53 put the area on the map. Some of them are still there!” After Bandon, Kidd was golf design’s new hot name. He picked up exciting jobs around the world – including the Nanea course in Hawaii, for the billionaire financier Charles Schwab, but his next big splash would be a lot closer to home. “I was building Nanea when my dad went to a dinner at the R&A in St Andrews,” he says. “Gordon Moir, who was then the links superintendent, asked him if I would be interested in building a course in St Andrews. They were in the early stages of planning for the seventh course, what became the Castle, belonging to the town. My dad called me the next day, and obviously I wasn’t going to say no. There were 20 firms that bid for the job.” Kidd and Paul Kimber, then his right-hand man, led the firm’s final presentation for the job. “It was in the links clubhouse in St Andrews,” says Kidd. “At the end, Alan McGregor, the Links Trust’s general manager, told me that they were hiring me. I drove back to Auchterarder, where my parents lived, and told my dad that his son was going to build the first 18-hole golf course at the Home of Golf for a hundred years. He might have shed a few tears that evening. He gave me some great advice – that I had to build something that I could live with, and that’s why we tried to be bold and creative.” The Castle course divided opinion when it opened. Fellow architect Tom Doak famously awarded it a zero rating – meaning that he believed it should never have been built – in his Confidential Guide. The extreme greens, and the liberal use of hairy mounds in the line of play attracted a lot of negative comment, but Kidd says that time – and, it must be said, some judicious softening – has proved him right. “It was polarising then, but I don’t hear much of that now,” he says. “With a little bit of time to mature and for the polarising opinions to subside, I think it has proved to be a success.” Kidd and his crew built another high-profile course in the UK around that time, but it was the polar opposite of the Castle. Machrihanish Dunes was a true links course, the first ever to be permitted entirely within a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Getting the permits required the team to sign up for some extremely rigorous environmental oversight, with a resident ecologist from Scottish Natural Heritage following them at every step. No disturbance of the ground was allowed except to build greens and tees, and the areas of ‘I told my dad that his son was going to build the first 18-hole golf course at the Home of Golf for a hundred years,’ reminisces Kidd, of his appointment to design the Castle course at St Andrews Photo: Nathan Kahler courtesy of Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Photo: St Andrews Links Trust
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