Yolk with Doak 3: Waialae CC, the Sony Open, and Seth Raynor

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Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak. If you haven't yet, check out our first two episodes on golf course architecture one on one. Also be sure to check out Tom's books for more golf course architecture information. I highly recommend the Little Red Book and The Confidential Guides, both of which are available on Renaissance Golf dot com Tom's website. Thanks, and here's episode three on Wili country Club, the Sony Open, and Seth Rayner.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back.

00:00:44
Speaker 3: But don't toss the Yolk and the famously candid Doak doesn't pull any punches. How do I make natural looking? Contour? Hire the biggest fool in the village and told him to make it.

00:00:56
Speaker 2: Flat burst, overrated, underrated, rough, terribly.

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Speaker 3: Overrated over the years.

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Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another Yoke with Doak. Today we are discussing why like country Club, Seth Rayner and the Sony Open so very timely. It's January golf season's kicking off. Tom tell us, when you guys started working at WYLI.

00:01:36
Speaker 3: That's funny. I don't remember exactly how long ago it was It must be about five or six years ago now that they that they finally sent out like RFPs to golf course architects looking for a consultant. They hadn't done much with a golf course for many years. And I know that like Jim Orbino when he worked with me, you know, stopped in there once or twice because he was a really big Rainer fan and was hoping that he could hook him into doing something with us, and they just weren't interested in talking to anybody back then. I mean, one of the things about Wiley, it's a really busy club. You know, why is a twelve month golf season. They play something like fifty or sixty thousand rounds a year on that golf course. They really like to play golf, and it seems like it's always busy. So you know, even if they want to do work to the course, it's like when you know, usually we do work in the fall or winter when things quiet down, and there is no fall or winter in Hawaii, they were just playing the golf course twelve months out of the year. So they you know, they're interested in architecture, but they don't want it to be a disruption and that makes it hard to carry out work at the club, so we're kind of, you know, we've kind of working on two holes at a time. And some of that's due to the tournament too. You know, the tournaments every year at the end of January or first of February.

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Speaker 1: And.

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Speaker 3: So everything's got to be back in pristine and you can't tell that we did anything by that time of year. So that pretty much means that when we are going to do work is pretty soon after the tournament, so give it as long as possible to recover and get back into shape. But that's also one of their busiest seasons. That's when people from outside of Hawaii are going to Hawaii in the winter.

00:03:25
Speaker 1: That's uh, yeah, I didn't ever think about it, but Hawaii.

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Speaker 2: Has literally no dead time with golf. Everywhere has a dead time, but they know.

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Speaker 3: Myrtle Beach has no dead time either.

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Speaker 2: But well, I wouldn't go to Myrtle Beach in the summer.

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Speaker 3: That seems like, well, say that, but that's you know, Myrtle Beach is packed in the summer with people at the beach. That's that's one of the reasons. It's you know that Myrtle Beach is so successful as a golf destination. It's like it's four seasons. They're playing every season, but we're on Hawaii today.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, stay in Hawaii, stay on top.

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Speaker 1: So Stephen Britain asked, I once read George Bato had Rayner's original concept drawings for WYLEI how does how do you go about gathering all the historical information for a project like WHYLEI Do you have someone employed who's doing the job and like research when it's at a historical site.

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Speaker 3: I know most of the clubs that we work with have some sort of official or unofficial club historian who's been digging through that stuff for years to write a club history book or something, so they've they've usually got a lot of stuff on offer already, you know, depending on the golf course and how much, how an extensive a project that we're doing, and how much detail we are trying to find. You know, occasionally I've paid somebody to go do more research, because the worst feeling in the world is to rebuild a green. You think you got it right, and then the next year somebody digs up an old picture of it and you're like, damn, I wish i'd had that before we started, because we didn't really get that exactly right. I mean, it's very hard. If you've only got an aerial photo to work from. You'd get it right in two dimensions, but you you know, you don't really have any idea in the third dimension of how deep the bunkers were or or how much contra there was in the green. And you know, when you're working on a course that someone like Rayner built, who had a very particular program to what he was doing, you could sort of interpolate from the other versions of holes that you've seen what the conjures and the green might have been like if you've got nothing else to go with. But you'd certainly rather have as much photography of the finish course as possible, and not just the aerial photo. I mean, the aerial photo is really important for like exactly where things were, but as for three D and how the shaping was, you need photos from the ground if they've got them. WILEI has good aerial photos, they don't have a lot of really good ground photos of what it.

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Speaker 2: Looked like I saw there. They've been like a host for sixty five years, so.

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Speaker 3: That long I didn't think that's probably right. Going back into the sixties or late fifties, that's probably right.

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Speaker 1: I got like a press release about the extension of the and it was something within there. But so you know, how much had the golf course been altered before, Like I mean, obviously you probably had a lot of photos of the early days of the tournament to get you know, messed up, you know, kind of throughout the years.

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Speaker 3: Well, I mean, as a general rule, a lot of these courses that we that were doing restoration to were built in the nineteen twenties and then in the thirties and forties, the world changed and a bunch of stuff went down and maintaining the golf course was not the highest priority. So in most cases, the depression was the big the big item. But you've probably heard of a little thing that called Pearl Harbor that happened about ten miles from Wilie, and you know, the the onslaught of World War two, you know, the golf course was basically abandoned for three or four years, and they had like serious barbed wire laid out over the golf course to prevent Japanese troops from landing. As strange as that sounds, but once bitten, twice shy, so they were always concerned about possible further attacks. So Wili for two or three years was kind of an army training ground and it's amazing that they didn't tear it up more than they did in that process. But coming out of the war, you know, getting the golf course back wasn't the highest priority for a while, so it took a while, and then some things really changed about the golf course in I think around nineteen sixty I'm not sure if the exact date that the course was changed, but there was. There was a very significant change. Some of the original holes are no longer there. The Kahala Hotel is there, yeah, and some houses are there, and you know, we can't put that back. I don't think anybody wants us to tear down the Kahala Hotel, even though the first hole playing through what is the Kahala Hotel along the beach would have been a great opening hole, but we'll never see that.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a question we had was you know, what were the biggest changes that happened over the years, and what are the biggest changes that you've made over the years at Wili and that's from grandm O'Connor Brooks.

