Yolk with Doak 23: Getting to 18, Pacific Dunes, and the Original Sheep Ranch

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at Riomar. Probably it's the middle of summer, you might need to refresh your look. I know some of the country you see people at least all the golf courses are open now, so you're around the club. And one of the best pieces that I've picked up this year are my real mar shoes. So these shoes are really versatile shoes. You could wear them in any kind of format. They are slip on, I mean, they have a lot of different styles. Actually they have chuck as they have your loafers, your waterman's, your drivers, and you know, they are very versatile shoes. You could dress them up, wear them with a jacket or khaki's, or dress them down. A couple key features about these shoes as opposed to your kind of standard deck shoes, they are water resistant. They also are smell resistant, which is a big one for boat shoes. I mean, I have so many boat shoes that have just stunk after a couple months of wearing them in the summer. These have held up great. They still don't smell, and they make it really easy for you. They free returns, easy return system, and they're good, good looking shoes. They also have women's shoes, so those are also available, and we've got a great promo code for you. The promo code is TFE and you can purchase these shoes at Riomarshoes dot com. They have been a great sponsor for us and supported both this and the Shotgun Start. So get those shoes over at riomarshoes dot com and use the promo code TFE for fifteen percent off your entire purchase. All right, here's another edition of The Yoke with Dooke. This is episode twenty three. In this episode, we talk a ton about Tom's new book, Getting to Eighteen. It just came out a couple of weeks ago, is available for purchase. It is a small batch. He's doing fifteen hundred limited release books that are all signed by him, and you can purchase this book at dopegolf dot com. But this conversation centers around the book, which is about how he routed all of his first eighteen golf courses, his first eighteen designs, and we are going to talk extensively about the book and his designs of Sheep Ranch and Pacific Dunes, as well as how he met Bill Core, which is kind of a cool story in this episode. We are all these episodes kind of bund together. We just did a batch of recording. We did about three hours of them. So we are going to release these on successive days. So you will have a new Yoke with Doke in your feed the next two days if you're listening to the day that is released, Otherwise you'll be able to get them all right in succession in the feed. So, without further ado, here is Tom Doak.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: I miss the green for example, I'm already upset.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in.

00:03:04
Speaker 3: A bride egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Friday, Frida egg Egg, Frida egg, bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to.

00:03:11
Speaker 2: Run off the golf course.

00:03:36
Speaker 1: Tom new book tell us about getting to eighteen.

00:03:40
Speaker 3: Well, it's a very big book, and it's something that I've been working on for a long time. I started working on it like three years ago. One of my former interns and then associates, Sarah Mass who used to run my office for a few years. She teaches school now, but so she's got time off in the summers, and she's she'd been bugging me for a while about working on this inner spare time, and I said, all right, yeah, let's get into the Yeah, we can do that. So, you know, for a long time I've thought that there's there were two books that I wanted to write that really you know, there's a lot of literature about golf course architecture, but these two subjects haven't been covered very well.

00:04:27
Speaker 2: One is.

00:04:31
Speaker 3: An architect explaining what he did on a golf course and all the decisions that he made from start to finish, like from the routing, from meeting the client and seeing the property of the routing to the to the decisions that you make during construction to how it plays when it's done. You know, there have been a couple of attempts at that. You know, there's a book by John Strawn about an Art Hills course in Florida that was you know, it was the saga of a development, housing development, golf course.

00:05:03
Speaker 2: That's not what I'm interested in doing.

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Speaker 3: You know, all the politics of that and then that, and you know, I've got I've had that book half done for years. I started writing a book about Pacific Dunes right after we built it twenty years ago. And I will go back and finish that at some point, probably soon. But then the other book is about routing a golf course and just how do you know, where do you start.

00:05:28
Speaker 2: And what do you do?

00:05:30
Speaker 3: And it hasn't been covered very much, you know, like there's a chapter in Thomas's book, but it's all really vague, you know, And anytime you talk about something like that, it's all about the piece of land that you're working with and what you're seeing in it. So trying to talk about it in general terms, you just come up with a bunch of rules for golf courses that are counterproductive, like oh, the part three you should go in every direction, and and you know the ideal way to route a golf course. But when you get an actual piece of land to work with, you find that those things don't.

00:06:08
Speaker 2: All fit together very well.

00:06:11
Speaker 3: And if you're really trying to fit it to the topography, you have to start throwing those things out to make a good golf course fit. So I wanted to talk about it, you know, how it really works on a real piece of ground. Instead of what are the ideals, what's the ideal scenario. And you know, in school, although nobody covers golf course routing in school, but in school when they try to teach you about something like that, you look at case studies.

00:06:43
Speaker 2: So this is a routing.

00:06:45
Speaker 3: This is how to route a golf course, basically the way I learned it from the very first time I looked at a map with Pete dye on. You know, how did he route this golf course that he was working on, which turned out to be the Honors course And to see too, you know, starting high Point and trying to figure it out for myself all the way through it ends with Saint Andrew's Beach because that was the eighteenth golf course i'd done. You know, it's sort of a progression of you get you know, you certainly get better as you go. You also, every situation is a little bit different, and you know, High Point, my first golf course was pretty much just a golf course. Although there was some extra landing. You had to kind of think about, well, what might they do with that extra land I can't just like leave a big hole in the center of it with you know, would note that they could never use for anything that wouldn't make much sense. So, you know, from that to working on a piece of ground that was just dead flat and trying to figure out what to do with it, to working on a project that was going to have a huge development around it and trying to allow for that and wrestling with the land planners over where the golf holes could go. You know, project is different, and until you've done ten of them or twenty of them, it's hard to be really good at it. And that's you know, one of the problems today is most architects don't get a chance to do that many you know, you learn from practice, and nobody gets much practice anymore because there's not a lot of projects being built.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's something you said that's stuck with me. In an earlier conversation we had was everybody, when you look at you know, if we go out and walk Crystal Downs, you'd say, well, I think they were thinking that they were routing it because of this, but I have really no clue unless and this is a great opportunity for future generations to be like if they go out and they play you know, Pacific Dunes, they can read and be like, oh, this is why he did this, and actually know this was the intention of the routing and why it's routed this way.

00:08:58
Speaker 3: Yes, and yeah, so a little of this too is to protect my own work a little bit. So people aren't speculating about why I did something in fifty years from now when when somebody's an expert at restoring, like off Courses, they aren't just pulling some concept out of thin air that I didn't believe at all because they think they saw something at Barn Google. That must be the way I was thinking when I built High Point twenty years before.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: I never thought about that. But yeah, like the idea of having there being a Tom Doak restoration specialist in sixty years.

