The New East Lake and the Same Old Tour Championship

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.

00:00:02
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

00:00:05
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in a fried.

00:00:06
Speaker 3: Egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg Friday Egg, Frida egg brid Egg, Frida egg.

00:00:11
Speaker 1: Bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Welcome to the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about Andrew Green's renovation of Eastlake Golf Club and we're previewing the Tour Championship. But first we're going to talk about what we're in on and what we're out on. Here. To do that with me is Joseph Lamania. Joseph, what are you in on, Garrett?

00:00:58
Speaker 4: I'm taking a big swing here, super controversial opinion. I'm in on the road hole at Saint Andrew's. Have a renewed appreciation for it watching the Women's Open this past weekend, but particularly at the women's scale of the game, and when you have to hit a long iron or wood in that hole is just so much more demanding, both off the tee and on the approach versus like in twenty twenty two with the Men's Open Championship. When guys have a short iron in or like a seven iron in that whole, it's still compelling, but it doesn't have the teeth that it does for the women. Watching Lydia Coe under the gun with the tournament on the line, worst of the conditions, blustery, rainy, pull out lumber and hit that shot to what was it eighteen twenty feet to help her end up. She ends up burning the eighteenth pole. Wins by two, but really one by one if Lily Avoo doesn't miss that short put at the end. The seventeenth hole is just awesome. It comes at a great point in the round. Now it's built these iconic moments, even the past couple editions of majors at that course, Cam Smith putting around the bunker, the shot that Stacy Lewis detailed on the pod last week. It's an exceptional hole, especially for the women, so couldn't be more in on the seventeenth.

00:02:13
Speaker 1: It's still a great hole for the men, but you're right that it's different for the women. And you know, part of what has always made that hole exciting is that the green complex really doesn't fit the scale of the shot that most players are hitting into it, and what has made the whole a bit more average recently for the men is that the clubs that they're hitting into that green are now kind of fitting the proportions of the green, and so it just feels a bit more normal, more ordinary for the women, though. You know, Lydia Coe hitting a punch three wood into that green, that's an extraordinarily difficult shot into that green with so much trouble around it and such a small area where you can be successful. And that's why that shot was so fun to watch. And so yeah, totally agree with that road hole. Wonderful seeing it played as it should be played also wonderful. Let me talk about what I'm in on, and this is a bit out of left field. I didn't plan to talk about this until about five minutes before the podcast, but I am in on the now abandoned plan to build a golf complex in Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Florida. Now, I am not in on the plan itself, on this idea to take this kind of pristine state park and turn it into a golf course. There are some places where golf courses shouldn't be, But if you look into the backstory of this plan. There are a lot of characters circulating around this story that are highly highly interesting, and I would just recommend that people go to a reputable Florida publication, UH newspaper or magazine and read up on the Jonathan Dickinson State Park golf scheme. It has made for some absolutely engaging reading this morning for me, and and so I'm very much in on that.

00:04:22
Speaker 4: I think this should just generally serve as a PSA that if you ever have details about some kind of scandalous golf course development project, Garrett Morrison wants that information. So I hope your inbox gets flooded.

00:04:36
Speaker 1: I hope it. I hope it stays flooded with scandalous golf course schemes because it's it's my absolute favorite kind of content. And and yes, you can find my email address very easily online. Please reach out if you see something, say something basically, all right, Joseph, what are you out on?

00:04:57
Speaker 4: I'm just out on this recurring making uses for why product the golf product can't be better. Most recent example the Women's Open yesterday, the final round, it took two hours to play the first five holes for the final group Every time you bring this up, you get met with excuses like, well, there's a lot of cross holes, so you have to wait for the somebody hit a shot on this hole before you can hit your te shot, or the conditions are terrible, it's gonna take extra time. You cannot have five holes in two hours. That is not the way that modern entertainment products are going. Every other sport's trying to get faster. The tail can't wag the dog here, like there needs to be a product enhancement otherwise you're gonna lose people. I talked to a lot of people who's trying to watch some of the Women's Open yesterday and it was just taking too long and ended up turning it off. Is this the biggest issue facing professional golf? Maybe not, but I think it's one worth getting out ahead of. There's gonna be resistance to it. Just do it and people will adjust.

00:06:01
Speaker 1: Resistance from players players. That is the only quadrant of the golf world from which you will get resistance to enforcing pace of play correct.

00:06:15
Speaker 4: Yeah. I mean, Garrett, they if they had gone to a playoff hole. We were messaging about this yesterday, like they would have had serious problem in the middle of summer in Scotland getting in a playoff hole. It took I don't know what the final count was because they sped up a little bit on the back nine. But we're talking about like six hour rounds here. That's just it cannot happen. So you're right, it's going to be resistance from the players. They would adjust. I think Andy makes a good point on this that playing under a time constraint is a skill and players need to get better about just figure it out. The world will move on, right, It's not going to be the end of professional golf if they put a shot clock in because there's going to be a player revolt. It would be fine, all.

00:06:55
Speaker 1: Right, Joseph I am out on the idea of a player captain at the Ryder Cup, And of course this is relevant right now because Keegan Bradley won the BMW Championship. Keegan Bradley is back again. He is a player who seems to be aging well into his game now. He also happens to be the captain of the Ryder Cup team and he has said in the past couple of months that he would not be averse to playing on and captaining the Ryder Cup team, and I just don't think that's a good idea. I think that captain of the US Ryder Cup team is a big job, an overwhelming job in some ways, a huge job on the week of the Ryder Cup itself, and that it deserves the full focus of the captain. And also playing in the Ryder Cup is a big job, and it just seems like those two jobs should remain separate, especially in this day and aga. You know, this is no longer the fifties sixties Ryder Cup where it was a more casual feeling kind of match. This is a huge production. And as somebody who you know hasn't always really rooted for the US team, but roots for the US team deep down, I feel like this is a bad idea. That we're approaching a tough situation for the US team. If Keegan Bradley feels that he can do both of these things.

