Ross’s role at Idle Hour is well documented in secondary sources that consolidate archival holdings: the Donald Ross Society’s course directory lists the club—“Idle Hour Country Club (FKA Ashland Country Club)”—as an 18-hole Ross original completed in 1924, the only entry for Kentucky and flagged as still extant. This aligns with the property’s well-known association with horseman E.R. Bradley’s Idle Hour Farm on Lexington’s east side, for whom the course was laid out.
The Tufts Archives in Pinehurst (custodian of Ross drawings) is the likely repository for an original routing plan for Idle Hour; a published image of such a plan, credited to Tufts, has circulated in architectural commentary.
No accessible evidence indicates that Ross returned for a later redesign. The Ross Society directory does not note a separate Ross-era remodeling phase, and neither contemporary press summaries nor club-facing overviews consulted for this entry record a subsequent visit by Ross.
In the modern era, the club engaged restoration specialist Ron Prichard. Trade-press reporting places his hiring in 2004 to “return the golf course to its Ross roots,” work that focused on restoring bunkering patterns and adjusting length; other accounts describe his program as restoring original bunker sites and expanding total sand area, with work generally completed in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Exact construction calendars and drawing sets would be verifiable in club archives and contractor records.
Unique Design Characteristics
On the ground, several holes at Idle Hour still read as distinctly Rossian within this site’s scale and topography. The long, exacting par-3 2nd and the drivable, position-oriented par-4 5th are routinely singled out; both were strengthened by the Prichard program, which re-established more assertive bunkering around their preferred lines. The par-5 8th retains a corridor guarded by flanking and diagonal bunkers; and the par-3 13th plays over/along a pond to a green where short or imprecise approaches are repelled—features that have persisted through the club’s incremental changes.
Idle Hour’s greens today are presented fast and firm, and various reviews refer to their elevation and contouring—a point consistent with the course’s reputation among state-level players—but specific interior contour forms (e.g., front spines or fall-offs) have not been inventoried in accessible, citable sources. A hole-by-hole contour survey or access to the club’s historical green drawings would be necessary to document those attributes to scholarly standards.
A notable routing quirk is the club’s “flipped” finish: over time the sequence near the clubhouse was reversed, so the present closing stretch is not the one members would have encountered mid-century. Contemporary summaries also note that some holes in front of the clubhouse were shifted to accommodate later amenities (pool, tennis, etc.), while the mid-property corridors remained largely intact. For students of Ross, these changes frame the most “original-feeling” holes as the interior stretch away from the clubhouse complex. Precise identification of untouched corridors would benefit from a comparative study of 1930s–1950s aerials against current GIS.
During competition set-ups—and visible in member play—Idle Hour also presents a localized idiosyncrasy: a double green associated with the early stretch (observed during the 2024 Southern Amateur), reinforcing the compactness of the routing in the opening nine. That feature’s lineage (original vs. later) is not addressed in published sources and would require verification via historic photography and as-builts.
Historical Significance
Idle Hour holds outsized significance in Ross’s catalogue as the acknowledged Ross original in Kentucky. For a state with a deep golf culture but limited early-era architect representation, the course has long functioned as the Bluegrass’s Ross touchstone. Secondary compendia and mainstream golf outlets regularly foreground this status.
The course’s modern competitive relevance was underscored when the Southern Golf Association awarded the 118th Southern Amateur to Idle Hour (July 17–20, 2024). China’s Wenyi Ding prevailed at 262, adding the club to an event lineage that includes numerous Ross venues elsewhere in the South. Hosting the Southern Amateur placed Idle Hour on a national amateur stage and encouraged closer architectural attention to how the restored bunkering and present green complexes test elite play.
Idle Hour’s earlier championship record includes serving as a Kentucky Amateur site in the match-play era; association records list Idle Hour among host venues in the early 1950s, when future PGA Tour star Gay Brewer was a back-to-back champion (1952–53). This provides a useful temporal marker for how the course presented in the pre-modernization decades.
Current Condition / Integrity
The routing remains substantially that of a compact, walkable Ross plan, though the order of play near the clubhouse has been altered and some front-of-house corridors were adjusted to make room for non-golf amenities. Numerous green sites and fairway corridors in the interior of the property are recognizable as Ross-era placements, while peripheral holes exhibit the cumulative effects of later amenity siting and tree growth.
Prichard’s restoration work—initiated in 2004 and carried out over subsequent seasons—concentrated on returning bunkers to historic locations and forms and on adding length where feasible within property limits. Public-facing course descriptions repeatedly attribute the present sand scheme and overall visual character to this program. Later notes from 2023–24 in the trade press and superintendent commentary suggest ongoing maintenance-driven refreshes of fairway bunkers nearly two decades after the restoration—routine lifecycle work rather than a new redesign. Precise scopes (liner replacement, edge recapture, drainage) would be confirmable through club capital records.
As it plays today from the longest tees, Idle Hour measures approximately 7,018 yards at par 71; alternative back sets around 6,675 yards are common in published scorecards.
Sources & Notes
Donald Ross Society, Directory of Golf Courses Designed by Donald J. Ross (June 2023): lists “Idle Hour Country Club (FKA Ashland Country Club), Lexington, KY, 18, 1924, YES.”
Golf Course Industry, Matthew Wharton, “Convenient when needed” (Oct. 26, 2023): notes original 1924 Ross design for E.R. Bradley and that the club hired Ron Prichard in 2004 for a Ross-rooted restoration.
Top100GolfCourses.com, “Idle Hour Country Club” profile: describes Prichard’s refurbishment of all bunkers, added length, highlights holes 2, 5, 8, 13, and notes routing changes and clubhouse-area adjustments over time.
Golf Digest, “Best golf courses near Lexington, KY”: mentions Prichard’s bunker restoration and that the routing has been flipped so the closing stretch differs from earlier sequences.
Southern Golf Association, “Idle Hour Country Club to Host the 118th Southern Amateur Championship” (release, July 16, 2024), and “Past Results” listing (showing July 17–20, 2024, champion Wenyi Ding at 262).
Golf Course Industry, “Southern golf trifecta” (Sept. 5, 2024): descriptive on-site observations during the Southern Amateur week, including note of a double green early in the round.
Kentucky Golf Association, Kentucky State Amateur Championship History: lists Idle Hour among host sites in the early 1950s match-play era (e.g., 1952).
Donald Ross Society, “Tufts Archives” resource page; OneBeardedGolfer (2019) showing a Tufts-credited Ross routing plan image for Idle Hour (used here only to note plan existence and the need to consult primary drawings).