The Future of Golf Course Restoration

00:00:00
Speaker 1: In the United States, many of the greatest old golf courses have already undergone what they've called restorations. That is, they've worked with architects to bring back elements of their original designs. In fact, many of these courses have gone through this process multiple times over the past thirty years, which begs the question, when can you actually consider a golf course restored? Can you?

00:00:28
Speaker 2: Ever?

00:00:29
Speaker 1: In any case, the restoration movement, which dates back to the nineteen eighties, has seemingly reached a point of maturity, and now I think we have to ask where does it go next. In this episode, I'll explore a few projects that I think represent interesting frontiers of the golf course restoration and renovation industry. First, I'll sit down with Jeff Stein to talk about his and Brian Ross's creative, historically inspired redesign the Great Dunes course at Jekyl Island. Then I'll speak with Clyde Johnson about his efforts to bring back vintage elements of British links courses. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is Designing Golf. Jeff Stein, Welcome to the podcast.

00:01:21
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, gar I'm really glad to be talking with you.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: So today we're talking about the future of golf course restoration, and I wanted to talk to you specifically, Jeff, about a project that you recently completed with your partner Brian Ross at Jekyl Island Golf Club off the coast of Georgia. I'm not sure i'd call this project a restoration in the strict sense of the word, but it certainly had a historical motive and there are a number of intriguing things about the project that might indicate where golf course restoration quote unquote might go in the coming years. So just to set the scene, where is Jeckyll Island and what's the history of golf there?

00:02:07
Speaker 3: Okay, So Jacky Island is on the southeastern coast of Georgia. It's kind of midway between Jacksonville, Florida and Savannah, Georgia. So from the airport in Jacksonville, it's an hour drive right up ninety five, you make a right turn at Brunswick and you head, you know, right through the marsh and onto jeckl Island.

00:02:29
Speaker 1: So we're talking about the sea islands here, basically the Georgia Sea islands.

00:02:34
Speaker 3: Well they call them the Golden Isles.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: The Golden Isles, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:02:38
Speaker 3: And then from Savannah. You know, it's an hour and a half south from Savannah. You know, Atlanta is probably four hours away from if you want to come from that direction. And the history of golf there is a long history. They you know, really done laid a golf course out there. Originally through I think it was the Riverside course. Donald Ross lay out a pretty would be a failed routing of a golf course through there. It just was too wet. He wasn't able to drain it very well. You know, the members went through several iterations kind of playing golf from the river through the Savannah. Later, Carl Keffer, the Canadian Open and their winter time pro laid out the original holes in the sand dunes, so where you would travel from the Savannah out to the sand dunes and back again. And then of course Walter Travis came in and fully laid out a spectacular ocean side links called the Great Dunes.

00:03:40
Speaker 1: So the Great Dunes Course a Walter Travis design. We'll talk more about Walter Travis in a moment. Originally eighteen holes, as I understand it, How did this course evolve over time? What happened to it?

00:03:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, Travis came and laid out the course in twenty six. Of course opened end of twenty seven, but Travis never lived to see the course actually finished. But the holes he laid out were you know, hard against the ocean, I mean, nothing in between you the beach and the golf and it was just one of these spectacular link settings that's pretty rare to find in the United States. And you know, Travis adapted the routing of Keffer on the front nine and he re routed stuff, but definitely used some of his green sites and the back nine which we lost due to basically time erosion storms. And then of course when the original owners, you know, this group of very wealthy individuals who used to own Jacko Island, they kind of gave up the club in the island in the you know, post depression, and the state took it over. And that's that is when we really lost the back nine of the Great Dunes golf course, and they decided to do a lot more economic development. They put a beach road in later on at convention Center, several hotels and and so on.

00:05:17
Speaker 1: So basically you can't get the original back nine back that has now been developed.

00:05:23
Speaker 3: That ship has sailed.

00:05:25
Speaker 1: Okay, you alluded to the ownership situation on the island. It's a pretty unique situation, so tell me about that.

00:05:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, oh, you mean currently or before?

00:05:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, currently, Well, as I understand it, this the was the Jekyl Island Authority. It's a state body, right, It's a government body that owns it, but it's relatively independent from the government. So yeah, the current situation, which I think dates back a couple of decades, right.

00:05:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I don't know when the authority was, you know, given their license from the State of Georgia to operate, but the state park was created sometime in the in the forties or fifties around that time, and the Jeklan Authority has, you know, complete control over all the you know, the lease agreements on the island for whether that be if you're a restaurant, a hotel. You know that they actually operate the golf course, a conservation department, landscaping, et cetera. And they just they oversee everything that goes on in the state park. But there are actually a for profit entity but given the right by the State of Georgia. So this project really came to be from a really massive commitment. I think I read the other day it was like two hundred and eighty million dollar renovation plan over several decades, and the and the golf piece was really the last part of that puzzle in this whole economic redevelopment of the island.

00:06:56
Speaker 1: So I guess the reason they can do a project this ambitious is that they are an entrepreneurial body. Essentially, They're they're not they they need to make a They need to make a profit, absolutely.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: Need to make a profit. And and I think that they they kind of they all pool the resources and pull all the dollart tourist dollars from you know, there's a ten dollars toll when you come on the island. So you know, they unlike you know, a standalone golf course. They do have maybe some other profit centers from tourism. But of course we're hoping that the golf is going to start to drive a lot of those tourists, uh, that tourist activity and and we start filling the t sheets at the Great Dunes.

00:07:35
Speaker 1: It's really cool. It's a it's a fun model of ownership that kind of combines the UH the entrepreneurial spirit of an ambitious golf course with the support of of government and and the and the and the you know, I guess the mission to bring people out and give them access to a great golf experience.

00:07:59
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and I think that, you know, oftentimes municipal golf isn't really that profitable or it's hard to be profitable. So we're and I also want to mention there's a you know, we have two other golf courses at the Jackal Island Golf Club. There's Pine Lakes which is just recently renovated, an Indian Mound which is more your budget friendly option right now, shorter golf course built by Joe Lee. And we're going to see what happens with that third golf course, whether that gets redeveloped, maybe into a short course or something along those lines. We're just going to see how this whole plan comes together.

00:08:38
Speaker 1: So just some history of the island itself. My understanding is that pre Depression, Jackal Island was sort of a happening place, right This was a place that that wealthy people vacationed, and then it it just fell on hard times during the depression and the war and that's when the state stepped in and took it over. Is that is that basically an accurate characterization?

00:09:03
Speaker 3: That's that's fairly fairly accurate. I think there's a funny anecdote that they, you know, these owners kind of walked away with a pretty large tax bill and just said, okay, you guys deal with it.

00:09:14
Speaker 1: You take care of our debts here. Yeah, exactly, so.

00:09:16
Speaker 3: They say, here's the land, we don't want to deal with this anymore. And you know, there's a there's another island just down the coast. I think it's Cumberland Island maybe is owned by the Carnegie family, and that they have a home like in a national wilderness or something. So like this, this whole area, you know, in the teens and twenties, was was very happening. You know, you had a lot of commerce and and just yeah, vacationing for like, yeah, the wealthy and influential folks. I mean, I think they made the first transatlantic phone call from Jackyal Island. They they formed the idea of the Federal Reserve on Jecko Island.

00:09:56
Speaker 4: This wasn't you know, your average getaway wow, okay, yeah, I mean the stories of these different islands off the southeastern coast are all different.

00:10:08
Speaker 1: That's that's the interesting thing about them. There's there's not really a standard narrative of the history of all these islands. People are maybe familiar with hilton Head Island, right, hilton Head Island is currently a much more developed and you know, I would say financially stable and thriving place than Jekyl Island has been until recently. And so you have a different situation at Jekyl, right.

