Bandon Shorty's and the History of Golf Course Design with Keith Cutten

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

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

00:00:06
Speaker 1: In a fried egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg Frida Egg, Frida egg Egg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course. Welcome to the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about the newest short course at Bandon Dunes. It's called, appropriately enough, Bandon Shorties. This is not to be confused with the Driving Range course which has long been known as Shorties, now known as Charlotte's. This is a nineteen hole par three course on some very dramatic Duneland and it's designed by Whitman, Axland and Cutton. That's the firm consisting of Rod Whitman, Dave Exland and Keith Cutton. Rod Whitman and Dave Exland are both veterans of the design build golf architecture scene. Both have worked extensively with Corn Crenshaw and both have done some great original designs. Keith Cutten is the youngest partner in the firm and he's our guest today. So he's worked with Rod Whitman for basically his whole career. Like Whitman, Keith is originally from Canada and he's helped with projects like Cabot Links, Cabot Cliffs, and Sagebush Golf Club. He's also the author of the Evolution of Golf Course Design, which is a very impressive single volume account of golf architecture. So I got a chance to meet with Keith a couple of weeks ago. We walked bandon Shorty's, talked a bunch about the design and the construction process. Then we sat down, turned on the mics and had a conversation and that is coming up in this episode. So Friday Golf has a few other podcasts going at the moment, and one of them that I wanted to make sure you know about is Explorations. This is where we post travel content and we opened it up with a season about Northern Ireland. The most recent episode on that feed is an interview with one Rory McElroy. Andy and Brendan sat down with Rory and talked to him about growing up in Northern Ireland, the golf courses he played there as a kid, and all that kind of good stuff. They also get into Rory's current career and have some banter about the Players Championship, which Rory was preparing for at the time. They also discussed Michael Block. There's so many topics here that I've never really heard Rory address before, so a complete delight. That's over on our Explorations podcast.

00:02:55
Speaker 2: Now.

00:02:56
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to Explorations, you know how incredible golf in Ireland is. Ireland is a golfer's paradise, with over four hundred courses, one third of the world's true links courses, and some exceptional championship layouts surrounded by epic landscapes. A couple of those championship courses are Royal County Down and Royal Port Rush, both in Northern Ireland, and these courses are going to host some pretty big tournaments coming up here. The Amjin Irish Open will take place in September twenty twenty four at Royal County Down. That will be the most premium kind of coffee golf imaginable, so make sure to check that out. And then, of course the Open Championship will be held at Royal Port Rush in twenty twenty five so some big, big tournaments coming to Northern Ireland in the coming years. Now, one thing that's really special about Northern Ireland, as you'll hear in the Explorations podcast, is the nineteenth Hole experience, the hospitality that companies any kind of Irish golf trip. It is the ending point of any day out on the golf course. You go to the local pub and you get to relax after some great golf, and whether you've performed well or not, you get to meet some wonderful people. These these casual meetings can turn into lifelong friendships. Quiet drinks at the pub turn into parties and that's that's really what brings you back to the place, is these people in these places. So if you're interested in an Irish golf trip, go to Ireland dot com slash golf and book your experience today. All right, so I'm here with Keith Cutton. Keith, I'm going to let you set the scene. Where are we right now?

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Speaker 2: Well, we're at Bannon in one of the nicest rooms that I think I've ever seen, looking out on the round lake second floor. And obviously you've got some friends in high places here at Bandon because this is a lot nicer than the room they gave me, although I shouldn't say that we've been well taken care of here. Yeah, we've got a nice little space to talk.

00:05:20
Speaker 1: I yeah, I'm sure that this room just happened to be available. But many many things to the people at Bandon. Yeah, we're looking out on the lake as you said, and then the seventh tee abandoned trails is just a little bit in the distance here, but we can see it, so pretty nice place. But we are here at Bandon Dune's big reason for that is that you're involved in the construction of the new short course here, which is called Shorties, and we're going to get into that. But the architecture firm of record at Shorties is Whitman, Axeland and Cutting, right, correct? Do you say whack? We say whack all the time.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, whack jobs, whack projects. Yep, there you go.

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Speaker 1: So could you just introduce me and introduce the audience to Whitman, Axland and Cutting. Who are you people?

00:06:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we're we've been around for a while. I myself, Keith Cutton, have been working with Rod Whitman for about twenty years. Rod's probably one of the most notorious shapers in this industry. He's worked for everybody from Pete Died to Bill Corr, Gil Hans Projects, Mike Hrdson projects. It's incredible that the different spots he's worked, and he's done incredible work for himself, so being Cabot Links in Canada and numerous other courses. But his relationship with Bill Corr dates back to the early eighties. They got they knew each other before they got into the business really together and they are for a family tree sort of speak, sort of derives from there. So Rod met Dave in the early early years of Core and Crenshaw and developed a friendship. And I've been working with Rod for, like, as I said, twenty years now, and sort of everything I know is kind of comes from that family tree. A little bit of work here with Bill and Ben, but a lot of it being with Rod and Dave. And about two three years ago we decided that, you know, hey, we like working together. We built some cool stuff. Let's formalize this. So after the nest that we built at Cabot the short course there, we talked about serious partnership and you know, kind of timed it right. The industry's kind of boomed since the since COVID, and we've been lucky enough to do some pretty exciting projects. This one included.

00:07:45
Speaker 1: How did you get involved with Bandon? Shorty? So what was the firm's entry point into Bannon, because you know there's no other Whitman Axelan and cutting courses at Bandon, though of course Dave Exland has certainly been on the property here and worked on projects here. But how did your firm get involved here?

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Speaker 2: And that's the key, It was the relationship between Dave Axl and the people here at the resort. Ken Nice was actually instrumental former director of grounds. He's actually moving to the position where he's going to be running the resort here, which is exciting news for everybody that loves golf because he's a very talented man and he was one that he heard that we were working sort of in the Bend area of Oregon and asked us to come in and take a look at the site. And it was kind of that simple. We kind of came over looked at the site and we're instantly like, wow, this is pretty good and did a twelve hole routing which we showed to Mike Kaiser and Chris Kaiser, and they both looked at it and went, this is pretty good. Can you do more because we have more land here, So we added another six holes and eventually we actually added one more when the clubhouse moved, and it resulted in a nineteen hole routing that we've spent the last year in a bit built.

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Speaker 1: What is the site like? Could you just describe it for somebody who maybe hasn't seen it.

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Speaker 2: I mean, it's just ideally suited for a short course. You know, there's been numerous times when I think people have wanted to do. You know, Bill talked about looking at that land when they did trails. It's it's right below the second hole of trails and just south of the preserve site. But they're some of the most choppy dunes on the site, the biggest dunes, and it's just ideally suited for a short course. It's some of the best sand actually on the property.

00:09:35
Speaker 1: And then okay, so just to get people's geography in line here, where is it in relation to the other courses? Where will people go in order to get to like the clubhouse, the putting green and the first tea.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, so it's like, as I said, it's south of two trails, south of preserve, but we actually has its own clubhouse, parking area and everything, so it's going to be its own sort of campus at the top of a dune, you know, Unlike you know, we didn't set out for this. But unlike a lot of the other hang spots here at Bandon, which are sort of off in the trees behind Golf, this is has the same thing Golf has got the forefront in the dunes, but the clubhouse itself actually sits on top of one of the biggest ones on the site and you venture off from there. So where the where the you know, fire pit's going to go, where the putting green is just has epic views looking north of the entire resort from Bandon all the way up to Pacific and Old Max. So it's got, you know, it's it's got a pretty nice, nice opening.

