Yolk with Doak 29: The Opening of St. Patrick’s and the Making of Pacific Dunes

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Fridagg podcast Off the Top. I would love to talk about our events. We just released two new ones at Prairie Dunes and Lancaster in Pennsylvania. Obviously, Prairie Dunes renowned Perry and Press Maxwell golf course that we've talked a lot about a lot on this podcast. Lancaster is a wonderful golf course. William Flynn in I guess it would be eastern Pennsylvania, central eastern Pennsylvania. I'm not sure exactly where people would put the line of demarcation there. That is the host of the twenty fifteen US Women's Open as well as the twenty twenty four so coming up you can get a little preview of what's to come for the Women's Open. Those are both October events, October fourth and October eighteenth. We also have a few others on the website if you go to the Fridagg dot com and click on events. So we are back with our series The Yolk with Doak and Tom and I have both been very busy so we haven't talked to him Ahtle while, so enjoy this. We recorded a couple of these so we will post the second one maybe in a week or two, and enjoy this chat with Tom as always, it's a pleasure to talk with Tom about what's new and what's going on. So, without further ado, here is Tom doak. I miss a green for example, I'm already upset.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: And when I find my.

00:01:36
Speaker 3: Ball in a fried egg Friday egg, the dreaded Friday egg, Frida egg frigg frida egg bride egg.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: Lie, I'm about ready to run off of them. You made your first visit post COVID overde Saint Patrick's, your new golf course in Ireland that opened, uh, just the other day recently here end of June.

00:02:18
Speaker 2: Right, yes, I couldn't.

00:02:21
Speaker 3: I had a commitment in Scotland the for that conflicted with the opening, and you know, with the COVID rules right right then, you couldn't if you went to the UK, then you'd have to quarantine when you came back through through Ireland. And so I couldn't figure out a way to do what I had to do in Scotland and make the opening of Saint Patrick's. So I went like two weeks before the opening and was there for ten days and then went to Scotland from there.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: Isn't the longest that you've ever gone without seeing a golf course that was, you know, in construction to opening.

00:02:59
Speaker 3: Collaps Oh, absolutely, yeah, it was. You know, I was there. We shaped and seated the last green in October first to November of twenty nineteen, and then we still had a few fairways and bunkers and teas and stuff to build, but you know, and we were going to do those in the spring of twenty twenty. And then you know, just as soon as you know, I was supposed to go over in April of twenty twenty, Eric went over ahead of me, and Eric and Angela and Clyde were all there, you know, get just getting started on on doing the last working in the last few holes. When COVID happened, and you know, one day it's like, oh maybe we can you know, maybe we can just wait it out here. And then the next day it's like, looks like we got to come back just to be able to get back to the States, you know, And it seemed crazy to them because like, you know, that part of Ireland was about as remote as you could be in mart you know, the odds that you were going to get infected from somebody else while you're sitting out on a machine, and the dunes in the northwest of Ireland seemed pretty remote, right then You're much more likely to get it in the airport on the way home. So but you know, they just shut down completely where you know, you know, if they'd have tried to stay any longer, like within a week after that, Ireland just said no, everybody goes sit in your house for the next month and a half and nobody do anything. So so it you know, it just became impossible for me to go over and and do the work. And you know, by the time we could ramp it up. You don't build stuff in the middle of the summer there because it's you know, you don't have enough moisture to be sure you're going to be able to grow the grass, so so you wait. We were waiting until August to finish it. And when August rolled around, I, you know, Eric and I talked about it a bunch and I was like, do you really need me to go back? You know, it's odd for me not to go back, but it seems like, you know, I've seen all the greens done. That's my main concern. You know, you and I have walked it like twenty times, so you know everything. I'm thinking. I really feel like you could finish it by yourself if.

00:05:12
Speaker 2: You want to.

00:05:12
Speaker 3: And my wife would at that point much rather that Eric just finished it himself instead of her worrying about me traveling so much. So, so I let the you know, I let the crew finish the golf course. And this is the first I've seen it in a year and a half.

00:05:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, it's got to be weird. What were what were the you know, how was it different than usual seeing the finished product when he went back missing out on kind of those final stage visits.

00:05:42
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean normally, I know, you know, normally, I know exactly what everything looks like and where it is, and you know, there was enough, there were enough bunkers built and things changed around. You know, we're always changing stuff on the fly, and I did, you know, I and I didn't want them to not do that just because I wasn't there. You know, when you're when you're working on something and you got a better idea for this would be better if the bunker was over, if I flipped the bunker over on this hole.

00:06:11
Speaker 1: So so they did quite a few.

