“There are some leading players who honestly dislike the dramatic element in golf. They hate anything which is likely to interfere with a constant succession of threes and fours. They look upon everything in the ‘card and pencil spirit.’ The average club member on the other hand is a keen sportsman who looks upon golf in the ‘spirit of adventure,’ and that is why St. Andrews and courses modeled on similar ideals appeal to him.”

Alister Mackenzie, “The Spirit of St. Andrews”

 

The keen sportsmen have made the pilgrimage from as far away from Nebraska, some 170 of them descending over two days on these rolling hills at the foot of Uwharrie Mountains. They have come to play golf at the Tot Hill Farm Golf Club designed nearly a quarter of a century earlier by a man with a pencil and a sketchpad navigating the property one moment on horseback and another on a backhoe. They are here to play golf, drink craft beer, eat barbecue, kibitz around a century-old farmhouse turned into a clubhouse and find the most bodacious photos to post on Instagram. It took organizers precisely 34 seconds to fill up the first day’s tee sheet via online registrations, two minutes to complete day two.

“Everybody out here will tell you they are Mike Strantz’s biggest fan,” says Brett McNamara, who grew up in Rochester, N.Y., where there are six Donald Ross-designed courses. “Donald Ross was golf architecture to me. Then I came here and it was, woah, this is so far removed from what I grew up with. I had played a lot of golf courses, but I was flabbergasted here.”

Landon Owen has played hundreds of golf courses around the nation and some of them are fancier and boast bigger reputations than Tot Hill. But this one is his favorite.

 

 

“Mike Strantz is one of those guys, if you could have anyone in history at your dinner table, he’d be there,” Owen says. “He was just an artist in the true sense. He rode around on horseback with a sketchpad and drew his golf courses, just a very Renaissance kind of guy.”

By day McNamara is an optometrist in Charleston, S.C., and Owen is a sales executive in Johnson City, Tenn., but by night and weekends and off-days they pursue their passion of trying to play a thousand golf courses and telling the story on a website called GolfCrusade.com. Golf buddies since boyhood, they’re in agreement that Strantz is their favorite architect and in 2018 began a series of outings for like-minded golfers at courses among the very limited universe of the seven original designs in Virginia and the two Carolinas by Strantz, who had an all-too-short career before succumbing to tongue cancer in 2005.

They call their event The Iron Maverick, after the name of Strantz’s company, Maverick Golf Design, and this conclave in October 2023 is something of a coming out party for Tot Hill, which opened in 2000, enjoyed moderate success, stumbled through horrendous weather events and economic ebbs and flows, and now is under new ownership with a total agronomic overhaul and operations reboot.

Owen looks around him and embraces the fall colors on the mountains in the distance, the handsome old farmhouse, the barn converted into a golf maintenance building, the chatter of golfers finishing their rounds and tucking into lunch, the golf course laid out over, around and through Betty McGee’s Creek and gigantic rocks dating back 500 hundred million years.

“What a sense of place,” he marvels. “The golf course is great. It’s always held a fond memory. What the new owners have done does nothing but enhance that. It’s the sense of place they have created with the clubhouse, the overall environment and the welcoming nature. These are golf people, they know what they are doing and have a conviction about it.

“I can’t remember feeling this good on a golf course just being there. It’s just wonderful.”

McNamara first saw Tot Hill 20 years ago and took his first-ever photo on a golf course. The image was of the par-three 15th, known as “The Waterfall Hole” because of the creek cascading down behind the green. He stood at the top of the waterfall, looking back to the west into the setting sun and marveled at the green below and the various sets of tees perfectly terraced from low to high. He captured the image on an Olympus point-and-shoot camera, and now, two decades later, returned and snapped the same view on his Pixel 6 Pro. The shadows, the rocks, the long grass, the undulations in the putting surface …

“It was perfect, it was fantastic,” McNamara says. “I thought, ‘Oh my goodness.’ That feeling hasn’t changed in 20 years.”

***

 

“Not since Alister MacKenzie sketched diagrams of par-fours that were as wide as they were long has any architect shown the chutzpah like Mike Strantz to let his imagination run wherever the land would take it.” 

