RCHITECT of the Year Tiger Woods made a big splash as a course designer in 2017, earning our top honor as Architect of the Year. He is one of 10 we recognize this year for their achievements and advancement of golf course design. By Robert J. Vasilak The battle for the soul of golf architecture rages on, but there’s little debate about which side is winning. The growing army of neo-classicists, their banners carried by designers such as Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, Tom Doak and David McLay Kidd, hold the high ground. But the signature architects who once were the trendsetters in golf design – former touring pros turned architects, such as Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Greg Norman – are still in demand, though much of their work is outside the U.S. And the old guard has been joined by a younger crowd of current and for-mer stars who are shifting their focus from playing to course design. This includes famil-iar names such as Phil Mickelson, Ernie Els, Nick Faldo, Louis Oosthuizen and Annika Sorenstam. Clearly, there’s still a market for signature architecture. And that brings us to Tiger Woods, whose Jupiter, Fla.-based TGR Design took a major step forward in 2017. Though injuries kept him off the course as a player for most of the year, his design business finally seemed to 36 Golf Inc. January/February 2018 take off after a decade of starts and stops. With the opening of Bluejack National in Texas; new projects in Dubai, the Bahamas and Mexico; and commissions for high-pro-file projects in Branson, Mo., and Chicago; Woods’ firm pushed its way into the front ranks of the course-design industry. For those accomplishments, Golf Inc. rec-ognizes Woods as our Architect of the Year for 2017. Tiger knows what sells Woods’ courses are unquestionably used to sell houses, and he declined to be interviewed for this story because, according to his pub-licist, he’s making a determined effort to resume his career as a professional golfer. That being said, Woods has plenty of proj-ects on his plate these days — testimony to the records he’s set as a professional golfer, his enduring value as a pitchman and the polish that his marketing team continually applies to his personal image. Woods knows what sells, so he sells him-self as a signature architect with neo-classic bona fides. His influences, he and his pub-licists have said, include the original links courses in Scotland, the distinctive layouts of the Sandbelt of Australia and the classic golden-age courses of the West Coast. He favors tracks that play firm and fast, with wide fairways, big greens, no rough and enough strategic options to “make golfers think and make choices.” He even has an appetite for short, unstructured playing fields that allow golf imaginations to run wild, such as Tom Doak’s Sheep Ranch layout at Bandon Dunes. On top of all that, no other architect this side of Kidd talks as much about bringing fun back into the sport. “Modern golf has become too hard,” Woods has said. “I want to design fun, play-able courses that bring people together and bring golfers back to the game.” Ron Whitten, architecture editor of Golf Digest, has drawn a surprisingly close con-nection between Woods and the neo-classic wing of golf design. In 2016, he compared the magazine’s choice for best new private course, Wood’s Bluejack National, with its choice for best new public course, Doak’s Loop at Forest Dunes. His conclusion: “They are virtually