00:06:13
Speaker 3: Things that were a little different than what we've been thinking all the way along. But you know, so you know, I saw it more like a golfer season for the first time than as the architect, which was a very unusual experience, but a pretty good one. And it's so weird now because you know, Alistair mackenzie didn't make seven trips during construction like we do now. You know, he never got back to Australia at all. He never got back to Crystal Downs at all to see how they turned out. You know, I'm lucky that I get to do that, but I'm also like a little cursed that I have to do that, you know, instead of just letting the crew go ahead and finish the golf course. And you know, sometimes I think to myself, is it really important for me to go do this, you know, for that last one percent of trying to be a perfectionist, because there's you know, the end of the day, there's it's it's not something you can perfect. You know, you keep working toward that, but it's all a matter of opinion anyway. So it was good. It was a really good exercise for me to let go of it at the point that I did and see how it turned out. And it turned out really well, So I might do a little more of that, especially if we're going to do projects far far away from home. You know, it's getting harder to make the trips, you know, like it's it's really hard now. You know, I'm getting calls from three or four different continents and it would be but it would be really hard to sign up a job right now because you do you know, how hard is it going to be to make those trips when the time comes, you know, is it going to be back to normal or am I still going to have to quarantine for ten days every time I go?

00:08:03
Speaker 2: I don't know.

00:08:05
Speaker 1: With regards to that. From everything I've read, like Donald Ross was considered like the greatest golf architect when he was living, like because he was very professional, but he didn't you know, he didn't go back places and sometimes it didn't even visit places to do the courses. It's almost it's interesting how like you know the different ideologies and you know societal things, but like now it's very like you know on hands on craftsmanship, you know, from cradle to you know, finished product, right, And it's just interesting how like the you know, in the twenties, when all those courses were being built like down everybody seemingly everybody was like, oh, you gotta hire Donald Ross, he's the you knows the best, or Mackenzie or you know, Tilling has spent a little more time on construction sites than some of the other guys did. But really we've romanticized that all of them spent a lot of time working on all these beautiful little details in that funky little contra at the edge of that green and somebody did you know, somebody built that little thing deliberately, But it wasn't them, they were They were off somewhere else by that for sure. So what were some things that stood out about Saint Patrick's finished product? Obviously Americans can go over there in the next couple of weeks, I think the travel is opening up to Ireland. What what are some things that you know you were impressed with that you didn't maybe foresee in our previous conversations.

00:09:47
Speaker 3: Well, for one thing, just you know, I was talking to somebody today out here that you know, we never build courses in the order that you play them. You know, you just the construction tends to start somewhere near where the water source is going to be for the irrigation, because they got to start. You know, you're not going to know the first hole that you seed is going to be close to where the water source is, not all the way on the other side of the site, and so that's that's completely random. Sometimes that could be near the clubhouse. Sometimes it could be way over on the other side of the project. So so when we were out of golf course, we're thinking a lot about the sequence of holes and how things fit together and flow together. But once we start building it, you don't really think about that very much at all. You know, you get you know, one day you're building. Well, I'll use the lido as an example, so the ledo. You know, the first holes that we built were number four and five, and then like twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, and then we're we're you know, we're working out of that corner into the rest of the site. So you never you know, like the first hole is going to be one of the last holes we build, and the eighth and ninth also, so you know, I haven't since we started I haven't walked in the order that you'll play at once. I haven't even thought about doing that because because you know, the fourth and fifth holes now are pretty much done, and the first hole they're still moving dirt around and there's nothing there's nothing worth walking. Yeah, and you know, Pacific Dunes was the same thing I was saying. You know, we we had all the holes near Bandon Dunes built first so we wouldn't blow sand on them. But then three four, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, they all came much later.

00:11:36
Speaker 1: So they're probably far from water source, right right.

00:11:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, we tapped off the we tapped off the sixth Hall Abandoned Dunes to start building Pacific Dunes, and then we had to like, you know, connect from there back to where the pump station was, which is over the side of number it's over the dune from eighteen t you know, we had to get that that loop done by the first summer so we could keep watering those holes through the summer because we could, you know, we could tap off band and Dune's water in the winter when they weren't really irrigating much. But when the time came in the summer to start irrigating the whole golf course. We needed our own system, so we you know, we were racing to get there in time.

00:12:26
Speaker 2: But you know, so so.

00:12:32
Speaker 3: The day I the day we finally sorted out the routing for Pacific Dunes, and like the first week of construction, I walked the golf course in order from one day eighteen and then I didn't do it again until like the last day of construction. I was just like, oh, I should really walk these holes in order now that they're all done, and you know, get a feeling for the flow of the golf course. But you know, you you do lose track when you're in the middle of building it or working on the fourteenth hole trying.

00:13:03
Speaker 2: You know, you're not really.

