Mike Strantz

Mike Strantz was a golf course architect, born on May 27, 1955 at Toledo in Ohio. He was a painter before he was anything else, and he read fine art at Miami University in Ohio; in his second year, though, he moved to Michigan State University, took up turfgrass management and graduated in 1978. He was working on the maintenance staff at Inverness Club in his home town of Toledo when Tom Fazio, on site for the remodelling of the course ahead of the 1979 U.S. Open, noticed him and took him into the construction team.

He spent some eight years under Fazio as a design man in the field, working on the building of Wild Dunes, Wade Hampton, Lake Nona and Black Diamond Ranch. It was in these years that he studied the work of the golden-age architects, Alister MacKenzie and Donald Ross among them — not, it is said, in order to copy them, but to use their work as the starting point for a design of his own. In 1988 he set up on his own, founding Maverick Golf Design with Forrest Fezler, who had played on tour. Strantz did not settle a design on the drawing board. He painted the holes one at a time in watercolour and fixed their shape that way, and he read a piece of ground from the back of a horse named Scout. He never carried several sites at once, taking on only the one course he could stand over himself, and he worked in that way to the end of his life.

The courses he built on his own account begin with Caledonia Golf & Fish Club in South Carolina (1994). After it came Stonehouse (1996) and Royal New Kent (1997) in Virginia, True Blue in South Carolina (1998), Tobacco Road (1999) and Tot Hill Farm (2000) in North Carolina, Bulls Bay in South Carolina (2002) and Silver Creek Valley in California. The one taken as his masterpiece is Tobacco Road, laid out north of Pinehurst on the floor of a worked-out sand quarry. Tee shots that thread between walls of sand, blind shots played up over a rise: one look is enough to know whose course it is. Wide fairways and bunkers cut large and deep, like sculpture, are common to all his work.

His last job was the rebuilding of the Shore course at Monterey Peninsula Country Club in California (2004). Oral cancer was found while that work was going on, and he carried the job through while under treatment. He died on June 10, 2005, at the age of fifty. He designed only nine courses on his own, yet in 2000 Golfweek named him one of the ten greatest architects of all time. His name is set beside Tom Doak and Coore & Crenshaw as one of the men who turned modern design towards natural shaping and bold movement in the ground.

See the other golf course architects here.