An historic Dallas golf club is getting some newfound national attention. This is how it happened.
DALLAS — Keith Foster moved earth and found heaven. He dug it out of the dirt.
Foster was standing down on the third fairway at Brook Hollow, the historic Dallas golf club that hired him to restore the course’s original design. Perhaps Foster’s real task was finding A.W. Tillinghast, who built Brook Hollow in 1920. The famed architect’s touch, Foster was certain, lay somewhere beneath a surface that grass and time had overgrown.
Guided by early aerial photographs of Brook Hollow and his own penchant for peeling back the layers of a golf course, Foster went to searching.
He started on the third hole, and on that fateful day in 2019, his crews were trying to shapeshift a slope away from the center of the fairway. Foster watched the excavator dig away, scooping top soil from the surface. On about the fifth or sixth cut, the excavator pulled up a bucket of sand.
“And then you look down,” Foster remembered, “and you see this vein. It’s just endless sand. Then you start excavating it, and as deep as you go, it’s all sand.”
Foster had unearthed what connected Brook Hollow to Tillinghast, and to the East Coast courses of Tillinghast’s world: A rare loot of sandy earth in the middle of Dallas, Texas. Foster had suspected it was somewhere there on the property. He just had to find it.
Now, the golf world seems to be finding Brook Hollow again.
In May, Golf Digest released its prestigious list of the top 200 golf courses in America, and Brook Hollow — as storied as any club in Dallas, and for all of Texas, for that matter — made the rankings for the first time, at No. 194.
The number was one thing. But making a debut appearance on such a ranking, at 105 years old, only reflected what locals have known — or merely heard — about Brook Hollow for some time, especially since the Foster restoration was completed in 2021.
The Dallas Morning News this year ranked Brook Hollow the top golf course in North Texas and No. 3 in the state, ahead of annual stalwarts like Dallas National, Bluejack National and Fort Worth’s tradition-rich Colonial Country Club (which was No. 182 on the Digest rankings, for the record).
AvidGolfer, the golf magazine that ranks and reviews North Texas golf courses, placed Brook Hollow as the No. 2 overall private club in town, behind Northwood. But the magazine was clear about where Brook Hollow stood as a golf course: “You simply won’t find a better golf course. And we don’t just mean in DFW.”
“I tell people all the time,” AvidGolfer editor Eli Jordan said, “if you were to pluck it outside of Pittsburgh or somewhere, and it wasn’t smack dab in the middle of Dallas, it would be (considered) a top 15 or 20 course in the country. And I truly believe that. I think it’s that good of a golf course.”
Oddly enough, Brook Hollow’s location in the middle of a major city — even golf-crazed Dallas — likely does create some anonymity in the golf world, where historic clubs in the Northeast or at stunning locales along the West Coast are renowned for their architecture and design.
Not that Brook Hollow is bothered by this.
The club, in a statement, said it was “honored by the recognition” of making the Golf Digest rankings.
“That said, Brook Hollow is a private club deeply rooted in tradition,” the statement said. “We don’t chase publicity or rankings — we focus on preserving and stewarding one of the finest historic golf courses in the country.”
That last part is no stretch. Brook Hollow, one of the city’s original courses, holds more than just local lore.
The club’s founders were inspired by those tradition-rich courses of the Northeast, around Philadelphia and Long Island. In fact, one of Brook Hollow’s founders, Foster would learn, had been a member at New Jersey’s Pine Valley Golf Club, still widely considered the best course in the country.
Pine Valley was carved out of the pine barrens south of Philadelphia. But its hallmark features became its sandy scrub surface and natural undulations.
The Brook Hollow founders wanted a golf course like that, even if they had to find it in Dallas.
So they brought on Tillinghast, who helped in the initial design on Pine Valley and was famous for his designs at historic courses like Winged Foot, Bethpage Black (host of this year’s Ryder Cup) and Baltusrol.
Tillinghast, who also designed Cedar Crest Golf Course in Dallas, picked a patch of farm land northwest of Dallas, along a branch of the Trinity River. It likely looked nothing like the wooded landscape at Pine Valley, and today it’s surrounded by Dallas growth on all sides. But if the club’s goal was to emulate Pine Valley, Tillinghast had something to work with: That sandy scrub surface.
“Brook Hollow aspired to be the Pine Valley of the South, the Pine Valley of Texas,” Foster said. “And something truly remarkable about that property is that it holds it — it contained it.”
Time, however, had a way of masking what Tillinghast had created. The Brook Hollow members wanted to “uncover” it again, they said.
They turned to Foster, who built his golf architect firm on working with existing clubs and a specialty in restoring Tillinghast designs. His past work, Brook Hollow concluded, “showed he understood not only what Tillinghast built — but why.”
Reviving a ‘certain power’
At first glance, the most striking thing about Brook Hollow is the scale of it all — both big and small.
