Golf Architecture 101: Fairness

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Should fairness be considered an important thing in golf course design. That's what I'm talking about today with PJ Clark in this installment of our Golf Architecture one oh one series. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf all right, PJ, welcome back to the pod.

00:00:25
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

00:00:26
Speaker 3: I love getting into the hot button issues of today. The number one hot topic on the PGA Tour on a weekly basis fairness and how do we achieve it.

00:00:36
Speaker 1: I'm ready to get listen. Some people say designing golf is too controversial. I say, I want all the smoke. I want this podcast to be on the forefront.

00:00:46
Speaker 3: Finger on the pulse here. I mean, this is the pulse of humanity today. Everything's got to be fair and down the middle.

00:00:52
Speaker 1: So absolutely yeah. Well, to start off, would you consider yourself a member of the fairness?

00:01:02
Speaker 3: I think, like in a vacuum, probably like I.

00:01:05
Speaker 2: I I think I'm too.

00:01:07
Speaker 3: My my logical brain wants to be rewarded for good shots and penalized for bad shots. I I don't want to say I disagree with a lot of what Scotty commonly says. As I as I look up the ladder to my chief of the fair police here. But I I understand the the arguments against it, and that having some aspect of luck in a game of chance is h I mean, it's part of the game, right, That's that's why it's not played on a simulator, even though I guess now we do have a simulator Golf League.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: It seems like you already have pieces of the upcoming lesson lodged in your brain, probably because you've sat in on many discussions between Andy and Brendan on the shotgun start about fairness and golf course design and Scotty Shuffler's comments on it. You know, the number one player in the world right now seems positively obsessed with the idea of fairness, although he doesn't He's not like Terrel Hatton, you know, whereas Hatton gets extremely angry at unfair elements in golf courses, even though he is a great player at the old course, Terrel Hatton always baffles me. It's like he's he's best at doing what he hates, which I guess is a sort of curse and and kind of maybe explains his his you know, a touchy personality, but it's not.

00:02:35
Speaker 3: A major championship until Terrell Haddon throws a tag from on a golf hole that he doesn't like. It's kind of like a badge of honor these days.

00:02:43
Speaker 1: It's a it's a tradition at this point. But in any case, fairness does commonly come up in discussions of professional golf right now, and it's one of those areas where I think golf are architecture nerds and people who just follow the pro tours and that's it. It's one of those areas where they cross over and kind of maybe end up in discussion with each other. And I think there are very different perspectives on both sides of that divide, which is why I think this topic is really interesting. So why don't we start off with the basic question here? What do you think it means for a golf course to be fair?

00:03:28
Speaker 3: I think good shots should be rewarded with either, you know, kicks down the fairway or short lies or good lies or angles into the green. We've talked about angles plenty on this series so far. But I also think missus should be penalized. Now, I think where I'm going to get myself into trouble is when you gave me this prompt to think about. I think I kind of agree with the Scotty line of thinking logically that it should be based on how bad your miss is. It should further misses should be further penalized than closer misses, if that makes sense, the penalty, the penalty should be exponential to how bad the shot is.

00:04:17
Speaker 1: This is something that a lot of pros believe and that actually our colleague, Joseph Lamangna talks about a lot. Joseph gets frustrated by courses where wide misses are not as penalized as or or you know, or just as penalized as narrow misses. Right and Tory Pines often comes up as an example of this kind of golf course where it doesn't matter if you miss the fairway by five yards or by fifty yards. It's going to be a similar situation because what you have out there is just a lot of green, irrigated rough, and once you're off the fairway, it just doesn't really matter or that much where you are in that rough. And that, in Joseph's mind, as someone who analyzes professional tournament courses, is frustrating and an indication of ineffective tournament course design. I'm gonna try to introduce some complexity to that idea in this podcast maybe and bring up some challenges to it. But it certainly stands to reason, right, it seems like a reasonable proposal that that should be how we go about testing golfers.

00:05:35
Speaker 3: I just I I it doesn't make sense that if you missed a fairway by five yards and you missed a fairway by fifty yards that even I mean at some of these courses. We were looking at it when we were at Oakmont, Like if you blew it way left on one into where the galleries were, you had the trampled down rough that you could hit off of pretty easily.

00:05:55
Speaker 2: Like that, just that doesn't make sense that.

00:06:00
Speaker 3: You should be quote unquote rewarded for a worst shot, you know what I mean?

00:06:06
Speaker 1: M Yeah, And it's an issue of fairness. This is the essence of what we're talking about when we talk about fairness and golf course design. And this kind of stuff drives professionals especially crazy because their whole life is geared toward executing golf shots well, hitting the ball well. They study and they bleed for their entire lives to do that. Thing well, and when they show up at a golf course where that doesn't give them a significant advantage, or somebody who hasn't worked as hard and who doesn't hit the ball as well is ending up in similar or better positions than them, then that's going to be frustrating. This is something that Scotti Scheffler has talked about. It's an understandable frustration because if that's if that's your life, then then you then you wanted to pay off and and so that seems to be the basis from which a lot of pro golfers criticize the unfairness of golf courses. It defies the very thing that they have worked hard to do. So kind of understandable.

00:07:20
Speaker 3: I think it makes sense, right if you're if you're aiming small to miss small, and you you do miss mall. Unfortunately, obviously no one is just blatantly trying to blow it in the rough. I mean, at some points I guess you are, but that's a different discussion.

00:07:37
Speaker 2: I would probably say with the course set up.

00:07:39
Speaker 3: But if you're aiming small and miss mall and you miss mall versus some guy that completely goes off the radar and he ends up at a better spot than you. I I I understand a level of frustration that would come with that, that would that would piss me off for sure.

00:07:56
Speaker 1: Okay, So a couple of related ideas to this would be that fair golf courses are generally understood by the fairness police primarily to be the golf courses where the elements of randomness and luck are kept to a minimum. So it's not just golf courses are fair if they reward good shots and penalize bad shots. They're they're fair if there is a if if randomness is kind of kept out of it, because randomness is one of those things that can end up not rewarding good shots or not punishing poor shots. Right, So randomness and luck are kind of opposed to these ideas that we're talking about.

00:08:41
Speaker 3: I think that's where you kind of lose me because I again, like it's an outdoor sport. There are bumps, there are there are bruises, there are.

00:08:49
Speaker 2: Mounds in the fair way.