00:10:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and even more even more close to home at Jeckel. You have Saint Simon's Island where you have this the you know this the Sea Island Resort, Open Forest Frederica. You know, there's there's dozens of golf courses right there, and that's just very much more developed, uh you know land Jecko Island is a state park. You know, we have we're playing golf in a state park. And and that's really evident and part of the part of what we like about visiting there having worked there, is just the tranquility of it. The wildlife. There's deer all over the place, osprey's flying over the golf course, all types of fish, and you know, gators and whatnot. So you really it's really a getaway and I think that's that should be the attraction and the focus of Jeckyll is the fact that it's not developed. You know, we do have a convention center and that's you know, like I said, that ship has sailed, but I think that we've done a lot to conserve the space that we have. And that was part of the thrust of the Great Dunes project is we got the nine holes from the Dick Wilson course, the only ender golf course because we gave away the other nine holes for wetland conservation. So the whole thing is wrapped up in you know, a nice little package.

00:11:51
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's good context. Now you enter the picture with Brian Ross. How did you become involved in the in this Jackyll Island golf course project.

00:12:05
Speaker 3: It was a public RFP. Brian brought the RFP to me one day.

00:12:10
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:12:10
Speaker 3: I we were working together in Pennsylvania. I was doing a design and build a type project where I really was working as like architect and contractor. We had built We'd built a very small crew and had shapers working for us, and Brian was one of those shapers and he said, Hey, what about this project. And I said, listen, if you if you can put this RFP together, because they're they're pretty onerous, you know, it's.

00:12:34
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, yeah, a government RFP. It's not you know, it's not just.

00:12:39
Speaker 3: A presentation patch together. I don't know if it was thirty forty pages or something. And I said, I'll co sign it. You mail it, I'll co sign it. And uh, that's how we got involved. You know, Brian had been there before and knew the potential of it. I really had no conception of it. He didn't even show me any pictures. He just I trust Brian's you know, I his his knowledge of the business. And the first day that we got there, I have to say I was a little bit like overwhelmed with the amount of work that I saw was necessary. And I was like, oh man, what did you get us into? How are we going to do this?

00:13:21
Speaker 1: What exactly did you see on that on that first day on site?

00:13:24
Speaker 3: So much overgrowth, an overwhelming amount of vegetation, vines. Not only that, like it's a sensitive you know, conservation district, like you're there are restrictions on removing trees.

00:13:40
Speaker 2: You know.

00:13:41
Speaker 3: We we had luckily since we were literally working for the j I A. The you know, the the methods, and like the mitigation was easy to work with if we had to take you know, a large tree branch out that was hanging over a green site. But that happened couple of times where we moved a green back by about forty yards, but we had this huge, you know, oak branch hanging over the green and you know, I kind of wanted to keep it because I thought it kind of reminded me a little bit of like the Harbor Town stuff. But in the in the end, you know, we had to lop lop off a few limbs here and there.

00:14:19
Speaker 1: And you were working for the authority that that would decide whether you could do this, so that it was fairlylined the process.

00:14:27
Speaker 3: But we we mitigated, we mitigated whatever we cleared, and we honestly we didn't We didn't take out any very large trees. It was just all the underbrush and palmettos and all the thick stuff underneath the understory needed to be just mulched up, chewed out, and and taken away. We buried a bunch of it to bring up clean sand so to kind of like again minimize our you know, our our footprint in terms of hauling stuff off off island, we did as much of that as possible to just keep everything like in the envelope.

00:15:02
Speaker 1: So how much of the Walter Travis design remained in the ground to restore through light touch methods? Like, to what extent could you get back the Walter Travis design by clearing out some vegetation, widening fairways, pushing out mowing lines on greens In other words, was there much in the ground that that you could work with?

00:15:27
Speaker 3: I would say there were three green sites that required a relatively light touch, and the rest of it what really had to be adapted for modern play, just kind of making stuff a little bit bigger, like amplifying the green site. Just you know, we're expecting you know, twenty thirty thousand rounds maybe a year, where there were probably playing a few hundred or a few thousand when the course was created. So yeah, we're just trying. Definitely some green sites were were worth preserving and working off of. And then the veget clearing vegetation on the dunes. I mean that that really elevates the architecture as well, because again more overhanging trees you couldn't see certain sight lines, lines of charm, stuff like that. And and of course the routing was intact. I mean, we accept our our ninth t was the first hole of the Great Dunes. So the way that we you know, looped in the Great Duns nine, it happens really in the middle of our round of golf. We play holes one, two, and three on the old Oleander, and then four through twelve is the Great Dunes. And and it's a really happy accident that it works out that way because it allowed it created this seamless transition and an out and in routing as well, that really doesn't require more than you know, fifty to seventy five yards walk between where the golf courses were linked.

00:17:08
Speaker 1: Okay, so you had two different courses. You had the Oleander eighteen designed by Dick Wilson, and you basically borrowed a portion of that course and connected it to the Great Dunes nine to create a new eighteen whole course. So presumably you had very different approaches for these two different sections of the course. You probably had to be way more aggressive on the Oleander portion of the course than you were on the Great Dunes portion of the course. Where maybe you were doing some more classic restoration work. So how were your methods different on these different parts of the site.

00:17:52
Speaker 3: Sure, well, the approach was the same because we're trying to create you know, a classic, a classic you know, appearing Golden age golf course. The method was on the odlander was okay, drop the blade and just smash all this dirt. There's a lot of dirt around those green sites, so you know, either we're just pushing it out as far as we can, trying to tie it out, you know, and just blend it into the kind of restore the landscape. That's like job number one, and then find a green site that that makes sense for the routing and the you know, the timing of you know, where you're gonna you're gonna see these particular greens. And that's what that was like the biggest the biggest challenges maybe just taking away and just trucking off a bunch of dirt and putting it somewhere where you needed it, you know, on the first green, for example, a ton of dirt around the green site pushed it out, but also we also created a kind of push up green there on number one to kind of kind of you know, punch you in the face a little bit. Let you know you're on a Walter Travis golf course. And and it also broke up some of the site line so that you could have a really focused target. And just the way we cleared cleared the trees behind number one, you know, it was just this long gun sight, you know, probably twelve hundred yards long from the first tee or the first fairway all the way to too Green, and we decided to just break that up a little bit so that you could you could just get a really nice target to hit at.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: So this might be a somewhat naive question, but was there ever any thought of restoring Dick Wilson's work on the non Great Dunes nine And if not, why not?

00:19:40
Speaker 3: I think it was a very fleeting thought if anyone had it. I think the work of Travis was just valued more highly above that of Wilson's. Not to say people really adored the only under golf course.

00:19:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Wilson was a good architect, There's no doubt about that. Maybe this wasn't the best example of his work. Well, but where he did good work, he did really good work.

00:20:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, except half his golf course was like perpetually underwater, so like it just was it just never was created in a way that was would be sustainable. Whether that's because the water table has risen, we're getting more rainfall, I don't know exactly, but decision was really made for us. We're gonna, you know, chop off half of the only inter course because we can't even get golf carts out there. And hey, we really like and this came from you know that we had a sense of it during the RFP process that restoration was a priority for Jecko Island, like going back as far as we could go to something that was usable and really like the best iteration of the golf on Jecko Island is from the savannah to the dunes. And we didn't have the choice to go dunes dunes, but you know, if we had a choice, hey let's let's marry these two pieces of land which were really actually very similar, Like the the thirteenth and fourteenth holes on the Oleander pretty much are joined up with this you know sandy plane that that rides in the in the the back of the sand dunes of the primary sand dune. So it was always I think it was always meant to be this way when when they built the Oleander golf course, the front nine was actually a part of the great They combined the two back in the sixties when they were building the Oleander. When they completed both nines, Oleander went to it's you know, its routing. So I find it I find it really interesting that again, like it seems like it was meant to be to join these two nines together.

00:21:50
Speaker 1: How do you go about restoring a golf course that never existed? Maybe that's maybe that's an issue for philosophers, but I like, yeah, how do you what's your what's your approach there?

