We concluded that very little of AW Tillinghast still exists at Swope Memorial Golf Course.

His routing is still intact, but the greens and bunkers had been rebuilt so many times that very few original features still exist. Tillinghast made his plans in early 1934, then left an assistant in charge, Thomas Henry Riggs-Miller. Tillinghast never returned during construction and in 1935 began his three-year stint as a consultant to the PGA of America, driving around the nation, inspecting courses and making recommendations on how to cut budgets. Tillinghast did stop by Swope in 1936 as part of his tour and told a reporter his plans were not carried through as originally intended.

There wasn’t much Tillinghast to preserve, but a good amount to ‘restore’. We call our process a sympathetic restoration, trying to address 21st century demands to an early 20th century design. We suspect the greens were surface drained and, thus, had distinct slopes on which pin positions could still be placed because the greens were mowed higher in those days.

But the greens we found at Swope today were those installed in a 1989 remodelling. While they tried their best to give it some Tillinghast flavour; in my opinion, they failed for the most part (and primarily an ill-advised ‘Great Hazard’). Many of those rebuilt greens were two-level affairs, with the transition slope invariably placed perpendicular to the angle of approach, resulting in a collection of very similar, almost monotonous two-step greens. We have some decent photos of each green (except the second) from 1934, and while a couple of two-level greens could be found among the originals, there weren’t that many.

A 1935 photo of Swope Memorial’s fifth hole (now the sixth) (Kansas City Parks & Recreation)

As there are no original detailed hole-by-hole green plans from Tillinghast, we’ve had to guesstimate on his original contours with what little photographic help we could muster, keeping in mind present day green speeds. Architects Todd Clark and Brent Hugo have developed what I think are a superb set of greens that we’re now installing, ones that will reflect those shown in photographs, but massaged to provide far more pin placements.

One example is the third green, which will have a left-to-right flow to it to help move shots down and around a master trap in the right front portion of the green. The green on the par-three fourth (which had been two levels) will now feature a slightly convex putting surface with the front half pitched toward the tee and the back half flowing away from the direction of play. 

There will be bigger greens that previously existed, partly to provide the superintendent with more potential hole locations and partly to allow us to create some Tillinghast slopes within the greens without sacrificing hole locations.

The golf course site is atop a hill with various slopes and gulleys that Tillinghast used in clever ways in his rerouting of the old Swope Park layout. Now that many trees have been removed, we get more appreciation of just how interesting his routing really is. Some slopes are used strategically – for example, the par-four first rewards a carry over a severe left-to-right slope in the fairway with a perfect angle into the diagonal first green. Sometimes he has us attack a hill straight on – the par-four sixth (which has been converted from a too-short par five) plays over a valley to a sidehill-uphill fairway with the green half hidden farther up hill. The par-four tenth is just the opposite, playing downhill off the tee to a half-hidden but generous fairway at the base of a gulley with the green embossed in the far slope.

Tillinghast put particular emphasis on his par threes and Swope Memorial’s four par threes will be very good. Curiously, their four greens are positioned within a hundred yards or so of one another, but on different sides of a ridgeline that crosses that portion of the course.

A page from Tillinghast’s 1916 brochure, The Golf Course, where he advocated for ‘Dolomites’, multiple and freeform mounds that act like a miniature mountain range (Kansas City Parks & Recreation)

However, there is one feature that I’m probably most excited about, and that is the Dolomites; those ragged mounds that Tillinghast featured on several of his early designs. We are reintroducing Dolomites at several locations and adding them to others – for instance, along the fairway of the short par-four second to discourage players from using driver off that tee. As most of these will be grassed with a prairie mix and won’t be routinely mowed, I hope that Swope’s Dolomites will become so distinctive that when seeing photos of them, people throughout the golf world will immediately associate them with Swope Memorial. We shall see.

Ron Whitten is a golf writer and consultant to the Swope Memorial project.

This article first appeared in the July 2025 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.

Read more about the project, including insight from architect Todd Clark, Casey Hames of contractor Mid-America, and director of golf Doug Schroeder.