The Essential: Tom Doak
Growing up in suburban Connecticut, Tom Doak would accompany his father on business trips to places like Pebble Beach and Harbour Town, where he caught the golf bug. He later traveled extensively throughout the British Isles on a Cornell University post-graduate scholarship, paying particularly close attention to the Old Course at St. Andrews, studying it […]
Great Courses of Britain & Ireland: Enniscrone
The golf club celebrates its 100th year in 2018, but as I round the peak of towering Cnoc na gCorp in search of my ball, I can’t help but ponder the millennia of wind and tides and sliding glaciers that pushed this sandy pyramid up out of the dunes. It is the tallest ridge on […]
Trinity Forest: A Golf Course Built on a Landfill
“Building a golf course should just not be this hard.” Those aren’t words one expects to hear from architect Bill Coore, who along with partner Ben Crenshaw has been responsible for some of the most important and appreciated layouts of the last few decades. But it’s exactly what Coore said over the phone to Jonas […]
Classic Course: San Francisco Golf Club
By Brian Hewitt A.W. Tillinghast’s only West Coast design has been restored to its original splendor In 1918, when the San Francisco Golf Club unveiled what turned out to be A. W. Tillinghast’s only original design west of Texas, it produced barely a murmur. No one knew the course would set the bar for […]
The Essential: Hugh Alison
Charles Hugh Alison, who was known to the world by his middle name, was born in 1883 in the small English city of Preston, about 30 miles north of Manchester. A powerfully built and athletic young man, he played first-class cricket and earned his “Blue” competing for Oxford against Cambridge in the University Golf Match. […]
The Architects of Pebble Beach
By James A. Frank In the early 1900s, the Pacific Ocean was a long journey from the East Coast, which was the center of American golf at the time. So when Samuel F.B. Morse—in charge of developing part of the Monterey Peninsula for a resort and real estate—approached leading architects including Donald Ross and […]
5 Questions with Golf Course Architect Brandon Johnson
Brandon Johnson earned a Master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard in 1999, before becoming Manager of Design for The First Tee, where he oversaw design and construction of 250 facilities. In 2006, he joined Arnold Palmer’s course design firm and, seven years later, was made a Senior Architect and Vice President of the company. […]
The Architect’s Ultimate Golf Trip
By Erik Matuszewski Golfers love few things better than a great road trip, with the opportunity to experience new courses in new locations. With this being LINKS, it only made sense to envision the ideal golf excursion for an aspiring golf course architect or aficionado of course design. Setting aside logistical obstacles—such as costs […]
Does the Golf Course Architect Matter?
Ted Vassallo, a retired civil engineer from Vermont, says the identity of the golf course architect wasn’t a major factor when he and wife Jan were deciding which of the seven communities at The Cliffs to move into. “We originally intended building a house up in the mountains at Glassy, which has a Tom Jackson […]
100 Years of Pebble Beach: The Academy
In 2019, Pebble Beach Golf Links will celebrate its 100th birthday and host its sixth U.S. Open. To commemorate these milestones, each issue of LINKS Magazine and LINKSdigital between now and then will tell the unique story that is Pebble Beach. Those articles will also be shared here on our website. Combining technology with the human […]
