In Memphis, King Collins
Begins Renovating a
Historic Muni
An old stone bridge connects Overton Park’s second green with the Old Forest — an ancient, virgin woodland that sprung up nearly 10,000 years before Memphis did, and which reaches down to separate the golf course’s second and third holes. In a sport that praises designers for tidy green-to-tee connections, the bridge is an invitation to an eccentricity, welcoming players to a two-minute walk through the undisturbed woods that have been a hallmark of the golf course for more than a century. If the walk is one of Overton Park’s most memorable features, then the bridge is its memorable beginning.
Parks Dixon knows the walk well.
“As I was walking with my grandson over there, I said, ‘I want you to know that you’re the fifth generation on both sides of our family to walk over this bridge,’” Dixon said. “My grandfather, my father, me, my son, and now my grandson — we’ve all played at Overton.”
He’s not the only one. More than a century after it opened, Overton remains a local refuge for golfers young and old. And that’s by design.
“It’s an odd duck,” said Nick Walker, who oversees Memphis’ parks and municipal golf courses. “We joke that it’s good for golfers from 8 to 88, because it’s a really approachable course. Nobody walks up to Overton and is intimidated.”
For a short, mostly featureless nine-hole golf course, Overton Park has played an outsized role in the lives of Memphis golfers since it opened in 1904 — making it one of the oldest municipal golf courses in America. Of Memphis’ seven municipal courses, Overton Park has always been the opening handshake, welcoming countless golfers to the game for going on 12 decades. “It’s just where you played golf — that’s where you started,” Dixon said. “As you got better and better, you went to Galloway or Riverside or Pine Hill — longer courses, 18 holes. But everybody starts at Overton.”
Tucked between Rhodes College and Poplar Avenue in Midtown, squarely in the heart of the city, Overton Park is an institution — a local treasure. And that’s a new challenge for Tad King and Rob Collins. Nearly five hours east of Memphis, at Sweetens Cove, they turned water into wine by reimagining a dead-flat afterthought of a golf course into one of the world’s greatest nine-holers; at Landmand in northeastern Nebraska’s Loess Hills, they’re moulding a jaw-dropping 18-hole design of breathtaking scale. But they’ve never handled the family jewels before. They’ve never held somebody else’s baby.
“It’s definitely a different experience,” Collins said. “But it’s been fun because of the passion of the people involved. You can tell there’s a lot of pride in the stakeholders, and that just gets you energized to go in and kick ass and do something special.”
Much of what makes Overton Park so beloved is intrinsic to the place: its location in an urban center, its relationship to its unique, natural backdrop in the Old Forest, and its sense of wonder as a place children clamor. In Memphis in Black and White, Beverly G. Bond and Janann Sherman write that the golf course’s construction and surrounding park’s development in the early 1900s quickly brought Overton Park “among the most desirable residential areas in Memphis.”
Few parks are so beloved that its neighbors take their support to the United States Supreme Court. But beginning in 1956, the federal government pursued plans to build a portion of Interstate 40 through Overton Park; after 15 years of grassroots resistance, the Supreme Court held that the plan violated federal law. It is no exaggeration to say that the decision saved Overton Park.
No golf course architect’s design changes could alter a century of memories. But all things age. So did the golf course: its flat greens shrunk, and maintenance crews battled conditions. “Everyone who’s ever looked at Overton has said, ‘This is a dog track, why don’t we make something nice out of it?’” Dixon said. “But the timing was never right.”
In 2014, though, unbeknownst to Dixon or anyone else, the stars slowly began to align. That October, family business took Dixon to South Pittsburg. Coincidentally, a new nine-hole golf course had opened that same weekend, and Dixon went to lay eyes on it before leaving town. Over the next couple of hours, he became one of Sweetens Cove’s first disciples.
“I didn’t want to leave the first green. I just didn’t want to leave,” Dixon said. “I really remember it — every shot. And there were a million of them. I had two pars and a birdie, and I’m a 7-handicap, but I didn’t care. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.”
