KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI | Ken Block has spent a lifetime in real estate, but nothing like this.
“I didn’t plan on buying a golf course,” Block said.
The managing principal of Block Real Estate Services specializing in commercial properties has been one of the most influential developers in Kansas City for nearly half a century. He’s also spent more than six decades as a lifelong member of Oakwood Country Club, where his father was a member before him.
So when Oakwood’s membership dwindled to uncomfortably low levels before the pandemic and the club opted to sell, Block was a natural candidate to lead a group of member-investors to buy it.
“It started off that the club was slowly but surely losing membership; the perception internally and externally was we were in trouble,” said Block. “I led this group to buy the club and spend at least $2.5 million and keep it a private country club and all that.
“It was more like I didn’t want to see the club die … and then it just sort of grew.”
Oakwood boasts of being the oldest country club in the Kansas City area still in existence. It was founded in 1881 as the Progress Club by Congregation B’nai Jehudah to “provide a non-religious social setting” for the local Jewish community.
As golf became a popular pursuit, the Progress Club purchased the W.A. Rule farm southeast of town to build a nine-hole golf course. Renowned architect Tom Bendelow designed a course that “opened to instant fanfare” in 1912 and for decades served as the course in Kansas City where Jews could play golf.
Its first golf professional in 1912 was Arthur Boggs, who came from the Oakwood Club in Cleveland (1912). This led to the club becoming known as “Oakwood, summer home of the Progress Club” – a moniker that eventually became simply Oakwood Country Club. It hosted one of the first professional golf tournaments in 1915 and in 1920 was one of the 11 original members of the Kansas City Golf Association.
As the club grew and expanded its footprint on the southern edge of metro Kansas City, the elegant Tudor-style clubhouse was built in 1930. Harry Truman frequented the club before and after his presidency for dinner and spirited card games. Oakwood even hosted the first women’s Heart of America Open in 1955, won by LPGA founding member and World Golf Hall of Famer Marilynn Smith.
The membership grew to a peak of nearly 700 in the late ’80’s and the golf course shrank and grew and underwent some tweaking through the generations, including some redesign work on several holes from native son Tom Watson. But the club essentially enjoyed the bucolic, rolling layout Bendelow shaped more than a century earlier, albeit grown up with mature hardwoods.
When its glory started to wane, in stepped Ken Block to reimagine and reinvent Oakwood as the top club in the region – a place set apart from the toney Country Club District in Mission Hills, Kansas.
“I saw it as a club that needed to be saved – great piece of ground, unique history,” Block said.
“The issue with me is that when I take on something, I just always got to make it class A. If you look at anything we develop, it’s class A-plus. We don’t do anything that’s less. So then it’s like, ‘Okay, well, if I’m gonna do this I gotta do it right, because now my name is on it.
“Let’s say there’s a percentage of my day that goes toward thinking about stuff at Oakwood now,” he confessed of the addition to his regular real estate workload. “Let’s just say I have less time to sleep.”
Block’s investment in Oakwood sailed well beyond the $2.5 million he promised to pour into the club. He’s transformed and enhanced every aspect of the property – including clubhouse, fitness center, sports bar, tennis and pickleball courts, swimming pool, recreational lake and hiking trails – into resort quality.
But it’s the golf course and its amenities that have made this into a passion project for Block. Under the hand of architects Todd Clark and Ron Whitten, the golf course was extensively renovated without ever closing for play. Three brand new holes (Nos. 4 and 5 and a charming par-3 14th) were carved out of the trees that surrounded the original course while the re-routed first and enhanced ninth, 12th, 13th, 15th and 18th holes were deftly redesigned to bring out more strategic elements. New bunkers are spread throughout and nine greens were completely rebuilt, including water features on Nos. 16 and 18 that were Block’s ideas. His aesthetic input included repurposing the former front gate with its 1881 signs where the concrete path leads to the new fourth and fifth holes as if they’d been there all along.
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With five sets of tees to accommodate golfers of every level – the course ranges from 4,500 to more than 7,200 yards – Clark and Whitten delivered on making a challenging course that maintains its familiar tree-lined character that Block insisted on protecting because dealing with all of those challenges “is part of the game.”
“I want people to consider it the most interesting, fun, challenging golf course in the region,” he said, noting that in a recent state qualifying event nobody broke par. “That’s what the goal is, but I also want people to enjoy playing it, so we have all these different tees.”
As much as the new holes add to the quality of the course, it’s what was done with the three holes that were removed that stands out. Where the old second and third holes were, a state-of-the-art Center for Golf Excellence and fully TrackMan-enabled practice range are the place of a swing tinkerer’s dreams. Among all the technology available in the performance center (with Maureen Farrell as director of instruction), they’ve meticulously mapped out Oakwood to include on the simulator so member’s can “play the course” in the dead of winter.
The adjacent short-game practice area included an 18-station layout to organize and curate a complete practice session.
“We got lucky (with the practice range) because there was a golf hole – I mean, it was basically hole No. 2,” Block said. “So we were able to manipulate that and expand it and take down some of the trees and the woods. The TrackMan technology, which I saw in Albany in the Bahamas, is across the lower range and across the upper range by the performance center, so we’ve got basically 35 bays.
“I mean, it’s anything and everything you want. … It basically allows you as a member, or as an associate of the club, to fine tune your game in ways that’s never been done before.”
The 2.5-acre area where the old par-3 13th used to sit has been converted into a lighted, 12-hole putting course with a Tudor-style pavilion with fire pits that has already become a favored hang for members.
While the work remains ongoing with the course to clean up the trees and the periphery as well as kill off the Bermuda rough and fill in with fescues, pine straw or flower beddings, the next phase on Block’s ambitious agenda is a nine-hole par-3 course (which can be played in loops of 4, 6 or 9 holes) that includes member cabins as well as residential villas that will complete his plan of creating a destination club “in our backyard.”
“The primary thing I was trying to accomplish with the golf club was to create a top-tier course with the right amenities,” he says of all the upgrades with the trendy additions of the putting and par 3 courses that few others in the region offer.
“If you want to be in nature, you could one day come and you just go fishing and hiking and the next day you’re playing golf and swimming and tennis and pickleball – whatever it is. We have that sort of destination type thing but yet it’s 15 minutes from everybody versus driving to Branson or Flint Hills or Prairie Dunes.”
Block’s vision for Oakwood goes beyond just the physical enhancements he’s implemented in short order. He wants the club experience to exceed anything else in the region. He has only two guiding principles for members – be nice and play fast.
“If you’re a member of some of these other clubs, you’ve got to get online a week ahead of time, you’re lucky if you get a time that you want and it’s slow golf. I don’t want that,” Block said of Oakwood’s fast play/no tee time policy that requires maintaining a tighter combined full-time and weekday-only membership of around 300. “Everybody can play Oakwood quicker than anywhere else that I’m aware of.
“The two main rules here are be nice to the staff – if you’re not, you’re probably not a nice person and you probably won’t be a member for long – and if someone comes up behind you, you gotta let them go through. They are not difficult. A lot of clubs don’t think they’re big rules, because every time I go somewhere someone’s being rude to the help or someone’s holding someone up on the golf course and don’t care. Basically, what you’re saying is, ‘I don’t respect you.’”
Block’s mission at Oakwood commands respect for the investment and his seamless implementation. Membership has grown and made Oakwood a coveted club in Kansas City for families from all backgrounds and cultures.
He’s pretty proud of what’s become of his lifelong home club and is a long way from being finished.
“I know that the other owners and members like everything that’s gone on and there’s more to do,” he said. “I think we’re on the right path.”