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One Man’s Vision, Two Great Courses

Where does a golf course get its start?

It is not a question most of us ask as we drop off our clubs at the bag drop. But for a golf geek like me learning the history of the course is sometimes more enjoyable than playing especially when my slice has come to town.

Golf course architects will tell you that the best courses are built by Mother Nature herself. Case in point is The Old Course at St. Andrews. St. Andrews wasn’t so much built as it was formed by natural elements.

The winds off the Firth of Forth, the flocks of sheep grazing along mounds and hollows gave St. Andrews its shape not a bulldozer.

Nowadays, it’s rare to find lands so readily formed for golf but we have seen a few men, men with vision find pieces of land that presented natural features fitted for a golf course.

Of course men like Herb Kohler, Mike Kaiser and Donald Trump have very deep pockets and their successes with Kohler’s Resort, Bandon Dunes and Trump International Golf have unearthed properties suitable for golf that otherwise were idle.   streamsong sand

There may be another name to add to that trio of leading course developers, be it a most unlikely one.

Rich Mack was a corporate executive for one of the largest mining companies in the world, Mosaic. His company was born out of a merger between Cargill and IMC Global and their mission was mining, not golf.

They had been mining rock phosphate out of their massive holdings in Florida for decades. The phosphate goes into making fertilizer and the mining operation leaves the land barren and scarred looking like a set for a Mad Max sequel.

But Mack was charged with finding a use for this land that had sat desolate for over fifty years. Luckily, Mack was a golfer and he had a bit of vision himself. “I felt there was a strong relationship in this land to the vibe you get at Sand Hills Golf Club in north-central Nebraska, or some of the great courses on Long Island, or at Bandon Dunes. Studying it, I knew we had two things that distinguish exceptional golf from just good gold: sand-lots of it-and elevation change.” 

This is where things got interesting and in John McAlley’s story on Ashworth Golf.com, Reclaiming the Mine: Three Visions of Streamsong, he tells us how Mack started the development of that wasteland into two of the most honored courses in recent years: Streamsong Red and Blue.

What do you do when you have thousands of sandy acres in central Florida that have been stripped naked and been taken over by all things wild for the past five decades? You call Bill Coore.

Mack had a very hard time convincing Coore that his site was worth a trip to investigate it. His response,”…the last thing Florida needed, I thought, was another golf course.” He relented, met with Mack and toured the property. He then called Ben Crenshaw telling him that this was worth the trip. They were hooked.

Streamsong had the base of sand and hills, left from the mining operation, and hollows and trenches where only a visionary could see the potential for golf.

Mack knew for his project to be successful he would need two courses for it to become a destination attraction. Few would make the trek to the hinterlands of the unremarkable landscape that surrounds Streamsong for a single course. Two eighteens were needed.

If this was going to be Bandon South he needed another course and another big name. His next call was to Tom Doak, the author of Pacific Dunes and one of Coore/Crenshaw’s most respected rivals. Once Doak got a look at the canvas that he could paint on he was in the game too.

At that point the two rivals got together. “Over the span of several months, Coore and Doak walked the property separately and together. And in an unheard-of collaboration between fierce competitors, in this case, competitors with a deep and uncommonly mutual respect for each other-the two began to compare notes.” 

They both saw the potential but one piece of the property seemed a bit better than the other. Doak took the plans and drew out the routing of the two courses, one in blue, one in red and that’s how they got their names: Streamsong Red & Streamsong Blue.

Then the battle over the more prized parcel started. After much haggling and back and forth Coore’s Team choose the Red, Doak was left with the Blue and the rest is history.

The Red and Blue have been highly ranked by all the “golf course raters” and have become the hottest “go to” destination for avid golfers.

All because of a golf playing mining executive who had a vision.

Streamsong Red #18

Streamsong Red #18

“Rich Mack’s hope for Streamsong was to deliver on this idea of rebirth: to provide jobs for the residents of the five Central Florida counties in which Mosaic does its digging, to give those same people something they could be proud of- a first class resort in their own backyard and, of course, to invigorate the experience of golfers, not only from the sunshine state but from around the world.” 

Mission accomplished and a new name added to the roster of golf course visionaries: Rich Mack.

Click here for John McAlley’s article.

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