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BRAINERD, Minn. – Imagine telling an Open Championship winner he can’t play from the back tees. It happened to Tom Lehman, a former World No. 1, five-time PGA Tour winner and victor in 1996 at Royal Lytham and St. Annes in England.
Some years after securing his Open title by besting the likes of Ernie Els and Mark McCumber among a slew of other big names, Lehman was out for a casual round on the famed Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. He played No. 1 then walked left to a relatively new tee box for the par-4 second hole, set behind the traditional tees to accommodate the vast distances which modern pros can drive the ball. After teeing off, a course marshal approached the American star who would go on to captain the 2006 Ryder Cup team.
“I'm sorry, but the back tees are for competition only,” Lehman recalled the marshal telling him.
Lehman mentioned that he was a professional golfer. “Oh, Mr. Lehman, I know you're the Open champion. I know who you are, but the back tees are for competitions only,” was the reply, Lehman recalled with a chuckle.
It was more than a funny moment. Lehman, who has had a hand in the design of nearly 20 courses and is now the lead golf course designer and president of Lehman Design Group, said the moment struck a nerve in his design sensibilities.
“And so that really got me thinking about, you know, what do I want to do with different levels of player?” Lehman said recently. “And so, I think we quickly morphed into designing for everybody, so everybody can have fun. And then later thinking about competition tees. Where do we put those where we can really test the best players with angles and length or whatever? So it came down to, always start with the green and work backwards.”
That intent is on full display at Cragun’s Resort and its Legacy courses in Minnesota. Since the spring of 2021, Lehman took the resort’s two existing golf courses on the shores of Stephens Lake – just a few minutes’ drive from the main resort on gorgeous Gull Lake – and revamped them into a totally new experience focused on playability for all levels of players. The result of the $17 million effort is 45 holes of golf, some totally new and others renovated, that take advantage of their natural surroundings and rolling terrain while offering golfers plenty of room to swing away.
All those holes are divided into two courses, the Lehman 18 and the Dutch 27, both of which were fully open as of mid-2025. The Dutch 27 features three nines: Red, White and Blue. Of note, the Red and White nines will be home to the CRMC Championship, a PGA Tour Americas event, on August 28-31.
The Dutch 27 course is named in honor of Dutch Cragun, whose parents founded the lakeside resort in 1940 and added a lodge in 1945. Dutch took the reins as manager in 1957, and the now 93-year-old oversaw the resort’s expansion until selling it to Minnesota-based investment group Leisure Hotel and Resorts in early 2025. The resort now boasts 206 lodge-style rooms as well as 55 cabins and many other amenities including five restaurants and bars. The new ownership group plans to invest more than $100 million in upgrades to the resort in the coming years.
Cragun invested heavily in the resort in his 80s, including a $25 million renovation in 2015. And he wanted to make changes to the golf courses before accepting any offer from interested buyers who want to continue his legacy. Enter Lehman, a Minnesota native and graduate of the University of Minnesota.
Several years ago, Lehman was visiting Cragun’s Resort to watch one of his sons play a junior golf tournament when he was approached by a friend, who told him that Dutch Cragun would like to meet. Dinner that night turned into several days touring the property and poring over proposed changes on topographical maps, with Cragun picking Lehman’s brain about what might be done to improve the golf courses.
“I think Dutch always had it in this head – because he’s very much a visionary – of what he had wanted overall,” Lehman said at the official re-opening of the Red nine in July. “The project quickly grew to the point we're going to re-do everything. We’re going to add these new holes and make 45 holes.”
Lehman was hired, and the trick for him and design partner Chris Brands became making the two courses distinct from each other. The Lehman 18 would include rethinking eight existing holes while adding 10 entirely new holes on a stretch of vacant land, which eventually will include an expanded residential element. The Dutch 27 would play largely through existing corridors of a course first designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., but the playing features of each hole would be revamped.
“We looked at it as these (Dutch) 27 holes need to have a similar look, you know, and they need to have similar style bunkers,” Lehman said. “When you're playing this course, you should feel like you’re playing the Red and the Blue or the Blue and the White. It all feels like a homogeneous golf course. The Lehman 18, obviously, was something that was going to be totally different.”
The Red, Blue and White nines of the more compact Dutch 27 play a tad tighter than the Lehman 18. The 27 holes now twist and turn through lightly tree-lined and frequently parallel corridors that were expanded, often with views of the lake that were opened during Lehman’s renovation.
