The History of Augusta National's Design (Great Courses 5)

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Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

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Speaker 2: And when I find my ball in a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg egg Frida egg, bride.

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Speaker 1: Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course. Welcome to the fridaygg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about the history of the golf architecture at Augusta National Golf Club. This is the fifth installment of our Great Courses series. These are basically deep dives into golf courses that have really shaped the game. And my guest for this episode is Joshua Pettitt. Josh is a golf architect and a historical researcher. His firm called Pacific Golf Design, and he's also the founder of the Alistair McKenzie Institute. Recently, Josh edited and published The McKenzie Reader, which is a truly impressive collection of Alistair McKenzie's writings on golf architecture and more. And today Josh and I are going to dig into where the golf course at Augusta National came from. Of course, Augusta National was designed by Bobby Jones and Alistair McKenzie, and so Josh knows a great deal about its origins, what it was like initially, what its philosophy of design was, how it evolved over time. Josh has a lot of information about those subjects and a lot of stuff that I really didn't know before I started talking to him. So I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I think it'll be a great way to kick off the run up to the Masters. But first a word from our sponsor, oors An Alps. Oors An Apps makes skincare products designed with men's needs in mind. They're built for an active, on the go lifestyle and they use clean, powerful ingredients. So here are some facts for you about suncare that I think you should know. Skin cancer rates have risen fifty five percent among men in the past decade. Golfers in particular are two hundred and fifty percent more likely to develop skin cancers, Yet only fourteen percent of men wear sunscreen daily, even though wearing sunscreen daily will reduce your risk of melanoma by fifty percent. So what Orizonops does is design products that take down some of the barriers that prevent men from wearing sunscreen. First of all, they have a kind of neutral smell for the most part, so you won't smell like a coconut or a banana. You won't get greasy hands from them, no weird residues. They're simple, easy to use, and most are travel friendly. One specific orizonops product that I'd like to highlight is the hydrating SPF fifty spray. This is a top seller for Orison Alps. It was chosen by Men's Health magazine as an editor's choice and it has become a real standard and go to for me personally. So many things about this spray are right on the money. It's a non greasy formula, it's water and sweat resistant. It has a light and subtle fragrance. They call it the Summer Splash scent at Oorsen Alps, and it's also available in SPF thirty and seventy as well as a travel size option. That's the hydrating spray. Really great product. So for Frida egg listeners, Orison Alps is offering a great deal fifteen percent off with the code EGG fifteen. That's Egg fifteen at Orison alps dot com slash Friday Egg again code egg fifteen fifteen percent off Orison alps dot com slash Friday Egg. Check it out. All right, I am here, Josh Pettitt, Josh, how are you doing today?

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Speaker 2: I'm doing great.

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Speaker 1: So we're talking about the history of the golf architecture at Augusta National. This is a big and complex story. Why don't we just start with a basic narrative about the founding of the club. Where did the club come from and what were its intentions at the beginning?

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Speaker 2: Sure? Well, Bobby Jones, as you know, you know, was probably the best golfer of at least the early twentieth century, some people say ever, and in the twenties especially, he traveled a lot, played a lot of competitions in the British Isles and all over the States, and he really fell in love with golf course design during that time period. And I think it was probably somewhere in the mid to late twenties he started thinking about the idea of building his own golf course. At some point. It was sort of always in the back of his head. So by nineteen thirty or so he was really thinking about this a lot. I guess the best way to set it up maybe is you know, he had met Mackenzie in nineteen twenty seven when he was over playing at the Open at St. Andrews, and Mackenzie and him had some correspondents prior to that because of the twenty six matches, the Walker Cup matches and the Open in twenty six and McKenzie was over there following both of those matches. Mackenzie had given him a copy of his book Golf Architecture that he inscribed, and so they had started a bit of a correspondence. And then you fast forward a couple of years to September of nineteen twenty nine, and this was the first time that Pebble Beach had hosted a major championship event, and it was the National Amateur, which nowadays we call the US Amateur. But it was the first time that the USGA had hosted an event west, a big championship event west of the Mississippi, And so Bobby Jones went out to Pebble Beach for that, and of course mackenzie was living there at the time, and they played Cyprus Point as sort of a warm up round. But the funny thing happened Bobby Jones, who had just won the US Open the year prior, lost in his first round match at Pebble and was knocked out. You know, it was match play, all mass play in those days, and he decided to stay for a few days and drove up to Pasa Tampo, which is about an hour north in Santa Cruz, where they had an opening round match to commemorate the opening of the course. And so during this few days or a week or so, he spent a lot of time with mackenzie and you got to see his work at Cyprus Point and at Pasa Tampo and the renovation work that he and his partner Robert Hunter and Chandler Egan had done at Pebble Beach. And during this time they spent a lot of time talking about golf course design and you know, their shared ideals. You know, they both had a mutual love and admiration for the old course. So they really bonded over their love for Saint Andrews. And when Bobby Jones saw Pasta Tiempo, he was just enthralled with sort of the development model, which was this you know, kind of recreational residential community, you know, where they had like horseback riding trails and golf and tennis and then you know, a residential development surrounding all of that, and he kind of used that as his model, you know, eventually for what would become Augusta. So that struck up the relationship, and that's how Bobby Jones went on to hire Mackenzie and he found the piece of land in Georgia the following year, and which had been a tree nursery. It propagated fruit trees, which actually that's where, interestingly enough, like all of the peach trees in Georgia had originated from. And that's sort of the founder of that nursery, Prosper Berkman's was kind of thought of as like the Johnny apple Seed of peaches in Georgia. And so they converted this fruit tree nursery into what would become Augusta National.

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Speaker 1: Let's talk about Bobby Jones first a bit. By this point in his career, in his life, he had some pretty sophisticated ideas about golf architecture himself. It wasn't just Alistair Mackenzie who was bringing that to the partnership. And so, you know, aside from his relationship with mackenzie and his conversations and correspondence with him. What do you think were some of the influences on Bobby Jones and his thinking about golf course design.

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Speaker 2: As I mentioned, he was in love with the Old Course at this point. You know, we all know the story of his first time playing the Old Course where he ripped up his scorecard and walked off. But he came to later love the Old Course and many of the other links courses in British Isles and really keenly studied them. And McKenzie alluded to this in an article he wrote, you know, he said he was so impressed with Bobby Jones's recollection of all of the fame this links holes on all the links, all the best links courses. And mackenzie was just very very impressed by this, you know, when they were talking about inspiration for different holes. He just had a great photographic memory. So the idea that he and McKenzie, they both were simpatico with was this idea of how do you build a golf course that's enjoyable for all classes of players but also challenging to professionals in competitive play. And they both were in a total agreement that the Old Course in those days was the paramount example of this, and so that was really the inspiration. I mean, they took inspiration from some other holes, and McKenzie lists these in his article of a lot of the holes they were inspired by it, but many of them were from the Old Course. So their approach was essentially, how do we build the world's best inland golf course on this sort of site with heavy clay soils, but try to replicate a lot of the features that you'd find on the Old course and other you know, some of the best links courses.

