by Doug Russell
It was unspectacular rural land, a muddy, undeveloped labyrinth of trees, glacial knobs and barren valleys, but in his mind’s eye, Robert Lang envisioned a spectacular golf course. In 1999, he began buying up property, and by 2004, he’d assembled some 650 acres in tiny Erin in southern Washington County. His dream was audacious: to build a world-class course that would host a top pro tournament.
Mike Davis, the United States Golf Association’s senior director of rules and competitions, first met with Lang in August 2004. At the time, Erin Hills was but a course cutout, barely more than a gleam in Lang’s eye. Davis could see the potential, but was still taken aback by Lang’s casual announcement. “Mike,” he said, “my goal is to build this course and host the U.S. Open.”
Adding to the audacity: This was Wisconsin, a longtime backwater of the golf world. Until the 1968 advent of the Greater Milwaukee Open (now the U.S. Bank Championship), the state had never held an annual PGA tournament. And even that tourney would come to be overshadowed by thefar more prestigious British Open, which now runs on the same weekend.
Yet in recent years – with the creation of championship courses like Blackwolf Run, Whistling Straits, and now, Erin Hills – Wisconsin is suddenly a golf mecca. It hosts three major pro championships and a Ryder Cup in the coming years, and Erin Hills is likely a future spot for the U.S. Open. How did a state known for snowy winters, chilly springs and a short golf season become one of the hottest new places for the sport? That development is more inevitable than it might seem, for Wisconsin has always been more golf crazy than outsiders – and even most residents – might imagine.
Wisconsin’s golf tradition actually goes back to the 19th century. The state’s oldest golf course is Eagle Springs, a nine-hole course that opened in 1893 at Eagle (40 miles southwest of Milwaukee). Milwaukee County’s first public course was Lake Park Golf Course, which opened in 1903 and was followed by 15 more county-run courses, 14 of which remain open.
Today, the state has some 500 public and private courses. Though about average in area and population among the 50 states, Wisconsin ranks third in per capita golfers and 10th in number of courses. The paradox is that a northern climate actually encourages golfing.
“I think it helps with everyone’s excitement because you really have only five or six months to play,” says PGA Tour pro and Menomonee Falls native Mark Wilson. “By the time The Masters rolls around on television in April, everyone is itching to get out and play, no matter how bad conditions are.”
It’s not the warm weather states or countries where golf thrives. Canada is the top nation in per capita golfers and Minnesota is the top state. And golf originated in Scotland, where even the summers seem like winter.
“We have players that are so proud if we open Grant or Lincoln [parks] in the winter so they can play all 12 months of the year,” says Brian Zimmerman, operations manager for the Milwaukee County Parks. “Golfers in Wisconsin are very hearty. This year, we opened up Grant for two afternoons in December and had about 100 rounds played.”
Skip Kendall grew up playing golf at Brown Deer Park and turned pro in 1987. He credits the courses here with building interest in golf. “Wisconsin has some of the best and most beautiful public golf courses in the United States,” he says.
They’re also relatively cheap, notes Herb Kohler, the Kohler Company president who runs two of the state’s more expensive private courses, Blackwolf Run and Whistling Straits. “We are a state filled with inexpensive golf courses,” he says. “This gives a lot of people the opportunity to learn and play the game. And occasionally, if they save their pennies, they can come to a course like the ones we have.” Kohler says rates for his courses drop by about 40 percent during off-peak times. “During this time, 80 percent of our play is from Wisconsin. People in this state know a good value.”
But for all the courses in Wisconsin, rarely was a pro tournament held here. A watershed moment was Gene Sarazen winning the 1933 PGA Championship at Blue Mound Golf and Country Club. In 1968, the Greater Milwaukee Open became an annual tournament, and in 1973, it relocated to Tuckaway Country Club in Franklin, its home for two decades. In 1994, though, growing development in Franklin led the tournament’s organizers to move it to the more expansive Brown Deer Golf Course.
Two years later came a signal event in golf history. Tiger Woods entered the pro ranks at the 1996 Greater Milwaukee Open with his famous “Hello world” announcement to a global TV audience. Both here and abroad, Woods drew more people to the game.
According to The First Tee program of Milwaukee County, more than 1,400 kids ages 6 to 18 will take up the game this year in southeastern Wisconsin alone. Just five years ago, the number was 100. With its other Wisconsin branches, the program will reach 4,500 children statewide this year.