00:08:34
Speaker 4: I mean the serious take, if it's even close. I don't think Hegan should pick himself for competitive reasons, not even optically. But to your point, it is a huge commitment. Team Europe doesn't handle things this way right like they don't minimize the role of a captain or conserving energy, like they don't play guys late on Saturday afternoon. If they're going to be going off early on Sunday morning, let alone have a player who is also making cats and captain's decisions, Like, I just don't think it sets you up for success. But from an entertainment perspective, I am absolutely rooting for Keek and Bradley to be on that team. Sounds like I can't imagine something more fun than him teeing off at Bethpage as the captain. So I am rooting for that scenario. But I would agree with you. I think it reduces Team usays chances of winning if Keith and Bradley is serving both functions.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: So in other words, I feel bad for my country. But this is tremendous content. Well put all right, Joseph. In a minute, we're going to get into a discussion of Eastlake in the Tour Championship, including a visit from the architect Andrew Green himself. But first I want to talk a bit about Club TFE. This is Frida eg Golf's membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and you get a lot with that, including exclusive content that we publish on a weekly basis. Design Notebook just came out this morning and it has a number of different subjects in there that keep you up to date on what's going on in the golf architecture world. We publish course profiles weekly. These are extensive analyzes of great golf courses with photography and illustrations and all sorts of goodies. So that's the content side of what we do in CLUBTFE. But it's also a full membership. You get other benefits, including an ongoing discount in the pro Shop, access to CLUBTFE only events, and all sorts of stuff like that. So we're building a great community in clubtf We would love for you to join us. Go to the Frida egg dot com slash membership and see what CLUBTFE is all about. All right, let's talk a little bit of East Lake and Tour Championship before we really delve into our discussion, Joseph, I want to bring in and Green, so our own Andy Johnson actually spoke with Green for about ten minutes on the East Lake renovation. They had a really interesting conversation and so I think we'll play that first and then maybe react to it and get into some of our own thoughts about East Lake and other courses that Andrew Green has renovated recently. So let's get to that tape with Andy Johnson and Andrew Green.

00:11:34
Speaker 2: What's it like doing a renovation in a year.

00:11:37
Speaker 3: It's a lot of pressure to get done. The amount of work that we got done in Atlanta, from the last putt dropping to yeah, the first player standing on the first t less than a year later. I think the one thing people probably miss about doing renovations on these annual championship venues, there's a lot of stuff in addition to the golf course that's in your way just to get started, and then you got to build all that stuff back to get ready for the next year. And so we really had to be smart about how we attacked the restoration effort and that we really had to begin on the front nine because there's less build out that was part of the Tour Championship last year, and then that meant we were finishing on the part where there's the most build out for this year. That just adds a whole new wrinkle to a project like that.

00:12:34
Speaker 2: How would you have approached the renovation without any structures? How would that be different.

00:12:42
Speaker 3: Well, part of the project involved a new practice facility those that might not recall or maybe have not been there the previous range hit over water. In one of my site visits, I sat and watched a group of ladies warm up to play their round. Not a single ball landed on dry land previously. It's not a great way to begin your day. So that change meant that there was a lot of earthwork and a lot of regulatory work that had to happen, and because of the sequencing, that ended up falling a little later in the sequence, which put more pressure on getting that done and back so we could play the Tour Championship this year.

00:13:26
Speaker 2: What are the biggest things that stood out to you about east Lake before you worked there.

00:13:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you know. This idea that the lake bisects the property kind of made me feel like east Lake was kind of two halves and how do we try to make it more of a hole In that process. While I was a little concerned looking at kind of the a little bit of the repetition of some of the holes, especially on the front nine, it did start to become pretty interesting on the way the routing worked, where number eight played across the other golf holes on the front nine, thirteen and fifteen played across the routing, and seventeen on the other side. Really made for some interesting, you know, overall golf shots and kinds of golf holes. For me, the big part of the restoration effort that I thought we could elevate the style of play and the experience for the members as well as for the Tour Championship was to move some green locations to get the golf holes to twist and turn. A lot of the corridors previously were incredibly straight and narrow, and we tried to find some width where we could, but really worked on trying to get angles of play and getting the golfer to play right to left or left to right.

00:14:50
Speaker 2: How did what was the era or what was the inspiration behind the work at East Like? What were you kind of what was the key thing that you were focused on bringing to Eastlike.

00:15:03
Speaker 3: So unlike other restoration efforts that I've been a part of, there was very little information from right in the heart of the founding vision of the golf course, So we actually relied a lot on the Obi Keller documentation of Bobby Jones and Alexi Sterling and all the great golf that was played pretty much from its early life into the thirties. And then we found an aeril from nineteen forty nine, which is really late. You know, typically that would not be a calling card. That era is usually not something I'm really stressing on. But it was of such high quality. The resolution of that image was so good you could see the scars of the life that it had lived previously. And then it also gave us a great sense of how the golf course was playing. And knowing that with the great depression in World War Two that not a lot had changed other than the golf course had maybe you know, just degraded a little bit through that process. That was a great calling card for us. So we use that kind of the documents, the words with that image and put a picture together of what the golf course once was.

00:16:13
Speaker 2: What was your favorite parts of that old golf course.

00:16:18
Speaker 3: So the original east Lake had two greens on every hole, a winter green and a summer green. Sometimes there were two different surfaces. Sometimes there was a left version and a right version. Sometimes they were conjoined. And so in seventeen there's a par three for one and a part four for another, so really interesting the way that came to be, so for me, it gave me a lot of artistic license to try to figure out how to best use those components and create a modern golf experience that hearkens to it, but it's not an exact restoration.

00:16:52
Speaker 2: What are a few of your holes that you're most excited to see play out in the tournament?

