It’s easy to forget that former USGA boss Frank Hannigan’s seminal article on golf architect AW Tillinghast was only published in 1974, just over forty years ago. Up to that point, Tillinghast was practically forgotten, and few golfers, if asked, would have been able to name the architect of the course they were playing.

Today, matters are very different. The rise of the signature design business, whether or not you view it as a good thing for golf architecture and the game as a whole, has made course design big news. The long careers of Robert Trent Jones Sr, and later Pete Dye, put architects on the sports pages. And, as public interest in golf design has grown, so architects old and new have emerged from the shadows. Historians and researchers alike have uncovered reams of evidence about how the greats of yesteryear worked, so we now know far more of the careers of Harry Colt, Donald Ross et al than was the case not so long ago, and several modern day architects have developed ‘fan clubs’ of people happy to travel half way round the world to play their latest work.

Alongside this increased interest in architecture and architects (which, naturally, we at GCA applaud), has grown a new movement – that of restoration. If the likes of Colt, Ross, and MacKenzie represent a pinnacle of the art of golf design, runs the argument, should we not try and ensure that at least some of their key works are as they were when the great architects built them? That way, when we talk about the works of those olden-times greats, we do at least have something we can reliably cite as evidence. 

But golf courses are living creations that grow and mutate every day, not stone carvings that sit in a museum. The simple act of playing golf ensures that a course will change; divots and sand splash from bunkers change the contours of playing surfaces. Regular maintenance sees bunker edges being trimmed and green edges moving along with the mower, so, in time, significant changes can be wrought without any intent to do so. 

And then sometimes changes are planned. We are a century on from much of the work of Colt and Ross, and the game we play now is very different from that of their day. Perhaps Bobby Jones could on occasion drive the ball 300 yards, courtesy of fairways that received irrigation only from the sky and would be rock hard in periods of drought. But he certainly couldn’t carry it that far, as many top players do today. Nor did he possess clubs with sharp grooves, allowing him to impart so much backspin that a mid iron could be expected to stop within a few yards of where it lands.

So restoration is a complex calculation. It is also arguable. If you take a hole that MacKenzie built at 360 yards, return the green and bunkering to his original positioning, shapes and contouring, but then move the tee back forty yards to allow for the greater distance of today’s golfers, are you restoring his hole? Opinions vary. Yet, as anyone who plays the heath courses of southern England regularly will testify, you don’t need 7,200 yards to provide a challenging, entertaining game for the overwhelming majority of players. So perhaps a more rigorous restoration programme would be of benefit for some clubs.

This question of length probably helps to explain where the restoration trend has most quickly grown in popularity. The courses that have embraced a restorative mindset tend to be those with a connection to a famous architect of yesteryear, but without ambitions to hold top championships any more. Such courses may well have been championship venues in the past, but most have accepted that a lack of length means their days of hosting the biggest events are past. Those that retain championship ambitions rarely seek to go back – we don’t hear of restorations to Winged Foot, or Pebble Beach, or Shinnecock Hills. These clubs tend to be more concerned with increasing the perceived difficulty of scoring on their courses.

Which is why the recently completed project on the North course of the Olympia Fields club in Chicago maybe rather significant. Olympia Fields, one of the city’s leading golf clubs, is a place with a proud history of championship golf – it held the US Open as recently as 2003 – and every intention of remaining a venue for such events, in fact, it will host the US Amateur later this summer. For a club of this stature and type to embrace a restorative mindset is a definite change, and quite interesting.

Before the Second World War, Olympia had four courses. What is now the North was the fourth to be built, and was originally designed by Willie Park Jr, the Scottish architect of Sunningdale and Huntercombe in the UK and Maidstone in the US. It is classic US parkland terrain, and, over the years, the course has been stretched and altered to remain a championship level test. New-England based architect Mark Mungeam, ASGCA has consulted on its design for over 20 years, overseeing in that time preparations for multiple big events, including the 1997 US Senior Open and the 2003 Open. In 2012, the club’s board concluded that it was time to update its long-term masterplan for the course, and asked Mungeam to lead the process, something which was due as the most recent masterplanning work on the North had been done in 1998.

This process went on during 2012. At the time the project was initiated and approved, there was no particular historical component to the planned works, but, during the planning process, the club’s then greens chair Andy Revell came across aerials of the course from 1938, 1952 and 1961. Fascinated by what those aerials revealed, Revell shared them with Mungeam and the masterplanning committee, and the group resolved to attempt, where possible, to put Park’s lost features back. The work was completed before the winter of 2014, and the course reopened in spring 2015.

One should not assume that the Olympia work is a total restoration of Park’s course. Nonetheless, several key features, including a Muirfield-style island bunker to the right of the first fairway and bunkers on several other holes, were rebuilt to return the holes to the vision of the original designer. Additionally, a water hazard in front of the green on the home hole was made significantly smaller – it had, over time, been extended to block off a substantial part of the green, forcing an aerial approach. Now, as back in the day, golfers who prefer to run their ball into the green will again be able to do so.

One of the remarkable things about Olympia North is the way that Park extracted so much golf from a property that, while pleasant, is hardly remarkable. There is elevation change, but much of the course is relatively flat. The best feature on the terrain, without a doubt, is the meandering water hazard called Butterfield Creek; Park’s routing brings the river into play on seven separate holes, including twice on the splendid par four fourteenth. 

Another key aspect of the course is its playability. Golfers who tackle the North will be well aware they are dealing with a championship test, but, unless the crew under head superintendent Sam MacKenzie have grown the rough particularly high, they are unlikely to have the kind of day they might expect from a course of this kind. Although the creek interferes with play regularly, there are few other ball-eating hazards to contend with, and, while making a good score is difficult, getting the ball around and emerging smiling is within the capacity of most.

Both Mungeam and the club deserve to be commended for their ability to present a course in this way. Throughout the history of golf design, creating golf that is challenging for the best, but entertaining for everyone else has been accepted as the architect’s supreme achievement, and Olympia’s North course achieves this goal admirably. 

This article first appeared in Golf Course Architecture - Issue 41