touring-pro-turned-architect with Clayton, DeVries and Pont. They struck up a dialogue, then Cooper was invited to lunch with Ed Cartwright, chairman of CDP, and architect Frank Pont, who offered him a dream job. “Effectively, as he put it, ‘Why wouldn’t you want to be a golf course architect?’” Cooper recalls. “He said, ‘Clearly you love it and seem well-suited for it.’”
His first work with Pont was at Wallasey Golf Club in the northwest of England, regarded as the birthplace of the Stableford scoring system and located just 10 minutes from where Cooper grew up.
After learning the ropes, he was promoted to an associate with the firm. Late last year, he and fellow CDP colleague Joe McDonnell hung out their own shingle, forming McDonnell & Cooper. Formby Golf Club, Southerness Golf Club, and a couple of other UK courses he wasn’t at liberty to discuss publicly yet are among their early clients.
Counting himself among the small fraternity of golf course architects, he says, is the greatest piece of good fortune of his professional life and he doesn’t take any of it for granted.
“Unfathomable,” he says of how his career has changed. “More people will climb Mount Everest this year than will work in designing golf courses, and I’m one of them.”
