Yolk with Doak 19: Pete Dye and Bandon vs. Scotland

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg podcast and another edition of the Yoke with Doak. This is from the batch of recordings I did this winter up in Traverse City. So this is our two of our conversation. We hit on a bunch of different topics including Pete die Bandon versus Scotland and the ways you make money as a golf course architect. So this is a fun episode, really good conversation with Tom. This last batch of interviews, so it'll end. I think it's about fifty minutes long, and then we'll have another one slated for a couple of weeks from now.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: So without further ado, here's Tom Doak.

00:00:41
Speaker 3: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball 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 with the course.

00:01:05
Speaker 1: So we've talked a little bit about you know, other architects, and your course isn't I'm curious. This is kind of a two part question I'm had In the first part do you, as you know, as a somebody that gets inspired by different things, is there?

00:01:23
Speaker 3: Does it?

00:01:24
Speaker 1: What inspires you when you go to a golf course change over time? And then if so, this is a question what feature on a golf course inspires your creativity the most these days? And that's from why Man's eer.

00:01:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's changed over time. I mean, you know now more and more I look at I really admire when I see a golf course that they managed to get the greens and tea's really close together, and it's the walk is so seamless from your off one green and your right there on the next tee and it works, which is another thing funny. You know, when you're doing a course for a tour event that doesn't work so well for them. They want space all around the tee and they want space all around the green for spectators. So with very few exceptions, they hate it when the t you know that they'll build another tea out away from that green just so there's room for the spectators. And it's yeah, it's a longer walk, but we can get people around it. And that's part of the point of this. So, you know, part of it depends on what's your goal. But you know, I guess you know, going into when I was first traveling forty years ago, I was looking at cool greens and cool bunkers, and those still are arresting to me. But after having seen sixteen hundred off courses or whatever the hell the number is, now I don't. I rarely see something like that that I haven't seen before, So you know more and more now. It's like when you see something that was really a constraint on the site, like you know, a boundary that cuts in really abruptly and squeezes two holes together, or or a big tree or a rocky hill or anything like that, It's like how they use that when they were really stuck and they had to figure out a way to make it come into play. What'd they do with it? Because you know, those are the things that will give you ideas for a boring site. Oh what if I just stuck a little feature in?

00:03:37
Speaker 1: Right, here's what's an example of one. Say you've seen in the last year that that really had you go, Wow, I hadn't I hadn't seen or thought of something like that before.

00:03:51
Speaker 3: Well, last year was a bad year for that for me. They really get to so.

00:03:57
Speaker 2: Extended out the last five years.

00:03:59
Speaker 3: No even last year. Last year one of the coolest places I visited. I was in Kenya for like five days seeing all the golf courses around Nairobi and golf and Keny's cool. They walk no golf carts. They don't want anything to do with golf car. You know, they're runners, they're also walkers. So golf cart culture. No, No, somebody built, somebody built a new course there that you know, it's a housing development course. And the green tea walks are terrible. It was designed for carts. It was designed by some South African designer guy, and nobody used the carts. They just they're just like, who's the idiot who put the green here and made us go all the way over there to the next tee. But they're not going to get in a golf cart to solve the problem. But I did see this little this, this older golf course, this little thing that was almost abandoned. If you drove by it, you would think nobody plays golf there. You know, the fairways are shaggy and they were just like sticks with a little ribbon or something for flagsticks. But and an open air club house with like a barbecue, but it's a nine hole course and it's like three loops of three. You know, you come right back around to the clubhouse. You can come right back around to the clubhouse. You can come right back around to the clubhouse. And the members that were showing us showing us it's just like a giant party. You never get every third at all. You stop and have a beer and you have something to eat, and then you go play three more olds and you do it again. That's all they you know, that's that's the game to them, and it's it's just it sounded like a blast. I mean we were the only ones there that day, but with a bunch of your friends, that would be a perfect way to play golf. And I don't think i've ever seen a golf course laid out like that in the States.

00:05:37
Speaker 2: That's a food and beverage manager's dream.

00:05:40
Speaker 3: Yes, it is.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: All these courses that renovate their food and beverage should you know, get their golf courses working that way to make the food and beverage work.

00:05:47
Speaker 2: Again, I mean, it'd be a bad idea at a lot of places.

00:05:52
Speaker 3: But so.

00:05:55
Speaker 1: That you talked about South Africa, Simon Marginson actually asked, why does South Africa lack of world renowned golf course?

