"This is the place for my anatomy links"

Thanks to reader Rob for Jolee Edmondson's Delta Sky profile of French golf architect Robert Berthet, who is taking the art form to new, uh, places.

Take, for example, the time in 1986 that he presented a plan to build a golf course in the shape of a woman. “They stopped breathing,” he says, recalling the reaction.

As perhaps only a Frenchman would, Berthet (pronounced “bare-TAY”) had long entertained the notion of imposing a female figure onto an appropriate parcel of land, with elevations, bunkers and rough representing anatomical features mentionable and unmentionable. His vision was realized when he was commissioned to fashion an 18-hole layout in the white wine–rich Mâcon region of Burgundy. It was amour at first sight when he surveyed the rolling, verdant, vineyard-framed property. What better canvas for his fairway femme than this lush, sensuous wine-growing hub?

“I suddenly told myself, ‘This is the place for my anatomy links,’” recalls Berthet with the intensity of a master sculptor. “‘It is here. I have to do it here.’”

The project’s board of directors fell silent when he proffered his blueprint, their faces etched with bewilderment. “But in 15 minutes,” he says, “I got them to grasp my concept. I had to prove to them that it was not a complete madness of sexuality.”

Or just madness.

And good news...

“I will someday do a butterfly course,” says Berthet, who feels that such a layout would be ideal for Taiwan, known as the “Kingdom of Butterflies,” where these creatures have special meaning. “The clubhouse will be the body of the insect, and the holes will spread out from there like wings, with round greens symbolizing the ocelli, or eyespots.”

Damn, I always dreamed of doing one of those!

So unconventional is Berthet’s philosophy on golf course design that he turns up his nose at the works of revered American counterparts Tom Fazio, Jack Nicklaus and the late Robert Trent Jones.

Well, he's not so bad after all.

“You can instantly recognize their golf courses by certain characteristics,” he says dismissively. “That, I think, is a weakness.”

Uh, Robert, I think they could say the same about you. The guy who makes Desmond Muirhead look rational?

Among the avant-garde designer’s current projects is an 18-hole course in the flourishing aerospace center of Toulouse in southwestern France, long known as “Ville Rose” (Pink City) for its distinctive brick architecture. Berthet’s reluctance to divulge his intended theme for the Toulouse track sparks a flurry of wild imaginings. Will there be bunkers filled with pink sand? Or maybe tees resembling launch pads for space capsules? Fairways shaped like the Concorde and a clubhouse that serves as air traffic control for flying golf balls?

One thing’s certain: It won’t be like any golf course France has seen before.