Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial
Ever since arriving in Fort Worth in 2020, a mantra — perhaps “the” mantra — of club founder Marvin Leonard has stuck with Frank Cordeiro as inspiration in carrying out his tasks as chief operating officer and general manager of Colonial Country Club.
“Excellence knows no completion,” the august Leonard once said.
And to that end, Colonial is undertaking a project of progress by walking back into its revered history. This era of the acclaimed club will forever be known as the “Originalist” as Colonial undertakes to bring Leonard’s baby, his 18 holes of bent-grass renown, back to its original Perry Maxwell-John Bredemus form when it opened in 1936 in a $20 million renovation project to begin on May 28 as the final putt drops at the Charles Schwab Challenge.
Over the course of its eight decades, the club has tinkered with the course, making alterations and modifications, including some made by Ben Hogan and Ralph Plummer. So many, in fact, that the course has changed significantly over its 87 years.
To restore it to its glory of the 1941 U.S. Open, Colonial has turned to Gil Hanse, the golf architect known ’round the world who emerged as a major player in the industry after designing the Olympic Golf Course for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro. More recently, Hanse just finished up the 36-hole PGA Frisco with Beau Welling, the PGA of America’s new headquarters.
Hanse says the objective is getting the course back to something that looks as if it’s “been there forever.”
The Charles Schwab Challenge’s new champion in May might not have even put on the iconic plaid jacket before Hanse orders in the John Deeres.
An 18-month project must be completed in 11 months, in time for the 2024 tournament. It’s a tight deadline that requires all the bent-grass greens be seeded by Sept. 1, at the very latest, and grown in before North Texas’ moody and fickle winter arrives.
It’s doable, says Hanse, as long as Mother Nature is agreeable. Luckily, as longtimers of these parts can attest with exasperation generally reserved only for the Dallas Cowboys, that won’t be our rainy season, but any storms like the one that troubled the bishop so in “Caddyshack” will be problematic.
Cordeiro is calling the face-lift a “monumental opportunity to celebrate our proud legacy with a nod to our storied history, but with an eye to the future.”
“It will still be the revered Colonial course we are all familiar with seeing and playing, but the Hanse work will improve, update, and maximize the legendary course and routing.”
Colonial Country Club
It will also be high tech. Innovation finally caught up with Marvin Leonard, an original thinker, if there ever was one.
Colonial is installing a hydronics system on each green that can circulate warm or cool water to alter the temperature of the soil, the essential ingredient to a healthy putting surface. It’s like radiant heating and cooling of floors, Hanse says. The superintendent at Southern Hills described the concept as being able to trick the grass in August into believing it’s June.
Conversely, if it’s a cool spring, you can “give them a little bit of a shot [of warmth] to get them ready” for the tournament.
It’s all somewhat ironic, considering Leonard built Colonial because River Crest wouldn’t take him up on his offer to try a — one — bent-grass green and to replace it, if it didn’t work out, all at his expense.
The experiment at Colonial was revolutionary in Texas because everyone, not just River Crest, was telling him the bent-grass greens couldn’t grow in North Texas because of the heat, a not-so-new phenomenon. So, he put them on his championship-caliber course he built near TCU. The other club he built, Shady Oaks, had them, too.
There’s a common theme of the greats among us: They’re the ones who do things conventional wisdom says aren’t possible.
Imagine how much easier Leonard’s life would’ve been with a hydronics system.
However, with that kind of history behind Colonial’s founding and its subsequent years, it seems only fitting that a guy with affection for history would be the one to dig into this hallowed ground.
Hanse, a native of upstate New York, took up golf as a teenager, introduced to the game by his grandfather.
“There was something about the golf landscape that hooked me,” he says.
But a career in it seemed as feasible as becoming an NFL football player.
Instead, he went off to undergraduate school with a future in government in mind. He studied political science and history at the University of Denver, while, he says, always doodling golf holes. After graduation, he enrolled at Cornell, a few par 5s from Robert Trent Jones Golf Course, with plans to study city and regional planning.
Fate intervened in the form of an introduction. While in a class for parks and recreation, he met a fellow Cornell graduate student studying landscape architecture.
“You can actually become a golf architect?” Hanse remembers thinking. “You can actually do that?”
He tossed his plans for the bureaucracy into the Cayuga Lake, like one might a club after a sliced Titleist.
“I jumped in with both feet,” he says of a new career path, which eventually led him to the UK to study the history of golf course design.