00:09:32
Speaker 3: Or yeah, I do think about it because I do. I do that kind of work sometimes.

00:09:39
Speaker 2: And.

00:09:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean one of the things about the restoration business that really bothers me is that you know, there's a Donald Ross expert or a Perry Maxwell expert or whoever, and that you know, to sell what they're doing, they over simplify what that guy did. I mean, I really believe that any great architect, with the exception of SETH Rayner, any great architect was trying to do. You know, he wasn't trying to do the same thing over and over again. They wanted their work to be different somehow, and they were responding to a situation. And you know, and yet when you hear somebody talk about restoration, it's like Donald Ross only built bunkers a certain way, and Donald Ross didn't put bunkers behind a green.

00:10:34
Speaker 2: And you know, he built six hundred golf courses. Of course he did that some of the time.

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Speaker 3: And you can't just you know, you should be looking at the you know, you should be looking at the aerial photo from when it was built before you say something like that, because that might be true of a golf course that he built fifteen years earlier in some other state, but it's not necessarily true for the golf course that you're working on.

00:10:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's something that makes me think about that. Is like the four Tilling half courses in Westchester County right next to each other, wing Foot, West, East, Fenway and quaker Ridge. There there are no like steadfast like this is. They're all unique in their own way. They're all sit on different types of topography and they all have, you know, different quirks and characteristics to them. They aren't by any means, like, you know, there aren't steadfast rules from one to the other, right, and.

00:11:29
Speaker 3: Those those were all built in a really tight window together too. You know, it's kind of amazing that he did vary them as much as he did. You know, a lot of that comes from the ground. But then I look at something, you know, the two tilling house courses that we've consulted on while we've done we've done more than two, but two of them are the first, like the first two big projects that he did, Somerset Hills and San Francisco Golf Club. And you know we've we've we haven't done work at Shawnee. We've looked at restoring that too. So those are all his really early courses. So there's several years before Wingfoot, and he did very different things. I mean, Somerset Hills has a whole bunch of like chocolate drop mounds around green sites and really severe greens, like way more severe than anything a Wingfoot or Quaker Ridge.

00:12:23
Speaker 2: And yeah, he probably changed his mind.

00:12:29
Speaker 3: Somewhere after that, or or even just realize that, hey, you know, I can do that kind of wild stuff if it's the only thing I'm working on and I'm there all the time. But if I'm going to be building a lot of golf courses at the same time, I got to be careful. I got to be a little more conservative, or something will slip through the cracks.

00:12:48
Speaker 2: And not work very well.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. I imagine when you have to redo stuff that's like the worst work, you know, and when if you're not careful and something to got screwed up and the somebody's like, hey, you got to come back and stoften this it's just it's like the I imagine, like what I like have to you know, I think about it sometimes, like when I have to redo something that I already did, I'm always just muttering to myself the whole time, right, And.

00:13:13
Speaker 3: The most important part of that for me is the second version is generally not as good as the first one because you're not in you know, you're not in a good mental place to do the work. At that point, you're like, damn it, we messed up. Okay, now I got to fix this. What do I have to do to appease whoever's not happy with it? Instead of you know, working in the flow of building the golf course in the first place, when you're feeling creative and doing things that you you know, doing things because you want to.

00:13:40
Speaker 1: Do something you touched on earlier. Is the the way that different projects connect together over time and you see things that remind you of olt projects and that it was I thought it was really cool how the beginning of the book and high point you're talking about the the four the forty acres, that the Sandy forty acres, and then in Saint Andrew's Beach there's a part of that property that reminds you of that. I imagine that just happens, and that's what you're talking about with the experience factor, But it just happens more and more where you see things and it reminds you of different places you've worked on or seen.

00:14:21
Speaker 2: It does you know?

00:14:21
Speaker 3: Some of it's just recognizing the same situation when it comes up again. And sometimes it's like you've got a hole that you're really trying to make work somewhere and it just doesn't work. And you know, if you're smart, you just give that idea up and wait because three years down the road there will be the right place for it.

00:14:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:14:45
Speaker 1: In tying to that, Sally Golf asked, what's the hardest routing decision you've ever made.

00:14:55
Speaker 3: The hardest routing decision ever made.

00:15:02
Speaker 2: Hmmm, well, one of the ones that I put in the book.

00:15:05
Speaker 3: There was a hole in our routing for Cape Kidnappers that if you look at the map of what we were going to build, it's on there. And it was a part three that was pretty much just hanging off the cliffs below where the thirteenth hole is now. So the tea was similar to where the thirteenth was, but even more out on the cliff. But the green was like eighty or one hundred feet lower in this little on this little shelf hanging down there before it falls off the world. And you know, when we started looking at that project, there was that you know, there was that famous old calendar Great Golf Holes of New Zealand, and of course everybody talks about that with Cape Kidnappers, that oh yeah, this is just like that calendar, but it's not. You know, Cape Kidnappers generally is a pretty conservative routing. We get close to the edge. It's not really that to play right along the edge very many places there because of the way the topography works. But you know, it's all on a relatively gentle piece of ground to walk and it's not there's not many just do or die shots other than the fifteenth hole playing out on the one finger with trouble.

00:16:20
Speaker 2: To both sides.

00:16:21
Speaker 3: But we had a hole in the routing, the original thirteenth that was really severe, like you know, scary to even stand on the ta and look at. And we really thought we were going to build it. And then as we started we started building the front nine holes. First, we had a lot of time to think about that hole, and the more we thought about it, the more hesitant we were. You know, like, how are we going to get people down there?

00:16:49
Speaker 2: In back? You can't let them drive a golf cart down there. If the brakes go.

00:16:52
Speaker 3: It'll just go off the edge and somebody will die.

00:16:57
Speaker 2: You know.

00:16:57
Speaker 3: So are we going to like build a fit down there and back up, or are we gonna like get somebody to shuttle people down there, or or what? How do you get in and out? You know, you could walk down, but it was like a pretty severe hike coming back out to get to the next tea.

00:17:13
Speaker 2: If you did it, it.

