This Is Not a Game

It is a gorgeous summer day in Wisconsin, and rather than enjoying a walk at Sand Valley, Brian Zager is inside the clubhouse, playing God. We’ve been sitting across from each other, politely eating our lunches, for 64 minutes when I ask to see how he does it. At my request, he pulls out a hulking Lenovo Y500 laptop from his bag. It thuds on the table. As soon as he opens it, it becomes clear that this computer has seen some shit. Parts of his keyboard are so worn that the black paint has been rubbed away, leaving red nubs where the letters S, D and F used to be.

The battle-tested machine boots up slowly, which makes sense, as it is 12 years old. I gawk at it, and Zager laughs. He’s supposed to be the tech guy, the wizard, and here he is carrying around an antique brick. I pull my chair around to his side of the table, and soon we are staring at a 3D model of a golf course. It looks pixelated, with flat coloring and low resolution—like something out of a video game from the year 2000. That, I find out, is because the model is something out of a 25-year-old computer game: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2000, to be exact. The Sim City–looking fairway in front of my eyes is none other than Dr. Alister MacKenzie’s fabled El Boquerón, one of the few designs from the visionary who dreamt up Augusta National and Cypress Point that never got built. Dozens of golf sickos pass by, stealing furtive glimpses of the screen. They look confused. None of them have a clue what they’re looking at, nor do they know that the man sitting next to me is responsible for conjuring it from mythic legend to an actual golf course.

With a few deft maneuvers of his portable mouse, Zager digs in. His pointing and clicking has created an amoeba-like blob in the middle of the first fairway. “I might draw some weird, funky-looking shape like this,” he says. “I have a process that I learned for contouring.” He makes a copy of his blob, resizes it to make it a bit smaller and nests Blob 2 inside of Blob 1. Then, using a menu tool that eludes my grasp, Zager starts futzing with the scale of the blobs. “Basically, the outer shape is the top of the slope,” he says. I have played golf for many years and reported on the tech industry for even longer, but this process has turned me into a slack-jawed boob trying to understand what’s happening. “Good scale contour for golf is, up and down, no more than 2 feet,” he says. I nod and pretend to know what he’s talking about.

Over the next 15 seconds, Zager delivers a monologue I find mostly incomprehensible. Things like: “I’m just lowering the middle [click, click]…One of the keys here is that you don’t do everything the same, so let’s go 1.3 down there [keyboard tapping]…Yep, and then we’ll go 2.2 there [clicking furiously]…You want to smooth all this out so there’s not quite such abrupt lines.” I don’t speak. He’s in the zone.

But the result, when he finally clicks the glorious rendering button, is immediately recognizable. His Russian nesting doll of blobs has turned into a beautiful, linksy fairway mound that would be perfectly at home on the Old Course. The whole process is weird and cool, and I say so. He smiles and tells me that a stranger on the internet taught him how to do this back in 2005. And it’s the same process he used to shape many of the mounds on the Lido, Tom Doak’s highly regarded resurrection of C.B. Macdonald’s lost Long Island masterpiece. One hour later, I am walking with Zager, driver in hand, toward my tee shot when he tells me to look down. “This mounding here is some of the first stuff that I did on the project that came right from the model,” he says. Those computer blobs? I am standing on one of them right now.

It is worth pausing for a moment to spell all this out plainly: A 41-year-old from a small town in Wisconsin uses a 12-year-old laptop to run a 25-year-old computer game, using tactics honed two decades ago on an internet golf-nerd forum, to design digital golf courses. Brian Zager has spent his adult life obsessing over, studying, mapping and shaping golf courses by the pixel. Now his work is leaving the computer and making its way into the real world. And the future of golf course architecture—maybe even golf itself—might never be the same.

Brian Zager was 9 years old when his father bought their first family computer, a Windows 95 monstrosity. Brian loved golf. His dad put a club in Brian’s hand around the age of 3 but had a strict driving-range-only rule for the first four years. When his father finally took him to play “the cheapest, dumbest course we had out there,” it was love at first swing. The only problem, as little Brian saw it, was that he couldn’t go out there every day. When he was 11, a computer game changed the trajectory of his life. Specifically, it was Accolade’s Jack Nicklaus Golf & Course Design: Signature Edition. By today’s standards, this game is nearly unplayable—blocky, wonky and laughably slow. (The screen wipes clean to load the graphics between each player’s shots, a process that takes four interminable seconds.) But for Zager, one feature of the game—golf course designer mode—offered endless entertainment.