00:22:01
Speaker 3: Right, that's the that's the semantical argument, and say hey, is this a restoration or not? And and so you go about that by really diving deep into the historical photography. You look at the aerials and you see, hey, what can we do what was actually built and how can we maybe place that on what we're doing here on those Oleander holes. And Brian came up with a great idea. Picked he picked a great green site. It's kind of a a T shaped green with a saddle, you know, two high dunes and you know saddle in between. And so the green sits down low in between these in between these mounds, and Brian found a great site on our thirteenth Green to recreate the shapes and strategy of of what we believe to be the fourteenth Pole on the Great Dunes. So that's a you know, the best example of how we went about restoring something that actually used to exist. But you know, kind of it's kind of like the Lido, right, you know, in a certain way. You know, they it definitely didn't ever exist in Wisconsin, right, So I think it's it fits in a similar category with Lido, although we didn't use like the you know, the lighter like they did, and you know the GPS technology. Ours is really handbuilt and using our judgment, intuition and and you know, just trying to find fun features that we think Walter Travis would have built if he had that had those pieces of ground to work with.

00:23:46
Speaker 1: So you were pulling inspiration for lost from lost aspects of the course. So that's that's one possible source that you can use. I assume you also looked at other Walter Travis courses to get ideas from there.

00:24:01
Speaker 3: Oh, without a doubt. Yeah, we uh, we took our executive our deputy executive director, Noel Jensen. We took him on a field trip to New Jersey. So we brought good, good, good old uh uh you know, buy you boys from Louisiana. We brought him up to New Jersey and we took Yeah, he had a blast, and we took him to Hollywood. We went to North Jersey and we went to Troy. Uh I. I have been you know, an intimate knowledge with Garden City Golf Club, Cape Arundle, and those were like a really good uh subset for us to like pull ideas from and and really look at the greens and see like what did Travis do here? And so going back to an earlier question like what was worth restoring? Was there anything that we could just do like a light touch on And the the ninth green of the Great Dunes, which is our eighth green, it had this this deep swale that ran through the middle of the green on a little bit of a diagonal. And that's something that we all picked up on in our in our field trip, was the way that Travis used these these swales through the middle of his green. He would rotate them different angles and create different playing strategies. And and that was far and away the most like intact feature that we found that was recognizably Travis uh out there in the Great Dunes. So you know, that's a great way to uh you know again like build something that was never there, but you know, to kind of transport yourself and say what would you know, what would Walter do?

00:25:35
Speaker 1: North Jersey is incredible.

00:25:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, Brian Schneider has done a ton of great work there and and it's hard to tell now like what Brian's done and what Walter Travis has done.

00:25:45
Speaker 1: So exactly right. Yeah, that's why it's such a relevant comparison because Brian Schneider has gone out there and created greens using his own imagination that seemed like Walter Travis greens but are not actually restored Walter Travis green.

00:26:03
Speaker 3: I couldn't agree more. We have a we have a ton of respect for Brian's work, his talent, and like clearly like the clubs that he's been working with in the Travis space, there's a huge inspiration for us. His eighteenth Green at North Jersey was was definitely something that we tried to We took a look at that and said, well, that's that's kind of a cool idea. That's you know, it's it's kind of like a mini beer. It's greed we built. We built one on the fourteenth green of our course that has like it's a little bit of a beer its style. It's a little bit of the sixteenth at North Barrick, you know the two plateaus with the swale through the middle, and we incorporated a dune that like kind of feeds into the green to to create this like you know, this two headed you know terminus for the dune and which makes for just an awesome put surface. It's one of my favorites.

00:27:03
Speaker 1: This is a little bit like dancing about architecture. But what for you are the characteristics of a Walter Travis green. How would you describe his style of green construction? Because it, I mean it is super distinctive.

00:27:20
Speaker 3: Yes, he often has steep transitions between plateaus. Often there's knuckles or mounds surrounding the edges of the greens, and irregular patterns you could have like these swales that we talked about, and I believe you know it's like you talk I've heard say before, like if you want to build a cool green, like throw some pebbles around and you know, like those where your mounds will be, and then you know figure out where the water is going to go. And it's almost as if he's constantly you know, moving mounds in asymmetrical ways around the green and then throwing a swale in, you know, doing a maiden style green two shoulders and at Troy has an awesome I think it's the sixteenth green at Troy there's like two shoulders left and right and the green falls away from you with the swale right down the center. Troy blew me away because I felt like that was the place where we saw his work the most untouched. To my knowledge, I don't know if the greens were really messed with at all. And again, like I see in Brian's work some of the ways that Troy has influenced him, like the eighteenth at Old Barnwell being like that dead flat you know, top of the plateau, like nothing fancy, just like this is what it is the eighteenth that Troy is like that, you know, So it's you know, it's good to study. It's good to study. The Masters.

00:28:48
Speaker 1: Yes, Country Club of Troy is so special because it really has been preserved as opposed to renovated or restored. And that's partly because they've been working with Bruce Hepner, who is not somebody who likes to go in and reconstruct he is he is somebody who likes to use a very light touch. And as a result, you have some very special feeling greens at at Country Club of Troy that then do you can tell their original because because you just wouldn't probably build greens like that anymore in a modern context. And so yeah, that Country Club of Troy just an incredible place to study what Walter Travis might have actually done in Cape Arrundle as well.

00:29:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think the ten and Bruce worked at Cape Rundle for a long time. He's worked at Skylar Meadows as a course in the Capital region in New York. And I think the tendency for restoring architects, you know, myself included would be again is to like expand things, get pinning locations bigger. And I think that's a function of green speed. And you know this, you know usability of the golf course, you know, getting more cup locations, spreading out where like all necessary things for the modern game. But you know kind of problems born by green speed. And so I think when you go see the greens at Great Dunes, we're not anticipating the greens that are going to be all that fast. So we were able to build some smaller greens, nothing crazy small, like we didn't. Our smallest green is like forty eight hundred square feet to Part three or fifth hole. But what we had to work with there before, I mean, Garrett, I mean the Moon's surface couldn't have been more than nine hundred square feet. And even if we like went out to like the fhillpad, it was going to be you know, twenty eight hundred square feet of actual green like our client would never We just couldn't build a green that small for a public resort. So it's it's very site specific, like what you do. And but I don't think we we have a variety of green sizes out there, and the stuff that we amplified, like I said, the few greens that we thought were worth preserving, we we were very cognitiant of that of just like, hey, let's let's keep this under control here. No need to make everything ninety five hundred square feet.

00:31:15
Speaker 1: So now that you've kind of done this deep dive into Walter Travis, like tried to become inhabit Walter Travis, you know, like get get his get as close to him as possible methodical. What excites you about about his architectural style as compared to his his contemporaries.

00:31:36
Speaker 3: I mean, he's just so well known for the intricacies of his greens.

00:31:40
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:31:41
Speaker 3: You know, I get really excited thinking about East Potomac Links. You know, the reversible course, and I've seen the green plans for that. Mike mccarton from National Links Trust showed me the greens plans for that, and so yes, his the way that the golf course works, especially so from the green back. Uh. In terms of Travis's style. And then yeah, thinking golf is you know Travis that was his the term that he coined and and about you know, uh strategy and you know the shot values and penalty and and you know, I think he wasn't afraid to make you take some take your medicine. If you hit it in a bunker, you know, hit it behind a chocolate drop. You know, the game was not meant to be. I don't think he was a very I think he was a little of a gruff guy, and I think that is reflected maybe in his architectural style certainly, like if you look what if you go to Garden City golf Club, like what he did to Emmett's golf course. You know, he really really tough in that that he's stiff in that golf course up from you know, Fairway bunkering to the to the greens themselves.

00:32:52
Speaker 1: Just the fact that his nickname was the old Man, and I think he got that nickname when he wasn't really that old, That's right. I think that tells you. That tells you a little bit about what his persona might have been.

00:33:06
Speaker 3: A cranky, scratch golfer.

