All in the Family
The Fazio clan of golf course designers is busy all over the Metropolitan
Area,
but the most prolific may be the one about whom you know least.
By Merrell Noden
 Standing
on a muddy hill in Briarcliff Manor, high above what will soon be a dizzying
waterfall
cut
from rare
black
granite,
Tommy
Fazio
starts
to get a little excited. Words tumble from his mouth, and his gray-green
eyes flash. Forgive him: When you are 33 years old and are fortunate
enough to be present not only at the birth of a
course as stunning as Trump National, but also at the sky-rocket launch
of your own reputation – no, this isn’t the famed course
designer Tom Fazio, it’s his nephew – well, you’d be a little
excited, too.
Fazio points to his
feet, where a fat bundle of black pipes coils across the rutted brown
earth towards the top of the cliff. “We’re going
to pump 5,000 gallons a minute, a real Niagara Falls,” he says. “None
of this was in the original plan, but Mr. Trump loves this kind of stuff,
especially the eye candy.”
And as New Yorkers well know, what Mr.
Trump loves, Mr. Trump usually gets, either by building it or buying it.
The waterfall, for example,
will be nearly 100 feet tall and the pond from which it will fall will
wrap around the back of the 233-yard, par-three fourth hole like a moat. “You
wouldn’t want to fall off that sucker,” Trump warns. “We moved
3 million
cubic yards of earth. It’s the largest excavation in the history of Westchester
County.”
It also is the Met Area’s introduction to yet another designing
Fazio. Thus far, we’re up to four. First there was George, not only
a successful player in the 1950s but later a prolific architect. He worked
on his own for a few years
after retiring from competition, but the body of his portfolio – such
as Jupiter
Hills, in Florida, or a reworking of Apawamis, here in the Met Area –
was done over the years with his nephew Tom.
 Ah, yes, Tom Fazio, who is Tommy’s
uncle. He has three designs in the greater Met Area: the Oyster Bay town
course, on Long Island; Hudson
National, overlooking the Hudson in Westchester County; and his most
recent contribution,
Galloway National, near Atlantic City. Tom has been busy of late in
New Jersey. Having recently completed Pine Hill Golf
Club, a splashy new Eric Bergstol-developed daily fee in south Jersey,
just down the road from Pine Valley, he’s now overseeing construction
on The Ridge at Back Brook, a private club some 10 miles northwest of
Princeton. Pine Hill opened to raves in March; the Ridge is scheduled
to open next July.
We next heard of Jim Fazio,Tommy’s father and Tom’s
big brother, and who also worked with uncle George (you don’t need a
scorecard to keep track of all their labors; you need a family tree).
Jim is the designer of record for Trump National, in Briarcliff Manor,
and
is hoping this second Trump course will make as
big a splash as his first, Trump International. Since it opened in West
Palm Beach, Florida, last year, it has won numerous awards and was the
site of this year’s LPGA’s season-ending Tour Championship.
So Tommy – Jim’s
son, Tom’s nephew – is the fourth designing Fazio. He not only is overseeing
day-to-day design and construction of his father’s
layout at Trump National but he has designed and built another course
of his own: Great River Golf Club, in Milford, Connecticut. It already
has generated excellent buzz since it opened on the eastern banks of
the Housatonic River, just north of the Merritt Parkway, this past April
He also has laid out routings for two more Trump properties in Westchester
– lndian Hills and French Hills – although Trump has not
decided whether the former will be used for golf and the latter is now
running the gauntlet known as preliminary paperwork. Overall, Tommy
seems to
be the busiest Fazio of all in these parts.
Notwithstanding the fact that his last name is Fazio, Tommy accepts
that there is a certain amount of dues-paying to be done when you are
young and asking people to trust
you with acres of prime real estate and millions of dollars. To overcome
whatever qualms his clients might have, Tommy
offers one-stop shopping of a kind that has gone out of style in this
era of prima donna architects racing from site to site in private jets.
He
not only will design a course, but he’ll oversee
its construction, and he works on that course alone until it is finished. “All
l’m doing is what virtually all architects did 30 years ago,” he
says.
With his shoulder length dark hair, Tommy bears little resemblance to
his thickly bespectacled uncle. On site, in a blue t-shirt, shorts and
work boots, he looks more like a rock band roadie or a Renaissance courtier
who’s wandered off the canvas and onto the seat of the industrial golf
cart he uses to cruise around the property. “I go in to see Mr. Trump
in his office dressed exactly like this,” he says with a chuckle, “and
they say, ‘You’re here to see Mr. Trump?!’”
Recalling his own exhausting days doing grunt work like picking rocks,
Tommy takes special pride in training the workers he finds locally. “See
that guy?” he asks. “He was so unskilled. Now he’s a great excavator
operator. Anyone who comes to me and is conscientious and wants to work,
I will take and teach him whatever it takes. It’s so nice to see that
that guy who was working for $8 an hour now gets $15.”
