What makes Beau Welling so interesting? (The First Call)

Welling is most recognizable professionally by his impressive golf course architecture portfolio. But take a broader view of the man and he appears to be something of a modern-day Renaissance man.

In 2006, a popular beer brand inundated airwaves with ads that played off a debonair fictional character known as the “Most interesting man in the world.”

That slogan became part of pop culture but could apply to the multi-dimensional Beau Welling. On the surface, it’s fair to say the Brown University erudite identifies as an adept golf architect (owning Beau Welling Design, or BWD) and land planner. He’s also an everyman who craves knowledge the way a dehydrated desert traveler desires water. He is so diverse that his diverse interests are even diverse.

How many other architects have had first careers in finance and investment banking? Quickly rose from novice fan to World Curling Federation president? Secured membership on the board of the Carolina Ballet Company? Can quote William Faulkner, James Joyce, William Yeats, Oscar Wilde? Became a published poet? Has a curious love of Sasquatch? Or can call himself the senior design consultant at Tiger Woods’ TGR Design?

The unofficial answer, of course, is none. All of this has contributed to an expansive world view that has shaped his intellect and analytical qualities.

“I’m passionate about many things,” says Welling, 55. “I’m one of those people who is never satisfied, so I always want to do more.”

For someone with more than 125 courses and land plannings globally under his belt, creating never stops, whether that’s in the real world or virtually. Of the latter, Welling joined Agustin Piza and Jack Nicklaus Design with constructing original holes for last season’s debut of TGL, the simulator league that combines advanced technology with teams from the PGA Tour for weekly two-hour competitions in Palm Beach Florida’s So-Fi Center.

Of the former, the BWD team is overseeing the new Travis Club course, as part of a 1,500 acre master-planned community near Austin, Texas. The layout, set to open in 2026, has Welling excited because of its elevation swings and topography that lends itself to his creative and strategical eye.

Closer to home, Welling is working on refurbishing the Chanticleer Course at Greenville Country Club by this fall. Welling, a local native, grew up at the club as a competitive junior golfer. Near and dear to his heart, Welling says Chanticleer was the course accomplished players graduated to after mastering two other layouts on the premises.

Born at the old Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. due to his father being employed as an accountant at the Pentagon, Welling’s parents moved to Greenville, South Carolina, when he was 2. His Forrest Gump-like existence propagated there, galvanized by an intellectual curiosity that he sated through voracious reading.

That motivation came from his parents and family, such as a globe-trotting accountant grandfather — with high-profile clients — who instilled lessons like hard work put food on the table and traveling equated to discovery and expanding the mind.

His path in life could be summed up in this way: Why be a nondescript roadway median weed when there were myriad opportunities to blossom into a colorful bouquet?

In short, Welling matriculated at Brown, earning a physics degree and then a master’s in international business from the University of South Carolina. To that point, golf had a subliminal effect; he’d doodled golf holes in his grade school notebooks but never thought of it as a vocation.

His introduction to golf course design came by fortunate circumstances. As a competitive junior golfer, a couple of his parents’ family friends were Augusta National and Cypress Point members.

“As a young person, getting to go see these cathedrals of golf was extremely impactful,” he says. “Then to learn that the same man, Alister MacKenzie, had been involved in both golf courses was the first time I learned that golf design was even a thing.”

It propelled Welling to seek every book he could find on MacKenzie. Yet he was still incognizant that a life in the game might be his calling, even after joining the Brown golf team his first two years there. As a junior, he attended Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, as a visiting student.

“Initially, my plan was to continue studying theoretical physics there,” Welling says, “but I soon became enraptured in literature, drama, history — and Guinness.”

He returned to Brown for his senior year, taking advantage of the nearby Rhode Island School of Design that students could access. It offered a landscape architecture program.

By that point, Welling kept wrestling with an internal debate: he wanted his concentration to be about physics, math or art, but what would that be?

“I remember it plain as day,” he says. “I woke up, sat straight up in bed and I had this epiphany. Golf course design. That’s sort of engineering and technical but artistic and creative. I thought, maybe this is what I am supposed to do, sort of mixing all these disparate interests into something.”

If anyone could apply his thesis — “The Klein Paradox and Other Simple Solutions to the Dirac Equation” — to golf, it was Welling.

By stroke of luck, he learned Tom Fazio had started building Thornblade Country Club in Greenville. Former PGA Tour player Jay Haas was involved and so was Welling’s father, as one of the developers. Soon Welling went to work for Fazio during summers in college.

Fazio tried to hire him full-time after graduation. Instead, collateral damage from the Gulf War led to a sputtering economy and Fazio was unsure there would be ample design opportunities. Welling opted to get his business degree from South Carolina. He took an internship at Siemens AG in Germany, conducting all business in German. Then he landed in Charlotte, North Carolina, as an investment and international banker. In 1997, Fazio coaxed him back to golf design.

“[The job] was almost like brand manager,” Welling says. “[Fazio] would say, ‘Beau is my business guy,’ but it’s not the business of accounting and all that kind of stuff. It would be more like making sure we picked the right clients, had the right design sort of setup, negotiated. It was a very design-oriented role as well.”