00:17:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think starting on all number one, we move that green back, but we're still going to play it as a part four. It's going to be a challenge for the guys. The first swing of the day will be kind of in this stadium feel and it's offul warm up putting green that we have for the members, but they'll be teen off from the center of that. It'll take really two great swings to get home in good position on the first hole. Part of that I love in that as the Tour Championship top thirty players in the world, it's an opportunity to challenge them right off the get go. And then the second green is really cool in that it's this diamond shape, very unique green, very unique contours. Those kind of back to back I think are really an interesting start to the round. The eighth hole. We made a driveable Part four. We'll see how they set it up during the week. I think at least a couple of days, guys will be able to get home if they want, and there's some thoughtfulness to lay up if they aren't trying to get all the way home. Nine is always going to be a tough long Part three, and then on the back nine, I think fourteen's going to plays a part five that's totally different from years past. I think it gives guys an opportunity to be more aggressive. The fair way will end up with a downhill lie for most drives, so then you've got to judge that it's more natural landform than what was there previously. The fifteenth hole, I swear it looks smaller. I don't know how it could. It does. The green's bigger, one hundred percent, it's bigger, but it looks that target looks smaller. The bunker's gone really cool. Part three and then the right side of sixteen green very interesting feature, shortcut grass rolls off. There were some interesting discussions about Bobby Jones playing into this kind of chasm off the right side of that golf hole as a kid. So it was important to try to find something to represent that, and so this short grass area does that. There's an amazing trench bunker on number seventeen that has a lot of folklore to it. Part of it talks about as a Civil War placement guarding the city. Part of it as a road that used to bicycle the golf course. But it's a bunker, really cool element. And then eighteen will be a really fitting into the championship. I think some good golf shots potentially make an eagle where you could get in trouble if you aren't careful.

00:19:19
Speaker 2: Is it the same corridor eighteen as it was?

00:19:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, the corridor in eighteen's pretty similar. We just really worked on getting rid of the terraces. If you recall there's fourteen and eighteen both had kind of this manipulated landform, and we really tried to find a way to make it look more natural and play that way. In part for me was to give the golfer a varied stance to hit those golf shots. Both of those holes play the same direction, they're both part fives, but the uncertainty of how your ball comes to rest and the kind of swing and how aggressive you want to play. I think there's just a great mental challenge to that.

00:19:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. I mean you introduce a sidehill or down hill or side hill and downhill lie with a longer club, it's a much more difficult shot than from a flat lie from a ramp. Yeah. I guess with the kind of getting to rework a course and having a big tournament there, what were your kind of ideas for how you were building a championship course that identifies the best player in a given week. What do you think are the features that are the themes that you introduced that are going to do that.

00:20:30
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, as we looked at the design and evolution of East Like, we saw some opportunity to shift some bunkering around and things to make the player think a little more off the tee. There'll probably be some golf holes where guys aren't pulling driver. We'll see, you know, it'll be interesting to see.

00:20:44
Speaker 1: How they play.

00:20:45
Speaker 3: The whole locations on the greens vastly different because of the dynamics of the two green system from the original version and the way we use that to unlock some kind of uniqueness, allows for whole locations that are incredibly varied. If you miss a green one side or the other, some longer putts over more interesting interior contour than was there previously. If you short sighted yourself, getting up and down can be pretty demanding. I think it was. Really every decision was based on this idea of let's give the best players an opportunity to be successful if they hit quality golf shots, but challenge them if they get out of position, and how do we find this opportunity and then really allow for a more unique and special golf experience for the members and their guests as they come play on a daily basis.

00:21:37
Speaker 2: Andrew really excited to see the Tour Championship. Honestly, I haven't said that for a number of years. Excited to watch golf at Easelake. So can't wait to see see your work and congrats on getting that just finished and can't wait to watch appreciate it.

00:21:53
Speaker 3: Me too, can't wait. We'll see what we'll see what they say never know.

00:22:02
Speaker 1: Okay, Joseph, we are back, So just right off the bad impressions about Eastlake, specifically what it used to be, the course that it used to be for the Tour Championship, and what it has now turned into from what you've seen so far. What do you think are going to be some of the biggest and most remarkable differences. What do you think are going to be the things that really affect play as it unfolds in the Tour Championship.

00:22:31
Speaker 4: The green complexes are a lot different now and there are way more pin locations. I think this is a pretty big change, right, I mean, this is not a small scale renovation to do it all in one year, Like quite a bit is different. There are some holes that are notably different, as a lot of them are. But Andrew Green called out in this interview that the eighth hole now may play as drivable, which I think will be fun. And given how few golfers play in this tournament there's only thirty, Like pace of play is not as big of a concern, so having drivable holes adds excitement. I'm excited to see that whole play is drivable at least a day. I would imagine they have it set up as drivable at least a day. The fifteenth famous par three that used to have a bunker that a lot of golfers kind of bailed out towards that bunker left of the green. That bunker's gone. Now it's I think it's a more compelling par three. So there quite a few changes my overarching reaction, Garrett, and I'd be curious, but you think it's kind of nice to hear a renovation project where the focus is not on scoring average, like we talked about TPC River Highlands on a pod where they covered up a lot of the golf course with rough basically to raise the scoring average, not affect member of play, but make it harder for pros. Is sort of a euphemism for just raising the scoring average. And then there's this announcement about TPC Craig Ranch that's gonna have a fifteen million dollar renovation, which is basically to make it harder for tour pros. Freshing to hear about a project like this where that wasn't the main focus. It was not geared towards raising the scoring average, specifically tailored to the Tour Championship. Obviously that's a consideration, but they do it. There's a lot of expanding here right, more fairway, bigger greens, more pin locations, and I think it's nice to see golf move in that direction.

00:24:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's something that Andrew Green is really good with talking about member play but also keeping the course relevant enough for professional tournaments. And he works as worked at a lot of courses that host major championships and other high level tournaments. You know, when it comes to east Lake specifically, I think that people should watch out for the seventeenth hole represents a lot of what Andrew Green does well. There's this big kind of trench bunker that cuts up the fairway and kind of splits the fairway into these two sections. There's a conservative section and an aggressive section. The Green is oriented toward the more aggressive section, so you get a reward if you go for the other side of this big trench bunker. Essentially, and I think that whole will get a lot of attention during the telecast and represents a major change from the Reese Jones version of this course. And Reese Jones was the primary architectural influence on Eastlake from the mid nineteen nineties to essentially a few years ago when the club decided to switch to to Andrew Green. I think, though, you know, aside from the specifics of Eastlake that it's worth talking a little bit about Andrew Green himself. He is a really important golf architect right now, and maybe somebody that people don't know a lot about because he's he doesn't do a lot of press necessarily, and he's also just really busy, and so he's always kind of at his projects and doing the work, and so I'm not sure that people have gotten a good opportunity to really get to know him. We've done a couple of podcasts with him. Obviously, we talked to him for this episode. We've done a couple of other episodes with him, We've done some videos with him. But aside from Aside from that, he hasn't been out there much. But if you look at the list of projects that he's done, these are really big time, important courses that we'll see a lot of in the coming years. So he was behind the Inverness renovation. He was behind the renovation of the East Course at Oak Hill, which which recently hosted the PGA Championship. He was behind the Sciota renovation. He redesigned the Blue Course at Congressional Country Club, which was a big transformation, and he recently just finished a renovation of Interlocking. That's just a selection of the courses that he has worked at. He is currently working on more than a dozen projects, and so he's going all over the place and doing this kind of work at a lot of important golf courses, and so I wanted to dive a bit into Andrew Green himself. I wonder if you have any curiosities about him, Joseph, if you have any questions, and we can kind of go from there.

