National Golf Links of America: C.B. Macdonald's Big Swing (Great Courses 2)

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 1: And when I find my ball in a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Friday Friday, Frida Egg Egg, Frida Egg, Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Welcome to the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison. I'm back from vocal rest feeling pretty good. So shout out Penicillin and shout out to Andy for doing the intro to the last episode. Today's episode is the second installment of our Great Courses series, But if you're starting here, that's fine. You don't have to listen to these in any particular order. They're basically deep dives into some of the best and most influential golf courses in history. The first one was on the Old Course at Saint Andrew's, and this second episode will be all about National Golf Links of America. This course was designed by Charles Blair MacDonald during the first decade of the twentieth century, and it opened in nineteen eleven. Many would consider it the first truly great American golf course. There are a couple of other options for that title, but this is really where American golf architecture came into its own and it was the site of some incredible innovations in both design and agronomy. My guest for this episode is Chris Millard. Chris is the co author, along with Anthony Edgeworth, of a history of NNGLA that was published in twenty sixteen. Chris has been a friend of Friday Golf behind the scenes for a few years now, and I'm very excited to have them on the podcast for the first time today. Now, if you like this kind of content, I think you would love CLUBTFE our membership program. Clubtf offers a number of benefits like early access to fridagg golf events and an annual member gift, but the core of the offering is exclusive content. Our weekly course profiles are basically deep dives just like this into noteworthy golf courses. So if you enjoy this episode, I can just about guarantee that you would enjoy the stuff we're publishing on our member site. Go to Thefrida egg dot com slash membership and get CLUBTFE for yourself or for someone else who loves golf. All right, Before we get into my conversation with Chris Millard about National Golf Links of America, a quick word about our sponsor for this episode, Club Champion. Club Champion helps golfers of any skill level play better golf through custom fitted and custom built equipment. They have extensively trained master fitters who provide an in depth, data driven, tour level fitting process, and these master fitters have access to fifty thousand hittable head and shaft combos as well as sixty plus brands. This is truly a brand agnostic fitting. You'll go with whatever works for you, doesn't matter what the brand is. These fitters also use industry leading technology like track Man and sam Putt Lab to really dial you in, and when they build the clubs, they build to the tightest tolerances in the industry. Club Champions fittings produce real results for every level of player. You don't have to be a scratch player to get some benefits from this process. I've gone through Club Champion fittings myself. I am not an elite golfer, and I've gotten really good results from them, and I've also learned a lot about my golf swing about what kind of equipment I should be using. So it has really helped inform my future equipment purchases. I waste a lot less time and money buying stuff that's not going to be suitable for me because of what I learned from Club Champion. So Frida Egg listeners, this is the deal that Club Champion is offering for the holiday season right now. You can use the code Frida Egg to get a one hundred dollars full bag Club Champion fitting, or for a fitting that is less than the full bag, you can get fifty percent off the cost of the fitting with the purchase of a club So just make sure to book your fitting by December twenty fifth and complete that fitting by January twenty first. Again, that's code Frida Egg. All one word, all right, let's get to my interview with Chris Millarden. All right, I'm here with Chris Millard. Chris, thank you for coming on the podcast.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: Great to be with you, Garrett, thanks for having me.

00:04:55
Speaker 1: Let's set the scene a little bit here. We're going to get into the specifics of National Golf Flinks and CB McDonald's story, but I want to set the scene for people and give them a sense of what the state of American golf architecture was before National was built. How would you sum that up, how would you describe that?

00:05:16
Speaker 2: Well, that's an important question because that's McDonald saw the beref state of American golf course architecture in the eighteen nineties, and that's why he did what he did. But to sum it up in a word, the condition of American golf course architecture in the eighteen nineties was primitive. I mean it was really things were very flat. Most places didn't have the resources or even the intuition to move earth in any way. And the inclination therefore is to build golf courses that are on easily managed plots of land. So things were. Golf was played in fields. Fairways were essentially massive, long rectangles. Bunkers would kind of just go geometrically across the fairway or into the fairway. Greens. You know, it's funny now most greens have kind of a rounded attitude. Back then, everything was flat and most of them were square, and it was an extremely kind of boring, repetitive geometric exercise. There was no art, and McDonald had spent so much of his time he was really introduced to golf while studying as a young man, a sixteen seventeen year old at St. Andrews University of Saint Andrews, and he saw he was introduced to golf over there. He didn't know a thing about I'm probably jumping ahead a little too much, but he didn't know anything about golf until he got to St. Andrews as a sixteen year old, was introduced to the game. The first day he ever saw golf, he thought, wow, this is terrible, what a lowsy game. He compared it to something that's boring as Tidley wings. And then a few days into his stay, he kind of his grandfather got a mi set of clubs, got him acclimated at the old course, and he saw the grandeur of the golf course architecture over there, and of course a lot of that was driven by nature. So he comes back to in America that was largely bereft of golf. Certainly Chicago, where he lived, was entirely bereft of golf. And he thought, you know, if if golf is going to have a chance in America, it's got to have that same style, the same feel and challenge and natural influences that I just saw in my years in Scotland. And he was cocky enough and arrogant enough to say, I am going to design a golf course that will not only please me and my friends, but it will be the paradigm for all future golf course architect in America and give America it's actual, it's rightful game as opposed to this rectangular thing that was beginning. And he did it. That's the beauty of McDonald. Yeah, he was arrogant, he was prickly, but he did exactly what he set out to do. He gave us the DNA for American golf.

00:08:23
Speaker 1: Where did McDonald come from in the world? What was his kind of social status? Location question?