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Speaker 1: All right, and then let's let's pick up with Alistair McKenzie. Now, now this is a big story. We don't have to talk about all of his career, but I think it would be interesting to try to situate the Augusta National project in Alistair McKenzie's career, because it really is toward the end of it. And so if you were to tell a story about how McKenzie's philosophy of design developed over the long term and eventually arrived at the place that it was at Augusta National, what would that story be.

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Speaker 2: Sure? So there's a few factors here at the outset of McKenzie's career. You know, this was like coming out of the Victorian era of golf design, or some called the Dark Ages, you know, so this is early, you know, first few years of the twentieth century, and golf had been booming in Britain and so there was a lot of golf courses being built inland at that point. But they were all very rudimentary in nature, very mathematically laid out, and mackenzie and his partner Harry Colet would later say that they were built in a way that was offensive to the eye. So they were essentially just trying to crank out golf courses because there were such demand to play.

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Speaker 1: And this was like the the eighteen nineties and you maybe even into the early nineteen hundred when golf was really expanding and expanding inland. Then maybe they didn't quite know how to build inland courses.

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Speaker 2: Yet exactly exactly, And it was well recognized by those guys that all the best courses were, you know, these old links courses that essentially were built by nature, and the clubs that found them, you know, figured out ways to route holes around these all these natural dunes. But you know, when you go went inland and started building all these golf courses. There was nothing like that, so Mackenzie started, you know, there's we don't have to get into the whole story of his time in South Africa the Boer War, but that's when he picked up this concept of camouflage from the Boers and how they manipulated the landscape in ways and created landforms to trick the enemy and to disguise himself. And he was thinking in terms of that, like how could I apply that concept to building golf courses on all of these inland largely featureless, flat sites with usually heavy clay soils. So that was like the initial concept, the novel idea in nineteen oh seven when Mackenzie he was one of the founders of Alwoodley and designed that course, and that was his sort of first attempt at this. So you fast forward several years and he had the opportunity to come to the States and start building a lot of golf courses here when everything was booming. So the other piece to this too is he always thought about economics. He was sort of an amateur economist, and he, you know, in the back of his head was always the idea of the economics of designing, building, and maintaining the golf course. But I guess what would what changed sort of in the you know, at the end of the twenties was the Great Depression hit in twenty nine, and so by the time he started building Augusta in nineteen thirty one thirty two, there were, you know, full in the midst of the Great Depression. And at that point McKenzie had been thinking a little differently than he had prior, which was like, how do I build a course as economically as possible? And at Augusta we see this in his economy of bunkering, where originally there was thirty six bunkers on the course, and he knocked down fourteen of those and he ended up with only twenty two bunkers. So you can trast that withe of his courses he was building just a few years prior that would have one hundred or more bunkers in a lot of cases. And for those of us that have worked in the golf course maintenance industry and construction business, building and maintaining bunkers is you know, very anathetical to economization of construction and maintenance. So that was kind of the driving factor. Just prior to building Augusta, he built a course called Bayside on Long Island and this was actually a public daily feed course and it had only nineteen bunkers originally, And he talked about this when he was building Augusta. How he learned a lot of lessons from his time building Bayside that helped him a lot during the construction at Augusta. So you know, again he was trying to build, you know, like a Lynx like course on an inland site, but do it as economically possible.

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Speaker 1: So if you were going to look at some of Mackenzie's courses leading up to Augusta National, which ones would you pick out as being particularly significant or showing some kind of development or evolution in in his design? Just in those kind of last few years before the beginning of the nineteen thirties, what should people think.

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Speaker 2: About Mackenzie was so good about adapting to the site that he had, you know, like, for instance, if you look at like some of the famous courses that people would know that he was building in that timeframe, you know, Cyprus Point was probably the most famous example, and then just prior to that was Ural Melbourne and very very different sites, and then Pasta Tiempo a year or so later, and that's also a very different site than Cyprus Point. And so I would say the things that started changing were, like I just mentioned, the onset of the depression and this concept of economization. So I think the two that I would really point to that were really important leading up to Augusta were the Jockey Club in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He built two courses thirty six holes there, and he did that on a completely like dead flat piece of land, and so in order to first of all create interest and then second of all engineer it correctly so that the water could drain off the property, he cut this series of swales running through the property and then use the material to shape all these interesting landforms for the green complexes. And it's just amazing if you look at that golf course what he was able to do with a dead flat piece of property, and also did it very economically, very few mountain bunkers, and the strategy was devised largely from the landforms. You know, at this point he was thinking more and more in terms of how do I create strategic value using landforms in short grass instead of bunkers. Or other hazards. So you know, after he built the Jockey Club and then building Bayside in New York, those are the two that I think really really influence just thinking when he started to build Augusta. And the other thing too that's important to know is this is right at the time when heavy equipment was just starting to be used in golf course construction. Prior to that, most of the courses McKenzie built in the twenties, they were shaped with horses and scrapers and plows, and it was a very manual, labor intensive process which actually resulted in these really beautiful landforms. But toward the end of the nineteen twenties, the first property actually he ever used mechanical equipment on was the Valley Club in Montecito, Santa Barbara, which is where you're from.

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Speaker 1: I think, yep, that's where I grew up. I didn't grow up at the Valley Club, but yeah's a I mean, that's a beautiful course kind of built into some canyons and ravines outside of Santa Barbara. Just a gorgeous golf course.

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Speaker 2: So for anybody it's been there that you know that golf course is sort of split up into two sides. There's a road that goes through at Sheffield and on the maintenance side there's ten holes. That side of the course was very, very rocky. All these just huge boulders, And so that was the first time he used a bulldozer to move They just use it to move boulders around and then to cover boulders with dirt. They didn't he didn't use it to shape any features really. But then fast forward a couple of years when he's building Bayside in New York. That was the first place where he actually shaped the green complexes with what we now know as a bulldozer. It's kind of rudimentary in those days. And then he did the same thing at Augusta where he shaped the greens with with dozers. So that was that was that fed into the economization of the construction.

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Speaker 1: Does Pasa Tiempo fit in anywhere here? I mean in terms of economy of construction? Certainly there are a lot of bunkers at Pasa Tiempo, barkers used as kind of land art. But you know, are there some ways in which maybe there are parallels between Pasa Tiempo and Augusta National, especially considering Pasa Tampo was fairly late in the nineteen twenties.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I do think at that point he was starting to build wilder greens, so that's probably the best way to think of it. You know. His first course he built in the States was the Metal Club just north of San Francisco in starting in nineteen twenty six, open in nineteen twenty seven, and those greens were were fairly mild. And as he started building Posa Tiampo Cyprus Point to a certain extent, but even more so at Posa Tampa, we started building wilder greens. And when he got to Augusta, he was very comfortable with building these pretty severe what some people might characterize as unfair greens, with just wild moving landforms.

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Speaker 1: The shapes of the greens kind of stick with me from Pasa Tiempo. They're so distinctive. They're kind of like these amiba shapes. Aside from the internal contours, which on some grains are extremely severe, the just the the outlines of the greens kind of became different for mackenzie. He started kind of wrapping the putting surface around bunkers, and if you look at early photos of Augusta National not to get ahead of ourselves here, But a lot of the greens are are kind of like that, with these with these strange little tongues that go out in unexpected directions.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I know what you're saying, And there might be something to that. And sure, at that point he was definitely experimenting with a lot of these tongues that stuck out, and in those days that was like nobody was building greens like that. But I would also say that Mackenzie didn't really think in two dimension. He was really just thinking three D and how to create these pin locations. And you know, in the case of Augusta, I think he had he and Bobby Jones and talked about that they could not envision what the Masters has become today, but they had talked about, you know, having it used for some sort of competitive venue.

