Double time: the world's best players will test golf architect Tom Fazio's designs at two elite tournaments in North Carolina this year.

• Author: Pace, Lee

Before the first ball is struck at the two most prominent professional golf tour events in North Carolina this year, the leader in the clubhouse is Hendersonville's Tom Fazio. It's a special year for the famed course designer as two of his Tar Heel projects will be in the professional-golf spotlight, with the Wells Fargo Championship making a one-off trip to Eagle Point Golf Club in Wilmington May 4-7, and the PGA Championship, one of pro golf's four major tournaments, visiting Charlotte s Quail Hollow Club Aug. 10-13. The Wells Fargo, originally the Wachovia Championship, has been held at Quail Hollow since 2003 but is making a one-year relocation because of the Charlotte event three months later.

It hasn't always been so easy for Fazio, 72, given the economic ebb and flow that can easily ignite a spurt of work or quickly swerve the golf business into the muck. "I've been through, what, four or five recessions in my career?" he muses, "The only one that really hurt was the first one the 1974-75 recession. We were just trying to get started, and it was a tough go. After you're established and successful, they don't hurt as much.

"But that '74-75 recession was the best tiling that ever happened to me. There was no work, so I got married and had six wonderful kids. Now, those kids have given us 14 grandkids. How great is that?"

Fazio's firm has designed some 200 golf courses over four-plus decades, including a Japan course that will host the 2020 Olympics. He and his wife, Sue, became enamored of the North Carolina mountains in the mid-1980s while Fazio was crafting Wade Hampton Golf Club in Cashiers and thought it a better environment to raise their family than Palm Beach, Fla. His resume includes 18 courses in North Carolina--from Pinehurst No. 6 that opened in 1979 and jumpstarted his career to The Hasentree Club in Wake Forest, which opened in 2007.

"This state has been so incredibly good to me," says Fazio, who also has designed 22 courses in South Carolina. "From the mountains to the coast and everything in between, you could call that course list a career and be very satisfied."

Quail Hollow was the brainchild of Charlotte real-estate and insurance investor James Harris, who was frustrated in the late 1950s with the crowded tee sheet at Charlotte Country Club. He believed a parcel of family land on what was then the city's southern edge would be ideal for a golf club. He hired Greenville, S.C.-based architect George Cobb, who helped...