When the Sand Hills Golf Club opened in 1995, it was more than just a collection of glorious holes set down in the Nebraska prairie. The course was a revelation, a minimalist masterpiece that instantly redefined golf architecture in America. The designers, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, moved as little dirt as possible during construction, letting the terrain dictate an aesthetic of heaving fairways and shaggy blowout bunkers, all framed by exquisite isolation. The end product was a far cry from the bulldozed, tarted-up look of so many modern American courses. The return to a more natural style of golf led to rapturous reviews and a consensus that Sand Hills is one of the ten best courses in the nation.
Sand Hills’ influence was immediate and far reaching, with its essence to be reinterpreted at courses as disparate as Bandon Dunes, Rustic Canyon and Sebonack. However, what made it so singular was not just the design but the destination. Located outside of tiny Mullen (population 502), five hours from the nearest decent-size city—Denver—it quickly became of one of the game’s pilgrimages. For golfers flocking to Sand Hills, it was hard not to notice the landscape along the way. “I was driving around Nebraska not long ago and saw tons of great golf sites,” says Tom Doak, who along with Coore and Crenshaw is a high priest of neo-traditional course design. “You stare out your window and it looks like Royal Portrush. Drive five more miles and it could be Ballybunion.”
A few of these evocative sites have already been claimed, as audacious golf courses have begun popping up in remote corners of Nebraska and other off-the-beaten-path spots out West. Last summer I visited three of the most notable: Ballyneal, Dismal River and Wild Horse. These spawn of Sand Hills offer their own takes on the original, and each is a harbinger of what golf may look like as Sand Hills’ influence continues to be felt across the high plains.
To get to Ballyneal Golf Club, you leave Denver airport and make a right at the first stoplight. The punch line is that said light lies two and half hours down the road, at the end of a desolate landscape of cornfields and cattle ranches in tiny Holyoke, Colorado. Make that right turn and six miles later you are on a road with fewer cars, it seems, than tractors. Eventually you will come to a little sign of weathered wood, emblazoned with one lyrical word: BALLYNEAL. This is the entrance to the club. The understatement is intentional.
“We want to make the right decisions now,” says Rupert O’Neal, the cofounder and managing general partner of Ballyneal, “so that in a hundred years we can enjoy the reputation that Augusta National has.”
It’s pretty obnoxious for a club that opened in September of 2006 to be comparing itself to America’s most venerated golf institution, but the message is made more palatable by the messenger. O’Neal, 48, is an endearing character, a lifelong farmer with a self-deprecating wit and a slightly skewed worldview. He grew up in Holyoke on his family’s 2,500-acre corn and wheat farm, where he and his brother, Jim, used to chase cattle across the dunesy countryside, which the locals call “chop hills” because of the landscape’s sometimes sharp, severe terrain. The boys were introduced to golf by their grandparents, and while watching a long-ago British Open they were struck by how similar the terrain was to what they had in their backyard. It was a notion that Jim never quite got out of his head.
While Jim pursued a life in golf—he is now head pro at the exclusive Meadow Club, an Alister MacKenzie design in Marin County, California—Rupert stayed behind to manage the farm. In 1999 he founded a hunt club for stalking game birds through the prairie grasses. Before long their parents’ health started failing and the O’Neal boys began talking seriously about the legacy their family would leave behind. They invariably returned to Jim’s old dream of building a golf course in the chop hills. Rupert, who had played only a handful of rounds in the preceding twenty-five years, went along.
“I thought we were building an amenity to the hunt club,” he says with a laugh. “I had never heard of Sand Hills. I thought we were going to be the first people to a put a really nice golf course out in the middle of nowhere. But people kept saying, ‘Oh, that sounds like Sand Hills!’”
That letdown soon gave way to relief, as Sand Hills offered proof that a remote golf club could work. After securing options on seven hundred acres about eight miles from their farm, the O’Neals reached out to their ideal designer, Tom Doak, who was riding a wave of acclaim thanks to the 2001 opening of Pacific Dunes, in Bandon, Oregon, another triumph of modern minimalism. Doak was entranced by the O’Neals’ land—he would later say the chop hills reminded him of the dunes at Machrihanish, in Scotland—but he was determined to create something original. “Not that I don’t love Sand Hills,” says Doak, “but I didn’t want to do the same thing. So the challenge became: How do you take similar terrain but create a completely different experience?”
