Home at Last
In some ways it’s been a dream come true. Bloomfield, Connecticut, my little suburban town north of Hartford, now has its own daily-fee golf course, and I was able to help bring it to life. It’s called Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, and it opened up in June 2004, nine years after we started. There are still moments when I go out there for a walk or to play a round and feel teary and emotional for what we achieved. And not only for the town but also for myself. In the process of helping my new hometown get a golf course, I also made more of a real home for myself in town. Having grown up in search of wide open spaces, I was finally able to indulge in them just down the street without having to go away.
I didn’t always feel that way about Wintonbury Hills, certainly not immediately following its opening, when instead of being excited, I was simply tired—of the meetings, the politics, the regulatory wrangling, the rumors, the mud, and the dust. On the day of the ceremonial first official round, a friend asked me if I felt overjoyed. He didn’t quite get it when I told him that instead of being enthusiastic, I felt as if I were recovering from a long illness. Eventually, I came around. But anyone who thinks that overseeing the development of your own golf course is a sheer, unmitigated joy has no idea about the day-after-day grind required and about how easy it is to fall short.
8. Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, Connecticut, par-4 fifth hole. Courtesy of Peter Gassner.
The best part was going out on-site with the design team and helping out with the routing and the features. The worst part was the endless meetings and behind-the-scenes dealing with various agencies, town boards, and people who wanted or expected input and thought they deserved to be listened to seriously. But now, a decade after the opening, I can look back with pride and with a sense of having achieved something on behalf of the town. At the same time, I’d warn people away from trying to do it again—or trying to do it under circumstances less favorable than what we encountered. When I give one of my industry lectures on the process, I end with an array of PowerPoint slides listing the lessons from doing a municipal project. The last image simply says, “Don’t.”
In terms of public policy I’m serious about that. The cost is too high, the conditions under which it could work hard to achieve. And the golf market is now so unreliable as to make it little more than a guessing game for what passes for industry-standard feasibility studies. But having said that as a matter of public record, it’s hard to convey the quiet sense of pride and fulfillment that comes from bringing to bear anything on the scale of a golf course and helping others enjoy the product of one’s lifelong ambition and obsession. Well, maybe not an obsession. But certainly a strong guiding vision.
Just to clarify. Wintonbury Hills is not my design, and I didn’t build it. Credit and blame go to golf course architect legend Pete Dye and to his associate, Tim Liddy. They’re the ones who did all the routing plans, documented the engineering specifications, and then took on responsibility for overseeing construction. They’re also the ones who got paid for their design services, though, it turns out, they got paid at bargain-basement rates. Dye got all of one dollar. Liddy got paid decently but well under industry standard for his plans, documents, and forty-plus site visits. But I was the one who got Dye involved and who managed the town’s politics and the endless committee meetings and review sessions that accompanied the project. I’m also the one who negotiated his fee.
Actually, I called him up and made him an offer he could not refuse. I had already known him well enough to ask him to do it for one dollar and told him, jokingly (as he immediately recognized), that if he didn’t, I’d write nasty reviews of his work for the rest of his career. In fact, I had heard Dye was doing a few of these public courses pro bono, and so I decided to jump in and ask for his help. Without that intervention the golf course in Bloomfield would never have been built. So, I was more than a passive witness to the process, and along the way I learned more than I imagined I needed to about how to do it and how not to do it.
Wintonbury Hills dates to August 1995, when officials from the town’s Economic Development Commission were casting about for innovative ways to encourage town growth. Bloomfield, on the northern edge of Hartford, the state capital, has always been a kind of “in-between” town, with one section bordering on the city and embodying the constraints of typical urban poverty and a much larger section, to the northwest, distinctly more rural and countrified, though by no means wealthy or estate oriented. That half of Bloomfield is still much less densely settled, marked by wetlands, open fields, and extensively wooded areas that are rich habitat for wildlife. The town also enjoys an unusually diverse ethnic-cultural mix, with African American and Caucasian families living side by side and even going to school together to a degree unusual in American society. The town regularly won various Model Town awards in the 1970s for its racial integration.
