John Fought’s plans for redesigned Indian Wells Golf Resort mean new holes, new greens
The Epson Tour completed its 2024 season at the Indian Wells Golf Resort Sunday
Hannah Lin birdied the 71st hole of the tournament to earn a one-shot win in the Epson Tour Championship Sunday in Indian Wells
John Fought is more than aware how serious the City of Indian Wells is about bringing some kind of tournament golf to the Indian Wells Golf Resort. So in redesigning the Players Course at the resort, which Fought redesigned in 2007 from an existing course, tournament golf was on his mind.
“I can tell you right now, this would bode very, very well for a tournament-type golf course,” Fought said of the new design. “I have had a lot of tournaments at courses I have done. I can tell you this will work beautifully for a gallery. This would be great for some kind of an event.”
Groundbreaking for the redesign of the Players Course will be March 5, with the project consisting of seven new holes being built while refreshing the other 11 holes on the course. While the city is focusing on perhaps an LPGA event in the future, Fought’s idea is to create a new and better experience for all golfers.
“What we are doing is really reimagining the entire golf course with all 18 holes, which has a lot of implications,” said Fought, who along with architect Clive Clark’s work on the neighboring Celebrity Course changed the layouts of the two Ted Robinson-designed golf courses built in 1986. “First of all, you have returning nines. The finish on the golf course in my opinion is spectacular now because it runs along the top of the (Whitewater) Wash. I really feel good about what we are doing.”
The City of Indian Wells voted last year to authorize more than $13 million for the work to redesign the golf course and to build a new fire access road onto the property. The city made clear that it would like to have an LPGA event return to the desert at its course, even bringing the LPGA’s developmental Epson Tour to the course last October for its Tour Championship. The LPGA left the desert after the 2022 Chevron Championship at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, ending a run of 51 years at that course.
In redesigning his own design for the course, Fought is actually bringing some of his original ideas, which were rejected in 2007, to the course. That includes new 17th and 18th holes — holes that currently wrap around the Renaissance Esmeralda Resort.
“Those two holes are disjointed from anything anyhow. I tell this to people, but they don’t believe me. I wanted to do something close to (the new design) back when we did the golf course,” Fought said. “But they would not allow me to not keep the last two holes (from Robinson’s design). I just felt like they were, well, it was just a mess. Over the years, as popular as the resort is, they have days when they wash out, they have to start (a round) on 17. It’s a mess.”
To bring all the holes to the north side of the Whitewater Wash and to have a ninth hole that came back to the pavilion on the north side rather than leaving golfers out in the middle of the course meant redesigning seven holes. The closing stretch now plays back toward the San Jacinto Mountains.
But Fought and the city wanted to take the opportunity to work not just on the seven new holes but also on the rest of the golf course as well.
“There were some areas that needed to be touched up over a period of time. Since we built this, there have probably been 500,000 rounds of golf there,” said Fought, who won the U.S. Amateur title in 1977 before winning PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 1979 and going on to win two PGA Tour events. “You put 500,000 people over a course, over the greens and putting, I tell you what, it does damage. That’s why really the best golf courses in this country go in and refresh their golf courses every 10 to 15 years.”
The work on the 11 remaining holes on the course will include scraping about four inches off the top of the greens and replacing the grass with tifeagle Bermuda. That way, Fought said, the 11 holes that are not redesigned will have greens exactly like the seven new holes.
In addition, work will take place on the tees and bunkers on the 11 remaining holes.
“We are redoing all the bunkers, and there is a chance to readjust a few,” Fought said. “Over a period of time there are little things that happen, so we are going to readjust a few of the bunkers. And also rebuild them so the infrastructure will be stronger than even when we did it. The bunker liners and things that are far better than when we did it.”
While the work on the new design continues over the next four months, Fought hopes to be able to put the base Bermuda grass on the course by July 4. The idea is to allow the course to undergo a traditional overseeding to cool-weather grass in the fall before reopening for golfers in later October or early November.
The work on the Players Course this year will force the Epson Tour Championship to move to the resort’s Celebrity course in October.
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