Embrace the pomp

The major champion directed an alumni band as it played a song not heard as often during recent falls as better-known collegiate jingles.

Hail to the lame! Cheer, cheer for this to end!

No bands should be allowed to trounce on golf turf, thought a skeptical editor who spends his mornings, weekends and evenings pondering golf course maintenance.

The editor then met the people involved in the ceremonial opening of the Lehman 18 at Cragun’s Resort in Brainerd, Minnesota, and realized pomp beats the alternative. Pictures from the day Tom Lehman led the band will adorn the Cragun’s clubhouse walls for decades. Tales will be passed down to generations of vacationing Minnesotans.

Lehman, winner of The Open Championship in 1996, is a Minnesotan who attended the University of Minnesota. The school’s best football run was 1934-1941, when the maroon and gold won five national titles, including three straight starting in 1934. The “Minnesota Rouser” had to be the most intimidating collegiate jingle of those days.

Around the same time, Merrill K. and Louise Cragun noticed tourism potential in the Brainerd Lakes area, a peaceful, secluded and wooded region 130 miles north of the Twin Cities. The couple built a few cabins along Gull Lake. By 1947, they owned 12 cabins and a lakeside lodge. Their son, Merrill K. Jr., known throughout the region as “Dutch,” started helping his parents operate the resort as a 9-year-old.

Dutch eventually assumed management and ownership of the resort and became a Minnesota tourism legend. Under Dutch’s direction, the resort added numerous amenities, including 36 regulation and nine par-3 golf holes in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Ninety-one years old and one of the resort industry’s great story slingers, Dutch remains omnipresent at Cragun’s. He convinced Lehman in 2020 to examine the Cragun’s Legacy Courses and submit a plan to revitalize the 36 holes originally designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr. Lehman’s design team, which includes associate Chris Brands, concocted an ambitious plan to add nine new holes, some of which now border lots cleared to build new homes.

Work commenced in 2021, with the resort leaving at least 27 holes open throughout the entire process. The final nine will be completed next summer.

Having 36 finished holes — the Lehman 18 complements the 18 open holes on the Dutch 27 — represents a celebratory milestone for everybody involved in the project. Renovations, especially multi-year efforts conducted during the heavy-play, tight-labor, delivery-delay era, are grueling. We’ll share more about the work at Cragun’s in our October issue.

For the rest of the 2023 golf season, director of golf course maintenance Matt McKinnon and team are preparing a pair of distinct courses for visitors and members as crews from Minnesota-based Duininck Golf shift earth and strip and relay sod on the final nine.

McKinnon temporarily escaped the most demanding parts of his job to subtly participate in the pomp of the reopening ceremony. He sat at a side table with Dutch as Lehman, general manager Eric Peterson and director of golf Jack Wawro described to a room filled with supporters and reporters the nuances of the renovation. McKinnon lingered in the background while the band played and Lehman hit the opening shot on the first hole, a right-to-left, uphill par 4 featuring a fairway bunker right, three left bunkers leading to the green and abundant short grass flanking the putting surface. Once the pomp ended and the shotgun event started, McKinnon played the completed course with Judd Duininck, the leader of Duinick Golf.

After learning what the project means to McKinnon, Peterson, Dutch, Duininck, Lehman and the teams they oversee, the grumpy editor understood why ceremonies such as the one at Cragun’s must be embraced.

Remember the golf construction slowdown of 2008-13? Panic surpassed pomp in Minnesota and elsewhere. Considering the not-so-distant past, hearing a one-minute song on a first tee symbolizes the industry’s transformation.

Busy always beats the alternative. Pomp always beats panic. Lehman visited. The band played. Dutch told stories. The superintendent experienced the results of exhaustive work from a relaxing perspective.

You’d have to be pretty damn grumpy to think it wasn’t cool.