00:08:29
Speaker 2: You know, a lot of people, a lot of people assume, because he was so definitively important in the formation of American golf, people assume he was American. He was actually born in Canada and he was raised in Chicago. And in his actual birth date we make a point of it in the book. His actual birth date is in dispute. There are several indications he was born in eighteen fifty five. There are several eighteen fifty seven. I went with the one that I found most often. I went with fifty five because that's the one that most people have used, but even in some of the family's own documents they have eighteen fifty seven, so it's up for dispute. When he was sixteen, his father decided the best thing for young Charlie would be to go to Saint Andrews and get educated at the University of St Andrews and live with the grandfather who was a professor at the University of St Andrews. And like I said, McDonald had no exposure to golf before he went there, and of course he finds himself in golf heaven and he after literally just a couple of days of exposure, he fell hard. I mean a lot of people love golf. I don't know if anyone's fallen as hard and as fast as CBA McDonald did.

00:09:59
Speaker 1: What was his personality, Like, you've given some indications of that so far, but you know, what do we know about what he was like as a guy.

00:10:07
Speaker 2: He was confident beyond compare. He was also you know, take confidence one step further. He was arrogant. He knew he was right, and you know what the thing is, he often was that's the funny thing. I guess it's not bragging if you deliver. And he was right on so many things, and a little aside on backing that up. He was concerned when he came back to America that somehow golf course, that golf itself, both its courses and its rules, would be Americanized, and he was concerned about that. He didn't want that to happen. He knew that if that happened, we'd have a lesser game than the one he had seen over in Scotland. So he became sort of a very prickly defender of the rules as the game was played in Scotland at the time, on implements and on the golf courses themselves, on you know what a golf course should look like. That's that's a big You have to have a pretty big ego to think that you can be the guy who does all this for the future, for the posterity of golf in America. He did all the above. He was beloved, he had. In fact, there's a section in the book where we talk about his death and the club wrote its own. The club essentially wrote a letter to the members mourning the death of their founder, and they talk about what he was, that he was an autocrat, that he was he was arrogant, he was argumentative, he was persuasive, And then they say, but above all these things, he was a friend. And he had this incredible ability to aggravate and irritate people. But those same people never turned their back on him. They were still attracted to them. So we had this amazing charisma and power and confidence that he never lost in his whole life. He was a I make the point, he not only had all these people at National and all throughout all strata of golf all over the world among his friends. The game really never had a better friend. Without C. B. MacDonald, golf in America does not exist as we know it today. It may have ultimately, we may have ultimately gotten there, but he saved us a lot of headaches and a lot of lousy golf courses along the way.

00:12:59
Speaker 1: He became a very good player too. Although he took up the game, you know a little bit later than a lot of say prodigies would, he ended up becoming a very expert player. What were some of the highlights of his playing.

00:13:15
Speaker 2: Correctly, you're exactly right. He became a good player very quickly and he was exposed. You know, I conjecture I don't even know if I make this conjecture in the book, but I believe the first lesson he ever took in golf was from old Tom Morris, and he was very close with young Tom. They were very good friends. And by the end of McDonald stay in St Andrew's he was contending with that kind of crowd with Young Tom and the other young bucks that were coming up around Scotland at that time, and there was you know, by the time he was probably in his mid twenty he could give anyone in the world a good game. He was that good. And of course, as I'm sure you know, you know, he won the first United States Amateur Championship, had a couple other close finishes. In fact, you know, his some of his close finishes that came before his win really were the impetus for the creation of the USGA. You know, we've to this point, we've really only talked about the game and golf course architecture. We haven't talked about Charlie or cb as a as an administrator, the legacy that he left in the creation of the USGA. There's there's a lot of evidence that, you know, in the early days of golf in America, when there was no USGA, golf was competitive, golf was a free for all. Anybody could declare them. You know, you could have started a tournament in eighteen ninety five or eighteen ninety four through maybe and you could have just declared this, Hey, this is the national championship. And I could have done the same thing the next day, and everybody could have had a national championship. And it was McDonald who kind of after having by the way, lost to so called national championships prior to the establishment of the us This is.

00:15:20
Speaker 1: The part of the story i've heard I've heard before. Some people characterize it as almost like he he refused to call it the official national championship.

00:15:29
Speaker 2: A lot of people think he kind of sour graped his way into the creation of the USGA. You know, he would he lost two of these events, and kind of his sense afterwards was, you know, these events were neither national nor championships. Yes, and if you're going to ever declare someone a national champion, it's got to be on a proper championship golf course, and it's got to be properly administered with the with rules. In fact, in one of the early ones that he lost, that frust traded him so much. One guy showed up and played with a poolque. I mean, that's how silly that's And so it was MacDonald, almost on his own shoulders, who said, you know what, we got to do something better than that. We have to be like this thing they have are in Scotland called the RNA. And he became a a real evangelist for the rules of golf. That's another way in which he wanted to spare the US from any cleavage with the game as he saw in Scotland. He knew that the rules had to be the same because if America, if we in America happened to somehow americanize our rules, we would lose some of the discipline that that is infused in the rules as written overseas. So he was a very good player. In fact, he got so good before he came home. He got so good that the magazines and the newspapers that would cover the achievements of a guy like young Tom Morris wherever he would go and play, you know, there'd always be a little paragraph Young Tom played here today they began to cover McDonald in the same fashion, so that gives you a sense of how good he was. And of course winning the first USM. And here's a quick aside on the winning the first USM. When I was writing the history of the National, those of you have you ever played the National?

00:17:31
Speaker 1: I haven't know.

00:17:31
Speaker 2: Okay, Well for those of your listeners who have, they they'll know. The smoking room. It's right off the bar. I was sitting in there with another guy who was doing some historical work at the National, and I'm sitting on a couch and basically I had part of my job was to kind of take in everything that was on the walls and I take notes and all that. And I looked down and there's like a little metal about the size of a quarter maybe a half dollar, sitting on the end table. And I looked a little more closely and I picked it up and I said, wow, does that say eighteen ninety five on it? And it was like a gold medal, and I realized it was Cebe McDonald's medal for winning the first US Amateur the very first Peak prize ever awarded by the USGA. Just sitting on an end table, I mean the place stripping with history that like something like that would just be sitting there.

