BROOKSVILLE, FLORIDA | One of the pleasures of being on the architecture beat is watching a place evolve from a dusty construction site full of bulldozers and backhoes to a fully operational golf course. It is hard not to appreciate the process, as arduous and full of twists and turns as it often is, and all that goes into creating a new layout. And there is something special about walking and hitting actual shots off of verdant fairways and tees that when I first visited were fairly nondescript stretches of woods and pastureland.
I have been able to monitor such transformations at some pretty remarkable places, among them Cabot Links in Nova Scotia, where some 15 years ago I rode around the site on which the Rod Whitman-designed course was taking shape in a dirt-encrusted SUV with Ben Cowan-Dewar, the man who was leading that project.
Several years later, I returned to the Cape Breton coast to check on the construction of the second course at that resort, Cabot Cliffs, and spent one sunny autumn afternoon with Cowan-Dewar walking the handful of holes that had been grassed-in with 6-irons in our hands and a handful of balls in our pockets. We stopped to hit the occasional approach shot into one of the greens as we also gawked at the shimmering waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the holes that Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw had so brilliantly crafted from that ground.
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