Just steps off the clubhouse, a pinwheel of a vista opens up, from right to left: No. 9 green, No. 7 tee, No. 6 green, No. 1 tee, No. 10 tee, and not far around the corner, No. 18 green. The property slopes down toward the clubhouse, like a funnel, giving each fairway a grand tilt. And yet the sightlines — being able to see numerous holes in close proximity — set the course to a human scale.
All of that might be a fancy way of saying: It’s no accident.
Historic courses were designed to be walkable — there were no golf carts in 1920 — and often, they were built on much smaller pieces of property. Clubhouses flowed into the first tee, and greens sat near the neighboring tee boxes. There were no short hikes through a subdivision to find the next hole.
Brook Hollow never lost this cozy feeling. But Foster, while shifting and shaping the course “as quietly as possible,” wanted to restore the way the course felt. Brook Hollow, Foster said, needed to have a certain presence.
“A certain power to it,” Foster said. “At Brook Hollow that scale needs to be big and large and strong. So all we did is re-capture and re-introduce the scale that Tillinghast first envisioned.”
Foster removed trees, but didn’t go full Oakmont, the Pennsylvania course that cleared all but one tree over a series of renovations. Foster left Brook Hollow’s “majestic” oaks and pines scattered across the course, he said, and the trees that line the edge of the property still provide the “frame of a painting.”
But it was important to Foster that trees — which, like at many historic courses, had sprung up in bunches at Brook Hollow — weren’t “encroaching on the golf.”
When this happens, Foster said, the golf course “instead of being wide and spacious, starts feeling like a bowling alley and smallish.”
Foster also made a change to the Brook Hollow scorecard, changing the first hole from a short Par 5 to a long Par 4 , as it was originally designed. The longer opening hole — a slight dogleg right that turns up a hill — gave Brook Hollow more of that “great power” Foster was looking for.
But Foster’s biggest goal — or at least the end result that gives Brook Hollow a certain character rarely found in North Texas — went back to that sandy scrub surface, and his quest to reveal it.
On the Par 3 No. 10, for example, Foster etched out a massive sand scrub area between the tee and the perched green. The sandy expanse was set just to the left of the long first hole, a pairing Foster wanted to showcase.
“The first thing you see coming out of the clubhouse is the scrub at No. 10 at Brook Hollow, which is Pine Valley,” Foster said. “That introduces a very strong attachment to East Coast, a very strong attachment to Tillinghast, and a very strong attachment to Pine Valley.”
Not every hole had a large sand feature like No. 10, but Foster said he tried to “cut into all the sand scrub that I could” to bring back the original feel of the course.
An aerial view shows pockets of natural sand areas dotting the layout. None of which, not even the sand on No. 10, play as prominent of a role in the restored course as the “Great Hazard” bunker Foster sculpted on the Par 5 No. 15.
The sandy, undulating hazard — straight out of the Pine Valley playbook — is a massive expanse of sand that covers the width of the fairway and runs about 40 yards across. The hazard holds not just sand but the scrub and moguls that can create havoc for players, forcing a solid tee shot and a long carry on their second shot.
It’s a two-shot sequence easier said than done.
Take one instance, for example, from the U.S. Junior Amateur at Brook Hollow in July. One of the top juniors in the field hit his drive just left of the fairway, into the rough. His second shot couldn’t carry the “Great Hazard” and it didn’t land cleanly in the stand, instead bouncing into a mogul.
“That great hazard had been diminished, and we re-introduced it,” Foster said, “but it was all sand scrub. It was always there. So just to be able to do that was really remarkable.”
The club in their statement called Foster’s work on No. 15 an example of the “strategic depth and visual layering” they were aiming for in the restoration.
The “Great Hazard,” the club said, “changes how the hole plays — especially for those needing to decide between laying up or challenging it on their second shot.”
Foster’s restoration was also something of a portal back in time. Tillinghast hand-cut his bunkers when he built Brook Hollow, so Foster and his crews went back and re-cut the bunkers by hand, raking and shoveling them relentlessly “to get it feeling authentic and real.”
“What I try to do, is I pretend I’m not the architect — I pretend that I’m his lieutenant,” Foster said. “I take a backseat. My job is to be the lieutenant. How can I produce flawless, seamless work, underneath the frame of a Tillinghast? Can I do that? And then that allows me to approach my work in a more workmanlike fashion.”
The course rankings, and Brook Hollow’s status there, are one thing. The first-hand accounts from people who have walked the grounds are another.
Evan Schiller, who photographs courses all over the U.S., raved about Brook Hollow, calling it a gem that “looks like a golf course you’d see in the northeast.”
Fred Perpall, the United States Golf Association president, shared a story from the Junior Amateur. He was talking with the dad of a player who was impressed by Brook Hollow.
“How do we have such a great course here in the middle of Dallas,” the dad asked Perpall, “that no one knows about?”
“It’s our Texas Winged Foot,” Perpall told him, calling back to one of Tillinghast’s East Coast designs.
The dad Perpall was talking to was Tiger Woods.