Golf Digest

 

Tot Hill was built on part of a 370-acre parcel that had been in the family of Asheboro native Ogburn Yates since 1943, and the family lived there during the summers through the mid-1900s and Yates later raised cattle in his spare time while pursuing a career as a Belk Department Store executive. In the 1990s, Yates and his siblings were faced with three options. One was to sell the land, but “there were too many memories,” he says. Another was to let it sit idle, but that was an expensive proposition given the annual tax burden without a stream of compensating revenue. A third was to jump on the golf and residential market bandwagon of the late 1990s and build a golf course and develop a neighborhood.

Yates owned a condominium at Pawleys Island on the South Carolina coast and through a church there made friends with Doc Lachicotte, a prominent area businessman who was a partner in the mid-1980s creation of the Wachesaw Plantation golf community in Murrells Inlet and soon after hatched the idea to build a daily-fee course on land along the Intracoastal Waterway used for decades as a fishing club. Lachicotte hired Mike Strantz, at the time in his mid-30s, to design what would become the highly decorated Caledonia Golf & Fish Club.

“I told Doc we were thinking of doing a golf course on an old family farm, and he said I should talk to Mike,” Yates says. “Doc said he’d bring Mike up here one weekend and let him look at the property. They got here and Mike said, ‘Let me walk around an hour or so.’ He came back and said, ‘You need to build a golf course here. This is a great piece of land.’”

Yates organized a consortium of 22 original investors, most of them family, friends and Asheboro businessmen. “The piece of property is tremendous,” Strantz said at the onset of the project in 1998. “I was brought in pretty much as a consultant at the beginning by Ogburn. We walked out on the property and looked at a few places. It kept getting better and better. I got across the road and I kept hearing this sound. I had to go see what it was. It was a waterfall and some big rock. I said, ‘Ogburn, you gotta do it.’ There was no question in my mind at that point.”

The work started in 1998, with Strantz living in the farmhouse for 18 months while drawing sketches of the holes during the evenings and wandering the property by horseback and jumping on earth-moving machines during the day.

“He was big, burly, husky, down to earth,” says C.C. Pharr, one of the project’s partners. “He was a terrific friend. He loved to come out here, put pork ribs on the fire and cook them all day long. He built this course on horseback, Scout was his name. He had a retriever named Gretta who’d follow him around.”

Pharr on a regular basis drove out to the job site, jumped in a golf cart and took his video camera to wherever Strantz was working and recorded snippets of Strantz’s thoughts as the course evolved.

One day Strantz was working on the third hole, a par-three with five sets of tees chiseled out of mammoth rocks.

“I think we may have the best set of par-threes anywhere,” Strantz said. “They’re pretty neat, they’re pretty spectacular. On this hole, we took advantage of all these big rocks and the confluence of two creeks. It’s a pretty little spot.”

Another time he was working on the 12th hole, a dogleg-left par-four with a peninsula-shaped green jutting into the one lake on the property.

“There might be 10 different ways to play a golf hole out here,” he said. “Play to your game. With the exception of that lake right there, you can always find your ball and go play it. You may not like where it’s at, but at least you can find it and get to it.”

One day Pharr happened across Forrest Fezler, the former PGA Tour golfer who later delved into golf design and became a close friend and business partner with Strantz.

“You guys have a $15 million golf course for $4.5 million,” Fezler said. “It’s tremendous. It’s by far the best thing we’ve done. I can’t wait to play it. Everyone should be proud of it.”

 

 

The course opened in May 2000 and golfers from the beginning were wowed by the tee area of the third hole cobbled amidst enormous rock outcroppings; the teardrop shaped green of the fifth hole set in another rocky and sandy setting; the “cave” built under the ground connecting the 10th and 12th greens; and the waterfall cascading down from behind the 15th green. The course opened with a set of back tees stretching to 6,600 yards, and the par of 72 was arrived at with five par-three holes and five par-fives.

“Tot Hill is one of the more dramatic courses I’ve ever done just because of the elevation changes and the creeks,” Strantz said. “It’s probably the prettiest piece of ground we’ve ever had to work with. It’s a breathtaking spot.”

Tot Hill has survived two recessions and the occasional flood like the one in 2003 where Betty McGee’s Creek washed out one green entirely and parts of two others. By 2018, Yates and his partners were getting along in age and thought it time to find a buyer who would continue the Tot Hill vision. They met with a half dozen potential buyers before reaching a comfort level with Pat Barber, who has been in the golf business since 2002 when he bought the Links at Stono Ferry, located a dozen miles west of downtown Charleston, and later added the Plantation Course at Edisto, built near the southwest tip of Edisto Island.

