Yolk with Doak 37: Scotland Travels, Restorations, and Listener Questions

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss a green for example, I'm already upset.

00:00:02
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

00:00:05
Speaker 3: And when I find my ball in a brid egg Frida Egg, the dread Friday Frida Egg, fridagg bride egg Lie.

00:00:11
Speaker 4: I'm about ready to run off the golf course.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg podcast. Today's episode is another edition of the Yoke with Dope. We had part one of this chat that released on Friday last week. We talked about all of Tom's new projects. In this edition, we dive much more into listener Q and A and kind of more golf architecture topics. Uh So we we discuss a lot of things and thanks to Tom as always for the time. A quick reminder, our Black Friday Cyber Monday Sale is live. We are doing a whole week of it, so it ends on Monday of next week, that is Monday the twenty eighth. The sale is twenty percent off everything and it's automatically applied at checkout. So that goes from outerwear. We have a ton of layers in there. We have Polos T shirts as well as photography, so we have I think over seventy courses up in the print shop, you can get a wide array of styles from you know, metal to canvas to photo paper prints that are either just the paper or framed. It is a great way to kind of spice up your office or you know, different areas of the house, and it goes to supporting us and allows us to you know, create continue to create great content. So, without further ado, here is Tom Doak and I hope everybody has a great and safe Thanksgiving. I saw on Instagram you commented about how you were. It was the first time you'd been back in Scotland for a while, and you did an extensive trip there this this fall after the Renaissance Cup. What what did you have any thoughts that came out of that trip or were you just reminded of things? What kind of how'd you feel after playing a substantial amount of golf in Scotland.

00:02:34
Speaker 3: I wish I'd played more golf in Scotland. Maybe I gave the wrong impression on social media, but so I took Brian Zaeger with me, who's been helping on the Lido and who who is helping us on a new project in Florida where we where we want to create something linkxy. So I wanted him to see some of those fulls firstthand and yeah, it'd been a while. So, I mean, I've been to Scotland pretty much every year the last few years, but it's always into the Renaissance Club for renovations there, and so I've you know, I've seen the same handful of golf courses I've seen. I've seen, you know, Mirfield and North Barrick and Dornick a couple of times because we've been up to Castle Stewart to look at that project. But but that's about all, you know, and I don't you know, I've only got a few days and I'm going back to the same places. So I had to hit those two bases again on this trip, but with Brian with me, I wanted to at least get around and see a handful of other things. And one of my priorities was, okay, let's go, let's see one or two things that I haven't seen before so we get something new into the into the deal. So we started out in Gullin and we're there for two or three days and you know, played Merefield, which I hadn't played for a while. Which was really fun, and played North Barrick, which I always do when i'm there, you know.

00:04:00
Speaker 1: I took him around the other course.

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Speaker 3: At North Berwick, what they called a glen, which is up on the cliffs on the east end, to show them that, you know, you can.

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Speaker 1: Have a great view. That's one of the great views in golf.

00:04:11
Speaker 3: But nobody thinks it's a great golf course at all, So you know, the two are somewhat independent of each other. You know, the idea that, oh, if it has an ocean view, it must be one of the great courses of the world now, even though there is some cool stuff about that golf course.

00:04:24
Speaker 1: That I really like.

00:04:27
Speaker 3: And then we went north and spent some time at Castle Stewart, but we also went up to Dornick for half.

00:04:32
Speaker 4: A day.

00:04:35
Speaker 3: And and then and then we went to Prestwick, where I had not been for several years. We just missed the window. You know, they set up Prestwick because of the one hundred and fiftieth open, They set up the original. They spent the last two years mowing out the original twelve hole course at Prestwick, and we just missed the window you were allowed to play out. We were there, just about four days too early to actually play, but we managed to get out there and walk the whole thing.

00:05:09
Speaker 1: You know, it's such a crisscross thing.

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Speaker 3: I mean there's like there's literally four holes to use the fair way of the alpshole as the landing area for that hale. So so it's just you can't have more than a handful of people on it at one time or that's a hard hat zone. So there there are two weeks of playing the old routing. They only had like twenty or thirty people a day, playing morning and afternoon on it. But that was so cool to see and see how how compact and simple that golf course really was, you know, and there's still like three or four holes of it that are pretty much intact on the golf course today and then they you know, to see how they use things two and three times was really cool. And then you know, we had a couple extra days around there, so we went to Turnberry, where I hadn't been in thirty years, and to and to see a couple of little courses over there, Prestwick, Saint Nicholas, which is a mile from Prestwick, and then Irvine which is five or six miles north.

00:06:19
Speaker 1: It's amazing though.

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Speaker 3: I mean you look on if you look on Google Earth, you get start at Prestwick, Saint Nicholas and Prestwick, and then once you get to Troon, there's there's literally like a dozen golf courses lined up, not all along the coast, but up this little valley of land that that you know, occasionally there's a break of like a couple hundred yards and then it is another two miles of golf after that. But it's pretty amazing how many golf courses there are there. I didn't even realize there are two or three that I didn't know the names of.

00:06:55
Speaker 2: So you could just create like a continuous routing almost a lot of those.

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Speaker 3: It would go for a that would it would probably go as far as any place I've ever seen.

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Speaker 1: You know, Gullan's got that to some extent.

00:07:06
Speaker 3: You've got Mirrorfield, the Renaissance Club, that archer Field thing, and then just you know, like a half a mile gap with a trailer park before you get to North Barrick. Yeah, so that's pretty far. But but the you know, the one in Troon would surpass that.

00:07:25
Speaker 2: It's uh, that's that's neat that's neat. What do you think of the new courses that you saw?

00:07:31
Speaker 3: Uh, Preswick Saint Nicholas was interesting. I mean Tom Morris was a founding member of it. You know when they found when they when Tom Morris built Preswick in eighteen fifty one, you know, they had a bunch of like artisan members and local members, and then pretty fast they had a serious membership and it got to be a big deal. And it's like now we're you know, we're going to need another club for the townspeople.