00:17:17
Speaker 3: Was just barely big enough for a green and a little place to miss long and right, and then the kicker, the thing that absolutely stopped us from doing it, which I didn't mention in the book directly. There were a couple of little mounds down there by the green, and we got concerned that they might be like archaeological stuff going on, because nobody really surveyed that stuff for kid kidnappers, but a lot of the natives there did things right along the coast. In fact, kid kidnappers is name because they kidnapped Captain Cook's translator from his you know, sent the He sent the translator in one of his guys ashore to talk to the natives, and the natives like saw this Tahitian guy that was his translator and figured that he was captured, and they captured him back and freed him. So Cook had just like send another patrol to get his translator back. And that's what that's how it got the name Cape Kidnappers.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: He named it.

00:18:17
Speaker 3: But we were concerned, you know, if we dig into something there and there's some archaeologoe, there's some archaeology there that shuts the whole thing down, and you know, between that and all the logistical stuff, it's like, no, let's not take this chance, you know. And then we had to scramble a little bit, find and find in room to build the thirteenthold. Now the way it is was you know, we felt like it was really kind of jamming it in there. I mean, it's a one hundred and thirty yard Part three and there's there's just the tea is right behind the twelfth green and there's just not much space, and we were worried whether that hole would fit in. It turns out that's one of people's favorite holes.

00:18:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, Hey, Cape Kidnapper is a good example of where, you know, you had a lot of different iterations of your routing and there were different concerns with the client wanting returning nines and and just I was impressed, and then the par three where you shifted it, and just the number of different revisions that went into the routing, and and it seemed to me that through the book, as the book progressed, it seemed like every routing got a little bit more intricate and more and more edits from early on because it just seemed like it got more and more complex and there was more and more thought into each routing. Is do you feel like that was the case when you were writing it, not necessarily.

00:19:39
Speaker 2: I mean it kind of comes and goes in waves.

00:19:42
Speaker 3: You know, some of it's the client, and whether the client is giving you good feedback on what they want and what they like.

00:19:51
Speaker 2: And don't like, really helps a ton.

00:19:54
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's you know, kip kidnappers. I mean, in theory, we had five thousand acres to build a golf course. In truth, not nearly that because most of it's so severe you can't use it. But but there were a lot of you know, there's there's a lot more ground to consider and and a lot more decisions that you could make. You know, it's much different to work with a piece of ground like that than when you've got one hundred and fifty acres and it's a rectangle and okay, routeing a golf course in that little box right there is an entirely different thing. But basically, the more the more good features you have to work with, the harder it is.

00:20:38
Speaker 2: In some ways.

00:20:39
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, in some ways it's easy because there's just there's great things just laying there. But on the other hand, you've got so many factors to consider. Instead of just trying not to play into the sun at the start and finish and trying to get the part of threes to go in different directions.

00:20:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the smaller site you tall is like when you're trying to fit it in. It's while it's challenging, it's a more almost more simple than when you have limitless options, because then you have to make a lot of decisions. Yes, So J Spurgeon asks, among your best sites you have built on are seen, are there any common characteristics besides sand?

00:21:22
Speaker 3: Well, they're not all sandy. I mean, Cape Kidnappers is not sandy. Rock Creek and Stone Eagle that are not in this book, but in the other book will be in one someday, I hope.

00:21:35
Speaker 2: Are not sandy.

00:21:36
Speaker 3: So, you know, sand makes it way easier to build things. It doesn't make it any easier routic golf course necessarily. The only thing that does make it easier is you do have more options because you can build a green in a valley and not worry about dreenish problems. I mean a lot of Billcour's coolest green sites are like he puts a sites a green and kind of the head of a valley and just puts a little fill in there and builds it up and it's you know, it's a beautiful setting. It just feels like you're hitting into a little glove. Almost eight at Sandhills is like that. Four or fifteen abandoned Trails is like that. And if that's on clay, that's really hard to do because all this stuff from both sides is coming down onto the green. And the only way you could do it is if you build bunkers all around to you know, cut off that drainage and essentially not have anything drained into the green.

00:22:31
Speaker 1: Using the bunkers to catch the water and drain.

00:22:34
Speaker 3: Well, ideally you're using your you're deflecting the water at the at the high side of the bunker on the back and getting it to go around the green, because otherwise you're going to contaminate the bunkers. But at least you won't at least you wouldn't contaminate the greens mix that way, you know. But you know, when you're building, when you're putting nice, expensive greens mix on clay, you really don't want anything so his straining onto it. You know, superintendents will tell you that's not a good idea anyway. You know, it's different kinds of grasses they use, different chemicals on them, so you don't want things washing from the outside onto the green. But you know, and landscape architecture will teach you, don't you know, get everything to drain away from the from the green itself. But you know, but you go look in the UK and half the holes you love, that's not true at all. You know, there's there's pieces of the greens that's gathering from outside. And you know, one of the things that's really cool about bally neilis there's so many holes that you you know, you're playing off a slope on the outside of the green to feed it to a certain hole location. You can't do that on clay, or at least it's really hard to do it on clay because you know, you could still have that feature outside, but you'd have to have something between there and the green to kind of stop the water from pouring onto the green, and that stops your golf ball from pouring onto the green the same way.

00:24:03
Speaker 1: That makes sense. It's what Michael Wolf asked, what's the biggest mistake you ever made design while designing a golf course. That's one of the things I love most about the book is that you've got some self criticism in it where you say this is something I would never do if I had a chance to redo it, or you know, different different things. So that was something I appreciated about the book.

00:24:27
Speaker 2: With Yeah, so.

00:24:32
Speaker 3: Well, there's two examples that come to mind from this book, and I can't really think if there's anything I've done in the last twenty golf courses in comparison. Hopefully I'm learning my lessons and not doing the same thing again, you know. And then there's a third general you know, the first general thing is don't take the wrong job with a client that's going to be impossible or or or a piece of ground or an environmental can strength. That's just there's no way around it, cause then you're kind of handcuffed and there's only so much you can do, you know, actual mistakes. Once I got the job and started building.

00:25:19
Speaker 2: One that.

00:25:21
Speaker 3: There was one from high Point, which was kind of you know, high Point, the eighteenth hole. You know, you had seventeen holes with that were kind of linksy or heathland style golf, no water and play at all. And then the eighteenth hole was a double dog leg par five around a pond. And you know the reason I did that well, partly thirty years ago I thought that would be a cool hole. Partly there was this wetland in the middle of the site that if I didn't use for a golf hole.

00:25:56
Speaker 2: It was useless to the client.