Barber had lived since 1995 in the residential community at Stono Ferry, a Ron Garl-designed course built in 1989 on the site of a Revolutionary War battle in 1779 with a replica cannon stationed at the 12th hole. He sold a medical staffing company in 1998 and was looking for new business challenges when he heard the golf course was for sale. Barber says he’s a “casual golfer” but has a keen interest in history and restoring old structures—from Low Country farmhouses to row houses in the Battery.

He and his long-time director of operations at his Charleston area courses, Greg Wood, drove to Asheboro in early 2022 to inspect the Tot Hill property. The ambiance, the farmhouse and the history appeared to Barber. The design of the golf course appealed to Wood, a PGA of America member who’s played golf all his life.

“The golf course is like a painting, but it has a lot of strategy to it as well,” Wood says. “It appears that he tries to overwhelm the senses. When Pat and I first walked the property the first couple of times, we were just like, ‘Where are we?’ It’s like it took you somewhere else. And that’s something a great architect does too.”

 

 

They realized a town the size of Asheboro (population just over 25,000) probably wasn’t robust enough to support a high-end, daily-fee operation by itself. But with Charlotte an hour to the west, Raleigh an hour to the east and Winston-Salem and Greensboro 30 minutes to the north, there was ample density to serve as a viable marketplace. And just as the Strantz design at Tobacco Road in Sanford has benefitted from its proximity to Pinehurst, so too could Tot Hill catch golfers on the first or last days of their Sandhills golf excursions.

They closed the deal in December 2022, shut the course down in May and reopened on Labor Day 2023.

Barber says being one of an exclusive universe of original Strantz designs was appealing. He likes renovation projects—from old houses in Charleston to beaten down golf courses.

“The idea of a special piece of property, a wonderful old farmhouse, Mike Strantz, the unique history of the place—it all combined to make it an appealing idea,” Barber says. “I drove to see the place and immediately fell in love with the property and the thought of bringing it back to life.”

***

“My experience of really first class holes is that, like the famous ‘Road Hole’ at St. Andrews, they at first sight excite the most violent spirit of antagonism. It is only after the holes have been played many times that the feeling of resentment disappears and the former critics become the strongest supporters.”

Alister Mackenzie, “The Spirit of St. Andrews”

 

Tom Fazio was working at Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, in the late 1970s, tweaking the Donald Ross-designed course at the behest of the USGA leading up to the 1979 U.S. Open. Fazio and one of his design associates, Andy Banfield, took notice of one particular member of the Inverness maintenance staff.

They noticed his stature—6-foot-4 with long hair and the athletic build befitting a high school football and hockey player. They saw his love of golf—he’d grown up playing on a local muni and at the age of 14 started working summers on the maintenance staff of Chippewa Country Club. His academic credentials were solid—he held a degree in turfgrass management from Michigan State University. And he had quite an artistic flair—a portfolio of pencil sketches and watercolors he’d created since childhood, many of them of golf holes real or imagined.

Mike Strantz was certainly not your typical kid with a blue collar and lunch pail.

“He showed a real desire to be in golf design,” Fazio says. “He had a lot of talent. He was a hard worker and a good guy. We thought he was perfect for us. Our company was growing, and we were moving out of a bad economy of the seventies into what would be a huge decade for golf-course design. We hired him on the spot to come work for us after the work at Inverness was finished.”

For the next eight years, Strantz assumed the nomadic lifestyle of the golf-course architect and builder, traveling wherever Fazio’s assignments took him—the coast of South Carolina for Wild Dunes, the desert of Tucson for Ventana Canyon, the quarries of Florida for Black Diamond Ranch, the mountains of North Carolina for Wade Hampton. Fazio would design a routing and a vision for the course, then Strantz was assigned to turn it into reality. Strantz later counted about a dozen projects he worked on for Fazio.

“Mike loved to be in the field, to walk the property, to be hands-on,” Fazio says. “But eventually the travel caught up with him. That’s the worst part of our business—being away from home. He had two young daughters and didn’t want to miss seeing them grow up.”

