Keith Rhebb has worked on some of the most impressive new golf designs of the past generation; now, he’s helping design what might wind up being some of the most important courses of the next generation. As a shaper for Coore and Crenshaw, Rhebb’s fingernails have dirt underneath them from an astonishing lineup of sites: Barnbougle Lost Farm in Australia, Yokohama Country Club in Tokyo, Cabot Cliffs in Nova Scotia, and Streamsong Red and the Sheep Ranch back in the United States — among others. But in 2016, Rhebb and partner Riley Johns turned out a landmark renovation at the Winter Park 9 in Winter Park, Florida — a municipal golf course, fun and affordable and thoughtful and cost-efficient (the renovation came in at just $1.2 million), in a state full of golf courses that commonly are none of those things. More recently, Rhebb and Johns have taken the fun-first ball and run with it at Michigan’s Forest Dunes, where their new par-3 course is scheduled to open in mid-2020.
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LYING FOUR: You’ve worked in some pretty far-flung places — Tasmania, Tokyo. I suppose Nova Scotia isn’t far-flung compared to those places, but it’s far-flung to me. Do you enjoy heavy-duty travel, or is that just part of the deal in your business?
KEITH RHEBB: It’s one of those things that you just accept: you’re gonna be on the road. You don’t really get a home gig very often, so you’re typically on the road. If you can accept that and accept the uncertainty of this industry, it’s really good. A lot of people say, “Oh that’s so exciting that you get to do that,” and it is, but if you’re not used to that uncertainty then it can be a drain.
LYING FOUR: I’m fascinated by Yokohama Country Club. What was it like working on that project?
KEITH RHEBB: You know, the cultural part of it was really cool. My wife would come out and visit quite a bit. She came up during the Cherry Blossom Festival. We just hung around the cities, and that was really cool. On the work side, it was really neat. The whole project was paid for by taking fill from projects around the city. Since you’re land-locked, it’s very expensive to haul dirt out of the city. So we got paid to take all the dirt, and we filled a lot of the fairways up and used that to reshape the golf course. It was neat to see how they approach golf there. The work side was neat, but the cultural side was even better.
LYING FOUR: Do you ever have to stop and pinch yourself to have done so much work with Coore and Crenshaw? In a hundred years, people will talk about them the same way we talk about Alister MacKenzie today.
KEITH RHEBB: There are some times when you get on a project and you’re working, and you’re focused on golf — but every now and then, you’ve gotta look up and take in the beauty of the site and the opportunity that you have to have to be working with some of the nicest people in the industry. Just to have that opportunity to be creative and work for these guys — I’m very blessed to have been working for them as long as I have and still working for them. It’s helped me move into my own design business. It’s been really exciting.
LYING FOUR: One thing Bill Coore talks about is how important it is to him that micromanagement be avoided. Has that influenced how you work with other people when you’re working on your own projects?
KEITH RHEBB: Yeah, absolutely. Every day that you go in to work for Bill and Ben, there’s no fear of failure. You don’t have any fear of making a mistake or doing something wrong in the design. It really gives you the freedom to go, “Maybe I’ll try a little something here.” And Bill will look at it and say, “Yeah this is really good,” or “Maybe we’ll change this a little.” It’s the type of freedom to not question yourself a little bit. It’s easy to get in your own mind and start overthinking something, and once you start overthinking, that’s typically when something gets overcooked. Bill and Ben really know how to teach you to know what you’ve got and to know when to walk away. You can get there and keep changing something and changing something, but sometimes you’ve gotta just walk away for a while, or maybe even have someone else work on it. That’s one thing that Riley and I really work on in our designs: when someone comes in to work with us, we really give them the freedom to do something neat. We give them an idea of what we’re looking for, and then let them use their creativity to do something neat. It’s been a big influence in the way I approach things. I think the biggest thing with Bill and Ben, it’s not just what you’re learning about design; it’s also learning about things that are personal: how you treat people, how you work with people. The model of how they go about their projects and treat their clients sticks with you. Somebody on site could be shoveling a ditch, and Bill will treat them as importantly as he treats the owner of the site. They’re so humble, and it shows.
LYING FOUR: Tell me about the Sheep Ranch. I know it’s a bunkerless concept, but then I saw some photos on Instagram recently that showed grass bunkers. What’s that course gonna look like?