00:08:50
Speaker 3: You're gonna get a bad kick, Like this is not it's an outdoor sport. Like That's that would be my counter argument to that is that like, yeah, you can, you can draw it up correctly, and I do. I would argue that the difference between five and fifty yards off the fairway should be different in a vacuum, but you can't.

00:09:10
Speaker 2: The randomness within.

00:09:12
Speaker 3: That pocket five yards off the fairway, I think should exist and is fair to exist, because again it's an outdoor sport.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, then what about fairness in the middle of a fairway?

00:09:26
Speaker 3: Yeah? Right, I mean you can get a bad kick, you can land in a divot like That's again, this is like part of That's that to me is part of the game more than this course is not set up. Well, if that makes if that if that's a cohesive argument to you, well.

00:09:45
Speaker 1: It's it's uh maybe exactly the definition of an uncohesive argument. There's a contradiction here, isn't there. I'm not saying that it's wrong, but there's a contradiction here saying we want good shots to be rewarded and bad shots to be punished. But but some element of randomness and luck is okay. Well, if you accept some element of randomness and luck, I guess the first question is how much of that? And the second question is, well, if we're accepting that, then you have to accept that if somebody, if two players hit the exact same drive, they might end up in completely different positions, whether they're on the fairway or off the fairway. Even if you limit the randomness and luck to just off the fairway, say two players hit it to exactly the same place, Well, if that area is random and chancy, then they might end up in completely different situations.

00:10:40
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:10:41
Speaker 3: I mean my counter argument to that would be, just hit the fairway. That's what we're all trying to do, right, Like you could just that's kind of the get out of jail free card here is like, oh, you don't if you don't like the wiregrass at Pinehurst last year, Scott, he just hit the fairways man like that. It's kind of it's what we're all trying to do here at the end of the day. But I think where I understand the fair police argument is that it is not the penalties I feel like sometimes are.

00:11:14
Speaker 2: Not proportional to a miss. But I think.

00:11:20
Speaker 3: There is an element of randomness that in and outdoor sport is completely agreeable. I mean, you look at it at other sports like baseball. Every ballpark has different dimensions. You hit a ball that's going to be out at Yankee Stadium. That's a fly ball in somebody else's field. Like that's normal, Like, that's part of sports. That's part of the game. But I do think on a mis hit or on a miss there should be greater penalties based on how bad it actually is.

00:11:52
Speaker 1: Baseball is a good example because the field in baseball is to a degree very standardized, more so than a golf course. And baseball you have the same dimensions of the diamond. But where the differences come in is that outfield wall basically, and the side of the overall size of the ballpark bounces off of the wall. Sometimes bounces off of the wall at a at a baseball stadium are are very chancy and introduce an element of luck into the game that might not be there if the fields were completely standardized and had all the same dimensions and all the same you know, structures around them. But so baseball does kind of welcome in that element of randomness, and golf, I would argue, let's in more. Yeah, and there's And so that is where the complexity and difficulty of this discussion arrives, you know, because we have to ask how much of this randomness are we willing to admit.

00:13:08
Speaker 3: Well, even it's not even a it doesn't even have to be a golf course. Then when you're thinking about tournament golf, like in baseball, everybody is hitting in the same two and a half to three hour window in the same stadium. But in golf, you're playing, you know, six hours after somebody. The wind could change, the weather could change, it could be completely different. You're not playing the same you're playing the same course on the ground, but you're not playing the same course as guys that went out in the morning or in the afternoon based on what wave you are, whereas in baseball even you're more constrained, like everybody's playing at the same time in that given matchup versus in a tournament, you are completely at the whim of whatever time comes out of the USGA's lottery ball machine.

00:13:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, and golf is an individual sport, whereas baseball is, you know, one team against another. I think that in an individual sport, there's more room for those individuals to claim unfairness or that they didn't get they didn't get a proper shake in the proceedings. And so yeah, golf, golf definitely sets itself up to these these situations where people might might perceive some unfairness, and that, to me, that's part of what makes the game so interesting. But I want to touch on a couple other factors that I think sometimes lead people to say that a golf course is unfair. One has to do with categories of par because I get the sense that many players really hate when a par three can't easily be reached in one shot or a par four can't easily be reached in two shots. They believe that a you know, some kind of decent strike of the ball should reliably yield chance at a two put par. And they object to holes that push at the boundary of a higher par category. So they'll object to a par four that maybe kind of is almost a par five, or object to a par three that's almost a par four. Now moving in the other direction, they don't tend to complain if there's a par four that's almost a par three. And and so I think that this complaint about golf courses tends to be a little more easily dismissed. I don't think this is a matter of fairness. I think it's a matter of people's perception of par categories.

00:15:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, everybody wants the red numbers right, they don't.

00:15:40
Speaker 2: They don't like it. They don't like it when you make.

00:15:43
Speaker 1: It seems to be more about ego than than actually about the golf course, you know.

00:15:48
Speaker 3: I think I think if every if it was just you know, get a if the goal was which the goal is, but if it was framed as get around in as few shots as possible compared to everybody else, I feel like people would have less problems with maybe that kind of stuff.

00:16:03
Speaker 1: And then the last area where I think people sometimes object to golf courses as unfair would be just when they see unexpected things, like when they see elements of a golf course that they're not used to seeing. So this might be a bunker in the middle of a fair way that's unfair, you know, or a blind shot that's unfair. But the reason those things might be perceived as unfair, I don't think is that they're inherently unfair. It's more that they're just unexpected and unusual.

00:16:36
Speaker 3: So from that standpoint of like a center line bunker or something crazy, you could even like, I mean, Andy talked a lot about it at Oakmont with the setup and the rough like where is the line to you, golf courses are between gimmick and fair because like I feel like, like you know, the Maya Cova Cave bunker, like that's just a gimmick, right like that that's there, everybody knows it's there. It's not really a matter of fair or not. It's just like that's just I feel like if it's there, there is a line that maybe crosses it. Maybe the rough at Oakmont could arguably cross it. Whereas like, it's not a question of fair anymore. This is just like it's a joke, gimmick of a setup.