Strantz and his wife Heidi loved the coast of South Carolina they came to know when Strantz was working on Wild Dunes in the early 1980s, and they moved from Toledo to Mount Pleasant. Eventually the burden of travel prompted Strantz to leave Fazio in 1988, thinking his skills as a commercial artist and a golf designer and builder could generate a sufficient freelance income. The latter skill came to the fore in the fall of 1989 when Hurricane Hugo ravaged the South Carolina coast and destroyed much of Wild Dunes. Strantz was hired to rebuild the course, and he never left the golf business again. He worked on the grounds crew at Dunes West, then assisted golf developer Larry Young and son Danny on some design and construction work at their three-course Legends Golf Resort in Myrtle Beach.

Strantz was the on-site design associate for Fazio on the Wachesaw Plantation course that opened in 1984, and among the client partnership was Doc Lachicotte, who six years later ventured into another project. During this early 1990s meteoric expansion of the Grand Strand golf inventory, Lachicotte believed a new course needed to stand out from the pack. He thought Strantz could deliver and asked Strantz if he would take on his first solo, start-from-scratch project.

 

 

Caledonia opened in 1994 and from the jump was listed among “best-you-can-play” lists in the national golf publications. Over the next 11 years before his death in 2005, Strantz would weave together a resume that included seven new courses and two major remodels of courses out west, most notably his swan song at Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Following Caledonia, Strantz designed New Royal Kent, Providence Forge, Va., 1996; Stonehouse, Toano, Va., 1996; True Blue, Pawleys Island, 1998; Tobacco Road, Sanford, 1998; Tot Hill Farm, Asheboro, 2000; Bulls Bay, Awendaw, S.C., 2002; and Monterey Peninsula Country Club Shore Course, Pebble Beach, Calif., 2004.

Strantz signed the contract to produce Tot Hill in 1997 and started on the job in 1998. That year and the next two, he was applauded by the golf universe with 1998 Golf World Architect of the Year; 1999 Golf World Architect in Highest Demand; and 2000 Golf Week among Top 10 Greatest Architects of All-Time.

“Mike was truly at the top of his game when he designed Tot Hill,” says Greg Wood, director of operations for all three of Barber’s courses. “And there are only seven of them. You’re in pretty special company if you have a Mike Strantz design. Unfortunately, there won’t be any more of them.”
From the start, Strantz laid down the parameters from which he would operate. One project at a time. Walk the property many times in creating the routing. Live on-site during the week. Sketch the holes first, build them second.

“I like to be on-site at least four days a week at a minimum,” he said. “If a site is situated where Heidi and the kids or I can’t jump in the car and either drive to the site or drive home in three to four hours, it’s just not going to work. If I can’t hop on a plane and be home in an hour or so for band concerts, football games, awards banquets, proms, whatever, it’s just not going to work.

“You have to be there. Topographic maps don’t take into account any kind of unique vegetation that you might have, any kind of specimen trees or rock formations. It just doesn’t show up. To get a real feel for the land you have to explore every inch of it. That’s the way the old guys used to do it. They didn’t have the high-tech stuff to do all this aerial topography, so they spent a lot of time on the ground. Most people in the business now don’t want to put in that kind of time on a project, but that’s the way I like to do it.”

The “old guy” who most influenced Strantz’s work was Alister Mackenzie, the doctor-turned-architect who created such masterpieces as Cypress Point on the California coast and Augusta National out of the Georgia clay. Mackenzie’s seminal book, The Spirit of St. Andrews, was Strantz’s Bible and playbook rolled into one.

“Just read that book and you’ll probably see why this guy is my all-time hero,” Strantz said. “The first time I read his book, I couldn’t help but feel he was answering some of the critical barbs being thrown at my work. I do think a golf course should surround a person with as much visual stimulation as possible, so did Mackenzie.”

That visual stimulation took many forms:

A course at Tobacco Road offering a tee shot on the first hole threaded through a saddle of enormous dunes and later an approach on the par-5th 13th to a shallow green tucked behind pillars of sand and wispy grasses.

A course at Royal New Kent set in the rolling hills of eastern Virginia with hand-stacked rock walls and tall fescue conceived to emulate an Irish links.

