Posh Sherwood Course Bears Nicklaus’ Stamp

The first thing you should know about the new Jack Nicklaus-designed Sherwood Country Club golf course in Thousand Oaks is that it is simply magnificent.

The second thing you should be aware of is that it is highly unlikely that you will ever play on it. And you are probably only going to get one chance a year to actually see it, unless you’re looking for work and happen to be handy with a weed whacker.

The private club, scheduled to officially open in November, will offer 375 memberships. At $100,000 each. After you’ve been invited to apply for a membership.

This, plus a few additional costs, will entitle you to lose your golf balls in a remarkably pristine setting, as opposed to losing your golf balls at the Van Nuys Golf par-3 course, which costs about $4 a round.

The exclusivity of the country club was noted recently in a letter to The Times by John Frederick, who lives in the area of the course but will not, he seemed to indicate, play golf there very often.

“Nicklaus’ course design for David Murdock’s enclave for the super rich, the Lake Sherwood Country Club, further divides the game of golf between the ultra-haves and the not-so-lucky,” Frederick wrote.

“The nature of Lake Sherwood’s shrine to grandiosity is to be found in the quaint Marie Antoinette style of its publicity. The first 300 ‘deemed worthy’ (and who can come up with $100,000) will be admitted. It is not the best of all worlds when the words wealthy and worthy are seemingly synonymous.”

For their money, members will get a lush, 7,025-yard, par-72 dream course and a 60,000-square-foot clubhouse that would make Donald Trump stop in his tracks and mumble, “Whoa!”

The price tag on the clubhouse is hovering around $20 million.

It also has a tennis and fitness club, 15 tennis courts with grass, hardcourt and clay surfaces, a swim club and a marina and boat club on the shores of Lake Sherwood.

Nearly 600 homes are being offered for sale, also. Sherwood brochures describe the spectrum of available housing as “ranging from carefree villas to sprawling estates with an infinite variety of choices in between.”

Prices? The homes start at $650,000. A few will be offered for $10 million each.

The course will be christened in November when Nicklaus and a few of his buddies--Greg Norman, Arnold Palmer, Curtis Strange, Lee Trevino, Tom Weiskopf and Ray Floyd, among others--will tee it up in a $1 million benefit tournament, proceeds of which will go to the Ronald McDonald Children’s Charities.

Murdock, the developer of the 1,700-acre playground, said that the three-day tournament will open people’s eyes.

“Being selected as the site of such a prestigious golf tournament will showcase Sherwood as the new standard of luxury living for the 1990s and beyond,” Murdock said.

Nicklaus, to his credit, was not an absentee designer. He supervised the project from its start more than three years ago and dictated not only the general layout of each hole but the intricate placement of water and rocks and trees that have resulted in a breathtaking golf course. One of the most telling agreements between Nicklaus and Murdock concerned the hundreds of towering oak trees scattered throughout the area.

When most golf courses are built, everything is cut down and cleared. But at Sherwood, many trees were left where they have stood for a hundred years or more and others were carefully dug up and transplanted in other areas of the course.

“Murdock made what I think was a brilliant decision, that rather than cutting down all the beautiful oaks he left many and transplanted so many more,” Nicklaus said. “It cost a lot of money. A lot of money. But in the end it more than pays for itself. The golf course looks like it’s been there for 100 years. It is a very unique new golf course. Most people don’t have the funds to do that, but Murdock looked at it the right way. The alternative is to spend a lot of money anyway on small trees and plant them and wait 10 years for everything to grow.”

Another unique problem that Nicklaus and Murdock had to contend with was an overabundance of water. At most golf courses, deep wells must be dug to meet the enormous demand for water to keep the greenery green. But at Sherwood, a natural creek that swept down from the Santa Monica Mountains ran through the middle of the property. Nicklaus was forced to turn the overflowing water into a part of the course, and he succeeded. The creek now splits the golf course, coming into play on 10 of the 18 holes.

On some holes, such as the 186-yard, par-3 No. 6, there is little other than water from tee to green. And No. 18 features a green surrounded on three sides by water that appears deep enough to make Jacques Cousteau leery.

“We did have a lot of water to control,” Nicklaus said, “but I think we did a really good job there. The runoff from the mountains was pretty heavy, but we turned it into a big part of the course in a very natural way.”

The course will not seek to bring in major professional tournaments, Nicklaus said, but was designed from the start with only the needs of the members in mind. Nicklaus said that he might have made one of his earliest courses, the famed Muirfield Village layout in Ohio, too difficult for the average player, and he said that he did not want to make the same mistake at Sherwood.

“This is maybe not the most difficult golf course in the world,” he said, “but I think we made it challenging enough for anyone, from the beginner to the established golfer. The name of the game is that the people who play there should be able to enjoy it. Muirfield is perhaps not as playable for the average golfer as I would like it, but that was in my early golf course design work and I learned something there.

“The members at Muirfield have trouble with that course. This course at Sherwood should be a much more, let’s say digestible, golf course for its members.”

The charity tournament in November will return to the course in 1990 and again in 1991, according to officials of the event. Those will be among the few times the general public will be allowed to roam the opulent grounds.

But it might be worth the visit.

“I, as you can imagine, have seen quite a few golf courses,” said Nicklaus, winner of 20 major golf titles and 71 total PGA Tour victories in his 27-year golfing career. “But Sherwood is really something special, really a special golf course. When I first toured the area and saw the mountains and beautiful valleys and the gigantic trees, I told someone I was with, ‘This is a piece of property I don’t even think Jack Nicklaus could screw up.’ ”