“This is exactly what I want to do,” he affirms.

Malach is one of the youngest Canadian upstarts in a business that was once prosperous but has more recently contracted significantly, a day in which most Canadian golf course designers work out of their homes and cars, travelling from client to client, however far apart they may be. And the work most are doing — tweaking greens, leading tree removal, completing bunker drainage and fixing previous designs — isn’t particularly sexy. Even avid golfers might not be aware of some of those working in the Canadian golf architecture business these days. Names like Keith Cutten, Riley Johns, Wade Horrocks and Yannick Pilon. These men — and a handful of others — are making a living by being a jack of all trades within golf design. They are planning; they are shaping greens and bunkers; and they and selling their services, all the while logging thousands of miles in search of new projects. It is hard, taxing work that requires multiple skills. Which begs the question: Who would want to take a job in an industry that’s challenged, where competition for work is fierce, where the future is far from certain? (Yes, we see the irony of a print magazine asking that question.) Well there are indeed some, and they are prepared to do what it takes to follow their passion.

There have been two no table booms in Canadian golf course design.

One followed the First World War when a young military veteran named Stanley Thompson started working with his brother, Nicol, and George Cumming, a Scottish golf pro, conceiving courses in Ontario. Thompson would eventually go it alone, creating dozens of the best layouts in Canada (as well as in the U.S., Caribbean and South America) before passing in 1953. The years after the Second World War saw the course design business slow, with a handful of Thompson associates, most notably Robbie Robinson, building a few hits but several underwhelming designs on frugal budgets.

That started to change around 1990. By this time golf in Canada was on the upswing, with foreign money and the ambition of developers fueling a rise in the number of courses being built. Golf course architects garnered more projects and more money, and in turn became recognizable in a way their predecessors were not. Thomas McBroom, Doug Carrick and Graham Cooke, to name three, had offices, design associates and support staff. More importantly, they had name recognition and could command fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single project. Often driven by real estate sales, developers used these top Canadian designers as brands to sell palatial homes. Ads selling golf course real estate projects started incorporating course designers. An ad might read, “A master planned community with homes backing onto a golf course designed by award-winning architect Tom McBroom.” The suggestion was clear — investing in such real estate, attached to a brand-name golf course designer, was better than playing the stock market. You couldn’t lose and golf courses sprung up by the dozens.

In those days, Brantford, Ont., architect Ian Andrew was working as an associate for Carrick. He would leave to launch his own firm in 2006 and has become — mostly by necessity after the trickle-down effect of the 2008 American economy collapse halted the golf course boom — the country’s most successful designer focusing on renovation and restoration, with more than 50 clients in Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the bridge between the most prosperous period of golf course design in Canada and the next generation of Canadian golf architects, but fondly remembers the days when new projects would regularly show up for his former boss.

“There was always something coming into the office,” Andrew recollects. “There was a great 20-year run for Tom, Graham and Doug. And then the bottom dropped out.”

By that point Andrew was relatively established and armed with an expanding client list. Others weren’t so lucky. While the Canadian real estate market didn’t fall as far as that of the U.S., the demand for a second home or lakeside retreat backing onto a Carrick or McBroom golf course diminished overnight. While 10 or more new courses often opened each year following 2000, that number has shrunk to almost nothing in recent times. News of a new course, once commonplace, is celebrated as a unique curiosity these days.

To deal with the downturn, Carrick, McBroom and Cooke cut their staff to the bare bones, letting go of a number of associate designers in the process. For those not in the know, those associates were often very involved in the designs, from making digital plans for approvals, consulting on course details and directing construction crews. Talented, but lacking the name recognition of a Carrick or McBroom, they were suddenly out of work in the midst of the worst economic slide since 1929. It wasn’t a good time to be an individual whose job was crafting golf holes.

Wade Horrocks was one who found himself cut loose in the slowdown. Horrocks grew up around golf in Lethbridge, Alta., and his interest led him to join the construction crew building Paradise Canyon under the direction of Bill Newis. Eventually he’d go to work for Evans Golf, a construction firm, before connecting with Gary Browning, the noted Calgary golf course architect who created Stewart Creek in Canmore, among others. Then suddenly in 2008, Horrocks found himself unemployed.

