Yolk with Doak 33: Listener Questions and the State of the Industry

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Speaker 2: Ball in a brid egg Frida Egg Frida, egg Frida, egg, Frida, egg bride egg Lie.

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Speaker 3: I'm about ready to run off of the.

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Speaker 4: Welcome back to another edition of the Yoke with Doak.

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Speaker 1: We had one last week that was the first part of this conversation where we talked about some new design concepts that Tom wants to do.

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Speaker 4: In this episode, we talk about.

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Speaker 1: Kind of the state of the industry with this surplus of jobs and you know, really the opportunity not only for developers but but other architects as well as kinda Tom's future career.

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Speaker 4: Uh.

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Speaker 1: This was this was a fun chat and we got to a lot of listener questions in this episode. So, without further ado, here is Tom Doak. So I get this is a question from Matt Rouches. Rouches he asked how long do you anticipate working and building golf courses late eighties like Pete. I mean, this is obviously a prescient topic given you know, golf architects never retire seemingly, and everybody works into their eighties. I don't know of any that have retired early. But you know, with with what you're talking about doing stuff that you want to do, you know, how long do you think you know when you look at your career right now, do you think you want to keep going?

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Speaker 4: Is it?

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Speaker 1: Is it until it's not fun anymore? Or you know, how do you approach how do you think about that?

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Speaker 2: You don't have control over that it happens to you. You know, first, you got to stay healthy and you know, you got to you got to have the energy to travel to go do it. That's the biggest thing, you know, am I you know, and you know I was worn out from traveling a couple of years ago. Now I've got kind of a second wind on it, and I think I'll be able to do it.

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Speaker 5: A few more years.

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Speaker 4: But for a lot of things.

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Speaker 2: Yes, And you know, at the same time, you know, I'm still getting calls from overseas and they're a lot harder to say yes to now because I've realized that every you know, every job is potentially what I'm going to be dealing with in New Zealand, that I'm going to have to go quarantine for two weeks every time I go there, And so I'm going to have to change my business model and just make one really long trip.

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Speaker 5: And do whatever I want to do in that trip.

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Speaker 3: Uh.

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Speaker 5: But if I you know, I've I've got somebody that wants.

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Speaker 2: Me to do a golf course in Vietnam, like really wants me to do a golf course in Vietnam. And it's like, how do I commit to that? You know, if every trip could take a ten day quarantine to go, that's like three times the time commitment that I would normally have for to do a project. So you know, I mean, either I become a new believer in technology and just say, oh, yeah, I can design it all from here. I don't even have to go, or I just have to say no to most of those opportunities because they're too unpredictable. But you know, in general, yeah, I still I love having puzzles to solve and as long as people keep showing good ones to me, I mean, and you know, my idea of retirement will be just you know, trying to help some of my associates and interns do you know, get their names out there, but me being able to tinker around a little bit helping them.

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Speaker 5: Out, you know.

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Speaker 2: And you know that's the hardest part of that is like their clients are going to want to, you know, use my name, and then if they want to use my name, then my clients are like, how can you let them use your name and only pay you a little bit where we had to pay you all this to be here. So, you know, I haven't really worked out exactly how to do that, but I know that that opportunity is out there. When I feel like I don't want to travel so much, is people will still want me involved on whatever basis. I want to be involved, and I have, and I've trained a ton of people to go do the rest of it and do a pretty good job.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's part of being a mentor, right, you know, is you want your people to get out and become almost better, better architects than you are.

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Speaker 2: You want to give them the chance to do what they can do.

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Speaker 4: I think one of the.

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Speaker 1: One of the things that happens with golf architecture is there are these waves of architects and they kind of you know, they occupy age groups.

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Speaker 4: And you're in one, you know.

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Speaker 1: But one of the things that's happening is is the older architecture obviously phasing out. You know, what do you see with with the industry, and you know, given you know, the peat Die generations kind of getting older and towards the end of their career and then you're you guys, you know, there's all this new development.

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Speaker 2: Right so so you know, I know that the history of golf course architecture has been told for a long time. There were all those guys doing work in the twenties and into the depression, and then between the Depression and World War Two there was like a twenty year gap, and when we came out the back end of that, they were all dead or got and you know, so you only had Robert Trent Jones who'd worked a little bit with Stanley Thompson, and Dick Wilson who'd worked a little bit with Toomey and Flynn, and a couple of other guys who had any experience building new golf courses, and they just dominated the business for twenty years, and they took a ton of jobs. They didn't pay much attention to it, you know, individually, because they were so busy. You know, I never thought I'd see that happen again, but it's kind of happened. Between the financial prices in COVID. You know, there's twelve or thirteen years of not much work, and now we're coming out of it and Pete Die's dead, and Our Hills is dead, and Jack Nicholas is pretty much retired, and Arnold Palmer's dead, and Rhys Jones and Bobby Jones are both eighty and not getting a whole lot of new jobs anymore. So all of those guys that did all those development courses twenty and twenty five years ago were the go to guys that nobody ever called me or Bill Corr about any of those jobs. They're all gone, and like who's left? I mean, there's only like I mean, from the calls I have with developers, you know, they know Bill Corr's name, they know Gill Hans's name, and they know my name. And after that there may be a lot of talented people, but the average customer slash home buyer doesn't know who any of them are and their names don't add anything to the value of the project.