Courtney Buchach, Milwaukee County director of operations of The First Tee program, gives much of the credit to Tiger Woods: “He has made the game ‘cool’ and more exciting to watch and play.”
That’s what converted Jason Mathwig, a 33-year-old account manager for GE Healthcare. “The day I decided to seriously take up golf was a Sunday in April 1997,” he recalls. “I watched Tiger dominate Augusta. I hadn’t watched more than 30 minutes of golf on TV before, let alone want to immediately run to Dunham’s to buy a set of clubs.”
Today, Mathwig spends at least $8,000 annually on greens fees and equipment. He plays through November and sometimes takes winter vacations to warm destinations, in part so he and wife Sara can hit the links together. Mathwig has also organized a Monday night golf league at Silver Spring Country Club in Menomonee Falls. “It was something I wanted to do from the day I graduated college because all my friends were golfers and we never seemed to be able to schedule weekends to do that,” he says. The weekly league now has 28 guys. “Not to mention a substitute list of about 20 more, all friends and family,” he adds.
Even as the Tiger phenomenon was drawing average golfers to the game, a new movement to create elite courses in Wisconsin arose.
In 1981, the Kohler Company converted a dorm originally built for immigrants into The American Club, an elite resort hotel. But it lacked one amenity guests would demand over and over: a golf course.
“The consumer was asking why we were hauling them half an hour here and 20 minutes there to public and private courses,” Herb Kohler recalls. “They looked at the 3,000 acres surrounding the village and asked, ‘Why aren’t you building your own public course?’ ”
In response, Kohler decided to build a course, though without any particular vision. He had no background in the sport. The company’s philosophy, however, has always been to have cutting-edge design and technology in its plumbing products and processes. So he decided the new course should compete with the country’s best.
Blackwolf Run, the 18-hole course designed by Pete Dye, opened in 1988, and was named the best new public course of the year by Golf Digest. It was soon chosen to host the 1998 U.S. Women’s Open. Meanwhile, the demand for tee times on the course had grown so quickly that Kohler added two more nine-hole expansions. Yet demand continued to grow, and there was an average three-month waiting list for tee times. So Kohler set out to find another property to develop.
He wanted this course to be quite different. Working with Dye again, he began looking for a sand-based tract on the shores of Lake Michigan to build the links-style course he’d become enamored with during his European travels. Ironically, the Kohler Company once had 280 acres along Lake Michigan that it donated to the state of Wisconsin in 1966, and it became part of Kohler-Andrae State Park.
“When you look at that land today and say ‘what it could have been’ if it were a championship golf course, you just shake your head,” Kohler marvels. “You can’t believethis company owned it, and then gave it away to the state for nothing!”
After an exhaustive search, Kohler finally found his Brigadoon. Along Lake Michigan in the unincorporated village of Haven sat a plot of land owned by Wisconsin Electric Power Company, a site used by the U.S. Army in the 1950s as an anti-aircraft firing center. After a year and a half of wrangling, Kohler was able to trade some farmland and cash for the property that became Whistling Straits, which opened in 1998.
The course has won more than 15 awards from golf publications, making it one of the country’s most acclaimed courses, according to golflink.com.It hosted the 2004 PGA Championship, will do so again in 2010 and 2015, and will host the 2020 Ryder Cup.
Kohler, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes magazine at about $1.3 billion, has become something of a golf fanatic. In October 2004, he purchased the Old Course Hotel at St. Andrew’s in Scotland for an undisclosed amount. The Old Course itself – often the setting for the British Open – is owned publicly and run by a charitable trust. Kohler is quick to point out that in 2010, he will have a distinction no one in the world has ever claimed: owning the host hotel for two majors in the same year. His American Club will host the PGA Championship, and the British Open will be held at the Old Course at St. Andrews.
Robert Lang credits Kohler for the renaissance of golf in Wisconsin. A schoolteacher for three years, Lang grew up in Illinois before relocating to Wisconsin in the 1960s. After moving to Delafield, he went into the building business, then sold greeting cards and calendars, gradually amassing considerable wealth and buying up the land in Erin he hoped to turn into a golf course.