“To be honest, after I left Gary I thought my career in golf might be over,” he reflects.

However his passion for the sport and course design continued unabated. Despite having a young family, he went back to school, taking a degree in landscape architecture from a university in Idaho while working at a landscape architecture firm at home. It was a daunting, tiring proposition.

“I’d work a 20-hour week and take six classes in Idaho, driving down there every week,” he says. “I did that with two kids. My wife deserves all the credit for making it work. In retrospect, I don’t know if we’d do that again. It was hard — really hard.”

Horrocks found a job at a landscape architecture firm, and his role expanded to include more consultation with existing golf clubs. These days a majority of his work is in golf — he’s currently renovating one of the two courses at Priddis Greens outside Calgary — though he admits being part of a firm that does more than golf allows him to balance out the periods when the course business is not so brisk.

Montreal’s Yannick Pilon faced a similar situation after helping Cooke to design numerous courses, including The Lakes on Cape Breton Island. He went out on his own, trying to create a new firm in Quebec, but with construction slowing amidst the economic downturn he struggled to find enough work in golf alone to make it a go. A trained landscape architect, it didn’t take long for Pilon to start taking projects elsewhere. He fell in with some longtime friends in the business, working on non-golf projects to balance his workload.

“I don’t think I would be able to make myself a living without this as the golf course industry has been slowing down in Quebec in the past couple of years,” he says. “It has not stopped completely, but it is certainly not thriving.”

He still works on golf projects — bunker redesigns at two private clubs (including one designed by his former boss) — but Pilon remains concerned about the industry.

“Most projects are getting smaller each year, apart from a few projects undertaken by private courses that are in the upper tier, which is, as you may know, pretty small here, in Quebec,” he says.

As opportunities in the business have diminished, a new type of golf architect has emerged. Led by Andrew’s example, many have focused on renovating existing courses. And increasingly, this new generation of Canadian designers — which also includes Canmore, Alta.’s Johns, Guelph, Ont.’s Cutten, and Toronto-based Jeff Mingay — are one-stop shops, offering everything from planning to imagery to actual design. They are as comfortable on a machine moving earth as they are in front of a computer screen or making a presentation in front of a club’s board of directors, hoping to convince it not to undertake a renovation in house so as to save money.

Some of these new-school designers will also undertake shaping projects to fill slow periods in their businesses. They’ll do practically anything needed to keep them in the sport, though it might not be what is considered golf design to many. Cutten recently reshaped bunkers at Cabot Links before moving to The Algonquin in New Brunswick, where he partnered with Cabot Links designer Rod Whitman on an extensive redo of the McBroom course there. Similarly, Johns often runs earthmoving equipment for projects devised by the ultra successful American architecture duo of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, which designed Cabot Cliffs.

“I can always hop on a dozer and get work shaping,” says Johns. “That was always part of my plan.”

Johns put that skill to work immediately after finishing his landscape architecture degree at the University of Guelph and finding himself saddled with $100,000 in student loans. That’s when Doak, with whom Johns had completed an internship, called.

“He asked if I’d ever been to China,” Johns recalls.

Johns jumped at the opportunity and banked much of the money to pay off his academic debt. He’d wanted to work with Doak to understand the business of golf course architecture, both in the field and in the office, recognizing he’d need to do everything — devise contracts, work with club boards and owners and help design actual golf holes — if he hoped to have any success. Johns moved to shaping Cabot Cliffs with Coore and Crenshaw before landing his first renovation project at Winnipeg’s Elmhurst G&CC, a Donald Ross design. More recently, Johns worked in Florida renovating the nine-hole municipal course Winter Park outside of Orlando (a project he undertook with American Keith Rhebb) that has been widely heralded. As well, he’s undertaken the design of a new practice facility at Vancouver’s Point Grey.

Aside from Andrew, Toronto’s Mingay is likely the most visible architect to emerge in Canada in recent years. Mixing media smarts, an interest in golf history, and finding a niche that was largely untapped, Mingay has crafted a vibrant business with clients in the Pacific Northwest.

“No matter what you do in this business, to be successful you have to be a good salesman,” Mingay, 44, says. “I’m always networking, trying to find jobs and visiting clubs.”