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Speaker 4: Well, everybody always wants a name, whether it's a club or whether it's a new golf course. The club needs to sell the membership and they say we need a name, and then but like to them, there's only there's really only three or four names.

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Speaker 2: Right And in Where and Where twenty years ago, there were a lot of tour pros who were also designing things on the side. There's not even that many of them now. I mean there's there a couple besides cor and Crenshaw that did have a pretty steady business, but you know, not like it's not like twenty years ago when you couldn't name a tour pro that wasn't involved in designing something somewhere.

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Speaker 1: It's always fun when you when you stumble upon a course designed by some eighties tour pro and you're like, huh, I know he decigned, of course.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and he didn't, but they did use his name. He did sell his name to be part of it. So yeah, there's a real changing of the guard right now. You know, there's a lot of new work and nobody knows. You know, all the old go.

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Speaker 5: To guys are not a factor anymore.

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Speaker 2: And you know, Bill Corr is like building three or four golf courses right now. He's as busy as he's ever been. But there's no way he's going to do more than that. And there's no way he's going to do even that many for five years in a row. And the same for me. And you know, Gil is trying to get big and do a lot of job. But you know, no one person is going to be able to handle the amount of new stuff that's going to come over the table right now. So there are big opportunities for the guys who are next in line if they're ready to do it. But you know, I mean the last few years, everybody's like downsize their business and they don't have much staff and they don't have many people that have been working for them, and it's hard to go from that to Okay, now go run a marathon starting tomorrow.

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Speaker 1: It's a huge opportunity, and the opportunities on both sides. Right if it's if a developer hires the right person, you know, the right new person, they could be the first person that you know does it. But then on the other side, there's a huge opportunity on the younger or you know, architects that maybe not haven't gotten the opportunity that they feel like they deserve to get that job.

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Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, So the question is when, well, you know, Pete Dye got I was reading I've been reading Pete Dye's book, rereading it the last few nights before I go to sleep. It's a really good book. I you know, I didn't really, I must have just skimmed it the first the first couple of times I read it because there were some tidbits about his his early life and like, you know, Walter Hagen and those age pros going to Urbana, Ohio and hanging out at his house when he was a kid.

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Speaker 5: I did not know that that.

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Speaker 2: You know, Keith's life spanned a lot of generations and and a lot of people.

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Speaker 5: But but I got a kick.

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Speaker 2: Out of reading, you know, I mean his start as an architect he wanted to be, he'd wanted to be an architect for a while, but really his start was like trying to fund trying to convince Robert Trent Jones and Dick Wilson to take a look at some things that were happening around Indianapolis so he could help them. And you know, they weren't interested. They were too damn busy to even like even come look at it. So eventually a couple of those developers said, we would you do it for us? And that was his foot in the door to show what he could do. And that's so, you know, I suppose the golf business wisdom is that you know, these jobs are going to go to the guys who are fifty years old who have done a few new courses, you know, who were who were doing some new courses before.

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Speaker 5: The crash, and now is their chance to do more.

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Speaker 2: But you know, if the developer's ideas well, those guys' names don't really add much to the value here.

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Speaker 5: So do I really.

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Speaker 2: Want them or do I want to take a chance on somebody brand new, who might you know, who might become famous in the next few years, you know, the decision that might are made twenty years ago. Yeah, Mike's You know, Mike got famous for picking guys that were not the big names of the business. But now partly because he feels loyalty to us because we helped make everything he's done so successful, and partly because we built stuff to a pretty high standard and he's not sure how many other guys there are out there who could do that. You know, he's very conservative. He keeps coming back to the same handful of people because it's worked.

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Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing, what do you take? You take the risk. Then what it does is it affords you the ability to be conservative the rest of your career because you've taken the risk.

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Speaker 2: Just like you were just like you were talking about switching careers at twenty eight.

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Speaker 5: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, when you're developing your first golf course, you can take that big risk whenever, you know, when you've done five or six and everybody who's expecting a certain standard, now it's much harder to say, oh yeah, and you know, there's tons of guys that could do that well.

