october-2009

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
4th Hole at The Tradition at
Royal New Kent
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.
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OCTOBER 2009 GO MAGAZINE
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