00:25:58
Speaker 3: And if I put a golf hole through there, he had ten more acres to develop around it someday. So it just made sense, you know, instead of that just being a swamp that was off limits, it made sense to try to build a golf holder and and you know, and I didn't and I didn't worry at the beginning that it would be kind of out of character from the rest of the golf course. But then so I committed to doing that, and we'd actually we'd applied for the permit to do the work around the wetlands and we hadn't heard back, and we started building the rest of the golf course, which there's a mistake. Don't start until you know you can do everything you want to do on the plan. And then a month or so into construction, the guy from the Department in Natural Resources came out to you know, mark the wetlands officially and tell us what we could and couldn't do, and he marked it pretty much where we anticipated that he would, and then he said, and yeah, there's a twenty five foot buffer around that that you can't touch either, that we had not anticipated, so that, you know, what was going to be kind of an S shaped hole around these the wetland and the pond turned into like a Z shaped hole with a forced carry.

00:27:12
Speaker 1: That whole reminded me of what became eighteen at Madina number one. No, not seventeen seventeen.

00:27:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's eighteen is the part three got a little bit.

00:27:28
Speaker 1: It was really similar.

00:27:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, not as long, I mean it was it was short enough that a good player would have to lay up off the tee a little bit and could still go for the green and two, which was another flaw with it, because you know, we didn't you know, we couldn't put the tea back or you couldn't make the carry over the first part of the Z. And then if we didn't put the tea all the way back the way that the way it got flagged out, there was no place for the drive to kind of run out further down. So so it was really you know, if if I'd have had them flag the hole with the buffer and everything before we started, I probably wouldn't have tried to build a hole there at all, And instead I was stuck with trying to fix it and you know, find a way for it to work for you know, we're talking about us playing now, But for women it was a horrible hole.

00:28:26
Speaker 2: I mean, it was just like.

00:28:28
Speaker 3: You have to decide how far back to put a tease so that quote unquote all women can get close to the edge, which is, you know, it is hard to do for men, if not harder, and then it was a really severe carry for them anyway, So just not a very good golf hole. You know, it could be a really heroic holl if you were just the right kind of player, but if you weren't just the right kind of player as a mess.

00:28:53
Speaker 1: So if only he could have just made a nineteen hole course and turned it into a part three and a short part four.

00:29:00
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, I suppose, I suppose if you started from the from the landing area, it would have been a good short part for it was about probably about the best thing going for it. So so that was a mistake and I learned my lesson, don't you know, don't try not to you know, when when somebody sends me a map of a new piece of property. I'm like a kid in a candy store. I just want to start routing holes.

00:29:34
Speaker 2: On it right away.

00:29:36
Speaker 3: And I still do that. But don't think that you're working on a real routing until you know what the constraints are, because something like that can radically change what the routing ought to be. And if you get too far down the line of thinking you can make something work in there, and then somebody tells you, no, you can't do that, you're really stock and you start having to give up things that you really wanted to do. You know, you fell in love with the whole after it, and now you can't get to there. That's a really you know, that's a really hard thing. You know, I'm I get excited about my work and I get kind of emotional about it. So when something like that happens, I'm pissed off for a while, and it's hard to like regroup and get something good to come out of it. And the best way is don't get too excited and don't get so far down the line that you're going to be pissed off.

00:30:32
Speaker 2: You have to give something up.

00:30:35
Speaker 1: It's funny. One of the progressions of the book is that you can tell how you're as your kind of career progressed and you became more and more well known, the sites got drastically better, because at one point, I think it was Riverfront you were talking about how you weren't sure if you'd ever see a site without power lines, Agaman that came through. And it's really interesting that progression was like, the sites obviously got drastically better in your career.

00:31:07
Speaker 3: Yes, and I mean I had some good sites early on too, but but yes, I had a little more to choose from, and I started, I started getting on the radar.

00:31:18
Speaker 2: Of different clients. Was really what it was about.

00:31:22
Speaker 3: But more than that, I mean, I I mean, Mike Kaiser will tell you that part of the reason his business model is what it was is that, you know, he was reading those top hundred lists for Golf magazine in the nineties and seeing all these great golf courses that were built on great pieces of land instead of just whatever piece of ground possible, and you know, and I was writing the articles that went with those, and one of them, like about nineteen ninety five, I wrote that, you know, if you look at these lists, no matter what architect you're talking about and how great they were. The courses of theirs that are on the list are generally the best sites they had to work with, you know, I mean even Pete do you know Pete Dye would be maybe an exception to that rule for getting a swamp like the TPC at Sawgrass and lining up with a top one hundred golf course. But even so, by far his best golf course and the one that he was most excited about was Teeth of the Dog, which had seven holes right on the Caribbean. So you know, that resonated with mister Kaiser that you know, it's not just the architect, it's the piece of ground you start with that that really matters for building something great. And it was really counterintuitive because when I'd worked for mister Dye, when I started in the business, prevailing wisdom was, you know, you can hire this guy to create a great god of course out of nothing, So why spend money on good land if he could do that? And you know, I started from the very beginning. I was really lucky to fall into high Point, which I thought was a beautiful piece of land for golf. Notwithstanding that eighteenth holl And, I you know, I went for this kind of niche of you know, being somebody to hire if you had a good piece of land, and a lot of people told me that was crazy.

00:33:27
Speaker 2: There's no good land left anymore. They were wrong.

00:33:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's good land everywhere. Let's see.

00:33:34
Speaker 2: Uh, there's good land everywhere.

00:33:36
Speaker 3: Whether or not you can get permission to build on it, and whether or not there's enough people around to make support a golf course.

00:33:42
Speaker 2: Those are the hard parts, but there's good land everywhere.

00:33:46
Speaker 1: Something I found interesting in the book was how you talked about the impact that Pacific Dunes had on your career and kind of launching you up versus how Bill and Bill Core and Ben Crenshaw sand Hills hadn't had the similar hadn't given him a superstart. I'm bumped at that point. And if I think I read that correctly, But do you think it's because Pacific Dunes was a public course?

00:34:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, Yeah.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: I mean that was in Sara when she was editing me, was like, you got to rewrite that because it sounds like you're saying sand Hills wasn't really that good. And I'm like, no, nobody's going to think I meant that. What I meant was it was great, but not that many people got to see it. You know, sand Hills is a private club. They do maybe six thousand rounds a year, and a lot of them are members. So you know, even though the buzz was, oh, this is one of the best golf courses in the world, there weren't a lot of people that had seen it or knew what it really was. And you know, to top that off, so you know, a new course like that, it'll win the best New Course of the.

