The Secret Home of Golf: The Authorized History of King-Collins Golf and the Creation of Sweetens Cove

By Jim Hartsell and Rob Collins

In April 2010, struggling architect Rob Collins of Chattanooga, Tennessee was looking for any way to get back into the golf course design business.  When he learned his alma-mater Sewanee planned to renovate their mountain top nine-hole golf course with renowned architect Gil Hanse, he contacted Sewanee golf coach King Oehmig in hopes of ge

• Language: English
• Publisher: Back Nine Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781956237016

Jim Hartsell

Jim Hartsell is a native and lifelong resident of Alabama. A registered architect, he has worked on the design of projects for the University of Alabama, Jacksonville State University, University of Georgia and University of Florida. Scottish golf and golf writing are his true passions, having made many trips to Scotland to study the lesser-known courses. He is the author of When Revelation Comes (2022) and The Secret Home of Golf: The Authorized History of King-Collins Golf and the Creation of Sweetens Cove (2021). He has written extensively on golf in Scotland for The Links Diary, NoLayingUp.com and is a contributor to The Golfers Journal and Today's Golfer.

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Prologue

South Pittsburg, Tennessee

Where do I begin to try to explain the joys of Machrihanish?

—Michael Bamberger, To The Linksland

The anticipation of something is at least half the fun of doing it. If you have ever driven from Glasgow to Machrihanish Golf Club, the legendary and mythical Old Tom Morris Course on the Kintyre Peninsula of Scotland, you will recall the sense of excitement of the first time you did it. The drive starts up the A82 along Loch Lomond by Rossdhu House, through Luss and Inverbeg, until you hit the A83 at Tarbet and head west, the excitement building all the while. Then suddenly, the impossibly winding road heads South at Inveraray and the scenery becomes even more like something out of a dream. You stop for lunch at Tarbert and stare wordlessly at the loch, thinking about your tee time. The last stretch of the A83 through Tayinloan, Muasdale, and Bellochantuy is from your wildest golf dreams of Scotland. You make your way through the lovely village of Campbeltown to find the B843 to take you through rolling farmland to Machrihanish. Finally, you come over a small hill, and there are the mighty seaside links, sitting right there on the Atlantic, as if to say: I’ve been here forever, what took you so long to find me?

Machrihanish Golf Club on the Kintyre Peninsula of Scotland (photo by Jim Hartsell)

Word began to leak out sometime in late 2016 among the golf literati about a nine-hole golf course in South Pittsburg, Tennessee—a small, quiet southern town on the Alabama border that is mainly known for being the home of the Lodge Cast Iron Factory. These people are the true believers in the game, the type that get up at 2 a.m. to watch the Open Championship at Carnoustie, or drive eight hours for a chance to play a Seth Raynor golf course. They started to talk among their friends, asking, have you been to Sweetens Cove?

The momentum built slowly. Golf architecture expert Andy Johnson, of the Fried Egg website and podcast, first visited in 2016, getting up at 5 a.m. to make the two-hour drive from Nashville on the day of a wedding he was scheduled to attend later that night. He was immediately hooked by the experience and had the relatively unknown Chattanooga golf course architect Rob Collins of King-Collins Golf appear on his podcast later that year. Johnson could not contain his enthusiasm for the course during the 90-minute discussion. It’s just so good and so much fun, said Johnson throughout the interview, paring his review down to the most basic level.

There were other seminal moments. A New York Times article appeared in 2017, followed by an excellent feature article in The Golfers Journal, which set much of the ongoing mythology surrounding Sweetens Cove. First-time visitors made the trip, often alone, playing all day until dark. They may have even walked all day, if the often crushing summer heat has allowed. Walking off the course to the small storage building/clubhouse (known as The Shed), they likely asked Patrick Boyd, the general manager of the club from 2014 to 2018, if they could get a tee time for the next weekend to bring their friends.

