Bill Kubly, right, moved to Nebraska nearly 40 years ago and is responsible for building many of the best golf courses throughout the state — and all over the world.
The boss was on his way. And he was in a hurry.
The staff at the Players Club at Deer Creek were redoing the bunkers. But first they had to show the owner the plans. And, of course, get his opinion.
Then Bill Kubly drove up. If you didn’t know he was the boss, you never would have guessed it.
“He shows up in shorts, golf polo and boat shoes,” recalled Tim Halpine, general manager at Players Club.
“So he does his typical thing. He goes down and gets a hot dog and a Diet Coke. Pays for it, pays full price. Tips the server. Introduces himself to the wait staff. Then he says, I only have a half-hour.”
About 2 1⁄2 hours later, Halpine said, Kubly was standing in a sand trap, drawing the shape of a new bunker with the end of a rake.
“He was friends with Arnold Palmer and did all these things with these fancy golf courses,” Halpine said. “But at the end of the day, he wants to play in the dirt. That’s what gets him excited.”
Nearly 50 years after he first climbed on a tractor to carve a fairway, Kubly still likes to play in the dirt. And he’s never been more stoked.
This is a man who created one of the world’s largest golf course construction companies from his little corner of southwest Lincoln.
Landscapes Unlimited has built more than 300 courses, from Nebraska City to China and Scotland.
The framed photos on the walls at headquarters tell a story. There’s Kubly with Tiger Woods. Bill with Arnie. Bill with Jack. So on and so on.
If you’ve watched the Masters or U.S. Open, you’ve admired Kubly’s work. He isn’t allowed to say much about what Landscapes has done at Augusta National, but “we have 10 to 100 people there all year.”
If you’ve golfed in this region, chances are you’ve enjoyed his craftsmanship.
His company built Sand Hills, ArborLinks, Prairie Club, Sutton Bay, Firethorn, Hillcrest, Players Club, Champions Run, Pacific Springs, Shoreline, Quarry Oaks and many more, including Tara Hills, where Kubly left the famous Keebler Cookie truck.
Kubly says he’s on project No. 2,015. And this one might be his favorite — a crown jewel as he plays the back nine of his career.
Lost Rail Golf Club in Gretna.
Kubly puts the project, at 232nd and Cary Streets high atop the Elkhorn River valley, alongside Sand Hills and Sutton Bay at the top of his list.
This one is for fun, this one is for legacy, this one is because a golf course sculptor can’t help himself when he sees stunning landscape he must touch. Kubly promised Lost Rail will be the No. 1 golf course in the Omaha area.
“This will be top two or three golf courses in the state,” he said. “I’m really excited.”
A rendering of the Lost Rail golf course's 13th hole.
Who gets this worked up about building a golf course? And then turns that passion into building a brand name in the golf industry?
This story starts on a bulletin board.
It was 1971. Kubly was getting ready to graduate from the University of Wisconsin. He had “designs” on being an architect.
He also loved golf. The kid from small-town Monroe, Wisconsin, near the Illinois border, grew up playing Monroe Country Club’s nine-hole course with his parents.
“My claim to fame was I tied Andy North in the conference my senior year,” Kubly said. “Unfortunately, it was for seventh place.”
Kubly’s goal was to golf for the University of Houston, then tour school. His game never caught up to the dream.
Instead he headed to Madison, where his senior year project was a special class called golf course architecture. He was going to be the next Rees Jones, until one day he saw a card on a job bulletin board.
“Need Landscape Architect interested in golf course design. Contact Dick Watson, Lincoln, Neb.”
Kubly got the job. The next thing he knew, he was driving a tractor and unloading pipe with Watson at Lake Panorama, a golf project outside Des Moines.
Next stop: Doe Valley, near Louisville, Kentucky. Because people in his business lived in the town of the project, Bill moved new bride Myrna to Louisville.