00:21:00
Speaker 1: So getting to the job itself mentioned that Mackenzie had a pre existing connection with Bobby Jones. That was likely why he was brought in to work on the course. Were there any other candidates for this job, any other people that Jones could have or would have been expected to work with or was it just Mackenzie.

00:21:24
Speaker 2: Sure, So this is somewhat speculation on my part, but I think there's others that have sort of made the same point as well. And in those days, especially on the East Coast, Donald Ross was sort of the prenominate architect, and Mackenzie wasn't doing a lot of work on the East I mean, other than that course in New York and then in the Midwest. You know, he had built Crystal Downs. But Donald Ross is building courses everywhere all over the East Coast, including the neighboring Augusta Country Club which borders Augusta National and So, and.

00:21:57
Speaker 1: Also Eastlake, right Eastlake where Bobby Jones grew up playing right exactly.

00:22:03
Speaker 2: So I've never seen anything written about this from either Bobby Jones or Mackenzie or Donald Ross. But the thinking would be, like it would be pretty logical if he had hired Donald Ross to build Augusta, and then were there other candidates. I've never seen anything to indicate that. I just think that he and Bobby struck up such a friendship over their love for the old course, and then the time they spent together out in California at Pebble Beach and at Cyprs Point in Pasa Tempo. I think in the eyes of Again I'm sort of speculating here, but in the eyes of Bobby Jones, he was just a clear candidate to build Augusta. Now, the other thing I will say is, and Mackenzie kind of alludes to this in some of his writings. I would say that Bobby Jones, if he had wanted to, he could have probably designed the course himself on his own, and somebody with maybe a bit less humility probably would have. I mean, Bobby Jones had the knowledge base, I would say, to build a pretty good golf course in those days. But he was a pretty humble guy actually, and he was smart enough to realize, you know, he needed a partner as a professional, and you know, he was wise enough to partner with mackenzie. But McKenzie was so impressed, as I said, with Jones's recollection of all the best holes, and he talks about how the course could not have been in close to as good as it was if it weren't for the contributions that that Bobby Jones made.

00:23:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you read Bobby Jones on golf Courses, it's clear that he was one of the brains behind this project, right, you know. Obviously Alistair McKenzie's writings are impressive to a degree that is, you know, unparalleled in golf writing. But Bobby Jones's thoughts about the golf courses that he has played and about Augusta Nationals specifically, were always incredibly sophisticated. And that's a I don't know, it's something that has always jumped out at me. Now getting to the philosophy of this design, of what they intended to do with the design at Augusta National, you've already mentioned that it was meant as an ode to the old course and to Link's golf, and it's always been funny to me that they tried to do that on this site because it's almost like they gave themselves the biggest challenge possible. If you want to replicate the old course, then you're not going to choose a huge hillside with massive back to front elevation change. You're not going to choose a tree covered property, You're not going to choose a clay based site, like all of these things are the opposite of the old course's environment. And yet they attempted to do something like the old course at Augusta National. So could you talk about how they tried to carry that out on this site, trying to import this concept to a site that would seem to reject it.

00:25:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is very counterintuitive. And you know, in those days, the construction methodologies clearly weren't as advanced as they are now, and we didn't have all these things like subair systems, and you know, they didn't have the ability to build that kind of infrastructure. But they did recognize the inherent value of the land itself, which, yeah, it's not really good comp to Saint Andrews because the elevation changes are so significant. But he did see opportunities in all of these scenarios to draw inspiration from a certain whole on either Saint Andrews or some other links courses, and not to replicate those holes, because as McKenzie would say, that would be feutile to try to do that, but to just take inspiration from the concepts of those holes, the strategic principles, and then apply them to the site of Augusta. I think the other thing was that they knew it was going to be a seasonal property. It was going to be kind of a winter resort, so you know, in January, February, March essentially was going to be the main season because most of the initial members were all sort of based in the New York area, some in Atlanta, you know, so the climate was conducive to having like a winter golf getaway. So, you know, as far as how they were able to replicate the old course or those principles, you know, he found certain sites on all of these holes that he was laying out where he just figured out how he could adapt without doing too much to the earth, but doing enough, you know. So, like I said, they had dozers, they did have to cut down a lot of trees. It was pretty densely forested, and so yeah, all those are contradictory to the way the old course was built. But again this all stemmed from Mackenzie's sort of career long ambition was to how I replicate Links golf on non links land.

00:27:04
Speaker 1: Are there any particular holes that people could look at and discern some kind of old course influence?

00:27:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, So he lists them in a great article that's in my book, and it's called Plans for the Ideal Golf Course and he sort of lists them, kind of goes hole by hole and gives a quick hole description. And so starting out. You know, they're not all templates, but a lot of them sort of are. And yeah, templates isn't really the right word. He probably wouldn't like that word. But the starting with like the fourth hole, which is that part three, that's his version of the Eden the eleventh of Saint Andrews. And then the fifth hole is like his version of the road hole, but it is reversed. And then the sixth hole was that another part three. That was his version of a ridan, you know, the fifteenth in North Barrick. And then the seventh which I think we want to talk about a bit later. That was kind of his version of the eighteenth at St Andrews, particularly with the green which was you know, modeled inspired by the Valley of Sandy Green at Saint Andrews. And then the eighth hole, which is a par five you know uphill that green complex, not really the hole, but the green complex is sort of a punch bowl green surrounded by these hillocks that was inspired by the seventeenth at Mirefield. And then like the ninth hole was sort of a take on a cape. You know, he also references like on the tenth hole, he sort of compared it to his thirteenth hole at Cypress Point that part four, and also the fourth at all of the the old fourth because the routing has been changed. The eleventh hole he kind of goes out of his way to say, this is like a very novel hole. He's never seen any whole like it anywhere, and that was like a very unique concept for a hole. And then thirteen, the famous par five Azalea. He sort of compared that to the seventeenth at Cypress Point that he built, you know, in reverse. And then the fourteenth was sort of modeled after this that st Andrews. And then the sixteenth, well, the old sixteenth, which is no longer there. That's that's the one hole that's completely different currently. But the old sixteenth was a par three that you hit over a little creek and that was modeled off of what was the seventh hole at a course called Stoke Poges in England.

00:29:18
Speaker 1: And Harry Colt course.

00:29:20
Speaker 2: Right. Yeah, but he sort of gave it a little dig and said like, well, we did a much better job and this site is this, you know, this site that we have to work with is much more visually beautiful, so we sort of one upped it. But and then the seventeenth The Green at seventeen was sort of modeled off of the fourteenth at Saint Andrews, but sort of reversed, so those were sort of, you know, kind of he lays out the inspiration for each of those holes, where you know where the initial concepts came from. But again he wasn't trying to copy these by any stretch. He was trying to adapt them. And the other thing I liked it I think is really interesting is he also wrote about how he was so pleased he and Bobby Jones were so both pleased with the holes that they created as collection of holes that they created, and he had hoped that in the future people would do the same thing that they did, and that they would take inspiration from many of these holes at Augusta and apply them to other sites and not copy them, but just take the inspiration and adapt them to new sites. And I always kind of think of that in terms of there's a lot of analogies you can make to other art forms, but like in music, for instance, musicians always talk about how they're kind of recycling their influences and kind of doing their own take a sort of more modern take on the music that inspired them, and you can kind of trace the lineage of this like through you know, blues and rock and roll, and so I think that was kind of the same mindset that he had with golf holes and the idea of trying to, you know, take inspiration from these holes. It was an homage to them. It was like out of respect, almost in admiration. It wasn't like, oh, you know, it wasn't cynical in a way that we want to copy these holes because they're good.

