Dateline August 2, 2019, Cedar Rapids and Donald Ross

Now that Janice had qualified, we headed for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where the championship would be played, and it happened that the host course was one of those on our list to write about. We called, and they were delighted to have us out for a round later that afternoon.

We pulled in around four and went straight to the first tee. The course is something special. Donald Ross, one of the most famous of the early-twentieth-century architects, laid it out in 1915, and in 2015 the Cedar Rapids Country Club spent four million dollars bringing it back to his original drawings, true to the way he meant it to play.

What a thrill it was. Over the years we have been lucky enough to play a Ross course here and there, and Cedar Rapids was a fine example of his hand: raised greens with rounded edges, so that a ball left short, or run too far past, simply rolled off, and as often as not left you three or four feet below the putting surface in the short rough.

The little touches were everywhere, down to wooden rakes in the bunkers and wooden flagsticks in the cups.

A good many of the bridges over the streams are suspension bridges, a graceful touch all the way around the course.

Donald Ross the architect. A restoration architect named Kris Spence, who makes a specialty of bringing Ross courses back, puts the man's genius about as well as anyone. Ross knew, Spence says, that he was handing the game to a brand-new public, and felt a duty to teach it in a balanced way, asking a player for the whole range of shots. He used his bunkers not to herd you along but to suggest a line and the shape of a shot, then left the choosing to you; the short way around was often the dangerous one, the longer way safer and easier to see, and each asked a different thing of you at the green. There were exceptions, the volcano par threes, say, where he demanded a single high approach and nothing else. What set Ross apart, by Spence's telling, was that he built from whatever each piece of ground gave him, so his holes seldom look alike; he placed his bunkers and tilted his greens and their edges by picturing exactly how a ball would run and drain once it was down; and he routed holes and set greens across rough, severe country in a way that, for the equipment of his day, was remarkable.

We found a fine county park in Cedar Rapids for the night, and were able to book it for the tournament itself, later in August.