00:18:24
Speaker 1: Well, cbe McDonald is such a fascinating subject in himself. You know, he's as charismatic in death as he was in life. Right, it's hard not to just keep discussing him. But of course our focus is National Golf Links, and so we'll skip over some interesting parts of McDonald's life to hasten to the National Let's get into some of his ideas about golf architecture. My understanding is that as his playing career declined, he became more and more keenly interested in architecture, and one of his key inspirations was actually a series of articles in Golf Illustrated. This series of articles I regard as one of the most important moments, one of the most important artifacts in golf architecture history. But people, I don't think generally know a lot about it. So could you tell me about this discussion that happened in the pages of Golf Illustrated and what McDonald took away from it.

00:19:27
Speaker 2: That was the article written by Horace Hutchinson where he kind of asked the subscribers and the readers of Golf illustrated, which was widely read then across the UK and even in the United States. What are the best holes out there? I mean, it was almost like you could almost imagine this happening on your blog or a webcast or a radio show. Right now, Hey, guys, let's talk today about the best holes out there.

00:19:52
Speaker 1: It's a very common thing to do now, it's very familiar to those of us who love golf and love golf architecture. As far as I know, this was the first time anybody had thought to discuss such a thing.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: Right, exactly right. And he poses this question to this universe of passionate golfers and knowledgeable largely knowledgeable people, and the answers come flooding in. And McDonald reads this article and says it says, you know, I'll only take a step back at that moment when that when that article came out, golf in the UK was being played against land that had been shaped by nature, and then golfing men came onto it and played their game. McDonald read this list in the in the article and said, wait a minute, I see this list of golf holes, and by the way, I agree with all of them, and I might even have some other additions that I would add to this list. But I wonder if you look at this list and you think about the elements that form some of the holes they're talking about, and we'll maybe talk about the redan at North Barrack that was in the list. McDonald says to himself, Yeah, these are great holes. These are the holes that deserve to be singled out as great. But I wonder if they can be duplicated. I wonder if you could take their essence or some of their features. Feature here, a bunker there, a green shape there. And I wonder if you could, rather than encountering a hole like this through the chance of nature, if you could actually bring intentionality to golf course architecture and say I'm going to actually start from scratch and create things like this. That's a huge leap. And the funny thing is that when he started to do that, and I've just I've just passed about twenty years. I just went about twenty years when he started to actually implement his idea at the National the originators, the guys over in the UK were kind of laughing at him, you know. They had this disdainful, ugly American kind of attitude like, hey, good luck trying to capture the spirit and the essence and the beauty of these holes on your lowly American simile. And I mean he pulled it off in spades, but he had hurdles. You know, the soil at National, the actual ground he was working with was violently hilly that had never been surveyed because it was essentially impassable. There was so much thick, prickly brush that people were familiar with the land. But who was ever going to bother with that land? No one until donald kind of had the vision. What McDonald didn't realize is that under when he finally cleared all of that brush and was left kind of with the naked land, how sandy He didn't He knew he wanted sandy soil, which is why essentially why he moved from Chicago to New York eventually, because that was he felt like it was going to be in Long Island or in New England where he was going to find that sandy soil. And that's really what brought him. I mean, he did get a job with an R. H. Thomas and Company in New York, but I think he went east precisely because he was on the hunt for the perfect sandy soil, and what he didn't realize is this gift of very sandy soil was also extremely difficult to grow gress on, and I think it was. There are two monumental achievements that McDonald pulled off at National. One is just getting that golf was built with the lack of technology they had at that time. And the other is overcoming figuring out and having the emotional stamina and the patients and the determination to figure out how to grow grass. Because for a year and a half or two years well after when he had kind of hoped to be open and running, he had bare sand and he was It was an embarrassment, and the Brits were laughing at him, just as they when he sort of suggested to the world, I'm going to transplant these coals into American and intentional golf course in America. They laughed, and they couldn't help but laugh even more when he couldn't grow grass, and they figured, yeah, he's revealed himself to be the ugly American. But he became a student of seed, He became a student of the dirt itself, and he ultimately figured it out. He spent a fortune back then. You know, right now, if you were where you're going to go order a ton of seed, that seed would be one hundred percent exactly the seed you want. Back then, seeds were intermingled. You might have ordered, you know, five hundred pounds of a certain seed, there were probably fifty or one hundred pounds in there of other seeds. It just wasn't that well organized, and he didn't know that. He also didn't know that even though Long Island seems to be sort of on the same longitude or latitude I forget which one, it seems to equate to England and Scotland kind of it really doesn't. It's got a very different climate, different humidity, and the soils in Scotland are far more akin to the soils up like where Bandon Tunes is, and that's a very different climate than the New York metro area. So he finally figured that out. And once he figured all that out and he was able to really grow the grass the way he wanted, the rest was history. And one of his friends and frequent sort of dinner companions and visitor to the National was a guy named George Crump, who was also trying to build a golf course Pine Valley in extremely sandy soil, and he came to McDonald and basically said, how do you do this? And McDonald basically showed him, I've been down a long, hard road. I'll tell you how to do it, and he saved Crump held a lot of time at Pine Valley.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: They still had a hard time at Pine Valley, though. That was And it's interesting that these two kind of you know, giant accomplishments of American golf architecture and National and Pine Valley, these are kind of the two pillars of that period of golf architecture in America both had a pretty similar problem when it came to actually getting grass on the golf course. Now, I'd like to take a few steps back here. You know, we've we've gotten to the point where the course is has been built and is being grassed. But I'd like to go back to, you know, how how it came about, how it became possible to build this course, and some of the architectural ideas that went into it. So let's talk for a minute about ideal holes coming from this. This discussion that happened in the pages of Golf illustrated where where something in MacDonald's brain kind of clicked and said, Okay, these are the greatest holes. How can we get something like this in America? Well, we can adapt some of these ideas, or maybe we can replicate certain holes. So how did he research his ideal holes? What did he do to kind of find out about them?