00:31:07
Speaker 1: Did he ever talk about CB McDonald and his ideal holes, Because what you're saying is might be similar in some ways to McDonald's approach, But I don't know if McKenzie ever thought through that link between him and McDonald specifically.

00:31:25
Speaker 2: It's a great question. He didn't really write anything to that effect, but I think it's safe to say that, you know, similar thinking there. I don't think McDonald really referred to his holes as templates either. Maybe you knew better than me.

00:31:39
Speaker 1: No, he called them ideal holes. It was never templates. I'm not sure where templates came from, just like I'm not sure where the golden age of golf architecture came from. All these all these words we used to refer to this era now are not exactly rooted in historical fact.

00:31:53
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah. My guess is that McDonald wouldn't really care for the term template, you know, as characterizing what he did, but I think it's safe to say that, yeah, Like, conceptually the intellectual exercise was very similar to what mackenzie was doing.

00:32:10
Speaker 1: All right, So you know, before getting into how the course was when it initially opened and then how it evolved, I wonder if there are any stories that you have from construction that you think about regularly. I honestly haven't heard that much about the construction of Augusta National specifically, and whether you know anything went interestingly wrong or you know, whether anything happened during during that period.

00:32:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't think anything went wrong necessarily, but there's a few things here. One is, yeah, definitely, the economic climate really influenced and changed right out of the gate what they were trying to do. I meant to mention earlier that initially they'd wanted to build two golf courses, they wanted thirty six holes, and surrounding those thirty six holes were going to be lots residential lots that they would sell to private owners that could build their own houses, similar to as I mentioned what they did at Pasa Tampo. But when they kind of got the surveys and started plotting everything out on actually the topo maps that I have, they realized that they didn't really have quite enough land to make two great golf courses and have space for the lots and other sort of amenities that they wanted. So right out of the gate they shifted and they said, all right, we're just going to focus on building one course. And then this later fed into them deciding to build They had at least the plan to build a par three course, so instead of building two thirty six hole full eighteen hole courses, they thought, well, we'll build one eighteen hole quote unquote championship course or the long course, and then we'll have a short par three course. And that ended up itself as a fascinating story, which I'm happy to talk about. But back to the construction for a minute. When they started building it, yeah, it was heavily forested. They had to cut down a lot of trees, so they had these big crews, pretty labor intensive, grueling labor, but they were just cutting trees down, pulling out the roots. But the construction went pretty quickly. They did it all beginning to end in four months, and they worked like sun up to sundown, and it was probably pretty grueling, but it went quick. And I think that, you know, the utilizing bulldozers and other heavy equipment that helped the process definitely.

00:34:33
Speaker 1: What happened with the par three course.

00:34:35
Speaker 2: Well, so McKenzie laid out a plan for an eighteen hole par three course that consisted of nine double greens, you know, going back to Saint Andrews. They both loved Saint Andrews so much, and seven of the greens at Saint Andrews are double greens. They you know, fourteen holes used those seven greens and you hit him to them from opposite angles. So his concept where the short course was eighteen hole's par three course nine greens that you hit into from opposite directions and it creates an eighteen whole routing, and that routing was actually he previously had designed a course in Argentina, a private estate course called Elboquerone, similar concept, but it wasn't just part three's. It was par three's and par four's nine double greens. Which never actually got built. So then the par three course at Augusta when he laid it out, he drew the plan. Bobby Jones didn't like the fact that two of the holes crossed a service road, and he kind of mentioned that he didn't really like that very much. But it didn't really matter because the financials of the development were so strapped they barely got the project finished and by the end of it, they were, you know, in debt contractors and they, you know, it was very difficult for them to even just finish the first golf course, and so they never even started building the par three course, which is I think a bit sad, but you know, you fast forward to nineteen fifty seven and George Cobb built the current Part three course on the same site. It's a twenty acre site and that's what they played, you know, the Part three competition on every Wednesday before the Masters.

00:36:14
Speaker 1: Are there any plans for this original Part three course concept out there?

00:36:20
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I found the plan, I don't know, twelve years ago or something like that. When I found it, I am fairly fairly confident that nobody, at least in the golf space who knew what it was had seen it probably since nineteen thirty two or thirty three, because there's only one plan in existence. It's actually stored in the almostad Brothers Archive, which is in Brookline, Massachusetts. And you know, I'd seen some things written alluding to the fact that Mackenzie had done a plan for a part three course there, but no one had ever seen it. And then I found it, and so it's, yeah, you can find it. It's it's in my book Mackenzie Reader. You know, the Olmstead Archive was gracious to give me permission to print it in the book, and it's on my website and it's floating around. I think it's posted on some of my social media and so it's been around spencirculating. You can find it. It's just a fascinating plan.

00:37:18
Speaker 1: Well, I wonder if anybody is gonna gonna take that and try to try to rebuild it at some point, not not to give anybody any ideas, but uh that that would that would seem to be low hanging fruit for uh, for for some people with the money to do it.

00:37:34
Speaker 2: I've been working on Yeah, I've been working on that for for years. We'll see, you know, hopefully we'll find the right site at some point.

00:37:40
Speaker 1: So, in other words, if you do it, hire josh uh, that would only be fair, all right. I wanted to take a quick break here to talk about Club Champion. Club Champion helps golfers of any skill level play better golf through custom fitted and custom built equipment. Their extensively trained master fitters provide an in depth, data driven, tour level fitting process with fifty thousand hit able head and shaft combos in the shop as well as sixty plus brands. They use industry leading technology like track Man and sam put Lab, and they build to the tightest tolerances in the industry. Club Champions fittings produce real results for every level of player, which include an average of twenty two yard increases off the tee and ten yard improvements in dispersion. Club Champion fittings for me personally, have been incredibly revealing. I don't think I'm unique in the sense that before I went to Club Champion, I didn't really have any idea what I should be playing, or at least I had ideas that turned out to be erroneous, and so going to Club Champion and working with a master fitter and actually seeing what was going on with my ballflight, spin, all that kind of stuff launch ain goal. That was surprising to me. I discovered a lot of things that I didn't know before, and I learned more about what kind of equipment allows me to play my best golf. So going to Club Champion is about getting equipment that works for you, yes, but it's also about this kind of education process. So for Frida Egg listeners, here is the deal the Club Champion is offering right now. You can use code Frida Egg to get fifty percent off the cost of your fitting with the purchase of a club. So go to club champion dot com and book You're fitting today. Again, that's code Frida Egg all one word. So getting back to the getting back to the main course. Obviously, when Augusta National originally opened, it's eighteen whole course, the whole numbering was different, and fairly early on in the course's life they decided to flip the nines and so now we have the sequence that we're all familiar with today, the great back nine at Augusta National. Everybody says, you know, it's one of the best back nines in golf. It's it's so dramatic, it produces such great tournaments Sundays. But of course that was initially the front nine. So why did they decide to flip the nines and was there a was there thinking behind having the nines the way they were originally?

