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Will Less Expensive Golf Courses Ever Catch On? by Steve Sailer UPI, December, 2003 |
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Third of a four part series The Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, Calif., where Davis Love held off a charging Tiger Woods to win $1.2 million at the Target World Challenge on Sunday, exemplifies the long-running trend toward ever more expensive golf courses. A few miles to the north in Moorpark, however, Rustic Canyon Golf Course represents the embryonic movement toward golf courses that cost less yet still intrigue. In 1989, financier David H. Murdock, now owner of the Dole Food Company, hired Jack Nicklaus and his golf course architecture firm Nicklaus Design to build a course that would attract Southern California's elite. Nicklaus met the challenge by crafting narrow fairways that run between giant oaks (many of which Nicklaus transplanted to ideal locations) and past artificial cascades plunging into rock-lined lakes. The spectacular result has succeeded in luring celebrities, such as hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, who built a 17,000 sq. ft. home overlooking the course. Yet, building waterfalls and moving mature trees, which seemed outlandishly posh when Sherwood was built, have since become ho-hum as the top golf architects have become accustomed to budgets that would impress even Hollywood movie directors. For example, Rees Jones Inc. spent close to $60 million on Cascata, which is reserved for guests of the Park Place Las Vegas properties. The weekend greens fee is $500. The number of rounds played nationally has fallen about eight percent in this decade, raising the question of whether golf has gotten too costly. In contrast to Sherwood, nearby Rustic Canyon won Golf Digest magazine's "Best New Affordable Public Course for 2002" award even though it's located in Ventura County, where the median selling price for single family homes is over $400,000. While Sherwood is so tree-lined that it lives up to its name (the land was the location for Douglas Fairbanks Sr.' 1922 movie "Robin Hood"), Rustic Canyon gets by with only a handful of trees and no lakes. Because Rustic Canyon is built in a U-shaped canyon upon a thousand foot deep deposit of sand and gravel, water sinks in immediately, making ponds impractical. Joe Perches, a business executive who has braved the long drive from his home in Santa Monica to play Rustic Canyon 20 times this year, doesn't miss the lakes. He told United Press International, "The land and architecture make the course -- not water, especially not artificially placed water." Architect Gil Hanse and his co-designer Geoff Shackelford carefully laid out 18 wide fairways over the pre-existing lumps and bumps they found in the sandy soil. The undulating links resembles Scotland's fabled home of golf, St. Andrews, which is built on similarly crumpled sand dunes. Both courses reward players for striking well-judged ground-hugging shots rather than the aerial game favored by expensive American "target golf" courses. Hanse and Shackelford moved only 17,000 cubic yards of dirt. In contrast, at the nearby Moorpark Country Club, architect and PGA Tour pro Peter Jacobsen shoved around five million cubic yards to build a course traversing mountain ridges and V-shaped arroyos. The total budget for Rustic Canyon came in at about $3.5 million. While most public courses in area have been offering discounts, and several private clubs are advertising for new members, Rustic Canyon has been raising its greens fees. At $50 on weekend mornings, however, Rustic Canyon is still a bargain for the region. Shackelford, a golf architecture historian who is writing a book called "The Future of Golf," walked the site countless times searching out subtle natural ripples and depressions. He said to UPI, "A sandy site helps, but much of the low construction budget is attributable to design restraint. That means leaving the land alone, using ground features, and allowing the native shrubbery to make for an aesthetically pleasing course instead of injecting expensive man-made features like lakes. By going with the flow of the land instead of fighting it, we did not need an expensive contractor to do feature work." Wrangles with environmentalists often add a decade to the time it takes developers to construct a course in California, but, Shackelford reported, Rustic Canyon enjoyed "a relatively pain free approval process, as environmentally the course was having very little negative impact." Shackelford argued, "Rustic Canyon can be replicated, but you need more developers and municipalities wanting to do such a course and architects who will show some restraint and creativity." Does Rustic Canyon represent the future? Perches noted, "I think that a defining characteristic of the players that 'get' Rustic Canyon is a willingness and perhaps a desire to spend 4 hours walking. But, I find most people prefer golf carts to walking." Oddly enough, this inexpensive course appeals more to the elite player familiar with the economical Scottish mode of play than to the average American golfer, who likes his golf lavish.
Steve Sailer (www.iSteve.com) is a columnist for VDARE.com.
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