GENTLE BEN WAS A GOLFER
TIGER Woods changed the game in April 1997 when he went out in 40 on the front nine on Thursday, came back in 30 and won The Masters three days later by 12 shots. No one was under any illusion he was a transformative player and after years of America yearning for ‘the next Nicklaus’ they found one.
Jordan Spieth broke almost every Masters scoring record except Woods’ 72-hole total, which courtesy of a missed short putt on the final green, he equaled. Many, it seems, are eager to anoint the 21-year-old Texan as the next great player and anyone who saw him play the incredible final day 63 in the Australian Open five months ago witnessed probably the best round ever played in this country. No doubt he is an uncommon talent and his confirmation he will be back to defend his title in Sydney is exactly the boost the Australian Open needs. After two years of the Adam Scott versus Rory McIlroy promotion, Scott will now have to deal with someone almost as hard to beat.
Spieth played a practice round at Augusta with fellow Texan Ben Crenshaw, the Masters champion of 1984 and 1995. It was Crenshaw’s final Masters as a player this year, his skills diminished and the course made so long now, there is almost no way around it for a short hitter. “Thankfully I never have to go back there again,” Crenshaw said of the final time he played off the 11th tee. Crenshaw was one of the early young, and generally blond, Americans to be cursed with the ‘next Nicklaus’ expectation but none, until Tiger, even came close to matching the Nicklaus record.
In the days after his death there was the often-told Richie Benaud story of the young boy who asked the great man if he had ever played cricket. So pervasive was the influence of television it was perhaps not surprising kids assumed he was just a TV commentator. Like Benaud, Crenshaw in years to come will perhaps be better known as one half of a great golf course design team, one, which has left the game with some incredible golf courses. Bill Coore, his design partner for almost 30 years now was pitching for a job in the mid-1980s when the developer suggested he would have a better chance of winning the commission if he could team up with a famous Tour pro.
Coore didn’t know any Tour players but someone suggested he might get on with Crenshaw. The meeting was arranged and the pair met and hit it off immediately. They saw the game the same way, liked and disliked the same courses and design traits and determined to build great courses together. Their business would be one where quality was never to be trumped by quantity. Not for them was the boast of how many courses in how many countries they were building at the same time. Whilst other famous Tour players were building multiple courses on multiple continents at the same time in the boom years of the 1990s, Coore and
Crenshaw were taking one or two projects at a time and pouring all their skills and energy into doing them as well as they possibly could. They teamed with talented shapers, who built beautiful man-made features highlighted by their bunkers, which are some of the most elegant ever made. Many times they would decline the chance to build a course because the land or the project wasn’t to their liking. Bill once rebuffed one of America’s richest men who wanted him to make a course. “You would hate what we want to build and we would hate building what you want,” was Coore’s summation to a man clearly used to getting his own way.
Their first great course was Sand Hills far out in the middle of Nebraska where the weather is so bad the course is only opened for five, maybe six if the snow holds off, months a year. There is an incredible 60 square mile area of sand dunes in the middle of the state and a brave developer, Dick Youngscap, took a chance on a golf business working in the middle of nowhere.
It has because the golf is so enchanting and so perfect, members were happy to join in the knowledge they might only get out there once or twice a year.
Friars Head, a couple of hours drive from New York, is another of their masterful courses made on beautiful land but as impressive is Talking Stick in Arizona.
The former is a small private club with an unimaginable joining fee and the latter is a public course charging less than a $100 a round. It is made on a flat utterly unpromising plot of desert but with just enough man-made hazards to make the game really fun and really interesting.
Golf course designers can never hope to match the fame of big-time sports commentators but decades from now when Coore and Crenshaw courses are defining classics in the mound of the work of Alister MacKenzie, Harry Colt, George Thomas and Tom Simpson someone will wonder of Ben Crenshaw ever played golf. My guess is he wouldn’t be unhappy about it at all.
MIKE CLAYTON is Australia’s most outspoken columnist is an acclaimed course designer with Ogilvy Clayton Cocking Mead Course Design. His column appears monthly in Golf Australia. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelClayto15