248 ANTHEMS · BROOK HOLLOW GOLF CLUB · DALLAS, TEXAS
The Return
01The design direction
Brook Hollow has the cleanest architectural story of the four Dallas courses: A. W. Tillinghast drew it in 1920; Coore & Crenshaw lightly tweaked it in 1993; and in November 2019 Keith Foster began a total restoration back to Tillinghast’s original design intent, reopening in November 2020.
The club did not modernise its golf course. It spent a large budget undoing a century of drift — and then installed SubAir temperature-controlled systems under the restored bentgrass greens so the original could survive a Texas summer. Going back to the intent did not mean going back to the technology.
The site is built on that, and the 24/8 link is exact enough to state plainly: a grid is the thing you return to when the playing drifts. Every swing drifts — a little longer at the top, a little quicker coming down — and rarely in a way you notice on the day. The tempo grid is not there to make anyone good. It is there so that when you drift, there is a specific thing to come back to. The page is careful not to slide from that into “old is better,” which is a different and much weaker claim.
Blueprint indigo
#2C3E63 · DRAWING INK, CYANOTYPE
Paper bone
#F2F3F0 · A DRAWING OFFICE, NOT A LANDSCAPE
One support colour, per the brand system. Indigo is the colour of a plan you work back toward, and the bone runs cool and paper-like on purpose: the subject here is a drawing, not scenery. Across the Dallas four this sits deliberately opposite Stevens Park’s warm clay.
0204 The Return
One century, left to right. A straight indigo line is the 1920 intent — drawn once, never moved. A darker line is the course as it actually was: starting on the intent, drifting away by degrees, corrected slightly at 1993, then pulled decisively back onto the intent in 2019–20 and running along it to the present. The shaded area between the two is the drift, widest in mid-century and closing to nothing at the right.
The wash and the stroke are generated from one path string — the fill is that same path closed back along the intent line — so the shading can never disagree with the curve drawn on top of it. Along the base, one tick per year at a constant interval with every eighth in lime, the same 24/8 device the other sites use for steps and holes.
Three assertions guard the shape at load: the course line must start on the intent, must be back on it by 2020, and must end on it. If any of those stops being true, the drawing has stopped making the argument, and the console says so.
The drift curve carries no data. No source found documents what changed at Brook Hollow between 1920 and 2019, or when. What is documented is that a restoration was undertaken in November 2019 and completed in November 2020.
So the shape of that curve is a way of saying “a century passed and things moved” — not a claim that the 1950s cost the course anything in particular. The two ends are real; the middle is a line connecting them. The figure caption says so inside the image, and section 4.1 on the page says it again in prose, because a smooth authoritative-looking curve is exactly the kind of graphic a reader would otherwise assume was measured.
03The facts rule, and a numbers problem
Atmosphere may be invented. Facts may not. Everything factual traces to docs/facts/brook-hollow.md.
The four Dallas facts files were compiled from web-search result excerpts only — in this build environment direct page fetches and outbound HTTPS were both refused at the network proxy, so no source page could be read in full. The 1920 / Tillinghast / Foster-2020 spine is corroborated across several independent results and is safe to build on.
The numbers are a different matter, and this course has the sharpest version of the problem in the whole series:
- The yardage, rating and slope all predate the restoration. Par 71, 6,703–6,752 yards, 72.1 / 131 on bermuda — these circulate widely across course databases that do not date their data, for a course that was rebuilt in 2019–20. There is no way to tell from those sources whether any of them describes the course as it plays today.
- So they are printed once, in the record, with the disagreement shown rather than averaged away, and explicitly labelled as pre-restoration figures. Not as the current championship length. No post-restoration numbers were found.
- Perry Maxwell, 1940, is marked but not drawn. Our database dates him on this course, so the year appears on the century in 04. No source says whether his work moved the course toward or away from Tillinghast’s intent, so the drift curve is deliberately not bent there — 1940 sits exactly on the line between its neighbours, and the label says “direction unsourced.” Tripp Davis is named with no year at all and is recorded rather than placed.
- 1946 is the only championship year we could verify — the Dallas Invitational, later the Byron Nelson, won by Ben Hogan. The club has also hosted the U.S. Junior Amateur, the U.S. Mid-Amateur and a long list of state and regional championships across nine decades, and every one of those is written without a year. Inventing a plausible year is precisely how a made-up fact enters the record and never leaves.
