Quail Hollow: An interview with Tom Fazio

Ahead of the 2025 PGA Championship, GCA spoke with Tom Fazio, the architect that has guided renovations on the Quail Hollow golf course in Charlotte, North Carolina, since the 1990s.

His firm’s most recent work was completed in summer 2023, in preparation for the course hosting the PGA Tour’s Wells Fargo Championship. Upgrades included resurfacing the greens with TifEagle bermuda and softening the slopes on 12 putting surfaces to accommodate new hole locations compatible with tournament-level green speeds. All bunkers were rebuilt using the Bunker Solution liner and filled with Spruce Pine 55 sand. Tees were resurfaced with Tahoma 31 bermuda, and the teeing areas on holes ten, thirteen and sixteen were either extended or reoriented. Fairways now feature a new custom perennial ryegrass blend from Pure Seed.

Can you describe the level of transformation that you have overseen at Quail Hollow since the early 1990s?

I got a call about 30 years ago from Johnny Harris – he spoke about having a PGA Tour event at Quail Hollow and he wanted me to come and look over the golf course with him and get it ready for this tournament. The course is only about an hour and a half from where I live and I have known Johnny for a long time, so I went down.

I remember Quail Hollow having a PGA Tour event in the 1970s called the Kemper Open and then that tournament was moved to Congressional. Johnny wanted to bring tournament golf back to Charlotte, and it was just around the time of the Big Bertha drivers and the Titleist Pro V1 golf balls. Johnny knew he had to ready the golf course for this new era of golf… Tiger, Mickelson and those players were just around the corner.

So, we evaluated the property and the course and came up with a long-range plan. We had started doing this before Johnny had even signed a commitment for a golf tournament. We executed phase one that brought in strategy that related to PGA Tour players, and we made some adjustments to the course, and it came off very well; the first tournament (the Wachovia Championship) was well received from the players, and the hospitality and operations that Quail Hollow produced became a favourite. After that tournament, we then continued with the plan for renovations and additions, creating a facility fit for tournament play on a long-term basis. It became so popular that it became the regular tour stop for the Wells Fargo Championship and also hosted the Presidents Cup (2022) and then the PGA Championship (2017).

What has your most recent work at Quail Hollow involved, and how has hosting a Major influenced your design decisions?

If you go to the practice tee during a tournament and watch Rory McIlroy hit a golf ball… it is certainly not like any of us hitting a golf ball! The strength, the speed and how the top players compress the golf ball is a whole different game. We’re always focused on the best players and how they make contact with the ball and what’s important in setting up a golf course through tee positions, angles into greens and on fairways. We’re always thinking of how to test the best players and how do we create that environment, especially for major golf, and it just evolves from those discussions. We also have to keep in mind that this is a member’s club as well – the members are decent players and very much focused on golf, but they certainly don’t play like tour players, so we have to make sure we balance the course for them as well. The easy part is designing for tour players as they’re all consistent – they all hit it long and strong. But how do we balance that with member play and create variety and likeability for them? That is always a major focus.

It is fun to see the members come out to the to the tournament to watch the best players in the world play the same place they play… obviously they’re 100 yards longer in length – they’re playing a par four that’s 520 yards versus 420 yards – but it’s a fun design process to create a course that can handle both sets of players.

How do you balance providing an interesting golf course with other factors like moving spectators around the property, broadcasters and camera equipment?

Those considerations were part of the original masterplan for making it a tournament golf course. Along with some tweaks and additions, we moved some tees and fairway areas as well as some green complexes, too. Fortunately, they had additional land where they could create support facilities for running a tournament. We took into account very important gallery positions and traffic flow where the gallery could move and be placed in areas where they could watch golf, get a good perspective of the holes and even cluster people so they can see multiple holes from an individual area. We also thought about how to ensure there are hospitality areas where corporate sponsors can be hosted.

What are the biggest changes and how will they impact the playing experience during the upcoming tournament?

The latest addition of length came on the sixteenth hole – we made it for last year’s Wells Fargo Championship. The sixteenth – part of the ‘Green Mile’, the final three holes that are known for being a stern test – was lengthened because we had to have the bunker on the turn of the hole’s dogleg. The carry over the bunker was previously 300 yards and we saw that most players were flying it over, so by adding a new tee, the carry over the bunker is now about 322 yards. This brings in a risk-reward factor for the hole.

For the tournament courses that we work on, the distance factor is a key design consideration. The new players coming in are hitting it further, even some of the college kids are hitting it further than the tour-level guys. That’s just part of the design process now. When preparing a course for tournament golf, we always have to evaluate the site and see where they can have additions and possibly tournament tees, but it can’t dictate the whole golf course.

Tom Fazio is a golf course architect and is the founder of Fazio Design

The PGA Championship will be played at Quail Hollow 15-18 May 2025.

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