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Speaker 1: What's been the timeline of the project? When did you start and when are you concluding it and getting the course open?

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Speaker 2: It moved fairly fast, and I think that's just because of how good the site actually was and how well maybe we worked with it, of how fast and economical and straightforward construction was. We started in November of not last year, the year prior, and then worked started in the spring and March clearing trees, minimal grubbing, and then set to work and spent most of the summer doing it. We were completely grasped by September and it's grown in over the winter. So we're back currently right now, which is why I'm here. We've got my design associate, Curtis Lavis out here as well, helping us finish the bunkers, and the crew, the maintenance crew here has just done an unbelievable job of growing this course in over the winter. It's probably one of the best growings I've ever seen. And you know, bunker edges, some of the hardest things that normally are notorious for just being difficult to grow in are superb and they've really set us up for you know, we've got a month and a half till the opening here May second, and we're well poised to just be you know, have the course in just unbelievable shape.

00:11:56
Speaker 1: Nice all right, So so opening up May second, there's gonna be a bit of a celebration, a little bit happening, you know, not not all around, shorties, but there's there's some plans for something around that time, right.

00:12:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a lot bigger. It's the twenty fifth anniversary of the entire resort, right, I mean, they've you know, it wasn't intentional. There'd kind of been murmurings when we were under construction that we might have it ready in time, but there was no pressure for us to do so, you know, it's just it's just worked out well that way. They are going to have, you know, several days of celebration here, big events. They're already that's selling right now, maybe sold out, I'm not one hundred percent sure, but we're going to be in here on May second in the morning with the opening of Shorties, and that night they're going to do a bigger event with all the architects from every course built here and do a bit of a fireside chat for some you know, special VIP people who've part of that event, and it's going to be special. It's a celebration of you know, one of the most influential, if not the most influential modern properties golf.

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Speaker 1: So getting into the architecture of the Shorties course a little bit, you know, it struck me as we're walking the site earlier this today, just earlier this afternoon, that if you play band in Preserve, which is the existing Corn Crenshaw designed short course here, the first short course on the property. If you play that course, you can see shorties probably for a lot of the round right at least you know the you know the stretch of holes you know two one, two three. You can look out on this property and see what you and Rod Whitman and Dave Exland have built at Shorties. And so I would imagine that there is some amount of pressure to differentiate from bandon Preserve, or at least to produce something of similar quality. So could you let me in on any discussions you had or thinking that you did about trying to do something slightly different with Shorties, introduce something new in trying to make it its own short course, even though it's right next to and in sight of Band and Preserve.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent it was. You know, anytime you're right next to two bill core courses being the trails and.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: Preserved there right there, and second hole it' sorry trails.

00:14:29
Speaker 2: Trails and that's a heck of a par three you know another short hole. You know you've got that sort of level of quality. You're not going to step foot on band and be presented with the challenge of putting something good here that is banned and worthy. You know, we always talk about when we do courses and any kinds of property, whether it be cab it or here, that you have to make it worthy of the site and the quality of architecture. That's everywhere else. There's always that pressure to build something worthy of the site you've been given, and that's no different here. We were given probably one of the best dune sites that we've ever seen, and you know, that's up there with numerous other ones that Dave's done in the past that are pretty special, but here's it was the nice thing that separated us from what we were looking at preserve and we walked it actually quite a bit. When we first showed up. It was just the scale of the features that we had, you know, the closest holes that we have to preserve or eleven and twelve and the bowl that the size of the setting that eleven sits in. Holes like three sit in our dunes are just bigger, they're broader, they're steeper. The nature itself differentiated the two courses for us, so for us, it was really okay, how do we play up on this with bigger turf areas, bigger greens, smaller greens, really play up on what the dunes are, sort of showing us from hold to hole and emphasizing those through the architecture to really differentiate Preserve from shorties. You know, just nice that nature kind of held our hand there.

00:16:02
Speaker 1: And then you know, another level of variety or differentiation that you have to do when you're building a short course is trying to make each whole distinct, right, because they're all par threes, and I guess on a regulation course, one vector of variety is par three's, par four's par fives yep. And you can also differentiate holes in terms of how the long holes in terms of how their fair ways move and are bunkered and are contoured, and so it just gives you more tools to make each hole memorable. Right when you're building a regulation course. I'd imagine it's pretty difficult when you're building a short course, especially one with nineteen holes. Right, this one has nineteen holes. Preserve has thirteen holes, nineteen par threes in a row. How do you make each one memorable and.

00:16:53
Speaker 2: Distinct it's just really you know, paying attention through the routing process all the way through to while you shaping, and that you know the fact that we spend an exordinant amount of time on site through both the design and construction really assists with that. You know, you have to be paying attention. You have to be paying attention not just to your routing. And you want each hole to sort of change directions. You're constantly getting different looks around the site, so that changes things up. You know, you might have even with even with short holes, you can still have left to right holes, right to left holes. So how are you using the ground. You've got down hill holes, you've got uphill holes, you've got flat holes. You know, you've got holes that play into dunes. You've got ones that run to the sides of them. Maybe the green is running away, maybe the greens pitch into you. Is the green left right, right to left? You know that goes with the with the flow of the holes. But then you're you're playing with length and it's not as significant as par fours and fives, but you can play with that. And the often thing, and we talked about this on site, the one thing that often gets sort of maybe ignored by other architects, is just scale. So you have smaller greens, and you have this sort of compression through different areas of the site where maybe the dunes get a little tighter, the greens are a little bit smaller, the holes are shorter, and then that emphasizes when you know, we went from fifteen our short as whole to sixteen today when we walked and suddenly, you know, you're just blown open with the change in scale. So it's playing with all those elements and tying them together, and you know, then you add different you know, the contouring of it, where the rollofs are, and how you bunker it. Are they native areas, are they more refined bunkers, formal bunkers. You tie all that together and you can really create, you know, nineteen or more unique looks going around that property.

00:18:42
Speaker 1: I want to dig into scale a little bit. This is kind of a digression, but I'm always interested in how golf architects talk about scale. The word has filtered down, I think a little bit too Avid golfers recently, where you know there's a turn of phrase that that sometimes these you know, golf nerds or Avid golfers might use, Oh, the scale at that course was just so big, and that's kind of a simple way of talking about scale, maybe maybe too simple. How did golf architects think about scale, both in terms of landscape and in terms of of what's being built? How do you how do you play with that? What's the what are the ins and outs of that concept?

00:19:23
Speaker 2: The key to me with good scale, and maybe not just big scale on a hole where it almost gets a little redundant, like you can have everything big and bold, and after five holes it all feels the same and you get lost in it. The key to me is, you know, going back to all these old writings on golf architectures, the variety you know, it's the variety of length, variety of contour, variety of scale, and they talk about that, and the key is just creating these ebbs and flows within your design of highs and lows, and you need these these these these times within the round almost like a good story of relaxation and or tightness, and you know, something that is different than everything else. So when you experience the big and the bold and the drama, it comes across as it was meant to. It's not obscured because you just played five other holes that kind of felt like that.

00:20:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and scale can come from so many different things, right, I guess the size of the green, the size of the bunkers, the size of the landforms, how the landforms relate to each other. It's a bunch of different things, I guess, right, all all kind of working together.

