Except perhaps for TPC San Antonio, you probably couldn’t name a single golf course in San Antonio. And that’s a damn shame. By Tony Dear
1992, Keith Foster was a 32-year-old out-of-work golf course superintendent/builder/architect who had just been let go by Arthur Hills’s design firm, where he had worked for the previous six years.
Fortunately, he knew a guy who knew a guy. The first guy owned a golf course management company called Club Consultants. The second guy, a gentleman by the name of Jack Parker, who had been the General Manager at San Antonio’s Woodlake Country Club, hired the first guy to oversee development of a high(ish)-end public-access course that he and a group of investors were planning on building in an old abandoned limestone quarry in the city’s northern suburbs. The first guy knew Foster had recently become available and asked him to come and take a look.
“The place was a total mess,” Foster says of the quarry, once owned by the Alamo Cement Company and from which the stone used in construction of the Texas Capitol in Austin was cut. “It hadn’t been active since 1983 and was basically being used as an illegal dumping ground. But I immediately saw a wonderful opportunity, something potentially very special. I thought how cool it would be to put golf holes in and around the bowl of the quarry.”
Routing the quarry holes was “pretty easy,” Foster recalls. He laid the holes out on the quarry’s various rock shelves to reduce the amount of blasting needed to adjust the existing grades.
But there are two parts to every quarry. The hollow on the north side of the property that resulted from 100 years’ of excavation formed an ideal site for golf. But a great deal of waste—much of it toxic, including cement kiln dust, leachate, and highly heat-resistant chromium brick — remained. “Really the only option was to seal the waste in huge vaults and bury them underground,” Foster says.
With approval from the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the clay-lined vaults went into the ground far away from the eight-acre lake that had formed in the bottom of the quarry and which was linked to the Edwards Aquifer which provides water for almost two million users in south central Texas. Foster made the quarry holes the back nine and those on the other side of E. Basse Rd—the holes with the underground vaults— the front side.
While routing the back nine had been fairly straightforward, forming a plan for the outward half was anything but. Faced with a dull, square, 100 acres surrounded on three sides by freeways, chain hotels, and office buildings, and under which vaults full of toxic waste needed to be safely concealed, the Florida native fashioned nine enjoyable and thought-provoking holes that can’t muster anything like the thrill of the back nine but which hold their own and add positively to the overall experience. “I had to use my imagination and we had to be pretty creative there,” says Foster. “The two halves look very different and it was a challenge tieing them together somehow.”
And that he did beautifully.
Not surprisingly perhaps, given its lack of trees, this part of the course is tiresomely labeled ‘links-style’ by people who really can have no idea what a links course looks like. But don’t let that put you off. And don’t worry about those vaults leaking and turning the course a radioactive, luminous lime-green. Course Superintendent Bruce Burger confirms they are still very much intact and monitored closely by the Alamo Cement Company, which reports to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. “Wildlife habitats have actually been created where there wasn’t one before, or enhanced where there was,” he says. “We have a 163-acre green belt where most of the wildlife can be seen early in the morning or late in the evening.”
Eighteen years have passed since the Quarry opened and it continues to thrive along with the residential and retail areas that have grown up around it. Reviews are invariably positive so it’s not surprising Foster, the young and inexperienced architect that designed it, still has fond memories of the job. “It was my first big solo project and I couldn’t have been happier with the way it turned out,” he says. “Because I worked with a great bunch of guys from Wadsworth Golf Construction, we got the job done in nine months. I ended up calling those guys the Dream Team. I was lucky to work with them again, in 1998 at Haymaker in Steamboat Springs.”
Another designer who has worked in both Steamboat Springs and San Antonio is Tom Weiskopf, whose course at the Catamount Ranch and Club opened five years after the Resort Course at the Westin La Cantera, which he built alongside his then-partner Jay Morrish.
Like its cross-city relative, La Cantera has a number of holes framed by the walls of a former limestone quarry. Atop one such wall is the seventh tee which looks down not only on a bunker-strewn fairway, a water hazard to the right, and a green just 316 yards away that can certainly be gotten at with a driver, but also up at Six Flags Fiesta Texas’s enormous 180-ft high Rattler roller coaster.
The 7th is just one of the many fun and engaging holes on a course that hosted the PGA Tour’s Texas Open from 1995 to 2009. Take it all on and you have 7,021 yards and a handful of really quite difficult holes. But choose the most appropriate set of tees and you will love every minute. The views are great, the course is invariably in good condition, and the variety of the holes will engage your interest from start to finish.
