Interview with Golf Architect Stephen Kay of N.J.

Author’s Note;  We’ll have pics up soon…]

Perhaps no other figures in professional sports are as affable and approachable as golf course architects. Only industry insiders will be likely to have access to touring professional golfers. Resort owners will likely only return your cold calls if they think a business deal will result. But call a golf course architect on the phone – even as a mere golf enthusiast – and you stand a good chance that you’ll get a real person on the end of the line who’ll at least give you a response, if not an engaging dialogue.

New Jersey’s Stephen Kay may not be a household name, but without question, he’s one of the finest minds in golf – he’s a professor at Rutgers University teaching an entire concentration in turf management and golf design – as well as one of the most energetic. He and his design partner, Doug Smith, have built, renovated, or redesigned over 200 courses worldwide. Their restoration work includes designs by Donald Ross, Alister Mackenzie, A.W. Tillinghast, Colt & Alison, Devereux Emmet, and Walter Travis to name a few.

Moreover, besides acclaimed original designs such as the much-heralded Links of North Dakota and Scotland Run, Kay has done two popular pastiche courses – courses that pay tribute to other great designs. First, The Architects Club has 18 holes in the style of 17 Golden Age designers: from Old Tom Morris to Robert Trent Jones. The course is a living museum of golf architecture and history you can actually play, rather than just see. Second, McCullough’s Emerald Links recreates famous holes of the U.K. on the sandy soil of Atlantic City, New Jersey, Kay’s home. Let’s meet one of golf design’s brightest minds and most colorful figures.

JF:  How did you first get interested in designing golf courses?

S. Kay:  Very simple:  As a teenager, I didn’t know what I was wanted to do with my life.  I thought I might be a math teacher, because I was always good at math. I got 100% on my New York State geometry Regents exam, and in college, I took differential calculus as an elective to get an easy A.  That’s how sick I was.

But I started playing golf in April of 9th grade, (1966), and I fell in love with it in my first round.  It was on the 14th hole at Clearview G.C., a muni in Queens, where I hit what I think was a 5-iron that soared into the air, then straight at the pin.  I thought, “I can do that every time! This is great!” and at that moment, I was totally hooked on golf.

JF:  So then what happened next to get you further along to becoming a designer?

S. Kay:  My second round was at Kissena, also in Queens, which was significantly easier, than Clearview, but I didn’t know that.  It’s a par-64 and I thought, “Wow!  Look how much I improved!”  So I took some Easter money I got as gifts from relatives, and bought a set of seven clubs:  driver, 3-wood, some irons and a putter…Kroydon brand, if you remember that model. 

Now in those days you used to get green stamps at the grocery stores, and I took my stamps to a redemption center to get an ugly, old, reddish-green, plaid golf bag, and that was it.  I played 15 times that year, and the last round I actually broke 80 at Kissena, (again, it’s a par-64 guys).

So one day I’m bored in school, and so I started doodling golf holes.  Well that month, Golf Digest had the first of a two-part article by Herbert Warren Wind called something like “Understanding Golf Architecture.”  Ron Whitten would later call it a definitive article in golf course architecture history.   Well I couldn’t wait for next month’s piece, and as soon as I got done with the article, I actually got down and prayed to God that I would become a golf course architect.  It became my childhood dream.  I still tear up thinking about that memory to this day because I was a kid with a dream and God let me achieve it and I’m so grateful for that blessing and all the rest.  I even just teared up a bit now thinking about it. 

It’s like Mike Schmidt the baseball player.  He teared up when he got inducted into the Baseball H.O.F. in Cooperstown.  People don’t realize how much childhood dreams mean to people.  My dad worked on an assembly line, and he said, “This is crazy. They’ll never let a poor kid in a rich man’s game.”  We didn’t know that so much of the game is played on public courses, so we thought it was a real long shot.

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JF:  Did that encourage you to take more jobs at public courses?