00:40:33
Speaker 2: All right, So this is a great question that I think people have speculated about for a while, and I think most people get it wrong. Mackenzie drew three routing plans for Augusta, for the main course of Augusta, not the four three course. The first one was from July nineteen thirty one, and the very first plan is the current current day routing with the nines the way they are configured currently. The second two plans he did both nineteen thirty two. One was in July, one was in November. I think those both showed the nines flipped what you're talking about. And then when they opened the course in thirty three, and then they did the first Masters in thirty four, they used that flipped routing for some reason, and I don't know why. I don't have a great answer. I've never read anything or seen anything that explains what the thought process was there. But then the following masters, the second Masters in nineteen thirty five, they flipped the nines back to Mackenzie's very first routing, which is now the present day routing, which is I think, you know, clearly a much better routing, especially on a Sunday of the Masters. You know, that back nine is just the drama that it provides is pretty much on parallel, I would say, in competitive golf. So I mean, it's hard to imagine them ending on the front nine. It just doesn't make sense. So I don't know why they were why they flipped them and then flipped them back. I did hear a story that, and I don't know if it's true that the thinking as to why they flipped it back after the first Masters was because of frost delays that they had on those first few holes like ten eleven, and somehow those holes thought out slower than the rest of the course, and so that's why they flipped them back. I don't know. That doesn't really make sense to me, But you know, I think it's more that that back nine is just a far superior finishing nine for competition play.

00:42:29
Speaker 1: That that's really clarifying, because it would be weird to me to imagine the course ending with the sequence of seven, eight, nine, even as originally built. I mean, maybe it would be kind of cool to have a driveable par four sixteenth hole, which would be which would be seven. We can, you know, address that more in depth in a minute here, but just a strange idea to flip those around the frost delay thing, you know, it kind of does make sense in a way. Or maybe it's like a drainage issue. Even where ten, eleven, twelve, those are very low lying holes, whereas the front nine is mostly sort of up more up on the hill, and so maybe maybe those holes just drained a little better up there, and so they wanted to give the lower lying holes.

00:43:19
Speaker 2: I don't know, there could be something, There could be something to that. And actually that's why that was one of the main factors as to why they moved the tenth Green was because of drainage problems.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, let's talk about some holes that were different in the early nineteen thirties than what they are today than the forms that everybody's familiar with. Everybody knows, you know, golf fans know every hole at Augusta National at this point. But one of the cool things about looking at the original iteration of the course is just how different and how strange in some cases certain original holes were. So why don't we start with the one that we've mentioned a couple of times already, Number seven? What was that hole initially?

00:44:03
Speaker 2: Okay, at the outset of this, let me just say, I'm going to post on my Twitter and Instagram a couple of maps so by the time this is live, if people want to like follow along visually, I think it really helps if you want to look at some of these old maps and look at the old configurations of these holes. I think that's that's pretty useful. But all of the green, like, starting with all of the greens, let's say they were initially you know, originally they are fifty percent bigger than they currently are. On average, the original greens averaged ninety six hundred square feet, which are pretty big greens, and the thirteenth green was the biggest, you know, it was over thirteen thousand square feet. Currently the greens average like sixty four hundred square feet and some change, so you know, they're thirty three percent smaller than they were. But the seventh hole in particular, that was, as we talked about earlier, sort of modeled after the eighteenth of Saint Andrew's short part four. The green was modeled after the value of saying Green. And you know, Bobby Jones wrote that it didn't play very well in competition. Was it was too easy and it wasn't challenging enough, I guess. And so in thirty eight, I believe thirty seven or thirty eight is when he started working with Perry Maxwell. This is after McKenzie had passed away. You know, McKenzie had died in January of nineteen thirty four, two months before the first Masters. And then, luckily, I think Bobby Jones was wise enough to consult with Perry Maxwell, who had been a partner of mackenzie's, and so Maxwell was very sympathetic and careful with what he did there. But you know, to make Bobby Jones happy and others, they pushed back the green thirty five yards, made it much longer, and added a couple of bunkers, and then it's evolved a lot since then, even you know, they've added more bunkers surrounding the green, and they've narrowed the fairway significantly. I think currently it's the narrowest hole on the property, with a lot of tree plantings and narrowing the fairway. So yeah, if you look at the current seventh hole in the original seventh hole, you probably wouldn't really recognize them. You know, they're very very different.

00:46:06
Speaker 1: Let's go to number ten. What was this hole initially? And then this is another one where where Perry Maxwell came in and oversaw the changes that ended up happening. So take us through the evolution of this hole.

00:46:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, so this was a very very steep downhill par four. You know, I think the elevation change from tee to green is just over one hundred feet, which is very very significant drop for like a four hundred and twenty five yard part four, which is what it was originally. And on occasion it was drivable, you know, I think when it was firm and being that far downhill and maybe if you had a breeze behind you. But people wrote that it was occasionally drivable in those days. But there was you know, up by the green there were sort of two big landforms. There was there was one convex landform that Mackenzie built, that giant bunker that we all sort of recognized. It's really the only recognizable bunker currently on the golf course that has all those tongues and those capes and bays, and just to the right of that was this concave land form sort of a bowl that Mackenzie built that green in, so it's sort of a punch bowl green next to a giant bunker. And yeah, apparently, you know, it always had drainage problems. So when Perry Maxwell came in, he built a new green about thirty yards further down the fairway, left that bunker there, which is a bit curious, and it built the new green and that also sort of meaningfully changed the eleventh hole because they had to move the tee for the eleventh hole to the left, which made the dog leg on eleven a lot less sharp. Previously eleven had a much sharper dog leg. And then I think since then the green on ten has been rebuilt even at least once more.

00:47:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, we kind of have to talk about these holes in tandem, you know, the tenth hole and the eleventh hole, because as you say, you know, they move the tenth green to a place where they could no longer keep the eleventh tee where it was, which was to the right of the of the tenth hole corridor, which made the eleventh hole, but pretty sharp dog leg to the right, whereas now it is more or less a straightaway hole. But you know, first of all, with number ten, the original hole, the strategy was kind of interesting in the sense that it's almost the opposite of what it is now, I guess in terms of angles, because now what you're really trying to do, or at least what the pros are trying to do, is like hook it around the trees on the left to try to get that speed slot, shorten the hole, and also find a somewhat easier angle into the green because it's very hard to approach that green from the right side of the corridor. The original number ten, if you got over to the lef left, you were screwed because you have that big famous mucker and you were hitting this like chip over that bunker to a little green on the other side. That's not where you wanted to be. You kind of wanted to be more out to the right. So kind of interesting how the how the redesigned hole flipped the strategy. It's still I think a terrific hole, but it's almost like a mirror image in terms of the angles. Yeah, and then the eleventh hole changed a lot as well. There used to be a center line bunker there. Could you talk a little bit more about that hole tea the green.

