Putting Greens News & Blog

Fairways to Heaven: Backyard Golf Course

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

Backyard Golf Course Owners Find There’s No Place Like Home

Close your eyes and try to imagine golf heaven. You do not need a tee time. There are no green fees. There is never a group in front of you when you are ready to hit. If you do not like your shot, just drop another ball. There is no hurry, because nobody is behind you. This fantasy is becoming a reality for more and more individuals who own their own golf courses. From a bent grass putting green to a full-blown 18-hole layout, you can build a little bit of golf heaven right here on earth, in your own backyard. Across the country, traditional home recreation facilities like tennis courts and swimming pools are giving way to tee boxes and greens ringed with bunkers. Gardeners who once tended flowerbeds are now trimming Bermuda grass, all so we can play more golf.

Reclusive real estate magnate Edward S. Gordon made headlines when he built his own nine-hole course on New York’s Long Island. Casino owner Steve Wynn’s Shadow Creek is not only a full-scale 18-hole layout, but the course, designed by the legendary Tom Fazio, is considered one of the best in the country. Montana’s Dennis Washington, who made his millions in the mining industry, used the firm of Robert Trent Jones Jr. when he added a nine-hole course to his fishing lodge in British Columbia.
Once you’ve made the investment and had the work done, your biggest problem, as one New York businessman who owns his own course pointed out, is deciding whether to play at home or join the boys at the club.

While only a handful of individuals can afford the cost of a full-sized golf course, which the American Society of Golf Course Architects (ASGCA) estimates runs between $1.6 million and $4.5 million, almost every golf fanatic who has enough land can put a little bit of paradise on his property. Many individuals choose to put in one full-sized hole, usually a par 3 or 4, that they can play at their leisure. Others invest in just a green, along with some sand traps, so they can practice their short game by pitching to the green from different spots on their lawn. For those who want to play an entire round, but have limited space and resources, multiple tee boxes can be used with each green. This way, three greens can be played from different directions to create nine distinct golfing experiences.

Most home golf course owners keep a low profile regarding their backyard investments–presumably because they don’t want to broadcast what might seem like wretched excess or they simply don’t want the rest of the world showing up to play on their private links–but the architects who delight in these projects are not as shy.

“It’s a novelty, and a hell of a conversation piece,” says Peter J. Fazio, Tom Fazio’s cousin and owner of Fazio Golf Green Design in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. “I started looking at the home market about two years ago. I did a green with two bunkers, with a tee at 135 yards and another at 160, for a friend of mine who had about five acres. He was a scratch golfer who had gone up to about a seven and was trying to get back down.”

Carter Morrish, a golf course designer who works with his father, the renowned Jay Morrish, recalls a project he did in 1992 in Malibu for a man named Bill O’Connor. “He had about 17 acres, but only seven were useable,” says Morrish. “He was building a house, and he had me put in four par-3 holes, each with two sets of tees, all on about two acres. It was a neat project.”
Another designer, Edmund Hollander, has also left his imprint on backyard golf. “We have done everything from an individual hole, a green with sand traps around it and a tee, to another job where we put in four good-sized greens, with a pond, and eight tees, so there’s a lot of back-and-forth play,” says Hollander, a landscape architect who has designed several personal golf layouts of varying size in the New York metropolitan area.

“Most people are doing just putting greens, with a couple of bunkers and sand traps,” says Hollander. “Fifteen thousand gets you a 1,500-square-foot green with a couple of sand traps. You can usually use the fill from the putting green for the bunkers. You can go with the real thing, or you can go with an imitation. You can never get synthetic greens to look like bent grass. On the other hand, you don’t have to mow and maintain it.”

Two main types of grass are used in putting green construction–bent grass and Bermuda–each of which comes in several varieties. Bent grass, which is usually considered the finest grass, is widely used throughout the northern half of the United States. In warmer climates, where the greens are used all through the year, hardy Bermuda grass is almost always used.

Many putting green owners avoid the expense of buying a mower by hiring either a golf course superintendent or, in some communities, a landscaping firm that owns the special mower. However, bringing in a mower from the outside exposes your greens to diseases, which are a common scourge of golf courses. Getting rid of the problem and restoring the grass can be more costly than buying the mower in the first place.

A low-maintenance alternative to real grass is a synthetic green. But how does it putt? “When you consider the people who are buying these putting greens, who could afford real grass, and know what real grass rolls like, there are no drawbacks,” claims one artificial putting green supplier who counts among his clients professional golfers Paul Azinger, John Huston and Larry Mize, as well as famed teaching pro Jim McLean. Golf club manufacturers such as Titleist, Callaway and Karsten use synthetic greens in their test facilities, as do several golf schools..
Robert Trent Jones Jr. designed and installed a presidential putting green. “Bobby knows President Clinton, and Clinton’s a big golf nut, and they were playing golf one day and Clinton was saying he couldn’t ever get to practice his short game. That was the part of his game that was weak, and Bobby said, ‘Well, you know there used to be a putting green at the White House.’ It wasn’t a big one, but it was there, and Clinton thought about it, and that’s where the idea came from.” Jones put in a new green on the site of the former one, and now the president can practice his putting in between meetings with heads of state.

Will the new green improve the president’s short game? According to Shok, practicing at home makes a real difference, especially for someone with as hectic a schedule as Clinton’s. “The most significant thing for me is those five-, six- and seven-footers,” Shok says. “It’s very convenient, and for those putts I have to make, it gives me a lot of confidence. You don’t have to get in the car and go anywhere, and it’s great when you get home from work and have 15 or 20 minutes before you have to take the kids here or there.”

Of course, you do not need a member of the golf course architects society to design most backyard courses, and certainly not for just putting in a putting green. Hollander, who gets almost all of his golf work through word of mouth and referrals, is a landscape architect who frequently works on projects unrelated to golf. “If you are going to put in a residential golf course, it is part of your residence, and has to be approached like any other piece of landscaping. You don’t want to put the green next to your kitchen window, so you look for a remote corner of the property, somewhere where it gets full sun and good drainage. Just like building a house, you have to select a good designer, contractor and someone to maintain it. Any one of them can screw it up. We are responsible not only for design, but for getting it built.”