Yolk with Doak 24: St. Andrews Beach, Covid-19, and East Potomac

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast and another episode of The Yoke with Doak. This week, we have three editions of this podcast coming out.

00:00:11
Speaker 2: The episodes just kind.

00:00:13
Speaker 1: Of blended together really well, and I figured why not put them all out at once. So just as a reminder, Tom just recently released a new book, Getting to Eighteen. It is a awesome book. I highly recommend it. It gives you so much insight into the design process. I learned a ton of stuff just reading this. I can't even I mean, we could do five hundred podcasts on the book and all the things talked about in there. So you can purchase yours at Dope golf dot com. It is a massive book, is huge, and it's got just a ton of beautiful images, beautiful maps, and you will definitely know a great deal more about golf architecture if you get.

00:00:57
Speaker 2: It and read it.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: As a reminder, last week, we dropped a three part docu series on this podcast. It's on the golf ball and the history. Garrett Morrison, our managing editor, did a fantastic job on this project. He I mean, he poured a lot of time into this and it's a different style podcast as far as I know, you know, nobody out in golf's really doing this style of podcasts. So he had a lot of great interviews with a lot of very smart, articulate historians and players and innovators in the game of golf to talk about the three major innovations of the golf ball. So check that out in the feed. It is called under Friday Eggs Stories and the Ball. So, without further ado, here is episode twenty four of The Yolk with Doak.

00:01:47
Speaker 3: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

00:01:52
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in a frid egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg, Brian Egg, Frida egg Bride egg. Lie about ready to run off of the hump question I had with all your courses and you go into detail on these, especially the first eighteen obviously, which of the courses highlighted in the book would you want to see and play every day if they had an unlimited maintenance budget.

00:02:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's such a hard question for me because I don't really There's a lot of architects who want their want every golf course they build to spend oodles of money on maintenance, so it's perfect, So it reflects well on the designer. You know, Jack Nicholas famously, back in the day used to have used to have a maintenance arm of his company and they oversaw the maintenance of his golf courses that had his name on them for a few years, and they would be they would pipe right up if they didn't think the client was spending enough on it, and a that's all. What's a hard thing to do with your clients. Politically, you have to be as powerful as Jack Nicholas to do something like to get somebody to sign off on that. But you know, it kind of precludes that the golf course is going to be affordable to play. So you know I've built, you know, used to bug the hell out of me that high Point wouldn't be in good shape when I would go back and play it. When it was still there, you know, it was still a lot better than than it is to have it be gone, you know. And but I understood that they couldn't, you know, they couldn't spend five hundred thousand dollars a year on meetings. They weren't making that, you know the I mean, really the answer to the question is Saint Andrew's Beach. I think St. Andrew's Beach is one of the best golf courses I've built. It's just a beautiful piece of land for golf. It would be ranked much higher if it was if it had the ocean view instead of one dune between being between it and the ocean, because it's really only half a mile from the ocean, but you just don't have any ocean views on it at all.

00:04:37
Speaker 1: Is that similar to a paraparam or paraparaum people, I've heard it pronounced both ways, where it's like one dune away.

00:04:46
Speaker 3: Yes, but in both cases there's houses on those dunes, some looking at the golf course and some looking at the ocean. So yeah, I mean it's you know, but I'm not saying and I don't care about it not having a view. I think it's a really great golf course, you know it It was going to be a private club originally. That didn't work out. It went through bankruptcy almost right away, and you know, so the bank owned it for quite a while and they just they paid a maintenance company company to take care of it so it wouldn't go away, And the maintenance company said, you know, why don't you let us open it as a public course. We could, you know, we could certainly do better than just losing money on maintenance. We might even be be able to make money. So they opened it as a public off course. And it's you know, it's always been kind of slightly scruffy maintenance, and the greens were some of the smaller greens that I'd built to begin with, but some of them have shrunk quite a bit from what I built. It's still a really fun golf course to play. I just had a bunch of people down there in February, you know, we we built that new course at the National, or redid the ocean course at the National, which is only about five miles from Saint Andrew's Beach is the crow Flies, and so most of the people that were down there played Royal Melbourne two days before our event and played Saint Andrew's Beach the day before. They played Ray Melbourne in absolutely perfect shape, like the best conditioned golf course that I've ever played. Saint Andrew's Beach and really scruffy, you know, normal busy, you know, just coming out of dormancy from the winter, and I guess not. We were into summer, just beat up from a lot of people playing it in the summer and pretty rough around the edges and green's not really that fast. And then the National for three days on super well maintained golf courses new so not quite imperfect shape yet, but spend a lot of money on it, you know, pristine looking, really good playing surface. And after all of that, a lot of people were like, oh, I really liked that Saint Andrew's Beach. I mean, that's it's that good of a golf course that even if it's scruffy, people are like, well, that's really that's pretty cool. There's a lot of cool holes on that. Why don't they maintain that a little better? So, you know, that is the golf course of all the courses I built. If I could have one in my backyard to play every day, I think that would be it. And you know, that scruffy maintenance that they've got, it's like a I think they charged ninety dollars or ninety five dollars to play it Australian, so it's like sixty five or seventy US might be the best course in the world for sixty five dollars US.

