Jim Wagner of Hanse Golf Course Design on Contours and Cavemen

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at b dratty. It is a spring everybody in the Northeast and Midwest is probably dusting off the golf clubs and it might be time to look at some new clothing options. And b dratty has their Dratty Sport line which has greatly expanded today. So one item that I'd love to talk about is the new Blair pullover. It is named after our mutual friend Zach Blair. He's been on the show a few times PGA Tour player, and it's inspired by probably my favorite item in the b dratty collection, the Russ sweatshirt. It's got that tech fabric but it's still got all the great features in that Rush sweatshirt. So you've got the kangaroo pocket everything, but it is unbelievably soft and it's got tech, that sport and awesome piece. So that would be one of my recommendations. And you can use the code TFE twenty five for twenty five percent off at b draddy dot com. That is b draddy d r A d d y dot com. Today's episode is with Jim Wagner. Jim is a partner at Gilhan's Golf design. Him and Gil have been building golf courses together since the mid nineteen nineties. So I met up with him down in Jupiter at their new project at Jonathan's Landing, and we talked about a wide range of topics. Hopefully we'll do more of these. He's got just so much stuff to talk about that really enjoyable talk. So, without further ado, here is Jim Wagner. I miss the green, for example, I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a brid egg.

00:02:01
Speaker 2: Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg bright egg, Frida egg brid egg Lie, I'm about ready to run.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: Off of the hump. I'm gonna start you off with a classic Friday question.

00:02:33
Speaker 2: I've never listened to The Friday before.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: That's good.

00:02:36
Speaker 2: I've never actually listened to any podcast before.

00:02:38
Speaker 1: If you were gonna eat a piece of one piece of fruit the rest of your life, which one would be and why it.

00:02:45
Speaker 2: Would be a banana? If banana is actually considered fruit, it's fruit. It's fruit. Yeah, uh, and it's a banana and I have for breakfast every day that and a cup of coffee and you're good to go for the rest of the day.

00:02:59
Speaker 1: I feel like when you're out on the site, you forget to eat a lot of times, right.

00:03:04
Speaker 2: You can, but I try to make sure that, you know, we have three squares a day. You know. Actually in some of our projects, when we did a Hoopy because we were out in the middle of nowhere and there was an old hunting lodge and part of the property and one of the wives of the guy that worked for Seamus, his wife, Soorn, was traveling with him and she's a great cook.

00:03:25
Speaker 1: What a couple of power couple of names, Seamus.

00:03:28
Speaker 2: And Shorn, it is, it is. It's awesome. They're awesome. They're awesome couple. So anyway, Shorn is a great cook, and you know, she was living in Statesboro and Hoopy's what forty five minutes from Statespro, so it's kind of boring there. So we actually hired her to come and she would go into the hunting lodge and we opened up a thing called Caveman Cafe. So every day we would show up at like twelve o'clock and she would have a full spread of food, you know, waiting for us. But you can't forget to eat. But it's important because you need the downtime to help. Once to sit on a machine going back and forth for ten hours straight.

00:04:03
Speaker 1: I don't know. Somebody might say I'd love to sit on a machine all day if they're they sit in an office chair all day.

00:04:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true, but I guess the guys at sitting on a machine all day long by like, I really could stand to go sit in an office chair for a while.

00:04:17
Speaker 1: Everybody's job, this is like something that I think is universal. Everybody's job has shit, you know, it does, no matter what, like, And I get so sick of people complaining about their job because it's like any job you have has shitty stuff about it, you know.

00:04:33
Speaker 2: No, you're you're absolutely right. Every job has some shit that you have to handle and take care of. And that's the bad part of the job.

00:04:39
Speaker 1: It's managing the shit, right, What's what's your shit?

00:04:42
Speaker 2: It's it's having to deal with contractors. I mean, contractors are great, you know, necessary evil for the most part, right, but they tend to just do what they want to do. At any given time. The problem is is when they do what they want to do, it's usually at the absolute wrong time and they do the wrong thing. You know, for people that are Seinfeldt fans, right, seinfeld fans, what they should do is go back and look at the episode where George decides to do everything opposite. Right, If everything he's ever done is natural instinct was wrong, then doing the opposite would be right. So a majority of contractors, really what they should do is watch that episode and take that advice and then just do the opposite of what their natural instincts are are or would be, and it'd be a home run every time.

00:05:29
Speaker 1: So if you're hiring contractors, do you know, if they recommend something, do the opposite.

00:05:37
Speaker 2: Exactly. You know, from golf course construction down to a house painter. Right, just do the opposite that they say and you'll be heading in the right direction. Yeah.

00:05:46
Speaker 1: Do you do you deal with contractors like on your house and stuff? And do you have a like are they Is it similar across the board in your you know obviously have massive dealings with contractors and golf construction, but is it consistent across the world. No.

00:06:02
Speaker 2: The problem is is like at home, like I have a wife, right, so when they start getting involved, and then things get a lot tougher, right because then you have emotions that you know, get involved with everything, and now you have to, you know, deal with that part of the construction. Right on the golf end of things. You can take the emotion out right, you can just pretty much tell them like this is the way it's going to be, and this is how we're going to do it, you know. So you'd think that I'd be good at dealing with the contractors at home, but it's a complete opposite. Like I'm in the middle. We just this time last year we signed the contractor to come in and replace all of our windows in our house and go with impact class right for hurricanes. We are about I mean maybe tomorrow will be one one year later and are still not done the job. So now I finish the job, already paid them the money and I tore my bicep helping them, so they review, No, it's not so don't get in back lass in your hash are bet off? Just moving? What?

00:07:04
Speaker 1: Uh? Some people have told me that you're like the best best person in the industry at dealing with contractors.

00:07:11
Speaker 2: Well, I hate the hell to see who the worst person was.

00:07:14
Speaker 1: What's what's your key to success? Other than telling them like do you do? You just tell them to do the opposite of what they would naturally do.

00:07:21
Speaker 2: Well for the most part, yes, you know, but you have to kind of somewhat work your way into it, right, Like just the guys here, because we're you know, on site here at Jonathan's Landing Old Trail project and the contract is great and a really nice guy. He's doing an awesome job. But like I was saying earlier, at the worst possible time, they do the opposite of what you want. So we had an area on a third tee where we were going to just go ahead and build the tea and remove some of the environmental regulation type stuff and move it to another portion of the project. And I go out yesterday and here they dug like a canal right through the middle of the third te So it's like, okay, great. So I had to tell a contract and like listen, you know, don't take any more holes. Don't do anything until you know you approve it with us, because it's going to be wrong, you know. So you pretty much have to insinuate it as opposed to saying just do the opposite, right, because then they'll start even thinking more. And that's the last thing you wanted to do, is think, right. All you needed to do is kind of follow directions. But it's just I think it's just a matter of staying on top of them and trying to explain to them what the vision is, which is the opposite of what they did for the last architect they worked for.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: So they just developed bad habits from working for all these different people compared to the way you guys work. And that's probably the hardest thing is that they figure they work the way they work with everybody else and they'll be fine.