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Speaker 4: And that's the thing.

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Speaker 1: It's what companies go through, right when if you're Microsoft and you launch a new product and it's a complete utter failure, everybody's gonna know it's a failure.

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Speaker 4: So Mike Kaiser in.

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Speaker 1: A way has become the people that he displaced, you know, where he can't you know, he they can't take as big of a risk because if it doesn't work, everybody knows it doesn't work.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not sure you know that that's definitely true of Mike.

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Speaker 5: I'm not sure that that's as true of his sons.

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Speaker 2: That they might you know, they know the history of there, so they might want to establish that they could do the same thing.

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Speaker 4: Yeah. So you know, under this thinking, they wouldn't hire you, right.

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Speaker 2: And you know, I know they're looking at all the guys that work for me thinking he could do a pretty good job without toime.

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Speaker 4: Yeah, so I agree. I think like this is it's a very.

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Speaker 1: Compelling time and that when we look back in twenty years, the history of golf architecture is what happens over the next five years, because there's more jobs than there's ever been in recent memory, and there's less architects than there's ever been. So what you know, what happened like not less architects, less bona fide, you know, you know, this is a superstar, higher architect you know, opportunity because of the just the capacity and the supply and demand, you know.

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Speaker 2: I mean, I was I was telling my son over Christmas. It's like, yeah, you don't remember, but thirty years ago, when you were a newborn, it was like I couldn't get attention for the things that I was doing.

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Speaker 5: You know.

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Speaker 2: I built a new course at stone Wall and it was really good, and nobody, not one Golf Dies panelist even came to look at it because they were so busy looking at the twelve Tom Fasio courses and the ten Jack Nicholas courses that had opened that year, and there wasn't you know, there wasn't any time for like who's that guy? Whereas these are the times where you're gonna go see when somebody builds something, you know, even if you don't know who the heck they are. It's like there's not much happening, so you've got a chance to grab people's attention.

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Speaker 5: Mm hm.

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Speaker 1: With with regards to some of your projects that are ongoing, we had a question. Jim Colton asked if there have been any changes to the Sedge Valley routing over the past few years.

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Speaker 2: Uh, you know, not so much, not much during you know, during the slowdown and while we were working on Lido, but certainly you know last summer while we were working on Lido and starting to think about Sand Valley again, Michael Kaiser asked me a couple of times, very pointedly, you know, like those holes and kind of the middle of Sedge Valley middle the middle, you know, the middle of the routing, but like the far end of the golf course from the clubhouse, because it's it's an out and back routing, so like.

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Speaker 4: Is it out by like that rock out cropping, Well, that's.

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Speaker 2: You get to that at like the fifth and sixth holes, okay, and then then then you go pass that and down into some pretty flat ground for four or five holes and then come back up through the dramatic stuff coming home. So, you know, being a minimalist by nature, normally I would just let the flatish holes be kind of flat and be okay with that. You know, you don't want every hole to be super dramatic, but you know, normally I would also make those kind of the longer holes to you know, so okay, it's not wild, but it's challenging because it's long, and for this course, we're not going to have so many long holes. So so Michaels started talking early on. You know, we're moving dirt all right, and left to do anything, you know, to build the lido. When the lido is not just sitting there. You know, Michael started talking about shouldn't we think about using the same technology to work, you know, you know, let's not settle for those holes be on the duller holes on the golf course. Maybe let's make them be some of the more dramatic holes on the golf course. So you know, it got me thinking again about, okay, you know, what how would I do that, you know, and what if I could just like move fifty thousand yards of dirt out there real quick to create something.

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Speaker 5: What would I create? And that's that's really hard.

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Speaker 2: I mean I spent most of last summer and fall struggling with that question and not really being able to, you know, creating a whole golf course from scratch.

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Speaker 5: That's one thing.

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Speaker 2: Just creating a little piece of it that's going to fit in with everything else is harder.

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Speaker 5: At least to me.

00:18:51
Speaker 2: It seems harder because I already know what some of these other pieces are going to look like, and it's like, okay, what would compliment that? So you know, when we we had we had five interns out there last summer, so I gave it to all of them as an as a design assignment. Okay, spend a spend a couple of weeks. I gave him a walking tour. It's like, spend a couple of weeks, you know, come up with a plan for these five holes. And you know, two or three of the plans were kind of close to what I was thinking, and one of them was really out there, but you know, the one that ultimately had influence on me, and it wasn't. It didn't right away right away. I was like, no, that's not what I asked you to do. He like tried to reroute it, and instead of using putting the holes in the flat part of it, he went up on the sides of the hills more to make it more interesting. And ultimately that's what I've done too, you know, I've got I've kind of like made a new little part.

