There was a wonderful interview with the golf architecture website Golf Club Atlas back in 2000 with Mike Strantz.  In the interview we get a sense of the artistic approach this man took to designing golf courses.  To anyone who has played Royal New Kent, Stonehouse, Tobacco Road, or any of the other Strantz creations they know that if the man brought anything to his projects it was an open mind and an artistic eye-his courses never lack for visual stimulation and interest.

This interview gets into the men who influenced his approach to design and the philosophies he developed in doing his work.  Very insightful, funny, and respectful at the same time.  As the interview reveals, unlike most “successful” course architects, he only did one project at a time totally immersing himself in the task at hand.  He would actually wander about a potential site with his sketchpad and pastels and create artistic renditions of the holes he was visualizing before he ever got to measuring and drawing plans.

Unfortunately, he died a few years ago from cancer at a very young age.  We can only feel remorseful for what he never got a chance to create because, based on what we have seen, there would have been some very memorable additions to a body of work that is already replete vitality and originality.

(Click here to see the full interview with Mike Strantz)

Golf Club Atlas website

Sometime in 2000