Dick Phelps: The Colorado Architect Who Made Golf Welcoming

Most golf architects spend their careers chasing the next private resort commission. Dick Phelps spent his designing the courses regular people actually play. Working out of Evergreen, Colorado for more than 40 years, Phelps built 47 courses listed on Stymie across ten states, the vast majority of them daily-fee or municipal layouts where greens fees buy more than just walking-on rights.

Richard M. Phelps, ASGCA Fellow, grew up in Colorado Springs and went east to Iowa State for landscape architecture, finishing his Bachelor of Science in 1961 and a Master of Landscape Architecture in 1963. He came back west, opened a practice in Evergreen, and never really left.

A Philosophy of Golfer-Kindness

Phelps coined his own term for how he laid out a hole: "golfer-kindness." The idea was simple. Show the player what they are up against. Visible trouble, no blind shots, no surprise water that only reveals itself on the second swing. He once put it this way: "I like to show golfers the trouble. They can flirt with danger all they want, but I'll do what I can to warn them first."

That philosophy did not mean easy. Colorado Springs Country Club carries a slope rating of 153 from the tips, among the most demanding tee sets in the state. What it meant was readable. A Phelps course will not hide a hazard behind a hill or tuck a creek where you cannot see it. The bunkers are positioned to argue with the line of play, not to ambush a wayward drive.

He also avoided what he considered architectural showing-off. No cavernous greenside traps engineered for Instagram. No island greens. No 8,000-yard back tees built so a tour pro could try to break a course record. He designed for the golfer who walks 18 on a Saturday morning, not the one who flies in for a member-guest.

Forty Years of Colorado Public Golf

The geographic concentration tells the story. Of the Phelps courses tracked on Stymie, roughly half are in Colorado. He built or remodeled what amounts to the spine of public golf in the Denver and Colorado Springs metros, including the Aurora Hills Golf Course, the eighteen-hole course at South Suburban in Centennial, and the courses at Foothills in Denver. He worked on military land, too, designing Cheyenne Shadows at Fort Carson, which still hosts soldiers and dependents at a fraction of resort pricing.

The high-altitude work mattered. A Colorado golf course is not a Florida golf course with snow. Thinner air carries the ball 10 to 15 percent farther, native grasses move differently in dry wind, and irrigation budgets stretch across hot summers and cold springs. Phelps understood the dirt and the climate. Cattails Golf Club in Alamosa, sitting in the San Luis Valley at over 7,500 feet of elevation, plays with a slope of 142 because the wind and the altitude do half the defense for him.

He stretched outside Colorado, too. Firewheel Golf Park in Garland, Texas became a 54-hole municipal complex that still ranks among the better public values in the Dallas area. Devils Tower Golf Club in Hulett, Wyoming sits literally in the shadow of the national monument, a nine-hole layout where you cannot help looking up at the volcanic neck on every tee. Catta Verdera in Lincoln, California shows him working in foothill terrain outside his usual elevation range, and it still plays with the same fair-but-firm character.

Recognition and Service to the Game

Phelps served as President of the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1980, a vote of confidence from his peers in a field that still leaned heavily toward the Robert Trent Jones lineage. He sat on the USGA Green Section Committee from 1980 to 1984, weighing in on agronomic standards that govern how every course in the country handles turf, water, and soil. The Colorado Golf Hall of Fame inducted him in 1998, and the Rocky Mountain Golf Course Superintendents Association named him an Honorary Lifetime Member in 2010 after four decades of affiliate membership.

Several of his courses won Golf Digest "Best New" recognition when they opened, which mattered more then than such awards do now. He collaborated with Hale Irwin on Indian Peaks in Lafayette and the Mountain Course at Cordillera in Edwards, two of the rare moments when a Phelps design tipped toward upscale resort work.

The Family Practice Continues

His son Rick Phelps started shadowing his father at age 10, joined the firm full time by the late 1980s, and bought the practice in 2006 when Dick semi-retired. The firm is now Phelps Golf Design, still working out of Colorado. Between father and son, the practice has touched more than 400 projects.

Dick Phelps never built an Augusta. He never courted the major-championship rotation. What he built instead was a long, steady portfolio of courses that working golfers could actually play, on land they could actually walk, at prices they could actually pay. The 47 courses he produced on Stymie are most of what that legacy looks like.

View all courses by Dick Phelps on Stymie