00:27:29
Speaker 4: Absolutely, you're the expert here, so I'd love to just tee you up. But I'd be curious if you could sort of define his overarching philosophy when it comes to architecture that I think that might be a good starting point, just to understand. Like, I think people who listen to this pot are pretty familiar with what somebody like Tom Doak believes about architecture. But I'd be curious how you would define what Andrew Green believes about architecture.

00:27:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Andrew Green is very much at his major projects at the at the projects that have gotten a lot of coverage. A lot of what he is doing is trying to take courses that had been changed for the sake of hosting championships and make them more playable for members, while also preparing them for future major championships, making sure that they don't lose their luster as potential championship venues, and that can be a really tricky tightrope to walk, and he has a few moves that he makes in order to meet this goal. But that's really a lot of what he's doing. He's working at a lot of courses that were designed in the golden age of American golf architecture, so in the nineteen tens, twenties, thirties by Donald Ross. You know, Andrew Green is very much about working at Donald Ross designed clubs. That's a lot of the work that he's done so far. He's become kind of a specialist in that, though he has done other kinds of work as well. But courses that were designed in that era, often by Donald Ross, then renovated by Robert Trent Jones in the nineteen fifties or sixties to prepare those courses for those post World War Two major championships US Opens especially, and then taken over by Ryse Jones. Reyesse Jones often would come in at those courses and kind of take the reins from his father, Robert Trent Jones, and make further changes that were intended to keep the courses relevant for hosting tournaments, and then finally Andrew Green comes in and a big part of what he's doing is trying to yes modernize those courses agonomically, make sure they are ready to continue being venues for modern major championships, but also try to make them more fun to play for members. So a few of the common moves that he makes set a lot of his courses is that he likes to push out the mowing lines on greens to the edges of the green pads. So he's often expanding greens, but he's not necessarily making them easier because he's opening up new pin positions that can be used during tournaments more toward the edges of the green pads, so closer to bunkers, closer to hazards. In expanding the greens, he is allowing for the possibility that there could be some really dangerous pins, So he does that at a lot of the courses that he works on. He believes in penal fairway bunkers, and so if you're in a fairway bunker at a classic course that Andrew Green is renovated, often you're not going to be able to reach the green from the bunker. You know, certainly PGA tour pros can do a lot of things that we don't expect, but Green tries to build fairway bunkers that exact a pretty stern penalty. He likes a certain style of bunker shaping at the especially the Donald Ross courses that he renovates. You'll notice this at east Lake. And if you compare the Eastlake bunkers to say the bunkers that Andrew Green renovated at Inverness or the ones that he did at oak Hill, then you'll see some similarities. They have kind of these angular knobby edges to them. He is he is fine with a lot of irrigated rough. You'll see quite a bit of green ir irrigated rough at these courses that Andrew Green has renovated. He has fairways of varying sizes. I would say at some courses he widens fairways. At others the fairways remain fairly narrow. The fairways at Inverness are pretty narrow, the ones at Oak Hill are not super wide. So he's not somebody who goes in and just widens fairways at every single course, though he does that at some courses. And then finally, the thing that people might notice the most at a course like Eastlake or at oak Kill or Inverness is the extent of tree removal that Andrew Green does. He is very successful at convincing memberships to remove a lot of trees and open up these sitelines across the property allow for more light and air circulation for better agronomy, especially at the Greens. His approach to tree removal, I'm not exactly sure how he does it, but it is kind of amazing how many trees he was able to remove. At Oakhill, for instance, a club that prizes its trees, that considers trees part of its identity. It is oak Kill. They really take that seriously. But even at that club, he was able to remove a lot of trees, and so it's pretty impressive what he does in that area. But those are the basic outlines of Andrew Green's philosophy.

00:32:58
Speaker 4: I would say one thing you've hit on that I would love your reaction to something I've thought a lot about with the evolution of the game from when a lot of famous courses were built one hundred years ago to today. It seems as though I'm oversimplifying, but the way golf courses have developed over time, we need to lengthen them to accommodate for modern length and at the same time narrow them because we want to make sure that they played difficult. But I think the issue with that is that the longer the ball travels, the more the dispersion patterns are actually wider. So if you wanted them to play the same way as they played back when they were designed, at the same time you move the t's back and players are hitting it farther, you'd also want to widen the fairways or push hazards out so that it plays similarly versus just covering up those corridors with rough and so I'm curious. I'd love to see golf land is a constraint, but I'd love to see it go a little bit more that direction and expanding those corridors out, not worrying about the scoring average, but thinking about playability and how it tests golfers. I'm curious Scarrett your reaction to that, and maybe where you think Andrew Green fits within that philosophy or within that evolution of golf courses, because it kind of seems with east Lake that it's a step in that direction. But maybe Oakhill as we saw during the PGA. I mean that very narrow fairways, firm narrow fairways that didn't play particularly well in my opinion, and I think in a lot of other people's opinions where you couldn't even hit the fairways it was often under fifty percent fairway percentage, and that's not really a great test of driving accuracy. So I'm curious what your reaction would be to that story to tell of the development of golf course architecture where Andrew Green fits in.