00:49:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the original tea on eleven was actually just behind the tenth green, so you'd walk off a ten green and the eleventh tea was right there, which, if you're looking at a map, is much further to the right than it currently is. So when they moved the tenth green back, they had to move the eleventh green to the left, which decreased that dog leg angle. And then over the years they kept pushing the tee back further and further and further, so now it's like way back and then shoot, and it's still it's so far back.

00:50:01
Speaker 1: It's if you have to you have to go there to see this. But it is like it is just like plunged back into the forest.

00:50:08
Speaker 2: Now yeah, yeah, exactly, So you have to walk backwards, which is you know, McKenzie wouldn't be thrilled with that, but hey, you got to use something, you know, to protect it. So but I mean, it's still a bit of a dog leg, but it's not totally straight. It's just kind of a slight dog leg. But it was a very sharp dog leg originally, and the original idea for that hole was and this is a great example of the design of the green complex, you know, is integral to your T shot. And so if you're teeing off on the original leventh hole, the best place to place your T shot is as far left in the fairly as possible, because there was this little stream that guarded the front left of the green. And I realized this may sound counterintuitive if you're not looking at a plan, but the reason being is that to the front and the right of the green complex were these two big mounds and they were sort of like feeder mountains where if you aim for those mounds and landed a ball short of the green, it would bump you up into the green. And the best way you could utilize those mounds was by being as far left in the fairway as possible. And actually, originally there was not a bunker in the fairway. That center line bunker was not there. There was no bunkers on that hole at all. Actually originally, and then I think in thirty five or thirty six for either the second or the third masters Bobby Jones, it was his idea actually to put that center line bunker there, which I don't know who built that, because I believe that was prior to Maxwell doing consulting with them, But I did read that it was it wasn't built in a way where you could visually see it from the tee. It was kind of obscured, so whoever built it probably didn't do a great job. And then the following year they took it out, so that bunker was only there for like a year.

00:51:58
Speaker 1: I think, oh wow, Okay, that's that's a new one for me. I actually recently saw a photo of this bunker for the first time I can remember. This is probably all very familiar to you, Josh, But Simon haynes On on Twitter has been kind of experimenting with little colorizations of of some old photographs of Augusta National and it's it's they're really interesting to look at. But he has one of eleven that does show that bunker. I guess it was the photo was taken right when that bunker was there, and as I was kind of looking at it in this photo, I was like, spunker looks kind of this, This looks kind of weird, like it's not not fully realized in the way that most Alistair Mackenzie Bunkers. Look, so, so that's that's actually photo.

00:52:45
Speaker 2: It's yeah, you're saying it's taken from the ground perspective.

00:52:48
Speaker 1: Yes, taken from the ground perspective, maybe somewhere in the vicinity of of of the tea. But it's the first time that I've ever seen a representation of that visually. So I'll have to look that up on Simon Haynes's Twitter account and discuss that with you, because that was the first time I had seen something like that. In any case, moving on through the back nine, one kind of sneaky hole that has evolved quite a bit over time is fifteen. And you know, the basic routing layout concept of the hole is similar now to what it used to be. You know, instead of a stream, there's a pond, all that kind of All the usual kind of stuff that has changed on a lot of holes that Augusta National has changed on fifteen. But I wonder if you could talk about the sheer width of the original fifteenth hole and what that meant about how the hole played.

00:53:50
Speaker 2: Sure, well, you know all the holes were wider in those days, and there was only a single cut of grass, so there was no secondary cut, no rough. It was just all short grass, you know, and then teas and greens, and they hadn't yet, you know, they had cleared so many trees and they had created these pretty wide plane corridors, and it wasn't until decades later that they started planting trees again to narrow the fairways. So you know, in those days, the entire course was a lot wider. You know. That's why it's kind of interesting to look at an old aerial photograph and compare it to today. And actually there's like a really really good Golf Digest did a I think a year or two ago. They did an article thing where it's like this sort of interactive hole by whole guide to all the changes of the holes over the years. And they took like a couple of the routing plans that I gave them and they have them like side by side, so you can kind of see that the transition, and you could just see how how much wider all those plane corridors were. But you know, Bobby Jones and Mackenzie were going back to the old course. You know, their intent was to not constrict you off the tea at all. They wanted to give you optionality, and they wanted you to you think about where you're going to place your t shot and give you a lot of width to do that, and you know, place a premium on certain sides of the fairways depending on how the green was set up. So you know, fifteen was was just like that. It was a lot wider, and if you were on the wrong side of the fairway, hitting that approach in was nearly impossible.

00:55:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean if you look at the some original aerial photos of Augusta or look at the original design plans and things like that, the fifteenth fairway is like this hillside field. It is so wide. And one point of reference is that you know those trees that the grove of trees that gets in the way. Now if you're on the left side of the fairway. I don't think there were as many of those trees originally, but there were a couple and they were centerline. Yeah, So the fairway just extended right down the hillside into the fourteenth hole. And yeah, the length of the hole was was almost kind of like the defense back then, along with the fronting hazard.

00:56:11
Speaker 2: And also depend on where the pin was on any given day, you know, it might it might you know influence if you decided to try to play left of those trees the cun Line trees or right of the cun line trees.

00:56:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right. You've referred to the to the sixteenth hole, mentioning that it was supposed to be modeled on a hole at Stoke Poges, which is a hairy colt course in England. Could you give a more of a picture of what this hole was and then why and how it was changed eventually by by Robert Trent Jones.

00:56:46
Speaker 2: Sure. Yeah, and I'll post some pictures of this too, because this is a hole that if you looked at it, you wouldn't recognize it.

00:56:52
Speaker 1: If you look, you can't even tell where it is. Now, like you exactly you kind of look at it and you're like, where exactly is this on the property?

00:57:00
Speaker 2: I'd be confused into thinking like, well, wait, is that thirteen maybe, but because you know essentially it's it's the same. There is a there's a creek crossing through that's the tributary that goes into Raised Creek. So it's the same tributary that crosses eventually in front of thirteen Green and goes along the thirteenth fairway and then ties into Raysed Creek right around you know, twelve green thirteen tea. But as you played the fifteenth hole and you walked off the green, you'd walk off to the right of the green and the tea was there, and you would sort of play to the left and the green was guarded by that creek, and then there's two little bunkers kind of up on the hillside to the left. And then currently the way it's changes, you know, the new hole that Robert Trent Jones Senior built just after World War Two, I think like nineteen forty eight forty nine. You walk off to the left of the fifteenth green and that's currently now where the tee is, and you play to the right, and they dammed up that creek to make a pond. And so as far as the routing flow, it's kind of interesting because you can make an argument that it's actually a better It makes the routing flow a little better because the current sixteenth green is now closer to the seventeenth tee, whereas before you had to walk sort of around across that creek from the sixteenth Green over to the seventeenth tee. But I think in those days. You know, they weren't thinking in terms of damming up a creek, building a pond, you know, doing these kind of major engineering feats like that, And they wanted to utilize the natural features that they had as best as they could to create strategy without having to build too many bunkers or do too much artificial work. So I think it made sense in those days that they would have built that green there on that side of the creek.

00:58:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's a pretty looking hole when you see the original one. But obviously the Robert Trent Jones sixteenth hole has become iconic, right, that is a you can't go back in history on that one. I think because of what the new sixteenth hole has meant to so many Masters tournaments.