When Doe Valley was finished, the Kublys moved to Lincoln on Thanksgiving 1972.
Bill Kubly at the site of his latest big project, Lost Rail, in Gretna.
“I’ve been here ever since,” he said. “I’m a Nebraskan. I root for the Huskers in all sports, even when they play Wisconsin.”
Kubly worked alongside Watson — driving a tractor, laying pipe, hauling cedars, working a chainsaw. In 1976, decided to strike out on his own.
That’s when Landscapes Unlimited was born. Same logo, too.
First project: irrigation at a course in Oakland, Nebraska. Then building a course in Mitchell, South Dakota.
That’s when a funny thing happened. Actually, two funny things.
Kubly used to take the box of a semitruck and put his office in it for a project. But for his first project, a nine-hole course in Mitchell, he didn’t need much.
“I found a Keebler Cookie box,” Kubly said. “Probably about a 15-footer. I was a little guy in there with the cookie box, had a little desk in there and my shovels.”
The Keebler box became his signature, until it was time to move on.
“I moved it to Papillion, where we did the first nine holes at Tara Hills,” Kubly said. “I left that Keebler Cookie box there. I think the superintendent raised chickens in it.”
The other interesting thing that happened: The kid who wanted to design golf courses found he would rather build them out of the dirt.
Kubly designed the Pines course in Valley, and a couple of others. There are occasions he dabbles, like the time he designed some bunkers at ArborLinks.
It was an interesting move. The architects get the glory. In every golf course’s history, they list the architect. Not the guy who dug the irrigation.
Somewhere along the way, the dirt got inside Kubly’s blood.
“I went into the construction business because I had to pay the bills,” he said. “But there were a lot of guys who wanted to design golf courses. Only a dozen or so were contractors. It was easier to break into that.
“The glamorous part is being the architect, but I believe we have as much to do with the projects, maybe more so. If the architect draws great plans and we’re copying the plans out on the field, that’s rewarding.”
How does a guy go from building a McCook golf course to working with Rees Jones in New Jersey? Kubly decided to branch out. And the little guy from Nebraska had an edge.
“We were low bid,” Kubly said. “They had to take me.”
He also did quality work, meticulous in detail. Word in the business spread. Kubly got a big break when Tom Fazio heard of the Nebraska man and hired him for a Long Island project in 1990.
Kubly did well. Then he separated himself from the pack.
Most golf contractors did one or two projects a year. Kubly took on four or five at a time.
“Most of the golf contractors were mom and pops,” he said. “There were three or four well-known contractors. It was pretty easy for me to get up to their level doing four or five jobs at a time.
“I traveled a lot. It was the life of a vagabond.”
His timing was perfect. The 1990s saw a golf boom. Course projects and developments sprouted up everywhere. By 2000, Kubly says, 350 new courses per year were going up.
The guy who looked more like a 7-handicap than a construction genius grew with the industry. His friendship with Lincoln developer Dick Youngscap led him to build Sand Hills in 1994. A big, big deal.
That inspired Kubly to build and develop Sutton Bay, a golf, hunting and fishing resort in South Dakota. Maybe his favorite project.
Well, there was another one, closer to his heart than Augusta, Torrey Pines, Dumbarnie Links in Scotland, Shanqin Bay in China and the other major names he’s associated with.
Erin Hills. Site of the 2017 U.S. Open. Built on rustic farmland in Erin, Wisconsin, some 35 miles northwest of Milwaukee — and down the road from where Kubly’s grandmother and great-grandmother lived.
While he was working on the Erin Hills project, Kubly heard that designers were going to put a real barn next to the clubhouse.
It was his great-grandmother’s barn.
A rendering of the Lost Rail golf course's 16th hole in Gretna.
He didn’t think he’d feel that karma again. But now comes Lost Rail, named after a Burlington train path from Yutan to Chalco that was abandoned almost 100 years ago.
