A Diminished Ross Design,
Oozing with Potential
Brainerd Golf Course
Chattanooga, Tenn.
Greens fee: $42 to ride 18
Date played: May 22, 2021
There are two types of men’s bathroom emergencies on a golf course: the kind that can be addressed behind the first tree off the fairway, and the kind that requires a walk deep into the woods. At Sewanee’s sixth tee, I took a walk in the woods and came back without my underwear. Make of that what you will.
The Chattanooga News (Oct. 2, 1926).
My swing was lost in the wilderness, too. I’d spent two days cold-topping my way around Sweetens Cove, and on the third day, my swing rose from the dead at Sewanee but remained on life support. My visit to central Tennessee offered one more chance to ascend into Heaven, and that chance was Brainerd Golf Course — a municipal course designed nearly a century earlier by one of golf’s titans of architecture.
For the most part, public golf around Chattanooga is a delightful but known commodity: the rollercoaster ride of Sweetens Cove, the contemplative stroll around The Course at Sewanee, and the Jack Nicklaus-designed Harrison Bay. Among them, though, Brainerd lies hidden in plain view: a twice-renovated Donald Ross design full of potential, compromise, and glimpses of brushstrokes painted by an artist at the height of his powers. Like many municipal-owned courses designed by Golden Age powerhouse architects, Brainerd is today diminished from its original grandeur. But there is enough scruffiness to be lovable, enough original Ross left in the dirt to hold the imagination — and more than enough playfulness to justify hiking out of the woods for a visit inside the Chattanooga city limits.
In some ways, Brainerd is the opposite of its higher-profile modern neighbors, Sewanee and Sweetens Cove: having opened nearly 90 years earlier, in 1926 (not 1925, as some sources report); located in an urban center; well past its prime, and hanging onto its identity by a thread. In other ways, Brainerd stands positioned to establish a personality that neither of those places — and few golf courses in America — could challenge. There is no reason that Brainerd shouldn’t be the finest municipally owned golf course in the South. Whether it ever achieves that station depends entirely on whether its caretakers realize what they have on their hands and muster an urgency worthy of the place.
. . .
“I’m probably not the first person ever to ask this question,” I said to the clubhouse attendant, “but are y’all on Eastern Time or Central Time?” About halfway between South Pittsburg and Chattanooga, my phone had welcomed me to the Eastern Time Zone — and to a cold flood of dread. Twenty-five minutes away, I’d left my hotel more than an hour ahead of my 2:40 p.m. tee time; but a few miles away from the Chattanooga city limits, the 2 o’clock hour became 3 o’clock — and in an instant, I became late. The attendant graciously never answered my question about how often this sort of thing happens, and grouped me with the next twosome scheduled to go off.
Several holes at Brainerd depart from Ross’ blueprints but still maintain hints of the original plans. Brainerd’s fifth hole, though, adheres closely to the original design.
My punctuality didn’t make an impression, but Brainerd did. The property fans out from the clubhouse — first tee to the left, 10th tee to the right — with lots of wide open space, a smattering of trees, and respectable land movement in the course’s core. This has got potential, I thought to myself. I knew Brainerd was a Ross design; but I also knew that it had undergone renovations in 1953 and 1983, and that not all the original Ross remained (for one thing, the nines have been flipped from Ross’ day).
As it turns out, though, there’s still a lot out there. If aerial photos from before the 1953 renovation exist, then I haven’t found them. But comparing Ross’ blueprints to the present-day course suggests that most of the changes to Ross’ design happened on the edges of the property. In the core, the greens complexes and bunkering teem with inspiration; even without the blueprints, for example, the fifth green jumps off its page: sitting slightly uphill from the fairway, with bunkers guarding the front-left and front-right, and a plateau-style upper tier diving down to a lower tier that slopes toward the fairway. It’s not the sort of thing that a 1950s club pro looking for an excuse to run a bulldozer would’ve come up with. And sure enough, Ross’ blueprints confirm that the hole’s design is mostly unaltered — the only apparent exception being the addition of a small greenside bunker behind Ross’ original front-left trap (ironically, the 1983 renovation appears to have restored the front-left bunker to a size and shape more in line with Ross’ plans than what 1950s photos show the first renovation muddled).
