Rob Collins and
Tad King’s Cutting-Edge
Plans for a Dead Course
Rob Collins is late.
At Walker’s Drive-In, the center of the local restaurant universe in Jackson, Mississippi, Tad King is quietly holding court. He has come here to meet a small group of local enthusiasts chasing a dream: the rebirth of a now-defunct country club golf course, and an opportunity to revitalize Jackson’s lackluster public golf scene. King is the quieter of the King Collins pairing, but his reservoir of stories is more than enough to carry the group’s attention. This has been King Collins’ busiest year since its namesake’s duo formed their partnership in 2010, and everyone at the table wants to know the latest on their budding projects. In New York, the final touches at their new nine-hole course will come in early 2020. In Nebraska, late fall will soon be winter, and shaping at Landmand Golf Club will come to a halt until spring’s thaw.
Colonial Country Club’s old 18-hole layout presented established playing corridors, but not enough width to support Tad King and Rob Collins’ penchant for strategic golf. Ultimately, the pair decided to ignore the original design and play across the old corridors.
And here in Jackson, perhaps another opportunity is warming up.
Eventually, Collins arrives — victim to a missed connecting flight, and now trailing the group by a couple of cocktails. He and King still look the parts of an unassuming, small-time firm — both in jeans and quarter-zips with tousled hair — but across the dinner table’s competing conversations, heads turn to listen whenever either of them speaks. They are no longer rising stars in golf architecture; their stars have risen. People want to know what they think; that is, after all, why they’re here.
Amidst the smell of appetizers and cocktails, the ghost of Colonial Country Club hangs in the air. For nearly 70 years, Colonial was an institution of the central Mississippi golf scene, designed by local architect A.G. Boswell — but always second fiddle to the Country Club of Jackson. Colonial was a baby boomer: a 300-acre housing-golf development created and marketed specifically to families settling down in post-World War II suburbia. As late as 2000, the club had more than 1,100 members. But an aging membership, a shrinking golf market, middle-class flight out of the city limits, new competition, and the Great Recession combined to ravage the club. The course closed in 2014.
King points Collins and developer Luke Guarisco down the northern edge of the property, toward what the designers routed as the 12th green.
King and Collins know something about resuscitating old golf courses. In Tennessee, their work converting tired old Sequatchie Valley Golf and Country Club into Sweetens Cove Golf Club has been universally lauded. Their ethos was revolutionary in its simplicity: golf should be fun, and everything else is secondary. After it opened, Collins spent years managing Sweetens Cove, keeping it on financial life support, and promoting it as an anti-destination destination: no pretense, no frills, just golf. Today, what started as the underdog story of all golf development underdog stories has a cult following.
“They don’t build golf courses for the way golf is right now,” someone at the dinner table says. “They build golf courses for the way golf is going to be in 10 years.” King nods.
The conversation inevitably turns from Landmand and Sweetens Cove to Colonial — the reason everyone is here. The optimism is palpable, but the discussion quickly reveals that the optimism (for now, at least) exceeds details. The subject of King Collins’ rate comes up; someone makes a joke, and everyone allows the topic to be pushed aside.
“I doubt we’ll route the golf course tomorrow,” Collins says deadpan, with just enough seriousness in his voice to account for the fact that some of the people at this table are true newcomers to his craft. Routing a golf course is serious; this visit is just a first date.
The waitress brings out dinner — mostly steaks, with onion rings as thick as doughnuts. There are more cocktails, and more laughs. There is no assurance, implicit or otherwise, that any of this will lead anywhere. But there is hope. That and the wine are enough to keep everyone happy for one night.
. . .
After daily maintenance ended at Colonial, willows shot up in the abandoned bunkers’ perpetually wet soil.
The next morning is cool, the way Mississippi gets in early November after leaving behind late-summer heat but before fully committing to winter. Without ceremony, Collins and King begin their first visit to Colonial. King is armed with a topography map; Collins carries a color Google Earth printout in one hand and a large styrofoam Chick-fil-A cup in the other. A four-seat all-terrain vehicle arrives to carry the designers and a small cadre of interested supporters; six people cram in, and another handful jump in the back.
The property is not entirely derelict; recent visits from a brush hog have revealed the old playing corridors enough for everyone to orient themselves. But no one has played golf here recently, either. When daily maintenance ended, willows shot up in the abandoned bunkers’ perpetually wet sand. Fire ant hills are common. Deer, startled by the trespassers, bolt for cover in the impossibly thick brush.
“There’s something about an abandoned golf course,” Collins says. “It seems post-apocalyptic.”
Inside Colonial’s old maintenance shed, built in the early 2000s but abandoned for more than five years.
Collins’ original plan for Sweetens Cove’s third hole included an eight-foot-deep fairway bunker; King gently reeled him in. On Colonial’s old fairways, that dynamic quickly reveals itself: Collins is the dreamer, and King is the pragmatist. Collins thinks up wild ideas, and King brainstorms how to make it happen. “If we built a bunch of catch basins around here,” Collins says, imagining himself on a green site, “where would it drain to?” King looks at his map and mulls his options. “This creek,” King responds, pointing to the map. They move on.
