Great Architects: Donald Ross (feat Bradley Klein)

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Speaker 1: With the PGA Championship at Aronominc. Golf Club coming up, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the architect behind Ironimink, who is of course, Donald Ross. Ross had one of the most impressive and remarkable careers in the history of golf architecture, but I'm not sure that his design style is particularly well understood. So today we're going to talk about it all in the form of a mail bag. My guest is Bradley Klein, a longtime golf architecture writer and golf course consultant whose book Discovering Donald Ross had a big impact on the revival of interest in the architect that happened toward the beginning of this century. And in this episode, I'm just going to toss Bradley a bunch of questions about Donald Ross that were asked by members of fried Egg Golf Club. So let's see how that goes. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is designing Golf, all right. Before we bring in brad Kline, let's talk about the five essential Donald Ross golf courses. These aren't necessarily his best courses, or even what I would consider my favorite Donald Ross courses, but I think they're his most important designs. If you want to know about Donald Ross, this is a good place to start. So I think I'm going to take these basically in chronological order. First up is Pinehurst number two in the North Carolina Sandhills. Probably an expected unsurprising choice here. Donald Ross lived in Pinehurst. He kept an office in Pinehurst for many years, so he spent more time tweaking and refining the number two course than really any other course in his catalog. The turtleback greens at Pinehurst are famous, but they're not actually original. They evolved into that form over the course of several decades in the middle of the twentieth century, probably because of some aggressive top dressing from the maintenance staff. But when Coren Crenshaw did their restoration of Pinehurst Number two in twenty eleven, they decided to just keep the greens that way because at that point the crowned nature of the greens had become integral to the course's identity, or at least so they thought. But for me, the greatest strength of Pinehurst number two is the way the course uses diagonals and side slopes. The property at Pinehurst number two really isn't that dramatic. There aren't big elevation changes or eye catching undulations, but what is there is really well used. The fairways are always working on these right to left or left to right diagonals in relation to the direction that you're hitting your shot. They use side slopes just brilliantly, sometimes banking off of one hillside then banking off of another hillside. It's really interesting stuff and it's very subtle. It doesn't come through on TV, but when you're playing the course, all this stuff has an effect on your ball, and in that way, I think Pinehurst Number two has a lot more in common with Links courses than basically anything else Donald Ross designed, and the Pinehurst resort itself is maybe the closest thing that we have in the US to Saint Andrews. It really does feel like a home of golf. It's a special place, all right. The second essential Donald Ross course that I'd like to talk about is Essex County Club in Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts. This is another course that Ross spent a lot of time fine tuning because he served as the club professional and basically in house architect at at Essex County for several years in the nineteen tens, but since he basically stopped working there in about nineteen seventeen, Essex County feels more old school in its design style than Pinehurst Number Two. Ross worked on Pinehurst Number two essentially for the rest of his life, but Essex County is more frozen in time. The greens are simpler, the features are a little bit less naturalized. But I think all these factors just add to the charm of Essex County and make it feel unique. It's a fantastic piece of land. It's rocky, but because the ocean isn't that far away, it actually feels a little bit lynxy as well. The most prominent feature is a huge knull that the back nine plays around. Then the seventeenth hole climbs directly on top of the hill and the eighteenth hole plays off of it. It's a roller coaster at the end of the round. There incredibly daring piece of routing. I can't believe that Donald Ross thought to put those holes in that location, but it makes for one of the most dramatic finishes to around that I know of. Essex County is also one of the best examples I think of golf course restoration of Donald Ross Restoration, specifically, the consulting architect Bruce Hepner and the longtime superintendent Eric Richardson have done an absolutely excellent job making small changes over the past twenty years or so that have added up to big changes, and the result is that Essex County might be the most historically authentic Donald Ross course in existence. All Right, The third Ross course I'd like to discuss is the South Course at Oakland Hills Country Club outside of Detroit, Michigan. Donald Ross designed this course in NI teen nineteen, and I think it's really when he reached full maturity as an architect. His routing ability, his sense for how to create variety and strategy in golf holes, his green building techniques, his mastery of construction and shaping are all fully developed here, and this might be his single best set of greens among championship golf courses. It's probably the closest thing that we have to augusta national in terms of the sheer, inventiveness and boldness of the contouring of the greens, of the variety that you get between different greens. You have everything from the eleventh green, which is very small and kind of tucked into a saddle to the sixth green, which has these wavy, rippling undulations that extend out to the edge of the putting surface and create little pockets and shelves for pins, some hard pins, some easy pins. It's just really complex and striking. But a lot of these features became hidden over the years at at Oakland Hills because the fairways and greens got smaller, trees were planted. Rhys Jones and Robert Trent Jones did some work that, in my opinion, wasn't very good, but Gil Hans's renovation a few years ago brought back a lot of what I love about Oakland Hills. Hans definitely modernized some things. The agronomic infrastructure at Oakland Hills is now very up to date, but the golf features themselves do closely resemble what Donald Ross did back in nineteen nineteen. And I think that when people see Oakland Hills host the US Open in twenty thirty four, that they're going to be really impressed and that they're going to wish that Oakland Hills would host the US Open more frequently than the every twenty years, which is kind of the cadence that it's on now. All right. Fourth Donald Ross course that I think is essential is a Ronoman golf club in Philadelphia or near Philadelphia. This is the current years PGA Championship venue. Really cool golf course that I think got a bit of a bad break with weather at the past couple of PGA Tour events that it hosted. The excellence of the course didn't come through as much in those tournaments because I think that the greens need to play firm. There needs to be a little bit of win So I'm hoping that we get that, but I'm not sure that we will get it in May, so we'll see about that. But yeah, I've heard Tom Doak say that Donald Ross was the best in the world at working out good routings of rectangular constricted properties. Those properties can be pretty tricky because you often end up with a lot of parallel holes or parts of the routing that feel cramped or unnatural. But Donald Ross was always so good at finding ways to make routings on this type of site feel open and organic and multidirectional rather than linear and awkward and constricted and aronom Mink is an excellent excellent example of that. If you look at a map of the course. Just pay attention to the way the routing constantly bounces between the boundaries of the site and the middle of the site, and the ways that holes kind of work on diagonals out to corners and then go out in different directions. The routing is continually changing direction and doing something different. It's really pretty brilliant how Ross worked that out. And then you have the greens, which is it's one of the best sets of Donald Ross green anywhere. I think it's right up there with Oakland Hills. They're very, very inventive, and you know, each green feels like it's part of a theme, but it is memorable in and of itself. So yeah, aronomic great golf course. I hope it comes through in the telecast for the PGA Championship. Finally, we have Seminole Golf Club in South Florida. Donald Ross built this course in the late nineteen twenties, so this was toward the end of his golden period and someone is currently undergoing a pretty ambitious Gilhan's renovation. Hans is making some big changes to the greens. He is, you know, bringing back some planned Ross characteristics of those greens that might or might not have actually been put in the ground. It's a pretty interesting project and I'm curious to see the outcome of it. But for me, what has always made Seminole special is the combination of the seaside wind and the constant changes of direction in the routing. This is another example of Ross just being better than everybody else at coming up with routings on smallish, roughly rectangular properties. Seminole is brilliant in that regard. There's never a moment where the routing feels limited or stuck in a certain direction. And in particular, the way Ross uses the big ridges at either end of the site is brilliant. There's a big ridge on the ocean side portion of the site and then there's a an accompanying ridge kind of parallel inland, and the holes are constantly interacting with these two big topographical features. So there's a lot of action on the golf course on a site that could have ended up being a little bit boring. So those are my five essential Donald Ross courses. Pinehurst Number two, Essex County Club, Oakland Hills, South Brooni, Mink and Seminole. Now, the greatest thing I think about studying Donald Ross is that his body of work is so deep and rich that you never really feel like you're at the bottom of it, or that you don't have more to learn. You know, of the great architects, there might have been a few who built more firstier all time courses than Ross. Maybe Alistair Mackenzie did, Harry Colt probably did, or in the modern period Corn Crenshaw and Tom Doak are running up the score in that regard. But I'm not sure any architect has ever built as many very good slash excellent courses as Donald Ross did. This is partly because he had a lot of reps. He did a lot of projects. He was always on the train, always looking at new sites, always coming up with plans, maybe not seeing some of these courses again after he submitted to plans. But in spite of that working method, he had a really high hit rate. If you go to a Donald Ross course that has been pretty well preserved and was actually designed by Donald Ross, you can almost be assured that it's going to be well routed, well built, have some memorable holes and cool greens, and be really playable and fun. He was the professional architects professional architect, and so beyond just his five essential courses. It's really worth pursuing and exploring Donald Ross's full catalog, so have fun with that. All right, I'd like to continue this discussion of Donald Ross with doctor Bradley S. Klein. Bradklin, as I mentioned at the top, is one of the og modern golf architecture writers. He was doing this stuff in the eighties and nineties before it was fashionable, and he did a lot specifically to enhance people's understanding and appreciation of Donald Ross. So I'm very excited to toss him some questions from members of Frida Egg Golf Club. We got some really good, thoughtful questions from FEGC, and if you'd like to participate in future mail bags. First of all, make sure to join Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Friday dot com slash memberships to sign up. I said memberships, but it's actually not plural, it's slash membership. And then make sure to keep up with what's going on in our member forum, because that is where I put out this call for questions. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Brad Klein. I'm here with Bradley Klein. Brad, how are you doing today.

