Roy Bechtol



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Roy Bechtol

Living in the tall grass

While making a huge and lasting impact of the Austin area’s golf landscape, Bechtol continues to branch out with high-profile projects

By Steve Habel

Building golf courses for a living would be a dream job for many of us who play the game, but for Roy Bechtol, the Austin-based principal of Bechtol Golf Design, it is more than that – it is a passion and an itch he can’t seem to scratch enough.

It is not because Bechtol hasn’t been trying. One of the town’s favorite sons (he played baseball at the University of Texas in the 1970s and can’t be dragged away from Central Texas for more than a few days before he gets a little prickly), Bechtol has made good on his oft-stated desire to give back to the community while building golf courses that are fun to play and that enhance the communities in which they sit.

If you don’t know Bechtol’s name firsthand, you surely have played some of the courses he has designed, influenced or said grace over. You know, tracks like The Golf Club at Circle C in southwest Austin, ShadowGlen Golf Club in Manor, The Golf Club at Star Ranch in Hutto, The University of Texas Golf Club at Steiner Ranch, Austin Country Club, Barton Creek, Great Hills Country Club, RiverPlace Country Club and The Hills of Lakeway.

Bechtol has designed more than 50 golf courses throughout the United States either as the lead architect or as a collaborator with other golf course designers. Bechtol Golf Design combines cutting-edge technology with creative, traditional design practices to determine the best possible plan for land development.

Other Bechtol courses in play include those above as well as Somersett Country Club in Reno, Nevada; Saddle Creek Golf Club in Copperopolis, California; Black Bear Golf Club in Delhi, Louisiana; Comanche Trace in Kerrville and The Legends on Lake LBJ in Kingsland. Bechtol-designed tracks run the gamut, from The Ambush at the posh Lajitas Resort in the Big Bend to the folksy (and surprisingly great) Concan Country Club adjacent to the Frio River near Garner State Park.

Bechtol’s career encompasses nearly 35 years of experience in land planning, landscape architecture and golf course design. On new projects, Bechtol works from a blank slate, and an initial walkthrough on the raw land will produce uncommon and stunningly complete ideas. On renovations, he has the background that allows him to improve already-sound concepts for the benefit of the golf course itself as well as its owners and investors.

Upcoming projects include courses in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, in the mountains of Panama, in the Colorado Rocky Mountains near Vail, on the coast of Mexico, in the hills of western Virginia, in the Texas Hill Country along the upper banks of Lake Travis and on Mustang Island on the Texas coast, as well as various sites in Central Texas.

“Life is great for me – every day is Christmas morning as far as I am concerned,” Bechtol said from the balcony high on a hill off Bee Cave Road where he could see four of his courses. “If you kind of hang in the moment and enjoy where you are and reflect, how can you not enjoy being a golf course architect?”

Bechtol is involved in the community in a general way as well, as a contributor to the St. David’s Community Health Foundation and as a three-time member of the Austin American-Statesman’s Fortunate 500, a list of the most social people in our city.

From his offices in West Lake Hills on the banks of Lake Austin, Bechtol provides the creative inspiration for great golf courses, golf communities and the building of freshwater trophy fishing ponds and lakes. His three companies – Bechtol Golf Design, Planned Environments, Inc, and Waters of America – employ as many as 20 people and embody the feel of Austin in the 1980s, only more high-tech. They are direct reflection of their principal.

Business District: How did you get interested in building golf courses?

Bechtol: I was in the right line in life. I actually started as a landscape architect and in the planning business, and my first golf project was with [noted golf course architect] Pete Dye at the Austin Country Club. I became enamored with the whole process and that was about 1979. It seems like every project we’ve been involved in since then has some kind of golf element to it.

Business District: What do you look for when you walk a plot of raw land – how to you determine if it is going to be good for a golf course?