Before it was converted to real estate in the 1940s, this land was dairy farmland. The terrain’s movement still looks it: rolling, but in a rough sort of way. Old push-up greens, long since grown over, sit flat-topped and perched throughout the property. Otherwise, though, the land looks much as it did for the nearly seven decades of Colonial’s life, and all the decades before.
“This land is really good,” Collins says. “Much better than what we had with Sequatchie Valley.”
The old Colonial course wasn’t entirely abandoned, but there’s also nothing left of the old layout worth salvaging. King Collins’ routing is an entirely new design.
Even accounting for the underbrush beneath the old pines, Colonial’s corridors are narrow. But more than once, Collins remarks at how much space the site has. Forget the old corridors, he explains: clear out most of the trees to open up the spaces between the old holes, and the new routing could simply play across them.
King nods. “We’ll play cross-country,” he says.
The brush that’s grown up beneath the trees is the first problem, though. It blocks out sight lines, which prevents even a rough routing. If you can get that cleared out, King and Collins tell the developer, then we can come back and draw up some holes. We’ll get it cleared, the developer says.
. . .
That developer is Luke Guarisco, an investor who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and acquired Colonial five years ago. Guarisco comes to the Colonial redesign (his first golf development project) for the best possible reason: he just likes golf. He started playing in college, and plays most of his golf at a country club near his home. Guarisco’s interest in King Collins was borne of the best possible reason, too: Guarisco understands, as Collins and King do, that if golf is to endure in America for the next hundred years, it must look radically different than it has looked for the past hundred years.
That’s especially true at Colonial, whose closing proved that central Mississippi’s supply of boring, cookie-cutter designs was overpopulated. When Guarisco told Collins and King about the site, they pitched him on a cutting-edge idea: a 12-hole golf course. Some of Colonial’s old footprint is now spoken for by a development of upscale apartments, but about 120 acres have been left for the new golf course (for comparison, Sweetens Cove sits on 72 acres); that acreage couldn’t support 18 holes at the scale that King and Collins build, but it could hold a dozen. The course could be divided into two loops — a nine-hole loop and a three-hole loop, which could be played separately or together, depending on how much time a player has. And a 12-hole course would be cheaper both to build and to maintain than an 18-hole design.
Collins and King are not the first people to imagine a course with an untraditional number of holes, of course. None less than Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the most bulletproof golf designer of all time, has advocated for 12-hole rounds as a cure for recreational golf’s ills — but America hasn’t been overrun by 12-hole Nicklaus designs, either. Ever since the golf bubble burst more than a decade ago, dozen-hole designs have been discussed in golf architecture circles as a potential solution to both rising costs and shrinking markets. But there’s been no rush to put investment behind the idea — to take the theory into the field.
Guarisco is ready to change that. But Guarisco also is a realist. Remember, Guarisco is an investor first and a golf developer second; no one forced him to begin redeveloping the land as a golf course. His interest, above all else, is to develop a course that endures not only because it’s architecturally interesting but because it’s financially sustainable.
“I have dear friends who’ve told me, ‘Be careful, be careful. A lot of people have lost a lot of money trying to develop golf courses,’” Guarisco says. “So we have to be really intelligent about this. We have to be smart and make sure the numbers work.”
. . .
December days in Mississippi can be 70 degrees and sunny or 45 and wet. This December morning is the latter. The dull grey sky sits like a dome over the landscape, with a cold north wind blowing a light rain sideways across Colonial’s old corridors. The weather is well suited for duck hunting, but little else.
Google Earth is Collins’ and King’s constant reference during the routing process. It allows them to orient themselves against Colonial’s old layout and to envision corridors that cut through existing walls of trees and underbrush.
But today is a special day at old Colonial. For the first time in more than 70 years, a golf course is being routed.
Routing is a process that alternates between artistry and practicality — a dance that serves King’s and Collins’ relationship well. They search out landforms and specimen trees that could mark potential green sites, but all within certain pragmatic concerns, like an entrance for traffic, the potential locations for parking and a clubhouse — and, of course, where to start playing golf.
“The hardest part of routing is finding the first tee,” Collins explains. “After that, things start falling into place.”
The three-hole loop will include a par-3, a par-4, and a par-5, and the first idea is to start with a long par-4, followed by a short par-3 and ending with a slightly downhill par-5. King and Collins begin in the property’s northwest corner, envisioning an opening drive along the western boundary, with the hole measuring around 420 yards. But the more they look at it, the more they talk themselves into moving the first tee farther away from the property’s western edge; this allows more width for the fairway, and brings the tee shot farther away from homes across the street.
An old, mature oak at the site of King Collins’ first routed green — the Ghost Tree, as Guarisco dubbed it.
In the cold drizzle, they walk the future hole’s length and spot a green site near an old oak tree, left leafless by winter winds but with handsome branches arcing toward the grey sky.
“It looks like a ghost tree,” someone says.
“That’s it!” Guarisco says. “The Ghost Tree!”