The terrain offered great variety, and Lehman took advantage by adjusting many greens to better interact with slopes as the hills drop toward the shoreline. The greens feature a vast amount of movement, and after Lehman expanded many of the putting surfaces, they offer more and better hole locations.
Bunkers were removed if they only threatened less talented players, and the remaining traps were renovated with liners to provide better conditioning and a new aesthetic. Forced carries were reduced or eliminated, and greenside runoffs were introduced with shorter grass. It was all done with resort players in mind instead of focusing solely on defending par from elite players, such as those in the PGA Tour Americas event.
“We created a lot more width,” Lehman said of his work on the Dutch 27. “We took out a lot of the underbrush in the trees, and we took down a lot of trees. We just created way more room for people to play. And yet, you know, I think we created a really great strategy that would make it interesting. So to me, the idea of combining great beauty, great strategy and great conditioning is what generates fun. That was the goal.”
That was the lesson Lehman learned at St. Andrews. And it was still in play for the new course, the Lehman 18, but on a distinct and expansive piece of land that offered its own opportunities.
“The Lehman 18 was intended to be totally different,” he said. “It's a completely different animal in so many ways.”
For starters, the Lehman 18 is a much bigger course – if there’s one issue, it’s that the Lehman 18 is basically unwalkable because of several long gaps between greens and tees that require a cart ride. It helps that the longest rides are broken up by a snack shack serving sausage dogs and other local treats.
The Lehman 18 also is wider in general than the Dutch 27, with fewer trees in play and only at the perimeters. The course wanders across hills and along Stephens Lake, often overlooking wetlands or prairies while playing to big greens with plenty of internal contours, often dramatic. It has much more of the feel and presentation of many modern courses of recent years that play across huge landscapes, the course calling for a great variety of shots while offering different tacks to approach the flags past sometimes sharp shaping and ground features. For serious golf architecture fans, this Lehman 18 is a course well worthy of investigation – it would be fair to anticipate it appearing on lists of the best layouts in the state and well beyond.
Lehman said he took inspiration for his namesake course, which plays across sandy soil, from the Land Down Under.
“I've always been a big fan of the Australian courses in the Sandbelt in Melbourne, and in the way the bunkers and the greens are so close with the bunkers right up against the putting surfaces,” he said.
But those kinds of Sandbelt bunkers, which often feature razor-sharp edges carved into the greens, are difficult to replicate outside Australia. There, the sand promotes turf with extremely deep root systems that hold the sodded bunker faces in place, Lehman said. It wouldn’t work at Cragun’s, where the bunker lips likely would crumble.
The solution came in the form of artificial turf from other sports’ playing surfaces, which is stacked to replicate the revetted sod bunkers of the British Isles and the sharp edges found in Australia. It’s a concept that has been used before to construct bunkers in the U.S., and Lehman employed it to great effect to create bunkers that are much tighter to the greens on the Lehman 18 than bunkers found on the Dutch 27. The artificial turf holds the shapes created by Lehman’s team in select bunkers without ever seeming out of place – many players would never notice that the surfaces aren’t natural.
“Everything is sand here,” Lehman said of the site. “So the Sandbelt style is something that fits. You can take inspiration from those courses, but you don't copy those courses. Maybe this is a unique topography, but we we can have a strategic look that kind is borrowed from there, and that's what we did. ...
“The looks (of the two courses) are different by design. We want it that when you play the Lehman 18, then you play the Dutch 27, you feel like you're playing different courses with more variety.”
Such variety is a passion, Lehman said. In his earliest design efforts in the 1990s, Lehman said he mostly provided player feedback and suggestions to established architects, most of whom were interested in producing “championship” courses to test the best players – this was a common pattern of design in the 1960s through the late 1990s.
Now that he has taken control of projects as the lead designer, Lehman said he is fascinated by introducing variety that engages all levels of players with strategic challenges more so than brute difficulty. He named Seth Raynor, an early 1900s master of strategic design, as a favorite architect. He said his favorite course is William Flynn’s Shinnecock Hills, a Golden Age model of strategic golf on New York’s Long Island.
It’s a passion that started early. Lehman said that when he was growing up in Alexandria, Minnesota, he constantly sketched golf holes along with houses, planes, anything that came to mind. He considered studying architecture at the University of Minnesota.
“I was encouraged not to by the admissions dean because of how rigorous the academic side was and how little time I'd have because of playing golf there,” he said. “So I bypassed that. But I've never lost my love for designing things.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Cragun's Resort shines in Minnesota with Tom Lehman course renovations
Continue reading...
