Photo: Bill Hornstein Old Memorial in Tampa, a Steve Smyers design on what was an almost entirely flat site 43 Golf media can make it easy to believe that every golf course is built on a perfect piece of land. It’s not hard to see why. Creating a course among beautiful sand dunes next to the ocean is a more obvious story than wrestling eighteen holes out of pancake flat clay, or working on an old landfill, atop tonnes and tonnes of refuse, which might even be toxic. But the reality of golf architecture is that most courses are built to serve a particular local market, and the quality of the site is not the only thing taken into consideration when choosing it. So, the fortunate few architects whose practice has seen them design courses that have become destinations for which golfers will travel long distances – which demands great land – are not the mainstream of the profession. More common is the task of trying to tease out a reasonably silky purse from a sow’s ear. Veteran American architect Steve Smyers has spent most of his career on such sites. “I graduated from the University of Florida in December 1975, and I went to work part-time for a golf architect in January 1976,” he says. “The job market was very sparse at the time, and the economy was very weak. Everything we did back then was real estate driven, and almost all golf architects were regional. “So, everything we did was in Florida, and everything we did was in swamps. They put us where the worst soils were, and we would have to design the golf course to make the real estate valuable. Everything was driven by engineering – we had to handle a certain amount
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