00:13:03
Speaker 3: Thinking so much about what twelve and thirteen are like before you play this hole, and you know, should I dial this up and make it harder because of those holes or not? You just you reacting to what's on the ground in front of you.

00:13:18
Speaker 1: I think anybody can probably relate to that. Like if you're in a big project, you get so far into the weeds that, like you, you lose sight of everything going on around. You're the bigger part of it. You know, it's like anything. I bet you you know, sometimes even when you're writing a book, you the same thing happens.

00:13:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, and certainly like you know, when you're making a movie, you shoot it all out of sequence depending on where you are, but you don't. You don't shoot the first scene the first day and work to the end. So you know somebody but but the difference is on those usually there's somebody behind the scenes thinking about how that all fits together.

00:13:55
Speaker 2: And on our projects.

00:13:58
Speaker 3: Really, if there was any it would be me, and I'm not thinking about it too much, so I doubt anybody else's either.

00:14:05
Speaker 1: So how did how does the flow of Saint Patri Like does the land really dictate the flow? Like you know, one thing that people always talk about is like comparisons to you know, different things to where like you know, courses crescendo, you know, some of them crescendo in the middle, some of some of them have it early on and then it kind of is that really dictated by flow? And maybe use Saint Patrick's as an example, like is that based off of the land and how you know where plate things are on the land or how does that work?

00:14:38
Speaker 3: Some yes, but no, there's a lot of conscious choices to be made when you're when you're trying to put it together. So Saint Patrick's has, you know, there's really kind of four distinct parts of the ground. There's there's a few holes over on the I don't even know what way north is really there. It's it's it's kind of skewed. It's not like it doesn't line up north, south, east and west very well. But the inland most part on the the inland part that's nearer to Rossa Penna and Olta Morris Course, there's some big blowout dunes just off the property. There's a fence line and the you know that where Saint Patrick's historically ended and the in the farmer next door. His land is protected under the under the EU rules, you know, so there's these beautiful blowouts and it'd be like kind of would have been nice to go over and use some a little just a little of that ground. But even if we could have bought the land, they wouldn't have let us go there, you know. But that that line was drawn around the thirty six holes that were Saint Patrick's because because there was already a golf course there, so they didn't make any restrictions on what could be done with it afterward. So so those holes are a lot like you know, some of the biggest looking dunes and blowouts you've seen, kind of looks like the sandhills of Nebraska, except you know, and you know, not so much of you of the water from those holes. And then the stuff that's close to the water before you get up on the big hill is like the old Tom Morris course. You're kind of down and there's like a fifteen or twenty foot dune to the right of you that drops back down under the beach. So when you're down in that valley, you're not really seeing you know, you're only seeing the water when you're like up on a tee or up on a green, But when you're down in the fairway, you're too low in relation to the top of that dune to see the water. So even though you're closest to the coast, it's like the worst of you. And then you get up onto the middle of the golf course is kind of on a higher ground, and then there's this big hill that you When there was thirty six holes, they had a bunch of holes just playing up and down the hill. Which are spectacular views off to the side of the bay and stuff, but it was very repetitive. You know, they were trying to squeeze thirty six holes into like three hundred acres or two hundred and eighty acres, and so they just wound up with a bunch of parallel fairways going back and forth. And you know, the biggest decision in routing Saint Patrick's was to say to the cases, you know, what are we trying to do here, because yeah, you could build twenty seven holes, but you know you would divide up the best holes into three different nines that you weren't using all at the same time. You know, if you're trying to get if you're trying to get new people here, you just want to try to build the best eighteen holes you can. And so we're using a really big piece of land by UK standards, just for eighteen holes. And that means, like some of my other golf courses, you know, you feel like you're exploring the property more. And when you get over to the low part where the fourteenth fairway is going down around the back side of the hill, you know, it feels like you're in a totally different world than some of the holes that are on the start the start of the golf course. They're only like three quarters of a mile away, but there's so much there's so much terrain in between you and that that it's hard to connect the dots that you're even in the same piece of ground anymore.

00:18:28
Speaker 1: You almost got lost, Yeah, you really do.

00:18:31
Speaker 3: And and then so what you know, so kind of what sequence do you want to get lost?

00:18:37
Speaker 2: Now?

00:18:37
Speaker 3: I did find a place. I found a great clubhouse location kind of in the middle of the site that you could get the road to pretty easily, and it had a great view out to the bay. It was sat high enough in the dunes, far enough back that you you were looking over some golf and you had a great view out to the water, and you know what, the clubhouse kind of in the middle like that, it made sense to make two loops of nine holes if we could. You know, I didn't really grind on it. You know, if it had worked out ten and eight, that would have been fine. Nobody's going there just to play nine holes. But it did work out as two loops of nine.