00:07:55
Speaker 1: This is going to be more prestigious.

00:07:57
Speaker 3: So they did a they build a golf course just down the road from it, and it's a pretty cool golf course. At least the hall is close to it. It's in a very tight space in a neighborhood, so like the first hole and the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth are all in a very small little block there with the c on one side and the and a residential neighborhood on the other side, and then the very far end of it, you know, there's some industrial like port stuff down there. So when you get to the end of it, it's not so pretty, but there are a bunch of good holes on it.

00:08:34
Speaker 2: Obviously with Brian being out there, that was his first time. Was there anything that you found, like found interest in watching somebody experience these places for the first time.

00:08:46
Speaker 3: You know, The interesting part was he you know, he's seen some of those famous holes on the computer at scale, like a perfect map, you know, a perfect light arm map of what they're like, and yet to see them in the flash in three D standing there is a different experience, very different experience. And you know, one of the holes that we're talking about wanting to do something like on our course in Florida is the eighteenth fall on North Barrick And you know, I love that hole just you know, it's a pretty simple drive, the green out of bounds really close on the right. But you know when you strip away, you know, standing on a tee and trying to imagine, okay, let's strip away the town from behind this and the and the clubhouse and the North Berwick law up there behind the clubhouse, what's that going to be like? It's like, boy, you know, that might be kind of dull. You know, it's the golf hole we play and we never think of it as a doll hole at all. We think of it, you know, it's kind of easy because it's a very short driveable part four, but it's not a doll hole to play. But the you know, one of the things I've learned from this exercise of you know, studying those holes more carefully is is really how flat they are through the line of play, and you know, it should be more obvious. You know, if if walking along the golf hole, if something comes up more than six feet from a low spot, you can't see where you're going, right. Yeah, So most of those famous holes they don't do that. They stay in a very narrow band of up and down and things come in from the side, but they don't get they don't block your view and make it blind. Very often, I think when we draw stuff, we we overdraw it. You know, if you just asked me to if you had just asked me to sketch what I thought the contours of those holes were, I'd have had four feet more elevation change.

00:10:41
Speaker 1: Than they really have.

00:10:43
Speaker 2: That that was something that stuck out to me in Scotland was just how small and wavy the contours are out there, like it's not they aren't these abrupt, you know, dramatic contours, and I think like the dramatic stuff is really cool for the you know, hey, I'm I'm not gonna play here every day type of stuff. But for everyday golf, which is you know, like those Scotland courses for example, they're just you know, part of the town. For every day golf. The best contours are the smaller ones, the wavy stuff that like it doesn't ever pop off the page, like you're never like it's not that jaw dropping, like I can't believe this place exists type of contours. But they are there. They influence the game a little bit more, especially because I think one of the things the ball stays on them a little bit more. When you have those big contours, you're either.

00:11:42
Speaker 3: Go in the other hale or you fall short and it comes back at you. Yeah, it's true. And you know, I think you're absolutely right that those those little, those little ripley contours, you know, they're far better for golf. And they don't you said pop off, You start to say pop off the page. And that's the thing. It's like when you're drawing a grading plan, if you're drawing like a two foot plan, that stuff doesn't show up or it just barely shows up as significant and you have to interpolate in between. And that's why, you know, the interesting thing about what the way Brian looks at it, it's all data. There's like a you know, there's an elevation every three feet all the way around, all the way around the whole golf course. So it shows all of that wrinkle. You know, maybe you can't zoom in and see it very well on the on the computer screen, but it's there and it's preserved, and so you can replicate that kind of little stuff into a plan that you don't normally get. And you know what it reminded me of, you know, many years ago, when Mark Parsonen was starting Kingsbarns, very early in the process, I was in St Andrews and he wanted to pick my brain for a day or two, and so he was staying. He had an apartment rented, like right on the street by the eighteenth hall of the old course, and we went out and walked, you know, we went out and walked the old course two days in a row, you know, and after the first day he showed me some of like the green plans for Kingsbarns, and so I took him out the second day, and you know, we looked around the sixteenth green and the fifteenth green of the old course, and I said, you see all these little things that are cool, they're not on those green plans. They're not big enough. You know, That's what at some point, you know, I've always felt like you just have to get You can't do it from You can't do that stuff from the plan anymore because the plan is not really detailed enough to get those little one foot ups and downs.

00:13:41
Speaker 1: But you can do it.

00:13:43
Speaker 3: It's just like you know, we typically haven't drawn it at that small scale to get it right.

00:13:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, you'd almost have to, Like if you're thinking about I mean, everybody who's probably seen those Donald Ross sketches. If you go play a Donald Ross course that they have on the the grid paper, and then you have the greens, and the greens are tiny, and if you think about, like especially if you take somewhere like the old Course trying to map out all the contours and that green, you would need to create like almost like one of those easel poster boards size thing to get all the little details in by hand.

00:14:22
Speaker 1: Yeap.

00:14:23
Speaker 3: Either that or you just super simplify it and show there's a little high point here and a bigger high point there and a little plateau over there, and then you just you know, let the let the rest work itself out.

00:14:37
Speaker 2: The I think you hit on the eighteenth at North Barrack and that was something that you know, when I was over there, I thought about because somebody was like, what did you think of the eighteenth hole at North Barrick And I was like, what do you mean? It's an awesome little hole, like that's really fun, and they're like, well, it's not very a very strong part four and it maybe realize it's like, well, you were playing stroke and not match play, right, you know. I mean that's one of the things I took away from over there was like every time we played, we played with locals everywhere. Every single time there was a match, it was like, you know, without like the first t we're playing a match, like this is a match. And that hole is the perfect example of a great match play hole because you know, you can make a two on it, but you have to take on a ton of risk and if you hit it over to the left, it's a really hard chip. It's like not a comfortable spot to chip from, or you could play it. You could play it so many different ways, but the idea there's such a wide range of score outcomes for what is it two hundred and fifty seven yards or something.