00:19:55
Speaker 5: Three up in the corner.

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Speaker 2: And you know, there was one thing I didn't like about the route, and that was the back nine had like ten, twelve, and fourteen. We're all going to be par threes, and I do not I'm not a big fan of that. I've seen a bunch of courses where you know, to me, you get out of the rhythm of playing golf and hitting driver when every other hole is a par three, and I just don't like that so much. I'd rather have like Pacific Dunes, even though it has the four part threes. In the back nine, there's two in a row, then there's a couple of long holes, then there's another one, and then there's a couple of long holes, and then seventeen the.

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Speaker 1: Last one, so also alternate shot. You end up with them all on even Yeah.

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Speaker 2: If they're all even holes, they're all odd holes. Not that anybody in America cares about that.

00:20:47
Speaker 4: Hey we care. We care here every Frida Egg event.

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Speaker 2: At the Renaissance Club, they gave me shit about that for basically all the par three's being the even holes, which it didn't start out that way, but then when we changed the routing around, it wound up more like that. So I don't think about that a lot, but every once in a while somebody's going to bring it up. But I did, like, you know, so I I changed the tenth and eleventh holes, so so to move that par three back one in the routing instead of a long part four and the first of those part three's, I put the par three first up on the side of the hill and then we'll you know, I'll create a more interesting landing area for the long part four. And then I've got there are three holes that kind of went around a little ridge at the far end, and now I've got one of them going up and on top of the ridge and.

00:21:48
Speaker 5: Using it a lot more.

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Speaker 2: So they're they're like they interact with the ridge more than they did before. And you know, Michael was really excited when he saw that. It's just like, you know, because it's all kind of it. That all is like one big fairway that's kind of cresting off the ridge and coming back down into the other two holes. You know, if you're playing the little short par four up along the ridge and you pull it, you're gonna wind up down pretty close to the green on the part three that's.

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Speaker 1: After that interesting, So you know, it could be a cunning player plays over there to see where the pin is exactly, you know, with a Here's a question from Bread and Poor athid one that I've never asked you, What if any non golf works, books, music, etc. Have influenced your work and how you think about your work over the decades. Has there been anything that's non golf related that have really changed the way you think about golf and golf design.

00:22:49
Speaker 5: Wow? Uh, he's putting me on the spot.

00:22:53
Speaker 2: I don't want to sound like a complete golf junkie who never does anything else. Yeah, I mean, certainly, certainly. You know, I can't point to like one song or one book that's really changed my thinking. There was the book that I've recommended to a lot of people, is uh. I got to remember the title. It's been a little while anti Fragile. I have that book, the Seam Taleb's Book.

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Speaker 4: I haven't read it, and I haven't Oh.

00:23:27
Speaker 2: My god, Well, yeah, you got to read it, you know. I make a point to go back and reread that every couple of years. You know, that's more about honestly, that's more about help more on the business side of things than on the design side of things. But there are some implications in that for design as well. The law of unintended consequences is really strong and and there's you know, there's certain ways to position things that like, I mean a design example would be the golf hole may not always work out the way you think it's going to work out, but if you design it certain ways, it could still work. Whereas if you do make other decisions, when it breaks down, it's just not going to work anymore.

00:24:18
Speaker 5: You know.

00:24:18
Speaker 2: That's really, I mean, that's really what's kept me away from keen old design. You know, you look at something like the old course at Saint Andrew's. I mean, the way people play it now is just totally different than they played it two hundred years ago.

00:24:30
Speaker 5: You know, you couldn't hit the ball one.

00:24:32
Speaker 2: Hundred and fifty yards two hundred years ago, so I had to work for that. And you know, it also happens to work out pretty well for guys who hit it three hundred yards. But in kind of every piece in between.

00:24:46
Speaker 1: It also kind of ties that sentiment ties to McDonald's thoughts on the golf ball. You know when the Haskell came out, is that it's turned ordinary holes into really good holes, turned some really and rendered some really good holes obsolete.

00:25:03
Speaker 4: Is that it's all you know, holes are.

00:25:06
Speaker 1: That's kind of like if you want to take the half half full approach to the distance boom and how it just keeps going. Is that like you know, I don't know if you saw Bryson hitting it over that bay Hill the pond on the sixth hole this year at bay Hill and this, well it's a spectacle, you know, you hit it over the pond, you know this par five and.

00:25:27
Speaker 5: Well I saw him last year in the tournament.

00:25:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:25:30
Speaker 1: And in a way, you know that option being available does make the hole a little bit more interesting.

