50 INTERVIEW Changing the world BILL COORE Alongside Ben Crenshaw, his partner of 40 years, Bill Coore has built more great golf courses than almost any present-day architect. Their firm has unwittingly led the golf design business through a period of total transformation. Yet Coore remains a modest man who reacts with shock when told of his impact on golf. Adam Lawrence spoke with him. 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. “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
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=