- Nothing about what Foster actually changed. “Restored to Tillinghast’s design intent” is as specific as the sourcing goes. Recovered bunker shapes, tree removal, widened corridors, expanded greens — all plausible, all the kind of detail that would make the page sound authoritative, none of it sourced.
- A hole-by-hole card does exist — this originally read “no hole-by-hole card,” which was wrong. The project database carries six tees, each with its own eighteen yardages, and it corroborates the strategy writing hole for hole: the Great Hazard 15th at 610, the Reef-style 16th at 233, the water-fronted 8th at 196. It still gives no bunker faces or green edges, which is what 05's profiles are about, so those stay schematic. It also totals par 70 against the web's 71 — a real conflict, left standing on the page rather than settled by preference.
One cross-link is real rather than decorative: Tillinghast also drew Winged Foot, which already has an anthem in this series. Same hand, two courses, and it is the strongest architectural connection Brook Hollow has to the rest of the library.
04The audio
Brook Hollow has no anthem yet. The repo manifest carries brook-hollow-anthem with status: "pending" and no file behind it; the deployed host does not carry the id at all, so in production the player filters it out and the queue falls through to Anthem Lab — How It Works, a real streaming track, with the full library browsable behind it. The page says so above the player, before you can press anything.
No invented duration, no placeholder waveform, no substitute music. When a master arrives, the flip is one edit: add its filename to sourceCandidates and set status to ready.
05How it was built
- Hand-written static HTML/CSS/JS — no framework, no authoring build step. ES modules only.
- All internal references are relative, so the site works from a domain root or under a subpath unchanged.
- Every graphic is generated SVG or canvas; no raster media anywhere.
- Fonts are self-hosted woff2 (latin subsets) from @fontsource packages, restored from npm at deploy time via
deployAssets, so deploy uploads stay text-only. - The spectrum canvas is driven by the player’s live analyser and draws nothing when audio is not playing.
- Accessibility: skip link, visible focus rings, semantic landmarks, a description list for the record, an
aria-labelthat describes the drift-and-return in words, and a reduced-motion path in which both lines are drawn complete and all markers are visible immediately.
06Iteration passes
Built to the brief: hero with the intent / century / decision claim block, dark player panel with the pending note, tempo system with 2.2 rewritten around drift and correction, uses written for finding a tempo again rather than for a members’ round, the return diagram, the record with its two caveat blocks, and a related grid that leads with Winged Foot rather than with the Dallas neighbours.
Rendering the diagram showed three overlaps at once. TILLINGHAST’S 1920 INTENT — NEVER MOVED was left-anchored at the frame edge and sat directly on top of the 1920 marker’s own note; it moved to clear space at mid-century. THE COURSE AS IT ACTUALLY WAS was right-anchored near the end of the frame, where the course line passes — so the label describing the line was struck through by it; it moved below the deepest part of the drift. And the second caption line sat at y 432 in a 430-unit viewBox, clipping it: the viewBox is now 452 tall.
This is the pass that changed what the site is allowed to say. Section 03 above records that “restored to Tillinghast’s design intent” was as specific as the sourcing went, and that recovered bunker shapes and green expansions were therefore omitted. A second search pass sourced them: Foster accentuated the pedestal greens and brought back their squared-off edges, installed steep-faced bunkers where the faces had been flashed, and reintroduced several of Tillinghast’s “great hazard” sand wastelands on holes including the par-5 15th.
Section 05 draws those three changes as before-and-after profiles — drift as a pale dashed ghost, restoration solid. The facts file was updated in place and the superseded OMIT line marked as such rather than quietly deleted, so the record shows what changed and when. Tree removal and widened corridors remain unsourced and are still absent.
The management read follows from the shape of the evidence rather than from any single quote: every documented change is at or around the green, which makes this generous off the tee and defended at the green — so the decision is the angle, not the driver. The page marks that as the brand talking.
The reveal-sweep bug found on Dallas Country Club was fixed here before rendering rather than after. One thing still needed the screen: the ground line ran straight through the bunker pit, making the hazard read as a rectangle sitting behind a line instead of a hole cut into the ground. It is now cut either side of the pit.