Half of It Is Underground

01The design direction

Stevens Park arrived as one of four Dallas courses commissioned together. Three of the four — Dallas Country Club, Brook Hollow, Dallas Athletic Club — are private. This one belongs to the city, and the most interesting verified fact about it is a budget line.

In 2011 Dallas spent $8 million rebuilding the course. $4.5 million of that went into irrigation and cart-path infrastructure. More than half the money was buried before a golfer could see a dollar of it. The visible half bought a new routing, new tees, fairways and greens, and 38 new sand bunkers; the finished course was named one of the top 50 municipal courses in the United States by Golfweek.

That is the whole site. The part that makes it work is the part you can’t see — which happens to be the honest argument for a tempo grid as well. Nobody hears the 24/8 structure of an anthem. It is underneath, and it is why the thing holds together. The page makes that connection explicitly and labels it as ours: the budget split is sourced, the analogy is a way of describing the design, not a research finding.

Per the brand system a course site may add exactly one support colour. Clay is used almost entirely below the surface line in the signature, so the palette carries the argument rather than decorating it. This is also the least formal of the four Dallas sites by design — it is a public course, and the voice should not sound like a members’ brochure.

0204 The Budget, In Section

A cross-section, not a routing. One horizontal surface line. Above it, a light band carrying 38 bunker marks. Below it, in clay, the irrigation mains and cart-path base.

The load-bearing decision is that the band heights are the real budget proportions — the drawing is scaled at a declared 40 pixels per $1 million, so the buried band is visibly larger than the visible one because $4.5M is larger than $3.5M. A version that made them equal, or that made the pretty half bigger, would have undercut the only argument the page is making. The scale is printed on the diagram so a reader can check it.

The 38 bunkers are counted, not suggested. js/main.js draws them from a BUNKERS constant, then queries the DOM and console.errors if the rendered count is anything other than 38 — the same self-check the Spyglass scorecard uses. There is also an assertion that the two budget parts sum to the published $8M total, so a future edit to one number that forgets the other fails loudly instead of quietly lying.

03The facts rule, under a worse research environment

Atmosphere may be invented. Facts may not. Everything factual here traces to docs/facts/stevens-park.md: opened 1924 as Dallas’s second municipal course, originally nine holes by Jack Burke Sr., the 2011 Colligan Golf Design renovation with Trey Kemp, par 70, 6,285 yards, and the Golfweek top-50 recognition.

One thing about this wave is worth stating plainly, because it affects how much weight these numbers can carry. The four Dallas facts files were compiled from web-search result excerpts only. In the build environment, direct page fetches and outbound HTTPS were both refused at the network proxy, so no source page could be read in full and no figure could be checked against a primary. The earlier facts files in this series quote club-owned pages directly; these do not. Each file says so at the top and marks its single-sourced figures.

The practical consequence is that the site leans on the facts that several independent results agreed on — 1924, Burke Sr., the 2011 renovation, the budget split — and omits everything thin:

• No course rating or slope. Neither was found.
• No hole-by-hole card, which is why the signature is a budget section rather than a routing map.
• No date on the Golfweek ranking, because none was found. It is stated without one.
• No claim about who the park is named for. Not established. A plausible guess here would have been indistinguishable from a fact, which is exactly the failure this series is built to avoid.
• No skyline or elevation claim. Kessler Park is hilly and downtown is close, and listing sites gesture at views — but no verifiable claim about which holes see what was found, so the page describes the neighbourhood and not the sightline.
• No “hidden gem” or “crown jewel.” Those are listing-site phrases. Section 5.3 says outright that we are not laundering someone else’s marketing into facts about the course.

04The audio

Stevens Park has no anthem yet. The repo manifest carries stevens-park-anthem with status: "pending" and no file behind it; the deployed host does not carry the id at all, so in production the player filters it out and the queue falls through to Anthem Lab — How It Works, a real streaming track, with the full library browsable behind it. The page says so above the player, before you can press anything.

No invented duration, no placeholder waveform, and no substitute music standing in for a Stevens Park anthem. When a master arrives, the flip is one edit: add its filename to sourceCandidates and set status to ready.

05How it was built

• Hand-written static HTML/CSS/JS — no framework, no authoring build step. ES modules only.
• All internal references are relative, so the site works from a domain root or under a subpath unchanged.
• Every graphic is generated SVG or canvas; no raster media anywhere.
• Fonts are self-hosted woff2 (latin subsets) from @fontsource packages; build.mjs restores them from npm at deploy time via deployAssets, so deploy uploads stay text-only.
• The spectrum canvas is driven by the player’s live analyser and draws nothing when audio is not playing — a fake waveform over silence is not allowed anywhere in this series.
• Accessibility: skip link, visible focus rings, semantic landmarks, a description list for the record, a long aria-label describing the section diagram in words, and a reduced-motion path in which the surface line is drawn complete and the bunkers are visible immediately.

06Iteration passes