00:19:18
Speaker 2: And then.

00:19:20
Speaker 3: The most of the time that I was working on it, I had the two loops backwards from what we what we wound up doing. I started on what I thought I was going to start on, what's ten now, and when we got when we were drawing the when we were drawing the plan for it. At the end, Don Plasik asked me, well, why do you why do you make this the front nine and that the back nine? And I said, I said, well, I really like this what's now the eighth hole, the short part four. I was like, really like that hole. I think that you know, I was saving that for seventeen.

00:19:57
Speaker 2: It's a great view.

00:19:58
Speaker 3: And he said, yeah, if you go and plus plus the what's now the back nine, going from fourteen to fifteen to sixteen, you're kind of working your way up the hill. And I figured it was better to do that early in the round instead of late in the round. And dud said, yeah, but you're kind of you know, you're starting with ten eleven twelve, which are really cool holes, but like the most inland and least dramatic holes, and and I thought, yeah, he's right, because you know, it's easier for that to be ten eleven twelve, you know, kind of lost in the middle after you've played some of these spectacular holes.

00:20:40
Speaker 2: Than to do those right at the start.

00:20:42
Speaker 3: So so by swapping the nines, now we're playing along those big dunes for one, two, and then the third hole you play kind of through a little gap at a green site that's hidden down. You just get a peak of the water. But then walking from three Green up to four ty, all of a sudden you're looking at the whole bay and you know a mile of beach front going down and it's you know, it's it's the same kind of reveal as from three from three Fairway to three Green to four Tea at Pacific Dunes. It goes from like I'm close to the ocean to holy.

00:21:20
Speaker 2: Cow, there's the ocean. I'm right on it.

00:21:22
Speaker 1: All of a sudden where uh, you know, obviously you've got your confidential guys, and you've got your your rating system where you know early like where does it kind of fall in your catalog of courses that you've built personally, you know in terms of maybe if you put them into buckets, or you know, in terms of sight and obviously you know the site dictates a lot of you know where of course falls, but you know where would where would you kind of you.

00:21:54
Speaker 2: Want to know what my dope.

00:21:57
Speaker 1: To give me.

00:21:57
Speaker 3: The people have been asking me for the last three months, even before I saw it.

00:22:02
Speaker 1: They're okay, so where is it on the doors out of You can put it in a bucket. You can buy bucket it if you want.

00:22:11
Speaker 3: It's a really good golf course. I mean it's it's a beautiful piece of land. It uses that land really well.

00:22:19
Speaker 2: You know.

00:22:20
Speaker 3: The couple of early reviews I've seen of it and got feedback from a couple of people I know, are just like off the charts good.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: And I really don't know how to take that.

00:22:29
Speaker 2: You know.

00:22:29
Speaker 3: It's like what you know, when we finished Terry Edie, I honestly didn't think anybody would think it was my best golf course, and a lot of people do, and that's you know, and I still kind of think that some of that is about the place rather than the eighteen holes, you know. I mean, I'd rather get the praise for the eighteen holes then then oh, I just love it there because that doesn't really have much to do with what I did. Some but not you know, that's not what golf course architects think they do, so so I kind of, you know, I realized after that that I'm not the one who can really say whether Saint Patrick's is as good as Barn Google or Terry Edy or Pacific Dunes somebody else. You know, other people decide that it's going to be in that conversation for sure, and and that's really all you can hope for is you know that people look at it now it's different.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: You know.

00:23:38
Speaker 3: One of the reasons Tera Edy does so well is because the first comparison there is not to all my courses. The first comparison is to like New Zealand and Australia, and there's not too many links courses in New Zealand and Australia, and it's a spectacular links course, so boom, it's automatically really high. Whereas in Ireland, you know, I think Saint pat You know, if Saint Patrick's was you know, if I took Barn Google and moved it to the site of Saint Patrick's, all of a sudden, the question would be was it better in Royal County Down? Is it better than Port Rush? Is it better than bally Bunyan, you know, And and Barn Google being where it is, doesn't have to answer that question, right away. They it has to answer, well, you know, besides Royal Melbourne, where else would you want to? Where else would you rather play in Australia.

00:24:30
Speaker 1: Now that makes a ton of sense. And like the style, of course, if it's a different distinct style, like you know, good examples like bally Neil and sand Hills are such a distinct style of golf in America and so different than everything around them that they really stand out, like prairie dunes.

00:24:48
Speaker 2: It's the same.

00:24:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like, you know, if it'd be the same thing as if you know, you took like the best you know, you know, I don't know. It's like I live in Naperville, right if you take our best Mexican restaurant, and then I go downtown where there's great Mexican restaurants everywhere, our best Mexican restaurant is not. Like I think about this all the time. With food, it's the same thing if you go to a place with a hot like you bring a links course to a links you know, neighborhood, all of a sudden you have a lot tougher comparisons to.

