Devlin & von Hagge: Golf's First Pro-Architect Team

An Australian Tour Pro Meets a Florida Designer

Bruce Devlin won the Australian Open in 1960, turned professional in 1961, and went on to claim eight PGA Tour titles. While competing in the United States, he kept playing courses he liked, and many of them traced back to one designer in Florida: Robert von Hagge.

Von Hagge had apprenticed under Dick Wilson starting in 1955 and risen to become principal designer at the Wilson firm before opening his own practice in 1963. By the time Devlin approached him in the late 1960s about a redesign of The Lakes Golf Club in Sydney, von Hagge had already made his name moving dirt in places where the land gave you nothing for free.

The two formed what historians of the game describe as the first official architect-and-tour-professional design team. Their partnership lasted more than two decades and produced more than 150 courses worldwide. On Stymie alone, 49 of those designs remain open across 10 states.

Florida Without Apology

Devlin and von Hagge worked their first wave of American courses in the flat, sandy, water-table-high ground of South Florida. There is no shaping there worth keeping. Every mound, contour, and elevated green has to be built. Von Hagge's instinct, sharpened under Wilson, was to move earth aggressively and use water as both hazard and visual frame.

You see it clearly at Crandon Park Golf Course in Key Biscayne, opened in 1972. It is a public, oceanside layout that doubles as a wildlife preserve, and the shaping does the heavy lifting where the natural terrain runs out. Colony West Championship in Tamarac (1971) tells a similar story: 7,152 yards, slope 141, all carved out of pancake-flat Broward County.

The Florida portfolio also includes Club at Boca Pointe, Hunters Run, Card Sound Golf Club in Key Largo, and the Club Course at TPC at Prestancia. Their fingerprints sit on what Florida golf looked like through the 1970s and into the early 1980s.

A Tour Pro's Eye for the Shot

What Devlin contributed was the playing perspective. He had hit the shots tour pros actually try to hit: low cuts under wind, recovery shots from rough-edged sand, long irons into firm greens. Their layouts reflect that. The standout test on Stymie is Gleneagles Country Club in Plano, where the tournament tees stretch 7,021 yards and the slope rating climbs to 155. Nashville Golf & Athletic Club can play to 7,590 yards. Eagle Vail Golf Club in the Colorado Rockies posts a slope of 151 from a course routed through a mountain valley.

Their work in Texas mattered as much as their Florida output. The Tournament course at The Woodlands north of Houston hosted the Houston Open for years. Closer to the everyday Texan, Blackjack Course at Chase Oaks in Plano (1986, 27 holes) and the New Course at Raveneaux Country Club in Spring round out the Houston-to-Dallas footprint.

Reach Beyond the Sun Belt

The 49 courses on Stymie span 10 states from Florida to California, with stops in Ohio, Kentucky, Colorado, Tennessee, and New Mexico. The Devlin Von Hagge Course at Quail Hollow Resort in Painesville, Ohio, carries their joint name openly. Lakeside Course at Blackhawk Country Club in Danville, California, shows how their style traveled to private West Coast clubs. Brookview Lakeview at Boone Links in Florence, Kentucky, is the public-municipal end of the spectrum, the same hands working a leaner budget for the everyday player.

End of the Partnership, Start of a Template

The firm broke up in 1987. Devlin was preparing to join the Senior Tour, where he would eventually pick up a win in 1995 at the GTE West Classic and end a 23-year drought between victories. Von Hagge re-formed as Design Associates and kept building courses for another two decades, eventually producing Les Bordes in France's Loire Valley, considered by many his masterpiece.

What lasts from the partnership is the model. The architect-and-pro team became a template that now feels obvious. Jack Nicklaus's design business, Tom Weiskopf's, Greg Norman's: each owes something to two men who proved the format worked, and who left 49 courses on Stymie as evidence.

View all courses by Bruce Devlin  |  View all courses by Robert von Hagge