S. Kay:  Well I think the munis and the daily fees just had lower budgets, and could not hire Fazio or Jack.  My design fee and budgets are more in their price range.  They were able to afford me as opposed to Fazio or Jack.  And the reverse is that private clubs feel they might need a celebrity name to attract members.  Happily Hamlet G & C.C. on Long Island had a low initiation fee, and hired me.  But some places need to have $150-200,000.00 initiation fees, so they need a player’s name to attract members.  At the time, I wasn’t attractive as a national name.

JF:  So let’s get back to your career path…

S. Kay:  So I’m in 10h grade.  I haven’t decided what college yet and how to accomplish my goal, but end of junior year, as I’m starting to take the SATs, I approached my H.S. guidance counselor and asked her where do I major in golf course architecture.

She said, “What?”

[laughter]

JF:  Okay, then what happened?

S. Kay:  She had no idea!  So then one of us found out about the ASGCA, and I wrote them, (or my mom called on the phone…), and I get the list of members.

So my mom and I did a letter, (mom was the typist, on an old typewriter), and we asked “where do I major in GCA” and sent it to Geoffrey Cornish, Trent Jones, Billy Mitchell, the Gordons, and a handful of others…maybe 7-10 guys.  Jones, Cornish, and Mitchell all took my letter and handwrote on it (not on their stationary), and they all wrote the same thing…”no college has a major…major in civil engineering or, preferably, landscape architecture.”  They suggested Cornell, Syracuse, and maybe a couple others.  So I get these letters and end up going to the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University, the longest named college in the world.

So I go to the 5-year program, and while there as a freshman, I see a tryout for the golf team…no charge!  So the first day 50 guys show up to play.  The person running the tryout was basketball coach Jim Boeheim.  So, I made the freshman team, and we got to play such powerhouses as Lemoyne and Onondaga Community College. 

Then sophomore year, I find out my design studios are 1 p.m. – 4 p.m. every day! I tell Coach Boeheim that I can’t play on the team any more because of my major.

He asked, “Why don’t you change majors?”

I told him, “As much fun as that sounds, I have a better chance of becoming a golf architect, than I do playing on the PGA tour.”

So then during summers I worked at the Concord Hotel on the maintenance crew at their International course, the smaller one by Billy Mitchell, after that, I graduated and wrote 20 architects.  The only one who interviewed me was Joe Finger, the guy who designed The Monster!  (I think that may be one reason why I got the interview.)  Now in 73-74 there was a recession, so at this point I was with a landscape architecture firm on Park Ave. as a draftsman waiting for my break.  Finger interviewed me in Manhattan, but no one ended up getting the job because the jobs he’d hoped would come through didn’t come happen, so he couldn’t hire me.

I was pretty depressed and unsure of what I was going to do, so I visited a friend from S.U. named Jim Wile who knew Frank Duane (who worked with Palmer before Palmer went with Ed Seay as his design partner).  Jim was at Michigan State’s turf program, so I applied to that and got in and graduated as a Spartan as well as an Orangeman.

Afterwards, I got a position as a grow-in super at a course in Michigan, and then got a break working with Bill Newcombe (the first person to work with Pete Dye), and later with Jim Lite, who became Nicklaus’s senior designer.

I left Newcombe in 1983.  He was getting into managing courses in California, and he wanted to know if I wanted to give up design and go into management.  I said no, so my next questions were “now what?” and “where?”  That answer was easy:  NYC!   So I went on my own in 1983.

JF:  So then what happened? How did you first start to study the architecture of the old master designers?

S. Kay:  I thought my career would be better if I learned from the masters like Ross and Tillinghast, so I got old photos and reading material like George Thomas’s book on golf course architecture.  The problem is that, yes, they teach you the strategy of laying out the holes and that’s critical, but I don’t think difficult to understand, and that’s why when Golf Digest had their first Armchair Architect contest, they had 20,000 entries.  Everybody thinks they can do it.

