Dylan Petrick, the CEO at Kenwood CC, is still stunned by the transformation his Kendale Course underwent from 2019 to 2021: “I think the members always knew we had the bones of a world-class, vintage golf course here. But what Fry and Straka have uncovered, revived and created here is pretty extraordinary.” One year after re-opening, the LPGA came calling: Its new Kroger Queen City Championship was conducted over the Kendale in 2022 and 2023.

The original 36 KCC were designed by architect Bill Diddel and opened in 1930. The championship Kendale Course hosted the U.S. Amateur just three years post-opening, followed by the 1954 Western Open and 1963 U.S. Women’s Open. According to Jason Straka, like so many putting surfaces from the Golden Age, the Kendale greens had gotten smaller over time: “I mean that literally: Putting greens tend to shrink over the course of decades, due to careless mowing habits. But I also mean that figuratively: Because green speeds were so much slower in the 1930s, steeper slopes were perfectly practical as hole locations. As modern bentgrass and maintenance allowed for faster and faster greens, those formerly ‘cuppable’ areas just weren’t cuppable anymore.”

Straka expanded all 18 putting surfaces to their original dimensions, using LIDAR technology to map the original contours down to 1/10th of an inch. Then, using Diddel’s original greens drawings, he carefully and proportionally adapted those steeper contours to work with modern green speeds. He and his construction team also rebunkered the entire golf course. Yet each of these critical agronomic/aesthetic improvements at Kenwood CC — all achieved during a pandemic — benefitted from Straka’s removal of more than 1,000 sweet gum, oak and spruce trees. This ever-proliferating forest had, over the course of 85 years, obstructed or otherwise compromised lines of play in ways Diddel never anticipated. The trees also shaded rough areas and competed for nutrients with surrounding turf, severely compromising that turf, for decades. But that’s all in the past: Today, the roughs and overall conditioning are points of pride.