00:15:45
Speaker 4: Yep.

00:15:45
Speaker 3: And you know the last time I was not this year, but the year before. And I won't name him so only he will know who I'm shaming. But I was playing a match and we got to the eighteenth hall. You know, we were we did it. We've been ahead most of the match. We get to the eighteenth hall. My partner drives the green and you know, I didn't hit a very good drive, so I was out. But it looked like he was gonna make three and we'd win the match, and then eat three putted for four and the other guy got up and down for birdie and we lost. You know, it seemed to it seemed like we were we were in such good shape. But you know, you've driven the green. You still have like a sixty foot putt that's a little hard to judge, and that green is just a little trickier than it looks as to which way it's sloping. And the next thing you know, you don't hit the putt close and you've you've blown the whole thing. But it's not just North Beric, if you you know, when you go around Scotland, like you know, the eighteenth All at Saint Andrew's wasn't drivable for average people back in the day, but it's a simple short Part four. The eighteenth hole on the Eden Course used to be the same. It was like two hundred and eighty yards before they turned it into the driving range. The eighteenth All at Ely is a really short part four. It's almost drivable. The eighteenth All at Prestwood is a two hundred and seventy yard driveable Part four. They've got a lot of finishing holes like that over there because two reasons. One one they're a really good match play hole, but two if the match gets that far. You know, if you read the old books about design, it's like you don't save the best hole for a last because the match doesn't get there a lot of the time.

00:17:23
Speaker 2: I you know, I've never equated it to that, like the idea of the match getting to eighteen. Something I've always thought of as a reason, like you know, eighteenth holes aren't always the best is they have to get back to the clubhouse, right that too, So I had never thought about it from the match play standpoint, but that makes another case. There's another point in the case that the eighteenth hole shouldn't be the best hole on the golf course. There's a lot of people might think, you know that movie the topic go I we got a couple questions about the idea of re restoring these restorations. It seems like there's a new trend of courses that have been restored that are now going on getting their almost second restoration. Yeah, and I was curious what your thoughts were on that.

00:18:15
Speaker 3: On that topic, boy, you know, those are those are the clubs that I try to avoid when I'm working because it's like, you know why, you know, number one, we're trying to do a good enough job that they don't want to redo it in ten more years. But two, if you've got a client that's just going to like never be happy with it and keep you know, when you when you decide to restore a course, first of all, you have to decide, like, what are we restoring it too? And if the club keeps changing their mind on that, then that's a never ending process and they're just going to keep spending money and wasting people's time, and and you know, pushing things back and forth. It's like, no, you don't want to get you know, I mean, I want to finish some thing and it's done for a while and the members can enjoy it again. So I scratch my head sometimes when I see stuff being done and redone and redone, and yeah, maybe a few of those examples where things that weren't really that well done before, or maybe they weren't really you know, everything sold as a restoration. Now, that doesn't mean that the first version was anything like a restoration. So there certainly are some things that, yes, the new restoration is closer to the real thing than the last attempt. But hell, let's see, you know, some of them, it could be going farther away because they also want to link in the golf course five hundred yards and move all the fairway bunkers, so they're relevant for today. What I do think too a little bit. I mean, you know, let's be honest, part of the restoration trend is driven by architects. They haven't had a lot of other things to do because there haven't been that many new courses being built, and you know, maybe you know, we're starting to see some more courses, more new courses being built. You know, clubs will stop getting talked into things. But but I do think that a little bit of this trend too is that you know, more and more, like you know, every every old golf course every five or every five to ten years in the past, you know, the clubs would renovate the bunkers, take out the old sand and put in new sand. It's just kind of you know, it gets contaminated, and you know it's a thing. But what I see more and more is, you know, every time that comes up, you know, it's not just some physical labor for the superintendent to do. He doesn't want any part of that. He wants to turn it over into a over to a contractor and then you have a consulting architect and the next thing, you know, it's a million and a half dollars bunker restoration instead of just pulling out the old sand and putting the new sand in.

00:20:57
Speaker 2: It is something I wonder with like the idea of the equipment that we're putting in, you know, like the idea that we put call the capillary concrete better billy bunkers. Then you have like the you know, sub error systems at certain places. Is you know, when you're putting something that's in there that's a product, the product breaks, and all it does is it ensures at a certain time that you're going to be spending a lot of money again in the near future, because all these things have a expiration date on them versus like I've been to places that are you know, run down UNI where it's an old course and you could look at the nineteen thirty bunkers and they're in better shape than the nineteen eighty bunkers, and it's because the nineteen eighty bunkers had liner versus grass bottoms. You know, like these things like when you put equipment into the infrastructure of a golf course, all you're doing is ensuring that that golf course has a new expiration date.

00:22:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, and.

00:22:03
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I've been a conscientious objector to sabair or green stuff and bunker liners as for as long as I could, on as many projects as I could. One of the reasons I'm getting out of the restoration business is because it's so hard to do that now. Like I'm my own golf courses. I can build a bunker without liners, and nobody has a problem with it. But when I go to bel Air, they have to have the latest liner. They get talked into it. You know, bell Air did did bunker liners in a place that we had the golf course closed nine months and it rained one day. You know, they're supposedly putting the liners in so the crew doesn't have to get out there and you know, fix it all the day after a rain. But it doesn't rain that much there, and yet they still, you know, they have to do it because that's the perfect thing, and you know, they have all the money in the world, and I just you know, I don't I just don't want to hear about that. But it does all those things too. On a construction project, whether it's a renovation or a new golf course, add in those layers and steps takes that much more time, and it's that much more time for the for the shape that you liked when the shaper got off it to get muddled and not quite as good by the time the thing gets finished. Because once they put the capillary concrete in, that's the floor of the bunker. It doesn't matter what the guy had originally. You know, that's gonna be the floor of the bunker now, so that has to be right, and then you you know, you build up everything after that and it's like, uh, that's not really as deep as I thought it was gonna be.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: Oh well, well, it's also then if you ever get rid of it, it's an excavation project.

