Yolk with Doak 18: Templates, His Routing Book, and Modern Green Speeds

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak. It's been a little while since we recorded with Tom. Just did a bunch of hours of recording, so should have new Yoke with Doakes every month or so going forward. Talked about a ton of different stuff and answered a ton of listener questions on this latest podcast. As a reminder, be sure to check out our events. We have one coming up in the end of March, March twenty eighth. It's called the Boomerang. It's in Ohi, California at Seoul Park, designed by Gil Hans. Should be a great time. We still have some spots available in that event. Registration is on the Frida egg dot com. You go to the pro Shop and you can find it there. And we are also releasing registration for the Dog Bowl at Yale Golf Course the Seth Rayner design, and that will be the Monday after the US opened, so the Monday after Father's Day June twenty second. Registration will open on Tuesday. The best way to get into the event is to sign up for our newsletter, because we will send out a newsletter on Tuesday morning when registration opens, so you can sign up for that newsletter on the Friday dot Com. There's a bar right there that you can sign up for and without further ado, here is Tom Doak.

00:01:41
Speaker 2: Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back. But don't toss the yolk and.

00:01:49
Speaker 3: The famously candid Doak doesn't pull any punches.

00:01:53
Speaker 4: How do I make natural looking contour hire of the biggest pool in the village and telling.

00:01:58
Speaker 2: Them to get flat first? Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated.

00:02:05
Speaker 1: Over the years, we're back, which you've been home for a while.

00:02:16
Speaker 4: I have been home with one quick trip to Detroit because our daughter had a baby. Yeah, since the middle of November. This is like the longest I have been home at one time in fifteen years.

00:02:30
Speaker 1: I have had a long stint at home too, and it's been really nice. I mean, imagine you feel like you're like kind of like in a It takes a while to get back in the mode. I feel like when you've been traveling for a while. But then once you get in a rhythm, it's nice for being home.

00:02:44
Speaker 3: Right, And I'm gonna you know.

00:02:46
Speaker 4: Of course, I came back from Australia in the middle of November, so it takes a couple of weeks to get over that and get your bearings and get back to sleeping on a normal schedule. And I'm going back there the end of February, so I'll get I'll get off again here pretty quick. But it's been nice to, yeah, sleep in your own bed and have a regular schedule for once.

00:03:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's really nice. So I guess we're going to kick off this with some Q and A. And we got a lot of great questions. Michael Lord, I'm curious about this one. If if there was a dope template hole, what is it?

00:03:26
Speaker 3: If there was a dope template hole, what is it?

00:03:31
Speaker 1: Or inspiration hall? Like we're one that maybe used a few times.

00:03:37
Speaker 4: Well, you know, obviously I've used some of the well known templates a few times. I've built you know, there's not many architects that haven't built a ri Daan hole or and Eden or something like those. So you know, I've built I think like half a dozen rid Dan holes in different places, and and I you know, I almost like the eaton hole better, but it's hard to the eaton hole is on, it'd be in firm enough that you can't just hit it over the bunker. And stop it. You know, if the conditions are like that, then it's not. Then it's just another part three. So you don't you know, you don't use that in a normal setting because you're not you're not playing in those conditions if you're you know, we built one of Texas Tech because it's straight down wind and it's just.

00:04:21
Speaker 3: You have to play the run and shot a lot of the time.

00:04:26
Speaker 4: You know, when I a couple three of my earliest courses, like Apache, Stronghold and Riverfront in Virginia have a version of the thirteenth Green and Crystal Downs where it's high in the front and then it drops away to the back into a lower whole location, which is actually a Perry Maxwell concept instead of McKenzie. You know, I've seen that two or three times on other Maxwell courses, but at some point I decided, no, I don't want to make somebody else's concept my trademark. So I haven't really done on one of those for a long time. We might again, but you know, it's been a while. You know, I've borrowed things from tons of golf courses I've seen all over, but do I have one that I want to keep using.

00:05:11
Speaker 3: I don't think so we've used.

00:05:14
Speaker 4: You know, one of my favorite, probably my favorite holes that I build are short par fours, and I like that most of them are really different than each other, you know. One of the best of those is six of Pacific Dunes. When we were building stream Song, the thirteenth hole is pretty much based on the sixth of Pacific Dunes. It was like the one hole where we had to move dirt because the hole that that hole, the whole left side of it was much higher than it is now, and you couldn't see, you know, it just looked wide open and then it cut. You couldn't tell where the edge was because it was fairly high, and then it fell, you know, it went crashing down into a lake. So you had a blind water hazard and a dangerous bank for you know, like we were afraid somebody was going to drive a golf cart off the bank of it and hurt themselves. So we have to do something about this, and we wound up like, well, the only way we're going to see it is cut it down a lot. So we cut down the whole left side a bunch and actually took all the.

00:06:15
Speaker 3: Dirt and hauled it over to the other golf course.

00:06:17
Speaker 4: So Billcourt could build his fifteenth te up in the air where he needed it, and you know, as we as we brought it down, it kind of made it like the six fallap Pacific Dunes because the tea and the green are both up, but most of the fairway is down low except right on the approach to the green.

00:06:36
Speaker 3: You know.

00:06:37
Speaker 4: And I've had one or two other places where I saw something that looked like, oh, you could build a similar hole here, But again I don't want to do the same thing all the time.

