When incessantly asked his secret to playing great golf, Ben Hogan would always provide the same clear message: “I dug it out of the dirt.”
For architects Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry of the Hurdzan-Fry Golf Course Design firm in Columbus, Ohio, the secret and the challenge to the Glenmaura project on Montage Mountain in Scranton, Pa., was also in the dirt and, more precisely, the rock below it. In fact, to complete the course following three years of construction, more than 100,000 cubic yards of rock were dynamited and 78,000 cubic yards of topsoil hauled in from neighboring towns.
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“From a construction aspect, every time you put a shovel in the ground, you just hit rock, and it wasn’t something that could be moved,” says Fry, one of the lead designers on the project, when describing the architectural challenges inherent with Montage Mountain. “It had to be dynamited and hauled. Then, because the nature of the rock couldn’t be moved, it was dynamited. Believe me, 100,000 cubic yards of rock is just an unbelievable sum of rock to dynamite for a golf course.”
When the 6,990-yard course opened for play in the spring of 1994, it played to a par 71. The front nine, known as the mountain nine, is hilly and tree-lined with numerous streams and brooks running throughout.
“The thing that happens when you have a lot of rock and when you rip through that rock, you start altering the flow of water because water will start seeping out of the ground, Fry says. “So we just started hitting unbelievable sums of springs after fracturing through the rock.”
The back nine, known as the valley nine, is equally challenging with more water and heavily forested areas. The signature 18th hole is a short par 4, measuring just 385 yards. It demands a forced carry from the tee of potentially in excess of 250 yards and is protected by a mid-fairway grass and sand bunker some 266 yards off the tee. The green is bisected by a boulder-lined creek and sits in front of a cascading waterfall.
Since its inception, Glenmaura has hosted Hogan, Nike and currently Nationwide Tour events and also has hosted the Pennsylvania Mid-Amateur Championship where only one-third of the field was able to break 80 on the challenging mountain track. In 2000, the NCAA Division I Eastern Regional Final was played there.
Fry, a former University of Arizona Golf Standout and a member of the Golf Magazine panel for ranking the Top 100 Courses, provides no small praise on the completed project.
"I can guarantee you one thing – it’s in the upper echelon of golf in the state of Pennsylvania,” Fry says.
Additionally, PGA Tour player Larry Mize, the 1987 Masters champion, was a design consultant on the project.
“Mike and Dana did a great job, and I was happy to be a part of it,” he says. “From the tournament players, the comments I’ve received on the course have been very positive, and that’s what you want to hear and that’s what means you’ve done a good job.”
Club history
Before the 1990s, Lackawanna County possessed two top-rated Philadelphia Golf Association Clubs: Scranton Country Club and Glen Oak Country Club. Likewise, Luzerne County contained quality courses such as Fox Hill, Wyoming Valley and Valley Country Clubs. For whatever reason, proximity excluded, golfers and businessmen from these two counties remained perpetually separated. In response to this, Glenmaura National founder, Chuck Parente, set out to establish an equity club that operated somewhat differently from other local historic clubs and provided access for Lackawanna and Luzerne County members. According to Parente, Montage Mountain, while admittedly rough terrain, seemed to be a natural location because of its proximity to both counties.
Cleve Coldwater, the head golf professional at Glenmaura National since its inaugural opening day, says what’s really attractive to many people in the area is that we sit between Lackawanna and Luzerne Counties and attract people from both places.
“Our membership has really helped the community as far as Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties because you get businessmen and golfers that didn’t used to deal with each other playing golf together, and that’s had a positive impact on our area.”
Currently, the membership is about a 50/50 split between Lackawanna and Luzerne County residents.
Beyond geography, Parente’s primary goal for Glenmaura was to establish a high quality golf club with an equity membership. While the club features a 25,000-square-foot clubhouse, three tennis courts and a heated swimming complex, Parente says golf was is the club’s objective. In line with that, Glenmaura doesn’t maintain banquet facilities, but keeps its focus on maintaining the golf course at the highest quality level. Since its opening in 1994, the golf course design has remained constant, and the focus has been keeping the course in pristine condition, according to Coldwater.
“The superintendent we have now (Jeffrey Koch) is doing a really great job, and it’s a constant, competitive process in our area that drives everybody to try and get a little better,” he says. “There’s an extra flower bed where there didn’t used to be one, making sure that the streams are a little cleaner than they used to be; the definition between the rough and fairway is a bit more defined; the bunkers are edged more and, because of that, the better the presentation, the better it looks in competition.”
Through its emphasis on golf and the maintenance of the course, Glenmaura is attracting new young members in Lackawanna and Luzerne Counties where young people are departing for bigger cities. A program was instituted providing nonequity memberships to anyone under the age of 46. The objective was attracting young people to become members and, upon attaining the age of 46, to become equity members. Through that program, Glenmaura has been able to gain more than 65 members.
Our board made a very good decision,” Coldwater says about recruitment. “They saw the future, looked into it and made an adjustment on how to attract new people, and it’s been successful.”
“A golf club … that’s what we’re interested in,” Parente says, citing the underlying focus of the club and describing the competition for attracting local young members. “We’re committed to keeping the golf course at the highest quality level, and that’s what has been successful for us.”
While Glenmaura’s challenging layout might have been dug out of rock, the club’s young and vibrant membership is committed to the game of golf and the course itself, which seems to make Glenmaura National special and unique.
Jody Healy is a freelance writer from Scranton, Pa.