00:23:43
Speaker 4: I see.

00:23:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like it's not like just throw We're just gonna throw some dirt over it. You have concrete or a rubber substance in the ground, like you have to remove it.

00:23:54
Speaker 3: So it's at least, you know, it's not happening so much in the States because people are more used to working with all those materials. But I've heard some horror stories from overseas about you know, they didn't excavate the floor of the bunker out deeper and then they put the liner in and you know, so now that the bunkers are like a little cat box that are you know, there's no depth to them because the you know, because the contractor didn't think through all the layers that they had to do. So, you know, the justification for having a designer involved is that you you have to make sure somebody's watching all that. It's not as simple as just taking the sand out and putting new sand in anymore.

00:24:38
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00:24:51
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00:26:30
Speaker 1: I know Lucas pretty well. I played golf with.

00:26:32
Speaker 2: Him, plays quite well. You floged your career in the industry being involved with the construction of golf courses, designing in the field with talented shaper shapers. It has the technology behind the Lido project changed your view on the best way to work. Could a truly great golf course be designed completely on a computer, plugged into a dozer and built to spec.

00:26:59
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the Lido was started with a computer and I was really impressed with what came out of the computer through the GPS dozers. But you know, we still did a lot of work after that in order to get all right. You know, Brian Schneider's role in that thing is completely you know, is totally underrated.

00:27:24
Speaker 1: He's not getting enough.

00:27:25
Speaker 3: Credit for what he did because they've sold this story about the GPS and the you know, all of that, and it's like, no, that didn't turn out perfect.

00:27:34
Speaker 1: We still had to do quite a bit. You know.

00:27:37
Speaker 3: That's a little different because we're restoring something, so we've got a black and white picture of exactly what it's got to look like. You know, if we'd have just taken what came out of the computer, yeah, that would have been a pretty good golf course too, but it wouldn't have been the Leado. So we had to do that much more work. So, as I mentioned briefly, and I'm not going to talk about the project specifically too much, but we are we're starting to do planning for a project in Florida that you know, we want to do something linksy, So we are going to like basically sample fairway contours of somewhere else to try to get that rolling links contra right without having to have shapers figure all that out for eighty acres to see how how close that will come out. You know.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: The the problem is, I.

00:28:32
Speaker 3: Don't think there's anybody alive that can draw that, you know, So it's if you if you want to get it right, it's easier to steal it from someplace else than it is to try to draw exactly like you want.

00:28:47
Speaker 1: Now.

00:28:47
Speaker 3: Brian Zaeger tells me he can get on a you know, he can get the thing in the computer version and like you know, use a tool that's like a bold you know, like a virtual bulldozer to change it around. And I'll let him try that a little bit to see how it comes out. But I'm going to have a shaper on backup.

00:29:08
Speaker 1: You know. It's not like I'm told.

00:29:09
Speaker 3: I'm not totally convinced that we'll get that all right, you know, just by playing around with it in the computer. But I am curious to see what we can get. And do I think it's going to make the process simpler? Yeah?

00:29:23
Speaker 1: I do. Do I think it's going to come out perfect straight out of the computer, No, I don't.

00:29:30
Speaker 2: It's it's funny. In San Francisco they have these way mow like they're autonomous cars, but there's people behind the wheel. It's like the people are the back in case. As you were saying that, I just immediately thought of that. It's like, well, like I I want to see what the computer does, but we need to have this backup just in case. It kind of reminds me that, you know, I imagine that, you know, I guess like one of the things you hit on is something I've been thinking about a lot. I went and visited some new courses UH this last week, and I was just thinking. I started thinking about, like, what's going to be the best new course of the year. And like you obviously, anytime the Kaisers build a golf course, it's going to likely be in the it's going to be the favorite for your you know, whatever magazine awards New Course of the Year. Should the Lido even be considered a new course if if the messaging is it's a restoration was something that I stumbled around, stumbled upon and thought about a lot, because you know, we're being told it's a restoration. That's the that's the marketing messaging. Now can that win New Course of the Year? But you know, is it a restoration if it's a course in Wisconsin? You know, there's all these like it was just something rattling around in my head that I was curious your your thoughts.

00:30:53
Speaker 3: On I don't know, it doesn't really you know, Luckily, luckily it doesn't really matter that much to me anymore, exactly how you know, exactly how people label something that I do. You know, I just I'm building a golf course. I hope people enjoy it, you know, all that other stuff. Who knows, I see your point. I mean, that's not my design, you know. I've told Michael, you know, say it's it's a McDonald course, say Brian Schneider, and I built it, you know. And that goes back to when I worked for Pete Die. Pete Die famously avoided the use of the word architect. But then if you were talking to Pete just randomly, he wouldn't even say so much that he was designing courses. He would talk about that he built golf courses. That was more important to him. And it's always been kind of more important to me too.

00:31:48
Speaker 1: You know.

00:31:48
Speaker 3: I'll tell a random person that I if they ask me what I do, I'll say, I build golf courses. Maybe ten minutes in the conversation they figure out that I designed the thing too, and they want to make a much bigger deal of that, And I'm like, building it's harder than designing it.

00:32:03
Speaker 1: So I don't know.

00:32:04
Speaker 3: You know, you got your opinion on what's the most important part, but I might not agree. So it took a lot of work to build the lead out and I hope it. I hope it that Brian gets due credit for that, whether they call it the best new course or the best renovation or whatever. If it's up for the best renovation, it's gonna squash that category.

00:32:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's that. There is nothing else that's going to compare to that next year.

00:32:32
Speaker 2: And the thing about it is like, that's probably you want to if you're the if you're the if you're the Kaiser family, you own it. You want the new course title. But you know, it would go against all the marketing messaging of we're restoring a golf course. It's just something an interesting wrinkle that I never thought we would have because they brought back the lido that like, it's just a conundrum that we've never faced as golf architect as a golf architecture society. You were at Crooked Stick, this fall, and Garrett Morrison from Fridagg had this question. He wants to know your thoughts on how Pete Die courses should be treated as we arrive at a time when many of them will need work, you know, in the sense of restoration renovation. You know those thirty year irrigation you know, milestones were reaching with a lot of Pete Die golf courses.

