Excerpt: A Visit to the Heartland From 'A Course Called America'

In this excerpt from his latest book, author Tom Coyne visits Sand Hills in Nebraska and meets a famous architect.

The following is an excerpt from "A Course Called America" by Tom Coyne, published by Simon and Schuster. It has been reprinted with permission. The book is available for purchase; order a copy here.

The Sandhills

Explorers had eschewed the place for its useless mounds of beige — couldn’t grow much, couldn’t build much — but I was here for that sand in August. I had landed at the heart of one of the world’s largest desert ecosystems craving the crunch of fine granules underfoot. They were crap for growing corn or soybeans, but when it came to holding golf holes, there were no better handlers than the dunes.

I had spent chunks of my life shaking Irish and Scottish sand out of my shoes; little did I know that every golf hole over there could have fit neatly into the dunescape in front of me, that the purest golf property on the planet wasn’t in the British Isles or in California or Australia but in the heart of my own country, in the last state my imagination would connect to golf. I considered myself a connoisseur of golf in the dunes, yet I’d been deaf to the call of earth’s mightiest sandhills. Now, America’s greatest golf miracle rushed past my open windows as I licked the grit from my teeth and waved hello to the sandhills of Nebraska.

How the largest grass-stabilized dune system in the world landed in the Cornhusker State is uncertain — it may have been born of sediment spilling off the Rocky Mountains, or by sand blown from dried-up riverbeds. Its ancestry mattered little to me; I took the surroundings as proof that our game was rooted in phenomena. In the divine, even. Golf’s greatest playing grounds were not shaped by software or backhoes but by an ancient and inscrutable confluence of wind, water, and sand. I eyed the hearty grasses waving atop soft slopes in every direction and felt myself cradled in evidence of golf as not a game but the great reminder to get outside and wonder.

“That’s a golf course, right there,” I found myself saying to the windshield. “And another one. And another one.” Every few minutes I spied a new stretch of rippled landscape—so many designers had struggled to re-create this elsewhere, yet here it was, untouched and unending. I imagined myself hiking it in heavy boots, hammering stakes into the sand for a green site or a tee box. But dreams of my personal paradise were interrupted by reminders of the toil it took to get here—too remote, too unpopulated; golf could never thrive here. And if it could, it would take a bolder soul than me to roll those dice. Thankfully, there are plenty of such souls out there, and one was named Dick Youngscap. He had not just created a Nebraska golf course but shifted a paradigm.

When the architects of the early twentieth century went looking for exciting new ground, they were drawn to seaside tracts on Long Island and Monterey, or to the pine barrens of New Jersey and North Carolina—all near population centers or railroad stops, and all accessible for a newly mobilized set of American fun seekers. Some builders wandered farther afield, but none dreamed as Youngscap did in the 1990s, and by doing so he transformed course development and helped usher in the new Golden Age of golf design.

I didn’t understand any of this until I played his course. I was just here to see if the holes were worth the drive and the letter I had written to Mr. Youngscap, in which I pleaded my way onto a yonder golf course called, appropriately enough, Sand Hills.

As I sat at the bar in the lodge after my first loop around Sand Hills, awaiting the meal I had been instructed to order—You have to get the bone-in ribeye, friends told me—I made small talk with the bartender, a kind woman in glasses with blond hair puffed to a height that recalled the schoolteachers of my youth. When I discovered that she was indeed a teacher who worked here during the summers, it made sense, and not just because of her demeanor—for a place like this to function in Mullen, Nebraska, it would take all the schoolteachers and college kids home on break. The job applicant pool must have been small, but the people who took those jobs were proud of Mullen’s acclaimed course and dedicated to the place’s success. When she heard I was from Philadelphia, she told me that she had once been to Pittsburgh. And from where I was sitting, here on some faraway planet called the Sandhills, Pittsburgh might as well have been right outside our windows back home.

The bar grew crowded with the arrival of a buddy trip of twelve golfers from Chicago. Somebody’s father was one of the club’s founding members, whom Mr. Youngscap had tapped to help fund the construction, and so this crew made the trip out here every year, to golf dawn to dusk, gorge themselves on Nebraska beef and California wine, and then crash in the simple but clean cottages behind the lodge. There was no Hilton or downtown nightlife around the corner from Sand Hills, so a trip here was a true compound experience.

We’re used to these sorts of getaways today—trips to Cabot, to Streamsong, to Sand Valley are now staples on golf calendars, where you eat, drink, golf, and repeat in the most inconvenient destinations. Bandon Dunes deserves credit for popularizing remote golf in America, but there is no Bandon without Sand Hills. This was the epicenter of the destination-golf movement, as its success emboldened Mike Keiser to take a shot on Bandon, and soon developers were seeking great land first and clientele second. We now live in a golf world where architects get to elevate their artistry on the best plots of land in the country, regardless of location. And those geographic handcuffs were first unlocked at Sand Hills, a golf oasis unlike anything I’d seen in America. Playing it felt like sailing a vast sea of grassy swells, where both your ball and your mind rolled with the tides.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster

Just that afternoon I’d met one of the men at the center of this new day in golf design—Gil Hanse was building a course not too far from Sand Hills, and had come over to play with some of his crew. Gil and I lived five minutes from each other back in Philadelphia, but we had to come all the way to Nebraska to finally meet in person.