00:20:34
Speaker 2: It is it's you know, it's it's all these things you're putting into a you know, a recipe for each hole and how it comes out. You know, we've always talked about looking at a golf hole like it's one thing. There shouldn't be anything within it that's kind of competing. It's you know, every element within that is complementing everything else. And then you turn the corner to the next hole and it feels like a different recipe. You know, there's different ingredients now there that you're paying it. There's different flavors that you're going to experience, and it might feel different from the tea. Then as you get into it and you're finding these nuances that those are the holes I love the most, the ones that it's not revealed completely when you stare at it. There's stuff out there, and that's where contour and shape and nuance and hidden envelopes and hidden portions because you've obscured something, that's where those different elements come together to really create interest.

00:21:31
Speaker 1: Now, another thing that is probably even more important at short courses than it is at regulation courses is the design of the greens. Right if you don't if you don't have great greens at a short course, you've got nothing. Yep, you can kind of get away. You know, no course can be truly great without great greens, but you might be able to get away with it a little bit more at a regulation sized golf course if you have interesting enough tea to green features and strategies, the greens can be a little bit toned down or maybe not quite as great as the rest of the course and you can sort of maybe get away with it a little bit. At a short course, if you don't have great greens, there's there's basically nothing else, and so you know you've got to you've got to build them. Well, what was your process? I know that you know something about Rod Whitman and Dave Exland and you that that people know if they know a little bit about you, is that you all like to spend some time on site shaping features, and so how all, how did all three of you kind of work together and designing and shaping the greens at Shorties.

00:22:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean people might might be surprised when they hear this, but it's not really surprising when you find out how long we've worked together that it really is a collaborative process. This isn't a you know, Shorties, wasn't like, you know, each guy gets six greens, you know, plus one. But you know, it's not like we divided them up and went this this hole's days, this hole's rods, this hole's Keith. That's not the way we did it. It was very much like, who's got an idea for this hole? Go create a base for us to work on, and then we would each go in, you know, and you've gotta have a big you've gotta have a strong skin to do that, and you also have to respect the guys that you work with to allow them to come in to do that very thing and have that sort of you know, collaborative design process. But that's just how we're used to working. You know, I learned how to shape. You know, Rod Whitman, is you know, one of my best friends and mentors. Unbelievable. You know, most people would call him maybe the best shaper on the planet. You know, Bill Kourr said that about him. I feel the same way about Dave. I just have you know, my edufcation in this is watching Rod Whitman. Literally I would build something early in my career and he'd bring a bulldozer over to it and blow it up. And he did this to everybody, and I was just it's kind.

00:23:57
Speaker 1: Of like the version in my world of an editor in it just you got to you got to rewrite this, or I'll rewrite it myself.

00:24:04
Speaker 2: And that's a great example because there's two types of people. There's the people that if they have an editor come in and edit their stuff, they'll either sit there and learn from that person and see what they're changing and why they're changing it and learn and build and grow. And then there's the other ones that will get all bent out of shape. We'll throw a tantrum, we'll walk out of the room and not learn a thing. And we've seen, you know, Rod has worked with a lot of the previous that think they have a thick skin and can roll with it and learn and I think few people have kind of lasted that that time where I've had the journey of going and watching my stuff being blown up, to getting it tweaked, to him coming over and making a little suggestions because we have that ability to communicate and to the point where it's like, yeah, this is this is pretty good, right, so you just see that, you know, from the bulldozer completely obliterating what you've done and reworking it to the point where you've learned enough over hope, you know, fifteen twenty years of working together that it's good and you know we're at the point now where I see things. You know, we talk about somebody's eye in golf architecture and how they see the ground. I'm very much I very much have been, you know, tutored to see things the way that rodden Dave do. So when we look at a piece of ground, it's not like he's over here, Dave's over there, Rod's over here, and I'm somewhere else. We're all sort of in the ballpark. It's all about perception of who's got the coolest creative idea, And sometimes that's for the entire hole, but sometimes it's unique element within a hole. And if you can contribute to something else that somebody's done, it just keeps getting better and better and better. And we can kind of spitball off each other, kind of like a jazz band or something, but we can, you know. It's it's that freedom to sort of work within each other's work to make it better. And anybody that sort of was on this site or our previous work, you know, they they come away being like these you know, every time these guys stepped on each other's work, it got better. And that's just the way we're comfortable to working. But it's you know, it's probably rare.

00:26:09
Speaker 1: So you just refer to Rod Whitman as one of the best shapers on the planet or maybe the best. Yeah, you know, and that's an opinion that a lot of people have, maybe including Billcore. Some would say similar things about Dave Exland, Right, And so I asked a version of this question. I remember asking a version of this question to Bruce Happner and getting his answer, when you look at shaping that somebody has done, how do you go about differentiating a poor job from a good job, or a good job from a premium job? Right, how do you how do you conclude that a piece of shaping that Rod Whitman has done is truly the best of its of its kind, you know, even a level above just merely competent shaping.

00:27:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of I mean just coming from a high level of doing contour. You know, you can see the guys that think they're very good at what they do and they can create creative shapes. But a lot of it is you can tell the machine a lot of the times worked in one direction and a lot of the time they're sort of redundant sizes to the shapes. There's not a lot of sharpness to them.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: What do you mean by the machine worked in one direction?

00:27:27
Speaker 2: So a lot of what I've learned from Rowd and Dave over time is when you're grading a site, you know the way the wind blows, especially, I mean the contours historically based on Scottish golf, which is wind and it's landforms that have been derived from the wind blowing over time. So that's essentially what we're trying to replicate when we build golf contour. There's contours out there that need to move the water, move golf balls, and you're still trying to do that. But how you actually shape those is really determined by you know, the way you move your machine, and natural landforms are shaped by winds which come in from various directions, and paying attention to those in the way the site has been made over time. You can look at the larger landforms and if you work your machine in the similar ways that those natural landforms are moved, what you make suits the land uh and then it's all about the variety that you put within that. You know, I've I've been watching Rod for years and he's not sitting there pushing dirt in one way. He's constantly changing direction with the dozer. He's going back and looking at things of how they tie in, and you know, there's there's there's there's a roughness and a nuance to it that he's not trying to be too clean. You know, when we finish things, we're not trying to polish it off too much because we're trying to leave things a little rough and feel like they're they're natural. So there's a lot of tricks there with shaping that I've learned from both Rod and Dave over time of how to shape the ground, and a lot of it is just paying attention to the sites you're on as well, So it's not like everywhere we go we try to build features of a certain size. Like you have to be aware, just like everything else with architecture, of where you're working. You know, you're not going to do an inland parkland horse that has humpy bumpy everywhere, that doesn't tie into anything. It wouldn't fit. But how can you do something that still has the same characteristics of playability and intrigue with shape, but maybe tone it down quite a bit and still make it play on sites like this. We had a scale of these dunes that was pretty big out here, so how can we do something that mimics that? And it's a lot of it is just variety. You know, you should be able to look at somebody's work or they're done shaping and they didn't just put contour everywhere. The biggest thing, and we've talked about this with the design is restraint. And you know, having a few greens that are calm is the same thing when you look at a fairway, which is really like a big playing surface like a green, because you're playing, you know, on a longer hold, you're playing to certain areas to get angles, don't the whole thing where it's just big, bold and undulating, and you know you're gonna have quiet areas, you're gonna have air areas that are more severe, and you know, Rod and Day are just you know, and I think myself by by just working with them for so long, you kind of understand that, and you just you just you become more aware of how to do unique, quirky, interesting things and how they relate to the land in each site.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: So I love this point that you made earlier about how how to do these tie ins. Right, it's just the term that golf architects used to to talk about how they make their shaping, their artificial features of course match or correspond with the surrounding landscape. And thinking of your your dozer as almost like a natural element, right, you said, you're kind of imitating how the wind behaves, coming from multiple directions and acting on the land in a certain way. I'd imagine like if you go to other sites that are where the landscape is more shaped, is less shaped by wind and maybe more by a river or something like that, by by water, then you then you're kind of imitating how that natural element acts on a land. I've never heard that stated that way before, but I really I really like that is that that's something you think about.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: It and we do very much. So like at Cabot when we built the nest or anything else, there's there's there's dunes there, but interior like you could tell there's these coded natural drainage washes and things through the course, and you know, there we might instead of a dozer because we're not modify you know, we're not trying to replicate the wind or anything like that. If it's more of erosion, then you could take an excavator to it and really create these nuanced landforms that feel like it's part of a wash. A lot of the times here too, And we kind of walked around today and I think there was a lot of instances where I showed you holes where it's like that was natural. We didn't touch it. This was natural, we didn't touch it. And a lot of those features were the biggest, boldest parts of those holes. If you actually allow mother nature to do the most interesting and you know the foundation points of each hole and then spitball and kind of build off that and use your hand as more restrained to accent those you end up with better golf. And that's that we use this I'm pointing in my brain, we use our minds a lot more to kind of figure out those features and how we can use them so that we don't just have to create something. You know, Mother Nature's given us it, right.