00:33:27
Speaker 3: Well also, you know those railroad tie bulkheads had a shelf life too, and most of them, you know, a place like cricket Stick, they've already been fixed a couple of times, but that will come up again every ten or twenty years of like this wall is collapsing again.

00:33:41
Speaker 1: What are we going to do about it now? You know, I don't.

00:33:47
Speaker 3: It's kind of too big a question for me. You know, Pete built a lot of golf courses, and what should happen to all of them? I don't think it's the same answer. You know, I've always said I think should be a handful of any designer's best work that you don't mess with too much. And then you know, beyond that, it's like you know, at the end of the day, it's still up to the club.

00:34:11
Speaker 1: So so at cricket Stick.

00:34:13
Speaker 3: You know, I love the original cricket stick, which I got to see before Pete changed it around too much. He did, you know, it was built in the sixties. In nineteen eighty five, the greens kind of all died from there was a lot of greens in the Midwest with a certain kind of bancrass on him just died. And so they had to redo the greens. And Pete thought, well, you know, if the club wanted to host the US Open or a PGA or something and the greens were too steep. Pete told me when he you know, when he built the greens a cricket stick in nineteen sixty three, he went to Brodmer Country Club in Indianapolis, a ross course, and the greens there were all three four or five percent tilt where the whole locations were. So that's what Pete built at cricket Stick the first time. And by the mid eighties Pete was like, that's not gonna work. You know, they're gonna get the greens too fast for that and it'll just be stupid. So I'm gonna have to flatten the greens when we redo them. And then, you know, Pete, I lived at Crooked Stick in the summers, and he was he was a tinker by nature. So over the years he rebuilt the greens, He rebuilt most of the bunkers.

00:35:24
Speaker 4: You know.

00:35:25
Speaker 3: The cool thing about Crooked Stick, like high Point, some of that stuff originally was Pete getting on a piece of equipment and building it. And there's almost none of that left. You know, nearly everything you've got now is somebody building it. In the nineties or two thousand and it started to look more like all of Pete's other courses, whereas the first time I saw it, you'd look at greens and go, that's a Maxwell green and that's it. You know, some of them you can still tell it that the fifteenth green has that like boomerang shape, and it's like, well, yeah, that's a Mackenzie Green, which Pete not from Crystal Downs but from the University of Michigan course, because he just built Raderick Farms. So he spent time looking at McKenzie's course at the U of M two and then he built the course. He built nine holes, and then they didn't have enough money to finish it, so he went away and he built the golf club and then he came back and built the front nine after that, and you know he told me that, you know, in those two years in between, he'd seen a bunch of different stuff, and he'd seen more Langford courses and more McDonald courses, so he put more of that style into the Front nine. So it was this really neat, eclectic thing, and now it's really not. And you know, Pete died did not believe in restoring golf courses. He told me that directly standing a crooked stick in nineteen eighty five. And yet the club asked me what I thought they should do, and I said, you know, I understand this is it's all Pete's work, some of us. You know, some of it's been redone five times by Pete. If you just want to honor that and leave it alone, that's what you want.

00:37:04
Speaker 1: To do, that's fine.

00:37:05
Speaker 3: You know, if you're asking me what I think you should do, I think you should restore some of this so it looks more like it did when it opened. And they're still trying to figure out if that's the right thing. I mean, at least, you know, I stood up in front of one hundred members ten days ago to talk about that stuff. And at least it dispelled the idea that I'm trying to put anything out there that's mine. I mean, I have way too much respect for Keete Dye to be doing that. And the only reason I got involved, you know, Cricket Stick is the last consulting project I'm doing, and one of the reasons I agreed to get involved with it is because that's a special golf course and tho's are going to be really hard decisions for them to make, and I thought it was worth my time to go way in on what they what they're going to do.

00:37:56
Speaker 1: But at the end of the day, it's still their choice.

00:37:59
Speaker 2: At different points in your career, I'm just always curious about this is something I think about. Is it difficult when you're in Obviously this is not supposed to be a difficult thing if you're a consultant, But is it difficult to you know, what's best for me as the golf architect that a club does versus what's best for the club to do, you know, because I to me that a lot of golf, you know, restoration and consulting is kind of that question. You know, what's the best you know, what is the best thing for the golf architect as a business to do isn't always maybe necessarily the best thing for the club to do.

00:38:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean personally, I pretty much don't think about it from you know, the sense of my business and what's better for my business. It's like, you know, it's even that much more freeing now because I don't you know, I don't want to be in the business of renovating golf courses, so I can you know, like talked about with Dorna Kills, when you're doing the work for free, it's like you tell them what you think and you know you're you're dead honest because because they can't really argue with that if you're doing it for free. I'm not doing it for free at Crooked Stick, but it's the same, it's the same thing. It's like, I'm telling you what I believe is you know, I'm telling you what I would do if it was my money.

00:39:21
Speaker 1: You know, No, you don't need to do that. No, you don't need to do that. Yes, I do.

00:39:26
Speaker 3: Think that this would make the golf course better, but if you're really restoring something, you have to divorce yourself from the idea of yeah, I'm making the seventeenth hole better, I mean, seventeen A crooked stick is a great example of that. It's the whole that I wrestled with the most about telling him what to do, because I know perfectly well from direct conversations with Pete Dye that the original version of the seventeenth hall he hated it just it was a big green with a lot of slope from back to front. And you know, he volunteered to me that he hated that hole while I was working at Longkove before I'd ever seen crooked stick. I don't even know why it came.

00:40:03
Speaker 2: Up, I tell you.

00:40:07
Speaker 1: So we're not restoring that.