00:17:24
Speaker 1: Right at Oakmont, the rough started to seem to some people to be almost a gimmick, and I think it probably was. But I was somewhat okay with it because the history, like the deep history of that course is very based on this idea that any shot off the fairway should be very severely punished. That was baked in to the identity of the course from the beginning. And so I don't think that justifies everything in a golf course design. You can't just go crazy just because somebody one hundred and twenty years ago I thought it was a good idea. But if it does have some sort of tradition and link to the identity of a golf course, then I tend to be more okay with it. I tend to also be more okay with it if a feature is based on some kind of natural, pre existing land form, and so actually, the cave bunker at my Acoba, I mean that's a natural land form, right, Yeah, I don't know, I mean it's not. I think the cave bunker at my Acoba is almost like a tourist attraction as opposed to a real golf course feature, because it doesn't seem to me to be all that much in play, even I might be wrong about that, but it just seems to be there for people to take photos of it, and so that's I guess, a little bit silly. But this is a great question, though, and I don't have an easy answer to it. In fact, this is like another episode of the podcast in and of itself what constitutes a gimmick in golf course design, because I don't know, Like when when people first saw the island green at TPC Sawgrass, it must have seemed kind of gimmicky because it was so unusual and so obviously constructed, Like there's no there's no way anybody could look at that and think, oh, well, Pete Die just found that there.

00:19:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was just there.

00:19:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. But now we're so used to it that it doesn't seem as gimmicky. So I think what we perceive to be a gimmick. It goes back to this issue of what I was talking about earlier, what we expect to see on a golf course and what we don't expect to see, And you know, architects have to work with those perceptions a little bit. They you know, if they introduced too many things that people would consider a gimmick, too many unexpected things into a golf course, then they can't be surprised when people regard it as gimmicky. But they can also challenge people, push against their expectations and occasionally introduce things that might be accused of gimme degree but have a certain purpose and philosophy behind them, and then eventually, maybe down the line, years down the line, those features will be accepted as less gimmicky and more familiar. This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by the USGA Green Section. Now you've probably heard about the USGA's data collection tools. The GS three ball and the new USGA Moisture Meter. I've talked about both of those tools on past episodes of Designing Golf. Paired with the USGA's Deacon Course Management System, these tools collect data and create digital records that give you insights into the performance of your playing surfaces. But what makes these tools work even harder for you is the person that comes with every purchase, your Customer's Success Agronomist or CSA. The CSA not only gives tech support and product education, but can also assist in using this technology to better understand and improve your agronomic plan. Meet Brian Powell, the USGA Customer Success Agronomist with over thirty years of experience in the industry. Brian is the director of Gronomy at Old Chatham Golf Club and a past president of the Carolina's Golf Course Superintendent's Association, and he has served on many boards, panels and task forces. Brian is just part of the USGA support that you get with the Deacon Management System and the USGA Green Section's data collection tools. So check out what the USGA Green Section is offering. A lot of great stuff. All right, let's get back to the episode so, uh, let's go on to talking about a few specific features that might be deemed unfair in certain players' minds. This was the other part of the prompt that I gave you yesterday. What are specific features that that you would consider or that just people might consider unfair on a golf course. Let's get specific.

00:22:26
Speaker 2: Well, number number one thing they've popped into my head.

00:22:29
Speaker 3: And not to sound like a lovely Twitter account known as us golf Facts when I say this, but I do think there is something to the idea of maybe pin positioning or or even bunker positioning or penalty positioning, however you want to phrase it, that you're only impacting Uh, you know a player of one handiness or a player that only plays one type of shot. If you're putting all of the penalty or bunkers or hazards in one side of the course, I feel like having a disparity relatively even placing of pins and everything is probably the easiest way to get something fair. So if you have a course where you don't have that many green locations and every pin is tucked to the right side, are you, you know, discourinated against somebody that plays a draw?

00:23:25
Speaker 1: Are you are you after Patrick and Justin Reid? Are you should you be sued? Should should should the claiman send you a season desist?

00:23:33
Speaker 3: I don't want to go there, but ironically enough, it was the first thing that I thought of that, like, yeah, I could see how somebody could get really angry about that if that was a repeated issue for them.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: Mm hmm, yeah, this is this is a good point. What rationale is there to put pins in different places on a green? If not fairness and equity to all golfers playing the course? Why would you do that if it were not for this concept of fairness? So I think that's that's a really good example, and let's let's put that in, put that in the knapsack, and what others do you have?

00:24:11
Speaker 2: Uh?

00:24:12
Speaker 3: Buckers was was my second one on more again, are you putting them on the front of every green versus the backside of every green? Like? Where where are the bunkers placed? I feel like, is in my mind are you giving this is maybe not a PGA Tour sentiment, but for a normal player, are you giving them the opportunity to use the ground and run it up to a green? Versus is every green guarded in the front by bunkers, so that you have to go in the air and you're not playing the ball on the ground. Again, as we've gone over as was originally intended by this game, some some would argue, so that was another one to me, And then I kind of just thought maybe penalty areas like the overdoing of water specifically, I feel like is probably a good one to point out as somebody that lives on Long Island, where there's a lot of water on a lot of golf courses, I feel like this is just it's kind of stupid.

00:25:15
Speaker 1: Listen, if you if you ever end up in Florida, and many many people who grow up in Long Island do eventually end up in Florida, you'll you'll find even more.

00:25:23
Speaker 2: Of that exactly.

00:25:25
Speaker 3: So I feel like the use of hazard's penalties, however you want to say it, Are you overdoing it? Is it not so much not random, but is it just borderline unplayable? I mean, you look at some of the holes that that we do undesigned disasters, where it's just like, what is the point of any of this lost marsh every fair way is a peninsula, Like this is just stupid. That's a that's a gimmick, but it's more just stupid and I don't know if it's quote unquote unfair, but it's certainly not. You're not identifying the the best golfer in a tournament there when anybody could just end up in the later at any given time.