00:59:09
Speaker 2: I've kind of thought it would be kind of interesting, you know, they'll never do this. But so the old sixteenth green was it sort of played as like a reverse ver Dan actually, even though it was sort of a shorter hole, you know, it only played I think like one hundred and fifty one hundred and fifty five yards from the championship team. But the space is there. If they wanted to, they could rebuild that sixteenth green as it was and keep the current sixteenth hole, and they'd be like crossing part threes and for member play or for like an alternate hole in competition one day, you could play the old part three and then switch back to the Robert F. Jones Part three. I mean, the space is there to do it. It would encumber some of the gallery space that they use, so I doubt they would ever do that, but I actually have laid that out in CAD. I have a plan of how you could rebuild that real part three.

01:00:01
Speaker 1: I have never heard that idea before, but I love it obviously. Uh the you know, they kind of do that at LACC North with the little seventeenth green that they they still maintained, but of course that's kind of tucked off to the side and doesn't doesn't really get in the way of of anything. But uh, but that's a that's a fun feature at that course. So hey, why not the last the last story about a hole that I'd like to get to is the eighth hole, And this takes us a little bit later in the in the history of the course. So could you just tell me the story of how the eighth hole got monkeyed with and then changed back.

01:00:43
Speaker 2: Well, okay, So the eighth hole is uphill par five and the green is surrounded by these giant hillocks that they these landforms that they created. They kind of the closest thing that they remind me to are some of the green complexes they built at the Jockey Club in Argentina. We talked about that earlier. Completely artificially man made, but just beautiful and so elegant, and the scale of them and the spacing is just I think phenomenal, and then the green was kind of like this punch bowl green that sits between them. And in nineteen fifty seven, Clifford Roberts, who was kind of the co founder of Augusta with Bobby Jones. Clifford was kind of the finance admin side of the development, and he was kind of tied in. He was a financier and tied in with those circles in New York. He took a very active role, you know, in the first few decades of the club and sort of managing it. And he thought that those landforms, those mounds that they built, obscured the green so that it was hard for spectators to watch when they were playing the masters. And so he decided it would be best to flatten them, completely flatten the green and create this if I'm sure you've seen a photo of it, this just ludicrous looking green complex that just doesn't look anything like anything else that is that Augusta or anything that McKenzie would have ever built anywhere in his entire career. And then it only lasted I think a couple of years at the most, And I think there was just so much outrage that they went back and they tried to They had photos, and they did their best to restore the original green that they had.

01:02:24
Speaker 1: I've heard a couple of different stories about how long this version of the Eighth Green lasted. One of those stories, I think maybe what I've heard is that. And it's funny how we're dealing in rumor here so much. This is not historical historical record that I'm talking about. But they altered the Eighth Green after that that photo was taken. That is so funny looking. I mean, it just like just like a pancake. Basically. The if you were to invent the opposite of whatever that original green complex was, you know, with its kind of almost outrageous big, you know, magnificent mounds, if you were to imagine the opposite of that. That's what the new version of the Eighth Green was. I think they altered it in some way a couple of years after, but that it wasn't fully restored to its original form. And they did a pretty good job in bringing it back to its original form, because if you look at it now and compare it to some of those nineteen thirties photographs like pretty good, I don't think they brought it back fully until right after Clifford Roberts died basically, and they brought in Byron Nelson to help.

01:03:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have read that they interviewed Byron and they were sort of picking his brain, like well, how do you recall this and that? And you know, like you said, they had the photos, but I think Byron Nelson had, like, you know all this, you know, just detailed recollection from playing it so many years. That could be true. I think it only lasted a year and then. Yeah, maybe the restoration was a phase thing over a few years, but I think initially what happened was in fifty seven when they built that green, the new Funky Green, which, as you were saying that I was kind of imagining like if you were to prompt chat GBT to build, you know, crank out something that would be the opposite of the eighteenth the eighth Green, that's what it would crank out, probably something like that, like the antithesis. But that was right at the time when they started consulting with George Cobb, the architect, and that was when George was building the Part three course that we now see on TV. Well, that's been revised also, but generally that was you know, what you see is largely the course that he built in nineteen fifty seven. I think those things were happening concurrently, the eighth pole, and then the following year, I think in nineteen fifty eight is when they put it back, So I'm pretty sure that was only in play for one masters and then, Yeah, to your point, it could have been that they did their best initially to get it back, but then they realized like they needed to sort of augment it a little bit over a few years to try to get it as close as they could.

01:05:13
Speaker 1: All right, So looking at the course now, considering how the course has evolved overall, there are a lot of suggestions out there in the golf architecture enthusiast community, the golf nerd community of which you and I are both a part, about what the club could do with the course to bring back some of its original features. A lot of these suggestions are not exactly realistic. But let me just lay out a hot take for you that I don't entirely agree with and just see how maybe you respond to it. The hot take is this, again, this is not something that I totally believe the ideal version of Augusta National, the greatest version of Augusta National that ever existed was in the nineteen eighties and nineties, after a lot of the changes that we've already talked about. After the original eighth hole was brought back, after the Robert Trent Jones sixteenth hole was installed, after Perry Maxwell moved the tenth green and the seventh green back to their current locations, all of that had happened, and the course became what it was in the eighties and nineties. Picture the course that Tiger Woods went on in nineteen ninety seven, still extremely wide, no second cut, beautiful championship golf course, incredible championship golf course. Maybe the main problem that has happened over the past thirty years is this tiger proof thing and the narrowing the tree plantings and the introduction of rough And I think actually a lot of people at the club would say, yeah, these are problems, but we've had we've had to do these things in response to the changes in equipment technology. And obviously the club has advocated or been supportive of a rollback for a lot of these reasons. But what if I were to say the real goal here is to try to get Augusta National back to the form that it was in in the nineties, How would you respond to that and would you argue against any aspects of that?

01:07:38
Speaker 2: All right, well, that's an interesting take. I wouldn't argue against generally speaking, what I would say is, taking that framework the course in the eighties and nineties, I would want to expand a lot of those greens to the original size so that, you know, if we went back to single cut, wide fair ways, that's beautiful, that's all well and good. But I would also like to expand those greens and get some of those prim locations back that have been lost. And there's a lot of examples of this, but probably the easiest, best one to think about is the thirteenth hole. You know, there's been a lot of conversation the last few years about the thirteenth hole, and they you know, last year is when they unveiled the new tea box, they lengthened it. You know, this was this Part five that Bobby Jones had always talked about. The second shot was supposed to be this momentous decision. You know, do you go for the green into and try to clear that creek or do you lay up and play it as a three shot hole. Well, you know, with technology, the ball and the clubs improving so much, it's become essentially a Part four for these guys. Well, they lengthened the tea which is great. I think that that's unfortunately, I think that that was needed for the Masters. But what they didn't do is restore the green. And that green was originally was thirteen thousand square feet and had this big hung on the front left of the green with another whole section that's gone that was tucked right behind that creek. You know we were talking earlier about all this kind of amoeba shaped tongues and stuff that were right up against bunkers. Well, in this case, that tongue was right up against the edge of the creek there, and currently there's a big bunker right where that section of the green was. I think if you restored that green to its original size, had that pin location, that would create much more variety for pin locations for the tournament. And so if you had a you know, on the four days you have like a back right pin on one day and a front left pin on the other day and then two other pins, that hole would play very very differently and where you would have to try to place your t shot would be probably very different, so I think, and there's you know, other holes for examples of the greens that have shrunk a lot. So I think just expanding the greens back would create more diversity in the strategy that these guys had to use and would kind of keep them on their toes a little bit. It would give the you know, the club more flexibility in the day to day setup of the four days the competition and keep the pros like on their toes a bit. But generally, yeah, having the you know, the much wider fairways, less trees, I'm all in favor of going for the single cut. The other thing I would say, is I sort of think of it in terms of like a hybrid. So if you were to take like say the current course with all of its infrastructure and all the improvements they made, and then you imagine it like it's a hybrid between the original course and the current course. Trying to get some of the rusticity back, sort of the rugged aesthetic of the original course, I think would be really interesting. Now I recognize that the club has this reputation with the course is just very very well manicured and just everything is dialed and perfect, and so I recognized that they would never go back to the rugged nature of the nineteen thirty four course if you look at those old photos.