00:40:10
Speaker 3: So then all we've got laughter these other, you know, PGA West versions of it. And it's like, could I build a hole that that I thought was better than the present day seventeenth oll at cricket stick?

00:40:24
Speaker 1: Yeah? I could.

00:40:25
Speaker 3: I mean I believe I could, But it's a Pete Die golf course. I can't do that there, you know, So we we have to go with one of Pete's versions.

00:40:35
Speaker 2: Here's a here's a different topic here. Is there anything non golf related that brings ideas or inspiration for design? And this is from B O.

00:40:45
Speaker 4: G bog.

00:40:46
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's bog or if that's initials.

00:40:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, not so much direct I mean, not so much directly. It's not like I see a building and think, oh, that porch would be like a cool feature to the right of.

00:41:01
Speaker 1: A green somewhere. But but yeah, I mean, you know, anytime I see great architecture or landscape architecture, I sort of you know, it's it's just on one level, it's inspiring to still be creative instead of building another red an hole, you know.

00:41:18
Speaker 3: And then on another level sometimes it's like, yeah, maybe there's a certain thing about this style that I could try to make a golf version of. I've told a couple of friends that one of the things on my list of cool things to do in golf is I would love to build you know, it might not be a full golf course. It might be nine holes, or it might be a par three or something else, but but I would love to build a golf thing that really doesn't look much like a golf course at all. You know, it's just it's just a cool wild landscape thing, or it's a piece of land art, but it's also playable. As for golf, you know, nobody's really trying to go that far in that direction, and I'd probably need some help from somebody who's better at the art part than me. But trying to do that puzzle, I think would be really cool. That would That's something I'd love to explore.

00:42:14
Speaker 2: Like almost you could call it almost like experimental golf architecture, right.

00:42:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know you have to.

00:42:22
Speaker 3: And that's the cool thing about you know, all of these part three courses and shorter things that are being built. It's like people might accept it at that level. And I think it would be easier to do at that scale too. But as soon as you're doing a regulation eighteen hole golf course, everybody's analyzing the scorecard like you know, oh it's not you got too many part threes, or it's you know, it's not seventy two hundred yards or whatever, and you know, there's I think there's still much less chance to do something that different. You know, when you go to the standard eighteen hole format, the.

00:42:58
Speaker 2: Stakes are lower too, the cost and everything when you're doing a par three too, like you and the requirements like you need less land, all that, all that with the with the current boom and golf. This is a question from Quiggs. Is the current boom repeating the sins of pass From a budget perspective, construction costs are higher and it's no longer abnormal to see fifteen to thirty million dollar projects, which implies ten plus years for investors to get an ROI. Seems like there's a big, big resk three years into a boom after a fifteen year bust.

00:43:38
Speaker 3: I mean, using the words ROI. Using the phrase ROI with respect to a golf course is just pretty tough in general. I mean, most of my clients aren't really looking for a return on investment. They're they're they're doing a golf project because they love golf, and if it makes money, great, They just they hope they're not paying for the maintenance costs every year. They're hoping it attracts enough business to at least, you know, do better than break even on an operating basis. But actually getting the investment back, especially when you're spending fifteen or twenty or thirty million dollars, that's really hard to do in the golf business.

00:44:19
Speaker 1: I mean, there's not many.

00:44:21
Speaker 3: Golf courses that have been built in the last fifty years that got a great return. So you know, that's why banks don't want to loan against golf courses now. They would if it was a big real estate development back in the day, but they didn't just for a golf course. That's why so many golf courses were built with real estate. You know, it's still possible to build a golf course that doesn't cost that much, you know. You know, we built Saint Patrick's for not very much money, and there are investors for that and hopefully, I think they're gonna get a return. But yeah, if you're spending thirty million dollars building a golf course, getting a return is really hard. So so you know, what does that mean for the future of the golf business. It means, you know, most of the clients for new golf courses aren't going to be like municipalities and and mom and pop type places. They're like private equity guys that have that kind of money to throw it a project and you know, hope it gets a return, but be able to shrug it off if it doesn't. And you know, that means there's not going to be many new courses developed. And you know, I've been saying that for years it's like the standard of what we expect of a new golf course is so high it's not affordable to do it anymore.

00:45:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, that plays into this question from Craig Moore, great superintendent up at the Marquette Golf Course, golf club, and he's probably enjoying some nice snow and cold winter up and up.

00:45:54
Speaker 1: You've definitely got snow today.

00:45:56
Speaker 2: So what fascinates you most in the world of modern turf grass management?

00:46:03
Speaker 3: Well, I only know enough about turf to be dangerous, so so I don't know that that's the right question for me really.

00:46:15
Speaker 1: Here. Okay, Well, you know, I hear more and more.

00:46:20
Speaker 3: Clients and and a few superintendents talking about robot mowers. I've even been to a place where they're testing them out to see how well they were, you know, like approving grounds for them. And you know, that just goes into what we were talking about. If the level of maintenance that we want on a golf course is so is so high that we can't afford a crew to maintain it anymore, We've got to invent robots to try to keep it up to the level that we want.

00:46:53
Speaker 1: That seems pretty crazy to me.

00:46:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, the expectation for a golf course maintenance is never been higher in the the both the environmental and the labor and uh, you know, kind of rising costs make that harder and harder.

00:47:10
Speaker 4: You know.

00:47:11
Speaker 2: I think it's a it's a situation that nobody really wants to broach, but it's it's it's going to come to a head. And you know, the the best answer I have is go play in Scotland for a week and come away and say like, are the green do the green greens being eight or nine really impact your experience? Nobody would say that.

00:47:33
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember when I Bill high Point, I thought, no, we don't have to have such high standards. And you know, really good friend of mine, Bill Sheian, came up to play right after it was built and played with me and he was like, boy, it's pretty rough around the edges. And I said, Bill, you're you're an overseas member of value. By how different is it than that? He's like, yeah, it's not much different. But the people from Chicago aren't gonna pay up for that.

00:47:58
Speaker 1: In America.

