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He Brought the U.S. Open to a Cow Pasture. All It Cost Was His Fortune.
Bob Lang says he spent $26 million to build Erin Hills, but has little left
By Brian Costa
DELAFIELD, Wis.—Fifteen miles south of Erin Hills, where the U.S. Open begins on Thursday, Bob Lang sits in an office surrounded by mementos from the golf course he built. There are early design drawings, the original clubhouse cornerstone, a framed photo on one wall and, on a recent morning, two enlarged landscape photos spread across the wooden floor.
They are remnants of one the most improbable tales in golf history: How a little-known Wisconsin businessman with only a passing interest in the sport turned a rural cow pasture into the site of America’s national championship.
Not commemorated here is where his pursuit of the U.S. Open has left him: without the golf course, without millions of dollars he poured into it and, at age 72, on a self-described quest for financial solvency.
“I don’t have any money anymore,” he said.
After buying the bulk of the land in 2001, Lang built and operated Erin Hills with a manic zeal that blinded him to the magnitude of his costs, which had two effects. It brought the U.S. Open to Wisconsin for the first time ever. And it put him so deep in debt that he ended up selling his calendar publishing company, his commercial real estate holdings and finally Erin Hills itself in 2009.
When players tee off on Thursday, Lang will attend not as the triumphant host but as a guest, hidden among thousands of spectators who would not be there without him.
“I had a passion that became an obsession to build a golf course for the U.S. Open, and I was going to do everything I legally could to get it,” he said.
Plenty of richer men have bought or built golf courses with the hope that they could one day host the U.S. Open, President Donald Trump among them. But as most of them have learned, the rotation of courses that host the tournament is not something one can simply buy into.
The USGA tends to prefer classic courses that have a rich history of hosting the tournament, such as Pebble Beach or Pinehurst. The sheer space required for infrastructure and corporate tents rules out countless other courses. Though Lang said his company earned as much as $65 million in annual revenue, he was not a nationally known magnate whose mere involvement in a project signaled the start of something big.
Don Hughes, a former Hallmark executive who worked for Lang, recalled a 2001 trip to the pasture that later became Erin Hills. Lang drove him and another colleague there in his Jeep without telling them where they were going. He veered off a two-lane road onto an open field. The car rumbled past deer and turkeys, amid trees and shrubs, until Lang stopped and said, “You are now standing on the first hole of Erin Hills.”
“We drive around for two hours, and when we finished, Bob said, ‘The U.S. Open will be held here one day,’” Hughes said. “I said, ‘This guy has gone off his rocker. There’s something wrong here.’ This was a Wisconsin field. There was nothing there.”
Still, Lang’s prior experience foreshadowed what he would do with Erin Hills. He had been a teacher and a self-taught home builder before starting a calendar and greeting card publishing business, The Lang Companies, from his kitchen table in 1982.
He spent much of the profits on commercial properties in Delafield, a town of over 7,000 people that had seen many businesses leave.
Lang, who said he owns the original signatures of the first seven U.S. presidents, remade Delafield in the mold of a colonial village. He chose high-end stone, wood or brick siding on the 19 buildings he developed, which made them at once an architectural wonder and a financial sinkhole. Lang sold all the buildings in 2007 and 2008, around the time of the housing crash.
“In everything I have done, it starts out with people saying I’m crazy,” Lang said. “Then I go through a phase and I go too far. My ideas always out march the money.”
His initial idea for a golf course was modest. Though he was not an avid golfer, he wanted to build a local nine-hole course for his 300-plus employees. But when he saw the former cattle farm up for sale in 1999, his ambitions grew.
After buying a two-year option to purchase the property, he attended the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and had an audacious thought: Take this course away from the Pacific Ocean and Erin Hills, with its glacial dunes and rolling fields, is a better site for golf. It was the seed for the idea that would consume him.
Lang closed on the main land purchase for around $2.7 million in 2001, according to local tax records. In 2004, construction on the course had yet to begin. Lang was waffling on whether to go ahead with it. Then he got a visit from Mike Davis, who was then director of the U.S. Open and is now chief executive of the USGA. On a tour of the property, Davis called it one of the best sites he had ever seen. The following day, Lang called his bank about a loan. He borrowed $11 million.
In retrospect, Davis said, “I would have been more cautious had I known. You don’t want to unduly influence it.”
Erin Hills opened to the public for play in 2006 with $150 greens fees, pricier than planned but a reflection of the financial pressure Lang had put on himself. It wasn’t just the $6.9 million he said he spent to build the course, or the $3 million he spent on a rustic-posh clubhouse. Lang also estimates he spent more than $5 million on small properties that lined the course, which grew from 517 to 652 acres.
