BELLEAIR, Fla. – Standing on the incline rising from the Intracoastal Waterway to Belleair Country Club’s clubhouse, it might not look like a work crew is restoring a classic golf course. To a casual observer, it looks more like the crew has demolished one. 

Everything is dirt, piled high in places, flattened in others as the earth tumbles down to the salt water. There’s not a blade of green grass to be seen for acres. Trees have been chopped out, a pond has been drained, tractors and work trucks bustle about the site some 20 miles west of Tampa. A steady breeze off the nearby Gulf of Mexico throws a layer of dust onto everything. It looks lunar, only in brown. 

But looks are certainly deceiving. 

Architect Jason Straka in June was midway through a major face-lift of Belleair Country Club’s West Course, with a reopening slated for November. In order to save the original Donald Ross layout, which the private club says is the oldest continually operating course in Florida, Straka first was tasked with erasing decades’ worth of alterations that dampened the intent of the original design, often burying Ross’s sublime work beneath good intentions. 

“People would come out here and see all this dirt being moved, and ask, ‘How can you be restoring things when you have to move all that dirt around?’” Straka said. “I remember one of my colleagues who does a lot of restorations too, and he said that so much of these restorations and time and budgets actually go into undoing a lot of things that have been done in the past 10, 20, 30 or 40 years.”

Golf began alongside the sound at Belleair in 1897, and Ross – one of golf’s most-revered course designers – was commissioned to expand the club’s offerings to 36 holes that opened in 1915 with the West Course above the Intracoastal Waterway and the East Course tucked inland. Ross returned a decade later and reworked both 18s, leaving detailed plans and diagrams of his designs. 

The inland East Course has lost much of its Ross flavor over the years, but the West was still championed as Ross’s original design. Only it wasn’t. Multiple renovations had changed the flavor of the course, with greens losing their edges and being pushed high into the air while bunkers shifted, changing shape and depth as their edges were muted. Strategic angles introduced by Ross were lost as fairways were narrowed, and greens lost their original shape, edges, contours and size. 

A Ross-designed bunker and its edges are restored to their original intent at Belleair. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

Enter Straka, who serves as current president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. 

“There were still a lot of Donald Ross features out there, but they were buried,” Straka said. 

To reintroduce those original Ross features, Straka turned to historical records stored at the Tufts Archives at Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina, where Ross lived for years. Straka was able to acquire photography and diagrams of Belleair’s West Course that showed the course in detail after Ross’s 1924 renovation to his own layout that reopened in 1925. 

Straka and his crew also could find much of Ross’s original work in the ground at Belleair. Greens edges were still there, often buried under several feet of renovations. Old sprinkler lines were clues to original fairway contours. Abandoned bunkers and edges could be found in the dirt. Coupled with the photos and Ross’s diagrams, Straka set out on what he calls a sympathetic restoration, trying to reestablish Ross’s features in fine detail while adjusting some elements, such as fairway bunkers, to accommodate the modern game and the distances golf balls now travel. 

“We were trying to mimic, or recreate, every bunker edge, every green shape, every green contour as much as we could uncover and find, and then bring that back to life – including all the strategy that goes with it,” Straka said. “Here, I think what’s neat about it is that we were able to uncover all the old plans and the restoration plans, then turn those into working documents. 

“We literally took all his cross-sections through all the greens, every cop mound, every bunker, and when we did modern-day greens plans or modern-day grading plans, we followed his cross-sections. He didn’t do a grading plan like we did, but we turned his plans into our grading plan.”

The historical research shed some light on Ross, whose most famous public-access course is Pinehurst No. 2. The greens at No. 2 are often called turtle backs, with the centers of the putting surfaces often perched above the natural grade and fall-offs in multiple directions repelling even slightly wayward shots. 

At Belleair’s West Course, Ross’s greens sat flatter on the ground, often with runoffs and hard edges in one direction but certainly not perched high in the air, Straka said. And these greens often featured extreme internal contours, as noted in the historical photography. But over the decades the greens of the West Course had grown in elevation, either through design or by maintenance practices in which the putting surfaces were top-dressed with sand, often gaining several feet of elevation while burying internal contours. 

Straka has strived in this renovation to reestablish Ross’s original contours and edges. 

“To the best of our abilities, these are his greens,” Straka said as he toured the work in progress, often pulling up the historical photos on his phone to make comparisons to what he could see in the dirt all around him. 

