A minimalist approach

Not much design and earth moving were needed to build the Erin Hills Golf Course in Wisconsin.

Restraint. It has been the key word during the designing and building of Erin Hills Golf Course in Erin, Wis., since golf course critic/architect Ron Whitten and the design team of Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry stepped onto the property five years ago.

The architects found the best green sites and worked backward to find the tees and landing areas.

Restraint from Americanizing the property into another parkland-getaway-type golf course. Restraint from fiddling with the already formidable kettle-moraine land forms – what Whitten describes as a giant rumpled blanket. Restraint from imploding here and exploding there.

“We tried not to create anything,” says Whitten, the golf architecture editor of Golf Digest.

“The greatest challenges were more in finding golf holes than creating them,” adds Hurdzan, whose bend toward subtlety balances Fry’s sometimes nuclear-blast tendencies when designing a golf course.

When all was said and done, and the final grassing was completed Sept. 23, golf course builder Landscapes Unlimited had moved less than 10,000 cubic yards of earth – all on just four holes.

“I’ve been with Landscapes Unlimited for 21 years and never have seen anything like this,” says project manager Curt Grieser.

The site was such a fit for golf that six weeks before the course was finished the U.S. Golf Association designated Erin Hills the host of the 2008 U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links Championship.

Whereas links courses are formed by the oceans, Erin Hills gets its look from kettles, moraines and eskers formed by glaciers and wind.

“It’s an absolutely spectacular piece of land – one of those rare properties where you think you almost don’t have to do anything to make it a superb golf course,” says USGA senior director of rules and competitions Mike Davis. “I told Ron it must have been what [golf course architect] Charles Blair Macdonald saw when he first visited [the site of] Shinnecock Hills [on Long Island] in the late 1800s.”

Davis acknowledges it’s unprecedented for a course that isn’t completed yet to be named as host of a USGA championship. He says that when he and USGA executive director David B. Fay visited Erin Hills Aug. 10, Fay told him, “If we think it has potential for a championship down the road, and we’re looking for a site in the Midwest, this might be the perfect venue.”

First look
Hurdzan and Whitten lay claim to a minimalist architectural philosophy, which Fry doesn’t. However, it took a tour of the Erin Hills property with Whitten to change Fry’s philosophy about this particular site.

“When Dana saw it [after] we had staked it out, he said, ‘OK, on the first hole, we’re going to have to blow it out here and push this over there to contain balls; and over here, we’re going to have to knock this down …’” Whitten says. “I said, ‘No, Dana, this could be our Sand Hills.' By the third or fourth hole, he started agreeing, and by the end of the round, he said, ‘Man, we can’t touch anything here.’

“I thought I was going to be the governor between Dana’s scorched-earth policy and Mike’s austerity,” Whitten adds. “As it turns out, I’m actually more right-brained than Dana.”

Before-and-after photos of the site and course are almost exactly the same. When the USGA officials visited the site, it was mowed to four inches and flags were stuck in the green sites.

“You could see the golf course from day one,” Whitten says.

The design team, all architectural historians fascinated by the land’s possibilities, exposed developer Bob Lang, president of The Lang Cos., which is based in Delafield, Wis., to the best late 19th century and early 20th century designs. Convinced, Lang gave free reign to Whitten, Hurdzan and Fry.

“Bob Lang has a keen eye for design, and like Ron, Mike and Dana, he has a passionate commitment to this project,” says Bill Kubly, c.e.o. of Landscapes Unlimited.

General manager Steve Trattner, a Wisconsin native who first found the land and convinced Lang to build a golf course there, says Lang put his money where his vision is. The original property was 430 acres, but to improve the routing, Lang purchased an additional 80 acres. But he wasn’t done yet. Noticing three houses overlooking the golf course and wanting a course set apart from the world, Lang bought the three homes – and the 51 acres they were attached to – and tore them down.

“I would have been happy building a little $20 muni and being a part of it in some way, shape or form, and now I’m general manager of what’s probably going to be a world-famous golf course,” Trattner says.

Shapes of things
A world-ranked golf course doesn’t always equate to minimal earth movement, but the end result has much to do with what exists in the beginning. At Erin Hills, it’s the land forms left by the glaciers: kettles, which are holes in the ground; moraines, which are large dome hills; and eskers, which are linear sluices in which water poured through ice and deposited sand and gravel.

The architects correlate kettle-moraine land to links land formed by the oceans. So they feel they’ve laid out a links-style golf course even though it’s far from an ocean. Erin Hills is a true links land form, but rather than being formed by the ocean and wind, it was formed by the glacier and wind, Hurdzan says.

“It has haphazard contours, closed valleys and all kinds of things,” he says. “The fact that it’s all sand and gravel allows it to drain out, whereas if it had been clay material, we would have cut channels through it and added ponds.”

The collective approach of the three architects has been to preserve the links land form as much as possible in the style of Old Tom Morris or Willie Park.