01:11:01
Speaker 1: But I think that they're not going to have like the turf the way it was. And now if you look at some of those old photos, like it's this is what turf was like, and the in the nineteen thirties exactly.

01:11:11
Speaker 2: Especially on like clay soils that weren't sand capped with little nitchin. But you know, so if you were to try to you're just taking what's there now. But then I think if you just you know, with the bunkers specifically, if you just gave a little bit of rugged texture to the edges, still keeping them like very well manicured. I think that that would help improve the esthetic a lot. I know you would argue, like, well, that doesn't really factor into the playability. It's just more of an aesthetic thing. But I think again, like there's a good happy medium. There's a hybrid between say nineteen thirty four, nineteen eighties and current day course where.

01:11:47
Speaker 1: You have the te's.

01:11:49
Speaker 2: You know. That's the other thing we haven't really talked about is like all the teas that have been lengthened since the eighties, which I mean, what are you going to do? You can't go back to those tea boxes. You know, you could argue that they're alreadytruggling in that in that department, and you know that's why they linked in thirteen and then fifteen last year. So I think I think at least for competitive play, I mean for member play and guest play, that's a very different thing, and you have, you know, you have a different set of teas entirely, but for competitive play for the masters, I mean, I think there's no way around it. It's like you need those you need those new te's And but creating the within the fairway and expanding the green complexes, having those more you know, those pinnable locations back, and then just adding a little bit of rustic character with some of the Bucker edges. I think that that would be like sort of the ideal way to approach a quasi restoration of Augusta.

01:12:42
Speaker 1: The aesthetic issue is an interesting one, you know, how do you reintroduce some rustic character without making the course a weird mixture of refined and rugged, right because right now the aesthetic is very consistent through the course. It is all extremely refined and sharp, and that's what they've gone for. But I think that there is, as you're saying, a possibility of a happy medium here and a course that comes to mind. And I'm not suggesting a new architect here or anything like that, but what leaps immediately to mind is the current version of Southern Hills Country Club and what they did there that was initially a very rugged golf course. And would I have preferred that they went all the way back to that ruggedness when they did the Gil Hanson Jim Wagner restoration there a few years ago. Probably that would be my preference. But what they did instead was a kind of compromise where they have some of that. Really, you know that the turf is obviously state of the art and everything does look really ship shape, but the bunkers have a little bit of that original shape, a little bit of that you know, chaotic look along the edges, but it all still fits. And it's not easy to do that as an architect, but I think it is possible. And then the other thing that you're saying about the greens would be maybe the easiest change of all the green that leaps to mind for me, or two of them that leap to mind for me when I think of possible expansions would be number four and number eight, number nine, nine, yeah, yeah, the nine used to be I mean nine is kind of more or less an oval at this point. It's a fairly big oval, but that used to extend way more down the hillside and maybe a little bit more around the top of the bunkers. But it was, as you say, a boomerang. And then four had this amazing section that wrapped down around to the left of the bunker. Now that green is fairly shallow and wide, but originally it was I mean, almost again a boomerang type shape with a with a big portion of it coming down the hill and around the bunker. Now, some of these sections would be unpinnable, but unpinnable areas on greens can sometimes be functional in the sense that you can use them to run your ball up and do different things in approaching the greens. So those would be the two that come to mind for me as good candidates for interesting expansions.

01:15:36
Speaker 2: I think you're right on the money. Yeah, I've looked at that a lot, and you know, if you could get that tongue back on four. You know, again that was modeled after the Eden and if you look at the eleventhole of St. Andrews, there's a bit of a tongue going out in front there, and they just sort of exaggerated that when they build that the fourth of Augusta. And then yeah, to your point, that ninth hole you have this boomerang, so you'd have like a back pin location way over that bunker. And then it's a little unclear to me if the front left was ever pinnable or if that was that section was more of just a false front. I think that the very front, the very front right section that sort of tongue. I believe that that was more of a false front, probably wasn't pinnable.

01:16:17
Speaker 1: That's what I think too. It would be a pretty radical pin if you put one there.

01:16:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, exactly, But yeah, you could do that. And again, I just think that it would keep these these pros on their toes a bit more having to navigate these different pin locations. I mean, they're so familiar with all of the current pin locations. They know those greens so well. So if you introduced some of these expanded greens, at least for the first few years, it would introduce, uh, you know, some more strategic challenges for them.

01:16:47
Speaker 1: Well, Josh, you and I could go on for another three hours about this, but it would it would no longer be a podcast. It would be it would be it would be more more of an epic and an audio form or an audiobook in any case, a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. Can you give people things to look for that you're doing. I'm thinking about book, website, institute, all that kind of stuff. Where can people find some of the work that you're doing, either architecturally or historically.

01:17:22
Speaker 2: Sure, well, yeah, thank you Girett for having me a really enjoyable conversation. Yeah, I have a book that I published called The McKenzie Reader, which is a compendium of all of his writings. You know, many of them have sort of been lost to time, and I sort of integrated all these different visuals to sort of interactive book with routing plans and photographs and all these writings. And there's you know a good amount of material about Augusta in the book and there's a whole section about it. So you can find that on my website, which is alisterirmackenzie dot org. That's the Alster Mackenzie Institute, which I founded and am in the process of building a museum that will eventually exist down the road. So yeah, you can check them with me there. You know, I've got some social media, which sometimes I'm not great about, but I'm trying to get back into that. So on on Instagram there's Mackenzie Institute and on Twitter x it's doctor Mackenzie. But yeah, happy to happy to chat with anybody, and yeah, you could. You can find the book at Alice McKenzie dot org. And yeah, I'm always good, always good talking with you. A lot of fun all.

01:18:32
Speaker 1: Right, thanks for coming on, Josh, sure.

01:18:34
Speaker 2: Thanks.

01:18:43
Speaker 1: This episode of the Friday Golf Podcast was produced by Matt Rusius. Thank you, Matt. If you'd like to do something really quick to support the podcast, go to wherever you're listening to this wherever it is and leave a rating and a review. Those really help us reach new listeners and we like hearing the feedback, so if you could do that for us, that would be much much appreciative. Thank you for listening to this episode and we'll be back again soon