ously rocky, of course, but this site proved to
be more than anyone bargained for. Pete Dye,
for his part, calls it “as difficult a piece of property to build a golf course on as I’ve ever
seen.” And at age 82, with nearly 150 courses to his credit, he has seen it all.
“It’s a lot like a movie,” says Wang. “Once
you start going, you have to finish the film.
Everybody tells you that every extra dollar
you spend makes it a better movie, so you
keep spending. The course was more expensive than we thought it would be, but the
good news is that it shows.”
The story of how Pound Ridge grew into
a magnificent new layout that is ready to open
its doors to the public actually goes back even
longer than a decade. It was nearly 30 years
ago, in 1979, that the Wang family acquired
the property in Pound Ridge, a small hamlet
between Bedford, N.Y., and Stamford, Connecticut. Years before there was an 18-hole
course on the site, with nine holes (actually
eight and a half) located across the border in
Connecticut. A developer had taken hold of
the course and turned the Connecticut side
into housing, but was unable to get approval
to develop the New York side the way he
wanted.
The par-three 15th
hole brings golfers
back across the
marsh to the most
rugged section of
the property.
Enter the Wangs. Owners of the U.S. Summit Company, a multi-faceted outfit with
interests ranging from pharmaceutical distribution to oil refining. C.C. Wang and his son,
Ken, were regulars at the former Pound Ridge
course. (Ken’s sister, Vera, is the famous fashion designer, and also plays golf.) Though the
family was wealthy, they considered themselves public-course golfers, and they had
looked into buying the course for no other
reason than to not lose this place to play.
They were rebuffed at first by the developer, who then called back after he determined that the New York portion would not
be viable for housing, telling the Wangs that
he had a “nine-and-a-half hole golf course”
for sale. They snapped it up.
There was enough additional acreage on
the New York side (172 acres, including the
existing golf course portion) to expand the
course to 18 holes. But tennis was the hot
sport at the time, and the U.S. economic climate in the early 1980s didn’t seem right for
building a course. Besides, that wasn’t really
the reason the Wangs bought the property—
they were content to keep it as a nine-holer.
Through the years they continued to occasionally discuss the idea of expanding the
course, especially as golf grew in popularity.
Then, in 1997, they decided to take the
plunge, and hired Pete Dye to do a routing
plan. They continued to operate the existing
nine-hole course because they figured it
would be quite a while before they would see
any tangible results for their long-term plans.
“Pound Ridge is a small town, and all the
board members are volunteers,” says Ken Wang.
“It went steadily. Not to say there weren’t times
when we wished it had gone faster, but it’s just
the amount of time these things take.”