00:32:33
Speaker 1: If the artificial feature is the biggest thing in the landscape, then that's when it starts to read as artificial.

00:32:40
Speaker 2: It always does.

00:32:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, very very good point. The final question on the subject of short courses, as we'll get into later in the conversation. You are a historian. You've done a great deal of historical research, and you apply that historical knowledge well to our present moment and what's happening right now. You know, if you were to kind of narrate the history, the recent history of short courses, where are we in that history, what are the trends, and and where do you think it's going next?

00:33:18
Speaker 2: I think, you know, as far as the history of short courses go, I think they're very valuable. It's something where we've kind of, you know, the rest of golf is kind of deviated into this you know, grandiose, very expensive, you know, not just the maintenance just the size of these courses and how much golf costs. And we're sitting in the resort right now. That is unbelievable, but it's going to cost you a fair bit of money to get here. And unfortunately the rest of golf, municipal golf is really under kind of attack. You know, through the seventies and eighties, we've just done such a poor job of putting golf into a position where it wasn't grounded in its roots of this really connected, vibron mental, community based passion sport and sort of took it from that. And because you can still go to Scotland and those golf courses are so part of the community and you come here and they're not. They're these private entities that are super lush on you know, capitalizing on resources. And at least that's the the the view from the rest of the general public that don't golf, and I think, you know, we're trying to bring people into this game. COVID's done such a good job because there was nothing else really accessible for that junior element of golfer. We hooked a lot of people in that time. And short courses, I think, are this ability that we can really create fun, interesting golf hook families, you know, the people that don't have time to spend five six hours on a golf course, and put them in areas where you know, we can maybe they're closer to cities, maybe they're closer to you know, where they're needed. You know, these municipal courses that seem to we hear more and more or that's like save the muni. You know, maybe some of it if we if we really have to, becomes the short course. I think it's a tool really moving forward that we can help grow the game. And because there's just such fun. It's done the right way, done by creative people. Yes they are shorter, but they're full on golf like it's it's just something where you can bring your family or if you if you if you're actually a great golfer, you can go out there and be truly tested.

00:35:27
Speaker 1: Well, maybe to put a finer point on this, are we reaching a point do you think where the modern short course, the kind of short course that you're building out at Shorty's right now, and that that Corn Crunshaw built a band and preserve and at the Sandbox at Sand Valley. These short courses that are that are not like the par three courses that I grew up on or that probably you grew up on, which were fairly bland architecturally for the most part, but very important to my development as a golfer. But you know, it's circular greens and mostly aerial, and you know, not not the most inventive architecture in the world. Very different kind of thing being built out here. When when you think about a Part three course at these different resorts, is the next step to move these kinds of short courses from the destination resort, from from these far flung places where, of course they're great and they serve a wonderful purpose here. But do they need to kind of move closer to the city center.

00:36:33
Speaker 2: I think so because I think, you know, the footprint that they take up is so much smaller than a bigger course. Yeah, you know, if we've got you know, a lot of these municipal courses where that's you know, tax payer money, it's a lot easier to justify if you've got the short course mentality. And I think, you know, if you've got if you've got the same expenses being put on something that's that quality of architecture but it's just you know, for the same resources, instead of an eighteen whole big course where they're going to complain that they can't have all this short grass and you know everything else that makes great quality golf. If you could shrike that down a bit and still get the you know we have out here at Shorty's. We've got five times sometimes seven or eight different teeing areas. We have four t's on every hole where you could just hit a putter. Yet if you stepped it back to the back, it's not a it's not a pitch and putt, you know, it's a real course. Uh. And it's one that you know, if you're out there with your buddies and you just played Pacific, you can go settle a match there and some people are going to make some big numbers if they start getting greedy. So yet, you could take your kids out there and they'll never lose a ball, and they'll be able to putt from everywhere. They literally just need a putter and they're gonna have fun. So if you could put that in more of a you know, our urban setting and allow people to experience that that. Yet, you know, great greens matter, these contours these slopes, the kicker slopes, and you know, somebody might hit a bad shot and all of a sudden, the light bulb off that there's different ways to play golf besides just this aerial target game. If this gets more people hooked into golf because of solid architecture, yeah, of course, it's a no brainer to me.

00:38:17
Speaker 1: Okay, I wanted to take a quick break here to talk about the USGA Green Section. The USGA Green Section has been helping golf facilities provide better playing conditions for over one hundred years. When you schedule a course consulting visit with a USGA agronomist, you'll get way more than just an expert in agronomy. You'll get a trusted partner who is familiar with your region and your course conditions. USGA agronomists can help you formulate a plan to communicate with your course leadership, staff and golfers. They also help you plan and prioritize your resources more effectively. USGA consultants can provide an unbiased assessment of your course maintenance and renovation needs, so you can ensure you are getting the trusted advice you need to make key maintenance decisions. So book a course consulting visit by March thirty first, and you'll receive five hundred dollars off your first visit. For more information on how to schedule a visit, go to gsshop dot USGA dot org. Again, that's gsshop dot USGA dot org. That's the USGA Green Section. Check them out, all right, So let's talk a bit about your kind of parallel career as a historian and as a writer. A few years ago you published a book called The Evolution of Golf Course Design that had a great deal of information and interpretation of the different eras of golf architecture, and it put it all together in one volume in a way that hadn't really been done before. And this book also has as great images, routing plans, photos, historical stuff. I'm sure it took a tremendous amount of research to put this together. It started, i believe, with your master's thesis and eventually evolved into this book, The Evolution of Golf Course Design. So you know, why did you even get started on this in the first place. Was it just a school thing or was there a pre existing fascination with or question that you had about the history of golf course design that needed to be answered by this project.

00:40:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit of both. Like I'd been reading golf course architecture books since i was, you know, fourteen, kind of a hobby. You know, my library is a little ridiculous, which I think most golf nerds listening to this, they end up down that rabbit hole and gets a little out of hand.

00:40:46
Speaker 1: It's not ridiculous, it's totally normal, exactly normal behavior.

