Spence, 54, chuckles now at his first foray


into “golf course architecture.” It wasn’t so funny at the time. “With no golf course in town I felt like


I needed a green, so I converted my dad’s backyard — without his permission — into a putting green,” Spence said. “I tilled it up and I bought some bentgrass seed. I was around 13 and my grandmother had an old reel mower so I built a green, not knowing it wasn’t going to mow it close enough. What I didn’t know is all the courses had bermudagrass greens in that region. My dad came home and he was just furious with me that I had this little circle tilled up and was planting seed. I guess I tried and failed.” Te incident didn’t discourage Spence from


staying close to the game as he rode the bus to school and began playing junior golf, which would eventually lead him to Arkansas State on a scholarship. “When I started playing golf and travel-


ing around there were a lot of bland greens, and then you would run across one that was really creative and had some contour and an architectural quality to it. Tat always caught my eye and I would always sketch them,” Spence said. “You always hear architects talk about when they were kids they would doodle up and down their note pads. I was constantly looking out the window doodling down the side of my homework, thinking about golf.” Te game eventually steered Spence toward


working at a golf course on the maintenance department. “I fell in love with it,” he said. “I always


loved the mowing patterns and everything being so straight and detailed and all the nice edges. I started out weeding and push mow- ing. Fortunately somebody didn’t show up to mow greens one day so the superintendent says, ‘Hey, jump on this mower’ and he was amazed. I was just that kind of kid. Everything had to be straight and have proper spacing, so I quickly advanced in the realm of golf course maintenance.” Spence moved on to Lake City Commu-


nity College in Florida, which had a 2-3 year program geared toward a career in golf course operations. “In my mind that was going to provide me


with an opportunity to play golf for the rest of my life, which is what I wanted, but we all know when we get in the business that’s the last thing we do,” Spence said. Aſter working summer internships at At-


lanta Athletic Club, Spence graduated in 1985 and immediately landed a job at Forest Oaks Country Club in Greensboro. “So from graduating in May at age 23 I held


my first PGA Tour event as the head superin- tendent in 1986,” Spence said. Spence remained at Forest Oaks for four


years and helped with some bunker work there before helping build Governors Club outside


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Chapel Hill. “I did not do any design work at Governors Club other than some sand grass lines, but to get exposed to the Nicklaus team executing architecture just kind of further gave me that itch.” While at Governors Club, Spence was ap-


proached by Greensboro Country Club about its superintendent’s job. “I had made a pretty good reputation as a


superintendent who could get things done and be able to deal with tough situations,” Spence said. Spence remained at Greensboro CC for nine


years. “When I first got there they were always


talking about their Donald Ross golf course, which was the Irving Park course, but there was nothing about Irving Park that resembled Donald Ross. I said, ‘Where? Sort of tongue and cheek,” Spence said. “We ended up finding the old Ross plans and old aerials. It had been redesigned in the early 1960s by George Cobb, so I was pitching the concept of restoring the Donald Ross golf course. “Tis was at the very early stages,


say 1996 or 1997 of what became the restoration boom with Ross work,” added Spence. “When the Open came to Pinehurst for the first time in 1999 Ross really got exposed to the modern era, and the restoration craze took off all over the country.” Te Greensboro Country Club board


began discussing its Ross layout, and were always coming back to one name to execute the work – Spence. “Some of the guys at the club got accus-


tomed to listening to me talk about it and they said, ‘Why don’t we do it and you do it?’ Tat was sort of a little bit scary,” Spence said. “Tey gave me their blessing.” Te Greensboro CC project was complet-


ed in 1999. Spence then received a call from the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, asking if he would take a look at one hole at its worn-out Ross course. “I mentioned that they should really go


through a process like we did at Greensboro, to do a master plan and some research, so they engaged me to do that.” Spence’s next move was his boldest and


would change his life. He decided to open his own design firm in 2000. “Te two architects I knew the most about


were Ellis Maples and Donald Ross, and when I researched their lives they both started out as greenskeepers. I said, ‘I’m not going to be the first guy to do this, so let’s give it a go and see where it takes me,” Spence said. “Here we sit 16, 17 years later and 50-60 golf courses later, so I’m obviously doing something right. But the Ross stuff was really the core and what I fell in love with. I was intrigued by the re- search, the discovery and almost archeological digs on some of these golf courses.”


