Ben Crenshaw

Ben Crenshaw is a professional golfer and golf course architect, born on January 11, 1952 at Austin in Texas, and known throughout the game as Gentle Ben. He won the NCAA Championship three times while at the University of Texas, and after turning professional took 19 titles on the PGA Tour. His majors were both Masters, in 1984 and in 1995, and the second of them came in the days just after the death of Harvey Penick, the teacher he had had since boyhood. He played in four Ryder Cups, and in 1999 captained the United States side at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, leading the team to victory. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2002, and played his last Masters in 2015.

His interest in design, his firm’s official site says, began at the age of sixteen when he first saw The Country Club. From the middle of the 1980s he has worked with Bill Coore as Coore & Crenshaw, the practice they run from Austin, Texas. The Plantation Course at Kapalua on Maui in Hawaii, opened in 1991, is taken to be the first course the two did together, and in 1995 they opened Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska. Friar’s Head in New York State (2002) and Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia, Canada (2016) followed. From 2010 they took on the restoration of Pinehurst No. 2 in North Carolina, working from old aerial photographs to widen the fairways, rebuild the bunkers and bring back the natural sandy waste that had once served as rough. The restored course staged the U.S. Open of 2014. On the firm’s site Crenshaw puts his creed this way: the easiest thing in the world is to build a hard golf course, and a player should always be left a way of getting to the green.

In Asia, Shanqin Bay Golf Club on Hainan Island in China, looking out over the South China Sea and opened in 2012, is a Coore & Crenshaw course. In Indonesia, Rimba Irian Golf Club at Kuala Kencana in Papua, opened in 1996, is held to be a course the pair designed at the request of the mining company PT Freeport Indonesia. It lies in rainforest, and the golf press describes it as the first work Coore & Crenshaw carried out outside the United States.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: Keith Allison（Flickr） / CC BY-SA 2.0