00:06:07
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm not sure that it does. I mean, Durban country Clubs are really good golf course. I guess it's not in the top hundred lists anymore. You know, most of the newer they build a ton of newer golf courses in South Africa. But the problem is nearly all of them are housing development golf courses. And you know, like we were saying early on, it's like, if the client's primary goal is the housing development, it is really hard to overcome that and build a good golf course too, really hard because you just have you have no support, you know, when it's just like put the whole, you know, a lot. I mean there are a lot of golf courses built in the States where some non golf person is saying, put the hole there. You move all the dirt you want, but the whole, the tea has to be right there, and the green has to be right there. And oh, by the way, there's going to be this whole line of houses, you know, fifty yards to the left of all this. You know, it's a very difficult thing to be really creative with that and come up with something that's looks like it wanted to be there.

00:07:10
Speaker 1: So pros and cons of abandon versus Scotland for an East coaster And this is from another one that I forgot to write down the name. Sorry sir, Sorry, your question was great and maybe future credit.

00:07:30
Speaker 3: Pros and cons if you've never been to Scotland before or Ireland. There's so much variety of golf over there. That's the main reason to go is just you can see, you know, Americans don't do it that much. They go to all the top fifty ranked golf courses and all the open championship sites that are all kind of you know, more or by the book and more conventional because they've had, you know, they've had all that imposed on them by hosting big tournaments and stuff. Whereas if you go to East Lothian for a few days and you play Mirfield, that's like that, and you play Gullen that's kind of like that, but you also play the five thousand yard Gullen number three, and you play kill Spindy which is really really short and par sixty seven or sixty eight, and you play North Barrack with all the stone walls and playing right along the sea. There's just a tremendous variety of golf in a small area there, and people miss that by just going to all the big championship courses. And the golf culture in the UK is its own thing and everybody should experience that sometime in their lives. How relaxed it is and how how natural it is. Really Bandon, you get that sense. I mean, everybody's there to have fun. Nobody's there. It's so much to break the course record or anything like that. And you know you have the same you have the same conditions your you're battling the elements, wind and rain and whatever firm ground. You know, you're playing real links golf courses. The convenience of Bandon is it's all right there. You don't have to get in a car and drive thirty miles to the next golf course or one hundred and fifty miles if you're on If you're just playing the five best courses in Scotland, you know, driving up to Dornick and back to Troon and over to and over to Mirfield eats up half your time. You're just driving around, whereas Bandon it's hard to get to you. But once you're there, you're there, and you could, you know, you could. You don't have to have a car at all. You don't have to figure out where to eat every night, you know. So if you're going with buddies and you want to just maximize the time of having fun with your friends, abandons a pretty good alternative. Yeah.

00:10:06
Speaker 1: More more to direct flights into there too, now, you know, so that helps also, so uh, Angela Moser.

00:10:16
Speaker 3: Angela Moser, one of my associates.

00:10:18
Speaker 1: What's your favorite aspect about working in Ireland?

00:10:22
Speaker 3: Mm, you know, I wanted I've said I wanted to do a golf course in Ireland for a very long time, and I had looked at two or three over the years and had them fall apart on me for whatever reason. It's amazing how fast, especially back in the day when you know, as soon as you leave, everybody's like Americans. We don't need more Americans doing stuff over here. But you know, I've been around there enough that I don't get that so much anymore, and really have friendships with the clients so there, and you know, I've known them for more than ten years now, so and we've both wanted to do this project for a long time. So so you know, getting to work on something with friends and and something that we've just thought about for so long and finally making it happen is really cool.

00:11:20
Speaker 1: Yet, give us an update on Saint Patrick's.

00:11:25
Speaker 3: A year and a half ago, we went over and built a couple of greens and irrigated them just to kind of show people what we could do and get a little start. Last summer when we weren't so busy. We we got a cracking start on the golf course, even before all the funding was in place. You know, I kind of funded the first part of it because because I had some really talented people kind of sitting around with nothing to do. And yet and then at the same time, I knew this summer it looked like we were going to be really busy and it was going to be hard to pull people away to go do that in Ireland. So we went ahead and started and we built all we shaped and seeded all the greens, and a bunch of the teas and a few of the fairways. You know, there's there's you know, there was an old golf course there. There's like three or four halls where we're using the majority of an old fairway, so some of some of the fairways were kind of half there. They were they were all you know, they've kept mowing them over the years, but they kept getting narrower and narrower and narrower, so they weren't really nearly big enough, but at least there was something there to work with, whereas other holes, we you know, we we had to start from knee high grass and get that down to something playable is going to take a lot more time, but we got a really good start on the golf course. We've got all eighteen greens built. You know, we've done a lot of the creative stuff. We haven't built all the bunkers yet, but you know, I think that'll only take a month or six weeks here in the spring to get the rest of them built. And the rest of it's just polishing up the fairways and irrigating them and you know, getting them ready so as soon as it gets warm enough to germinate grass, we can plant the rest of it this spring, and you know, we hope we've got a little loop a holes playable this fall, and then the rest of the golf course in the spring of twenty one.

