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FeedAbsolutely Amaz-engh!
Colorado’s Jim Engh continues to design golf courses that astonish, win awards and create loyalists
If you’ve ever played a golf course designed by Jim Engh, you may wish to give a little nod — or other gesture — to Van Morrison. That is because the Irish-born crooner often motivates Engh through his music.
“There is such a bellow to his soul that I do not feel from other artists,” says the Parker, Colorado-based course designer. “He does standards, blues, R&B, funk, jazz…his music really gets my creative spirit going.”
In 1958, after watching his father and his father’s friends build a local nine-hole course, the younger Engh was intrigued by it all, but didn’t consider a career as a course designer until college.
It is a common practice for Engh, who has more than 60 of Morrison’s CDs, to slip on the stereo headphones in his studio and let the vibes do their thing. “I’ve been to probably 20 of his concerts,” notes Engh. “Morrison has this energy, this honesty, and that is what I try to bring to my designs.”
Stand on the tee boxes at any of the award-winning designer’s layouts and it is clear he’s got the rhythm in him. On Colorado’s Western Slope, The Golf Club at Redlands Mesa beautifully integrates the surrounding red rocks into the design, while at Fossil Trace Golf Club in Golden, he had to be respectful of the 64-million-year-old fossils.
Lakota Canyon Golf Club, near Glenwood Springs, and The Snowmass Club course illustrate his skills for mountain tracks, and The Club at Pradera in Parker shines the spotlight on what can be done to transform what was formerly ranchland.
Born and raised in North Dakota, Engh had an unforgettable introduction to the game of golf. As a two-year-old he was riding with his father in a three-wheeled Cushman golf cart when his dad stopped to get out and take a closer look at the turf.
Curious, Engh the toddler reached down and pressed the gas pedal, and off he sped. Just shy of the Heart River the cart and the small boy tumbled butt-over-elbows into a ten-foot-deep hole that had been dug for a well.
“The doctors were saying that I wasn’t going to make it through the night,” explains Engh. “I was in the hospital for a couple of months, and lost a kidney and part of my stomach. That is how I started in golf.”
Ardent golfers, Engh’s parents lit the fuse on their son’s passion for the game a few years after the cart incident. His dad, a World War II fighter pilot, returned home from the war to run a John Deere tractor and farm equipment dealership.
“My dad won two North Dakota Seniors’ Championships and was inducted into the North Dakota State Golf Hall of Fame,” Engh comments. “I just hung around the course in the summer time working maintenance, being a caddie or spotting balls in tournaments. There was always something I was doing on the golf course.”
In 1958, after watching his father and his father’s friends build a local nine hole course, the younger Engh was intrigued by it all, but didn’t consider a career as a course designer until college.
He wanted to attend Colorado State University but, unable to afford the out-of-state tuition, he came to Colorado’s oil fields to work for a year to qualify for residency. “My brothers had a company that provided cathodic protection that prevented metal pipes from corroding,” says Engh. “It was ugly and not the kind of job I wanted to be doing in ten years.”
Leaving CSU in 1985 with a degree in landscape architecture, the newly minted grad took a job with an established golf course architect in Chicago named Dick Nugent, with whom he worked for two years. His post-college path also led him to Landscapes Unlimited and McCumber Golf Construction, prominent golf course construction companies that taught him how to efficiently and economically build courses.
Two experiences soon followed that set his compass point toward his current station in life — meeting a woman and taking a job in England.
The first happened in the summer of 1986. “I was doing a nine hole addition to a private country club course in Shreveport, Louisiana,” Engh reminisces. “It was fortuitous because that’s where I met my wife, Monie. That was in July and we were married in February the next year.”
Then, In ’87, he accepted an offer from A.H. “Gerry” Buckley to be director of golf course design and construction for Cotton Pennick, the renowned British golf course design firm.
The position was the career launcher the emerging designer had sought, so the newlyweds moved overseas. Not long after the couple settled in London, Cotton Pennick was acquired by IMG and Engh was named director of golf course design for IMG Developments.
“It wasn’t uncommon where over five days I’d be in five different countries and have meetings in five different languages,” Engh muses. “For a 28-year-old kid from North Dakota it was quite an adventure.”
His travels took him to Scotland, the birthplace of golf, as well as to Ireland, whose courses are among the most heralded in the game.
“In Scotland so many courses are built below your line of sight,” says Engh. “You’ll come up from a hollow or crest the fairway and there is the village. The land forms are used in such artistic ways.”