00:08:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, And because I mean believe or not, you know, since we still do all of our own shaping and all that good stuff right, sore extremely hands on most contractors that we use to come in and you know, do all the nuts and bolt stuff right, the drainage, the side leging and things of that nature, the non artistic type stuff, right. But we still put together a huge book of specs which pretty much lays out exactly what we want them to do. But I think the most contractors who are reading the specs have attention deficit disorder, and they may get to about page ten right of one hundred, and then they just start looking at quantities as opposed to what the scope is. And all they do is bid on how they usually do work right, which is not how we want work to be done. So when they come out and they start working, they just think that they're going to go ahead and do it the way they've always done, and it's not the case, you know. So it takes about six to nine holes to knock out the prior architect and the prior jobs they've done out of their system. Right. Then it takes another six or so for them to understand what you want to do, and then the last two or three holes it's easy, you know. But then you're going home and you're starting all over again.

00:09:50
Speaker 1: What's your process for finding the guys that work for you, guys that do the shaping and different things like, how do you guys go about that?

00:09:57
Speaker 2: Well, what I tend to do is we're driving, you know, going for one job to the next, right on the road, exactly. We looked for the first guy who's hitchhiking, and we slow down and we ask them, you know, how much money they have or if they have any beer, and then we throw them in the back of the car. And then we just go ahead and ask him a couple of questions and see if they have a driver's license, and if they do, then we throw them out right. If they don't have a driver's license, then we keep them and then we put them on a dozer and it works out perfect. No, Actually, what we do is, uh, a lot of our guys have worked with us in the past, right, So, like you know Neil Cameron who's been with us the longest. Uh, he was just getting out of college when we did Castle Stewart. So Neil was just out of college and he was working for the for the club and he enjoyed what he was doing and he said, Hey, I really like this work, you know, can I come work with you guys? And you know, we took him on to the job and then he's been with us ever since. And then sometimes it's just word of mouth, Hey, we're looking for somebody to have anybody good, you know, and people say, yeah, you know, talk to so and so, and then like Seamus. Shamus was somebody that had done a lot of golf course construction work in the past, and he was living he has a house in Petaluma, California, and we were looking for somebody and he came down to Durel and you know, started with us there and he's been with us now that's been what maybe eight years something like that, So you know, it works out, It works out good. But yeah, we like to bring them on, We like to work them, see what the likes, see if they have any talent, and then really what we're looking for is good people. We weren't people that are funny. You know.

00:11:26
Speaker 1: What was it like working with that client at Durell.

00:11:31
Speaker 2: Well, you talk about you know, entertaining Uh yeah, I mean, I mean the thing that we have to remember is we talked about this, we had I have to preface it all. But this was well before running for president, right and everything we've seen for the past you know, a couple of years okay, but you know during that time, it was just like working. You know, he was a developer. He was a real estate developer, right, So that says a lot right there in a lot of cases. But he was engaged, he was hands on. You know, we had a good time, you know, holding the golf course and doing the work and you know, at that point in time in his life was actually you know, a lot of fun and a funny person, you know, so it was a you know, it was a good job.

00:12:10
Speaker 1: You know, this is funny, Like why would you go to be the president of the United States from that?

00:12:14
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, exactly, you know, from that where we're.

00:12:17
Speaker 1: Building golf courses.

00:12:18
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, when when I look at you know, all the stuff that's happened, I think back to them, I'm like, wow, what happened? We're wrong, you know, So it's just like it was crazy, but no, it was fun.

00:12:28
Speaker 1: You know. You talked about a whoopie with having the Caveman Cafe, and it seems like, you know, you guys really like working from you from everything all counts I get, you know, and can see from the outside, and I'm I'm curious in terms of what do you guys do to make sure they're happy, Like what what you know in the industry, obviously, shapers kind of float around a lot, but it seems like you're stay with you everywhere.

00:12:55
Speaker 2: That's because you hold back half their pay every year and we force it on until the next year.

00:12:59
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, it's like you think back to when they get picked up on the road.

00:13:02
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, Yeah, Yeah, they're happy to be with us. Yeah, it's like a golden parachute, you know. For that. No, I just I think like one of the things that Gil and I try to do with everything is we just want to have fun. Right when we go out and we work, we want to have fun and we want our we want our guys to be able to have fun and just kind of go and be creative. And you know, you're creating golf courses. There's no reason not to have fun. You're outside every day, you know, ninety percent of the time, the weather's great, you're having a good time. So I mean we just try to keep it light, you know. And but plus we've been very fortunate, and I think really the key is, you know, we want to get down to it. It's money, right. Think about a lot of the shapers that go around, they may do a six or eight month stint with somebody and then they may not work again for four or five six months, and then they come back again. Well that's great, you know, because they're making good money while they're working, but also spending good money while they're not working. So I think you know, we've been very fortunate that we've had work, and the way we schedule at work is really on timelines, so we try to fill as much of the year as we possibly can. So you know, our guys are usually you know, you know, ten eleven months a year they're able to work. And that's a huge thing, you know, because I love the work, so I think, you know, in the end, it's having fun and money.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: Do you ever think about how like different it would be if there were instead of ten to twenty golf projects a year, like one hundred to two hundred for you, For you and the guys that work for you. I think about this all the time.

00:14:31
Speaker 2: If they're well, I wouldn't like that, you know, that's like way too much work, you know. Uh, you mean if there was a lot of work going on, what it would be like?

00:14:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, because obviously I always think like there are guys that if it was the mid nineties that are shaping golf courses, that would be building their own golf courses just because there frankly aren't enough jobs around to have you know, one hundred and fifty busy architects.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know, I've never really thought about that you know, you think about it. So I don't know what's in your head.

00:15:01
Speaker 1: It's come out of too much shit.

00:15:03
Speaker 2: My head is just like a ping pong ball bouncing around all the time. But uh, I don't know. I mean, I think I think it would change everything. I think the desire, the creativity. You know. The cool part about the work that we do is if your project is six or eight months long, it's six or eight months long, right, so the creativity is there, it flows for that long. If you had to do that, you know, continually, I think it would be tough. You know. So if you leave one project and go to another one, it's a whole new ballgame, right There's a new set of you know, conditions, there's a new you know, phrases, there's new design elements, you know, so it kind of keeps light and fresh. So my question would be, if you're doing one hundred or two hundred projects, or there are that many projects out there, you know, in general, is it just going to like basically wood down you know, the excitement and the fun of golf, It probably would. You know. It's like put this right, like you can probably equate it to the NFL versus the NBA NFL sixteen games. It's great. Every game means a lot, right, eighty two games, you know, shocking the big stars. They don't play till January, you know, and then they get ready for the playoffs. So at the beginning of the year is just kind of watered down. It's too much, you know. So I think that would probably be what you would see. I mean it kind of be my guess.

00:16:12
Speaker 1: Then you got baseball that was like that was like the early nineties.

00:16:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, well baseball is meant to be boring, right, It's meant to kill, like, you know, the long summer just sitting around doing nothing. But yeah, that's way too long. You know. Last year was better. You know, the COVID was good for some things.