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Speaker 2: Great, the beautiful starting to get some spring weather. Might actually go play golf one of these days.

00:15:23
Speaker 1: It's starting to get to be that week when we make the decision to take the clubs out of the garage and go do our best.

00:15:32
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, every morning, and still we have frost delays, but it warms up.

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Speaker 1: So yeah. Well, so today we're talking about Donald Ross in advance of the PGA Championship at aronom Ink. And I thought the way that we would do this, Brad, would be to ask some of our members at Friday Golf Club for any questions they have about Donald Ross's design, philosophy, career, or whatever else. I got a bunch of really good questions, and so we're just gonna dive into the mail bag here. The first question I have for you is from Zach Anderson, and Zach asks if you were blindfolded and led onto an anonymous golf course, what elements routing, hazard placement, green shapes would tell you it's a Ross design. And I like this question a lot because it kind of gets that what you think is distinctive about Donald Ross's design style, which can be a little tricky to pin down because there are many Donald Ross's, so to speak. So how would you answer that question?

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Speaker 2: As first of all, it's a great question, and I'm always appreciative of anything that is different than what are your three favorite Donald Ross courses? Right, So that's actually a very thoughtful question. So the first thing is that Donald Ross were a century ago. It's now twenty twenty six, and we're going to be looking at golf courses that have evolved over one hundred and twenty to eighty years, so there's a little bit of a qualifier. But the first thing I would look at is the routing. And by what I mean by the routing is the sequence of the holes, how they fit onto the parcel. And with Ross, it's fairly distinctive that there is an intimate relationship between green to next tea. You're not walking a long ways. He fills up the space. As someone once described it, it's like a bowl of baby shrimp. They all fit together and there's not a lot of superfluous space. He'll have the occasional triangle of one hundred and fifty yards for a practice area, but for the most part, the dog legs fit in a way that is really intimate. So that's what I would look for is kind of an intimate connection. Most but not all of his golf courses are returning nines the later the second half of his career. You know, he came to the United States in eighteen ninety nine. He designed about four hundred and ten courses until his death in nineteen forty eight, roughly a couple of different phases in the middle, but a little more strategic. I would say that more of his courses are returning nines in the second half of his career. But I would look at the intimacy of the routing. That's the first thing. The second thing, and are the green contourse. Now, this is tricky because over a long period of time and maintenance and neglect and alteration, a lot of his greens have shrunk, They've become more circular, they've lost some of then a lot of the contour because of top dressing. The square edges up front have been rounded off through triplex mowing or normal practices. So that's a little harder to determine. But I would I always look at his the position of the greens, so that they're set on a little bit of a rise, and the back that tends to fall off because what he would do or has met his construction crew. You know, he was building or having his golf courses built by hand labor, dozens of laborers with wheelbarrows for the most part, and they would build up the fill pad of the green by taking the dirt from behind and then just piling it on. And you know, a couple of days of that, and you have a fill pad that rises three feet in the back one foot in the front. So I would look for those fall offs in the back that balance the cut and fill that comprises the fill pad. So that's the second thing I would look for, and then I would look for the fairway bunkering and the green side bunkering. His fairway bunkering tended to be about two hundred yards to twenty off the tee of what was then the back tape the turnpoints. Some of those have been a lot of those have been lost over the years. But I always love looking for what the ghost bunkers, the sort of abandoned hollows. I remember when I was doing my preview of Oak Hill for the twenty three PGA, and I went around with an assistant pro and I was pointing out to him the old ghost bunkers from the shorter part placement that had been altered over the years, and you still see those in the ground because when they abandoned bunkers over the years, they wouldn't fill them in, they just let the grass grow. So you sort of look for those signs of the ghost bunkers. And also you look for the fill pad, the green, the platform that sits on with the bunkers tended to be put at the base of the fill pad, so that you had a natural rise of a foot or two down into the bunker and a foot or two up to the green, and that formed your three and a half four foot the depth of the bunker. So you look for those kind of characteristics generally, and that's the start. I would say of Moross, you'd often find a very short part three surrounded by bunkers. I could five of them right off the top of you know, want to moist it. The third hole to Ujica, the seventh hole, SIOUTA, the ninth hole for example, come right to mind. And very often a short, very short part three surrounded by bunkers, with a little bit of a hollow and a and then a little bit of a ledge behind the hollow for the whole locations. So those are the things you look for right away or tell tale I would say.

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Speaker 1: Follow up question from Zach Anderson related to what you're just saying, are there any kind of template holes Donald Ross template holes that people should look for? You just named the short par three surrounded by bunkers. Something that comes to mind for me is a you know, a volcano green, so called volcano green, although there aren't an overwhelming number of those, but they are very memorable, and so you know, whenever you see one of those holes with the that where the green kind of set on a knob that falls off on all sides, you remember it.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. The best one is the thirteenth of Franklin Hills in Detroit. That's absolutely three hundred and ten yard hole with a yeah, probably a two thousand square foot green perched way up in the air.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, very cool hole and interesting that it's not a part three in the case of Franklin Hills. But there are a few of those Ross Ross volcano greens. There's another one at Lulu country Club, I guess, and the Country Club of Buffalo, and there are a few here and there. But are there any other It was was Ross somebody who thought in terms of template holes at all?

