When Sisyphus Succeeded

As a boy, Doug Stein played football on the 17th fairway of Lookout Mountain Club. A group would gather; a football would be found. They turned their legs into pistons, broke their lungs open and gulped crisp air as they ran with delight through what, to them, seemed a wide-open field. It surely wasn’t a golf course. Little Doug couldn’t care less about that game. But, with each step, he was ingraining a deep, unshakable love of his home. From the foot of Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the road upward is long and winding. First-time visitors can’t wait to ascend to what feels like the top of the planet and luxuriate in the million-dollar views. The club, which has been there since the 1920s, feels almost inevitable. Of course there is a pristine golf paradise up there. But they have no idea of the struggles to make it happen. Standing in that 17th fairway some 40-plus years later, Stein points down the mountain. “I was the firstborn male on that street,” he tells me. “That makes me the king of Marvin Lane.” He explains that he’s been here his entire life, save for college and a year in Colorado after he graduated, where he’d followed his girlfriend and dreamed of writing a novel. He takes another gulp of perfect air and readies himself. We’re here so he can tell me about the many births and near-deaths of this place. It’s a tale longer than the road up the hill.

Lookout Mountain Club was originally slated to be called Fairyland. The early days were anything but that. The development of both the golf course and the mountain was the brainchild of Garnet Carter and his brother, Paul, and “they had promised everybody that they were going to be playing golf on the Fairyland Golf Course in the fall of 1926,” Stein tells me in his cozy Southern drawl. From there, he says, “the story of the development of Lookout Mountain is just a series of catastrophes.”

The first one occurred just 10 weeks after Seth Raynor had drawn up the plans for the golf course in January 1926. At 51 years old, the legendary designer died of pneumonia. The execution of Raynor’s plans during this time fell to Charles Banks, who came to Lookout Mountain to assess the property. The mountain’s original developers used manual labor to grade the course with drag pans and found that the property was “a slab of rock.” But the Carters had promised golf, so they started building green complexes, stripping the land of all the soil they could find and dragging it to the green pads. Stein says that, at this point, the decision was made to do the entire course in Bermuda grass. “But they didn’t have topsoil,” he says. “So, they brought in rail cars of topsoil and mixed it with Bermuda seed down at Fort Oglethorpe [in Georgia] and brought it up here to spread it on the golf course, which had no fairway bunkers because they couldn’t dig one.”

Shortly after the developers got the soil over the property, Stein says, “a remnant of a tropical depression came up over Tennessee and washed everything away.” The rain clouds lingered for nine months, flooding the Mississippi River Valley and saturating the ground just in time for the next catastrophe.

One of the Carter brothers’ major investors was Commodore J. Perry Stoltz, who operated the Fleetwood Hotel in Miami Beach. He was expanding the brand to include the Fleetwood of Fairyland and the attached Fairyland Golf and Country Club. The near-constant rain and washed-away topsoil had already put Garnet Carter in a panic, because they hadn’t even broken ground on the hotel. Then, in September 1926, a hurricane struck Florida, flattening the Fleetwood and draining Stoltz’s pockets.

Stein pauses, looks at me and matter-of-factly says, “So, things were not going well.” Despite being nearly out of money, the Carters pressed on. Stein believes that when the Carters started building the hotel, officials in Walker County, Georgia (where the golf course technically resides), opposed its construction, and the brothers had to build the hotel across the state line in Dade County. You can see the hotel today from the course, sitting atop a nearby mountain. Stein admits this is speculation, “but the more you read about it, the more you can put the puzzle pieces together.” I believe him. No one alive has read more about the history of Lookout Mountain than Stein.

He continues around another turn in Lookout’s winding road. As a way to fulfill the promise of golf, Garnet Carter invented Tom Thumb Golf, the precursor to miniature golf. It became a huge hit, and Carter sold the concept to “a bunch of Chicago investors for, I think, $220,000,” Stein says.