00:07:47
Speaker 1: That's that's something I always deal like when you go somewhere that's a little scruffy, there's a diamond spring to this mic Divreice course. It's got a couple problems, but it's in Hamilton, in Michigan.

00:08:01
Speaker 3: I never yeah, I've heard of it. I've never been there. That's the only one of my excourses that I haven't seen.

00:08:05
Speaker 1: And it's got this unbelievable ravine scape that really reminded me a lot of like the way Short Acres has those ravines on the back line and like it's final five holes, but they aren't cleaned out like Short Acres, you know, where you can't see a cross and you you know. And I just was like the whole time I'm there, and they do single row, they do single row irrigation, gang moo cut right, you know, one one cut of grass right into the native and it's it's thirty bucks and it's just you know, in terms of and I had I play it. I was playing it and I was just thinking, God, if this place had money, it could be really something. And then I got to thinking when I was driving back. You know what, it's better the way it is because everybody can see this for thirty dollars, right, and and that is, you know, great architecture on a cheap budget. It has to come with, like for a low cost, has to come with a smaller maintenance budget.

00:09:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, it has to come with a smaller main its budget. It has to come with, you know, a very low construction budget and a low which means a low irrigation budget. I mean that's the key. I mean, you know, you kind of you can't get those I mean, never mind Augusta. You can't get us country club conditions without a very expensive irrigation system. And that's the thing that drives up costs to you know, now you're not a thirty five or forty dollars golf course anymore, you know. And I've seen that. The most clearly I saw that I was when we were building Terry Edy and we were hung up there for a little while with the permits. I was down there with my wife and just traveling around, driving around the South Island and a little bit of the North Island and sight seeing. But and you know, I stopped and saw a couple of small golf courses. But really it was just driving by them. I noticed that it was the summer, and like, you know, only the resort, only the big expensive resort courses were green wall to wall. The rest of the golf courses were just burnt out yellow brown, like except for the greens. They watered the greens, they watered nothing else. And I was like, that's how golf in New Zealand is affordable, you know. And that's the difference, you know, I mean, the choice is very stark. You've either got a green golf course that costs two hundred and fifty dollars to play, you've got a yellow golf course that costs thirty, you know, and it's not The irrigation budget is not that much different, but it kind of is because everything else goes along with it. If you're not irrigating, there's a lot of other things you don't bother with either, because why bother you you know, it's never it's not going to look green and perfect anyway, So why would you edge cart pass and why would you even have cart pass? And and all these other things just start to fall away, and you're like, Okay, we're just playing ground, We're just playing golf over really pretty rough ground with a good green at the other end. And that's that's what golf is about here.

00:11:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, sounds like my yard. You know, I must spend one hundreds of dollars every month water at it. So it's got some it's got some issues, but it's so too.

00:11:31
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of that in the golf. This is actually superintendents make fun of that. You know. They spend all this money to get there, get their golf course perfect, and they go home and the last thing they want to do is take care of their own law exactly.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: The one of the things I think it was St.

00:11:47
Speaker 1: Andrew's Beach was the first time you had a topa with a satellite image of the course, right.

00:11:54
Speaker 3: Yeah. It's actually still one of the few that they you know, they just put the map together. They they they put the topo lines right over the aerial photo, which really helped routing the golf course just you know, you could there weren't many like big specimen trees or anything, but you could see, you know, on a Toba map. They'll they'll make they'll make little judalee lines for where the trees are. But you have no idea it was like, are those big pines or those little bushes or whatever? And an aerial photo you could tell, Okay, that's a big stand of trees. You know, I'm not going to punch a hole through that if I can avoid it, and I'm certainly not going to play over it. So there were just certain things about that that having both together that made the routing process easier for me. And it just you know, that's you said, the progression of things. It was almost like the routings were getting more complicated as you go through the book, and I wouldn't necessarily argue with that. And yet Saint Andrew's Beach the last one. I did that whole routing before I saw the site, and it was you know, we basically only changed the sequence of it. We didn't really change the holes at all, except for except for one that we couldn't build for some environmental reasons.

