Virginia Golfer Sep / Oct 2019 | Page 36

A Boulder Experience QUARRY OWNER DENNY PERRY TURNED A QUAINT ORCHARD NEAR WINCHESTER INTO A 36-HOLE GOLF HAVEN E very player on the planet knows full well the meaning of finding themselves between a rock and hard place on a golf course. On the two 18-hole layouts at Rock Harbor in Winchester, it can be a frequent occurrence. After all, there’s a nearby quarry owned by the man who designed and then personally helped build them, and some difficult shots required to nav- igate most of the 36 challenging holes. The courses are appropriately named Rock and Boulder. And Denny Perry, who owns them, as well as the quarry and a thriving construction business, made it all happen. Perry, 68, was never much of a golfer himself. He picked up the game in his late 20s so he could play on Sundays with his father, the late Maurice “Mickey” Perry, at a nearby scraggily public course named Carper’s Valley that closed in 2006. There wasn’t much time to work on his game, if only because he was so involved with the family’s business headquartered at the quarry purchased by his grandfather, Stuart Perry, in 1951. They also owned a 400-acre farm, and that’s where Denny Perry began devel- oping his own impressive work ethic, starting at age 11 when he was assigned numerous chores on the property. When he graduated from Winchester’s James Wood High School 50 years ago, he head- ed straight to the quarry, where he was immersed in learning every aspect of the operation, including how to run its heavy equipment. Many of Denny Perry’s ideas on course design came from playing some of the region’s best courses. 34 V I R G I N I A G O L F E R | S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 19 “I started out doing maintenance, then some welding,” he said. “I call it Knocks College (as in hard knocks), and eventu- ally I could do everything. There was not a job I couldn’t handle.” As the years passed and he start- ed playing golf, he and his father often would attend conventions and weekend meetings of the Virginia Aggregate Asso- ciation, a trade group that often held their events at major resorts. As a result, Perry learned there was more to a golf course than the grass-impaired fairways, sand-deprived bunkers and bumpy greens of Carper’s Valley. He played the Golden Horseshoe in Williamsburg, the Greenbrier in West Virginia and The Homestead, as well as venues at Pinehurst and Myrtle Beach. Each was a revelation. The more he played those storied lay- outs, virtually all of them the work of revered golf architects like Donald Ross, Robert Trent Jones and Pete Dye, the more interested he became in their design. “I would always ask myself ‘why did they put a bunker here, why did they put the green there?’” Perry said. “Everything about them fascinated me. Then, when I’d be reading a golf magazine, I loved to look at pictures of the different holes they featured. I wasn’t really reading the personality vsga.org by LEONARD SHAPIRO