00:35:04
Speaker 2: Year and it'll get like four pages in Golf.

00:35:06
Speaker 3: Digest, but after that, you're not gonna hear about it again in Golf Digest unless it ranks really high in the top one hundred courses a few years later, because it's private and their readers can't go there, and they don't spend a lot of time writing about you know, it's funny now with all the video stuff they're doing, all these photo tours of Pine Valley and Cyprus Point and Terry Edie and which they never would have done when they were just a print magazine because the readers can't go there, So why get them all salivating about how great a golf course this is? It's just going to piss them off at the end of the day.

00:35:47
Speaker 2: You know.

00:35:48
Speaker 3: The contrast is, and the great thing about Mike Kaiser's business model was if you build the same quality of golf course and it's public, the magazines fall over themselves.

00:35:58
Speaker 2: To write about it.

00:36:00
Speaker 3: They don't just write about it being the best new course. They do like a twelve page spread every two years about Buddy's trip to Bandon. And they just keep doing it. You know, I said to somebody a few years ago, it's like winning the best new course every year. It gets that much press every year. Cape Kidnappers has been on. So many Cape Kidnappers not even so.

00:36:25
Speaker 2: You know.

00:36:25
Speaker 3: The other thing about Bandon is forty thousand people a year have played Pacific Dunes.

00:36:30
Speaker 2: You know.

00:36:31
Speaker 3: That thought about how different it was than sand Hills came to me like a year and a half after it opened, and it had been opened for a year and a half and sand Hills had been opened for like eight or nine years, and I realized more people had been on Pacific Dunes already. But then on top of that, you just get oodles and oodles more publicity. Even Cape Kidnappers, as remote as it is, it's like eight thousand miles away from where we're sitting today. Tons of people know about it because pictures of it have been in magazines around the world all the time because it's public. If it was private, it wouldn't be on the cover of every golf magazine every few months. But it gets a ton more exposure because it's a resort.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: The other thing with Bandon is every time they open a new course, then the discussion becomes what's the best course of abandon and then Pacific does gets recirculated with everything, and everybody's making the case. Everybody makes their case for different courses, and you know, it just gets brought up again and again and over and over again.

00:37:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, you don't want to be the fifth best course at one of those places, but being in the conversation to be in the best is really good.

00:37:51
Speaker 1: So you wrote detailed on Sheep Ranch and it was interesting. It was interesting to read about how one to look at the map that you had of the eighteen hole routing the map and then look at what Bill and Ben built just recently and see how many similar holes there were. And two the you know what Bill wrote about he was mesmerized at Pacific Dunes about he he in turn, you didn't see it at Sheep Ranch, and he saw it there.

00:38:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I got to start.

00:38:29
Speaker 3: I've known Bill Korr for like thirty nine years since the first summer I worked for mister Die at Long Cove.

00:38:40
Speaker 2: I took off from the job.

00:38:41
Speaker 3: We basically had all the holes finished and they were just playing grass and I took off from the job like two weeks before school started and made a big, like circular road trip to get to Ithaca from Hilton Head by way of Texas and Oklahoma and Prairie Dunes and a bunch of courses that I hadn't seen yet, and I stopped through when I was in Texas on my way from Houston to Dallas, I stopped through this place called Waterwood National that Pete's brother had actually designed in the late seventies, and it was a really rustic looking golf course on Lake Livingstone. It had one hole that was pretty famous, like a two hundred and twenty yard part three over the corner of the lake that was really dramatic and really severe. It was a very difficult golf course, and you know, i'd just seen a little publicity about it and knew it was sort of Pete's but not really, but I wanted to check it out, and so I just drove in and asked somebody if I could get a golf cart and drove around and they were doing a little work to it.

00:39:47
Speaker 2: They were actually.

00:39:48
Speaker 3: Rebuilding the green, and there was a guy out on a box blade finished in the green.

00:39:53
Speaker 2: That was Rod Whitman.

00:39:55
Speaker 3: And then you know, I talked to him for five minutes, and then the superintendent came up, came and found me, and I went to his office and we chatted for a while.

00:40:05
Speaker 2: That was Bill Corp. And Bill had worked for the Dies for a few years before.

00:40:11
Speaker 3: That, and then in the late seventies when the recession hit big time, was just when they were finishing Waterwood National, and a friend of his in the business said, you know, you should probably just park yourself there for a while because there's not going to be a lot.

00:40:28
Speaker 2: Of new work. You know, it wouldn't it wouldn't be bad.

00:40:32
Speaker 3: For you to learn about the main inside of golf courses and be the superintendent. Plus, honestly, this golf course is way too severe.

00:40:41
Speaker 2: It's gonna need some fixing up. So they're gonna need somebody like you around for a while.

00:40:47
Speaker 3: So that's so I've known Bill for a long time, and I've known Ben for the same amount of time. They hadn't known each other that long, but they've always been really good friends. And you know, Bill and I had a converse thirty nine years ago, like not cocky in anyway, but we both knew what we wanted to do with the rest of our lives, and amazingly, somehow.

00:41:07
Speaker 2: We got about where we want to be.

00:41:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I asked Bill to write the forward for the book, and partly because he's great at doing routings, partly because he doesn't write very much, and if you know, if I can drag him into writing a little bit, so much the better. But you know, but the interesting part was that I did want to write about the Sheep Ranch in my book, and he was working on this new version of it, and you know, the only way it was, you know, the only way I was really comfortable with writing about the Sheep Ranch was to have Bill be included a little bit too.

00:41:47
Speaker 2: And I asked him if he would give.

00:41:48
Speaker 3: Me the routing that he'd done for it, you know, like a year and a half ago, so I could include that at the end, and how different that was from what Donn and I I'd been trying.

00:42:00
Speaker 2: To do the whole time.

00:42:03
Speaker 3: You know, The sheep Branch was such an interesting project, and I was so pleased that Sarah managed to dig out from some file drawer somewhere a lot of our just not original attempts at trying to rout it.

00:42:18
Speaker 2: And we had like.