00:40:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, tell that to my wife. But it was one of those things where I'd read everything. Everything was kind of put people into silos. I kind of mentioned this, you know, you looked at one architect in their work, you looked at one course in their history. There was a little bit out there as far as tying it together. But as an architect that really wanted to be a much more serious architect and having gone and built Cabot Links in the recession and coming out of that and doing a lot of renovations the Algonquin, you know, I coul assaulted a couple Stanley thomp courses, Stanley Thompson courses, a couple Donald Ross courses, and knowing that that was going to be a part of my future I wanted to really understand everybody, all these architects, all these practitioners, and not just them and a couple other courses, but them is actual artists. And when you study art, you learn, and it's so weird that golf has never looked at this way. But coming from you know, I did planning as an undergrad and landscape architectures as a master's, which is where this thesis came from. But in every you know, landscape architecture one O one, when you study people, you learn about the evolution of their career, you know. And when if you study art, you learn about the errors of the artist over time and how they evolved. And this is there something phase and this is right?

00:42:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well, I mean just to interject here, sorry, I shouldn't interrupt you when you're in the flow. And we'll pick up there. But one thing what I'm bringing to this is having studied literature, and that's what my graduate degree was in. And the historical perspective on where literature comes from is not an interpretive path that every literary critic takes, but it's definitely one that's really well established and fleshed out. And there's been a great deal of research done on it, studying literature as a historical object.

00:42:49
Speaker 2: But.

00:42:51
Speaker 1: Not much has been done on golf architecture in the in the same vein. And so the importance of your project really was that, where in just about every other artistic discipline there was a very healthy historicist body of research on where these cultural objects came from and why they were the way they were at their certain times in history, golf architecture didn't really have that. It's almost like it was stuck in the phase of literary criticism where people were just looking at the poem itself in isolation from everything else, and and there wasn't that kind of counter trend or differing body of knowledge about the history of golf architecture and how history informed golf architecture. And so yeah, I just wanted to add that because it's it's a very important move for the scholarship on golf architecture to figure out its history and how it relates to broader history.

00:43:55
Speaker 2: I guess, exactly, yeah, And that's that's so accurate. And there was there was two when I was when I was sort of trying to figure out what I was going to do for my thesis. I started looking at Pinehurst, which has just happened, and knowing Bill and Ben and thinking I was going to do something there about the environmental benefits of that, and there was one there was one statement by Bill that basically said like, we're not we're not environmental stewards. We're not doing anything here but trying to put this golf course back to the way it was meant to be. And I went, well, why did the common question is that what happened to make it change? And having all this massive library, there's a quote in Charles Blair McDonald's Scotland that he talked about the early sort of dark days of golf architecture.

00:44:51
Speaker 1: Right the Victorian period exactly, that's what they refer to as the Dark Ages.

00:44:55
Speaker 2: Exactly what I there was this quote that's sort of struck me, and I just happened to read his book be reading it again after sort of having this illumination with what Bill had said in this in this quote, and he talked about guys like Tom Dunn and others that were doing, you know, what was deemed to be bad and they said, you know, we can't judge people for the eras in which they were like they're shaped by the everything else that's happening around them. We can't blame them for that. You know what he was doing, He's they're a product of their time, essentially, and I went, well, that's why has nobody else looked into golf that way? Like, it's not just these people are products of their time, but they change over time based on external influences. So art, science, technology, everything else comes into it to form who you are at the start of your career, but then you change over time as you continue to learn. And I just went, you know, I don't understand these people enough that if I'm given the keys to the kingdom at let's say, somebody work that I really respect this architect, am I going to mess it up because I don't know them well enough. I don't know the details of the course well enough. So it was really me going, I need to step up my game and I'm going to do everything possible to understand this history. And that's what the thesis was. That's where it took me. And when I was done, I just you know, it wasn't it wasn't for the purpose of writing a book. It was really you know, I have a friend George Waters, who had literally a few years before me, had done a master's at Guelph Stame University and had turned his thesis into a book. And when I was done, I was like, I remember showing it to a few golf architect friends and then going, you know, this is pretty good. You know if you if you kind of put this more into a book form, there could be something here. And I went, well, George did it, maybe I can do it too, so and you're right. It took another you know, it was two years to kind of do the thesis and pull everything together. It was another two and a half to turn something that was already flushed out into a book. So it was a lot of work.

00:47:09
Speaker 1: Right In that book that George Water is published, by the way, is called Sand and Golf, which is another really excellent book that people should definitely get. I think you can still email George and he'll send you a copy. Is the same True of yearbook. Right now?

00:47:24
Speaker 2: Are you still you've I got three thousand original prints. Those have been gone for a little over a year. Of course, they sold out right during the pandemic, when trying to get a book reprinted was basically impossible.

00:47:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, paper and supply chains were a nightmare for a lot of people who are publishing in a small way.

00:47:43
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, it was, Yeah, it was. It was a lot when I had time to look into it. And since then we've just been, you know, thankfully, Wax been pretty busy as far as with projects and here and elsewhere, and I just haven't had time to get a reissued. But I get a lot of people asking, and I think it's going to be something that I pushed for later this year and hopefully have another another limited print series done before the holidays.

00:48:12
Speaker 1: Cool, all right, Well, let's get back into the content of the book a little bit. You know, we were we were talking about how how you were trying to formulate a historical interpretation of golf architecture, talking about golf architecture as a product of its time in a number of different periods, and trying to explain why a golf course was the way it was by understanding the historical period in which it was created. Yes, right, And so there's not just some kind of universal way of building golf courses that is shared between old Tom Morris and Tom Fazio. Each of those architects is a product of his of his separate historical period and that's why they did what they did.

00:48:57
Speaker 2: The interesting thing that happened, though, is is you realize that there's different eras and the focus, Like there's definitely a pre war era, there's a post war and an interwar era, and the way the courses are built during that time differ. You know, post war you've got the emphasis of technology and where that takes in professionalism in golf architecture where the architect becomes almost removed from the site and plans in office and exactly. But there's funny, there's these threads that I found that go from that link that that sort of golden era and even prior of golf architecture, and it's come to full surface now and there's sort of the pillars of golf architecture. I kind of referenced them the Book of Contour and Width and Strategy that are back. But the other thing was mentorship. The one thing that I pay a big thing and that kind of came out with a book. When you start tracking everybody's influences is you find out who their mentors are and knowing where they worked, and you know, when you start link King Old Tom with you know, all sorts of other people in the US, from Charles Blair MacDonald to you know numerous others.

00:50:10
Speaker 1: Donald Ross for that mat He's not American, but spent because of his career.

00:50:15
Speaker 2: You know, There's just there's a number of people that sort of met the old man and uh that was big, hugely influential. Uh. And there's we talked about, uh, you know, family trees and golf architecture and that was one thing that you know, you and.

00:50:32
Speaker 1: I were talking about this over lunch.

00:50:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's to me, that's just the biggest thing. Like I really, you know, pinched myself every day knowing that I lucked out falling into this family tree where I've got Rod Whitman, Dave Axlan and by association, Bill Core and Ben Crenshaw as some of my closest mentors in golf. And I'm very lucky to have that. But there's been a lot of that throughout history where I think the right people were in the right place at the right time and it benefited golf course architecture, you know. Being Canadian, we've got Stanley Thompson. Well, he grew up playing Toronto Golf Club and was there when his first business partners George Cumming and his brother Nicol Thompson. Harry Colt was in town and happened to build the Toronto Golf Club. His brother Nicol ended up being the head pro at Hamilton another Colt which which he came back in in nineteen fourteen and did two years later, and in between Stanley was at the University of Guelph learning to be a golf architect. So there was clearly this guy was like hugely influential. And you go through that Colt family tree and it's like everybody from the Golden Age. You've got you know, Mackenzie, Alison, You've got Maxwell by association through Mackenzie, and it kind of ripples out from there and you look at the They literally touched golf from Africa to Australia, to Europe, to the US to Anada, and they set the foundations for the entire profession during that time, and you know, it's just it's wonderful where you can kind of pick up on those influences and you could track one person and see all their early work. You can kind of pay attention to the details of how that kind of reflects that time and then their artists. You could see how they grew from there and started doing their own type of work, and then maybe they took somebody under their wing and how they affected that person and then they grew into something else. You know, that to me is probably some of the most interesting parts of it. And for me it's important because if we get any work at these clubs, it's important to tell them, you know, you don't need to copy that course down the road yet you have the same designer, but that was built ten years later or ten years earlier. Here's your history. Here's what we need to harness, and it's uniquely cool, it's uniquely distinctive.

