TULSA, OKLAHOMA | When course designer Gil Hanse and partner Jim Wagner were tasked with what Hanse likes to call an historical restoration of Southern Hills Country Club, his mind went to a long-ago place.
The Depression.
It was 1936 when course designer Perry Maxwell completed Southern Hills – a dry, dusty and discouraging time, which helped mold the golf course that last week hosted its fifth PGA Championship and eighth major championship.
Always viewed as a muscular, demanding test, Southern Hills showed off a restored version with a fresh star turn, its bona fides bolstered not just by the changes Hanse and Wagner made but by the chorus of praise from players.
Sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a hospitality suite sponsored by Rolex before the championship began, Hanse noted the juxtaposition of a luxury brand at a place born at the end of the Dust Bowl era in the American heartland. Somehow, it worked.
“... they wanted (Southern Hills) to have this certain edge which fit in with the Oklahoma landscape, and I think the presentation links back to some of the rugged treatment around the creeks, the treatment around the bunkers and gives us that feeling.”
Gil Hanse
“It was a wonderful thing that this club was built during part of the Depression and there was a lot going on,” Hanse said. “There wasn’t a lot of good news, and this was viewed as a good-news story, so there was a lot of documentation about the building of the golf course and they hosted major tournaments very early, 20 years after they opened.
“(Because it was) built in the heart of the Depression and they wanted it to have this certain edge which fit in with the Oklahoma landscape, and I think the presentation links back to some of the rugged treatment around the creeks, the treatment around the bunkers and gives us that feeling.”
Hanse is the hottest name in course architecture, his bulldozer prints on the layouts of seven courses hosting major championships this year or in the relatively near future: Southern Hills, The Country Club (Brookline), Oakmont, Merion, Los Angeles Country Club, Aronimink, PGA Frisco’s East Course and Baltusrol.
In a business in which top-tier designers see themselves as stars, Hanse does his best to deflect attention. He makes a point of mentioning the influence of his publicity-averse partner Wagner and is adamant about crediting the original course designers, whether it’s Perry Maxwell at Southern Hills or George Thomas at LACC.
He’s not above admitting that he initially had misgivings about taking on the Southern Hills project. He was persuaded to take a look by superintendent Russ Myers, who worked with Hanse on the Los Angeles CC project before returning to Tulsa and Southern Hills where he had been previously.
“It was the scale of the restoration and the presentation of Maxwell that I questioned, and I am as guilty as the next golf-architecture nerd that I looked at Southern Hills Country Club via aerial photos and came to a conclusion when I should know better,” Hanse said. “When I came out here, it was a revelation to see how good this piece of property was.”
At the same time, Hanse immersed himself in learning about Maxwell, who, in addition to Southern Hills, also designed Prairie Dunes and Old Town Club and did work on Merion, Augusta National, Crystal Downs, Pine Valley and Colonial Country Club.
Maxwell never had the profile of Donald Ross or Alister MacKenzie, but the quality of his work has endured.
“I think that William Flynn and Perry Maxwell are probably the two most underappreciated Golden Age architects who have a great body of work but you don’t hear much about them,” Hanse said. “From everything I understand about (Maxwell), he was just a very self-effacing, humble guy. Let’s face it: Back then, golf architecture wasn’t a profession that many people talked about and certainly wasn’t something where the media paid a lot of attention.
“At the end of the day – and you have heard me say this before about other places – but it is more about Perry Maxwell than it is about Jim [Wagner] and I. I mean, we are here because Perry Maxwell can’t be, but if he could be I am hopeful he would be really proud of what we have done here. I’m hoping that by the end of the week, Perry Maxwell is much more of a household name within golf architecture and people think that, ‘Wow, I would love to learn more about Perry Maxwell because I have never heard of the guy or seen his work before.’ ”
Like others in different professions, Hanse is a sponge for ideas both old and new. If he finds something he likes, he’s not afraid to borrow it and apply it elsewhere.
“One of the things that Jim and I talk about is if we do our job here, then Perry Maxwell is back, but we can always steal Perry Maxwell ideas and put it in our own designs,” Hanse said.
“If we see something here that we think is really cool, we are fortunate that with all the restoration work that we do we have a large catalog of ideas that we can go back to and use for our own stuff.”
Ron Green Jr.