But subsequently the town, with nineteen thousand residents, had stalled economically. Economic development had been hampered in part by a tightly regulated zoning plan that discouraged manufacturing industry as well as by a poorly conceived central town area that allowed for little expansion, had very limited parking, and was controlled by out-of-town commercial space owners whose rents discouraged small, local retail. With the development of well-run high-end shopping malls in neighboring towns, much of the commerce that had flowed into Bloomfield’s two aging market areas was now hemorrhaging. Bloomfield became known as a town that was pleasant to live in but not to shop in or spend money in. And because for decades it had been a dry town—that didn’t change until the 1970s—the town never developed much of a nightlife. Town treasuries were long spoiled by the dominating presence of a single commercial source, the insurance giant Cigna, whose four hundred–acre corporate campus provided one-tenth of all local tax revenue for Bloomfield. Overreliance upon one taxpayer is never a good situation for a municipality to be in. The tax base needed both expansion and diversification.
Discussion focused on a public golf course as a way to solve several problems at once. It could provide much-needed recreation for the town’s residents. It could also build up the asset value of living and doing business in the town by providing residents with a cherished value—access to a quality golf course on a discounted basis. If operated successfully, a course could also pay for itself in the long run, although it would need a municipal subsidy over its first few years to pay off construction costs.
The project could also complement efforts to pursue some development while preserving the town’s rural character. Many towns in the region had pursued relentless growth in the previous two decades. Along the way they had destroyed their character and become littered with exurban sprawl, tawdry strip malls, and hodgepodge buildings.
Bloomfield, by contrast, had always taken a more modest path, including the acquisition of open space areas that were set-aside preserves and not to be developed. A golf course could fit in nicely with such open space preservation efforts and yet at the same time create much-needed revenue and recreation.
Geographical destiny played an important role as well. Nearly one-fourth of the town’s twenty-nine square miles are designated wetlands and are thus beyond the scope of dredging, filling, or development. This was a legacy of the Ice Age, when glaciers came down into Connecticut and emptied themselves east of what is called Talcott Mountain into the huge basin in which Bloomfield now sits. Pardon us in southern New England if we call a nine hundred–foot–high hill a mountain, but it does constitute an elongated ridge at least a mile long that looms over the town and serves as a dividing point between central and western Connecticut.
The town’s golf course project got a big boost when we signed up world-renowned course architect Pete Dye to design the course—for a fee that was about $749,999 less than he normally charged. Dye’s early commitment gave us tremendous leverage when it came to selling the idea to the town council. It also gave us a lot of credibility with the public, whose support would be crucial during what turned out to be three separate bond referenda.
Bloomfield already had one golf course, the twenty-seven-hole Tumble Brook Country Club. It’s a private membership club, founded back in 1922, when the area’s Jewish doctors and businessmen found themselves excluded from the other private golf clubs in Hartford County. It started as a nine-hole facility, gradually expanded to its present configuration, and when all the private clubs in the Hartford area began to diversify their membership recruitment in the 1980s, Tumble Brook soon found itself having to work harder than ever to maintain its enrollment and its financial health.
Becoming a member of a private club had always been a goal of mine. More like a yearning, actually, one that I can link back to the feeling I had as a teenage caddie at Woodmere Club, when I marveled at the apparent ease with which these wealthy, comfortable, and well-dressed people all fit in so well with one another. I was too young back then to realize that my image of their lives was an idealized one. The whole point of such an indulgence fantasy is to meet some need or fill up some emotional void. It’s a feeling that was all tied up with simply wanting to belong and be part of a place. Over the years the feeling of wanting to belong seems to have evolved somewhat, to the point where, when we moved to Bloomfield in the summer of 1987, it had become a practical desire. I simply wanted to be affiliated with a place where golf enjoyed some stature and where I could run off to join friends for a round or indulge in a late afternoon “emergency nine” at a place that felt familiar.
Bloomfield was the town where my wife, Jane, had grown up and been to high school before leaving for college and her university teaching career. For her the move back was something of a homecoming to family and long-term friends. I didn’t know anyone outside of our little family, however. And so the sense of longing and wanting to be part of a community was very powerful those first few years.