00:13:08
Speaker 2: The Ian Baker Finch stories just great.

00:13:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the first version of it, you know, I wound up doing the course with Michael Clayton a few years later, but the first version, well, when the National decided to do their second and third courses down on the Cops Land on this open ground. I heard about that from somebody in Australia and I went and interviewed for that job. And Mike Clayton, who I hadn't met yet, like met me as soon as I went down there, and he's like, we'd love to work on this with you. We think we can get Ian Baker Finch to work on it with us, you know, so that that will hopefully slightly offset the fact that Greg Norman and Peter Thompson are both trying to get the job and they're the two most famous golfers in the history of all Australia. Didn't help. They wound up getting the jobs, but so so you know, we did. We did a plan for thirty six sols and now didn't get the job. Very disappointing because it was a beautiful piece of land for golf, and as it turned out, I wound up going back and working on one of those courses twenty years later. Then the guy who developed the National originally David Inglis, who was not involved with the National anymore, had an option on the land for Saint Andrew's Beach and he called me about doing the project with Ian Baker Finch. So I, you know, so he sent me the topo and I was like, Wow, this looks good, and I did a plan and I went over there to meet him. I took Tom Mead, who'd worked for me at High Point in a couple other places. Tom and I went went there and I said to Tom, you know, I've got a routing for this that I think is pretty darn good. But I don't want you know, we've never met these guys. I don't want them thinking, oh, he thinks he can figure it all out from America or whatever. So let's you know, we're not going to roll that thing out for a couple of days. We'll just walk around and talk with them about what they want. So so we did that, and we spent a couple of really nice days. Ian is a super nice guy, one of the nicest guys I've met, and just talking about golf in general and and how that would be very linksy and and you know, such a good piece of ground to work with. And then I think it was the second afternoon we were there, Tom and I were going to go out and try to walk some of my routing while David had something else to do. He had to go meet with planners or something, and I said to Ian, you know, I kind of played around with a routing for this and this, you know before I came Tim and I are going to go walk it. You want to go with us? He said, sure, So, so we went up to where what's now the first tee for the for St. Andrew's Beach and we walked number one and number two and two's one of the best short part for us I've ever built. And then that original routing instead of going into instead of turning right and going to three, four and five, you went up the hill to where sevente is now. So we climbed up the hill to seventy and looked at walked seven and eight and nine, and he and is like, you figured this all out from America, you know, And it was just like, well, yeah, it's sitting right there on the topo map and there's you know, and there was nothing in the way, you know, because I had that aerial photo to go with it. There were those holes were all laying there. There was you know, there weren't like trees to cut down or anything getting in the way of those being good holes. So yeah, I had figured out a lot of the routing for that golf course without ever having been on the site at all. Because I can read a topo map a lot better now than I could when I was in college. I've had a lot more practice at it.

00:17:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's funny.

00:17:21
Speaker 1: I talked to Mike Clayton for a podcast about Year Tour back in the day a few, you know, a few months ago, and he's been holed up during this quarantine at his beach house and he's just gotten to play Saint Andrew's Feet. He's got it in his backyard like you deluded to on the book, and he's been stuck there for a few months.

00:17:41
Speaker 3: So he's doing all right there. Yeah. I envy him for that.

00:17:46
Speaker 1: From maybe the best best ground from golf A question from Sam White, which course of yours would you consider the least advantageous land for golf and how did you overcome the challenge?

00:18:00
Speaker 3: Well, I think probably the least advantageous land were the two sites that I essentially build a golf course from flat ground, the Legends and the Rolls Course. I mean, that's not the worst case at all. You know, you can certainly have a piece of ground that it just has too many wetlands problems and boundary issues and severe topography and power lines and other things. I don't take those jobs if I can avoid it, and I pretty much avoided you know, I mean, I pretty much won't take a job if I look at if I look at a site and just think, well, this is a dead end, I'm just not going to be able to figure that, you know. So it's one of the important things about being able to ride a golf course is to be able to see at the beginning that might not be so good. You know, I'm not going to just take a leap of faith with this, you know. Where the so the Legends and the Raws course didn't have those strikes against them. The Legends did turn out to have some some more wetlands problems than the owner thought when he bought the ground that we had to be very clever about working with. But the but those two were essentially flat sites to start and it's like, how do you create something from nothing? And you know, in both cases they were you know, we we took kind of a different approach to him in terms of what what what we wanted them to look like, and then you know kind of ran different directions from there, and you know, that's something. I mean a lot of architects most of their projects are like that. Pete I a lot of his projects were like that.