The problem in those books was there weren’t enough photos to show you what they did on the ground.  I tried my best when working at old clubs to find old photos.  The best I could find were those in Thomas’s book.  It was slow process, but they taught me which bunkers to flash and which not, how far out to put bunkers and, more importantly, tricks like flashing sand in fairway bunkers on uphill holes so as to see them from the tree and on downhill holes leaving the sand at the bottom of the bunker…a “grass down” bunker.  I learned that from Ross.

So I’d collect these photos and books, and I’d go out in the field and find those holes and see if they changed or if they are the same as in the photo.  Then I’d carefully study architectural drawings, as well as what’s on the ground already on the site.  I had clubs that had Tillie and Flynn and Ross’s drawings, which were particularly instructive.

JF:  So tell us about your career arc.

S. Kay:  My first 18 hole master plan was Glen Head Country Club on L.I.  It was an old Devereux Emmet course formerly called Women’s National.  My first 18-hole original design was Hiland C.C. in Glens falls NY – public daily fee, circa 1988.

Then I built a 9-hole course on an estate near Millerton, N.Y. owned by Stan Peschel, but we didn’t just do two sets of tees to make an 18-hole course for him.  I did two greens on some holes or I did big double greens.  So he had 18 tees and 18 pins and greens and flags, but only nine fairways.  From the back tees it was about 6500 yards, par-71.

When the USGA came to do slope and rating, they thought they could only go around nine holes once, but when they saw it they said, “shoot we have to go around twice and rate and slope it as a true 18-hole golf course!”

JF:  How much money do you think you saved doing it that way?

S. Kay:  He got that course, irrigation included, for about $400,000

JF:  Do you think that in a recession more courses could look to this solution and still provide interesting cheap public golf?

S. Kay:  Absolutely!  One of the problems with golf is it takes so much land!  People have time constraints too, but people when they play 18, they don’t want same green complexes and same putts.  That’s the difference I made for Stan.  His course is right on the border of where N.Y. hits Connecticut and Massachusetts, right on the corner.

This is a great way for a municipality that needs to do a course or for developers who have issues with space; it’s a nice, inexpensive compromise, 18 greens or a combination with double greens, and then some angled tees with hazards placed so that they affect shots differently each round of nine.  It also works well for developers with housing.  That way, it also gets more play then your average 9-holer.  It costs a little more to maintain than a traditional 9-holer because there’s more green, but more marketable despite that.

JF:  A smaller course a bit like what they did at the Sheep Ranch out at Bandon?

S. Kay:  I wish I’d have known about that when I was out there, but I did get to play Old Macdonald.

JF:  So then what courses came next?

S. Kay:  Blue Heron Pines, The Hamlet Golf and Country Club, the Links of North Dakota, Manhattan Woods (private, w/Gary Player), Links at Unionvale, Scotland Run, The Architects’ Club, and McCullough’s Emerald Links.

JF:  Who are some of your favorite architects and why?

S. Kay:  Well I mentioned Ross and Tillie.  Ross used land well and routed his courses well.  He did wonderful greens, although he didn’t do the Pinehurst greens.  He didn’t do turtlebacks.  His best greens that I ever saw were at Oyster Harbor on Cape Cod.

Tillinghast did great looking bunkers.  He varied them from flashed sand to grass down and would do it not only on the same course, but in the same bunker! I also like how he did his bunkers at a diagonal, more than Ross who did them parallel or perpendicular to the line of flight.  Go to Hempstead G.C., a hidden gem of Tillie’s.  The members know they have a great course there. It’s only 6500 yards, but has great diagonal bunkers.  There’s also Sunningdale in Westchester:  which personally I think is both a Tille and a Raynor.

