Fair Oaks Ranch Is Golf and Tennis Paradise
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Step into the clubhouse at Fair Oaks Ranch Golf & Country Club, and you feel as though you are stepping into a gracious home. That’s because you are.
“What is now the clubhouse used to be Mr. Fair’s 13,000-square-foot house. One of our mottos as a company is that we want the club to be ‘a home away from home,’ and there’s no better place than Fair Oaks Ranch, because it was indeed a home. There’s a comfortable feeling,” says Phil Wiese, director of golf at the private club with a whopping 1,800 memberships.
Fair Oak Ranch was once the 6,000-acre working ranch of internationally known oilman and rancher Ralph Fair Sr. The home, built in the 1930s of native Texas Hill Country river rock, is its centerpiece. The club opened its doors in 1978 and was sold in 1987 by Ralph Fair Jr. to Dallas-based ClubCorp, the world’s largest private club operator.
Members enjoy two 18-hole championship golf courses, both designed by golfing legend Gary Player. The original course, Live Oak, was built in 1974 and renovated in 2006 by professional golfer D.A. Weibring’s course design company. “It’s a traditional layout as far as the routing of the course, the bunkering and the trees,” Wiese says. “They did a great job of updating it.”
No. 8 on Live Oaks “tends to get people,” Wiese says. Players must carry one ravine off the tee, and a second ravine makes going for the green in two on this par 5 tricky. “This is probably the hole you hear the most about,” he says. Live Oaks also is the home to Wiese’s favorite hole, the “very pretty” No. 16. The par 3 plays 188 yards from the back tee box with a pond guarding the green. “The wind can blow in your face sometimes, and it can be pretty diabolical,” he says.
The second course, Blackjack Oak, opened its front nine in 1986 and its second nine two years later. “There’s a stretch of holes between holes 6 and 15 which used to be an old hayfield, so it has a very open links feeling. The wind blows across it, and there’s natural grass between the holes,” Wiese says.
About 58,000 rounds of golf are played annually, equally split between the two courses. The men’s member-guest, played each June, is dubbed The Battle Intense, named in honor of Fair’s prize bull, a Pole Hereford. There’s a monument dedicated to Battle Intense on the club property.
Golf isn’t the only game in town at Fair Oaks, which has one of the most extensive tennis programs in the San Antonio area. With 15 lighted courts, the club boasts about 650 tennis members.
Among the club’s members are 1,100 children under the age of 15 who enjoy junior golf and tennis programs that rival any others in the region. “Everything here is done in Texas fashion as far as size goes,” Wiese says.
Story by Sharon H. Fitzgerald