In his four years abroad, he also worked with Bernhard Langer (winner of the Masters in ’85 and ‘93) on the Dashstein-Tauern course in the Austrian Alps near the village of Schladming. The experience got his wheels turning about designing mountain golf layouts.
Returning to Colorado in 1991 to start his own firm, Engh had lined up three “for sure” projects in the States, all of which fell through. Fortunately another client hired him to design Dragon Hills, a course in Thailand, and his career caught fire.
He soon made the acquaintance of Dave Liniger, founder of ReMax International, who envisioned a private golf course on land he owned in Sedalia, Colorado.
“We were playing golf and he mentioned he was looking at property for his Arabian horses,” Engh explains. “He ended up showing me around the land and wondered if I could build a golf course on it. I returned to the property, penciled some contours, came back to him and said, ‘I believe I can do this.’”
When it debuted in 1997, Sanctuary turned heads. Woven subtly into the forested landscape, the layout drew raves from golfers. Even those trying to extricate their balls from what are now considered Engh’s “signature” bunkers were wowed.
“My bunkers are visual accents that bring my golf courses together,” comments Engh. “They enhance the playing experience similarly to how the proper spices would enhance an excellent meal.”
Deliberately deep and contoured (think pot bunkers in Ireland and Scotland), the drama they add to his courses is enormous. Yet, as confounding as they are, the bunkers represent only one element of his overall design.
Engh consciously avoids using a design template or formula, opting instead to let the raw landforms influence his thinking. “When I worked in Ireland, I saw where these guys tried to fit a golf hole through the crazy-ass landscape and then figure out how to play it,” Engh chuckles. “However the golf course developed on that land is how you played. It was like a chess game.”
Employing what he calls his “pirouette theory,” where he walks the land continually rotating to get a 360-degree view, Engh is better able to turn his vision into reality. Working from quick pencil sketches of how the holes might take shape, he returns to his studio, slips Van Morrison, Bruce Springsteen, Sheryl Crow or one of over 300 CDs in his collection into the disk player and lets the creativity flow.
The results have earned the transplanted North Dakotan numerous accolades. Golf Digest, which has honored Engh’s designs more than 25 times, has twice ranked Sanctuary among America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses.
His golf calendar-worthy layouts have also been praised by Golf, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Travel + Leisure Golf, Links, Maximum Golf and Golfweek.
For the very small fraternity fortunate enough to play Sanctuary, the thrill is apparently unforgettable. The 18-hole course is used primarily for charity golf tournaments of which more than 25 are planned in 2008.
One way he keeps his ideas on the leading edge is to play courses designed by others. “There are golf courses I’ll play and I can tell right away whether I’m going to be intrigued or bored to death,” says Engh. “The ones that you’re fired up about and you go back and play, I’ve learned something from those.”
Four Mile Ranch, a new course opening this summer, is an excellent example of Engh’s propensity for thinking outside the box. Located in Cañon City, Colorado the 18-hole public layout shares the semi-arid setting with white shale mesas, shrubs, piñons and fir trees. Curiously, the course has no bunkers challenging golfers to steer clear of the copious amount of blonde, powdery soil instead.
With an eye on eco-sensitivity, Engh found a way to move less than 80,000 cubic yards of dirt to shape Four Mile Ranch, of which 40,000 of those were excavated to create a lake. In a business where it is not uncommon to move 500,000 cubic yards of earth to create a course, he proved the adage less is more.
Believing his golf courses are a form of art, he acknowledges golfers, like visitors to an art gallery or museum, have differing opinions of his designs. “I’ve realized that if I push the envelope, one out of five people won’t like what I’ve done and I’m okay with that,” Engh explains. “But the other four are in for one hell of a ride.”
Whether it is The Club at Black Rock in Idaho, The Creek Club at Reynolds Plantation in Georgia, his soon-to-open Montalcino in Napa Valley, or any of his nine Colorado courses, Engh’s artistry is evident. Still, it is his impact on the planet that awes the designer most.
“It is such an honor to be given the responsibility to take a piece of land and form it into how you imagine it should be,” Engh reflects. “To not take it extremely seriously and to not give it your full effort to me is a shame. You don’t get that many shots on Mother Earth here. It is truly a blessing.”
As Van Morrison sings, it’s as sweet as Tupelo honey.
Kim McHugh, a Lowell Thomas award-winning writer, is associate editor of Rocky Mountain Golf Magazine. On the occasions he’s been in an Engh-designed bunker, Van Morrison’s song “Scream and Holler” comes to mind.
