As the collegiate golfers attempting to make peace with it during this week's NCAA Men's Golf Championship will hopefully appreciate, part of The Honors Course's magic is that it looks like it's always been there.
Architect Pete Dye didn't fight the rolling Ooltewah landscape; he embraced it, right down to the blackberry bushes that still hug more than a few fairways.
Or as Honors course superintendent David Stone noted last week, "There's nothing gimmicky here. All these holes look like they belong in their natural East Tennessee landscape."
It wasn't initially supposed to be that way, at least not in Honors founder Jack Lupton's bright mind.
"He kept talking about Augusta (National)," Dye said from his Indiana home last Thursday. "Jack was a member there and he loved that course. But I kept telling him, 'You've got such a pretty property right here, it's wonderful. Let's develop that.' Of course, it turned out to be the dead opposite of Augusta."
Lupton quickly came around. Oh, the billionaire philanthropist strongly encouraged Dye to make a few enlargements to the manmade lake that's basically the centerpiece of the course. The driving range was moved to give the practice swingers a better view of the surrounding mountains. A couple of greens were changed to place them closer to the clubhouse.
But all in all, by the time it opened in 1983, Lupton couldn't have been happier save for one portion of one fairway.
"My son, P.B., oversaw construction of the Honors," Dye said. "And he planted zoysia grass up the hill to the green on the sixth hole. That was the only place on the course he used it. Well, Jack gave me the dickens. He said it didn't look like the Bermuda grass on the rest of the course. He didn't like it one bit."
The following winter brought uncharacteristic cold to Chattanooga, however. When time came for green to return that spring, the zoysia bounced back, the Bermuda died. Within a few days, Dye's phone rang.
"Pete, this is Jack Lupton," the familiar voice announced. "Very rarely am I wrong, but I need you to get back here and put that zoysia grass everywhere."
Dye said he'd be happy to oblige, that they could sprig the fairways and they'd fill in completely within two to three years.
"You're not listening to me," Lupton fired back. "I want zoysia grass and I want it now!"
Said Dye, breaking into a gentle chuckle: "We bought out every inch of zoysia sod for at least a 300-mile radius of Chattanooga. We sodded the whole course that spring."
A quarter-century later, the zoysia's still green. The course remains so perfect that Dye, when prodded, admits, "There's nothing any better than The Honors Course."
And just as Lupton always stated, the club remains true to its mission to "honor amateur golf" by hosting its second NCAA championship in 14 years.
The only thing missing, sadly, is Lupton, who died at the age of 83 two weeks ago today.
"I tried to come through and visit him at his office at least once a year," said Dye, arguably the best course architect of his day, having done the TPC Sawgrass course, Crooked Stick and Oakmont, to name three of hundreds.
"We'd talk and laugh. It was always fun. Then, like clockwork, he'd look at me and say, 'You've been here 25 minutes. Now get out of here.'"
Dye wishes he could get into more courses that salute amateur golf over the professional game.
"You end up designing courses for spectators more than golfers," he said. "You've got to find room around the 18th green for half of New York. You've got to worry about where you're going to put the generators and toilets for the corporate tents. It was so nice not to worry about any of that when we built the Honors."
The stories about Lupton's civic largesse will keep surfacing for years. But he could be intensely private.
A longtime friend, Chattanooga attorney Jim Lee, declined to share stories about his pool games with Lupton at the Mountain City Club because "Jack really valued his privacy."
What he did say was, "When I first started playing there in the 1960s, we played 8-ball for 25 cents a game. Today, it's still 25 cents a game. It was never about the money; it was about winning."
Perhaps that's why when the U.S. Amateur came to the Honors in 1991 and Lupton found himself in a conversation with a spectator who didn't know the billionaire from a beggar, he answered thusly when asked if he was somebody important.
"No, just a member," he said.
But until the final years of his life, whenever he and Stone would ride around the course, Member No. 1 would look out at the zoysia fairways, turn to his superintendent and say, "Best thing we ever did."
Said Dye of his old friend, the words certain to gain new meaning this week among the sport's best collegians: "Jack Lupton was the best thing that ever happened to amateur golf."