00:19:52
Speaker 1: And.

00:19:55
Speaker 3: It's a it's a it's a really different process and it's not to me. It's not as fun as trying to find a really cool, different hole out of a nice piece of ground. So I don't you know, I don't do jobs like that very often. And I don't you know the people that have a piece of ground like that probably don't call me in the first place. If they they've listened to a bunch of podcasts, they think, oh, he only works if the ground's like Pacific dudes, And it's like, no, if I just did that, I i'd be retired mostly. But but no, I don't. I don't take on those projects all very often, and I you know, I need to have enough time between him to be all right, you know, what would I do the next time that would really be different instead of just doing the same approach again.

00:20:44
Speaker 1: And this ties into something that you uh talked about in the book. This is from Crystal. She asks, it seems to me like contemporary architects, even though they are true genius like yourself.

00:21:03
Speaker 2: I praise.

00:21:04
Speaker 1: All right, enough of that only reinterpret the template holes. Well why don't they create also their own, their own, with all the talent they have.

00:21:16
Speaker 3: Well, Crystal should know as well as anyone that there's not there's a couple of holes and that's sant Emilia's. Crystal's the daughter of our client for st Emilion in France. And there are some things there that are based on template holes, like even the first green there is kind of a road hole, kind of green. But but there's not there's not very many holes like that that that are based on something else. But you know, the the dollar a site you have where there's not a lot of topography giving you something to work with, you know, the harder it is to be original and come up with a different idea. It's you know, it's it's more you know, when you think of what you could do. Yeah, some shapers will think of what they could do just like you know, they're used to just pushing earth around and that they don't think about a golf hole first all the time. They just think about a landform maybe, but most golf course architects think about it in terms of golf holes and could I do a hole like that hole I love at North Barrick or Crystal Downs or wherever. So that's the problem. That's the problem with what Crystal's saying is if if you go into a new project in the site is not very good, and you know, you've heard a thousand podcasts where people are so excited about the ra Dan Hole, it's just easier to build another version of the Red Dan Hole than it is to try to come up with you know, it's pretty hard to come up with a par three that's truly original. I mean, there's like fifty thousand of them around the world, so it's you know, it's easy year to think of something that you like, or you or even if the piece of land is good, you'll see something walking around and it will remind you of a hole that you like, and you just think I could do that instead of I'm going to try to create something original here. So it takes, you know, you have to be really stubborn with yourself to try to do things that are original, especially since there's a lot of golf writers and other people will say, oh you can, there's nothing original anymore. You know, it's all been done. I don't believe that I know, I've built some holes that there's nothing quite like them. But but you can't. You can't just keep churning out holes like that. You're lucky if you do a couple on a golf course that really do feel like that's different. I've never seen anything quite like that before. And even the great golf courses, you know, there's not a whole bunch of them that you know, you could take Pine Valley and say, well, the third hole is kind of a bridan hole, and just you could pick apart nearly any great golf course that way if you want to.

00:24:15
Speaker 1: So, one thing it seems like that really good land affords you is the ability to be unique because the land beneath the hole.

00:24:25
Speaker 3: Is unique exactly. Yeah, you don't have to come up with the idea. You just have to recognize that it's different and it's good.

00:24:38
Speaker 1: And then when you and I imagine when you have to come up with an idea, one thing you touched on with Atlantic City is, you know, coming up with an idea from scratch versus having a golf course already there, and the unique challenge that presents. And like when you're when the ground's not interesting, you immediately kind of think about other holes that you've seen, and I imagine that's the same case when you're redesigning an existing course.

00:25:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very hard. You know. One of the reasons I don't like to do, you know, big renovation projects where you're totally changing a golf course is it's really hard to get out of the box that the old golf course gives you. It's like, you know, you want to like route the holes somewhat differently, but they've planted trees down beside all of them, so that means you're going to like tear out a bunch of trees and it's still going to feel awkward, like you're you know, you'll still be able to tell the rows of trees are there unless you tear them all down, so you'll be able to tell that something's changed here instead of that it's it's a real new golf course. You know. The new course at the National is not like that. It's in land without any trees, so you could kind of change the routing and not get stuck with that. But it's pretty rare to have something like that. Usually everything if it's an old golf course that you're talking about redoing everything that's happened over the last twenty or fifty or however may years since that course was built. Reinforces the original plan, and it just makes it harder to break away from. And even if you just say, you know, I don't really like this golf course much at all, but that one hole over there is pretty good, maybe we should leave that. And then this one hole over here is pretty good, maybe we should leave that, that makes trying to fit the rest of them together way harder. You know, you could maybe take one corner and say, I'm not gonna mess with that, But once you take try to leave two or three pieces in different places on the land, you're gonna you're gonna wind up connecting them together pretty similarly to what's there.