That first summer in Bloomfield I used to go for drives to the various private clubs, an early morning coffee in the car’s cup holder and with AM sports radio talk blaring. I’d furtively drive around to the half dozen private clubs in the area, pull in to their parking lots, and sit for a while or else drive around the perimeter of each golf course to see whatever it was I could glimpse of the place. Finally, one Saturday afternoon late that first summer, I dressed in suitable “golf casual” clothing and rode around to these courses and introduced myself to the golf pros. I was just trying to get the lay of the land, not even trying to play, and it was immediately clear to me that though they acted diplomatic and proper to me, they were in effect the first line of defense against interlopers, presiding over private clubs with long histories and heavily invested members. These were not the sorts of places you just walked into from off the street to get acquainted.
And so I spent my first few years in town playing public, daily-fee courses, mostly Keney Park in the north end of Hartford, a rundown old municipal layout with an impeccable design pedigree by Devereux Emmet that went back to the 1920s. But it had been neglected by the city’s parks department for decades and was subsequently in the hands of a management firm that, while trying to improve things, lacked the capital and the imagination to do much with it. And in any case a restrictive tree covenant prevented the necessary tree pruning that would have allowed the course to see some sunlight and air.
The layout, for all its knobby mounds and intriguing ground game character, was suffocating under the tree canopies and barely had a chance. Which was a real shame because it was obvious from the avid group that showed up there every weekend morning that the course meant a lot to people. All the more so because Keney Park, to a degree found nowhere else in the region, was a gathering place for African American golfers, many of whom came from as far as Bridgeport and New Haven in search of a game and in a place they felt comfortable.
Golf everywhere in this country suffers a reputation of being elitist. In fact, the game is public and accessible to an unusual degree. Fully 70 percent of the nation’s sixteen thousand golf courses are public and open for daily-fee play. Three-quarters of all rounds of golf played in this country take place at such courses; whether municipally owned, privately held, or operated as resort courses, these layouts allow everyday golfers to walk on, pay a fee, and enjoy a four- or five-hour round. And yet the culture of the game is totally dominated by private, exclusive clubs. They are the ones that tend to host the most prominent championships. And their memberships tend to be the most active as volunteers in various state and national golf associations.
Unfortunately, Connecticut has always been among the most underserved states when it comes to a supply of daily-fee courses. Add to this class bias the obvious one of racial exclusion—if not by fiat, then simply by some unwritten social code. Precisely how these restrictions manifest themselves and by what gestures and rules and customs they make themselves effective—these are the kinds of things that people experience even if they have trouble openly articulating them. And one thing we were going to make sure of at Bloomfield was to provide a place where everyone was welcome, regardless of class, race, or religious background. To the extent we ever made this an express part of the golf program, it was when we stated, in various meetings, that the goal of building a municipal golf course was to create a place for the entire town’s population in all of its diversity to gather and play and enjoy each other’s company. We’d know we succeeded when the people lined up on the first tee to play looked as diverse as the town’s actual population.
But first we had to go through the motions of seeing if there was a market. All through the 1990s the golf industry was touting the need for new course construction, as if the thing holding back more people from playing was a paucity of available golf courses. Industry representatives beat the drum for opening “a course a day” to meet pent-up or latent demand. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of feasibility studies churned out in those days argued for the need to build courses. Some firms never seemed to submit a negative report. There’s not much money in telling people want they don’t want to hear. My own advice ever since has been to tell anyone thinking of hiring a firm to do a consulting report to ask for samples of work that said no. How else can consultants’ work have any credibility unless they occasionally come up with news the client doesn’t want to hear?
As much as we were hoping to get the nod of approval for the town to proceed, I always looked upon these market surveys as an unreliable basis for decision making. The idea that people were being held back from playing because of a lack of opportunity struck me as nonsense. Maybe they didn’t have the time. Maybe the game was too expensive or was too hard. And perhaps some courses were overcrowded or in poor condition or simply not inviting to newcomers. What we did sense in Bloomfield was that there were a lot of busy daily-fee courses at the lower end of the market—with $25 to $35 green fees and pretty basic, merely functional conditions prevailing that didn’t seem particularly compelling. And we figured we could compete effectively with that sector of public golf—the Keney Parks of the world—by offering something that was attractive, well maintained, affordable, and yet felt like a real golf club.
