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.
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“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