00:13:22
Speaker 2: You talked a little bit about you know, self funding. The beginning of it is.

00:13:26
Speaker 1: That you know, is doing more, being more involved on the side of the business side of it, something that you look at, you know, going forward.

00:13:37
Speaker 3: It is. I mean, you know, I've two reasons. One because I've worked on some very financially successful projects and and there, you know, and I could see you that they were going to be really successful, and it's like, you know, could I have a little piece of this, No, because the client knows just as well as I do how successful that's going to be, you know. But Two, I don't think you know, most people don't realize that some of my best projects just wouldn't have happened unless I'd been willing to go either take a major pay cut to do it, or you know, or have some kind of creative agreement where I get paid some more at the back end of the project in one way or another. You know, it's being a part owner is tricky. You have to trust your partner really well. So you know, I'm doing that at Saint Patrick's where I've you know, the one or two other times I've done in the past, it hasn't turned out that great, but you know, common ground for that we talked about for the CGA. You know, I make my money on that and not at the beginning, but in royalties off the green feest that they charge, which is great for them. That made their four million dollars go that much further when we built the golf course. And you know, and part of that relationship is I really feel more involved in that place. They keep the green feed down in part because my agreement is, you know, if they raise the green fee, I get paid more, and I don't really I don't want them to raise the green fees, so I get paid more, but it's kind of one more factor holding them down a little bit. You know, this is what we promised to do. Let's keep it here. So you know, projects like barn Google and bally Neal, just to name two, those never would have happened if I'd have said, yeah, my design fews eight hundred thousand dollars, what do you think they would have run for the hills And those are some of my best work, So I absolutely wanted to do those even you know, my wife always asked me, would you do the project for free? And I really do try to pick projects kind of on that basis. But hopefully I've got some clients that want to pay me something too.

00:16:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the important part. You got to feed your associates and that too. Yeah, it's interesting the idea of having some skin in the game in a way, you know, when you think about across the industry could ensure more you know, focused work from all aspects where like you if you have if there's from that kind of setup, like you think about a lot of like partnerships outside of golf, like of a partnership where you get paid off of conversion, say marketing wise, like you know, you're going to make sure you do your best work to make sure that it works.

00:16:47
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, you know a lot of my clients, you know, there's really not much in the contracts that I sign about promotional stuff. You know, what will you do? What will I do for it? But you know a lot of them, especially in the past, just leaned on me really heavily as writer. You know, I was writing the ad copy, I was the photography, you know, I was the photographer who had the best pictures of the golf course and on and on, and I'm doing all this marketing stuff for them, basically for free, and I'm like, this is crazy. You know, they would pay somebody half as much as I'm getting paid for the design just to do all this other stuff that I'm doing for them. Now, if i'm if I'm a part owner, if I get you know, if I'm some way compensated for all that, that incentivizes me to do all that stuff. Yeah, it's in my you know, in my interest too to promote this place. Although you know, to me, one of the keys of trying to do be more involved in the financing of my projects and own them, you know, maybe own a piece of some of them, is there's a lot of got A golf developers and b wealthy guys who play golf who trust me when I tell him that this site at Barnboogle is really good. That's you know, the only reason Mike Kaiser went there is because I told him, yeah, that site might be as good as Specific Dunes. It's really good. I didn't think he'd want to get involved there at that point, and he wound up being involved in it. But you know, I didn't really get anything extra out of making that connection other than eventually I got to build a golf course there, so that was that part was good, but you know, as a lot of times I see, like the back of my book on getting to eighteen is a few of the projects we never got to build, including a couple that somebody else built later on, like Aaron Hills and others that have that never came together but still might someday, because you waste a lot of time. You know, it's hard to run a business designing golf courses. You sign a contract, you have no idea if the project's going to happen or when it's going to happen, but you're not gonna get paid very much upfront. You're not really going to get paid until the thing goes. So, you know, when you're a small you know, especially in the beginning, when you're small and you don't have many projects, and you know, something like Aaron Hills comes up and oh, this is a cool piece of land. I really want to put time in on this, and you wind up only ever being paid twenty five thousand dollars for all the time that you spent on it. It's a killer, you know. That's why it's so hard to be a golf course architect on your own because a lot of things fall through. But you know when you get to the position I'm in now, that the tables kind of turn, and it's like if I was involved in a project like that and it's kind of fallen through. I know people that might be interested in helping put that together, and I I have a lot of credibility with them because I don't tell them that every single project I do is the coolest thing that it was ever built in the history of golf. I'm very critical. And it's funny. I saw there's a there's an article in one of the new Golf magazines about Josh Smith, the painter who did the covers of my books, among other things, and and he's he mentioned I should thank him for mentioning that that when he was just starting out, I bought one of I was one of the first people that paid him for one of his paintings. We met him up at Bandon and he was he was just trying to get started doing doing his paintings, and I said, I'll buy one from you for the office. And still hanging over here, that's of the ninth at Pacific Dunes, and that if you look at the painting closely, there's no flag because it's just grass still and growing. We hadn't opened it yet, but Jos said one thing that really helped his career was when he when he told other people in golf that I bought one of his paintings, they were like, Wow, you must be really good. Because Tom doesn't throw the praise around very much. If he says your work is good, it must be good. So it's kind of the same thing with with development. It's like if I go and look at a site and I think, boy, this is this is really good. Somebody should do this. There are people who will listen.

