18 INTERVIEW During his youth, Brian Costello could often be found tagging along as his father played golf at the public Cypress course in Colma, just south of San Francisco. He recalls spending much of the time jumping into bunkers, usually followed by a swift rebuke from his father and an early lesson on how to use a rake. All that is left of Colma now is a driving range – the first nine made way for a cemetery in the 1980s and the remaining holes were closed about 25 years later. But the course piqued an interest in golf that would eventually become a career for Costello. By Design sat down with the new ASGCA President to talk about how he got into golf course design, his career and what he hopes to achieve in his tenure. How did your interest in golf and course design develop? That experience with my dad planted the seed, and I continued to play golf. My mom would drop me and some of my buddies off at the Fleming nine-hole course next to Harding Park and we would try to squeeze in as much golf as we could. As I got a little more proficient, my dad would take me on the weekends to play golf at Lincoln Park in the city, as well as Sharp Park in Pacifica which would turn out to be my first exposure to a course designed by the legendary Alister MacKenzie. During the summers, I caddied at San Francisco Golf Club and when the course was closed on Mondays, I would get dropped off early in the morning and play as many holes of golf as I could before it got dark. Looking back, the exposure to this highly strategic AW Tillinghast masterpiece definitely made me a better golfer, and certainly influenced my fondness for the classics from the Golden Age. I ended up playing golf for four years at Riordan High School in San Francisco, which allowed me to experience great golf courses like Olympic, Lake Merced, Cal Club and Peninsula. One common denominator with all these courses, both public and private, is that they were built a long time ago; their scorecards, plaques and merchandise all bear dates of establishment in the 1920s and 30s. At what point did you think about making golf course architecture a career, and what was your first big break into the industry? During my last year at UC Davis, I was playing golf with one of my classmates and we were talking about our plans after graduation. I mentioned that I was heading back to San Francisco to join a landscape architecture firm, and he said that he was going to be a golf course architect. I literally stopped in my tracks and asked ‘what did you say? A golf course architect?’ Because, in my experience growing up on the San Francisco peninsula, there were no new golf courses being built. They were all built! New ASGCA President Brian Costello speaks with By Design about his golf upbringing in the Golden State and the influence of Golden Age design on his own work. “ Sharp Park would turn out to be my first exposure to a course by Alister MacKenzie” Golden ticket
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