Fazio's ace in the hole
is quite a Wise guy

By Jeff Reynolds,
TravelGolf.com Staff Writer

CHICAGO (Oct. 10, 2002) -- We've all heard the great parables of turning water to wine, a loaf of bread into a thousand fish. The newest legend is that of The Glen Club, an Air Force base turned elite golf course.

When the magic wand stopped waving, Kemper Sports Management and Tom Fazio Designs had altered a military stomping grounds into a golf stratosphere yet unreached in the Chicago area.

Tom Fazio, along with senior designer Dennis Wise, have hit home runs before. Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, Butler National in Oak Brook, IL, and Wade Hampton Golf Course in Cashiers, N.C., to name a few that consistently rank in the top 100 golf courses in the United States. Those are the landmarks that allow many to fancy Fazio as the preeminent designer of modern golf courses.

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Wise is his ace in the hole, a right hand man with credentials to steer alone but an immeasurable degree of respect and admiration for the captain that he hasn't and will not jump ship.

"If there is or was a better teacher, I'd be working for him," Wise said.

He's been seated next to Fazio at the Scottsdale-based Fazio Design for the last 18 years, but was well-seasoned when the two formed this permanent partnership. His journey began in his hometown, where he worked at a Pete Dye course (Golf and Country Club) in Des Moines. "I was a grunt," Wise quipped, with a hint of seriousness. "I did a little of this and that and spent some time around Pete."

From there, Wise earned his landscape architecture degree at Iowa State, studying one year at Oxford in Cambridge. In the 70s, Wise latched on with Chicago-based designers Larry and Roger Packard, earned his wings and landed at the pinnacle of course composition.

Today, Wise heads up the majority of projects in the Midwest and West and is in firm control of his "gypsy" existence that sends him around the country and back on a weekly basis.

"Tom is the only one involved in 100 percent of our projects," Wise said. "We just layer it because you could get in over your head trying to do it another way."

While all course construction opportunities are unique, The Glen Club was truly one of a kind because the course's features and topography were made from scratch.

"Any time you get a flat piece of ground, it doesn't really have much of an environment," Wise said. "We had to create one. We built it with an eye on creating variety on every each hole. To do that, we needed to understand the dynamics of the land and of the town."

Having spent time in Chicago with the Packards, Wise wasn't walking in the dark but took some time to feel around before making final calls on Glen Club's grounds. Glenview is an upper-crest suburb, where even modest chunks of real estate command top dollar. KemperSports managed to purchase 250 acres on which to rest the course, a smallish plot compared to past Wise works.

"The land was just so expensive, we were confined to the 250 acres," he said. "In some cases, that is big for Chicago courses. But on other projects, we were talking upward of 350."

Virtually untapped grounds, Wise remembers the first steps. "Initial meetings were with Kemper and the village. At that time, we weren't sure if we were going to get the project based on what portions of the village land could be golf," Wise said.

Demolition lasted more than a year. The majority of the materials - cement, some metal, tons and tons of dirt - were recycled and used as fill to build the mole hill into a mountain. Wise said the weather, specifically Chicago winters, was a challenge because the soil wasn't easy to work with the latter half of the year.

"We couldn't cut into the ground more than four or five feet," Wise said. "With that, we didn't have enough material from what we had dug up. We started to ask, 'Where do we get the material?'"

The project was aided by truckloads of scrap materials from other construction and demo jobs in the Chicagoland area. The trucks dumped dirt, concrete, rock and finally gave Wise the materials he needed to create elevation changes of 30 to 40 feet. Fazio designs have been gaining recognition as 1990s constructions - like Shadow Creek, Victoria National (1998), Sand Bridge (1998), The Estancia Club (1995), The Quarry at La Quinta (1994) and World Woods (Pine Barrens) a 1993 model - eclipse erewhile classics.

"The demolition process made The Glen Club very unique," Wise said. "But beyond that, I think the major factor that might be overlooked is that there was no environment there, simply because there was no existence. It was a piece of flat land."

The Washington D.C. area features another Fazio-Wise jewel. Lowes Island, a private 36-hole club in Potomac Falls, VA, was a create-an-environment assignment as well. Arthur Hills designed one 18-hole course and Fazio's regime the other, both lining the Potomac River. While Lowes Island presented more of a scenery boon than Glen Club because of the existing natural vegetation and waterways, it was a steep challenge for the same reasons because as Wise said, "you really can't cut (into the ground) much" when you are in that ocean setting or along a flood plain. Needless to say, the Fazio folks did just fine. In 1994, Lowes was recognized as one of the top 10 new courses by Golf Digest.

Once the actual course design began, the goal was simple: create a masterpiece. The litmus test normally comes when Wise takes eight or nine office mates to a Fazio design and asked each of them, post-match, to select a favorite hole and tell him why. If he gets eight or more different answers, that alone is reward enough for Wise.

"With this course we wanted each hole to be a picture that looks different than any other," Wise said. "And it does. We have a saying that if each course is a 36-shot roll of film, each shot should be different if you took a couple shots per hole. So our goal was very much strategic, in terms of the golf, but our type priority there was visual."

Consider it a success.

"From a golf standpoint, what makes this design unique is perception," Wise said. "I think what you actually see when you get to the course is drastically different than what you expect, which is a flat, normal course. You get there and see the contrast with all the lakes, creeks and trees and most people are very surprised."

To say the least. Part-links style and part traditional, many holes are framed by mature trees and defined by vegetation, including fescue thicker than a wedding cake. The course is less than two years old, but many trees - including ancient oaks and willows - were preserved from the air base and reside near the turn at holes eight and nine.

Fairways are ragged in spots because of the 200 rounds per day that tire the sunburned grounds of the 7,149-yard course. As it matures, there is potential for Glen Club to enter the tournament scene that will make five stops in the Chicagoland by season's end.

"If Glen Club is the site of a tournament in the future, it wouldn't challenge professional golfers on the par-4s and 5s," Wise said. "Most of them hit driver-short iron on par-5s. I don't know if the distance would be great enough. The thing that we did to counter that was play the longer holes, most of the par-4s at least, into the wind. You have to do that in Chicago."

Any opinions expressed above are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the management. The information in this story was accurate at the time of publication. All contact information, directions and prices should be confirmed directly with the golf course or resort before making reservations and/or travel plans.