00:27:53
Speaker 2: That's a great question. He set up like a war room in his office in New York City.

00:27:59
Speaker 1: All of this is totally incredible, by the way, Like the way that he attacked all these problems is just like it's amazing what he did. Sorry, sorry to interrupt, but it just strikes me like this guy was an absolute psycho. He just he took everything he did with this project so seriously and just went after it.

00:28:21
Speaker 2: And he would not he just wouldn't be denied. And this is a guy, by the way, who had, you know, a big job, he had a lot of other responsibilities, he had two children, and you know, he'd made this his life's work and it worked. That's the amazing thing about it is every corner, every time he challenged himself to take on something that was going to change the game, he did it.

00:28:47
Speaker 1: So he set up his war room for researching.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: War rooms in the city. He himself between the time that that article came out and the time that the National they started buying the land for the National around nineteen oh six is when they started buying the land for the National. So that first five six years of the nineteen hundreds, he spent a good chunk of those first three or four of those years overseas literally with his eyes playing golf, but surveying holes and thinking to himself, you know that principles knows that's a feature I love. I'd like to incorporate that somewhere. At the same time, while he was doing his own research, he had his knowledgeable pals, guys mostly in Scotland, sending to his office rudimentary photography. It's amazing. There are some pictures that were sent to C. B. McDonald with letters that are in the National's archives. There are also sketches from some of his more artistic friends on like graph paper that kind of sketch out. They'll say, you know, here's here's what the roadhole green looks like, you know, and it'll be, you know, one quarter inch to one foot scale. And there's piles of this stuff hanging around the National. So what McDonald did is he accumulated all these comments and insights from all his friends and from all his own research. He goes back to the war room. He then commences the search for Sandy Land. He really looked up and down the East coast, I mean essentially from Jersey to the Cape up there. He scoured. He actually approached Shinnacock. He was a member at Shinnacock. He went to Shinnacock and said, I mean, you want to talk about cocky. He went to Shinnacock and said, I'd like to buy the club to build a proper golf course.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: Because they had a golf course. It's not the golf course that people know that's a William Flynn golf course that was built later at the time, I'm Shinnacok had a more rudimentary kind of golf course on that spectacular piece of land that we're all familiar with now.

00:31:07
Speaker 2: Exactly right. So he goes and they said, well, gee, thanks for thanks for your offer, but no thanks. And it's around that time he looked there were several other we detail in the book. There's a few other properties in the general area that he looked at. Then ultimately settles on the property that he acquired, and I believe this is how things unfolded. He first traveled that land on horseback because it was completely inaccessible on two feet. He and HJ. Wigham, And that name may ring a bell to some of your golf historian listeners. He was also a great amateur golfer in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, one a couple of the USMS, I believe, and ultimately became CB McDonald's son in law. But he brought Wigham out with him to kind of get us just an overall impression. What do we think if we could clear this land, what have we got? And they both agreed, this is it. This is the land we're going to buy. Well, the land had never been surveyed, and there was a surveyor working for the village of Southampton on the city payroll, who as Southampton at this time in the late in the early nineteen hundreds is kind of growing a little bit as a summer community and so the roads have to be improved and modernized, and the surveyor of the streets was this guy named SETH Rayner. And I believe that well, what I know is that. McDonald asked Rayner, Hey, you're a surveyor by training. He went to Princeton to study it. Maybe you could come and help me survey this land. I kind of need to know what I'm dealing with here, and he was so rest with Rayner that he ultimately hired Rayner to Basically what he said to Rayner was, Okay, I've got this Principal's nose bunker and I even have the dimensions of it because my friend over in Scotland drew a little chart of it. He told me how high it is and how deep it is. How do I implement that into this land? And that was Rayner's job. That's what Rayner did. In fact, we found the invoice in the researching this book. Rayner was paid one hundred and fifty five dollars for his work at National Golf Links, and he spent if you look at his itemized invoice for the days he worked there, Essentially he was the most common work he did was measuring and determining bunker heights. How deep should you know? Because where the Principal's nose bunker is now is very different topography than the McDonald in interpretation of the principal's nose, which is going to be on number eight. So it was Rayner's job to transplant that detail, that feature onto this new land and make it function with this new land. So that is how Rayner got involved. Ironically enough, Rayner never was a golfer, and at a certain point in his career, Rayner actually made an intentional decision that he would never play golf. He felt like he was having such success in nineteen fifteen to nineteen twenty five, et cetera, that he was so good and in such demand. He felt that if he took up the game it would only maybe diminish his instincts and he'd start looking at a whole design a player rather than as a golf course architect. And so, amazingly enough, he never played the game.

00:35:10
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00:37:47
Speaker 2: I think he meant everything. I think on the courses where they work together, I don't think Rainer gets enough credit for how heavily be leaned on him. They were also two fascinatingly very different people. McDonald was boisterous and cantankerous and kind of arrogant and cranky, and Rayner was very quiet, studious, polite, calm. I interviewed Rayner's grand niece. She's still well. I wrote this book came out in twenty twenty fifteen. I think so at that time, his grand niece was living in Southampton, and she said she remembered her mother talking about how occasionally Rayner and his family would go off to this little cabin in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles away from the National because he knew that McDonald couldn't get to him.

00:38:54
Speaker 1: There he could have a little bit quiet, and the.