00:33:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, when I look at Travis's architecture and think about how it can be applied to a modern context, it's exciting to me because he didn't do wall to wall reshaping, and not many architects of his time did. Obviously, you know, Donald Ross maybe did that a little bit. SETH. Rayner got close on some projects. Certainly the Lido was was just created from whole cloth. But Walter Travis's courses really leave most of the natural terrain completely intact, and from tee to green, especially there's just not that much alteration of the natural landscape. There might be some chocolate drops, but you can there's a kind of transparency about where the manufacturing happened. You can see, Okay, that chocolate drop was manufactured, but the rest of it is completely lay of the land. Okay, the green is highly manufactured, obviously manufactured, but everything around it is natural. And for me, that's that's almost the best of both worlds, where you get the natural terrain, but you also get some really interesting architecture and not everything is blended in, so you can actually see where some of the work happened. And for me, that's a that's a compelling combination.

00:34:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think there's another layer to that in that Travis edited a lot of people's work and added on to others golf courses. Wayne Styles did a bunch of this in New England where he took nine holes and added another nine in and you know, didn't necessarily move a lot of earth other than creating the green sites, you know, digging some bunkers and things of that nature. So I think it is very site specific, like at North Jersey that you know, they probably had to blast a lot of rock or you know, and and it's a pretty severe sight as well, so they would have had to, like, you know, do some significant fills. But the way that he blended it in h is very much in the same way that uh Travis's contemporaries did. And and the thread here for me is between McDonald, Rayner, Travis, and Emmett. I think they were all so closely related in the time that they were creating golf courses, and you can just see how they borrowed ideas and the style and methods of construction from one another. And you could almost confuse an Emmett and a Travis sometimes or like a Rainer and an Emmett. Uh very you know, it's it's it's not too far fetched.

00:35:49
Speaker 1: And they were all buddies, right, so it kind of makes sense they were. They were all sharing ideas with each other and and maybe even consciously emulating each other and competing with each other about Yeah. All right, so the Great Dunes Project, I want to get into some macro questions about it. Okay, would you call it a restoration? Do you have a do you have a term for what you did here?

00:36:15
Speaker 3: I think at first we approached it like, hey, we're going to restore this golf course. And then the more that we got into it was it was just clear, like how much new that we were building out there. You know. Certain we didn't mess with the routing, We didn't mess with Travis's routing, but there were just there wasn't anything. There wasn't too much recognizable. Like if we just like dusted it off, stripped the side, and like put it back, I think people would think that we were crazy and they would be very very much disappointed. You know, people were being promised a Walter Travis restoration, right, but most of that cool stuff had been obliterated either in the hurricanes and storms on the Back nine, or it had been obliterated by you know, saying irrigation renovation in the nineteen seventies or whatever. Right, because we did find, you know, these kind of platforms of dirt in the center of these film pads. They were like ten to twelve inches, like our famous the famous May West hole, the our fourth hole. Like the green feels like it's sitting in a hollow in a punch bowl behind these two dunes. But then there's like this little pyramid on in the middle of the green, and we're like, this doesn't make any sense, you know, you know, this is not what the green shape would be. So we really, in all honesty, we restored as much as we could. We had historical photographs of that particular green site. We have some of the stuff on the back nine, but there's there's more than half of this golf course that is you know, newly created from you know, putting ourselves in walter shoes. Between Brian and I.

00:37:57
Speaker 1: You know, this is an interesting to me because in previous conversations I've heard you express the view that there might not really be such a thing as pure restoration.

00:38:11
Speaker 2: M H.

00:38:12
Speaker 1: Could you explain that that position to me and how it might have led to your approach to this to this project.

00:38:19
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, in the most doctrinal sense, like purely restoring something, you would have to have one hell of a record or it would take you an ungodly amount of time to like archaeologically peel back and figure it out. And you know, we tried to do that certainly. On that may West Green. We went down all the way to the to the native sand layer and to see how deep was the soil layer that was built up upon that and by far and away. That green was filled more than any of the other greens. It was a very unique green site. Some of the other greens we found a little bit of consistency, maybe there was you know, eight to ten inches of soil, but it was just so inconsistent what we were finding in the ground. We're just like, well, how can we possibly just restore? There was no there was no like consistent way or method that we could find to get to the actual like elevation that we thought it would be. So what is what is restoration? I'd have to think a minute of you know, how you could which golf courses have actually been restored. You know, I'm working with Hooper Golf Course right now, and this is a bit of a hot topic. Like the first green at at Hooper is you know, the members would love to have backpin positions there, but and the green, to anyone's knowledge, has never been altered. But the question is did they ever have back positions on a green that was sloping you know six to eight percent sometimes ten percent in place?

00:40:00
Speaker 1: Six Oh yeah, the whole that's not that's not pinnable, Just just to clarify to people.

00:40:06
Speaker 3: But it may have been pinnable when the greens were running out of five.

00:40:11
Speaker 1: That's the thing is that like, Okay, at what point can it really ever be a restoration if green speeds are what they are?

00:40:20
Speaker 3: Right? So you get you getting into this massively gray area of are we restoring the intention and the playability of the original hole? Are we you know, are we going to just turn back the clock and say no, we want to play Victorian style golf. You know, we think that's cool. We're going to hickorys and cop mounds, you know, And I don't believe that's where we're going, you know, in the next decade or more in the golf restoration game. I think more people we clearly have you know, been changing classic designs. Like you know, I work at the you know, the lower course at Balterstral with Gil, and and I don't Gil in all honesty, Gil did not change many of those greens at all. But there were certain instances where we we literally had to change stuff. They were like clo there were uh, you know, closed contours in greens where water was settling, and in one instance Gil actually left that contour. He said, no, we're not touching it. This thing is perfect. We're not, you know. And then another instance where we decided to you know, cut you know, cut three four inches out of the back of the green to let water flow flow out. So, you know, of all my people, I've worked with guys who are the best in the business. Like it's always there's always a judgment call to be made, you know, and maybe Bruce Heppner is a guy who's like not willing to make that call. And then on certain stages like championship golf courses, members and architects are much more willing to make those calls for the same of continuing the tradition of championship golf.

00:42:03
Speaker 2: You know.

00:42:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, well, Balthus roll Lower is an interesting comparison because they're a lot of historical evidence was used, as you obviously know, like Gil loves to use historical photographs and really try to precisely get back what was there. But in the end, those greens were dug up and you know, high tech infrastructure was put under them, and then they were reconstructed.

00:42:33
Speaker 3: Well they were scanned, you know, they were scanned to a very high degree of accuracy. The greens were certainly expanded around the edges, and like I said before. They they look amazing. They're also expanded around the edges to improve pin locations because they want championship golf and the greens running at twelve plus and the members want to play that every day. You know. It's like Wainfoot, same deal. You know. That's what's so was the experience there is playing US Open Golf PG Championship golf. So it's it's really tough. Like I'm one like going back to Hooper, you know, I sympathize with like regular members who don't get to experience like the full dynamism of that hole at Hooper. It's such a cool hole. The second it's a short par five, and the idea is, okay, if the pin's in the middle of the green or in the back of the green, how dare do you get close to that pin? Because the danger like ratchets up the more club that you take. These days, the pin can only be laid in the front third of the green. You're always sure of the bunkers, you never feel like you need to take extra club, and the strategy becomes you know, dull. So then you say, okay, what do we do? Do we just slow all the greens down, or do we, you know, take take a few inches off the back and restore the playing strategy. And that's the opinions vary wildly.

00:44:07
Speaker 1: Oh I'm sure. I'm sure it's a lively debate. But these are the questions that I think more and more architects are going to need to confront going forward in renovation and restoration projects. And I think part of the reason for that is that a lot of the great courses that could be restored through less interventionist methods or with more historical accuracy have been restored, maybe even multiple times. At this point, they've they've been restored supposedly right, And so what's left is courses that have either been altered beyond recognition so that very little remains to be restored, or courses that maybe weren't very good to begin with. And so the architect is put in the position of trying to introduce some of their own idea is and say, this is what I think good golf is. If we want to make this a good golf course as opposed to just a restored or historically authentic golf course, then here are some of the things that we need to do. And so how do you how do you get to that point where you have enough guts basically to say this is what I think would best serve the golf course.