00:26:41
Speaker 1: I that's one Like, I feel like I can look at a bland with no course and sea holes, but if I look at a course and try and see new holes, it's extraordinarily harder because you automatically gravitate towards existing green sites. Even if you're playing from like a different te to different green, you're still seeing the same kind of golf.

00:27:03
Speaker 2: It's hard to see.

00:27:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know that that's just a personal ancdote from somebody that's never designed a golf course.

00:27:10
Speaker 3: And you know the sad part about that is that's, yeah, I think that's where much of the future of the business will be. You know. It's so hard now to do a new project from scratch and take the leap of faith of yeah, I'm going to buy that piece of land and put a fair amount of money into getting permits for it, when I don't know, I'm I'm you know, I might just be totally out of luck spending money and they won't let me do it. And then okay, you do get to permission, but not you know, with some restrictions that don't make it quite as good as you thought it was going to be. And then you know, now I have to build all that, not just a golf course, but all the infrastructure that goes with it. Versus I could buy that piece of land there and it's already got a clubhouse, and it's already got a pump station, and it's already got all this other stuff in the ground, and I could just you know, I don't really need much in the way of permits to redo it. I could almost start tomorrow on it, you know. Instead of like spending three million dollars in waiting four years to get started. I could start at it the next day and start trying to make my money back.

00:28:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a lot has happened since we last talked.

00:28:37
Speaker 2: In the world you wrote a book.

00:28:42
Speaker 3: Actually, actually, not much has happened.

00:28:47
Speaker 2: It's very true.

00:28:49
Speaker 3: Very little has happened. I've spent way more time at home in the last five months than I have in any five months stretch since I met my wife.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: Talk about what it's done in terms of business, and if there's been any point in your career that could compare to the you know, just the design world, like what's happened to the golf architectural world.