Lang enlisted some of the top golf course designers: Dr. Michael Hurdzan (Golf World Magazine’s1997 Architect of the Year), his business partner Dana Fry, and Golf Digestchief architectural critic Ron Whitten. “The first time Mike Hurdzan and I walked the property, I don’t think either of us thought, ‘Gee, this would make a great championshipgolf course,’ ” Whitten recalls. “We did, however, think, ‘Gee, this would make a great golf course.’ ”
Hurdzan was impressed by the terrain, by its kettle holes and eskers, the latter being sandy, serpentine ridges created by glacial ice. “We both felt it was a natural to create a very minimalistic, lay-of-the-land golf course, something akin to what you find in Ireland and Scotland,” he remembers.
It wasn’t until two or three years later, after the final routing was established, that Hurdzan began thinking that all the available space, dunes and unspoiled natural beauty would create spectacular vantage points for tournament patrons. “That’s when I began thinking about Erin Hills in terms of championship golf.” And that’s when Lang began approaching Mike Davis and the U.S. Open, the USGA’s foremost tourney.
The USGA, however, is famously conservative. The Open had never been awarded to a single-operator golf course, but rather to historic courses like Merion and Winged Foot, resorts like Pebble Beach and Pinehurst, or public courses like Torrey Pines and Bethpage. However, the landscape of Erin Hills was intriguing enough for Davis to report back to his office in Far Hills, N.J., that Lang might just have a winning formula. Davis and others on the USGA’s executive board kept in touch, watching Erin Hills morph from raw acreage to a true championship masterpiece.
Erin Hills was chosen as the location of the 2011 U.S. Amateur, often a precursor to courses being tabbed to host the U.S. Open. Lang closed the course in October 2008 to modify holes as the USGA had suggested, and it was slated to reopen in July. The USGA will vote in February 2010 on the site for the 2017 U.S. Open, with Erin Hills expected by many to be chosen. When added to the three prestigious tournaments upcoming at Whistling Straits and the 2012 U.S. Women’s Open (to be held at Blackwolf Run), it’s clear Wisconsin has transformed itself from a pro golf backwater to prime territory for championship play.
Even as these courses have revolutionized Wisconsin, the state’s original pro tournament is in trouble. In 2004, the Greater Milwaukee Open changed its name to the U.S. Bank Championship, as that company became a major sponsor. However, sagging attendance and television ratings, coupled with the economic downturn, led U.S. Bancorp to pull out after this year’s tourney.
“We have begun looking for a new title sponsor and are doing so in conjunction with the PGA Tour,” says Dan Croak, the tournament’s director. Croak is optimistic, contending the tournament offers a “very good value proposition.” However, if the PGA Tour is to continue here, a commitment from a new sponsor is critical, as is interest from fans and players.
Croak is seeking help from his best allies: Wisconsin golfers on the PGA Tour. “It’s really important that we have those ambassadors – not only for our sponsors and to the media, but to other players on the Tour. All of the guys, whether it’s Jerry [Kelly], Steve [Stricker] or any of the others, they’ve been tremendous in reaching out to other players that aren’t eligible for the British Open to come to Milwaukee.”
Says Skip Kendall: “I think it is very important. It is one of the events that helps make Milwaukee a major league city.” It also raises a lot of money for charity, he adds. (More than $525,000 in 2008 alone, Croak says). And major championship golf is big business. An economic impact study showed the 2004 PGA Championship pumped an estimated $76 million into Wisconsin’s economy.
The British Open was again played simultaneously in July, leaving Milwaukee to take whoever was left. PGA pro and Madison native Jerry Kelly was among those who committed to Brown Deer, as did Chris DiMarco, Brad Faxon and Fred Funk. “I don’t want this to be the last Milwaukee tournament,” Kelly says. “Unless people step up … there’s always that possibility.”
But while the future of the U.S. Bank Championship is in doubt, the state of Wisconsin golf isn’t. Kohler thinks there could be more championship courses to come. “Look at Erin Hills. It popped out of nowhere, and no one would have predicted it,” he says.
Counting Brown Deer, Wisconsin now has four championship-quality courses, along with more golfers per capita than 47 other states. The color green has become more than just the match for gold in the Packers’ uniforms.
Avid golfer Doug Russell is the sports director and co-host of The Doug & Mike Show on WSSP-AM 1250. Write to him at letters@milwaukeemagazine.com.