00:47:59
Speaker 3: It's like when they fly overseas, the rules all go out the window, but when they come back here it's like we want this, and he wasn't wrong. You know, it's like we you know, we heard a lot about it at iPoint those first few years, like why did you leave the fairways so wrinkly? Why didn't you just smooth them all down? It's like, you know, we were trying to make something that was more natural, and that's not what a lot of people want.

00:48:23
Speaker 2: Well, it's you know, the courses by you, the mom Pa courses by you. There's there's an owner that owns Champion Hill and Pinecroft up there, and you know, they they're very just normal people, and they they maintained the two courses with like four or five guys and you know, the the fairways aren't are an inch tall and the greens aren't fast, but those are two really good golf courses that are owned by a family and like that. That's the way they can operate a golf course that cost you forty dollars to go play exactly exactly.

00:48:56
Speaker 3: And it's just you can't, you know, the standard that we're building stuff at now, you can't build a new course like that, you know. That's that that forty dollars golf market or less. There's some places where it's even less. You know, that has to be an older golf course where there's not you know, nobody's looking for a return on investment for what it actually costs to build a golf course. Either that's you know, either through it it's gone through bankruptcy once or twice and the investment is much smaller than what it would actually cost to build that, or you know, it was paid off long ago when standards weren't so high, and now we're just you know, now we just have to operate at a profit.

00:49:36
Speaker 4: Uh.

00:49:36
Speaker 2: Here's a question from Ryan Mesturf. How do you handle criticism and how has it changed over the years.

00:49:44
Speaker 3: You know, I don't know that I personally, I don't know that I handle criticism much better than anybody else. Nobody likes to hear it. It stings, you know, I understood. I understood when I started that because I'd written the confidential guide. Yet if you're going to dish it out, you have to be able to take it. So, you know, I've been prepared my whole career for people to be pushing back at me, like he said this about my golf course.

00:50:10
Speaker 1: So I'm going to say something.

00:50:11
Speaker 3: I'm going to point out the flaws in his and it's like, you know, that's held me to a really high standard. You know if I if I mess up, I'm going to hear about it.

00:50:21
Speaker 1: And I'm okay with that.

00:50:23
Speaker 3: But you know, at another level, it's like, you know, and this is something Pete Didye said to me about about it very early on. It's like, at the end of the day, it's all opinion, whether it's good or bad. You know, if you're listening to everybody else's opinion on whether it's good or bad, you're just going to be lost.

00:50:42
Speaker 1: You know.

00:50:42
Speaker 3: You have to you have to really believe in what you're doing. And if you do, then the fact that tour pro x or remember why, doesn't like the sixteenth call is like, you know, you just dismiss it as sour grapes. It is funny, you know, Like you know, Padreke Herrington involved consulting a little bit on the Renaissance Club now, so I had a discussion with him after the Scottish Open this summer of what the player's reactions were, and god damn if they're not almost exactly the same as you'd hear from any member at any club. It's like, oh, that's holes too hard and that holds an unfair bounce, and like that's the perspective. It's like anything that's really difficult, to fix that and make it easier.

00:51:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, I you know, I think when it comes to just ideas in general, and you're you're in the ideas business, like putting ideas into in like into a golf course, making a golf a unique golf courses, and U you know, I always think about this quote from this guy. His name's Neval. He's a famous tech investor, and he has this great quote and I think about it a lot when I get frustrated with things, whether it be like you see something it's like, uh, you know, but I think like it's authenticity outruns all your competition. And you can take that so many different ways and it cover so many different scopes. But if you're listening to others and allowing them to shape, you know, your ideas or what you put into the ground, that's obviously going you're not going to be yourself the next time you're there. And the best way to be unique in you know, in an ideas business is to be yourself because nobody can copy that.

00:52:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you know.

00:52:24
Speaker 3: I mean it's probably taken a little too far to say you don't listen. Yeah, you listen.

00:52:29
Speaker 1: But you know, when somebody complains about something that you've already thought through, it's like, yeah, I thought about that. I'm not worried about that part.

00:52:36
Speaker 3: You know, if you say something that I didn't think about it, it's like, yeah, I should learn from that. But a lot of it's just, you know, criticism of most golf course architecture boils down to I made a double there, it stinks.

00:52:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that. So what are your three to four favorite bunkers and what makes them so great? And this is from Jeff. This can be anywhere I assume he didn't specify yours or you know, any golf course.

00:53:07
Speaker 3: You know, you said you sent me that question before, like fifteen minutes before we started this podcast, and I was like, Jesus, I mean, let's see, I've seen a fifteen hundred golf courses. I don't know how many body you know that must be like, you know, hundred, one hundred thousand bunkers say that I've seen, you know, it's like three or four. Uh So I just all I could think of is was in general terms. I'll talk about two things. In general terms, I mean for most people and for me, the coolest stuff is just you know, the big, raw, natural hazard. And you know, it's kind of the bigger and more grand and deeper and nastier.

00:53:45
Speaker 1: It looks the better.

00:53:46
Speaker 3: So like like the that bunker at Saint Anaduct that's on the cover of the first volume of the Confidential Guide, or you know that the bunker at Saint George's Hill that was on the cover of Robert Hunter's book in nineteen twenty six. You know, it's still just like, boy, you don't see hazards like that every day, and you know, and I feel fortunate that, you know, places like barn Google and Pacific Dunes and sand hills, and you know, we have been able to build some modern courses that have that feeling to them, and they're you know, it's big and rough and natural looking, and that's just cool. They're a maintenance nightmare, you know, And like even the ones I named at Saint Anadac and Saint George's Hill, they don't look as good today as they did back when we were doing those pictures, you know, because they're trying to figure out how do we maintain this for the long time, and it's hard, it wants to erode, it's you know, it's a difficult thing, and they're trying to you know now they're trying to maintain it to modern standards. You know, in nineteen twenty six, if you hit it down in there as like you're not expecting a clean lie in that thing. It's like you're lucky if you get the ball back. Now they want the sand to be perfect, so you could try to hit the bunker shot up to the green. So that's the one kind. But then the other kind is like the really small scale stuff that it's it's like just in the right place, and it's really hard to do. There's there, there's a little there's a tiny, tiny, I think the smallest bunker I've ever.