00:25:19
Speaker 3: Make, yes, And you know, I've I've dealt with that with the Renaissance Club sitting in between Mirfield and North Barrack.

00:25:26
Speaker 1: It's like that's a tough battle to win. And so there's something too about old like you know, like a new course will never be at the top of the America's rankings, right, even if it's the best course in America, it would.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: Take an awfully long time for it to be accepted that way.

00:25:47
Speaker 3: It's just like, you know, it's the same I mean Barnboogle, as highly rated as that is, you know, is Barnboo ever going to be rated higher in Royal Melbourne?

00:25:56
Speaker 1: No, of course not.

00:25:57
Speaker 3: You know, Royal Melbourne is the standard thing is judged against. And don't get me wrong, I think roy Melbourne is one of the best courses in the world. I don't think. I'm not saying barb Googles should be rated higher. But you know, facts are facts. It's like, you know, that's the heavyweight champion, and yet you know, you don't beat the heavyweight champion unless you knock them out. And how do you knock out Pine Valley or Raw Melbourne or Cyprus Point?

00:26:23
Speaker 2: You just you don't.

00:26:25
Speaker 3: So so you know, if I had a guess where Saint Patrick's will wind up being rated as one of the best courses in the world. I think it's going to be a while before it has any chance of being rated higher than bally Bunyan and Royal Kenny Down and Port Rush. Whether it's that good or not, it's just that's that's the glass ceiling that it has to break through, and it'll take a while before it really has any chance. Do I think it'll be ranked as one of the top hundred courses in the world. Do I think it's an eight or nine in my book?

00:27:00
Speaker 2: Yeah? I do, But you know it's it's a tough neighborhood over there.

00:27:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. It's the same thing as like, you know, building the golf course on Long Island, like if you've built one in Southampton, like a couple a couple of times. I have done that. I've experienced that. Now for a quick word from our sponsor. I think we all saw at the Open Championship great approach play is something that you want in your golf game. Calm Morkawa, I think I mean one of his greatest skills. He never miss his numbers, seemingly, he hits the club, he gets all of his irons, the right distance. That's a mark of a great iron player. We have something that can help you hit the right distance, hit the number, control your irons better more often. Rap Sodo is an affordable mobile launch monitor. It's great, it's affordable, it's portable. This thing's the size of your really rangefinder, so you can throw in your bag. You have it every time you go practice, and it works through your phone, so it's it's super easy to use, it's super accurate. It can be used both indoors and outdoors, so it can be used in the summer and the winter. And it's going to make you better at golf because you're going to get real feedback to your swings. So with the promo code fried Egg no Spaces, you will get a free premium subscription, which is a ninety nine dollars value, gives you cloud storage for up to ten thousand videos, which gives you slow motion swing replays shot apex, and it gives you access to their online coaching program. So if you go to rapsodo dot com, that is r ap sdo dot com slash fried Egg, you can get your launch monitor there and start hitting ironshots. Probably not like column Marco, but maybe a little bit better. Incremental improvement. That's a big thing.

00:29:04
Speaker 2: All right.

00:29:05
Speaker 1: Now back to Tom doak Well, I was gonna ask, you know, on the topic of this, you know, is the era of nineteen sixty to nineteen ninety somehow going to be underrated in some form as semblance or two thousand, because you know, we've got this new age golf, the new golf courses, and then the old golf courses, and in the middle all those golf courses are almost in a way underrated. Some of the golf courses, not all of them. Some of the golf courses could become underrated because they are, you know, from this era of design that's now.

00:29:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're completely overlooked now and kind of passe. And you know, and I can remember forty years ago when I started in this business, that's how people thought of the national golflings of America. So so yeah, yeah, there's the possibility that at some point in the future those places will make a comeback, you know, maybe just because they were built long, and you know, we need long.

00:30:12
Speaker 1: Golf courses now.

00:30:14
Speaker 3: You know, if equipment keeps running and running, it's like, well, you know, those those courses still have enough length to challenge really good players. You know, maybe that'll become more important again one of these days. But you know, I don't think there's as much detail work to latch onto to love in most of those golf courses. You know, they were built in an era where they you know, there was only like three or four architects that anybody was paying attention to their work, and they were all doing a ton of golf courses at the same time, and they really didn't have a lot of time to put in a lot of finicky details, you know. They they they made their whole business around being able to churn out a lot of golf course versus every year and hire a big construction company and not worry too much about you know, just build the green like it is on the plan here and it'll be fine. So, you know, I don't know that those will ever come back and be beloved the same way some of the really old courses are beloved and some of the new stuff is there's just not as many things to hang.