As a public entity that has to follow certain formal procedures, the Town of Bloomfield had to hire a consulting firm to do a professional feasibility study. Not surprisingly, the report assured town officials that there was indeed a market for a quality daily-fee course. Who knows whether this was a matter of sound reasoning based on evidence or a matter of grasping at a convenient explanation to justify what they wanted to do all along. The closer you look at how public officials operate, the more opaque their reasons and motives become.
Market data aside, we knew that a Pete Dye–designed course would give us a quality course that would enjoy some distinct competitive advantages over all the other daily-fee courses in the region. And we also thought—or at least hoped—that if we did things right, we might be able to loosen up enough defectors from the private clubs who would want to use our course as a less expensive alternative to spending the $500 to $1,000 a month they were spending for playing privileges.
The first time Dye came to town, in September 1995, he mesmerized local officials with his down-home, midwestern, aw-shucks attitude. Dressed in his typical white polo shirt, khaki slacks, and waders, he spent a full morning traipsing through a mucky site that looked promising for golf but that also served as an Army Corps of Engineers flood control site. He emerged from the trek with his khakis muddied and his pet dog, Sixty, whom he always brought along for such walks, wet, filthy, and apparently flecked with ticks. As various town officials, including the mayor, city manager, and some members of the town council, gathered around Dye to solicit his impression of his walk-through, he got down on the ground to pull ticks off Sixty, all the while keeping up a running conversation about the site without losing count of the arachnids he pulled off—“twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six.”
That first site Dye walked turned out to be unacceptable to the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Too bad it took us two years to find out they wouldn’t let us build there. We knew it was a complicated site, what with wetlands and all sorts of flood control dams designed to hold back water and prevent downtown Hartford from flooding. The storm water management area we were considering had been built by the Army Corps of Engineers following a 1955 flood that saw Hartford streets turned into streams and people using rowboats for a week or more just to get around. Dye had engineered a routing for an eighteen-hole golf course that would not have reduced the overall carrying capacity of the site to absorb storm water while keeping the holes on uplands. But the state had problems with proposed changes to the adjoining wetlands and ended up vetoing our plan. So, it was back to the drawing board and a different parcel of land.
The old A. C. Petersen Farm on the west side of town is a throwback to the days when Bloomfield was rural and agricultural. A few tobacco farms have remained—the region is home, after all, to the tobacco leaf used as the outer wrapper in quality cigars. There are still remnant tobacco sheds all over town. But active family farms disappeared two decades ago, and the 210-acre Petersen property, which had been zoned for real estate development, had for whatever reason not yet been converted to home sites.
When we first got there to look it over, an old barn was there, half-collapsed, along with an abandoned farmhouse. Shotgun shell casings littered the ground, suggesting that the resident wildlife, while extensive, were also not very safe. For all the open space in town it was the only site with enough contiguous undeveloped uplands that could be converted into a golf course. Unfortunately, a high-tension electrical line ran right down the middle of the property. And with wetlands scattered all over, there wasn’t enough land for a golf course unless we could somehow lease an adjoining ninety-acre parcel of open land that belonged to the Metropolitan District Commission, the MDC. The land it held was one of several large tracts scattered throughout the town used as watersheds for drinking water—water that was held in a series of lakes, including a placid half-mile-long reservoir pond that ran the length of the east side of the parcel for our golf course. If we could negotiate access to that land, we’d have a chance at waterfront holes. Routing them on paper would be easy. Getting permission from local, state, and federal authorities would prove to be a more complicated matter.
I keep old routing plans in a bin in my garage. Among my collection of nearly one hundred historic and more recent designs are almost a dozen rolled-up maps depicting various iterations of the Bloomfield course. Each one shows a different version of a proposed routing. They vary as to par, hole sequence, whether there are returning nine-hole loops or not, how many holes along that reservoir, the clubhouse location, and the size and placement of the practice range—and whether there is to be one at all.