00:45:23
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean it just you got to build up a lot of trust with your client. And you know here right behind me where you know, I'm sitting in the office at essex Fell's country Club right now, it's a it's a job that I'm working on with Jim Orbina's who's done a lot of this restoration work. And you know, we could open up that conversation about you know, Posit Tiempo is too as well, like where they did a lot of archaeological type construction method. But here at essex Fell's this is kind of a mishmash of architects coming through here throughout the years. You know, we have record of SETH. Rayner coming through and he did did a survey as built drainage plan, and then we have another plan of Tilling Hast drawing green sketches in the margins of that drainage plan. Rhees Jones has been through the golf course and and now Jim and I are here doing just exactly what you are alluding to, is like creating good golf, you know, usable space.

00:46:26
Speaker 2: Uh.

00:46:26
Speaker 3: You know one thing that we you know, we didn't really thought, we didn't really feel like fit the style of the golf course here at Essex Fells is you know, the Jones group brought a lot of dirt in around the greens to I guess kind of create the sense of difficulty when you really didn't we didn't think you really have to do that. So we're kind of undoing some of that, removing the extraneous soil and creating some of those sharper features and and fall off that. You know, tilling Hast has shown us a lot of his original work, and we believe tilling Hass did some original work here. Uh, you know, it's just some of it is beyond recognition.

00:47:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you're using your own judgment to put it back together, your own knowledge of what telling Hast might have done or what he could have done, and not necessarily needing to fall back on historical evidence to justify your moves. And that sometimes a little bit scary, I would imagine.

00:47:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes the evidence just isn't there anymore. It's just it's just been you know, warmed over. Uh and and a lot of the bunkers get crowded into the side of the greens, and that's what create you know, they create these like these false roles that clearly were never on the side of the greens. And you can see that in the when you take it apart, you can see, you know, what materials were used, so you can see, Okay, somebody did something here, So let's the first step is just take it away and tie into what they didn't touch, right, and so that you know, so your powers of intuition are just by being very careful about how you go about, you know, deconstructing things sometimes that and then you have to know when to stop and maybe that's you know, that's where our expertise comes into play.

00:48:18
Speaker 1: M hmm.

00:48:19
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:48:19
Speaker 1: Personally, I think these projects are really exciting because you need to make some of these judgment calls. And so I'm actually very really anticipating that that the restoration and renovation game is only going to get more interesting as we go on because the projects, a lot of the projects do exist in this gray area.

00:48:42
Speaker 3: Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think, like everything is that we're always approaching like our work and thinking how can we improve this area? You know, how can we make this shot value a little bit better? How can we make this uh, you know if if there's too many bunkers that's often happens like too many bunkers pinched the front of a green right, how can we create an angle by removing a bunker and maybe shifting one in the other direction, opening up locations and things. So it's a very fun exercise. And again you're putting on your architectural hat and you know whether it be Tilling, Hass, Travis or Emmett, and you're doing your best to incorporate their design principles into the way into the lens of improvement, design restoration.

00:49:29
Speaker 1: Jeff, it's been very fun talking to you. Thanks for spending the time.

00:49:33
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it. Garry a lot of fun as well. Hope we can do it again soon.

00:49:37
Speaker 1: Absolutely. This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by Perfect Practice and specifically Perfect Practice's new product, chip Shot. This is the first chipping that on the market with an automatic ball return. There's a large, multicolored target that helps improve aim and accuracy. It can be used on grass outdoors, but it also comes with a turf mat as well. It's exclusive to perfect Practice dot Com and Amazon, and it's currently available in both places, so this is ready for the holiday season. I currently have my chip Shot set up in my backyard. It's under my patio cover and I'm very much relying on it to get me through the rainy winter here in Portland, Oregon. So Perfect Practice products are available online at perfect practice dot com and you can use the code design for twenty percent off. That's the code design de sign is I believe how design is spelled. But this code is specific to the Designing Golf podcast. So if you've been enjoying this particular podcast, then this is a great way to show that if you also are looking for a chipping mat, so check out chip Shot by Perfect Practice. All right, let's get to my interview with Clyde Johnson. Clyde Johnson, welcome to the podcast.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: A right good to be honest.

00:51:15
Speaker 1: So I wanted to make sure to speak with you, Clyde, because you've recently been doing a kind of restoration work that is pretty rare right now, but I think might become more common in the coming years, and that is the restoration of links courses. So, first of all, why do you think links courses in Great Britain and Ireland have generally not done restoration projects.

00:51:41
Speaker 2: I think generally is that there's an attitude towards golf and Great Britain mind as you know, we certainly not precious about the history of our golf courses. I don't think, you know, golf courses have evolved a lot, especially over you know, from the mid eighteen hundreds to the nineteen thirties. You know, golf courses, even the great golf courses like Mirfield's, evolved a bunch over over that fifty thirty seventy year period, depending on the age of when the golf course was initially laid out and developed. Yeah, so I don't think, you know, there's this there's not that same preciousness towards the work. And you know, if we're talking about restoration, it's really difficult to take a fixed point and time to restore a golf course too. So yeah, I think that's a lot of it. Really.

00:52:33
Speaker 1: In Hoursty you mentioned that a lot of British links clubs don't really seem to think of themselves as having like significant architecture that needs to be preserved right there. They instead kind of view their courses as grounds for the game, and those grounds evolve as time goes on. And that's okay, I've heard you make that point before. It's a really interesting point of difference between between say, UK golf and American golf, where a lot of people in the American golf community are now kind of obsessed with the history of architecture and bringing back things from the Golden Age exactly as they were. There's there's not as much of that ideology I guess that you find at especially older UK links clubs. Do you think that perception is changing now and and do you want to change it?

00:53:24
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think I think, I think yeah, I think I think it definitely. It definitely is more recognition of you know, a golf course is history and past and how it's evolved, you know, partly, you know, I think most of that really comes from American influence in terms of coverage of golf course architecture, you guys, and you know, almost talking about this type of stuff more readily. And I think, you know, I think British architects as well have seen what's been done in America as well, you know, in the reference for the history, and you know, wanted to incorporate, incorporate that certainly into certainly into thought processes an execution of of work over here, you know. But you know, it's it tends. It tends to be you know when when we I think when clubs look at the past, but you know, when it comes to doing work, they use it. They're looking at the past for you know, ideas, you know, ideas to grab onto as opposed to wholesale and exact restoration to that to that certain day. So yeah, certain there's there's certainly more value. There's certainly more value and knowledge near today history about history our clubs, and I think I think that's generally a good thing. You know, it's not it's not restoration for the sake of restoration. But if there was a good idea that you know, if it looked to be a good idea it was one hundred years ago and it helped solve a prone or it makes some more interest in golf today, why why not look at the past and use that for inspiration and bring that back into into you know, some of some of our golf courses today. And you know, often you know no thing, you know golf courses, all these you know linkxy features links, you know, links in the general lynx environment. You know, it's continually evolving more than any type of any of the type of golf course really, you know, so there's there's generally a reason why golf courses have evolved, and there's not massive big blowout e sand scraping bunkers anymore. So you know, when you are thinking about, you know, recapturing and reusing these historic features, you know, you kind of got to have a fairly pragmatic and practical approach and think how you can lean on those, but also think how it might work and exist today, because you don't want to put them back and then watch them being done again or filled in in five or ten years time.

00:55:46
Speaker 1: Some of these factors that you're talking about are part of why the idea of British links restoration is so interesting, because because it's kind of a more towards the beginning stages of that movement than a lot of American Golden Age clubs are, where restoration has been kind of a fixed reality of those clubs and what they're doing for you know, thirty years now. And so it's I'm excited to get into some specific examples with you of projects that you've done at links courses. So, first off, over the past four years you've helped with some projects at North Barrack Golf Club, the famous and very wonderful Links course in East Lothian, Scotland, famous as the home of the Radan Hole and the pit hole and Perfection and many other holes that have kind of served as an inspiration for later golf golf architects. And you know, I think there's been kind of a rediscovery of North Barrack's brilliance over the past decade or so. It's really risen in prominence, I think, or in at least in frequency of discussion as far as I've been able to see, So have what have just broad strokes what have your projects at North Barrick Ben over over the past three years or four years.