00:16:27
Speaker 1: You guys obviously have grown. I mean after do you think think back to like when you guys were just starting out to now, how much has your job changed as you guys have grown.

00:16:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's changed a lot, right, because what happens is when we first started, it was really just you had one job, right, and it was the job you were working on. Maybe had another master playing or something like that that you were working on, but you would be able to just concentrate on that one job. There was no outside stuff. When you finished up the work at the end of the day, you could go home, have dinner but the TV or and watch a ball game or whatever, go to bed, wake up the next day, and you know you're back on the job, you know, shaping or whatever you know you're doing. But now it's you're still doing that because that's the fun part of the job. But all the other demands, you know, all the emails you get preparing for other jobs, you know, the phone calls you get doing today from the other projects that are either just starting up, going through permitting, you know, design changes, or winding down and finalizing the contractors, you know, pay and just kind of doing all that kind of stuff. It's it's almost a full time job, you know, like, really, I could probably take at least one week if not, you know, a week and a half to two weeks every month and just do that part of the job. You know, but you have to kind of regulate and be like, Okay, you know you want to be on site because you want to be part of that, but you still need that time and if you want to have a life outside of work and be able to enjoy Saturday or try to play golf or go out to dinner with your wife. You know, that's stuff you've You've got to balance it, really, you know, that's what it comes down to and being efficient, right.

00:18:04
Speaker 1: I imagine, because like, the the interesting thing that you guys get into is like your business work, which you know, the permitting, all the operational stuff has grown so much, but the stuff that made you, made you grow into where you're so popular, is the creative work. So you have to keep doing that right.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: Correct, And that's the fun part, right, That's why we keep doing it. If we had to do all the permitting stuff and deal with the agencies and deal with the budgeting and write the specs and do all these stupid zoom calls, right, it waste more time setting up a zoom call than it was to be on the zoom call and finalize what the issue was, right. But yeah, that's you know, it's just it becomes a big part of the job. If we had to do that every single day, you know, we probably wouldn't be in the business.

00:18:51
Speaker 1: You know, I'd be a house painter or a contractor.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: Exactly, and I'd have somebody else may do it on actually know what they do. I'd go back to the golf course and I on the maintenance staff, and I'd cut failways and I purposely like scalp the rough and do like a lot of crazy shit just to make the superintendent. We can sing go or be the cup cutter and put the cups on like the top of mounds or on like six percent slope, you know, like we see when we go out and play golf.

00:19:16
Speaker 1: Seems like you always have a unique relationship with your superintendent. So it's always a very good one. They love you, but you like you like to ruffle their feathers a little bit.

00:19:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we have to. Again, we're having fun, so we got to tweak them a little bit, you know. But in the end, those guys make us look the best, right, you know. And you know a guy like Russ, you know Russ, right, Russ is great. You know, he's a good friend. He's great. But you know we've gotten into arguments and you know, ruffling each other feathers and you know, and doing that sort of thing. But you know that's good because really ultimately, what we're all trying to do, right, we're all trying to get the other people, whether it's a superintendent and us or us in the superintendent right to think like them, to work with them and to be a part of it. So all we're doing is trying to strive for affection in our own little you know, corner of the golf course. Right from a design standpoint, we're trying to force as much of the design and you know, the design elements and the understanding of what we want on them, and they're trying to do the same with us on the maintenance end of things. But in the end, you're really just melting it together, right and trying to work together on everything. But it's really just basically out of the desire to be excel in what you're doing. That's all. Yeah.

00:20:26
Speaker 1: With the with the superintendent working with them, I obviously you've worked with a ton but in terms of the qualities, like what you know, do you want them to be hands on, like have a strong voice with like what's going on? Tell you if they foresee any sort of issue, like can you talk a little bit through some of the qualities of the best guys that you've worked with.

00:20:47
Speaker 2: Well, well, that's it right there. It's it's it's them wanting to be involved, to be hands on, right, we want to give them all the tools that they need to be successful in the in the agronomic end of things, the sign of the site, right, we need them to be there. Okay, there's no way we're going to be able to understand the property like these guys have if they've been there a long period of time, or if it's a new site. The way they're thinking about the property, We think about it differently, right, We look at it from a design standpoint, right, first two dimensional and then the third dimension. We're not looking at all the other environmental conditions. I mean, we do a little bit, but there's so much out there. I mean, the science behind the superintendent end of things they're ground to me is huge and people forget that. So we need the superintendents to be hands on, to be involved, to do research, to really you know, think outside the box, but to work with us from a design standpoint, understand the design. So you know, most of the guys are the ones that are out there every day, you know Russ or you know Paul Atchell. Guys like that. They're involved, right, They want to be involved, they want to come out, They ask questions. They try to understand what you're doing. Right, They know in their mind exactly what they want to do under the ground, and then we just have to give them the freedoms to go ahead and do that. But if you can work together and doing that, that to me is the best success. But they have to be handsling, they have to be there.

00:22:14
Speaker 1: Let's let's talk about the place we're at here. We're at Jonathan's Landing, South Florida. Your hometown, hometown area.

00:22:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, my adopted hometown.

00:22:25
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that's a nice move being somebody that's Midwest spending a lot of time down here this one. I don't blame you.

00:22:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, you get it. Yeah, you know. And if you like to play golf, you know, there's no better place to be, Like we were in Philadelphia. My wife and I moved down here seven years ago. Who the hell wants to try to play golf in Philadelphia November December January February. Right, it's just it's impossible.

00:22:48
Speaker 1: That's how Pine Valley started though, right.

00:22:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they say, right, you know, it was probably cold there, I mean this time, yeah, exactly exactly so, But yeah, I mean, how much warmer was it, you know, a couple degrees or something. But anyhow, so it's so yeah, we moved down here and then this job came about. What it is is Jonathan's landing has fifty four holes. Right. They have two properties. They have an intown property, which is you know, your typical Florida goth right, it's you know, eighteen hole golf course, homes surrounded by homes, a little bit of inner coastal you know frontage, pretty straightforward golf course. Right. Then they have this property, which is, you know, people are familiar with Jupiter, it's kind of it's it's west western part of Jupiter. They call this area Jupiter Farms, right. And really, when you cross over ninety five and the turnpike, the landscape of Florida changes, right. It changes from terra cotta roofs and asphalt and palm trees to you know, open fields, you know, horses, pine trees, oak trees. So it's a totally different landscape. So when we were broad here to take a look at the it was by Neil Lockey, who was the director of Golf at that point in time, and he had heard about a hoopie and talked to Todd who was the pro to Hoopie and him and Todd were friends, so he got the lowdown about a Hoopie and the Whiskey routing at a Hoopye and how it was a shorter golf course. It was just kind of a match play, you know, fun and how much people enjoy it. I mean a lot of the comments we get on our projects that we've ever done, because we've done some really big and bold stuff, right, and we've done some smaller things like the Whiskey Rally and a Hoopie. We get probably more comments about the fun people had on the Whiskey Rally and Hoopye than we do on the other golf courses. So it kind of, you know, clicked a little bit. And so they brought us in and said, hey, we have this you know, old Arthur Hills golf course which is built in nineteen eighty two and it's just tired and old, and they kind of wanted the repurpose to land and what can we do with it under the kind of premise of what we did at a Hoopie. So we just said, listen, the best bed is like because the property dictates anything but your typical Florida golf is we're going to create something that is not Florida right as best we can for being in Florida, you know what I mean. So he took a look at the site again, the more the natural vegetation. Uh, and then we started to think about what is Florida golf right, the typical Florida GoF it's homes. Okay, well here, I think there's only about five or six homes that you can see from the golf course. But they're not on the golf course, so not on any golf hole. You can just see them through the trees or on the other side of the water. Two is lakes, right, there's water everywhere you look at the Honda this week. You know, there's a guy yesterday in an eleventh hole. I think he took his clothes off or something, right, I don't know why he took his shirt off. You know, it didn't really seem to make anything.