KEITH RHEBB: It’s gonna have a different character from all the other courses [at Bandon Dunes]. It’s gonna be wide open. You’ll be able to look across that whole property and take it all in. It’s another one of those things where you almost have to pinch yourself — when you first get that call and they ask you, “Hey, would you like to go to Oregon and go work at Bandon?” I’m like, “I’m hopping in my truck right now! I’m headed that way!” It’s very special. What Bill and Ben did to that property — someone else might have tried to put more of a thumbprint on it to say “this is all mine” and try to erase what was already there. But Bill really tippy-toed around those contours and figured out ways to use them as, say, a green complex or other ways of using what was there. The contours from what was left over with the original Sheep Ranch was some of the neatest stuff I’ve seen. It looked like it’d been there for 200 years. The challenge that we had when we were building golf there was how do you make the new stuff that you shape look like the old stuff, and make it look like there isn’t a disconnect between the two? I think when that thing opens up, it’s gonna look like it’s been there for hundreds of years. It was really cool to be back on another Keiser project; this was my third project working for them as an owner, and it’s always a great time. They really appreciate what we do, and they show that, so that’s really neat.
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LYING FOUR: How did you get into golf course design and shaping?
KEITH RHEBB: In the beginning, I really just fell into it. I interviewed with a golf course design company in Lincoln, Nebraska, and one thing happened after the next. Doors opened. I worked with Coore and Crenshaw on a project at Colorado Golf Club when we were the contractor. I kinda hit it off with Dave Axland and a lot of the crew. And about a year and a half or two years down the road, they asked me if I was interested in coming out to Clermont, Florida, to work on Sugarloaf Mountain. Working for them for almost 13 years now has really given me the ability to be a sponge — working around them and listening and learning. And seeing the model that Bill and Ben have — having two people who can bounce ideas off each other, I worked that into my designs. I connected with Riley Johns, and we started our partnership. We enjoy that collaboration, how our skills mesh, and the excitement of a new project — bringing people in and arranging the puzzle pieces of different people to make it successful. It was never one of these things where I was a little golfer or striving to be a designer. Even when I was with Coore and Crenshaw for all those years, it was never my goal to be a designer. But as you learn how great Bill and Ben are, you can’t help but start striving for something a little more — to take those things you learn from them and continue that in your own designs. And Bill and Ben are so gracious. They’re excited for Riley and I when we have projects; they say, “Go do this. We’re good here on this project, but go do that.” And then I still have a home to come back to and work with them. It’s never been like, “Oh, you’re going out on your own — good luck.” I still have the ability to fill in and work with them, and they give me that flexibility. I think that doesn’t happen very often, when someone is so gracious with that type of stuff.
LYING FOUR: When you’re shaping on a project, what does an average day look like for you?
KEITH RHEBB: You get there in the morning, and maybe you look at what you shaped the day before in the morning light — look at how the shadows fall, look at the horizons of what you shaped. Just give it a once-over. Then you put on the headphones, put on some music, hop in the machine, and start shaping stuff — seeing how things flow and come together. Things that might happen on the site, or a constraint, can become something pretty neat. You just have fun. It is a lot of fun when you can get in a machine — get in your office — and get in a zone and not have to deal with anybody. For me, those are the most fun times: just being creative. I think those are the moments when you have to pinch yourself and be appreciative of where you are. There are times when you’re shaping something, and you look at it and think, “Oh man, it’s really starting to come together.” Then, toward the end of the day, you get off the machine and take a final walk around, look at what you worked on that day, and see what it looks like in the evening light. And if Bill and Ben are on-site, then maybe the next day you do a whole course walk-through to assess what’s going on with the whole project — “what’s going on with this hole,” “are we repeating ourselves over here,” “what’s the length of this hole?” That’s it. It’s kind of simple when Bill and Ben are out there. A lot of times, they’re just the editors on the stuff we’re doing. Bill always sets us up with an amazing routing and really sets us up for success as we’re going out to shape something.
LYING FOUR: Let me ask you about Winter Park. There are probably a thousand different ways to answer this question, but how was that project different than projects you’ve worked on with Coore and Crenshaw?
KEITH RHEBB: I think the biggest thing — and the thing that Riley and I enjoyed most about that project — is that a lot of times, when we’re building golf, we’re building golf on a coastline or somewhere detached from a community. With Winter Park, we were right there on the city streets of Winter Park. And there are people there, walking by, walking their dog; or their might be a nanny there with one of the kids, and she’d come by every day, and the kids just love watching the equipment. So we’d always talk to them. We created these relationships and friendships, just through the interactions with the community that we were working in. We were really in a fishbowl there, but we had people who would stop by and bring us brownies. We were on a first-name basis with people, and we had support. You had people who were almost like ambassadors of our project to other people around the community. That was the biggest thing: really getting the pulse of the people who live there and were getting ready to play it. We had those people come out on days when we did sprigging, and they helped grass the fairways of Winter Park. It was a great way of integrating the community into our process and construction. That doesn’t happen very often — you’re disconnected from the people that you’re building it for, and a lot of times you don’t see that until you come back out.
LYING FOUR: Did that project give you any insight into how municipal golf courses should be viewing their futures — what municipal golf courses are doing right, and what they’re doing wrong?