Spence’s work is seen annually on national television during Greensboro’s Wyndham Championship, held at Sedgefield Country Club. (photo by Carlton Vinson)


tion market; they didn’t really consider it golf architecture. But there was a void there and some of the guys doing business at the time were quite frankly destroying a lot of these old Donald Ross golf courses. It really bothered me because I felt like modernizing them was not creating better golf; it was creating a golf course that wasn’t playing as well as well as some maintenance issues.” Spence has never built a golf course from


scratch; given a tract of land to make his own. “It was in my dreams to design my own golf


courses, and I signed several contracts and I routed some golf courses, but unfortunately for me the economic collapse happened and they are yet to be built to this day. And some things were offered to me in Florida that didn’t appeal to me that I turned down. Was that a smart move? Maybe I should have built them, but when somebody looks me in the eye and says ‘We want some very basic golf course and we don’t care about strategy,’ architecturally it just didn’t appeal to me.” Spence has done two major rerouting


projects in his now flourishing career – Lake Toxaway and the recently opened Town of Mooresville Golf Course. He is also working on four new holes at Blowing Rock Country


hands-on approach and a lot more,” White said. “Kris is one of Donald Ross’s great am- bassadors, and he truly cares how Roaring Gap has looked and played long aſter he completed the spadework in May 2014.” More of Spence’s work can be seen every


summer on TV during the Wyndham Cham- pionship at Sedgefield. “So many golf architects become involved in


a renovation and it becomes their golf course, but Kris Spence was able to add things to our golf course AND keep it a Donald Ross golf course,” said Sedgefield director of golf Rocky Brooks. “Kris doesn’t have this huge ego where he needs have his name on everything. Kris simply gave us a faceliſt that made us so much better.” Spence does have his name on the score-


card at CCNC Dogwood, a fitting tribute to a North Carolina architect who combines the past the present into quite a modern-day golfing presentation. “Ross talks a lot about a player paying


attention to what they are doing and the angles you need to get to in order to approach certain hole locations,” Spence said. “Tose are the things I am always thinking about when I am sketching jobs.”


TRIANGLE GOLF TODAY • SPRING 2017 11


Spence’s masterwork restoration work at


Grove Park Inn landed him some loſty recog- nition from Golfweek magazine, and others. “Tat sort of swung the door open and gave


me the confidence to hang my shingle out there,” he said. Not an educated architect, the 6-foot-6


Spence was considered somewhat of an “out- sider” in the business when he first started. But he kept his nose to the ground and worked his way up the ranks with craſtsmanship at such esteemed venues across the Tar Heel state as Cape Fear, Mimosa Hills, Sedgefield, Roaring Gap and the Country Club of North Carolina’s Dogwood Course. “When I got into this the renovation busi-


ness was sort of the logical way to start, you get your feet wet so to speak,” Spence said. “At the same time, there were so many new golf courses being built a lot of golf architects sort of looked down their noses at the renova-


Club. Spence is considered a good interview with


potential clients, and oſten connects with the marching orders boards of many private clubs are seeking in a renovation or restoration. “When I interview for jobs one of the com-


mon themes they always tell me is it’s obvious you did your homework on our golf course and your interview was focused on OUR golf course. Some of the guys you compete against talk about themselves or name drop on projects they have done. Tere are clubs very interested in that and I probably lose those jobs.” Dunlop White III, a longtime golf commit-


tee member and restoration chairman at Roar- ing Gap, can’t say enough great things about how Spence transformed the private mountain layout into a more playable, enjoyable, strate- gic round of golf. “Roaring Gap was the beneficiary of a


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