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Speaker 3: Okay, So the first thing we've got to do is decide for sure. You can tell me which way you want to go, whether we're talking about the golf courses you see it on TV for the Hawaiian Open, or the golf course the way the members play it, because they flip the nines for the tournament.

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Speaker 1: I think it probably would be best if we want the way the tournament goes.

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Speaker 3: Okay, So so I'll have to watch myself because you know, what's the back nine for the tournament, and those are pretty much the only holes you see on TV is the front nine for the members. So the front nine for the members, you don't see much about the Uh, you don't see the tenth hole very much on TV at all, or at least not that I can remember. But the original first holl, the clubhouse, is by the beach. It's kind of slightly removed from the golf course. It's like the holes come together at a pro shop, and then across the street is a clubhouse parking lot, and then the clubhouse and the clubhouses right on the beach. But originally the first hole played straight along the beach. Out that would be east out along the ocean. The first and second holes both so what's now ten and eleven on the current course played with the beach on the right, and then sixteen and seventeen came back in the opposite direction with the beach on the left. And the only one of those four holes that's still in that configuration is the seventeenth. For the tournament, the rare dan hole sixteen, what was sixteen was turned into a dog leg left to the old sixteen green site so they could build some houses along the beach at the far end of the course, and what was the first fairway and the second tee is now the Kahala Hotel. So that changed the entire back nine for the tournament.

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Speaker 2: It sounds like it changed the whole story of the of the golf course too.

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Speaker 3: Yes, yes, And you know, I think it's fair to say that the club in the fifties and sixties didn't value SETH. Rayner as having been a significant architect or something that they should historically preserve. You know, I don't know how much of the decision was financial. Clearly somebody made a lot of money off the hotel and the real estate, and you would think that the club made some of that, but they didn't have you know, Rainer's name or reputation to balance it against. You know, it might have been a you know, it might have been the only financial decision they kept the club going. You know, there are a lot of clubs that were close to decisions like that back in the day. I've got a man up of Chicago Golf Club from the nineteen fifties showing thirty half ac or home lots inside the golf course.

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Speaker 2: Oh my god.

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Speaker 3: You know they were going to put streets in and have a few lots in the middle between golf holes, exactly the routing that it is now. It's pretty hard to visualize when we see the plan of it. It's pretty shocking. I don't know how seriously they considered that idea, but a lot of fairly famous golf courses considered stuff like that. Some of them fortunately rejected it.

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Speaker 1: That's a the Chicago Golf like given a state now is like it's I mean, that's crazy to even.

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Speaker 3: It's pretty hard to imagine. Yeah, so I sort of answered half the question. You know, the fact that they changed those three holes on the back nine really changed a bunch of other holes in the back nine let me think in order, so ten was moved inland. It actually plays down what used to be the eighteenth fairway, coming back number eleven, which was an Eden hole green. The green site is about where today's green site is, but they played to they play to it like straight I think that would be south playing straight out toward the ocean with the ocean behind, which, funnily enough, that's the way the real Eden hole is. You play with the river behind the green. And so one of the first things I suggested there was restoring, you know, not restoring that hole because we can't put it back with the beach on the right, that's where the pool is for the Collie Hilton. But but you know, twisting the green around and making it an Eden type green again with the bunkers like the Edenhole that was one of McDonald's favorite templates or rainers in this case. And you know, using the beach behind the green is more of a feature of the hole, the way it is on the Edenhall at Saint Andrews. Then the twelfth and thirteenth holes are both pretty much the original rainer holes.

00:14:24
Speaker 2: With.

00:14:26
Speaker 3: I think the twelfth green was changed a little bit, but fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen were all changed completely when they moved sixteen inland, then seventeen's an original hole, and then eighteen is not an original hole at all because because the tenth hall had to be moved to where the eighteenth was, the eighteenth had to be flipped further inland, even though the tea is pretty close to seventeen green right out by the beach. So that's why the eighteenth hole is such an awkward, sharp dog leg to the left off the tee, and that's something they've battled with ever since they made the change. You know, it's you drive, if you're playing the back to you drive out of a out of a bit of a shoot with a bunch of palm trees, and they've kind of, you know, they've kind of put the palm trees tight on the left deliberately to try to stop people from cutting the corner, which doesn't stop the pros too much, but it's it's a it's a pretty awkward feel off the tee. It's something when you see it for the first time in person, is not like, you know, it almost looks like in a soccer match where you know, there's a penalty a penalty kick, but a free kick, and they line up a bunch of players between the goal and then and the where the ball is starting to the guy will have to bend it around. That's what those trees look like on that hole.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, that that's a it's that hole doesn't seem like many many ones that Rainer designed.

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Speaker 2: He didn't have many sharp snap dog legs.