Mingay started his career working for Whitman, the wildly talented, but somewhat eccentric, designer and shaper behind Wolf Creek and Blackhawk near Edmonton, Sagebrush outside Kelowna, B.C. (which has been closed for two years) and Cabot Links.

Searching for a way to distinguish himself in the market, Mingay began focusing on the work of the late Scottish-Canadian golf architect A.V. Macan, who worked in British Columbia, and down the American west coast, and this year was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Golf Hall of Fame. In 2000 he visited the historic Victoria Golf Club to talk about its Macan connection and though the club wouldn’t hire him to consult on a restoration for a decade, his recent work there has been extremely well received. His reputation spread to clubs with a Macan connection in Washington state, which hired him to bring the Macan back into their courses.

“When I initially told people I wanted to be a golf architect, they were often surprised,” Mingay says. “‘That’s a job?’ they’d ask. But I stuck with it.”

To keep ahead in the business, many of today’s golf course architects have extensive, with the first stop typically being a degree in landscape architecture. Like Mingay, Cutten, 33, cut his teeth at Sagebrush and Cabot Links with Whitman. But at Cabot he suddenly found himself out of work when the ambitious project nearly shuttered after the downturn hit in 2008. “I was told to go home,” he recollects. “That led me to think about what else I might do to improve my skills. How should I best structure my business?”

With that in mind, Cutten commenced work on a Master’s degree in landscape architecture, with a thesis on golf design. And since every project needs planning permissions, Cutten set upon learning that process. Finally, he developed a skill many of his peers don’t have. During his time at school, he became an expert in digital imaging, a key for golf designers selling their services to wary clubs and members.

“That meant I could do more than just shape a course,” Cutten explains. “And my ability with graphics and planning has led to good things.”

But Cutten is also a realist, which is why he partnered with Whitman at The Algonquin in pretty St. Andrews-bythe Sea on the New Brunswick coast. With twins at home, and a wife with a vibrant real estate business, Cutten is trying to find balance in a business that offers very little.

“I’m doing this because I love it,” he says, noting he spent eight months away from home last year, with more planned this year. “I really haven’t done all of the math — it would just be depressing.”

For certain, anyone entering the business these days had better be rounded and multitalented. They need to understand golf design and what makes a great course — that’s a given. But as the big golf architecture offices disappeared, so did the supports. There’s no administrative assistant to book appointments, no graphic designer to do your digital presentation for a club’s board. And perhaps most challenging of all is the chase. Even if you have a significant renovation project in hand, it will eventually end and you’ll need to find another. It is a challenging, difficult business.

“There are no guarantees, that’s for sure,” Johns says. “You can make a lot of money and have some success and suddenly have nothing. And people need to be able to do more than just design — you have to understand banking, and marketing, be both a shaper and understand contracts. It is a complicated business.”

While chasing restoration projects and redesigns all over the world, hardly any of the architects who spoke with SCOREGolf for this story see an original design in their future. There may be opportunities to rebuild existing golf courses, but the notion of creating a design from scratch — so as to really put their stamp on the industry in the way that Carrick, Cooke, McBroom and other Canadians like Browning and Les Furber have done — seems less and less likely every year.

“I feel lucky to just be able to work on courses and do what I do for a living,” says Horrocks. “Maybe there will come a day when I have the opportunity [to build a new course], but working in golf is great.”

In his widely-read book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the importance of timing when it comes to breakthroughs in various industries. Gladwell points out that Bill Gates wouldn’t have become a tech titan without his family living near a university with a computer lab Gates was allowed to access and market conditions that were trending towards consumer computer use. Similarly, Stanley Thompson’s design talents benefited from the influx of money and interest in golf in the 1920s, just as Carrick, McBroom and Cooke capitalized on the real estate boom of the 1990s. Those architects not only had the talent but the timing to capitalize on their gifts.

