53 thought, ‘Uh oh. Have I just stepped in a hornet’s nest?’ But the people at the club have been great – people keep coming up to me and saying, ‘Say hi to your dad’. Nobody has thrown a tomato at me yet!” “I played the Georgia Junior at Pinetree CC in Kennesaw when I was 15,” says Bill Bergin. “I played my first State Amateur there, we played high school matches there, and when I was a pro, they used to let pros practice out there, and a bunch of us used to play together there. “In 2007, we did a full redo of Pinetree. It was really kind of average, and I think it’s a pretty good test now. I knew a lot of the people there, which was pretty exciting. Being local was certainly a good thing. They basically were very trusting – I knew the pros and the influential members, and I still work with the club – and I think they’re less trusting now! Pinetree had four greens that had slopes of five per cent or more, which would have been absolutely unputtable at today’s speeds. None of the bunkers came into play for a decent player: only bad golfers were hitting them. The greens were tired.” Bergin, who lives in the Atlanta area, has worked on other courses he has known for many years in the region. “I just finished a renovation at Marietta CC – which I’ve known since high school,” he says. “They sold off their old site, and Bob Cupp, my old boss, built them a new course just before I went to work for him. My college roommate was a member there, and I played there with him a lot. In high school, I shot 64 on their old course – the best round of my life at the time! I know a lot of members there, and it was very interesting to present in front of friends. The members are over the moon with the work. They have been very smooth. At Marietta, my college teammate invited me to be their member-guest. They were doing a renovation of their Cupp course with Cupp, and it was so contentious that he left the club!” Chip off the old block Golf course architect Adrian Stiff grew up in Bristol, England. He still lives there and has done most of his work fairly close to home. It is, therefore, inevitable that he has long been familiar with most of the existing courses he has worked on during his career. “I was a junior member at Chipping Sodbury GC between the ages 13-16, and I played all the Bristol and Bath courses, and I have worked on most of them over the years,” he says. “At The Players Club, where I’m based, we swapped a corporate membership with Chipping Sodbury, so I still go there from time to time, and I know all the members. The course was designed by Fred Hawtree and opened in 1971. It was pretty flat, and there was a substantial drainage ditch through the middle of it, and in the early-1990s the committee came to me about putting a big lake in the middle. I designed a lake that affected about six holes, and I dealt with the greens committee. There was a chap on the greens committee who I had played with a lot as a junior which made it a lot easier. It was just a case of doing a professional job and working out where the material was going to go.” HOME COURSES The twelfth hole at Pinetree in Georgia, where Bill Bergin played school matches. Inset, the same hole before Bergin’s renovation work Photos: Bill Bergin
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