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Speaker 3: That so that's you know, that's one of the holes on our list for next year after the tournament's over, that will probably try to tackle. But so which hales have I changed? You know, any rain or course, the first holes that people look at are the four template part threes, because he built pretty much the same set of four part threes on every course that he'd done and in while I most of them had been changed. So for a tournament's sake, what the members play as the back nine. The fourth hole is a beer ritz hole, a really long part three raised green with a big dip. Used to be in the middle of the green. Now it's at the front of the green because the front part of the green they didn't mow, as they just mowed his fairway for a long time. That was probably the hole we changed the least, but they had kind of shrunk the green in at the side, so you know, the green wasn't entirely on the platform, and if your bald, you know, it hit the green and started to trickle off and down the bank. It just stopped in the rough, and we just got him to mow the green out bigger so the balls would get off the table top and maybe into some trouble at the sides. What's the seventh hale for the tournament? The sixteenth for the members is the short hole. It's one hundred and fifty yard part three, with a big wide green with a pretty severe kind of I've called it a horseshoe shaped contra and the green that divides it into left and right and kind of a bowl in the front. A little different than some of the other ones I've seen, but clearly it was that concept. There was that shape in the middle of the green, so you couldn't mistake what they were trying to do. We've done some more kind of bunkering around that green to you know, go back to having a tighter to the green like it was originally, but and and expanding the green out the full pad. I mean that green was probably only two thirds is big when we first looked at it five or six years ago as it is now. I talked a little bit about a bit about the Eden Hall already twisting the green ninety degrees, and because the hole plays in a different direction now and you know, trying to get where you could play a ball. There's kind of a low right pin placement that you could feed the ball too if you were if you were an amateur player the pros, we'll just hit it right over the bunker right at that thing. It's cool that the you know, it's a windy place and that wholes crosswind a lot of the time, so you know, and we're talking severe winds in Hawaii, it's you know, twenty and thirty mile an hour gusty winds, so you know, it's a tough hole in the crosswind, and it does have an effect one it's actually usually it's cross wind left to right at tournament time and try to keep the ball on the left side of the green and not have it take the slope and go down to the right as the hard part. And then seventeen was the Radan hole, and at some point in the I think it was the nineteen eighties they changed the Radan green and basically flattened it. I mean it was built originally they have a pretty steep bank up at the back right corner and slope from right or front right down to the back left like all Radann holes. And for whatever reason, I think it was Desmond Mirrorhead that was the consultant there for a while, and he didn't care about that history or whatever. He flattened the green. So it had the you know, it had that kind of angular shape to it, but didn't have any tilt that you could play into the opening in the green and try to let it feed around the bunkers. You just had to hit it straight over the bunkers. And I didn't realize until I started digging that that change was pretty recent, you know, So I like, I talked to a couple of players, you know, I talked to Ben Crenshaw because he remembered the whole from me. He'd played it at least a couple of times before they changed it, you know, trying to feel out, how, you know, how much chilt it had before we went to restore, because we didn't really have any good information on that to go by. All we have now is the knowledge that the green's a lot faster now than it was thirty years ago, so we'd better not put too much tilt back in it. But we we restored both well, we did eleven first and then we did seventeen just last year. So this is the first year they're playing the tournament on the new seventeenth green, and I hope it works well because that'll be kind of a focal point, seeing how it's the seventy first hole of the tournament. Yeah, that's that.

00:21:04
Speaker 1: That one you just don't want to have a shinnacock situation with, like the US Open a few years ago.

00:21:12
Speaker 3: No, that's true. That was a radian hole too, and by the end of that event everybody thought the daan was the worst idea in the world.

00:21:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, so what uh, what do you gain, if anything, from watching the PGA Tour play at a course you consult, And that's from Brian m M.

00:21:35
Speaker 3: I suppose I would gain more if I if I had a chance to watch the turnament person watching on TV, you get a little sense of how it's working, but it's you know, because you know the contours, but it's still hard to really gauge what's going on, and you know, I mean, I'm thinking as much about the membership as I am about what's going to happen in the tour event. Obviously, you know, anything that's potentially controversial is going to be magnified by the tournament by one hundred times. You know, if I build a green that's too severe on one of my own courses, people bitch about it, but you know, it's not out there for the world to complain about, so we have to be a little more conservative. I'm building greens for anything that hosts an event, and that's you know, one of the things about my design career is for a long time I was kind of immune to that. You know, when I started, i'd work for Pete Dye. And when I worked for Pete Die every except for a long cove, every project that we worked on was a potential tour site, stadium course at PGA West, those kinds of places, and you know, Pete was cognizant that all the eyes of the world were on him. And you know, I'd certainly seen from the reaction the TPC at Sawgrass that the players were not afraid to speak up, especially when it was a TPC course that they felt like they owned it. It was like open season on the architecture. So I'm not going to say Pete got any more conservative in that situation, but I think he was more conservative with green contours because he knew that if the green speeds got up really high for an event, which they're very likely to do, that you could look foolish on something that played fine in normal circumstances when they cranked the green speeds up for a tournament. And I think that a lot of architects, you know, certainly Jack Nicholas has to think the same thing. Every course that he's doing is a potential tournament site. So I'd better not let this get away from me. And I was immune to that when I was building the high Point. It's like, they're never going to have a tournament here, you know. When the client said something about having a tournament, I just, you know, I laughed. I was like, you have spend five million dollars to host a tournament, because if you're not, I shouldn't be worried about that. And I, you know, and I never thought that my early courses would want to get the green super fast because that costs more money. Yeah, and the average golfer isn't banging on the door demanding that, or at least they weren't twenty years ago. It seems like more and more do. And so I've probably gotten a little more conservative over time with my own greens, just seeing the trends and having had a conversation with a client at the beginning about how fast are these greens going to be, and then going back three years after the course is open, and that conversation was apparently a distant memory because what they told me and what they are two entirely different things. So now you have to allow for the fact that the greens are going to be faster than you might want them to be. But especially when I'm doing restoring work on an older golf course, you have to be more conservative working at a course like that than you do on your own new designs. When you're building a course from scratch, it's like you can do anything, and you know a lot of people might not like it, and that's still okay as long as there are enough people to like it that it will survive as a business. You know, some people can hate it, and that's okay as long as some people love it too. But when you go into a club there's hundreds of members, they all join, presumably because they like it the way it is. You're making changes, it's all a matter of opinion. You're really sticking your neck out there to make any big changes. It's a lot easier when you can make those big changes in the name of restoration than oh, this is my club for a new idea, because I'm smarter than whoever built this fifty years ago.