ON THE HORIZON New golf courses are few and far between these days but there are two notable tracks coming soon. Doug Carrick would like to be busier than he is, but he’s nonetheless grateful to have a new course near Barrie, Ont., in The Nest at Friday Harbour. Part of a four-seasons resort community on Lake Simcoe, The Nest resides inland and on former agricultural fields with the finishing three holes carved through mature woodlands. Though originally flat land, the excavation of Friday Harbour’s marina provided Carrick with approximately two million cubic metres of earth with which to shape holes. It will open as a semiprivate facility next year. In Nova Scotia, Jack Nicklaus’ firm is building Forest Lakes CC outside of Halifax, again as a component of a resort community. Set to open fully in 2021, Forest Lakes is being billed as more natural than most Nicklaus designs with little earth moved in its shaping. A few back-nine holes border Cochrane Lake while natural rock outcroppings are being incorporated into the design. In addition, two significant rebuilds are taking place on opposite sides of the country. The seaside Algonquin GC in New Brunswick is being redone by Rod Whitman and Keith Cutten, while Campbell River G&CC on Vancouver Island has been rebranded (it was formerly Sequoia Springs) and completely rebuilt by Graham Cooke. – Jason Logan

Architects like Mingay, Cutten, Johns, Pilon or Horrocks may have the skills to design a course that would rival the best Canada has to offer, but they will likely be prevented from doing so because of the changes in the game and economic conditions. Andrew, despite partnering with 2003 Masters champion Mike Weir in Weir Golf Design in 2009, has only had that chance at Laval-sur-le-Lac, where he and Weir completely overhauled the club’s Blue Course in anticipation of it one day hosting an RBC Canadian Open. And even in that instance, it wasn’t a raw site with which Andrew had to work. The few new projects that have come along lately have still mostly gone to McBroom or Carrick — McBroom at The Links at Brunello in Halifax; Carrick at the soon-to-beopened The Nest Golf Course at Friday Harbour Resort in Central Ontario — or big-name Americans — Phil Mickelson and Rick Smith at Mickelson National in Calgary and Jack Nicklaus at Forest Lakes near Halifax. (See sidebar.)

Johns is hopeful an opportunity will one day come but believes he can leave his mark on the business even without designing a new course.

“I just want to do what I’ve been doing,” he says. “I want to be able to work with clients and involve some artistry. I think there will be opportunities to rework existing courses, and hopefully there’s one or two of those a year. That’s enough for me.”

Mingay, who has undertaken some redesigns, like Edmonton’s Derrick Club, says it would be unfortunate if a new build doesn’t come his way.

“I’d be disappointed if it doesn’t happen, that I don’t get the chance to create something new from scratch,” he says. “There’s going to be opportunities — but it might just be presentations that never get beyond that. It could be a plan that never gets built.”

Andrew is also skeptical.

“I don’t see a catalyst that will kick-start the industry,” he says. “Right now we are treading water. How long will that last? A decade? Twenty years?

“I think there will be a lot of projects renovating existing golf courses and making them better,” Andrew continues. “But until then you’re going to have to be willing to grind it out.”

Malach sits in his dorm room in Inverness, N.S., and talks enthusiastically about his future prospects in the industry, punctuating his comments with the names of movers and shakers in the business — like Cabot Links partner Ben Cowan-Dewar and the iconoclastic designer Doak — with whom he has developed relationships.

Young and unattached, and maybe even naïve, Malach sees only opportunity in the business, and he is prepared to travel the world chasing shaping jobs at the handful of new courses being built or the redesigns of existing courses. He says he’s content to work on small renovation projects at largely unknown courses to generate revenue.

“Those are the kinds of clubs that don’t invest in doing their bunkers properly, but where a lot of people will show up on a Saturday to play,” he says. “I want to show them what can be done with a little reno work and some tree removal.”

But wouldn’t he like to build his own course and make his mark on the game? Will his career be complete if he spends a few nomadic decades travelling the world fixing greenside drainage, reshaping bunkers and tinkering with cart paths? Will he still be inclined to do so if he has a family? Malach doesn’t miss a beat.

“If there’s an opportunity to build a course sometime in the future, I’d be a fool to say no. Of course I want to. But even if that doesn’t happen, this is an incredible business. If I can wake up every morning and go to work in the golf business, that’s my dream.”

So far, Malach is living that dream, even if it’s not exactly the one he imagined all those years ago.