00:39:01
Speaker 2: Grandies talked about how, you know, she would see you know, her great uncle. I guess that's what it was. You could see him. The burden would come off his shoulder as they would just sit by a fire and you know, chat, and that's all Rayner really wanted. So and the other thing is in the book there's this discussion where this illustrates, well what McDonald thought of Rainer in the nineteen twenties or thirties. You know, McDonald does Chicago Golf Club and like eighteen ninety four or somewhere around there. I know, he does the you know, the World Fair comes to Chicago and he lays out a few holes. That's fun. Then they go to that lake forest, then they go to Belmont and they do they do nine and then they later on add another nine. And that's the first eighteen Hole golf course in the West. Then years later, Chicago Golf Club reaches out to McDonald and says, hey, we're thinking about having Seth Rayner come in and kind of modernize what you built all those years ago. Would that be okay with you? And McDonald writes back that yes, it would be okay with me, but under one condition, and that condition is that you do everything. He says, Now, for McDonald to defer to someone, we've talked about, what a towering ego he had. For him to defer to someone with that kind of respect, you know, one condition, you do everything, he says. That's all you need to do about what McDonald thought of Rayner's understanding of golf course architecture.

00:40:47
Speaker 1: And he's very tender about Rayner in his writings. Of course, Seth Rayner ended up dying in nineteen twenty five or nineteen twenty six, too young than right, and McDonald was clearly affected by that and wrote about it. And so their friendship was clearly very strong, even though they were very very different people, and McDonald could be a difficult person, whereas Rayner, by all indications, was the definition of not a difficult person.

00:41:17
Speaker 2: And by the way, to put to put a somewhat romantic or poetic exclamation point on all that they are buried feet from one another in the Southampton Cemetery.

00:41:27
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.

00:41:28
Speaker 2: That's incredible.

00:41:29
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, So getting back to National Golf Links, of course, you had these two enormously talented men, along with some other talented companions, laying this course out, trying to build the great American golf course, the first truly great American golf course. And when I say that, by the way, I want to mention, you know, the way we've characterized this the history of American golf architecture to this point is very general. There were some outstanding courses in America before National Golf Links. It's not like it was a complete wasteland myopia. Hunt Club Garden City are often mentioned as among the best courses of the pre National era, and those are still incredible golf courses. And so, you know, we don't want to paint with too broad of a brush here. National was clearly on a different level, however, and it was important to, you know, kind of changing the history of golf architecture. One thing about it that it had that previous golf courses in America didn't have was funding like big time funding, big money to allow this piece of land which was in some ways well suited to golf but in other ways was a little bit difficult and required some work that allowed this piece of land to be turned into an excellent golf course. That money needed to be had for that to happen. And so how did McDonald find this money and put together the funding for this brand?

00:43:00
Speaker 2: Given his career in the financial world, he was connected to a lot of the wealthier people in New York. It is actually kind of amazing to see how quickly a guy who was born in Canada, raised in Chicago, educated in Scotland and then ultimately moved to New York when he was forty five, scaled the social ladder in New York City. It's incredible. He was a very New York at that time. Even frankly even still today, But at that time it was a very clubby place. Everybody had a club. You had a club you belonged to where you went to lunch at that club. Then you had a dinner club. Then you had a club where you danced. Then you had a club where you played golf. You had a club where you would stay overnight in the city. I lived in Connecticut, and McDonald had this massive collection of clubs, and I think those were for him the breeding ground of these social slash financial relationships. This is where he got to know people. You know, he didn't go to Harvard, he didn't go to Yale, he didn't go to Princeton. But at these clubs he was hobnobbing with everybody who did. And he got to know a lot of kind of brand name people in New York with a lot of money. And when he set out to do the National he looked for sixty men, each of whom could put up one thousand bucks. So we're talking about seventy thousand dollars in nineteen oh five ish money. That's a lot of money. And you're right, the project was much harder than McDonald originally envisioned, particularly that that grass growing escapade. And it's interesting, you know, I never really thought about this, but if McDonald had tried to do that golf course without a lot of money people behind him, I think it probably would have been a disaster. Because with that money also came patience. He had the time to solve the grass crisis because he had guys who had money. So I think you're right. The money was a huge part of what we ultimately got in the National.

00:45:36
Speaker 1: Now, when he went to this piece of land with this funding behind him, he could do a number of things right. He could build some holes, he could really move some earth around. He could, you know, bend the piece of land to his will in a way that previous American golf architects really couldn't and really most previous British architects couldn't either. There was some building, ambitious building happening around London in the Yeah, Sunningdale, Harry Colton and all of them were we're starting to do some of these things. But National seems to take that to a new place. So were there holes that McDonald simply found in the land at National Golf Links? And what were those?

00:46:29
Speaker 2: I would say the best example of that by far is the Cape, the Cape hole that he designed number fourteen at National. Now, if anyone listening has ever played the National, there's a road you take that kind of takes you towards Paconic Bay. That that's the road that's going to lead you to the National. And today as you're going down that road. There's kind of a rusty old gate, beautiful wrought iron gate that's kind of like neglected, and you drive by that, and then you turn into the McDonald gate, the beautiful gate they now have, and you go up the hill to this beautiful house. Back in the day, that gate was the entrance. The first gate you see on your left was the main entrance to the club. And they did a deal. National Golf Links did a deal with the city of the Village of Southampton. After McDonald had laid out the golf course where the fourteenth hole is now. Imagine you're looking at the green. The original fourteenth hole had water a little bit in front of the green, all the way around the right side of the green and all the way around the back of the green. It was almost an early island green, not quite all four sides, but three sides, and that right side went all the way out into Bullshead Bay that was tidal water. Well, the National Golf Links wanted to there was a road that actually went right through their property, and so they made a swap. National Golf Links said, hey, look, village, you give us this road that goes through the property, which is now basically the road they use for tractors and mowers and that kind of stuff, and we will help you build a road that goes to the beach, which is and now that's where their entrance is. So what happened effectively was that tidal water that used to come up on that right side of number fourteen that is now bridged by a road, and that took away. It's now just kind of sandy low spot that goes to the road, and then right of the road is Bullshead Bay. So when it was essentially surrounded on three sides by water, it was purely McDonald's vision. This concept of how much of this water do you want to take on was a radical new concept. Even McDonald even writes that he there was nothing like it. And of course, when you think now about cape holes and the how much do you want to bite off shots in golf around the world today, it's one of the great, one of the great additions to the golf architecture canon. Everybody loves it, one of those holes. How much can you chew on this hole? And so the cape, I think clearly that was conceived of and and created entirely out of McDonald's head. And probably is his greatest addition is singular addition to the golf canon. So that's my best example of how he sort of did his own thing there too, as well as kind of take other concepts and features and work them in right.

