It does not fall to many people to change the world in which they spend their lives.
When Bill Coore, having graduated from Wake Forest University with a degree in classical Greek and having spent a few years in the US military, started looking for a career, the impact that he – along with twice Masters champion Ben Crenshaw, who would become his partner – would have on the world of golf cannot possibly have occurred to him. Yet Coore and Crenshaw have, over the past three decades, led the golf industry out of a period when courses were designed primarily as a means of selling housing into a new era that has seen the construction of more great courses than any since the Golden Age of golf architecture before World War II. Coore graciously – a testimony to the man he is – agreed to tell GCA a bit about his life and works.
“I have always loved golf, and I enjoyed school, so on graduation I thought I was going to be a professor and play amateur golf – the seasons work quite nicely together!” he says. “Then Uncle Sam decided I should do something different for a few years, which I did. It was during the Vietnam War, but I was never sent there.
“Just as I was about to get out of the military – I had been accepted for graduate school at Duke – I saw this golf course being built near my home in North Carolina.
Coore with his long-time partner Ben Crenshaw on site at Colorado Golf Club, which opened in 2007 (Photo: Coore & Crenshaw)
“It was the era of Robert Trent Jones, but the course I saw was really quirky, with railroad ties and small greens. It was a place called Oak Hollow. I thought ‘I love golf, I wonder how you build a course?’
“It was on a Sunday, I had come out to visit my mother, and was wandering round this golf course. There was an irrigation guy doing watering – they were growing the course in – and I think he was lonely, because he ended up driving me round. I asked him, ‘Who is doing this?’, and he answered, ‘It’s a guy called Pete Dye’. I said, ‘I wonder how you would get in touch with this Mr Dye?’, and he found a card with Pete’s number. I don’t think Pete was thrilled that I called – I found out later I was just one of many people who called him – but I ended up driving to Delray Beach, Florida, to meet him, having made up a story that I was coming for a different reason.”
Bill’s first encounter with Dye was memorable, though perhaps not for the right reasons. “I called him to tell him I was in town, and he’d forgotten me completely,” he says. “I was feeling pretty awkward, but he said, ‘Where are you staying?’, and came to meet me. I didn’t know what he looked like – I’d never met him or seen a photo.
“Finally, this man walks in, looks around the lobby, and says to me, ‘You must be the guy’. I chitchatted with him in the lobby; he looked at me and said, ‘Do you have a TV in your room, I want to watch the football game’. He was a huge Miami Dolphins fan. ‘I’ve got too many people at my house who don’t want to watch the ball game’. He propped himself up on the bed, I turned the TV on, and he started watching the football, while I’m trying to ask him about golf course design. At half time, we did have some conversation about golf. He said, ‘Well, the odds on getting in the golf course design business are about the same as being struck by lightning’. The Dolphins won, so he was happy, and said, ‘I’m about to start a new course in North Carolina – the Cardinal – come on out there, and we’ll talk’. I took that to mean I’d have a job; Pete took it that we’d never meet again.
“I saw something about the course on the local TV news one evening, so I drove out there, and found him. He’d pretty much forgotten me again, but he was talking to the project manager and said, ‘This guy keeps showing up, find something for him to do’. I started as a labourer; my first job was cutting trees with a chainsaw in a swamp, wearing thigh-high rubber boots. They then let me run some equipment – which I was totally inept at. For years, Pete referred to me as ‘the guy who can’t start a tractor’.”
Over a period of time, the golf architecture and construction business provided Coore with a (rather hit and miss) living, before the project that would give him his real start as an architect appeared. “I had worked with Pete for about three years, and he sent me to work with his brother Roy, first at the Country Club of Montreal, and then at Waterwood National in east Texas. It was advertised as a Pete Dye design, but Roy did all the work,” he says. “Then the golf course business went totally quiet: it was 1974, and the Middle Eastern oil embargo hit hard. Almost everything in the US golf business came to a halt. I was at Waterwood, helping to get the course open, and then I became assistant superintendent to Gary Grandstaff. I didn’t know anything about agronomy!
“Roy and Gary went down to do a golf course in Mexico – this would be 1976 or 77. The people who owned Waterwood came to me and asked me to become the golf course superintendent – I found out later it was because they couldn’t find anyone else to do it.
