It was going to be a day of celebration. Stress-free golf, food and beverage. A day years in the making and months in the planning. And it would subsequently be followed by dozens of pages of laudatory print media exposure and hours of glowing radio and TV coverage.

Except that nobody wrote anything. And nobody said anything.

On the cruelest of days, it was the cruelest of ironies that the much-anticipated launch of Legends on the Niagara Golf Club in Niagara Falls, Ontario just happened to occur on the 11th of September, 2001.

“I’d written a weekly golf column for 25 years and had written a lot about Legends—the plan, the marketing. I was really looking forward to the grand opening. But I didn’t write anything about that day,” admits Buffalo News scribe Mark Gaughan.

“There was also the passport issue right after 9/11 and there was hesitancy to leave the U.S.,” adds Tom Newton, Niagara Parks Senior Superintendent and assistant superintendent at Legends on the Niagara on that fateful day. “We built this business model based on being 40-50% American business. But it shrunk to below 10%. And then SARS came along in 2003.”

“All the work the Parks Commission put into the logo and branding, organizing, inviting people above and beyond your normal marketing—it all went down the drain, because nobody was talking golf at the end of the day, or in the days and weeks afterward,” remembers Carrick Design associate Steve Vanderploeg. “But you don’t really consider it compared to planes hitting the Twin Towers.”

“I don’t think Doug and I ever felt that the courses got the attention they deserved,” says golf architect Tom McBroom, who co-designed the Legends alongside Doug Carrick, including McBroom’s Ussher’s Creek course, Carrick’s Battlefield 18 and the nine-hole Chippawa executive layout. “Admittedly, flat land doesn’t get people’s attention. But as designers you try to create something that’s interesting and memorable. The big challenge, which Doug and I talked about a lot, was to create two courses that could stand out as being unique in their own right. Mine, Ussher’s Creek, had the creek winding through probably nine holes in interesting ways.”

Not everyone embraced the prospect of the Legends facility, however, recalls Robert Brooker, former Assistant General Manager and Finance Director with the Niagara Parks Commission. “The concern from several courses in the area was that the development of the Legends would be unfair competition. But we felt it would help the Niagara Region become a golfing destination and complement the tourist industry,” Brooker relates. “Then Royal Niagara, Thundering Waters and Grand Niagara popped up afterward. And we hosted the 2004 LPGA Canadian Women’s Open. So I think it worked in that sense. It brought people to hotels and restaurants to the area, and they’re still coming for the golf.”

And there is finally sustained momentum for Legends, suggests Newton. “We’d been ramping up for about five years even before COVID, offering more through stay-and-play and our All Access golf program. And the last two years have been through the roof. It’s hard to get tee times for two weeks out.”

 

(The much-anticipated launch of Legends on the Niagara GC coincided with 9/11. How do eight people there that day remember it? Visit here.)