Landscape Design for Golf Courses
Falling in love early with how golf courses are individually designed to take advantage of local land conditions, her persistence to design courses led to career responsibilities throughout the world.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
Angela Moser (AM) was born in Germany. Her father was a pilot for Air Berlin. Her mother was a homemaker. Neither parent ever played golf.
CHILDHOOD
As a 10-year-old, AM attended her first summer camp away from home, where one of the activities offered was golf. Her natural swing produced pure contact, noticed by a local pro who informed AM’s parents that they might have a child prodigy in their family. AM’s parents then joined a club so she could play regularly.
At age 14, AM vividly remembers seeing a golf ball roll upon a green and feeling the doors of her mind swing open. Seeing the ball slow here, accelerate there. Frictional force dictated by ground, gravity and the golf gods’ whims. Moving. Reacting.
The young AM realized that someone, somewhere, had intentionally designed that green to manipulate that ball. It became all she could see.
AM was a promising junior golfer at the time. By 16, she was a single-handicap, regularly leaving home in Augsburg, Bavaria, to play in tournaments around Germany. Chasing college or professional golf was never an interest, though. Instead, she doodled golf holes and studied landscapes.
EDUCATION
While in college in Germany, AM was already hooked on the natural beauty provided by many golf course scenes so she studied landscape architecture with an end goal of building golf courses around the world. She landed a scholarship for half a year at the University of Sheffield in England, where she jammed an entire week’s worth of classes into a day-and-a-half schedule to enable her to spend the rest of her days driving a rental car through Britain, along the Scottish coasts, seeing the game’s birthplaces.
Walking upon the greens at North Berwick, said AM, “amounted to a religious experience.” She came to understand that while other sports are beholden to courts and fields and confined by borders and measurements, a golf course is whatever the architect wants it to be in his or her mind’s eye.
PERSEVERANCE
AM searched various lists of the best golf courses in the world, wanting to know who built them. She noted the names of Bill Coore, Ben Crenshaw, Gil Hanse and Tom Doak. She emailed all of them and applied to Doak’s internship program. He replied that he was interested but she would need a visa.
To AM, Doak’s reply was an invitation to obsessively email him for the next two years, trying to write in English as she learned it. Her hope was that Doak might eventually break ground on a project in Europe – where AM would not need a travel visa. Meanwhile, AM was studying software design and learning golf course excavation plus bunker management as part of a local golf construction internship. On the side, she worked as a greenskeeper in Munich.
PART DESIGN AND PART MANUAL TRADE
Finally obtaining a visa to travel among the British Isles, AM was ready to take advantage of any opportunity from Doak, following a meeting with him in France, to assist in Scotland on new holes being build along a cliffside. There, AM climbed aboard a Sand Pro for the first time, steering around, shaping and raking and repairing bunkers. Then an excavator. Then a bulldozer.
The world of 26-year-old AM began moving fast. What began as an internship with Doak grew into more and more work. So, she created “Moser Golf” her own firm, as an independent contractor.
Within several years, AM was shaping the earliest stages of St. Patrick’s Links, Doak’s course along the Irish dunes. Then the Loop, the first reversible course in the world, an 18-hole Northan Michigan layout played both clockwise and counterclockwise. Next, AM joined Hanse and his partner on the renovation of the Los Angles Country Club, followed by the Ohoppee Match Club in Georgia, what is now Hanse’s highest-ranked original design. The list goes on – Streamsong Black in Florida with Hanse, Te Arai Links in New Zealand with Doak.
“Each place has its own identity,” AM said of her landscape philosophy, “you get to take a golfer by the hand and take him or her through it.”
CHALLENGE – GENDER QUESTION
Every accomplishment of AM seems to come with the constant expectation to once again explain herself as a female golf course architect. So, she does.
“All I know is I love golf course architecture, and I’d be the saddest person in the world if I couldn’t do what I love. Really, I don’t care if there are only five women in the world doing what I do. And I don’t care if I’m the only one actually on a bulldozer and building stuff. I would love it if there were more women. It’d be great to not be the one who gets singled out, gets asked about it. But I accept it because building golf courses is the coolest thing in the world.”
“That’s all I know.”
CAREER SATISFACTION
While Golf has evolved to welcome more people to play, its history is full of those in power rarely relinquishing control. Course architecture is no different. If anything, many believe the road is narrower. It’s a field shaped by supply and demand, economic flux and arbitrary rankings. Any chance taken has to be pretty compelling.
To work as a golf course architect is one thing. To be selected to design a routing upon a blank canvas? Or handed the keys by one of the major resort developers? That’s another thing, another world.
AM has said that if and when a big course opportunity comes, she’ll be ready. “Hell, I would do one of those big putting greens courses, as long as I think the land is interesting.”
That, ultimately, is what AM cares most about: the dirt. She said she played in it as a kid and never really grew up. It’s why she prefers a bulldozer to a drafting table. At Pinehurst No. 10, as lead design associate, AM was forced to oversee construction, as opposed to being out there each day, moving earth herself. It’s the price an architect has to pay when moving up the rungs.
“A real learning experience,” commented Doak, “and it can drive you crazy, because you’d rather just be building all the greens. But at some point (a golf course architect) has got to step back and accept help from other people.”
At Pinehurst, Doak permitted AM some discretion to work on the 17th green, which she built, shaped and sculpted by her own hands. It involves a shortish part-3, one with water to carry and two gnarly bunkers guarding the front. The green gives and takes. Tempting backstops offer wild possibilities. Wayward approaches into certain pin placements offer certain disaster.
Playing No. 10 recently, Moser put her tee shot into the back right of the green. Not too bad. Except the pin was in the front-right, and that right bunker carves into the green, making a straight putt impossible. “I didn’t mean to do that,” claimed AM while rolling her eyes.
Except, she did.
At Pinehurst, AM’s fingerpirnts are literally all over an entirely new experience. You just need to know to look for them.
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This career story was based on a news article written by Brendan Quinn of The Athletic, published by The New York Times on June 13, 2024 plus internet research.