00:06:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's do you think there's a do you think? I mean one of the things is obviously people copy ten place from you know, other architects, like you talked about the green with Perry Maxwell.

00:07:01
Speaker 2: Use if if you were.

00:07:03
Speaker 1: Going to take one, say green that you've built, and you were this is a pure hypothetical here, but if you were a young architect, what green would you take from your greens that you've built?

00:07:20
Speaker 4: Well, you know the ones that I think are the coolest or not the kind that you just want to do over and over again, like the wild green of barn Google that we called the Sitwell Park Green that was inspired by McKenzie's or you know, the very first course I did, high Point had the thirteenth green of high Point was one of the absolute first greens I built. That was the first thing I started on when we started building that golf course.

00:07:46
Speaker 1: Is that the one with the YouTube video from that you hit the putts, so people are they should watch that.

00:07:54
Speaker 4: It's it sat on a saddle and it kind of rose up to the back and then it fell away really hard at the back left and there was a bunker behind the back left, and so from the right side of the green to this lower back left pin place when there was like a I mean it was like a three foot drop.

00:08:12
Speaker 3: It was pretty bad.

00:08:13
Speaker 4: And you know, if you were on the right side of the green and tried to putt straight at the left, it would usually go off the green. But when we were building the hall, I thought, well, if you're in this bunker and back, you're like not if you're right handed, it's going to be hard to even get a stance up against the wall of the bunker to play back toward the pin. So I want to do something that lets you play up on the back of the green and have it roll down there and then Once I started thinking about that, I was a little I was like, well, you could use that for a chip shot from the other side too, or you could even try to play your approach that way of just hitting the approach up to the back of the green and then it peels.

00:08:55
Speaker 3: Back and goes down to this back left pin.

00:08:58
Speaker 4: So you know, a lot of people when they come and play golf with me, I'd show them that shot because nearly always, if the pin was back there at all, there was surely somebody who could benefit from that if they if they knew it was there.

00:09:12
Speaker 3: And even if the pin wasn't there, we'd, you.

00:09:14
Speaker 4: Know, I'd just throw down my wallet and say, okay, try to get at that.

00:09:17
Speaker 3: See if you could figure out the way to do.

00:09:19
Speaker 4: It, you know, and that that golf course is close.

00:09:26
Speaker 3: Now.

00:09:26
Speaker 4: I went out there this year for my or last year for my uh the book that I'm working on now, and actually surveyed the green so we could put you know, so we could put a plan in, because I.

00:09:41
Speaker 3: Didn't build it to a plan. I just built it, you know, and.

00:09:45
Speaker 4: Something that's something that I actually shaped, and you know, that's one. I mean, I don't know where I'll find a natural site to build that again. But if I had like a project like Texas Tech, where I'm just building something from scratch, I would build that green again now because the original's gone and you know, nobody's ever going to get a chance to see what it's like unless I build it somewhere else.

00:10:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, some people ask about upcoming books, and I'm curious to hear more about your book project that you're working on right now.

00:10:19
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I did the.

00:10:23
Speaker 4: Series of The Confidential Guide out of the order that I thought I was going to. I did the first three volumes, but then the fourth one was supposed to be courses in continental Europe and Africa, and the fifth one Asia and Australia and New Zealand. And when I got to it, we were working in Australia and New Zealand, and you know, and I was busy here in the summers, and it seemed like it was easier to go to It was easier to finish the Asia and Australia New Zealand book than.

00:10:53
Speaker 3: It was the Europe and Africa one.

00:10:56
Speaker 4: I didn't have time in the summer to go to the places in Europe, so we finished volume five and I still get calls like every three or four weeks, I miss Volume four, Can you please send Volume four? And it's like Volume four is not done yet, and Volume four is probably not going to be done for a couple more years because I'm really busy, and you know, I've got to have some time off in the summer to go see these courses in Europe, and I'm not going to have any time off in the summer this year for sure, and probably next year either. But in the meantime, I've been working on a book that I always wanted to do. The title is Getting to eighteen because it's about my first eighteen courses, but it's really about routing golf courses. And you know, it's impossible to talk about routing golf courses in a really general sense. You know, it just all sounds the same, you know. I mean, there's a few basic concepts that people know about. You're trying not to play the first hole into the rising sun, and you're trying not to play into the setting sun at the end, and you're trying to get the part of threes to different directions and all of that.

00:12:01
Speaker 3: But you know that.

00:12:02
Speaker 4: Most of that goes out the window when you've got a real piece of land. Because now that some of that doesn't work so easily, Like the clubhouse site is over here in the west corner of the property, and guess what, the first hole is going to probably have to play east and the last hole is going to have to play west, even if you know that's a bad idea, because that's just the way the property is. So, you know, the only way to talk about it is use examples in case studies. So what I'm doing is kind of doing a retrospective on the courses that I've built, but from the perspective of how did these get routed? What were the decisions I made? Why is the eighth hole there instead of somewhere else? And you know how many steps did it take to get to that point? You know, some there's a couple of golf courses we've talked about a little before that I did the routing before I ever saw the site, and then I went there and I was like, wow, this is good.

00:12:58
Speaker 3: We don't really have to change this.

00:13:00
Speaker 4: But usually it's two or three or four different trips, and you know, the first the first routing you do, you might get three or four holes at eighteen that you that wind up in the finished version, not because the other one's all stink, but you know, something that connects to them stinks, and you just don't like that little corner. So it's kind of like you keep working on little parts of the property at one time and find a solution to them, and then of course they've all got to fit together in the end.