00:25:38
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yes, absolutely, you know, I mean one of the first the first big article I wrote for Golf Magazine was about all the par fives that had never been hitting two shots and I talked to a lot of architects about it, and most of them are like, no, that's bad. You know, par five should always give you the option to be hitting two and and Pete Die said, well, there's no thing wrong with it, but you don't you don't really want. You know, if you get to the point that nobody ever thinks about hitten into, then you've gone too far, because then it's just you know, then they're just going to play it conservatively.

00:26:13
Speaker 5: They're not tempted to do anything.

00:26:16
Speaker 2: You know, even if even if it's almost impossible to reach into the longer hitters are going to be like, if I can hit a bit really big drive here, then I can go for So you know, you're tempting them off the tee to try to to try to put themselves in position, whereas if they just have given up on the idea before they start, it's a very different thing. Yeah, McKenzie said the same thing in his book that you know, some holes, You know, people always wanted to lengthen holes, but some holes would be better if they were shorter, you know, at least you would get.

00:26:50
Speaker 5: Over it faster.

00:26:53
Speaker 1: So we we when we do our events, we do you know, you played in the one at last Odia and for the afternoon, but in the afternoon we moved teas way up, and I think, like I think a lot of holes get a lot more interesting from way up, you know, like you take like you're kind of like nondescript four hundred yard part four, all of a sudden you play it at to eighty and I.

00:27:14
Speaker 4: A lot of times becomes a lot more interesting.

00:27:17
Speaker 5: Yeah, not always.

00:27:18
Speaker 2: I mean there's some holes that are like there's really no place to go with a driver from this tee. I have to get seven iron and then hit five iron to the green, and I don't really like that so much. But you know, that's still like test your patients, Like is that you know that might that is the best thing to do, but you know not everybody's going to be happy with that, and they're going to get themselves in trouble.

00:27:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, my my favorite moment.

00:27:43
Speaker 1: We have a really good player that played in like five of them, and I played with him the last event that he played in, and he it was at Prairie Dunes and all the holes that I moved up to two eighty three hundred, he was pulling out six iron I'm like, Kent, what why and six hirgher He goes, Andy, I, I know what you're I know what you're doing. You're trying to get me to hit driver and if I hit driver, we're gonna make Parr bogie. And he hit pulled six hire just every time, and after every hole would be like, look at that made birdie.

00:28:16
Speaker 2: You know you know I played Crystal Downs with the senior guy. I'm sixty, so I can play with the senior group now. So I played it a few times from the senior teas last year, which I really hadn't done. And the senior tea's are like they're the old ladies tea's on most of the holes. And the one hole that really confounds me the fifth hole where we drive it over the ridge. That's a really confounding hole from the forward for for a longer hitter from the forward t because the forward keys kind of down and left. So you know, unless you're going straight toward the green, which I don't think I'm long enough to do, and I'd probably lose the ball if I tried.

00:28:56
Speaker 5: You know, you can't you're.

00:28:58
Speaker 2: Going like straight over the fairway from the from the left hand side instead of like along it where you can get further down the fairway. And it's just I still haven't figured out how to play the hole from that tee. I think it's just seven iron or something like that for me instead of doing it. But it's so hard to make yourself do that.

00:29:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, we had a question, what was your favorite shot from a PGA Tour caddy? What was your favorite shot that you saw at the at the Houston Open this year.

00:29:32
Speaker 2: I walked with Adams Gotten a practice round and the third hole is a part five. There's a bunker on the left that gets out to like three ten off the teeth, so it's a really long carry for those even for those guys. So he's just playing safely right of it, and he's got two sixty two to a front pin and he asks the caddy for four from two sixty two, and he was getting ready to hit the for iron and then he backed off and he said how far is that bunker short of the green on the left And the caddy said thirty five yards? And he's like, yeah, yeah, you know, if I if I don't, if this doesn't fly out of this this fly, I'm gonna wind up in that bunker. So I can't do that, So give me the seven wood. So he hit seven wood from two sixty two and you know, wound up like he landed just short of the green. It didn't bounce up there, and so he had to chip up and make thirty. But he you know, as soon as he was done playing that shot, I said, were you really going to hit four iron from two sixty two? And he said he said, well, I thought it was gonna be a flyer and when I and when I saw the seven would come out, I was like, man, it's a good thing I didn't hit the four iron because that would not have gotten anywhere close of the green. But he said, this seven wood is like, you know, I've been looking for a long time for like a fairway wood that I could flight the ball with and hit shots and make it.

00:31:11
Speaker 5: Go either way.