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Speaker 2: No, did not. So just as an example, you name Country Club of Buffalo, the volcano hole, there is a middle length part three, the sixth hole, you know. And then so here's the thing with Ross. He was trying to work to puzzle out all those shrimp falling together on that platform or in that bowl that he was working with, and so you know, he would often, I would say that he often relied upon a very short part three if there's a template hole, although they differ dramatically, but I've seen a lot of the very short little drop shot part three. And again we've mentioned a few of them already, the restored fifth hole at Oak Hill, for example.

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Speaker 1: There's a great one at Roaring Gap. It's kind of a combination of a volcano hole and a and a and a drop shot par three. It is, I believe the sixth hole, but don't quote me on that. In any case, striking hole.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, But you know, sometimes they were uphill, like the fourteenth at Augusta Country Club. So it varied a lot here. But I've seen, you know, I would say I've seen that a lot on US courses and I've also seen a very long part three two thirty, the fourteenth that ok Kill, the thirteenth at Wamping on the fourth at Worcester, for example, come immediately to mind. The seventeenth at Brayburn, come you know, so they the ninth at oak Kill also you'll see a long part three. But having said that the bunkering would have varied, the contouring would have varied, I will say that I have seen more of that short part three with the thumb print green up front and the little shelf around the back of it, and but I haven't seen it. At every course you will often see a shorter I wouldn't call a driveable part four, but you'll see a three hundred and fifty three hundred and forty yard par four very well bunkered in the landing area with a small green idle hour in Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky. The fourth hole, although they keep changing the nines, but it's the fourth hole there Uphill comes to mind. A third at Pinehurst, number two kind of a classic.

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Speaker 1: Yet will yeah drive on a pedgehole?

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Speaker 2: Yeah yeah? The sixth that Oakland at Oakland Hills, for example, comes right to mind there as well, you'll see a shot a much shorter hole. They were never drivable in those days. They've become driveable. But he was very good at throwing in the occasional short part four, not usually at the start or at the end of a round, although when he got squeezed for territory like fourteen the eighteenth hole in Inverness, and he wasn't averse to using a short hole to end Wooster the same thing. Beautiful, short little hole, but with a lot of contour and a lot of complexity to the landing zone. So there was always a challenge and thoughtfulness required. What you don't see with ross our long par fives. A lot of his par fives were for eighty four seventy. You know, the best one is Holston Hills, the seventh hole down in Knoxville, Tennessee, with multiple paths to the green. He was a master at delineating alternative paths, and unfortunately those holes have lost their strategic value given the distances that people are hitting. But when he would map out, you know, a t shot of two twenty and a second shot of two hundred and a wedge shot, and then you had alternate paths. Those are really intriguing. So I've seen a lot of those mapped out over the years, which I think have in effect become essentially long four parts. But I would say, of you know, it's certainly not like Rainer or for example, you didn't have the tilling Hast array of part three's, for example, where you had your standard refol. For example, you didn't have your beerits or He built one pseudo Beirits, as far as I can tell, not Beirits re Dan. The only Redan that I know for sure is the ninth hole. Had built more forest in Asheville, North Carolina. He built the occasional punch bowl, not very often, you know. Nothing was sixteenth and augusta country club comes to mind, but not real severe. So he was always very i would say, more varied in his design genres than most architects.

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Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So well, why don't we apply some of these ideas that you're laying out here to a particular course. Ironom Inc is coming up as the venue of the PGA Championship. I think ironom Inc is a very interesting example of one ross routing and two ross green building. Irono mi Ink has outstanding greens, and this may not come through on TV very well. But a really interesting set of Donald Ross greens, and the routing is is brilliant. You know. It's one of those Ross routings that's on kind of this rectangular site. And Ross was maybe better than anybody at figuring out how to route rectangular sites with variety, and the way he does it at Aronomic, I'd like to get your thoughts as well, but I really, I really think it's interesting how he uses these diagonal holes at at Ironomy, the way the holes work on diagonals in relation to the rectangle that is the property. He has holes kind of playing out to corners of the site in ways that open up land to use, and and it's you know, it really works well. At Ironomy. The two nines kind of kind of do similar things in relation to the site where where they play into the middle of the site and then out corners on similar cadences. So the routing is is pretty brilliant Aronomic. The greens are are fantastic. So what are some of your thoughts, Brad about how you know how Aeronomic embodies Ross's design style.

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Speaker 2: Well, you've laid it out pretty nicely. And the brilliant thing about ironomy is you're always turning a corner. Once you come off the first The first green heads to the southeast corner of the property on a fairly complicated piece of terrain. Then you tack inside diagonally on two, then you go up three into the corner. On four and the fourth you're down to the south west corner. Then you work your way up to the north a little bit, and then you come back and then you end up at the ninth green, back in the right, top right corner. Then you turn right around, so you're always tacking. You're always turning around after the tee to go to the next hall. I think I counted fourteen changes of direction when you walk off of the t which is remarkable. You know, the only time you're going in the same direction at all is four or five, thirteen, fourteen.

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Speaker 1: That's it.

00:30:59
Speaker 2: Everything else you're moving to the right or left, turning around completely.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's not very often that you that you go back in the opposite door. It's not like you're always going back in the opposite direction. It's not. It's not the sardines. Yeah, it's like different kinds of turns, which makes it in well.

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Speaker 2: The only time you actually turn right around and flip is five to six and then fifteen to sixteen.

00:31:23
Speaker 1: Yep.

00:31:23
Speaker 2: So but you're always moving. And the other thing that's interesting is that it's a bunch of basically demanding four pars that are on the lengthier side. On the front nine, the average I just wrote this for PGA tour dot com. On the front nine, the six par fours average four to thirty five and on the back nine, the six par fours average four sixty five. So there's a that's a two club difference to every green. That's that's not a mistake. That's amping up the challenge. You know. The two clubs is even on the tour. That's a big difference. That's a difference between a nine iron and a seven iron, which is a lot for those guys. So you're constantly changing directions. That's the first thing. And it's a big site. That golf course was originally intended for twenty seven holes. The area that was going to be the third nine is now designated or used for the range and some kind of open club area, but the property itself is moving. Andy Johnson described it as sort of descending into a bowl where you go from one, two, three, and then you drop down and then you come back up a little bit. But every green where every fairway is sitting on a side slope, so you're not just dealing with a direction, you're dealing with an angle where it kicks, which is resulting in a very interesting setup. The fairway is their average in the landing area between twenty yards and fifty yards. I asked Carrie Hey, who's responsible for PGA Tour for PGA of America set up on championships, what's your average fairway with He says, there is no average. It varies dramatically because of the way in which they've allowed the slopes to dominate the play. So there are some very tight landing areas. You know, there is a short There is one short par four the thirteenth hall. It's back to these three eighty five, but at least one maybe two days they're going to play it at two ninety five, and it's got the very tight landing area and out of bounds on the left right along the green, So it brings the hazard into play that is actually a worthy risk, which isn't always the case on these shortened parf furs. So I give them credit for the variety. So what's great about that golf course is you're constantly changing. You don't get comfortable with the wind, you don't get comfortable with the terrain, and you don't get comfortable with where you have to work the shot left to right, right to left. That's the first thing. The second thing is it's an extraordinarily powerful set of greens. And I should have said this early on. The first thing you do when you're dealing with Donald Ross is you forget about Pinehurst number two. Pineher's number two is a complete anomaly. The greens had nothing to do with anything he ever built anywhere else. Those turtlebackgreens are an evolution, probably a mistake, unintended. They're not what Ross initially designed. They've evolved over the years. They got higher and they got more pronounced, and Ben and Bill Color and Crenshaw I didn't have the nerve to change them when they did their big restoration in twelve twenty thirteen. So that's become the anomaly which people mistake for the paradigm. It's not. It's completely uncharacteristic. Then when you get to aronomic, it is stunning in terms of the complexity the boldness of the severity of the slopes, and the potential if they wanted to, they could set that golf course up for seven hour rounds that nobody would ever break eighty just with whole locations on the margins, on the edges and so on. They're smarter than that, and these guys are good enough that they can actually handle it. But you know, those greens are going to be rolling at thirteen and a half cut to a tenth of an inch rolled and mode daily, probably roll twice, and it's going to be a stunning set of complex contours where you're going to have to really figure out where the ball is going to end up and where it's going to slow down and stop. And they're going to be twenty foot plots that break nine feet on that golf course that they're going to have, which is going to be fascinating to watch. So now this is the interesting part of the whole construction of Ironoming. We know, first of all, we know Ross was there because he has fairly detailed drawings, but also there's a fascinating eight millimeter film. It's a four minute movie that somebody made of the construction, and it's very rough it's all they're hands sawing trees that are sixty eighty caliber. That's a lot of work. Yeah, so they did a lot of clearing. And then there's about thirty seconds when Ross himself appears on the film. He's on the site. He's in his three piece jacket with a little handkerchief, and he's looking very proper and clean, and all these laborers are struggling and you know, trenching and putting an irrigation pipe. And then Ross goes up in an airplane and they fell him flying getting in the airplane and flying above the site. He's surveying the side, so we know he was there. It's a precious piece of film, and it's available on the It's available on YouTube somewhere.