00:29:19
Speaker 3: Well, you know, since I got into the business in nineteen eighty nine, there's been you know, there's been two seismic history events most people are really aware of nine to eleven and then a few years later the Great Financial Crisis in two thousand and eight, and so nine to eleven Pacific Dunes was just finished. In fact, we had to we were supposed to play the Renaissance Cup on September seventeen, two thousand and one. We had to push it back a little bit since nobody could fly, you know, and I had just signed up actually I hadn't signed up kid Kidnappers yet. We were going to work on we were working on Stonewall, We were getting ready to start working on the rolls course I was. I went to New Zealand for Cape Kidnappers the first time in November of two thousand and one. And you know, Julian Robertson, my client from New Zealand, you know, runs a huge hedge fund and is a Wall Street legend, and he, you know, so just listening to him talk for three days about how nine to eleven would change the economy and you know what, you know, what businesses would be really screwed for a long time, and what businesses would bounce right back. That kind of helped me from getting too from despairing too much about how bad it would be. You know, he certainly had it pegged that certain things would change drastically. He didn't anticipate actually that, you know, that we would respond by funding the TSA. I mean, without that, travel would have been very difficult and people would have been just as reluctant to travel as they are today. And interestingly, you know, nobody's talking about spending government money to fix that part now, you know, like testing people before they fly, or you know, getting you know, having some government program to make it feel safe to fly again. You're just on your own wondering if the guy next to you is going to wear a mask, and if the airline's going to pack the plane full of people are not and people are scared to fly, and that's going to make a huge difference in the economy generally, tourism specifically and golf tourism, which has been a big part of my business for the whole time. That's probably the most significant effect of this. Now in two thousand and eight, you know, that was such a huge hit to the economy in general and to the real estate market, and that certainly affected golf construction tremendously. You know, up till two thousand and eight, we were building three hundred new courses a year, probably eighty percent of them were tied to a real estate development in some way, and those pretty much went away after two thousand and eight. There's almost no projects being developed like that since, so every golf course architect has you know, there's a lot of you know, there were way more golf course architects in two thousand and seven than there are right now. And there's way more golf course architects right now than there really should be because so much business has gone away as a result of that, and a lot of guys are still just kind of hanging on by their fingernails ever since, trying to just get one project every two or three years to keep going. But that had a huge effect on the business in general, not so much on my business in particular, because you know, my name never sold. Really, I mean that affected Arnold Palmer's business in Jack Nicholas business tremendously more than mine, because that was their bread and butter, is building building golf courses with real estate attached. You know, that's how you justified paying them so much money to designed the golf course. Their name will help sell the real estate. And when that went away, a lot of their business did too, except for certain places overseas. You know, I remember a land planner that I was that we were working with on a project back then saying that you know, this is a guy who was in his sixties and he'd been in the business forever, and he said two thousand and eight was the first time that he had seen planning stop, you know, like even nine to eleven. You know, everybody was like nervous about how it was going to affect their business. But people didn't stop thinking about building new projects. So the people in the planning business and the developers of the world were still out there thinking about what are we going to do next? What are we going to do once we finished this, where are we Where are we going to take all those profits and put them in a new piece of ground and start again. And two thousand and eight people were what was going to happen to the economy was so obscure for like two or three years, nobody was playing anything new. I was extremely lucky then we were finishing. We were halfway done with old MacDonald and bless my Kaiser for going ahead and finishing it, even when times were really slow and business that the resort had slowed down a lot. I think if that had happened a year the recession happened a year earlier and we hadn't started yet, we wouldn't have built it for five years. But because we were halfway done anyway, I was like, Okay, we can afford to finish this, and then we also, both Bill and I stumbled into the crazy company that wanted to do a new resort in Florida. You know, a corporate client who you know, big corporations like the Mosaic Company. You know, they have like twenty five years into the future projected how much money their company is going to make and what they're going to be doing. And of course they don't really have any idea, but they all still have all these projections of what they're going to do. So and they you know, and they have a lot of capital to work with from their existing operations. So even the Great Financial Crisis was not enough to make them sit on their hands. They were just like, we have to restore this property. We're done mining this, we have to restore it. We want to do a resort project. We're going to do it. But you know, like Mike Kaiser wasn't looking to build a new project in two thousand and eight. You know, he was just trying to figure out whether the ones that he had were going to keep floating for a while. You know, this one, the jury is still out. To my surprise, and contrary to what that land planner guy told me in two thousand and eight, I am still getting the occasional call about new projects or total redos like we were just talking about, which is great, you know. I mean I was really afraid. You know a lot of a lot of the things that we thought we were going to build this year, people have sat on their hands and they're waiting to see because we weren't halfway done with them. The only thing we were in the midst of building was in Ireland, and you know, we'll finish that this summer, but you know, all the rest of them that hadn't started yet. The first thing you do when something like this comes along is like, whoa hold off here a minute, let's think about what we're doing. So, you know, like when that happens three weeks before you're going to break ground, the world comes to a halt and you just don't do it for a little while. So, you know, I've got I've got four projects that I hope we're going to build someday, sit and waiting to go. And are they going to happen next year? I don't know. Yeah, nobody knows. Is the coronavirus thing going to be all solved by next year? Are they going to have a vaccine everybody wants to be an optimist, but how much of your money are you going to bet on that? You know? So developers are in a rough place right now. It's like they really don't know what to do. But you know, and some of them are like, is this going to change our business model completely? You know, like I mean, just look at my Kaiser's business just as an example. You know, he's got a place like you know, a lot of the people that play off and band and fly there, and people aren't flying nearly as much. Now does that mean that nobody's going to go to Bandon now that they've still got a lot of support from their local market And there's a lot of people that are still getting on an airplane like it's no big deal. So and a certain percentage of people fly in there privately, and those people aren't worried about flying privately at all. So, you know, is it going to be a hit to the to how many people plag golf in band in the next year or two? Absolutely, But is it going to like destroy it? Probably not. Cabot Links Today as we sit here, people from outside Nova Scotia cannot visit Nova Scotia, you know, not only can people from New York not get on a plane and go there, people from Toronto can't either. That's eighty ninety percent of their business. You know, eventually that'll relax, but right now it's a mess. And then so places like that, and you know, the whole international side of my business, which has been a big part of it the last ever since two thousand and eight, is hanging by a thread. Right now. I don't know where any of those projects stand because you know, the whole the whole business model of people flying there to play golf is threatened by this. And then there's other projects like Sam Valley that will benefit from that. They're driving distance, you don't have to get on a plane. You know, they're you know, just like all the public courses in America are suddenly swamped with people because it's one thing you can do during the coronavirus. You know, anything that's built around a local business model is actually doing pretty well right now. And that's just like one hundred and eighty degree turn inside out for what this business has been the last fifteen twenty years.

00:39:58
Speaker 1: It's crazy that this is you know, what's spurning like a I'm never seen really since probably the game started in America, popularity in America for the game. I've got numerous friends from college that never played golf that have picked golf up in the last three weeks really or three months.

