A one-acre putting course hopes to attract scratch golfers, novice players to this California golf course

PALM DESERT, Calif. — Jay Blasi knows there is only one reason for a one-acre putting green to exist.

“A putting green, a large putting green or a putting course, is a place for people to come and have fun,” said Blasi, the designer behind a one-acre green under construction at Shadow Mountain Golf Club in Palm Desert. “The beauty of it is golfers from age 4 to 94 can come out, and scratch golfers and people who have never played a full round of golf can enjoy it.”

What course officials are calling a one-of-a-kind attraction for the desert, the one-acre putting surface is the first step in new course owner Lindi Biggi’s plans to revive Shadow Mountain after several years of the course teetering on the edge of closure.

“Originally, it was the most hot spot in the whole area,” Biggi said of the course she took over on Aug. 13. “It’s going to be back to that. It’s going to be an adult playground.”

Perhaps the most famous putting course in the world is the Himalayas Course at St. Andrews in Scotland, which covered about two acres near the second tee of the famed Old Course. The Shadow Mountain course will be half that size, but at one acre it will still cover between 40,000 and 45,000 square feet, or about the size of nine or 10 regular greens at Shadow Mountain.

“You could set this up an infinite number of ways,” Blasi said. “Touchstone (which is operating the course for Biggi) has operational freedom out here, You could put a hundred cups and let people use it as a giant putting green or make a nine-hole putting course in which each of those holes would be 100 feet with big old wild and crazy slopes. Eighteen holes, 36 holes, you can do whatever.”

Mark Luthman, president of Austin, Texas-based Touchstone Golf, said the chance to build a putting course at Shadow Mountain was too good to pass up.

“This is a unique opportunity,” Luthman said. “We have observed the success of similar greens and 18-hole putting courses. There is a handful of them, and we thought because there is nothing like that in the desert, this is a cool, really unique opportunity to do just that.”

The desert does have nine- or 18-hole putting courses at private courses or resorts, but those have traditional layouts on smaller pieces of land. The Shadow Mountain course will be on a much larger scale with the ability to change the course layout daily.

With just 60 acres for the entire course running through nearby housing, the only land available for the one-acre course was on the area of the course’s practice range between the first and ninth holes. A shorter range with perhaps some nets for hitting full shots will be arranged at the south end of the new putting surface.

A one-acre putting green project at Shadow Mountain Golf Club in Palm Desert, California (Photo: Andy Abeyta/The Desert Sun)

Still a design in progress, the new putting facility will have a traditional practice putting area at the northern end of the acre, a pond that will be occupied by flamingos that currently live at animal-loving Biggi’s house and a small creek. After that, the rest of the acre will be a surface that won’t resemble other greens in the desert, Blasi promised.

Bumps, humps and a flamingo profile

“The beauty of these putting courses is they are just built for fun, so the things you wouldn’t do on a normal golf course, whether it is big humps and bumps or if you were able to think about a skate park, kind of a half-pipe thing, you can do here,” Blasi said.

Some particularly wild slopes and bumps may remind some golfers of miniature golf courses, he added.

Construction is being done by Texas-based Greenscape Methods, but it isn’t requiring much movement of dirt.

“It’s all kind of push and place. When you push a green, if you do a one-foot cut and a one-foot fill, that’s two-foot elevation change, and on a putting green, that can be significant,” said Don Mahaffey of Greenscape. “So it doesn’t take a lot of massaging to make something interesting. The challenge when you do a green this size is that all greens have to have surface drainage. So you are still trying to create something cool that functions.”

Sculpted into the middle of the putting surface by the bulldozers will be a large profile of a flamingo, another nod to Biggi’s love of those birds as well as a way to create wildly sloping areas that can create pin placements that could delight or infuriate golfers.

The one-acre green is not what is called a USGA green, meaning it is being built on the surface of the land rather than having drainage and other layers under the putting surface.

“You have native sandy soils here. If you were to build a traditional USGA green with imported sand and a blanket of gravel and build one that is an acre in size, it would be very, very expensive and time consuming,” Blasi said. “But the fact that you have the ideal soils here to begin with makes the construction of the green simpler. You just kind of shape this and go.”

The green will be sodded with overseeded Bermuda grass from Palm Desert-based West Coast Turf, with Blasi saying the course should open in a few months but only when the turf has had the proper time to come together and be presented as a true putting surface.

Once the massive green does open, Biggi, Luthmar and others believe the putting course will attract new clients to Shadow Mountain.

“We want to make the place more appealing to a wider variety of people, be it families, people who might not be able to get out and play 18 anymore, people who are visitors to the valley who might play 18 and then have a couple of extra hours, whereas now it is limited appeal just to people who play 18 holes,” Luthmar said.

“It’s supposed to be a place for fun,” Mahaffey said. “Leagues, alumni associations, any of the 120 golf courses in the valley can bring their crews over here for a night of putting and drinking. It’s basically built for fun.”