00:57:03
Speaker 2: So it's it's kind of funny really, you know, on some of the stuff we talked about earlier, as as Northbury Bay has become more recognized and fought more fondly of over the last decade fifteen years, say, the architectural presentation of the golf course until four or five years ago was actually going in the opposite direction. Fair Ways were shrinking greens were shrinking. Bunkers. Bunkers were massively shrinking. You know, you know when you rebuild, when you rebuild a revetted or sod wall bunker, you know, normally you'd chased back in you know by you know, mostly by hand, uh you know, shovel out of the old revet wallers that decayed, say between three and seven years have been the the average lifespan of a revetted wall, depending on orientation, exposure to win, amount of traffic, et cetera. You know, you know, rather than rather than the older ready wall being chased out and the new wall being built in the same position, as they're really careful to do at the old course in Beuerfield was being built on the inside of the old wall. And you know that happens over a twenty to thirty year period soddenly something the bunker becomes half the size. So you know, a lot of you know, a lot of the work has been to remedy, remedy therese remedying. The fairway lines were really shrunk in. For fairway, for example, was maybe about fifteen yards wide. Four or five years ago. As Kyle's Grugshanks, the superintendent was taking over and we've slowly been able to push that out to thirty thirty five yards kind of back to where it used to be. Picking up so some of the cool old features that are on the right, on the seaside side of the whole. The same same with green expansions too, just just getting those back as far as irrigation will allow, and then assisting Kyle with a lot of the you know, you know, he's he's had a four or five year program for vetting the bunkers that you tend to tend to do North berks, not particularly bunker heavy golf course in Link's terms, probably seventy twenty bunkers so I remember correctly, but you know, rotating those on a five year program, so twenty is twenty ye ish bunkers a year, and then just really helping him to recapture the original size of those while also dealing with you know a lot of them. You know, so there were Dwanhill, for example, the famous or not the famous book with the lamb the lamb bunker on the left, on the inside of that one that tilts away that that become it was maybe three yards three yards deep in terms of you know, from the green side back to the direction to play floor was floor was tilting really hard towards the base of the revect wall, which meant, you know, the ball would generally have become trapped right at the face and you know, the floor to bunker and also deepened with times versus where it used to be. So not only did not only did it look inconsequential or not be fitting of hold the scale or statue of the redown, it was also become really playable and difficult for the average golfer. So it was remedying stuff like that while thinking about, you know, improving the maintainability of those features as well.

01:00:23
Speaker 1: There have obviously been many versions of North Barrick over the years, and so yeah, one of my questions is always like what how do you settle on a version of the course to go back to When you're doing things like working on bunkers on the Radan hole, you know, what kind of historical evidence do you look at and then how do you make a decision about what's the best version of that bunker that we want to bring back.

01:00:47
Speaker 2: Well, listen, there's some great obviously his pretty famous holes, some great old photographs. There was a nineteen twenty nine areals that really helped, like an aerial photograss. There was a nineteen twelve plan sketch that actually talked about how deep the faces of the bunkers were. So the lamb bunker was six foot deep. We worked on the Raddan got the color ra Dan bunker, which is the pair of bunkers at the front forty to fifty yards short of the green. This went that was seven foot deep, for example. But then the bunkers on the right of the green, which are now free today and have been free in number since nineteen nineteen thirties, I think around that time, but a long time anyway, that you know, in that sketch were only actually two bunkers, so had a bunch of great ground photographs. So one you know some of the really some of the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds pictures. You know, the rare Dan was stabilized by a sleeper wall, for example, but you know with time that became a sod walls. So you you're basically, you know my approaches, you're kind of thinking about the problems that you're trying to solve that exists with the existing bunker off feature, and then you're kind of interpolating all of the different imagery that you've gotten, coming up a solution that kind of fits the problems that you're trying to address with, you know, a nod to how the bunker used to look and how the bunker used to play. So, you know, on the lamp on the lamb bunker left of the green, we kind of restored that sold wall to the you know, to six foot high, really really cut it tight or as tight as possible to the green, squaring off the corners. You know, that kind of you kind of give that old you know, you look at you know, modern revetted softwall bunkers of you know tend to people a little bit rounder, and that's I think that's really driven by maintenance and wanting to get you know, the triplex mo as close as close as possible and riding over and tight to the top of those lips. And then you know, also also raising the floor, also tilting the floor back up towards the green, you know, in the old in some of the old folk or actually you can clearly see in both versions where it was either timber, timber faced or so on faced. You know, the floor was climbing up into the far car, up the bunk and the wind which just doing its thinging like blow around, and it kind of looked cool, easy to access, easy to access, an easier to play out, while also of looking visually pretty intimidating.

01:03:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let me let me know if this is like a good distillation of what you're saying about your approach. You're you're kind of you're you're coming in there to solve current some current problems with whatever version of the course currently exists, problems that numbers are having, or or just you know, maybe esthetic problems or problems with the architecture in general, and you are looking at some historical evidence to find, you know, possible solutions to that problem. You're not necessarily saying like nineteen nineteen was the best version of North Barrick and that's what we're going to bring back, which is a very common approach in the US where where where where you know, fed the line by by many clubs that you know, this particular year is the course that we think was ideal, and we're going to do everything we can to get the course back from from that year. It seems like this is a more complex process where where you have to go through a number of different options, see different iterations of the feature and kind of decide all right, this this is the one that best serves our current needs.

01:04:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I tend to have a fairly tragmatic approach to certainly consulting golf cost design. But really it's kind of kind of thinking of you really just create, you know, problem solving in a creative way, you know, with with the nod to history. So you know, you kind of especially at place as historically significant as North Barrick, you know, you've got to view your role as a custodian. You know, you're only you're only there for you already working there for a short moment in the golf course's history of the golf course has evolved. What you kind of want to make sure the pieces or your impact on the golf course is sensitive to what's gone before, but also can hopefully stand the test of time. So you know, you know, I was going to say, you know, going back in and recreated a cool feature that was one hundred years old that obviously didn't last beyond a certain period without thinking about the consequences of that. It's a it's a surefire way to have to have to redo your work pretty soon, pretty soon after. And there is only you know, there is only a lifespan. There is only a certain lifespan to a revetted bunker, you know, So you've kind of got you know, you kind of you're accepting that the next person to build that's probably going to be the you know, the greenkeeping team without any put from an architect or a designer. That's the assumption that you're going to make. So you kind of got to set them in the right place. And you know, if you do get if some thing doesn't quite turn out right, you know, then it's you can you can force be a little bit more risky, I think when in the links environment, and and you know, building reverted bunkers partly because they've only got a short lifespan, and you know, constructions relatively easy in the sound, and you know, often the materials you're using coming from the sites that they've got their own turf now sort of they're using for reverted walls, et cetera. So you know, if you don't quite get the walk, you know, you lead the walk in a little steep because that's what it used to look like in the old photographs, but it doesn't quite work as you think, or the wind blows and the roads more in a certain direction. You can theind of just that wall, just to just hold the sandal a little bit more. Next time around you do it. You know, you look at the mut Field's got a mate got putting the best reveeted bunkcause anywhere in the world, and they, you know, they've evolved really over seventy eight years, whereas North Berwick because of the north the reflect the neglects it kind of had, which is perhaps a bit of an fair word, but you know the bunkers really were because of that neglect over the last thirty years. Say, you know, you kind of starting against well a lot on a lot of those books, rather than you know, having had that dialed in or refined final bunker, if that makes sense.

01:07:19
Speaker 1: So, just a couple of days before I'm talking to you right now, Clyde north Barrick actually announced that it had hired Gil Hants as its new consulting architect. So you and north Barrick are parting ways. I just wonder when when you kind of reflect on your work there now that it's now that it's kind of a complete four years of of interventions at North Barrick and tweaks and adjustments and things like that. What overall effect you do you hope that your work there had had on the.

