Lloyd “AJ” Bridges created his personal field of dreams in the cornrows behind his family’s Western Kentucky farmhouse. He didn’t carve out a baseball diamond, however; he aimed a golf ball at selected stalks as if they were flagsticks on the green. Like millions of children in the late nineties, he’d grown smitten with Tiger Woods’ meteoric rise to stardom, a passion that led to unexpected fairways.
“My father saw how obsessed I’d become with Tiger and golf, so he went out and found a used set of left-handed golf clubs since I was left-hand dominant,” Bridges remembers. “Unfortunately, I swing right-handed, so he found me a second set of used clubs that I hit in my backyard for several years.”
Bridges had no opportunity to play an actual golf course. The closest tract was two hours from his home, and the sport was prohibitively expensive. He chose the next best option: golf in his living room via EA’s Tiger Woods on his PlayStation. “I would play in ‘Season’ mode and follow the PGA Tour schedule,” he says.
A precocious student with an educator mother, Bridges transferred his junior year to the new Gatton Academy of Math and Science in Bowling Green. This move, in tandem with extracurricular enrichment programs like “Odyssey of the Mind,” engendered his curiosity about design.
“I became fascinated with golf course design from playing all these great courses,” he says. “But I looked at golf from a math and science perspective, the intent of each individual shot and how the design formulated what the player did.”
One of the courses Bridges loved playing was Bandon Dunes, Golf Digest’s eighth-ranked Public Course in America and a frequent USGA tournament site. Coincidentally, Bandon was also golf architect David McLay Kidd’s first significant project. Fast-forward fifteen years to today, and Bridges is an Associate Landscape Design Specialist for Kidd’s DMK Golf Designs, a premier firm.
As a kid from rural Kentucky, Bridges’ path to his dream job was as crooked as a double dogleg.
A talented illustrator from a young age, Bridges began sketching golf holes in middle school. He told everyone he wanted to design golf courses when he grew up. His grandmother, who’d sit on the porch watching her grandson chip balls into the corn rows, encouraged him to follow his dream.
“My school buddies always teased me, saying I was crazy to think I could design golf courses,” recalls Bridges. “My professors basically said the same thing when I entered the landscape design program at the University of Kentucky. It was during the 2008 recession, and many golf projects were shutting down. One prof said he doubted a new course would ever be built again.”
Undaunted, Bridges continued to study landscape design from a golf course perspective. One semester, J. Drew Rogers, golf course architect and Kentucky alum, visited. “Alumni often returned to speak to our program,” Bridges says. “But I consider Rogers’s visit one of the most important days of my academic career.”
Inspired, Bridges began cold-calling golf design firms across America, asking about jobs. One office told him to get on a course construction crew, so he found a job working on the new PGA Frisco project in Texas.
“I did whatever was needed, from laying sod to staking fairways,” Bridges says. “One day, DMK Golf Designs called to offer me a job. I loaded up my car and left for Bend, Oregon, the next day.”
His persistence had paid off, as his boss David McLay Kidd notes: “I tell every kid who calls and wants to be me to give it up and find a different dream. The odds of success are so incredibly slim I try to dissuade them all I can,” Kidd says. “Some I can’t. AJ was that kid; he was driven to be seen and motivated to succeed. We hired him largely because of that drive, although he is pretty darn smart, too. When my peers and I eventually hang it up, it will be AJ and a few others who fill the void.”
Bridges just completed work on DMK’s Loraloma, a new golf community outside of Austin that’s already been touted among the Southwest’s best new courses. It’s undoubtedly more than video-game-worthy, and bigger even than the dreams of one kid who used to hit toward corn stalks. The views now soar through the Texas Hill Country landscape, looking out over the winding Pedernales River and beyond.