00:40:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, like they are, they are beginners.

00:40:20
Speaker 1: There's now a group chat with my college friends that is dedicated to golf and they're all beginners, and I'm like the only one that's a golfer on it.

00:40:30
Speaker 2: It's like a hardcore golfer on it.

00:40:32
Speaker 1: It's just such an It's been such a fun thing to just read because it's a different lens that I haven't looked through into golf and so long.

00:40:39
Speaker 2: And it's through beginners.

00:40:41
Speaker 1: But the public courses are packed, and I guess you know, one project that's got But.

00:40:46
Speaker 3: At the same time, all the public courses are packed. A lot of the private clubs are like thinking it's going to kill them because so much of their business model is based on wedding but not golf part yeah, you know, and and really some of the public courses too. That's where you know, I've been saying for a long time or just biting my lip for a long time that so much of the golf business, you know, golf is not sustaining itself anymore that you can't you know, you can't do a public course without building a clubhouse big enough that you can hold weddings there too. It's like, well skip that and not build a big clubhouse, you know, and you know, have three million dollars less in the thing at the start might also work, but it's just you know, the whole the whole business has been like, oh, we're going to pull in all this outside revenue or that, you know, even the Scottish and Irish courses, you know, they've gotten so far away from this works with just a bunch of townies playing paying eight hundred bucks a year. It only works that way now, you know, it only works that way now with the increased maintenance budgets they have because they have people flying over there worth willing to pay one hundred or two hundred dollars around and that just all went away, and now all of them are like, we're going to fail. I mean they didn't fail one hundred years ago when there was no outside revenue, but now they're going to fail because they they've come to depend on it so much.

00:42:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, you shift your business to certain demands and you know, to attract the American play you have to have American maintenance and then you know the it's yeah, and I think the courses that are doing the best are the ones that have are the least, are the most minimal, whether it's.

00:42:39
Speaker 3: The mom and pop type places.

00:42:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, they're you know, they're thriving because it's like they don't have a lot of overhead. They have the same clubhouse that they've had for seventy years, and they have a small fleet of carts that they own, and they have, you know, a minimal food and beverage business that hasn't been impacted by people not being able to come dine in their restaurant. One kind of piece of news is obviously there's more hoops to get through, but the National links Trust in DC with East Potomac something that you're attached to obviously that kind of fits what we're talking about here, where it's a municipal golf course a you know, and one that would be dedicated to golf and not have a lot of the frills. Talk a little bit just about East Potomac. I know you've been out there and just about the golf course that's there and the golf course that was there and the potential there.

