The Cadillac Championship returns to Trump National Doral on Thursday for the first PGA Tour event at the Blue Monster in ten years. Your golf course superintendent has been watching the practice rounds all week. He knows what most viewers don’t. Those lakes were never designed. They were dug.
In 1959, Alfred Kaskel paid $49,000 for 2,400 acres of West Miami swampland and asked architect Dick Wilson — the protégé of William Flynn, the man who redesigned Shinnecock Hills — to build a championship course on it. Wilson’s solution became the template for every Florida resort course built since. Cut and fill. Dig where you need a hazard. Pile what you dig where you need a green. The water table sat two feet below the surface, on top of the Biscayne Aquifer — the 4,000-square-mile body of fresh water that supplies drinking water to five million Miami residents. Wilson’s lakes are aquifer windows. They have never gone dry in 64 years.
This episode traces what every viewer of the Cadillac Championship is missing: the borrow-pit thesis, the USGA greens specification, the sand-capping technique on the fairways, Hurricane Irma’s stress test of the engineering, and the 2014 Gil Hanse renovation that used the exact same dredged-earth technique Wilson invented in 1962. Why Hanse refused to touch the par 4 eighteenth. Why the driving range expansion forced three holes to shift. And why Augusta National, in Georgia clay with natural elevation, is the inversion of everything Doral represents.
Augusta found its drainage. Doral dug its drainage. Your course probably has both.
Chapters
- 0:00 — The lakes were never designed
- 0:34 — Wilson’s borrow pit thesis
- 1:13 — Kaskel’s folly: the airplane in the muck
- 2:08 — The cut-and-fill technique
- 3:58 — Sand-capping the fairways
- 4:43 — One excavation, three jobs
- 5:20 — Hurricane Irma: the engineering’s stress test
- 6:04 — Augusta found its course. Doral dug its.
- 7:44 — Hanse’s 2014 renovation
- 8:32 — The driving range and the 8/9/10 reroute
- 9:38 — Why Hanse refused to touch the eighteenth
- 10:29 — PGA Tour’s ten-year absence
- 12:18 — Your course is a borrow pit too
- 13:10 — Augusta found its drainage. Doral dug its.
Sources
- U.S. Geological Survey: Hydrogeology of the Biscayne Aquifer
- USGA Green Section: Greens Construction Specification
- LINKS Magazine: Trump National Doral Renovation Report
- Golf Digest: Gil Hanse Doral Redesign Interview (2013)
- PGA Tour Press Release: Cadillac Championship Announcement (Dec 15, 2025)
- South Florida Water Management District: Biscayne Aquifer Hydrogeology
- Doral Community News: Alfred Kaskel and the Founding of Doral