Renowned golf course designer Tom Fazio has written that the ultimate golf course is one that “looks hard and plays easy.”
There’s no question that the celebrated Mr. Fazio, who has designed more than 200 courses in his career, knows his way around the links. So, when we began considering the growing number of golf communities, we decided to ask him to look past the fairways and consider the whole package.
We were fortunate enough to find the well-traveled Fazio in his downtown Hendersonville office where we posed the
question to him: What is it that makes a great golf course community?
Naturally, we expected the veteran designer to tell us that the secret to success was the quality of the links. His answer was circumspect…and a little surprising.
“Without question,” he told us, “it’s the program that the owner puts together; the master plan. Champion Hills [one of his better known projects in Western North Carolina] isn’t just 18 holes of golf. It’s a well-designed community of like-minded people who enjoy the amenities and the whole package. Certainly you need a good product [his term for the golf course]…but I look for people who have the vision and the commitment and the resources to build a total community.”
This is not mere guesswork on his part. Fazio knows whereof he speaks when it comes to such communities. He has, in fact, been called the top golf course designer in the world. He learned the business from his club pro father, Sal, and his Uncle George Fazio, a tour pro in the 1940s and ‘50s. In his book, Golf Course Designs, Fazio dedicates the writing to several prominent golf personalities, including, “…Ben Hogan, for winning the 1950 U.S. Open at Merion in Philadelphia where he defeated Uncle George and Lloyd Mangrum in a playoff. If George had won the Open, there’s no telling what might have happened, and maybe he wouldn’t have gone into the golf course design business and I wouldn’t have had the good fortune to follow such a wonderful profession.”
There’s no question that golf has been good to Fazio, even in an economy where interest in the game may be slowing…at least on some levels. Just before our meeting, Fazio spent a half hour on the telephone with a reporter from a national news magazine talking about the softening market for golf course memberships.
Fluctuations in the economy and subsequent tremors in the industry don’t affect high-end golf communities such as Champion Hills or other similar projects, he says. People of means still want to live in a place that boasts a “masterpiece” golf course.
Ask Fazio what his favorite project is and he’ll tell you that he doesn’t have a favorite. However, savvy marketing people have dubbed Champion Hills Fazio’s Mountain Masterpiece. “Of course, my other clients think theirs are masterpieces as well,” he says.
That kind of marketing angle “sets a standard,” he explains. “Here in America we are given to hyperbole…as a culture. My job is to make sure my work lives up to that standard. People expect it to be a great club. That’s why it’s important to find the right people with the right vision to work for.”
Ironically, he says that having the “perfect” piece of land is not the most important thing in designing a golf community. “There’s not one great piece of land,” he says, in the entire roster of 200-plus courses he’s designed. “None were really better than any of the others.”
It’s what the designer and the developer do with the property that gives the course and the community its distinction.
“We do the game a service,” he writes in his book, “by resisting temptations to impose artificial solutions on golf designs…you may wonder sometime why you like a golf course. Why does it feel good? Is it just the beauty of the setting, or is it something else?”
That hard-to-pinpoint element is what engenders enthusiasm in the residents of a well-designed and executed golf community.
However, there are other more tangible elements as well. Environmental concerns, for example, were not really considered back in the “golden age” of golf course designing.
“Environmental issues are now among the most important we encounter,” Fazio writes, “…30 years ago or more, the impact of golf courses on the environment was not an issue.”
“In fact,” he says, “many of the so-called classic golf courses designed in the 1920s and 1930s would not have been designed today as they were then because they wouldn’t have been allowed.”
Environmental and economic issues can be overcome, however. The real tension in building a great golf course and a great community revolves around playability and livability. This is particularly true in a community of residents who have greatly varying degrees of golf skills.
The course, says Fazio, has to accommodate everyone. A great course has to be designed so that it can be made to play either fairly easy or fairly hard. “People like drama and golf is a difficult game at best. You don’t make a course difficult. We like them to look distinctive and beautiful and grand.”
