What Bruce Charlton remembers most about his first trip to Madison to look at the site where University Ridge Golf Course would be built was that he arrived the day after University of Wisconsin football coach Dave McClain died suddenly of a heart attack.
Nobody thought back in 1986 that the UW football team and the school’s golf course would become two of the athletic department’s biggest winners over the past two decades.
But Charlton, who was the lead designer of University Ridge for Palo Alto, Calif., architect Robert Trent Jones Jr., was as confident that the Ridge would become a champion as Barry Alvarez was that his UW football team would win Rose Bowls.