00:25:39
Speaker 1: Like a new trend, like guys get down to their boxers to hit a shot. It's like you could just have pants that are dirty for twenty minutes.

00:25:46
Speaker 2: I know, and I don't know who the guy was, but it's not like he was showing off his physic or anything. You know, he looked like he was like a seventy five year old body on the guy. But anyhow, so there's water everywhere. There's water on the right side of the hole, there's water on the left side of the hole, and it's not water. There's a house houses right, So there was some water on the inner the inner portion of the property. So we said, okay, let's move as much water as we possibly can to the outside of the property. Right. And it was like, you'll say, he's like, this would be cool if we could kind of do like a Chicago golf type feel or a seminole field where you go out there and all as you see is golf, right, because usually in Florida you don't see the next hole right because it's on the other side. You got to go through somebody's backyard, you know, to get to the next te So it's like we just went under that that premise and just golf everywhere. So instead of missing if you miss the fairway, now you're not either. You know, you're not in the lake, you're not in some home depot, you know, garden center backyard, you know, with a bouncy bounce and you know all that kind of stuff. You're probably in another fairway or in a rough in between fairwiyes. And we opened up the property, cleared, you know, several acres of ground just so we could get that feel. And there's a couple of places where you can pretty much see the entirety of the golf course. We're limited a little bit because a golf course is shaped like a U and the center, the top center part of you is the what you McCall it is like the clubhouse in the parking lot. But you can probably several points on the property see twelve to fifteen holes. So just anything but typical Florida golf.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think that's kind of what Everything was built here around a central premise, and it seemed to me it seems like, you know, there's gonna be some new projects coming up down here that changed the way people the perception of Florida golf, and this is obviously one of them.

00:27:28
Speaker 2: What I'm really.

00:27:29
Speaker 1: Interested in is reworking a previous site that was built, you know, with what was in vogue, containment, mounting and different, you know, a routing that wasn't really walking friendly. How have you gone about taking a site that had golf that was, you know, maybe not your your typical style of golf and taking it and making it your style of golf.

00:27:54
Speaker 2: I think the first key when you do that right is when you're going through the routing phase is to look at the old golf course, right, just pretend it's not even there, you know. So you have your your topo map and you're working off a plan, and it'll be funny because you'll go into a committee meeting with people and they'll be like, you just say, we're talking about like the sixteenth hole, and they're like, the sixteenth hole, which hole is that? Oh, that's our third hole, And now they start speaking in terms of what the golf course is before we get there, and you're speaking in other terms because and that kind of shocked that you don't know what hole they're talking about. But we don't want to know what hole they're talking about, right, because if you get locked into that would almost be like and people have kind of asked some of these questions before in different ways, but it would almost be like trying to write music with music on in the background, you know what I mean. It's like you got that tune in your end. Now you're like you're starting to write towards that, so you just kind of eliminate all that, right, try to figure out the best routing. And the cool thing here is, although it's heavily regulated, the regulations were that from like a water standpoint, is all we had to do is make sure we had the same square footage of water, you know, pre our work and right, So that's pretty easy, and then we just start looking at moving everything to the outside and getting it out of play. But you know, you kind of got to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. But the easiest way forget there's even.

00:29:11
Speaker 1: A golf course there, and then what do you do with all the mounds?

00:29:15
Speaker 2: Well, actually some of the mounds have turned out to be pretty cool. You know, they're on the outside of old dog legs right now, like our sixteenth hole. Those mounds are on the outside of some golf hole. Right that looked weird. Is the outside of a dog leg? Right? And then with all you know, catch basins in front of it because the water couldn't actually moved to the lake that was on the other side of the mounds, right.

00:29:33
Speaker 1: I never understand that. One of my pet feeves is when you see a basin right next to the lake.

00:29:40
Speaker 2: And one of the problems here it was wet right, and I mean you're you're out in the Everglades for the most part, it was wet right. But then you look and you're like, okay, well there's a lake there, but there's six foot mounds between the fairway and the lake, and then there's just the catch basins. So it's like, well, maybe if they would have taken the dirt from the mounds and put it into the middle of the fairway and increase the slope across the fairway, they could you know, sheet float everything into the lake. But like in some cases, like on a sixteenth holl, these mounds that when the outside of some dogwag and we filled the lake in is now just off the carry of the tea. So you stand back of where the tea side is and you look at the green, like we could keep those mounds because they kind of interrupt your view of the green, and we could build this kind of just green that sits at grade and it would be really interesting, you know, something that you don't see in Florida. It would be like if people know our work would be similar to like say eight at Boston Golf Club. You know where you're sitting on the tee and they got the low bumps and rolls and the light chop in front of you, and you see part of the green that sits out there, but you don't see all that foreground. So actually we're using those mounds the way they're falling into the into the landscape to our advantage.

00:30:42
Speaker 1: It's one of the most interesting things I think about with all those old older golf courses from the sixties seventies, all the moundings on the outside of the hole, and if they would have just done all the work with the mounting on the inside of the hole. Like you think about some of the greatest holes in the world and they have the like really ir regular mounding and hills throughout them, and it's like, why did you do all that work over there when you could have done it in here and it would have yielded. Like I don't know if you've been to Santa Anita.

00:31:10
Speaker 2: I have been to San Anita.

00:31:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Like the mounding in the middle of the fairway there is just utterly unbelievable. It's like one of the coolest Like they was some of the coolest stuff I've seen at a municipal of course, it's just these like what you know, if you fast forwarded forty years, they would have all been on the outside. But this guy that you know, one time architect just built him all in the middle of the fairway.

00:31:34
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it's great. And I actually went out there with Tommy Knakarada, you know, numerous years ago when they were talking about redoing it. It was great. I mean, yeah, it's like one of the holes out there, the narrows right that has the mounding right down the middle of the fairway up by the grind and right. I think it was ten.

00:31:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that is such a cool little short part for it.

