Ken Kavanaugh's fee for redesigning the hallowed 75-year-old turf at El Rio Golf Course was ridiculous. "Pro bono," he said. "Zero." "C'mon," you reply. "How much really?" "Listen," Kavanaugh said, "I couldn't stand the thought of someone else doing this golf course in my hometown. This is a museum piece. I would have done it for free, and so I have." On Tuesday afternoon, Kavanaugh stood in the mud at the made-over No. 3 hole and did everything but pray. "I love this place," he said. "We wanted El Rio to look old and play old. This is the essence of what we have done out here. The (Los Angeles) Riviera Country Club would be proud to have this hole." So he gave Tucson City Golf a freebie. Over the past quarter-century, Tucson golf property owners have paid millions of dollars to Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Tom Weiskopf, Tom Lehman, Craig Stadler - a veritable Ryder Cup roll call - to fly into town, cut away cacti and uproot quail for the purpose of building big-name golf courses. But El Rio? It is surrounded on one side by urban blight, on another by low-rent apartment units, on another by traffic and on all sides by people looking down their noses at this wrong-side-of-the-tracks muni. It's like dusting off an old watch you find in the closet and discovering it's a first-edition Rolex. Sometime soon, perhaps early December, El Rio will reopen and those who have played and appreciate Kavanaugh's fabulous 1990s makeover of the Dell Urich Golf Course will understand that he didn't just get lucky once. El Rio, you look mah-velous. For the past six months, Kavanaugh and his golf crony, Tucson attorney Chip Plowman, a former caddie on the PGA Tour, have met at El Rio to discuss, sometimes with animation and often applying four-letter curses, what should be done to preserve the original character of El Rio. "This course had been arbitrarily changed and dumbed-down so many times since 1930 that it lost its character," said Plowman, a member of the Tucson Greens Committee. "When Ken restored the bunkers to their original state, we saw dirt that hadn't seen the light of day for 70 years." Given its dignity and its original personality back, the new/old El Rio Golf Course has not been redone in an attempt to squeeze more money out of the cart-pulling muni golfers who are already squeezed tight. Thanks to a $1 million gift by the Tucson Conquistadores, the PGA Tour's First Tee program has been incorporated into Kavanaugh's design. The once dumpy, dirt-bowl of a driving range lining West Speedway is now nothing but green. Kavanaugh designed three par-3 holes within the driving range, to be used exclusively by junior golfers. At other times, it will be an aesthetically pleasing driving range. Each of the 18 holes on the course are now equipped with junior tees. A short-game practice facility has been built between the 17th and 18th holes. Legendary golf course architect William P. "Billy" Bell designed El Rio in the late 1920s. He was something of a workaholic, who, during the same period, designed Randolph Golf Course and a score of others, including Mesa, Yuma and Phoenix courses. Years later, Bell designed Forty Niner Country Club and the Tucson Country Club. His work at El Rio was typical of the 1920s: small greens, narrow fairways, formidable bunkers. Kavanaugh essentially shaved down El Rio's greens back to Bell's specifications. He added a dozen bunkers, almost all of them deeper and larger. He realigned the tees at Nos. 1, 6, 12, 15, 17 and 18 so that "you can see the hole." He took out all of the cement curbing, eliminated cart paths in unnecessary areas and planted grass. "We studied aerial photographs of the area from 70 years ago," Kavanaugh said. "We put back the quirky little contours around the greens, the way Bell intended it to be. We restored the course's integrity." El Rio now looks like a golf course, not a hurry-up-and-play muni. "Before," said Kavanaugh, "this was a golf carnival. People putting, people driving carts, congestion everywhere." By December, when the grass has fully grown, El Rio will be something it hasn't been for decades: a beauty. "What Ken has done," said Plowman, "is to give Tucson a third great public golf course. "The Randolph and Dell Urich complex is one of the best of its kind in the country, especially for the size of Tucson. Now, with El Rio back to its original state, we've got three great public golf courses. How many cities can say that?"