NY Times On Sweetens Cove: "The Little Golf Course That Could"

Thanks to reader Jim who sent this wonderful Dylan Dethier New York Times piece a few days ago and I finally got around to reading.

Sweetens Cove is profiled, the low-cost, great fun, model-the-future risk taken by golf architect Rob Collins. It recently cracked Golfweek's Top 100 Modern Courses list and is just the kind of thing we need more of.

You can hear Collins on the latest Shipshow with Harry Arnett and Jeff Neubarth.

Dethier writes:

Collins worked with a skeleton crew for long hours and low pay on an accelerated timeline. Other architects and prospective owners circled like vultures, ready to buy up the property. In sheer desperation, Collins mortgaged everything and took over the lease himself.

The course cost about $1 million to build, while a top design firm would have charged $8 million to $10 million for such a project, Collins said.

“The whole thing just got bootstrapped together; it was a labor of love,” he said. “I had a thousand opportunities to walk away, but, damn it, I believed so much in the project, and I honestly had nowhere to walk away to.”