Different Strokes

THE LATE MIKE STRANTZ DESIGNED GOLF COURSES THAT SHOCK, TERRIFY AND CHALLENGE ALL WHO PLAY THEM.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE WOOTE/IMPACT GOLF MARKETING

18th hole at Tobacco Road Golf Club

The 18th hole at Tobacco Road Golf Club in Sanford, NC, is one of the most distinctive holes in American golf. From the tee you don't see any hole at all, only the entrance road that crosses in front of you, then a large, sunken sand barren spotted with scrub, and finally high, fescue-topped dunes encircled by pines, beyond which, you assume, must be fairway and who knows what else. You won't know until you get there, assuming you can collect your nerves and hit your drive over everything.

The sight can be shocking, but it shouldn't surprise you. This is Mike Strantz territory, after all. The architect of Tobacco Road, which opened in 1998 just 50 miles south of Raleigh, was one of golf 's most artistic and iconoclastic designers.

His courses, replete with scenes like these, are through-the-looking glass adventures routed across extreme landscapes full of strange-looking golf hurdles that often seem to flout architectural convention. Just as Impressionist painters once revolted against the principles of classicism, Strantz's designs are fullthroated renunciations of the sort of standardized, face-forward courses that have come to dominate mainstream design. The look and style of his courses have no contemporary parallels, and for enthusiasts, they're among golf 's greatest rollercoaster rides.

Unfortunately, there are only nine places in America where you can see his work. Strantz died of cancer in 2005 at the age of 50. His courses now live on like museum pieces, and his architecture continues to both inspire and baffle players and designers alike.

Golf Digest's Ron Whitten once described Strantz as "part [Alister] MacKenzie, part Stephen King." Strantz even looked the part of the mad artist, wearing his hair long with a Fu Manchu mustache and riding horseback around the properties he designed. His background in drafting - he worked as a graphic artist during a hiatus from golf course architecture in the late 1980s and early 1990s before returning to open his own firm, Maverick Golf Course Design, in 1994 - no doubt influenced his creative temperament. You have to be a visionary, or crazy, to build putting surfaces with one level set 6 feet below another, or greens nearly 90 yards from side to side and only 20 yards deep.

Strantz began his college career in a studio art program before transferring into a turf grass management program that later led to a job with leading designer Tom Fazio's firm. The art never left him, and his drawings of individual golf holes are not just visual blueprints of how to build them, but also frame-worthy expressions in their own right. (You can see examples of his drawings at www.mikestrantzdesign.com/sketches.html.)

Forrest Fezler, a close friend who worked with Strantz from 1994 until his death, says Strantz's creative zeal made him push back against popular trends. "Mike always told me that if you look at a golf hole and think you want to do something like put a bunker here or do [a certain] type of a look, you've got to do exactly the opposite. Because that's what everyone else is probably going to do," Fezler says. "He always had to be unique, and had the tremendous gift of being an artist."

Tobacco Road, Strantz's most fully realized vision, 3rd is carved out of an old quarry where players are faced with outsize spectacles such as sandy wastelands, towering dunes, hidden greens and fairways, surreal putting surfaces, and holes that twist and turn through carved-out valleys and native grasslands. Like Impressionist paintings, holes with so many different shapes and stimuli force players' eyes to do much of the strategic heavy lifting.

"People can't really pinpoint why his courses have such charm and appeal when you play them, why your heart goes through your throat when you stand on the tee," Fezler says. "He tried to get that feeling on every golf hole that he did. He felt that golf was becoming boring, and if you see enough new courses, pretty soon each hole starts looking the same."

Strantz took chances few others would dare. Where most architects employ bulldozers and big budgets to remove obstacles - like the sand barren and large dune face off the tee at Tobacco Road's 18th - in order to make players comfortable by showing them everything that's ahead, Strantz used those same instruments to create obstacles. He embraced randomness, blind shots and mystery. By not revealing everything the hole had in store, he teased out the tension between fear and faith - faith, because in nearly every instance where you can't see around the corner or over the hill, there's invariably more fairway or green than you know what to do with. If you can get a modest drive airborne and over the dune on the 18th hole, you realize the landing area on the other side is enormous.

