Gil Hanse Talks Transforming Colonial Country Club
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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - So we had this great photograph,
00:05 or had a number of photographs of that hole,
00:07 and the Trinity River, before they straightened it
00:09 in the '60s, used to zigzag and weave its way around,
00:13 and they had several golf holes
00:14 that basically were impacted by it,
00:16 and the eighth was one of those.
00:18 And then when they straightened the channel,
00:20 they moved the green away, kind of inland,
00:22 so it really didn't have any, I mean,
00:24 unless you hit it at the world's biggest block,
00:25 you're not going in the river.
00:28 And so we couldn't replicate that,
00:30 just for permitting reasons with the Trinity River,
00:32 but we did look, and there's a tributary,
00:34 the one that actually runs in front of 15, 17, 18, 10,
00:39 and then runs all down the right-hand side of 11.
00:43 That tributary actually exits the property
00:46 right where the eighth tee was.
00:48 And so what we did was we built the mirror image
00:51 of the golf hole, the 1941 hole
00:54 that we've got the photos of Hogan.
00:56 And so now, instead of the water being on the right side,
00:59 it's on the left side.
01:00 Green sits up on this huge bluff,
01:02 and it's only 30 feet down to the water.
01:05 But we looked at the bunker patterns,
01:07 we did the best we could to try and figure out
01:09 what the green looked like,
01:10 and through the descriptions in the program,
01:12 but also the photographs,
01:13 and we feel really good about what we built there.
01:15 It's definitely a dramatic change.
01:18 - 'Cause that eighth hole never really fit the golf course.
01:20 I remember playing, it just was a random hole
01:22 that just kind of appears in the little forest area
01:26 by the river.
01:27 And now that that tee box,
01:30 it used to be pretty far back there.
01:32 I imagine it's allowed you to maybe push back
01:34 the seventh hole a little bit,
01:35 or maybe find a little extra room there at number seven?
01:39 - We did, yes.
01:40 So now the seventh green goes back,
01:42 and I mean, not quite to the river,
01:43 but it goes back pretty far.
01:44 We extended about maybe 30 yards.
01:47 So it's got, and it now sits up on that bluff,
01:51 and you've got this sort of valley in front of it,
01:53 which is the dry wash that runs along the fifth hole,
01:56 down the left of the fifth hole,
01:58 cuts across the sixth tee,
02:00 now is extended and runs across.
02:02 It's turf, but the landform of that baranca
02:07 cuts across in front of it.
02:09 So it's really, it's pretty dramatic up into that green.
02:12 (upbeat music)
02:15 (bell ringing)