00:49:58
Speaker 1: Well, if you were to choose another hole at the National that you think represents the brilliance of McDonald's design, and maybe this one incorporates elements of these model holes that McDonald had studied and wanted to adapt.

00:50:16
Speaker 2: A great example is number seven. And you know, like a lot of great old clubs, the club the holes have a name, you know, a nickname, and number seven is the road hole. And if you went to National today and you played number seven and I said to you, as we're playing the hole, I would say to you, hey, Garrett, what hole do you think this is kind of modeled? After you go, I don't know. And then if we played it again and I said, this hole is modeled after the road hole, the light would go on in your head and you go, oh my god, this is an unbelievably good interpretation, not copy of the road hole. So McDonald, for instance, the great features of that road hole is, you know how close the road runs to that back right of the green over at the old course. Well, there is no road to the back right of number seven at National, but he has this stretch of ever deepening bunkers that is right where the road would be. And of course it wouldn't occur to you necessarily the first time you played that, until someone says, yeah, he modeled that. That's that would be the equivalent of the road on the road hole. And little features like that like bunkering where the or the old drying shed or the train shed would be on the road hole. You know, he's got bunkers in there to give you a sense of you have to you have to hit over those bunkers to get to the dream spot on the fairway. So he did a lot of things like that where he took the general concept and then adapted it to what he had.

00:51:56
Speaker 1: All Right, so we get to the point now where where the National has been designed and built. You've already told us about the difficulties that McDonald had in seeding the greens and how he sort of had to invent modern agronomy basically in order to solve that problem. And ultimately he did a great deal of research and came to a kind of solution that produced pretty good results, I believe, And we can talk about that, but let's get to opening day. When the course first opened. What did the people who played it think of it?

00:52:40
Speaker 2: Well, McDonald, We've had a lot of descriptors of what McDonald was. You know, he was arrogant, he was cocky. He was also a showman, a consummate showman, and he had the instincts of a boxing promoter, and he wanted his opening to be, you know, worthy of his accomplishment. So he opened the golf course. Harold Hilton wins the nineteen eleven US Amateur at Applewamas, which is in Westchester County, which is across Long Island Sound from the Nationale. And it might be a little bothersome. So what he wanted to do was have these all these great players who were in town, roughly in town in the general New York area playing in the US am Wouldn't it be great if I hosted my opening while these guys were all here, so they could come over and be part of it. The only problem is going from Westchester all the way through Manhattan and all the way out to Southampton was a tough journey in those days. So he got a with the instincts of a promoter. He got a great idea. He had a member and a friend named c Ledyard Blair who had a yacht, sailing yacht called the Diana, which was the envy of sailors all over the country, highly regarded as the most beautiful sailboat extant. So McDonald figures, I got an idea, why don't we have him sell the Diana over to Westchester County where the guys are wrapping it up Applehamas, and we'll get all these big name guys, the Harold Hiltons of the world, to get on the Diana, and we'll sell them over to the shores of the National. And I mean they'll make a triumphant entry that'll get attention alone that they were sailing over in the Diana, and then they'll go play the National for opening day. And so that that's how, that's how. And when he actually opened the golf course in September of nineteen eleven, and I believe it, they had the kind of an informal little tournament and Harold, it couldn't get better than Harold Hilton winning. And so Harold Hilton followed his US Amateur win with winning this event. So it was a perfect, you know, perfect way to open things up.

00:55:07
Speaker 1: What were some of the early reactions to the golf course? What did people say about it?

00:55:11
Speaker 2: You know? McDonald Again, another descriptor that I haven't really used is McDonald. In addition to all the things we've said, he was also an unbelievably detailed publicity manager. He hired a clipping service. I didn't even know they had clipping services in like nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, nineteen twelve, but he hired a clipping service to send him anything anywhere that was ever written about the National And he had great relationships with golf journalists, and he was not afraid to use those relationships. You know, he would he would sit.

00:55:55
Speaker 1: Down and.

00:55:57
Speaker 2: Like a like a CEO. He had a great way of getting his words into the journalist's head and then the journalist would literally spit those words out. Like There are things that you read if you read his biography, for lack of a better term, the book he wrote called Scotland's Gift Golf. If you read that book and you learn about what McDonald felt about architecture and his golf course the National, and then you go and you read these clips. So you know a lot of these clips are in the archives at the National. Word phrases and words that he uses in his book show up routinely in the newspaper articles. And today a CEO of a company would love to have that kind of persuasiveness where he could get what he wants in the newspapers. McDonald had that gift. It's one of the things I always marvel at is how he handled the back end of his golf course too, not only getting the land, not only getting rainer, and not only getting these features and holes, but actually the back end of promoting and taking care of the image of National golflings, which he did for the rest of his life. Because anyway, I think I lost my train of thought there. But I've always been amazed at his ability to control. Oh, you were asking about what did people have to say about it?

00:57:23
Speaker 1: It sounds like what people had to say about it was what McDonald had to say about it.