I also like Dev Emmet, who did interesting putting surfaces especially.  And obviously, you have to like Macdonald/Raynor/Banks. The way they would take those same 25 holes they kept doing – the Redan, the Biarritz, etc. – it was fascinating how they translated those and fit them onto the piece of property they had to work on and make them work as a cohesive whole.  They did the same 25 holes, but they were masters at making every course feel different, have great variety, and give each course a character of its own.

Jack Nicklaus got a lot better over time. In the ’80s I didn’t like his stuff at all, although I do like Desert Highlands in Scottsdale, a Jack from the 80s.  Recently, he’s learned to make his courses more playable for the guy who is trying to break 100.  And of course, his magnum opus is Muirfield Village in Ohio.  That golf course surprised me a lot.

JF:  Why and how?

S. Kay:  Well I see a lot of courses, especially a lot in the top 100, and I’m not impressed with many of them.  So I go there and expect sometimes when I see it, for it to be overrated.  But I got to Muirfield Village and it was one great golf hole after another.  Desmond Muirhead did the golf routing and the housing and roads, and Jack did the course.  Its’ tremendous, it’s in my top 10.

Then there’s Pete Dye.  I like Sawgrass.  I love Kiawah’s Ocean Course.  I know this is a minor thing, but he hides his cart paths well and that’s an example of how he does the little things right.  I think he’s a lot like Seth Raynor.

JF:  Why and how?

S. Kay:  He tends to do grass down bunkers.  He tends to do his bunkers in geometric patterns, which Raynor did because he was an engineer.  His holes have the playing characteristics of famous holes like a Redan and an Eden and a Long, and they have a look to them that reminds me of a modern looking Raynor.

JF:  Tell us what important lessons you learned from the architects who gave you your first jobs?

S. Kay:  Newcombe and Lite taught me the routing first, along with the  safety issues.  Then, when you are bidding out a course, what drawings and blueprints do you need.  On a green, what are the basic concepts of designing a green to hold a golf shot, yet drain properly:  basically GCA 101 and 102.  Then, it was me renovating courses that taught me a lot as well.

JF:  What courses that you have played inspire you to imitate the same design concepts?

S. Kay:  First here are some I had nothing to do with:

Anything at National.  The whole thing is a masterpiece.  Then, Bethpage Black.  I love 4 and 5.  Next is Pine Valley:  there are no specific holes, but if you want to make a course look natural – not manicured like Augusta – if you want to see two polar opposites in that regard, see Pine Valley and Augusta.

In the Bronx, Split Rock influenced me a bit in the early part of my career.  I loved the mounds and berms that connected into the bunkers.  Now it’s way overgrown with trees, but if they ever get it away from being stupidly narrow, there is a lot of architecture there.

Then there are the places that I renovated and then used things I saw and used in my own work.  There’s Tillie’s Hempstead.  Ross’s Oyster Harbor and Winchester C.C. in Boston, and Knollwood – both Raynor and Tille worked here.  There are a number of Raynor courses I have seen around d the country.  Then Seawane on L.I., a Dev Emmet design with wonderful green complexes and contours.  I started doing work there in the ’80s and then did a radical extreme makeover from ’01 to ’06.  We took all the trees down, we added 10,000 yards of fill per hole and went from a flat course to one that looked like the Ocean course at Kiawah.

JF:  Tell us about some of the most interesting holes on the public courses you have designed.

S. Kay:  I think all the par-3s at Links of North Dakota are great.  I have had people say they are the best set of natural par-3s on any course they have seen in the world.  The 11th is a variation on 10 at Pine valley.  The 17th is a Redan.  The two on the front I just followed the topography. 

At Blue Heron Pines, the 7th is a short par-4.  I love short par-4s. I did a hole of my own creation there called a Trinity hole with three bunkers.  I repeat that one a lot.  Then the 14th there has “Hells Half Acre,” Tillie’s “Great Hazard” idea.  Then 15 has a big diagonal bunker like 5 at Bethpage

JF:  Where do you go to play golf for fun?  For Vacation?

