The Next 10 Years: Architecture

by Victor Williams

Pronghorn, in Central Oregon, offers a stunning new Tom Fazio golf course to its private club members.

It seems like anyone who’s ever picked up a golf club or watched The Masters on TV fancies himself or herself a golf course architect these days. It’s been a hot job for a good 15 years now, if not longer, and while last year saw more American courses closing than opening for the first time in decades, newcomers to the design game are still joining the kings of the profession in record numbers to try their hands at fashioning fun, profitable and playable tracks out of whatever 200-acre-or-less hunk of land they’ve got to work with.

The operative word there, of course, is “profitable.” With spiraling land, construction and water costs, it’s nearly impossible for a quality stand-alone public course to be built these days, unless it’s on a Native American reservation (like We-Ko-Pa’s new Saguaro, reviewed on Page 14) or part of an over-the-moon destination like Bandon Dunes. Most new projects are considered “amenities” to massive housing projects or private clubs or both. That’s what the West’s golfing public has become used to — though a lot of folks still can’t swallow the hefty greens fees that come with the privilege of playing these immaculate new courses. Nor do many of them, especially those with young families, have the time to dedicate an entire day to a round of golf.
That presents a rash of challenges for today’s architect: To keep designing courses that make economic sense while adhering to both a developer’s needs, the public’s desire for great conditions and their craft’s time-tested tenets. What will a new course look and feel like 10 years down the fairway?

To get an idea, we asked three architects — a giant in the game (Tom Fazio), an up-and-coming West Coast designer (Damian Pascuzzo) and a relative newcomer from Oregon (Dan Hixson) — to give their best educated guesses on what’s around the next dogleg.

There’s been talk of a movement toward shorter courses recently — maybe six-hole loops that will let people play in much less time. Any thoughts on that?

FAZIO: I think we’ll see [shorter courses] in specific locations. It won’t be the norm. When we had a downturn in real estate development and golf back in the ’70s, there was a big move to executive courses. Then we had a boom in the ’80s and ’90s and nobody built those courses. Now here we are back to the same thing, but I don’t see the six- or 12-hole courses. The game we watch on TV is an 18-hole game. Nine-hole courses are wonderful, and some old courses had two different holes on one green, or alternate tees — a lot of those things have been done over the 125 years golf has been in America. We’ve had a lot of ups and downs.

I’ve always been a proponent of executive courses. In certain markets, they’re fabulous, and if they’re done in the highest quality, they have a specific place in golf. They are good for golf. It all gets down to cost. One problem with golf is that it takes a lot to maintain a course, and we all want conditions to be so good. That doesn’t come inexpensively.

I don’t know where there will be a trend. From 1997 to 2007, if you look at the growth of golf over that time on a chart, it would be interesting. Where would that chart be going over the last couple of years? It would be down. Nobody has a crystal ball, but I think we’ll find with more people retiring and more disposable income, more wealth than ever in the history of America, it would seem that executive courses would work. The problem is, how many bodies can you put on it? What are the economics of that? In America, if it’s not profitable, who’s gonna do it?

PASCUZZO: You’re going to see courses configured so you can play fewer holes. We’re doing shorter courses. There’s such a bifurcation in the game right now between guys who play it for a living or at a high level, and how far the weekend players can hit the ball. I don’t even worry about the top-end guys anymore, unless I have a client who wants to hold championships. Pretty much all of my clients right now want courses for the four- or five-time-a-month player; for them, 6,400 or 6,500 yards is plenty.

The acreage I’m not using in length, I’m trying to get it in width. I think we’ll see more and more of that.

I can tell you what I wish we would see. I would love a revolution in golf like snowboarding was to skiing — totally reinvigorate the game at a different level. I’m not sure what that is — a game you play with four or five clubs, with a different ball, on shorter courses. But, damn, something like that would be awesome.

It’s going to take someone like a Nike, with deep marketing expertise and deep pockets, to say, “Here, this game is cool, it’s kind of like golf, but it’s faster, it’s more fun and here’s why you’ll like it.” That would stimulate interest in traditional golf.

HIXSON: The whole industry has been saying we need alternate facilities to get people on the course and started. But not a lot of those have big business success. There’s a need for alternative deals — they just need to figure out how to fund them better, so they work for a developer. The First Tee program and things like that are great, and I’d gladly donate my time to make something like that happen, but the costs to develop something like that are so high. There’s an alternative site going in [in Eastern Washington], a new Peter Jacobsen-Jim Hardy nine-hole design with three-hole loops. I think that’s a great idea.

Last year saw course closings outnumber openings for the first time in many years. Is this a long-term trend or just a natural cycle? Are costs taking their toll?

FAZIO: If you look at where golf started, in Scotland and Ireland, they had a lot of land, linksland, because nobody wanted to live there. It’s too harsh. One of the problems with golf in America is the cost of land. And then there’s the environmental issue; that sounds negative, but that’s why golf costs what it costs.

Will we continue to have that growth? Who would have thought we’d have as many expensive homesites as we have now, or golf magazines, or golf course architects? It’s interesting, and hopefully I’ll live another 10 years to look back and see what’s happened. There are so few new courses started, because we’ve had so many built. Golf is just in that cycle again.