00:37:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's on YouTube. That's the thing about it. I've encountered this as well, and it's kind of surprising to me that something like this is on YouTube, but it is there if you search for it.

00:37:12
Speaker 2: Yeah. I've seen both the black and white and the colorized version. I have to say the black and white is starker, but in any case, so the first thing is we know Ross was there, and we know he appreciated it because later on in the little book that Ron Witten came up with called Golf has Never Failed Me. There's a famous sentence that Ross author. He says, basically the golf course he knew it was going to be a great championship course. It turned out better than he ever thought. The reason it turned out better than he thought is because the green chairman, who was also construction supervisor, was JB. McGovern. JB. McGovern was Donald Ross's right hand man for twenty years. JB. McGovern was hired by Ross in nineteen seventeen or eighteen. He was a skilled landscape architect. He was based in Philadelphia. He was green chairman at Ironomy Ink, and he oversaw the project so Ross didn't have to worry about the quality of the construction. And then the other thing that's really amazing is that Ross's plans for Ironomy Ink are very sketchy. In terms of the bunker plan. They generally indicate where he wanted bunkers. But mcgovernent went nuts with bunkering and put one hundred and seventy five bunkers out there, which is I think probably more than any I can recall off the top of my head in any other ross course. So over the years, those bunkers got what's the word, joined up, and they you know, by nineteen ninety they were down to seventy five bunkers. And when Ron Pritchard first restored the golf course in the nineteen nineties, he rebuilt those seventy five bunkers. And then the superintendent discovered the old aerial photography of the golf course that had been made in the early thirties, and they counted and they found all these bunkers, and so they then went back and restored all of those. So now the golf course has the original count and the proliferation of one hundred and seventy five bunkers, and it's an astonishing scattering in you know, there was holes where there are bunkers one hundred yards off the tee and they put them back, and then there are others downfield. They moved them a little bit for visibility and for positioning and strategy. Where the terrainal out for this was Gill Hands and Jim Wagnerhood did this in twenty sixteen and they did a great job, and they expanded the greens back out about twenty five percent to recapture all those whole locations. So now what you have is an unusual, distinctive, an array of features which I think are among Ross's strongness that he ever actually created, and that will be the show piece for the PGA Championship.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: Well, in the case of the bunkers, Ross didn't necessarily even really create them. It sounds like it was JB. McGovern who is the primary influence behind this bunkering style, which is unusual in Ross's ubra. Right, That's something that makes ironomyk stick out a little bit, is that it has this kind of clustered bunkering style that has been restored by by Gil Hansen and Jim Wagner in recent years. So this gets to a kind of philosophical question about restoration. Do you restore the as built, as represented by early photographs, aerial photographs especially, or do you restore the plans because Ross's plans probably were different, right, they.

00:41:00
Speaker 2: Were different, but they were also incomplete. So you know, Gil, I've spent a lot of time with Gil hands on ross restorations. I worked with him at Worcester Country Club up in Massachusetts, for example, And I'll never forget this sentence that he uttered when he was you could believe this interviewing for the job. This is in twenty nineteen, like he needed to interview for a job, and we were making a presentation. I put the PowerPoint together and Gilve is just masterful in terms of explaining Ross's thinking. And the question was are you an expert on Donald are you a restoration expert on Donald Ross? And Gil's response was, I'm an expert on what Ross created here at Worcester Country Club. And it was the perfect answer because what he did at Worcester in nineteen thirteen was completely different than what he created at Aronomy in nineteen twenty eight. It's totally different than what evolved at Pinehurst. It's completely different than the strategy at Seminole on and on and on, so or Salem Country Club, Salem Country Club, which was a much more up in the Boston area, which was a much more strategic, spartan look, very few bunkers, scattered, very modestly but functionally. So you know, that's the beauty of Ross. He was site specific and Aronomy is unique in that regard. And I hope they show those areas because it really is inspiring to see those those areas by the way were taken by a Colonel Victor Dollon, who was an air enthusiastic pilot, a photographer. He was an avid golfer who lived in Philadelphia. He had a big studio, camera studio, and he mounted a camera on the bottom of a biplane and flew over golf courses all over the mid Atlantic. And the collection, now the Dollin Collection at the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, is a major source of information for those who were interested in restoring the classic era golf courses.

00:43:25
Speaker 1: Oh that's neat. So he was specifically interested in golf courses. This wasn't just like a generalized survey. He was going for the golf courses and.

00:43:33
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, he mounted these at the bottom of an airplane. He flew over hundreds of golf courses. He's got I think the collection is five hundred golf courses or five hundred or so. Of course, he became the Commissioner of Airports for the state of Pennsylvania, but ultimately retired. And guess where he ended up living, Pinehurst, North Carolina.

00:43:55
Speaker 1: Of course, where else would you go? That's right, that's where we all end up in the and Bradley. I think, yeah, that's where we're that's where we're all going.

00:44:05
Speaker 2: But that's source of And I'll just give you another example, because I've been writing about this and I was involved. I did some restoration work at Kennett Square Golfing country Club, which is basically south southwest of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, and that was a golf course that rosted in nineteen twenty two. And we have the aerial overflies from Dollin collection which showed essentially coffins, rectangular coffins, and so we restored them to the whole golf course. So that was as detailed and as you know, it was only twenty miles away from aronom Inc. But completely different style.