Gil was taller than I expected, and if I hadn’t recognized him from TV, I would have struggled to peg him as the designer of the Olympic course in Rio or the architect charged with restoring an inordinate amount of American classics, from Sleepy Hollow to Brookline to Baltusrol to Oakland Hills to Winged Foot to Southern Hills to Olympic to Fishers Island to Merion. He just looked like a dude, with relaxed posture and dancing bears on his belt.

As he walked from his truck toward the clubhouse, I stopped him and introduced myself. He was very gracious and said some nice things about my books (it’s a kind thing to say to an author, but congenital insecurity leads us to assume you haven’t actually read them, though I think Gil had), and we talked about the Eagles for a bit; whenever they played near one of his job sites, he said, he was in the stands in green.

I followed him inside to poke around. There were plenty of architects with egos of legend, but Hanse spoke in thoughtful and humble tones, somehow managing to give the impression that he was as pleased to meet me as I was him. As we don’t rank anywhere near each other on the golf notability scale, I quickly identified that quality in Gil that I searched for like Diogenes with his lamp—simple class.

We both scooped up some Sand Hills souvenirs in the pro shop. He would be giving his to friends and employees, while mine would be peacocked around for the next decade as proof that I was golf anointed. After we’d gathered our spoils, Gil told me to follow him, and we went searching for a map.

Down a stairway we found a creased drawing on the wall. It looked like a framed spiderweb to me, but its black-and-white dots and lines actually sketched out 136 different golf holes that Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw—two more heroes in golf’s new chapter—had identified on the property. Creating Sand Hills, for them, was not a matter of building golf holes as much as it was a matter of eliminating the unnecessary ones. Blessed with natural green sites and ready-made fairways funneled through the dunes, they moved precious little earth during construction, and the course was completed for the absurdly low sum of $1.2 million. Some courses spent more shaping a driving range.

Gil was quiet as his eyes studied the map with the reverence of an art lover in a museum. He took out his phone and snapped a picture of it, and I was again impressed by the modesty of such an accomplished designer who had come here not just to play but perhaps to learn as well. A less noble mind might have resented Coore and Crenshaw as competitors, but it looked to me like Gil was paying homage to his peers.

As Gil was leaving to get back to his worksite, he posed for a picture with me in the parking lot, and I asked him about his own answer to the question that had set me on the road for the last four months.

He paused, and in that silence I admonished myself for asking Gil Hanse such a broad, high school newspaper question. Why not just ask him the meaning of life, as he’s trying to get into his car to leave? But he answered as cool and clear as the pro he was.

“I think a sense of place. I think that’s a really important thing, and I think that a golf course needs to tie in naturally with its surroundings. With how diverse the topography in our country is, there are so many great examples of golf courses that just fit where they are,” he said. “The best examples of golf architecture take advantage of the natural advantages that are already there. And that gives them that identity that I think is really critical to any good architecture. I understand when we talk about strategy and interest and character, and any great golf course is going to have all that. But I think it’s really about that sense of place that makes a golf course feel like it belongs.”

In that brief moment, Gil had not only aced his golf architecture exam but he had done more work to soothe my psyche than the therapist back home who kept wanting to talk about my trials as a grade-school ginger. Place. Belonging. They were words we often applied to our own search for happiness, but to extend them to golf, and to think that when a golf course possessed them, it impacted our own happiness—I was knocked off my horse. The mystery of why sometimes a nine-hole muni felt perfect while an elite rankings topper sometimes felt incomplete finally made sense. It didn’t have to be in Scotland or Ireland or Nebraska or Monterey—it just had to be the right course for wherever it was. Because when it was, it was place and belonging and comfort; it was home. And damned if I hadn’t roamed the golfing world searching for precisely that.

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That evening, the ribeye was as good as had been foretold, and as I sat at the bar with upturned wine glasses dangling overhead, a few of the Chicago group recognized me, and one of the more well-served of the party insisted he had read my book about golf in America.

“No, you haven’t,” his more sober friend told him, pulling him back by the shoulder. “You read his Ireland book.”

“No!” he insisted, leaning in closer over my empty plate. “I read about you playing America. I swear to God I read that book.”

“He hasn’t written it yet!” his friend explained. I confirmed that was indeed the case, but the gentleman insisted that he had read about my American travels, waving his glass of red wine for emphasis.

He was confusing some social media posts for a book, I surmised, but I silently wished he was telling the truth. So many more miles and states and courses ahead—I looked at the Nebraska twilight past the windows and dreamed of the moment I could say America, complete. Such a moment felt like myth, but as I reminded myself every morning, all I had was the day in front of me, and there would be a time not too long from now when I would miss all of this, a day when I could tell the guy at the bar at Sand Hills that no, he hadn’t read my book about playing all fifty states over the course of eight glorious, enlightening, maddening months in America—

But you are now.