A critic's eye : A case study on Tom Fazio design - Brief Article

Tom Terrific, in his words

Look beyond all the sumptuous photos in Tom Fazio's new coffee-table book, Golf Course Designs (with Cal Brown, Abrams, $45) and you'll find some candid insights into golf's most popular designer:

* Fazio says he deliberately doesn't have a design philosophy, except to avoid imitating his past work. If the land lacks features, he'll shape them. If it lacks trees, he'll plant them. "We can create just about anything today," he writes, "but without water, you can't have golf."

* Fazio doesn't see a finished course in his mind's eye while designing it. He needs to see it shaped. "So often in our designs, it's what we leave out rather than what we put in that completes the picture most naturally."

* Fazio says courses built these days are comparable to the grand old classics, and suggests that 50-75 courses built since 1992 deserve to be ranked among Golf Digest's 100 Greatest.

* All the good land for golf has been taken? Nonsense, Fazio writes. "I'd guess there are about a million excellent potential golf-course sites in the continental U.S. today."

Owners now want "18 great finishing holes," and, as evidenced by The Meadows Del Mar Golf Club, shown here, Fazio tries to deliver. "What comes out in the end is not an accident, and it's not luck," he writes. It's the result of talent, imagination and hard work, he concludes. And plenty of money, he might have added.

How to get on this course: $110-$160. Phone 858-792-6200; www.meadowsdelmar.com.

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group