Jerry Matthews: The Most Prolific Architect in Michigan Golf History

Walk onto a public golf course anywhere in Michigan and the odds are good that Jerry Matthews touched the routing, the bunkering, or the way the greens drain. Ron Whitten of Golf Digest called him "the most prolific golf architect in Michigan history, by a wide margin," and the numbers back the title. Over a 60 year career, Matthews completed more than 100 original designs in the state and nearly 200 remodels. Stymie currently lists 46 of his open courses, almost all of them within Michigan's borders.

A Michigan State Education, a Family Trade

Matthews grew up inside the business. His father, W. Bruce Matthews, had learned design from the Boston firm of Stiles and Van Kleek in the 1920s, worked through the Depression as a Michigan greenkeeper, and opened a design firm in Lansing in the mid 1950s. Jerry was 12 the summer he first joined the maintenance crew at Green Ridge Country Club, where his father was superintendent, and he kept that summer job through college.

He earned a degree in Landscape Architecture from Michigan State in 1956, served a stint as a U.S. Army officer in Alaska (he later returned to design Chena Bend in Fort Wainwright, the farthest north military course in the country), and then went back to MSU for bachelor's and master's degrees in Urban Planning. In 1960 he joined his father to form W. Bruce Matthews & Son. By 1979, with Bruce easing into retirement at the family-owned Grand Haven Golf Club, Jerry took over as president of Matthews & Associates, PC.

The Modified Minimalist

Years before minimalism became fashionable in American golf, Matthews was already preaching a softer version of it. "Mother Nature provides the best landforms for golf," he told Whitten in the late 1980s, "but isn't the best at golf course architecture. She doesn't provide everything. Doesn't provide the strategies or the sparkle that make for a great golf hole. The designer has to massage that out of the land."

That meant routing courses that respected wetlands instead of fighting them, building greens that fit the terrain, and finding what his longtime associate Paul Albanese described as the property's anchor hole: usually a short downhill par 3 over water. Matthews would scout for that hole first and route the rest of the course around it. You can see the formula at work in the dramatic short threes at Greystone Golf Club, at Timberstone, and on the inward nine at Hawk Hollow.

A Decade of Top-Five Public Courses

From the late 1980s through the mid 2000s, Matthews produced a remarkable run of public courses that landed inside Golf Digest's annual Best New Public lists. Michaywe Hills in Gaylord took third place in 1988. Timber Ridge Golf Club in East Lansing followed in fourth place in 1989. Elk Ridge in Atlanta finished runner-up in 1992. St. Ives in Stanwood landed at fifth in 1997. Timberstone, his Upper Peninsula course in Iron Mountain, placed third in 1998. Sundance in Kewadin earned another third place finish in 2006.

His other most-cited designs include The Majestic at Lake Walden (1994), Hunters Ridge in Howell (1995), and Bucks Run Golf Club in Mount Pleasant, his 2000 build that still rates a 146 slope from the tips. He also expanded the original nine-hole course at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island into the modern 18-hole Jewel, a project he completed with his irrigation specialist Carol Colein, whom he later married at the hotel.

Quiet Authority and an Environmental Streak

Matthews never courted publicity the way some of his contemporaries did. He stayed close to home (a self-described reluctant flyer), worked mostly in Michigan with occasional projects in Indiana, Ohio, and Virginia, and put his name on courses that filled tee sheets rather than glossy magazine covers. His peers noticed anyway. He served as president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1994 and was inducted into the Michigan Golf Hall of Fame.

Ray Hearn, his chief designer from 1986 to 1996, said Matthews's respect for natural ecosystems showed up in every routing. Unlike many architects of his generation, Matthews never groused about wetland protection laws. He treated them as a design constraint to work inside, not a problem to engineer around. In 2014, at 79, he laid out a nine-hole course called Northport Creek that ran entirely on solar power; Golf Digest gave it that year's Green Star Environmental Award.

A Three-Generation Legacy

The Matthews name spans three generations in Michigan golf design. Bruce taught Jerry. Jerry trained his nephew, Bruce Matthews III, in the 1980s, and brought Paul Albanese into the firm in 1992. From 1993 onward, he also taught Golf Course Design and Construction Techniques at Michigan State's Turfgrass program, sending a generation of superintendents into the field with a designer's perspective on how the work actually gets built.

Matthews died on September 15, 2022, at age 88, at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, hours after receiving a standing ovation at an event celebrating his career. He had just come out of retirement in 2019 to co-design the Silver Nine at Saskatoon Golf Club with Albanese, and was discussing another collaboration at the time of his death. The work, like the man, never really stopped moving.

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