00:31:22
Speaker 2: Your hat on.

00:31:24
Speaker 1: Something I've been thinking about a little bit is like, you know, we everybody rushes to judge courses right away, right.

00:31:31
Speaker 3: Yes, before they open it's annoying.

00:31:37
Speaker 1: In a way. Should golf courses almost be judged like ten years and see how they age, because and I think some of this goes with the ownership and who takes care of the course, and you know, but like in a way, the best courses age well too, right.

00:31:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean the you know, the best courses just like a house, the best courses just keep getting better because you know, everybody wants the thing to be perfectly mature and look like it was done forever the day it opens. But that's really hard to do. And really, you know, it's it's a couple of years in before this the greenkeeper has like even had a chance to worry about how the roughs play, you know, the first all through grow into opening day, you're just trying to get the greens and the fairways good, really good, and you don't really have time to worry about all this stuff on the margins. That's important too, because people don't hit him a fairway all the time, and so it takes a while to get around get back around to that stuff and get it dialed in too. And then you know, like a lot of the famous courses that we talk about now, raw Melbourne. There's no way Royal Melbourne was as good when it was built in nineteen thirty five as it is now. I mean, what's there now is eighty years of evolution, you know, with two of the best superintendents who ever lived taking care of it for twenty or thirty years each, you know, working on all the little details around the edges. And you know Pine Valley was that way too. Pine Valley just spent forever, like you know, doing researches of native plants that they could use out there and and you know, and working around the edges of the golf course. It was just you know, complete mass when they started, and you know, it took them a long time to get it to where it is today. So new courses should have that going for him too, and the ones that have, you know, I was just at Pacific Dunes a couple of weeks ago and Ken Nice and Jeff Sutherland are still taking care of that golf course twenty years later, and you know it's better now because they've been taking care of it all that time. I mean they've they've really got it dialed in. But it takes a while, but it's so nice to have that continuity of management. You know, like high Point in its first twenty years had like nine superintendents and seven head pros.

00:34:14
Speaker 4: And you know, because sign management, you just naturally transitioned us star next topic here bandit or a Pacific dude starts twenty You got a new book out about it.

00:34:30
Speaker 1: I haven't read the book yet, so I'm gonna ask questions like an idiot, but that's usually what I do. Anyway.

00:34:36
Speaker 3: You know, the book is about the golf course. You know the golf course. You kind of know it's in the book.

00:34:41
Speaker 1: So this book, it's a deep dive into the construction and all the stories from that.

00:34:46
Speaker 3: Right, yes, design, construction and really so you know, twenty years ago went right after we finished building the thing, before it opened, my dad was got ill, you know, his cancer came back and he was in the hospital and I was like, you know, I got news of it while I was out there for a press day and like the spring of two thousand, so I was dealing with that for a few months and he passed away that late that summer. But you know, going back and forth to the hospital and getting it moved up to Traverse City, and you know, I just had like a lot of emotional stuff going on, and you know, spend a lot of time with him, but you know, like trying to burn off energy and his spare time hadn't really had.

00:35:35
Speaker 2: We weren't that.

00:35:36
Speaker 3: Busy building stuff. We were doing the planning work for the Ralls course and then the next course at Stonewall, but they weren't in the construction yet. So I had time, and I thought, I'm just going to try to write down, like everything I remember about building this golf course, you know, for posterity, and maybe make a book out of it someday, so you know, like where the ideas came from, because a lot of times people like when you were building that hole, were you thinking of this, you know, something that is similar in their eye to what I've done? And sometimes yeah, they're right, And a lot of times no, I was thinking about something else. I can see where you might think that, but I never really thought of that as a comparison until you just set it. So but you kind of forget after tenures, you know, it's like where did that idea come from? So you know, so I wrote all that down, you know, and you know, and you know I would still be able to take you out there and show you, like the futures that are built and the features that are natural, you know, but most people can't tell the difference.

00:36:44
Speaker 2: But you know, I wrote all that down, like, you know, where did we do work? And where did we not do work? And all that stuff that looks cool as natural?

00:36:51
Speaker 1: What would be the most surprising thing for just a random person that's played the course that's all natural, that wasn't built.

00:37:01
Speaker 3: The most surprising thing that's actually natural? All the all that mounting in front of the seventh Green, okay, and the punkers around the seventh Green that's mostly natural. All the contra in the sixteenth fairway all natural?

00:37:19
Speaker 2: Oh I hope.

00:37:25
Speaker 1: What about the other way?

00:37:28
Speaker 3: The other way I think would be more surprising to people as some of the things that we built that you wouldn't have any idea.

