Dateline May 8, 2012, The Robert Trent Jones Trail
Off for another adventure. Pete and Bunny, who we met during Walkabout in Alaska, came down to Flagler Beach in late January for a few days. We took them up to Riviera Country Club in Holly Hill, our new home course since the move to Flagler, run by a wonderful family. Somewhere along that round Pete lost his Rolex out on the course and was understandably gutted. The next morning, the greens superintendent had found it and got it back to him. Pete was overjoyed, less about the Rolex itself than about the kind of place where the greens superintendent finds your watch and gives it back. Honor and integrity, both. Over cocktails that evening, we hatched a plan: meet up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in May for a three-week golf fest along the Robert Trent Jones Trail. Twelve courses. And that wouldn't be all of them.
Before we get to playing them, a little history about the Trail itself, because the story of how Alabama ended up with 26 public golf courses on eleven sites is genuinely interesting.
In the late 1980s, Dr. David Bronner, the CEO of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, found himself with two problems on his desk. He needed to diversify the state pension fund and he wanted to do something to help Alabama itself. Most pension managers stop at the first problem. Bronner borrowed an idea from Field of Dreams. Build it, he figured, and they will come. Not a baseball diamond in a cornfield, though. A network of public golf courses across the entire state, all at the same time. The hope was that the courses would draw tourists, attract retirees, and seed economic growth in parts of Alabama that needed it. He liked to say, "I don't do windows, and I don't do just 18s." He meant it.
To put the plan into motion, Bronner brought in Bobby Vaughan, who had been the director of golf at Tanglewood Park in Clemmons, North Carolina. Anyone who lives in our part of North Carolina knows Tanglewood. Vaughan formed SunBelt Golf Corporation to develop, build, and run the courses, and then went looking for a designer.
When you are building eighteen golf courses simultaneously, you don't start at the middle. Bronner and Vaughan went to Robert Trent Jones Sr., arguably the most respected golf course architect alive, the designer of more than 500 courses around the world, including many on Golf Digest's list of America's 100 greatest. Jones was in semi-retirement at the time. He came out for this.
What followed was the largest single golf course construction project ever undertaken anywhere. Over seven hundred pieces of earth-moving equipment in operation at the same time. Someone called it a D-Day of bulldozers. The original plan was 378 holes on eight sites. After the first eight opened, two more sites were added. Then in 2005, the historic Lakewood Golf Club in Point Clear came under the Trail's umbrella, bringing the total to eleven sites, 26 courses, and 468 holes.
The Trail's other quiet innovation is something every golfer who has played on it appreciates. The tee markers are pegged to ability, not to age or gender. Courses range from 4,700 yards from the forward tees up to about 7,700 from the tournament tees, with as many as twelve tee boxes in between. The same course can challenge a touring pro and welcome a weekend beginner. Same eighteen holes, twelve different golf rounds depending on which markers you choose.
These are not manufactured courses. Each one was pulled out of the existing topography rather than imposed on it. The philosophy, according to one of the Trail's directors of golf, was simple: nobody remembers an easy course. What lodges in a golfer's memory is the one brilliant shot that, for a moment, conquered a hard hole.
We will be sharing the rounds as we play them. Twelve courses, three weeks, Pete and Bunny along for all of it. Muscle Shoals first.