00:26:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, I imagine renovation is a much more sensitive subject when you're than restoration.

00:26:10
Speaker 3: You know, yes, and that's why, you know, that's why a lot of things that are built as restorations aren't really you know, even even when architects are renovating courses, if they stay, if they say it's a restoration, it's like back off membership. You know, this is history, so you don't get any say. But then they you know, then they take real liberties with what restoration means. They're moving bunkers to where good players will hit it now as opposed to where the bunker really was. And sometimes you know, they could be changing the course dramatically and still call it a restoration. For the most part when we do restoration work, we're putting back what was on the ground back in the day. And you know, sometimes that means that the bunkers are like shorter off the tee than you would expect. And sometimes the clubs have added bunkers further out. You know, certainly a place like Wileyes added a bunch of bunkers where the pros hit it now, which is way farther than Seth Rayner ever visualized in his wildest dreams. And you know, it's kind of a case by case basis. Do we take those out or do we leave some of them? And we've sort of split the difference on that. We've left some that we think are are important to play nowadays, but we've taken some out that we think are just overkill and don't really have a whole lot to do with how people play the hole.

00:27:40
Speaker 1: It's got to be especially tough with the tour because you've seen like that the distance has boomed like crazy in the last five to ten years, Like you've seen the driving distance go up.

00:27:52
Speaker 3: But now now now they say that's not true, you know, and to be fair, it's more like it happened more like ten or fifteen years ago, and you know, they like to point out that it hasn't changed so much in the last ten years, but that was kind of after the cat got out of the bag.

00:28:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, the the average driving distance of the world's top top fifteen players is like I think their average rank in the in the on the tour is like twenty six and a half. And in nineteen ninety seven, I think that was like they were it was like eighty one or seventy five something like that. So the game has changed, and I think it has the distance doubt. Justin Thomas last year kind of took a route to Wiley. Wiley has always been considered you hit it to the corners, and this is from Andrews and you it's a precision course and he was the first one that just hit it over trees and cut all the corners and really exposed it with a high trajectory and being on point.

00:28:58
Speaker 2: Can of course, like really test be a test to the world's best. His question.

00:29:10
Speaker 3: One of Wiley's defenses has always been wind and they haven't had that much win for the tournament in the last couple of three years. In fact, for what they say in Hawaii, the climate's changing a little bit. Nobody would offer a theory on why that would be. But you know, the wins which were very predictable from season to season, it's just trade winds at certain times of the year and on shore wins other times of the year. That predictability has been a little more messed up. And the clubs say that the last two tournaments the wind just hasn't been anything like what they used to see that same time of year. So you know, that makes the golf course play differently right off the bat. You know, when you design a course and you expect it to be windy most of the time, which they certainly would have at Wiley, you have to build a little more leeway into the shots because you know, links courses don't have a lot of bunkers in front of the green because they're always thinking about, well, what happens if you have to play this whole down wind at thirty miles an hour and you know, I could just barely carry that bunker, but the grounds hard as a rock and there's no way anybody's shot would stop on the green in those circumstances. So while I I think has a little more leeway built into it and not quite as much bunkering in front of the greens and up close. You know, that makes it that much more vulnerable to scoring, especially when you're not getting the wind. So I hope it blows like held for the tournament. That would you know, it might make our new changes to a couple of greens seem that much more severe. But for the golf course overall, I think that's what it was intended to be. Now. As for how Justin Thomas is playing the golf course, he's being much more aggressive and taking lines that guys wouldn't have thought of fifteen or twenty years ago, which works great if you're hitting it right in the center of the club face. You're also taking more risk when you do that. You know it might not work for as well this year if he's not hitting it as pure, because you know, anytime you cut the corner of a dog leg that much, you know now you're playing kind of across the landing area instead of straight down it, and you're more likely to hit the ball into the rough if you get the line a little wrong, or you just hit it a little farther than you thought. So I don't necessarily think that you know, the lines he's taken makes the golf course defenseless, It makes it trickier, and he really has to pull off the shots. You know. It's just if there's a lot of players that can hit it that far and take those lines and hit nine aron into the par five, then it's hard for the rest of the field to play conservatively. Yeah, you know, if they know the targets score. The target score. While it's always been way under park.

00:32:24
Speaker 2: I think it's usually about twenty or.

00:32:25
Speaker 3: So, yeah round, I mean, and you know, I mean somebody shot twenty six or twenty eight under there a long time ago. It wasn't just the last couple of years. So you know, most of the players are gonna be really aggressive on a golf course like that, just because they have a number in mind of what it's taken to win this tournament. They have and they have such a long history with it that they're not going to guess wrong. You know, like sometimes for the US Open, you'll see them like overestimate how hard the golf course is or overestimate how easy it is, and you know they'll attack. They'll attack the golf course. They think they can attack the golf course and they find out, oh, that was a bad idea. But usually in the US Open, it's more the other thing. They're scared and they played very conservatively and then somebody comes along and you know, runs away from them pretty fast just by having one good round, separates themselves pretty far from the field, and it's hard for anybody to catch up.

