Taking a Stand Stretched to the max, the Florida layout highlights the divide within the golf industry

"Is this a golf course renovation or a golf course reprieve?" I
asked that question one night in June, while dining with the
Weed Golf Course Design team at the Ballyhoo Grill, a
Gainesville, Fla., eatery with a South Seas island motif. "It's
a reprieve," said design associate Chris Monti, who had spent
the past few months watching as his boss, Bobby Weed, executed
his plan to stretch the University of Florida Golf Course from
baseboard to baseboard. "This course can't get any longer.
There's no place to go."

Ten weeks later, as workers finish grassing the redone course,
Monti's assessment rings true. The new 5th green is a chip shot
from the 34th Street boundary wall, on which graffiti artists
responded last week to the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon. The 9th green is 50 feet from the golf course
parking lot. The 10th tee is nestled up against the cart shed on
Second Avenue, and the 8th tee is so close to the wooded
southeast corner that you can hear Hansel searching for Gretel.
"This course could be obsolete in 15 years," says senior
associate designer Scot Sherman. "People will realize it's a
crisis when we put a tee on 34th Street, a tee on top of the
clubhouse and a tee across Second Avenue in the Publix parking
lot." Sherman smiles at the thought. "Right by the traffic light.
You'll push the button for the crosswalk signal before you tee
off."

The crosswalk suggestion is fitting, because many golf
architects want to install a red light at the intersection of
ball design and club technology. "Great courses now defenseless"
warns a recent position paper issued by The American Society of
Golf Course Architects. "Today, with 300-yard drives
commonplace.... The strategic principles that guided the design
of all the great layouts in the 1920s and '30s can no longer
keep up with the state of today's game," the report says. To
save courses from obsolescence, the society endorses a remedy
championed for years by Tour legend and course designer Jack
Nicklaus: a rollback in the distance a ball can travel under the
Rules of Golf. "Inaction today is complicity in the
deterioration of the game tomorrow," the position paper
concludes. "We urge the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal and
Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews to take the necessary steps to
preserve the great courses of the world."

The author of the architects' manifesto is Bobby Weed, whose
sensitivity to the equipment issue has no doubt been heightened
by a summer spent working on this 105-acre Florida site.
"Spalding just announced a new ball that's seven yards longer
than its existing ball," Weed said recently. "Last week the
long-drive championship was held in Canada, and the winning
drive was 417 yards! Where are we going with this?"

Understandably, equipment makers bristle at the idea of a
rollback. Their mission, since the days when Allan Robertson and
Old Tom Morris were making featherie balls in Robertson's
kitchen in St. Andrews, can be summed up in three words: longer
and straighter. That presents problems for course designers, who
can't introduce a Pebble Beach Golf Links every year to keep up
with improvements in technology. It also troubles course
operators, who must spend money on land, permits, water, trees,
grass, cart paths and labor to lengthen their courses. "The
manufacturers aren't held accountable for any of that," says Weed.

Strategic design is another area in which interests collide.
When Weed installed a bunker on the left side of the 1st fairway
at the Florida course, men's coach Buddy Alexander worried it
would take the driver out of his players' hands. Weed defended
his design by pointing out that it requires a downhill carry of
only 270 yards to clear the bunker--a routine blow for a
strapping young Gators golfer. That's today. In 2011, if the
distance trend goes unchecked, long hitters may be bouncing
their drives into the greenside bunkers on the 370-yard hole.
"We've lengthened the course by almost 500 yards," says Scott
Hampton, the Florida course's director of golf, "but 6,700 yards
still isn't that long, even for a par-70."

Hampton's take on the issue is instructive because he has a foot
in both camps. As a teaching pro he's proud of the nifty layout
taking shape outside the window of his clubhouse office. As a
golf shop operator he has to order the best clubs and balls for
his customers. If you granted him a third foot, Hampton would
admit that he has gained 10 to 15 yards off the tee in the past
year simply by switching to one of the new urethane-coated,
solid-core balls. "They'll probably have to do something about
the ball," he says with a sigh. "There are a lot of fun and
interesting courses, and it would be a shame if they all became
obsolete."

Many of those fun and interesting courses are opening their
checkbooks to keep that from happening. Architect Tom Fazio
recently put cherished Augusta National on the rack, stretching
that Alister Mackenzie landmark to a serpentine 7,270 yards. Rees
Jones, known as the Open Doctor for his remodeling of tournament
courses, toughened the Highlands course at the Atlanta Athletic
Club, site of this year's PGA Championship--only to see David Toms
win with a 15-under 265, the lowest aggregate score in major
championship history. From sea to shining sea the bulldozers roar
as architects grudgingly add to the golf equivalent of suburban
sprawl.

"Where does it end?" asks Sherman, standing at the edge of a
little cypress head that workers are planting as a buffer between
the 15th green and the new maintenance barn. "What if the USGA
allowed a ball with a global positioning system chip in it that
could weave around obstacles and land where you wanted?"

Before I can ask where one might buy such a ball, Sherman answers
his own question: "If that happens, the game is over."

What's a punch list? We'll find out next time as we watch project
manager Tom Weber apply the finishing touches (and a few
Band-Aids) to This Old Course.

For previous installments of This Old Course go to
golfplus.cnnsi.com.

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID WALBERG Gainesville residents expressed themselves on the wall behind the 5th green.

COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID WALBERG

High Energy

Alaina Wesserling, a 21-year-old public relations major at
Florida, thought the help-wanted ad in The Independent Florida
Alligator, the student newspaper, looked a bit shady--"Need
secretary, please call"--but she called anyway and wound up as
office manager on the golf course project. "I follow the paper
trail," she says. "Payroll, deliveries, prices." With a wink she
adds, "And I keep the guys in line."

That is no mean feat, because Wesserling (above) is the only
female on a project that has employed as many as 75 workers at a
time, including 16 rambunctious college interns. "I have to
remind them of their manners," she says. "They belch and burp and
use naughty language." Like a modern-day Snow White, Wesserling
cheerfully mops the floor of the construction trailer when the
good-natured louts leave muddy footprints, and she has been known
to take a protective interest in what they eat for lunch. One day
she told construction intern Nick Carhart that two king-sized
Snickers bars didn't exactly constitute a balanced meal,
prompting another intern to say, "You're like Nick's mom!"

Wesserling, who was captain of the girls' golf team at North
Fort Myers (Fla.) High, took everything in stride until an SI
photographer asked her to let a few of the guys hold her over
their heads in a beauty-and-the-beasts pose. "It was very
Seventeen magazine," she says with a laugh.

--J.G.