CHAPTER 7: Setting a New Course
The official number of golf course redesigns on the hilltop is lost to time, but Art Holmes’ guesstimate is better than most.
“We might have had five major changes and that’s quite a few,” suggested Holmes. “That’s because we had people at our own club who would do the work. It worked out really well.”
Holmes played every varsity sport except golf as a high schooler at St. Ambrose Academy in Davenport. But just before and long after he earned his college degree at the University of Miami, his game was golf.
“I played a pretty good game when I was very young,” he said, noting he carried a single-digit handicap playing the first 18-hole iteration of Short Hills he saw. “I kept telling myself don’t get too cocky about it because that’s when the golf course was much smaller, shorter, and played easier. That frontside many times, I hit 31, 32, or 33. The front side now is the much harder nine.”
The course Holmes and others played in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s was a good 300 yards shorter than the current iteration, and was 200 yards shorter than a revamped version that emerged from a 1964 makeover.
The ’64 redesign played to a par 73, and all of those additional 200 yards were packed into four new finishing holes on a muscled-up, 3,581-yard front nine that played to par 37.
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The new frontside finish started with a 420-yard par-4 sixth, followed by an uphill par-3 7th that could play as long as 174 yards. (That was plenty long in the days of persimmon, but was a cupcake compared to the existing par-3 fourth that could stretch to 250 yards.)
The 1964 revision brought into being the dastardly downhill-uphill-downhill-uphill eighth hole that Shorties still love to hate today. Behind it came a 585-yard par-5 ninth. It doglegged sharply to the right and was an early version of today’s classic finish to the outward nine.
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The new configuration got its first true test in June of 1965, when visiting Velie Cup crews made the turn muttering, Quad-City Times columnist John O’Donnell wrote, about the length and strength of the frontside final four.
Bud Hanson was the lower lounge bar manager who applied liquid salve to battered and injured egos between Velie Cup nines. “Man, you never heard such moaning,” he told O’Donnell.
There was much about which to mutter and moan. Only 14 of the 74 competitors managed rounds in the 70s that day.
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A week later, O’Donnell took on the new layout himself, honoring a time-tested tradition of sportswriters scamming free golf while confirming to the world the new Short Hills was a doozy.
“Yeah, man,” he wrote. “Short Hills could well qualify now as one of the genuine rugged courses of the Middle West.”
In 1967, Illinois’ best amateurs challenged the new Short Hills, and for the second time in as many hilltop-hosted Illinois Amateur Championships, the trophy stayed home. Jim Jamieson won by four shots, matching Johnny Hobart’s home course victory in 1950.
In 1972, the title of the third and last Illinois Am contested at Short Hills went home with a Lansing, Illinois, school teacher named Steve Benson. The real winner was that 8-year-old hilltop layout, particularly the challenging frontside final four.
“You have to stay out of trouble on the sixth hole through the 11th,” Benson told Dispatch sports editor Paul Carlson. “You can make birdies on those holes but you also can make doubles and triples if you let yourself get into trouble.”
Benson went on to an Illinois Golf Hall of Fame career as a Chicagoland club pro, but a pair of other players in the field did considerably better. Future PGA TOUR stalwart Jay Haas finished third as a teenager and a fellow the papers called Don Weibring finished T13.
That wouldn’t be young Don’s last visit to Short Hills.
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SHCC layout prior to 1964. Click to enlarge.
D.A. Takes the Case
Art Holmes himself is partially responsible for adding more muscle to the finishing frontside a couple of decades later. He was president when the club purchased 40 acres on the course’s western boundary. That’s land that today hosts the sporty par-3 fifth hole, which is guarded by a green complex that closely resembles those the TOUR pros encounter every summer just a few miles away at TPC Deere Run in Silvis.
There’s a reason for that.
The green complexes members play today at Nos. 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 18 are part of the most recent modernization of the century-old course. Each features a green guarded by deep bunkers and tightly mown chipping areas, the signature look for green complexes on every hole at Deere Run.
The figurative common ground between the two courses separated by fewer than five miles is the Dallas-based Golf Resources Group helmed by lead designer Donald Albert (aka D.A.) Weibring.
There are a number of stories that tie Deere Run’s short history to Short Hills’ own, but it all starts with membership’s decision to invest in another course revision a decade beyond the last of the glory days.
“We were in a cost-cutting mode and wanted to try and breath new life into Short Hills,” said John Callas, who had graduated from lifeguard to a leadership role on the board in the mid-1990s. “One of the ways to do it was to redesign the golf course.”
Working on the Short Hills board with Callas at the time were Doug Hultquist and Todd Raufiesen, who also were members of a John Deere Classic executive committee that then was deep in the process of courting Deere & Company to become title sponsor of the local TOUR stop.
Key to the tournament’s evolution was finding a new home for the event, one that could attract a better brand of pros. That new home, of course, would become Deere Run, which Weibring insists to this day found its canvas on a former Silvis horse farm partly because the folks at Short Hills saw it first.
The decision to try and recreate the magic that made Short Hills the place to be in mid-century meant considering all options in the mid-1990s, and among those the board considered was building a brand new course and clubhouse in an entirely new location.
The former Friendship Farms property was freshly on the market following the death of Tish Hewitt in 1992. The great-great-granddaughter of John Deere, she had transformed the pristine family-owned property into a world-renown breeding farm for majestic Arabian horses. In the aftermath of their wife and mother’s death, Bill Hewitt and his children tasked the Rock River Valley Trust with selling the 400-plus acres along the Rock, but only under the stipulation that it not be used for housing or commercial development.