00:31:50
Speaker 2: It is so cool. It's so cool. And actually that that part four there actually inspired a little bit of what we did at Florid to Hoopie, right. It was kind of the same, a little bit of the same thought process where you get a power slot and you can you know, use that to funnel the ball into the green type thing. But yeah, no, I don't know why they don't. I just I don't understand you. No, but I agree with you. They tend to take all the dirt and they just piled up around the outside of play. I guess I guess they feel containment. Mounting is is the way to go.

00:32:18
Speaker 1: One of the best ways I've heard it describe, and it applies to this project so well.

00:32:23
Speaker 2: It was.

00:32:24
Speaker 1: J Blasi told me once. He was like, you know, if you think about building architecture or like a house, you know, there's an era where everybody needed as many small little rooms in a house as they could, and like you know, it'd be like your kitchen, your living room. But like now everybody realizes, hey, like we want like sprawling, open design, like where everybody feels comfortable when they're in a bigger space, you know, and one that's more connected. And that's really kind of what golf went through, where everything was siloed off and it was like this is the eleventh hole and you see nothing else from here except for eleven.

00:32:58
Speaker 2: No, you're right, And then the places that didn't do it with dirt and mounting, they plant the trees, right, so it's pretty easier when you're coming, like listen, if you cut down the trees and then remove the mounding, now you're actually being able to see the people that you're you know, members at the same club with or see other you know, guests of the club, or if you're at a public off course, or to see people. The fun part is is to see other people. If you know them and you're passing each other, you can give them a little bit of a rib shot, right, you can have some fun with them. Or if you're on a green, they're on the tea, you know they hit a bad drive, you know, you can yell over at them, right, that's part of having fun, right, that's part of it. Or if you don't know the people, you kind of watch their shot if they're playing a hole in front of you and try to see what goes on. He say, Man, that guy sucks, You know what I mean. But it's fun, right, It's kind of entertaining, and that's part of really what we're doing. We're going out to play golfers hopefully three and a half to four hours and at five or six and be entertained, right, either their own skill level or watching other people do stupid stuff. And the golfers are going to do stupid stuff.

00:33:56
Speaker 1: What are your big projects that it's all done? PGA Frisco built with major championships of mine, but obviously big PGA facility with their headquarters moving down there. What's it like having like an eighteen month growing.

00:34:11
Speaker 2: You know, it's great for us because you know, we don't have to do it. Actually, we were talking as we have Roger Meyer, who's the superintendent there. He was in town yesterday because we're going to do this golf course down at West Palm Beach. You know, has a little bit of pja of American influence, and so Roger came out just to look at things. But he said, yeah, it's probabably close to like three years, you know, from a growing standpoint, and in this case, actually, you know, we needed it to our advantage because the site was a great site. But going through all the environmental restrictions and some of the needs of being able to host a big tournament, you know, the site got changed dramatically with earthwork and adding wetlands and all that crazy stuff. Right to get everything out of one hundred to your floodplain and the soil in Texas. It's terrible, right, It's just it can barely hold itself up.

00:35:01
Speaker 1: Can you explain to a layman, You know, I'd like to meet a layman sometime. You know, like where did the term come from? But anyways, spray explaining like a layman's terms like soil, Like why is Texas as bad? Why is a hoopies great? From like a technical like building a golf course?

00:35:26
Speaker 2: Well, you know it would probably be under under the premise of like, say you're cooking, right, if you want to simplify it, right, is a layman? Yeah, and you're oh, yeah, you're you're a lay cook. Right, And say you're making a pizza dough, okay, and you got all this flour piled up, right, and you start pouring the water in the flower, right, and the flower will absorb the water and it'll just go through. Right. That is what a hoopie is. You can just keep pouring water on it and it'll be no issues. Okay. The problem with what you McCall with, say Texas, is is that now you've added added the water to your flour and you only have X amount of flour. So you have a cup of flour and like an idiot, you put four cups of water in it. Right now it turn almost turns into a soup. But you still got to make that same pizza crust, so you try to pack it together, and the more you work it, the weather it gets. And then you try to pile it up. We'll put it into a little ball, and it just kind of sluffs off, right. That's that's the material in Texas, because it gets to a point that it can't hold any more moisture, which is pretty much right away, and then it can't hold itself up, you know. Like for instance, our job in Thailand, it was an old shrimp farm I think at one point, right, a shrimp farm. Yeah, yeah, so those tie shrimp, you know, those big U U sixes and U eights that you get in the bag that you know, that's what they do. They farm raised the shrimp, right, So it's just obviously all water, you know, and they're raising the shrimp. But the soil there was so bad. And somebody actually phrased it perfectly. It's like if you got a bowl of pudding, right and it's in the refrigerator, to take it out, you can push your thumb on that top of that pudding, you know, with a little bit of pressure, but at a certain point your finger's gonna go through and you're gonna be in the pudding, right, And that's and that's kind of what the soil was in Thailand, and it's not really that dissimilar in Texas. It's just it's the composite of the soil and it's just it can't hold the amount of moisture that you know, mother nature is providing, and it just sloughs off. It just turns to nothing.

00:37:18
Speaker 1: So then when you're working in the dirt, how do you how do you I'm thinking about now the last time I made tried to make try it to make pizza, and the crust just it was awful. I couldn't do anything with it. But what do you do? How do you make it work?

00:37:35
Speaker 2: In that you kind of push it and hope that it holds up, you know, because you're still trying to be creative, right, you know, you look at a lot of golf, and you can look at a lot of golf in Florida, right since we're down here and you've probably played some of the courses. Everything is very simple, these long, simple lines. You can tell they're all pretty much created by you know, bulldozers and stuff like that. From our standpoint, you know, you need to be more creative, right, You need to come up with different situations. You need to come up with a little bit of a you know, abruptness, right, and you need to kind of break things up. So you've got to go ahead and just keep working. Or what will happen is the soil may not be consistently bad. There may be sections of soil or soil elsewhere that is better. Then you've got to be able to bring that stuff in and use it to create what you need to create where you know you want abrupt side slopes and things in that nature and hold it together. But in the end, if you can get it to hold up through construction, and if you can try to drain it and divert the water and you can get grass on it, it will eventually hold itself in place. Right, And you asked the question earlier about the superintendent. If they understand what we want to do, right, and they know how important because their hands on that we need to have that sort of stuff in there, they're going to continue and they're gonna work it and they're gonna make it a priority that that stays that way. Maybe it's changing grass variety, maybe it's going ahead and that in the drain, or maybe it's them like if you get a twenty foot crack and the slope and it stuffs off right to come back in and patch. Okay, then maybe the next time you get a bad rain or something happens, it's only ten feet that they know it's less and they know how important it is, so eventually through it it'll it'll be fine. They'll make sure they take care of it. But if they're not hands on and they look at them like, oh my god, this is a maintenance night there, then they're just gonna go ahead. They're gonna add did and to make it a you know, a shitty side slope, you know, when you're gonna be left with nothing.

00:39:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, because then if they make it a software one, make it easier on maintenance, it loses the abruptness exactly.

00:39:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. And abruptness is maybe what you want from a play standpoint, you may want it from a visual standpoint. There's a lot of different things, right.