The $15 million project is headed by Scott Hoffman, who once worked for Landscapes as a draftsman. Hoffman, who worked several years for Tom Fazio, is designing the course.
About 75 percent of the money is raised, including almost 60 individual memberships, Kubly said.
Kubly is 70. He and his wife of 48 years have two daughters and four grandkids. He has done it all, and you couldn’t blame him for driving his tractor into the sunset.
But he still likes to get dirt in those boat shoes. And the thing about Lost Rail: It has an incredible view of the sunset.
“Fabulous views, fabulous unique property,” Kubly said. “I walked every inch of it. The first time I didn’t have the right shoes and I almost fell in the ravine.
“I thought I was done with my own development deals. But I looked at it. I got the juices flowing. Just like Erin Hills. The stars are lining up again.”
The Nebraska 100: Our greatest athletes
The Nebraska 100, originally selected in 2005 and then updated and re-ranked in 2015, came from a pool of nearly 500 names from the ranks of high school, college, amateur and professional sports from the past 140 years. Assistance came from a panel of veteran sports observers from across the state, with the newspaper's sports staff determining the final rankings.
After his days as a three-sport standout at McCook, Jeff Kinney came to Nebraska in 1968 to play quarterback. But two other QBs also joined the Huskers that season. So Kinney moved to flanker and eventually I-back, and that's where he flourished over the next three seasons.
Decorated college and high school football and wrestling star. High school teacher, coach and administrator. But Charles Bryant was foremost a pioneer. Bryant, an all-state athlete at Omaha South before graduating in 1950, became the first black football player of the modern era at Nebraska in 1952.
George Flippin was once described by Lincoln Star sports editor Cy Sherman as a "charged bull, into which was bred the tenacity of the bulldog, the ferocity of the tiger and the gameness of the man who knows no fear." He was Nebraska's first black athlete, in 1891, before black athletes were banned by the university from 1917 until the late 1940s.
Former Broken Bow cowboy Paul Tierney has won arguably the two most prestigious titles in rodeo. He finished his 10-year professional career by topping $1 million in career earnings, and his 2008 induction into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame makes him the most accomplished cowboy from Nebraska.
Shelby, Nebraska, is one of the flattest towns in one of the flattest states in America. The elevation difference between the highest and lowest points is 7 feet. It is literally a town without a hill, one of the last places you’d expect to produce an Olympic gold medalist in bobsled. But that didn't stop Tomasevicz.
Rhodes did it all. The Ansley native held three state high school track records at the same time (vault, long jump, high jump); was player-coach of Ansley’s first football team in 1920, which went undefeated that season; helped Ansley win a pair of state basketball titles; and played baseball. After graduating from high school in 1922, Rhodes went on to earn eight varsity letters at Nebraska — three in football and track, and two in baseball.
After a stellar three-sport high school career at Cambridge, Houghtelling surprised many by signing to play volleyball instead of basketball at NU.
Even though basketball had been her first love, she’s never regretted the decision.
Ruud is Nebraska’s all-time leading tackler with 432 stops. As a senior captain in 2004, he was a third-third All-American, a first-team All-Big 12 performer and NU’s defensive MVP. He was selected in the second round of the NFL draft. Ruud played eight NFL seasons, leading Tampa Bay in tackles for four of those.
Trotter starred at Omaha Creighton Prep, where he was a two-time all-state selection, and was Nebraska's first — and only — player named to the McDonald's High School All-American team.
Grand Island coach Doug Whitman once noted that swimmer Scott Usher was "one to watch." As it turned out, the entire country had the chance to watch Usher. Usher finished seventh in the 200 breaststroke in the 2004 Olympics and in 2008 fell just short of returning for a second Olympics.
Ron Kellogg is considered one of the best pure shooters in Nebraska prep history. The Omaha Northwest grad wasn't bad in college, either, according to then-Kansas coach Larry Brown.