00:13:32
Speaker 1: I speaking, you know what you just said about routing. It's interesting you could come up with routing your first visit, but then the continued process of adjusting it maybe more and more.

00:13:44
Speaker 2: How do you know when to stop?

00:13:46
Speaker 3: You don't. That's it, you know, I've compared.

00:13:48
Speaker 4: You know, it's it's a different thing, but it's you know, it's it's kind of a puzzle, you know, and it's it's no different than getting good at doing the New York Times crossword puzz or Sudoku or you know anything really, you know, except it's really complicated. The good thing is you kind of get to make up what the pieces are.

00:14:11
Speaker 3: You know.

00:14:11
Speaker 4: It's one of the reasons I fight when people say, well, you know, you don't always do par seventy two courses and you don't always have four part threes. It's like, the fewer restrictions like that I have, the easier it is to solve the puzzle. You know, if I can say, ah, this would be just fine if I just have another par three hole here to make this work, you know, whereas whereas of the hole I'm you know, I've got seventeen good holes and I'm missing a par five and I don't have room for one. Then it's start from scratch again. So you don't want too many restrictions put on you by other people about what are the pieces like? But then putting them together, you know, Like I say, sometimes it comes out really quickly, and sometimes it just you wonder if you're ever going to get to the final solution. But the one thing that's not like a Crosser puzzle is nobody puts the answer in the paper for you the next week so you can find out. You know, you have to have worked on it enough to go, yeah, I think that's the best solution I'm going to come up with. You know, your first version could be really good, and you're kind of you kind of get emotionally attached to certain things and think, yeah, I really like this, But you also don't want somebody to come back a year later and say, well, why didn't you go over there? That would have been a great hole over there. You miss that, So you do have to like give it some time. You know, even if you think you've got the thing figured out the first day, it's like you want to give that a few months to make sure.

00:15:48
Speaker 3: That you still feel that way and you didn't miss something.

00:15:53
Speaker 1: I'm curious reflecting, obviously, you probably thought a lot about things that you hadn't thought about while when you went back to write Somebodace. I'm curious if there was any example like where you thought about something and and you said, wait, maybe and you thought of a new solution for a problem you faced.

00:16:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's one, and I you know, I've debated how much to get into it on the book. One of my early courses, Riverfront Virginia, is in a big housing development, and there was a lot of back and forth with the land planners about what ground the golf got to use and what ground the real estate gets to use. And you know, it's kind of like we both want the same parts, you know, you both want the beautiful you know that. I mean, there was one of the first things that I drew when I got that topo map was a hole that looked kind of like the eighteenth fall at Pebble Beach, playing along a tidal marsh that opened up into a big river. But then it's like, well, that's cool, but I don't see how it's practical.

00:16:58
Speaker 3: To use that in a routing, because you know, there's.

00:17:01
Speaker 4: A little power line you've got to get passed to get to it, so and the tea is not right next to the power line, so to get to it, you've got to have another hole in there before it, and at least one more hole to.

00:17:12
Speaker 3: Get yourself out of there.

00:17:14
Speaker 4: And all this time, so all of that, you're chewing up all this real estate that the client wants to sell houses on, and these are the best views it'd be. It would have been one thing if it was just that one hole and there were beautiful house lots along that hole, But once it got as complicated as being two or three holes that were taking value away from the real estate, it's like, no, you can't do that. So there's just a ton of trade offs.

00:17:38
Speaker 3: In something like that. But but the you.

00:17:41
Speaker 4: Know, so there was all this cool kind of coastal land and then including some big inlets that were pretty, and then the rest of it was just dead flat soybean fields.

00:17:54
Speaker 3: You know, they've been farmed for years.

00:17:56
Speaker 4: So all the cool vegetation and all the elevation change and all the use were along the edge, and the middle was nothing and a lot of you know, if you had a client that didn't care so much about making a good golf course, they'd just say, well, you put the golf holes in the middle there, and maybe we'll let you out to the from marshview.

00:18:18
Speaker 3: At one one point over here.

00:18:20
Speaker 4: Like a lot of courses in Hawaii have one part three hole on the ocean and then everything else is back inland away from that. You know, we actually got to put a lot of holes along the marsh there, and I almost wonder if we didn't do too many, because because you know, you're playing, you're playing a lot of holes where one side is pretty and then the other side has as many homes as you could possibly imagine jammed up against it real tight.

00:18:47
Speaker 3: Because that was the trade off.

00:18:49
Speaker 4: And you know, you don't if I did, just if I'd have said, okay, I'll try not to stretch this out so far, and I'll and I'll take three or four holes together in the middle where I can you know, make a landscape for them and have them feel like they're not the homes aren't right up against them. That probably would have been a good trade off. And at the time I was just like, boy, you'll give me more land to do this.

00:19:15
Speaker 1: That's great, that's interesting. How it's really interesting Now? What about did you have like the reverse happened where you were thinking about how you did something where you're like, God, I used to do this so simply, or something where almost like the more you learn it sometimes confuses some stuff. And the way you did work early in your career was there was almost like a simplicity to it or the way you thought about it.