00:39:28
Speaker 1: That one thing when I walked Pinehurst for with Ben from Your Guys' Crew and Seamus was there for a little while and they talked about blending everything in with with the surrounds, like creating these horizon lines, but also creating abruptness is something I never really think about the abruptness because that draws your eye to things, right, is that the idea behind it?

00:39:53
Speaker 2: It kind of is. I mean, abruptness is for a lot of reasons. Right. It can draw your eye towards something or away from something. Right. It can add you know, a play value where you know, you see the abruptness and you're trying to stay away from the abruptness and the causes you to be in a bad place on the other side of the green, you know. So, yeah, and it has to be dictated by the site. Right. You look at all the great golf courses, right, and I always look at Marion right, at Marrying for everything, because one I think it's one of the best golf courses in the country, is not in the world, right, But almost every single single architectural element has been broken at Marion, right. If so, if you took somebody out and took them to sixteen Green or seventeen Green and you said to them, look how great this is, they would think you're nuts. Right the front of sixteen Green and that you know, the big upslope coming in out of the quarry. I mean, that's abruptness, right, And that's a great part of Marion. You know, a modern day owner may look at that and be like, why are we wasting the money to have that green? Right, But it's an important part of the design elements.

00:40:53
Speaker 1: You know, like an unpinnable surface. I think that unpittable surface is such to those much of a magic of greens. But then you see that's like the first thing to go when they cut maintenance guffs, like well we can't put a pin there or we shouldn't.

00:41:08
Speaker 2: Have it, and that's what you hear. And that's it again, go back to the superintendent. The important part of those guys, you know, Steve Rabbitu you know and wing Foot in places like that, right, you know, you have to embrace that stuff, you know, and not worry about the maintenance. Look at those greens, you know at wing Foot and the sharp drop offs on the backside of some of those greens, right, if the superintendent isn't willing to try to mow those greens out and get to those to those points on you know, the old you know, uh pad of the green before the drop off, and they say, well listen, I can't cut that, and how my guy's going to turn? Then over time you end up with ten feet of rough between the edge of the green and the drop off, which defeats the purpose of the drop off. Right. So it's just you know, you need to have that stuff and people have to understand that it's part of the game. And you also need to have the greens that lay on on grade of the ground, right, you need to have that, and you need to have simple flowing lines. But I think if you have too much of one and not enough of the other, you know, whatever it might be, then you're you're losing that that excitement, that that difference, you know, that that interest, because after a while becomes the norm.

00:42:08
Speaker 1: I think you just hit on something. Is those lay of the land, those you know, sometimes benign or looking things that restraint you almost have to exercise restraint. Is that something that's learned with experience. Like I you know, sometimes when I go see places, I just think, God, you know, if you just took your foot off the gas every once in a while. It's sometimes because like you go to places and you're like, God, the best hold some of the best holes are the ones that don't look like the best holes right from you know what you see.

00:42:40
Speaker 2: No, you're absolutely right and that you know, That's one of the things Gil you know, really loves is just anytime we go visit a golf course and stuff that we do, it's just greens laying kind of flat on the ground, right, because you're right, and the thing that we see and you know, you can call it mister potato head or missus potato head or whatever we're allowed to call it nowadays, right, is that a lot of times a lot of people when they look at golf course architecture or don't have maybe the experience, right, is that they feel everything needs to come up out of the ground. Right, And it's like, okay, and that's where you get some of the mounding, right, That's where you get the greens, where you get everything that comes up in the air. And that's why I call it mister potato. And it's like almost taking the ear of mister potato and sticking on the top of the head. Right. So I think that's the kind of stuff that you have to be you know, aware of is like listen, you know, keeping it natural is great and laying it on the ground, but you don't always want that at some point, you know, having some of the abruptmen or something pop up is also is also good.

00:43:38
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's not doing something almost tougher than doing something sometimes.

00:43:44
Speaker 2: Probably probably most most of the time, not doing something is probably a lot harder than doing something right because you always feel you have to do it, and you're always looking at stuff. And you know, the one time I happened to go on to your site. You know, there's an article big golfers small golf, Right, you just had one that came out. It was big golf for a small guy. You didn't write that one, but somebody did, right, you know, but not so much, you know, to that article, but just in general, right, it's like we're kind of talking about the same thing. It's like, is there things that become too much? Is it harder? Is it more? Are you thinking too much? Right? And that's true when you're putting stuff out there, because when you look at stuff in two dimension, you can come up with all these great ideas. It's when you translate that into the third dimension. Right, how hot does that in the green need to be up in the air and kind of sit flat, you know, And it's it's the restraint of trying to keep it flat. It's not easy to do I can tell you.

00:44:33
Speaker 1: That how long did it take you to figure out what something? I'm reading Pete Didye's book right now, and he talks all the time about what something looks like in the ground, and then when you put grass on it, how it changes, and like how it all sudden is way more severe than it looks in the ground. Are you still getting better at that or is that something that you like kind of like talk about that.

00:44:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, I don't think it's anything that you really grasp the concept of right away. I think I think every job you do, you're going to miss something like that, right you know, because it's hard. You're just saying, so I put grass on it. But sometimes you know, when you grass things, it feels like it gets softer, you know. So you can go both It can go both ways, you know. And I think a lot of it has to do with the third dimension and what you're looking at right If you could take away the backdrop, if you can take away everything around you, and you could specifically look at that green site and say, okay, when I grasped this thing, yeah, you could probably go ahead and say it's going to get, you know, softer, it's going to get more severe. But you got to take into all the stuff on the surrounds, right, like when we did La country Club South, when you're up against the backdrop of thirty story buildings, right, it changes your perception of everything.

00:45:43
Speaker 1: You know, you think this great the scale.

00:45:45
Speaker 2: It's the scale.

00:45:46
Speaker 1: I feel like scales misunderstood because you could you know, that's big scale in the distance, versus if if it was an open field, it would look completely the scale would look completely different.

00:45:57
Speaker 2: Exactly exactly. So I think in what you're saying is I think it just depends on your surrounds to understand, like what's it going to be. Is it going to be more severe? Is going to be less severe? The surrounds, the scale of it, the spatial context, all that stuff comes into play, and it's hard to be able to understand like what you're going to do. It's gonna get softer, is it going to get more you know, abrupt?

00:46:18
Speaker 1: So when it's a bigger when there's bigger scale around, it's going to get softer.

00:46:22
Speaker 2: When you get grass on it, you could probably say that.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: I mean when it's smaller scale around.

00:46:27
Speaker 2: Just generally speaking, I'm not smart enough to be able to think back that for you know, and be able to you know, discern one or the other. But I mean, and it could flip flop too. Sometimes you think it would be that you know that it's going to be more severe with the more surrounds or taller surrounds. In some places, it could be the opposite of that, but it could also it could flip flop on you. Right, it's hard. Like when we did swany right the nine whole swan, your view shed off of some of those greens. You're looking for what fifty miles or something. You know, that has to change the perception of what you're looking at because you're looking at one hundred eight degrees or ever how far your peripheral vision can can go from left to right right. But you're trying to discern whether six thousand square for green is gonna look more severe or less severe after it's grassed. It's like you've got all this other stuff going on. I think it's almost virtually impossible.

