The last time the US Open traveled to Pinehurst, Zac Blair was a 23-year-old rookie who didn’t know a life without qualifying for majors.
He turned pro in March of 2014 and by June had finished with a T-40 against golf’s best. His father, Jimmy, carried his golf bag up to the final hole as the world watched — a dad, a PGA Tour player himself, passing on the torch to his son’s promising career.
A decade later, Blair will return to Pinehurst. But life hasn’t been as smooth as those first few months. He had to claw just to get into this field by playing 36 holes over 10 hours at a qualifying event on golf’s “longest day.” Before that, the last decade has seen him tear his labrum, lose his tour card and only appear in three majors since that tantalizing debut.
But perhaps the long road, and the longest day in golf, suits Blair better.
It certainly fits his profile as a player — a plucky golfer who ranks 181st in driving distance but gets by on accuracy. And maybe it fits him as a person, too, as Blair keeps plugging away at his dream to one day build his own golf course in his home state.
Blair had the vision of building The Buck Club in Utah for a decade. The dream seemed to fall apart five years ago when he ended up changing plans and building a different course in South Carolina called The Tree Farm.
But the hope remains: Like his career, he can circle back down the road and eventually build his Utah course.
“Definitely,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. “How I looked at it, I felt like The Tree Farm would be a really good proof of concept. Show people that I could be involved in building something really cool and making it work, and making it a place where people enjoyed. Kind of going and being able to do it in Utah, maybe later down the road.”
Blair started his quest to build a Utah course almost a decade ago. Growing up, his father owned a few courses around Utah and he’d sketch out different holes here and there. When it was Blair’s turn on the PGA Tour, he played the most elite courses and then sequestered himself to read about the architecture.
He jotted down what he liked and what he didn’t. He started mapping out what a course in Utah would look like. In the earliest renderings, the course route would start with a 530-yard par five and end with a 600-yard beast of a hole.
He didn’t have the funds to build the space but he put the idea on social media and started selling merchandise with The Buck Club’s prospective logo. People bought in and Blair formed an annual golf tournament in Tennessee, at Sweetens Cove Golf Course, to raise money for the course.
Before 2020, Blair looked at several sites in Utah. He brought in King-Collins, a well-known golf architect company, into the project. It helped build Sweetens Cove, which is billed as one of the more entertaining and unique courses in the country.
He zeroed in on land in Morgan, about 45 minutes north of Salt Lake City. It already had a golf course on it called Round Valley, but Blair would build over it.
“We’d do site visits, and worked on some routings and different things like that,” Blair said. “Obviously the sale just never happened. I think there were some differing opinions on how much the property was worth and what we could get it for. And if they wanted to help and be involved.
“There were a lot of moving parts to really get any traction on it at that time. It was obviously just going to be challenging and expensive. There was still so much they kind of had to get lined up and figured out. Just never got to that point.’
Blair pivoted and bought land in Aiken, South Carolina, in 2020. He turned the forested land into a golf course that is now fully functioning. He is the president of the club and raised money for memberships, hired staff and at one point was booking guests to come before his own PGA Tour events.
He thought about taking The Buck Club architectural plans and simply building it in South Carolina, but he held off.
“We didn’t know what [the Carolina course] was going to be,” he said. “If that was going to be The Buck Club, or if it was going to be something different. I still kind of held on to hope that we’ll be able to do something in Utah for TBC.”
The Tree Farm now is entirely different. It is built into the typography of the land, which shares some of the extreme undulations of Augusta National rather than the more unique elements of Utah. Blair also pulled some styles from different courses he liked. He went to Rye, England, and noticed how the greens were protected by wood. If you miss the green, you can’t putt onto it. The fifth hole at The Tree Farm has some bricks around the right side of the green.
“You have to miss it way right for it to come into play,” he joked.
Still, Blair is preparing for what a Utah course would eventually look like.
He’s already modified some of his original plans. At first, he wanted The Buck Club to be a member-only, private course. Now, he has flipped it to be a public course.
Part of it is so that everyone who helped The Buck Club get off the ground, buying merchandise and going to the golf tournaments, can play.
“All those people, I don’t think, necessarily want to just join a club that’s in Utah,” he said.
He also acknowledged that having a private club is more difficult in Utah weather. Golf is seasonal in Utah. Getting members to join from outside the region typically requires good weather year-round. So, for example, when New York has poor weather, people can retreat to their membership club to play. Salt Lake can’t offer that.
“That was one of the big things I learned throughout the whole process was just the seasonality of a club in Utah is a lot harder,” Blair said. “In Utah, you’re realistically trying to get people out of good weather to come to good weather. When it’s good weather up in the Hamptons and in the Dakotas, it’s good weather in Utah. But the other months, when it’s bad weather in those places, people want a place to go.”
The actual course design is also in flux. For one, the elevation in Utah forces the course to be a bit longer than in South Carolina. The soil is also a challenge in Utah compared to different climates. The Tree Farm, for example, was able to use all native soil. That wouldn’t happen in Utah.
Plus, in South Carolina, almost all the holes were built into the natural topography. In Utah, there would be some holes Blair would have to build from scratch and the land would come second.
“It was just a completely different style of architecture, building whatever you wanted,” he said. “It takes a lot more time, a lot more money and a lot more everything, basically, to make it work. And that was one of the [original] roadblocks that was kind of adding up to the long list.”
But just as Blair is keeping that dream alive, he’s also living another.
As Blair heads into the U.S. Open this week, he thinks his actual game is the best it’s been. He had a top-five finish at the Zurich Classic in April and was top-25 at the RBC Canadian Open last week.
He still has days that pull him out of contention too often. But that is something that the 2014 Blair would have worried about. Now, he is in it for the journey.
“Feel like it’s all kind of right there, just a matter of time before we get it all to click,” he said.
And one day, he believes, The Buck Club in Utah will click, too.
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