Summer is the perfect time to rediscover forgotten courses in the desert
Rediscovering golf courses can be part of golf’s charm in the hot summer months
John Fought has done plenty of golf course renovations and redesigns, but nothing like what he’s overseeing at the Indian Wells Golf Resort.
“This is really massive. This was a big deal,” Fought said about the major changes at the Players Course at the city-owned golf resort. “I did a golf course a few years ago where the road moved it, but I just had to move three holes to make it work. This is taking two holes out and putting it where there were already 16 holes.”
The new Players Course – a course that Fought has already redesigned from the original Ted Robinson design from 1986 – includes seven new holes fitted into the area that already has 16 holes. The course’s 17th and 18th holes have been eliminated by changes that leave very little of Fought’s first redesign in place. Cost of the renovation is $13.5 million.
“We’ve mixed and matched from both nines, which is interesting,” Fought said while touring the course that is now in the grass-growing stage of the renovation.
By eliminating the par-3 17th and par-4 18th holes, which wrapped around the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort along Highway 111, Fought has brought back his first vision of the course.
“I feel fortunate. The city has allowed me to do more of a golf course that I wanted to do originally,” he said. “I really lobbied to be able to do this.”
The seven new holes on the course had to be fitted into the property with 11 holes remaining. But to get both nines of the course to return to the pavilion and grill for the course and to have the final three holes run along the banks of the Whitewater Wash, Fought and his crew had to reroute much of the course. That will mean returning golfers will need to pay attention to signs pointing them to the next hole, a hole that might well have switched from the back nine to the front nine or visa versa.
Other changes to the course included re-doing all 18 greens, scraping off four inches of thatch layer and filling in some sand in the base before reshaping the greens to their original size. Greens on the remaining holes have been rebuilt just as greens on the new holes have been built.
“So every green on this course will be the same age,” Fought pointed out. “If you had the original 11 greens, they would have held better and it would have taken four or five years to get them the same as the new greens.”
Other changes, some of which are still ongoing, include revamping every bunker on the course.
“Every bunker, even ones that stayed in basically the same location, all got rebuilt,” Fought said. “The whole green complexes are new, the bunkers are new. There was a lot of stuff in the bunkers, dirt and the like. So we put in new liners and we are refreshing the sand.”
The changes in the course are about more than the local residents and tourists who play the course as well as the Celebrity Course at the golf resort.
“They want to be able to either have the LPGA or, I don’t know about the PGA Tour, but at least the Champions Tour will look at it,” said Fought, who won the 1977 U.S. Amateur and later won two times on the PGA Tour. “I think they want to do something like that. I think it is a great idea. It’s is a great tournament course because (the pros) walk and you can walk every hole instead of having carts everywhere, and there are no houses on it.”
A tour of the courses show many tee boxes now close to the preceding green, and a piece of land that had 16 holes that now has 18 holes.
With Bermuda grass and the greens now growing in, a regular overseeding should come sometime in October. Fought anticipates the Players Course will re-open for play somewhere around Dec. 1.