00:53:01
Speaker 1: And you can do a more proper or authentic version of that history and of that architect's work. Then the club down the road if you kind of try to situate yourself clearly in the historical period that your course came from.

00:53:17
Speaker 2: And that's what that architect wanted. Like the funniest thing is you get all these courses where they want to be one version of a style that this architect had. But if you got Donald Ross, for example, he's not doing the same thing twenty minutes down the road as he did somewhere else, that's just that'd be crazy, you know. Although we did that, I guess in the seventies and eighties, but as a profession. But the best didn't do it and never have done it. They've always been distinctly different or tried to put a spin on whatever they were doing based on where they were working, to give something unique to that client.

00:53:51
Speaker 1: So what's one of your favorite examples from your historical research of how a general historical trend or phenomenon outside of golf made its way into golf architecture and found expression in the way that golf architects were doing their work.

00:54:12
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the biggest thing I kind of put together in the book was that whole arts and crafts movement. To me, that's just one of the most interesting, you know.

00:54:20
Speaker 1: So what is the arts and crafts movement? First of all, what this is building architecture, Yes, really.

00:54:26
Speaker 2: Building, but it extended more so than that. It was actually a sort of anti movement against the industrial revolution over in the UK and elsewhere. But really what it was is there was a there was you know, where everything prior had been handmade and well crafted by masters that passed their hone their craft and pass it down to proteges, which is kind of interesting way of we look at golf too. Everything was sort of starting to be mass produced, you know, factories and everything else. Text were coming in and machines were making things, and that that hand made craftsman style approach was being lost, and the arts and crafts movement was really in opposition to that. So there was crafts people, arts people. Arts and crafts is where it comes from. But it extended into buildings architecture where you had stained glass windows and really ornate decorative like molding, all handmade, and it was more of an emphasis on uniqueness versus something that was more sterile and mass produced because it had to be for economy of production. So where that came about is the center of this world with arts and crafts was in just outside of London, and it happened to be Surrey, England, which, funny enough, that's where the same movement for golf architecture came about. And Toomic Wood, who was a historian and part time writer on a forum called Golf Club batleists that most people on this listening will.

00:56:06
Speaker 1: Sure will be well aware of Yeah, we know golf Club batlest And obviously a huge influence on Friday Golf and a Tomic Wood was a prolific poster on golf club batlest and wrote a number of really serious historical articles for the website.

00:56:21
Speaker 2: Some of the best sort of you know, there was no there was a very sparse sort of bibliography of where he was getting this. You had to kind of put the pieces together. He wasn't the best writer. It kind of jumped around a little, but the points he was making were spot on and far beyond far before a lot of other people were talking about this, to the point where he was getting actually a lot of backlash from certain people on golf club bat lists because he hadn't tied all the threads together. Well, you know, doing the research that I had done, I sort of came across this prolific Horace Hutchinson, who was the you know, chief editor of Golf or country Life magazine over in the UK, and you know, one of the first sort of amateur players from England that were members of the RNA, and just he was the who's who of sort of that turn of the century golf architecture. It was the first ones writing about it. Gave spotlights to some of the first architects and created a bit of a platform for these guys to talk about this emerging sort of new science, new art, whatever you'd like to call it. And you know, they were trying to try to figure out, we love this game and the links it's been there and it has naturally evolved, and how do we do this elsewhere we're on ground not ideally suited and you know, meant for that purpose, and it was done bad by a few individuals, but they were starting to figure out, you know, what strategy was, what the contour meant to golf, what the sub soil meant. There was a lot of you know, elements coming together for them to start figuring that out. And this is around the same time where this arts and crafts movement is happening. And Horace Hutchins actually actually he had some issue health issues throughout his life and there's a period in his life where he left the writing world in golf for a while and ended up diving into you know, the rich socialite world of England at the time, and somehow got an apprenticeship with a guy named Frederick Watts, who wasn't an arts and crafts person per se, but was almost a godfather in a certain way to a lot of this movement. He was doing things that were arts and crafts esque and a prolific artist. You know. It was type where Obama had I think one of his paintings in the in the White House during his time there, you know, very famous artist, and Hutchinson had spent some time for a full year under his tutelage. Watts actually married an arts and crafts woman who was at the head of that kind of industry. And Horace actually wrote a book called Portraits of the Eighties where eighteen eighties where he talks about all these individuals in there. It's not specifically arts and crafts people, but there's a whole list of people within that book that are and then politicians and everybody else that sort of framed the late half of that Industrial Revolution and those that were encounter to it that that sort of pioneered the arts and crafts. So you can see his although he doesn't say it per se in this big statement of this is my you know understanding and why why naturalism and everything else is important to golf architecture. But the evidence is there in these books, especially with some of his later books like hints on golf. All the wonderful graphics in it are drawn by Frederick Watts. There was clearly a huge connection between this early architectural movement toward more naturalism and strategy. And you know, you've got Low in there, who's a friend of Hutchinson, and tying these things together. You've got the you've got the understanding of what makes good golf strategic and everything else and variety coming from Low, but the natural element of it and how to do that is really coming from Hutchinson. And this this Surrey landscape of arts and crafts and kind of tying all that together. And I just found that deeply, deeply, you know, intriguing. Right.

01:00:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, He's kind of the vessel that brings arts and crafts into golf architecture. And you know, arts and crafts is almost kind of like a localist or naturalist movement in other kinds of architecture. And so when you start to apply that to golf architecture, you start to see more natural, local kinds of forms showing up on golf courses. In the first decade of the twentieth century in Great Britain, specifically south of London in Surrey, through the work of Harry Colt and others, right, and so you know, this is just one example of how how you know, an outside historical influence coming from a reaction to industrialization, the biggest historical phenomenon of the time, the dominant historical phenomenon, industrialization. There's a reaction to that in architecture generally, and it finds its way into the kinds of golf courses that are being built by Harry Colt and others that we that we all know now. And so this is kind of the you know, if you follow those threads that they're incredibly interesting, and that's the kind of stuff that you were trying to track in the evolution of golf course design. So I want to fast forward now from that. Now that people have some familiarity with how you're trying to think historically and think about large historical phenomena and seeing how they connect to what's happening in the golf courses that are being built in a particular moment, how would you then interpret our current moment and golf course design either. You know, if you want to extend that moment back twenty five years, you can do that. You can talk about how things are changing right now, because I think we seem to be at something of a hinge moment right now. But how would you, you know, talk about the late twentieth century the early twenty first century in golf architecture as an example of our overall historical moment in the world.

