Leader of the club: Tom Fazio creates great golf courses and great programs for children

Golf Digest, May, 2001 by Nick Seitz

He oversees a 32-person staff spread among this main office in Hendersonville and outlying offices in Palm Beach and Scottsdale, but he is not your typical chief executive. He doesn't do voice mail or e-mail, places his own phone calls, carries no business cards and has no promotional materials, offering in the way of PR only a list of courses he's done (numbering more than 125 after 36 years of designing). The office phone is unlisted, as is the company name in the building directory, to discourage walk-ins by golf nuts. "We're kind of undercover," says a staff member.

I mention that, of the 175 or so photos in the book, I didn't notice a single cartpath. His head snaps up. "There's one," he says.

Fazio feels about cartpaths the way cops feel about drunken knife wielders. "They're the biggest negative in this business. People have nightmares about going down a dark tunnel to die? I have nightmares about going down a cartpath. You have to take them out of play and out of sight. If an artist was painting a hole, what would you tell him not to put in? A stupid, long path, right? How do you create 'wow' effect on the tee? Not with 1,200 feet of concrete. That's total failure on our part. When I started my career, there were no carts. But now we have to have 'em."

Fazio will go to almost any lengths to hide the hated paths, whether from the tee or looking back from the green: ridges, mounding, vegetation . . . even tunneling.

Jackie Burke, the sage of Champions Golf Club in Houston, says, "You can ride on Tom's cart trails, but you'll never see 'em." Burke, who has hired him to remodel his Jackrabbit Course, adds that Fazio "has the most passion for the game I've seen."

Trying the options

Andy Banfield, one of Fazio's 10 senior design associates, is showing him the plan for Steve Wynn's new Desert Inn course in Las Vegas. A quiet, strong-jawed man who's a well-known talent in his own right, Banfield is struggling to situate the expansive practice area, a staple of recent Fazio designs. "Let's look at it another way," Fazio says. "What if we swap the range with these two holes over here? I think the range area could be better for golf holes."

Later Fazio tells me, "I like to clear my mind and start the thought process over--try other options. I encourage the staff to do that. Routing plans are fun, like a puzzle, and we might do 10 or 15 on a course, where some designers might do one or two.

"I'll be involved at every stage of a project, but this is not about ego. It's a team concept. You can't have 'yes' people, or people with thin skin about critiquing. The great thing about a staff that's been with you a long time is they know the way I think. Good people have to have responsibility, and I like each senior designer to have a project. I'm the only one who has to think about all the jobs at the same time.

"I still want to be a designer, but at this point I don't make as many decisions. It's a big business, and there are too many. Chances are I didn't paint the lines in the dirt to contour a bunker. My son [Logan] is an associate designer handling the bunkering at a course we're doing in Dallas. The senior person he's working under might make changes on site, and I might, but the owner loves what he's seeing. He's paying for a level of quality. If he or any other client feels he's not getting it, we'll give his money back. Fortunately we haven't had to do that."