In the gray doldrums of a central Wisconsin winter, Zager basked in the 800 x 600 low-resolution glow of his boxy computer monitor, moving pixels left and right and re-creating from memory all the local golf courses he’d played. “If I made those for the game,” he says, “I thought it would feel more like playing golf in real life.”

He built Tree Acres in Stevens Point and Wisconsin River Golf Club. There was a thrill to bringing the real world into this digital one. Then, in 1997, came the internet. If you came of age at any point during the halcyon days of dial-up, this part of the story ought to feel familiar. For many, the computer transformed from a gadget to a lifeline. The world of chat rooms, forums and awkward, clip-art-laden HTML designs acted like a particle accelerator for the curiosities, obsessions and hobbies of kids like Zager. He remembers the joy of discovering that other people shared his interest in designing. Then, one day, he found a design for Cypress Point from the Jack Nicklaus game, which kicked down the doors in his mind. “I remember that being a moment,” he says. “It was so well done, and the course was like nothing I’d seen before.” He reached out to the man who made it, who then introduced him to more like-minded nerds. He and Zager are still friends to this day.

But it wasn’t until he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point that Zager got fully sucked into the world of architecture. Friends on a message board called Copyright Club created a design contest inside Tiger Woods 2000—the game Zager still uses for his renderings. Contestants were provided with a routing over a set piece of land, and Zager and his buddies had to come up with a unique design for each hole. Everyone would submit their proposal, and the group would vote on the winner. It was here, among this crew, that Zager began to understand what makes a great golf hole. “There were a bunch of guys who were interested in golden age architecture and minimalism, and they would drop all these references and I’d scramble to look them up,” he says.

They introduced him to architecture sites like Golf Club Atlas, and Zager found himself happily tumbling down rabbit holes. He remembers at one point in 2007 purchasing Doak’s famous The Anatomy of a Golf Course: The Art of Golf Architecture. It never entered his racing mind that 14 years later, he’d be working with Doak, traveling the world and playing its most renowned courses.

Zager began to see golf the way that good architects do: as a strategic test instead of an obstacle course. He saw how the best courses can challenge scratch players while remaining fair to high-handicappers, and why courses that keep the ball on the ground longer are more exciting. He began to evaluate holes not on how they looked but on how they made a player think. Hitting and hoping is boring golf. The best designs featured holes that asked questions of a player and forced them to come up with an answer unique to their skill level. And Zager was eager to decode and replicate it all. “What appealed to me about games and simulators was that I didn’t think I’d ever get to go around to these brilliant courses in my lifetime or career,” he says. “This allowed me to experience great golf in a way that was fun and made it real, instead of just reading about it.”

Zager shouldn’t have worried about discovering world-class golf—eventually, it would come to him. Sometime in 2013, while he was working a quality-assurance software engineering job he wasn’t crazy about and building courses for golf-simulator companies on the side, he came across a newspaper article about a new golf resort, set to break ground 20 minutes from his hometown. Mike Keiser, the man behind Bandon Dunes, was bringing his model to Wisconsin to build what would eventually become Sand Valley Golf Resort. Zager was desperate to get involved. Around this time, he’d begun using lidar (light detection and ranging) data—collected when a plane or drone shoots a beam of light down to the ground and records what it bounces off of, like sonar—to survey land for golf courses. Good lidar maps exist for most of the United States and are publicly available, which means that Zager had access to detailed contour imaging for the land Keiser had acquired.

Intrigue veered toward obsession. Zager found the Sand Valley site on his own, grabbed the imaging data and then made multiple visits to the property before they broke ground. He made calls to the construction company on the project, all of which went unanswered. On his third visit to the site, he took pictures and posted them to Golf Club Atlas. That’s when Craig Haltom, head of Oliphant Construction, which was building the resort, finally reached out. “I guess they thought that I was either really serious or really weird,” Zager says.

Haltom had Zager make a topographic map for the property using lidar, something Zager had never done. It took him a few days. Sporadic freelance assignments continued like that for six more years. Zager eventually mapped every course at the resort and quit his software job to work on the grounds crew. Sand Valley became Zager’s life, but golf wasn’t a career. Not until 2020, when Haltrom called him about a new project. He told Zager that a Chicago-based consultant and golf history buff named Peter Flory had spent years researching C.B. Macdonald’s lost Lido course—considered to be one of, if not the best in the world during its time. Flory dredged up archival photos and plans to meticulously build a 3D version on Tiger Woods 2000, triangulating features and aligning landmarks from the photos taken between 1917 and 1941 to make the course as true as possible to its original design. Doak, who’d toyed with building a Lido replica at Bandon Dunes before ultimately creating Old Macdonald, was slated to bring Flory’s model to life, and Haltrom wanted Zager’s help.