00:47:15
Speaker 1: It's almost like you need to have like a big black tarp that you hang up behind every green that you stare at. Yeah, yeah, then everyone would look the same.

00:47:26
Speaker 2: You'd be like a weather man like you know they're at the green board or whatever they call that stuff. You know, you're just pointing out there to nothing, you know, and over time, obviously you get a little bit better at it. But I think there's always gonna be an element of that that's gonna like change how you're viewing. And it could be the sun, right, because sometimes you view stuff. And that's why I think being in the field is very important, right, is you can walk that same If you're walking the same golf hole every day at two o'clock in the afternoon, you're gonna miss fifty percent of the interest. And we've done that stuff. We've done like the first Hall of Boston Golf Club. We were there, we're working it, working it. It's kind of one of the last holes we'd always go by that area. It wasn't until the fall had come and some crab grass that was sitting on this face of where they went to drill a test well. So they made a flat pad to bring in the rig for the test well, so it just flipped up some dirt behind it. Then through the summer and fall, you know, some crabgrass and stuff came in. And then as the sun got lower and the crabgrass turned color. It kind of showed off as like, man, that would be really cool. We could put some bunkers there, and it was literally right off the teeth. So there's two bunkers you see off the tee at the first All Boston Golf Club. That's how they came about. It was just because over time and walking it and seeing it in different light, it changes it.

00:48:32
Speaker 1: So the light's going to have different seasons.

00:48:34
Speaker 2: Different seasons too, because it's the color. We react to color. That's why you know warm season grass golf courses are generally somewhat boring from an a static standpoint because it's the same color, same textures, same tones. Right, That's why you know when you start to go dorm and a golf course becomes more interesting because you have different colors.

00:48:52
Speaker 1: I think it's crazy any golf course over seats.

00:48:55
Speaker 2: It's a waste of time and money. I think.

00:48:58
Speaker 1: I think the golf course looks cooler, plays better when storm and it's just just crazy to me.

00:49:03
Speaker 2: I agree.

00:49:06
Speaker 1: So you brought up the West Palm Beach project earlier, helped another hometown project.

00:49:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the whole year. Yeah, this is awesome, you know. Yeah, So that'll start. Hopefully it'll start. You know, they had a huge fund raising and I think they've hit their target and it's going through permittent at this point in time, and we're hoping maybe by June first we'll be in the ground, so we'll be working these two jobs at the same time. So Gil and I were talking about the other day. So it's pretty simple, girl, because it rains every day here west of the Turnpike, you know, in the afternoon, and our site here is a little bit heavier sand of your soils, right, and that is pure sugarcane sand. So we actually need the rain there to shape, and here we don't need the rain. So some shape perfect, it'll be perfect. We'll shape here in the morning and the long rain and we'll go down the West Palm and we'll shape there in the afternoon. You know, the work out perfect. But no, it's a beautiful site. There's a reason that you know, Dick Wilson when he built that golf course, and I forget when it was by the fifties or something, I picked that site. The ground is unbelievable, you know, rolling terrain like that on two hundred acres and just bouncing all over the place and you know, ten to you know, fifteen foot elevation changes pure sand. It's just to find that, you know, five minutes from West Palm Beach Airport, five minutes to the beach and right off of I ninety five. It's like one of the guys of oles that he's been looking for a piece of ground and anywhere in Florida for like the past ten or fifteen years, and he's looking all over Florida for something like that, and here it was, you know, fifteen minutes from his house.

00:50:37
Speaker 1: I mean, that's why I kind of think like there's this just massive opportunity for municipal golf. Is a similar vane Cobbs Creek which you guys are doing, is like, you don't get these pieces of a ground with the proximity to major metropolitan areas just don't exist anymore.

00:50:54
Speaker 2: No, you're right, and look at all that stuff, right, it would actually be a really good business for somebody that to just manage, specifically the PGA of America or somebody like like that, to get into the management of these municipal courses the right ones, pick the right ones. I mean, you said, you know, West Palm's a great one. Cobbs Creek is a great one, right, I think, Tom, did you know what's at Memorial Park?

00:51:13
Speaker 1: Right? Yeah, you know another great bunch in Chicago that right on the lake that you could make. I mean, there's the Sydney Marivits in Chicago. It's a nine hole are on the lake. I used to play at five in the morning before work, and it's like I just walk around and be like, this could be one of the five best nine hole golf courses in the country.

00:51:32
Speaker 2: Yep. You know, and look at watch McCaul, look at uh you know, Will Smith and those guys are doing for National Link Trust in d C. You know, they have the leases of those golf courses and they're talking about repurposing some of them and moving things around. And you know, eventually, once they get you know, underfoot and they get the donation money and stuff like that, they're going to have three great properties in DC proper. That's awesome. That's what it should be.

00:51:53
Speaker 1: And that's what I mean. That's the cool thing about the DC project was that that was like the goal from the ouset was create the model municipal golf. They put so much effort into the design aspect of it. It just you know, I feel like municipal golf's turning a little bit, you know, but there's a long way to go. But if we're going to introduce people to golf, you know, it shouldn't be on you know, if I was going to introduce somebody to coffee, it shouldn't be the same as me taking somebody to gas station at ten pm and giving them a cup of coffee, you know.

00:52:24
Speaker 2: Right, like you want to give a nice cup of cubanussiple.

00:52:26
Speaker 1: Golf should be the most interesting. And that's I think like a lot of people will say go about design process and say, hey, this is municipal golf. Don't get too crazy, but in a way it should be crazier than any golf, right.

00:52:40
Speaker 2: I think what's happened is is that and hear it all the time, like you know, people you know downgrade it or you know, criticize it and they call it muni. It's Muni golf, Like Muni golf has become this bad you know stereotype. Right, Oh my god, that was a bit muni. You know whatever that means, I don't even know what it means. But maybe what's and is the management end of things, the thought process of things have turned that that Muni golf into a real thing. But like we're saying, with all these projects we're talking about, it's trying to turn unie golf into a different name, into fun, into parks, into communities, right into a place to grow the game. And that's important and it can be you know, great design elements, playability walking like a conversation you know a couple of weeks ago about you know, clubs that don't let you walk. I mean it's insane, right, I mean, you have to have all that stuff. It's a social aspect, right, which always gets lost. Golf is extremely social, Right. There's nothing better than you know, going into a golf property or a golf course or wherever you're going and meeting people, right playing golf for four hours, Right, It's it's the best. Well.

00:53:44
Speaker 1: I think that's part of the magic of short courses is that, you know, it brings everybody together even more because where people diverge when they're walking together on a golf courses off the tee and if you get rid of the t shot, then you're never not with the group that you're playing with. And that's why everybody has so much fun at ends of the days having beers playing a short course.