00:19:47
Speaker 4: Well, you can be your own worst enemy. I mean even my very first golf course high Point, you know that the best part of the land was the forty acres in back that have more dramatic elevation changes, and and from the beginning, I was like, Okay, the more holes I can get back there are the better, because that's the coolest part of this land. But I had to ask, you know when I when I did a routing, I was like, you know, this is really good. But this where the fourteenth fairway was, was like that would have been a perfect place to build some homes and look down on the golf holes and you could get to it from the back of the property pretty easily. So I had to go ask the client, like, you know, kind of hold my breath, So this is either two good golf holes or it's a bunch of high value lots, because he had three hundred acres, so he's going to have some development potential leftover. And he kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, if the golf course isn't really good, then the lots are going to be worth more than anything else up here anyway. So you know, I'm hiring you to make a good golf course. You know, music to my ears. But you know, a lot of golf course architects, you know, think on the client's behalf and give up the best golf hole, cause it's the practical thing to do. And you know, the unfortunate truth is, and you know, you get a little sense of it in the book. My clients aren't all the same person, but and they have you know, people have different motivations for building a golf course, but I've been really lucky that most of my clients the golf is really important to them. Like that big development project I was talking about, you know, the client was a guy that I met, John Gorman, who was the green chairman at Butler National when I was at Cornell and writing letters to clubs asking if I could come see the golf course, and he and his friend Bill she and played with me at Butler when I was twenty and then, like you know, I stayed in touch more with Bill actually than with John. But let's see, so that was in nineteen eighty one, so like ten years later. John did a lot of things and owned a few businesses, but he also had a little development business. And the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company owned this big piece of land and they didn't know anything about residential development, but they knew it was worth a lot for residential development, so they hired him to figure out what to do for it, and that's how I wound up getting this job. But John was like a one handicapped serious golfer, so he didn't just want to build a golf course and a big housing development. He wanted it to be a really good golf course. Otherwise I never would have won any of those battles with the land planner about where I could put my golf holes.

00:22:38
Speaker 1: A question that goes perfectly into this book conversation is from Golf Dock or Texas Golf Dock, what was your most challenging project?

00:22:51
Speaker 4: Well, you know, challenging is all kinds of different reasons, Like that Riverfront job. Just as we were going to start to build it, the Chicago Bridge and Iron Company got taken over on Wall Street and you know, postpone the project for another four years while we sorted that out. So that took eight years from start to opening day. That's that's difficult on one level. You know, the the two hardest golf courses to build by far, we're Stone Eagle and Palm Springs and Rock Creek in Montana. Because you're dealing with Rock and Stone Eagle, we were dealing with three hundred and fifty feet of elevation change from the top to the bottom. But that that was the most rugged site by far that I've worked with, Like it was hard to walk around it. You know, half the holes when we started, I remember saying to Eric Iverson while we were walking around early on, it was like you know, if we were older, we'd have a hard time even walking around here. We just have to take a bulldozer and get out in front of us to even see what we're working on here. And you know, I think that turned out amazingly well considering how complicated it was, because you know, we managed to leave a lot of rocky features in between the holes, and then you have no idea how much more rugged it was in between some of you know, some of those things were like a canyon and we had to put fifteen feet of fill in it in order to get something wide enough to play golf.

00:24:24
Speaker 3: You know, it was just a v So that's probably the hardest.

00:24:30
Speaker 4: One we've had to build, where you really had to have a lot of imagination to see a golf hole out there at all. Even though it was clear which way you had to go, it was just going to be.

00:24:42
Speaker 3: A lot of work to get there. Okay.

00:24:45
Speaker 1: So yeah, so you you know, it was always going to places and then it was hard, always hard.

00:24:50
Speaker 2: Getting out of them.

00:24:50
Speaker 1: Like you talked about how getting to one corner of Rivermont, then you had to get out of that, and it was like that all over the place.

00:24:58
Speaker 2: But you knew which way you had to go.

00:25:00
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, you know, the the the rock features were kind of ridges, so almost like dunes. Honestly, you know, there were rows of them in places, and you know you weren't going to go smashing straight across all those. You kind of wanted to play the valleys in between them, and just in the valley. You know, with a bunch of cut and fill, you had control over what it could be like if you were trying to leave some of the ridges and go perpendicular to them.

00:25:26
Speaker 3: There was just no way.

00:25:28
Speaker 2: So with this book, when does it? When's it coming out? Expected?

00:25:33
Speaker 3: Well, he's actually started.

00:25:35
Speaker 4: We started selling them just before New Year's even though it hasn't gone to the printers yet. It'll go to the printers the first of March, and hopefully we'll be sending it out in late May. You know, it's written, we're just still putting pictures with text and laying out the last few chapters. And Sarah Mass who used to work for me here and as she teaching school now so's she's only working.

00:26:02
Speaker 3: On that part time.

00:26:03
Speaker 4: We got a lot done over Christmas in New Year's but now she's back at work and she can only do it on weekends.

00:26:09
Speaker 2: That's that's exciting. Uh, I look forward to reading it.

00:26:12
Speaker 1: I read a few of the chapters, and one of the things I found it really interesting was the courses I hadn't been to was actually what I found more interesting than the course that you know. Well, one of the courses I read about that I had been to, which I'm very excited to read about all of them.

00:26:30
Speaker 4: So it covers my first eighteen courses. The cutoff for that is St. Andrew's Beach, so it includes Pacific Dunes and Kidnappers and barn Google and Saint Andrew's Beach, but it doesn't include bally Neil and Sabonic and Terry Edy. Those will have to be another book sometime in the future if I get around to them.