00:26:06
Speaker 1: Yes, that would be where the idea of fairness would come in. I suppose is that golf courses with so much water on them create such a difference between just being on the fairway and being off the fairway that the difference between those positions is so stark in the case of water that you know, if you repeat it enough, it could certainly be said to become unfair. And I would say that the same accusation has been made of out of bounds too, because the disparity is so big between just being right inside the out of bounds line and being outside of the out of bounds line. I mean a huge, huge disparity there. Some players could say that's that's unfair. Okay, So those are two good ones. I want to introduce a few that have been I think really common in this discourse about fairness. One key one is undulating fairways. This was a big bone of contention among people who discussed golf architecture back at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was one of the main topics in this fairness discussion. Should fairways be heavily undulating? And the reason I think that this was such a big topic was that people were trying to figure out how to build golf courses inland. And one thing about inland golf course properties is that they didn't tend to have the natural undulation constant undulation of links land properties and links golf courses were, of course the first golf courses. They were the examples that everybody discussed and compared new golf courses too. And so when they started to build golf courses inland, one of the big questions was, well, we don't have natural natural undulation here, should we build it? Should we construct it? Is that an important part of the game, And one side would argue, no, it's not an important part of the game. In fact, it's a less ideal part of the game because you can hit it in the middle of the fairway on an undulating fairway. Two players can hit the exact same shot and one might end up with a weird uphill or side hill lie, and one might end up with a flat lie and there's really no controlling that when you have undulations like they have at the old course at Saint Andrews. And so what we should do, in fact is intentionally, if we're going to construct anything, we should construct flat fairways so that players get approximately the same lies if they hit the fairway. Then there was another faction that argued, that's ridiculous, that makes the game boring. A big part of the charm of golf is exactly this lynxland undulation. We shouldn't be taking that out of golf courses. In fact, in some cases we might want to introduce it to golf courses. So this was a big issue of fairness that people argued about back in this kind of key period of golf architecture history around the turn of the twentieth century. What do you make of that debate about undulating fairways.

00:29:39
Speaker 2: I feel like it's just part of the game at that point.

00:29:42
Speaker 3: Like I again, I could see the argument that if you are artificially creating it and not going with the land and not using what you've been given, some could call it a gimmick. Maybe if you overuse it, I get that aspect, So.

00:29:59
Speaker 1: It seems it's like part of a part of what a big part of what a gimmick might be is that it's contrived or obviously constructed, that somebody went in there and made it, as opposed to encountered it in the landscape. And this is and if you think about that, this is so connected to our perception that golf is a game played in a natural setting. If it's a game played in a natural setting, we have a much bigger acceptance of randomness and quirks that might lead to unfairness. If we consider it a purely manufactured setting, I think our tolerance for those factors really goes down.

00:30:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I feel like if you are just bulldozing a bunch of trees and you decide to build a giant hill for no reason, then like that and you in theory people would be able to tell, like to some extent that you just made this, Then like, yeah, that's kind of stupid, and I would argue that it's unfair. But if that's just the way the cookie crumbled and these glaciers moved however, many millions of years ago, then again I would just go with it's an outdoor sport like, sorry, you'll get the next one. Like on the aggregate. Sure, there are people that are just blatantly unlucky, but at the end of the day, I feel like everything's going to relatively come out in the wash or be as close to fifty to fifty good break bad break as possible. Maybe on a certain day you just get hosed, but then you come back tomorrow and you get the good breaks like outdoor sport man can't can't complain about that.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm with you on this one. And I think moreover that if we're talking about fairness, if we're talking about the test of skill, a golf course assessing a player's level of skill as part of the fairness of the golf course overall, Because if a golf course is fair, then that means probably it's testing the skill of players above all. Yep. Then you can even argue that undulating fairways make a golf course more fair or a better test to skill in the sense that these courses require players to hit shots off of uneven lies on occasion, and it's unlikely that any given golfer over seventy two holes or whatever length the tournament is is going to get consistently worse lies than any other golfer. They tend to get sort of the same approximately the same number of breaks, the same number of side hill uphill downhill lies.

00:32:31
Speaker 3: If you listen a Brandle and he quotes his favorite statistic of strokes gained good breaks, then then you don't you have to pay attention. This is something you should be tracking.

00:32:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, what I'm saying might not be completely I do think over seventy two holes, there's a lot of room for variants, obviously, and some players do get more lucky over the course of a tournament than others. So I'll give some credit to Brandle there, but I think it tends to kind of come out in the wash.

00:32:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, and who like it happens right, Like that's that's the game that we're playing here. Like, sorry, you're gonna get a good breaker, bad break. Eventually, you could hit the wrong side of a hill on a green and run all the way back down, like that happened at the window a thousand times last week, Like it's it happens. Like I don't know what to tell you. It's kind of the game that we're all playing here. And obviously there's a bigger microscope on it at the professional level, but even it could happen to anybody. So like, yeah, if you're building a giant hill for no reason, I would I would, I don't know that. I'd call it unfair, I'd call it stupid, I'd call it a gimmick. But if you are just on the side of a hill because that's where the fairway is, and you got to hit a shot that's below your feet, then like, that's part of the game.

00:33:48
Speaker 2: It's it's you have to be able to hit that shot at the.

00:33:51
Speaker 3: End of the day.

00:33:52
Speaker 1: Okay, let me give you another potentially unfair element of a golf course, and this one maybe will be better received by you. I'm guessing it'll be better received as as potentially unfair than undulating fair ways, and that is greens that don't tend to receive approach shots of the length required. So the simplest example of this would be you have a two hundred and fifty yard par three and the green is fronted by a bunker. You kind of outlined a version of this scenario earlier. Say the approach is blocked and the green is shallow, and you have another hazard in the back and the green tilts away from the player and the par three is two hundred and fifty yards. Is that unfair?

00:34:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, in a way, like I feel like you have to be especially in a part three, there has to be a way to hit the green right.

00:34:50
Speaker 1: Well, are you being devoted to par categories here? Though? Why not just consider it a par four lay up and then hit a pitch in to the green.

00:34:56
Speaker 3: That's such a good point.

00:34:58
Speaker 2: That's a good point.

00:34:59
Speaker 1: This is where it becomes tricky.

00:35:02
Speaker 3: I feel like if you are if you have that green and you know where people are going to be hitting it from, then you have to be able to reasonably assume that somebody can hold it with metal at that point, if you're not giving the opportunity to do that, and the easiest way to do that for at least ameters would probably be to run it up to some extent. And if you're not giving people the opportunity to do that, then you're asking for big numbers. I would say it's probably a pace of plate disaster at that point, which is never what anybody wants.

00:35:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably just impractical to a degree, I.

00:35:38
Speaker 2: Would call it.

00:35:39
Speaker 3: I would lean that's more unfair than maybe hitting off the side of a hill in a fair way unless you built that hill out of nothing.