The par-3’s green site makes itself obvious: about 150 yards east of the first green, in a hollow alongside another beautiful old oak. But as Collins — his formerly waterproofed shoes soaking wet — begins walking back north over a slope to the green site that will close the three-hole loop, he realizes a practical problem: by moving the first green away from the property’s northwest corner, he has encroached on the space where he and King assumed they would finish the third hole (a double green that also will culminate the 12th hole). After some head-scratching, Collins arrives at a solution: stretch the first hole from a long par-4 into a par-5, and trim the third hole from a par-5 to a downhill par-4.
This is the conundrum of routing: like a Rubik’s Cube, changing one thing changes everything else too.
King Collins’ first three routed holes compose a three-hole loop, designed to be played either with the site’s other nine holes or alone as a quick, half-hour round.
Satisfied in his solution, Collins walks back up the third fairway to Guarisco and King to explain the problem he realized and to pitch his idea. They all agree. The trio walks back to the all-terrain vehicle that’s keeping the rain off their heads, and while King and Guarisco chat about the challenges of public golf, Collins begins sketching the loop in a tiny notebook: a theoretically reachable par-5 opener, followed by a par-3, turning finally into the long par-4 that will share fairway ground with the first hole. Maybe a fairway bunker in the elbow of the shared ground, Collins muses, where the first and third fairways meet.
“That was the hard part,” Collins says, with the hint of a smile on his face. “The last nine holes will be easy.”
That afternoon is colder and rainier. Collins and King retreat to a hotel room, where they jot out the nine-hole loop’s potential routing over a Google Maps printout. The next morning, they return to the golf course to test their plan; it mostly works, but hiking the land reveals complications that never could have been seen without looking at the site. For one, the apartments development juts into the golf course more than Google Earth shows. For another, the land on which they planned to lay the ninth and 10th holes is more dramatic than they anticipated; to maximize it, they revise their plan so that they can fit the 11th hole in the same area, too.
King stakes the site for the second green of their routing at Colonial.
“This is why you can’t do this shit in an office,” Collins says.
Routing can devolve into a geography problem; opportunities for creativity don’t make themselves obvious in the same way they do when shaping a green. “When do you start thinking about the course’s creative details?” someone asks.
“Now,” Collins says.
Frequently, Collins stops with an idea — an elevated tee here, a Friar’s Head-style wall of bunkers there, layering an infinity green and a Biarritz here, amphitheater-style mounding behind a green there.
Always the pragmatist, King’s mind is elsewhere. While Collins pitches an amphitheater-style landform near the 11th tee, King pauses and stares across the rolling terrain. “We’re gonna need a big line item for drainage,” he says.
Creativity and practicality frequently collide during the routing process. Here, King and Collins iron out the logistical wrinkles of a double green shared by the second and fifth holes.
There are moments of creative tension between the two. King’s and Collins’ first idea for the ninth hole is a par-3 that travels 200 yards downhill to a Redan green set in an existing hillside. But when they agree that the ninth enters the property’s best land, King suggests routing the ninth in a completely different direction; the change would take the routing across as much of this land as possible, but it also would sacrifice the Redan. At first, Collins resists; “I really like that green site,” he says. But he agrees to look at the new proposed green site; when he and King arrive, they find a teeing ground for the 10th hole that would lead back to the original ninth’s green site — with room to spare for a long par-3 11th, and a long par-5 finishing hole.
The final routing winds across three distinct portions of the property, with a variety of holes in each area: the first five holes (including the three-hole loop) move up and down a large hill on the property’s western side; the sixth, seventh, and eighth (a par-5, par-3, and par-4) race along the side of an earthen basin; and the final four holes zigzag across the rolling hummocks on the property’s northern land. Even with all the final morning’s on-the-fly changes, the routing still finishes with four par-3s, four par-4s, and four par-5s.
“It’s funny how the coolest shit is often an accident,” King says.
. . .
How far this new effort is from completion remains, for now, unclear. Guarisco already has begun planning to reach out to potential partners; as of yet, there’s no timetable to begin construction, and the course needs a new name (“Ghost Tree” seems to be an early favorite, but even that remains far from decided). The race is a long way from the finish line.
Just as clearly, though, the runners are out of the blocks: a nationally renowned design firm has been hired, and they’ve produced a routing. That’s a lot farther than pipe dreams make it.
“In the golf industry, there’s maybe a 10-percent rate of getting from a phone call to an actual project, and this is a lot farther along than most,” Collins says. “This is so far along that we’ve been hired to produce a plan; there’s gonna be a fundraising stage of that, and a budget, and we’re being compensated for our efforts to do that. For every designer, there’s a lot more phone calls than action, so we’re already a lot farther down the line than a lot of projects.”
The concept’s plans have a distinctly Sweetens Cove feel: an unconventional layout, a tiny clubhouse, a commitment to public access, and faith that golfers remain eager for something different than the paint-by-numbers designs that crowd the golf landscape. And its location opens up customer bases that Sweetens Cove just doesn’t have: New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and Mobile all are a day’s drive from Sweetens, but three hours or less from Jackson. Memphis and Tuscaloosa also are just three hours away.
As in Sweetens Cove’s development, hurdles remain between routing and opening. But this time, no one is going to be surprised to see it come together.
. . .
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