The Short-Lived Dream of the Sam Snead Country Club

Two weeks ago, we flagged the National Links Trust’s plan to turn the Washington, D.C., municipal course at Rock Creek Park into a multi-use, family-friendly golf facility. The proposal echoes the recent overhaul of Belmont Golf Course in Richmond, Virginia, and the concept of “community links,” as articulated by Andy Staples.

The Rock Creek project also reminds me of a little-known footnote in the career of Robert Trent Jones. In the early 1950s, Jones made plans with Sam Snead to develop a chain of public-access “Sam Snead Country Clubs.” According to Jim Hansen’s excellent RTJ biography A Difficult Par, Jones and Snead imagined these clubs as “multipurpose golf facilities not for the elite but for the average American golfer.”

An agreement signed by the two men in December 1951 stated that each Sam Snead Country Club would offer an impressive list of services:

• A sheltered driving range
• An 18-hole par-3 course
• A 36-hole grass putting course
• A miniature golf course
• A clubhouse stocked with the latest equipment and apparel
• An outdoor vending service
• An outdoor movie theater (!) for showing instructional films

The vision might have been too good to be true. Here’s Hansen:

… no Sam Snead golf complex of such magnitude was ever built. The two men renewed their agreement in 1954, but the scope of the project was scaled down from the original concept. The idea that Jones and Snead pioneered was an “executive” course, designed with shorter yardages for a faster pace of play to suit the needs of corporate executives and other businessmen who did not have time on weekdays (or weekdays after work but before sunset) to complete an 18-hole round on a standard-length golf course. The total par for such a course would typically be less than the standard 72, but more than a course of all par 3s.

During the 50s and 60s, Jones and Snead’s partnership produced 13 such courses—six in Florida (the first two being American Golfers Club in Fort Lauderdale and All American Golf Course near Cape Canaveral), four in California, and one each in Minnesota, Nevada, and Virginia. Soon, though, the executive-course trend abated. Hansen speculates that this happened because the demand for convenient golf was already satisfied by nine-hole courses and 18-hole courses that offered nine-hole rates.

My take is that Jones simply had more lucrative projects on his plate. In 1951—the year that his association with Snead became official—his “monstrous” renovation of U.S. Open host Oakland Hills made him the first post-World War II star in golf architecture. His calendar soon filled up with copycat renovations of championship venues and new builds for well-moneyed clubs and resorts. He designed public courses, too, but creating 40-acre complexes for the golfing everyman seems not to have been his priority.

Last year, I stopped by one of Jones and Snead’s few remaining executive designs, Tecolote Canyon in San Diego. The course has 14 par 3s and four par 4s, and sits in a valley that has been spared from suburban sprawl. The green fee is between $15 and $25. If you’re not a golfer, you can use the land for hiking. There’s a clubhouse, driving range, and practice green but nothing like the array of amenities imagined by Jones and Snead’s initial proposal. I didn’t have time to play, but I took some photos.

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Places like Tecolote Canyon are rarer than they should be. Today we need them not so much for executives on long lunch breaks but rather for families looking for types of recreation that parents and kids can enjoy together. I’d love to think that executive courses or even full-fledged Sam Snead Country Clubs will become more common in the next few decades, as many local and municipal facilities will need to adapt—as Belmont did, and as Rock Creek hopes to—or die.