The reactions of first-time visitors to Sweetens Cove are telling. Boyd says, I used to love to watch one of our original members, John Allen, drive up with first-timers, just to see the reaction on their faces when they got out of the car and saw this place just sitting here. It becomes like the Hotel California to a certain group of people. They start coming back every chance they get. For people who are used to playing traditional American golf courses, it can almost defy description. It was overwhelming the first time, to be honest, said Jake Hartsell, a then 25-year-old visitor from Alabama, but I immediately wanted to play again. Todd Schuster (aka Tron Carter), of the golf media outlet No Laying Up, discovered the course while living in Atlanta: I had really quit playing golf at the time. This place made me want to start playing again. It showed me how fun golf could be.

Regulars often develop an almost religious fervor for the place. It’s the essence of pure golf, said Kevin Moore, a math professor from the University of Georgia, who visits every chance he can make the trip. It’s a magical place. I’ve actually thought about moving there, said Jay Revell, a golf writer from Tallahassee, Florida. As successful as the design of the course is, the other-worldly quality of the Sequatchie Valley in which it sits, cannot be discounted in the overall experience. The late afternoon sunlight often illuminates the course and the surrounding hills like a Seurat oil painting.

 Warning sign on Sweetens Cove Road

The journey to Sweetens Cove can come in many forms. Whether it’s a plane flight to Chattanooga and a rather pedestrian and crowded drive on I-24 to the South Pittsburg exit—or a two-hour drive through the back roads of Alabama farm country through towns like New Hope and Gurley—the turn onto Sweetens Cove Road recalls that same feeling of discovery as the last stretch of the B843 into Machrihanish. The lovely, winding country road gives you a brief respite to consider why you came to Sweetens Cove, and to anticipate what lies ahead.

As you turn into the gravel parking area and step out of your car, the entire world of Sweetens Cove stretches out before you, looking as if it has been there forever, waiting only for you. This is the story of how—against all odds—Sweetens Cove Golf Club came to exist in a small town in rural Tennessee.

Chapter

1

A Golf Course Architect

Golf architecture is a new art closely allied to that of the artist or sculptor, but also necessitating a scientific knowledge of many other subjects.

—Dr. Alister MacKenzie, The Spirit of St. Andrews

The legendary Ailsa Course at Turnberry on the west coast of Scotland was playing rock-hard and fiery fast at the 1994 Open Championship. For Rob Collins, a 19-­year-old American college student traveling to the Home of Golf for the first time, the experience of links golf was life-changing. Watching people play great golf shots on a course like Turnberry was just thrilling. I had never seen anything remotely like it before. The ball just rolled forever. The shots were entirely dependent on the ground, he recalls over 25 years later—with still an almost childlike wonder. Whether young Rob knew it then or not—from that moment forward—this University of the South art history major was destined to become a golf course architect.

Rob Collins was a self-described decent tennis player while playing on the high school team at the McCallie Prep School in downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee. At some point before the start of his senior year, he realized that his tennis skills paled in comparison to some of his more accomplished teammates. I went from being the #1 player on the team in junior high to struggling to make the top four in high school. We had a guy named Rob McMillan that was the third-ranked junior player in the southeast, he says with a laugh. He switched from tennis to the golf team his senior year and started to fall in love with the game. Golf was something he had played occasionally as a way to spend time with his father John and older brother Lewis—especially on family summer vacations—while growing up just outside of Chattanooga on historic Signal Mountain, overlooking the Tennessee River.

Genius loci, or sense of place, seems to be ingrained in the fabric of life of most native Southerners—many of whom trace their roots to immigrants from Scotland and Ireland. There is an almost overwhelming genius loci in the narrow valleys and mountains around south Tennessee and north Alabama. Time passes differently. People are especially tied to the areas where they were born and raised. My mother still owns the house on Signal Mountain that I was born in. It was built in 1890 as a summer cottage, says Collins. In the days before air-conditioning, mountaintop homes afforded some level of much-needed relief from the oppressive summer heat of south Tennessee. Homes were located to take advantage of prevailing winds or the shade of massive oak trees—the sense of place was an integral part of the architecture and design.