S. Kay:  I love the North Dakota trip of Hawktree, Bully Pulpit, and LND.  There is an Arnold palmer/Ed seay course called Fossil Creek – the name may have changed – but whenever I’ve been at the Superintendent’s show in Dallas, I try to visit my college roommate and play Fossil.  I also like what Nicklaus did at Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida.  He has three nines of his own, and then he has the copy of St. Andrews called “The New Course.”

JF:  Yeah, but that’s a $500 round.

S. Kay:  It’s high.  Then there’s my trip to Scotland for Gleneagles, St. Andrews, and North Berwick.

JF:  What public courses do you think people should go tom play to learn about what makes for great golf design?

S. Kay:  One of the golf magazines took their top 50 daily fee courses and compared them for value and LND was number 2 in the country.  Bandon is great, but it will cost you a couple thousand dollars.  The North Dakota trip is a fraction of the cost.  Friends of mine that have done Whistling Straits and Pacific Dunes said that all told 36 holes at Hawktree, Bully Pulpit, and Links of North Dakota was $1,100.  You can even play 54 holes, because you’re at the end of the time zone and far north, you can play till 10 at night.  One day we played 72 holes at LND!  I couldn’t move much the next day!

Next, you have to play Bethpage.  You have to play both the Red and the Black, and add the green if you can.  It has terrific greens and it’s a nice easy warm up.

Then go to Atlantic City.  As a golf destination, it has a large quantity of large golf courses within 30 minutes, and there are about a dozen terrific courses.  I challenge any other destination besides Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head with a dozen courses or more to prove they have better courses with a greater variety of design than A.C.  There’s  Blue Heron Pines, McCulloughs, Twisted Dunes, (the rates have come down and you can get good package rates), and then you have Seaview, (Donald Ross and William Flynn), and Atlantic City Country Club (Willie Park and William Flynn with a Doak redesign).

Then the two complexes at Boyne Mountain and Boyne Highlands in Michigan are also nice.  Boyne Highlands has the Donald Ross Memorial Golf Course.  It’s a replica of Ross’s best holes and it’s really good.

JF:  What is the first duty of a golf course architect?

S. Kay:  To design a golf course that’s safe.  You can’t design where people are ducking balls and feeling like they need a batting helmet.  I’ll walk away from the job instead of risk someone getting hurt on a cramped site.

JF:  What mistake would you like to have over again?

S. Kay:  What?  Like that girl I dated in college? 

[Laughter]

Well let’s see…get everything in writing!

[More laughter]

Okay, besides that, trees are a big issue.  If I could have a dollar every time someone said, “the tree makes the hole,” my wife and I could go to on some nice vacations!  People fall in love with trees.  Thank goodness for Oakmont and Winged Foot that in the last seven years!  Those golf course have done intense tree clearing, which has made it easier to cut down trees at courses around the country.

So at plenty of courses, I’ve had arguments and difficulty to convince clubs to cut down trees, and so its easier now to get clubs to cut down trees than it was twenty years ago.  Well about 15 – 17 years ago, I was at a course which put out proposals to renovate the course.  They got 15 proposals, and I got one of 5 interviews. After the interview, the Greens Chair called me and said that the members and the chairman liked you, and they wanted to go see what you renovated recently. Well one job had a couple key trees on a couple holes that the club fought to not cut down.  They didn’t allow me to remove them, and they were just stupid trees.  Well the chairman of the course of the job I wanted visited this course and asked about my work.

Two weeks go by, I hear nothing.  So I called them and they had decided on someone else, but the green chair said the fact that I didn’t get the stupid trees down, they couldn’t use me.  He said that their course had a lot of stupid trees that needed to come down, and he needed a strong personality to get some of their trees down.  He told me I needed to get stronger and tougher.  He said I should have been tougher on getting the trees cut down at the other club, or walked away.  Because I wasn’t more forceful at the smaller course earlier in my career, it cost me a nicer renovation job at a more prestigious club because I didn’t have the chutzpah to stand up and insist stupid trees come down.