00:26:49
Speaker 1: You got a lot of you got a lot of projects, so it could be your second eighteam you got second eighteen.

00:26:54
Speaker 4: Well, I actually have done I mean I've done thirty six golf courses at this point. Uh, and well from this book, three of them are gone, so yeah, there's still more material.

00:27:09
Speaker 1: Saint Andrew's Beach was a question for your internship program, right routing it.

00:27:18
Speaker 4: Yes, there's there's a little part of the Saint Andrews Beach property. That's kind of it was kind of like that back forty acres at a high point that I thought, well, this is really cool ground. I want to get as much as I can out of this. So so when we started the internship program, I.

00:27:40
Speaker 3: I gave.

00:27:44
Speaker 4: We haven't done this every year, but one year or two years. I gave everybody that little map of that forty acres and just said find a golf hole or two on here, just to see if they if any of them had any if they could read, first if they could read the tope map well enough to understand what they were doing, because you know a lot of them would draw things and you're like, okay, you can't read that. And but also to see like if any of them would try to get more than that, because there were like five or six golf holes on that map, very tightly bunched together, very cleverly, I think. And you know, it was a good practical test for people because you know, some people just draw one hole across it and go, wow, that's great, this is going to be a really cool haul, and then other people are like trying to find how they could fit things together. You know, And that's really what routing a golf course is about.

00:28:45
Speaker 3: It's like.

00:28:47
Speaker 4: Trying to be efficient with it too, so you can get more out of the good parts of the ground. You know, I look at Mackenzie's courses especially. It's hard to look at somebody's courses after the fact and really think about the routing, even for me, so the average percent is no chance of it. But even for me, it's like, Okay, what was here? Why do you do that that way?

00:29:10
Speaker 3: But the one thing I've noticed consistently about McKenzie courses, if there's a fault with them, it's that when he found the cool feature, he jammed as many holes as he could right there, to the point that now that they're busy there, it's like too close together and almost unsafe. You know. Posita Tampo's got some problems with that, and.

00:29:31
Speaker 4: A lot of the like lesser known McKenzie courses that I've seen. That's why they're lesser known, because they have problems with safety in some places, and just you know, or you know, they planted trees between the holes to try to solve the safety problem, and they wreck both of them because you know, the feature in the middle was the thing that they were built around. But now you can't you can barely even tell it's there.

00:30:00
Speaker 1: Say that routing trade of Mackenzie that you allude to is one of the reasons that the Roars of Augusta exist. Yes, because there's so many holes that are clustered around those key features out there.

00:30:14
Speaker 4: Yes, And you can't say he really thought about it because he had the nines backwards.

00:30:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's true.

00:30:21
Speaker 2: It's an unintentional consequence.

00:30:24
Speaker 3: Right, Sometimes things work out really well.

00:30:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, So move on to another course that you've done it. And this is a question I forgot to write down the person's name. How would you get more state golf associations to do what the Colorado Golf Association did at common Ground?

00:30:45
Speaker 4: Well, first of all, I would love to encourage them all to, you know, have a have a look at common Ground website and just see, you know, not only what they did with that golf course, but all the programs that they run out of it. Their caddy and they're.

00:31:02
Speaker 3: You know, it's a great hub for golf in the state.

00:31:05
Speaker 4: Now they've they've played like every single level of tournament that they play at the state level on that golf course at least, and yeah, and qualifying for the US Amateur and what was the US.

00:31:20
Speaker 2: Midham they had the stroke play round at this year, right yep.

00:31:26
Speaker 4: So you know, it is a golf course that's that's worked reasonably well for everybody. It wasn't quite as hard as Cherry Hills when they when they did the the one round of the stroke play qualifying for the Amateur on it. But I got to see a heck of a lot of good players that day. That was justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth and all those guys were out there trying to figure it out. And you know, I mean the the CGA kind of lucked into that they inherited the golf course that it was a it was an old Air Force base course and they closed the base.

00:32:04
Speaker 3: And I don't know exactly how, but.

00:32:08
Speaker 4: The the CGA wound up getting the golf course donated to them, so they had it at zero cost basis and they operated it for like ten years the way it was, but they were saving up money from all the handicap fees and everything to renovate it. And they you know, eventually they saved up four million dollars to renovate the golf course, which you couldn't you know, if you're going to start a new project from scratch, it's going to cost triple that. Even if the golf course doesn't cost you know, you might be able to build a golf course for four million dollars, but but infrastructure, clubhouse, land cost all the rest. No, that's going to you know, the total bill is way more. So you know, they got a lot of it handed to them.

00:32:52
Speaker 3: And then when they you know, when they hired an.

00:32:58
Speaker 4: Architect, they said, okay, this is all the money we got. We can't go over on this, you know, but we'd like you to try to do as much as you can with four million dollars. And you know, my crew was really motivated to do that. Eric and Jim Orbana and Don Placa all were around Denver. You know, Don lives here now, but he grew up out there and went to college there. So Eric ran the job. And he's a pretty clever guy. I mean he you know, he they had a bunch of trees that were in you know, some of them were reasonably decent looking trees, but you know, they planted him in rows and they didn't look good.

00:33:44
Speaker 3: And you know, the rows.