00:37:34
Speaker 2: You know.

00:37:34
Speaker 3: And sometimes it's things that we took out, like the eighteenth hall. Originally the second shot when you're hitting kind of over the corner of the dune on the left where the big the big sandy hollow is over on the left, that ridge was like twenty feet higher than it is now.

00:37:53
Speaker 2: You know, we just we just blew you.

00:37:54
Speaker 3: Know, we we had to get through there to make a golf hole, and we just blew that thing down and filled in the valley behind it, you know, like the fairway that goes around it is basically all fill. That was all a deep bowl that kind of connected across to number one and then and then this ridge that just came through and blocked everything. But when there's something big like that that's in the middle of a golf hole, you can just take it away because you don't have to worry about how it ties into the edges. You know, it's just it's just gone completely and there's there's no peace left for anybody to get a sense that there was something there. It's harder to do do work like that at the edge of the hole. You know, if you've got a big dune kind of coming in from one side wherever you cut it off, it's going to really be really.

00:38:44
Speaker 1: Hard to make that the whole thing right.

00:38:48
Speaker 3: You know, you almost need to go somewhere way behind that and work. And sometimes that's why things are built as wide as they are. It's because we had to go all the way back there to make this thing go away, and so if we if we went back there at that point, then we kind of had to make the whole hole wider so that we could grass it in and make it look natural.

00:39:11
Speaker 1: But so other.

00:39:13
Speaker 3: Places at Pacific Dunes that are not natural, like the green site for number four, that that dune that's to the left of the green came almost all the way to the cliff hedge.

00:39:24
Speaker 2: Okay, so we jim dug.

00:39:25
Speaker 3: All of that out from the dune and kind of flipped the dune over a little bit to make space for a green in there.

00:39:34
Speaker 1: That had to be kind of an unnerving job. Over there, moved.

00:39:39
Speaker 3: Number eleven green is you know that that sits into the other side of the same dune basically, And you know, that was a hole that mister Kaiser didn't really he latched onto number ten be in a Great Hall right away. He didn't really latch onto number eleven be in a great Hole because the green site wasn't there. It was just like the face of that hill. And we so we had to carve it down in where you see those little sharp dips at the back of the green that's all created. You know, it kind of looks like the same scale of stuff as the natural stuff on number seven.

00:40:15
Speaker 2: But it's not natural.

00:40:19
Speaker 3: Even the like the sixth green where it falls off where where the debunker is left a six and then on back behind it. Hard to believe, but that was even steeper. I mean it was it was literally just straight down off that thing when we started and we were like, well, this is way too steep. I don't even understand how you maintain it. So so we brought in Phil from there was there was another dune ridge kind of in between six and twelve that we just took out and use some of it for Phil for that, but we used a bunch of it to like see cap the fourth and the twelfth holes that was basically just blown down to sandstone. So there's three feet of sand fill on four twelve and thirteen that you know, the contre is basically natural contra, but mimicked on top fourteen is completely manufactured. Fourteen you know when I when we found thirteen and thirteen is as natural a hole as there is there. In fact, the cover of the book is a picture of thirteen with a guy in a red jacket standing in the fairway. That's Jim Orbina And that was the day we found the hole. You know, we hiked up to it from the road down to the beach where you go up to the sheep Branch now, because we couldn't get across the I mean the like the where four and twelve and three are now was just solid gorse and there was like one trail going through it, and it was flooded in a couple places. So it's like we couldn't we couldn't go to that end of the site to even look at what was over there. And thirteen was not on the map. The property the property line for Pacific Dunes was supposed to end right We're twelve Green and four t R and not go over there.

00:42:17
Speaker 2: And I said to.

00:42:18
Speaker 3: Mike, well, you know, we had lost some ground to David Kidd that was on my map. And I said to Mike, you know, I've got a lot, but you know, I think I'm going to wind up having three holes that are pretty on pretty dull land out I'm part of what would be Old McDonald now, say, like the tenth hole and the sixth hole at Old McDonald would have been land for Pacific Dunes. And it was like that didn't seem very exciting compared to everything else that was out there. And Mike said, well, I do own the land to the north too, Why didn't you go look at that? So we go around and we hike our way back in there, and you know, see the thirteenth Hall for the first time from like up by where fourteen Tea is now. You know, I said to Jim, you stay here, I'm going to go back to the tea and try to get a sense of out. You know, it looked like the perfect distance for a hole, but I didn't have a range finder or anything, so I just wanted to paste it off. So he stayed there and I paced off back to the tee and I had my camera with me, so I took that picture. And so I put that picture on the front of the book because that's the first time.

00:43:24
Speaker 2: I saw it too.