“Dick Psolla, who did all of Pete’s agronomy and soil science, became my mentor. I spent a weekend with him, and he had me write out everything I was going to do on the course for the next two weeks. Then he said, ‘At the end of the two weeks, call me, and we’ll go through the next two’. He held my hand for the first year and gave me an understanding of what it takes to manage a golf course. He taught me what is and what isn’t maintainable – which has been massively important for my subsequent career.
Coore & Crenshaw’s layout at Sand Hills is generally recognised as the best course built since the end of the Golden Age (Photo: Larry Lambrecht)
“After I’d been at Waterwood for two or three years, the project manager there came to me and said, ‘I know what you really want is to be a golf architect. There’s a course being built at Rockport, and the owners are in a difficult place – they’ve parted company with their architect. I’d like to take you down there and introduce you to them.
“He did; they looked at me and said, ‘We don’t know anything about you, but you’ve been recommended to us, and we’re in a pretty difficult place, because we’ve already started construction’. They took me out and said, ‘We’ll make a deal with you: you can design these nine holes, but you can’t spend a dollar more than our budget, and you start now’.
“It was a low-key and low-budget project, but I got a foothold. The holes had already been routed, but we built them, and a few months after, started building the second nine. People saw the course, and I started to get some nice comments.”
It was after Coore built the Rockport course that he would, eventually, make the relationship that would define his career. “There was another project along the Gulf Coast, and the project manager there contacted me about possibly designing the course,” he says. “The site was impossible for golf, but this man said to me, ‘Bill, we’ve seen your work at Rockport and it’s good, but no-one has ever heard of you. Why don’t you have a partnership with someone well-known?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how that would ever happen’, and he said, ‘Well, if it did, who would you choose?’. It was 1984, Ben had just won the Masters, and I said, ‘I’ve never met him, but the person who seems to have the best knowledge of golf architecture is Ben Crenshaw’.
“I began to get asked that question quite a bit. I’d got another job, but invariably, developers would ask the same question – ‘Why aren’t you working with someone we’ve heard of?’ There was a very serious real estate developer in Houston who I talked to about possibly doing his course. I went to see him in his office. In the midst of him talking to me, he said, ‘Bill, I need you to come over to the window’. He pointed to the street and said, ‘I’ve seen your course at Rockport, and it’s really good. But what you need to know is that this business is not who can do the best course. It’s about who can sell the most real estate. That’s why I’m going to hire the Nicklaus company for my course. Nobody down there has ever heard of you. But if you walked in here tomorrow with Lee Trevino or Tom Watson, I’d hire you’. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know those guys, that’s not going to happen’. He asked me the same question, and I gave the same answer. He looked at me and said, ‘Bill, I have known Ben since he was a boy, and he’s as romantic and naive as you are. The two of you together would be a disaster’.
“At the same time, Rod Whitman, who I had worked with at Waterwood, was working for Pete at Austin Country Club, and had got to know Ben. Rod had said to Ben, ‘You should meet my friend Bill Coore – you guys have a lot in common’. Ben had heard about Rockport, and unbeknown to me, the project manager for the Gulf Coast project took it upon himself to call Ben’s business manager and say, ‘I’d like to put Ben and Bill together’.
“Ben came down to talk about the Gulf Coast project they were proposing, and I met him for the first time ever. Ben looked at the project for a few minutes and said, ‘You can’t build a course here’. We ended up that afternoon going over to Rockport, walking round the course and talking about golf, architecture and life. We had no intention of working together, and for the next year or more, we would talk periodically, and met up a few times. There was no suggestion that we would work together, and to this day I have no recollection of a particular moment that either of us said, ‘We should work together’. It was an evolutionary process; there must have been a time when we decided to work together, but I couldn’t tell you when if my life depended on it.”
Coore & Crenshaw was established in 1985, but its first years were slow. They built the Plantation Course for the Kapalua Resort in Hawaii, which opened in 1991, but it was in 1990 that they got the call that changed the world.
Lincoln-based buildings architect Dick Youngscap had developed the Firethorn course outside his home city with Pete Dye, and had been travelling to the region of Nebraska known as the Sand Hills since the 1960s. He came to love the area and, knowing that most of the world’s great golf courses were built on sand, began wondering if that area could support something special. He found a particular piece of land, near the village of Mullen, that he thought was exceptional even by the standards of the region, and began contacting golf designers. Dye declined to be involved, as did everyone else Youngscap contacted when they learned where his site was.
