When In Rome

Many, many years ago during my time at Touche Ross one of the partners walked into my cubicle and told me that he was ending me on an assignment to Paris.  Knowing the partner in question, I immediately responded that I assumed my destination to be Paris, Texas.  I was dead wrong, it was Paris, Tennessee, but in the larger sense I was spot on.

The astute reader, and you'd need to qualify to have found this blog, will immediately grasp that we're headed to Rome, but not THAT Rome.  We are headed instead to Rome, Wisconsin, which is counter-intuitively the location of the most interesting golf development in the country, if not the world.  And it's quite the contrast with last week's visit to Ferry Point, which while enjoyable is of far less interest to me.

I'm going to quote extensively from Gary D'Amato's Journal-Sentinel piece, and here's his lede:

Town of Rome — The bald eagle circled lazily over the handful of people standing atop a sand dune, seemingly checking out the strange interlopers, then banked and disappeared over a stand of jack pine.

It was a fitting end to a spectacular day of "wilderness golf."

There are bald eagles in Wisconsin?  Anyone care to fact check that?

Last week, about a dozen founding members of Sand Valley got their first look at what

could be the most ambitious golf project ever undertaken in Wisconsin.

If all goes according to Chicago developer Mike Keiser's plan, someday there will be five courses and lodging on 1,500 acres a few miles south of Wisconsin Rapids — a resort that would provide hundreds of jobs in depressed Adams County and further enhance Wisconsin's reputation as a world-class golf destination.

Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, course architects who are widely praised for their minimalist, imaginative designs, have routed the first course at Sand Valley on topography that words can't adequately describe.

Please give it a try....

Hundreds of thousands of red pine have been harvested, revealing a wondrous sand barren — a prairie-like habitat that once formed the bed of a massive prehistoric lake. The sand is 100 to 200 feet deep here, and over eons the wind has created towering dunes and ridges.

The land tumbles and heaves to the horizon in all directions, leaving visitors awestruck by its rugged beauty. Who knew such a place existed in Wisconsin?

See, that wasn't so terribly difficult, was it?

"It's a stunning visual landscape," said Michael Keiser Jr., the project manager and the son of the man who built the renowned Bandon Dunes resort on the Oregon coast. "It's as calming and as inspiring as an ocean. It's endless."

When you look up Lucky Sperm Club in the Urban Dictionary, I assume there's a picture of Mike, Jr.

The loyal reader knows of my respect for Mike Keiser, and how about this as a financing vehicle:

The small group of founding members — some 165 people have paid $50,000 each for lifetime playing privileges — played "wilderness golf" on seven holes of the Coore-Crenshaw routing and toured the other 11 holes by foot.

That's $8.25 million that he raised in this manner, quite the imaginative way to finance the project.  I wonder how many of these folks are local, but there's no guarantee that the project will survive and no way of knowing how many courses will be built, but the guy in charge is about the only guy that could do this based upon his reputation.  Keiser doesn't build on boring sites, and he doesn't build dreck, so how exactly does one get on his Rolodex?

Sounds like they had quite the adventure:

The golfers hit shots off mats they carried around with them, because the course has just been roughed out by heavy machinery and is a jumble of sand and brush. Wooden sticks marked tee boxes, "fairways" were all but indistinguishable and flags flew on "greens."

The site is still so hard to get to that the golfers had to park their cars at the property entrance and be driven in by four-wheel drive vehicles that fishtailed on a rutted path and through huge swaths of sand.

While they played, carrying their clubs and mats and picking their way slowly across the rugged terrain, ATVs and dirt bikes zipped past, leaving clouds of dust in their wake. A few riders slowed to stare at the golfers, no doubt wondering what on earth was going on.

Now this location of course took everyone by surprise:

Initially, Keiser was hesitant about the site because it lacked an ocean or large body of water.

"For us the three ingredients a golf course needs are a brilliant architect, a sand site and an ocean," Keiser Jr. said. "We asked the Field Museum in Chicago to come out and assess the site and tell us what they thought.

"When they got back they called us and said, 'You do have an ocean.' We thought, 'What are they talking about?' They said, 'You have an ocean of sand and prairie and wildflowers. Its name is a jack pine sand barren.'

"Once we realized how unique this look is, we realized that an ocean of sand and prairie could compete with an ocean of water. That's when we were hooked and knew we could do this project."

We know Keiser's MO pretty well by now.  He'll not dawdle to start the second course, since he knows he'll need more than the one to draw folks to this remote location:

Plans already are in place for a second course, likely to be designed by Tom Doak, a name that resonates with architecture geeks. There is room for three more courses after that, but expansion will be dependent on the success of the first course.

What, did someone call my name?  Doak was disappointed to lose the first commission, but we've all assumed that he'd get the second course.  I just hope Keiser requires that he collaborate with master-shaper Jim Urbina on it, as he did with the Punchbowl putting green that they did at Bandon.

"We're very deliberate and we're just focusing on making the first course as good as we canmake it, because we know if the first one doesn't exceed your expectations, there

won't be a second," Keiser Jr. said.

Fully realized, Sand Valley would join a redesigned SentryWorld in Stevens Point, two fine courses at nearby Lake Arrowhead in Nekoosa and Northern Bay in Arkdale to make north-central Wisconsin one of the best golf destinations in the Midwest, if not the nation.

Tiny Rome, population 2,720, would be at the epicenter.

"Wisconsin, we're finding, is very welcoming," Keiser Jr. said. "The Town of Rome has been so supportive. Day 1, they got it. They knew what this could mean for the poorest county (Adams) in Wisconsin."

This is just the beginning, so patience is required.

Rome, after all, wasn't built in a day.

A couple of reactions.... first, I'm surprised that they're using the more local courses as the bait, whereas I would think that the Koeller Kollection and Erin Hills would be the far more appropriate peer group, especially for those traveling meaningful distances.  And that will be quite the cluster, won't it?

Secondly, I might be over-interpreting his praise of Wisconsin, but I've long maintained that the single most amazing fact about Bandon Dunes is that it exists at all, because the People's Republic of Oregon is in the business of making sure that nothing can be built.  For anyone rolling their eyes at that statement, please read this and then let's talk.  If a crazy Irishman hadn't brought some genuine Irish gorse, maybe the nastiest plant form known to mankind, to the town of Bandon in the 19th century, Mike Keiser might be sitting on the prettiest stretch of useless coastal land one has ever seen.

But glad to know that the powers that be in Wisconsin understand the value of such a project to their state and its citizens.

There's a few more photos of the site that they won't let me copy for you to be found here.  I particularly like that someone went to the effort to print up a seven-hole scorecard, though how can you have a match if they don't give you stroke indexes for each hole?

Put this one on the calendar, though perhaps not until 2018.