Done with a (Bill) Diddel-inspired renovation
Below are excerpts from an article that originally appeared in Golf Course Industry.
Thirty-six-hole Kenwood Country Club in Cincinnati has planned a June 2021 grand reopening for its Kendale Course, a Golden Age layout where Ohio-based Fry/Straka Global Golf Course Design has completed a comprehensive $5 million renovation.
Ground was broken at Kenwood, north of downtown, in fall 2019, following three years of careful preparations and master planning. The renovated Kendale layout had been poised to fully reopen last summer, but COVID-19 intervened. Members enjoyed some limited play in the fall of 2020, but June 2021 has been slated for an official reopening.
“We experienced just enough of a sneak preview last fall to knock everyone’s socks off,” Kenwood CEO Dylan Petrick said. “Still, the board, our course superintendent Kent Turner, and our new director of golf Shawn Costello all agree the renovation won’t be fully realized until the spring 2021 growing season is over.
“I think the members always knew we had the bones of a world-class, vintage golf course here. But what Fry and Straka have uncovered, revived and created here is pretty extraordinary. We can’t wait to show it off.”
The original 36 at Kenwood Country Club was designed by architect Bill Diddel and opened in 1930. The club had retained Donald Ross two years prior. He is, in fact, responsible for identifying the 341-acre property on which the club sits today. But Ross wasn’t hired to design the course. No one is quite sure why, Petrick said. And no one is complaining. Diddel’s work proved quite spectacular: the Kendale Course hosted the U.S. Amateur just three years post-opening, followed by the 1954 Western Open and the 1963 U.S. Women’s Open.
Diddel is, in fact, one of the unheralded heroes of golf’s Golden Age of Course Design, a period roughly bounded by the two World Wars that produced an outsized number of American masterpieces. Starting in 1924, the Indiana native laid out more than 250 courses across the Midwest, including the celebrated Woodland CC in Carmel, Indiana; The Northwood Club in Dallas, Texas, host of the 1952 U.S. Open; and The Summit Course, the original 18 at the Shanty Creek Resort in northern Michigan. He was a founding member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1947 — and a member of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
“Ross was great, but he can’t compete with Bill Diddel from a basketball perspective,” said Jason Straka, with a wry smile. Straka is a partner with Fry/Straka and will serve as ASGCA president starting in fall 2021. “In a very real way, Ross and Diddel collaborated at Kenwood. The land Ross chose here, for what became the Kendale Course, is absolutely perfect for golf — just the right amount of roll, with some extraordinary vistas.
“Diddel did the rest. The greens he created here are quite good, but like so many putting surfaces from the Golden Age they had gotten smaller over time. I mean that literally: Putting greens tend to shrink over the course of decades, due to careless mowing habits. But I also mean that figuratively: Because green speeds were so much slower in the 1930s, steeper slopes were perfectly practical as hole locations. As modern bentgrass and maintenance allowed for faster and faster greens, those formerly ‘cuppable’ areas just weren’t cuppable any more.”
Straka expanded all 18 putting surfaces to their original dimensions, after first using LIDAR technology to map the original contours, down to 1/10th of an inch. Then, using Diddel’s original greens drawings, he proportionally adapted those steeper contours to work with modern green speeds.
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