He knew he was wildly overpaying, but he was intent on having a course with no homes in sight. “I wanted the purity of it,” he said.
In 2008, the USGA awarded the 2011 U.S. Amateur to Erin Hills, a move that signaled it intended to bring a future U.S. Open there. Davis suggested a few course design tweaks, which Lang says would have cost no more than $200,000. Lang decided to spend another $2 million, adding many new bunkers as part of a larger facelift.
All told, Lang said he spent nearly $26 million on Erin Hills.
“We all wanted him to have the U.S. Open, but sometimes you can just want it too much,” said Ron Whitten, one of three architects who designed the course. “I used to counsel him, ‘You don’t need to do this, Bob,’ but he was adamant that he had to re-bunker the course or do this and that or he’d never get the U.S. Open.”
On June 16, 2010, the 2017 U.S. Open was awarded to Erin Hills, which checked three boxes for the USGA, aside from the quality of the course: It was a public course. It was a massive property. And it was a rare Midwest venue.
But by then, Lang was a bystander. Unable to find a partner and with the bulk of his remaining debt on the verge of coming due, he sold Erin Hills in October 2009 to Andy Ziegler, a Milwaukee money manager. Lang declined to comment on any aspect of the sale, but public records show the price was $10,041,900.
Lang retained a sense of accomplishment, confident that Erin Hills would be awarded the tournament. What pained him was that he had put the ownership of the course in a trust for his three children. His voice cracking and lowering to a hush, he said, “That’s the killer.”
Lang now lives off a Social Security check and the generosity of Ziegler, who retains him as a paid consultant to Erin Hills, a job which exists in title only.
He is seeking a benefactor to buy his extensive collection of original period Abraham Lincoln paintings and display them at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum, where they are housed. He is also in talks to buy a small furniture company, which he said he can grow into a made-in-America version of IKEA.
Whatever pride he feels this week, it is unlikely to match what he felt in his early years owning Erin Hills. He would go out on his green John Deere tractor every weekend, clearing brush for several hours a day. On land that this week will welcome the masses, Lang was alone, dreaming of a golf course and a tournament that in those moments existed only in his imagination.
“It was ecstasy. Me and my tractor,” Lang said. “That was the most enjoyment I ever had.”
Write to Brian Costa at brian.costa@wsj.com
Bob Lang says he spent $26 million to build Erin Hills, but has little left
By Brian Costa
DELAFIELD, Wis.—Fifteen miles south of Erin Hills, where the U.S. Open begins on Thursday, Bob Lang sits in an office surrounded by mementos from the golf course he built. There are early design drawings, the original clubhouse cornerstone, a framed photo on one wall and, on a recent morning, two enlarged landscape photos spread across the wooden floor.
They are remnants of one the most improbable tales in golf history: How a little-known Wisconsin businessman with only a passing interest in the sport turned a rural cow pasture into the site of America’s national championship.
Not commemorated here is where his pursuit of the U.S. Open has left him: without the golf course, without millions of dollars he poured into it and, at age 72, on a self-described quest for financial solvency.
“I don’t have any money anymore,” he said.
After buying the bulk of the land in 2001, Lang built and operated Erin Hills with a manic zeal that blinded him to the magnitude of his costs, which had two effects. It brought the U.S. Open to Wisconsin for the first time ever. And it put him so deep in debt that he ended up selling his calendar publishing company, his commercial real estate holdings and finally Erin Hills itself in 2009.
When players tee off on Thursday, Lang will attend not as the triumphant host but as a guest, hidden among thousands of spectators who would not be there without him.
“I had a passion that became an obsession to build a golf course for the U.S. Open, and I was going to do everything I legally could to get it,” he said.
Plenty of richer men have bought or built golf courses with the hope that they could one day host the U.S. Open, President Donald Trump among them. But as most of them have learned, the rotation of courses that host the tournament is not something one can simply buy into.
The USGA tends to prefer classic courses that have a rich history of hosting the tournament, such as Pebble Beach or Pinehurst. The sheer space required for infrastructure and corporate tents rules out countless other courses. Though Lang said his company earned as much as $65 million in annual revenue, he was not a nationally known magnate whose mere involvement in a project signaled the start of something big.
Don Hughes, a former Hallmark executive who worked for Lang, recalled a 2001 trip to the pasture that later became Erin Hills. Lang drove him and another colleague there in his Jeep without telling them where they were going. He veered off a two-lane road onto an open field. The car rumbled past deer and turkeys, amid trees and shrubs, until Lang stopped and said, “You are now standing on the first hole of Erin Hills.”
