Photo courtesy of Red Run GC.
Hole No. 14, Red Run Golf Club New Zealand. Hepner was design associate/shaper at Pacific Dunes, Stone Eagle and The Renaissance Club, a complex tucked between Muirfield and North Berwick in Scotland. As lead design consultant, Hepner’s work included Belvedere, Birmingham CC, Canterbury, Cape Arundel, Detroit Golf Club, Essex G&CC, Holston Hills and Piping Rock. The list is impressive.
into the much-respected gem that it is today. Park came from one of Scotland’s leading golf families and one of the country’s leading centers for golf, the Royal Musselburgh Golf Club. Musselburgh, host to the Open Championship from 1873 to 1891, was home to the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. In 1892, the Honourable Company moved to Muirfield.
Hepner’s niche is to provide a big-picture approach to his projects. He focuses on making sure all of the components mesh perfectly in scale and composition.
There may not be a more glorious stretch of seaside in golf than the Lothians linksland on which Gullane, Muirfield and North Berwick, are situated. The Lothians is a region of Scottish lowlands – in contrast to the highlands to the north – that lies on the southern shore of the First of Forth.
Tom Bendelow laid out the original holes at Red Run beginning in 1914. The prolific Scot, was a course designer who is credited with having designed an estimated 600 courses in a 35-year span until his death in 1936. His inexhaustible thirst for course design earned him the nickname of The Johnny Appleseed of American Golf. But it was Willie Park, Jr., a fellow Scot, who transformed Red Run
Edinburgh is the principal city, with others rimming the eastern shore of the country down to Dunbar. North Berwick Golf Club is a course of impeccable character and charm. Its West Links is one of the most influential and unique courses in the world from which many design
concepts have been borrowed over the years. The West Links’ par 3 15th hole is the original Redan, undoubtedly the most imitated hole in all of golf. What’s significant here is that Park grew up in this region (he also designed nearby Kilspindie and Luffness New in Aberlady, East Lothian) and was nurtured on the designs of courses like Musselbergh, believed to be the oldest unchanged course in the world, and North Berwick. Park’s design concepts were born from his experiences on those courses. To have played those courses is to have experienced many of the Red Run holes in their original incarnations. In 1914, Park was commissioned to finish at Red Run what Tom Bendelow had started. For Park, course design was as much instinctive as creative, practical as much as intellectual. The objective for Hepner is to restore those instincts. - MG -
MICHIGAN GOLFER MAGAZINE • SUMMER 2016
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