It appeared that another link to Las Vegas' brief-but-colorful history was lost forever two years ago when the Wynn Golf Club closed its doors.
Built 14 years ago on the site of the old Desert Inn course, Wynn Golf Club reopened last week after a 10-month renovation by Tom Fazio that brought the wow factor back to this course on the north end of the Vegas Strip. Fazio designed the original Wynn layout in 2005. From the start, the Wynn course was considered a temporary stop gap until a more profitable use for the land could be determined.
"Well, certainly it's kind of good news/bad news," Fazio said of Wynn's closing in 2017 in a recent conference call celebrating the club's reopening. "I knew the news, it was originally planned to be there for a period of time; no real designation that it was going to be five years, 10 years, 15 or 20. It was just known that the golf course would be built initially and at some point, some day, and it's only obvious when you look at the location site is perfect, usually golf courses do not exist in such a perfect, expensive location. So I understood it. I knew it was going to happen someday in the future. That day showed up, and it was a disappointment obviously because the golf course was so well received and it was such a great environment and a great setting. And personally for me, some of the great memories in creating it, because I go back to in my career, my uncle was a tournament golfer in the Ben Hogan era, Sam Snead era, so all those players that played on that original golf course on that property, the old Desert Inn, I knew many of them personally. Although I was a youngster, but I knew them. So when we built the new Wynn Golf Course initially opening, I was so excited it, obviously closing something is not logical. It doesn't seem like - in your brain, it doesn't seem to work that way, but all of a sudden within a short period of time, here we are back and we're operating and it's better than ever. So it's a unique thing, that's for sure."
The Wynn is a mix of two worlds. Lush and green with undulations and elevation changes everywhere, it stands out as a slice of the Pinehills of North Carolina on the Las Vegas Strip. But rather than blot out views of the Stratosphere and other iconic Vegas landmarks, the Wynn embraces them.
That's the great part about golf design, there are no rules, you can go do whatever you want.
"(T)he interesting part about the Wynn for me, most of the time we're trying to block the views of surrounding areas, we're trying to block the views of buildings and it kind of puts you in a golf total setting. In this particular case, we're in Las Vegas, we're on the Strip. We have these magnificent structures all around us and this magnificent environment of buildings and fun and excitement, there's no way to hide them or frame them out, but also you're going to get the best view you can from there," Fazio said. "But step one was grading the land. Based on the corridors, we were forced with our golf holes to be in locations, because we saved much of the vegetation that existed. In fact, there's even some vegetation from the original Desert Inn Golf Course where we kept some of the huge big trees. Now, we cut the land around it, away from it, behind it, which put these trees on higher elevations, but it gave us the opportunity for mature framing and definition. Basically, the shaping evolved to whatever view we had. We put the best shape into the frame of the golf hole and not try to manipulate the shape of the land to what was in the distant view."
The Desert Inn opened in 1950 as one of the first five resorts in Las Vegas. Entertainers who performed there included Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Dean Martin and Wayne Newton. The golf course opened two years later in 1952. The only golf course on the famed Las Vegas Strip, the course was the site of the PGA Tour Tournament of Champions from 1953 to 1966. When the Desert Inn closed in 2000, the posh Wynn Las Vegas resort went up on the site. The golf course was retained but was the constant subject of redevelopment plans. When it closed in 2017, it was supposed to be for good as a $3 billion development deal was announced for the site.
In the days of the PGA Tour, the course also was a Senior Tour stop from 1986 to 2001, the Desert Inn course was noted for its tight corridors. Today, the resort course commands some of the highest green fees in daily fee golf ranging from $375 to $550. Fairways are more wide open now than they were then to help push golfers through a little faster.
Brian Hawthorne, the club's director of golf operations defended the greens fees in the larger context of the Wynn/Las Vegas experience and noted that it might even be a bargain compared with other forms of entertainment.
"If you keep somebody from gambling for four and a half hours," Hawthorne said, "we might be saving people money."
The course, where Jason Morgan is superintendent, is unique in that it has six par-3 holes rather than four, including one on No. 18.
"The interesting part about the Wynn Golf Course, it's not unusual, it's not out of the ordinary per se to finish the golf round on the 18th hole with a par 3. It's been done before with some famous golf courses," Fazio said.
"The first time I've actually built and designed a golf course with an 18 hole par 3. You normally don't do that. Not that it's not accepted overall, but usually you have lots of other choices and opportunities. We had choices and opportunities; none was as good as the 18th hole and where it's placed. So that's the great part about golf design, there are no rules, you can go do whatever you want.
If you keep somebody from gambling for four and a half hours, we might be saving people money.
"Usually the one word you want to hear when a person walks up on the tee, it's a three-letter word with two Ws in it, and it's "wow." That's the word you want to hear because that says everything. It says so much about the environment, says so much about the hole, says so much about the experience, and that in itself gives the overall feeling."
Throughout the duration of the project, which he completed with son Logan, the 74-year-old Fazio field questions about retirement.
"I've even had questions of people say, 'I heard you retired.' Of course, I say, 'That's competition spreading rumors,' " Fazio said. "Why would you retire from the business of designing golf courses? It's easy, it's fun, people pay you a lot of money and you work in great, exciting places for great people. Who would retire from that? Nobody. So that's a false rumor that's out there. But the only thing I retired from was going to meetings. I don't go to meetings anymore, because I don't have enough time for meetings. When you get older and there's only time for going, doing the things you want to do, so my son goes to the meetings and deals with the details."