BIRTH OF A GOLF COURSE: DALHOUSIE GOLF COURSE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Designing a golf course is like playing the game itself: You prepare and plan, but ultimately you trust your instincts and experience.

"It's not like building a house," says Gary Nicklaus.

The soft-spoken 32-year-old son of golf great Jack Nicklaus is designing Dalhousie Golf Course under construction in Cape Girardeau. As a touring golf pro he plays some of the best courses in the world. Dalhousie and three other courses under construction -- one in Wales, one in Spain and another in Minnesota -- are his initial golf course designs. Gary is one of five Nicklauses designing courses for the company.

Nicklaus was in Cape Girardeau Monday to check the progress at the 27-hole Dalhousie project. He, Nicklaus Design associate Jon Garner, Prestwick Group principal partner Cord Dombrowski and construction coordinator Mark McDowell drove carts from the tee to the green on each hole.

Much of the preliminary work on the design was done by Garner, who has a master's degree in landscape architecture. He has worked with Jack Nicklaus on a number of courses and knows exactly what Nicklaus Design is trying to do. "He's got a lot of my dad in him," Gary says.

Taking shape

The two men worked with topography maps to see how their design fit the property. Prestwick Group, which is developing the golf course/ residential project out Bloomfield Road, gave him all 900 acres of the property to sculpt a golf course from.

The dirt on first 18 holes has been shaped, including greens and bunkers. The next 9 holes aren't as far along. Nicklaus, a compact version of his famous father, was here to do some tweaking, and he did.

The landscape is brown now, a panorama of scraped earth, irrigation pipes not yet laid, and poles marking turns and greens. To a non-golfer it looks like a moonscape with trees. But Nicklaus and Garner can see the golf course coming into being. Soon the fairways will begin turning green. Sodding of 100 acres of zoysia and fescue grass could begin next month.

Nicklaus wants to do some things differently from his father's designs. The mammoth 16,000-square-foot 18th green is definitely one of them, as is the horseshoe-shaped green at No. 15. Jack Nicklaus does not approve of greens where putting from edge to edge might be impossible.

He also opposes "blind trouble." He thinks hazards such as sand-filled bunkers and the edges of lakes should not be hidden from the golfer. On that point and many others, Gary Nicklaus concurs.

"I pretty much like what he does," he says of his father.

Jack Nicklaus is one of the world's most sought-after golf architects, commanding a fee of $1 million per project.

Dalhousie is named for the Scottish province where Dalhousie Castle is located. William Ramsey, the Earl of Dalhousie, was the brother of Rebecca Ramsey Giboney, who once owned the land the golf course is being built on.

The $7.5 million Dalhousie Golf Club is the centerpiece of Prestwick Plantation, a 900-acre residential community under development on Bloomfield Road. The golf course's first 18 holes are scheduled to open next spring, with the other 9 holes to follow possibly by the summer of 2002.

The development recently was featured in a story in the Southwest Airlines magazine.

Plenty of challenge'

Dalhousie will have five sets of tees on most holes, six sets on some, with a distance of 100 yards between the championship tees and the forward tees. The course will be highly playable from the correct set of tees for golfers' abilities, says Jack Connell, director of golf. "It will be hard on your handicap if you don't."

At 7,200 yards from the championship tees, Dalhousie has the length to test the best golfers.

No. 17 is a long uphill par 4 that has no bunkers. "We figured 465 uphill was enough trouble without putting in bunkers," Nicklaus said, grinning.

No. 13 is Dombrowski's pet project. Called a redan hole, the style was created by famed golf course architect Alistir MacKenzie, who was a professor of military strategy before he took up golf course design. To protect their bunkers from artillery fire, military commanders would build redans -- ridges set at angles -- to fool the enemy spotters' depth perception.

To a golfer standing on the 13th tee at Dalhousie, the green will appear to be 165 yards away when in fact the hole is 200 yards long. Dombrowski meticulously modeled this one after a redan hole at the North Berwick Golf Club in Scotland.

At No. 16, Nicklaus changed the angle of the fairway bunker. From the tee, it didn't fit his eye.

On some holes he merely approved. "I think it will work," he said.

Monday was the first time Nicklaus saw holes 19-27. Some of them have horizontal ridges that appear to be levees built by previous residents. Nicklaus has decided to retain the sharp edges rather than round them. "We want to retain the history," he said.

Construction concerns

Construction was stopped temporarily earlier this year after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Missouri Historic Preservation Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency each had different concerns about some of the work that had been done. The Corps had a complaint about proper permitting, the preservation commission had questions about possible historic sites on the property. The EPA had concerns about drainage and silt.

The development must mitigate 1.27 acres of wetlands consumed by the development, but Nicklaus's plans fit right in. He wants to create 3 acres of marshland on holes 6 and 7 on the third nine.

Dombrowski says he expects the agencies will sign off on the company's plans by the end of May.

Remarkably little earth -- less than half the national average for golf courses -- and no rock have had to be moved to build the course. This fits with Nicklaus' design philosophy.

"I want to design something that at the end of the day looks like I didn't do anything to it," he says.