Below are excerpts from an article that originally appeared in golfdigest.com.
When Tom Fazio and Steve Wynn’s Shadow Creek opened outside of Las Vegas in 1990, it was a supernova event. No construction project to that point in the history of golf courses had made so dramatic an alteration to a property as Shadow Creek, where a pan-flat parcel of desert was transformed into mountain-like foothills covered in pines and cut with streams amid 60- to 80-foot elevation changes created by digging deep into the rocky earth. Conservative estimates at the time put the construction cost at an unheard of $40 million, over $100 million in today’s dollars.
Shadow Creek redefined what was possible in golf course creation, and recalibrated what wealthy owners would have to pay to make a similar statement. Over the following decades, architects and developers continued to pursue similarly ambitious golf largesse, invading previously hostile environments and moving cubic yards by the millions to make silk purses of sow’s ears.
Miakka Golf Club in southwest Florida, 45 minutes east of Sarasota, has taken this concept of maximalist golf design to previously unheard-of levels. It is as far away from High Grove on the architecture spectrum as John D. Rockefeller is from Mahatma Gandhi.
The course sits on roughly 900 acres of a much larger collection of ranches and ag land that owner Steve Herrig purchased along the Miakka River. The property was gentle and bucolic with large live oaks along the river but nothing special in terms of golf potential beyond the sandy sub-base.
Herrig hired architects Dana Fry, who once worked for Tom Fazio, and partner Jason Straka to design the course with consultation from Paul Azinger. Fry had experience in the elevation creation business with big digs at places like Calusa Pines, two hours south in Naples when he worked with former partner Michael Hurdzan. But what Fry and Straka attempted at Miakka was next level epic, with many of the ideas tilting into the “never tried before” category.
The Germans have a word, Gesamtkunstwerk, that means “total work of art.” Miakka puts the gesampt in Gesamtkunstwerk. Every aspect of the golf property is created, from the 80-foot dune ridge on the eastern edge of the site to each wash, ravine, waterway, mogul and embankment. This is not just total artwork but total earthwork.
Millions of trees, bushes, clusters of ornamental grasses and other flora have been imported and planted. Thousands—yes thousands—of live oaks and other large hardwood specimens were rolled in and arranged to create barriers and sightlines that tie in with distant canopy horizons.
On the agronomic side, there’s more. Miakka is wall-to-wall zoysia grass, Stadium zoysia fairways and tees (there is no rough) and Lazer zoysia greens and approaches, grown on a sod farm the club owns across the road.
It’s expensive but not uncommon for courses to sand-cap fairways—that means trucking in sand and building a percolating base beneath the grass to assist in shaping and drainage. Miakka didn’t just do that. They covered the entire course in six inches of the same combination of greens mix profile that are typically found only on the putting surfaces of golf courses, essentially creating a 140-acre USGA green with 89 miles of drain pipe underneath.
The bunkers are inspired by those cut into unique sands of Australia’s Sand Belt in Melbourne. To mimic the natural compaction of the soil that gives those courses their crisp edges, Miakka harvested tons of the dark dirty sand and silt from the site, processed it, and mixed it with a soil stabilizer called Loksand. They then rolled out miles of the thick liner composite and used it as a stark barrier that props up the fairway and greens grasses above the bunker sand. These vertical black faces are one of a kind and provide not just sturdy soil foundation but a color contrast that makes the bunkers pop against the surrounding white, beige and green.
Of course, none of this matters if the golf is not good. Members and guests will determine that when they begin playing this winter, but all the elements for excitement are present: wide fairways, alternate angles and risk/reward drives, attractive hazards, hints of blindness, a combination of concave, flowing greens and big bowled putting surfaces like one and 11, and four vastly diverse par 3s. The effect is total.
Click here to read the full article on golfdigest.com.