One of Sand Hills’ hallmarks is its extremely wide fairways, which make it playable in strong winds; on some holes Coore and Crenshaw tweaked the dunes to open up sight lines and keep blind shots to a minimum. Ballyneal’s fairways are even wider than Sand Hills’, but they put a higher premium on positioning because Doak chose to frame the short grass with the towering chop hills. A timid or poorly executed drive may still find the fairway at Ballyneal, but more often than not it won’t leave a clear look at the target. I learned this on the very first hole, a stunning 380-yard par four that conjures Machrihanish’s famous opener, thanks to a fairway that doglegs diagonally to the left around a gully full of long, untamed prairie grasses, what the caddies call “the native.” Cutting off the dogleg and keeping your drive down the left side leads to a straightforward approach shot, but I bailed out to the right. My ball was on the edge of the seventy-five-yard-wide fairway but I couldn’t see the flag, and after flying the green I was lucky to make bogey.
It is on and around the greens that Ballyneal carves out its separate identity. Sand Hills’ greens are big, relatively flat and very fast, with edges that often run off to devilish, tightly mown chipping areas. Ballyneal’s greens are often flanked by scary bunkers that are so natural looking they seem at one with the prairie landscape. The putting surfaces themselves are even more memorable. Of many classic courses, whether it’s Oakmont or the Old Course, you often hear it said that “you couldn’t build greens like that today.” Well, Doak has at Ballyneal. They have to be seen to be believed: multitiered and full of humps and hollows and all manner of undulation. At 12 on the Stimpmeter, Ballyneal’s greens would be unplayable. At 9.5, they’re a gas.
“‘Fun’ is not a dirty word to us,” Doak says of the staff architects at his Renaissance Design firm. “It’s a compliment. If you enjoyed playing the greens it’s because we had fun building them.”
Ballyneal has embraced another nontraditional idea with its tee complexes. Every hole has a number of different tee areas, but rather than being set up in a straight line they are scattered hither and yon. There are no tee markers on the course, so it is left to the player with honors to decide where the group will tee it up, a decision that can dramatically alter the length and playing angles of any given hole.
Wild greens, thought-provoking tees—clearly Ballyneal is striving to be unique. But the course’s biggest departure may be in something as elemental as its grass. After college Doak caddied at the Old Course, and he fetishizes the ground game. There was never any doubt that Ballyneal would strive for the firm-and-fast turf conditions that define British links golf. Ballyneal’s bump-and-run ethos is integral to its seventh hole, a 335-yard par four with a thrilling green. The left side of the putting surface is banked like the turn of a Nascar oval. The right side seems to melt into a pair of nasty little bunkers. The day I played Ballyneal, the flag on seven was in the middle of the green. A drive too far to the right forced me to go over the bunker with an approach that I hoisted in the air long and left of the flag, using the contour to let my ball trickle to within fifteen feet. Rupert, my playing partner, hit a more educated drive down the left side, and for his approach he bunted a tricky little shot that landed twenty yards short and fed up the left side and back toward the pin. Diametrically different shots, yet our balls ended up two feet apart.
The fescue in the turf (mixed with bent grass) encourages this kind of shotmaking, but it is a delicate grass vulnerable to damage by golf carts. So Ballyneal made the far-reaching decision to be walking-only, part of its unmistakable effort to out–Sand Hills Sand Hills. “Everything we do is to make the golf experience as pure as possible,” says Rupert.
The decision to be walking-only may please traditionalists, but it has not proven to be a blockbuster recruiting tool for Ballyneal. Near the end of last season, despite a relatively reasonable initiation fee of $50,000 and fast-spreading acclaim, the club had only seventy-five members. What the O’Neals are discovering is that when golfers make the schlep to a far-flung destination, they generally want to play thirty-six holes a day, because there isn’t really much else to do. But walking thirty-six a day is more than a lot of golfers can handle, because of maladies ranging from balky backs to bad attitudes. Currently Ballyneal houses thirteen beds in a lovely stone lodge, and two more lodges are under construction; by summer the Ballyneal bed count should be up to thirty-two. But bunking there and playing only eighteen holes a day leaves an awful lot of time to kill. A modest spa is in the design stage, but right now there are no other amenities except the hunt club. Logic suggests that traipsing through long grass after pheasant is even more physically demanding than walking the golf course.
