A friendly rivalry is a rivalry, nonetheless.

 

So, while long-standing DCC members were reasonably accepting of the other Iowa-side country club on the Davenport-Bettendorf border, that is not to say they were resigned to the perception the club on the bluff was something less.

 

“I think that throughout history there has been a competition between DCC and Crow Valley, and a lot of what drove the major renovation of this clubhouse and the massive renovations on the golf course was to keep a step ahead of Crow,” Cal Werner said. “Right now, I think we are the preeminent club. Better golfers almost unquestionably say that DCC is the better course. The pool facilities, strong junior golf program, good tennis program. It’s a pretty good spot.”

 

The good folks at Crow might take exception with some of that, but, without question, the Country Club today is a far better version of itself than it was through the final three decades of the 20th Century.

 

That’s true in no small measure because it is a club — and a course — much truer to the 1924 version of itself.

 

Certainly, the state-of-the-art clubhouse raised the DCC profile in the eyes of prospective new members with families. The near-immediate drop in the average age of membership is proof of that.

 

Over the ensuing decade, however, it became increasingly clear that the modest changes to the golf course in the late 1990s failed to complete Davenport Country Club’s push to again become the preeminent club in the Quad Cities, let alone in the state of Iowa.

 

Ultimately, Scott Azinger and Dick Schmidt found the map to the future among a trove of artifacts in the attic of the home on Valley Drive where Reinhardt Schulz raised his family.

 

“When they were cleaning out the attic of that house in the late 1990s, they found the routing plan Alison had done,” Azinger said. “There was a topographical map, and I ended up sending that out to the East Coast to get refurbished and framed. You could see the way that whole theme came together. I sent it to a Colt and Alison expert in Canada. It ended up in the USGA Golf House in New Jersey.”

 

The treasured find led straight (back) to DCC’s future.

 

Reclaiming the Captain’s Course

 

As the son of an esteemed club professional in Fort Dodge, Iowa, John Panek came naturally to a career in the pro shop.

 

By 2012, he’d spent almost a decade at DCC. He arrived in 2001 as an assistant to Kevin Kwak following a solid college career at Northern Iowa, then a year on the inaugural staff at TPC Deere Run. Panek left the bluff in 2005 to serve as head pro at the Tournament Club of Iowa in Polk City, but returned only eight months later to succeed the departing Kwak as top man in the Country Club's pro shop.

 

Leaving a relatively new post to come “home” wasn’t a difficult decision.

 

“I loved Davenport Country Club. I loved the Quad Cities,” Panek said. “My wife was from the area so that made it really easy. And, obviously, I had a lot of good friends here.”

 

As a new decade dawned, Panek worked with Azinger and the board of directors to develop a Master Plan that would eliminate the ad hoc processes that had unsystematically altered Alison’s layout throughout the Country Club’s history.

 

“We started that process because we were always changing things based on who the chair of the greens committee was, not necessarily doing what was best architecturally for the course,” Panek said.

 

In 2012, three design firms were interviewed for the task of leading a comprehensive restoration of the DCC layout. The Pennsylvania-based Forse Design Group, Inc., stood out among the three, largely because partners Ron Forse and Jim Nagle previously had restored Kirtland Country Club, the Ohio course that was part of Alison’s very busy agenda in 1921.

 

“Kirtland had a lot of the same topography we do and we felt most comfortable with them in doing the plan,” Panek noted.

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Forse grew up caddying and playing his high school golf at Mountain Ridge Country Club, a Donald Ross-designed course that opened in 1929 in West Caldwell, New Jersey.

 

“I started going around to other courses and seeing they just weren’t the same,” he said. “It had a big influence.”

 

That early appreciation for the classics paid considerable dividends when, like many modern designers, Forse discovered early in his career that restoring courses built in the Golden Age was a far more lucrative line of work than building new.

 

“We’ve done new golf courses but that was a long time ago when there were more being built,” he noted.

 

Prior to the Kirtland restoration, Forse’s understanding of Alison’s work was limited. On arrival at DCC, his and Nagle’s appreciation for the Captain’s craftsmanship exponentially grew.

 

“The first thing they did was send us Charles Alison’s routing plan on the topographic map and it looked like tootsie pops,” Forse said. “It was just a circle at the green and a stick on the center line of the hole. I could tell immediately by the way it was routed on that map that Alison had maxed out all of the best of the land for golf.”

 

Forse Design’s mission was to make a good golf course better.

 

“The routing was still there but the features had changed,” Forse remembered. “The greens had been shrunk, and, in many places, there were too many trees and some undesirable tree species. Bunkers had been worn out over years of edging, and there were unfortunately a number of remodeling changes that had imposed a different era of design on the golf course.”

 

Between 2012 and 2014, when work started in earnest, Forse and Nagle enlisted that treasured map, along with countless photographs of the original golf course, to inform their design. They even made use of a book that detailed Alison’s subsequent work at Hirono Golf Club, a stunning Japanese track the Captain conceived in 1929 that won a No. 7 world ranking a decade later.

