53 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. “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 Photo: Larry Lambrecht Coore & Crenshaw’s layout at Sand Hills is generally recognised as the best course built since the end of the Golden Age “ Pete Dye said, ‘I’m about to start a new course, 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”
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