Two courses on the South Carolina coast, one at True Blue with greens exploding out of sand barrens, and another at Bulls Bay with wind sweeping off the Atlantic and holes routed through ancient live oaks.

“You look at a Mike Strantz course and there is no doubt who did it,” says Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion and design partner with Bill Coore in one of the modern age’s most notable design firms.

“The huge, wild bunkers, the unique greens, the way the fairways snake through valleys and mounds … it’s just so distinctive. And yet it looks like it was always supposed to be there.”

His work certainly paid proper homage to the name of his company, Maverick Golf Design.

“Maverick is true to its name: We are innovative and captivating,” Fezler said. “History’s mavericks have always disrupted the status quo by shaking up the unimaginative masses.”

***

“A good golf course is like good music or good anything else: it is not necessarily a course which appeals the first time one plays over it, but one which grows on the player the more frequently he visits it.”

Alister Mackenzie, “The Spirit of St. Andrews”

 

 

Some were playing Tot Hill Farm for the first time. Others had been before and were curious to see the new coiffing, the restored farmhouse and soak in the fresh new vibe. From the course reopening on Labor Day 2023 through the Iron Maverick in late October, golfers plied their clubs on the course and their cameras on social media. The flow on Instagram included shots of the sunsets, the creek, the boulders, the angled fairways, the ups and downs with glowing prose and hashtags:

“Thank you to all involved with bringing back another wonderful Strantz design.”

“Top 5 courses in North Carolina. Catch it in the fall and it is truly beautiful.”

“Hour from Pinehurst. Worth the drive.”

“It was epic.”

“The day flew by, but damn what an event.”

“Golf’s ultimate thrill ride is back!”

Among golfers returning to the course they had played often in earlier years was Jay Campbell, who came to the Iron Maverick from his home in northern Virginia.

“It’s amazing what they’ve done with it,” Campbell said. “I have played this course maybe 10 times over the years. I came back because of the good bones, how good it was before. I fell in love with it back in about 2005. Mike was an artist and an architect. I have no idea how he sees these things. He’s just incredible to have that kind of vision. It’s a lot of fun in so many ways to play his courses. They’re beautiful, they’re art. I’m glad to see this one saved, someone step up and do it right. So many holes just take your breath away.“

Tot Hill is a “home game” for Asheboro’s Mark Voncannon, who has seen every iteration of the course and lives in the residential neighborhood adjacent to the course.

“There’s nothing that I’ve played that can compare to this or exceed this,” he says. “The new owner’s vision and what they’ve done has been really impressive. To sit on that back porch and watch those guys finish on 18 and to walk to number one tee box … you see green grass and sunshine and it’s just a good time.”

The course was candy to the lens of one of the photographers on-site for two days of the Iron Maverick.

 

 

“This is a photographer’s paradise,” said Zach Pessagno, who with brother Andy is an avid golfer who’s turned his passion into a photography business called Chasing Fowl Photography (as in “chasing” birdies and eagles on the golf course). “Tot Hill is going to blow up, it’s going to grow and get a lot of notoriety. We love Strantz and we love Tot. This is a Strantz course from the first hole through 18.  Strantz courses are epic. There’s not a single hole out there you cannot shoot and find angles for hours and hours.”

And the visual spectacle could have filled up at least 18 canvases from the brushstrokes of artist Dave Baysden, who paints golf courses from his home in nearby High Point. He set up his easel on the 12th fairway and used his oils to recreate the view to the peninsula green with the 13th in the backdrop on the left portion and the 10th fairway on the right.

“Visually, every hole you stand on and walk away and say, ‘That was amazing,’” Baysden says. “The next hole, same thing. You wonder what the next one will be. It’s a constant string of visuals. Every hole you could paint. And it’s fun to turn around and look back. It’s amazing looking back at every hole instead of just looking at what’s in front of you. It’s a wild, fun course.”

Geoff Dail owns and operates Dail Agronomic Solutions and worked for Ogburn Yates’ original owners group and has carried over to Pat Barber’s tenure as well. His company and the Tot Hill maintenance staff took on a major overhaul project over the summer of 2023 that included removing approximately 2,000 trees to improve airflow and sunlight; planting the greens and collars with Prism Zoysia, a shade and heat-tolerant update to earlier Zoysia strains; restoring most of the original bunkering; dredging the creeks and streams to clean out some of the silt that had accumulated over more than two decades and performing some stream remediation to open up channels and allow water to flow through the property; rebuilding the motors running the waterfall behind the 15th green; and resurfacing most of the cart paths.

