Metro Phoenix is famous as a golf destination, and it’s home to some of the most renowned courses in the sport.
If you’re not a golfer, you might not have thought much about what goes into designing a golf course — and you might think they’re all more or less the same size. But as The Show recently learned, courses are often the product of a very specific vision.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: When Forrest Richardson was a little kid, he fell in love with mini golf.
FORREST RICHARDSON: By all accounts, my family said that when I was like 4 and 5 and 6, it was hard to drive past a miniature golf course because I wanted to stop and play.
DINGMAN: A few years later, his older brother took him to play a round of golf on a regular course, at which point Forrest became — as he puts it — addicted to the game. When he wasn’t playing golf, he was sitting with a sketchbook, designing his own courses.
RICHARDSON: Just fantasy golf holes. I was creating these, you know, like wild versions of what I thought a golf course could be. Like what would be fun? What if it really long or really short, or what if it had palm trees in front of the green, or whatever.
DINGMAN: At some point, a family friend noticed him doing this, and told him he should consider becoming a golf course architect. Forrest was thrilled — he had no idea that was even a job. And he was even more excited when he discovered there was something called the American Society of Golf Course Architects.
RICHARDSON: I was a pretty entrepreneurial kid. I had letterhead, right? So I sent a letter.
DINGMAN: You had letterhead as a kid?
RICHARDSON: I had letterhead. I don’t know what it said, but it made me, apparently, not look 11 or 12, or whatever.
DINGMAN: Forrest got a letter back from the society, which included a directory, with contact information, of all the golf course architects in North America. There were a handful of them right here in Phoenix. So he cold-called one of them: Arthur Jack Snyder. Jack, as Forrest would come to know him, turned out to be a legend. The day I met Forrest, we were standing on the course that made Jack famous: Mountain Shadows in Paradise Valley.
RICHARDSON: Way ahead of its time! Mountain Shadows was the fun, not long, two-and-a-half-hour golf experience in 1961 and it had a resort and restaurants and little golf course, called, back then, an executive course.
DINGMAN: The idea behind the so-called executive course, also known as a short course, was that you, a busy executive, could play a full round of golf - 18 holes — in about half the time it would normally take.
Instead of a sprawling, 7,000-yard expanse of grass and sand, Mountain Shadows is condensed into just a few thousand yards, all of it contained in a quiet neighborhood in the Camelback foothills.
The holes are, well, short: about 70 yards or so. Each one is a little puzzle — kind of like mini golf. Case in point: the 12th hole, or, as Forrest calls it, “The Oasis.”
RICHARDSON: This little pond was Jack’s little oasis in the desert. ... I don’t know what kind of birds are out there today, but you can hear them in the palm trees there.
DINGMAN: As we approached the pond, a heron took off from the shore and glided across the water. Meanwhile, two golfers teed off from the opposite side of the pond. I watched them try to figure out the puzzle. In order to reach the hole, they had to chip the ball over the water, towards a small hill. If they hit it too hard, the ball would roll up the hill, and then they’d have to somehow putt it downhill without it rolling into the pond. But if they chipped it too softly, it wouldn’t make it over the pond.
The key, Forrest explained, is to hit it just hard enough to land on the slope of the hill, so it rolls down gently towards the hole. We watched one of the golfers take a swing.
RICHARDSON: Oh, there’s a good shot! Look at that, now this one’s gonna back — oh, come back!
DINGMAN: She’s fishing her ball out of the water as we speak.
RICHARDSON: She’s fishing her ball out of the water — the good news is the little rocks on the shoreline stopped it from going too far down. But, you know, they’re going to give her a hard time. They’re gonna say, "Well, you know, you should’ve just hit an easy shot! You shouldn’t have gone for all the glory."
What looked like a pretty simple little hole just was a train wreck, here — not that that’s what I wanted to set out to do, but it’s meant to make you think.
DINGMAN: The current version of Mountain Shadows is actually a reboot of Jack Snyder’s original design. Snyder passed away in 2005, and a few years ago, when it came time to redesign Mountain Shadows, they called Forrest. It was a special moment for him — he considered Jack his mentor. They had worked together for years before he died.
DINGMAN: What do you feel like you got from him that you carry with you the most?
RICHARDSON: I think I took with me the Snyder values of people come first.
DINGMAN: In a practical sense, that means designing holes that pack interesting golf into small spaces that are thrilling for players at any skill level. The Oasis, that 12th hole, is only about 75 yards. You don’t have to start by swinging a driver and trying to whack the ball 300 yards over a treeline. Ideally, anyone can play a short course.
RICHARDSON: You know, I can come out here and play with one of my, let’s say, great nephews or nieces, might be 10 years old, 12 years old, whatever. And length is not the defining factor, right? So dad can come out here with his daughter, and on a short course, they can both reach the green in the same number of shots — one. And maybe the daughter’s even a better putter than dad, right? So it’s not about length and having to hit the ball a long way, so it’s very, very fun.
DINGMAN: But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
RICHARDSON: We want the golf holes to make people think and to solve the puzzle.
DINGMAN: Make no mistake: Mountain Shadows isn’t some rookie course. Golfers come from all over the country to play it — and they pay top dollar. A round at Mountain Shadows costs more than some full-size courses.
RICHARDSON: You know, it’s amazing, right? It’s kind of like the beer analogy: golf was, for many many decades, only selling a keg of beer. Now people are willing to buy, you know, the little craft beers, and they’ll pay a premium for it. And that’s kind of the same thing we’ve seen in golf.
DINGMAN: But on the other hand, I associate golf culture with, well, executives. Corporate types — not exactly the kind of people who are generally interested in pushing boundaries.
I asked Forrest if there’s any resistance to short courses in the conservative corners of the golf world. He said it happens, but not as much as it used to. When architects first started designing short courses, they sort of felt like an afterthought. The architects weren’t putting as much effort into them as Forrest and Jack did with Mountain Shadows.
RICHARDSON: I’m not taking credit for the short course movement, but I was certainly part of it — trying to get people to think, not only golf architects but developers and people that invest in courses, and resort developers and community developers, to get them to think about, golf isn’t just one size.
DINGMAN: Forrest likes to point out that one of the most hallowed golf courses in the world — Leith Links, in Scotland — only has five holes. And that short courses also use less water, take up less space and create jobs.
But of course, Forrest also admits that the people who really love short courses are people like him. The golf architects.
RICHARDSON: That’s the only place, the only type of golf hole that when I create a design, I’m able to say, “Golfer, stand here. And execute a shot to that target."
The golf architect is able to, on paper, plan, and in the field create a place where we say this is where you’ll start, and this is where you’ll end. It’s really defined by the golf architect.
DINGMAN: Well, Forrest, this has been absolutely fascinating.
RICHARDSON: Well, you got to see almost half the shots on number 12 go in the water, which is depressing in a way. But I will say that we’ve also seen some good shots.
DINGMAN: And everybody who’s driven by us on a golf cart afterwards has been smiling very broadly.
RICHARDSON: I noticed that. I noticed that.
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