00:33:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, I uh, I think that's a it's a valid point because people expect low, so they but then you see the cut usually isn't that low there, it's a you know, it's a higher but there's a dispersion and it could be that, you know, the guys that aren't. And Justin Thomas came in there last year after winning at at Capalua. I mean, he's shot nothing there and he I think he had finished second in his start before that, so he was clearly in a groove. And you know, maybe he wasn't wouldn't take those lines if he wasn't in a groove.

00:33:58
Speaker 2: So something I hadn't thought about maybe.

00:34:01
Speaker 3: I mean, one of the best things I've ever heard. I've heard it from a couple of tour players. The first one to say it to me was Scott Verplank. I've known him since he was an amateur. We were a friend of mine was hosting him at his house in Chicago the week that he won the Western Open as an amateur back in the eighties, and Scott said, you know what people don't realize when they're watching TV is that everybody they see is playing better than normal for them. That's why they're in the hunt to win a tournament that week. You know, Like when he won the Western Amateur, he said, Ben Wright made a big deal of he hit driver eight iron on the seventeenth hole at Butler National. He's like, I don't do that all the time. You know. That's like I'm not even a long hitter on a tour. That's more like a driver five iron for me. But you know I was hitting everything just perfect that week. That's why I won. So you know, it makes you when you watch TV every week, you think the pros are super human, but you're only seeing all the guys that are in the groove and playing really well. You know. I mean, the most compelling, the most compelling event in golf is the Ryder Cup. And the reason is those guys were picked months in advance, and they are not all in the groove and having all that pressure combined with the fact that they may not be playing well right then is really daunting for them but really interesting to watch. But week to week you don't get to see that. You turn on the TV, everybody's hitting it.

00:35:41
Speaker 1: Well yep, and you don't see a ton of shots either. But that's another subject for another day, all right. Andrew Bailey wants to know what the we're gonna shift gears the Rainer in architecture a little bit more, What templates are talked about too much, and which ones are talked about too little.

00:36:14
Speaker 3: Too much. All of the template Part three's I think are talked about a little too much because it's all they're always They're always there on every Rainer McDonald's course, and they've been analyzed to death. You know, I'm tired of them anyway, I'll put it that way. Now. That's not to say that I don't think the rid Ann is a great hole. You know. I've built five or six versions of the rid An Hole myself on thirty five courses, but I've kind of stopped. You know, I may build one again someday, but it's probably not going to be the next course I do you know, just because I don't you know, I believe in trying to find an original hole first, you know, and the and the template there's more off a fallback when you when you don't have a great idea for what to do with a particular green site. You know, sometime like the seventeenth of Pacific Dunes is a redan, and we tried as hard as we could to not build the redan there, even though the first day we looked at its like, boy, you could easily build a redan here, so we were like, let's not do that. And then the more we tried to do something else, it just didn't work. And we finally just said, you know what, we're trying too hard to fight this. It's going to be a really good hole if we just go with what if the first idea that popped into our heads. And that's probably the best version of ra Dann hole that I've ever built, because it really works well when you're playing down wind and the ball runs, so uh, the most underrated template holes. I love McDonald and Rainners punch bowl greens. You know, I love the concept of a punch bowl green in general, just you know, a different kind of green side instead of eighteen plateaus sitting up in the air with deep bunkers to the sides of them, you know, And that's you know, and that is an idea something that you find on any piece of sandy ground. There's dunes, and there's hollows, and why not put a couple of greens in a hollow just for variety's sake, you know. McDonald Rainer had a very specific version of it. It's nearly always a left to right shot into the green. The green opens from the front left, and there's a deep bunker right up sticking right up into the green on the right hand side, and kind of a you know, a deep enough bunker that it's raised up over the bunker and falls back down into the green. And then the left side of the green is the bowl comes up into a ridge, usually like three feet high compared to the middle of the green. So you know, if a ball catches that edge, it's spinning around into the green pretty hard. And if you happen to get over that edge, it's a pretty tough recovery shot because you're coming up over that and then everything's just flying away from you down to the bowl. And then you know, this, so this green, a little of it may drain out the front, but most of it is draining around the bowl and out the back, right behind the bunker. While I had a punch bowl hole, originally it was the old it was what they now play as the second hole in the tournament, but we didn't think we could rebuild it there for a couple of reasons. They built a pond to the left of the hole in between the second and third holes for the tournament, and they build a house like right next to the green on the right hand side, so they'd kind of shifted the green over a little bit, and you know, we just thought it was you know, where the ball drained out, there's now like phil and a house. So you know, we couldn't really restore that. So we looked for a different hole on the golf course that didn't really have a a noteworthy green as a place to do a version of that green concept, and we came up with the it's fifteen on the as the members or yeah, it's fifteen as the members play it, so it's six for the tournament, and that's the other green besides the ridin that we just built last year. So that this will be the first tournament played on it. I don't know if it'll make the TV or not. It's it's more or less a green that Eric Iverson and I designed. Then, you know, it's certainly based on the template that Rayner had, but it wasn't in that particular location before, so you know, it's more of a taking a flyer on something than anything else we've done there. And I hope it's on TV because that's the one and I'm most interested in watching how how that works for the players. It was a fairly flat green site to start with, so we had to shape quite a bit. You know. It's actually as much restoration as I've done of those holes. It's the first time I tried to build that template from scratch, like really jack it out. Well. I guess Old McDonald we did too, but but you know, really jack up those shapes to make it work, and we really struggled with it. It took like three days of build that up more now push it back down, you know, just trying to get the feel of it right.

00:41:39
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's a punch bowl on tour. I don't think Greenbrier has one.