A postcard from the 1920s showing the fourth green at Belleair (Courtesy of Belleair)

One prime example is the par-3 fourth hole, which plays downhill toward the Intracoastal Waterway but several hundred yards removed from the salt water. Ross’s original design offered a prime view of the Intracoastal beyond the sixth fairway. But in the following decades, a pond was constructed beyond the fourth green near the sixth fairway, and its wide dam blocked the downhill view toward the Intracoastal. Then the fourth green was pushed up several feet above the surrounding terrain, with runoffs in all directions that made for a difficult approach shot and even more difficult recoveries. 

“No. 4, back when they redid it in the early 2000s, that green ended up getting pushed way up in the air,” Straka said. “What happened, they had added the irrigation lake on the side of the hill nearby and they created a dam on the back end of it, then somebody came out and said now we can’t see the water in the Intracoastal. So they artificially built the fourth green up several feet so at least when you were standing on the green, you had some view of the water. But it blocked everything out in front of it. 

“So that green became impossible to play to, because you were hitting to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle and everything fell off around it. So we’ve lowered that green back down to its original grade, we got rid of the dam on the pond, and you actually can see all the water from the tee shot because it’s up so high, roughly 30 feet above the bay. You’re going to have this epic view out across that green.”

Straka said Ross wasn’t afraid to break with expectations in other ways besides his greens. Ross was enough of an artist to know the general rules of course design and to break those rules when he saw fit. Much of his originality, though, had been replaced in various renovations at Belleair. 

“It’s funny because some of the stuff, you have these kinds of, I don’t want to say rules but maybe guidelines that people get used to in modern design,” Straka said. “Like for example, people say a long par 4 needs to have a large green. For me, I don’t particularly agree to that – it could be, but it doesn’t have to be. Here, we’re actually putting things out there that were per his plan, his design. There were small greens on long par 3s, long par 4s. Meanwhile over here, No. 10 has a massive green on a relatively short par 5 with a lot of movement to it and a lot of interesting pins. And so there weren’t necessarily those kinds of rules that were followed here at all.”

The new seventh green is being built on a point of land that wasn’t available to Donald Ross. (Jason Lusk/Golfweek)

Straka is, however, deviating from the original Ross design in one big way. He replaced an existing par 3 on the front nine with a new seventh hole that plays to an incredible dollop of land that extends into the Intracoastal Waterway, creating a dramatic one-shotter that plays downhill across saltwater. The land where the green sits was not available to Ross, but a spring house had been constructed alongside the water decades ago, and the point of land built up over time. The club didn’t own this nugget sticking out into the Intracoastal, but a long-term lease was arranged with local authorities that allowed Straka access to the new green site, which has been reinforced with bulkheads. 

There’s no telling if Ross would have built such a green if the land had been available to him, but there’s zero doubt it will be one of the prettiest waterside holes in Florida. 

“It’s interesting because if anybody was to have a criticism while we’re trying to do a true restoration, it’s that we added a new hole and we took out what we deemed as one of the weakest holes on the golf course,” Straka said. “Yes, but then you look at the setting and what the hole is going to become, and those are tough decisions to make. But for any golfer who goes now and looks at that green, you’d say, ‘Why wouldn’t you do that?’ 

“But even then, that style has to match everything else. That’s why we included the cop mounding, or inverted bunkers if you will. We added those to that hole so when you’re looking out at the landscape, it flows from one hole to the next hole and even into the new hole. That parcel of land, when he built this course, wasn’t even a parcel of land. … Ross didn’t even have the opportunity to do anything with it. Would he do it or not? That’s a guess.”

No. 6 at Belleair, with a graphic of how the hole will look with the new seventh green beyond when finished (top), and an aerial photo of No. 6 from before the restoration (Courtesy of Belleair)

There’s frequent debate in golf involving renovations, where new holes and features are introduced to a course, versus restorations in which the original designer’s ideas are more closely followed. There’s a wide range of gray area between the two. Is the new hole at Belleair, as stunning as it will be, enough to push this away from a restoration project and closer to a renovation? And does it even really matter? 

“Every architect and every writer, I think, defines it differently,” Straka said. “If you’re talking about doing a restoration, with Belleair as an example, are you restoring it back to 1915? Is it back to 1924 (before the 1925 reopening)? Is it later than that? For us, we’re trying to return it to some semblance to 1924 because Donald Ross made changes for specific reasons. …

“Almost every architect likes to fiddle with a course or make improvements. If you think you’ve got it almost exactly right, 100 percent the first time, you’re fooling yourself. Even here, he came out and looked at how the golf course ebbed and flowed and changed nearly 10 years (after his first work at Belleair), and he said, listen, there are things I want to change. And he did. For us, we’re restoring it back to the 1924 period. We’re putting back as many features as we can possibly find and uncover, just trying to bring that essence back.”

Ross would likely approve, and just as importantly, the members of Belleair certainly will. 

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