00:57:27
Speaker 2: That's you. You You said it exactly right. And I don't know if he was if he intimidated them. I don't know if they just wanted to be his friend. But these are legitimate writers, you know, like the Bernard Darwins of the world, Henry Leach, back then, Henry Leach. There's a sidebar in the book of Henry Leach having heard so much about the National that he took the train out from New York and then walked to the National. And he tells us that it's in the sidebar book where he had heard so much he walked, and at the end of his little piece he writes about he says, and worth the walk. So to a man, it was highly praised. I don't think I've ever seen a negative comment from even from from people like Darwin Leech early New York Times, all the New York Times, New York Herald, all the local papers. He had command. It's almost like he had command over them. But they were right too. It was it was the ideal golf course.

00:58:33
Speaker 1: I think it was either Darwin or Horace Hutchinson who said something to the effect of I'm not going to come out and say that it's the best golf course in the world, but if someone were to say that, I wouldn't look askance at them. Yeah, so that's that's Darwin, right.

00:58:52
Speaker 2: You mentioned Hutchison McDonald. You know, McDonald did not up to the time where he designed the Nation, he really hadn't done a lot of golf course architecture. I mean, he did the variations on a theme with Chicago Golf Club, you know, the Lake Forest and the Belmont, and he hadn't executed a lot of golf course architecture. He's played a lot, he'd studied a lot, but he hadn't executed a lot. And he asked Hutchison one time, you know, I struggle a little bit with greens, which with designing a green, how should I think about this? And Hutchison said to him, take a handful of little stones and drop them, and he goes However they fall, however nature determines that they should come to rest on the ground. That's how your humps and bumps in the green should look. And if you look at you know, when you play the National and you have that in your head, you can see it. You can see where McDonald took that advice, and you can see these humps that are exceedingly natural but clearly put there. And that's one of the beauties of how McDonald took input from so many people. You know, it's the only people always say, you know, if you design something by committee, it's going to be a disaster. In a way, this was designed by committee, but it was just all this information fed into McDonald, combined with the info we already had and tips like that from Hutchison just dropped the pebbles and all.

01:00:29
Speaker 1: This advice was filtered through McDonald. I think that's probably the key. If it were designed by committee in the way that people usually mean when they say designed by committee, everybody would have to come to an agreement on certain things and maybe some quirks we'd get flattened out. But this was all mediated through McDonald, and so ultimately was it was his product. And it's interesting that the parallels to Pine Valley because George Crump really did the same thing there, taking in all this advice from the best minds in golf architecture at the time and and channeling them into this one course, and to an extent, you know, McDonald kind of did it first at the National. I love that story about the pebbles too. It the things that golf architects do to try to randomize themselves a little bit or to get out of their tendency, the human tendency to organize and to impose order on something. You know that I've heard architects say, and Andy Johnson often talks about potato chips, modeling greens after potato chips. That's another way to kind of randomize things. This pebbles story is another iteration of that kind of way to get out of your own head and produce something that's sort of natural.

01:01:50
Speaker 2: Right, absolutely right, I agree with that. And by the way, the potato chip analogy is so good, Like when I think of that, I automatically go through about thirty greens and my head that are obviously potatoes that.

01:02:02
Speaker 1: Look like potato chips. Yeah, Perry Maxwell's greens look so much like potato chips, And yeah, you had to think, you know, somebody was explicitly thinking that when they were designing some of these classic greens that we see from the I don't know even know if there were potato chips back then, maybe that were there.

01:02:21
Speaker 2: In any case, there were crisps.

01:02:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you got crisps. So you know, some of these writers who reacted to the national early on, including Darwin and Hutchinson, I believe both of them, said something like this. They said, you know, the original holes, the unfamiliar holes, the ones that came out of McDonald's own head at National Golf Links are my favorite ones, are the best ones. And so you know, when I see that, I think, okay, well, first of all, that's that's impressive. But I wonder how McDonald received that feedback, whether he thought to himself, well, maybe they should have all been original. Is there an argument that National Golf Links would have been an even better course? Wow, if all of the holes had been original.

01:03:14
Speaker 2: Wow. So I've been I've been mired in thinking about the National since I got the assignment to write the book, which is nineteen eleven, twenty eleven, and the book came out in like twenty fifteen or sixteen, and so I've been thinking. I thought about it all those years, all day every day, and I think about it a lot since I've never thought about that question. It's a hell of an idea, you know, imagine if on that piece of land he had just taken his own ideas and put them in the land, what.

01:03:48
Speaker 1: Would we have, Right, It's a little bit it feels almost a little bit blasphemous to think about it in that way, right, I mean, part of this, part of the impetus behind this question for me, why I'm thinking about it, is that, you know, before this kind of renaissance in appreciation of C. B. MacDonald and Seth Rayner that I would say we're currently experiencing and have been experiencing for the past ten fifteen years. Before that, I think the common perception of McDonald and Rainer was that they were kind of these transitional figures in American golf architecture, that they weren't quite fully formed in some way, that they were the people who allowed the Alistair Mackenzie's and the George Thomas's, the Perry Maxwell's, the William Flynns of the later period of the American Golden Age of golf architecture to be truly original. They were the ones who kind of, you know, made the transition from the Victorian period to the Golden Age happen, but they themselves weren't truly high Golden Age architects because they were still relying and on those old models. I think I think that's that's kind of the argument that was there, and I think that people think about it differently now. But this thought experiment about would the National be better if it were one hundred percent original to me relates to that overall debate about whether McDonald and Rayner were truly like fully formed. Well, great a couple.

01:05:25
Speaker 2: Here's a couple thoughts on that. One is the holes that he did interpret. You know, we call him the template holes. That's a kind of a demeaning name because that almost sounds like they just took the exact same thing and just did it time after.

01:05:40
Speaker 1: Time, and they just take copy and paste, and you know that there was no no art to it. It was just like, yeah, replication.