Some years after securing his Open title by besting the likes of Ernie Els and Mark McCumber among a slew of other big names, Lehman was out for a casual round on the famed Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. He played No. 1 then walked left to a relatively new tee box for the par-4 second hole, set behind the traditional tees to accommodate the vast distances which modern pros can drive the ball. After teeing off, a course marshal approached the American star who would go on to captain the 2006 Ryder Cup team.
“I'm sorry, but the back tees are for competition only,” Lehman recalled the marshal telling him.
Lehman mentioned that he was a professional golfer. “Oh, Mr. Lehman, I know you're the Open champion. I know who you are, but the back tees are for competitions only,” was the reply, Lehman recalled with a chuckle.
It was more than a funny moment. Lehman, who has had a hand in the design of nearly 20 courses and is now the lead golf course designer and president of Lehman Design Group, said the moment struck a nerve in his design sensibilities.
“And so that really got me thinking about, you know, what do I want to do with different levels of player?” Lehman said recently. “And so, I think we quickly morphed into designing for everybody, so everybody can have fun. And then later thinking about competition tees. Where do we put those where we can really test the best players with angles and length or whatever? So it came down to, always start with the green and work backwards.”
Tom Lehman's renovation goals at Cragun's Resort
That intent is on full display at Cragun’s Resort and its Legacy courses in Minnesota. Since the spring of 2021, Lehman took the resort’s two existing golf courses on the shores of Stephens Lake – just a few minutes’ drive from the main resort on gorgeous Gull Lake – and revamped them into a totally new experience focused on playability for all levels of players. The result of the $17 million effort is 45 holes of golf, some totally new and others renovated, that take advantage of their natural surroundings and rolling terrain while offering golfers plenty of room to swing away.
All those holes are divided into two courses, the Lehman 18 and the Dutch 27, both of which were fully open as of mid-2025. The Dutch 27 features three nines: Red, White and Blue. Of note, the Red and White nines will be home to the CRMC Championship, a PGA Tour Americas event, on August 28-31.
The Dutch 27 course is named in honor of Dutch Cragun, whose parents founded the lakeside resort in 1940 and added a lodge in 1945. Dutch took the reins as manager in 1957, and the now 93-year-old oversaw the resort’s expansion until selling it to Minnesota-based investment group Leisure Hotel and Resorts in early 2025. The resort now boasts 206 lodge-style rooms as well as 55 cabins and many other amenities including five restaurants and bars. The new ownership group plans to invest more than $100 million in upgrades to the resort in the coming years.
Cragun invested heavily in the resort in his 80s, including a $25 million renovation in 2015. And he wanted to make changes to the golf courses before accepting any offer from interested buyers who want to continue his legacy. Enter Lehman, a Minnesota native and graduate of the University of Minnesota.
Several years ago, Lehman was visiting Cragun’s Resort to watch one of his sons play a junior golf tournament when he was approached by a friend, who told him that Dutch Cragun would like to meet. Dinner that night turned into several days touring the property and poring over proposed changes on topographical maps, with Cragun picking Lehman’s brain about what might be done to improve the golf courses.
“I think Dutch always had it in this head – because he’s very much a visionary – of what he had wanted overall,” Lehman said at the official re-opening of the Red nine in July. “The project quickly grew to the point we're going to re-do everything. We’re going to add these new holes and make 45 holes.”
The Dutch 27 at Cragun's Resort: Red, White and Blue
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Lehman was hired, and the trick for him and design partner Chris Brands became making the two courses distinct from each other. The Lehman 18 would include rethinking eight existing holes while adding 10 entirely new holes on a stretch of vacant land, which eventually will include an expanded residential element. The Dutch 27 would play largely through existing corridors of a course first designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., but the playing features of each hole would be revamped.
“We looked at it as these (Dutch) 27 holes need to have a similar look, you know, and they need to have similar style bunkers,” Lehman said. “When you're playing this course, you should feel like you’re playing the Red and the Blue or the Blue and the White. It all feels like a homogeneous golf course. The Lehman 18, obviously, was something that was going to be totally different.”
The Red, Blue and White nines of the more compact Dutch 27 play a tad tighter than the Lehman 18. The 27 holes now twist and turn through lightly tree-lined and frequently parallel corridors that were expanded, often with views of the lake that were opened during Lehman’s renovation.
The terrain offered great variety, and Lehman took advantage by adjusting many greens to better interact with slopes as the hills drop toward the shoreline. The greens feature a vast amount of movement, and after Lehman expanded many of the putting surfaces, they offer more and better hole locations.