00:35:45
Speaker 1: Sure, Okay, I think a lot of people agree with you, and I think that green design and the ways that greens can be receptive and unreceptive is the one area in which a lot of architects and architecture nerds suddenly become members of the fairness police. It's kind of funny when you see this happen. It is accepted as a principle of golf course design that greens should kind of be built for the length of the whole that they appear on. If you have a long par four, then it's generally accepted that the green should accept a kind of low running, longer shot, Whereas if you have a short par four, it tends to be more accepted that the green can be small and unreceptive if you have a long par three and a short part three the same thing. I mean. Consider the eighth green at Oakmont versus the seventh green at Pebble Beach. One is very small and surrounded by hazards and has no room to run any shot up. That's the seventh hole at Pebble Beach, But everybody accepts that because it's one hundred yard shot. Whereas the eighth green at Oakmont, even though there are still obviously some people who did not like that hole and thought it was unfair, the green does does receive longer shots. You can run the ball up. The green is big, and so it's pretty receptive.

00:37:16
Speaker 2: So here's my thing on that.

00:37:19
Speaker 3: After seeing it in person and seeing it played for six days or whatever, I don't really get the unfair argument. I didn't get the whole big blow up about aid at Oakmont. I didn't really understand it at all. Honestly, if you're a professional player, it kind of seemed like an easy hole. Just blow it up there, get up and down, get.

00:37:38
Speaker 1: Out because of how the green was designed, right, Yeah.

00:37:41
Speaker 3: Like, it honestly did not seem that bad, even if you ended up in that bunker on the left, like, get up and down and cool, you're good. Like it honestly didn't seem like a problem at all.

00:37:51
Speaker 1: PJ. That was a great example of people not knowing ball pre criticizing the eighth hole at Oakmont just because it was going to play three hundred yards. I mean, please get over yourselves. And of course, once the tournament started, all those complaints just kind of disappeared people.

00:38:09
Speaker 3: I feel like it was like probably one of the more simple holes on the course. It's just like, ah, I'm just gonna blast it up there. I'm gonna make it three. Worst case scenario, I'll make a four and that's it.

00:38:18
Speaker 1: Like Jeff Ogilvie actually said this in our interview with him. I'm not sure if it appeared in the video or not, but he said something to the effect, well, the eighth hole is kind of a breather, you know, even though it's a three hundred yard part three, it's it's it's a pretty simple hole, you know, and and success you're not going to make a triple bogie there, and so you're just not not that scared of it. Yeah, I think that hole has lost some of its teeth. It's become less of a good hole since players have become more able to reliably carry the ball through the air. Now that players can, you know, you can pretty much be assured that you're going to hit the ball a certain length, especially if you're a professional. That whole is the point of it is, is kind of lost a little bit. So yeah, kind of a kind of a side note on the eighth hold oak mind, I think at one time that that was a really cool, nuanced par three, but it's lost some of those complexities because you can just carry everything now. You know, those bunkers that kind of form a ring around the approach, those aren't that big of a factor. Players just hit it over them. Now. It used to be the case that you kind of had to land near them and run the ball up, And maybe for some amateur players that's still the case, but it's just it's not the same hole anymore.

00:39:33
Speaker 3: So what outside of you mentioned like several seven a pebble beach, Like that's that's a wedge for everybody, Like you don't have to run that up. But what I was trying to say before, when you ask what might be unfair, I feel like four maybe not Like a webshot par three is the one example that like that.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: I feel like it's commonly accepted. But I feel like, if if.

00:39:57
Speaker 3: You're on a normal golf course for amateurs, reasonable people, I feel like you have to give some level of access to a green on the ground to it at least at something right, Like I feel like if you have to fly it on every green. That's a lot And I don't know that i'd call it unfair, but I definitely I call it mean.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, and maybe joyless. Yeah, the golf course isn't as fun. This brings in the idea of playability, which is again one of those words that's part of the word cloud here, the fairness word cloud playability. It's not exactly the same as fairness. Playable and fair those are I think related concepts in a lot of people's minds, but maybe not exactly the same. And I would I would say the same thing about the word equity. What you're talking about giving players who hit lower trajectory shots and maybe have less ability, giving those players the ability to run the ball onto a green is yes, maybe a question of fairness to those players. The whole is more fair to them because they can use that route. But it also overlaps with this concept of equity. Building an equitable golf course that all players can play and enjoy, and I think that the impulse to do that comes from a slightly different place than the impulse to build a perfectly fair golf course. If you're trying to build an equitable or playable golf course for the broadest number of people possible. Yeah, I do think that overlaps with the concept of fairness, but it's not exactly the same thing. Yeah, and so the ability to run the ball up is maybe more part of that discussion than part of the fairness discussion. But again, these things are a little bit hard to differentiate. What I'd like to do now, though, is is go back to this question of green receptiveness and apply it to a few very famous holes that maybe don't have very receptive greens and are maybe extremely exciting exactly because they are not fair in this specific way. The first one would have to be the road hole. There are a number of ways in which the road hole might be unfair. What are some of the ways in which you from tee to green the road hole? What kinds of elements does it have that might be might be deemed unfair?

00:42:35
Speaker 3: Well, there's a there's a building in the way, So I feel like that that's the first one that stands out in my head.

00:42:42
Speaker 1: Completely blind tea shot, and not even because there's a hill in front of you, but because there's a hotel.

00:42:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, I definitely thinking about how I how I play. I don't hit the ball very high. So I'm I'm primarily worried about the building. That's that's any time that I have to carry something that is above me off the tee, I'm moderately worried that I'm just going to hit a warm burner.

00:43:09
Speaker 1: And here you're a single You're a singles hitter, is what you're saying.

00:43:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, big Mark Leishman, just taking it, taking it to the right field, going the other way, not not really worried.

00:43:20
Speaker 1: About slapping it out there.

00:43:21
Speaker 3: Yeah, now the prime prime eture not really worried about the log ball these days.

00:43:26
Speaker 2: Uh So there's there's a building for sure.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:43:30
Speaker 3: Then then you have the road itself where if you're playing, if you tend to hit a cut and you're playing it down the right side of the fair way, you are obviously, I guess that's more of a strategy decision that it is a matter of fairness that if you decide to get risky and play towards the road, that's more of a U issue. But sure that is obviously the idea of that is daunting.

00:43:57
Speaker 2: Whether you're near it or not.

00:43:59
Speaker 3: I guess I never been, but in my head I would be scared because there's just a road right there anyway, and then the green is kind of angled, so that if you're not coming at it from the right angle, it's got a giant bunker in front of it, and you're kind of screwed that way.

00:44:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, an extremely putative bunker.

