A few years ago I enjoyed one of the great perks of life as a reporter. I played a round of golf at Colonial Country Club as part of the Charles Schwab Challenge Media Tournament.
Along with remembering that Dallas Mavericks radio announcer Chuck Cooperstein can hit a golf ball farther than a tank of gas can take an automobile, I recall how beautiful and pristine the course was. To this weekend duffer it was as immaculate as any course I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I’ve also attended the actual big boys tournament and accompanying festivities pretty much every year for quite some time now – save the couple of years I lived in Colorado and of course the COVID year – as a member of the media. Walking virtually every inch of the course, I can attest that, to me, it seemed as nice as a course could possibly be. And now, it’s even better.
This year’s Charles Schwab Challenge is set for May 20-26 and when tournament week arrives, officials at Colonial will pull back the curtain on the highly-anticipated renovation of the legendary course by world-renowned golf course architects Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner.
It will be quite the sight. And while it’s a gigantic step forward, it’s also an intriguing step back in time.
When Colonial began working with Hanse Golf Course Design a few years ago the vision was to transform the course back to the same historic look, feel and playability of the original John Bredemus and Perry Maxwell design. Those were the days when the course hosted the 1941 U.S. Open.
With PGA headquarters just up the road in Frisco and with Colonial borrowing a page from the past in its redesign maybe it’s time to bring another major championship to the historic course. With all due respect to the cities that have played host to majors in recent years, Cowtown or Funkytown or whatever you choose to call good ol’ Fort Worth is about as good as it gets when it comes to hosting a sporting event – or any event, for that matter.
Just ask the NCAA, the Professional Bull Riders – and, oh yes, the world-class professional golfers who will be here this month.
Back to the renovations. I’m not sure how to describe all the fancy stuff that was done – I’ll pass along the experts’ descriptions momentarily – but if the course revamp conjures up the days of golf legend Ben Hogan that’s pretty special. After all, that is a statue of Hogan greeting visitors as they enter the course.
”We are always energized by the potential for golf courses when we look to their history to provide the direction for moving forward,” said Hanse. “At Colonial, not only did we have some significant architectural decisions to make, but we also had a complete restoration of the appearance of the course based on its early history.
“We are hopeful that when Ryan Palmer, who was a great help to us, greets his fellow [PGA] Tour players at the Charles Schwab Challenge they will see a course that feels familiar in the questions it poses on how to play it. However, it will look and feel like a much more natural course that sits in its Fort Worth landscape much in the way it did when the best players in the world showed up to play it in the 1941 U.S. Open.”
A year might seem like a lot of time, but when it comes to completely reworking a golf course, time travels faster than, well, one of Cooperstein’s tee shots.
After Emiliano Grillo sank a birdie putt to win a sudden death playoff with Adam Schenk in the 2023 Charles Schwab Challenge, the clock started ticking. Hanse, Wagner and their team had just 358 days to create a masterpiece that would be finished in time for this year’s tournament.
There’s daunting, and consider this: Every square inch of the course, about 120 acres, from every tee to every green, got a facelift, including a new state-of-the-art irrigation system and bunkers.
The new PrecisionAire hydronics subterranean system (that’s what the experts call it) cools and heats the green complexes and manages and adjusts soil temperatures to aid in reducing the negative effects from the extreme Texas heat on the bent grass.
According to McIntosh Grounds Maintenance, Colonial is one of only a dozen courses worldwide to have this system.
The hydronics underneath, for lack of a better description, trick the greens into thinking they have prime weather conditions all year long.
Now, if we could only figure out how to do that with humans.
How good are these guys? Hanse and Wagner have a body of work that includes such esteemed venues as Los Angeles Country Club, Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Winged Foot Golf Club in New York, Baltusrol Golf Club in New Jersey, The Olympic Club in San Francisco and numerous more.
“It has been extremely rewarding to restore some of the early character and architectural features of the golf course at Colonial,” Wagner said. “We are honored that the members entrusted us with this classic gem. We are hopeful that upon playing the restored course, the best players in the world will find that the attributes that make Colonial challenging will still be at the heart of the design.”
The most dramatic changes to the course are on par-3 holes No. 8 and 13, both of which were dramatically shifted already by the 1969 flood project.
The eighth green has been shifted to the golfer’s left, making it almost exactly like the original hole, with a creek now on the left side instead of a river on the right. The 13th green has also moved left, with bunkers added in front of the hole.
Most greens have been lowered, and some shifted slightly back or a few yards to either side.
The hardscape drainage infrastructure that runs through the course has been removed and returned to its native, natural form.
Pond walls have been removed around greens to restore grass banks on holes 9, 13, 16 and 18.
Undergrowth has been thinned on the north side of the course to expose the previously unseen Trinity River and the Trinity Trails from holes 5-9 and 12.
“It’s an honor for me to be a member of Colonial and it’s something I cherish,” Ryan Palmer said. “To be asked by the Colonial leadership to provide my input to Gil Hanse as a member and [PGA] Tour player has been an awesome experience.
“The time I spent going around the course with Gil, looking at and talking about holes and hearing his vision of bringing Colonial back to its natural, historic design was comforting to me because I knew we had the right guy. Gil has a tremendous amount of passion and he pursues perfection with laser beam focus. The end result has turned out to be far more than I imagined. I have been talking it up on tour and the players can’t wait to see it.”
Neither can we, Ryan. Neither can we.
Rick Mauch writes regularly for the Fort Worth Business Press, covering a wide array of topics including business, sports and entertainment.