Bechtol: It is a process and it depends on what area of the world or the country we are in. Usually what we are looking for – quite frankly – is the dirt. If we can find some good shaping dirt on site, or if we could find some rolling dirt on a site that features some interesting topography, then it makes our job a lot easier. Then we look at the natural vegetation and plant life, the natural features like creeks, waterfalls and lakes. Around the Austin area we are pretty blessed because we usually have great pieces of land to work with – down in Florida, where there is little except flat, coast land, the job is a lot harder.

Business District: What, in your mind, makes a great golf course?

Bechtol: The primary ingredient is the routing – and that affects the sequencing of the holes, which affects the playability, which affects how the course fits on the land, which affects the views and the pace of play. All those elements begin with the correct routing. If you route a golf course properly, when you are finished and you haven’t moved a whole lot of dirt, it looks like it has been there 100 years.

Business District: What are some of the hurdles that need to be navigated when designing and building a golf course?

Bechtol: We have had every issue you can imagine crop up on our projects. I remember we had a project in California where we had an antiquities issue where they came out and looked around the site for a year and a half and all they found was an Indian head nickel and a button. Meanwhile they postponed our development and the golf course for 18 months. We have a lot of environmental considerations on our golf courses; for example we always search for wise and productive use of water. We would prefer – in the long run – that all our courses use effluent water on their tracks to keep from using fresh water that would erstwhile be wasted. You have to aware of the resources for each individual site.

The other is obviously the goal of laying the golf course gently on the earth, if that is possible with the size dozers we are using to construct the course. The course needs to flow and fit with the land. All that begins with having a real respect for the land, and I think that comes to me from my training as a planner and the use of the many tools and maps we reference in that role of my job.

Business District: What differentiates you from other golf course architects and golf community planners?

Bechtol: I would start off by telling the developer that you build a golf course for two reasons: to sell real estate and to get rid of effluent. Anything else above that is kind of egotistical. We try to build the finest and very best golf course we can when we are given the opportunity, but to be real about it the game of golf is a hard thing to make money at. If a course can enhance real estate, you are ahead of the game. Because I am a planner, I understand the enhancement value of golf to real estate. I guess we have a niche: ours is a total community process.

Another thing we bring to the table is that being from Austin, we understand the environments better than anybody. I am lucky enough to work all over the country and I don’t know of any place that is tougher, environmentally, than Austin. So through our work here we have attained environmental sensitivity through osmosis, if you will.

We also understand endangered species, we understand critical environmental features, and we understand caves and sinkholes and all that stuff, and it has become kind of second nature to us.

Business District: What is your favorite project and why?

Bechtol: I think the University of Texas Golf Club has to be No. 1 on my list, just because of my love for UT and for my father [Hub Bechtol, one of the greatest football players in Texas history, was a four-time All America]. Being able to work on that course was a joy and a privilege. We also did the land planning around the golf course in what has become Steiner Ranch, so we were able to blend the edges of the golf course to the real estate.

I also think Comanche Trace (designed by Bechtol along with Tom Kite and Randy Russell in Kerrville) is a wonderful community because the course seems to blend well with the real estate. I was able to do the master plan for both The Hills of Lakeway and Austin Country Club and they have both been very successful. I am also very proud of RiverPlace – it was a little tougher site, and is a little more eye-popping – but it has been a great project over the years.

I think the project that – when it is all said and done – will shine as one of the best tracks in Texas is Waterford Texas, which is east of Marble Falls. That piece of land is unbelievable, and I think we nailed the routing and were very blessed to have the kind of site we had to work with.

Business District: What is your favorite golf memory?

Bechtol: I would say playing golf with my kids. Playing golf with Hub (his son) and Bradley (his daughter) when they were growing up and now with little Isabelle (his seven-year old daughter), who is trying to take it up with me. And then playing golf with my brothers – we grew up playing together and it has kept us close. You can learn a lot about someone playing golf with them. All the different courses I have played and varied and some are far flung, but all the time I have spent in the game with my family is what I hold dearest.

Outside of that, being able to be around Harvey Penick and hanging out and playing golf with Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw and those guys early on kind of sets a precedent for the rest of your life.