00:44:47
Speaker 1: So right, yeah, I mean, this is what you have at the site. This is what you want to see, or at least what I want to see in ross restorations is the specificity to cite and project because everyone was different and there influences from the seconds in command as well that I think deserve to be represented as well. And so that's what we get at ironom Inc. And I think that ironom Inc. You know, in the past couple of tournaments that it hosted on the PGA Tour. It got a bit of bad luck because it was wet at both of those tournaments and the course was playing slow. And who knows what we'll get in May in Philadelphia. You know, it could be the same story at this PGA Championship, which would be a shame. But if it's firm, if it's windy, it's going to be a different golf course, and I think that people will find it much more interesting than they found it in those, you know, past couple of PGA Tour tournaments that were hosted there so far.

00:45:46
Speaker 2: Has been very dry. It's impossible to imagine, or I should say it's astonishing to imagine Keegan Bradley and Justin Rose shooting eighteen under par yeah, as they did in the BMW Championship in twenty eighteen. You know, if there's any wind and it's firm and dry and a par seventy golf course with a one par five that very very few people will be reaching and lots of demanding four pars, you know, you could see a winning score of five six under these. You know, it's impossible to imagine how good these guys really are and what they can do. But to do that for four days is really quite something.

00:46:40
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by the Golf Course Superintendent's Association of America. We're very excited to partner with the GCSAA. This partnership makes a ton of sense for Friday Golf. I would say, actually that our company would not exist in its current form if it weren't for the way that superintendents have supported us. We have always been able to call up golf course superintendents and talk about their courses and just get knowledge from the source itself. They are the people actually walking the land out there. Nobody knows more about the golf courses that we talk about on this podcast and on our website and on other videos and podcasts that we do than the superintendents. The GCSAA supports more than twenty one thousand members worldwide, from superintendents to equipment managers, as well to students and educators who feed in to the superintendent profession. Currently, GCSAA is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary, and they continue to ensure that their members are on the forefront of research, education, innovation, and advocacy through a range of programs and services. So if you want to support golf course superintendents, which is a good thing to do, you should support golf course superintendents. Then you should check out what gc SAA is doing and consider supporting them. You can learn more about the organization at gcs AA dot org. Check them out. Okay, let's get back to some reader questions here. I'd like to this. Yeah, they're good questions. The folks at Friday Golf Club are very smart about golf architecture, and so when I asked them to ask questions related to Ross, they actually get into some insights here. So these are some The next couple of questions are more about Ross's kind of career I suppose as opposed to his style. So read Pasifero asks how would you compare Ross's earlier courses with his later ones? And we can kind of pair this up with a question from my colleague Will Knights, and he asks, do you see themes or periods in Ross's career like you might for Picasso or something. So those two questions take on how you want to take them differences between early Ross and late Ross, and do you see any periods kind of in his career that you could identify.

00:49:30
Speaker 2: So the short answer is yes, distinctively. And I would say there are three periods which I've written about. First of all, he starts off coming off the boat from Scotland in eighteen ninety nine at Oakley and for up in Boston, and for the first fifteen sixteen years he's on his own. So his early work Worcester Country Club, for example, Rhode Island to come immediately to mind Essex County Club up in Boston. They have a kind of very distinctive random use of bunkering, lots of mounds, lots of buried debris. When he took down trees, he'd throw the trees into a pile and put dirt on top, and then they would break down over the years and create a regular mounting scattershot bunkering. Didn't think anything of pot bunkers, big long linear ones, much more random scattering of bunker shots in a more penal mode at Rhode Island Country Club, for example, where he actually used a lot of small bunkers. He's also got inverted bunkers. He's got always get confused con vex bunkering vers bunkering. Sand piled up.

00:51:03
Speaker 1: Like dunes, Yeah, right, like you see a garden city in Jacob.

00:51:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, so very random, very scattershot, very different green styles with sometimes very you know, twenty five hundred square foot greens and others seven thousand, much more scattershot. Nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen, he hires Walter Hatch and JB. Mcgovernors and associates. He starts developing much more sophisticated planning documentation whole by whole drawings. In twenty October nineteen twenty, he has a civil engineer in house who then converts those drawings onto blueprint grid ten yard paper, and now you've got a much more formal process. He's now becoming, after World War On, kind of the Henry Ford of mass production. He's doing fifteen twenty courses a year. He's not able to oversee everything as carefully. He's deputizing the Hatch and McGovern And you see a more strategic use of bunkering, where instead of short one hundred and fifteen one hundred and twenty on hopscotch stuff, it's a little more strategic in the corners. The bunkers get deepened and a little bit more rounded in terms of flashed up, whereas before he's using a flatter style, and that's kind of the strength of his design period where he's a little bit more spartan and a little bit more I would almost say predictable. In terms of the green size, they tend to average about fifty five hundred to sixty five hundred square feet, not as much front linear, a little more rounded. And then in his in the mid thirties, Hatch and McGovern go off on their own. There's almost no work. Ross is confined more so to the Pinehurst area. He's rationalizing the bunkering. It's much more simplified, very very few spartan bunkering Hartford Golf Club, for example, the third nine on Hartford, which Who's done in the late forties. Raleigh Country Club as well has that look as well. So what I would say is that there is a rationalization and a kind of simplification of this design over the years. I don't know if I want to break it as much into phases, because you do have these anomalous examples, aronomy being one, and then one of my favorites right down the road where I was very involved both as a member and then is on the restoration wamping on Country Club in West Hartford. Eight of the first nine holes have cross bunkers one hundred and twenty yards off the tee, and every hole on the back nine has either a cross bunker or a major water hazard for a t shot. So yeah, comes out of nowhere. So he's obviously able to break the mold at times. But generally there's a simplification and I find as early as work generally more interesting and more varied to me, Essex County Club up in the north side of Boston is one of the great examples of that.

00:54:49
Speaker 1: Absolutely, there's a kind of freedom in the design at Essex County Club that you maybe don't see in later ross courses. It's sort of unexpectedness of feature.

00:54:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then he's got these, you know, the more strategic stuff. Franklin Hills comes to mind, for example, or as a really good example, which was mid late I think nineteen twenty six. That's a great example of a very spartan use of dramatic slopes and bunkering, but not a massive proliferation of features.

00:55:22
Speaker 1: So right, Yeah, So in general simplification over time, I like this term rationalization, you know, almost as though he is becoming kind of more professional or restrained or elegant over time. But do you see this as I mean, is there a bit of a loss of verve in his design over time?

00:55:47
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, but his greens get really interesting. You know, It's like he concentrated his impact on the greens. You think about what Seminole used to be and what it's getting back to now, for example, a lot more variety. So he was absolutely a master at shaping interesting greens, and that got stronger as he went on. You know, the older work was actually simpler greens, but much more complicated bunkering to get there. It's almost as if the emphasis. You know, the equipment has changing completely by the late twenties, You've got the advent of well, early thirties steel shafts, sandwiches for example, much more reliable golf ball irrigation, consistency in the agronomy, and the maintenance. You're mowing fairways more than once a week. So that the shift in emphasis, I think it's fair to say, and I've never thought about it till just now, which is interesting. But that's that's how great this question is. I think the emphasis went from essentially t shot to approach to green in terms of where he emphas sized his impact.

00:57:02
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. I think that's absolutely true. Right if you if you take Essex County Club as an example and compare it to say, uh, well, maybe ironom ink isn't the best example because of how complex ironom innks bunkering schemes are. But but if you look at the green the approach to green design, the greens at Essex County Club are very interesting, and it's great that they haven't blown them up. They've just kind of kept them over time, and and so they have all these little wrinkles, little tiny wrinkles in them. They're they're very interesting, but they're not they're they're they're nothing like the style of green that that Ross built at say Franklin Hills or or or around them ink uh. They they are much simpler and and so yeah, it does seem like his his interests kind of shifted to the greens as opposed to the you know, overall layout of the holes and arrangement of hazards, et cetera. Maybe he discovered that, Okay, I can do a few things at the green that have a really big impact, and I don't need to build all this other stuff in a sense.