According to family legend, Tommy was 10 when he first showed an
interest in building golf courses. His father was working with his uncle
on a couple of projects in Florida and the kid tagged along, trying to
be helpful wherever and whenever possible. Bitten by the bug, he later
spent a year at Mississippi State, studying landscape architecture, but
quickly realized he’d learn more on the job. So he fled to Italy, where
his dad was working on a course in Rome called
Marco Simone. For two years he labored at Marco Simone before returning to Florida,
again to work with his father. The first design of his own was Eagle
Marsh, in Jensen Beach, Florida, and was followed by Presidential Country
Club
in Miami and then Great River.
That he should go with the family flow is not unusual. Lots of course
architects’ kids grow up with bunkers for sand boxes. Comequently, golf
architecture has boasted three Joneses, two Maxwells, two Bells, two
Nicklauses, a bunch of Dunns and four Dyes. For the record, Tom’s son
Logan is part of his design team, while Tommy has a brother, Jim Jr.,
who works with their dad.
Tommy was working in Florida when he met his wife Gabrielle. They were
married six years ago, and as Tommy forewarned, if she hoped to see him
at all, she’d probably have to travel with him. But at least Tommy’s contracts
have included housing on site, or close to it.
By Trump standards, Trump National is actually a rather small project,
but it happens to be a personal favorite. “It’s a business I like
because I love shaping earth,” says Trump, who visits the Briarcliff
Manor site several days a week. “It’s not a big business relative
to building 90-story buildings opposite the United Nations."
The property was once Briar Hall Country Club. When Trump purchased
it for $8.5 million in 1996, it was nothing special, a tired, short track
dating to the 1920s. The front nine was too hilly, the back nine too flat,
and it demanded a number of frustrating blind shots. Worst of all, it
opened with two short and bland par fours.
Jim Fazio’s most ingenious brain storm was finding a spectacular way
to “fix” these two opening holes – with a little help from Trump. As
the two men were discussing Fazio’s design on the phone, Fazio ventured
that the course would have 16 unbelievable holes.
“What do you mean, sixteen?” demanded Trump. Before Fazio
could finish explaining his idea for the first two holes, Trump called
Carolyn Kepcher, his onsite manager at Briar Hall and had her bid on the
two houses standing across the ravine from the existing first green and
second tee. Soon they belonged to Trump who, with his familiar confidence,
predicts that Trump National will quickly take its place with the
three Westchester courses already in the Golf Magazine’s “Top
100 Courses in the World”: the two at Winged Foot, where Trump happens
to be a member, and the adjacent Quaker Ridge.
“To have a great course I had to figure out a way to use the very
large and very deep gorge that was created there many, many millions of
years ago,” Trump explains. “There were houses on one side of
the gorge but not on the other. I owned one side but not the other. Jim
said, ‘If you could get those houses, we’d have something truly
spectacular. We’re putting three bridges over that gorge. I won’t even
tell you what it cost us.’”
“There’s no such thing as a budget,” says Tommy, with an
I-won-the-lottery type of shrug. “You just spend the
money to do what you need to do. There’s no excuse for bad holes.”
Limitations come in the form of environmental regulations. In the town
of Briarcliff Manor they limit Fazio to “exposing” just 25 acres
at a time in order to minimize the possibility of run off. So he has completed
only the seven holes that occupy two fairly narrow parcels across the
road from the main parcel, where the predictably grand clubhouse is to
be built.
Those seven holes are breathtaking. The greenness of it all is enough
to bring you to your knees. Two holes wide and framed by gorgeous old
trees, this stretch of the course plays through wetlands, ponds and grand
swales
Tommy has bulldozed into existence. Immaculate rock walls built from all
that dynamited black marble offer sharp contrasts.
Beautiful as it is, there are hazards and challenges everywhere. No.
12, for instance, is a sweeping, 475-yard dogleg left par four. To
cut the dogleg is to court disaster, since wetlands and a pond guard
the left side. Then again, three deep bunkers await long drives down
the right. Eight months away from opening, the fairways were already nicer
than most greens. It is all seductively lethal.
The first Fazio to come to America, from Sicily, was Vincenzo,
Tommy’s great grandfather. He reached Ellis Island in 1905 and eventually
settled in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a blue collar town north of Philadelphia.
Vincenzo had six sons, the oldest of whom was Tom and Jim’s father,
Sal. As the oldest, Sal was expected to support the family, this being
the Depression.
 George. the next son, was also discouraged from pursuing his first
love, golf. But he persisted and went on to have a better than respectable
pro career. Not only was George a talented
teacher,
sought out by his fellow pros and by celebrities like Bob Hope, but he won a
number of tournaments, including the Canadian Open in 1946, and was one
of Ben Hogan’s victims in the legendary U.S. Open playoff at Merion in 1950.
With his career winding down in the late 1950s, George planned to open
a car dealership and run a few courses in the Philadelphia area, including
the Langhorne Country Club, which he bought expressly to be owned and
operated by the Fazio family. He gave no thought to designing golf courses
until an acquaintance who worked in real estate persuaded him to complete
the Atlantis Country Club in Tuckerton, New Jersey; it had been abandonned
mid-job by its original architect.
