Like his fellow Briton James Bond, Alister MacKenzie got around, hopscotching from one global hotspot to another. His trade was architecture, not espionage, but that work too blurred international borders and left a lasting impact.
That’s true of MacKenzie’s final and most famous work, Augusta National Golf Club, a co-design with Bobby Jones that is hosting a little tournament this week.
But it also applies to a far-flung project that never even got off the ground.
The story of El Boquerón bears a whiff of design-world fable. Dreamed up by MacKenzie on behalf of a wealthy family in Argentina, the course was still in its paper-planning stages when the Depression hit. The project foundered. MacKenzie’s drawings went missing, lost for decades, only to be recovered.
Now, nearly 100 years after MacKenzie first put pencil to paper, a cap-tip to El Boquerón is rounding toward completion, not in South America but in the Sandhills of South Carolina, between Aiken and Augusta, at a high-end private club called the 21 Club.
The driving force behind it is Wes Farrell, a successful attorney with golf in his bones and music in his bloodline. His father, also Wes Farrell, was a celebrated songwriter who co-authored “Hang On Sloopy” and “Come a Little Bit Closer” and produced the music for The Partridge Family. The son, marching to his own beat, launched a juggernaut law firm and is now busy building the club of his dreams.
The 21 Club sits on rolling terrain that’s well-suited as a canvas for MacKenzie’s revived vision. To help bring it to life, Farrell has enlisted Brian Zager, an architect and computer-modeling specialist who contributed to the Lido project in Wisconsin. Unlike the Lido, the MacKenzie Course, as it is called, is not meant to be a clone. It is an interpretation: faithful to El Boquerón’s routing and spirit, but adapted to its surroundings and expanded to offer both a Golden Age yardage and a modern championship length, or a hybrid of the two.
It will eventually be joined by a second offering, the Hammer, a match-play concept designed by the firm of King Collins Dormer. This week, the 21 Club is hosting preview play for members and guests. But in the run-up to the Masters, GOLF.com got a sneak-peek, spending time with Farrell on the course as part of a broader exploration of the booming golf scene around Aiken, which has emerged as one of the most buzzed-about destinations in the game. You can learn more about the 21 Club, and the golf-rich region around it, in the videos below and above.
