Tom Fazio reflects on great desert golf courses he's designed as well as the people and land

Tom Fazio reflects on great desert golf courses he’s designed as well as the people and land

Posted by author February 6, 2025 Golf

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For each of the high-profile golf courses he has designed in the Coachella Valley, Tom Fazio has memories of the people behind the projects.

“All my projects, everything I have ever done, there is usually the real story of the person behind it,” Fazio said. “Like the Vintage Club is Mick Humphreys, the Canyons at Bighorn is R.D. Hubbard, the Quarry is Bill Morrow. When I am being interviewed for a job, I’m interviewing that person.”

Fazio, one of the top golf course designers in the world from his first golf course in the 1960s, returned to the Coachella Valley recently with his sons, now part of his design team. Fazio wanted to show his sons some of the courses he designed and built in the desert, in some instances before they were born.

“Our business for me, I’ve been in it for decades,” said Fazio, 79. “I don’t use years. I like decades. It’s been more than 40 years since I did Vintage. That’s a long time, but if you say four decades, it doesn’t sound as long. So I am dealing in those terms now. It makes you feel better.”

The two courses at The Vintage Club in Indian Wells – first the Mountain Course in 1981 and later the Desert Course – were Fazio’s first layouts in the desert. They were built with his uncle, golf professional George Fazio, who often played with friend Bob Hope. Hope was thinking about buying the land adjacent to Eldorado Country Club which became The Vintage Club, and his uncle’s friendship with Hope brought Tom Fazio to the property.

The Vintage Club was a rarity for Fazio at the time, a West Coast project for a man who preferred to work on the East Coast in order to avoid extended absences from his family in North Carolina. He worked mostly from Florida to North Carolina, a distance of about 750 miles, in which Fazio has built approximately 100 golf courses. But Fazio was intrigued by the project at The Vintage Club, which would host one of the first events on what is now the PGA Tour Champions.

The Vintage Club was long considered the pinnacle of Coachella Valley country clubs and is still among the desert’s best. But it has been challenged through the years by other Fazio-designed courses like The Quarry at La Quinta (1994), the only desert course currently on the Golf Digest top 100 courses in the country list, the Madison Club in La Quinta (2007) and The Canyons Course at Bighorn (1999), a course Fazio calls “an excellent course. It’s as good as any course we’ve ever done.”

Each project had its own back story. At Bighorn, Fazio had declined to design the first course on the property, but was lured back by a new ownership group that included Hubbard to build the second course. At The Quarry, developer Bill Morrow was an unabashed Fazio fan and presented Fazio with a property that was an old sand and rock quarry along with some added land up a canyon of the Santa Rosa Mountains. It was property too good for Fazio to turn down.

Madison was a spinoff club of a property that was in financial and legal trouble. That property was revived into the 36-hole Hideaway by new owners Discovery Land, but Discovery wanted to turn the third proposed course into a standalone property. Discovery officials called their favorite designer, Fazio.

“I don’t know if it has ever been done in the history of golf design. I have done 29 golf courses for Discovery Land. Twenty-nine golf courses for one client. That’s in Scottsdale, it is Whitefish, Montana, it’s in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, it is in Costa Rica, it’s in Cabo, it’s in Florida, it’s in the Bahamas, it’s in Portugal, it’s in La Quinta.”

There was also a major renovation of Eldorado, a course built in 1957 in the land desert at the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains in Indian Wells. Fazio updated the course in 2003.

“They asked me to do a critique of the golf course,” Fazio said. “They were going to do an irrigation system, and we were talking about their grass on their greens. And I said, ‘guys, I think you should be considering more than that.’ This should be renovated. What you have is flat and boring. Think out of the box.”

With his resume of courses from private facilities to courses that have hosted major championships – Fazio hopes there is more work for him in the desert soon – Fazio is still busy designing new courses. But the recent surge in the popularity of the game post-COVID hasn’t necessarily translated into more work for Fazio.

“People think that golf is going great because of all the tee times being used,” Fazio said. “But because of the cost and the regulation and the environmental issues and the whole thing, golf has reached a plateau where it is difficult to build because of resources.”

Having built golf courses in the Coachella Valley on tabletop flat pieces of land to land that climbs into the rocky mountains, Fazio said new projects need to offer him a challenge.

“My favorite place that I would like to do a golf course would be the Mall of America parking lot,” Fazio said with a big smile. “There’s asphalt and cars, and to me, that’s a challenge.”