Dye and Liddy are ingenious at seeing possible hole sequences—far better than I’ll ever be. I can spot individual holes in the raw, but the real art in routing is in making the connections work so that the holes are linked to form a unified composition, with minimal green-to-tee walks and fairways that make good use of native contours. On a complicated site such as ours, they tried their hand at all manner of combinations. At one point they had a 7,300-yard-long golf course with an expansive practice range, plenty of clubhouse parking, and four holes running along the reservoir pond.
But the regulatory process kept picking away at such ambitious plans. And it did not help that the state DEP had no idea what was involved in a golf course and basically, as far as we could tell, was determined for the first few years just to say no to everything. As the golf course got whittled away, thanks to wetlands setbacks, the power lines, and the state’s reluctance to allow any golf near that pond, somebody at DEP at one point asked if we’d consider a nine-hole course. Our unanimous response was no because we knew instinctively there would be no viable market for a nine-hole layout. But the next time around, when Liddy responded with a drawing for a 5,200-yard, par-64 course, it still met with objections. Back to the drawing board.
The frustrations on our part had a lot to do with the internal bureaucratic politics of the state DEP. As we soon found out during our meetings, the department was not a single office but in fact a collection of nine different divisions, each staffed by a bright, dedicated person who was out to save the world ecologically and make us (and each applicant) responsible for that salvation. It would have been a whole lot simpler if we had just been presented with the rules and guidelines and been told up front what we could and could not do.
The design team was serious about preserving wetlands and minimizing impact while enhancing wildlife habitat. Dye and Liddy were trying to move as little earth as possible and to work with the existing features. They also intended to minimize maintenance by relying upon native wildflowers and indigenous grasses for the roughs. But in getting ready for each subsequent meeting, they’d send in revised plans weeks ahead, only to find out when we got downtown for the meeting that no one had reviewed the plans ahead of time, and there’d be a different alignment of the DEP divisions present, with some of the participants seeing the plans for the first time or not privy to agreements reached the last time around.
Needless to say, the regulatory process was a painful, expensive crawl. Permits and regulatory approvals had to be acquired at three levels: federal, state, and local. Eventually, Liddy pared down the proposed routing to get a golf course with only one hole along the reservoir pond. The scope of wetlands prevented us from getting a large driving range that was close to the clubhouse. Instead, we settled on a smaller practice area up the road on the other side of the wetlands, about a thousand feet away from the main golf course area and reachable only by surface road, that is, in regular cars.
Because we kept impact on existing wetlands down below a quarter of an acre, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave its approvals without us having to go through protracted formal review through Washington DC. Instead, the matter was handled regionally, and a field representative who came out to walk the site was uncharacteristically clear and straightforward about what was allowed and what wasn’t.
Of course, this was New England, where localism is strong and towns are empowered, and so the municipality of Bloomfield had to pass arduous review through its own engineering department, Inlands and Wetlands Commission, zoning board, and town council. The extent to which the applicant had to adjust to town scrutiny was fascinating, if occasionally costly. Here we were trying to save money, but we also had to comply with some exacting demands. Three wetlands crossings on the back nine, each made by wooden boardwalk–style bridges and totaling 1,200 feet in length, were needed to span sensitive areas. By specification of the Inlands and Wetlands Commission, the ten-foot-wide structures had to be built with equipment that inched forward from each subsequent cross-board and that would not be allowed to actually sit in the wetlands.
On another occasion we had a small building in the middle of the golf course equipped with two bathrooms and a drinking fountain. It would have been easy to drop a pipe down from the building into the well field and pull up water that could be used to flush the toilets and for drinking fountains. But a number of folks on the wetlands commission were worried about the possibility that golf course pesticides might leach all the way down into the aquifer. This concern was in the face of evidence that golf turf root mass as well as many feet of soil serve as an effective biofilter and that drinking water pulled up from wells down below would be safe. So, they mandated a half-mile-long direct line for potable water to be piped in from a hook-up at the street serving the clubhouse—at a cost of $90,000.
The idea that golf courses pollute the environment has been shown by repeated scientific studies to be exaggerated, if not mythic. Properly managed golf courses use far fewer chemicals than a comparable area of farmland—the former use of the A. C. Petersen site was far more toxic than anything we were going to do with it. Had the land not been used for golf, much of it could have been used to develop as many as eighty home sites—an acre-for-acre utilization that generates far more waste, pollution, traffic, and hard pavement of habitat areas than any golf course. Only fifty-five acres of the site would be under active turf cultivation for golf. The rest was established as native, no-maintenance areas or simply left undisturbed. A golf course was thus a very good way to ensure the ecological stability of the wetlands, habitat, and flora on-site.