“This is a great story—to revitalize and bring back a masterpiece of a property like Tot Hill to what it originally was and was meant to be,” Dail says. “Moving forward, the maintenance routine and the maintenance regimen that is planned is going to continue to improve and make Tot Hill one of the best-conditioned golf courses in Mike Strantz’s portfolio.”

Beyond the golf course itself, Barber turned his focus to the physical infrastructure, the centerpiece being the farmhouse set at the top of a plateau with the golf course laid on the ground below. The middle portion of the two-story structure was built in 1851, the front part added in 1905 and the back part added in 1960. The restored and redesigned building includes a front porch with rocking chairs, a room named “The Strantz Room” with the architect’s hole sketches and club logo ideas framed and mounted, a pro shop and grab-and-go concessions room and an entertainment enclave with a fireplace and wide-screen TVs.

 

 

The exterior of the house and all of the outbuildings, including a barn that serves as a maintenance headquarters and cart storage, were all painted white and re-roofed with dark gray shingles. There is a dinner bell just a few feet from the front porch, harkening to the days when the Yates children left after breakfast, roamed the hillsides, woods and streams all day and returned at suppertime.

“We didn’t want to lose the historical feel and charm of the house, but still we had to open it up and make it flow to serve our purpose of it being a working golf pro shop and clubhouse,” Barber says. “First and foremost was not to strip away the charm and history of the building. I think we accomplished that.”

Another nod to the vision of the original owners was reinstituting the names of each hole designated back in 2000 by C.C. Pharr.

The first hole is Imagination, the view from the tee downhill and almost a football field in width. The fourth is Fairway to Heaven, the tee being at some 620 feet elevation and the highest point on the property. The 11th is Mother Nature, the green of the par-three nestled in the woods and fronted by Betty McGee’s Creek.

“I told Mike, ‘I can’t believe you’re charging us to build this golf hole,’” Pharr says. “It’s just like it was when you got here. All you did was grow some grass and plant a flag.’ He couldn’t argue with me.”

The 12th is Old Dam, the par-four doglegging around a lake created by damming the creek, and the 13th is Strantz’s Backyard, since the uphill par-3 sits below prime residential lots, including the one Strantz picked out. Fifteen is Waterfall in honor of the course’s signature visual, and the course builds to a stunning climax on No. 18, Country Road, an uphill par-5 with safe and aggressive fairway options and the framing of a white-picket fence along the road and the farmhouse and a stable in the background.

Beyond the drama and eye candy, Greg Wood is struck with the width of the holes. He notes that with the exception of the par-four ninth hole, most of the landing spots are 50 yards wide.

“This is a second-shot golf course,” he says. “It’s like a driving range off most of the tees, but the angles are crucial. Do you take a riskier angle off the tee? If you pull it off, you have a better angle at the pin and a better chance for a birdie. So there’s a lot of strategy to this golf course. Mike said there were multiple ways to play every hole.”

Indeed he did, exactly the concept he drew from Alister Mackenzie.

So as Tot Hill winds into 2024 and its first calendar year of operation with its new ownership and vision and refurbished tees, fairways, greens and bunkers, it stands at the ready to receive a generation of golfers that didn’t exist in 2000 when it first opened, those who play not just to hit shots and pencil in a score but have fun, play some music, take photos, wear their shirts out. Landon Owen leads the chorus, as he did with this passage from a blog post after the Iron Maverick:

“Anyone who sets foot on this property who doesn’t feel transported to some other plane of existence simply being within eye-shot of the farmhouse and barns within the idyllic shaded plateau, just isn’t doing it right.”

 

“The great courses are fascinating to the golfer by reason of their shape, their situation and the character of their modeling. When these elements obey the fundamental laws of balance, of harmony and fine proportion, they give rise to what we call beauty. This excellence of design is more felt than fully realized by the players, but nevertheless it is constantly exercising a subconscious influence upon him and in course of time he grows to admire such a course as all works of beauty must be eventually felt and admired.”

Alister Mackenzie, “The Spirit of St. Andrews”