The Tradition Golf Club at Stonehouse, opened in 1996 in Toano, VA (30 miles from Richmond) is perhaps his most conservative creation. Here, he muscled holes into natural valleys and ravines of a severe and heavily forested site, yet found room to build enormous greens and several fairways that are almost 100 yards wide, even though sometimes they're out of sight just over the crest of a hill.

Just 15 miles from Stonehouse, The Tradition Golf Club at Royal New Kent is an homage to Irish links courses. Sections of the site were rolling meadow, and Strantz tucked certain features - like the secluded eighth and 14th greens - deep within existing mounds and hillocks that he doctored to resemble seaside dunes. The abrupt flow of the ground looks natural but you know it's not, and the movements conceal portions of fairway and putting surfaces from clear view.

"I think Royal New Kent is just fabulous," says Jim Engh, an architect whose designs similarly defy accepted norms. "It's so creative. Some of it mimics what the links courses look like, and then other parts blend [traditional links features] with his own ideas of what makes a unique golfing opportunity."

Tot Hill Farm, opened in 2000, is a different experience altogether, set amid a tumultuous landscape of exposed boulders in the Uwharrie Mountains of central North Carolina. Instead of moving the rocks, Strantz incorporated them into the design, using them as hazards and shading greens behind them. Here, players can tee off across a country road, play to alternate fairways hidden behind hand-stacked stone walls and hit into three-level greens. And that's all on one hole.

While his contemporaries often bristled at such excesses, Jim Engh admired Strantz's boldness and élan. "In golf today, it's been the same for 80 years… and no one has really tried to step outside the box," Engh says. "To me that's wild, great stuff. It makes for a fun experience. I think that's what people sometimes forget. There's so much [of] a bigger spectrum to the golf experience than the shot and the direction the par threes play and all that stuff. It's so much deeper and more cerebral than that."

Blind shots, like those at Royal New Kent or off the first tee at Tobacco Road - where the drive must split two monolithic dunes - can be exhilarating if played with a sense of adventure. The severely uphill ninth hole at Tobacco Road, similar to the ninth hole at Tot Hill Farm, looks unconquerable from the tee, its green perched blindly atop shaggy bunkers two and a half stories above the fairway. Fezler learned from Strantz that, as outrageous as these holes may seem, they can ignite deeper emotions - inspiration, even terror - that are intrinsic to golf but all too absent on most American courses.

"The unknown is more exciting than seeing everything set out in front of you," Fezler says. "Whenever you play a hole going uphill or over a hill, where you can't see all the green surface, the anticipation of where you are on the green is pretty exciting."

Golfers are enamored of Mike Strantz's body of work for the same reasons collectors are drawn to certain pieces of art: because they inspire, because they show the creative potential of the imagination and often because they're rare. And though his courses are fixed in numbers their power to move and inspire is not likely to wear off.

OBSTACLE COURSES

These holes typify Mike Strantz's extreme brand of artistry.

4th hole at The Tradition at Royal New Kent
Large dunes block the view off the tee at this long par four hole, and only a ribbon of fairway can be seen creeping around them on the right. Directly over the dunes, however, is one of the widest fairways on the course, which bobs and weaves all the way to a small green notched into a grassy hillside amphitheater.
www.traditionalclubs.com; Providence Forge, VA (25 miles from both Williamsburg and Richmond)

14th hole at The Tradition at Stonehouse
This par four hole isn't long, but the tee shot disappears over bunkers and the crest of a hill. The approach shot drops steeply downhill through a gap between two hills, and half the green is tucked behind a vertical, grassy slope on the left.
www.traditionalclubs.com; Toano, VA (10 miles from Williamsburg; 40 miles from Richmond)

5th hole at Tot Hill Farm
A long tee shot across a wooded ravine kicks off the par-five fifth before it tumbles downhill through the forest toward a wild, split-level green. The lower lobe hangs 6 feet below the rest of green, while the upper right portion is tucked behind a garden of exposed boulders.
www.tothillfarm.com; Asheboro, NC (72 miles from Raleigh)

13th hole at Tobacco Road Golf Club
The first gratuitous section of fairway at the par-five 13th is framed by a sandy waste area. The second section is a blind shot between a gap in the trees and two bunkers. From there, the smallest green on the course is hidden in a shallow basin completely encircled by man-made dunes, and only the very tip of the flagstick, at best, is visible from the fairway.
www.tobaccoroadgolf.com; Sanford, NC (50 miles from Raleigh)