BOLTON, Massachusetts — International Golf Club still has its Pines Course, but by no means is the current version remotely close to looking like the one that opened in 1956. At one point it was heralded as the longest golf course in the world — stretching to a mammoth 8,325 yards.
Renowned course architects Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw are responsible for the new look, which is a complete re-routing.
The totally revamped layout is fully two-thirds of a mile (1,200 yards) shorter than its predecessor and occupies 15 new corridors of play, including one that crosses perpendicular to three of the old, abandoned holes. The new 15th and 18th are only a fleeting resemblance to their previous incarnations that were the ninth and 18th holes, respectively. Only the par-3 sixth hole across a pond embodies anything approaching a similar structure to what used to be there, the old 13th hole.
This was no renovation. This was more like a blow-up-the-place ordeal, except that Coore and Crenshaw are not the type to rely upon dynamite and mass bulldozer grading when a subtler, hand-crafted approach is better suited to achieve the naturalistic look they are after. “We wanted it to look like it was embedded in the native New England landscape rather than built on top of the site,” Coore says.
That meant maximizing use of the native topography for green sites, exposing sandy waste areas, revealing any underlying rock, and routing the holes through and around marshland and old ponds without insisting on forced carries.
Golf on this rolling, well-treed 665-acre property dates back to a nine-hole course in 1901. In the mid-1950s, Geoffrey Cornish, then the dean of New England course architects, was hired to create an expansive 18-hole layout over the eastern half of the property, most of which was naturally well-draining sandy soil and thus ideal for golf. That course was subsequently lengthened and toughened by Robert Trent Jones Sr. in 1972.
In 2001, Tom Fazio took the more rugged western part of the property and created a second 18-hole layout, The Oaks Course. Together, the two courses formed one of New England’s only 36-hole private membership clubs. Meanwhile, most of the adjoining old, short nine-hole layout was preserved for public access in the form of Twin Springs Golf Club.
Over the years, International Golf Club has seen several ownership changes, including a stint as a corporate outpost for ITT, then as a resort property under the Starwood Hotels & Resorts flag, and more recently under ownership by a private partnership that in late 2020 sold the club to Escalante, a golf-oriented investment firm that specializes in re-energizing underperforming golf assets. Among its other recent acquisitions are Black Diamond Ranch in Florida, Clubs of Dove Mountain in Arizona, Kingsley Club in Michigan, and Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club in Oregon.
As evidence of its commitment to reviving International, Escalante undertook several major steps. It hired architect Tripp Davis to freshen up the Oaks Course in time for a LIV Golf event in 2022. It also kept veteran club superintendent Michael Galvin on board to ensure continuity of maintenance. And it convinced the team of Coore and Crenshaw to undertake a complete overhaul, without any restriction as to the scope of a re-routing.
Back in 2006, Coore walked the property and prepared a re-routing for a potential group of investors — a business deal that did not pan out. But when Escalante acquired the club, Coore’s routing plan was still in the club’s files. Unchanged in basics, it became the basis of the total overhaul. The course closed prior to the 2023 and has continued through 2024 with hopes of an anticipated reopening for light play in the fall. Yardage for the par-71 layout will range from 4,651 to 7,103.
Coore is legendary for his method of design build. It starts with spending days just walking the site with little more than a map, note pad and candy bar in hand as he looks for natural green sites and interesting contours. The idea is to generate a site specific set of holes that fit easily on the land and require minimal earth moving while making use of natural surface drainage.
The design/build method he and his partner rely upon entails the services of a trusted in-house crew of shapers, in this case led by Coore & Crenshaw veteran team member Zach Varty. He’s the kind of shaper who understands the esoteric lingo that architects invoke. If you transcribed that talk and read it out loud you would not find a complete sentence, nor even a completed thought. They communicate in the field like trusted friends or a married couple (without the shouting), seamlessly referencing a litany of standard references to golf features — the “16th green at North Berwick,” “17th fairway at Cabot Cliffs” — immediately known to everyone in the design business.
Along the way, the course got an entirely new, Toro irrigation system with 1,300 heads, each of them independently controllable to limit usage of water. Installation, along with much of the hand labor on sodding, drainage and bunker liners was subcontracted out to the firm of Landscapes Unlimited.
The grassing plan features a variety of fescues for the tees, fairways and rough, ensuring a firm, fast surface down the middle and a tawny, multi-hued texture on the periphery. The greens, all built anew, are outfitted with 007 Bentgrass. The bunkering is sparse and relaxed, leaving lots of room for ground-game approaches and rollouts for wayward approaches.
Coore’s routing at International allows the underlying landforms to come to life and establishing the fairway contours, without help of a bulldozer. Where supplemental material was needed to create a tee or a shoulder of a green, the underlying soil provided the material, in the process yielding large open sand pits that in turn, became prominent features in their own right once dug out. They now gave the place a scruffy, hand worked look akin to a Pine Valley or Tobacco Road.
The result, as members and their guests will soon find out, is a refreshing update of a golf course that had dated itself. No one who appreciates course design should regret its passing. Along the way, the club is slated to get entirely new structures to replace the ski chalet-themed clubhouse, pro shop and meetings rooms that constituted the earlier property.