00:42:21
Speaker 3: Fifteen different routings for it that that I didn't that I didn't print them all. You know, it was just like, you know, I tried to write about how many different versions we tried to do to come up with something that Mike and Phil Friedman would like. But you know, you've got that really dramatic coastline, which you know, one of the big differences between my routing and Bills, or between my routing at Pacific Dunes and David's is you know, David abandoned Dunes, tried to get as many greens close to the cliff as he could, and I tried to get as many holes playing along the cliffs as I could. And you know when you do, when you take up four hundred and fifty yards of cliff for one hole, you know everybody's going to think it's a great hole, but you've given up. You know, you could have gotten two or three greens and tea's there if you were trying.

00:43:23
Speaker 2: To do that.

00:43:24
Speaker 3: And I, you know, in general, I would rather go for the great golf hole, especially because at Pacific Dunes you had so much great ground inland to work with. Those dunes were so spectacular, but you know, the sheep Branch wasn't that way. You know, once you got away from the cliff, it's not sandy and it's not really dramatic. So I had you know, I kept putting holes along the cliffs, but then every time I would turn away and go inland, it was like, oh, this isn't so exciting. And you could see when we'd take Mike and Phil and walk around things. As as soon as the routing would turn away from the cliffs, they'd be like disappointed and just wanted when we were going to get back from the cliffs. And at one point, like six months or a year into playing around with it, I said, you know, you could just like have holes along the cliffs and just play back and forth all day, because at that time they were thinking it was going to be private, you know, so the whole concept of it going back, and so, you know, one of the things people don't understand the reason it was the way I was. Phil Friedman was Mike's college roommate and his partner in Recycled Paper Greetings, And when Mike started looking at doing Bandon Dunes, he asked Phil if Phil wanted to be a partner in Bandon too, and Phil said no. He thought Mike was crazy to be spending so much money out there or on a golf project in the middle of nowhere. So when we started doing planning for Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes was getting ready to open a lot of the trips, Phil would come out with Mike to Bandon and Phil was just feeling like such a dope for not having been part of Bandon Dunes. He loved playing the golf courses. He was like, he played the first loop of Hall's the Preview Loop at Pacific Dunes more than anybody.

00:45:30
Speaker 2: I think. He just loved it.

00:45:32
Speaker 3: And and he was just like beating his head against the wall. Why didn't I participate in this? So the land for the Sheep Ranch came up for sale. I don't know if there was an intermedia At one point a power company had owned it, and there were some wind turbines out there, like back in the seventies or early eighties, and it was so windy like way the wind turbits and they didn't work. So they took that all out. But I don't know if there'd been an intermedia owner or not. Anyway, it was for sale, and it was for a pretty good chunk of money for you know, two hundred acres on the Oregon coast in the middle of nowhere, and you know, it was right next to Bandon and right where you could see it. And and Mike was like, well, I got to buy it to protect the resort from somebody building a big, ugly hotel there or cashing in off what we've done and building another golf course. They're separate, but it was a chunk of money too, And and you know, Phil raised his hand and said I'll go have these with you, and Mike was like, okay, I don't save me some money. So it was a separate deal from the resort, a separate ownership, And so they tried to come up with a business model that was like directly tied to the resort, and the first idea was, well, let's make a private and you know, and you know, I thought it would have been neat as a private course to you know, like get some members, build a little clubhouse with some lodging. Sure, they go play at the resort during the day, and then they come up there at the end of the day and play till dark, basically on their own little golf course without a lot of.

00:47:27
Speaker 2: Other people around. I thought that would have worked, and it might have worked.

00:47:32
Speaker 3: But somewhere during the process of routing as we were starting construction, I don't think Mike Kaiser ever anticipated at that point what a hero he was going to be in the golf world for building bandon dunes and it being all public. But that was that was starting to be the story about the resort and Mike all of it sudden realized that if he if he did this private thing right next to the resort, he would kill that.

00:48:03
Speaker 2: And he didn't want to do that.

00:48:05
Speaker 3: So he got really called feet about the business model and kind of backed off and didn't really want to didn't really want to build anything, not having any idea what he would.

00:48:14
Speaker 2: Do with it.

00:48:16
Speaker 3: But Phil who spent half the money to build it, and you know, he really wanted.

00:48:21
Speaker 2: To go ahead. So he asked us if we could go ahead.

00:48:24
Speaker 3: And you know, what could we do for a limited amount of money. And I said, well, you know, really, the big cost of this whole deal is irrigation. You know, if you put in fairway irrigation and you know, that's irrigation. The irrigation system was literally forty percent of.

00:48:46
Speaker 2: The cost of building Pacific Dunes.

00:48:49
Speaker 3: So without that, you know, if you're just building greens and a few bunkers. And we didn't even boo. We built about three bunkers because it was not sandy soil, and we figured the sand would all blow away. We just built a couple of bunkers to see if they would hold up at all. And Phil said, okay, we'll just build some greens and you know, we'll just we'll just see the whole place. And you know, you get enough rain there in the winter, you get a catch of grass, but it just goes, you know, it goes super dormant the summer. They would shut it down for a while in the summers because it would just get so toasty.

00:49:25
Speaker 2: You didn't want it to catch fire.

00:49:28
Speaker 3: But it just had a loop of irrigation around the greens and nothing else. So it was really like what you'd see in New Zealand or rural Scotland.

00:49:37
Speaker 2: Or somewhere as far as the maintenance level of it.

00:49:41
Speaker 3: And but but because Mike had kind of like disavowed it, there was this always this awkward relationship between the resort and and the Sheep Ranch, like you know, you know, we've got to make sure that no staff from the resort is doing a work up there, and they're now using equipment from up there. So the sheep Branch only had a couple used motors basically was what they maintained the golf course with. I mean, it was basically a two man operation for years. And you know, some people didn't get it. It's like why are the golf courses down there so perfect? And this is kind of raggedy, And some people just loved it that way because it was so different.

00:50:24
Speaker 1: And I think that's an important historical anecdote that everybody obviously, it's what happens when when new courses open, magazines write about how it's the best course here. You know, no matter what, it's always that's always going to be the conversation. But It's important to remember that what you did at the Sheep Ranch was a drastically different concept and wasn't. It's not like it was a failing. It was a success in a different way than what Bill and Ben just completed there is it was a commercial golf course, and yours wasn't a commercial golf course built for resort play. You know, it was a it was a concept, and in many ways, the idea of low cost construction, low cost maintenance with a golf course that made people like imaginations run wild is a smashing success and not something not an idea of golf that should be abandoned necessarily.

00:51:27
Speaker 3: No, and I'm meant I mean, I want to be really careful. First of all, I haven't seen that. I haven't seen Bill and Benn's.

