wide open fairways

Reviewed by James Holzmeister, Auburn University

22 december 2013 archive

Wide Open Fairways

While an interest in golf course design might seem necessarily limited to a select minority even amongst those who play golf, Bradley S. Klein's new book, Wide Open Fairways: A Journey Across the Modern Landscapes of Golf, seeks to demonstrate why all of us might benefit from taking a deeper look into these wide expanses of green grass. Part memoir, part design critique, and part academic treatise, Wide Open Fairways utilizes Klein's varied intellectual and professional experience – from player, to PGA Tour caddy, to political science professor, to staff writer for Golfweek magazine – to present the golf course as a "cultural marker" that "tie[s] this popular recreation into larger issues of land use, ecology, design, and imagination" (viii). Through the course of Wide Open Fairways, Klein synthesizes many of the typical features of works on golf course design into the context of a broader social criticism that allows the golf course to take on a greater cultural significance.

Klein informs us that the golf course is unique in the context of traditional sporting landscapes in that its design is limited by only one rule, the four and one-quarter inches that define the diameter of the hole. This lack of design restriction has resulted in a highly fluid form, allowing the golf course to manifest itself in a myriad of varied iterations which, in turn, have come to reflect not only the visions of those who build them, but also the shifting values and proclivities of the society that surrounds them. Eschewing the grand prescriptive theories that characterized his work in political science and expanding the limited purview of most works on golf course design, Klein builds his critique of the golf course through a series of case studies. While Klein is not shy about stating which courses he prefers and why, the critique is not confined to concerns of playability and aesthetic merit. Organized by chapters devoted to specific courses within specific locales, the work carefully describes the collective process that guides (and sometimes stymies) the creation of these immense and costly sporting venues. Through the course of these chapters, Klein not only reiterates many of our classic assumptions concerning the role of sport in our lives, but also challenges us to contemplate the golf course as a site which distills the complex social, economic, and ecological relationships that are involved in their construction, maintenance, and utilization. The best course, in Klein's opinion, is one that can fulfill both of these complex sporting and sociocultural roles.

Coming on the heels of a boom and bust era of golf course construction, a time when it was not uncommon for course designers to move a million cubic yards of earth to construct their ideal course, Klein draws upon wider critiques of later twentieth century America to suggest ways we might temper course design with twenty-first century perspectives. A chapter devoted to Los Alamos, NM, describes the decline of this quintessential military-industrial town and the shifting fortunes of the Los Alamos GC as both town and golf course fight a losing battle against the nearby metropolis of Albuquerque. Chapters devoted to two of the current darlings of recent course design, Nebraska's Sand Hills and Oregon's Bandon Dunes, suggest ways to create fantastic courses in ecologically responsible and culturally respectful ways. The grandiose mentalities of the recent past meet their match as Klein outlines an attempt to turn Ferry Point, one of the last remaining tracts of open land in the five boroughs, into a golf venue that might attract the PGA Tour. Despite the urban-renewal legacy left by Robert Moses and the influence of Donald Trump, the project's over-ambition is reflective of a design philosophy that seems to exemplify the past rather than the future. Klein culminates with a presentation of his own efforts to establish a public golf facility in his adopted hometown of Bloomfield, Connecticut, to illustrate the difficulty that even the best intentioned and meticulously planned project will face in today's complex sociopolitical climate. While Klein's efforts in Bloomfield eventually proved successful, his lasting message for those who seek to replicate the effort is: "don't."

While Klein is largely successful in his attempt to produce a work on golf course design that is widely accessible and interesting, the work's inherent identity crisis serves as its weakest point. Never quite sure if it is addressing an audience of golfers or general readers, the work's wide social perspective may alienate those looking for a more technical work on golf course design while its limited academic development will leave some readers longing for more. Despite these shortcomings, Wide Open Fairways is certainly successful in its effort to elevate our appreciation of the golf course, and sporting landscapes generally, as an important element in the maintenance of contemporary society. The work seeks to remind us that beyond their specific purpose, golf courses and sporting grounds represent critical points of confluence within the increasingly atomistic context of collective lives. Klein asserts that the process of developing a golf course achieves much more than simply creating a place to play. Through his seven year involvement in the Bloomfield, CT, project, Klein argues that: "[he] 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" (167). Sport may serve many roles, but Wide Open Fairways will challenge readers to see the golf course (and by proxy other sporting grounds) as critical elements of our contemporary communities, a means through which we find place and purpose, enjoyment and fulfillment. While not all of us may dream of the wide open fairways Klein evokes in his title, the work will certainly invite any reader to contemplate their own sporting daydreams in a more complex light.

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