00:33:45
Speaker 4: Were really tight in some of the fairway areas, so much so that we put the fairway like in the roughs in between the two holes because the holes were too narrow. But Eric said, well, why don't we sell some of the trees in return for them moving some of the other trees, you know, because like like getting a landscaper to move trees cost a couple thousand dollars a tree. But we said, okay, for every tree you move for us, you can take one and you know, take it to some residential project you're doing. So we got to move the trees around for zero. You know, we tore up the cart paths that were there and ground them up and recycled the asphalts so we could do the cart paths for your zero. So we had, you know, we had a good budget to build the golf course and do it right.

00:34:38
Speaker 1: It's almost the opposite where you talked about with the routing, where you want as few constraints. This is an example of where a constraint with the budget yielded a lot of creativity.

00:34:49
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, I've had a lot of people comment on that that, you know, a lot of the cool things you see in.

00:34:57
Speaker 3: Golf course architecture are based done.

00:35:01
Speaker 4: Necessity is the mother of invention, Like like I mean the fifth tall at Crystal Downs. You wouldn't build a hole like that if you didn't have to to make everything connect, you know, they they just that's not the first.

00:35:13
Speaker 3: Hole he found on that routing. That's one of the last ones.

00:35:17
Speaker 4: If it's like, okay, six that's obvious, and seven and eight maybe not quite so obvious. But how do I get to sixty to make that all work? Well, I guess I got to hit it over that ridge right there.

00:35:31
Speaker 3: You know.

00:35:32
Speaker 4: So when you've got you know, it's the hardest job for me to think about is like Texas Tech or the Legends, where okay, it's flat, you can do anything you want. You know, first of all, where do you start? You kind of have to start with ideas from other places because there's really because there's really not much there to go on. And then it's like, well how do you judge that? I mean, you could have done anything, so so who's to say this what I did was any better than something completely different somebody else would have done. You can't whereas if you've got a really nice piece of land, even if it's a tight pie tight acreage, or you know, it's got a really difficult portion over there. It's like, okay, you know, what's the best solution for this, assuming we're not just gonna nuke it and start from a scratch. You know, what's the best solution for using the features that are out here? You know, that's more fun for me, even if it's got some constraints.

00:36:39
Speaker 1: It's interesting you brought up crystal down to like a connect connector hole. So that's something I noticed the summer of visiting some Perry Maxwell courses.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: But like, there are you know, he had very distinct like you could.

00:36:52
Speaker 1: Tell a lot of times where he had a connector hole that got him to another spot where then you have all these you know, unbelievable Like it seemed like in a way maximized the and prioritize the long holes over the shorter holes.

00:37:06
Speaker 2: Is that something that you found in your Yeah, Like.

00:37:09
Speaker 3: Well you have to do that.

00:37:11
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, if the if you're dealing with a lot of topography and it's kind of up and down and all around, you know, it's harder to find a long hole where you you know, where the visibility works out where, you know, not just from the landing poll at two hundred and eighty yards off the tee or whatever, but from anywhere within fifty yards around there where people are going to drive it. They can see the target pretty well. You know, the hillier it is, the more the less likely that is to be able to work out. That's why par fives are the hardest to design well, because you know, where is the second landing area in a part five. I mean, just you and me, It's going to be sixty or seventy yards different because you hit it farther and so so now we've I've got to find a huge area that I can still see where I'm going for the third shot, because neither of us is going to think that hole is any good if we wind up with a blind third shot, and you're not going to think it's good unless you can see the green pretty well from the landing area, because you might be going for it. So you know, on a par five, you've got to make everything, almost everything from two hundred and fifty yards into the green.

00:38:25
Speaker 3: Work as a place to approach the.

00:38:27
Speaker 4: Hole from and and feel like it's a natural thing. You know, A par three is really easy to put together. You know, the tea's here, the green's there, and I don't have to worry about any place else. So you know, you can find par three's all over a site if that's if that's what you're looking for, but you can't.

00:38:47
Speaker 3: You shouldn't.

00:38:47
Speaker 4: It's hard to prioritize them because you need to save some of those for the tough spots. You know, if you see a hole, that would be a good cool part three. The first thing you're thinking about is what could I go back in They're two hundred and fifty yards with the tea and drive it to where I'm standing here and then hit this approach shot. And if you can, you're probably going to.

00:39:10
Speaker 1: That's an interesting thought about, like, because I think for the layman, you know, it's easy to see. You know, you see people take picture like holes that aren't holes, and usually it's like a par three. Sure, but the idea of seeing par threes and then going back is a really interesting one.

00:39:29
Speaker 4: That's you know, I don't know if every architect thinks that way, but I would guess most of them do, because you know, the the tough part is finding thirteen or fourteen long holes on the property that fit together reasonably well. And the par threes they're the easiest one to use for connectors because you can connect something that's you can connect a one hundred or one hundred and fifty yard or a two hundred and fifty yard green to tea walk with a part three hole.

00:40:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's at Southern Hills.

00:40:03
Speaker 1: I was thinking it was like became so clear, like the eleventh hole, which is after that tenth hole that has that great, great feature that goes kind of around and up, and then that twelfth hole that's.

00:40:14
Speaker 2: Got the great you know slope.

00:40:16
Speaker 1: It kind of reminds you of like an Augusta National slope coming in. But then there's this massive, you know, kind of hill that cuts through the eleventh.