“We drive around for two hours, and when we finished, Bob said, ‘The U.S. Open will be held here one day,’” Hughes said. “I said, ‘This guy has gone off his rocker. There’s something wrong here.’ This was a Wisconsin field. There was nothing there.”
Still, Lang’s prior experience foreshadowed what he would do with Erin Hills. He had been a teacher and a self-taught home builder before starting a calendar and greeting card publishing business, The Lang Companies, from his kitchen table in 1982.
He spent much of the profits on commercial properties in Delafield, a town of over 7,000 people that had seen many businesses leave.
Lang, who said he owns the original signatures of the first seven U.S. presidents, remade Delafield in the mold of a colonial village. He chose high-end stone, wood or brick siding on the 19 buildings he developed, which made them at once an architectural wonder and a financial sinkhole. Lang sold all the buildings in 2007 and 2008, around the time of the housing crash.
“In everything I have done, it starts out with people saying I’m crazy,” Lang said. “Then I go through a phase and I go too far. My ideas always out march the money.”
His initial idea for a golf course was modest. Though he was not an avid golfer, he wanted to build a local nine-hole course for his 300-plus employees. But when he saw the former cattle farm up for sale in 1999, his ambitions grew.
After buying a two-year option to purchase the property, he attended the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach and had an audacious thought: Take this course away from the Pacific Ocean and Erin Hills, with its glacial dunes and rolling fields, is a better site for golf. It was the seed for the idea that would consume him.
Lang closed on the main land purchase for around $2.7 million in 2001, according to local tax records. In 2004, construction on the course had yet to begin. Lang was waffling on whether to go ahead with it. Then he got a visit from Mike Davis, who was then director of the U.S. Open and is now chief executive of the USGA. On a tour of the property, Davis called it one of the best sites he had ever seen. The following day, Lang called his bank about a loan. He borrowed $11 million.
In retrospect, Davis said, “I would have been more cautious had I known. You don’t want to unduly influence it.”
Erin Hills opened to the public for play in 2006 with $150 greens fees, pricier than planned but a reflection of the financial pressure Lang had put on himself. It wasn’t just the $6.9 million he said he spent to build the course, or the $3 million he spent on a rustic-posh clubhouse. Lang also estimates he spent more than $5 million on small properties that lined the course, which grew from 517 to 652 acres.
He knew he was wildly overpaying, but he was intent on having a course with no homes in sight. “I wanted the purity of it,” he said.
In 2008, the USGA awarded the 2011 U.S. Amateur to Erin Hills, a move that signaled it intended to bring a future U.S. Open there. Davis suggested a few course design tweaks, which Lang says would have cost no more than $200,000. Lang decided to spend another $2 million, adding many new bunkers as part of a larger facelift.
All told, Lang said he spent nearly $26 million on Erin Hills.
“We all wanted him to have the U.S. Open, but sometimes you can just want it too much,” said Ron Whitten, one of three architects who designed the course. “I used to counsel him, ‘You don’t need to do this, Bob,’ but he was adamant that he had to re-bunker the course or do this and that or he’d never get the U.S. Open.”
On June 16, 2010, the 2017 U.S. Open was awarded to Erin Hills, which checked three boxes for the USGA, aside from the quality of the course: It was a public course. It was a massive property. And it was a rare Midwest venue.
But by then, Lang was a bystander. Unable to find a partner and with the bulk of his remaining debt on the verge of coming due, he sold Erin Hills in October 2009 to Andy Ziegler, a Milwaukee money manager. Lang declined to comment on any aspect of the sale, but public records show the price was $10,041,900.
Lang retained a sense of accomplishment, confident that Erin Hills would be awarded the tournament. What pained him was that he had put the ownership of the course in a trust for his three children. His voice cracking and lowering to a hush, he said, “That’s the killer.”
Lang now lives off a Social Security check and the generosity of Ziegler, who retains him as a paid consultant to Erin Hills, a job which exists in title only.
He is seeking a benefactor to buy his extensive collection of original period Abraham Lincoln paintings and display them at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum, where they are housed. He is also in talks to buy a small furniture company, which he said he can grow into a made-in-America version of IKEA.
Whatever pride he feels this week, it is unlikely to match what he felt in his early years owning Erin Hills. He would go out on his green John Deere tractor every weekend, clearing brush for several hours a day. On land that this week will welcome the masses, Lang was alone, dreaming of a golf course and a tournament that in those moments existed only in his imagination.
“It was ecstasy. Me and my tractor,” Lang said. “That was the most enjoyment I ever had.”
Write to Brian Costa at brian.costa@wsj.com