Golf's designing ace

Southern Living, Mar 1997 by Young, Dianne

A frequent winner of "Best New Course" honors in golf design (two more Golf Digest first places just last year), Tom Fazio moved his famed company and beloved family to the North Carolina mountains in the 1980s.

A couple of years back, to celebrate its 100th anniversary, Pinehurst Resort & Country Club decided to add another 18 holes to its storied collection of golf courses.

Everyone involved understood from the start that this new layout had to be truly special, one worthy of mention in the very same breath as fabled Pinehurst No. 2. So it came as no surprise when the powers-that-be at the legendary mecca of golf asked Tom Fazio to take the job.

The choice of Tom and his Fazio Golf Course Designers, Inc., was something of a no-brainer, really. And not merely because his offices lay just up the road a piece in the sleepy mountain town of Hendersonville. The truth is that after some 35 years in the business Tom Fazio has established himself as one of America's premier course designers.

Golf Digest has repeatedly named him the best present-day golf architect around, as his projects yearly find their way onto "Best New" lists. And when the golf media compile their annual "Top 100" course rankings, plenty of Tom Fazio's designs regularly rate a place among them.

All these acknowledgements and awards might have turned a lesser man's head, but it has changed Tom not a whit. He may have achieved virtual celebrity status, but you wouldn't know it by meeting him.

A deep-voiced, thoughtful man, he is utterly unpretentious. No fancy sign marks his company headquarters, a second-floor, walk-up affair on Main Street. The first hint of what goes on here comes at the top of the stairs, where framed color photographs of picturesque golf holes decorate the walls and thick sets of proposed and completed designs blanket tables, stand rolled in corners, and even drape the banisters. In Tom's office, though, pictures of his wife, Susan, and their six children give the strongest clue of exactly who works here: a family man foremost.

Construction of the Wade Hamp ton Golf Club in Cashiers first led the Fazios to the area. "Then," he explains in his relaxed, rambling manner, "after being here a couple of summers, my wife liked it so much, she wanted to move here. The kids were young, and Hendersonville is an absolutely great place to raise a family. So we just came up here for the summer, and she decided to stay," he adds with a chuckle.

Tom points to a map of the country and then traces a massive circle around the Hendersonville/ Asheville area. "See how quickly you can get any place east of the Mississippi?" His hand sweeps from Illinois to South Florida. "So it's great for me. Next week I'll go to four of my projects and not spend a night out of town." And that's imperative to Tom Fazio, who has his own plane and pilot. He has no intention of missing a son's high school baseball game or a daughter's dance recital. "What I do is get their schedule and then plan my travels around what my kids are doing. That way I can fly off to do my job and be home to see Onae hit a home run." He pauses and beams. "And she will," he predicts of his softball-playing daughter.

Tom literally grew up in the golf design business. Even as a teenager he was helping his uncle, George Fazio, a championship professional golfer, plan and build courses. In the 1960s the Fazios moved from their Pennsylvania home to Florida, where their business began to garner a national reputation, and now-with more than 110 golf courses to his credit-Tom has become one of the most familiar and famous names in the field. He's fashioned awardwinning courses in classically lovely settings, such as Pinehurst, and in as unlikely a site as an abandoned quarry in Florida or barren desertland in Nevada. If these diverse projects have one thing in common, it's this: They are all masterfully and gloriously suited to their environment.

"I like to think I can take all the experience of all those golf courses and have it all filed here," he says, tapping his head, "and know we're not going to do anything that's been done before. I think creating uniqueness and variety is important. There really isn't a trademark we have," he stresses. "There are no two golf courses that look alike, even in the same region. We have eight golf courses in play in North Carolina, and they are all distinctively different."

The one site he remains closest to is Champion Hills, a residential community course he designed in the early 1990s and now calls his home course. A breathtaking combination of spectacular mountain views and championship layout, Champion Hills was named "Best New Private Course in the Southeast" by Golf Digest in 1992. These 18 holes, as much as any he's done, reflect his design philosophy. "A golf course that looks hard and plays easy is the ultimate," he declares. "We all would like to shoot low scores, but we all want a challenge. There's a fine line there."

Giving an informal tour of Champion Hills, he tells how he walks that fine line with a perfectionist's balance. "When God created this piece of land, he wasn't fooling around," he allows, carefully steering the cart down the precipitous hill that shapes the first fairway. "It's easy to build a hard golf course on a site like this. One of the biggest challenges was to build a very playable one."