With a Routing
and a Name,
King Collins’ 12-Hole
Project in Mississippi
Heads Toward Fundraising
Naming a golf course is harder than Luke Guarisco thought.
Six months after Rob Collins and Tad King finished a bold, 12-hole routing on the site of the former Colonial Country Club in Jackson, Miss., Guarisco — a Baton Rouge investor, and the property’s owner — still found himself trying to figure out what to call it. At first blush, naming a golf course that has yet to break ground might seem trivial, or at least premature. But potential investors in a golf course’s fundraising pitch generally like to know how the developer plans to keep the course afloat — a question that quickly leads into marketing, which quickly leads into what in the world to call the thing.
Making a living as an investor requires a lot of numbers-crunching. But it turns out that golf course development involves more than just math — it also takes an imagination.
“I’m not starry-eyed. I’m a realist,” Guarisco said. “I do think it can make money. Now, I do have friends of mine who say, ‘Are you fucking crazy? Look at the track record of golf courses and how many make money.’ They don’t do well.”
Inside an old maintenance building at the former Colonial Country Club in Jackson, Miss.
Central Mississippi could be Exhibit A. Perhaps more than any other major city in the Deep South, Jackson is a wasteland of public golf options: the nearest top 100-caliber opportunity is Dancing Rabbit Golf Club, nearly 90 minutes away, and LeFleur’s Bluff Golf Course — a long-neglected track in an urban state park — closed indefinitely in February. Two underfunded municipal courses have seen years of decline in both conditioning and rounds played. The Refuge in suburban Flowood was the area’s top go-to public option for 20 years before closing in 2018 for a complete renovation, but timeframes for reopening have been pushed back repeatedly.
In that void, Guarisco sees opportunity. Central Mississippi has rarely enjoyed quality public golf options, and even less so in the capital city. Golfers in Jackson who want to play a top-notch course either have to leave the city or join a private club. Guarisco’s plan would allow both groups something newer, closer, and cheaper.
“We’ll see whether people in Jackson want to get in on public golf,” Guarisco said. “I’m betting they will.”
The plan isn’t finalized yet. But it’s close enough that the course’s unique concept already has skin in the game from two notable partners: its designers.
. . .
The plan underlying that bet has moved firmly out of the world of dreams, though, and into the world of cold, hard numbers — the part of the project over which architects typically have the least control. But Guarisco, Collins, and King have struck an arrangement as uncommon as the 12-hole layout they’ve planned: King Collins is taking an equity stake in the Jackson course. Collins and King will have hands-on roles in the fundraising effort, and once the course opens, they’ll remain the courses’s management experts.
It’s not unheard of for designers to take an equity stake in their projects — Tom Doak, for example, owns a piece of the Rosapenna resort in Ireland, where a new Doak design is slated to open in 2021; and in Virginia, architect Lester George owned a stake in Ballyhack Golf Club for many years — but it is uncommon.
The irony of helping manage another of his designs isn’t lost on Collins — who, after completing work on Sweetens Cove Golf Club, initially resisted but ultimately agreed to lease and operate the course for its owner. He opened Sweetens Cove for play in 2014, and the rest is history.
For King Collins’ collaboration with Guarisco, though, partnership might have been inevitable. The three have had a genuine chemistry since their first meeting in late 2019, and Guarisco considers himself among Sweetens Cove’s diehard disciples. Collins and King have a doctrine, and Guarisco believes in it.
“It’s a good fit,” King said. “We’re very confident that this thing is gonna be a success, so why not?”
So instead of sitting back and waiting for construction to begin, King Collins’ partnership with Guarisco keeps them involved through a process that every developer approaches differently. Ohoopee Match Club in Georgia reputedly was paid for almost entirely by its owner, Michael Walrath, who sold an online advertising marketplace to Yahoo in 2007 for $680 million. The more traditional model involves founding members contributing startup capital in exchange for shares in the club. For the Jackson project, Guarisco and King Collins envision something in between: the plan is flexible, but for now, it calls for cobbling together a handful of large investors and a few dozen smaller donors, with a total raise of $5.2 million.
The illustration of King Collins’ design for their 12-hole golf course in Jackson, Miss.
With the goal of breaking ground in September 2021, Guarisco has begun laying the groundwork for a fundraising push beginning in 2020’s fourth quarter. For now, Guarisco is working on creative ways to share the vision under the pandemic’s constraints: for example, drone video clips of Sweetens Cove, which for many is still an unknown commodity — but makes a powerful first impression.