00:51:37
Speaker 2: Course yet, but.

00:51:39
Speaker 3: But I can. I've got a pretty good idea what it's like. It's spent a lot of time in the ground. You know, I've seen the routing plan. I think the routing plan is really good. They did some things that Don and I never thought of that made I mean, basically, they fit eighteen holes on about one hundred and twenty acres and made it really cool, you know, it's got to be really close together and it's got to be kind of all mode tight for that to work. But it looks really cool and I'm excited to play it. So I'm not saying what we did was better. It was completely different for a completely different concept and client and everything else. And you know, unfortunately, you know, so the she Branch was kind of in limbo for you know, we you know, it was done in two thousand and three, and it sat there for fifteen years with people occasionally playing it and not really understanding what was going on. You know, in when when Mike and I started talking about Old McDonald, and really not when we started talking about it, but just when we just when we agreed that I would do Old McDonald. Right as I started to shake his hand about it, he said, you realize that if I have you do Old McDonald, when whenever I do something with the Sheep Ranch, I'll probably have somebody else do it.

00:53:16
Speaker 2: And I like hesitated for.

00:53:18
Speaker 3: About a half a second, you know, because at that time, you know, Mike and Phil wed an impasse over what to do with it. I was like, whatever's going to happen with the Sheep Ranch? Is way down the road, and you know, we could use this old McDonald's job right now. So I didn't think very hard about that, but I did it kind of with sadness too, because I really I did love the concept of the Sheep Ranch, and you know, I knew it was going to go away someday and they would do something real with it. And it was kind of a bummer that that we didn't get to work on it again when the time came. But by the same token, you know, I was kind of like, that would have been hard for me to do. And as I say in the book, which I which I'd never said anywhere else, and I could not say to Mike and Phil in two thousand and one, two thousand and two when we were doing planning, you know, I was always concerned about whether the sheep Branch could be as good as Specific Dunes. I just finished Pacific Dunes, and I really thought it was really good. And I thought it was so good because that the inland part of the property was so cool and there were so many good holes there, and I couldn't see how the sheep Branch could really compete with that, because it didn't once you got inland. It wasn't nearly as exciting, you know, if you'd let me, you know, even when we built all McDonald, if you if you'd said, then okay, go back and look at the Sheep Branch again. Now I might have had a different perspective on it, and I might have been able to see some of the things that Bill did, you know, But that wasn't on.

00:54:57
Speaker 2: The table then.

00:54:59
Speaker 3: So you know, it needed that space for me at least between Pacific Dunes and doing the Sheep Ranch in order to do it, you know, and I you know, I'm the first. You know, Mike is a big believer in hiring different architects to do each golf course, and you know that that that that that helps promote them. And he also thinks, and I think he's dead wrong about this, but he also really believes that when he hires Bill Corr to do the Sheep Branch, Bill is trying to top Pacific Dunes or that, you know, when when we you know, when one of us follows the other, we're trying to do a better golf course than the other guy.

00:55:46
Speaker 2: And that's what motivates us.

00:55:48
Speaker 3: And I swear that's not true for me, and I really doubt it's true for Bill Core. You know, both of us are looking at like this is a beautiful piece of land. We got to make the most out of this. We cand know, we're comparing it to everything we've done in our own career. We're you know, we're comparing it to all the courses we really admire. You know, it doesn't really matter to us very much that, oh, Tom Buildegar is right over there. I got to make sure it's better than that. There's no way. But but Mike believes that, you know, So Mike is going to hire David Kidd to do the next course, and I'm going to do the third course at Sam Valley whatever. You know, it's it's good to be one of the guys in that loop, for sure. But but I don't, you know, I don't.

00:56:33
Speaker 2: Believe that.

00:56:36
Speaker 3: Having a different architect for every golf course is going to make the thing better, that it's going to get you really more publicity. And you know, and my my trump card for that is Old McDonald. I did build two golf courses right next to each other in Abandon, and different people like different ones better. But they're both really highly regarded. So you can do it. But but you do need some time in there. I don't think you. I don't. I think it would be really hard to do three golf courses in the space of five years and have them all turnout that good.

00:57:19
Speaker 1: And I think it's true too at Bandon with Bill and Ben at Abandoned Trails and Sheep Branch where they and they had a lot of time in between the two. But certainly I've talked to some people that are like sheep Branches, So I mean, and what's not to like about sheep Branch You stare at the ocean the whole day, you know, And but Banded Trails has this you know, unique followers that love it, and you know it's a wildly different golf course, but it's another you know, with your two courses there and Bill and Ben's it kind of proves that, you know, you can do multiple courses of the same spot and have them turn out different. And as well. Thought of something with with Pacific Dunes that you talked about was the how much you appreciate being able to rout a golf course that had similar characteristics to that of like a cypress, where you it takes you out to the ocean, brings you back in and brings you back out to the ocean. And you know, it might not have been the case until they found that extra land that he had. And I'd love to hear a little bit more about the story of when you guys stumbled upon the thirteenth.

00:58:29
Speaker 3: Okay, So, so the book has three routings for Pacific Dunes, and the first one is something that I never even showed mister Kaiser. I'd had a topo map of it for six months or a year before I went out to look at it, to look at the ground, because well, i'd actually I'd met mister Kaiser in like nineteen ninety five, so way before the first golf course existed. David Kidd was already working and his plan for the first golf course at that time. And instead of instead of trying to like elbow him out of the way, I just figured, well, you know, Mike's talking about doing two golf courses. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do the second one. So so I just, you know, I just spent some time with Mike. We played golf a couple of times when I actually went on a golf trip to Ireland together, got to know him a bit he saw a couple of my other golf courses, and as you know, as Bandon Dunes was being built, he acquired the land for Pacific Dunes which a lawyer had owned, and the lawyer went into personal bankruptcy and that piece of land just fell into Mike's lab, and so Mike sent me topo of that land. But we both agreed that it probably wasn't right to go out there and start working on the planning while David was still working on his golf course, and you know, and you know, having another architect around while David was still you know, making decisions and changing stuff just wasn't kosher. So so I didn't. So I had the map for quite a while to just play around and try to find golf holes. But I didn't go to look at the site until David's course was all done and a month or two away from opening. And Mike had told me that when he got the land for David, when he got the land for Pacific Dunes, he let David build a couple of holes into the corner of it along the coast, but he didn't really say how much. And you know, i'd seen a picture of the sixth hole Abandoned Dunes, so I could kind of see where that was on my map and thought, okay, he came into there and then he probably just went straight back out. So so I routed holes pretty close to there. And as it turned out, this map that I took with me to Abandon Dunes the first time, you know, I had golf holes all over where David's seventh and eighth holes were. I didn't know they were there. So my routing just flat did not work. From the moment I set foot on the site that the circulation of it didn't work at all, and I was like, so I never showed it to Mike. I was just like, crap, now I'm back to square one. There were four holes on that map that are pretty close to four holes of Pacific Dunes today. But that's the extent of what you know. There were some other holes that would have been good holes that didn't fit together very well, and there was some but there was some. There were a lot of things that we saw walk in the ground that we were like, boy, that's cool, and I, you know, and I hadn't picked up on the seventh Green site all the little jiggly contours that are the seventh green on the topa map. When I looked at the topa map, as soon as we walked by it, I was like, let's build a green there.