JF:  What is the strangest, zaniest thing you have ever had to deal with while trying to build a golf course?

S. Kay:  Well I was doing a master plan at a country club, and one night the green chairman and the super and I are having dinner, and out of the blue the green chairman, who normally was quiet and reserved, said the funniest thing right while I was drinking some water.  He made me laugh so hard, I spit up water all over the him, he was drenched! I was sure that when I turned in the plan I wouldn’t get invited back, but he had a good sense of humor about it.  That was without question, my most embarrassing moment.

JF:  Some architects say that you have to compromise and make trade offs pretty much at every course.  Can you recall some moments that you had to make some trade offs that you were concerned about initially that actually might have worked, just specific examples from some courses that you built?

S. Kay:  At Blue Heron Pines, the first hole was originally 360-370 from the back tees.  Then, because of wetlands, we had to make the first hole about 325 from the back tee. Then, I also had to angle the par-3 2d hole.  But also, the course is public, and many players who play munis with no practice ranges might need a warm up.  So at first, I thought the beginning at BHP was too short, but since most people like starting with an easy bogey, par, or birdie, it worked out even though I though it might not at first.

I have also had a few courses where we had to shorten a hole due to environmental restrictions.  I was perhaps hoping to get a long par-4, but then a letter comes back saying that we can’t use that land because of environmental concerns, and I have to build a short par-4, but it works out in the long run because I still get to design an interesting hole, just a par-3-1/.2 not a par 4-1/2!  Plus it’s a lot of fun to design short par-4s, because you have a playable hole for everybody, but it still it has to have interesting strategy and options.  They can drive it or hit short clubs and not take the chance on driving into trouble, but I leave it to them and the hole ends up working anyway even though it’s rather short.

Jay:  Examples?

S. Kay:  Blue Heron Pines number 7 and at the 6th at Scotland Run.

JF:  How do you deal with the dilemma of restoring a course to its old design, but with technology advances, still making it challenging to the best golfers?

S. Kay:  Is the old style from someone famous and is it worth preserving?  Next, was the architect actually on the site or did he mail the work in?  As an example, let’s look at the character of the bunkers.  Tillie in his drawings just did simple egg-shaped ovals to tell the builder on site where to put the bunker, but he didn’t draw shapes on his plans…but he did more ornate work when he went into the field.  But his foremen just did what they saw in the drawing…but when Tillie was on-site a lot the bunkers had more ornate details.  But when he wasn’t on the site, you could tell because the bunker shapes were much more simple.  So when I restored Lakewood, for instance, we made them more ornate because we wanted to create what Tillie would have done if he were on site during construction.

Next, I sometimes need to move something to get more yardage for the course, and get the bunkers into back into play for who they were intended to be in play.  First I try to move tees, then move the bunkers if I can’t move the tees back.  It’s a very conscious thought.  If Tillie, Ross, or Mackenzie could come back today, the first thing I thing I think they would do is examine the game for three months if not a year.  They’d play the courses, try the new clubs, and then see the pros and watch the speed of the greens and how the ball flies.  After that, how would they renovate their course?  That’s how I try to think

JF:  Do you think that television has a bad impact on architecture because people tend to associate prettiness and opulence with great design?

S. Kay:  Unfortunately, the Masters tends to be the most watched and most liked major, everyone wants to copy it.  Also, the timing of the Masters being first signals the start of golf season in the north.  Then you get greens chairmen around the country trying to play monkey see-monkey do and have an unbelievably pristine and green golf course, which costs too much money and is next-to-impossible to reproduce.  TV shows “green is good” and that hurts golf.

JF:  Tell us about the Architects Club, where you did holes in the style of 17 different Golden Age architects.