01:02:47
Speaker 2: I think the biggest thing here is a lot of these these movements in golf architecture. As with any art, they're kind of you know, there's abs and flows to it, and they kind of come back around. That was something that we saw, you know, with the Arts and Crafts movement. It was really looking at this sort of man made forced on nature, you know, the Dark Ages, the Victorian style of architecture. It wasn't ideal, and there was this revolt against it, and it became what we still refer to as the Golden Age. You know, there was a lot of time honored principles that came out of there in golf architecture. And then, funny enough, you know, you get a great depression in the Second World War in there and modernization and flights to the moon, and you know, people were looking in a completely different direction and they really wanted to not focus on the past. There's complete almost break in you know, the reverence for what happened previously, and every other discipline. It wasn't just golf architecture. Every other allied art form was looking and trying to reinvent itself.

01:03:54
Speaker 1: And it's almost like a form of cognitive dissonance with some people. You have Robert Trent Jones, and you know, I did a podcast series on Robert Trent Jones a while back, and one of the most odd things about his career, and it's example of this of this gap that you're talking about, or this break in history where people seem to forget what came before. I want to forget, and they wanted to start anew Robert Trent Jones trained basically with Stanley Thompson correct and it was very steeped and Golden Age architecture. Knew what it was about, knew about Donald Ross, had seen all these great courses. But after the war, although he could have been a connective tissue between the Golden Age and the post war golf boom, he didn't seem to want to do that.

01:04:44
Speaker 2: No, And Dick Wilson was the same.

01:04:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, Dick Wilson was trained with what Flynn and to me right, and it was you know, maybe Dick Wilson did. You can see the Golden Age influence a little more clearly and some of Dick Wilson's work, but the stra were totally different.

01:05:01
Speaker 2: And that's and aesthetic was completely different. Yeah, like and it's this it's this need to and there's there's letters from RTJ Senior that were written to his wife that literally talk about you know these guys are doing, referring to McKenzie and Thompson, who he wrote a lot about. He had a deep reverence for McKenzie as well, and you see that in a lot of his early sketches. But he talks to his wife about and this is during the depression and how tough everything is. So he's trying to paint this picture of looking toward a bright future and he's giving these ideas of like, I've got a lot of ideas that these guys don't have, and he's talking basically essentially that you know, this time honored practice is great, but man, we're looking to over the future and it's going to be bright and he's going to reinvent the wheel, which he does go and do and it literally is he's a product of the time. That's what everything else around him was doing. Why wouldn't he have done the same, And especially when the purpose of me publishing the book was because we didn't understand our own history. There was a lot you know, the best parts of the Golden Age were where we had those top practitioners were the leaders of the same magazines writing about it. And there was the public debate going on where all that was in the public forum, and there was this debate about what great golf architecture was and you could see it right there for yourself, and there was a great history of it. But that was an extended post. You know, all the post World War two, nobody was really writing about it. You know, these guys went into offices, the writers became something else. Everything was just, you know, how it related to golf, the playing of it, not architecture itself. So it became all about the faces of the game versus architecture. And every course renovation was great because it was modernizing past tired layouts, and they looked tired because they went through a great depression, and there wasn't really an understanding of how good the architecture was. So these new these new modern practitioners tweaked and adjusted, and you know, they're combating newer equipment that was going farther and they had ways of solving that because you know, the modernization of design as well and clarity of design. There's a lot of modernist principles that came into golf. So things had to be framed, holes had to be separate from others. You can't have joined fairways. You know, we need mounds behind greens because I wanted clarity of where, you know, clarity of landforms. So a lot of things were forced onto sites that would not have naturally been there. And the funny thing is is we kind of came up to that era of minimalist movement in golf architecture with Tom Doak Billkoor. And you're you're in an area era of society where we start getting globalization is at its peak. You start getting this bilocal think local movements coming.

01:08:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, and now we're getting to our current period. This is your transition. So we've talked about the modern period. So current period, the broad influences globalization.

01:08:13
Speaker 2: Is one yep, and you've got sort of the big box stores and everything that come in you know, that's part of that end of you know, the eighties nineties.

01:08:23
Speaker 1: Suburbia, like the extreme rationalization of our physical environment everywhere correct.

01:08:30
Speaker 2: And again we get to this point where you know, the past comes back and this is minimalism, is our own version of the arts and crafts movement coming up again. We start having this reverence, we look back, all the old books start coming back around. You know, there's this return of what golf architecture is. You've got a young golf architect touring the world, seeing courses and then writing about it and trashing his his But that was such a necessary book that turned the world of golf architecture on it head. From everybody just going we're comfortable doing our same style everywhere, to a young guy going, get your heads out of here, you know where you know there there's better golf architecture out here, and here's my opinion. And it turned some heads and made him some enemies. But what it did was set the foundations for people to look at things differently. And you had Bill Corr who was kind of feeling there was some you know, I'm a little different. You know, these Perry Maxwell courses that I grew up on and playing in Pinehurst, and yeah, there was something special about those like, you know, let's do something a little different here, and they define a style and you know they'd already been the Pete Die influence was not so much the way he built or the way his style was, but it was the way he built golf. And these guys were now more in the field, Tom and Bill and Ben and and Gill and others, and obviously my mentors and now partners. We come from that family tree of Hey, we're already out here. But how do we embrace these you know, we have a deep respect now for the past. How do we embrace all these things? And you know, we've become golf nerds to the end degree and we've seen everything. We've traveled well traveled to see golf, and we're all historians in our own way, and that reflects on who we are as designers. And it's very much now you get this. What's interesting and where I see let's look toward the future, is you've got this sort of in any other form of art form, whether it's architecture. You can look at churches where they've got sort of minimalist architecture. Then it goes into like a there's a romantic phase or something, and then it gets more elaborate, and then you reach the pinnacle of it where it's like it's so elaborate, this is.

01:10:55
Speaker 1: The decadence phase exactly. Yeah, you so the you know, romantic movements are typically a reaction to some form of rationalism in the culture, you know, overly logical art and thinking and social institutions, and romanticism tends to be a chaotic reaction to that, a desire to be wilder. But then you know, as romanticism starts eating its own tail, it gets to a certain peak and people want to go back in a different direction.

01:11:26
Speaker 2: Yes, and I think we're it's interesting right now because we still have those people that are around that are still practicing that sort of those time honored revenant style of architecture that's based in the past and you know, using a soft hand, letting nature be the guide, and there's people that are on the other side that are really pushing the envelope. As far as you know, the principles are still there. There's still kicker slopes and contour and width and strategies, but there's not the maybe the variety element of it. They're pushing the envelope on every hole to make things bigger and bolder. And there's a place for that. There really is, you know saying with there's you know, the end of sort of that eighties nineties era of architecture might be Shadow Creek. Some people have said that that's a that's an okay, that's a pretty good golf course. It's better than okay, it's pretty good.

01:12:19
Speaker 1: It's it's impressive.

01:12:20
Speaker 2: It's impressive. I mean, it's a monument in that style of architecture. Yeah, that's and it really is. But do you need five hundred of those? You don't.

01:12:30
Speaker 1: Can you even build five?

01:12:32
Speaker 2: And that's it. And that's where I look at this other movement in golf architecture. It's great at some of these public courses or resort courses now that are having this sort of grandiose style being imposed, But it's it's it's it's the common sense of the rest of the industry to go, how much of this can we sustain? And what is really the bread and butter, the pillars of golf architecture that need to go in everywhere else to suit the sites. We shouldn't be overdoing every site, and you know, ending up here in ten years that all these designs need to be rained back in because the maintenance and the economy of the place can't sustain it. That's not our job as architects. Our jobs is to set the client up for the best success, and you do that by paying attention to all of these things and understanding the history and your style and influence, and really setting up a project to be unique, you know, and not just kord of I did this at the last one. I got to be bigger and better at the next. That's not a recipe for success.