00:44:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:44:20
Speaker 1: Like talk about a hazard that seems out of proportion with the size of the miss. The road bunker is the ultimate example of that, and even the road might be considered an example of that. So you have so many elements of this whole that would anger members of the fairness Police if those people were inclined to criticize a course like the Old Course, which maybe they seem a little bit less inclined to do because the Old Course has been with us for such a long time and because it's so natural and it just kind of uses what's there, even if what's there is a bunch of man made stuff. So the road hole does have so many elements of quote unquote unfairness about it, including you know, you mentioned that the green is kind of angled. If you if you bail out to the left, then then it's very much harder to hit. I think the road green is probably hard to hit from pretty much everywhere Yeah, it's definitely easier to hit if you've got the right angle, if you if you manage to kind of hug that out of bounds line. Hey, we have out of bounds too. There's another there's another thing that you might consider unfair. But if you if you manage to end up on that right side of the fairway, you have an easier approach shot than you would if you're on the left side. But it's still very, very hard to hit a green of that size from that distance. Because this is a long hole. The road hole is a lot. I mean, it might not be very long for Roy McElroy anymore, Yeah, but for the rest of us, and for most of the history of golf, the road hole is very long for a part four. Now, it wasn't always considered a part four. It was considered a par five, and maybe that's part of the reason why the green is the way it is. But now we consider it a par four. And so players are in this situation where they feel like they have to hit their second shot on the green, but it's so difficult to pull off that shot that it almost seems unfair. And if you miss, then you're in the freaking road bunker or on the road itself in those penalty and you're screwed. And so the hole is almost ridiculous, and it definitely has many elements of unfairness about it. But there's no hole that people look forward to players playing more than this one, no holes that players look forward to playing themselves more than the road Hole, and watching in tournaments as well. And so maybe it is exactly these elements of unfair, like it pushes at the bound of our taste for unfairness and doesn't, for whatever reason, doesn't quite push us all the way over. And and for that reason, it's a really great hole.

00:47:12
Speaker 2: It's got the aura, it's got the gravitas, it's got you.

00:47:15
Speaker 1: Know, it's part of it.

00:47:16
Speaker 3: It's the road hole, Like you can't get mad at it kind of thing.

00:47:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, some players still do.

00:47:22
Speaker 3: I mean, for sure, I'm sure if Tyrolhadden loves the road road Home, I love to get his thoughts. But yeah, I mean, I I understand it from the highest level. Why you might think this is out of proportion. I mean a lot of the old courses out of proportion.

00:47:39
Speaker 2: Now at the highest.

00:47:40
Speaker 3: Level, the open chair, the camp smith wanted like twenty two under like, yeah, it's it's not it's not good. But I I think for a normal player, you're more captivated by the scene and the environment and the history of the place to like, you know, yeah, it's not good to be that bunker and it's not good to be on that road. But I feel like I'm not going to be ranting and raving about how this is the most unfair thing I've ever seen. I would just be mad that I made an eight on the road hole more than anything else. I would attribute that to user error more than I would course to.

00:48:20
Speaker 1: That You're not going to be in a critical frame of mind, no, because the course has sort of wowed you, yeah, maybe even snowed you yeah to it, you know, created a mist about itself where you can't quite see its potential flaws. But I think because the old course puts people in that frame of mind that they're willing to maybe loosen up a little bit and have fun with a whole like the road hole. And once once you're in that state of mind, you realize how fun potentially quote unquote unfair things can be. Yeah, the road Hole's exciting, and I don't think it's just because of its aura. That's part of it. It has an aura. The old course has an aura. But the road hole is also exciting because of that potential for disaster. It is achievable, though it's not like this hole is completely ridiculous where no player can play it. Well. We saw Lydiaco hit an incredible fairway wood into this green that is just not designed to accept fairway webshots. We wouldn't see that on any other hole in the world except for maybe maybe a couple of others that that we can mention briefly. But part of the reason that shot was so exciting is that the green is not proportioned to receive it, and and it has that that that little, that little whiff of unfairness about it. And I think that's exactly what what makes it fun.

00:49:52
Speaker 3: So would would do you in the context of the old course then the unfairness you have like a lot of the undulating fairways.

00:49:59
Speaker 2: But I would say there's I feel like it's on a hole.

00:50:05
Speaker 3: I would argue it's probably even more fair than usual because you don't have to play it necessarily a certain way that you can do so many more different things. There's not like a ton of rough out there so you can kind of just blast it around and still be like, I feel like that puts everybody on a level playing field to the point where it's hard to get mad about anything unfair. Maybe this is I don't know a ton about links golf, but at least at the Old Course where it's pretty open, that like, you know, it is what it is at that point, even bad shots are not taking you out of the whole per se, and that on the whole makes it actually more fair, even if the road hole is kind of maybe potentially a gimmick.

00:50:53
Speaker 1: This is where we might be redefining fair as equitable or playable. Yeah, which I'm all in favor of. That is not notably how professionals tend to define fairness. Equitable and playability, those aren't Those aren't big factors in the way that the Scottie Schefflers of the world think about fairness. They think about fairness as good shots being rewarded and bad shots being punished. If you, though, think about fairness instead as a as an extremely playable course that many different people of different stripes can enjoy, then the Old Course might be the ultimate example of an equitable and playable course. And that's a big part of why it inspired the likes of Alistair McKenzie. You know that that's the one of the big things that Alistair McKenzie loved about that course. It created the greatest pleasure for the greatest number because of this sense of kind of democracy about it. That any different kind of player could be successful there in their.

00:51:56
Speaker 3: Own way seems like a good thing to me. I think that's how I can pro that. I understand why if you're competing in an open championship maybe you would not want that, but you know, that's fine.

00:52:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would say in general, the old courses like that. The road Hole might be a bit of an exception to that, though. If you play it as a three shot hole, if you lay up on your second shot, you might beat a lot of players who who who try to go for that green in two, which again, you know, goes back to this idea of equity.

00:52:25
Speaker 3: But that's kind I mean, I'm just trying to put myself with a mentality. It's like, oh, I'm at the road Hole, I'm not going to lay up like that's that's not of course, I have to like.

00:52:34
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if you're if you're on the sixteenth t at Cyprus. Point, Yeah, well that is it? Is it fair for there to be a two hundred and thirty two hundred and forty yard part three where you have to carry all ocean to get there? Is that? Is that fair? Well? Guess what you can lay up to the left if you want. Go ahead, man, just try to Yeah, have have your buddies stand behind you with the phone filming. You kidding in irons?

