BELLEAIR, Fla. – Standing on the incline rising from the Intracoastal Waterway to Belleair Country Club’s clubhouse, it might not look like a work crew is restoring a classic golf course. To a casual observer, it looks more like the crew has demolished one.
Everything is dirt, piled high in places, flattened in others as the earth tumbles down to the salt water. There’s not a blade of green grass to be seen for acres. Trees have been chopped out, a pond has been drained, tractors and work trucks bustle about the site some 20 miles west of Tampa. A steady breeze off the nearby Gulf of Mexico throws a layer of dust onto everything. It looks lunar, only in brown.
But looks are certainly deceiving.
Architect Jason Straka in June was midway through a major face-lift of Belleair Country Club’s West Course, with a reopening slated for November. In order to save the original Donald Ross layout, which the private club says is the oldest continually operating course in Florida, Straka first was tasked with erasing decades’ worth of alterations that dampened the intent of the original design, often burying Ross’s sublime work beneath good intentions.
“People would come out here and see all this dirt being moved, and ask, ‘How can you be restoring things when you have to move all that dirt around?’” Straka said. “I remember one of my colleagues who does a lot of restorations too, and he said that so much of these restorations and time and budgets actually go into undoing a lot of things that have been done in the past 10, 20, 30 or 40 years.”
Golf began alongside the sound at Belleair in 1897, and Ross – one of golf’s most-revered course designers – was commissioned to expand the club’s offerings to 36 holes that opened in 1915 with the West Course above the Intracoastal Waterway and the East Course tucked inland. Ross returned a decade later and reworked both 18s, leaving detailed plans and diagrams of his designs.
The inland East Course has lost much of its Ross flavor over the years, but the West was still championed as Ross’s original design. Only it wasn’t. Multiple renovations had changed the flavor of the course, with greens losing their edges and being pushed high into the air while bunkers shifted, changing shape and depth as their edges were muted. Strategic angles introduced by Ross were lost as fairways were narrowed, and greens lost their original shape, edges, contours and…
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