Five Things to Know: Colonial Country Club

Harry S. Truman was President, Ted Williams and Stan Musial were the MLB MVPs and Perry Como’s “Prisoner of Love” topped the charts when the Charles Schwab Challenge debuted at Colonial Country Club in 1946. PGA TOUR tournament venues have come and gone since, but Colonial remains. Here’s Five Things to Know about the historic venue that hosts the longest running TOUR event at the same location, a place where so many of the game’s greats, from Ben Hogan to Tiger Woods, have walked. 1. ELDER STATESMAN In 1946, Ben Hogan held off Harry Todd by one stroke at the first-ever Colonial National Invitational. It was one of 13 PGA TOUR wins Hogan had that year! His dominance defined the early years of the tournament. He won four of his first seven appearances at what is now known as the Charles Schwab Challenge and didn’t finish worse than fourth in that span. He added one last win in 1959, his fifth at Colonial and the last of his 64 TOUR wins. Now, 76 years later, the tournament is still being played at Colonial Country Club. The Charles Schwab Challenge is the longest-running non-major on the PGA TOUR that is played on the same course. Flooding in 1949 and hosting THE PLAYERS in 1975 left two years vacant and explains why Colonial is not the longest-running concurrent venue on the PGA TOUR. That 1946 Charles Schwab Challenge actually was the second PGA TOUR event hosted by Colonial Country Club, though. Upon Colonial’s opening in 1936, founder Marvin Leonard almost immediately began petitioning the USGA to award a U.S. Open to his new track, the rare layout in the southern half of the United States with bentgrass greens. Colonial guaranteed the USGA $25,000 and the nation’s championship came to Fort Worth in 1941, the first time the U.S. Open ever visited the South. Craig Wood – who’d lost a playoff in all four major championships before claiming the 1941 Masters – added a U.S. Open to his resume with a score of 4 over. In 1941, Colonial played as a 7,035-yard par 70, significantly long for the era. Today, it plays 7,209 yards. 2. TO THE MAX Feeding off the momentum of Southern Hills, this is another week to give Perry Maxwell the respect he deserves. Both Maxwell and John Bredemus are often credited with creating Colonial. For many years, it was believed founder Marvin Leonard approved architectural aspects from both men’s designs. However, Texas golf historian Frances G. Trimble says that while both men submitted routings for the course, Leonard tasked Bredemus with supervising construction of Maxwell’s layout. At the very least, Maxwell is credited with exerting his influence on the greens, as he famously did with Augusta National Golf Club. Leonard’s vision for Colonial seemed borderline impossible at the time. While most Texas golf courses featured bermudagrass greens, Leonard, an avid amateur who relied heavily on his putter, wanted to bring smoother bentgrass greens to Texas. A regular at River Crest Country Club in Fort Worth, Leonard campaigned the club’s governing board to convert two or three greens to bentgrass. He even offered to underwrite the cost. The River Crest president told him, “Marvin, if you’re so sold on bentgrass, why don’t you go build your own golf course and put them in?” That was the push Leonard needed to go build Colonial and create a tournament-ready course in Texas with bentgrass greens. Shortly after its initial opening in 1936, Maxwell was brought back a second time to prepare the course for the 1941 U.S. Open. He toughened the course by adding 56 bunkers and styling the par-3 fourth hole and par-4 fifth hole into the “Horrible Horseshoe.” While Keith Foster provided a recent restoration in 2008, it was recently decided that Gil Hanse will perform another, more in-depth restoration. Work will begin after next year’s tournament. Of course, Hanse already has experience renovating a Maxwell design. He already did the trick at Southern Hills, host of this year’s PGA Championship. 