Finally, the connection that would change the world was made. “Dick was aware of the Sand Hills region, and he likes challenges!” says Coore. “He had worked with Pete at Firethorn, and he spoke to Pete about his new project, and Pete didn’t show a great deal of interest. Dick had sent out feelers to a couple of other design companies, and I don’t think he got much interest from them. He asked Ron Whitten, the architecture editor of Golf Digest, to look at his site, and I had got to know Ron quite early. Ron had seen Rockport, and obviously he knew Ben, and I think he suggested to Dick that he should talk to us. He thought it might be a good fit. Dick knew Doug Petersan, then the superintendent at Prairie Dunes, who I had done some work with before I partnered up with Ben.”
What Coore & Crenshaw eventually built in the Sand Hills has been generally recognised as the best course built anywhere in the world since the end of the Golden Age. For that alone, it would have been massively influential, but it wasn’t the course’s quality alone that made Sand Hills so important. Coore and Youngscap both echo the same message: Sand Hills returned golf development to being about the site, not the market around it. Golf development had become so wholly focused on who was going to play the course – and buy the houses that inevitably surrounded it – and the ability to move earth had convinced the industry that the land on which the course would be built was not important. Sand Hills changed that. It reminded developers that the quality of a course is defined most strongly by the quality of the land on which it sits, and, over time, it created a new market of travelling golfers. If you built it, they would come.
Bandon Trails, the first of three Coore & Crenshaw courses at the Bandon Dunes resort in Oregon (Photo: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort)
And it was a founding member of Sand Hills who would take that message to the world. Mike Keiser had made a fortune from selling greeting cards and then built the nine-hole Dunes Club on the shores of Lake Michigan.
He then bought a massive tract of seaside land on the southern Oregon coast and created a behemoth. Two other design firms worked at Bandon Dunes before Coore & Crenshaw, but every Keiser project since has featured at least one of their courses.
“I think the two most influential people on golf courses that I have met are Pete Dye and Mike Keiser,” says Coore. “Pete changed the direction of golf architecture twice, the first time at Harbour Town, and then he did it again at TPC Sawgrass. And Mike did the same thing, in the perception of what interesting golf is, how to create it, and how to make it accessible to a large number of players. Find a site that is truly gifted for golf, let the site guide you, and you will create something that people will travel a long way to see.
“But Mike never dreamed that Bandon would be as big as it is – he just wanted to build something reminiscent of the roots of golf, and he thought there would be a market for it. And he insisted that it shouldn’t be some ultra-private place that only a few could see; he wanted to have something that the public could play – in dunes by the ocean. And since, he’s done it again and again. Mike has made the creation of the ‘build it and they will come’ golf model look so easy that people have done it all over the world. They have made being successful look so easy that other people think they can do it too! The influence that he has had on golf architecture is extraordinary. He wants golf to be fun, exciting and inspirational. And that is amazing.
“Mike resurrected the idea that par three courses, and other alternative formats, are both acceptable and desirable. I remember when he called me and said, ‘Bill, I want to build a par-three course at Bandon. Everyone comes out here thinking they’re going to play 36 holes a day, but I want to have a shorter form of golf for them to enjoy’. In the 1980s, Ben and I tried so hard to persuade some developers to build par-three or nine-hole courses, but the view was always, ‘Nobody wants that; it’s not proper golf’. Then Mike Keiser comes along and builds a par-three course, and now everybody wants them.”
Coore will be 80 at his next birthday, but he shows few signs of slowing down. The current boom in golf development no doubt has something to do with that, but he continues to fly from project to project, reviewing and editing the work done by his team of hot-shot – and loyal – associates.
One of Coore & Crenshaw’s most recent designs, the Point Hardy course at Cabot St Lucia resort, is already being included on many world ranking lists (Photo: Jacob Sjoman)
He realises that the boom must eventually come to an end. “Every business is cyclical, and I don’t think it can continue at the rate it is, but there will continue to be very interesting projects coming forward,” he says. “The site-driven, remote projects will probably slow significantly, because they appeal to a more narrow segment of the golfing community so are economically more demanding than local courses. As time and years go by, it will become clear that the success that the Keiser family has had didn’t come as easily as they make it appear. I think there will a steady stream of refurbishing existing courses to keep them alive and prospering.
“I get a bit concerned when I see a lot of older, highly acclaimed courses being changed dramatically to try to meet some kind of ‘modern standard’ for either competitive play or to keep up with other clubs. I believe that golf architecture needs to be represented, just like any sort of creative endeavour, by different forms from different eras – I look at some old courses and think, ‘These are museum pieces. They should be allowed to stay as they are’.”
This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.