Five Things to Know: The Renaissance Club

The first Scottish Open was played 50 years ago in 1972, as Neil Coles edged Brian Huggett in a playoff at Downfield Golf Club. Coles won £2,000 as the champion after holing a 12-foot putt on the second extra hole. In 2022, for the first time, the Scottish Open will be co-sanctioned by both the DP World Tour and PGA TOUR. With one week to go before The Open Championship at St Andrews, the best of the world will collide across the Firth of Forth at The Renaissance Club in North Berwick. But these 18 holes in East Lothian are not without American influence, going back to their founding. 1. Modern Scottish-American look It was in 1744 that The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers established the 13 rules of golf. For reference, that was before the United States had even declared independence from Great Britain. In 1891, the club would find a permanent home at Muirfield, which today, borders The Renaissance Club. The Renaissance Club has a more modern history. And it doesn’t involve 18th Century Scotsmen, but rather a group of Americans. In 2002, the Sarvadi Family was on a golf trip at Pinehurst when an associate asked them a question, “You want to build a golf course in Scotland?” That associate was Don Lewis, whose father-in-law Pandel Savic was one of the co-founders of Muirfield Village with Jack Nicklaus. Among the nine Sarvadi siblings, Jerry, who made his fortune in aviation fuel, took the lead. He was invited to play Muirfield shortly before the 2002 Open Championship and loved what he saw in the neighboring property. He met with trustees from the proposed golf course land, which was owned by the Duke of Hamilton. Multiple trips to Scotland followed and in 2005, Jerry signed a 99-year lease. Working with a U.S.-based limited liability partner and a UK investment business, the Sarvadi Family owns 66 percent of the club, while the Hamilton-Kinneil Family Trust own the rest. The Sarvadi Family added another American to the fold, hiring Tom Doak to design the course. However, Doak, a scholar of global golf architecture, who spent his first year out of college in the United Kingdom and once wrote a whole book on English design legend Alister MacKenzie, says, “Our intent was always to create a course that feels like it belongs on that site and on the coast of East Lothian.” The result is not an American-influenced course in Scotland, but a tribute to Scottish golf that happens to be funded, designed and appreciated by Americans. 2. The Muirfield Trade While trees are mostly absent from Scottish courses, The Renaissance Club replaced a landmass that featured 300 acres of pine trees and needed 8,500 tonnes of wood cleared. According to Sarvadi, the property’s unusual treeline was the result of Britain’s Forestry Commission planting large stands of pine and sycamore after World War II. When the team from The Renaissance Club pulled out tree stumps, they found pure sand beneath the trees. Upon opening, Sarvadi and Doak kept a chunk of trees on the property, influencing some tee shots and approach shots. Many of these were still present when the Scottish Open arrived in 2019, but a batch of trees were stripped from the land before the 2020 event, altering the aesthetics of the track. The trees actually proved to be an important trade asset for The Renaissance Club, as they provided a forest of mystery. “Muirfield owned all the dunes to the north of the course,” Doak recalls. “But The Renaissance Club owned the woods right up to the wall at the 8th green of Muirfield, so to protect that boundary, and their access to the dunes in back, the HCEG offered to trade a bit of their land in the dunes, which we happily accepted.” In 2021, Doak told The Fried Egg, “For all Muirfield knew, we’d knock down all the trees and build a hole right there and wave at the members of Muirfield.” Doak says Sarvadi and the team never planned on doing this, but nonetheless, the leverage was useful. Along with establishing a defined forest buffer, Muirfield used some of its land to move around the 9th tee box during the 2013 Open Championship. Meanwhile, The Renaissance Club applied for extending its golf layout into the newly-purchased dunes, a process that would take roughly five years to get planning permission approval. When given the green light, Doak was brought back to make three new holes directly on the coast, which make up No. 9, 10 and 11 on a normal day and No. 12, 13 and 14 for the Scottish Open. 3. Path to the coast Without the Muirfield trade, it is hard to imagine the Scottish Open being played at The Renaissance Club. On TV this week, starting with the 10th hole (7th hole for members), viewers will watch the march out to the Scottish coast. That hole is a short par 5, while the 11th hole is a long par 4 that can play 510 yards sometimes into the wind. What follows is The Renaissance Club’s siganture stretch along the dunes. “The prettiest view on the course is when you walk up onto the 12th and the lighthouse on Fidra comes into view after you couldn’t quite see it from the tee,” Doak says. “Then the next hole plays right along cliffs with a secluded beach to the left. And then at the 14th, you turn around and play back toward Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh