The FOURTH Age Of Course Design
Where else would you find golf ’s ultimate maximalist design than Las Vegas? In creating Shadow Creek, Tom Fazio shunted three million cubic yards of earth around to force some gradient into the shapeless desert terrain. With more than 20,000 mature pines and cottonwoods among the flora shipped in to help create this mirage, it is hard to imagine a course more at odds with its landscape. The final bill was reputed to have been somewhere between US$45-60 million. It’s impossible to know whether the artifice and extravagance of Shadow Creek triggered the minimalism movement; but the fact is that even as its gates were swinging silently open in 1989, a pioneering golf course developer named Dick Youngscap was – 1,000 miles to the north-east – scrambling up and down the mighty Nebraskan sand hills. He had just concluded a deal to buy the 8,000 acres of grazing land that would eventually pull the game in the opposite direction… and golf course architecture into a new age.
Had Dick Youngscap set out to find a plot that allowed him to site the first tee precisely in the middle of nowhere, he could scarcely have found a better spot; the nearest settlement, Mullen, had a population of a single Strip casino. The closest airport was 60 miles away. Youngscap could have been on a different planet to Vegas, but it was he who was doing the real gambling.
The odds of success were long, yet he was undeterred. Unconventional and idealistic, he had a vision for what could be achieved in this raw, rolling dunescape – perfect linksland, were it not for the fact that the Atlantic was 1,200 miles to the east. Perhaps it was coincidence that Field of Dreams was released this same
