Brent Wadsworth keeps a low profile. Very low. In fact, his name`s just about off the bottom of the charts in recognizability-even among golf fans.
And golf`s Wadsworth`s business. They clamor for the courses: Cantigny, Castle Pines, Desert Mountain, Troon Village, Loxahatchee, Las Colinas, Long Point-public, private and resort. People want to see them, play them.
But few know that the builder behind those efforts, behind eight of the 15 most recent additions to top-100-courses list in ”Golf Digest,” behind more than 350 golf courses in the past 34 years, is Wadsworth Construction Co.
Or that the golf course construction company, with revenues last year of $50 million, is based in Plainfield on a modest stretch of land encompassing an equipment storage area, some construction inventory and a small cadre of offices.
It was standing there, in the conference room before a picture window, that Wadsworth and his chief operating officer, John Cotter, looked out on Aug. 28, 1990, at what looked like a pretty bad storm.
It was actually the devastating tornado that ripped through Plainfield and other areas of the southwest suburbs, killing 29 and causing $135 million in property damage. ”Right over there,” he points on this flawlessly sunny spring day.
”It hit right behind that building. Two houses were flattened. We just thought, `Gee, it`s a bad storm.` We didn`t know; then someone called and said, `Half the town`s gone.` ”
It could as easily have been his office, his building or him. Yet it seems almost fitting the unassuming Wadsworth remained calm during that tragic storm.
And that his company donated equipment and manpower to assist the cleanup effort. ”When we could,” he says, ”we helped.”
Shaking his head, he adds, ”It changed this town completely.”
Though he has offices in Florida, Arizona and Hawaii, and is president of a posh Florida golf resort and a Colorado ski destination, the Plainfield/
Joliet area remains close to the 62-year-old`s heart.
Though Wadsworth`s wife, Jean, and his four children (Stanley, 37;
Leslie, 35; Martha, 31, and Eric, 27), moved to Florida in 1979, he lives in the Naperville area half the year and bought a 100-year-old farmhouse in the rural confines near Joliet that he and Jean have been renovating for several years and plan to move into in the next year.
”I missed the change of season, the familiarity of people,” he says.
He`s kept his main business here because, ”I grew up in this area and I guess you have an attraction to the area that provided you with your home.
”I started my business here, and I`ve continued to utilize the connections you`ve made throughout your life.”
Wadsworth slips easily into the more anonymous ”you” or the team-player-oriented ”we.” ”Just lucky” and ”In the right place at the right time” are words he uses to define his success. He just doesn`t draw attention to himself easily.
Nor do his friends.
”He`s Mr. Nice Guy. A gentleman in every sense of the word,” says architect Dick Nugent of Long Grove, who`s known Wadsworth 30 years. ”He`s been very diligent in his business practices, and the reason for his success has been because of the high standards he`s set for himself.”
Nugent, like renowned golf course designer Arthur Hills of Toledo, Ohio, and others asked about Wadsworth, had nothing controversial, nothing shocking, in fact nothing but good things to say about his friend.
There was the time in 1969 when Wadsworth was on a construction job for a Hills-designed public course in Toledo, where the architect is based. Wadsworth`s company had submitted the low bid for the project, but it turned out to be a little too low due to a miscalculation.
Nevertheless, the construction proceeded and the company lost a hundred thousand dollars, ”at a time when that was like a half-million,” says Hills. ”And they did every last thing that had to be done on that job, a superb job. This epitomizes Brent`s philosophy. He`s far more interested, I think, in doing everything perfectly and doing the job right than he is in the bottom line. On the other hand he`s scrupulous about the bottom line.”
Wadsworth is a perfectionist, Hills says, and ”probably the most modest person I`ve ever met.”
Hills thinks for a minute and remembers this about Wadsworth. ”His being the majority owner in Innisbrook (Wadsworth`s golf resort in Tarpon Springs, Fla.), I`ve gone there with him, in there for lunch or something, and nobody has any idea who he is. He`ll say, `Can I get a table?` and that kind of stuff.”
So Wadsworth`s no Donald Trump. He couldn`t be. That`s not the type of person who went into the golf course construction business in the 1950s, when Wadsworth first began to realize his dream to someday build a golf course.
Arnold Palmer was just beginning to revolutionize the game that had exploded during the golden years of the 1920s with the help of the flamboyant Walter Hagen and the immortal Bobby Jones.
True, there`d been Hogan, Snead and Nelson since that time, but the icy Hogan epitomized more than ever that golf was not yet a game of the masses. But Palmer, the son of a greenskeeper, was changing that, and golf, with Jack Nicklaus soon on the scene, was braced by the 1960s for an explosion.
It was one that waned slightly during the tennis-mad `70s, but regained its momentum spectacularly in the 1980s, sparking the National Golf Foundation to issue its mandate in 1989 that the U.S. needed a ”golf course a day”
built until the turn of the century to keep up with the mushrooming numbers of American golfers-25 million this year, a 120 percent increase over 20 years ago.
