Think about your most memorable golf experience. Was the last impression created by that one-in-a-million shot, or was it the entirety of the event, the vistas, the challenges, the fun? If your answer is the latter, and it took place in Colorado, chances are it occurred on a course designed by Jim Engh.
Based in Parker, Engh is the architect of some of the most compelling tracts in the state, among them Sanctuary, Redlands Mesa and Fossil Trace. It was at Fossil Trace in Golden one early morning last week, with head pro Jim “Magic” Hajek in tow, that Engh discussed his work, the muse behind his creations and where golf is going, design-wise.
The round began with a simple question.
Why golf?
“I grew up playing. I grew up working maintenance crews and with golf in my life. I thought I was a fairly creative soul and got an architecture degree, and I did some work in the summers with an engineering firm that did work on golf courses. All of a sudden the light went on. I could combine my love of the game of golf along with my love of creativity. I don’t get my kicks from playing golf; I get them from seeing land and trying to become inspired by it and then trying to make it functional in the golf world.”
Be the art
“I think I’m a little bit of an oddity who thinks my business is more of an art form than anything else. It’s a human experience art form — there’s very few art forms that you get to experience the art from within. Architecture is one, this is one of the others. But this is the only one I know of where you get to compete against the art form. And there are no rules — you can be as creative as you choose to be, as long as you can make a living at it.”
The pirouette theory
“I’ve probably been to Ireland 30 times. I’ve just been inspired by the courses, the craziness and wackiness. And I’ve been trying for years to figure out why that is. Once I was at Carne, and I noticed that the guys I was playing with are ahead of me and I’m walking real slow, and I look over here and I look over there, and I look over there — and by the time I’m done, I’ve done a pirouette. It’s absorbing that and hitting shots that you’ve never seen before, and so the number of pirouettes I do on a course is a measurement of how much I like it.”
Different strokes
“At Fossil Trace, holes 10 to 15 were created out of an old mine. There are people who criticize me for leaving those fins (giant rock formations) out on the fairways. But it’s part of it; it’s a different sort of hazard, a different kind of adventure in golf. If you don’t get criticized, then you’re not pushing the envelope at all. There are no rules that say you have to keep hazards to a bunker or water. Why can’t you leave something like that out there? Somewhere along the way, someone invented some rules in design that I didn’t hear about. I think the only rule that I have is that there aren’t any rules.”
That’s just the way it is
“It’s not often that I’ll see one of my courses and think I wish I had done something differently. There are usually a couple of things, but I’m also a believer that unless it’s technically wrong, it doesn’t drain right or something like that, it usually becomes a nuance that adds a kind of quirkiness to it. So I usually just leave it alone.”
Not for the select few
“Professional golfers are so talented, but they have to be so focused on what they’re doing, getting the ball from here to there. That’s how the courses they play on are designed. But if you take them out of that realm, of comfortable shots and give them something else, they don’t like it very much. That’s the case with people who don’t embrace what I do. They have to get out of their comfort level. For them, it’s the score that matters, not the experience. On tour, you have to be so in that tunnel to grind out scores that you don’t see the rest of the experience. Tom Weiskopf said he played so many great courses, but he never saw them because he was too busy trying to make a score. He never looked around until he got into the design business.”
Brand names
“When someone wants to build a course, the tendency is still to say, ‘I want (Arnold) Palmer; I want (Jack) Nicklaus.’ The issue, I suppose, is do you want to have a tour name and the image that comes from it, or do you want the guy who’s going to bring you a unique golf course, who’s won a lot of awards and who’s proven to be cost effective? Those are two different decisions to make.”
Follow the ball
“On some of the first courses I did, I do wish that I had made them wider. I think the game is starting to expand sideways; people talk about how the game is getting longer because of equipment, but it really isn’t. It’s longer for the pros, because they’re syncing their ball spin with their launch angles with their shafts so everything is perfect for them, and they have enough swing speed to take advantage of it. The rest of us are just kind of out there hitting it.”
Who’s the boss?
“The pros would never play a course like (Fossil Trace), so they’re irrelevant to my thinking, unless I’m specifically asked to do so. But for the average player or even the good daily player, the game should be fun, and you don’t have to have it play at 8,000 yards for that. A lot of the game, private clubs and daily-fee public courses, haven’t expanded to the new generation of golfers. These guys coming in want to have fun. At Pradera, we have rock ‘n’ roll playing on the driving range and around the clubhouse. It’s a loose sort of feel. In a lot of ways the game as it is now intimidates players trying to come in. We have to lighten the game up, lighten up the attitudes to encompass and embrace today’s players.”
Here’s dada
“Dada is the art of randomness that comes from around the turn of the century, about 1900 or so. That’s kind of the way golf is. The guys who first started playing were walking from St. Andrews in Scotland out to the sea to work, and they wanted something to do to have fun along the way. So they just started smacking a ball around from here to here. There was no diabolical little guy deciding that you had to do it a certain way. You were playing against nature and there was no fair, there was no unfair. There was just nature; you were playing against dada. I look at golf that way. I’m interested in putting out these interesting land forms that inspire people to do pirouettes.”
Anthony Cotton: 303-954-1292 or acotton@denverpost.com
