The Champion Trace course was designed by architect Arthur Hills and opened in 1987.
The Champion Trace course at Keene Trace Golf Club in Nicholasville, Kentucky – site of the 2023 Barbasol Championship on the PGA Tour – was designed by architect Arthur Hills and opened in 1987.
The private layout meanders through rolling hills not far from Lexington. It will play to 7,328 yards with a par of 72 for this week’s Barbasol Championship. The event has been played on the Champion Trace layout since 2015.
Thanks to yardage books provided by StrackaLine – the maker of detailed yardage books for thousands of courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the players face this week in the Barbasol Championship.
Michigan offers miles of great golf at Arcadia Bluffs, Forest Dunes, Greywalls, Boyne, Belvedere, Island Resort & Casino and Eagle Eye.
Red barns and cows. Narrow two-line highways and trees – so many trees. Grand lake views stretched to the horizon. Blue jean jackets and gas stations attached to liquor stores. Tall cornfields and billboards advertising only the finest marijuana edibles.
And incredible golf.
Michigan is more rural than an outsider might expect, full of farms and small-town crossroads. Outside Detroit and a few midsize cities, the Great Lakes State is the embodiment of Midwestern agrarian living, this despite it being the 10th-most populous state among the 50.
And thanks to a boom of golf course developments over the past 25 years mixed with a handful of exceptional classic tracks, Michigan offers what could be considered a surprisingly inspiring spread of public-access layouts. Outsiders might expect states such as California, Arizona and Florida to be packed with solid golf, but a recent study of Golfweek’s Best ranked courses revealed that Michigan offers the seventh-best sampling of elite public-access layouts in the country, ahead of such golf-heavy destinations as Hawaii and Virginia. Not bad for a state where the golf season doesn’t stretch much past seven months before the snow falls in many locales.
The Links nine at Boyne’s Bay Harbor Golf Club in Michigan (Courtesy of Boyne Golf/Evan Schiller)
I was there to see as many courses as I could fit into 11 days. Landing in Detroit and cruising west toward Lake Michigan, I would tee it up at 15 layouts – including a new par-3 course – and put some 1,400 miles on my rental car’s odometer before dropping it off in Milwaukee, the easiest major airport for me to reach after sliding my carry bag back into its travel case at the end of the trip.
This trip started with an airport arrival in Detroit and meandered all the way north into the Upper Peninsula along the shores of Lake Superior with samples of everything from daily-fee options with one course to a winter-season ski destination with 10 tracks. The only rule was the courses had to offer spots on their tee sheets to non-members. I started my planning with the goal of playing the top five Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play in the state and added plenty more, including four days in the Upper Peninsula hosting a tournament for Golfweek’s Best raters. My golf route, in order:
Eagle Eye, No. 5 in Michigan on the 2021 Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for public-access layouts
Arcadia Bluffs’ Bluffs Course in Arcadia, No. 1 in Michigan
Arcadia Bluffs’ South Course, No. 6 in Michigan
Forest Dunes’ Bootlegger par-3 course
Forest Dunes’ The Loop, No. 3 in Michigan
Forest Dunes, No. 4 in Michigan
Belvedere, No. 9 in Michigan
Boyne Golf’s Arthur Hills course, No. 19 in Michigan
Boyne Golf’s Donald Ross Memorial
Boyne Golf’s The Heather
Boyne Golf’s Bay Harbor (Links/Quarry nines), No. 8 in Michigan
Island Resort & Casino’s Sage Run
Timberstone
Marquette Greywalls, No. 2 in Michigan
Island Resort & Casino’s Sweetgrass, tied for No. 15 in Michigan
One of the best parts: The end of summer in Michigan offers some of the best-rolling greens found in the country. Bent grass thrives at this latitude, and the putting surfaces I sampled were, without exception, pure. Perfect greens frequently are an imperfect goal – there’s a lot more to great golf than smooth and fast greens – but seeing ball after ball roll across Michigan’s putting surfaces with hardly a bump or wiggle was a highlight of my trip.