A golf course would meet that unique requirement. And months before the tournament, the TOUR, and Deere & Company began considering constructing a TPC course on the Silvis property, a group of Short Hills board members toured the grounds with Weibring associate Sam Swanson.
“It was just a flyer,” Jim Smith recalled of a ride around the Friendship Farm grounds on a tractor-pulled hay wagon. “What a beautiful piece of property that was even then. It was just immaculate.”
But, he said of the brief flirtation, “It never got beyond just looking.”
Instead, the Short Hills board went full steam ahead with a more affordable plan to modernize the club's existing golf course and facilities. So, Weibring mentioned the magnificent Silvis property during a conversation about a potential new course for the Classic when he sat down for a September 1996 meeting with tournament leadership at an Oakwood abuzz in the presence of young Tiger Woods.
In April of 1997, a landmark agreement between Deere, the TOUR, and the tournament was announced. Three-time QC winner Weibring was on hand to hit a ceremonial tee shot after being commissioned to serve as the player design consultant for TPC Deere Run.
Five miles away, board members were teeing up the next iteration of Short Hills Country Club.
“It was back and forth until we hired Weibring,” Callas said, noting Hultquist’s tourney connections helped in contracting Weibring’s Dallas-based firm to draw up a new Short Hills design. “We basically did the redesign without a vote. Hultquist. Me. Tom Bracke. Bill Murphy. Gregg Ontiveros. Todd Raufiesen. Bill Daugherty was president. Basically, we decided if Short Hills continued the way we were, it wasn’t going to make it. We were losing ground to technology.
“We mortgaged the club. Put money into the pool, the clubhouse exterior. We changed the face of the club and we did the course redesign. That’s basically what you have today.”
A few years later, with Deere Run struggling to meet the TOUR’s business projections, Raufiesen and Hultquist led a very short-lived movement toward merging Short Hills with the semi-private Silvis course. The proposal was roundly rejected by longstanding Short Hills members and never got to a vote.
How to play No. 18/ J.R. Howell video.
A Modern Course Emerges
Although years later, Weibring’s recollections of the Short Hills project are feint, he was actively involved in the design.
Greg Chickris remembers seeing the par-3 fifth emerge in the designer’s mind’s eye one fall afternoon.
“He came out in blue jeans, with a 12-pack of beer in the cart,” Chickris said. “I followed him around and remember being on what is now the fifth hole, and it was nothing. The blue tee for the old 6 was all that was there. He created that hole out of nothing while I was sitting in the cart.
“They started building it and he said ‘Put a bunker over there,’ and they did. He was going to make the ninth hole like No. 13 today, and in order to do that, he was going to take out the hillside so you wouldn't have a blind approach on your second shot. What happened was they were trying to do it in February and they got the equipment stuck in the mud. So they didn’t move all that dirt, and it’s a great hole today.”
Several more great holes emerged on the backside. What had been that old-school dogleg par-5 11th where Babe Ruth once carried the lake and the trees to come within an “easy poke” of the green became today’s signature hole, an over-the-water par-3 11th. The old fairway The Babe circumvented became today’s straight-away par-4 12th. Patti Lee lobbied to make the 11th an even more memorable hole, with an island green, but the cost was prohibitive.
The near wholesale backside remake also produced a modern risk-reward par-5 13th along the course’s eastern border, as well as a short, water-fronted par-3 14th that’s been known to yield aces (see: Smith-Davis back-to-back, 2007). Next, came a reasonably tight but definitely drivable par-4 15th.
Behind those holes, what had been the testy par-4 14th became today's No. 16. A 15th hole par-5 that dared you to go for the green in two by carrying a deep ravine through a narrow tree-lined chute became today's 17th, where that damnable ravine still swallows missed shots.
The new Short Hills’ piece de resistance is the new, long, par-4 18th, with water left off the tee and water right on approach. The entire hole is a credit to then members Bill and Mike Murphy, who committed their Murphy Brothers Construction crews and equipment and moved much of the dirt for the entire turn-of-the-century renovation.
They dug the lake left of the 18th fairway from what had been a willow-filled bog and created the sloping descent to a green surrounded by steeply banked hillside to the left and a lake to the right that swallows any (make that many) errant approaches. It is a dandy hole that can make or break a round, and most Shorties will tell you it’s the best finishing hole in two states.
Lost to progress were two memorable over-the-valley par-3s and par-4 17th that was a backward lesser version of 13 today. Gone, too, is the historic par-3 finishing hole with a wide lake fronting the massive green that serves as the practice green today. Longtime members remember more than a few final tee shots that landed on the clubhouse roof. Many recall the fun diners had watching through the upstairs dining room windows, making wagers, as golfers took that tee.
The trade-off for bygone memories is a modern, challenging, yet playable track that draws many of the best players in Quad Cities to the hilltop today.
“I have a hunch that the old 18th hole as a par 3 was a really cool finishing hole,” said Brent Haydon, who came of age on the new Short Hills design and scarcely remembers the old. “But we have maybe the best 18th hole in the entire QCs now. So we improved on something that was really awesome.
“The layout now is a lot of fun. The front nine is so difficult. The back nine, if you’re playing well, can be so much fun. It’s just a really fun golf course to play.”