00:43:39
Speaker 3: Well. You know, both Will Smith and Mike mccarton, who are behind National Links Trust, worked for me as interns construction guys shapers for a handful of projects back ten years ago, and both super smart guys, super nice guys, and you know, and pretty much after two thousand and eight both decided that there it would be hard to have a future in golf course architecture with all the jobs going away, and have started to look for other things to do. They both live in d C. They you know, they've they've played public off in d C. They've seen the conditions they're not very good when you know, Mike mccarton actually did his college thesis on East Potomac Park and being able to restore it. So now he and Will have done this National Links Trust thing to try to get the least to operate the public courses in DC, a very bold and brave move on their parts. You know, that's a tough business to be in in the best of times, and you know, to actually restore them, they've also got to raise a bunch of money to do it, which is not a done deal yet, so hopefully we'll get to work on the golf course eventually. I don't know when. Not right away for sure. You know what fascinated Mike about East Potomac. It's on a super flat, pointy little I think it's an island, if it's close to an island, if it's not really an island, yeah, I mean it's it's down just it's it's just below the tidal basin where the Jefferson Memorial is. And it's a really flat piece of ground along the river. And in the nineteen twenties, Walter Travis routed twenty seven holes there, including and the mean eighteen holes was a reversible golf course. Now, you know, I've worked on restoring a few Travis courses over the years, starting with Garden City Golf Club, my very first client as a consultant. And also you know, I did a reversible golf course here in here in Michigan. So so who better to restore Travis's reversible design than me and Mike mccarton, who's been fascinated with it for fifteen or twenty years. The golf course that's there has changed, not completely, but it's it's fairly different, you know, like most most of the holes are in roughly the same quarter that they were. Two or three of them got pushed out and smushed into the into the rest by their huge driving range. And when they first talked to me about it and I saw the plan, I was like, wow, okay, so we're not going to be able to restore those holes the way they were because the you know, the driving range is the cash cow of the whole thing. And yet you know, when when Mike started talking about restoring the original golf course to I mean, the less E is not the City of DC, it's the National Park Service that all that ground is actually National parkland, and the National Park Service when you talk about restoration, they take that way more seriously than country clubs do. To them, that is that is a commitment to restoring what was really there. It's just like talking about it to the National Trust in the UK. It's like, you know, when you talk to the National Trust in the UK about restoring a home, it's like, well, it didn't have bathrooms originally, so we're not sure we can let you put them in. You know, So that that's who we're dealing with overseeing the thing. If we if we do restore the golf course. They're going to want to put back pretty much exactly the way it was, including moving the double decker driving range to somewhere where it doesn't interfere with that eighteen whole routing, you know, in addition to some of the holes not being in quite the same place anymore. It seems like they I don't know why, but they, you know, they moved a few greens at some point and just you can kind of see contour where the old green was, except there's a tree planet there now. So it's going to be a fair amount of work. And then on top of that, it doesn't drain very well. It's a really flat site. There's only six or eight feet of elevation change on it, and and the Potomac River floods sometimes to the point where you know, quite a bit of the golf course has gone under water for a week or two at a time. So we've got to figure out do we raise the whole thing up is like a huge project and would cost you know, another five or ten million dollars more than what it will cost to fix to just restore the golf course on the ground level, or do we figure out, like some very clever drainage system like Pete Dye put in on a few of his golf courses in the Southeast that are all that have almost no elevation change to them to like you know, basically suck the water away as soon as you get an event like that. So so you get it back and you know, not covered by water and in good shape pretty fast. We still got to figure that out. Kind of depends on how we can raise the money to do it. But other than that, is it restorable. Absolutely, yes, the grounds still all there, and what a neat project to work on. And you know, and the goal is kind of like the goal that we had a common ground is, you know, put money into it, but not try to turn it into one hundred dollars golf course. You know, whatever we do, you know, most of it's going to be done through donations and so that won't affect the bottom line at all. And it you know, and hopefully there's still it's still an affordable golf course for everybody in the area like it always has been, maybe a little more expensive because you know, hopefully they'll maintain it a little better than it's been maintained in the last thirty years.

00:50:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it's a it's a situation.

00:50:34
Speaker 1: It's an interesting situation when you look at the structure of how they're doing it. With a private long term lease for municipal golf as maybe a potential future model of you know, hey, as a private entity, we might be able to, you know, manage this golf course a little bit better. And with a long term lease, we have incentive to put money into it. Because that was always kind of seemingly handstrong the DC courses was that they were short term leases, so you can't put any money into it and get money return on your investment because you're worried you might lose the lease.

00:51:12
Speaker 3: Right even you know, even most of the management companies that are in the business, I mean, you know, generally the longest leases I've heard on most of most of these deals are ten year leases, and the management company might put some money in upfront for the first few years, but when they get to like year seven, if if they don't, if they don't think they're going to get the lease renewed and they're not on really good terms with the town, they start just letting her go and not doing all the verification and stuff that they should be, because it's not going to affect the condition of the golf course very much until their leases run out. You know. That's you know, it would be better if municipalities really cared about golf enough to maintain them appropriately, but not many do, and and the you know, the price becomes this political thing from all the regulars you know, not want the price to go up, and you know, I don't want the price to golf to go up either. But but you used to be able to maintain a golf course for twenty five or thirty dollars around thirty years ago. But it doesn't that same twenty five dollars doesn't go as far out, and nobody wants the price to go up at all.

00:52:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's if this, if it works and the model works, then we could see it would be great to see some like a Muni revival with a lot of the there's so many great munis across the country that have you know, historic designs that are just sitting there, like the one that just pops into my mind. I don't know if you've seen Sleepy Hollow in Cleveland now, the Stanley Thompson there, it's you know, it's wonderful and it's just all just sitting there and it's like, oh, you know, but it's almost like the you know a lot of times the the governments themselves don't believe in it. And then you you wrote about in your new book about you know, the village of Sand's Point the other issues. Then you get these big committees and you have all of a sudden, seven hundred people committees when you have the town meetings.

00:53:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's politics makes it hard to do the right thing. And there's just there's just so many factions that have their own view of what should be done. And you know, every community it's like, you know, only ten percent of Americans play golf. That's the big problem. In any city, only ten percent of the people plus or minus a couple points are going to be golfers. So the you know, the you know, I mean, you know, we've gotten to where we even do it to school systems. It's like, well, only thirty percent of the taxpayers are going to have kids going to school here. So no, let's not raise the budget for schools. We don't want to do that because because we don't gain from it. And you know, that's it's a democracy makes running running an operation pretty hard sometimes yeah,