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Background Check
The Florida architects inspect the work of the course's original designer, Donald Ross
Posted: Tuesday July 24, 2001 1:21 PM
By John Garrity
After weeks outdoors with engines growling and trees splintering, we've found a
quiet place: a big room with crystal chandeliers that look as if they're not
turned on very often. There are desks, long tables, display cases and document
shelves. From an adjoining room in which books are stored comes a small
sound -- the squeak of a shoe? A mouse? As I'm thinking that an afternoon in
this place must be the equivalent of being bottled in formaldehyde, Khristine
Januzik fills the room with energy. "The biggest part of my job is the
document files," she says, standing by a row of drawers. "If I find
something on a Donald Ross course, bam! It goes into a
file."
It's the bam, the unexpected addition of Emeril Live to Dewey
decimal, that hints at the adventurous side of Januzik -- that and her red
hair and ability to mix precision with hyperbole. "Oh, god, we have 115,000
photographic negatives in the basement, and gazillions of prints," she
says. "It took me three years to index them all on the computer. It almost
takes an obsessive personality to do something like
this."
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Januzik catalogs all things Ross at the Tufts Archives,
including his 1928 routing for East Lake, Bobby Jones's home club.
Greg Foster |
Januzik is director of the Tufts Archives, a golf-infested division of the Given
Memorial Library in the Village of Pinehurst, N.C. The mission of the archives
is to preserve and catalog documents, images and artifacts relating to Pinehurst
Resort and its founder, James W. Tufts. To a certain narrow segment of polite
society -- golf nuts -- the archives are better known as a final resting
place for the business records and memorabilia of Donald Ross, the Scottish-born
master of course architecture. Ross and his associates designed more than 400
courses between 1902 and 1948, including Pinehurst, and I'm here with Scot
Sherman, senior associate designer for Weed Golf Course Design, to ask about one
of them: the University of Florida Golf Course, which was built in the early
1920s as Gainesville Country
Club.
Januzik looks up Gainesville Country Club on her computer, goes to an artifact
drawer, opens it and comes up with ... nothing. No routing plans, no sketch
cards, no construction drawings. "Some Ross courses have a complete record,
but for others the records are lost or destroyed," she says. "You
wouldn't believe all the clubhouse fires. You'd think General Sherman was
marching through all those
courses."
"Well, I've got something for you," Sherman says. "An aerial
photograph of Gainesville Country Club from the
'30s."
Januzik beams. "That's wonderful," she says. "We like to fill
gaps in the
collection."
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Skilled Labor
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A famous golf architect was once asked how he was going to
fulfill his grandiose promises for a new course. "With lots of money and
Mexicans," he replied. Mexicans, in fact, are the backbone of the golf
construction business in the U.S. and make up about 80% of the labor force on
all course projects. "We're used to working hard," says Martin Rosas, a trackhoe operator for MacCurrach Golf of
Jacksonville.
Rosas, 34, grew up on a farm in Cortazar, in central Mexico. He left home when
he was 16, working sporadically in the U.S. before catching on, in 1989, with
architect Pete Dye's Ocean Course team on Kiawah Island, S.C. Rosas has helped
build courses throughout the U.S., returning to Cortazar twice a year to be with
his wife and three children. "He's one of the best hoe operators in the
country," says Florida project manager Tom Weber. "He gives these
bunkers a look that the dozers can't." On this job, architect Bobby Weed
instructed Rosas to tilt the bottoms of the bunkers up toward the green and to
keep them flat on the low side to avoid downhill lies. "Bobby wants to make
them a little concave," Rosas says, "flashing the sand up so you can
see it from the
tee."
Rosas reported to work late one recent morning but was greeted with hugs. That's
because he had come from the Jacksonville Immigration and Naturalization Service
office, where he was told that within 90 days he would be sworn in as a U.S.
citizen. "It's like a dream," Rosas says, smiling
broadly.
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Sherman and I, too, have had a fulfilling day. We played golf this morning with
Sherman's boss, Bobby Weed, on Ross's masterpiece, Pinehurst No. 2. (Our
fourth was No. 2's course superintendent, Paul Jett, who fired a 69 from
the back tees, making us wonder how he spends his workdays.) Weed, a six
handicapper, played distractedly. Like a shopper wandering down grocery aisles,
he stopped to examine a hillock here, a swale there -- all of it food for
architectural thought. "People think Ross built only flat-bottomed
bunkers," he said in the 2nd fairway, his eyes trained on the green.
"That's a misconception. He flashed sand in his bunkers." (Flashed
bunkers have high faces that can be seen from a distance.) "What happened
was," Weed continued, "a lot of bunkers were flattened later for ease
of
maintenance."
Weed paused at the edge of the green to appreciate the undulating putting
surface, refined over decades by Ross and others. "The point is, Ross's
style varied. He did different things in different parts of the country, and he
delegated a lot of work. What did not vary was his design
strategy."
We got around in 3 1/2 hours, and nobody lost a ball. In the locker room a
wound-up Weed could hardly wait to catch his plane to Gainesville to resume work
on the Florida renovation. "I think that's the case whenever I see a great
course," he said. "I get so pumped up that I want to go right out and
work on a
green."
Actually, how (or whether) to renovate is the subject of hot debate at meetings
of the Donald Ross Society, an international membership organization devoted to
the preservation of Ross's memory, design philosophy and courses. Some Ross
aficionados become apoplectic if they hear that someone has moved a bunker or
built a new tee on a Ross course. Others accept that courses must evolve with
time and exigencies. "Look at this," says Sherman, handing me a copy
of a Ross sketch card -- a line drawing of a hole on graph board. "This
angle turns at two hundred yards." He points to the outside of a dogleg and
continues, "At Florida we're turning it at three hundred yards
because those kids can bomb
it."
Another image, produced by a grinning Januzik, shows the Pyramids, a
long-forgotten cluster of chocolate-drop mounds on Pinehurst No. 1. The
ugly, unnatural mounds, arranged in perfect rows, were an accepted feature of
course design in the early 1900s. "They were a useful way to dispose of
rocks," says Sherman. "They piled up some rocks, covered them with
dirt and planted grass on
them."
Neither of these examples of Ross design, it goes without saying, will find its
way onto the Florida course. For Sherman, as for Weed, the visit to Pinehurst is
not so much a hunt for things to copy as it is a quest for inspiration. The
sketch cards, with marginal notes in Ross's precise hand, are like Tibetan
prayer flags. The rolled-up blueprints are like symphonic scores. So when
Januzik unrolls a 1922 routing plan of the Pinehurst courses -- printed on
linen, no less -- Sherman gazes upon it as reverently as he might the Shroud
of Turin. "You see why we like this more than the computer?" he says.
Sherman touches the linen with his fingertips. "This elicits
emotion. Our computer elicits no
emotion."
It's quiet
again.
A change of hue is coming to This Old Course with the arrival of the
first truckloads of sod. In our next installment we'll celebrate with the summer
interns of MacCurrach Golf Construction, Inc., at their campus hangout, the
Salty Dog
Saloon.
Issue date: July 30, 2001
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