00:40:23
Speaker 2: It's like a short Part three.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: It's like that's the only hole that could go with that that land there, and it kind of connects you with with ten and ten green and twelve te.

00:40:32
Speaker 4: Right, and you know, I mean it's become even more prevalent to use part of three holes as kind of the connectors because people's tolerance for blind holes keeps going down. You know, if you can if you say okay, it's it's you know, it's it's fine to have a par four that you drive short of that ridge and then hit a shot over it, then okay, then you're not stuck with a par three there. But not many people will go for that kind of hole anymore so, so it's almost like you've got to solve it. And you know, the other thing about a Part three is, you know, when you get to really severe rugged land. I mean, obviously some places you've got too big a stretch to just solve it with a par three.

00:41:18
Speaker 3: But but it's easiest to solve I.

00:41:21
Speaker 4: Mean even if it's you know, if not the Grand Canyon, but if I've got you know, if I've got.

00:41:28
Speaker 3: Three hundred and fifty yards from me to the other.

00:41:31
Speaker 4: Side of some really rugged land, what I'm going to do is build a par three and then the te shot for a par four getting out of there. Because now, because even if if that land is totally hostile, all I've got to do is build a green for a par three and a tea. I don't have to build a fair way where the ball will stop.

00:41:52
Speaker 2: It's like short akers twelve to thirteen.

00:41:55
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, I mean any big stretch like that. You know, Part three all you got to do is build a green, which is a small area that you can manufacture pretty easily. Manufacturing fairway is a lot harder, you know, You've got to worry about every part of the fairway working instead of just this little target.

00:42:17
Speaker 1: It's interesting to what you said about blind shots, because if you go to like some iconic golf courses, the thing that people bring up immediately is blind shots. Like I'm thinking about Fisher's Island's fourth hole, right, you know, like it's the first thing people are going to talk about.

00:42:36
Speaker 2: Really.

00:42:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like they're so rare now that they're really cool, and everybody's like, wow, why don't we have more of these? If we had a lot of them, people would complain about them again, But if you only ever see them on really cool golf courses, then you think, wow, this is great, we should have more.

00:42:56
Speaker 1: And then like something that comes to mind also along with blind shots is like greens. Like people go to Wingfoot West or Wingfoot just in general, and they're like those greens are unbelievable. But if you put them on a new golf course, people would be go nuts about them. And I just don't I guess I don't understand why the line like why a classic golf course? Is it because the tradition that and this is the way it is here that people accept it.

00:43:26
Speaker 3: I mean, what, No, it's I mean it's mostly because.

00:43:31
Speaker 4: You can't ask tilling Has why he did that and why he didn't do that differently, or.

00:43:36
Speaker 2: Ask him to come back and soften him.

00:43:39
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, but just the general thing. You know, it's been that. Yeah, yes, the weight of it's been there a long time has a lot to do with it.

00:43:48
Speaker 3: But but really it's you know, when.

00:43:51
Speaker 4: Tilling Has built those greens and the speeds were slower, I don't know how much complaint there was about them, Probably not much, but that's you know, modern arch are always worried that people are gonna complain object and they'll have to you know, it's expensive to change greens, so I'd better not take that chance. I better build something that's tame, and I better worry about what if green speeds are eighteen and another ten years And you know I laugh at that, but you know I started the golf business for mister Dye thirty five years ago and green speeds were ten. That was fast ten or maybe eleven. And now that's like day to day speeds. Everybody wants the greens there all the time, and for a tournament they should be. You know, people talk about thirteen and fourteen on the stint meter, and I, you know, I don't know whether I even believe that some greens are that fause like Augusta's greens have so much slope. If they were really that fast, you know, if they were fifteen, the ball wouldn't stay on some of them. So I'm not sure. You know, they keep I have no idea what the green speeds are at Augusta. That's that's they keep that very secret. And even though I know one or two other people in the committee that the measure them, I would never ask because they can't tell me. But they probably also don't tell you because it's probably not quite as fast as you think it is.

00:45:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, it couldn't be that fast.

00:45:25
Speaker 1: Like having putted very very fast greens, it's like they're never as fast as you think they are, if they're greens with a lot of slope.

00:45:33
Speaker 4: No, I mean, I the fastest greens I've ever putted on my life.

00:45:40
Speaker 3: Scott Bordener.

00:45:41
Speaker 4: It was super intent of Chicago Golf club for a few years, just left there to go back east somewhere. But he got his greens really fast one fall, and it was just like the perfect storm of he had just cut him down to try to get him fast, and then it got dry and windy and they really dried out. And I had a friend of mine and who lived up.

00:46:01
Speaker 3: Here in northern Michigan.

00:46:03
Speaker 4: He'd gone to he went to the University of Chicago, and he always said, oh, could you take me with you to Chicago golfs one day?

00:46:11
Speaker 3: So we picked that day to show up with.

00:46:15
Speaker 4: The greens at sixteen or whatever the hell they were on the stip meter where if you you know, if you were at the edge of the green and you yiped your little chip shot, it was all the way across the green and off the other side. And my friend had never seen anything like that at all, and he was just petrified and couldn't basically couldn't play.

00:46:32
Speaker 3: It ruined the day for him.

00:46:34
Speaker 4: I was like, you know, I still had some remnants of my short game at that point and I could finish.

00:46:42
Speaker 3: But it was scary.