Three small bunkers have been added to challenge the approach at Brainerd’s hazard-laden seventh hole. Otherwise, though, the seventh hole shows little change from Ross’ plans.
Brainerd repeats that pattern elsewhere: holes where Ross’ design elements remain in place, but where superfluous bunkers were later heaped on top. For instance, the green at the par-4 seventh hole (324 yards from the back tees, 308 yards from the white tees) — probably the best hole on the course — sits perched on a ridge high above the fairway, with a rocky outcropping downhill to the right (Ross’ blueprints referred to this as a “gravel pit”). The 1983 renovation added three small bunkers in front of the green, impeding what Ross probably intended to be an on-ramp for running shots; but Ross’ original bunkers remain intact. And again at the par-5 fourth hole (505 yards from the back tees, 489 yards from the white tees), Ross’ fairway bunkers and green remain, but a greenside bunker was added in the 1980s.
In other places, Brainerd is more a mishmash. At the ninth green (the 18th on Ross’ plans), for example, the shaping feels reminiscent of what Ross drew up, but the bunkering has been lost. Likewise, the par-4 third hole (408 yards from the back tees, 387 yards from the white tees) climaxes at a green adorned by contours, but two dramatic fairway bunkers from Ross’ blueprints were eliminated in 1983 and replaced by a small, forgettable pot bunker at the green.
Of course, Brainerd presents all the challenges that are common to reimagining an aging classic: shrinking greens have lost their original shapes, and the edging on Ross’ bunkers has worn and lost its flair. In still other places, the original vision clearly has been compromised nearly beyond recognition. The important thing, though, is that the spaces Ross imagined remain in place: both acreage and corridors. For many municipal-owned contemporaries of Brainerd, land has been lost over the years to easements, eminent domain, and housing (Riverside Golf Course in Austin, Texas — a now-butchered Perry Maxwell design — comes to mind). Perhaps because Brainerd has always been owned by the city, it hasn’t suffered those losses. It’s lost a lot of the substance that Ross dreamed up, but it’s held onto a lot, too. More importantly, Brainerd’s full footprint and original blueprints are still available.
And then, there is the opportunity. Through sheer happenstance, the Chattanooga area has come into a public-golf embarrassment of riches. Chattanooga itself, though, has missed out on that: Sweetens Cove and Sewanee are well to the city’s west, and Nicklaus’ course at Harrison Bay is a half-hour north of town. The area is a destination for golf travelers, but Chattanooga itself offers no reason for those travelers to make time on their itineraries inside the city limits. Restoring Brainerd to Ross’ original plans would change that immediately — not only by adding a must-play golf course to the city’s portfolio, but also by positioning Chattanooga as the central hub of any golf trip to the region.
In fairness, Brainerd is already uncommon. But it could be virtually unrivaled.
. . .
The rough-hewn stairway up to Brainerd’s seventh green.
“The ideal course,” Ross wrote, “is one that presents a test of golf for the everyday golfer and the first-class player.” By that standard, Brainerd is not far from being an ideal course: my two playing partners at Brainerd had fewer than a half-dozen career rounds between them, and neither had any problem getting around. Even as it is, then, Brainerd serves a high purpose: a wide-open playground where newcomers can fumble around for a few hours. But the departures from Ross’ original design — especially the loss of the bunkers that his blueprints imagined — have stripped much of the challenge and strategy out of the course. For travelers, Brainerd’s chief attraction is a glimpse at what was: the remaining relics of Ross’ design.
But Brainerd could be so much more: a rare, publicly owned Ross course in the heart of a major city. Around Chattanooga’s edges, public golf is already enjoying a boon; by restoring Brainerd, Chattanooga could cement itself as the hub of the area’s golf travel, and elevate a scruffy local hangout into a must-see destination. Ross restorations are by now a full-blown cottage industry within golf design, and Overton Park in Memphis has written the playbook on public-private partnerships to revitalize aging public golf courses. The how-to, then, is there for anyone to see.
In its current state, Brainerd is still worth seeing for architecture aficionados. But restoring Brainerd to Ross’ plans would make it can’t-miss.
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