South American courses hint at future National

The shape of greens to come

SAN ISIDRO, Argentina — California gems Cypress Point and Pasatiempo are famously credited for inspiring Bobby Jones to hire Alister Mackenzie to co-design his dream golf course on a nursery in Georgia. But courses Mackenzie shaped in South America might have influenced Augusta National Golf Club.

The genesis of the design elements Mackenzie employed at Augusta National is readily apparent in the swales, hillocks and greens that transformed a featureless 300 acres in a rich suburb of Buenos Aires into The Jockey Club.

"You can see a lot of the Mackenzie traits around the greens," said Marcos Lawrie, the executive director of the Argentine Golf Association. "There are a few whales buried here and there."

The Jockey Club is a special and privileged place, where the dominating scent of jasmine and gardenia greets visitors emerging from its regal Tudor clubhouse. But it's the crafty strategies required by the two courses beyond that stand out.

The Cancha Colorada (Red Course) is where Angel Cabrera won his first European Tour event in the 2001 Argentine Open. It boasts a list of champions that includes Argentine greats Vincente Fernandez and Jose Jurado along with Americans Jim Furyk, Mark Calcavecchia and Lloyd Mangrum.

Started in 1882, The Jockey Club was an equestrian and social organization. It was already considered one of the greatest and richest sporting clubs in the world when it decided to add golf in the late 1920s. It naturally reached out to the most acclaimed architect in the world.

Mackenzie had already designed his signature masterworks at Cypress, Crystal Downs, Royal Melbourne and Lahinch. But with the United States on the verge of the Great Depression, he jumped at the chance to make his first foray to South America.

In January 1930, Mackenzie traveled for two weeks by boat from his home in California, through the Panama Canal and onto Buenos Aires. In no hurry to return, he spent at least four months overseeing the construction of his two courses at The Jockey Club and several other projects, including one across the Rio de la Plata in Montevideo, Uruguay.

In San Isidro, Mackenzie found an expansive piece of flat land more suitable to the massive turf racetrack and polo fields that flank it. His challenge was to turn the nondescript landscape into an inviting challenge for golfers.

His inspiration would be his favorite muse: the Old Course at St. Andrews. He set out to create an "inland St. Andrews" with a similar kind of intriguing linkslike game played along the ground. He achieved this by enlisting irrigation engineer Luther Koontz in shaping an elaborate series of drainage swales and hillocks that created a natural-looking rippling landscape. Then they built a varied assortment of green complexes with the dirt excavated from the drainage project.

"The land was originally dull, flat and featureless," Mackenzie wrote in his book The Spirit of St. Andrews, "but it now has wave after wave of undulations and has a greater resemblance - not only in appearance but in the character of its golf - to the Old Course at St. Andrews than any inland course with which I am acquainted."

The contouring of both the Red and Blue (Cancha Azul) courses was completed in just 21 days, and the blueprints didn't include any bunkers until the captain of the club requested some.

"The undulations have created such a varied, interesting and pleasurable test of golf that we do not require a single bunker," Mackenzie told the captain. "Nevertheless, for the sake of appearance and for the purpose of creating more spectacular thrills, we will give you a few bunkers."

Though Mackenzie was not blessed with the kind of dramatic elevation changes he would encounter in Augusta, on the more renowned Red Course he was able to shape green complexes that are strikingly similar in both style and diversity.

The second green is surrounded at all corners by closely cropped gumdrop humps, including one that plays with the mind and the ball on the right front of the putting surface.

The par-4 16th is an obvious precursor to the No. 8 green at Augusta. Framed on three sides by tightly shaved 9-foot high mounds, the green is shrouded except for a small tongue on the front. The contours repel shots that are just the slightest off line, leaving some creative recovery work to be done.

Other standout elements of the Red Course are the narrow-targeted par-3 third and 17th holes and the world-famous 10th - a 470-yarder that locals call a par-4.5. The cleverly angled, tiered green features a narrow right shelf guarded in front by a bunker and behind by a shaved dropoff.

"MacKenzie defends par at the green as well as any architect in the history of the game, and this is a sterling example of his talent at doing so," raves a review in Golf Club Atlas.

What sets the Colorada and Augusta National apart is the fearless embracing of short grasses. The shaved humps and swales around the greens invite imaginative strategies that vary widely from hole to hole, making the once featureless landscape anything but monotonous.

"The bunkering is completely different (from Augusta National), but you definitely see the movement of greens that is similar," Lawrie said.

Some of The Jockey Club's features were certainly freshest in Mackenzie's mind a year later when he started plotting the design of Augusta National. The par-3 seventh hole of the Blue Course - despite being 20 yards longer and with no bunker between the water and green - is considered a likely rough draft of Augusta's iconic 12th. And at the Golf Club of Uruguay, the dogleg left par-4 10th with a back-to-front sloping green has been dubbed a "dead ringer" for Augusta's ninth.

ALISTER MACKENZIE

Alister Mackenzie was born in England in 1870 and raised a Scotsman by his parents. He was a physician and soldier in the Boer War before becoming a golf course architect.

Mackenzie designed or renovated more than 100 golf courses, including Cypress Point and the Jockey Club.

Mackenzie wrote two books on golf course design, Golf Architecture and The Spirit of St. Andrews. In Golf Architecture, he laid out his 13 essential features for a golf course. His points include that the greens and fairways should be efficiently undulating, the course should have beautiful surroundings and that a variety of clubs should be used.

Augusta National co-founder Bobby Jones picked Mackenzie to help him co-design Augusta National after Jones played two of Mackenzie's courses in 1929.

Mackenzie first visited the Augusta site in July 1931. One of his initial sketches for the course had the nines routed the way they are played now. But sometime during course construction in 1931, he changed his mind and had the players going off the current No. 10 first.

Mackenzie died in 1934 and never saw tournament golf played at Augusta National.