00:31:12
Speaker 2: He's like, you know, most of those clubs you just you're just trying to hit a square on the face. And he's like, this is the first one I've had that I really like. He said, I put it in the bag here a year ago and I've used it on a lot of courses since. So I was like, great, So I finally came up with a shot that's hard for you, and you just go.

00:31:32
Speaker 5: Get a new club and sort it out. And he laughed. He's like, that's what we do, that's what we get paid for.

00:31:39
Speaker 1: It's funny because we had a guy that does a lot of data analysis and has a really good golf break on last week talking about the PGA Tour season and he said that, like the one of the things he'd like to see PGA Tour players be more flexible with is is changing clubs for courses, Like you know, when you get to different places and look at the situation and be more flexible with what you're the setup of your bag.

00:32:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, guys used to do that a lot for majors back in the day, don't.

00:32:09
Speaker 5: I don't know that many of them do anymore.

00:32:12
Speaker 2: But besides that, I mean, the shots that I remember the most from the actual tournament this year were the shot that Jason Kokrak decided not to hit on sixteen that probably saved him the tournament. You know, he's standing out in the fairway to sixty from the green or something, thinking about going for it with a little mud on his ball, and then you know, backed off and laid up and he hit a good wed shot and made birdie. Anyway, and you know that was like his fourth birdie in a row to give him the impetus to win the tournament.

00:32:51
Speaker 5: Yeah. I know.

00:32:51
Speaker 1: There's a great audio on that too from the telecast, like they really talked through it.

00:32:56
Speaker 2: It was I was just I was over the other side of the lake on by seven watching, but but I could see he was really debating with himself about whether to go for that or not. I didn't realize until the interview after that that he had mud on the ball, which was like, how could you even be thinking about it with that?

00:33:14
Speaker 5: That's a long way back there.

00:33:16
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean as a designer, you sort it. Yeah, I mean you really you want to see the guy hit the heroic shot. But you know that was the right decision to make there. You know, that hole is long enough that there's a lot of guys that cannot go for it unless they hit a perfect drive to the perfect spot and they're really feeling confident. It's still a really hard shot, second shot, and there is nowhere to bail out. You've got to hit if you're going to go for that green, you've got to hit the shot, and so because of that, more people lay up on it than I expected.

00:33:52
Speaker 5: But they're not making the wrong call.

00:33:56
Speaker 2: You know, it's a really hard shot, and you know, I've seen a lot of guys go for it missed too, like, way more than I expected, way more than normal on a PGA Tour event to see you know, thirty forty percent of the guys that try it wind up in the water, so they're they're backing off.

00:34:14
Speaker 5: You know.

00:34:14
Speaker 2: And then you know, the last year or you know, one year plus ago when they played the first tournament, you know, we had always visualized that they would move the tee up on the seventeenth hall for one of the days, and they don't want to do that Thursday or Friday and have guys wait to drive the green. But last year they didn't do it on the weekend either. They were you know, they were they didn't know how it would work out. They were afraid, you know, they were just afraid of trying it. You know, a play backing up b you know, is it a reasonable shot to ask these guys to hit? So they didn't go for it last year. This year they went for it on Saturday and they had tea that that forward tea that they can go to the men's tea. It's about forty yards long. We gave them some flexibility on you know, move it up to two where the carries two seventy five, or move it back to where the carries three to h five.

00:35:17
Speaker 5: They had the t they had the.

00:35:19
Speaker 2: Tea pretty far back where it was three three hundred yard carried to the green or something like that. And I spent a lot of time there that day watching what they were doing to see if it would work out, because last year from the back tee, guys were hitting five six iron t shot, all laying up to relatively the same place and then going at the green with a nine iron or wedge. And I thought, okay, if they moved the te way up there, guys are not going to hit nine iron, layup.

00:35:49
Speaker 5: To go dead right. Matthew will yeah.

00:35:53
Speaker 2: So so the first so this is Saturday, So the first groups that are coming around these are guys that just barely made the cut, and they were like why not. So about half of those guys went for the green. Not many of them hit it on the green. You know, a lot of them kind of hedged left, and if you hedge left. It's a really hard shot, and honestly that they had the pin kind of front left, which was the nastiest pinned use. You know, if you bailed left and hit it too far. You know, Kevin Tway playing really well, definitely in contention, bailed left, hit it through the fairway, hit a bad ship and it rolled all the way across the green into the water, and it cost him a chance to contend on Sunday.

00:36:38
Speaker 5: I mean, that really cost him.

