People, Projects, Place

A golf course project spends years crawling towards a few months of absolute madness.

Meetings. Plans. Another meeting about the plans. Then the machines arrive, and years of discussion become a pile of dirt before lunch.

I was thinking about this while working on a hole in full view of the clubhouse. There’s something wonderfully absurd about performing major surgery on a place while people watch through the window with a cocktail.

Imagine a member arriving for Saturday lunch. Their home course is closed, an outrageous failure of civilisation. Fortunately, the bar remains operational.

They take their usual seat and watch a machine tear into a familiar bunker.

“Good. I hated that fucking thing.”

A sip. A small victory.

The following Saturday, they miss lunch. A kid’s soccer game. A weekend away. By the third Saturday, they’re back. Same cocktail. Same table. Different hole.

Twenty years of local knowledge, gone between two lunches.

I wonder what that feels like. A place you know through repetition, carrying memories of good company and golf you’ve spent years trying to forget. The next time you tee up, you’ll begin learning it again.

Meanwhile, the guys outside the window are forming a connection of their own.

The team at MAS Golf will spend months here, six days a week, sun-up to sundown. They’ll know where the water sits, where the machine bogged, and which job looked straightforward at seven before becoming a complete bastard by three.

They’ll remember the afternoon something finally worked. The rain that arrived too soon. The joke repeated until it became part of the project’s vocabulary.

By some questionable arithmetic, someone could spend 1,800 hours here during construction. Roughly 400 rounds of golf, or twenty years for a member playing twenty times a season. You can’t convert a working day into a Saturday fourball, but it makes you appreciate how much of their lives these guys give to a place.

Their work becomes the ground beneath everyone else’s stories. Rarely does anyone ask about theirs.

I’m somewhere between these two experiences, helping change a place that means something different to each group. We’re working towards next spring, when golfers return and begin making new memories. But the guys building it are making theirs now.

I get to contribute to that. By listening, trusting their judgement, giving credit and having a laugh when the whole thing threatens to become far too important for its own good.

I hope the restored ninth becomes someone’s favourite hole. But it matters more to me that the guys who built it remember their time here fondly.

We’re creating a place for people to enjoy. That should include the people building it.

Team Photo