 

“That really gave us some hard data to go on for giving them a very dynamic bunker style,” Forse said of the new/old DCC design he and Nagle conceived. “We really upped the the architecture of the golf course with that.”

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Very quickly, Forse and Nagle became huge fans of Davenport Country Club.

 

“I didn’t know what we were dealing with at all until I saw that tootsie pop layout on the topo map, and I knew immediately that place was really great,” he said. “I knew how good Charles Alison was.”

 

Like Tom Bendelow a century before, Forse recognized at first sight the tremendous canvas Alison had been gifted in 1924. He subsequently discovered the old-boned playground had one thing in common with other Alison classics.

 

“Kirtland, Milwaukee Country Club, Knollwood near Chicago and Davenport are all built on a grand scale,” he said. “He was given a lot of land, big sweeping landscapes, and they just kind of flow with the topography.

 

“At DCC, it is an unusually dynamic landscape. It has holes that are almost flat, holes that play along the creeks with the limestone cliffs, with dramatic drops in elevation. There are uphill holes, downhill holes and holes that do both. Also in his routing, he used the ridge lines superbly. You have holes like 11 and 12 going out along the ridge tilting right, and then holes coming back on the other side of the ridge that again tilt right. Yet you have tremendous variety. He just took full advantage of all the topographic advantages that were there.”

 

Forse found Alison’s true genius lay within the subtle challenges he created.

 

“His shaping of the earth was often very mild,” Forse noted. “It wasn’t wildly undulating with a bunch of mounds like Walter Travis and Donald Ross would put in. He was very ‘lay of the land.’ Not elegantly simple, but sophisticatedly understated

 

“His greens don’t have bunches of ridges, bumps or plateaus. They’re just very demanding. A lot of subtlety. For green design, he was in the school of William Flynn, George Thomas and some other architects, where they deemphasized a lot of bubblywups and dibblysquibs but had a lot of undulation. They are just broad sweeping contours.”

 

And, so, with the tootsie pop map, photos, and, most importantly, a now keen understanding of Alison’s artistry, Forse and Nagle restored, re-imagined and reinvigorated the captain’s course.

 

The Plan Comes Together

  

The Master Plan design Forse and Nagle submitted called for:

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• ​Reclaiming the large greens Alison built. At No. 6, for instance, the green doubled in size. At No. 9, where the green had been relocated closer to the tee in the 2000 Bob Lohman renovation, “we rebuilt the green to give it a more authentic and interesting character,” Forse said. Greens at 1, 8, 12, 17, 18 and the practice putting green were entirely rebuilt, and the course went from 90,000 square feet of greens to 140,000.

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• ​Rebuilding and reshaping bunkers, many of which were made better by incorporating the dramatic flair Alison enlisted in building Hirono. Working onsite, the new architects made allowances for their own artistry. “The plain bunkers are ones Jim did and the real hairy ones are ones I did,” Forse said. “There’s like this combo, which is totally appropriate for a classic course.”

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• ​Removing a large pond that had been added to front the par-5 12th, and rebuilding the green that Alison had left flat as a billiard table. “He dropped the ball on that one,” Forse said. “It just shows you no architect is superhuman and perfect. We had to rebuild that one because it didn’t fit.”

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• ​​Reclaiming the plateau left of the daunting valley off the tee of No. 7, one of Forse’s favorite DCC holes. “That was almost covered in trees,” he noted of an undesirable mid-20th Century change. “We went back 60 feet, at least. They didn’t have any options off the tee. If you can get up on that plateau, that’s the best position to hit a second shot.”

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• ​Reconfiguring the new finishing hole by bringing the fairway left, closer to Condit Creek. “Poor Bob Lohman had to design the 18th around a septic field and so it doglegged around big mounds, trying to hide the thing. The hole stayed there even when the septic field was gone.” The architects brought the fairway left toward the creek, creating an approach better suited to the deep new green.

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• ​And, yes, removing trees — lots of trees — that had been imposed on Alison’s design across the previous nine decades, and which obscured many of the strategic lines the captain cagily had created. “Loads of trees had been planted in rows,” Forse said. “It looked like a Weyerhaeuser property and it wasn’t very skillfully done. Those were taken out.”

 

Bern Hofmann was president when the restoration was approved over the objections of many members who had grown accustomed to the tree-lined golf course.

 

“It was funny because my Dad was on the board in the early 70s and was really proud about having planted 2,000 trees, pretty much all over,” the younger Hofmann said. “He said he was proud of getting all those trees planted and I was like, ‘Oh, sorry. I just took them all out.’”

 

More than 1,400 trees initially fell, and more have followed since, Hofmann said. “We did most of them within the first week of the project,” he said. “Davey Tree Service brought crews in from across the Midwest. They dropped trees left and right that first week. It was pretty amazing.”

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Finding a Spark

 

Like Panek, coming home to the Country Club was an easy decision for Dean Sparks.

 

He had cut his teeth — and the DCC greens— as a teen working on Warren West’s ground crew, but unlike Panek, Sparks’ time away was considerably longer than eight months. Beneficial, too.