00:54:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well the other thing too is you don't have to take so many clubs. You can actually carry a beer, right, so that helps as well. But no, you're right, it's all those different aspects, right. It's I mean, I play in an event every year where we start. The first nine holes you play is on a par three. But it's a great way in forty five minutes to get to meet the four guys, play some golf with them, with the three guys, right, play golf with them, understand their abilities, and be able to then go out and play you know, the regular scramble on the golf course. But it's a ton of fun. You know. We need more of that. So and I think we talked about it before is that it's like golf has lost a little bit because and we can use it in terms of like basketball, right, I think were when we were going over this before. It's like, you know, kids will grab a basketball to go to the court, doesn't matter how many people there are, right, they'll figure out a way to play. You know, two, three, four, five, six two exactly. Yeah, you know, and you know half court games, two on three. It doesn't matter, right, they'll figure out. When it comes to golf, the feeling has always been or at least up till well, you know, now has gotten into like this standardization. Everything's been standardized. You know, from GOFA you have to play eighteen holes, you have to have returning nines. Right, everything has become standardized, and I think it's kind of wooded down the game, you know, kind of dummed it down a little bit more and lost the excitement.

00:55:16
Speaker 1: Right, this is so many of the best courses, for example, don't have returning nines.

00:55:20
Speaker 2: You know, Hey, like I said, let's go to Marion and talk about anything but typical. Right. You know, you're crossing the road twice. Your last par five is the fourth hole. You play thirteen, and you walk across the entry road. You walk across one te to get the fourteen. The first t is right up against the let's we call it the patio. So you hear people clanking their forks when they're teeing up your ball, and then they stop and you hit a shot. And we go to a lot of clubs and one club. Now they play a lot of golf out they're talking about expanding their patio. It just you know kind of restaurant halfway house area which is extremely popular, a great spot to gather and watch people. Well, if we expanded, then we have to move the tea. Now you have to the take. You want to put it right there again, like we were talking about with opening up play chords and seeing people, you want to be there. You want to be the person having a beer and your friends teeing off, or you want to be the guy teeing off. Right, that's the fun part about golfin it's just I think over time it's just been lost, you know, in a lot of ways.

00:56:17
Speaker 1: Then people don't want to be uncomfortable with people. But then you listen to pros that are like, well I'm excited to be nervous tomorrow. You know, if I wasn't nervous, then what am I doing playing golf?

00:56:28
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it makes you every so often, right, you have to dig down and get out of your comfort zone. And whatever it is, right, whether it's in work, you know, personal, whatever it is in life, it's always good to get outside of your comfort zone. So to be put outside of your comfort zone and with people watching you and be able to pull it off. You're going to be more confident and that's important.

00:56:48
Speaker 1: How are you outside your comfort zone just in general with work these days versus when you guys started.

00:56:55
Speaker 2: I think much better I think when I first started. I want to be sitting here talking to you, so you have to. But you know it takes time. Right, We're all different people. Everybody's different, right. You have strengths, you have weaknesses, and you have to understand how to you know, break down some of those you know, weaknesses and be able to, you know, move forward in life. You know, it's no different than like when you're a kid and you didn't want to eat the peas, right, you find it later on? Peas are good?

00:57:21
Speaker 1: Can you tell us the Can you tell the Caveman construction how it came about?

00:57:25
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, well it was we were started. It was a lot and oddly enough, you know, we're going back to the club where a Caveman construction first was. The phrase was coined, Uh is it Rolling Green? Right? So we're doing work at Rolling Green. We were brought in by the committee to go ahead and rehab one of the greens and some green side bunkers et cetera. And it really wasn't favorable for the superintendent. He almost didn't want us there and tried everything he possibly could not to have us there. Right, and since we were trying to do it, you know, very low cost, right, we're just basically doing on our sales with a couple of guys from the staff and the tools. Right, Like, why should we pay a contractor to come in to bring shovels and rakes when they got a maintenance facility full of shovels and rakes and back goes and everything, right, it doesn't make any sense. What a little project. Well, the maintenance staff leaves every day at like two thirty or three o'clock. So we're out there and bunker shaped and you know, we're kind of getting ready and we're like, where are the tools. It's like three thirty, Well, there's no tools because the maintenance they took them in they locked them up. So now we're like, we have no tools. So at that point in time, you know Bill Kittleman, who is the old pro Marion. It still works with us. Bill's you know, in his eighties, but still a great mentor to both built Gill and I and so Bill was af there and he's just looking at it. So he goes and grabs like a stick or something, right, and he goes and kind of carves in the sand line, you know, at the top edge of the bunker, and he carves it in. It looked awesome. And he walks back and he has a stick in his hand. He throws it to the ground. He's like, Jesus Christ, are what are we a bunch of goddamn cavemen? So Gil and I've always took to that name, and Bill had several other like funny, funny phrases about different stuff. So when we decided that, hey, maybe we should look at just basically starting you know, a separate you know company that was our designated shaping team and just kind of run as a separate business for insurance purposes and sake of ease and things like that, we were trying to come up with a name, and then we eventually came up with, you know, Caveman Constructions.

00:59:23
Speaker 1: The hardest thing in the world to do.

00:59:25
Speaker 2: It can be. You know, most people like, what's your initial? You know, what's your initial? Okay, you know, we'll be A and J construction. You know, it's like there's zero creativity in that, right, But yeah, if it has if it has a story behind it, I think it's well worth you know, you know, exploring and going with it. Yeah.

00:59:41
Speaker 1: But my I've got a different LLC name for my company, but we named it after my my dog's toy.

00:59:48
Speaker 2: Well there you go.

00:59:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, I called the toy mister Cluckers because it's like a rooster or something.

00:59:54
Speaker 2: That's that's perfect.

00:59:55
Speaker 1: So we got cluck Media.

00:59:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that's that's perfect. You know, Hey, we're trying to have fun. Like, you can't take yourself that serious. You know, what are you gonna make it?

01:00:03
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the thing. If you want to hire somebody and you want to have fun with you, look at look at what their names are. If they're very buttoned up, you know, they sound like a law firm, probably not gonna have fun.

01:00:14
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly. I mean, what's it gonna be like Farnsworth Financial or something, you know what I mean? It's like that's nothing, all right.

01:00:21
Speaker 1: I know, you gotta run, so I want to be.

01:00:24
Speaker 2: I'm not running anywhere.

01:00:25
Speaker 1: I walk this Part one Part one. Who knows when part two will ever be recorded?

01:00:30
Speaker 2: That's fine. Part one of one hundred Yeah, like it was a lifetime golf.

01:00:45
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to another edition of the Friday Podcast. Today's episode was edited by Meg Atkins and Garrett Morrison. And as a quick reminder, be sure to check out our events go to our pro show at www dot thefridagg dot com. We have released the Meadowbrook and the Rolling Green event. I think there's a couple like maybe less than five spots left at Meadowbrook and Detroit and Rolling Green in Philadelphia, there are a few spots left there that's called the Cheesecake. Those are both in June, and then in a couple of weeks we should have some new events rolling out. We have Davenport and Blue Mount Davenport in Iowa and Blue Mound in Milwaukee. So look for more events and hope to see you out there this summer. And thank you again for listening to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast.