The 12th hole at Wannamoisett Country Club. RIGHT: Green directs his team at Kawonu. |
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the rapidly expanding capability of personal computers. He began creating digital renderings of hole designs he had sketched by hand in notebooks.
“ Take creativity, technology, love of the game of golf and being outdoors— when I put all those together, [ golf course architecture ] seemed like a really awesome way to have a career,” Green adds.
Less enthusiastic, to put it mildly, were professors he spoke to at Virginia Tech, which has highly regarded landscape architecture and turf management programs. They offered a sobering assessment of the golf industry, noting the difficulty of breaking into the design side of the business without either a pedigree or extensive connections.
Green listened politely, but he was undeterred.“ I think that just drove him to work even harder,” his brother Sam says.
And soon enough, a connection came along. Sam Green was working as assistant superintendent at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Md., when it hosted the 1997 U. S. Open. He offered his little brother, then a rising sophomore at Virginia Tech, the opportunity to volunteer during the tournament. That week, the younger Green met John“ Chip” McDonald, founder and president of McDonald & Sons, one of America’ s top golf course builders.
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“ He has the vision and he knows the agronomy. The main thing I taught him was,‘ Don’ t just draw pretty pictures. Whatever you draw has to work.’”
— John“ Chip” McDonald
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They hit it off and McDonald hired him as a summer intern.
“ I really liked Andrew,” McDonald says.“ He had a good head on his shoulders, and he worked hard, so I offered him a job after college.”
Green, who had graduated from Virginia Tech with degrees in landscape architecture and turf management, went to work fulltime for McDonald and Sons in 2000. Over the next 14 years, he received a crash course in the golf business: from pricing out jobs and preparing bid documents to drawing up plans, overseeing work onsite and effectively managing projects through completion.
“ I knew right away he was a good architect and he had all the skills,” McDonald recalls.“ He has the vision and he knows the agronomy. The main thing I taught him was,‘ Don’ t just draw pretty pictures. Whatever you draw has to work.’”
Heady Projects
Renovation projects from Green’ s tenure with McDonald and Sons included layouts from America’ s Golden Age of golf course architecture: Pine Valley, Shinnecock Hills, Merion and Oakmont. Green also immersed himself in Golden Age subject material, from historical articles to course visits, learning all he could about work done by the early 20th century immortals: Charles Blair Macdonald, A. W. Tillinghast, Donald Ross, Harry Colt, Alister MacKenzie, George C. Thomas and Seth Raynor.
Green was particularly hungry to land a commission at one of the roughly 400 courses Ross designed during his prolific career. A job renovating the bunkers at the Country Club of York in York, Pennsylvania, turned out to be just the professional breakthrough he needed.
“ There was a time when I almost gave it all up. I was in a pretty dark place— as a young architect, you just want opportunity,
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and often you need to have done work to get an opportunity. It’ s the old‘ chicken or the egg?’ thing,” Green says.“ I didn’ t have any experience with a Donald Ross course. That’ s a very frustrating set of circumstances, especially for someone who has a lot of drive and just wants to be given a chance.”
Looking back now, that seems like another life. Just two years after Green opened his firm in 2014, he was hired to restore the East course at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, New York. Designed by Ross in the early 1920s, it had hosted three U. S. Opens, three PGA Championships and a Ryder Cup when Green was plucked from relative obscurity to take the course back to its iconic roots for the 2023 PGA.
In what would become a playbook for future success, he collected all of Ross’ drawings and sold Oak Hill’ s leadership on his plan to meet the demands of modern championship-level golf and make the course playable for the members while honoring Ross’ original vision for the property.
“ My approach is,‘ To know where you’ re going, you have to know where you’ ve been,’” Green says.“ Connecting with your past, especially one that has some legacy
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East Lake |
GREEN GOLF AND TURF |