The same is true at the Palmer Course, which opened in March 2001. Like most Palmer designs, this course certainly has its share of decorative, eye-catching holes. The 18th is probably the most notable with an uphill drive, and 80-foot plunge over boulders and water to a green surrounded by four sizeable bunkers.
Traditionalists will be happy to know A.W. Tillinghast and Press Maxwell both worked in San Antonio. Maxwell built a lovely course at Pecan Valley in 1963 that hosted the 1968 PGA Championship won by Julius Boros, and which you can play for just $67 Monday to Friday, and $87 at weekends. Situated about five miles south and east of downtown, Pecan Valley is set in 200 acres of woodland on the Salado Creek and was restored by Bob Cupp in 1998.
Tillinghast worked on several courses in Texas including three in San Antonio: The private Oak Hills Country Club and San Antonio Country and the very public, very inexpensive ($50 during the week), and very entertaining very Brackenridge Park. Located a mile from downtown with huge, flat-bottomed bunkers and square, push-up greens, “Old Brack” is quirky in the very best sense—unconventional and a little eccentric in places, but never frivolous or silly.
One of seven city-owned courses that form the Alamo City Golf Trail (AGT), “Old Brack” enjoyed something of a rebirth in 2008 when architect John Colligan and associate Trey Kemp restored Tillinghast’s original as closely as was possible. Having worked on restorations at a number of other historical courses, Arlington-based Colligan was the logical choice for the job and, well aware of the course’s significance, persuaded the Municipal Golf Association (now the AGT) to authorize far more than the simple renovation it had originally sanctioned. “We felt it was our duty as stewards of the game to do more than just renovate the course,” says Colligan, who with the help of a 1922 survey rerouted it to incorporate 15 of the original 18 holes and bring back many of the course’s old features, including water and bridges.
At 6,243 yards “Old Brack,” has all the length non-tour pros require and you certainly won’t be getting anywhere near the remarkable 257 Mike Souchak shot over four rounds during the 1955 Texas Open. And it is as much a museum as a golf course. “It is to Texas golf what St. Andrews is to World Golf,” he says. “She will always hold a very special place in my heart.”
If you need more golf, head to the Hyatt Regency Hill Country Resort for three lovely nines designed by Arthur Hills. There’s also the fantastic Greg Norman-designed AT&T Oaks and Pete Dye-designed AT&T Canyons Course at TPC San Antonio, where you’ll also find a 1,002-room JW Marriott. Former Gary Player associate Tom Walker authored the challenging Canyon Springs Golf Club. Or savor Silverhorn, where designer Randy Heckenkemper and PGA Tour players Scott Verplank and Willie Wood created a Hill Country gem five miles north of the airport.
This man doesn’t live on golf alone. As the seventh most populous city in the country and the second in Texas (behind Houston), San Antonio also boasts a $10.7 billion tourism industry and the three most popular tourist attractions in the Lone Star State.
Tops is the Alamo, the 4.2-acre compound where Davy Crockett, the King of the Wild Frontier, lost his life along with so many other American heroes. Next there’s the very impressive River Walk—a network of footpaths bordering the San Antonio River that meanders around downtown and is lined by restaurants, bars, shops, and hotels. Third is Sea World, which might not have the history of the Alamo nor the charm of the River Walk but does have far more whales, sharks, alligators and dolphins to look at.
And you’ll need to eat. Should you crave something a little different, try dinner on a river barge such as that offered by Boudro’s, which Esquire once listed among the top 50 restaurants in the U.S. Another place to try is La Gloria on E Grayson St. where Culinary Institute of America-trained Johnny Hernandez serves up Mexican street food, which is 100% better, and quite a bit milder, than it sounds.
There is one dish, however, for which some of that furnace-lining chromium brick at the Quarry will come in handy—Camarones AguaChile, which basically translates as Shrimp in FireWater. If a full plate of this explosive dish is a little too much for your delicate palate, try the shooter. It’s still fairly lethal, but you might get half way down at least before screaming for ice. “As a general rule, most Mexican food is pretty mild and not spicy at all,” says Chef Hernandez. “Real Mexican foods are often accompanied by condiments and salsa that will bring the heat if you want it."
Hernandez strives for authenticity and everything, even the AguaChile…for the first three spoonfuls anyway, is absolutely delicious. As you’d expect, there are plenty of margaritas and some quality tequilas to sip on the side – smooth and ‘light-straw’ Herradura Blanco possibly being the best place to start for those wanting to do as the locals do.
When you consider all the good stuff it has to offer; the courses, the après-golf, the food, the weather, it’s a wonder San Antonio didn’t rank even higher than 13th on that list of the country’s best golf cities.
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