It was an unforgettable and sometimes exhausting romp, with nine rounds played on foot and six in carts. There were cliffside holes overlooking one of the Great Lakes followed by secluded, forested layouts – even a fast and firm track that plays in one direction one day, the other direction the next. Hills, valleys, bluffs – a few birdies to keep things rolling, and so many bogeys. Too much golf and never enough, always waking before sunrise to squeeze in more holes, trying to finish before dark with enough time to find an open restaurant while avoiding the roadside deer that flashed through my high beams en route to that night’s bed.
Arthur Hills built more than 200 new golf courses and renovated more than 150 others in his six decades of design work.
Arthur Hills, the architect of more than 200 new courses around the world and renovator of more than 150 others, died Tuesday at the age of 91.
Hills was a past president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects (1992-93) and was a member of the Ohio and Michigan Golf Halls of Fame. He was the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Michigan Golf Course Owners Association.
A cause of death was not listed by the ASGCA in its release announcing Hill’s passing.
Hills founded his architecture firm in the 1960s, and the company continues today as Hills • Forrest• Smith Golf Course Architects based in Toledo, Ohio. He joined the ASGCA in 1971.
Golf course architect Arthur Hills died May 18, 2021, at the age of 91. (Courtesy of the American Society of Golf Course Architects)
“He started the business by placing an ad in the Toledo, Ohio, Yellow Pages under ‘Golf Course Architect’ while operating a landscape contracting business,” Steve Forrest, Hills’ business partner and another past president of the ASGCA, said in a media release announcing Hills’ passing. “I had the great privilege of learning all aspects of golf course architecture from a distinguished professional practitioner and humble gentleman over 42 years. Arthur became a fatherlike figure to me who was a mentor, an instructor, exhorter and admonisher while always trying to improve his own skills and increase his personal knowledge every day.”
A graduate of Michigan State (Science) and the University of Michigan (Landscape Architecture), Hills was a prolific designer and was tagged by fellow architect Pete Dye as “The Mayor of Naples” for his many designs in southwest Florida.
Among Hills’ extensive renovation work, he made small changes to Oakland Hills before the 2004 Ryder Cup.
His original layouts are sprinkled throughout the Golfweek’s Best course rankings for public-access layouts and private tracks. Most notable are Old Stone, which ranks No. 2 among private courses in Kentucky; the Glacier Club’s Mountain Course, No. 8 among private courses in Colorado; Bay Harbor’s Links/Quarry course, No. 8 among Michigan’s public-access layouts; and Chicago Highlands, No. 11 among Illinois’ private courses.
He also was credited with renovation work at the Country Club of Florida in Village of Golf, which ranks No. 150 on Golfweek’s Best Classic Courses list for all layouts built before 1960 in the U.S.
Other samplings of his work include Bonita Bay in Naples, Florida; the Arthur Hills Signature Course at LPGA International (pictured atop this story) in Daytona Beach, Florida; The Golf Club of Georgia in Atlanta; Bighorn Golf Club in Palm Desert, California; Keene Trace in Lexington, Kentucky; and Hyatt Hill Country Resort in San Antonio, Texas.
“As a kid drawing golf holes and dreaming about becoming a designer, I would read the magazines and marvel at the articles about new courses,” ASGCA President Forrest Richardson said in a media release in response to Hills’ death. “One was Tamarron in Colorado, a new course by Art Hills set in a rugged valley with steep cliffs. Eventually I got to see it firsthand, and it inspired me with its bold greens and creative routing.”
The ASGCA noted that Hills was an environmental pioneer, designing the first Audubon Signature Sanctuary courses in the U.S., Mexico and Europe.
“Mr. Hills was among a handful of golf architects who subscribed to a newsletter I published about golf design in the 1970s, and he also took time to comment and contribute,” Richardson said. “While he left an incredible legacy of work across the world, for me I will always recall the kindness he showed a young aspiring student — a gift we should all pay forward.”
Hills is survived by his wife, Mary, with whom he had eight children, 24 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. A funeral is scheduled for May 24 in Sylvania, Ohio.