01:07:52
Speaker 2: Course and really well so it's been a privileged to how a golf course like North Beric ando into have the opportunity to really recapture and you know, bring back the gory some of the most famous holes in the in the world of golf course architecture. But I really just hope that we've been able to show the members what they have and the potential for North Berrick still. You know, there's still there's still plenty of bunkers out there. We've worked particularly focus was helping Kyle and the Greek keeping team on the bigger bunkers that they weren't able to really work on themselves. But you know, just to recapture the scale of some of those features and just you know, just to be able to, you know, just show what North Berrick should. You know, there's some, there's some and there's still some. There's still plenty some more of a low hanging fruit to recapture. Once the ons in the club installing new irrigation system, the next couple of years. The third Greek, for example, used to be used to be massive, used to go tied to the wall on the right of that green and back towards a bunker short of the green that we've kind of just reinstated or restored somewhat that used to connect all the way throughout prove to the beach. Believe it or not, but we we kind of did a a sensible version of that one that kind of went half of the way back to the beach and is revetted. But yeah, I really really just hope, yeah, that we're well, I'm just glad to have you know, shown shown the potential of what North Barak should be once again. You know, so have got some coastal erosion issues that they're looking to deal living and looking for a robust plan, you know, conveniency plan really to hopefully address something that no one wants to really contemplate, which is, you know, we've been a loss of some of the most famous holes in Scotland and the world.

01:09:43
Speaker 1: That would be a very difficult architectural project trying to you know, if holes get lost or altered, how how in the world do you do you design something that that can replace it. I would imagine that would be a very tricky problem for the club.

01:09:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No one who wants to think about losing the pit, green, harp, per section, greens or you know, you know some of those some of those great those great features and holes. But I'm sure, I'm sure it will be a sensible, sexible solution from coastal erosion from the from the council before them.

01:10:14
Speaker 1: All right, so let's talk about another course that you've been working on recently. As I understand it, uh, the event, correct me if this is not not the arrangement, but I think you're helping Tom Doak or helping Renaissance Golf Design implement a master plan at Saint Anadoc Golf Club in southwestern England. Of course that people should more people should should know about because it just looks it looks amazing. Is that the arrangement right now? First of all? And then second of all, can you tell me about the big project that you completed there recently?

01:10:49
Speaker 2: So say ana doc Golf Club hired Tom to do a consulting report in twenty sixteenth I think it was the twenty sixteenth, Okay, So I went I went down with Tom when we're doing some or we're just planning for the work, and his restoration worked at Woodhollspark in Lincolnshire. So I headed down with Tom for that consoling visit with the idea that i'd help the plumb emplum implement that over the next however many years. Yeah, it's one of Tom's favorite golf course, is one of my favorite golf courses, a golf course that really relies on some amazingly diverse and amazingly interesting topography and artificial features within the golf course, historically artificial features within the golf course. So yeah, really, you know, Tom completed that report twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, club sat on it for a for a while, did a little bit of work twenty nineteen and head greenkeeper at a time after that, wanted to try and implement some of the work himself over the next few years, and then that wasn't successful as the club would have liked. So since then been you know, back into continue to implement more for Tom's ideas really plus some plus some of my own where where needed, but trying to say as faithful to Tom's report as possible, you know, the big the big feature. You know, it's it's that'sn't that's that's another. It's such a great golf course. A lot of the issues there that they have, like I said earlier, are about getting traffic around the golf course. Very popular holiday resort, second home village and area for people from generally from stereotyping, generally from the southeast, from London. So yeah, so you know, the big the big project this year was to restore the famous Himalayas Bunker to something of its form of law, because it really was a shadow of what it used to be in the early nineteen hundreds.

01:12:50
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Himalayas Bunker's bunker. Which hole is it on? And could you kind of describe the feature, like the landform that it's cut into and the scale of it. Just give people a picture of this.

01:13:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's the it's the current it's the current day six hole. So you kind of you kind of tear off from a high high june platform. You can kind of you know, there's about tour and fifty yards down the hole as a massive let's call it twenty thirty meters high sand dune. I'm useless, I'm useless of getting the scale of elevated features like that, but.

01:13:31
Speaker 1: It's it's it's big. Basically, Yeah, if you, if.

01:13:36
Speaker 2: You, if you like, if you, if you're thirty yards short of that, you've still got one hundred and eighty yards probably ish at least one hundred and fifty into the green and you and you're laying back on as much club as you think you can get on it to get over over this enormous dune that's an exposed sand feature. From the tee, you kind of you kind of you kind of kind of see the green just poking out behind, so you know, you kind of know what the task ahead is. But you know there's a road that runs down there and some rough and the last of that there's a low marshy area. So you basically got to you kind of got to hug the left side of the fairway as much as possible and took the natural topography of the fairway can't take it into that position. But you know, it's still he going over the toe of that june. It's still plenty to think about. It's amazing how many people actually end up pretty much if it's the intimidation fact or it's the need to get the elevation over the June but end up in the in the face of that amazing sound feature.

01:14:35
Speaker 1: So how had the Himalayas Bunker evolved over time? What did its earliest version look like? And then what did it look like when you and Tom came in and started working at the club.

01:14:46
Speaker 2: There's there's actually some there's some great there's some great photos in the locker room actually that give the paint a pretty good picture of the history and you know, a bit like they're's not quite as prevalent as Dane, but there's lots of there's lots of historic phogra historical photographs out there over time. Because of the nature of the feature, it might be maybe great Britain Island's greatest links bunker feature. It's certainly the greatest in terms of scale of any surviving feature that I can think of. But you know, in the in the early nineteen hundreds, it was essentially a dune ridge which on the near side, on the Tea side of the of the whole was evolving sand dune, you know, some of marin clumps. Nature was you know, it was it was barely stabilized, kind of exposed somewhat to the prevailing wind from the west there, but not completely depending you know, if it was flipping around to the south or to the north, you know, but bye. By nineteen thirty seven, it really evolved to the point where the right side of it was kind of you know, it was stretching out quite a long way, so you know, it's maybe a forty fifty yard plus expanse of sand, you know, and went beyond the height of the of the buk itself. But that was kind of stretching out to the right, and it's kind of been started to stabilize on the right and on the left side. It certainly appears like there was some kind of effort to at least stabilize, you know, the feature, because the feature is kind of like a big at that point. By the nineteen thirty senn was like a big high ball, and then like a flare, you know, like a tail that kind of wrapped all the way down to ground level and stretched to the toe of the dune on the left side. And then you know, by the nineteen eighties it really become you know, it was really just high ball that was left a sound which was still still a pretty still a pretty impressive feature. And you know, if you've got Tom Dobe's Confidential Guide, the latest or the reading we did were the Great Britain Island to kind of kind of looked like that was the you know, you know, the painting in the front of that book. And then at some point, you know, it's no no photographs from the from that period, and you know, the committee within the club haven't given me a definite avant on this, but at some point there was also a pot bunker that was established to where the tail on the left used to go. You know, so there's a really puny little poplunker on the left, this enormous expanse of sand on the high side, which was kind of a really weird juxtaposition, and then you know, in the late twenty in the late twenty tens, that was filled in, so we're kind of back just to or you know, left with this high, high expanse of sand, but you know, nothing, you know, a really poor reflection on what feature used to be. The greenkeeping team over the last ten to fifteen years had tried tried really hard to contain the sand at the top, so they'd use chicken wire to hold that in which was you know, was saidible the sand didn't quite climb as high as it used to be, maybe a couple of meters down from from the very top. But yeah, it was a it was a that was a sensible solution to at least the top edge. But you know, the tail in the lower half of the bunker were completely lost.

01:18:20
Speaker 1: So what did you end up restoring or building there on this feature?