00:21:22
Speaker 1: That's something I get frustrated with sometimes with just the world we live in. Everything's everything's great, you know. And if everything's great, then what is great exactly?

00:21:33
Speaker 3: And that was the that was the whole point of the Confidential Guide. It's like when you read the golf magazines, every course is good, better or best. There is nothing below really good because they had they don't want to offend any potential advertiser. I offended a lot of people with the Confidential Guide, but it also gave me a reputation for being really honest about what I thought. And that means that when I like something people pay more attention.

00:22:04
Speaker 1: I was listening to a venture capitalist on a podcast, and one of my favorite quotes that I've ever heard he said, authenticity will outrun all of your competition, and I think that is big with golf course design too, especially thinking about Bill Corer talked about Pete Die on the podcast about how he changed architect or twice and he recognized people mimicking Pete die style but just missing the vital components of it.

00:22:34
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, you know, well, I was thinking PJA West was on TV this weekend. I drew the first plan for PGA West, and yeah, that sixteenth doll is pretty much exactly like we drew on the plan, and the bunker's nineteen feet deep. I note because I drew the grading plan for it's but the seventeenth all with the island green that was not an island green on the first plan because Pete didn't really didn't want to do that again. He'd just done it at Sawgrass. It was famous, everybody paid attention to it, not everybody loved it. Pete didn't mind that part at all, but he just didn't want to repeat himself. So so we worked on a plan for a part three hole that was kind of a peninsula green sticking in from the back, and it was on a diagonal and it was just different. He wanted to do something different, and we showed it to the client, Joe Walser and Ernie Vssler from Landmark Land and they, you know, they'd built like ten golf courses with Pete and they said, we want an island greet and they were pretty adamant about it, and you know a lot of other potential. You know, if Pete hadn't done ten courses for them, he'd just told him no and walked out of the room. But with them, it was like, I've done all this work with him. If they really want that, I'll do it for him. So we did that as far as I can think. I was trying to think yesterday, is that the last island green that Pete Dye ever built? And I think it is. You know, there's twenty that Perry and Peebee have done that. Sometimes their dad's name gets on that too, but their dad saying he wanted to build an island green, I think he did two. And yet everybody thinks, oh, that's a trademark of a Pete Tie golf course.

00:24:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, It's interesting how certain things from architects, if the courses on TV are the ones that are on the high, become trademarks of that architect. Like one that jumps of mine is don Ross turtleback greens because of Pinehurst number two.

00:24:35
Speaker 2: But you know that not all Donald Ross courses have those.

00:24:40
Speaker 3: No, most most Don Ross courses do not have greens like that at all. You built four hundred golf course and there's about three where the greens are like that. And of course those evolved. I mean, mister Dye swore that those greens were not like that fifty years ago or seventy years ago when he first saw the golf course, and that you know, that had just kind of evolved from top dressing, top dressing, top dressing Bermuda greens. I mean, you top dressed them a lot, and I could see that. I mean, you know when when I consulted at Gaman's Hall before we started rebuilding the greens, they had they had those big green pads, but either in the Depression or World War two, at some point they made the greens a lot smaller to save money. So the green was like a three thousand square foot circle in the middle of those big pads. But because they top dressed the green all the time and not the surrounds, the little three three thousand square foot pad was a foot higher than the rest of the green. That's how much top dressing had built up over twenty thirty years or whatever they've been doing it for. So you can see how those greens of Pinehurst could have evolved that much too. But no, if you well, it just goes to show. You know. When I wrote for Golf Magazine years and years ago, they asked me to do a piece on Piner's Number two, for it's probably the first of the US opens that was there. And the story I wrote for them was how Pineer's Number two was not a typical Donald Ross course and how different it was than a lot of his courses, using a bunch of other examples, and they, the editors basically came back to me and said, yeah, we understand all that, but can you write about the ways where it is like a typical Donald Ross course because that's the story that everybody wants to read, So ignore all that. It's like, damn, but that's you know, that's that's the journalism business. Now I'm my own publisher. I don't have to deal with that step.