PASCUZZO: New course development in the U.S. has already slowed. The vast majority of new golf will be tied into residential or resort development. I don’t think you’ll see too many more La Purisimas — stand-alone golf courses on 200 acres — until eight to 10 years from now. There will be a critical mass of boomers that will be into that age range where they have the time and ability to play a lot of golf. That may stimulate a greater need for new courses. I think you’ll see remodeling and renovation of existing courses. Most of the courses closed are low-end value courses, not so much the mid-range or high-end courses.

HIXSON: I sort of think the industry in general has to get a lot smarter — not so much the designers and construction people, but the people who develop them need to think things through better. In Central Oregon, there’s far too much inventory. The golf courses are fantastic, and if you look at who’s building over there, they’ve got the top tier of the golf design business, but there are homesites for sale on all these big projects, and not enough members to go around. There are a lot of great niches, and I think we found one in Bandon [Bandon Crossings, opening later this year]. My next project is in Walla Walla, a housing development course. There are a lot of niches out there, but a lot of people sort of wishing their projects will work.

There’s a lot of design and build activity beyond the United States’ borders, from the Caribbean to China. How long will that continue?

FAZIO: Architects will go where the jobs are. We went to Japan and the Philippines when it was booming. Then when that market faltered, the U.S. market boomed again. It’s very cyclical on the economic side. When you’re in a slow housing market, the golf market is on the same side. We may be in a cycle where there are not many new golf courses on the scale we’re used to.
I still have the same number of projects I always do, because I never grew to the point of wanting to do tremendous numbers, especially worldwide — but now I’m in the Virgin Islands, Cabo, the Caribbean. I’m doing two courses in the Bahamas, which is now an emerging market. Funny how that happens.

So, overall, what do you see over the next decade in course design? Will Americans still demand near-perfect conditioning and be willing to pay for it?

PASCUZZO: I think one of the reasons golf appeals to so many people is it’s a wonderful landscape experience — they get out into a great environment four or five hours a day. And you tend to play a little better if the conditioning is better. Still, I think you’ll see fewer $100 courses. Most of my clients are looking at the market of $45 to $60 on weekends and even $25 or $30 on weekday afternoons. Maybe Tom Fazio has a little different clientele, bigger membership value and $150 greens fees, but my clients are looking much more at the mid-range.

HIXSON: Mega-developments will continue to happen. The industry needs to cater to the low end, but there will be someone like Donald Trump building something bigger and fancier; everybody’s trying to do something on that high end, and that won’t go away. It’s one notch down that we’ve built too many, with too few people to fill those spots. I’ve been in the golf business a long time — my dad was a pro, my brother’s a pro, I’m still a PGA pro. Grew up in a small down with a course with five bunkers, and you could rake them for free golf. That’s gone. Nowadays, who doesn’t want to build a course that’s really nice and can charge quite a bit?

I was inspired by Bandon Dunes — that this is what designing golf courses can be like, for under $5 million, as opposed to run-of-the-mill, $7 million or $8 million courses that after you’ve played them three times, you don’t care if you play it again. Pacific Dunes is as good as anything in the world. We’re building Bandon Crossings for about $2 million. So it can be done. FG

Topographical Trio

The Master: Tom Fazio
In the game since: Early 1960s
Based in: Florida and North Carolina
Play one of the West’s handful of $500 golf courses, and you’ll likely find Fazio’s fingerprints on it. Of course, the list is short — Shadow Creek and the Wynn, both in Las Vegas, are perhaps Fazio’s best-known West Coast efforts, and they’ll both set you back five benjys and a stay in one of the hotels with which they share an owner. But Fazio’s work is found up and down the West Coast, starting in Palm Springs back in the 1970s and continuing to this day with openings in Oregon (Pronghorn), NorCal (Martis Creek, scheduled for 2008) and others either under construction or on the drawing board. By any measure, Fazio is an architecture superstar, right up there with Jack Nicklaus, Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Tom Doak.
And he’s also one of the best minds in the business, with the quotes to back it up.

The Natural: Damian Pascuzzo
In the game since: Late 1980s
Based in: El Dorado Hills, Calif.
Online: www.2Pgolfdesign.com
Pascuzzo is a bright light on the horizon of design trends for the West Coast and beyond. Based in the Sacramento area, he flew under the radar for several years, doing the heavy lifting at courses credited to others, before setting out on his own a few years ago. Now he’s partnered with former PGA Tour player Steve Pate. The pair drew raves for their first major effort, Monarch Dunes, which opened on California’s Central Coast in early 2006. Now they’re working on new 12-hole “Challenge Course” at Monarch, all tough 3-pars, followed by two new projects also on the Central Coast, then in Japan.

The Fresh Voice: Dan Hixson
In the game since: 1980s (player), early 2000s (architect)
Based in: Portland, Ore.
Online: www.bandoncrossings.com
Hixson is a native Oregonian who grew up in a golfing family and spent several years as a golf professional at Columbia-Edgewater Country Club in Portland, Ore., before switching to the challenge of designing the kind of courses he wanted to play — those that hew closely to the natural landscape and offer whiffs of his favorite architects, among them Alister MacKenzie and Tom Doak, the mastermind of Pacific Dunes, just up Highway 101 from Hixson’s soon-to-open Bandon Crossings. Watch out for this guy — we predict he could find himself at the red-hot designer’s table next to Doak and David McLay Kidd, who laid out Bandon Dunes.