Eventually, a golf course was fashioned, and somehow Bobby Jones was persuaded to visit on opening day. But the course was scrubby and barely seeded. Its lone virtue was the thing that had launched this entire quixotic journey: its magnificent placement and impeccable vistas atop Lookout Mountain. As the years wore on, so did the course. Greens were mowed in circles and pushed up into turtlebacks. The club survived and muddled along until the 1990s.

Enter Stein. He was 26 and had barely bothered to pick up a golf club when he met Pete Dye, who had hired his father’s firm, Stein Brothers Construction, to help with building the nearby Honors Course in the 1980s. Stein’s best friend told him that if he was going to help Dye build a golf course, Stein had better learn to play. “And I said,” Stein recalls, “‘The ball’s not moving. How hard can it be?’” It turned out Stein was a natural, and he got very good very quickly. By the 1990s, he was a fully obsessed golfer, and he discovered that Raynor was Lookout’s first architect. That led him to procure an original drawing of the course from the local engineering firm that had done Lookout’s first topographic map. Armed with this information, Stein called Dye.

“Have you ever heard of Seth Raynor?”

“God, yes,” Dye replied. “He was the main influence on my career.”

Stein told him he was confident they had a lost Raynor design at Lookout. Dye responded, “That poor bastard only knew how to build 22 golf holes. The only question is, which 18 of ’em did you get?”

“Will you help us put it back together?” Stein asked. 

“I’m not going to do that,” Dye said firmly. “I don’t do that stuff. You’ll find somebody.”

In 1994, a visitor at Lookout who was a member at Fishers Island saw similarities between the scruffy course and Raynor’s magnum opus in New York. The visitor told King Oehmig that they could be standing on an uncut diamond. Oehmig was the right person to tell: His family was Tennessee golf royalty. King’s father, Lew, was one of the most successful amateurs in history, winning state or national titles in six different decades, including three USGA Senior Amateur titles. He captained the 1977 U.S. Walker Cup team and in 1994 received the Bob Jones Award, the USGA’s highest honor. King followed in Lew’s footsteps, playing four years at the University of Virginia and becoming one of the most accomplished players in the Chattanooga area. He would go on to become one of the greatest high school coaches in the state’s history, leading the boys’ and girls’ golf teams at his alma mater, the Baylor School, to a combined 21 state championships. After that, he got involved in the creation of the famed Chattanooga nine-holer Sweetens Cove, where the fourth hole, King, is named after him.

Oehmig, a lifelong resident of Lookout Mountain, immediately jumped in to help Stein revitalize the course. They visited other Raynor projects and developed a plan to not so much restore the course as honor its original design. They began interviewing architects, including a young guy named Tom Doak. Today, golf courses undergoing restorations is a common practice. “Nobody had done it back then,” Stein says. “And we’re trying to raise money, and people are fighting us.” They finally got a breakthrough when wealthy local businessman Jack Lupton agreed to become their chief benefactor. They convinced him with a long-range plan drawn up by Brian Silva, whose projected budget was more than Stein could get the club to pay for. With a little less than half of what Silva needed for the whole project, they went about putting in fairway bunkers, with Silva telling him, “Once your members see how great this place is, they’ll want to do Son of a Long-Range Plan,” Stein says. “That’s what he called it: Son of a Long-Range Plan.”

Stein says that the project was important for the members to see “the function of money in golf course design,” which, at that point, involved simply blowing up a lot of rock. Every bunker was created with TNT, and the man who came out to do the demolition work “looked like Hagrid from Harry Potter,” Stein says. Wearing bib overalls sans undershirt, he blew holes in the earth. Stein was amazed to see the rock completely pulverized into dust. He asked the man how he did it. “I drill in holes, and I load it up with dynamite until I get real nervous,” he said. “Then I add a stick.”

“First time he fired a shot,” Stein says, “the blasting mat went 8 feet in the air.”

When I ask if he thinks that procedure would pass OSHA guidelines today, Stein laughs and says, “Hell, no.”