00:26:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh what Uh that's fine. I I write my site without.

00:26:46
Speaker 2: You know, I write whatever I want.

00:26:47
Speaker 1: But when I do simons for other people, I always find them to be the hardest one to write because I don't get it right whatever I want.

00:26:54
Speaker 3: Yes, it's it's well, it's also more dangerous when you're writing by yourself without a filter. You just hit done and it's out there. Sometimes, you know, there's good reasons for people to have a layer of management in between there sometimes.

00:27:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, uh, food conscious asked a favorite Pete Die design, But I know you don't like favorite, So let's go ten rounds. You got ten You got ten rounds to spend a Pete Die courses. How are you spending enough?

00:27:23
Speaker 3: You can?

00:27:23
Speaker 1: You know, I'm going to use multiple rounds obviously if you want to.

00:27:28
Speaker 3: Well, I would have to go back to Long Cove, which was the first construction project that I worked on, and play there a couple of times. We're actually going to go back there for a crew reunion, like four or five years ago, and missus Dye canceled it at the last minute. And that was the first Inkling I had that Pete was not doing okay, you know that he just wasn't going to be up to that. And you know, I've had Alzheimer's in my family, so I read the handwriting on the wall for that, and I've you know, so I've kind of known ever since. But Long Coo was a really cool It was the first course he built after the TPC at Sawgrass. It was a development golf course houses all around it, although back in the woods he had a wide enough quarter that you don't the houses never feel like they're on top of you. But a really beautiful piece of land for Hilton Head, you know, a little movement and and gets out to the marsh on the back nine. Some inland lagoons that they built. I guess they started trying to do something for a project there years before, so they dug a bunch of lagoons and stuff. And there were a bunch of features that had been there for a while and kind of matured again. Instead of us digging.

00:28:47
Speaker 2: Lakes, they like naturalized.

00:28:50
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, just I mean the stream song is the same. You know, they just threw sand around for mining for years and it just blew around. But it also vegetation grew back on it, and by the time we saw it it looked natural, except for like, you know, some of those landforms aren't natural. You don't see a twenty foot trench through through ground the way they had a couple on the property. But other than the shapes of things in certain places, it looked like it had been there for a long time because there was vegetation on it. So definitely a round or two at Long Cove. I spent some time with mister diet teeth of the Dog. I didn't have anything to do. The course was built when I was ten or whatever, but he at the time, he absolutely said that was the best course that he'd ever built. It was certainly the coolest property. He's got six or seven holes right along the Caribbean. But he loved everything about it. You know, it was mostly built by hand, by like one hundred of Dominican laborers. They barely had any working bulldozers down there. You know, you'd have a bulldozer and then break down and it'd be you know, he couldn't get apart for a month. So so a lot of this stuff was done by hand, and a lot of this stuff, you know, I asked him. When I was down there, I was like, you know, I think we've talked before about the World Atlas of Golf, one of the one of the great early books about golf course architecture and great golf courses. And there's a picture right in the front of it, like on one of the title pages or something, this two page spread of the eighth hole at teeth of the dock, and you see the the tea sticking out on the point, the fairway going around, and the green like it is now, but there's also where there's houses now, it looked like another fairway over there, all mode down tight and nothing on it. And when I was with Pete down there, I said this picture, did you have like another fairway over there to the right, And he said, when we were building the golf course where the fairway is now was all coral, just just quarrel with holes in it everywhere. He said, So, so I built the fairway over there up higher first, and then I had all these laborers just to buckets over their shoulders fill in all the holes in the coral with sand over the course of like two or three years. And then when they got all that filled in, we moved the fairway down here and they put lots over there that'ble. You know, not every place would they let you do that anymore, obviously, Yeah, but yeah, that's you know, Pete just loved a being able to do that kind of stuff. Be he loved the people down there. You know, I worked for him. If he and Alice had more than a week where they weren't working on something else, instead of just going back to Florida, they would go to the Dominican. Yeah, he just loved everything about it. And the funniest thing when I worked for him, every time he'd come back from the Dominican and i'd see him on a site somewhere, he'd be like the superintendent's name, I can't remember his last name, but his his name was Jose. And every time Pete would come back from the Dominican, he'd say, I saved Jose's ass again. You know, he was like almost lost the grass on half the golf course, but we got to put back together. And after like the you know, this is going on for like two or three years, and so after about the third time, I'm like, why does Jose still have a job, you know, because it doesn't sound like he's doing really well. And then after a couple more times than here and Pete talk about it, I was like, he likes going there and saving Jose's ass. You know, if everything was running like a top in the Dominican, it wouldn't be as much fun for Pete.

