Belmont Golf Course in Virginia renovated by Davis Love III to make best use of the Tillinghast design

Here’s a trivia question: Name the only golf course in the Commonwealth of Virginia to have hosted a men’s professional major championship.

Give up? The answer is Hermitage Country Club in Richmond, home of the 1949 PGA Championship in which Sam Snead defeated Johnny Palmer 3-and-2 in the match-play final.

The club and its golf course both still exist, but they’ve long since parted ways. In 1977, when Hermitage elected to move the club to a new location west of the city, the old layout was taken over by Henrico County, which renamed it Belmont Golf Course and operated it as a municipal facility for the next 40-plus years.

All that time, the golf world had an affordable, public-access 1917 A.W. Tillinghast design within minutes of a sizable metropolitan area. But how many golfers outside of Richmond had even heard of it, much less played it?

Probably not that many – the county hadn’t given golfers much reason to seek it out. Its infrastructure had aged and trees had overgrown, choking off playing corridors. Greens morphed into bland circles, and course conditions languished. Belmont was, in short, one of the many American munis with a fine set of Golden Age “bones” and not much else. It was still capable of bringing enjoyment but ultimately frustrating for its unfulfilled potential.

Toward the end of the last decade, it became apparent Henrico County had grown tired of operating the course. Rumors of redevelopment swirled. Belmont sits in the middle of a pleasant residential community of moderate density – inner-ring suburbia – and its neighbors, desperate to preserve green, open space in their backyard, jumped into action. “Save Belmont” yard signs popped up everywhere, and advocates for the course made their voices heard in community meetings. County Manager John Vithoulkas listened and in 2019 put out an request for proposal to find Belmont a new operator for a 20-year lease.

The county considered more than half a dozen proposals before settling on one led by the First Tee of Greater Richmond, with Davis Love III (assisted by his brother, Mark, and the firm’s lead designer, Scot Sherman) as the architect of record. During a tour of the property last month, Brent Schneider, the CEO of the local First Tee chapter, explained that the Loves’ work at Birdwood, the University of Virginia’s golf course in nearby Charlottesville, had caught his eye.

“I went up to Birdwood with one of my board members,” Schneider recalled. “We met with Scot Sherman, and we were aware of the work he had been doing with the Loves at Sea Pines and Kiawah Island. He knew the history [of Belmont] well. On the ride home, I said to my friend, ‘We can put in a proposal, but we’re going to have to change the golf course because of what the First Tee does.’ ”

 

With little time available for fundraising, financing for the First Tee-Love proposal would be underwritten by an anonymous donor. Construction took place throughout 2020; because the property was already a golf course, the group sailed through the permitting process.

The Love plan, which combined elements of renovation and restoration, was radical. First Tee flagship facilities need driving ranges for their standard programming, of course, and on a property of just 100 acres, something needed to be sacrificed to free up that space. That ended up being the first six holes of the original golf course. Historical preservationists were aghast, and not without reason. After all, A.W. Tillinghast isn’t making golf holes anymore, and losing any part of his legacy stings.

Now that Belmont has reopened, though, it’s worth reviewing what was gained in the deal. Along with the driving range – and a dedicated wedge range that plays to the fourth green of the original course – Belmont now offers a six-hole short course. Nicknamed Little Bell, its holes range from 80 to 145 yards, making it an ideal first course for youngsters or a good spot for avid players to sharpen their wedges and short irons. The holes are inspired by Tillinghast templates like the Reef, Tiny Tim and the Duel hole at San Francisco Golf Club. The Love team also built a wild, 39,000-square-foot putting course known as The Ringer. Like the Punchbowl at Bandon Dunes or the grande dame Himalayas putting course at St. Andrews, it promises to be a first-rate community gathering spot.

And the twelve remaining holes of the original course have been completely refreshed. In some cases, like at the first, the Love team used vintage aerials to perform restorative work, with the original greens being GPS mapped and rebuilt to spec – Sherman called the process “core and restore.”

In other places the team departed from the restoration script. The par-4 third, for example, combines a Tillinghast “Great Hazard” cross-bunker with an homage to the 18th green at Winged Foot West.

“We took some creative license, but we were respectful of the Tillinghast tradition,” Sherman said. “We thought the place would show itself well with old-school greens and flashed bunkers rather than the oval sand pits in the photos. We spent a lot time shaping and detailing those bunkers.”

While Tillinghast is most famous for the Winged Foots and Baltusrols of the world, Sherman pointed to the lesser-known coda to his career, when he took to the road as a consultant for the PGA of America at the height of the Great Depression, advising small-town clubs around the country on how to make their courses more playable and affordable to maintain.

“He was an innovator,” Sherman said. “He went around improving courses. If he were alive and saw the changes in our society today, I think he’d be all for it.”

The new Belmont addresses some of those changes in a vibrant way. One is the ever-increasing desire to use golf as an instrument for strengthening community bonds. To do that, facilities need to do more than pay lip service to “inclusion” – they need to provide amenities that multiple constituencies can really use.

The other is the issue of time. Everyone knows how difficult it can be to carve out four hours to play eighteen holes; at Belmont, Little Bell and The Ringer are great appetizer-size golf options that will appeal to anyone with as little as half an hour to spare, making it easy to incorporate the facility into one’s daily life rather than thinking of it as a place to pay an 18-hole green fee once a month. At Belmont, there’s certainly no excuse for First Tee parents to sit in the car scrolling Instagram while their kids are at the clinic.

Belmont’s amenities, viewed as a group, fall under the rubric of the “alternative” golf facility, but they’re becoming increasingly common. Schneider cited Atlanta’s Bobby Jones Golf Club, John Ashworth’s Goat Hill Park in Oceanside, Calif., and Sweetens Cove in Chattanooga as inspirations for Belmont – places that are long on “vibe” and short on formality. Along those lines, the First Tee even conducted a rebrand, hiring the artist Lee Wybranski (who’s famous for his major championship posters) to create a distinctive bell logo – perfect for boosting pro shop sales, yes, but also for carrying the course’s story out into the golf world at large.

Superintendent Dan Sabina, who has logged time at Oakland Hills and Pumpkin Ridge in Portland, was brought over from the Federal Club in nearby Glen Allen. “My boss, Matt Drayton, actually pushed me,” he said with a laugh. “He said, ‘If you really believe in what the First Tee does, you should do it.’ ”

Sabina lives a mile from Belmont and is thrilled to be raising a family in the neighborhood. “For my kids to learn on the kind of greens that I didn’t play on until I was an adult … it’s going to be amazing.”

Belmont reopened its doors over Memorial Day weekend. A contingent of First Tee kids helped to kick things off. “One nearly made an ace,” Sherman said. “And another made birdie from a bunker. Watching them play was a very rewarding experience.”

If you have kids in your life, it’s hard to imagine coming away from an afternoon at Belmont without the impression that this facility will do anything other than thrive in the years ahead. You might even drive off somewhat upset that your own neighborhood doesn’t have a Belmont at its heart. Sherman, though far from unbiased on the point, agreed: “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Davis, Mark, myself – we’ve all talked about it. We’re jealous, too.”