00:53:01
Speaker 2: How do you explain that to people? Oh? I went I went eight iron, I went eight iron pitching bunch.

00:53:06
Speaker 1: Sorry, I mean par man, I got up and down. Come on.

00:53:12
Speaker 3: That's when you lead with people, is I've made par in sixteen at Cyprus.

00:53:15
Speaker 2: Don't ask me how I got there.

00:53:17
Speaker 1: That's a that that that if if a friend says that to you, then you know that you need to move away from that friend. Potentially that's it's probably not a fun person. But uh, in any case, Uh, you're right that the road hole kind of uh you know, you know, bates you into doing the not smart thing. I would say there are a lot of examples of holes like the road hole that have big elements of unfairness about them, and those are exactly the elements that make them super exciting to watch. The postage stamp hole at Royal Troon is a good example. There's there's so much chance there because it's so windy that part of the course. You know, it's an elevated tea, you're up, you're vulnerable to the wind. And that green is so small, so severe, with such penalizing hazards around it, that two players can hit pretty good web shots into there and one might end up in the coffin bunker and one might end up five feet from the pin.

00:54:11
Speaker 3: So I was going to bring up the coffin bunker before, like exactly that example, Like would would you? I don't want to call a coffin bunker's a gimmick because it's been there for however many years, that hundreds of years, But I feel like it's kind of maybe unfair to some extent.

00:54:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it absolutely is. And that entire hole, I mean that the size of the green, the way the tea is situated, how much the wind affects you in that and that little shot. I don't think that hole is a is purely a test of skill. Now it might be a test of metal and psychological.

00:54:56
Speaker 2: Strength at the end of the day.

00:54:58
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean you could say it's a test of skill in that way, certainly, but there's such a big element of randomness there and the you know, the the line between success and absolute dire failure is so thin that it's hard to call any any part of that hole fare. But what does everybody want to do when they go to Royal Truon. What does everybody want to watch when they go to an Open championship at Royal trun They want to go to that hole and see what happens. I would say the same thing of the fifteenth hole at Augusta National. Is that green built to receive any kind of shot? At this point, now this might enter into a discussion of green speeds and how you match a green's severity of slope with the speed of the green, But putting that aside for a second, the fifteenth hole at Augusta National is almost ridiculous because of how severe the green is. But what is the most Where have we seen the most exciting shots in recent Masters tournaments? It's at the fifteenth hole at Augusta National exactly because we know how unreceptive that green is. It's achievable. Rory, can you know, bend a seven iron around the trees and hold the green, But you have to hit an extremely exceptional shot and you have to get a little bit lucky. Probably.

00:56:21
Speaker 3: I feel like the landing area on fifteen is so small that you can reasonably no matter where the pin is, Like, you have to be on that upper tier and if but if you're above it, as we saw with Rory, you're screwed at that point then too, because it's impossible you can't ship it coming back the same way. Yeah, So I feel like that, I don't know, like when you're picking out these iconic holes, I feel like it's hard. It's hard to criticize them because they provide these these moments in time that are etched in everybody's memories.

00:56:54
Speaker 2: But like for a normal player, I guess.

00:56:58
Speaker 3: Maybe my my my theory of fairness, as you kind of just said, has evolved throughout this last hour or whatever we've been going on here, is for the professionals. I agree with Scotty. I agree with Joseph is that you know, wayward drives should be penalized more than decent drives, then good drives should not be screwed with it all.

00:57:22
Speaker 1: It's frustrating for a lot of people, fans included. If that's not the case, we it's frustrating to watch a player blow it way. I mean, like Wyndham Clark did on the on the Deal at LACC a couple of years ago. People are still really pissed about that. Now. I have I have my notes about why that's that shot isn't isn't what people thought it was. But but it is clearly an example of people being frustrated by a lack of penalty for what was perceived to be a poor shot.

00:57:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm with that professionally, but I think at the di amateur level, I feel like it's I would be more about playability and equitability and making sure that everybody has path too.

00:58:09
Speaker 2: You don't have to be good, but everybody is a path to finishing the hole.

00:58:13
Speaker 3: Whereas like some of these like if I get stuck in the coffin bunker, I'm sorry, Like I'm I'll hit like two shots. I'm not gonna be able to get out. Sorry, I'm going home.

00:58:22
Speaker 2: Like that's it. It's not it's not gonna be You're not.

00:58:25
Speaker 1: Going home though you're gonna You're gonna finish, finish the course, and then you'll have a nice story for your buddies about what happened to you on the poster stamp.

00:58:32
Speaker 3: Exactly like but that that, I feel like there should be a path for everybody of varying skill levels.

00:58:38
Speaker 2: Maybe I'm just saying.

00:58:40
Speaker 3: That the Old Course is greatest place in the world, which might not be my worst take.

00:58:43
Speaker 2: I've had worse takes than that.

00:58:45
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people would would accept that, both past and present. Yeah, I think that's a really good nuanced view of the situation, that the that the requirements or the goals of professional tournament courses are and should be different from those of courses meant to appeal to tow amateurs. Of course, this becomes a little tricky when you have courses that are meant to do both and and some courses do that better than others. You know, Pinehurst Number two and the Old Course are probably the best examples of courses that can do both well.

00:59:21
Speaker 3: There's not a lot of rough and you can bunt it up on every green like. I feel like that opens that opens you up to a lot as a bad player, that you you can still challenge the professionals with the kind of roulette wheel of what what is your you know why look like?

00:59:39
Speaker 1: And this tough perfectly stated, and I agree. Now I do want to finish, though, on a brief monologue in support of cultivating little bits of unfairness in golf course design. If you had a perfectly fair golf course, in whether we're talking about fair in the professional sense or fair in the amateur sense that you've outlined, it would be I think boring and charmless. It would become predictable. But equally true is that a perfectly unfair golf course would be ridiculous. So we need a combination that If we accept that a perfectly fair golf course and a perfectly unfair golf course would be both unacceptable, then we have to live somewhere between those polls. Yes, so we do want a course to give an advantage to skilled players, but that's not all that we want a golf course to do. So I think, you know, a well designed golf course will strike some sort of balance between fairness and unfairness, between randomness and order, between skill and luck. Right, there to be some kind of balancing act between all of those dichotomies in a golf course that's going to stand the test of time and be exciting to play and also test skill in a way that we find fair and acceptable. So I guess what this means is that if you're an architect, you have to figure out ways to cultivate a little bit of randomness or luck or even unfairness on your golf courses without going overboard and falling into something that's unreasonable, unplayable, or absurd. Because you know, insisting on fairness at all times is not a good recipe for design, and the most fair golf courses, the rigorously fair golf courses that have been built over the history of golf architecture, have tended to fall out of favor, not stand the test of time very well, and have tended to be redesigned to reintroduce some more quirk and eccentricity and unexpectedness into them. So at the same time, you know, we can say that insisting on fairness is not a good recipe for design, neither is disregarding the concept of fairness entirely. And so ultimately, I do think we have to live between these extremes in some way or another, and different golf courses might have more of some more of an element of unfairness than others, but all golf courses need to find their particular blend of that. I guess that would be my argument. How do you feel about that?