KEITH RHEBB: I was out today, just biking my dog, and thinking that I wish people would look to the model of what’s happened at Winter Park — and take the ball and run on their own municipal projects, and see that they can be better. It doesn’t take millions and millions of dollars to make a project successful. I really wish that it’d give these communities a little more of a roadmap to making this happen. And I’m in no way saying that we’d somehow have to be involved in that; anybody could just say, “We could be better.” Just like the task force that first looked into redoing Winter Park said, “Look we can be better. This is not good” There was nothing there that a superintendent could do, or anything that could turn that place around at that point. The grass and irrigation were shot; there were roots growing through the greens. But a lot of times, people get this sticker shock thinking that it has to be millions and millions of dollars to redo these courses, and the fear gets into them, and they can’t move. Then they’re like, “Well this developer is telling us that golf is dying, so maybe condos would be better on this land.” It’s the easy out. The biggest thing is that I hope people see the story of Winter Park. Even in their first years of opening up, they were breaking even. Now they’re making upward of $150,000; they’re making a profit now. Seeing what it’s done for the community, and how it’s opened the doors of golf for anybody — I live here in Winter Park, and you can drive by and see the mix of people out there and enjoying it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the whole Boca National thing or not —
LYING FOUR: Somewhat. I’ve read Andy Johnson’s work on it.
KEITH RHEBB: The park district has hired someone to do the project, and the city was the people who were gonna have to pay for it. And the city said, “Well, wait a minute. Here’s an example down the road — why does it have to be this much?” They spent $24 million on the property, and they’re looking at putting another $28 million into it. That’s $54 million into a municipal golf project. I mean, are they ever gonna make that back? Or is it gonna be another example of golf supposedly “failing?” It’s a bad example.
LYING FOUR: It’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point.
KEITH RHEBB: I think the city tried really hard to change people’s minds, but you’ve also gotta know the community that you’re building for and how to explain it to them. A lot of people in the Boca Raton community thought, “If it doesn’t cost $54 million, then it’s not gonna be good. And if you spend $54 million on it, then it’s gonna be world-class.” You have to break people from that idea. Throwing a bunch of money at it doesn’t equal great golf. That’s the shift that a lot of people need to look at: just because it’s done for a reasonable price and with thought for where the money’s going doesn’t mean it’s cheap.
LYING FOUR: We have a municipal course here in Jackson that came into some money in the mid- to late Nineties, when a lot of new golf courses were being built around Mississippi. And they were your typical par-72, championship-length golf courses. And in hindsight, it was a moment in time for this municipal course, where they could’ve changed course and become something unique. But they doubled down and decided to try to compete with the bigger courses, which was the wrong decision. And they’ve been living with the consequences of it ever since.
KEITH RHEBB: That’s the biggest thing: where does change come from? Does it come from within, or someone coming from the outside and creating something different? That’s what Rob has done out at Sweetens. You have to come out of left field a little bit to shake things up. That’s what we try to do: try to think outside the box. That’s what we did for Lew Thompson out at Forest Dunes, building that short course for them. He gave us the guidelines and said, “I want a place where I can go out and play with my grandkids. I want people playing in eightsomes, listening to music, maybe kicking off their shoes and going barefoot, grabbing three clubs or one club, and just enjoying it.” It’s more about enjoying the people around you, being creative, and just being laid back. That’s something that’s gotta shift in our thinking. When you’re taking a new guy who’s never golfed before to a private club or something like that, think about how nervous that can be — “Is someone gonna say something? Are we gonna play too slow? How is this gonna go? Are they gonna enjoy it, or are they gonna be beat up and not like this game?” Take them to Winter Park or a short par-3 course, and give them the opportunity to see what this game is about and have fun — that’s one thing that I hope we get back to.
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LYING FOUR: What’s your favorite golf course?
KEITH RHEBB: Like to build, or to play, or to see?
LYING FOUR: To play. If you had one more round, where would you want it to be?
KEITH RHEBB: [long silence] That’s kind of a difficult question. Each one has their different things. That’s like when people ask me which one was your favorite to build; it’s just difficult. But Lost Farm — just being out there, having that opportunity with that raw land and lots of sand. Anything with sand is what you like to work with. There’s just something about that course and how much fun it was to build with Dave Axland and Bill. Bill gave Dave and I a lot of freedom to go out there and have fun. Dave has been a key person in my life, as I’ve gotten more into design; he’s been a great mentor. He’s someone that you can work with and collaborate with; you might be out there shaping something and you get stuck, and you can just hand it over to Dave, and he’ll work on something that you worked on. It’s like a painting that you hand back and forth — instead of one artist, you’ve got someone else filling in a couple of parts. So I guess I’d say Lost Farm. That was a special project to me. The Sattler family, going from potato farm to having someone of the best golf in Australia and the world — it’s just amazing.
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