01:13:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that there is some decadence creeping in to architecture golf architecture, especially post COVID, and there could be a number of reasons for that. There's kind of this baroque style, really over the top style, and some of it's really and it's seductive, but there's no doubt that there's some overcooked things happening, and it's just it's an effort to kind of take some of the interesting architectural work that's been done in the past twenty five years and turn up the volume a little bit on it and that's that's kind of the point that we're getting to, and it's very interesting. But I think another another historical influence on this is the economy. The condition of the economy. The recession was a massive shock to golf architecture, and COVID was another. But then in post COVID there's all this money flowing into golf, and that's another kind of shock. It seems to me that minimalism, as practiced by billcore and Ben Crenshaw, most notably at sand Hills, an actual minimalist course, right, and your partner Dave Exland and his then partner Dan Proctor did perhaps the best rendition of it I've seen at Wildhorse in Nebraska. You know, that came from a desire to spend less on golf courses, to be more restrained, to let the land speak, right, and that that fit in well with a downturn generally in the golf industry and then a downturn in the economy starting in the late oughts. Minimalism was suited to that moment. But now that there's all this access to fast money in the golf world, are we forgetting why we scaled down in the first place?

01:15:42
Speaker 2: A little bit because it's just harder for you know, the big name architects to be as present, and that's what that's what results in great architecture. You know, we're we purposely as a as a company only take two to three projects on at a time. There's three of us, that's all we can do. You know, at worst case, there's going to be one of us at each job. And we've got design associates to do that too. You know, a lot of some of these younger guys who are very busy right now, they're going to struggle with that. You know, they're gonna have good guys on the ground. But you know, there's a point I'll just go back to and kind of tie this together. There's a point where you looked at, you know, what Pete Die was doing and trying to bring these these fundamentals of Scotland over. And the funny thing is is when other people try to interpret that and rip it off, all we got was bulkhead walls and you know, you know, pot bunkers and stuff. Get the soul, the soul of it.

01:16:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, the design build was part of the soul and the other was the strategic.

01:16:42
Speaker 2: That's what I'm worried about happening. Now we're going to have. You know, the recession, what it did is it kind of the office guys struggled because there was only a handful of courses around to do work. And when you're doing plans and giving those over to a contractor, you get less of the pie. The one of the things that comes from design build is that we get more of the pie. We do less slices because there's less projects, but the pie is generally bigger because you know, we're doing more of the work. You know, you roll that into now where the industry was slimed down because there wasn't that much to do. The design build guys are the ones that took over, but by design, they can't handle as many projects. And now we come post COVID, post pandemic, where you've got this boom and you've got a smaller industry with people that are by necessity, can only take on less work. There's a lot of work floating around there that's either going to go to people that haven't done the quality of work for a while, or some of these other firms are going to bite off too much and the projects are going to suffer. So that is a reality, and it's something that we're cognizant of and it's something that we try very much to limit the best we can. But it's tough because you know, you're turning down work. So the key is just to take the best, biggest projects we can and make sure they're great.

01:18:05
Speaker 1: So for Whack Shorty's is opening soon, what's next that you can talk about.

01:18:12
Speaker 2: Well, we've got a wonderful project in Florida that we've just started clearing. Kenny Bass, the owner of Friar's Head, is our client there. You know, we've got one of the modern masterpieces and the visionary behind it that's guiding our hand there in Florida, just outside of Stuart. There's a lot going on in that area. But you know, we think we're pretty privileged. We're going to be the last ones to the dance. As far as these other club opening.

01:18:41
Speaker 1: There's a lot of courses going in in this area, including ones by Tom Doak and Gil Hans, etc. Yeah, this is kind of the vaguely the Hope Sound Florida area.

01:18:51
Speaker 2: Uh. The interesting thing is we've you know, we feel we've got the biggest and best site. You know, we've got four thousand acres on which Kenny was basically like, golf comes first, go find me the best golf and the vision was thirty six holes, but we've since added you know, a ten hole, full length practice course, a short course in laya putting green, unbelievable practice facilities, but golf is placed first. You know, We've been given our selection of four thousand acres and we found two distinctly different sites for the two main courses. One that's more trade, one that's much more open pasture. And because of the scale of the property in each golf course sitting on roughly three hundred acres, there's a lot of wetlands out there that other sites. And this is the nature of working in Florida. You either have to get rid of those wetlands by digging ponds and therefore every golf hole is on water, which you know, the typical Florida golf or you end up doing this sort of ditch and berm system where some of your edges just don't tie as nicely into nature, and because of the burm system, you end up blocking those transitions. You don't see as much of the native areas, and we have a lot of room on this site to do what we want build unbelievable quality golf. But it's going to tie into that site better than I think all of our neighbors, so we're really excited about it. That's going to get going here soon. And we've got our two Canadian projects, so again there's our three. We've got one in just outside of Montreal, formerly called Hillsdale Golf Club, going to be called AIM which is the owner's company's name, Herd Black. There is given us sort of the reins of this thirty six hole property that was tight and a little awkward, and we're going to put eighteen holes on it, new clubhouse, new practice facilities, and that's pretty exciting. It's gonna be great use of that land. And then we've got Cabot Revelstoke, so you know, another repeat client. We're going to be doing that wonderful course in the rocky mountains of British Columbia. It's at Revelstoke Mountain Resort, which is one of Canada's best ski hills, and right at the base of the mountain, we've got this unbelievable bench for land that sits above the Columbia really River valley floor below. So you've got these you know, unlike some of our Stanley Thompson's best courses like Paff and Jasper that are in the valley floor and you're kind of looking up at the mountains. We still have that, but we've got this thirty forty foot bench actually forty fifty foot bench that sits off the ground where you're going to get these sweeping views of all the valley floor as well. So that's one that we both the Montreal Job and Rebel Stoke. We sort of set the foundation's last fall for construction, and we're going to be full going there once the spring kicks off and going in Florida here shortly as well.

01:21:40
Speaker 1: You're going to be busy.

01:21:41
Speaker 2: We're going to be busy. Yep. We'd like it that way, and we're just you know, timing works out great. We're just here right now putting the finishing touches on the bunkers at Shorty's and we're going to roll right into the other projects.

01:21:54
Speaker 1: So cool. All right. Well, Keith, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I've wanted to bring you on for a long time. I'm I'm glad we found a chance to be in person and have a conversation. I thought this was really great, so thank.

01:22:06
Speaker 2: You, thank you so much, Keret. I really enjoyed it.

01:22:17
Speaker 1: This episode of the Frida Egg Golf podcast was produced by Matt Rushis. Thank you Matt. So I wanted to give a quick plug here for our pro shop. We have just refreshed the fried Egg pro shop. Go to pro shop dot thefrid Egg dot com and see what we have going on in there. The main thing that's going on right now is that the major's collection has landed hats, polos, headcovers, t shirts and more. You'll find the Mackenzie Bunker logo on a lot of stuff, a really cool logo. Something for shotguns start fans that we have right now is the Gnome logo. And finally, Cameron has created a fantastic routing map of Augusta National. It's available as a poster in our print shop. So all that's going on in the Frida Egg pro shop right now again proshop dot the Frida Egg dot com. And a quick reminder that if you're a CLUBTFE member, you always receive ten percent off in the Frida Egg Pro Shop, So check out CLUBTFE as well the Frida egg dot com slash membership. All right, thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.