00:55:19
Speaker 1: Seen that anybody created.

00:55:22
Speaker 3: There's a bunker on one of the fairways at the at the Dunes course at the Prairie Club that Tom Layman designed. But you know Tom Layman designed it, but that was Kyle Frantz and Will Smith that that did a lot of the shaping out there. They're the ones that put that tiny little bunker in and they said there was something natural there, and they just kind of work exaggerated to get it what it was, and that was you know that I you know, when I saw the golf course, I was like, that's too severe for me. I mean, the thing is only like five feet wide, and you know, either go past it and it's perfect, or you know, one time in fifty year ball goes smack into it and you're dead. It's like that seems a little much to me. But at the same time, you know, I admire that, and so what I'm trying to figure out. You know, to me, the best bunkers in golf are mirfields, but all the all the revetted side wall bunkers that you see in the UK, they're the only real hazardous bunkers in golf anymore. Everything else is so perfectly maintained and there's no real face to them. And it's like, you know, if you're a good player and you're in there with a ninern or a wedge, you're gonna hit the ball in the green.

00:56:36
Speaker 1: It's easy.

00:56:37
Speaker 3: The only bunkers that really good players are scared about are ones with those you know, straight faces, and you know, sometimes no matter how good a player you are, you just can't go straight at the hole because there's there's a face in your way. But the cool thing about Mirrorfield is those faces aren't really high.

00:56:55
Speaker 1: You know, you see, you know, you.

00:56:57
Speaker 3: See more and more of the links course is going to you know, making the bunker a little deeper and making the face like all the way to the top of the mound and Mierfield they don't do that. A lot of the walls are only like two feet high, but the bunker is so narrow that the ball just you know, the only place for the ball to wind up is almost right against the face where you can't where you're looking at something. And it's only as high as my little desk right here. But it's like, can I get the ball up over that or I need to play out to the side a little more to make sure I make it like the the you know, the first one that comes to mind because I was just at Mirrfield and we were looking at we were looking at this specific thing, like how do we make bunkers in Florida to their penal. There's that bunker to the right of the eighteenth green of Mierfield. It looks like a donut donut bunker.

00:57:44
Speaker 1: There's just a.

00:57:45
Speaker 3: Little sand trench and there's an island. There's a big island of grass in the middle. It's not like a big sand bunker with a couple of little grass islands.

00:57:53
Speaker 1: It's the other way around.

00:57:55
Speaker 3: But then the mound in the middle is kind of crowned and they mow it tight, so ball almost can't stay on that. It's gonna roll, it's gonna hit there, and it's gonna wind up in the little trench of seeing going around, and you're always gonna have a really hard shot out of that.

00:58:12
Speaker 2: I think in the playoff, I can't remember who one of them got. One of the women got up and down out of there to I think extend the tournament. It was a great up and down. But yeah, I completely agree. Like the thing when I was in Scotland, I was petrified of bunkers. It was terrify, Like they're terrifying. This is the last place that you want your ball to end up is in a bunker, because you know, like there's a really good chance that you're going sideways out and it's actually a real penalty, and that's even more magnified. I played hickorys that kill spindy and when you're out there then with that old equipment, it's like a minefield, you know, like you're starting to think about like, hey, you know, I know I'm only one hundred and twenty five yards out, but I don't think I could stop it if I had to fly over this bunker. Maybe I hit it short right of the green and chip up and get up and down, you know. And it's it's those bunkers really make things come alive. And it's and I imagine that they're a little bit they're probably on the economical side of things too in terms, but they don't have that you know, photo appeal of a big nasty blowout like we're talking about.

00:59:24
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, they're not really on the economic side. I mean rebuilding. You have to rebuild those those side walls pretty regularly, and that's it. That's too big an expense for a lot of the clubs in the UK, the smaller clubs, it's like they're trying to figure out how to deal with that. Either they're going to the artificial turf to revet them, or they're just taking out revetted bunkers.

00:59:42
Speaker 1: Because they can't afford. To me, they can't afford to rebuild them every two years.

00:59:47
Speaker 2: All right, last question here, which of your greens would you most want to have as as a backyard pit, putting and chipping green. And this is from Jim Colton.

01:00:00
Speaker 4: Oh.

01:00:01
Speaker 3: My first response was just like, yeah, any of them. You know, we I've built a lot of cool greens, and I don't you know if you're if you're just trying to go out and practice different shots and stuff, It's like, well, there'd be there'd be a lot of good choices. I mean, one of my favorite greens that I ever built was on a high point, the thirteenth Green, And you know, I think we're getting that one back. It won't be in my backyard. It'll be five miles down the road, but close enough. I don't want to maintain and green in my backyard anyway.

01:00:31
Speaker 2: That's that's good, all right, Tom, thank you for coming on. We'll do more of these. I think we're both at travel welves. Maybe we'll get another batch in around the holidays. But but thank you so much for coming on. And uh and we'll be back sometime soon.

01:00:47
Speaker 4: All right, Andy Tiko, thank you for.

01:00:59
Speaker 2: Listen listening to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast and another episode of the Yoke with Doke. Big thank you to Meg Atkins for edding up this podcast as always, great job.

01:01:11
Speaker 4: Thank you Meg.

01:01:12
Speaker 2: As a quick reminder our Black Friday Cyber Monday sale, I'm sorry for beating you, beating you over the head with us as every company is doing right now, but we got a big sale going on. We have tons of stuff, T shirts, all sorts of stuff, accessories, photography, and you automatically will get twenty percent off when you go to purchase something until this coming Monday. Thanks and we will be back on Friday with another episode of the Frida Egg Podcast.

01:02:10
Speaker 3: H