00:58:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you know, I've been writing about this for forty years, and the first time I've thought about it along these particular lines. It may also have something to do with the simplification of construction, where the process of taming the landforms and building in the bunkers became easier, so that that sort of took care of itself, whereas the process was more concentrated on the shaping, mold and crafting of those of those putting surfaces.

00:58:40
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, Yeah, And you could use bigger equipment too in shaping those fairway features. You weren't you were necessarily just sending men out to dig every bunker. You could use some bigger equipment for those bigger tasks and then concentrate the manual work more on more on the greens, I suppose. But a lot of interesting possibilities there for why his style evolved the way it did. Now, that's a question. The one we just we're grappling with is a question about Ross's career over time. This next question is about Ross's career over geography. Ben Dennison asks, how would you assess or rank the Ross catalog of courses by geography Northeast, Southeast and Midwest? Is there? Do you do you like to split Ross's catalog into those different geographies. Do you have a favorite region of Ross? Do you think he shifted his style from region to region?

00:59:46
Speaker 2: Again a great question. I've mapped this out. And first of all, nobody ever talks about his workout west because right across the only cross the Mississippi River. I think twice in his life he went out.

01:00:00
Speaker 1: Is there only one Ross course in California?

01:00:02
Speaker 2: Is that the golfing country Club in San Mateo, which he was very interesting by the way he went out there. His wife Janet died in February of twenty two. Ross went into a funk, was kind of depressed all year, took a three week hiatus, got a ridiculous fee from negotiated a ridiculously crazy high fee from this new club in San Mateo called Beresford. He went out there for basically a month, went to San Francisco, after touring some courses in La laid out a golf course, went back and never saw the golf course and it was opened a year and a half later. And then he's got a couple of courses in Denver, one in Topeka. He's got Cedar Rapids nineteen fifteen, and in that's not you know, a couple in Texas, but very little. Anyway, The short answer is my favorite ross courses are built along the Great Lakes, along the moraine territory of Rochester, Buffalo into one of my absolute favorites up in Duluth, Northland. Sure, he was a master of using the glacial moraine and the terrain that had been created by the glaciers. And that's that's okill, that's Monroe, which is astonishing, a country club Buffalo with massive slopes and big washouts, all created by the washouts from them, the glaciers. Detroit.

01:01:58
Speaker 1: I was just gonna ask you you include Detroit in this. I mean, obviously it's Great Lakes, but but it's yeah, kind of part of the same geological formation that you're talking about.

01:02:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's my favorite. That's to me is the strongest consistent quality of work that he did. Skulkie has that quality. Beverly certainly they come immediately to mind.

01:02:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is it's I haven't thought of these courses as all as a group before, but he built so many courses in Rochester. He built so many courses in the Detroit suburbs and in these kind of upper Midwestern cities. He really kind of made a second home in this area, and he built some of his most kind of spectacular and fully realized courses on these pieces of land. They obviously, you know, this kind of land inspired him in some way or another. You know, the kind of land you see at at Oakland Hills and in Rochester and these different places. And that's it's that's really interesting. Yeah, I don't know if it's happenstance or or if he when he got a job in one of these areas, he just thought to himself, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna really throw it all at this one.

01:03:17
Speaker 2: Well, a couple of things. First of all, it's the railroads, so he was writing. I've documented his travels. He was back and forth all the time on the railroads, and it was an easy trip from Boston through Buffalo Cleveland. I have one of his itineraries. He's in Detroit on a Saturday morning and he wires folks up it sends a letter actually, or writes them up in Northland. He says he'll be there twenty three hours later. It takes some twenty three hours to go by train from Detroit to Duluth via Chicago and Minneapolis. But that's what he did. He rode the trains and he went where those who were and it shows and you know that if you think about the glacial moraine, you're creating thirty forty foot falls, which is what you want. By the way, one of the greatest of his courses that nobody ever talks about is Glen's Falls up in upstate New York.

01:04:18
Speaker 1: I've heard wonderful things about this course. I have not been yet, but it's very high on the list.

01:04:23
Speaker 2: It's where the Wisconsin Glacier ripped through and just transformed the landforms and created these incredible, incredible terrain, even down in the Bronx, New york'si WINOI very impressive in terms of how he routed all of his holes. The short holes go use the most severe terrain, the long holes right on top, very clear use of really beautiful rolling terrain. The oddity, I have to say, the oddity of raw is he only did one little nine hole golf course on Long Island. Everybody else was making hay there and he did North Fork Country Club. It did the front the original nine holes, which was then capped off by nine holes by Devereux Emmett in the twenties, but he was there in nineteen twelve nineteen thirteen fairly early on. Never did another one. So the short answer is the Great Lakes district is really strong to me. Obviously, he did a lot of work in the Carolinas, in the mountains as well, all through on very different terrain, the sand hills of Pinehurst. Those courses obviously very strong, but didn't have as much of the interesting terrain as you had with the glacier.

01:05:47
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, I think I agree. Now that you have grouped those Rochester and Buffalo courses together with the Michigan ones and the Chicago ones, that does kind of and you know, highlight this this corpus of golf courses on similar terrain where where ross really seemed to seem to thrive. So the next question here is is kind of a fun hypothetical. I'm not I'm not sure where you're gonna go with this. I'm not sure where I would go with this, But justin McCarthy refers to, you know, the story that has been told from time to time of the handshake deal between Bobby Jones and Donald Ross to to build Jones's ideal course after Jones's retirement. In other words, Ross, you know, perhaps was Jones's first idea for an architect for Augusta National, and Justin goes on to say this all changed after after Jones lost early in the US Amateur at Pebble and decided to go see Cyprus while he was out there, which ultimately convinced him that doctor Mackenzie was the guy. Justin asks what would a Donald Ross version of a Gusta National have looked like? Would it too closely resemble Ross's work on the other side of Rays Creek at Augusta Country Club or do you think Ross would have created something equally special.

01:07:13
Speaker 2: I don't think there's any truth to this story, so I'm not seeing a piece of evidence, a reference. I don't believe a word of it. Ross was already at Augusta Country Club. He had done the eighteen holes, he was director of Golf, he had occasional job there where he was the resident pro. He was spending time there. I can't imagine that Augusta at Clifford Roberts would have hired the guy next door to build a golf course. So I don't see any evidence for it.

01:07:53
Speaker 1: Do you think there was ever a backup plan to Alistair mackenzie at all? See, because I'm not sure that Jones even had it in his mind that he, you know, what this course would be until he was aware of Alistair McKenzie.

01:08:06
Speaker 2: Well, someone want to ask Jim Nantz if he could ask Fred Ridley why they never paid Alistair McKenzie. You know, they stiffed him on his feet. I think McKenzie was supposed to get ten thousand dollars. They only paid him two thousand. He got pissed off.

01:08:21
Speaker 1: Fine. He was begging for it, McKenzie. He was sending letters saying, please pay me.

01:08:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he sends what's her name, the great female golfer.

01:08:33
Speaker 1: Marion Hollands.

