An Artist in the Dirt

By Lee Pace

Tom Fazio was working at Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio, in the mid-1970s on some course renovations leading up to the 1979 U.S. Open when he noticed an ambitious and talented member of the course maintenance staff named Mike Strantz.

“Mike developed a close friendship with Andy Banfield of our staff,” Fazio remembers. “He was a talented artist and drew sketches of golf holes. He showed a real desire to get into golf course design. He liked us and we liked him. After the Inverness project was finished, we offered him a job working for us.”

Strantz immediately moved to Hilton Head to begin working on a Fazio project there. Over the next eight years, he plied his trade on courses such as Moss Creek Plantation, Wild Dunes, Black Diamond Ranch and Osprey Point.

“Golf course design is one of the few trades today where apprenticeship is the only way to get good experience,” Strantz said. “A good designer needs to have excellent knowledge of soil structures, engineering and vegetation, as well as a feel for the average golfer. I was fortunate to work with and learn from one of the best in the business.”

“Mike was a wonderful person, very talented, a devoted family man,” Fazio says. “He loved to be in the field, loved to walk the property. But he didn’t like the travel. That’s the biggest negative to our business—you’re always gone, working on a job.”

Strantz believed he could set up a base in the South Carolina Low Country doing design and construction work. He left Fazio in 1987 to work full-time for Wild Dunes, which was reconstructing parts of its Links and Harbor courses, and later worked for developer Larry Young of Myrtle Beach in designing the Parkland Course at The Legends complex. Strantz did his first solo project in 1993 when he was asked to turn an ancient parcel of hunting and fishing lands near Pawleys Island into a course named Caledonia Golf & Fish Club.

And the dominoes started falling, one job leading to the next and Strantz living temporarily wherever he worked, though only once having to travel more than a half-day’s drive from his home:

Caledonia, Pawleys Island, 1994; New Royal Kent, Providence Forge, Va., 1996;

Tobacco Road

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.

Monterey was his last course, and Strantz finished it despite having been weakened by the effects of cancer that would take his life in 2005.

“His golf courses were very strong, they were very artistic and had a lot of flair in terms of elevation and steep slopes,” Fazio says. “All of them are very memorable, just as Mike himself was very memorable. It’s a shame we lost him so soon.”

Strantz named his design firm Maverick Golf Design for excellent reasons. He rode a horse around the property and made intricate sketches of every hole, then turned the drawings over to his shapers. He would be covered in dirt after working the equipment all day or in paint after marking the lines of the various layers of the course — fairways, fescue rough, love grass, areas to be left in their natural sandy state.

Strantz’s courses garnered all manner of accolades starting from his first solo project. Caledonia was named fifth-best public course in America by Golf Digest in 1995 and in the “Top 10 You Can Play” by GOLF Magazine. All of his courses have been listed in the Top 100 Best Modern Courses in America by Golf Digest.

Strantz first got to know Doc Lachicotte in the 1980s when Fazio was designing Wachesaw Plantation. Lachicotte was one the partners in the development company and later hired Strantz to design Caledonia. Lachicotte in a sense is responsible for the two Strantz courses in North Carolina as he recommended Strantz to the developers of both Tobacco Road and Tot Hill Farm.

“We interviewed several architects, and Mike’s work was the most unique we’d seen,” says Tony Stewart, one of the partners at Tobacco Road. “We figured if we wanted a ‘10’ in this area, this close to Pinehurst, we’d better go with the most exciting architect we could find.”

“Mike was an artist and a tremendous talent,” says Ogburn Yates, whose family farm land was used for the Tot Hill project. “He created some memorable features that you don’t see anywhere else.”

Yates pauses a moment and chuckles.

“Now, Mike didn’t pay a lot of attention to the budget,” he says. “We had to go back to the bank to pay for some of his ideas. But the finished product turned out pretty well.”

Read more about Act 2 at Tot Hill Farm

Chapel Hill-based writer Lee Pace has been writing about golf in North Carolina and the Sandhills for four decades. His latest book is “Good Walks—Rediscovering the Soul of Golf at Eighteen Top Carolinas Courses,” available from UNC Press.