S. Kay:  The last thing I did with Bill Newcombe was routing plan for Donald Ross Memorial G.C., and my mom called during lunch and she told me how excited she was that the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) was having exhibit of greatest architects of the 20th century, so I got the idea to have a museum of great golf architects that you could play.  Photos of the great golf courses aren’t enough.  You have to play a golf design to experience it; there’s no other sport like it except maybe skiing.

What are some of my favorite holes there?  Let’s see:  13, Mackenzie, is the only hole that is a copy of a specific hole – 13 at Augusta. The other holes are not copies of holes, but we tried to capture three traits from each designer.  We asked ourselves:  how did these architects 1) design the hole – penal or strategic or freeway, then 2) how did they build and shape the bunkers, then 3) then how did they contour the greens.  So in that regard, I like 5 – Walter Travis.  That’s a wonderful little par-4.  I also like 7, Tillinghast.  It’s different from the rest of the course in this way:  most architects had a style, but Tillie had many styles.  This long par-4 with a hard dog-leg over a cross bunker, dolomites, a narrow bunker, and a large bunker with a tongue to walk up, is an amalgam of his styles over time.  We also gave Ross two holes because he had so much variety of style and because he was the father of modern golf course architecture and the ASGCA.

Last, 10 is George Thomas.  With the bunkering and with it being short, it’s a good rejoinder to the 10th at Riviera.  Thomas was wonderful at designing a “risk and reward hole” and we feel #10 is a great example.

JF:  What about LND?

S. Kay:  It’s my highest ranked course nationally.

JF:  Why?

S. Kay:  Because the site was so awesome.  The only problem is not enough people have seen it. 

JF:  It used to be called Red Mike Resort?  After a rustler who they tied to a chair and lit a fire under it, but he endured the torture and didn’t tell where he hid the stolen cattle?

S. Kay:  That’s right.  We were going to have an air strip and 36 holes and a resort and a lot of other attractions and lodging and even a little park, but we didn’t get enough investors to make all that happen.

To fill you in on how I got to build the course, I teach four classes in a two year professional turf program at Rutgers where they learn how to be golf course superintendents.  It’s ranked number 4 in the country.  In 1994, one of the students approached me and asked if I would be interested in doing something in the Midwest.  I said my wife just had a baby and I’m not interested right now, but out of curiosity, I asked where and he said N.D.

Well it turns out that one of the best shapers I know was born and bred in N.D. So I told the student about the shaper friend and said if I don’t have to be there a lot, he knows me and he does my work really well.  If the two of us can do this together, maybe we can do this project. 

Well then the student tells me he doesn’t even have a site picked out!  I though there was nothing that could come of this.

Well it turns out he was already super of a 9-holer in Williston, up in the furthest northwest corner of the state near the Canadian and Montana border. 

Well, long story short…

JF:  Too late…

[Laughter]

S. Kay:  The site where the course now sits was found by my student and others.  It looked like Ireland with all the hummocks.  The soil was U.S.G.A. spec, and six feet deep there were still no rocks and it’s on the water!  Just unbelievable:  a dream come true.

So I did several plans before settling on a final version, and Weeks went to meet the owner of the land, a 90 y/o guy from Montana. He drove out to meet him, and…he’s not selling.

They had left the plan in the car – we didn’t want to scare him off telling him it was for a golf course – so they go out to the car and get ready to back out and leave, when they notice in this guys back yard, he has a golf cart.  So they go back in, tell him it’s for a golf course, and show him my drawing.  His eyes get as big as saucers and he sold the land for …guess how much for 250 acres?

JF:  $250,000

S. Kay – $76,000!  Under $200 an acre! Can you believe it?  For lakefront property!  In order to afford building the course I waived my fee and so did the shaper and irrigator.  So we built that course for $300,000.  We moved only 7,000 cubic yards of earth.  We hardly had to do anything.  Six greens I didn’t change any grades, we just seeded it to existing grade.  We also just pushed up greens and pushed up tees.  It was a dream come true for everyone involved and a bit of Heaven I love to visit time and again.