Total costs for the golf course project—including site purchase; development; ecological assessment and permitting; maintenance equipment; design and engineering fees; and construction of the clubhouse, cart barn, and maintenance office—would come to $11.5 million. That’s more than a private developer could ever hope to recoup in our market. But the town’s excellent credit rating enabled Bloomfield officials to borrow the money on the basis of what’s called a general obligation bond at the prevailing rate, in 2002, of 4 to 5 percent interest. A specific project-oriented performance bond akin to the private, commercial side would have cost more like 6 or 7 percent interest and would have made the project impossible to manage responsibly. On a twenty-year bond issue, annual payments would come to $845,000. The town pledged to make that payment, with golf course revenue covering day-to-day operational costs and any overage or net gain for the year going to offset the town subsidy. Eventually, the town’s share of the bond payment would be taken over by the net surplus of the golf course—perhaps beginning as early as in year 10 of operation.
In an era when voters look suspiciously upon bonding measures for swimming pools and new schools, we were able to pass three separate bond measures overwhelmingly. In each case we had a strong citizen-based movement supporting the action. A grassroots, get-out-the-vote effort not only brought out strong majorities but also created a sense of community and camaraderie. Even before the golf course opened, a sense of togetherness was being forged through the very process of getting the thing done. Dye’s presence in town, and the willingness of the town council to commit to the project early on, seemed to create one of those rare moments of civic involvement in which political partisanship and other standard fractures of race and class simply were suspended.
Not that the whole thing was accepted unquestioningly. There was a fairly vocal taxpayers’ group that was opposed to the golf course, or at least extremely suspicious of its likely financial performance, and they managed to make a strong case that the town’s non-golfing citizens should not be burdened with the cost of a facility that only a small percentage of the populace—about 10 percent, if industry norms were to be believed—would actually be playing.
Those of us active in the citizens’ group backing the golf course could not help noticing that the folks opposed to the golf course were the same people opposed to additional spending on schools. And they generally took a very hard line on anything to do with all municipal endeavors. In a small town like Bloomfield, people know each other pretty well. We know who turns up at school board meetings and at Monday night town council sessions to watch the proceedings and speak up during the open comment sessions. It also helps a certain sense of civility that we see the same folks in their everyday routines, whether having breakfast at the local Starbucks, doing business in the print shop, or eating dinner at the Italian, Japanese, South Indian, or Thai restaurant in the town center.
Today, a decade after we built and opened the course, I can still recall the many conversations I had with town residents about golf course issues and impending bond measures—while waiting on line at the post office or at the breakfast counter at Town & Country Diner. Sometimes I felt that the substance of the discussion was less decisive than the awareness all around of this being a community effort undertaken by folks who knew each other and who had to live with each other. It took us seven years from the start of the planning to the point where we could begin envisioning actual construction. Somewhere along the way the golf course acquired a status of inevitability and familiarity as a presence, as an object of curiosity and interest. For all the controversy and issues of cost and permitting, we had plugged away and persisted to the point that, more and more, I heard a simpler line of inquiry: “When is the golf course going to open? When are we going to be able to play golf on it?” The answer, as it turned out, came on June 7, 2004, when we officially opened Wintonbury Hills.
Years later when I go out there, I’m still amazed at what we achieved. Unfortunately, I don’t get to play too much. Traveling as much as I do—150 days on the road—makes it difficult to justify playing golf at home. And for all the golf I play on the road, I don’t feel like I want to very much at home. But a few times a year when I’m out there at Wintonbury Hills, I still occasionally feel something special when I look out upon the reservoir pond. We could only get one hole alongside it, but we terraced in two holes above it that overlook the water and help give the place a special feel.