01:08:34
Speaker 2: He sends Marion Hollins to finish the golf course and Ross, I mean McKenzie never saw the finish or a finished You never saw the golf course after mid nineteen thirty two.

01:08:46
Speaker 1: So, in other words, Ross dodged a bullet here.

01:08:49
Speaker 2: But I still think that's my first take on it. I think there's very little air to that story.

01:08:56
Speaker 1: But yeah, I haven't I haven't seen any good I think Lee Pays written about it before. I'm not sure what his conclusions were, but this is certainly more of an urban legend than it is an established historical fact. But the thought experiment is still perhaps perhaps interesting, perhaps not. Do you think Ross's approach to routing Augusta National would have been different from Mackenzie's. Do you think his stylistic approach would have been different than Mackenzie's? And how well?

01:09:27
Speaker 2: It's a great question. And now that I think about it, I'm trying to think of a golf course that Ross did where the routing overwhelmed everything. That's the beauty of Augusta National. It's high point to high point, it's across. You're playing across these big drop offs. You're sweeping down one hundred and twenty feet on the tenth hole used to be the first hole.

01:09:53
Speaker 1: It's such a different, difficult property to rout too, you know, I mean, I you know, Ross's built courses on all sorts of different sites, but one that is as severe and difficult and it poses the kind of challenges but at the same time opportunities as Augusta National. It's hard to think of one that Ross worked on that was like it.

01:10:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree, and it's interesting when you think about the original design. I think Mackenzie understood that because the land was so dramatic, he only needed twenty four bunkers to make it work, and so Ross himself. Northland is the only golf course I know of, and I'm sure the readers are smarter than this will figure one out. But Northland is one of those up unto the loof overlooking Lake Superior. It's one of those few golf courses where the routing. When I say overwhelmed, that's the wrong word. I don't mean swamps it. It is the story. The whole story of Northland is that incredible routing where it just climbs up and then descends and gives you this long view along the way. So that's more along the lines of what augusta national pain. So I don't know what he would have created had he had that opportunity. You know, if you look at the land next door where he augusta country club which has a very beautiful, elegant flow to it. It's a non returning golf course, essentially a link style. It's all basically paired off double fairways it was going to be a real estate on that There was real estate on the other course that Rainer had designed, But that's sort of marching up around back up along a creek bed to eight and then circling back. But it didn't have the scale and the width and the horizontal drum that Augusta had. So right, you know, I guess one of these days this might be a good article for I can think of another publication that to debunk the myth of ross Augusta Country.

01:12:23
Speaker 1: Hey, National, Look before every single masters, I ask myself, is there anything else that I can say about this golf course and its history? And perhaps this is an angle that that that needs to be taken one of these years. All right, moving on to the capstone question. The last question that I have for you, Brad, from from our readers. This is from Dan Grigg.

01:12:48
Speaker 2: Let me just say this, by the way, I think fried Egg has become the leader in architectural judgment and criticism, and the fact that you have these quality, this quality of questions is testament to that I reluctantly concede that a new form of social media might have overtaken classical long form print. In this regard.

01:13:13
Speaker 1: I don't know if I would call us, And we don't feel super new anymore. We feel like kind of old guys at this point. But that's very very nice of you to say, Brad, of course, And yeah, it's the it's our readers are the ones who kind of inspire the stuff that we do and enable us to do what we do. And uh, yeah, they're they're they're extremely an extremely smart and savvy bunch, and so we're just trying to keep up with them.

01:13:40
Speaker 2: As one of the last long form dinosaurs of old pros. I have to concede, you guys are doing a great job.

01:13:49
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. All right. Question from Dan Griffith, what aspect of the industry has been most heavily influenced by Ross? So the modern industry has been influenced by Ross, and he says in parentheses, more so than by his contemporaries. So, in other words, when you think of Ross's influence on the industry, is there a particular aspect of today's industry that you think Ross has had a particularly important role in shaping.

01:14:24
Speaker 2: So the first thing I would tell you is that I think the aspect of The industry that's been most neglected is routing. So it's a reverse answer or an inverse answer. I think that modern architecture should pay more attention, and Ross was blessed with the ability to take a unified piece of land and use it. It's much more difficult now. I understand that because of wetlands, regulations, housing, the economy, and the temptation to utilize large equipment to solve topographical issues. In Ross's day, they weren't moving fairways, they weren't leveling sight lines. You had to and if you didn't like the way the piece of land worked, you had to go next door to another farm and find another one hundred and sixty acres. You don't have that latitude now, so I think that the art of routing has been lost in a lot of modern design. That's one thing. So that's a different answer. The area that's been most influenced is probably the importance of turf grass and turf grass selection and mowing heights and adaptable grasses. Because he was an inveterate researcher. The front of the pine needles not pine needles, what's the pine crest? The holly in He used the land between the holly in what is now that Givens Memorial Library, that was a test lab for turf grass for putting greens. Because you know, people don't realize Pinehurst did not get grass greens until the nineteen thirty six PGA Championship. Right all through the twenties. This is astonishing. All through the nineteen twenties and into the early thirties, golfers at Pinehurst were playing on sand greens.

01:16:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is why I like to say sometimes, you know, sort of provocatively, maybe not entirely accurately, but there's some truth to it that Pinehurst number two is the nineteen thirties golf course, you know, the greens where the greens represent the state of the Donald Ross art by the nineteen thirties. They don't represent nineteen oh seven.

01:16:50
Speaker 2: No, that's exactly right. So and he wrote about this in the program. I have a copy of the original program for the thirty six PGA, and he talked about the importance of long irons and quality of putting grasses and the importance of turf to presenting a challenge. And he spent a lot of time trying to get Bermuda grass to sustain itself through the winter, and to get Italian rye and other overseated grasses to make them work on that golf course. So he was a real experimenter in turf grass quality, and he worked hand in hand with his superintendent Frank Maples, who was also his construction foreman, who became himself very important all through the construction and maintenance of the courses throughout the Carolinas in making sure that those grant because the hard part of the South was the weather extremes. You know, East Lake for years, for example, had two sets of greens. It had winter greens and summer greens, with completely different grasses. And when you have winter greens and summer greens in a small space, the quality of the putting surfaces are compromised. So it wasn't un till those were unified in the forties and fifties, probably in the fifties, that you've got what we think of as the modern version of East Lake, for example. So what I would say is that Ross himself he was you know, after all, his mentor was Old Tom Morris, and he was superintendent at Dornich, and he came over and the primitive conditions pre irrigation of turf quality and grounds in the United States did not allow for much of what we now celebrate as the ground game. So to get those proper conditions, he was really a master maintained of the importance of getting firm, draining, well growing soils and grow well growing grasses. And I think that's probably his biggest quiet legacy, if you will, that yeah, has transformed the industry.

01:19:07
Speaker 1: There's a whole strain. Yeah, there's a whole strain in Golden Age architecture in general where where these architects were contributing more to the science of turf grass than than anybody remembers, partly because it's so boring to read about. You know, you read the you read the you read the books by these guys, and you just want to skip the chapters chapters about grass.

01:19:31
Speaker 2: I've got all of those old turf grass books from Oakley and Piper and Horace Hutchinson.