00:34:49
Speaker 1: I think if Andrew Green had his brothers, that he would widen the fairways at almost all of the courses that he renovates, and part of that is because he does take the historical record seriously. That's something I probably should have mentioned in my rundown of his philosophy that he looks at historical aerials and tries to bring back at least some elements of what the course used to be and is guided and inspired by what those courses were originally. And he's done quite a bit of that at East Lake. It's not a pure straightforward restoration of Donald Ross's design, but he has certainly taken some cues from an aerial from nineteen forty nine that he found that represented aspects of that original course. And so I think when you look at those historical aerials you see much wider fairways on average. Then we tended to get at those same courses in the nineteen nineties and early two thousands, and a major trend in golf architecture, as defined by Tom Doak and Gil Hans and other renovation and restoration architects, is that we should try to recapture the former width of those playing corridors in order to try to re establish the strategy of the holes, to make angles possible, to make it so players had room enough to position themselves to gain an advantage. So where does Andrew Green sit in that well? I think that his philosophy would be that he would want to widen fairways back to their former dimensions at any course that he works at. But he's also guided by the membership at these courses. I don't think at oak Hill and at Inverness to an extent, they were interested in super wide fairways. I think they believed that those narrow fairways guarded by long rough were part of what made them viable major championship venues and of course, you and I would argue with that, would dispute that, but I believe that's what those memberships believed, and so Andrew Green carried that out. When you're a consulting architect at a club, it's like a it's a tricky it's a tricky diplomatic exercise. You push in some areas and you concede in other areas. I think Andrew Green does an amazing job of pushing for tree removal. I think he finds that important that a lot of these courses tend to be overgrown, and one of the biggest things that needs to be done at those courses is to start to take down those trees, because that is much harder and much more expensive than just pushing out mowing lines of fairways. I think what you figure is that, well, if you can push for the tree removal, but you concede a bit on the fair wits, maybe at some point in the future will it be able to get the fairway wits as well. I'm not sure if that's what's in Andrew Green's mind, but that would make sense to me as an approach when you're dealing with a membership that might be a little bit suspicious of what you're doing.

00:38:19
Speaker 4: Yeah, the only not clarifying point, but I think additional context on the widening fairways and how it creates angles that you can plays. A lot of people would push back and say, well, angles don't even matter at the professional level, which which is valid overall to an extent. Right, we've talked about this before. The matter a little bit, not as much as they would if you had longer irons in. I think the point though, that shouldn't get lost is what it means for driving accuracy, right, and when you have fairways that are too narrow and play too firm. We've seen how that can often play out that they're too they play too small for some of the most accurate drivers in the world to actually realize their accuracy advantage. And I think that's a relevant point that I don't think should be lost. I guess s Garrett one maybe not final question. We can go whatever direction you want, but what are your overall We haven't seen the golf course yet, so it's hard to form too strong of an opinion. But as you understood what the vision was heard from him, maybe have looked at some aerials not necessarily need to give it a grade. But what are your overall impressions of this effort.

00:39:23
Speaker 1: I think it looks really good. I think the most interesting thing about this project is how Andrew Green thought through the history of the double green arrangement at east Lake, the two Green arrangement, and incorporated that into his vision for what the greens should look like in the twenty first century. That's the most standout thing I think about this project, and it seems to me that he did a really good job of executing that, of being faithful to the historical record, but obviously also putting his own spin on it. You know, something that Andrew Green does really well is blend his own ideas kind of seamlessly into the pre existing ideas of the course at oak Hill and Inverness. He built new holes there. He built holes that never existed in Donald Ross's time, and those holes, for the most part, fit really well with the rest of those courses. And so I think Green deserves some praise for how well he's able to make everything match. Things don't feel like a hodgepodge, and the greens that at Eastlake look to me like they seem historical. They seem like Donald ross greens. But of course they're Andrew Green creations, because for most of its history Eastlake had that kind of two green system. The one thing that I think might bubble up this week in people's reactions to Eastlake is the question of whether Andrew Green needs to start varying his approach. If you look at the work that he's done at Donald Ross courses, there are some definite similarities, and I think those similarities come through more in photos than they do on the ground. Once you get on the ground at these courses, they are distinct from each other. East Lake does not feel like Inverness. Inverness does not feel like oak Hill. These courses have unique things about them that you discover when you play them, when you actually walk them, when you take photographs of them, A lot of what you'll see is that bunker style, which is fairly similar from Inverness to Oak Hill to Eastlake, and the green design style, the way those edges are pushed out, and the way they kind of have this more squared off shape. It's not really squared off, but I think people will know what I mean when they see them. So there are definitely some aesthetic, some hilarities across the courses that Andrew Green has done these big projects at, and so there's gonna be a question as to whether he's homogenizing these courses and whether it's time for him to start changing his approach. I think there'll be a couple of things that get in the way of that. One is that the memberships of these clubs sometimes explicitly ask for bunkers in the style of the ones at Inverness. They say, I like those ones over there, can you do something like that for us here? That happened at East Like Actually, they explicitly requested bunkers in the style of the ones at Inverness. I think that will continue to happen. Architects will be asked to do what makes them successful elsewhere. What I think these clubs should start doing, though, is pushing for things that are unique to their terrain, to their history, and to their design, because I think if they start asking for those things instead of asking for something that was done elsewhere, that will start to see more varied work out of architects like Andrew Green, like Gil Hants, like other architects who do a lot of these renovation projects. Tyler Ray. If clubs start to do that and start to focus more on what makes them unique. I think that they'll get different work out of these architects, so I hope that that starts happening going forward. But I do want to acknowledge that a lot of Andrew Green's work in the past few years shows some similarities, especially at the Donald Ross courses that he has done these projects at, and that could start to be a bit of a concern. I understand why the courses are starting to look kind of similar to each other, and I do think that if you actually get on the ground at a lot of these places that they do feel different. And I think that all the course have definitely improved from what they were before. But that is a topic, a question that I think needs to be broached in the years going forward, as Andrew Green starts to get more and more projects. Does that make sense?

00:44:16
Speaker 4: It makes sense, And I don't want to put you on the spot if you don't know the answer to this. But is that a modern question? Is that a new question or is that a similar question that Donald Ross himself would have been dealing with in the style of his own bunkering. I mean to you, were they all much more unique to their own property then and now they look much more homogenized. Where would you stand on something like that.