00:33:00
Speaker 2: You get to visitor a bunch either.

00:33:02
Speaker 3: He wants to have something to do when he's there, and it's like save the grass on the golf course and don't overfertilize it this time. But he just loved that place, and he hated that, you know, in the eighties, the Dominican really was the Third World, and there weren't there weren't a lot of guys from New York hopping on a plane and going down there for the weekend. And he hated how little publicity that course had compared to Harbor Town and the TPC and his famous courses. So one of the reasons he sent me there a couple of times was to get good pictures of it and try to out get the golf magazines to talk about it some because he really loved it. And you know, I haven't. I haven't been there for twenty years, so I'd be curious to go back and see how much he changed it since the last time I saw it, because I'm sure there's some pieces that are different, you know, they always they also have a hurricane every once in a while to like rearraate things for them and give them give Pete something to do. So definitely there might spend a lot of my time there. The golf club played there in ages. I did stop in and see it three or four years ago when I was down in that area seeing some other courses for my book, but I didn't just I saw I'd seen about three other golf courses and I stopped in at the end of the day. I'd really like to get back out and play it again, because that's, you know, that's as close to my style of golf courses as anything Pete ever did. You know. It's it's a fairly gentle piece of ground, and you know, he made a few really abrupt land for hims. And he made that crazy hole where you know, the fairways elevated two feet and there's just a whole railroad tie or actually telephone poles sawed off separating the fairway from the rough. He did some really creative things on a pretty flat piece of ground instead of of jacking it up and moving dirt all over the place. And it's really fun and it's a hard golf course too. I might actually like to go back to PGA West. You know, it's funny. When I was working on Stone Eagle, I never went back over there. It's probably about a half hour drive to get over there and see it. But you know, part of my job on that was trying to do it as efficiently as possible so they could put homes around the rest of it and maximize that. And you know, it's funny because we never we made the course. I think it was like three hundred and fifty yards longer than the TPC at Sawgrass when it was built. Of course it's in the desert. The ball flies a little farther, but we thought we were building it really long in nineteen eighty four, in nineteen.

00:35:49
Speaker 2: Eighty five, but you did, the tour players revolted.

00:35:53
Speaker 1: They said they couldn't it's the hardest, and they got it off the tour three year after one year.

00:36:00
Speaker 3: Yes, their objection was. Their excuse was we play three other guy of courses that are like birdie fests, and this one really hard. One and if like you know, you'd if Friday is the windy day, everybody that plays PGA West on Friday is screwed. You know, they'll shoot ten shots higher and have no chance in the tournament the rest of the week. And you know, it's funny like if you look at the this I didn't watch much of the tournament at all, but if you look at the day to day scoring, it's like all the guys they figure out contenders play PGA West on Saturday and Sunday to try to minimize that. It's like they keep them all together so that nobody can complain too much about that if it happens.

00:36:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, they arrange them, like the biggest names are Saturday Sunday there right now.

00:36:51
Speaker 3: That's partly for the pro am thing too, you know the pro am is going to be on TV on Saturday or do they even have one anymore?

00:36:57
Speaker 2: Anything they have a pro am I forgot.