Dixon and Collins quickly became friends. Three years later, when Collins visited Memphis for his wife’s class reunion, Dixon — on a whim — took Collins to see Overton Park, with the hopes that he and King might be able to lend the aging course a younger spirit. It howled rain that day, forcing Collins and Dixon onto a porch at the course’s clubhouse. Without a walkthrough, Dixon spilled a lifetime’s worth of memories at the course. Collins quickly understood how precious the course had been; his mind turned soon to how much more it could be.
“That part of Memphis is really cool: the park’s there, Rhodes is across the street, and there’s the Old Growth Forest,” Collins said. “The course just kind of winds its way through the park. The routing is a little disjointed, in the way that Winter Park is a little disjointed. There are some long green-to-tee connections, and normally in a golf experience that would be a negative, but at Winter Park it’s cool because you’re walking through a neighborhood. And I was thinking this was very similar to Winter Park in a lot of ways, because it’s not a dazzling piece of ground, but there’s enough movement there that you could do some really cool stuff.”
Collins was ready long before all the hoops had been jumped through — but especially on a course owned by a municipality, hoop-jumping is not optional. That rainy day in 2017 turned to 2018; 2018 turned to 2019; and then COVID prevented what seemed like a potential ground-breaking in early 2020. But one autumn day in 2020, Collins’ phone rang. It was Dixon, excited to explain that the project was creeping toward a likely beginning sometime in 2021. But a lot had changed since 2017: King Collins wasn’t flying under the radar anymore. Part of King Collins’ business model is that the firm works on no more than two courses at a time; Collins explained that he and King’s calendars for 2021 were nearly full, and that unless the Overton Park pieces came together quickly, Collins doubted that he and King could fit the project into their obligations.
“Within five days, things had fallen into place,” Collins said with a laugh.
Even aside from the tediousness of working on a municipal course — not to mention the pressure of handling a local treasure — Overton Park presents challenges that are new to Collins and King. For one, Overton Park’s routing is set in stone: tree elimination is a non-starter. For another, the course is short: a par-34 whose nine holes measure only about 2,200 yards. Furthermore, Overton Park’s role in Memphis’ portfolio of municipal golf courses has always been as the city’s beginner-level venue, and the City didn’t want that to change. That left King and Collins more limited in their design options than they’ve been on other projects.
Even so, on a piece of monotonous ground with flat greens and no bunkers, there’s a lot of room for improvement. The plans include an ultra-short, 215-yard par-4 (five of the eight par-4s will measure fewer than 270 yards), an Alps hole, and a punchbowl green in excess of 12,000 square feet — larger than the first green at the Old Course in St. Andrews. But the new design also will retain some of Overton Park’s familiar quirks, like the short par-3 second hole, where the tee shot must navigate a chute of trees like a thread through the eye of a needle.
“We will put some more strategy into it. We’ll take advantage of the natural contours to do things like the Alps hole,” Collins said. “I think we’re only gonna put three bunkers out there. Basically, we’re just gonna kind of take what’s there and what’s the land’s giving us, and infuse interest and strategy into that, and build bigger, more dynamic greens that ask more questions. There’ll be variety in the greens. There’ll be right and wrong ways to get to the hole and consequences: things you don’t have right now.”
The flip side of the less invasive approach is that the project should wrap quickly. The golf course closed in mid-January; after shaping and a roughly 100-day grow-in, Collins estimates Overton Park could reopen around Labor Day. The new design adds about 50 yards in length, which will make the renovated version a 2,240-yard, par-35 course. Collins imagines it as the sort of design where players can hit every shot in their bag, but also will allow for casual rounds with just five or six clubs.
“This is an opportunity to do something that’s a little more understated than other things than we’ve done so far,” Collins said.
The course’s greens fee also will remain understated. Walker says the City plans to maintain Overton Park’s $7 greens fee for Memphis residents — although out-of-towners could pay a higher rate.
“I would call it Sweetens-light,” Collins said. “We’re not gonna go out and build Sweetens-esque greens; it just wouldn’t be appropriate. But there’s gonna be a lot more interest in them than there is right now.”
. . .
Photos: courtesy Rob Collins
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