Though many other courses by that time had started redoing their Raynor courses, Lookout still held back. Stein says he isn’t sure exactly what caused it, but cites an unknown rift between Silva and the membership. “Some of that was residual animus for people from the North, and it broke my heart they wouldn’t bring him back to do Son of a Long-Range Plan,” he remembers. “I loved Brian Silva. I love him to this day.” The two would eventually work together in 2000 and open the Black Creek Club, Stein’s development in Chattanooga that features Silva’s audacious re-creations of some of Raynor and C.B. Macdonald’s most famous template holes.

In 2004, Stein and Oehmig were 10 years into the Lookout project, and the membership wanted to complete the process without Silva. Stein was upset about the decision, but committed to seeing the work through. They conducted another interview process. They settled on an up-and-comer named Gil Hanse. Hanse visited the property and drew up his plan, and the membership voted to adopt it into the bylaws, but when the budget for the project finally came through, the Great Recession was in full swing, and the membership shelved it.

Stein was not immune to the lag in the economy. Stein Brothers Construction had been a Chattanooga institution, but, as Stein says, “the world was coming to an end.” After having to liquidate his company, Stein was forced to turn away from the Lookout project and focus on his business and family. In 2015, Oehmig passed away. Stein, who was making something of a financial comeback by that point, conceded that the Lookout effort may have died with his best friend. “I thought, That’s that,” he says. Then COVID happened.

The tidal wave of interest in golf made it all the way up the mountain. Membership numbers at Lookout boomed. “Suddenly,” Stein says, “we’ve got all these young members saying we’ve got to execute our long-range plan.” The club turned to Stein and asked him to relaunch his project. Hanse said he would love to do it—but he was now booked for several years. He was out. But his plan was still in the club’s bylaws, so Stein was then faced with the unenviable position of finding an architect to execute another’s concept. He thought it might be impossible. And yet, like Garnet Carter back in 1926, he found someone. Or, rather, two.

Tyler Rae and Kyle Franz dug in to fulfill the vision of Raynor, and Silva, and Hanse, and Oehmig, and Stein. “I call this a completion, not a restoration,” Stein says, “because we don’t want to restore something that wasn’t ever finished.”

Today, the course rises over the surrounding valleys. Trees dapple the skyline, and mountains abut the clouds as far as your eye can carry on the first tee box. The work has revealed the land’s unique topography, which, in this case, is a surprisingly happy meshing of Mother Nature and the ill-conceived plans of imported topsoil all those years ago. The fairways have rumples where the storms pushed that dirt nearly 100 years prior. Rocks jut from the surface along canted fairways, and trees at the perimeter of the course hold you inside its expansive confines. It’s a stirring layout for its golf challenges, for the way you play above nature more than inside it and for what it’s always had: the magical feeling of playing atop the earth.

It’s the place where Oehmig and Stein became close and fought together for a vision, and where Stein, when remembering his late friend, cries at his memory. “It’s bittersweet. We were finishing the project, but he wasn’t there. I’ve got tears in my eyes thinking about it right now, that he didn’t get to see it.”

Oehmig was an Episcopal priest, and Stein offers, “His boys and wife say he is with us, though. So, there’s comfort in that. I don’t know what happens when you die. I’m having this conversation with my children all the time, and I hope it’s something good.” He pauses a moment. “I can feel him,” he says.

Watching Stein walk the fairways, it’s as if Sisphyus got the boulder to the top of Lookout Mountain. He tells me golf keeps him centered in his life, and we talk about the game’s magic. Then he tells me one last story about an old dog. “I would go out there with him at night and put a little glow-in-the-dark collar on him and throw tennis balls to him from the rocks on the ninth fairway,” he says. “He’d run and go get ’em. Sometimes I’d worry my wife was going to be pissed if I lost our dog. But he would come back, and when he had got his run in, he’d sit on that rock with me, and we’d look out across the valley. That means a lot to me.”