00:37:00
Speaker 3: But that used to be the biggest part of the deal. And that's where you know, there was a lot of a lot of fundraising for a lot of charities go on there. So it was five days for a long time to even get more out of it. That way, where it was a four day pro am and then Sunday the amateurs didn't play anymore. And then let's see. You know. The other one that i'd really like to go back to that I have not seen in I've never even seen the back nine finished was the Pete Dye Golf Club in West Virginia. Pete sent me there like right at the end of when I was working for him. I went through. He was working on crooked stick, redoing crooked stick and rebuilding the greens of cricket stick. And I went through there and I was headed back east, and his client from West Virginia called and said they wanted to do a little more work toward building the golf course. And Pete said, you want to go see that. So I went and worked on it for like two or three weeks. And this project, his client was a coal miner, and when things got slow and the coal mine, they went and built golf holes for a while, and then when things recovered he went so he was like he was never in a hurry to finish it at all. I think they started it like nineteen seventy eight or seventy nine. And the story I was telling you about was from nineteen eighty five and they were just getting back to it. Nothing had been grassed yet, it was still just dirt, and they didn't they I went to the grand opening of the front nine, they still didn't have the back nine finished in nineteen ninety three, coming home from the grand opening of Stonewall. So I had opened five golf courses by the time they finished nine holes of this thing that I worked on for Pete and they started. I mean, they'd been working on for fifteen years at that point. But it was a beautiful site. It's got this, you know, it's in very hilly terrain, and it's got this big river running through it, and it's just gorgeous. It's in a really rural area. And you know, the club that they built has kind of suffered and never caught on. And I think one of those outfits that own several courses in different places around the country owns the place now. But if Pete I had finished that golf course in nineteen seventy eight eighty, it would be famous because it had all the big severe stuff that he was doing way before, any way before Sawgrass and PGA West and all those golf courses opened. But nobody saw it until fifteen years later when that was all kind of oh, there's nothing new here, and there is new there. I mean, it's it's different, it's it's a pretty exaggerated version of stuff. But I would really like to see it finished, because I never did.

00:40:00
Speaker 1: So something you said about Long Cove, about it being a project and having you know, these features, these man made features that weathered and the vegetation that went around it, would that I'm just thinking for it is like a golf course that's spent, you know, that goes you know, where it dies and then coming back. Would that give some advantages to golf courses that may have closed and you know, gone dormant, where it could come back as a better version of itself.

00:40:33
Speaker 3: Well, yes and no. I mean, you know, one of the big problems with taking an old golf course is that the you know, they planted a bunch of trees wherever when they built it, and they haven't Nobody managed that for years and years, so that Stu's kind of out of control and you really, you know, you've got to clean it up a lot compared to what the piece of land was originally. You know, to me, it's better to have those kind of features on a raw piece of land. You know, if there was a golf course there, then all that planting and everything was done on the basis of the routing that's there, that was there from the guy before. And it's really hard to overcome that. You know, if if all the holes are running north and south and there's trees in between them, you can't change the routing and start going east and west. It's just like it's just like all those rocky ridges I was talking about at Stone Eagle. You know, it just looks stupid to play through the checkerboard the other way. But you know, so the only time you can really re route a golf course is if there's not much big stuff between holes, like the course that we just did in Australia at the National You know, that's dunesland and even though there's you know, long grasses growing around it in places, it's kind of the native stuff that was always there. And when we decided we wanted to change the routing, it's just as simple as you know, let's let's build a green over there and the rough and let's cut sod out of where this fairway used to go and connect it up to that. The hard part was not that that was the easy part. Actually the hard part was they'd shaped a lot to build the greens on the on the course, so we had to deconstruct all that, which took a lot more time than I expected. I just hadn't really thought about, well, I hadn't thought about how much work they'd done, you know, because because it's one of those golf courses that they said, oh yeah, they just laid it out and just laid it right on the ground. And it's like, uh, it wouldn't have taken us nearly so much time or effort to put it back together if they had just done that.

00:42:49
Speaker 1: That's one of golf's like all time cliches.

00:42:52
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is, you know. And I well, you know, some people have asked me about my book that I'm working on. Aren't you afraid that you're giving up too many secrets here? And you know, like certain clients, I won't name names, but certain clients love the myth about their place and don't want everybody to know that it was a little harder than how they say it was, or in some cases they want it to sound harder than it was. You know, it's weird, but you get both, you get both conds. And you know, here I am saying, what was really there at this start? And what you know that feature that was always there, this one over here, and now we made that up completely from scratch. And there's some people like, why would you want to do that and spoil the mystery? And why would you Why would you tell other architects that's what you did and let them all figure it out. I'm like, that goes back. The last question goes back to working for the Dies, because the Dies were not like that at all. You know, once you were kind of working for them, they treat you like part of the family, and there were no secrets at all. You know, why are we doing? You know? I mean Pete might get annoyed sometimes if you ask too many questions, but he would never hold anything back because he was trying to keep it a secret from you. He told me a ton of stuff that I had no idea that I would ever have the chance to apply, and now I get to apply it. And there was the one time that I remember most vividly. There was a point where I was living just before I went to PGA West. I was living with his son, Peebe on a project in Savannah which is called the Ford Plantation. Now I think that was another project that took years from start to finish. They built the front nine and then they didn't get the back and I built all like years later. But we're staying at a house and one of the guys on the construction crew was Peebe's college roommates, Steve Luciola. So the three of us are staying in this house and one night we're just sitting up shooting the shit and Pebe is expounding on some part of golf course design, and Steve he've stopped him in the middle of what he was saying and said, you're really sure you should be telling all this stuff to Tommy because he's smart, he'll probably remember it all. And Tebe just looked at him and said, shrugged his shoulders and went, hell, if he could take this and go out and build a golf courses on his own, so much the better, more good golf courses. That's the way they were. So that's the way I am. I mean, if anybody in the business asked me how we did something or why we did something, I'll tell him.