His first job out of grad school was with Tom Doak, another Cornell grad. He worked for Doak for about four years before striking out on his own in 1993, based just outside Philadelphia, site of the Stonewall Golf Course, which he designed. Basing his company there made sense because that was the only course with his name attached to it.
That’s changed obviously over the last 30 years. His handiwork is seen in dozens of original designs, such as Rio and Scotland, and renovations and restorations all over the world. Hanse and his wife Tracey, coincidentally a native of Wichita Falls, just an hour-and-a-half-or-so ride up U.S. 287, essentially move to each location. They’ll basically live in Fort Worth for the duration of the project.
The work at Colonial is something he relishes.
“It’s something we really enjoy, studying and trying to understand what the original architects did there and how it evolved over time,” Hanse says. “When you look back, particularly the 1941 U.S. Open, it was a very different golf course in appearance and character.”
As part of that study, Hanse and his team sat with Marty Leonard, Marvin Leonard’s daughter and Dan Jenkins, the late esteemed writer of golf, prolific author, and friend of Ben Hogan. (This project has been in the works for the better part of six years. Jenkins died in 2019. The project was first supposed to begin after the 2022 tournament but was postponed.)
“We had a great lunch with Marty and Dan Jenkins,” Hanse says. “I just sat and listened. It was great to hear the two of them reminisce about the character of the course.”
Jenkins recalled it as a “dark golf course,” Hanse says, the metaphoric language used to describe all the trees. “He said it felt as if you were hitting into these dark corridors,” Hanse says. “Greens were shrouded in the trees.”
The trees aren’t coming back. Neither are some bunkers, many of which will be removed. In its place will be rough, light enough for amateurs but thickened during tournament week. Just about every green will be lowered and “more receptive as targets.”
The biggest changes will be to holes eight and 13, both par 3s.
No. 8 will be brought back to its former self, with the green shifted to the left to bring the creek into play. No. 13, a gathering place for failed AA members during the tournament, will also get a makeover.
Hanse called the changes on those holes “dramatic.”
The fairway on No. 5, as good of a hole as any you will play, will be leveled on the left side. Trees will be removed on the right side, so, by 2024, you will be able to watch your ball fly into the Trinity River. Right now, it’s hard to even know the Trinity was over there.
“I was a little nervous at the beginning because of how great colonial is,” says Ryan Palmer, a PGA Tour professional who lives in Colleyville. “It always stands up to the professionals.
“I was real skeptical.”
Colonial, though, asked Palmer and his caddie, James Edmonson, a member of Colonial and club champion on more than one occasion, to be part of the process.
“To give our two cents,” Palmer says.
Palmer and Edmondson jumped in with both feet, too. Palmer consulted from a pro’s standpoint, and Edmondson gave perspective as an amateur, walking each hole with Hanse and sitting for hours-long lunches going over every hole.
“I was shocked and impressed by how much Gil listened to us and took our advice,” Palmer says. “That said a lot about him and gave me more confidence in him and what the plan is.
“I think it’s going to be magnificent.”
Like Palmer, pros were concerned when first hearing about plans for the renovation. “Don’t screw up Colonial” was a common theme.
For the everyday golfer, the course will play fairer without the traps, which the pros favor. Pros have no trouble getting out of them and actually prefer them to alternatives. The amateur, of course, has trouble getting out of them.
Now the everyday golfer doesn’t have to fly every bunker. There will be more opportunities to bump balls forward. For the pro, the rough will make the course harder.
“Most guys said, ‘You’re going to make it even harder,’” Palmer says of his conversations with professional peers. I said, ‘That’s the point. That’s the plan.’
“Most guys I’ve talked to have been very supportive. They love Colonial, which is a great thing to hear.”
Notable Gil Hanse Designs, Renovations and Restorations
Original Designs
The Los Angeles Country Club — South Course — California
Streamsong Resort — Black Course — Florida
Ohoopee Match Club — Georgia
Boston Golf Club — Massachusetts
Pinehurst Resort & Country Club — No. 4 and The Cradle Short Course – North Carolina
The Olympic Golf Course — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Renovation Projects
Soule Park Golf Course — California
Royal Sydney Golf Club — Sydney, Australia
Narin & Portnoo Links — Donegal, Ireland
Restoration Projects
The Olympic Club — California
The Country Club — Massachusetts
Myopia Hunt Club — Massachusetts
Oakland Hills Country Club — Michigan
Baltustrol Golf Club — New Jersey
Fishers Island Club — New York
Sleepy Hollow Country Club — New York
Winged Foot Golf Club — New York
Southern Hills Country Club — Oklahoma
