The Madison Club

Almost twenty years after he fashioned the Shadow Creek course in Las Vegas, architect Tom Fazio was handed another enormous budget (reputed to be in excess of $200 million) by the Discovery Land development company and asked to turn a nondescript tract of desert landscape into another iconic golf course.

With money no object, construction was undertaken on a grand scale which involved the clearing of almost five hundred acres of former ranchland, the shifting of five million cubic yards of earth, the transplanting of more than two and a half thousand mature trees and the installation of a number of lakes and streams.

The best hole on the card may well be reserved until last. With the snow-capped Santa Rosa mountains as a backdrop, the par five home hole doglegs past a tumbling creek on the right of the fairway where an approach is played to a narrow waterside green protected by a sentinel 50-foot elm tree.