On
a gray winter morning, Ed Walker reached for his coffee as he scanned the
classifieds section of the Traverse City Record-Eagle. He spotted an ad for a
320-acre site 12 miles south of the resort town in Michigan. Three days
later, he and his business partner, Art Preston, bought the
property.
The
pair then began the process of building their dream: a private sanctuary to
Northern Michigan’s resort-golf frontier.
Walker’s vision was fueled by national clubs at
which he and Preston held memberships, including Michigan’s own Crystal Downs and Nebraska’s Sand Hills.
The
venture was boosted by the presence of a third player, Fred Muller, head golf
professional at Crystal Downs, who had a designer in mind for the Kingsley Club:
Mike DeVries.
Muller
knew he faced a sales job, primarily in convincing the partners to hire DeVries,
who had grown up at and been influenced by Crystal Downs, designed by Dr.
Alister MacKenzie.
What
Walker, Preston
and Muller all wanted was what the land perfectly afforded: contours, variety,
intrigue, flow. An open front nine of scrub and hills would thread its way into
hardwoods and valleys on the back. Angles and visuals and disparate tees would
change a golfer’s perspective from round to round.
Their
vision was nothing compared with the glacier-carved golf holes DeVries refined.
MacKenzie’s imprint—as channeled through Crystal Downs’ influence on DeVries—is
conspicuous on the front nine, particularly on holes 2–7. That stretch is rife
with swaths of tall fescue, waste areas, and bunkers, hills and depressions that
DeVries has exploited to achieve an admirable state of MacKenzie-like
illusion.