01:02:44
Speaker 3: I think there has to be some level of randomness if you want to call randomness unfair. Like to me, I don't know that those are the same thing. We're talking about the gray area between playability and fairness and all of that to be. Randomness and unfair are not necessarily the same thing.

01:03:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a difference between an architect saying I'm gonna try to make this a little random somehow versus I'm gonna create a feature that just screws the player over. Yes, those are maybe two different things.

01:03:17
Speaker 3: I think those are not necessarily the same definition. So I would be pro randomness, as again, this is an outdoor sport. You need to have some level of Yeah, it's you know, player versus player, it's player versus self mentality, but it's also a player versus nature and you're trying to beat the course, and the course can.

01:03:39
Speaker 2: Fight back a little bit.

01:03:41
Speaker 3: But I feel like when you start to get into the unfairness of I wouldn't go so far as like the rewarding bad shots is not necessarily the right term, but not penalizing them, or not penalizing them enough. That's where I think you start to lean into the little too much randomness, not enough fairness for at least in a professional setting.

01:04:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe so. And we all have our different levels of tolerance for what constitutes something that is outright unfair as opposed to, you know, charmingly random or natural seeming or whatever you want to say. My position on this issue is probably always going to be in favor of promoting more unfairness than people are comfortable with. And part of the reason for that is that I think over the past two hundred years or so, golfers have become very, very much less accustomed to unfairness. If we were to be transported back one hundred and fifty years to the links course of the eighteen hundreds, we would find those courses so extraordinarily unfair that we would hardly want to play them. Possibly. I mean, I think I would still want to be I would be fascinated by them, but you'd hit the ball in the middle of the fair way and get terrible lies all the time because of the state of agronomy at the time. You know, the hazards are not going to that bunkers are not going to be raked. There would be all sorts of things about those very natural golf courses that would strike us as unfair. And I think the story of golf and golf architecture to a great degree has been to introduce gradually more and more fairness into the game through architecture and agronomy, to the point where players have gotten very used to certain things that just weren't there in the original game. And so my position is always going to be I'm going to promote some more unfair I'm going to add Kate for that, But also, just to be intellectually honest, I have to acknowledge that fairness is an important thing to think about in design. You can't have a completely unfair golf course. You just can't. It would be stupid and it would not be fun. And so there's a yeah, I have to take a balanced position while at the same time being an advocate for one side of it. Does that kind of make sense?

01:06:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that totally makes sense.

01:06:26
Speaker 3: I think you made a great point there about even like as far as like agronomy, where you have the perfect lies in the fair way and you're you know, you're not running into some weeds or grass or anything. Like how far things have come, Like everything is so optimized even for normal people at this point, Like I.

01:06:50
Speaker 1: Mean, municipal golf courses that I play in Portland are are so much more consistently maintained exactly and anything anybody would have played even fifty years ago.

01:06:59
Speaker 3: I think, like that's a great point that I hadn't even considered that, Like, yeah, the development of turf at even just a municipal level like that has gotten to the point where that's taking out so many dice rolls that would have been there fifty years ago. That yeah, I again, I think any use of the elements, I feel like I'm gonna end up being pro that.

01:07:25
Speaker 2: I think that's cool.

01:07:26
Speaker 3: Again, Like I'm not here to have every shot go perfectly if I hit it well, I don't think that. I don't think that is fair, even though it is quote unquote the perfectly fair, I don't think it's reasonable to expect that to be true. Like bad bounces are part of the game. We're doing this outside. Uh, you know, the wind could adjust anything like. All of that to me is part of what you sign up for. But the unfair at the municipal level, I would say, would be unplayable to a wide to the full population.

01:08:07
Speaker 1: You have to give everybody or just like way more playable for one type of player than another.

01:08:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, give everybody a chance.

01:08:12
Speaker 3: But at the professional level, I think it's it's the goal should be to identify the guy who played the best that week in the tournament. And I feel like a lot of times we don't necessarily get that.

01:08:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and and we we don't get that, not necessarily because of well maybe because of unfairness to a degree, but not because of interesting unfairness. Usually it's usually just because the course is kind of too too easy, too soft. Yeah, and so yeah, so that's that. That is kind of u that is a separate issue. But yeah, very very interesting distinction that you've made between kind of the what we expect of a tournament course versus what we expect from a course that we all play on a daily basis. And I think that's a very valid thing for a golf course designer to think about, and for a golfer to think about when they're assessing a golf course, like try to figure out what the purpose of the golf course is and does it succeed in that in that objective? And I think that's totally okay to think of courses in that way.

01:09:13
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean once, once we're all playing the new double dot that has made Cameron Young the greatest golfer of all time, I think all of this will get changed anyway we're all be on the same level playing field.

01:09:23
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, equity will no longer be an issue because we're all we're all we're all hitting it like like young Cam. All right, PJ, it's been a pleasure as always. Thank you for coming on this episode of Golf Architecture one on one. I hope it was fun.

01:09:37
Speaker 2: Oh, this is great.

01:09:39
Speaker 3: Great to get get a little lesson about what Sheriff Scotty's teaching to his comrades out there.

01:09:53
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. If you're in jo designing golf, then I can guarantee that you would love what we're doing in Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see what fe GC is all about. But we're building a great community in there of avid golfers and golf nerds. We we gather around and we we discuss the issues of the game in a way that's that's really really enjoyable. So we'd love for you to join us in there again the Frida egg dot com slash membership and also, you know, if you're if you're liking the podcast, then then give us a rating or review wherever you might be listening to us. It's it's always good to get some feedback. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.