On the surface of things, the place was doing just fine. In the years after it hosted the 2006 U.S. Open, Winged Foot Golf Club’s West Course was basking in its reputation as a relentlessly demanding championship course that was always in fine shape for its members.
Geoff Ogilvy’s winning score of 5 over par showed that the finest players in the world had their hands full with this layout. If any further evidence were needed, all one had to do was rerun the highlight reel – or lowlight reel – of Jim Furyk, Colin Montgomerie and Phil Mickelson, any of whom would have won with a par on 18, all of whom double bogied.
For all the drama on the surface, there were issues down below. As anyone in turfgrass management knows, a big part of what it takes for a golf course to function well is hidden underground. So, when veteran superintendent Steve Rabideau, CGCS, took over course management at Winged Foot in 2012 he made a thorough study of the infrastructure at the 36-hole facility and found it in need of improvement.
Putting surfaces had shrunk, leading to a loss of the original strategic complexity that A.W. Tillinghast had built into the place when it opened in 1923. The push-up construction of the greens did not allow for the kind of sustained speeds, proper drainage and firmness needed to deliver the desired playing conditions. Greenside bunkers had been altered over the years to the point where there was a mismatch in the relationship between the bunkers and the putting surfaces. Keeping sand on the steep bunker faces was a major problem, with washouts common after a heavy rain.
Across the 280-acre site, drainage was problematic given the intrusion of so much native rock below and above the turf surfface. The drainage hollows that had been built were boggy and did not drain freely. The club was also unable to capture its own runoff after rains and thus relied upon town water for irrigation needs. Trees had also started to clutter the landscape and intrude upon shotmaking variety, as well as impeding proper agronomy.
By 2012, Gil Hanse had already established himself as a golf course architect capable of delivering high-quality new courses and classical restorations. In the New York area alone he had done highly regarded revivals at a trio of Tillinghast-designed clubs: Fenway, Ridgewood and Quaker Ridge. Still, it took a bit of explaining to convince a rightly cautious membership at Winged Foot to entrust their club – home to five U.S. Opens, a PGA Championship, two U.S. Women’s Opens, two U.S. Amateurs, a U.S. Senior Open and a Walker Cup – to Hanse. An initial project involving a new short-game practice area between the ninth and 10th fairways of the East Course, just off the clubhouse, helped build confidence.
Winged Foot has a very golf-literate membership. They take the game seriously, they travel, they see other leading courses and they appreciate great architecture. At a meeting with over 200 members, Hanse made the case for the master plan. Key to the program was a commitment to preserving the exact contours of the legendary putting surfaces. When asked at the meeting if he could guarantee the exact replication of the contours, Hanse gave an unequivocal answer: “Yes.”
Earlier work by other architects at Winged Foot had softened the severity of some putting surfaces or compromised some of the design features in the process of reconstruction. Back then, the technology available for measuring and recreating existing contours had been limited. The recent advent of laser surveying technology allowed for scans of slopes to within a few thousandths of an inch. Hanse and Rabideau knew they could fulfill the promise to restore the putting surfaces exactly; all it took was time, effort and a complete commitment to the original design.
Work on the front nine of the East Course began in the fall of 2013 and moved to the back nine in 2014. Work was completed in time to allow the East Course to host the second U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship in 2016. Work on the back nine of the West Course began in 2016 and on the front nine of the West in the fall of 2017. In each case, they didn’t completely shut down the nine holes being restored. They worked their way across, basically closing two more holes every two weeks as needed. This initially kept 34 holes open to member play and never less than 27.
The normal rule of thumb for major golf course renovations is to keep golfers away. It’s the same with surgery on a loved one; you don’t want the nearest of kin looking on from the gallery. But at Winged Foot, the process was fully exposed and subject to ongoing scrutiny. That’s partly a function of the routing, with the nines of the two courses overlapping. As long as play proceeded, golfers were never far from seeing the extent of the work.
The construction process was developed on the East Course, and by the time it got to the West the program had picked up in pace, scope and confidence. Helping out Hanse was his longtime associate, Jim Wagner, as well as a team of feature shapers from their in-house shaping unit, Caveman Construction, led by Shaymus Maley. LaBar Golf Renovations handled the major excavation and installation work. Scott Poole and his GreenScan 3D technology provided the technical basis for the precise surface measurements. The club’s in-house staff was trained to do all the robotic station data collection and downloading of putting green scans. Kelley Ami Inc. did the site engineering, focusing on water flow. Rabideau’s crew did a lot of trenching, installation of pipes and wires, stripping the sod and stitching it back in. Working directly under Rabideau on staff were Steve Bigelow (now the East Course superintendent), J.R. LaPan (now the West Course superintendent) and Weston Neff (now the U.S. Open superintendent).