00:41:46
Speaker 3: I don't remember Green Brier. They interviewed us for the work at the Greenbrier ten or twelve years ago when they were when they redid it the first time, and of course it's been redone again since then, so I don't I don't remember it that well. Whether they're the there was that.

00:42:01
Speaker 2: Green there lough to ask, but I don't think there is.

00:42:04
Speaker 3: One green does have. It has a fair amount of slope in it.

00:42:09
Speaker 2: It's got some knobs in it like that.

00:42:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, not really sharpind not really sharp spines, but there's enough contract. You know, there's more contrary in it than most of the greens at Wiley. So it'll be interesting to see how well it fits in.

00:42:24
Speaker 1: What do you think that Rainer did best at Wiley and in terms of what was left.

00:42:36
Speaker 3: Well, I'm sure he had a great seventeenth hole before they blew it up, you know. I'm sure that one of the most special things about the golf course was now the hotel routing. Yeah, unfortunately, and and that's you know, some of the holes we haven't tackled yet. There are the holes in the middle of the back nine, like fourteen fifteen sixteen, you know, all three of them are dog leg holes and Rainerd didn't build that many sharp dog legs on a lot of his courses. They don't really have a template green at all, so we've kind of saved them for the end. You know, whatever we do is going to be a redesign, it's not going to be a restoration. And you know, we've you know, we've tried to be pretty faithful up till now about what we were going to do and really give ourselves time to think about, you know, what would fit in there. And we're still probably a year or two away from doing any of those holes.

00:43:42
Speaker 2: Do you know what's next for after this tournament.

00:43:47
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure that it's going to be the tenth and the eighteenth as they play for the tournament, so the first hole for the members, but you know, the eighteenth is the one I'm you know, now that we've built up some trust and confidence in what we've been doing and assuming that the tournament goes okay, you know, the eighteenth hole is the one that it's always been such an easy hole for the event. It plays down wind, it's it's kind of a it's a fairly long part five. It's like five sixty or five seventy, but you know, playing down wind, it's like they're hitting short irons at it a lot of the time. And you know, it's not a rain or green. You know, this is the hole that was moved way in when to make up for the taking away the hole at the beach. So we kind of have to start from scratch on it. And the only template that I can see that fits in there, and really one of the only templates that Rainer like to use on a par five was from the long Hold at Saint Andrews with a pretty severe you know, and if you don't look just at Rainer's versions, but you think about the long Hold at Saint Andrews. You know, it plays down wind, and of course it's got out of bounds right and hell bunker and a lot of other things going on. But the green is pretty intense. You know, it's kind of got a big false front and then it falls away from the line of play from right to left, and then it's got a like a left side where it connects over to the green on the other side that's kind of flatter but a pretty shallow target. And I'm thinking that we can build a green something like that for the event, so that yes, you can get to this green and two, but it's not so easy to hold, and you're going to have to think about where do you want to miss it? And going back to you know what we discussed in the last podcast, having a green that falls away a little bit on a downwind hole, we'll really make guys think about what kind of approach shot they're trying to play.

00:46:13
Speaker 1: We talked about recovery options too, and I just from years of watching that tournament, the recovery from around that green currently is pretty simple, right, Yeah.

00:46:24
Speaker 3: And you know if we get it right, I mean, as Saint Andrews, you know, missing in front and having the false front and the thing going away from you is a terribly hard shot. So you know, just like the fall away green, you know, miss over the back is the best thing to do. A fall away green. You know, that'll probably you know, if I do it, that will probably be the way to play the hole. But then you've got to think about, well, they got they've got like huge grand stands all around this thing, so they're going to have to give me some room, yeah, to you know, if that's going to be a place where guys are deliberately trying to play. You're going to have to have that much more space behind the green to make it work. But I think it's a you know, that'll be really going out in a limb. You know, if we've built something that that some players are going to try to deliberately miss long even though they can get there into pretty easily. Uh, that's not what they're used to seeing. So I think we've got to go ahead. But really, how these these last two greens that we've built work out for the tournament. We'll have a lot to say on how daring I can be with the eighteenth green next year.

00:47:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's I mean, those two are a big change.

00:47:41
Speaker 1: Let's a it'll be I'm I'm way more excited now that I know that there's a punch ball there. So I might be the very small minority of tour tour fans, but I mean, I'm I'm pretty excited now. So, Uh, Peter ostro Guard has a question. So it's you've been critical of the engineer to look at Rainer's bunkering at Fisher's, saying it takes away from the natural beauty of the setting. Conversely, you praise the good doctor at Cyprus for altering bunkering style based on the setting. You know, the trees, open coastline, Wili has less of a traditional rain or bunkering. Was this an effort by you to better match the landscape or has his original look been altered over the years.

00:48:29
Speaker 3: His original look has been altered over the years quite a bit. And one of the hard things about you know, if you close a golf course and restore it all at once, you can change the bunkering style to anything you want. When you do it a couple holes at a time, or sort of in piece work, it's really hard to change the bunkering style very much from what's there, because you would start with two holes or four holes that look radically different than the rest of them, and they might be you know, I mean at Wiley, so far we've worked on you know, eleven and fourteen one year, and thirteen at fourteen, and then seventeen and six the next year, so it's kind of random where we're, you know, and four and seven one year, so it's kind of random where we are. And if you just have some you know, you know, the really geometric flat sand bunker and steep grass face on the new holes and bunkers that were flashed up more on the old holes. It's hard to blend the two together. So, you know, Robert tren Jones is the one who did the routing change for the golf course in the fifties or early sixties when they built a hotel and changed it, and he redid a bunch of the bunkering at the same time. So there's more flash sand from nineteen sixty forward than what was there originally. You know, I don't think it looks that bad on that golf course. It's very flat golf course. If you just had the flat sand bunkers in the grass faces, there wouldn't be much visual excitement to it. They're also you don't get as you know, well why as tropically you don't get the same kind of shadows even the early and late in the day, quite the same way you do it more northern venues. So between that and just the way we've approached the thing a couple holes at a time, we haven't tried to change the bunkering style tremendously from what they've had for the last forty years. You know, personally, I don't think that the style of bunkering and especially how it's edged you know, I think it gets way more attention than it should.