01:02:13
Speaker 1: It's amazing green site, amazing fairway too, Like that's just such a beautiful hole.

01:02:18
Speaker 3: And one of the nice things about the book is, you know, not for very many of my early courses, because the pictures were slides and they were thirty years old and they're not well sorted out. But for Pacific Dunes, we have a bunch of pictures from before when you know, seeing that green site when it was brand new, or you asked about the thirteenth all which I'll get to in a minute. You know, I have the one of the pictures in the book is me standing on the thirteenth ee and Jim or benis stand in the landing area for the fairway the first time we saw it.

01:02:54
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:02:55
Speaker 3: So so anyway, I'm trying to figure out how to rework my routing minus the land for six, seven and eight abandoned Dunes, And you know, I was out there with Jim for I think for like five days, and you know, we played Bandoned Dunes a couple of times with Mike and Phil and some other people, and but we you know, we were spend a lot of time walking the site, the parts that we could walk because a lot of it was still covered with gorse, and then coming back and working on the maps, and so you know, we found like the sites for the first hole and the second hole, and the and the seventh green and the eighth and part of the eighteenth because those weren't under gorse, and you could walk them pretty easily. But the north side of it was almost you know, once you dropped off three t onto that flatter plane that was all eight foot high gorse, you really couldn't walk through it at all. So we just you could see the dunes on the far side, and we had a topo map and it's like, okay, it's five hundred yards to there, so we could play a hole here. But it was still hard to get a feel for and Mike was feeling nervous about it. But you know, I said to him, after like three days, you know, I really like this, but you know that that little corner there that we gave up, you know that means I'm gonna wind up with three or four holes inland away from the water that I just I don't think they're going to be as good.

01:04:33
Speaker 1: That's like the best thing you can say to Mike Kaiser, right, if you want to get more waterfront land.

01:04:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, threatening.

01:04:42
Speaker 3: Same process as Terry Edy actually. But you know the funny thing is those those three holes on the on the the second plan that or the I guess it was on the first plan. That area that I was thinking of is part of old McDonald now, so it's like we could we could actually build good golf halls there, but it wasn't as good as being along the coast. And you know, so I said to Mike, you know, I'm just not sure what I'm gonna do with the with hales like inland on that flatter bit of terrain. I think I'm gonna have to like build some dunes and create something there because it's just not as dramatic as everything else. And Mike said, well, actually we own the property north of this too, so you know, why don't you go look over there? And I was like, okay, So, like I said, you know that that big plane from the third te at Pacific Dunes and kind of the twelfth to pretty close to his fence line was just all gorse and you couldn't walk through it. So Jim and I drove around to the beach actually where you drive into the sheep where you could drive into the sheep ranch and hike back up along the dunes to get in, because there was you know, it was sandy along the dunes and there was a there was a little bit of a trail and it wasn't solid course, so we came in and we we wound up where kind of where fourteen Tea is now, and that was our first view of thirteen.

01:06:20
Speaker 2: I was from up there, like.

01:06:23
Speaker 3: Alex, pretty dramatic going back there toward the tea and then you know, I look the other way and I was like, holy crap. But you know, it's just, you know, there's this this giant dune coming down in just enough space for a green site between that and the water, and really a green site just sitting there.

01:06:39
Speaker 2: I mean, it was there. And so we.

01:06:43
Speaker 3: Walked down in there and I said, you know, go to We didn't have a map for this yet, so I was like, you stay here, let me go back to where a tea would be so I can laser it and see how far it is. And it was just perfect you know, it was just the right distance for the big t shot and then a pretty tough second shot up uphill to the green site, and I did I took a picture of Jim in his red jacket so he really stands out, and that wound up in the book. But you know, we immediately went right back around to the resort and said to Mike, yeah, there's a great hole there. You should come see it. And I don't think he'd ever seen it. He might have for all I know, but but he was excited when he saw what we were pointing at. And then you know, we showed it to him from fourteen and he said, could the next hall be like a part three up up in the dunes here where so you're still looking at the ocean instead of like you know, teeing off and playing down into the land world McDonald is and not seeing the ocean at all. Because Mike at that point was still his idea of how great the golf course was going to be was how many holes were you looking at.

01:07:58
Speaker 2: The ocean from? You had to count in his head whole time.

01:08:02
Speaker 3: And I said, sure, you know, we'll just you know, we'll have to like do some earthwork on the dune over there to build fourteen, and we actually had to do more work to build that hole than most of them, but you know, that was basically Mike's idea for a hole.

01:08:18
Speaker 1: There was that fairway contour, that kind of that little hogs backed right in the middle of thirteen faaraway, All just there was that did you move some stuff to make that it was.

01:08:28
Speaker 2: Really all just there.

01:08:29
Speaker 3: The only thing we had to do because it you know it the fairway was there was there was gorse growing on it, but it was only like ankle high because it was basically sitting right on top of sandstone. There was hardly any soil there, and you know, it came up just perfect where it didn't quite cover the green. But you know, when we were we had to sand cap that hole and four and twelve with about three feet of sand. And when we did that, you know, the fairway was gonna come up so much relative to the green that that it wasn't gonna the visual wasn't gonna be so good. So we had to like knock the fairway down a little bit so the sand cap didn't ruin ruin the view. But it looks what's there now looks almost exactly the same.

01:09:21
Speaker 2: As what was there at the start.

01:09:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, that that picture in the book is like stunning, you know, you see that, it's it's it's like whoa, that's exactly what's there.