00:46:45
Speaker 4: You know, if you'd if I was putting a card in that day, it would have been really scary and you know, and I'm looking at this thinking this is the speed that they're talking about getting tournament greens too.

00:46:58
Speaker 3: I'm like, how could have you know?

00:47:00
Speaker 4: I know those guys are good, but the ball will barely stop on these surfaces at all.

00:47:07
Speaker 1: With it, you know, you designed a tournament course the Memorial Park.

00:47:11
Speaker 2: What working with the tour was there?

00:47:14
Speaker 1: You know, obviously green speeds, they're quick there, they're pretty consistent weekend week out. Was their constraints with you know, slope as and obviously public golf course which is so popular, right, you know, is there were there concessions that had to be made.

00:47:31
Speaker 2: At the green.

00:47:33
Speaker 4: Well, when people see Memorial Park, they'll think this is really times course because the greens are really flat here compared to some of those other courses. And that's just you know, that's the that's more the constraint of having a PGA Tour event than it is of having a public golf course that does sixty thousand rounds a year. You know, the Tour just flat out says, you know, they weren't. They weren't around a lot you know, whispering into my.

00:48:03
Speaker 3: Ear about design at all.

00:48:06
Speaker 4: But they pretty much just told us flat out at the beginning. Anywhere more than two percent slope on a green, we're not going to put a pin.

00:48:14
Speaker 3: So you better have some places that are.

00:48:17
Speaker 4: Under two percent, and that really limits what you're gonna do.

00:48:21
Speaker 3: And then you combine that.

00:48:24
Speaker 4: With, Okay, this place is going to do sixty thousand rounds a year, so you have to have a lot of pinnable area on these greens. There's really not a lot of options but to make you know, some pretty flat hole locations and you know, a few greens with some steeper transitions in between them, and some that are more gentle and rolling, but they're not severe greens by any stretch.

00:48:49
Speaker 2: And it limits your variety.

00:48:50
Speaker 3: Well.

00:48:51
Speaker 4: To me, the thing that that it limits the most is, you know, the greens for the Houston Open won't be as fast as they are for the TPC or some of the other big tournaments or Gusta because they're going from maintaining it for the public to ten days later tour players on it, you know, and they're not going to maintain those greens.

00:49:18
Speaker 3: At twelve year round.

00:49:20
Speaker 4: There's no way the city's putting that kind of money into it. There's no way that sixty thousand players a year can handle that. You know, those the greens will be nine for daily play and then you can't go from nine to twelve on the dial in a week's time, just like that. So you know, we would have liked to get the tour to say, Okay, these greens are only going to be ten and a half or eleven for the tournament, so you could you know, so it's not two percent, it's not the limit.

00:49:48
Speaker 3: Two and a half percent would be the limit.

00:49:51
Speaker 4: But they don't budge, so you so you build it at two percent. And what that means is the greens aren't that interesting unless their speed, and most of the time there's not going to be speed for all the reasons we just talked about.

00:50:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it.

00:50:07
Speaker 1: I noticed it at Keppeloua this year, just with you know, they went through that whole refinement process. It's like coming down the stretch like I was like, God, these guys every putts inside the hole. You know, it's like they're there and you start to realize that, you know. I heard from people that are familiar with the setup, is like they have a box that they keep the pins and.

00:50:26
Speaker 2: The hardest thing with putting the biggest challenge is slope. It's not speed for.

00:50:32
Speaker 1: The best players, right, it's having to commit to line and speed, and if if it's fast and flat, it's just inside inside, right, and you know the speed.

00:50:43
Speaker 4: Right, Yes, you're exactly right that you know that two percent limit is basically I don't have to aim outside the hole if I'm inside six feet.

00:50:56
Speaker 3: That's a huge difference.

00:50:57
Speaker 4: It caught, you know, as soon as you're start thinking thinking about is it left lip or is it outside the lip, you know that it's a whole different thought process and your confidence goes way down.

00:51:12
Speaker 3: And of course confidence is half a putting.

00:51:15
Speaker 4: So so that little extra it's like the difference between you know, if a bunker is four and a half feet deep, you can still see out of it and see the bottom of the flag, and when it's six feet deep you can't anymore. It's a huge you know, it's not much difference in terms of depth. The first four and a half feet are pretty much the same, and then that next foot is like a psychological hurdle all of a sudden, No.

00:51:39
Speaker 1: Shit, it's hard to know how hard to hit it because you can't see it, right, That's so true.

00:51:45
Speaker 2: It'd be interesting.

00:51:46
Speaker 1: I you know, I have to get on a stack guy, but looking at like six feet putts of six feet. The different in the average at Augusta versus PGA to our weekend week out different is obviously they also don't allow the green reading books Augusta. It's just something I've always been fascinated by with putting, is the problem is statistically it's such a small sample.

00:52:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.

00:52:12
Speaker 4: The I mean, I was playing off of Mike Clayton the end of last year, done in Australia, and he said something that I think, I'm I hope I get this right because secondhand information, but he's he said the we were talking about chipping and he said, you know, the difference, the difference between getting a chip close or not quite as close as all the difference in the world. He said, you know, the one, the one tour statistic that jumped out at me the most is the best putter on tour from four feet is still worse than the worst putter on tour from three feet. So the difference between three and four feet is a lot.

00:52:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, huge, I mean, it's like that's stress. Three feets like a brush and four feets like stress, especially if you've got to play it outside of the hole.