“There was almost no earthmoving,” Hurdzan says. “I don’t think we changed any contour on any green more than one foot. All the greens were shaped within a week or so.”

When construction was completed, course builder Landscapes Unlimited moved a total of just 10,000 cubic yards of earth.

Although modern courses have flatter putting surfaces because of new bentgrasses and low mowing heights, Erin Hills’ greens contours are unchanged.

“Where we have very distinct and steep contours, we have just made the greens bigger to allow for that,” Hurdzan says. “Where the natural contours were subtle, we left them subtle.”

Au naturel
When the architects laid out Erin Hills, they found the best green sites and worked backward to find the tees and landing areas. It took longer to complete the routing than to build the golf course.

“There are blind shots, great big greens, small greens with 6-foot contour changes and punch-bowl greens,” Hurdzan says. “Whatever the land allowed is what we built.”

“We didn’t set forth to build that [turn-of-the-century] era,” Whitten adds. “We were trying to do something that adheres to the land and looks like Irish links land in the kettle-moraine terrain. We put in fescue and a limited irrigation system – a lot of the old bump-and-run kind of architecture.”

The architects designed a Biarritz green, which has a deep side-to-side swale in the middle, and a dell hole, which is a blind par 3 in a hollow between grass-covered dunes.

“If you’ve been to Lahinch [on the West coast of Ireland], you will have seen The Dell hole before, but most Americans will have not played a blind par 3,” Whitten says. “We also have some holes that are even more natural and quirky than that.”

Twelve or 13 of the fairways were not altered at all, according to Fry. Landscapes Unlimited mowed the grass, installed the irrigation, applied three applications of Roundup and seeded straight into the soil. The land was so perfect for golf that Landscapes Unlimited irrigated more than half the holes before crews moved any dirt at all.

And Grieser’s crews did little topsoil stripping to keep the land’s organic content. They simply scraped off the top and cored out the green sites to install drainage and build California-style sand greens, retaining all the contours. Fine fescue was planted directly into all the fairways and roughs, while A-4 bentgrass was used on the greens and Penncross on the tees.

“It was almost like a renovation project in the sense that there was little earthwork or contouring fairways,” Grieser says.

Though the course has a links style, not all the trees were eliminated, combining the look of Wisconsin with the feel of Ireland.

Hurdzan says the course is underirrigated by design and is about one-third to one-half that of most courses.

“We want it to dry out much more than a normal golf course – definitely a European irrigation philosophy rather than American,” he says.

The design aspects that changed the land the most on the 581 acres were the bunkers and the trees.

“We’re trying very hard to make the bunkers look like natural erosions and kettles, so that when you play it you think, ‘Aren’t they lucky to have that here?’” Whitten says.

Carved out of the sand and gravel in the native hillsides, the bunkers will remain a work in progress during the next several years, Whitten says.

At a glance

Location: Erin, Wis. Owner: Bob Lang General manager: Steve Trattner Superintendent: Jeff Rottier Acres: 581 Yardage: 5,800 to 8,100 Construction cost: NA Par: 72 Turf on greens: A-4 bentgrass Turf on tees: Penncross Turf on fairways: Ambassador chewings fescue, Ambrose creeping red fescue, and Jamestown V chewings fescue Course architects: Michael Hurdzan, Dana Fry and Ron Whitten Course builder: Landscapes Unlimited Project manager: Curt Grieser Clubhouse architect: Lang Homes.

“It’s all sand and gravel, so we simply carved the bunkers out of the native hillsides and pretty much left them alone,” he says. “The bunkers will look like they’ve been there forever.”

But the trees are another matter. Links courses have no trees, and thus a debate began.

“Dana wanted to nuke all the trees,” Whitten says. “I like a little more variety. It’s Wisconsin, after all, not Ireland, so we have retained a few accent trees to provide a better sense of where you’re at. But Dana was right: The more trees we removed, the more we revealed the huge sweeping grandeur of this property. It’s surrounded by wetlands, so you see no homes, no power lines, just this piece of untouched property.”

Potential
When all is said and done, Erin Hills has the potential to be among the best golf courses in the world, according to Davis.

“A lot of the country’s best golf courses don’t sit on land even close to being this spectacular,” he says.

Although it’s far too early to think about Erin Hills hosting a U.S. Open, it can play as long as 8,100 yards, and the land and routing are good for spectator movement and for having all the ancillary adjacent space for corporations, television compounds, etc., according to Davis, who says the course could host a number of championships.

Because of the course’s Old World style, complete with blind shots, quirky features and natural fescue grasses, Whitten says the course will be an acquired taste for many golfers.

“World-class golf doesn’t need to be maintained wall-to-wall,” Kubly says. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” GCN

Mark Leslie is a freelance writer from Monmouth, Maine. He can be reached at gripfast@adelphia.net.