In 1915, on top of the Cumberland Plateau, a churchman with no training in golf course design gave the University of the South a golf course, and he built it with mules and a football team. That is the founding story of Sewanee, and the rest of its history grows out of that odd and devout beginning. The man was Albion W. Knight. He is remembered as the university's religious minister, as its vice chancellor, and as a bishop who loved the game. Golf was booming in America then, and the university saw it as more than recreation. It was a vessel for moral formation, for discipline, for the conduct expected of a gentleman. Knight had no experience laying out holes, so the course was rudimentary, shaped to the natural lay of the land. The plateau, a southern reach of the Appalachians, rolls and folds, and the nine holes went where the ground allowed. The labor came from a famous program. In the 1890s Sewanee had been a pioneer of intercollegiate athletics and the strongest football power in the South. In 1899 the Tigers won all twelve of their games, eleven by shutout, and outscored their opponents 322 to 10. They became the Iron Men, later voted the greatest team of all time by the College Football Hall of Fame. Years after that season, burly Sewanee football players manned mule-drawn plows, working a golf course into the mountaintop. For more than a hundred years since, students, staff, and members of the public have played it. Almost a century after Knight, a group of Sewanee graduates raised a reported $3.5 million, and Gil Hanse and his design partner, Jim Wagner, were hired to overhaul the course. After two years of work it reopened in 2013. Hanse built nine new green complexes, strategic and undulating. He added artful bunkers, removed trees, and set new tees across the property. Yet Knight's routing remains. The walk is still the novice's walk, an invigorating loop over rolling ground, and that may be the finest compliment a modern architect could pay a bishop with a team of mules. The tree work produced the course's most memorable moment. The par-3 third has always played straight toward a cliff's edge, but for years overgrown trees hid the expansive views. Hanse cleared a gap to increase air flow across the putting surface. It was a practical decision about turf, and it opened a view that stretches for miles. You stand on the tee, aim at the flag, and the world falls away beyond it. The tees are the quiet clever part. Every hole has several, so the nine can be played twice at different yardages, and some holes change their par the second time through. The first is a 461-yard par four on the opening loop and returns as a 556-yard par five. The ninth works the other way, a 513-yard par five that comes back as a 456-yard par four. The same ground asks a different question each time around, and the shot variety and interesting greens make a second lap feel like an invitation rather than a repetition. A nine-hole course becomes an eighteen-hole day without adding an acre. That is Sewanee's charm. It is one of the very best nine-hole courses in the country, laid out by a man of the cloth and carved into the mountain by young men from the school that once fielded the Iron Men.