As a remedy, the guiding forces at Ballyneal are hoping to build at least one more golf course, on which carts would be permitted. Keeping with his man-of-the-people bent, Rupert is leaning toward a course that would be open to the public. A longtime Deadhead, he has already picked out a tentative name for the course: Grateful Dunes.
If the simplicity of sand hills and Ballyneal is designed to help you get away from it all, the Dismal River Club has tried to import everything your sybaritic heart might desire. Even before you see the golf course, you can’t miss the massive clubhouse, set high on a hill affording a glorious view of the club’s eponymous river and the dramatic basin that contains it. By contrast, first-time visitors to Sand Hills are often struck by its unpretentious trappings—after parking your car, you check in at a structure that has the architecture of a motor lodge and houses a restaurant with a decor and menu that calls to mind Denny’s. Dismal River’s clubhouse, with its soaring twenty-two-foot ceilings and rustic timberwork, makes an entirely different statement.
Not that getting to it is any easier, coming as it does at the end of a seventeen-mile-long private road off of Highway 97, a thin ribbon of dark asphalt that cuts through the otherwise pristine countryside of central Nebraska. I arrived in the early evening and was greeted by the director of golf, Rob Brown, who eagerly gave me a tour of the grounds. Within the clubhouse is a screening room, a card room and a billiards room. Construction on a spa is soon to begin. Spread across the club’s three thousand acres are two stocked fishing ponds and five miles of walking trails; by summer, sporting clay stations should be up and dogs will be available for bird hunting.
The club didn’t skimp on accommodations, either. There are thirty cabins to house visitors. Mine was a two-bedroom beauty with peaked, open-beam ceilings. Each bedroom had a huge flat-screen TV. This was a major upgrade from my cabin at Sand Hills, which was so small and spartan it stirred memories of sixth-grade sleepaway camp.
The food experience at these two clubs is also wildly different. Sand Hills’ course is a long cart ride from the main building, and once out on the course your only dining venue is Ben’s Porch, a little wooden shack where an older gent wearing a cowboy hat and oversize belt buckle will barbecue your seven-dollar burger to order. For dinner at Dismal River I enjoyed thirty-six-dollar crab legs flown in that day from Alaska and desserts courtesy of a pastry chef imported from New York City. (Ballyneal, too, is an epicurean’s delight, its signature dish the lobster macaroni and cheese.)
Standing on the spectacular elevated first tee the next morning, I couldn’t help but wonder where we were going. This 435-yard par four doglegs left, its roller-coaster fairway dotted with rugged bunkering. In the distance a sliver of green is visible behind an enormous sand hill, but don’t expect to spot the flag. The second hole is even more visually intimidating. Rated the number-one handicap, it’s a par four that plays 513 yards from the back tees. Prudence guided me away from the tips, but even measured from the blue tees it’s a 451-yard hole. From the left rough, where I drove my ball, the second shot is totally blind. These opening holes are a few quick punches in the nose, but architect Jack Nicklaus makes no apologies: “Why in the world, if you’re going to leave some major metropolitan area, would you want to come out here and see the same golf course you could see in Denver? If you want conventional, stay home. If you want a unique golf experience, go to Dismal River.”
And yet Nicklaus showed some compassion. The first hole has a punchbowl green that collects off-line shots, and the contours of the second fairway are even more forgiving. From the rough I had slashed at my ball with a five-iron, but I caught it heavy and expected to be thirty yards short of the green. To my delight, the ball ran down a steep slope onto the putting surface, stopping fifteen feet from a front pin. (Thanks, Jack!)
At Dismal River the revelations never cease. If Sand Hills is a meditative stroll in the park, Dismal River is a nerve-jangling tiptoe through a minefield. The fifth hole is an outrageous little par three, uphill all the way to a green that is fitted into a notch between a pot bunker and a towering dune. On the short, par-four sixth, I was unable to resist the green’s come-hither charms, smashing a downwind three-wood pin-high but into a fiendish bunker that was easily twelve feet below the surface of the green. The tenth hole is a gonzo take on Riviera’s celebrated sixth, the par three with a bunker in the middle of the green. Here, Nicklaus conjured a huge, undulating asymmetrical green, the back of which is so recessed that some pin positions can’t be spied from the tee box.