00:44:39
Speaker 1: Well, well, Donald Ross is kind of funny in this way, and this is part of the reason that restoring Donald Ross features is really tricky and sometimes calls for some creativity on the part of the restoration architect. Donald Ross's style wasn't really consistent. It wasn't like Alister Mackenzie or even Harry Colt or Perry Maxwell, where there was a definite esthetic signature. Those architects weren't doing the same thing from course to course. They were adapting to each piece of land. But you could kind of tell what their style was from course to course, and they took esthetics very seriously. They took the execution of their shapes, of their bunkers and their green contouring. They were really specific about those things. Donald Ross wasn't always like that, in part because he didn't always spend a lot of time on site at his courses. He was building a lot of different courses and so some of his projects received more of his attention than others. But what Donald Ross did have was a group of very capable associates who were on the ground executing the features that he designed, and if you were to trace the work of those associates, you would see that some of their style made their way into Donald Ross's courses. And so that's something that happened with Donald Ross. But you could argue that certain projects didn't really represent a great Donald Ross style, and so you might as well try to do something a little bit more interesting with it. There would be different approaches basically to restoring Donald Ross. You could say, let me look at this historical photo and try to replicate that as closely as I possibly can at this specific course, no matter who built it, no matter which associate of Donald Ross was most responsible for this feature, I'm going to try to restore that because that's what was on the ground. Or you can take the approach of Donald Ross did something more interesting and better at this other course, and so I'm going to import that idea into this course and see what comes of it, because this might represent more what Ross would have done if he had taken more responsibility for this specific project. So there are a lot of different approaches that you can take with with Ross restorations. It's not always strict. There's not one formula that works for every Donald Ross project, and so architects kind of have to come up with their own way of doing things. I will say that Andrew Green has worked at a lot of Parkland Donald Ross courses. That's most of the work that he has done, and it seems like Andrew Green has an idea of what the Parkland Donald Ross style is. If he were to work at a North Carolina Sandhills Donald Ross course, I very much doubt that Andrew Green would do something like he did at east Lake or Inverness. I am sure that he would try to adapt his style of restoration to what those courses were, but he just hasn't worked there as much. That's been Kyle Franz and Corn Crenshaw doing most of that work in the sand Hills. So Donald Ross is a complex subject and very fun to discuss, but certainly we've seen a number of different approaches work with Ross. There's not one way to do it that is the best. All right, Joseph, Let's get into some player storylines going into the Tour Championship. Moving on from the golf course itself, let's talk about a couple of players who might be who might be interesting going into the net Championship. That wraps up the PGA Tour season. Who's your first player that you're looking out for.

00:48:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the biggest storylines is are people excited about this tournament or not. It feels like a really important storyline of the success of what the PGA Tour has done recently. So that's an overarching storyline. In terms of players specific stories. To me, what feels like the biggest story is Scotti Scheffler Xander Shaffley, that duel that's happened all year where they're pretty clearly the two best golfers in the world in twenty twenty four and Scotty's played terribly at east Lake relative to his expectations. Xander, on the other hand, has been much much better at east Lake than Scotty Scheffler in the Scotty's played this event every year since twenty twenty in those sixteen rounds that they've overlapped. Because both Xander and Scotty have played sixteen rounds since twenty twenty, Shoffley's won eleven of those. He beat Scotty by eighteen last year alone, Like he's just been way better on this golf course, which opens up a lot of questions, right when you have the season ending championship at the same course every year and it's an achilles heel for one player, Like, what does that mean? How does that impact the historical record in hosting what's Golf's super Bowl as it's been referred to being sarcastic, but uh, it's hosted at the same place every year, and I think it being an achilles heel for Scotty Scheffler is a very interesting story. He just hasn't played very well there, so he starts with the lead. But whether or not he can actually keep that lead, we'll see. It's not been of course he's done well.

00:50:15
Speaker 1: Well. Is that going to be different now that the course is different?

00:50:18
Speaker 4: Maybe? I don't think it's I'm sure that that will be the narrative either way. Right, like now Scotty's better on it, now Scotty's worse on it.

00:50:27
Speaker 1: But worse on it?

00:50:30
Speaker 3: Right?

00:50:31
Speaker 1: Has the Andrew green taken away? Is Andrew's superpower or edge at at East Lake?

00:50:35
Speaker 4: I think the putting will maybe be the biggest part of that because a lot of the greens are much different and Scotty's lost strokes putting every single time he's played at East Lake Scotti. Schefler's not a great putter, so it's not shocking to see him lose strokes putting four times or in four years at a particular golf course. But I think that's one thing to keep in mind, is can he get by a little bit more. But overall, like when we're talking about this renovation, I expect a lot of the same golfers to have success here, Like Rory's always done well here, Xander Schoffley's always done well here. I don't think you're going to see a drastic change. This golf course is pretty different from a layout perspective, but overall, in terms of what skills at tests, I think it's going to be pretty similar.

00:51:16
Speaker 1: Okay, another player storyline, what are you What are you looking for? Yeah?

00:51:20
Speaker 4: I think this kind of more or less a two part story. But Hideki Matsuyama's resurgence this year is notable, and I mean he's he won a medal at the Olympics, but he won at Riviera this year and then he won the first playoff event. He starts in third in the net Championship. He's three back of Scottie, but I think what's notable about Hideki is he withdrew last week with a back injury, and his health has been a factor over the past few years. The overarching question I have is are we just going to start seeing more injuries in golf and what does that mean. It's not necessarily a championship specific storyline, but there have been a lot of injuries in golf this year. They're not publicly reported always. Golf doesn't have an injury report that goes out every week, but like Matt Fitzpatrick's dealt with a thumb injury, Sahith Thagala has had an injury. Christian Bezeidenhout, who's done some speed training this year, He's been injured at periods this year. Had Deki's been dealing with injuries. I think something to consider as ball speeds continue to increase on the PGA Tour is what does that mean for injuries. Hedeki Matsuyama is a good use case, even Scotty. Scotty's dealt with some injuries this year. Attributing those all to speed chases is probably not accurate, but I think that's something to monitor and maybe golf needs to consider getting out ahead of that. A little bit. There might be some ways that you could incentivize golfers to not go at it full speed with every swing. I don't know the answer to that, but I would be curious if you shrunk driver heads and made them less forgiving, would players prioritize finding the center of the face a little bit and not swing as hard. I actually don't know the answer to that, but I think it's something worth looking into.