To make the Lido project work, Doak needed a way to take Flory’s rendering and turn it into something he could work with: a topographic map. Zager’s task was to find a way to extract the innumerable data points and triangulations from the game and reverse engineer the file so it could record the height of every slope and give Doak the grading plans he needed. Initially, Zager was stumped. Then, after months of nothing, he realized he could write a script that would ping around the course and create a grid of measuring points, which he could then convert into lidar points. From there, he built a Python script to turn those coordinates into a map. If you don’t know what any of this means, you are not alone. What matters is that Zager cracked the code to get Doak his map (which Doak later admitted to me was much more detailed than what he’d have drawn). More importantly, Zager also managed to create a dataset so precise that it could be fed into GPS-driven bulldozers, which, to borrow language from Flory, “essentially 3D-printed a rough draft of the golf course onto the ground at the site.” By going full nerd, Zager helped to turn the Lido into the first of its kind: a long-lost golf course resurrected, in part, by robots.

Are lidar data sets and GPS bulldozers the future of golf design? Yes. But Zager and his hero, Tom Doak, believe the human element will continue to separate the greatest layouts.

Perhaps the purist in you is bristling right now. Maybe all of this seems a little gauche compared to sepia-toned photos of men in the 1920s wearing newsboy caps and hand-digging perfect green sites in natural settings. MacKenzie famously built Cypress Point for just $90,000—$10,000 less than he’d anticipated. Perhaps you find GPS bulldozers and 3D mapping an affront to the artistry and history that connect the game to the past. Let me assure you that none of that tech comes through walking the Lido, which feels at times like stepping into a time machine. Strap on your tweed blazer.

Standing under a late-afternoon sun, I watch Zager, whose ball on the 11th hole has stayed up in a knob of grass, teetering on the precipice of a 10-foot-deep fairway bunker. He has half a stance but almost zero chance of delivering the clubface to the ball cleanly without falling headfirst into the crater he helped build. It is a true rub-of-the-green situation, and he’s loving it. He’s thrilled that his shot, which missed its target slightly, is being justly punished with a gnarly lie. Zager remains a purist—the kind of golfer who is frustrated that we aren’t getting proper winds today, which makes it even harder to hold the massive sloped greens. He speaks reverently of his forebears, from C.B. Macdonald to Doak and his No. 2 on the Lido project, Brian Schneider. On No. 16, a brawny par 3 named Redan, I squirt a 5-iron short and right that thuds in front of the green, kicks a little right and stops. Zager frowns. “No offense, but that’s not supposed to happen,” he says, telling me that my ball should have scooted forward violently over the ridge and down into a vertical hell bunker that would have left me short-sided. “I think the mound there is a bit too tall. It might be a place for a future restoration,” he says with a smile. I thank whatever pixel or human is responsible for the more generous grade and proceed to make double bogey anyhow.

“[Zager] had the two key attributes I look for,” Doak told me recently. “He loves golf, and he was sincere about what he was doing. Apart from that, he had an understanding of tech that we as a company didn’t have.” Zager’s work taking Flory’s design and making it mappable was, Doak said, “essential” to getting the Lido built. This is why, after the Lido project was complete, Doak asked Zager to intern with him, a program whose alums consist of names like Gil Hanse and Mike DeVries. “It was the quickest yes of my life,” Zager recalls. “I replied in less than two seconds.” On Zager’s first day at Renaissance Golf Design, Doak asked him to come up with a routing for a project he was working on. Doak had already mapped his own, but he wanted to see what his newest team member might come up with. He gave Zager a piece of paper with the boundaries of the land and told him to get to work.

“I played around with it for 10 minutes, and then I went up to Tom and said, ‘Can I just do this on the computer instead?’” Doak said yes. Despite some rookie flourishes, Zager’s finished product was not far off from Doak’s own routing.