Skinny 14-year-old Geddes left his father, eight brothers and eight sisters in Jacksonville, Florida, and arrived at Boys Town in 1962. Geddes had played football just once before arriving but took such a beating in a sandlot game against older players that he didn’t plan to play again. But Boys Town coach Skip Palrang spotted him and talked him into giving it a try. He eventually thrived and helped the Cowboys win a state title.
The 1978 Holdrege graduate turned down multiple scholarship offers from other schools, including a football and track package from Iowa State, to walk on with the Nebraska football team. The 150-pound walk-on became an integral part of the Husker offense. The three-year starter ranked in the top 10 in receptions and yards by the time he left in 1982.
While a career in the NBA never materialized for the Omaha Benson and Iowa graduate, Woolridge played overseas for 13 years. Leagues in Turkey, France, Germany, Venezuela, Israel and Cyprus. And the money was good. "To do what I loved professionally for 13 years, I can't complain about it," he said in 2013.
Louise Pound, in so many fields, was the trailblazer for women's athletics in the state. And this while becoming a preeminent educator in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English department over a half-century. In 1890, Pound won the Lincoln city tennis championship. She captured the university's men's singles and doubles titles in 1891 and 1892 — the only female in school history to receive a men's varsity letter.
The best softball teams used to hail only from the West Coast. Keaton changed that. The former Papillion-La Vista and Nebraska star put Nebraska softball on the map with her dominating presence and performances in the pitcher's circle.
Once the last player to survive the cut on Nebraska's recruiting board, Noonan ultimately became a household Husker name. He earned first-team All-America honors and was named the Big Eight athlete of the year as a senior. His 12 sacks that season are tied for third in school history, and his 24 career sacks are tied for fourth.
John Parrella was Nebraska raised, the pride of Grand Island. NU defensive coordinator Charlie McBride once ranked him among the top three defensive tackles he had ever coached.
One press clipping described Hopp, a first baseman and outfielder, as "a dynamo who, perhaps more than anyone else, typifies the dashing, hell-for-leather play” of the St. Louis Cardinals. Hopp's 14-year career spanned five teams and as many World Series appearances, including back-to-back World Series victories with the Yankees. In all, he won four World Series and was an All-Star in 1946, when he hit .333 and drove in 48 runs for the Boston Braves.
Born in Holdrege in 1939 and raised near Axtell, Anderson began his quest at an early age and eventually built a makeshift shooting range as a high school senior at Axtell. After attending Nebraska for one year, Anderson joined the U.S. Army so he could pursue his Olympic dream.
Hare picked Nebraska from a slew of offers after starting for four years for Omaha Tech, where he averaged 26.4 points a game as a senior in 1963. Tech won the Class A title that year after going 22-2 and cruising through the state tournament by an average of 21 points a game. That team was voted into the Omaha Sports Hall of Fame and recently was chosen as having one of the best starting fives in Nebraska high school sports history.
Osborne remains just one of two men to win The World-Herald’s high school (1955) and state college (1959) athlete of the year awards. In high school, Osborne was all-state in football and basketball in 1954-55 and helped Hastings win a state title on the hardwood. In track, he won the discus at the state meet and placed second in the 440-yard dash. The future coach and congressman also stood out on the baseball diamond and had a pro football career.
Hoppen turned down a Kentucky scholarship offer. He also said no to Notre Dame, Missouri, Kansas and Colorado. And yes to Nebraska. Between 1982 and 1986, the 6-foot-11 center became NU’s all-time leading scorer, and he did it with clinical efficiency.
The only native Nebraskan to win a national wrestling championship at NU, Vering took his success to the international level, representing the U.S. in a pair of Olympics, claiming a world silver medal and winning gold at a Pan Am Games.
As a junior, Henry won golds for Bellevue West in the 200, 400 and long jump. Henry went on to set a national age-group record in the long jump and was part of the USA Junior World Team in 1995. At Nebraska, Henry won the NCAA indoor and outdoor long jump titles in 1996. All told, Henry was a three-time Big 12 champion and a 10-time All-American.