00:51:09
Speaker 2: Well, it's an easy thing to look at, and.

00:51:11
Speaker 3: Yes, that's that's exactly why it gets the attention that it does. Is it's one of the most visual things that we do, so everybody wants to comment on it, but it doesn't change the playability of the golf course very much at all. Ultimately, that's what we're more interested in.

00:51:29
Speaker 1: What's your favorite Rainer course? And this is from Spencer Warsik.

00:51:40
Speaker 3: You know, every time I get asked this question, I have to stop and think, well, okay, which are the McDonald ones that I have to throw out? And then there's some you know, McDonald has a dozen courses to his name, and there's a few of them like Chicago Golf Club that you know, Chicago Golf Club Rainer rebuilt almost completely in the twenties after McDonald kind of lost interest. And so if we count that as a Rainer course, that's definitely one of my favorite Rainer courses, but it's still got McDonald's name attached to it too. You know, if we're counting McDonald courses, then National Golfling certainly, but you can't really count that as a rainer course because Rayner just started working that. No, he really didn't. He was a surveyor and he didn't know. You know, that's where he started learning about golf course architecture. But he can't give him any design credit for the national you know, I suppose the highest ranked rainer courses or Fisher's Island in Chicago golf and it's it's uh hard to go past those. I mean, you know, I've personally been more involved at Camargo was one of the very first places that I consulted, and we you know, we've very slowly, slowly restored it over like thirty years because restoration wasn't a thing in the eighties, so you know, we just started working on kind of one hole at a time. But I was pretty much restoring it without trying to sell them on that being the thing to do until we got pretty far along and Yemen's Hall, which had been first ripped up pretty bad by a hurricane when I was working down a Myrtle Beach in the late eighties, and then you know, the greens had just the greens at Yamen's Hall were the first time I saw him, they were about half the size that they are today, they'd shrunk up in the depression and they'd never mowed him back out big again. And then they were common Bermuda greens, and the only way to get a good putting surface with common bermuda greens was top dressed the heck out of it because the grass was so coarse, so run the green and then they just started top dressing the green as they knew it, so that little green pad got like built up like a foot higher than the rest of what the green used to be. It was the oddest look at one of the oddest looking things I'd ever seen on a golf course, just you know, a big old green pad sitting up in the air and then like a little mushroom growing on top of it that they mowed short. And that's where the flag always was. And you know, when I wrote the Confidential Guide the first time, that's basically how I described it. It was like I didn't get into that much detail. I was like, if they could just restore the greens, it would really be something. And the green chairman wrote me a letter after he got my book and said, what do you mean. You know, they really had no concept of it. You know where some of those ideas had come from, or what all the templates were, or how big the greens had been in the old days, even though they had like a detailed plan of it at all.

00:55:00
Speaker 2: They'd like some amazing old photos too, there, don't.

00:55:04
Speaker 3: They they do, but they That's one of the only places that I've that we've actually had Rainer's plan to work from, like with everything measured out like a center line and exactly how far the bunker was and exactly how wide the fairway was at different points along the way. The only thing it didn't have, and the main thing we were doing was restoring the greens. It had like little little scratch marks, like looking like caterpillars moving across the green where the contours were in the greens. But it didn't, you know, it didn't say up down, how high any of that. We just had to base all that on the other Rainer courses that we that we'd worked on.

00:55:52
Speaker 1: Mark LEVINESK wants to know what renovations or restorations would you like to see done at Rainers of course at Yale.

00:56:02
Speaker 3: Oh well, Yale a couple of years ago they sort of informally approached me about being a consultant there which I should love to take on. I mean, I really love that golf course, and at the same time, I haven't gotten around to trying to do it. You know, it's I'm a Cornell guy, so I'm starting behind the eight ball there working at Yale. And of course they didn't accept me when I wanted to go there in college, which is probably a good thing for my career because I wouldn't have been taking landscape architecture there. But I think it's a terrific golf course. They have done quite a bit of work on the bunkers over the years, and they've kind of made some of them shallower and smaller, and that's you know, the first thing about Yale that's so impressive is the scale of it. I mean, the hills are bigger and the bunkers are deeper and bigger than pretty much any of Rainer's o their courses. So that's something you don't want to newter. And yet they have neutered it some in the interests of maintenance or a.

00:57:22
Speaker 2: Maintenance.

00:57:23
Speaker 3: I think it's mostly maintenance. I think some of it's playability that they think it's too hard, even though you know, if you go back and read about the golf course when it opened, they made a big point of saying that they wanted it to be a physical test for the students. And when I say physical, I don't just mean hitting the ball square. It's like walking up and down the hills and everything. You know. That was like promoted exercise, as McKenzie used to say, something that was good. That may have been. That was not long after McKenzie's book was released, so they might might have gotten the idea from that, but I don't. I don't know Yale well enough. I remember there's a couple of holes that I've always suspected there must have been a lot more going on in this hole. Originally sixteen is one. It was a short part five, and the green is small and flat by the standards of everything else there, and I just think, well, there must have been something different here at some time. And the third hole, which is a wild little short part four with a ridge sticking in the fairway, plays along a pond on the right, and there's a couple of ridges sticking into the fairway, so if you drive away from the pond at all, you can't see the green. And the green site was moved at some point it originally was like a wild punch bowl or even like a double punch bowl. I've heard it described, which I can't quite visualize. I've never seen a great picture of it to know exactly what they're talking about. But I know that hole was a lot more interesting. You know, it's still an interesting hole now, but I'm sure there was more to it before than there is now. That's Uh, I've heard about that double punch roll.