Chris Cochran has been a Nicklaus Design associate for twenty-five years, and he detected a special spring in his boss’s step while they were working on Dismal River. “Jack was definitely fired up about this land and finding the holes that were out there,” says Cochran. “When you talk about an extreme design, that usually means a lot of earth has been moved. This was an extreme design in how little was touched.”
Dismal River opened in the summer of 2006. The next spring Nicklaus was brought back with orders to make it more playable. Native grasses were trimmed back in places, the contours of several putting surfaces were softened, and the thirteenth green was relocated, making the hole forty yards shorter.
If the members found the course too tough at the outset, Nicklaus blames his restraint. “I probably got carried away a little too much on not moving dirt,” he says. “The greens basically were as they were discovered. We left them, for the most part, as is. We let the areas design the greens for us.”
This respect for the land has resulted in one of Nicklaus’s most imaginative creations, one that demands as many heroic shots as any other course on the planet. When I asked Nicklaus if he had consciously tried to come up with a more rollicking take on Sand Hills, he said it had no influence on Dismal River.
“I had heard of Sand Hills, but I had never seen pictures of it, nor did I know anything about it,” says Nicklaus. “I flew over it in a helicopter coming from North Platte, but that is as close as I’ve come to Sand Hills.”
Dismal River members may get to enjoy that same view. The club has its own 4,570-foot grass landing strip and an eight-passenger Cessna Caravan that is available to pick up members in Denver, Des Moines, Kansas City, Omaha, Lincoln and North Platte. Clearly Dismal River could not be doing any more to attract and pamper members, but so far only 140 folks have signed on, paying either $30,000 for a national membership that has some restrictions on play or $60,000 for a full charter membership. One of Dismal River’s co-owners, Jerry Tanner, says the club would like to build another eighteen holes, and there are plans for a par-three course, too, but first more memberships and homesites must be sold. (They hope to sell up to fifty lots; so far twenty-nine have been claimed.) “We’re trying to be patient,” says Tanner.
Sand Hills has prospered because it was the first of its kind, and it remains unclear if the plains will support other isolated, exclusive golf clubs. To find an entirely different business model, I traveled 120 miles south to Gothenburg, Nebraska, site of one of golf’s most unlikely success stories.
To Reach Wild Horse Golf Club, you take the Highway 47 exit off of Interstate 80, which puts you in downtown Gothenburg. Drive past a John Deere dealership, a doughnut shop, a bank and four churches, until you hit Road 768. Make a left. A mile and a half later you arrive at one of America’s very best public courses. A round at Wild Horse can be had for the princely sum of thirty-three dollars plus tax. Of course, even that is considered steep by the locals, who pay five hundred dollars a year for a membership that provides unlimited golf for the whole family. (Throw in another hundred dollars and you get a year’s worth of range balls, too.)
Wild Horse was a vision that first appeared in mud puddles. The nine-hole Gothenburg Golf Club used to be the only course in town; built in a low area next to a canal, it would become unplayable after even a moderate rain. During these frequent rainouts, the damp and underserved locals would gather beneath a clubhouse awning to bemoan their bad luck. Eventually all the whining led to action. Around Gothenburg, inquiries were made, search parties were sent out, and in due time a 310-acre cattle ranch was selected as the ideal site for a new course. Gothenburg Links Inc. was then formed, loans were secured, and after a long search an architect was selected. The papers were a day or two from being signed when fate intervened. Actually, it was Dick Youngscap.
Youngscap was a family friend of one of the new course’s organizers. He also happens to be the prairie visionary who built Sand Hills. When he heard about the Wild Horse project, he was inspired to recommend Dave Axland and Dan Proctor as course architects. Coore and Crenshaw get all the glory for Sand Hills, but Axland and Proctor, two of the primary shapers, did much of the important work. They had already collaborated to design Delaware Springs, a well-received muni in Burnet, Texas. Most important, they would work cheap.