00:43:27
Speaker 3: But then so we brought we brought Mike Kaiser out to look at it that afternoon, and after we looked at that hole, he said, well, where would.

00:43:34
Speaker 2: The next hole go?

00:43:35
Speaker 3: And I hadn't really thought about it yet. I just was just like, I just found a great hole. I haven't thought more much past that, you know, I said, the tea has got to go up here, you know, I figured it would be more like what fifteen is now you tee off the dune and play back into the rest of the land for Pacific Dunes. And Mike said, well, could you build like a par three up on top so so you're looking at the ocean from it too, And I said, sure, we would do that. But you know, where the green site was for fourteen was just a very very very sharp dune ridge that was quite a bit higher than what's there now, and you know, we just had to melt that down. And you know, if you go if you miss the green to the right, you know what, you know what it's like, it's just straight down. But it was equally just straight down off the left. So we you know, we we melted all that down and pushed all, you know, through all the dirt off to the left to make it playable firm over there, so you wouldn't be just going back and forth across the green from twenty five feet below.

00:44:43
Speaker 1: It's amazing with with the notes. How long had it been since you looked at them before you started working on the book, or like, had it been what happened? Tell me a little bit about these notes. You write these notes out? Where did they go? Yeah? I would have lost them, but what what what happened to him? Once they were written?

00:45:07
Speaker 3: So in like two thousand and five or six, somewhere around there, I started trying to finish up a version. So there was a bunch of text files and I printed up a few copies and sent them to some friends, just like, you know, for feedback, Like what am I not telling you that you want to know about the golf course? You know, what if this is like too much information, don't tell us that, you know, is there too much about the other people?

00:45:37
Speaker 2: Are there not enough stories about construction? Whatever?

00:45:40
Speaker 3: So you know, two or three golf writers, Amon Lynch from who was with Golf magazine back then, Ian Andrew Fellow architect who writes really well, just trying to get their feedback on stuff. And they gave me some really good feedback. But then I just like, you know, I kind of took that and had a box in my office and we were busy as hell.

00:45:59
Speaker 2: You know.

00:46:00
Speaker 3: That's when we were building Sabonic and bally Neil and all these golf courses we're talking about now.

00:46:05
Speaker 2: I didn't have time to think about it much at all then.

00:46:08
Speaker 3: But Sarah Mass who was working for me, you know, was kind of running my office and you know, day to day there wasn't much for her to do a lot of times. So she she had that stuff, and she's the one who kept like getting back on me to do something with it, or or could she help try to put it together into a book. And really she's done most of the work since the initial version of it, just you know, finding all the right pictures to put together with the text and the right places. You know, that's the actual writing the text of the book. You know, when you're done with that, you're maybe fifty percent done with doing a book, especially a book like this. You need all that, you need all of the stuff to go with it and to match up. And that's really pains. And you know, if I'd have had to rely on myself for that, there would never have been a book. I would never have had enough time or patients to put it together. So, you know, so I didn't really start working on it again until about three years ago. You know, when we started working in Getting to Eighteen, we kind of started working on this too, because we.

00:47:21
Speaker 1: Had to use a portion of it for the part about.

00:47:25
Speaker 3: Pacific Dunes that's in Getting to eighteen and then it's like, well, we've got all this other stuff too, we should really try to finish this and make it all fit together into a nice, neat package.

00:47:37
Speaker 1: And right for the twentieth anniversary.

00:47:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, I just worked out that it was coming up on a milestone, so it was a good time.

00:47:46
Speaker 1: People can buy it on your website, yes, duk golf dot com, and.

00:47:52
Speaker 3: You know you'll start seeing We've got a few like affiliate partners for it, so you'll start seeing more about the book and other in other places too, but they're all going to direct you back to my site to buy it.

00:48:03
Speaker 1: It's good go to dope golf dot com though, yeah, because then you got to kick all the money, true, you know, we want to keep it all the money.

00:48:13
Speaker 2: Or you can buy it in the pro shop at band and they've got a bunch.

00:48:27
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. This episode was edited by Meg Adkins. Just as a quick note, thank you guys for all the support. You can get your own Frida Egg gear. We've got a lot of stuff in the pro shop. Get some new gear. It's great because you can mix up the logos. You know, if you're worried about wearing too much golf course logos. You know it's a great logos throw in there, Frida Egg. People think it's from some breakfast place, but it's you know, it could be your favorite golf podcast or your second or third. You know, we don't think we have the best golf podcast. Maybe you know, but we're just humble midwesterners here. So you can visit our pro shop at the Friday dot com. It's up in the corner. Visit there and check out our pro shop. We got hats, t shirts, polos, all sorts of stuff. Headcovers, I think. But thanks a lot and thanks for listening.