Or I’ll stand on the tee at the 333-yard, par-4 fifth hole and marvel at the long views north that show off Talcott Mountain. At the 190-yard, par-3 ninth hole I take a kind of playful amusement in seeing how the back edge of the green complex emulates the shape of the distant hills behind it. And at the only blind shot on the entire golf course—the tee shot for the 408-yard, par-4 sixteenth hole—I am always amused by the elevated lunar bunker that Dye and Liddy put in. You can’t see the landing area, but you sure can’t help noticing that weird bunker to the right. And soon enough you also learn to orient the tee shot way to the left of it. When folks play that hole and are jarred by the image of that wild bunker and how far off-line it is, they’ll ask me what it’s doing there. I give them one of my stock tour guide answers: “It’s to remind you that Pete Dye was here.”
With this 6,620-yard, par-70 layout, we got some things right and some things wrong. For one thing, and this is personal, I never understood the rationale for the name of the course. Here we were trying to put the town on the map and market our pleasant little community. All along I thought it should be called “Bloomfield Links,” as a way of drawing attention to the public nature of our enterprise. But no, the town council instead insisted on a public contest to name the place, and the winner turned out to be the old historic eighteenth-century name of the town, when the community that sat conveniently in the middle of Farmington, Simsbury, and Windsor was officially established as Wintonbury—a homonymic gesture of neighborliness back then but one that is lost on the contemporary traveler. Of course, I took solace in that it could have been worse. Our golf course could have been named Bloomfield National or Eagle Grove or perhaps The Challenge at Hartford Junction.
Name aside, in retrospect we misjudged a few things about the golf course. There’s a little too much similarity in the opening four holes on each side, as if they almost mirror each other in their par, structure, and parallel locations. In fact, holes 10–13 are each longer than their front nine siblings and different, but not different enough. It’s not something I noticed for a year until someone pointed it out to me, and it’s one of those things that once it’s been pointed out, you can’t quite get it completely out of your mind.
Less disconcerting to me is the fact that all three of our par-5s head due south. That wasn’t supposed to be the case; the routing we started to build had the fifteenth hole as a par-5 heading due north. But there was an awkward doubling back of the path to the sixteenth tee, and the routing was made more walkable and less dangerous after Dye and Liddy shortened the fifteenth to a par-4 and extended the south-heading thirteenth hole into a par-5. Like so many things in golf design, it’s one of those issues that can be easily explained away. But as designer Bill Coore once told me about course architecture, “If you have to explain it, it doesn’t work.”
We were all terrified about the power line that runs smack through the middle of the property. Not because of the threat of electrocution or cancer-causing radiation but simply because it could intrude on the routing and ruin the experience of a good round. And it did prove to be quite a puzzle to route the course in such a way as to avoid the wires and to place greens, fairways, and tees so that we played around them without them getting in the way. And yet I got a distinct sense of how impish Dye can be the day he headed out to stake the first green site because on paper it looked awfully close to a tower holding up the lines, and I’d assumed he’d try to move it away. Instead, Dye actually staked the center of the green directly in front of the tower so that you couldn’t possibly miss seeing it from the center of the first fairway. “No sense in trying to hide the thing,” he said. And in fact, after that initial encounter, you hardly notice the power lines during a round.
As with any construction process, things happened fast. One time I came out there late in the winter of 2003 and noticed that the line demarking the outside of the clubhouse wall was suspiciously close to the edge of the ninth green—like 100 feet, which was way too close for a par-3 that was supposed to play 230-plus yards and required a full-bore 3-wood or driver. Turns out the engineers had nudged the building closer in an effort to squeeze a few more parking spaces in the lot on the other side of the clubhouse. But this move compromised safety. So, after a hasty cell phone call to Liddy, he arranged to come in a few days later to move the entire ninth hole fifty yards away. We left the green he had built for the original ninth hole as a practice green, and while the new ninth hole plays safely, it has a cramped feeling—for good reason, because it was squeezed in at the last moment.
Getting the clubhouse right was a nightmare. Some folks in town wanted a big building with a full-service restaurant, banquet, and meeting space. At one point the mayor brilliantly suggested we have a gymnastic center in the building. But all along we were hopelessly limited on parking space. Of course, it would have helped had we bought the two remaining houses and quarter-acre lots they sat on that fronted the golf course and that today occupy the space between the clubhouse and the maintenance building. The town engineer said we couldn’t afford what would have been perhaps a $500,000 purchase of the two homes. But we ended up spending an awful lot on value engineering to squeeze everything into the remaining land we had.