3. UP HIS ALLEY “Hogan’s Alley” may be one of the loosest terms in golf. It can describe Riviera Country Club, where he won two Genesis Invitational titles (1947, 1948) and a U.S. Open crown (1948). It can describe the sixth hole at Carnoustie, where Hogan won his lone Open Championship in 1953. But it was Colonial Country Club, where Hogan had perhaps his most success on the PGA TOUR and felt most at home, quite literally. Born in 1912, Hogan moved to Fort Worth with his family in 1921 and would spend the majority of his life in the Texas city. At age 11, he began working as a caddie at Glen Garden Country Club, then a nine-hole course. One of his co-workers was a kid named Byron Nelson, born six months earlier. As teenagers, Nelson would take down Hogan in a caddie tournament, thus beginning one of golf’s greatest rivalries. Hogan also met Marvin Leonard, a prominent Fort Worth businessman, while caddying at Glen Garden. Leonard picked up the game under doctor’s orders and found in Hogan the son he never had, while Leonard became a father figure to Hogan, whose own father had committed suicide. Leonard mentored Hogan and provided financial backing while he was trying to establish himself on TOUR. Leonard also founded Colonial. In 1941, a 28-year-old Hogan recorded his best major finish at the time, a T3, at the U.S. Open at Colonial. After opening 74-77, Hogan stormed back by shooting 68-70 in the two Saturday rounds. He finished five back of Craig Wood. When the PGA TOUR returned to Colonial in 1946 for the first Charles Schwab Challenge, Hogan had established himself as one of the game’s premier players. In the midst of a 13-win year, he won the inaugural Charles Schwab Challenge by one stroke over Harry Todd. Hogan defended his title in 1947 and would go on to win three more times after his 1949 car accident (1952, 1953 and 1959). Hogan continued playing at Colonial until 1970. In 1967, he famously finished T3 at age 54, three shots behind Dave Stockton. After retiring from professional golf, Hogan could normally be found hanging around Colonial, his home course, before moving on to another Fort Worth club founded by Leonard, Shady Oaks. Today, a statue of Hogan’s picturesque swing is present on the grounds of Colonial Country Club and a special room contains memorabilia from Hogan’s historic career. 4. THE HORRIBLE HORSESHOE While Colonial opens with a rather welcoming par-5, it doesn’t take long for Perry Maxwell to fight back. The Horrible Horseshoe, Colonial’s stretch from Nos. 3-5, is consistently one of the hardest trios of holes on the PGA TOUR. In fact, in 2019, the Horrible Horseshoe played 284 over par, the most difficult three-hole stretch on the PGA TOUR that season. Legendary sportswriter, World Golf Hall of Fame member and Fort Worth native Dan Jenkins is credited with giving these three holes their nickname in the 1980s. The three holes wrap around the club’s practice range to form a horseshoe shape. The third hole is a 483-yard, dogleg-left par-4 with a sharp turn forcing an accurate tee shot. A wall of bunkers on the left portion of the fairway lead many tee shots into the right rough, leaving players with a longer approach shot. Drives pulled to the left, if they avoid the bunker, may be blocked behind a series of trees. The fourth hole is a long par-3 playing 247 yards. An elevated green makes this beast of a hole even longer. While the Charles Schwab Challenge’s history may go all the way back to 1946, the tournament has yet to see a player make an ace on the hole. Just escaping with a birdie is highway robbery. The finale, the fifth hole, consistently plays as the hardest hole on the course. Mirroring the third hole, No. 5 is a dogleg right, but this time, a river on the right and a ditch on the left demand an even more precise tee shot on this 481-yard par 4. Trees just off the fairway on both sides and two bunkers protecting both sides of the green set up for a narrow approach shot if a look at the green is even available. 5. UNLUCKY 13 The signature hole on Colonial Country Club’s back nine, No. 13, can turn into a player’s friend or enemy real quick. The 170-yard hole plays over water, and the hillsides around the hole are one of the Fort Worth fans’ favorite gathering spots. The high Texas winds can cause headaches for the players, however. The green has a unique triangle shape, with its third edge directly in the back of the surface. Two bunkers on the left guard the short route to dry land. While multiple tee boxes mean the hole can play from a myriad of yardages, the base distance used to be 190 yards. In 2013, the hole saw 22 scores of double-bogey or worse. Shortening the hole has limited some of the crooked numbers, but not the theatrics. Grandstands surround the green with fans filing into any other crevasse they can find. Come Sunday, the most electric atmosphere on the course will be on No. 13. Get ready for shots that may scare the pin or plop into the water and make or break the week.

Click here to read the full article…