Collins backed into a spot on the golf team his last year of high school. The team wasn’t very good and I wasn’t any good at all, but they needed a sixth man, he says. The experience of playing with a close-knit group started to kindle his love for the game. McCallie Prep’s home course was Moccasin Bend Golf Club in Chattanooga, and being a member of the team exposed Collins to many golf courses in the area, including the Donald Ross designed Chattanooga Country Club and Seth Raynor’s hidden masterpiece, the Lookout Mountain Club. I really started to fall in love with golf that year, says Collins.

After graduating from high school, Collins enrolled at Sewanee (aka the University of the South), a semi-legendary liberal arts college founded in 1857 by the Episcopal Church and located on top of Monteagle Mountain, an hour west of Chattanooga. A great academic institution, Sewanee also has a well-earned reputation as one of the great party schools in America, perhaps second only to Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. Collins loved the atmosphere on the Mountain and took full advantage of its many cultural opportunities. It was a wonderful college experience, and I had a bunch of good friends. I had a really good time up there. It was a lot of fun. I think graduation was my first and only visit to Chapel, he says with a laugh. Collins also met his future wife Denise, then a student at Rhodes College, on a Sewanee-sponsored study abroad program in Europe in 1995.

Sewanee has a nine-hole golf course—located on the edge of Monteagle Mountain—that students could then play for a nominal fee. Collins and his friends would play the type of golf that college students often play—wild and loose—but a few things about the old Sewanee course made an impression on the young future designer. The course had been laid out in 1915 by an Episcopal bishop who had emigrated from Scotland—and it had the quirkiness of inland Scottish courses like Killin or St. Fillans. Collins explains, it was just kind of a quirky country golf course with a very low maintenance budget. The greens were the big defense. There were some greens with a 7% or 8% slope across big parts of the surface, which is almost unheard of. If you got on the wrong side of the green, you had no chance at all—on almost every green there was a spot that was just almost impossible to play from. Ironically, over 10 years later, the course at Sewanee would become an integral part of the Sweetens Cove story.

In the summer of 1994, after Collins’ freshman year at Sewanee, his good friend and former McCallie teammate Zach McClister invited him on the trip of a lifetime to Scotland—to attend the Open Championship at Turnberry and play a few rounds of links golf. The trip was a high school graduation gift from McClister’s father Ronnie, who would accompany the two boys, along with his good friend Charlie Taylor. Taylor was a local golfing legend in Chattanooga who had been a phenomenal junior player and played golf at the University of Tennessee. Zach and Charlie were both great players at that time, says Collins.

The first stop of the Scotland trip was one of the great towns of the world, and indisputably its greatest golf town: St. Andrews. The foursome was booked to play the Old Course and the only slightly less-heralded New Course. The experience of playing true links golf for the first time—at the Old Course—was a revelation for the young Collins:

I remember how completely different it was than anything I had ever seen before. The greens were just massive. The ball rolled forever. On the double greens you would see another group that was 75 yards away from you—all on the same putting surface. I was just enthralled by the history of it and all the stories our caddies were telling. After a few holes you kind of get a sense of the rhythm and movement of the Old Course that is really unlike anything else in the world. I was in awe of the place at first, but then I started to get focused on trying to play shots. Then we got to the tee on the 11th hole and the caddies told the story about Bobby Jones tearing up his scorecard and storming off the course. I was just like, goddamn, this place where I’m standing—I’m on the same tee that Bobby Jones stood on, that Jack Nicklaus stood on. Every great player who had ever played had been here. It was almost overwhelming.

The following day, the group played the New Course, and Collins was enthralled by the way golf balls seemed to funnel into the deep and numerous bunkers. Shots that seemed safe just trickled inexorably and fatefully into the depth of the cavernous sand pits. Rob explains, the excitement of that dynamic of the ground game—with just such a razor-thin margin for error—was so cool. There were all these trap doors lurking on the course and the specter of disaster was always hanging over every shot.

1994 trip to St. Andrews (l to r): Rob Collins, Ronnie McClister, Charlie Taylor, and Zach McClister (Photo courtesy of Rob Collins)

The four Americans then visited the lovely town of North Berwick—staying at the famous Marine Hotel overlooking the historic West Links. Golf is an inherent part of the fabric of life in Scotland and is a largely democratic game, both facts that were