When Steve Johnson of Elk River played in the Minnesota Golf Association Senior Players' Championship last week at Deacon's Lodge in Brainerd, he made sure to jot down his thoughts of the place.
And what Johnson thinks means something: He's a former State Amateur champion, one of the top senior players in the state and a golf course rater for Golf Digest.
Johnson gives Deacon's Lodge, a Grand View Lodge course designed by Arnold Palmer, a thumb's up. In fact, he likes a lot of the golf he sees in the Brainerd area.
"That's a lot of golf holes in one place," Johnson said. "It's amazing how good it is."
He isn't the only one singing the praises of golf in Brainerd. Golf Digest ranked the area among the top 50 golf destination places in the world, even before Johnson hopped on the bandwagon.
The courses in the Brainerd area know they've got a good thing going, and recently they've increased their efforts to get the word out.
Eighteen courses featuring more than 300 holes joined forces a few years ago and called themselves the Brainerd Lakes Golf Marketing Alliance. When BLAGMA failed to catch on, the group changed its name last year to the Brainerd Golf Trail.
"We needed to create a memorable destination name that would click with golfers," said Bill Crumley, director of marketing at Madden's on Gull Lake. "And like all great things, we copied a good idea."
The Brainerd Golf Trail borrowed its name from the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, a group of upscale courses designed by Robert Trent Jones that stretches from one end of Alabama to another. Unlike the courses down south, those in the Brainerd area are centrally located. All are within a 45-minute drive of each other.
Some of them are next-door neighbors: Madden's has 63 holes on the north end of Gull Lake, and Cragun's Resort has 45 holes on the south end. From one end to the next, the 108 holes are only a couple of miles apart.
Golf in the Brainerd area takes full advantage of thick forests, expansive lakes, rolling terrain and pockets of wetlands.
The Brainerd Golf Trail is anchored by the five big, family-owned resorts in the area: Madden's, Cragun's, Grand View Lodge, Ruttger's and Breezy Point.
For generations, fishing and family fun were the main attractions at the northland resorts. Golf was casual at best. Ruttger's opened the first golf course in the area, a nine-holer, in 1921. Madden's opened the first 18-hole course five years later.
"Jim Madden's philosophy was he wanted people to come up here and have the best round of golf in their lives," Crumley said of the Madden's founder. "Golf here wasn't about being challenging. It was about being fun.
"That was pretty much the philosophy of resort golf up until the '90s."
That's when a golf boom nationwide steamrolled into Brainerd, bringing some of the biggest names in course design: Robert Trent Jones Jr., Arnold Palmer, Joel Goldstrand.
The Pines course at Grand View Lodge opened in 1990 and started the move to championship courses. Over the next decade, the area averaged almost a new course opening every year.
Grand View added The Preserve and Deacon's Lodge, plus another nine holes at The Pines, and now features 63 holes of golf. In March, Golf Magazine ranked Grand View Lodge among the top 75 golf resorts in the country.
Madden's The Classic is perhaps the best course of all, and it was designed by Scott Hoffmann, a Fergus Falls native who has spent the past 27 years as Madden's golf course superintendent.
Madden's owner Brian Thuringer interviewed Robert Trent Jones, Pete Dye and Rees Jones before turning the project over to Hoffmann, who had no experience in the design business.
What Hoffmann produced was, indeed, a classic.
Last year, Golf Digest ranked it 33rd among all public courses in America, ahead of Torrey Pines in San Diego, Kapalua in Hawaii, Pumpkin Ridge in Oregon, Doral in Miami and Wild Dunes in South Carolina, among others.
The Classic is talking with the U.S. Golf Association about playing host to a national championship and is in line to conduct the U.S. Men's Mid-Amateur in 2008.
Not all the golf in Brainerd is for hard-charging, gung-ho golf nuts. Each of the five resorts in the area has what it considers "family friendly" courses that are less demanding on your game. For information on golf in the area, go to www.brainerdgolftrail.com.
Source: Saint Pail Pioneer Press (Minnesota)