01:05:47
Speaker 2: And the truth of the matter is if you look at a plateau green at National and a Plateau green at pick the you know, the one out in Chicago Short Acres. You know, if you if you look at the country Club of Fairfield and Yale and you look at the you know, pick your pick your template hole, they're different, and they're they are suited to each place. So it's not just replication. And that was one of the knocks on Rainer. A lot of people will say, hey, what was Rainer except a guy who kept using you know, this feature and that feature, and to which I say, you know, what was Frank Lloyd Wright other than a guy who kept using walls and roofs. I mean that you you only have so many things you can work with, and nobody ever worked with them better than Rainer and McDonald, McDonald and Rayner. You know you're you're gonna have fair You're gonna have te's fair ways, hazards and a green That's pretty much. It's like you're gonna have a floor, you're gonna have windows, you're gonna have walls and a roof. Who does it better? I mean, there's a lot lot of people who designed houses. Frank Lloyd Wright is set apart. Why because of the vision that he had and the way he used those common features. And that's McDonald or Rayner. They had a unique vision and they used those features in an artistic and challenging and golf knowledgeable way. I would also say this to your question. To that question you're asking about what if McDonald had done the National entireties on his own, Well, the cape is one of the landmark golf holes ever designed, and that's created purely out of his brain. The redan at National is arguably the best redan of the world. In fact, when the golf course opened the head professional from North Barrick came over to play it and proclaimed the redan at National to be better than the radan of North Barrick.

01:07:56
Speaker 1: Was this Ben Sayers? Yes, exactly right, and so at least that's what McDonald said exactly. I've always looked at that part of the McDonald's book and been like, wait a minute, did someone's actually say that or is this just McDonald who's.

01:08:10
Speaker 2: Going to exactly Yeah, who's going to operate like that a little bit?

01:08:14
Speaker 1: Yeah? I mean I I don't I don't discount that that opinion either. Right, The National redan looks absolutely amazing, so I could see why why somebody might might react that way.

01:08:27
Speaker 2: It's unreal. It's it's one of the great holes, you know, their short hole is the six holes. Just every hole there is just magnificent. I mean, you can't. I don't know if there's a better golf course on earth. To me, if I had one golf course that I could only play for the rest of my life, it would be the National. I would never ever tire of playing that place.

01:08:51
Speaker 1: Now, speaking of the National historically, as as a moment in golf architecture, especially in America, that influenced future moments. What what did the National inject into the bloodstream of American golf architecture. How would you sum that up?

01:09:14
Speaker 2: I would say it it gave us a beacon. It gave the future of golf something here in America. You didn't have to go to Scotland to see what it should be like. You can now just go to Southampton and that's the beacon. It was almost like a compass. And you know, MacDonald, amazingly enough, had that in mind. I need to I need to build this not just for my friends to have a cool place to play golf. It's so that the world that America will have something to look at, so that for the future of American golf course architecture, they'll know what's good and what's not. And here's here's good. That's it's amazing. And it turned out to be true. I mean guys like Gil Hants, Ben Crenshaw, I mean, two of the most in demand golf course architects on Earth. Their north star is C. B. MacDonald, SETH Rayner and the National. So he gave us that foundation. He also gave us the sort of like even though he was against or he feared the americanization of the game. He gave America and an identity in golf, like we were a golfing nation because we had the national we were legit And in a way, he kind of legitimized golf course architecture as an American thing as well as a Scottish or UK thing. You know. They were all looking down their noses at him, and they were giggling, you know, and it was, you know, the ugly American will never get it done. Who is this Yankee who thinks he can pull this off? You know? But when he did, they all kind of had to either shut up or write articles saying, hey, the guy pulled it off and this is incredible. So there's a real American thing there. And this whole the concept of this American element, this this element of American pride is it goes throughout McDonald's writing. In fact, the reason he called it the National Golf Links of America was because he wanted the club to be seen as some national enterprise, not as just a little club that you know, a few guys from one little town played. He had this concept in his head of a national model, and that's why he literally put it in the name, and he was ahead of his time. He wrote letters to his friends early early on nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, saying, my desire is to make this club as national as possible, and therefore I hope he'll help me in coming up with names of people from all over the country. And the first I think the first eleven guys to join the National, the original founders. One of them was from Atlanta. Think about that, in nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, Atlanta, Georgia to Southampton. That must have seemed like a frontier away. But he also, you know, he saw Saint Andrew's as sort of a national club. He saw Saint George's as a national club, and that's that's kind of what inspired him to have this national concept at National Golf Links, and that's why it's in the name.

01:12:53
Speaker 1: Well, Chris, thank you so much for this conversation. Really enjoyed it. There's a lot more to explore here. We could go on for another couple of hours, but call me.

01:13:03
Speaker 2: Any time you want. I'm happy to talk about it.

01:13:06
Speaker 1: Thank you. I appreciate it so much. And yeah, thanks for being on the podcast.

01:13:09
Speaker 2: My pleasure. Thank you. Garrett.

01:13:20
Speaker 1: This episode of the Friday Golf podcast was produced by Matt Ruschius. Thank you, Matt. If you'd like to do us as solid, then go to wherever you're listening to this and give us a rating and review. We have published some podcasts on some controversial topics lately, which means that we've gotten a couple of unhappy people in our reviews, and guess what, we appreciate those two. If you have some criticisms, then feel free to let us know in the reviews. But if you've been somebody who has been enjoying what we're doing, appreciating what we're doing, and you haven't yet reviewed this podcast or given a rating, now is a great time to do that. It really helps us out. It helps us find new listeners for this podcast, and helps us keep growing.

01:14:06
Speaker 2: What we're doing here.

01:14:07
Speaker 1: All right, thank you so much for listening. Happy holidays, and we'll be back again soon