The fun increases exponentially when player-architects are presented with sites like those Crenshaw received at Sand Hills and Bandon Trails (along with a client who understands good golf design). Faldo may have found such a landscape in Cottonwood Hills, which sits just two miles from Prairie Dunes Golf Club in Kansas.The six-time major champ and ABC announcer is also working on a Caribbean project called Roco Ki, set on a stunning piece of Dominican coastline, that could well vault him to Crenshaw-like status among architecture aficionados worldwide.

Mickelson receives weekly offers to put his signature on a project, but he is determined to avoid the “rent-a-pro” image, and his selectivity is why he’s waited four years since Whisper Rock opened for his follow-up design, Palmwood, an exclusive retreat featuring a 7,850-yard layout an hour from Mickelson’s San Diego home.“The property is a huge factor in my selection of a project,” says Mickelson. “I prefer to do high-end projects that allow me to provide a great golf experience and not a course set up just for homesites to surround it. I like to keep it as natural as possible and move very little dirt.”

When it comes to shaping the site, the new breed strives for varied, timeless and challenging routings and designs that defy the kind of characterization in which some player-architects take pride (and by which some developers are mysteriously comforted). To the notoriously studious Faldo, the lure of great design is in the strategizing, not the cultivation of a certain look. “It’s like a giant, physical game of chess played outdoors on an ever-changing stage,” he says.

Like sponges, the new breed soaks up information from various sources, Crenshaw foremost among them. “I know [Coore and Crenshaw] spend a great amount of time planning and routing the course,” says Lehman. “I think that’s what made the architects of the past so good, too. They were geniuses at using contour as a strategy. Too often we think of strategy in terms of where you place the bunkers or where the water is. But so much of it comes down to how you use contour in the fairways to reward drives or in how you subtly slope the greens.”

Love is struck by the attention to detail displayed by Crenshaw and Coore, who do not use plans but work with a band of traveling artisans from project to project, crafting the holes as they go and allowing the bosses to tinker with bunker placement and green design. Love also studied two of the best at work in his own backyard, grilling Tom Fazio during the redesign of Sea Island’s Seaside course and Rees Jones during the construction of Ocean Forest.

“I always knew what I liked and didn’t like,” Love says. “The hard part is the ‘why.’ Why can’t we go over there? Why can’t we build it like this? I’d say I liked that green right there or that style of hole, but I didn’t know how to build it.”