01:19:38
Speaker 1: For example, incredibly tedious material. It's much more interesting to read about, you know, strategic golf and and those kinds of things. But to them, the most important stuff that they were writing was about turf grass because that they were really trying to figure this out and it was that they were there at the kind of begin of agronomic science for golf, and so certainly a legacy of Ross's that shouldn't be forgotten. Let me give you let me give you a take here about Ross as a golf architect and his legacy, and see if you agree with it. I'm not sure if I fly buy into this entirely myself, but I think Ross was really important in presenting a figure of a professional golf architect that other people then imitated. A lot of architects of Donald Ross's era kind of styled themselves as gentlemen, amateurs, right. This was just something that they did in their free time, and they took it seriously. But it wasn't a profession. It explicitly wasn't a profession. For somebody like George Thomas. Donald Ross very much styled himself as a professional, and he built so many courses. He optimized the number of courses that he was able to build by taking the train and by designing his business in a way that a golf architecture business hadn't really been designed before and after him, people like Robert Trent Jones picked up on that model. They looked at Donald Ross. I think the mid century American golf architects looked at Donald Ross. And while they didn't necessarily imitate his design style or even all of his working methods or his business practices, I think when they imagine themselves as a professional golf architect, they imagined somebody like Donald Ross, and that is a big aspect of Ross's influence. Does that resonate with you at all?

01:21:52
Speaker 2: No, it's you know, it's amazing. I have to say our conversation is making me think about stuff. I've been writing about it for forty years and thinking about it completely differently now for the first time. You're absolutely right if you think about the difference McDonald, CB McDonald and George Thomas weren't getting.

01:22:14
Speaker 1: Paid, right, They in a way they didn't want to be paid in the way that Bobby Jones didn't want to be paid because there was something there is something about that that would have been ungentlemanly.

01:22:26
Speaker 2: Right, And they were wealthy enough, and they also wanted to preserve amateur status. That has a little bit to do with USGA rules amateur status. But you're absolutely right. Ross professionalized the trade with his use of his design associates with Walter Irving Johnson, his draftsman, with Eric Nelson, the secretary, with the contract, with the procedures, the plans, the charging, the sequencing of visits. They turned it into a business where they were stamping out golf courses. And it's not a mistake that the American Society of Golf Course Architects is formed at Pinehurst in nineteen forty seven. Its first honorary president is Donald Ross. Robert Trent Jones was one of thirteen members in attendance, and he certainly styled himself became more of an aggressive business person. But you know, those were tough days and the architect there were very few architects who actually survived the depression and came out on the other side.

01:23:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, Jones. Jones was the one. You know, he'd fought and scrapped and figured out how to how to make a business out of it, and he.

01:23:36
Speaker 2: Starved during the thirties. Oh yeah, it's clear from that wonderful book.

01:23:43
Speaker 1: That Jim Hanson, by the difficult part, Yeah, recommended to everybody who's interested in golf architecture. It's a really, really fine, fine home.

01:23:53
Speaker 2: So the people who you know, very few people managed Bith William Flynn didn't really get very far afterwards. Stanley Thompson was died in the early fifties. Dick Wilson was one of the few who survived and made it, But was Jones who modeled himself. You're right after that practice, and that's that was the forming of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. But it was also the way in which they went about training because as you said, I don't know if I call them gentlemen, both of leisure, because their their their life choices were a little bit questionable in terms of their indulgences. But guys like McDonald and telling has for who squandered a fortune, died broke, penniless, depressed, miserable. They they didn't know how to manage their own business. They never had to, whereas Ross came up from working class background, so did Trent Johns. Of course, yeah, because they had to create something from scratch. They weren't born with anything to start with. So they understood the value of hard work and saving and money and efficiency and in their construction methods as well, you know. So I think it's a very interesting point that the professionalization starts with the model that Ross created with his use of associates.

01:25:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that that perspective on golf architecture as a profession almost required somebody like Ross who was fighting to make a living. You know, he didn't have hereditary wealth. He was an immigrant. He arrived in this country and immediately started to work his way into relate the relationships that would allow him to turn this into a sustainable profession. And his innovation in creating a living for himself very interestingly, I think ended up ended up essentially creating golf architecture as a professional practice.

01:26:10
Speaker 2: Yeah. And he was lucky enough that his clients just lined up outside his office there in Pinehurst. You know, he had an office above what's now the pro Shop overlooking the putting green that was his main office, and his clients all came there, they visited him, they stayed, and he had an incredible portfolio that he developed through that presence.

01:26:36
Speaker 1: Well, it's an amazing life. Yeah. Ross's life is remarkable. I'd recommend that anybody and everybody read about him, and in reading about him, they will encounter your work, Brad. The book Discovering Don Ross has been a very influential one in my understanding of the history of golf architecture, and you've written many other things about him as well. Anything that we should keep an eye on from you in the coming months here.

01:27:07
Speaker 2: So in the spirit of self promotion, I think Mike Hannigan of the USGA once said, if you don't have a conflict of interest, nobody takes you seriously in the industry. You know. Obviously I've written the biography Discovering Donald Ross. It's hard to imagine, but it came out in two thousand and one, right and I've sold out the book completely. I can't the printing is exhausted. It's now available on eBay for ridiculous amounts of money. Oh, I've gotten my copy, so I'm glad you do. But I'm proud to announce, through an arrangement with back nine Press, that going I'm doing now in a twenty fifth anniversary edition. We are calling it Rediscovering Donald Ross, and it's going to be that book plus a considerable amount of new material over the last twenty five years of restoration and the evolution of design and what's happened with Ross courses. So I'm putting that together now. We hope to have that book available for pre order through a back nine Press by the end of the year.

01:28:15
Speaker 1: Excellent. Back nine Press is doing a lot of great stuff, publishing a lot of excellent authors, and so people should just check out their offering in general. But I will definitely keep an eye eye out for rediscovering Donald Ross. This is the first I've heard of it, so that's exciting.

01:28:32
Speaker 2: It's the first and then I've ever announced it, so I'm using your platform.

01:28:36
Speaker 1: Hey, I'm glad to serve that purpose for you. Brad. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and answering these questions and we'll have to talk to you against him.

01:28:45
Speaker 2: And thanks to your readers for their intelligence and their goggedness at this. It'll make for it just makes some more interesting golf. And the one I will say this, I do think that architecture is not just some esoteric pursuit of the courses on the list on the top hundred. It's also about enjoying your game and learning and mastering the shots and having more fun and playing better. So there's an instructional element to design that I've spent a lot of time trying to explain.

01:29:21
Speaker 1: Well to me. Learning things about somebody like Donald Ross, like the fact that there was that line outside of his office in Pinehurst actually makes playing his courses more fun and more rich and that's h Yeah, that's absolutely the point of what we're doing. So thanks for contributing to that.

01:29:41
Speaker 2: Well, it's been an honor, and you know, I'm glad you guys are doing what you're doing and we're just trying to have some fun hacking around at golf.

01:29:52
Speaker 1: Thanks Gret. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsom. Thank you. Will. Something to check out at the Frida Egg Golf Pro Shop is our Donald Ross in North Carolina poster. It's a really cool poster made by our own Cameron Hurtis that shows Donald Ross's golf courses in North Carolina. And he obviously did a ton of amazing work in North Carolina and this poster is sort of a tribute to that. It looks really cool and it gives you the location of Ross's courses in that state. So make sure to check that out at the Frida Egg Golf Pro Shop. That's pro shop dot thefridagg dot com. It's a great way to support our company. If you've been enjoying our content. Going to the pro shop and picking something up is very very much appreciated. All right, thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode Happen