00:45:35
Speaker 1: I think that's it's a And if you look at the history of architecture typically what happened as it evolved, you know, yeah, one if it took one style and it evolved into a different style.

00:45:48
Speaker 3: And you know, well, and back in the day, you know, all those guys from Philadelphia were good friends. Yeah, and then they went on, you know, and George Thomas moved to la and started doing things out there and spreading the word. And you know, McKenzie traveled all over and taught other guys how to build stuff. Yeah.

00:46:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, that exchange of ideas is I always look at the history of goth design and that's kind of what happened. Everything stopped for a while, and then we got to the fifties and it was a distinctly different different style.

00:46:24
Speaker 3: Yeah. And really you know, I know from working for the Dies and then from being around Jack Nicholas a little bit and seeing how his operation worked. And you know, the Dies never sent like perryde would send guys to see his dad's other courses so they could get a sense of what they liked to build. But you know, I was certainly the first one and one of the only ones that went out and saw everybody else's golf courses too, and that really, you know, it helped me when I, you know, when I would have conversations with Pete Die about stuff, he'd be trying to describe something to me. If I didn't understand what he meant, I'd be like, you mean like the thirteenth green a cricket stick, or you mean like the twelfth green at Oakmont or wherever. But it was a shorthand conversation of something like this, and it really helped, you know, you could you understood each other a lot, you know, not just that the green's tilting away, but a lot of other things that go with that once you start comparing it to something else that you've seen. And there's a lot of architects that just don't encourage that at all. Nicholas. When when we finished Sabonic, Jack brought a lot of his associates up to see it and they did a tour of it, and then they went over to They actually went to Friar's Heead and went around it too the same day, and one of them pulled me aside in the middle of the walk around and he's like, just so you know, we don't ever do this, you know, we're we're you know, we're we're really busy, so mostly we only look at our own golf courses. That's all the time we have. But Jack's never like giving us a tour of somebody else's golf course, like going over to Friar's Head and you know, and we're only doing this because he thinks Sabonic is different enough and he wants to show us what he likes about it. So but the whole idea of you know, going to see every Mackenzie and Perry Maxwell course that you could get to, I don't you know, that didn't originate with me. Pet Die had seen all those in his own time. But I think I made it popular again where where now it's like every young person that calls me and wants to be a golf course architect is seeing half those places already. It's like it's kind of astonishing to me that they they've seen as much as they have.

00:49:01
Speaker 1: I think like Maxwell's, you know, he's got a good following, but you know, Mackenzie's obviously so popular because of the top of his you know, collection of courses that he designed is so famous.

00:49:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think Maxwell's about.

00:49:16
Speaker 1: To just you know, blow you know, be the next one that reaches that Mackenzie's status.

00:49:23
Speaker 3: Maybe maybe, but you know, if you really look at it. One of the things that really separates those guys in terms of how how much their work is a topic of popular discussion is whether they wrote a book. If they wrote a book, then you can quote them and there's all kinds of you know, you can speak very knowledgeably without actually having seen many of the golf courses, whereas Maxwell, because you didn't really write very much down, you not only have to go see his golf courses, but you have to figure them out for yourselves instead of just accepting what Mackenzie wrote in his book at It in nineteen twenty about what he was doing.

00:50:00
Speaker 1: The other thing with Maxwell and Mackenzie is the location of where they designed. You know, Mackenzie in America, San Francisco, He's got a plethora of designs.

00:50:11
Speaker 2: And and then Maxwell.

00:50:12
Speaker 1: You're you're going through Oklahoma, you know, Iowa, North Carolina, They're they're just less populous areas flyover country.

00:50:21
Speaker 3: I live in flyover Country now too.

00:50:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh the yeah, Maxwell, that was somewhere someone I've made a you know, a concerted effort in the last year to see a lot of his stuff, and it's just incredible.

00:50:37
Speaker 3: And that was you know, when I wrote a letter to Ben Crenshaw like forty years ago now and asked him, if if he was me, what golf courses should I go see. He gave me a very short list, and Prairie Dunes was on it, and you know, he loved that place, and he loved a lot about Maxwell's stuff. Obviously Maxwell built some pretty wild greens, and you know Ben grown up on a set of Maxwell greens, that's so so he had an affinity for that from the start.