Golf's leading designer is beloved by many, yet his courses have
lifted expectations -- and costs -- to troubling levels
By Ron Whitten
Golf Digest
May 2005
He's the
800-pound gorilla of golf course architecture, a man who seemingly
gets any project he wants, any place he wants, with any budget he
wants.
Clients love Tom Fazio because he creates more headlines than
headaches. Golfers love him because he doesn't beat them up. And rival
architects love him—well, they appreciate him—because his splashy
impact has helped raise everybody's fees.
Fazio, 60, is clearly the dominant designer on
America's 100 Greatest Courses, with seven additions to the 2005
list and 14 courses overall, by far the most among all architects.
Fazio is also the consulting architect for Pine Valley, Augusta
National, Oakmont, Winged Foot, Merion and Riviera, among others.
There's no denying the man's personal likability, his down-to-earth
nature and his devotion to his family, his staff, his clients and his
favorite charity, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. But popularity
and critical acclaim don't necessarily result in a lasting legacy.
Will his architecture be the enduring standard for golf design well
into the future?
| More on Tom Fazio | |
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GD Archives: Leader of the club: Tom Fazio creates great
golf courses and great programs for children.
• Find Fazio-Designed Courses: View more more information including course yardages, greens fees, readers comments on Fazio-designed public courses in Golf Digest's Places to Play guide. • Augusta: New & Improved: A massive makeover in 2002 has turned the Masters into the ultimate test of major-championship golf. • The Masters Mechanic: The club's consulting architect, Tom Fazio toughens up Augusta National. |
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| America's 100 Greatest Courses | |
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•
America's 100 Greatest Courses • 100 Greatest Public Courses • Breaking down the numbers • How our panel rated them • Best-in-State: The top-rated golf courses in each of the 50 states • Can you buy your way onto our list? No, our rankings are not for sale. But money does matter when it comes to creating today's super courses. • The Book of the Best: We've gathered our favorite course rankings, including the new Planet Golf list of the top courses in 184 countries, in a new booklet called "The World's Greatest Golf." Order your copy here! |
The fact is, Tom Fazio's architecture is extremely expensive to create, and darned expensive to maintain. (Design for easy maintenance? Fazio once told me he thought manufacturers should develop equipment that could more easily mow the steep, showy slopes and banks that he and others were producing.) Golfers ultimately pay for the perfection of a Tom Fazio design in six-digit membership fees to private courses and three-digit green fees to public ones. That has certainly contributed to the inflation of golf that started in the mid-1990s and has remained on the rise even as the U.S. economy has sputtered.
Why pick on Tom Fazio, when most golf architects these days are equally guilty of driving up costs? Because Fazio is the main attraction and leads by the sheer force of his examples. He can be forgiven for being seduced by the $37 million budget of Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, where he had to spend money just to create a golf environment. But Shadow Creek seems to have made it easy for him to insist on subsequent enormous budgets, say, $30 million, to smooth out the shortcomings of the remarkably natural site of Dallas National. Worse still, Fazio's "Shadow Creek look" has led to countless expensive imitations by others, the prime example being the $35 million Trump International in Florida done by his brother, Jim Fazio.
Most of the money being spent on Fazio designs these days is for creature comforts—installing continuous cartpaths, for example, and hiding them behind mounds and vegetation so as not to spoil the image of a pristine, though manufactured, landscape. But golf can be just as much fun, and certainly far more challenging, when played in more Spartan conditions, with a pullcart on dry, patchy fairways where one might have to improvise some shots. Tom Fazio used to design such courses, like Wild Dunes, his first 100 Greatest layout. It's a shame we don't recognize that course on the 100 Greatest anymore, and a shame that it's no longer his standard.
Fazio counters that he's simply giving the people what they want. "My clients don't want to wait 30 years for a golf course," he says. "They want instant maturity. And we have the technology to give it to them—equipment that can move huge trees, for instance—so why shouldn't we use it?" Part of the blame, he adds, belongs to Golf Digest and its course rankings: "Everybody wants to win, so it's a major financial impact. You sod instead of seed. You put in bigger trees. You build in more ‘wow' factors like water features. You spend more on promotion."
Based on an unscientific poll of Fazio course owners, Golf Digest panelists and others in the golf industry, it appears that Fazio's work offers an artistic appeal that's more emotional than substantive. Veteran character actor and panelist Bruce McGill sums up Fazio's work with a single word: "Pizazz!" Golf architect Clyde Johnston calls it "sizzle." Panelist Craig Jorgensen of Kansas City offers, "His courses look hard and play easy," and course designer Mike DeVries suggests, "All golfers ‘feel good' playing his courses."
"He might not build the hardest, most challenging, best risk-reward holes or get the absolute most out of the property," says panelist Terry Inslee, a member of Fazio-designed Black Diamond Ranch in Florida, "but his courses are always visually appealing and usually very memorable."
More than 25 years ago, Fazio vowed he'd build only one course at a time, recalls Ron Read, a regional director with the U.S. Golf Association. Somewhere along the way, Fazio stopped being a course architect and became a corporate brand. These days, Fazio rarely takes chances. He churns courses out, repeating what has been successful on previous designs. "Fazio is a factory firm," says panelist Gib Papazian, a golf writer. "There is nothing seminal [or] original about his architecture."
Fazio doesn't let criticism of his designs get to him—"It's a free country. Everyone is entitled to their opinion"—but he disputes the idea that he is operating a factory. "I have an extremely talented staff, many with 20 years' experience, and I give them the freedom to express their talent," he says. "But the only person who is involved in all my projects is me. There isn't anything that goes on in any of my course designs that I'm not involved in."
| Why pick on Tom Fazio? Because Fazio is the main attraction and leads by the sheer force of his examples. |
If Fazio's designs are something short of championship caliber, why are so many of them on America's 100 Greatest? The answer is that only two categories—Shot Values and Resistance to Scoring—deal with challenges presented by a course, but the remaining categories—Design Variety, Aesthetics, Memorability, Conditioning, even Ambience—reward the ephemeral, "feel-good" qualities of a design. Plus, there are some panelists who confuse great cosmetics with great Shot Values. Fazio's bold and beautiful fairway bunkers, for instance, rarely pose strategic challenges, but it takes a number of rounds to realize that.
None of this has affected Fazio's demand in the industry. Says Read, "If I had unlimited funds, I'd give Tom a blank check and know the number he wrote in would be fair."
Fair is one thing, but realistic is another number. While he was designing Dallas National, Fazio told an assembled group of founding members, "Whatever your expectations are, we'll exceed them." That's an unreasonable goal, particularly when you're spending other people's money achieving it, and ultimately an unhealthy one if we want to keep golf from becoming a game for the elite few.
With prices still rising and participation still dropping each year, I wish Fazio (and the rest of us in golf, including this magazine and our America's 100 Greatest survey) would be a little less pretty and a little more practical. This is vital if we expect the game of golf to remain viable as a pastime, not just for this generation, but for generations to come.
source: Golf Digest