George was quickly hooked. Drawing inspiration from classic courses
like Merion and Pine ValleY (he’d served two years as club pro at Pine
Valley in the early 1950s), Fazio designed courses that, according to
Geoff Cornish and Ronald Whitten’s “The Architects of Golf,” “had
a gracefull and appealing appearance that belied their youthfulness.” He
also had great success redesigning courses like Oak Hill in Rochestcr,
New York, and Inverness in Cleveland for U.S. Open play. Both Jim and
Tom got their starts working for Uncle George, with Tom graduating to
partner in 1973. “If Uncle George had won that Open in 1950,” Tommy
says,“I might not be here now.”
Tommy’s task at Great River was made tougher by environmental rules
that forbade anything being removed from the site. By bulldozing roughly
1 million cubic yards of earth. “Tommy transformed what in many
places was jungle into 18 sculpted, linksy-feeling holes, almost all
of which feature water, elevation changes or both. Brilliant purple loosestrife
dot the marshes, and in places bullrushes tower high over the golfers.
Six holes run right along the river, with the front nine sitting perhaps
10 feet above the river, the back nine on a higher plain, most of it
about 70 feet above the river. From the tips, Great River is very tough
– 7,209 yards with ratings of 75.5/152 – but there are four shorter tee
options,
all the way down to 4,975 yards.
Every effort has been made to make this a top-notch golf experience,
from the cheerful young men who greet you at your car to the food in
the huge clubhouse. Tee times
are 12 minutes apart, there is no housing around the course, and there
is a superb practice area with six bunkers and a 300 yard driving
range. The $125 weekend green fee ($100 Monday to Thursday) is worn as
a badge of pride. “they’re the first three-figure public green fees
in Connecticut – because Great River’s four owners are convinced
it’s worth
it.
“We wanted to give people a resort type experience without having
to go to a private club,” says General Manager Al Lenoci Jr., one of
the four whose family owns United Properties, a real estate development
company in Fairfield. “There’s really nowhere to do that in our area."To
that end, he and his partners waited more than a year to open the course
until the clubhouse could also be finished.
The family’s reigning star for now is Tom Fazio, with seven
courses among GOLF MAGAZINE’s latest “Top 100 Courses in the U.S.” He
is the rare architect who gets to spend a lot of time at home, in Hendersonville,
North Carolina, where he makes breakfast for his children. ferries them
to soccer and little League games, and indulges his eccentric but endearing
love of Christmas by hanging ornaments year-round. Fazio is also a tireless
campaigner for the Boys and Girls Clubs, on whose national board he sits.
Golfers who’ve made the drive to Exit 3 on the New Jersey Turnpike and
played Pine Hill will be excited to learn of The Ridge at Back Brook.
It ought to be just as spectacular as Pine Hill and is slightly closer
to New York, though unlike Pine Hill, which has panoramic views of the
Philadelphia skyline, the Ridge is fairly remote.
Its owners, Joel and Pam Moore, knew Fazio’s work firsthand, as members
of Black Diamond Ranch,
in Lecanto, Florida. They insist that had Tom not agreed to design the
Ridge, the project would not have proceeded. “There wasn’t a second
choice,” Moore says.
Set in the rolling farmland of Hunterdon County, near the town of Ringoes,
The Ridge occupies a large piece of land, nearly 300 acres. When Tom
got his first glimpse of the property, he jumped at the chance to work
on it. “It has tremendous variety,” Fazio says. “Besides
the tree cover and forested areas and the streams running through it,
you have some major rock outcroppings and some very steep elevations
along the edges of the golf course. So you have these very dramatic land
features that create accent and framing and definition.” Nos. 9 and 18,
for instance, will play along the bottom and top, respectively, of the
ridge
that gives the course its name.
There will be no easing into this course. From a par-five opener that
plays over Back Brook twice in its 527-yard path, through No. 8, a par
three boasting two drastically different tee sites, the course figures
to stun golfers visually even as it’s whipping their butts. “The
‘wow’ factor will be redundant on this course,” Fazio says. “Just
when you think you’ve played the best nine holes you’ve ever played, you’ll
step up to No. 10 and start all over again.”
The Ridge will be golf only, with a maximum of 275 members. Here, too,
the practice facility should satisfy the most serious golfers, covering
20 acres and induding short game and putting areas. Golfers will
have every option to get around the 7,127-yard, par-72 course: They can
ride or walk with a caddie. The Ridge plans to have a fulltime caddie
master when it opens next summer.
When you consider all these projects within driving distance of each
other, it is hard to believe that there is no rivalry among the Fazios.
Tom even believes that the time has come for the next generation of Fazios
to take over. But when they gather for Thanksgiving or Christmas, either
in Jupiter or Hendersonvllle, for a traditional Italian feast, the talk
rarely turns to golf course routings or preferences in turf grass. It’s
how the kids are doing or Tom’s work with the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs.
Because Tommy and the rest of the Fazio family can let their works,
in the Met Area and beyond, do all the talking for them. |