 

At West’s urging, Sparks left his native Bettendorf after high school to study golf course management and business at the prestigious Mundus Institute at Arizona State University.

 

Part-time college work on the maintenance crew at TPC Scottsdale led to a post-graduate position working on various projects across the TPC network. From 2006 through 2009, Sparks worked alongside Pete Dye on a massive renovation of Crooked Stick near Indianapolis. Then, between 2009 and 2014, Sparks served as superintendent at TPC Piper Glen in Charlotte, N.C., and TPC Prestancia in Sarasota, Fla., overseeing significant restorations at both PGA Tour-managed courses.

 

The sum of his experience made Sparks the perfect choice to come home in 2014 and lead the implementation of the Master Plan that would return the course on the bluff to its past glory.

 

“Working with Mr. Dye was a great experience,” Sparks said. “I got to go with him on trips to Whistling Straits, the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island in South Carolina, and French Lick in Indiana. So I got to learn from a lot of industry people and see a lot of what was going on on the construction side, which was great experience for me.”

 

Before pursuing the DCC opportunity, Sparks consulted with original mentor West, who had assumed the role of Director of Facilities. Today, a half-century beyond his experience as a pint-sized caddie, West remains a fixture on the bluff.

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“I work longer and harder than I ever did as superintendent,” said West, whose gruff exterior hides, well …  a slightly less gruff interior. “They call me the grumpy old man. If somebody does something wrong, I’ll let them know.”

 

Implementation of the plan to restore Davenport Country Club would cost $3 million, and winning membership approval was no slam dunk.

 

Steve Vandemore, a decade-long member and past board member, got his first look at the preliminary Master Plan in 2012, and immediately was intrigued.

 

“I’ve always been a student of the game, I guess,” he said. “I knew this course was designed by Alison, but very few others knew the significance of that. The real potential of the course was just hidden.”

 

Having ushered large projects through the corporate climate at Deere & Company, Vandemore committed to taking the lead in the challenging but critical mission of selling the Master Plan to membership. Hofmann and his board readily accepted the offer.

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“I told myself ‘I know how to do this and I’m going to get it done,’” Vandemore said.

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He did, slowly winning the support of a slim majority of members through a series of seven open presentations and a number of sessions with various smaller, like-minded constituencies. Most of the latter were skeptical.

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At the start, Vandemore said, “20 people were gungho for the plan and 250 or more were ‘Are you kidding me?’”

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He steadily gained support by convincing voters the club had fallen behind on maintenance and repairs, per the USGA’s recommended golf course agronomy schedule. “It was easy for me to make the argument we were late on everything and as stewards of the course it was our responsibility to make sure we leave a beautiful course for the next generation,” he said.

 

Vandermore next made the case for the cost, using the now 13-year-old clubhouse as an example of a sound club-wide expenditure that brought a significant return on investment.

 

The final vote on a plan to finance $2 million and cover the remaining $1 million through member assessments over the ensuing three years passed with 62 percent of the members’ approval.

 

On July 27 of 2014, Sparks, Forse, Nagle and crews from Davey Tree Co., Leibold Irrigation Inc., and Landscapes Unlimited went about the work of reclaiming Captain Alison’s course.

 

‘Rip the Band-Aid and Be Done’

 

Forse still marvels at the level of activity on that first day of construction.

 

“We hit the ground running and there were 125 workers on the golf course,” he said.

 

The massive construction crew certainly signaled a level of urgency to get the job done, both fast and well.

 

“We originally were going to phase it in over a few years,” Panek said of the full renovation. “At some point, we had a meeting and decided let’s just get this done now. Rip the band-aid off and be done vs. having the golf course under construction for three years.”

 

Sparks’ network of industry contacts fueled both the pace of the project and the quality of the workmanship. As early as March of 2014, he started building the schedule around the availability of the best hands Leibold Irrigation and Landscapes Unlimited had to offer. He even convinced the superintendent at TPC Scottsdale to accelerate a greens rebuilding project there in order to get two of Landscapes Unlimited’s top hands to DCC by August.

 

“Oscar and Roberto San Juan are guys who did a lot of work at Augusta National,” Sparks said. “They are really good. We brought them up and had them float the greens and build them out. So we knew we were going to have a great product when we were done.”

 

DCC members, meanwhile, had to do without their course, but not without golf. Panek arranged reciprocity agreements with Crow Valley and Oakwood and a number of local public courses — nearby Pebble Creek in LeClaire, Byron Hills in Port Byron and even Fyre Lake National on the distant outskirts of Sherrard.

 

The work on the bluff was projected to last a year or more, but grass grew quickly and the renovated golf course opened on May 29, 2015.

 

There was more work to be done and many more trees to be removed in the coming months and years, but very quickly the restoration of the Captain’s best work won the approval of some of the most passionate original objectors.

 

“As trees came out, and grass was starting to grow better than it ever had grown, people started to see what it was we were envisioning,” Vandemore said. “Those who I know voted against the project are some of the first ones you regularly see on the tee today, and were the biggest proponents for pulling out more trees.”

 

DCC, in all its glory, was back. And better than ever.