Under Fazio’s tutelage, Welling learned all angles of the business and was exposed to top-notch projects such as Pinehurst No. 4 (Pinehurst Resort, North Carolina), Dallas National Golf Club, Escondido Golf & Lake Club (Horseshoe Bay, Texas), Pine Hill in New Jersey, Vaquero Club (Westlake, Texas) and Ireland’s Waterville to name several.

He also had a life-changing moment when the relationship seeds with Woods were sown.

In 1997, he attended the Masters with Fazio and met Greg McLaughlin, who ran the Tiger Woods Foundation. He and McLaughlin hit it off and stayed connected.

“Years later, he calls and says, ‘I just got out of a board meeting with Tiger and [father] Earl Woods and Tiger’s dad wants to do this Tiger Woods Learning Center, and they want you to be a part of it.’”

Without even a site in mind, Welling advised them not to hire an architect. Instead, Woods’ people sent Welling land sites, he’d analyze them and tell them his unfettered thoughts. That impressed Tiger Woods enough that, in 2007, he started partnering with Welling on projects. Woods became Welling’s first client when he went out on his own in 2007.

“[Tiger Woods] was debating that he had this opportunity he wanted to pursue, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to get fully into golf design yet because he was still playing,” Welling says. “And in his mind, he always had this thought that ‘golf design will happen after I finish playing.’”
Welling told him he would analyze the idea and then figure out execution later. It earned Woods’ trust.

After a downturn in 2010, which left him stressed, Welling met an older developer, Bob Hughes, at a local bar. That meeting was akin to driving out of a thick fog and toward a clear sunny horizon, the same direction he’s been in since. Hughes told Welling that it’s more than just golf design; it’s about land planning and bringing people together.

“I started to realize that, ‘Hey, one, maybe we can go do things that aren’t necessarily golf-involved,’” Welling says. “There are things that go into golf design, many considerations, and I could be talking about race, gender, socioeconomics. But it’s also a universe of golfers and non-golfers, regardless of how they are. It’s about an idea of bringing more people into golf that is a positive.

“The projects that I found the most interesting were more than greens, tees and bunkers. They really were projects that were bringing people together and helping people have these human moments. Increasingly, I saw how golf helps empower connection amongst people.”

Since then, he’s been busier than a chef at a popular five-star restaurant.

Things started taking off after 2010 when he developed the 27 Club in Tianjin, China.

“The developer there was impossible,” Welling laughs, “but I’d do anything for this man because without him having faith in us to do such a large-scale project in China, I’m not sure our little company would have survived.”

That led to doing Quinta do Lago (North) with Paul McGinley for Irish billionaire Denis O’Brien in Algarve, Portugal. It became a domino effect that led to partnerships with Woods on Bluejack National, outside of Houston, which included private residential living. Welling also helped Woods with Payne’s Valley at Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, with at least four more projects in motion. Recently Woods threw his hat in the ring on a Fazio-Welling redesign plan to enhance “The Patch,” known as Augusta Municipal Golf Course. The TGR Design team will design a new nine-hole short course there called The Loop.

“The planning is still in process,” says Augusta National Golf Club Chairman Fred Ridley. “It has almost unlimited potential. … We hired Tom and Beau to help us with that. I see it as a hub for junior and high school golf.”

With more than 50 course and land development projects under his belt, Welling isn’t interested in superlatives or having a favorite.

It would be hard to argue against the Fields Ranch West Course at Omni PGA Frisco Resort in Texas because it became the home of the PGA of America in the past few years. The PGA hired Welling to master plan the entire project that included another course by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, not to mention a hotel, par-3 course, Topgolf Lounge and restaurants.

Welling competed with four other designers before his presentation won out.

“It reminded me of Greenville Country Club on steroids, the club I grew up on,” Welling says. “It had the PGA of America brand around it and I saw the impact the facility would have, could have.”
Says former PGA of America president Jim Richerson: “This is a project that’s going to make memories and create moments for families and generations to come — not only to get into the game, but to spend time as families.”

Welling’s story wouldn’t be complete without understanding how he got involved in curling. The sport first piqued his curiosity as a senior in high school while watching the 1988 Winter Olympics. Fourteen years later he threw himself at the sport like a stone while watching the 2002 Winter Olympics at Salt Lake City.

“The science nerd in me got caught up in the science of the sport,” he says. “When the Torino [2006] Olympics were on, I just stopped working and watched curling all day long. I couldn’t get enough of it.”

He had decided to trek to Bemidji, Minnesota, a curling hotbed, to watch the 2006 U.S. National Championships. He devoured all the information he could get, while absorbing lessons from the sport’s legends.

“And the curling world was so shocked that some redneck from South Carolina would do this that they just took me in,” Welling says.

From there, he started receiving appointments before being asked to be on the board of USA Curling. In 2022, he was elected as World Curling President. When following up on information for this story, it should have been no surprise that he responded from Gold Coast, Australia while participating in the World Curling Congress.

Since being a curling advocate, he’s found many similarities between golf and curling. Both share a similar Scottish ether, he says, that have weird terminology. But, more important, they both ingrain honor, fairness, integrity, etiquette and perseverance.

“This sounds like a PR line,” says Welling, “but I honestly believe that if the world could have more curlers and more golfers, the world would be a better place.”

(This story by reporter Ken Klavon first appeared at The First Call on September 8, 2025.)