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.”