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CONSTRUCTION

I’ll get to the fun-and-games here in a second, but first the I get that now more than ever. A monsoon visited us. Rees
backstory. Coral Ridge is a family country club. Big pool. was soaked. We were all soaked. Nobody cared. The
Big tennis program. Twenty-seven holes of golf. Low-slung rain was warm.
elegant clubhouse. Not preppy. More like established, Rees was telling the fellas what he liked, what he was
comfortable, secure. Even in these uncertain times.
looking for. “I can see the course,” he told me. “I can see
There are ladies playing cards, in normal times. (Not now. exactly how it will play.” His sand is the sculptor’s clay.
The clubhouse is closed.) Uniformed course workers with Every architect wants to work on a sandy site like this.
their names on their shirts. Tall drinks and big portions. That’s the dream. That’s golf’s past.
On the course, you’ll find classic Robert Trent Jones Rees is interesting. He’s the son of a famous architect and
landing-strip tee boxes, long enough for a Kennedy family he went to Yale. He knows everybody and he belongs to
touch football game. Also, RTJ kidney-shaped greens, hard various hushed-voice clubs. On Tuesday, he was wearing
by a pond, here and there. You’re in America now, South white socklets with the Maidstone logo on them. (He’s a
Florida-style.
member there. East Hampton, L.I.) He was wearing a
But over the years, nature and golf carts contrived to Breakers hotel hat and belt (he designed one course there
render the course dead flat. Rees’s job, or one of them, is and renovated the other, beside the hotel. Palm Beach,
to give his ancestral course, the actual playing surfaces, Fla.) He was wearing a Coral Ridge shirt. But the course-
shapes. He’s giving it swales and humps and life. building business is a working-class one, and Rees speaks
in the language of his craft. His manner is always
It’s subtle work, but a massive, fast project and the club is
thoughtful, but also simple and direct. The architect is an
spending millions. It is not looking to get the U.S. Open.
Coral Ridge is looking to make the course more interesting artist, an engineer, a team manager — and a
workingman. Rees is a gent. That is, he knows how to
and fun for the golfers upon it, members and guests, and
to draw new members and new guests. The circle of life, treat people.
club-style. There was never a thought of pulling the plug But more than anything, there’s a lot of kid in him. I drove
on the project, which started in mid-March, just as the in Rees’s wake, and in the wake of his colleagues. There
pandemic was becoming the talk of the nation. American were no instructions, no warnings, no rules, no lectures.
golf is on a spending spree! No, that’s not true. But Coral Just golf-course talk. Yes, this is their work. This is how
Ridge is bullish about its future and golf’s future. The they earn their livelihoods. But I wasn’t fooled.
course will open for play again in November. This was recess. Playtime. n

South Florida has been getting soaked for a while now, as
often happens this time of year. When I arrived, the club
manager said he had a cart for me. (No sharing.) But it
wasn’t a cart. It was some kind of diesel-powered
all-terrain vehicle from Apocalypse Now. This thing
rumbled. I was in a parade of these forest-green
trucks, going through brown standing water
nearly three-feet deep, up and down beige
sand hills, straight through giant mud pits. A
good time. Nobody had an iPad.
I remember when Ted Oh played in the 1993
U.S. Open at Baltusrol as a 16-year-old. He
came into the press tent and somebody asked him
what drew him to golf. Driving the carts, he said.

The Landings & Bay Colony 17