Kindig-Malone won gold medals at state in the long jump, hurdles and relays, but it wasn’t until she started getting scholarship offers from UCLA, Iowa and NU that she realized she might be good. Later, she won Big Eight heptathlon and pentathlon titles at Nebraska, becoming an All-American and helping the Huskers win their first indoor national championship in 1982. Kindig-Malone also won a Class C state basketball title with Hastings St. Cecilia in 1977.
Sauer and Bernie Masterson — No. 43 on the Nebraska 100 — paired together in the backfield to usher in one of the first great runs for Husker football. The two led Nebraska to Big Six championships in 1931, ’32 and ’33, when the Huskers went undefeated in league play. Sauer was an All-American in 1933 for the second-ranked Huskers. He also lettered in track, baseball and wrestling.
Cantwell, from Crete, won four straight Class B shot put and discus titles, including three consecutive all-class gold medals in the shot. She was a two-time NCAA shot put champion at SMU and was the 2002 U.S. indoor and outdoor champion as well as a 1999 world indoor bronze medalist. Cantwell also competed in the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.
Orduna lettered at running back for the Huskers in 1967, ’68 and ’70, running for 1,968 yards and 26 touchdowns. The Omaha Central graduate also played three NFL seasons.
A two-way football player even during his professional career with Green Bay, Charles Brock helped revolutionize the linebacker position in the pros while helping the Packers win two NFL championships. The Columbus native was recalled as a fierce competitor by the late Lee Remmel, a team historian who covered the Packers for nearly 30 years.
Lindsey, a Millard North graduate, was a standout defender for Notre Dame, the U.S. national team and San Jose of the WUSA, in which she played three seasons.
The image of Cory Schlesinger barreling into the end zone for the winning touchdown in the 1995 Orange Bowl burns brightly in the memories of Nebraska football fans. Schlesinger did some barreling in his day, but prided himself on being a bruiser. That trait served him well, especially in his 12 years with the Detroit Lions.
Schmidt represented the U.S. in the 2008 Olympics in the 800. Four years later, she returned to run the 800 and 1,500. The Olympic appearances are accompanied by plenty of other honors: a 2006 U.S. indoor 800 championship; a pair of U.S. outdoor silvers in the 800 (2006, 2008); and while with the North Carolina Tar Heels, two outdoor 800 titles and a distance-medley relay championship.
Mann was a jack of all trades, but a master of all of them, too. “Les did everything well. He was tops at football, basketball, track and baseball. He would have been equally great in other sports,” said Mann’s close friend, Scott Dye, in a newspaper account following Mann’s 1962 death in a car accident.
Dan Brand’s path to an Olympic wrestling medal was anything but typical. He competed in football, basketball and track at Bellevue High, but never was all-conference. He made the Nebraska freshman team in basketball, but after being cut, he signed up for the intramural wrestling tournament. He won and went on to compete in the Olympics.
Vinciquerra played football at Tech High and Creighton University, but is better remembered for making the 1936 U.S. Olympic boxing team. A natural heavyweight, he won a national Golden Gloves championship that year as a 175-pounder. He had a pro record of 42 wins (26 by knockout), four losses and five draws from 1937 through 1941, fighting over 20 times in 1937.
The résumé almost seems too much to comprehend. Four-sport star at Lincoln High. Nebraska football great. Pittsburgh Pirates baseball signee. Four-time football All-Pro with the Green Bay Packers.
At Beatrice, Hohn was a four-time state hurdles champion, a state basketball champion and an all-state football player. As a senior in 1960, he was the Nebraska high school athlete of the year.
Lincoln High football went 23-1-1 during Debus' three seasons on the varsity squad. Debus also played basketball and was all-state in American Legion baseball. But his best sport was track and field, where at state he single-handedly nearly doubled the point total of the second-place team.