LET'S REVISIT for a moment Bethpage Black, the public golf course on Long Island that was tailor-remade for the 102nd U.S. Open, which ended last Sunday. Perhaps you heard some of the pre-Open blather about the course being too long for anyone but Tiger Woods and a few other really long PGA hitters.
Longtime Columbia resident John A. "Chip" McDonald wasn't all that surprised. Starting nearly five years ago, McDonald could see it coming. For he and his Jessup-based, family-run company did much of the work that turned Bethpage from being merely hard into a monster, 7,295-yard, par 70 - yes, 70! - mind-twister of a course for even the best pros.
And McDonald says similar features are due at some of the nation's most revered courses. That includes places such as Merion on Philadelphia's Main Line, Oakmont outside Pittsburgh, Riviera in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and Congressional in Bethesda.
He knows because McDonald & Sons Inc. - the business that includes sons John II and Erik, wife Betty, and daughter-in-law Mary Robyn - is or will be shoving around dirt at all of them. The firm is rebuilding tees, lengthening holes, re- tailoring greens and deepening the sides of sandtraps to make them, as McDonald says, "more penal."
One other tweak you don't hear much about but McDonald says is going on: Greens on some courses are being leveled for surer putting, mainly because grass can be cut so short these days; at Bethpage, it was .0741 inch high, about the thickness of a dime, he estimates.
Courses where five of the next six U.S. Opens will be played are on McDonald's work schedule. That isn't unusual. The work on Bethpage, which the U.S. Golf Association says cost it $2.7 million, started in July 1997.
"I thought that [lead time] was a little extreme," McDonald said. "But the USGA likes to have a course finished two years before one of its events is played there so that it settles in."
His company has been working off and on at Riviera for three years. On the Merion contract, USGA hired the construction firm before picking an architect to oversee the work - that says something about McDonald & Sons' reputation. McDonald's firm understands and builds what the USGA, the PGA, and some of the nation's most famous golf course architects want. Which is courses to offset technology that is turning even weekend hackers into long, if not more accurate, hitters through use of "metal woods" and hyped-up balls.
"We specialize in high-end renovation of golf courses, and now, new construction," McDonald said.
You needn't go to one of the nation's Top 100 golf courses to experience McDonald's handiwork. His firm built Fairway Hills in Columbia. Lighthouse Sound in Ocean City - McDonald workmanship. Hayfields in Hunt Valley, with a Senior PGA Tour event ending today - ditto.
Or try the new Uplands public course in Denton, on the Eastern Shore; that's a first for McDonald, whose firm has begun designing courses as well as building from others' plans.
McDonald didn't accidentally choose the mission of his own company, which opened in 1981. His roots in golf course building sprouted while he was a teen-ager in western Pennsylvania. He helped his father, who rented construction equipment, build a course. During college summers, he worked for an Ohio company that did the same thing.
After graduating from West Virginia University with a degree in agronomy, the company assigned him work on a new course, called Hobbit's Glen.
And that job led to employment with the Columbia Association, where he stayed 15 years that included initially overseeing both Hobbit's Glen and the old Allview Golf Course. Walk the pathways of Columbia's Harper's Choice, Oakland Mills, Long Reach, and Kings Contrivance villages, and you'll see more McDonald work from that same period.
"I fell in love with Columbia," he said. He and his college sweetheart married and lived in Long Reach for 28 years until recently moving west of U.S. 29, to the Beaverbrook community.
"He was a surgeon - with a bulldozer." That's how McDonald's friend and former boss, Robert Bellamy, the Columbia Association's operations director, remembers him while Hobbit's Glen was being built.
The "surgeon" is now 58. His company employs 35 people full-time; that rises as high as 80 during the summer, he said.
"We're really busy between April and December, he said. Too busy, in fact, for him to use the courses he has built.
"I've played one round this year," he said.
Call the writer at 410-332-6525 or send e-mail to lowell.sunderland@baltsun.com.