Here’s where I tell you about the fairy tale. How Zager hadn’t played a course outside Wisconsin before Doak took him across the country, then the globe, to see the world’s best golf. How he’s already walked and mapped Cypress and played Prestwick and the Old Course. How he became lead associate on one of Doak’s swanky, confidential projects. The private jets. The invitation from Wes Farrell to be the lead architect and resurrect El Boquerón in Aiken, South Carolina, for the 21 Golf Club. Where I stress the improbability of the journey from rendering golf-simulator courses on a 12-year-old laptop to moving 1 million cubic yards of land to realize the as-yet-unfulfilled dream of one of golf’s most important architects. At one point during our Lido round, I ask Zager’s father, Ron, who’s joined us for the walk, if he ever imagined this for his son while watching him hunched over the family computer back in the mid-’90s. “Never in a million years,” he tells me. For the Zager family, Sand Valley is personal: Zager’s father still works on the grounds crew. “Who knows what would’ve happened if they didn’t build this golf out here?” the elder Zager says, gesturing to the rolling terrain that made Sand Valley possible. “This game can change your life.”

If you ask Brian Zager about the future, he mostly demurs. He’s quick to note that the skills he brings to course architecture make the process more efficient, but that he is not reinventing the wheel. People like Doak, he argues, who innately understand the scope and scale of a piece of land, and have a natural eye for routing, will never go out of style. And yet it’s impossible to watch Zager work and not imagine the implications. How he solves problems with technology is remarkable. Like the way he created an algorithm to map areas based on slope to guess where water will pool on courses and where it will wash away. Or how he took the lidar data from the place where he surmised MacKenzie was going to build El Boquerón in Argentina, then overlaid and twisted it around on Farrell’s property to find the spot where the elevation profiles matched, so they could stay true to the good doctor’s sketches. By his own admission, Zager’s first lead project has been a learning experience—managing drainage, interfacing with superintendents, scheduling shaping. But the facts are indisputable: Right now, in Aiken, earth has been moved in MacKenzie’s name. Greens shaped. And someday soon, people will hit shots on a course that was drawn up 100 years ago.

Zoom out, and things start to get heady. On a recent secret project, Zager and Doak pulled lidar maps from pieces of famous holes around the world—think 150 yards of fairway from No. 4 at Bandon Trails. Not full holes, just slivers of land and contouring that the pair found especially engaging. Then they remixed them. For one original hole, they used the final 100 yards of approach from the second hole at the Old Course—the exact same slopes—but then Zager mirrored it on his computer and flipped the design so the left and right of the hole were switched. Their version of the hole, unlike No. 2 at St. Andrews, is a par 5. As such, the sampling is virtually unnoticeable, even to the trained eye.

“I’ve taken people out there who were members of some of the courses we borrowed from, and they didn’t even recognize what we’d borrowed,” Doak told me. And so, somewhere out there, unbeknownst to them, golfers are playing a collection of tiny elements of some of the best courses in the world, and they’re all exactly to scale. It’d be wrong to call them templates or even replicas. What Zager has helped make possible is something more like what a DJ does: chopping and screwing, mashing up and finding ways to honor the classics, while making something completely original in the process. 

Technology at its best is democratizing. At its worst, it removes enough friction that it saturates markets with crap or lets grifters in. I asked Doak if he thought we were in for a rash of recovered or lost golf courses. “I hope not, and I doubt it,” he said. But he is concerned that “developers will use these tools to a) avoid paying architect fees and advancing the art, and b) expropriate the name of a great architect from the past.”

While we sit at our table at Sand Valley, Zager is cycling through the four programs he uses to import data, find slopes and grades, and manipulate the land—an onerous process—and I am getting start-up ideas in my head. It’s easy to imagine a world where Zager hires a programmer who can combine all his software into one proprietary tool. It’s just as easy to imagine him licensing that tool and training others in the Zager Way, which would marry the best of classic minimalist design with new-age GPS mapping. In this fantasy, let 1,000 flowers bloom—a rash of new architects who come from different backgrounds, all with unique ideas that can be realized with the click of a mouse. I am getting dizzy thinking about it, putting innumerable carts before horses. I know it’s more complicated than this; designing a course on screen and bringing it to life in the soil are vastly different things. And yet here is Zager, seemingly threading the needle. And if he is heralding a new architect world order, who better to lead the charge than a genuine golf sicko who’s studied under the greats?

Two hours later on the Lido, moments after a short Zager monologue about how he’d like to move a hump on a greenside bunker leftward so that those who hit the fairway on the right and catch the speed slot can be rewarded with an easier approach into the green, I inquire about this future. I mention the app idea, and, with characteristic understatement, Zager tells me he thinks it’s cool. He beckons me to come with him up a ridge where he hopes they’ll put tipped-out tees for the Wisconsin State Amateur later this summer. He’s geeking out on the sight lines and proudly pointing at the undulating land he helped bring into existence. He seems utterly at home out here. “But I don’t want to run a tech company,” he adds. 

“I want to build great golf courses.”