00:53:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the first thing that comes to mind for me. I'm not sure what else would do it. I don't think you can do anything with a golf course necessarily that would incentivize players to not swing hard. They're going to go for it pretty much everywhere. You could have every PGA Tour event at a course like Harbortown, I suppose, but that would get a little bit repetitive. And it's a difficult issue, and I think it is something that they should take seriously. But considering that the lack of movement on stuff like pace of play, it just doesn't seem like maybe the tours of the world are sort of prepared to take on an issue that complex. But does seem like careers are getting shorter, players are spending more time injured. There could be a number of causes for that, but it would be reasonable to assume the players swinging out of their shoes way more, contorting themselves way more is a contributing factor to that trend.

00:54:10
Speaker 4: I think the fundamental question there, Garrett, is does do you find the center of the club face at a much study the relationship between swing speed and finding the center of the club face, Because if you shrunk the driver heads but you didn't find the center of the club face at a significantly different rate by swinging hard, they'd still swing hard. That would not solve it. So I think that's what you need to look into to see what controls you could put into plays that would actually incentivize golfers to swing less hard. I think that's the question there.

00:54:41
Speaker 1: All right. Do you have a third and last player storyline?

00:54:45
Speaker 4: I think a minor one would be President's Cup implications. I don't know how much people are excited for the President's Cup This year could be a little bit lopsided, but there are golfers like Billy horschel Akha Batiya who are trying to qualify for the US on the US side, and then other golfers like Taylor Pendrif on the international side who are trying to qualify. So I think that's a storyline to keep in mind that who ends up getting those captain's picks. If this were going to be a more competitive President's Cup, then I think those storylines would be more compelling. So famous last words, that Team USA might blow him out, But right now it does look like the talent is quite lopsided, so that would be a minor storyline. Like somebody like ak she Batilla's probably going to be on the team. Do you give somebody like Nick Dunlap even a consideration and try to get him some experience, Like I think some of those conversations will get underweight. Dunlap's not playing this week, but those other three names I mentioned are all right.

00:55:45
Speaker 1: Do you have any wrap up thoughts on the format of the Tour Championship talking about player storylines going in anybody who's starting at the back of the pack, it's kind of hard to talk about them because they don't really have much of a chance. It's kind of a strange tournament with this staggered start. We're several years into it at this point. I'm not sure it has generated much affection among fans or among players. Where are we at with the tour championship format? What do you think needs to change? Do you think there's any hope that it's going to change.

00:56:28
Speaker 4: Look, I think the format's awful. We've talked about this many times on this pod, so I don't want to just repeat myself, but I think it's useful to analyze or to get into the anatomy of a championship a little bit, to not just say it's awful for the sake of saying it, but actually break down maybe a little bit of why. And I know we've done this before to an extent, But what people have been saying and I agree with, is it's kind of in the middle of being a season long race and being a true playoff, and by doing the middle road it accomplishes neither. I think what's difficult about golf compared to other sports is in other sports, your season long success gives you an advantage in the playoffs. Right, So home court advantage is massive in the NFL and the NBA in all sports, there's not a great equivalent of a home field advantage in professional golf outside of maybe giving them some strokes to start with, so I can understand how he sort of ended up in this position. I think on the point of it's in the middle between a season long race and a true playoff. Rory McElroy is a good example where he finished almost dead last in the first playoff event and he still has a chance to win. He's starting in sixth this week. In a true playoff format, he wouldn't still be playing. So I think those are like some of the symptoms here of a problem if you want to consider it a problem. And I know I've given this solution before, but that's to me is why this lends itself if you want to do a playoff, it lends itself very well to something like a twelve person match play where four of the players get a buy and that kind of represents the home field advantage where they're playing less that week and they don't have an opportunity opportunity to get knocked out in the first little wave there of the first wave of matches. So I think that kind of solves some of the problems of giving an inherent advantage to the player who's had more success leading up to that point. But you cannot start a championship at different strokes, right, Like you play the Super Bowl on a neutral field zero zero, you don't start at three to nothing. So that to me is the clear solution. I would be very open to hearing from other people on what they think the solution would be that satisfies some of those conditions, but I don't think you can ever get to a place where you start with different strokes. And again, another thing I'd call out as a problem is if Scotti, Scheffler, or more realistically Hideki Matsuyama, like if they withdraw with an injury, it looks like they finished thirtieth this year on the on the final standings, and that's just not representative of what the playoff should look like. So I'm retrotting a lot of points there that we've talked about before, but I still think it's been a failure. And those are some of the reasons. Why where do you land, Garrett Well?

00:59:13
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that the reason we've gotten here, in this in between space that you're talking about between a true playoff and a season long championship, the reason we've gotten here is that the PGA tour or any tour around the world really does not want to do a true playoff because that raises the possibility of one of the most bankable stars being knocked out early on and not being on television, not being available in the late stages of the playoff. That's the nightmare scenario for them. And I think part of this is holdover from the Tiger Woods Are era, when you know, we really didn't want Tiger, under any circumstances, not to be on TV on Sunday. That was a big part of the PGA Tour's job during that era was to make sure that Tiger was there when he was playing the tournament on the final day in some form or fashion. And I think that's why part of why the PGA Tour has been so willing to abandon cuts recently because Cuts created a problem for them. It created that possibility that Roy McElroy or Jordan Speith wouldn't be on TV on the weekend. And so Golf is never going to have the PGA Tour at least is never going to have a true playoff. Maybe Live will because they've got the team format and that allows them to do a number of things that keep those big players in the mix throughout the tournament, but the PGA Tour as currently constituted is just not going to go for an actual playoff, and so I think the emphasis has to go back to the season long championship. I'm not sure how interested I'll ever be in the PGA Tour season long Championship. Maybe if it were better constructed, I would be more invested in it. But one thing I am pretty invested in is the Tour Championship. Even though this is not that old of an event as of the late nineties and early two thousands, I found it to be a pretty important and exciting event. And the thing that's really valuable in professional golf is great events. The Majors are obviously extraordinarily valuable. The Ryder Cup, even the President's Cup, even the LA Open formerly known as the LA Open, the tournament at Riviera Bayhill Memorial, those are valuable franchises. For the PGA Tour and for golf, the Tour Championship, by all rights should be that, especially now that they have a much improved venue. So I think the focus should really go back to what's good for the Tour Championship. How can we make the Tour Championship as great as possible, and clearly the answer to that question is not a staggered start. That's not how you make the Tour Championship as great as possible. So I'd like the emphasis to go back there. And for me, what that would mean would be just eliminate the playoffs. I know that that's never going to happen. They have the FedEx money, They're going to have this playoffs thing. They're going to want those three events at the end of the season that they call a playoffs and that they can sell to a sponsor. And so this is a naive suggestion, but I would really just like the playoffs to go away and for the Tour Championship to remain. Maybe make the BMW Championship a thing again, you know, reconnect it to the past of the Western Open and try to make that a great tournament. I think what the PGA Tour should be doing is trying to make tournaments great, trying to create tournaments that feel big. I didn't even mention the Players Championship before, but the Players Championship is doing great. It's a great addition of the Players Championship earlier this year. That tournament is in good condition, is very valuable to the PGA Tour, and the Tour championship has really struggled in this era of the new FedEx Cup playoffs, and I think that that's a big loss from the PGA Tour's perspective and that they need to go back to figuring out a good tour championship. Does that make sense?