01:18:25
Speaker 2: You know, so on so one of the rigs. So there's probably two reasons for two reasons for why the bunker had been allowed to get to that state. One was foot traffic. You know, all the foot traffic had to go round the tail of the bunker on the left to get to get towards the appafeat of Green and there was a bowl shot that's that made you know, that made traffic really squog. You know, there's there was a dune on there was a dune that flag the left of the fairway that tied in too, uh, tied into the near side of that feature, so really new like a five ten yard wide piece of space that near enough every golfer had to channel through. So that was a problem and it was you know, it was also you know because of the depth of that bowl short of where the tail of the bug he used to go. Also, you know maybe six seven eight feet deep made it really difficult for the lady golfers. That's really really lazily say, it's the lazy golfers that are struggling. But the weaker golfer to to play, to play around, you know, to lay up into that space, and it was it wasn't a great shot from there. So you know, my solution was to take off take off the backside of that dune on the fairway. He used that material to raise the bowl to give the give the weaker player a little bit of a flatter space to lay up to, you know, if you if you can't get around the feature into while also creating some more space for the walk for the golfers to get around. So that space and twenty thirty yards, but you know it would look exactly the same from the fairway and the teas it did before because it was all the blindside. Yeah, and that gave us, that gave the opportunity in the space to then recapture the full tail of the bunker looks maybe extending twenty yards down to the left like it did in nineteen thirty seven. We had to get the practicalities right to be able to sell the cool part of the job, if that makes sense. So the cool part of the job is obviously seeing that bunk look as great as it used to. But if it didn't, if it didn't work, the question would be how to play this? Why we did this right?

01:20:35
Speaker 1: Function and artistry had to had to be matched, and you know, I would I would advise that people go to Clyde's Instagram account and take a look at the at the bunker that Clyde produced out of this process. It is really interesting looking and obviously much better looking than than what they what they had before, but also from the sounds of it, you know, serves the kind of functional needs of the golf course. And I think this is kind of a representative story in a lot of ways, because a lot of bunkers at British Links courses have evolved in this way over time. As the courses became more settled and more used. What were these initially very wild gouges of sand in the Lynx Land kind of turn into smaller and more formalized shapes, and now we see an awful lot of just like straight up circular pop bunkers with rivetted walls, and that's a very common look at Scottish links courses. But if you looked at these same courses in nineteen hundred, obviously you would have much much more kind of random sand shapes on these courses. And so, you know, I guess the question is when you bring back a kind of more intricate shape for a bunker like you did at sant Anadoc here, is there some kind of assurance that this is going to last, that this is going to be maintainable.

01:22:06
Speaker 2: We're certainly very pragmatic in terms of the upper section of the bunk, and you know, we didn't want to didn't want to really disturb the stabilize efforts that had gone before. And you know, it was kind of a shoulder on the left that could have that we could have opened up. It would have looked cool and made the bunk look exactly like it did on old photographs. But that was that was doing a that was doing a product, that was that was doing the job of you making the bunk. The upper section of the bowl really sam swirl around route that blows straight out. So I think, you know, that's part you know, that comes from experience of just being able to well leaning on the experience of the green keeping team that you're working with ball, so the experience of being able to read and understand Link's features and how things evolved in nature. But you know, the perception, you know, the tailor the tail of that book actually sits relatively low down the face of the dune, so we can be what can be more confident that the bunker is going to be more sheltered and not blow out as quickly or you know, a road. But you know, there's also there also needs to be you know, there's there's you know, there's also an awareness as well that there's no no bunker is ever maintenance free, you know, so we we we've we've left a we've left a small RAVET four three fourth vet high step on the leaning edge just to stabilize that and you know, to stop that collapsing and going away really quickly with time. And then I think, you know, I think there's an understanding that if you know, if the bunker, if it does, if the newly cut bunker does start the road in an odd place, then there's nothing wrong with having to stabilize that with a couple of rows of revet, and you know, like they did in the in the turn of the cential, the early Unite hundreds, where it's just really practical, you know, just like the bunker roading care. Let's let's short that up with sleepers or throw some turf down and look cool, it's quite cool.

01:24:07
Speaker 1: I want to widen out the lens a little bit here and just talk about kind of what's going on in the British golf industry and British golf course renovation and restoration in general. You know, my understanding is that a lot of links clubs, including North Beric and Saint Enodoc, have historically not had the kind of financial wherewithal to do big, ambitious restoration and renovation projects. Would you say that's that's changing right now?

01:24:39
Speaker 2: I think I think certainly. I think certainly the top end golf courses is definitely. I don't I don't know if it's partly there's more of an appreciation for golf course architecture in the UK these days are great Britain Island these days, you know, you know, has gonna be really easy to ero type. But outside I mean even the very best golf course. It would just be like committee would decide what was what would what what should be done. The head green keeper would be responsible for implementing it. But then job, job's done, really and I mean, and that's part that's partly why golf courses was so well preserved from the nineteen thirties until the court of let's say the two thousands on the twenty tens, was because because of that attitude, and you know, so you know, there's definitely, know, there's definitely there's definitely much more work being done now to golf courses. Whether that needs to be done, whether as much needs to be done has been done, This is is really up to personal taste and personal preference.

01:25:45
Speaker 1: Royal Dornick, Higher, King Collins, Dormer. We've seen North Berrick obviously higher gil Hands. We've seen englansh Inland English clubs start to start to do some more projects as well. You know, when when you think of shifting from the old approach that you're talking about the kind of more preservation focused approach or just you know almost kind of like hands off, let's deal with this in house and and just maintain the golf course. If there if there is a shift from that to maybe something else, do you think there are any dangers that come along with.

01:26:23
Speaker 2: That wink skulls specifically, I think it's I think it's really important to have great understanding of link skulls when you're working on golf courses because you know, really the most, really the most important part of a links golf course is that you know certainly when they play, they don't pray. Golf courses could be regage systems don't play quite as firm and as fast as perhaps used to, but still that that's thirty yards in front of the green also is just as important, you know, for the average golf for certainly maybe not the best player in the world, but the average golf that that's really where the most interest or most important lies, because that's kind of where you thinking about lagging you ball, you know, in you know, depending on wind conditions, and then also also being able to read you know, and understand how much the wind can change and how strong it can blow, and how you know you know you might see a bunker that you might drive past or not even give consideration to. Ninety nine times out one hundred times you played the golf course in one day, the wind's doing something. I didn't realize that bunker was there, but it was actually really in a great place and there's kind of a reason for that. And you know, understanding understanding that the vagaries of links golf, and yeah, the importance of the shapes around the greens and how they impact recovery shots into the greens that I think is is probably an acquiet taste, not that it can't be learned by people that haven't spent as which time around links golf, but yeah, I think I think that I think that's important and just an understanding of, yeah, the evolution that golf courses have been on in Great Britain over the last hundred years and why, you know, understanding why golf course are involved in knowing when knowing when to trust the past or when you can take you know, where you can think about bringing or you know, introducing new ideas or bringing old ideas into the new. Yeah, it's just it's that experience I think is really valuable.

01:28:36
Speaker 1: All Right, Well, Clyde, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been fun talking to you and uh and good luck with your with your future work.

01:28:43
Speaker 2: Thank you it was a pleasure.

01:28:51
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. The holiday season is approaching and you I consider giving the gift of Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see what fridagg Golf Club is all about. But it could make a wonderful gift for a golfer in your life. It's a community of avid golfers who just love the game, love discussing the game, are into professional golf, into course architecture, and just like talking about it with fellow enthusiasts. As a Friday Golf Club member, you would get early exclusive access to certain Frida Egg Golf Club events, so you can make in person meetups part of your Frida Egg engagement. But you know you also get exclusive content on our website if your experiences mostly at home with us. So we have a new community discussion form that we just set up and it's popping off. It's doing really well and people are very excited about it seemingly, and the discussions have been very very interesting so far. So come join us at Frida Egg Golf Club. Give the gift of Frida Egg Golf Club this holiday season again the Frida egg dot com slash membership. Thank you for listening and we'll be back again soon with another episode.