around the curve of the shoreline.” No. 12 and 14 are par 3s, while No. 13 is par 4. As No. 12 and No. 13 usually play as the turn, players will have to navigate a patch of natural dunegrass and moss Doak was not permitted to alter while they hike to the 13th tee. This stretch may be beautiful for players making the turn on a normal day, but the Scottish Open found it would not make sense to shuttle half the field out to the coast on Thursday and Friday. Thus, adjustments were made to make the front nine holes 1-6, 16, 14 and 15, while the back nine is 7-13, 17 and 18. Doak admits this leads to some longer-than-usual walks between holes, but it does avoid having half the field start with the treacherous tee shot along the cliffs on No. 13 (No. 10 on the normal layout). As for future coastal plans in East Lothian, Muirfield owns roughly 200 more acres of dunes along the water, but for now, it does not appear Muirfield or any other golf entity will be getting permission to bulldoze through that land. 4. When will the wind blow? While many American courses may be characterized by their green shapes or treelines or hazards, a coastal course in Scotland has to start with one natural factor: wind. “It’s designed around windy conditions and so far, the Scottish Open weeks have been unusually calm, apart from one very nasty round in 2020,” Doak says. To the critics of The Renaissance Club’s lenient scores (notably a Northern Irishmen by the name of Rory McIlroy), Doak believes patience is needed. It is also worth noting the 2020 edition of the Scottish Open took place in October due to the COVID-19 pandemic. If the expected wind hits in July, The Renaissance Club should play to its full challenging potential. “The windier and firmer it is, the more ball-striking plays a premium,” Doak says. “If it’s soft, it becomes more of a putting contest, and that’s not what the best players want to see. There are a few greens with some really tricky short-game shots – the back pin on the 18th is one, but more of them are on the front nine, as well as the shots around the 10th and 11th greens.” With Jon Rahm among those headlining the field, Doak better hope the wind picks up or he might get hit by some stray muttering. As for the greens in relation to The Open, depending on the year, The Renaissance Club could be a great tune-up. This is not one of those years. “Last year, Colin Morikawa said he was glad to have played, so he could adjust to the slower green speeds in the UK. The [DP World] Tour coordinates with the R&A to have the green speeds the same for both events,” Doak says. “We actually built our greens flatter than my usual, thinking they’d be faster for the tournament, but the greens at Sandwich and St Andrews (and their exposure to the wind) require slower speeds.” 5. Padraig Harrington’s help While The Renaissance Club has a unique American history for a Scottish course, it recently added the assistance of a links legend. Just before the 2021 Scottish Open, Padraig Harrington, a six-time PGA TOUR winner, with two Open Championship titles, was named as a player consultant for the course. Harrington noted that his job would be to both pass along his own golf course ideas to Doak, while also gathering feedback from the top professionals in the world, coming through The Renaissance Club for the Scottish Open. “Padraig has been great, both as a sounding board for my ideas on changes and as a source of ideas himself,” Doak says. “I was always taught not to take the driver out of players’ hands, but it’s a new era, and he has underscored that we needed to tighten the landing areas of the longer holes or the game is too easy for these guys. Sometimes it’s an added bunker (to the right of the first) and sometimes just some added contour so they’ll have to hit from an awkward lie if they bail away to the safe side of the fairway. Most of all, though, Padraig has been steady in saying the course is a good test and we don’t want to overreact to the low scores just as players are starting to come around to it.” One influential player in particular has expressed some candid thoughts on The Renaissance Club. During the club’s Scottish Open debut in 2019, McIlroy claimed the setup was not difficult enough for the best players in the world. The winning score of 22-under that year was and still is a Scottish Open record. “We have a lot of respect for Rory McIlroy’s opinion and I hope I will have a chance to speak to him directly about the course one of these days,” Doak says. “That’s one reason the club enlisted Padraig Harrington to provide some input from the players’ side. In particular, we are looking to strengthen the par-5 holes, where a lot of the red numbers come from. But we have been going slowly with changes because the truth is that over twelve rounds, the pros have yet to see the course with firm conditions and the normally strong winds from the west. You have to design a links course to be playable in strong winds, but if it rains just before the tournament every year, they’re going to keep shooting low scores.” Harrington, who just conquered a USGA layout in the U.S. Senior Open, finished 11-under at The Renaissance Club in 2021, good for a T18 finish.

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