01:03:32
Speaker 4: It makes sense if you just abandoned the playoffs and capped everything off of the Tour Championship, you would wind up back in the position where the winner of the Tour Championship is not necessarily the season long winner, which the Tour has worked pretty desperately to erase with this new format. So maybe you're right, though maybe that is I'm.

01:03:52
Speaker 1: Okay with that. I don't think that's as big of a problem as the as the Tour seem to think it was, And that's the case with any season long championship. That one championship doesn't. I mean sometimes it ends five races from the end. Maybe that's not ideal, but I just don't think it's that big of a problem.

01:04:08
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think if you want it to be exciting, I know I've said this a million times, but match plays the solution there and play out every spot, because I think the fallacy of what the Tour has done is say, well, we like Scotty can win by ten this week, right, and that's not exciting either. So they haven't guaranteed themselves excitement with this format either. So I just don't like where it is right now. I don't think it's a disaster, and I'll give the Tour credit for well, I do think it's a disaster, but I'll give the Tour credit for adjusting the points system so that we have a stronger thirty this year, like it is a better representation of who's played well this year, So some things have moved in the right direction. I just think they need to get this final piece right in creating a Tour Championship that people actually want to watch. It'll have some excitement this year with Scotty and Xander going back and forth a little bit, and if anybody else gets in the mix. But I kind of want Scotty to win by twelve and just to expose some of the flaws in the thinking with this tournament.

01:05:03
Speaker 1: All right, Joseph, let's get to our final segment recommendations. What are you recommending this week?

01:05:10
Speaker 4: We've been talking about Donald Ross, so I'm gonna recommend a golf course slash trip. I will recommend Bass River Golf Course in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, and Cape Cod was in that area this past weekend and it's just a delightful place to be at the end of the summer. That golf course is really cool, publicly accessible, so I think it's worth making a trip to that area of the country of America. Sometime around this time of year, did a whale watch. Was an incredible few days, great weather, and that's a really cool golf course that you can play and check off the list of good Donald Ross. So I'll recommend Bass River, good experience.

01:05:50
Speaker 1: Lots of fun courses on Cape Cod. Do you have favorites. I haven't been there much, but I haven't played Cape Cod Country Club, which I've heard really good things about. I have previously been to Highland Links I believe it's called, which is kind of way way out there, but beautiful golf course that is one of America's very few true links golf courses according to the kind of traditional definition of the terrain that sits on kind of real links land. And there's lots of great stuff out there, and obviously it's just a fun place to go. All right, I'm making kind of a guilty pleasure recommendation out of left field. I want to recommend the Tornado Chasers series. This is an online series documentary episodes. There are two seasons of them. It was funded by a Kickstarter campaign and it debuted online, but they're now housed on the YouTube channel of a storm chaser named Reed Timmer is a meteorologist and a storm chaser and quite a character. But the Tornado Chasers episodes that they made just independently are really high quality documentary storytelling, I think, at least compared to your usual like sort of Weather Channel documentary shows or Discovery Channel documentary shows, which read Timers has also featured on before. He was earlier a member of the cast on one of those shows. And they're edited kind of in that, you know, really fast like loud music cues kind of way. The Tornado Chaser series is more relaxed in its approach to storytelling. And I just you know, I'm sort of a closet fan of the Twisters movies, of the original Twister movie and the recent one that came out. I like to imagine that in another life I would have studied meteorology and ended up like chasing tornadoes across Oklahoma and Kansas. But I know that that probably never would have happened in any version of my life. But I just kind of like living in that world. And the Tornado Chaser series is a good document of what chasing tornadoes is kind of like. And they're just amazing to look at these these tornadoes and obviously very dangerous. So tornado chasers, that's my random recommendation for the day.

01:08:23
Speaker 4: Yeah, but has modern equipment made discovering tornadoes too easy? Garrett? Do they need to roll back the Doppler radar.

01:08:31
Speaker 1: Or roll back the tank like cars that they're chasing tornadoes in. Instead of chasing them in a Chevy Impollo or something, they're now chasing them in like these these civilian tanks. Basically, I think it's still very scary. If anything, the technology should be better that these storm chasers are using, because it seems to me that they're doing something that is extremely dangerous and unwise. So I want them to, you know, arguably be even safer. So no rollback for the tornado chasers?

01:09:05
Speaker 4: Fair enough?

01:09:06
Speaker 1: Okay, On that note, Joseph, let's finish this episode. Thanks for being on the pod, Thanks for having me. This episode of the Frida Egg Golf Podcast was produced by PJ. Clark. If you would like to do something really simple that helps Friday Egg, go to pro shop dot Thefrida Egg dot com and just see what we have there. We have a lot of appealing merchandise and apparel. I think if you just go to pro shop dot the fridagg dot com that you'll see something that you like, and if you choose to buy one of these items, that would be a big thing for Frida Egg Golf. Thank you for listening and we'll be back again soon with another episode.