00:36:40
Speaker 2: And then Matthew Wolf hit wedge off the tee and then hit a fat wedge shot into the water and made dump and I was like, well, that's karma. You know, you're you're one of the really long hitters and you're laying up with a wedge off the tee. I don't feel too bad for you. But at the same time made me think, you know, I think the reason the tour was anxious about using that tea setup is because they know how far you know, you know how far every single guy on tour carries the ball now, so if you know, if you're if you're putting the tea marker at two ninety two, that that's perfect for these guys, and it's too far for these guys. But it's also a little too short for these guys over here, you know, like because nobody's gonna back off their driver and try to carry it ten yards less far to get.

00:37:43
Speaker 1: Close exactly water in front of the green I have this theory that there's a certain length short part four that that gives the long hitters like tremendous fits because it's in between driver and three wood.

00:37:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's it's that. It's that it's that sixteenth fall at Harding Park.

00:37:59
Speaker 4: Yes, long.

00:38:02
Speaker 5: Long as guys did not.

00:38:04
Speaker 2: Know where to go with that, and Morikawa and a few guys that aren't quite as long.

00:38:09
Speaker 5: That was just perfect driver distance for that.

00:38:12
Speaker 2: But so the problem in Houston, though, is it's it's all carry all or nothing.

00:38:18
Speaker 5: So you really are just you know, where they.

00:38:23
Speaker 2: Put the tea on any given day if there's no wind, really determines who's got a chance to hit it close and who doesn't. And that's tough, and I don't you know, they don't they don't really want that responsibility. They would rather have You know that we stuck that green way out on a.

00:38:42
Speaker 5: Point that was there.

00:38:43
Speaker 2: You know that we expanded that lake tremendously, but that that where that green sits was kind of a natural feature, and we left it. And I didn't want to just build the the standard pete dye par four, you know, gently along the water the whole way, because they've played that whole a million times.

00:39:05
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you know.

00:39:07
Speaker 2: And I wanted to do something that was like a go for it or don't you know, take a chance.

00:39:13
Speaker 5: I'd like to see them do it again, but.

00:39:16
Speaker 2: With the with the whole in a little friendlier place on the green where if you bail left, it's not like a really super hard shot.

00:39:28
Speaker 5: So you know, so I always want to back off.

00:39:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.

00:39:31
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of this has to do with infrastructure. But I think one of the things that the tour I wish they did more of was just like when we saw it when there weren't any fans at some places like Pebble last.

00:39:42
Speaker 4: Year, moves all over the.

00:39:45
Speaker 1: Place like make them be ready to play the entire golf course. And we've seen sometimes in golf history like just these moments where they move, you move a tea box up to boxes and a guy just is completely flummixed.

00:39:58
Speaker 4: They don't know what to do.

00:40:00
Speaker 1: And I think that's it because you know, one of the issues that the tour has right now with like practice rounds is a lot of guys don't play practice rounds. They'll play nine holes two days and be done. Is like if they actually had to prepare for the entire course. Like it sounds like they moved the tea there and guys didn't really know what to do.

00:40:17
Speaker 2: No, some of the some of the first guys on the tea were like, oh, I gotta get out the artage Brucket. How far is that they hadn't really thought about whether they should try to go for it or not, even though you know, the tour puts a puts a poster up in the locker room on Tuesday that says we might use an alternate tea on these four holes this week, so they should be prepared for it, but they're still not in a lot of cases.

00:40:49
Speaker 5: You know. That's one of the.

00:40:50
Speaker 2: Things when when I talked to Koepka in the very like the first time we sat down, he said, try to build more holes with like alternate teas, And he didn't just mean forward, he meant left and right. So you didn't have the same thing to aim at all four days. Yeah, you know, because he was you know, he's a big believer in, you know, making guys prepare and not letting them play this the whole the same way all four days. Unfortunately, Memorial Park, you had so many mature trees out there that you can you didn't really have many places where you could change the angle dramatically.

00:41:26
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:41:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that's the thing you changed this the orientation of the tea. A hole can go from like, uh, you know, fitting a fader's eye to just like be the worst worst hole ever for fader.

00:41:39
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:41:40
Speaker 4: All right.

00:41:41
Speaker 1: What one question that's been burning burning at my my uh, you know, my insides of me for for years. I've been wondering this is maybe the uh the greatest question, the greatest mystery on golf Instagram. Why does Tom Doak not have an Instagram picture? We got at numerous people asked this question.

00:42:04
Speaker 5: Uh, because I'm contrarian.

00:42:11
Speaker 2: The more people that you know, I've had, I had a couple of people early on confront me about it, like send me a nasty little message about it, and I'm like, hey, why do you care? You know you're supposed to be looking at the picture I'm posting not the little circle thing that would have my face in it, and I don't.

00:42:31
Speaker 5: I hate posing for pictures, so I.

