Dr. Michael Hurdzan: The Architect Behind Erin Hills

Most golf architects spend a lifetime trying to land a single major championship venue. Dr. Michael Hurdzan landed one with a public course in rural Wisconsin that charged $50 to play.

Erin Hills, the original design Hurdzan co-created with then-partner Dana Fry and Golf Digest architectural editor Ron Whitten, evolved over a decade from a daily-fee field of dreams into host of the 2017 U.S. Open. That arc captures something essential about Hurdzan: he has spent six decades arguing that public golf can be as strategically rich, environmentally smart, and architecturally honest as any private club, and then proving it course by course.

Stymie lists 42 American courses under his solo design credit, spread across 17 states from New York to Texas. Add his collaborations with Jack Kidwell and Dana Fry and the footprint pushes well past 70 American courses in our database alone. He has worked on more than 400 projects across five continents.

From the wrong side of the country club gate

Hurdzan was born in 1943 in Wheeling, West Virginia, into what he has called the "coal and steel proletariat" of the era. He started in golf at age 14 as an apprentice to Ohio architect Jack Kidwell, a former ASGCA president who would later become his business partner. Together Kidwell and Hurdzan designed more than 200 courses, most of them affordable public layouts across the Midwest. Stymie carries nine of those joint projects.

While building courses, he kept going to school. He earned a B.S. in turf management at Ohio State in 1966, then a master's and a Ph.D. in environmental plant physiology at the University of Vermont. He served as a Special Forces Green Beret and retired as a Colonel in the Army Reserve. The doctorate and the military background are not biographical decoration. They show up in the work, in how he thinks about soil chemistry, drainage, water use, and the discipline required to build a course on budget.

The modern bible of golf course design

In 1996, Hurdzan published Golf Course Architecture: Design, Construction, and Restoration. Many in the industry simply call it the bible. He has now authored seven books, including titles on green construction, practical facility design, and most recently golf law. Few architects working today have written one widely cited reference text. He has written the shelf.

That scholarship is part of why he became, in 2017, the fifth person in golf to win the non-playing "Grand Slam" of industry honors: the highest award from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, the ASGCA, and the Golf Course Builders Association of America. The only other names on that list are Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Byron Nelson, Robert Trent Jones Sr., Rees Jones, and Pete Dye.

Environmental design before it was marketing

Long before "sustainable" became a brochure word, Hurdzan was building courses that proved golf and ecology could share ground. He designed North America's first Environmental Demonstration Golf Course at Widow's Walk in Massachusetts, and the first Environmental Education Golf Course at Farm Links in Alabama. He has spent years arguing that fairways can host wildlife corridors, that wetlands belong in play, and that turfgrass selection is a moral question as much as a maintenance one.

You can see the philosophy at work in courses like Eagles Landing Golf Course in coastal Maryland, where the routing threads through tidal marsh, and at Crystal Highlands Golf Club in Missouri, where the ridges and ravines drive the strategy instead of fighting it.

The tournament-grade Hurdzan layouts

His public-access portfolio has real teeth. Cobblestone Creek Country Club outside Rochester carries a slope rating of 152 from the tips, one of the steepest tests in the Finger Lakes region. Blackthorn Golf Club in South Bend stretches to 7,136 yards with a 144 slope and has hosted multiple state and college championships. Ironhorse Golf Club in suburban Kansas City sits at 149 slope, a brawny daily-fee design with a routing built around a creek and rock outcrops.

Further east, Glenmaura National Golf Club in northeastern Pennsylvania is a 141-slope mountain test that has hosted Korn Ferry Tour qualifiers. Gibson Bay Golf Course in Kentucky tops 7,100 yards on a generous municipal site that punches well above its green fee.

Devil's Paintbrush is still his answer

Ask Hurdzan to name his best work and he does not pick Erin Hills. He picks Devil's Paintbrush, the windswept, treeless companion to Devil's Pulpit north of Toronto, both built for the founders of the Trivial Pursuit board game in the early 1990s. Both were named Best New Course in Canada by Golf Digest. He has said Paintbrush represents a kind of architecture, simple, cerebral, walking-paced, that golf largely abandoned during the spending boom of the 2000s and is only now starting to rediscover.

That instinct, build the course the land already wants and let strategy do the talking, is the thread running through his entire career. It is why a $50 public course in Wisconsin could become a U.S. Open venue, and why a daily-fee track in Indiana can keep a scratch golfer working for every par.

View all courses by Dr. Michael Hurdzan on Stymie