The demand for courses has given Wadsworth more work than he ever would have imagined. ”Back then I think we would have been happy to build one course a year,” he says of the early years.
The son of Joliet physician Harold Wadsworth, he graduated from the University of Illinois in 1952 with a degree in landscape architecture and a love of golf, having played at the same municipal courses in Joliet (Crystal Lawns and Inwood, which no longer exist) every day during the summers of his youth. After a stint in the military, Wadsworth went to work for Robert Bruce Harris, a Midwestern architect of note during the `40s and `50s. He later joined with an associate from Harris` firm, Edward Packard, in the golf course design business.
He made the decision to start his own construction company in 1958, abandoning his initial love of design for the mechanical side of the business. ”We struggled in those days,” Wadsworth says. ”You could count the number of courses being built on two hands. It was very slow.”
Now Wadsworth Construction builds a dozen courses a year. They are the cream of the crop, too.
In addition to those named above, they have built 40 in the Chicago area. The company has worked at hallowed Augusta National in Augusta, Ga., several times, and completed the entire reconstruction job in 1990 on the course`s storm-devastated 11th green in time for the 1991 Masters.
A quick tour of the Plainfield office reveals engineers at work on designs for a Jack Nicklaus course in New Mexico and a Ken Kavanaugh course scheduled to open in Aurora next year.
Blueprints spread out on drafting tables, computer software displaying color-coded course layouts on a small screen, pieces of pipe in a storage room and bulldozers parked out back of the building-all these point to the complexities of the job Wadsworth`s people must execute.
They must work with the designer-and Wadsworth`s worked with them all, Palmer and Ed Seay, Nicklaus, Hills, Kavanaugh, Robert Trent Jones Jr. and Rees Jones, Gary Player, Tom Weiskopf and Jay Moorish, Pete Dye, Tom Fazio, all those and more.
They must work with the client. Wadsworth was the perfect builder for the somewhat secretive Shadow Creek project outside Las Vegas, completed in 1989. Wadsworth literally had to make the desert bloom for this golf course, which was built for the private use of Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas entrepreneur and owner of the Mirage hotel.
”It was a flat piece of land, as flat as this,” says Wadsworth, motioning to the Illinois prairie outside his window. ”He (Wynn) wanted his own environment.” They dug 30 feet, bulldozed earth, planted more than 50,000 trees, sodded the dry ground, installed a demanding irrigation system, even put in a waterfall. Though the course`s cost has been estimated as high as $37 million, it has never been confirmed.
Wadsworth isn`t about to do so, either. His discretion is another mark of the professionalism held so highly by colleagues. He`ll only say, ”We`re builders; we do what we`re told,” and that he`s always gotten along with the designers, though it`s easy to imagine the size of egos he`s encountered over the years.
For his part, Wadsworth is said to be an uncompromising perfectionist. Kavanaugh remembers a recent visit to the Orchard Valley site in which Wadsworth inspected the 11th tee and noticed the proximity to a passing road. Wadsworth ordered the mound torn up and reconstructed to create more of a barrier against the passing traffic.
”With the wave of an arm, that`s thousands of dollars he just instructed his people to spend,” says Kavanaugh. ”He thought it would be a better golf experience if we could screen the golfer from the road. Generally that would come down to a big argument with the contractor over who`s gonna pay, but Brent`s so into the golf course and getting it right.”
”When you go to the Chicago Symphony or the Boston Pops it`s a guy like Zubin Mehta or John Williams who gets all the credit but really, a conductor can have all the best ideas but they don`t mean anything if you don`t have the best musicians in the world playing the music. Brent`s the guy who plays the music.”
The music has become increasingly complicated with the growth of the industry. As a builder responsible for vast stretches of land that is often among the most beautiful and valuable in its region, Wadsworth and his consorts have more than ever before come into contact with environmental concerns.
The future trends that golf course developers, and in turn the construction company they hire, must adapt to include coexistence with wetlands, and limits on the use of chemicals to maintain grasses and the availability of water to keep courses the lush green color players have come to expect.
”The changes may come,” he says, ”in the level of maintenance when we may begin to backtrack in terms of the qualities of our grass and not use as much water and chemicals, as they did in the early part of the century.
”They played with brown and weeds,” he says. American golfers have become spoiled, he agrees, by the artificially manicured lawns displayed on television in PGA Tour events, and might take a page from the Scottish, who gave birth to the game on natural ”courses” that were stretches of brown grass differentiated by natural bunkers and gentle curves.
Wadsworth`s had one of the great perks of any job on earth, and he knows it, with the opportunity to play some of the finest golf courses on the planet.
”It`s one of the great enjoyments of this business to play the golf courses you`ve built,” he says.
”It`s something unlike another occupation. A builder builds a road and what`s he got to do? Drive on it? A builder builds a building, and what`s left to do? This has the special enjoyment of playing a game.”
