So, when I got a call from a publicist for a new golf course in Amherst, Virginia and he invited me to come play the course, I had to think long and hard before I could commit. Amherst is, after all, over two and a half hours from the Capital Beltway, a little southwest of Charlottesville. That's over a five hour round trip - it's a day's commitment!

The publicist, Mark Glickman of the Glickman Group in Charlottesville began to tell me about the course named Poplar Grove. "It's great," he said. "It's a very special place." "Troon Golf manages it." We've all heard those types of words in advertising for this or that golf course or other consumer product. I can't tell you how many times I have been disappointed in a product labeled "great" or "special." But Glickman is no ordinary media guy. He's well respected by all of us in golf and, when he said what he said next, I knew I was going to make the trip to Amherst: "It's Sam Snead's final golf project."
When Snead died a couple of years ago, I wrote a piece praising his career and his personal passion for golf excellence. I liked the competitive athlete that Snead was. If he had a hand in this course, I knew it was worth seeing. And, after seeing and meeting all the hands involved in Poplar Grove, I'm encouraging you to make the trip as well. Poplar Grove is headed for a "special place" in Virginia golf, a place not because of just who was involved but, and this is as it should be, because of what was created. This course will someday be one of Virginia's most honored golf venues because it's that good and represents an extraordinary set of design values that many designers have never understood. And the course was almost never built!

Let's start at the beginning. Johnny Maddox and one of his development partners in Poplar Grove Associates, David Smith, were walking some land they had purchased. The thick woods and small streams were perfect for hunting. In fact, one of Maddox's sons had already been hunting deer on the land. As they walked, Maddox turned to Smith and commented, "This place would be a great golf course." The partners group had a few golfers in it and, when they heard what Maddox said, they nodded and their minds considered the possibilities. None of them knew much about golf course development but they knew this was a worthwhile opportunity that would help their homesites and they also knew that, if they were going to do golf, they wanted to do it very well.

The group asked a firm called Anderson & Associates to take a look and Brad Stipes of Anderson just loved the idea of a course on the land. More importantly, he had connections to Sam Snead and his son, Jack, a golf course design consultant. Getting the Sneads involved in the land was important to everyone. Their next move was to bring in an architect who could work with the Sneads and really optimize what they all thought was great land. That architect was Ed Carton of Carton Design Studio, a former associate of Tom Fazio.