Bunkers were removed if they only threatened less talented players, and the remaining traps were renovated with liners to provide better conditioning and a new aesthetic. Forced carries were reduced or eliminated, and greenside runoffs were introduced with shorter grass. It was all done with resort players in mind instead of focusing solely on defending par from elite players, such as those in the PGA Tour Americas event.
“We created a lot more width,” Lehman said of his work on the Dutch 27. “We took out a lot of the underbrush in the trees, and we took down a lot of trees. We just created way more room for people to play. And yet, you know, I think we created a really great strategy that would make it interesting. So to me, the idea of combining great beauty, great strategy and great conditioning is what generates fun. That was the goal.”
That was the lesson Lehman learned at St. Andrews. And it was still in play for the new course, the Lehman 18, but on a distinct and expansive piece of land that offered its own opportunities.
“The Lehman 18 was intended to be totally different,” he said. “It's a completely different animal in so many ways.”
The Lehman 18 at Cragun's Resort
You must be registered for see images attach
For starters, the Lehman 18 is a much bigger course – if there’s one issue, it’s that the Lehman 18 is basically unwalkable because of several long gaps between greens and tees that require a cart ride. It helps that the longest rides are broken up by a snack shack serving sausage dogs and other local treats.
The Lehman 18 also is wider in general than the Dutch 27, with fewer trees in play and only at the perimeters. The course wanders across hills and along Stephens Lake, often overlooking wetlands or prairies while playing to big greens with plenty of internal contours, often dramatic. It has much more of the feel and presentation of many modern courses of recent years that play across huge landscapes, the course calling for a great variety of shots while offering different tacks to approach the flags past sometimes sharp shaping and ground features. For serious golf architecture fans, this Lehman 18 is a course well worthy of investigation – it would be fair to anticipate it appearing on lists of the best layouts in the state and well beyond.
Lehman said he took inspiration for his namesake course, which plays across sandy soil, from the Land Down Under.
“I've always been a big fan of the Australian courses in the Sandbelt in Melbourne, and in the way the bunkers and the greens are so close with the bunkers right up against the putting surfaces,” he said.
But those kinds of Sandbelt bunkers, which often feature razor-sharp edges carved into the greens, are difficult to replicate outside Australia. There, the sand promotes turf with extremely deep root systems that hold the sodded bunker faces in place, Lehman said. It wouldn’t work at Cragun’s, where the bunker lips likely would crumble.
The solution came in the form of artificial turf from other sports’ playing surfaces, which is stacked to replicate the revetted sod bunkers of the British Isles and the sharp edges found in Australia. It’s a concept that has been used before to construct bunkers in the U.S., and Lehman employed it to great effect to create bunkers that are much tighter to the greens on the Lehman 18 than bunkers found on the Dutch 27. The artificial turf holds the shapes created by Lehman’s team in select bunkers without ever seeming out of place – many players would never notice that the surfaces aren’t natural.
“Everything is sand here,” Lehman said of the site. “So the Sandbelt style is something that fits. You can take inspiration from those courses, but you don't copy those courses. Maybe this is a unique topography, but we we can have a strategic look that kind is borrowed from there, and that's what we did. ...
“The looks (of the two courses) are different by design. We want it that when you play the Lehman 18, then you play the Dutch 27, you feel like you're playing different courses with more variety.”
Tom Lehman has passion for design
Such variety is a passion, Lehman said. In his earliest design efforts in the 1990s, Lehman said he mostly provided player feedback and suggestions to established architects, most of whom were interested in producing “championship” courses to test the best players – this was a common pattern of design in the 1960s through the late 1990s.
Now that he has taken control of projects as the lead designer, Lehman said he is fascinated by introducing variety that engages all levels of players with strategic challenges more so than brute difficulty. He named Seth Raynor, an early 1900s master of strategic design, as a favorite architect. He said his favorite course is William Flynn’s Shinnecock Hills, a Golden Age model of strategic golf on New York’s Long Island.
It’s a passion that started early. Lehman said that when he was growing up in Alexandria, Minnesota, he constantly sketched golf holes along with houses, planes, anything that came to mind. He considered studying architecture at the University of Minnesota.
“I was encouraged not to by the admissions dean because of how rigorous the academic side was and how little time I'd have because of playing golf there,” he said. “So I bypassed that. But I've never lost my love for designing things.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Cragun's Resort shines in Minnesota with Tom Lehman course renovations
Continue reading...