All along I insisted on a small clubhouse and on this issue was not going to relent. We got it down to only 5,400 square feet, and also at my insistence we didn’t put lockers or showers in the bathroom—on the theory that no one uses them at municipal courses. Instead of a banquet facility and large, expensive kitchen, we settled for a concrete pad and a tent arrangement for outdoor functions, with space for food that could be heated in the kitchen but not cooked there. It’s worked well enough, and we even make money on the bar and café that seats all of forty-eight people.
But in the battle to get the function rooms right, we overlooked getting a proper entrance hallway, and so the one we have today looks a little bit, well, miscast. The building also looks somewhat mundane, which is no surprise because the architect who designed it (a town resident) usually works on schools, medical buildings, and office spaces. To make it less suburban and more indigenous to the site, we settled on a cheap little architectural trick that stamps the buildings as suitable for a farm. We found a source for inexpensive faux-cupolas and put them on all our buildings—clubhouse, cart barn, maintenance shed, and that bathroom out in the middle of the course. Amazing what $500 can buy you in terms of seeming authenticity.
When plans were originally presented for the back tees at 6,620 yards, a number of folks in town claimed that was too short for championship play. Our response was that we weren’t building a championship course; we were building a facility for everyday town golfers. Turns out most of them play the course from 6,283 yards or less and get around just fine.
Despite the downturn in the golf market over the last decade, Wintonbury Hills still manages to book about thirty-one thousand rounds a year. Green fees run $45 to $55 for town residents and $69 to $79 for nonresidents. There are all sorts of group packages available as well as senior discounts. And about one hundred avid golfers have availed themselves of a seasons pass. Luckily, we turned over management of the course to a private firm, Billy Casper Golf Management, and while it works closely with a town committee on issues of direction, budget, and policy, it staffs the place day to day, and we pay for this service out of the proceeds.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about the operation is the maintenance. We’ve been blessed with two superintendents who seem to know what they are doing without having to spend a fortune achieving it. Greg DuBois grew in the turf and kept us going the first few years; he’s the kind of splay-footed, mis-shaven greenkeeper who looks like a country hick. But when you see the quality of turf he produces, you realize he’s in fact a skilled craftsman whose appearance is disarming. He left Wintonbury Hills in 2005 to be with his new family at a fine private club in New Hampshire. His successor, Mark Mansur, is at least equally adept at cultivating fine turf, and the fact that he’s able to do so on a budget of only $550,000—half of what comparable eighteen-hole private clubs in the area spend—really attests to his management skills.
It helps that we pursue a somewhat rough, minimalist maintenance program, with only those fifty-five acres under active management and the rest of the site allowed to go native in tall, wispy roughs. The town also undertook an aggressive wildlife management program on the grounds, with bird boxes and nesting areas everywhere. A professional wildlife inventory has documented over 150 species of birds on-site, half of which have successfully fledged in and around the golf course. We’ve also seen evidence of dozens of mammals, including river otters, snapping turtles, turkeys, foxes, bobcats, deer, and the occasional bear. Maybe they’ve figured out that they are a whole lot safer out there with golfers rather than with the hunters who used to roam here.
Today I look back at the opening and the subsequent years of golf at Wintonbury Hills and think how much time and work went into creating the place. And there are still moments when I am out there on the course looking around, taking in the views, thinking about how close we came to failing because of money and politics and regulatory concerns, and I start to get a little emotional and teary over what we created and what the place has meant for me.
It’s not just that we’ve done well and that nearly a decade after opening the place is in very good shape. It’s also—mainly, I think—that in the process of creating the golf course, I created a sense of place and of being part of a place that means a lot to me and that others recognize. And by that I don’t mean any public recognition but simply an everyday sense from folks who live here that they know I was part of the process and that in the course of all of those meetings and hearings and explanations, I acquired a simple sense of being someplace and of having a home and of being a real person. It turns out that the search for those wide open fairways brought me to my own front yard.