Axland and Proctor buzzed into town to see the property. “To say we were excited would be an understatement,” says Axland. “The land was less dramatic than Sand Hills, but you could stand there and see great golf hole after great golf hole.”
The team began construction in 1997. It was golf’s equivalent of an Amish barn-raising. At the beginning they had only one full-time employee, a kid named Cody Gracey. Much of the labor and equipment was supplied by volunteers from the community. “Farmers would be driving by on their tractors,” recalls Wade Geiken, board president of Gothenburg Links Inc., “and they’d stop and ask what they could do to help. Dave and Dan would tell ’em to tear up some sod, and then the farmers would be on the way to their fields. This happened every day.”
The finished product is a layout that flows gracefully from hole to hole. The fairways are framed not by towering sand hills but by long prairie grasses swaying in the ever-present wind. To make the course playable for a variety of golfers, the fairways are generous and many greens are open to run-up shots. But at 6,955 yards, with a rating/slope of 73.6/134, Wild Horse is all the golf course you could want, especially given that some of the blowout bunkering is fiendish in its size, depth and placement. Because of Axland and Proctor, Sand Hills and Wild Horse will always share the same DNA, making comparisons all the more inevitable. “It’s an honor to be compared with Sand Hills, because it’s internationally renowned,” says Don Graham, Wild Horse’s head pro. “At the same time, we get a little tired of being the little brother. We think we can stand on our own.”
Immediately after it opened in 1999, Wild Horse began garnering accolades. How did the refugees from the old Gothenburg Golf Club feel about all the fuss? “Awestruck,” says Chris Healey, the onetime head of Gothenburg Links Inc.
Wild Horse now ranks as high as twenty-second on lists of the top hundred modern courses, and it would surely be higher if points were given for hospitality. Says Graham, “You don’t have to be a five handicap to enjoy our course; you don’t have to be rich. Everybody is welcome, and being as personable and accommodating as possible is important to us.”
Of Wild Horse’s 25,000 rounds a year, some 40 percent are played by nonmembers. In 2007 golfers from forty-one states visited; the year before, pilgrims from eleven countries made the trip. This steady revenue stream will make it possible for all of Wild Horse’s construction loans to be paid off by 2010.
Yet the Sand Hills revolution may not be finished. On a prime piece of earth an hour north of Sand Hills on the Nebraska–South Dakota border, plans have been drawn up for the Prairie Club, featuring a course by Gil Hanse. Geoff Shackelford, a consultant on that course, says a second eighteen, by Tom Lehman, as well as a third, by Graham Marsh, are also being discussed. Ultimately the project could become a Bandon Dunes of the plains. To date, only the Hanse course has been mapped out, and there’s no word on when construction might begin.
With or without the Prairie Club, however, the sand hills—and the nearby chop hills—have already emerged as some of the most thrilling terrain in the golf world. Says Axland, “When we built Wild Horse we weren’t sure anybody would ever see it. In fact, the same is probably true of Sand Hills. I guess all this proves is that if you build a good course, the golfers will eventually find it, no matter where it is.”
Golf on the High Plains
Ballyneal (private)
1 Ballyneal Lane, Holyoke, Colorado.
Architect: Tom Doak, 2006. Yardage: 7,150. Par: 71. Green Fees: $100–$250. Rooms: $100–$250. Contact: 970-854-5900, ballyneal.com. Prospective members welcome.
Dismal River Club (private)
83040 Dismal River Trail, Mullen, Nebraska.
Architect: Jack Nicklaus, 2006. Yardage: 7,584. Par: 72. Slope: 151. Green Fees: $170–$270. Rooms: $120–$180. Contact: 308-546-2900, dismalriver.com. Prospective members welcome.
Sand Hills Golf Club (private)
Highway 97, Mile Marker 55, Mullen, Nebraska.
Architects: Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, 1995. Yardage: 7,089. Par: 71. Rooms: from $90. Contact: 308-546-2237, sandhillsgolfshop.com. Member introduction required.
Wild Horse Golf Club (public)
41150 Road 786, Gothenburg, Nebraska.
Architects: Dave Axland and Dan Proctor, 1999. Yardage: 6,955. Par: 72. Slope: 134. Green Fee: $33. Contact: 308-537-7700, playwildhorse.com. Public welcome.