Collins and King, of course, are uniquely qualified to explain their vision; they’ve been doing it since Sweetens Cove opened six years ago. “Tad has tons of operational experience overseas in setting up courses and their operations,” Collins said. “Of course and I set up the initial operations at Sweetens, and then there’s all the things that we’ve learned about the Sweetens experience.”
Guarisco sees three messages tied up in the fundraising pitch: practicality, altruism, and uniqueness.
The first might be the most obvious, and to Guarisco it is the most important: a home for public golf in a region long devoid of one. The 12-holer would keep golfers in town who otherwise would travel to Dancing Rabbit or farther. And with a high-quality, viable public course available, it’s not inconceivable that a share of private club golfers might drop their memberships and join the cheaper, hipper new option. At this level, Guarisco sees the plan in purely financial terms, devoid of the project’s emotional pull.
“I value capital, because I’m always the one being pitched to,” Guarisco said. “I value my capital as much as you value your idea.”
But the second note in the chord is undeniably emotional: the opportunity to create a place with legacy, that offers future generations of hardcore golfers and newcomers alike a common playground in a city where that’s never happened.
Finally, there is the allure of building a golf course that would be not only financially feasible and transgenerational, but a unique design built by an architecture firm coming into the height of its powers. Before King Collins unveiled Sweetens Cove in 2014, no one would have pegged tiny South Pittsburg, Tenn., as one of Twenty-First Century golf’s Stations of the Cross. Now, though, the philosophy behind Sweetens Cove has been on full display for six years, and Jackson stands to enjoy only the duo’s second course in the South.
“If you can get the founders together, then the advantage of that is that you have a group who can evangelize for the place, be a part of it, and give it a good foundation,” Collins said. “In the case of Sweetens Cove, it was really difficult to find founders, because the vision — for a lot of reasons — seemed muddy. But if you have a vision up front, and some financial backbone like what Luke can bring to the table, it makes more sense.”
. . .
If the work of fundraising amounts to gathering the Jackson project’s first disciples, then there still remains the question of what to name their gospel.
When King Collins routed the 12-hole course in December 2019, a dying, haggard oak near the first green site made “Ghost Tree” the early favorite. But Guarisco moved on from that idea quickly. “I never liked ‘Ghost Tree.’ It was too gloomy,” Guarisco said. “Besides, we’re gonna take that tree out.”
“New Colonial” and “the Colony” entered the mix as possible nods to the site’s lineage, but the desire to create a clean break with the old course — and to emphasize its newfound uniqueness — ultimately ushered those possibilities out too.
Attention turned to something quirky — not bizarre, but different — to underscore the project’s 12-hole idiosyncrasy. “Won Too” (pronounced “one two,” as in the digits comprising the number 12) and “the Odd Duck Club” were deemed too quirky. “Drummadoon Farm,” a nod to 12-hole Shiskine Golf and Tennis Club in Scotland, drew attention as well.
The first logo for Brazen Head Golf Club, the King Collins-designed 12-hole course in the works in Jackson, Miss.
Ultimately, though, Guarisco landed on a name that captures the site’s pre-Colonial Country Club history as a livestock farm, the project’s daring design, and the unapologetic ethos beneath it all: Brazen Head, an homage to Dublin’s famous 822-year-old pub.
“This place will be like an old goat — and if you know any goats at all, you know goats don’t give a fuck about anything except breakfast,” Guarisco said. “With Brazen Head, you just replace breakfast with golf.”
Instagram and Twitter accounts have been set up, and the project’s logo — a blue and white Rorschach test that can be read both “BH” and “12 H” — might adorn merchandise before Brazen Head even opens, in the vein of Zac Blair’s Buck Club. Guarisco is mulling an autumn trip to Sweetens Cove for the curious but unindoctrinated, to show off King Collins’ work in action. And ultimately, he sees Brazen Head as the start point for a de facto King Collins golf trail, from Jackson up through Tupelo in northeast Mississippi and ending at Sweetens Cove.
“I think if you can bring that feel, that vibe, that look, and the craftsmanship that King Collins delivers in a city with so little public-access golf, it’s very easy,” Guarisco said. “Jackson sits at a crossroads — very easy to get to. It’s a city with half a million in the vicinity. I’m a foodie, and I have never had a bad meal in Jackson. It’s got plenty of hotels, and the course is gonna be very easy to access off the Interstate. It’s gonna be a great destination for a golf trip.”
Now comes the hard part: taking that vision to the masses.
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