00:59:17
Speaker 2: Last.

00:59:17
Speaker 1: Uh, last question on Yale is the since you talked about a couple holes. Andrew Bailey wants to know. He wrote an extensive article on the eighteenth at Yale. What are your thoughts on the eighteenth at Yale.

00:59:31
Speaker 3: Uh, It's a hole I've pretty much never seen anywhere else. You could you could say at least part of it is, you know, like a Alps hole for a part five because you you know, you're it's it's over six hundred yards from the back tee and there's a you know, it's on very hilly terrain, up and down and left and right and then and then there's a big hill that if you take the left hand route to the green, you're going over the crest of a hill. Something like eighty or one hundred yards short of the green and then way downhill to the green. So for most people, unless you hit two great shots, the third shot is blind over that hill to the green, which is like, wow, this is pretty severe for a finish and just you know, I mean, it kind of fits the old joke of you know, well we played seventeen holes and now we're six hundred yards from the clubhouse. I guess we got to build a really long or five to get home. You know, you look at it and you're like, really, did they you know, they did they design a lot of things around trying to get to this point to have this hole for the finish, because it's not like there are other courses. Yeah, it's really they didn't build a comparable hole of that, which is what makes it cool. So I like it because it's different. What I build a hole exactly like it? Well, I don't know, you know, the best part, honestly, the part that you remember most is the hill in front of the green, which if you don't want to play over, there's like a low fair way to the right to play around, but it's a great t shot from the back t there's like you're playing kind of into a valley at the start of it, before it starts going up over the hill. There's a shoulder coming in from the right of the hole. If you're on the back, to the shoulders in just the perfect spot where you have to hit a really good drive to get over it, you know. And if you play left, then your second shot is going to be just climbing straight up the hill for the second shot. But you know, not many people are good enough to play that old back tee. You know, most people are playing fifty sixty yards up from that and that you know it doesn't have the same effect as it does from the back.

01:02:00
Speaker 1: All right, last question and then we'll do overrated underrated? What how do you think members of clubs that have you know, been designed by a Banks, a Rainer or a McDonald can best protect and restore their features on a small budget.

01:02:28
Speaker 3: The simplest thing is just don't tear things up. I mean, a deep bunker is a deep bunker, you know. Trying to cut and fill to make life easier for players, is you know, a it's not. It doesn't It doesn't really help them very much. I mean, if the bunkers, if you cut a twelve foot deep bunker down to nine or ten feet, it's still a deep bunker, you know. I I think my advice would be what my advice would be to most clubs, but people might take more heed of it in this case. Let hazards be hazards, you know, don't worry about maintaining them, just such a high level. And you know, I mean, if you read McDonald's book, it's like trample a herd of elephants through the bumpers to make it difficult for guys. You know, that's not quite the same as as you know, line the bunker with something so it drains perfectly, and then put in perfect angular sand so everybody can hit a good sandshot. Yeah, totally different concept. And having rough bunkers cost a lot less.

01:03:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good maintenance.

01:03:50
Speaker 3: Without paying for elephant feed.

01:03:53
Speaker 1: That's you probably could afford elephant feed with what some of these things cost. But that's another topic for another day. All right, overrated, underrated, trade winds, underrated.

01:04:13
Speaker 3: Hope they make a comeback.

01:04:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, we've seen that they are quite quite important.

01:04:20
Speaker 2: What about Charles Banks?

01:04:25
Speaker 3: Underrated because really, outside of the real nerds like us, most people never heard of him, and he did do at least a handful of really dramatic courses in the Northeast. The two that I've seen are Forest Gate in New Jersey and Whipperwill and like Upper Winchester County in New York, which you know, both of them are kind of in the met area. There's so many good courses in the met area, including a bunch with with more famous architects behind them, that they kind of get overlooked. And I think you know, at least twenty thirty years ago, neither one of those clubs was in great financial shape and they didn't take care of him very well, so it was really easy to overlook them on those grounds too. But they're very dramatic courses. I mean, it's some of the you know banks built maybe because he had something to do with the Yale course. I mean he built deep bunkers like Yale on a lot of his work, and that's that's the kind of terrain he had to work with, and he did not fight it. It's just like, Okay, this is steep hill. That means there's gonna be a deep bunker.

01:05:43
Speaker 2: Here as the steam shovel. Yes, it's he like Rainer died early. It's it's kind of a shame.

01:05:54
Speaker 1: But yeah, so be exciting to watch the tournament this week, and I'm I'm excited to see your changes that while I it should be, I mean, I'm sure you'll be hopefully watching intently and hopefully the PGA Tour is listening and hearing that we need to see the punchful.

01:06:15
Speaker 3: I think it's the TV network that I'll make that call, and yeah, I'd love to see a little bit of a bit of it this year.

01:06:21
Speaker 2: We need more punchfull. It is the you know, like the cow bell we need.

01:06:25
Speaker 3: To make like there you go.

01:06:26
Speaker 2: That could be our hashtag for the week.

01:06:28
Speaker 1: So all right, Well we'll be back in a couple of weeks with a pot on a stream song.

01:06:34
Speaker 2: You've been listening to the podcast, we do the digging for you.