00:42:33
Speaker 2: Just don't have a photo of myself that I'm like, Yeah, I want that photo.

00:42:39
Speaker 5: I want people to look at that photo every day.

00:42:42
Speaker 1: You should put your favorite hole that you've designed, or you could psychologically.

00:42:46
Speaker 2: The only the only thing that I've even come close to doing, the only one that I've ever even considered. The suggestion Sarah Mass suggested, I use the headcover for my driver, which is you know, which is pretty much one of a kind. Nobody else has it. So I thought about that, but but then I would have to explain that story to a lot.

00:43:10
Speaker 5: Of people.

00:43:14
Speaker 4: That sometimes it's not worth it.

00:43:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well with the toughest question last, we're going to wrap up this recording. You're hitting the road. Where are you going? That you could share and uh, well we'll end on that.

00:43:31
Speaker 5: Oh that's the toughest question.

00:43:33
Speaker 4: No, No, the toughest question was the Instagram question.

00:43:35
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I've got like, I think I've got a half a dozen stops on this trip.

00:43:42
Speaker 5: So so I'm driving south.

00:43:44
Speaker 2: You know, I don't I don't want to get on a plane to make five stops.

00:43:47
Speaker 5: I just I just had to quarantine the other day.

00:43:50
Speaker 4: You got a business card car, you said.

00:43:52
Speaker 2: Yes, So you know, I just had to quarantine the other day, thinking thinking that we're going to get COVID from our personal trainer because he tested positive.

00:44:01
Speaker 5: Luckily we dodged it somehow.

00:44:05
Speaker 2: But you know, instead of getting on five airplanes to go check out all these places, I'm like, I'm just gonna get in the car and drive and so, yes, I just bought a new company car that looks exactly like my wife's car, and I'm going to go. First, I'm gonna take Brian Zaeger, my intern, with me, so I got somebody to share the driving because it's like thirty five hundred miles round trip. We're gonna drive to Alabama first and then fly to Texas to go look at a potential project that I've not seen the land before. Then we're going to go look at a new project. Potential new project. I mean, I'm pretty much gonna do it in the Panhandle of Florida, but the client hasn't announced it yet, so i'll, you know, and it's and it's probably like three years down the road still, so no no sense.

00:44:59
Speaker 5: In that one yet.

00:45:01
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:45:03
Speaker 5: Then I'm going to Southeast Florida to.

00:45:07
Speaker 2: Look at the new private course we're doing down there.

00:45:10
Speaker 4: Lots of stuff going on down there, lots of stuff.

00:45:13
Speaker 2: And then back to South Carolina. I've signed up to do a new course, private course in Beaufort, South Carolina, and we're going to spend a couple of days there, and then I'm going to stop in at the Tree Farm for three or four days. I promise Zach, I would try to do that if I had time. And and then I might go buy East Potomac Park for it's kind of out of the way, but I might go up there for a day before I come home because they're actually we're starting to talk about a federally funded project to rebuild the sea wall around the park and the island there, and that was you know, if big work like that is going to be done, that might actually trigger like building doing work on the court sooner instead of later.

00:46:01
Speaker 4: That's that would be great news for all of DC and American golf.

00:46:07
Speaker 2: We've still got a you know, we I'm just getting now like a good base map for the golf course. I mean, most of the problem with East Potomac Park is drainage. It's all very low lying and it doesn't it doesn't have a lot of reliefs. So so the you know, the the water doesn't drain off the green and get to the drain two hundred feet away. It's all half a percent going that way. So there's you know, it's just wet the whole way. So either we've got to do like one of those peat die drainage systems of pumping water around the thing, or build up big areas of the golf course if they if there's dredge material happening around the island that we can use. I mean, trucking in phill is just out of the question. But if we you know, if there's a project happening where they have to get rid of phil that's a game changer that you know, then we don't you know, I don't know. There would be like bailon where we can get somebody to pay us to take it, but at least we won't have to pay for it.

00:47:09
Speaker 4: A difference, yeah for sure. All right, Well, safe travels and uh enjoy the ride.

00:47:16
Speaker 2: You know, a lot of time to talk golf along the way, maybe even listen to some podcasts.

00:47:20
Speaker 4: Hey, how about that? Yeah, hopefully it'll least some interesting ones are there for you.

00:47:25
Speaker 5: All right, and you take care.

00:47:37
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to another edition of the Frida Egg podcast. Today's episode was edited by Meg Atkins and Garrett Morrison. Thank you to the both of them, they are the best. As a quick reminder, golf season is heating up, check out the fridagg newsletter. Go to the Frida Egg dot com and there's a nice little bar there that you sign up, put your email in.

00:47:58
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00:48:06
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