55 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 BILL COORE Photo: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Bandon Trails, the first of three Coore & Crenshaw courses at the Bandon Dunes resort in Oregon
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