Yolk with Doak 12: Sand Valley, Golf in England, and Listener Questions

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak. In this episode, Tom Doak and I discuss his new project at sand Valley Golf in England, and then we get to a bunch of listener questions. Recorded a few of these, so we'll release these throughout the winter without further ado. Here is Tom Doak. Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back.

00:00:33
Speaker 2: But don't toss the yolk, and the famously candied Doak doesn't pull any punches. How do I make natural looking contour hire the biggest pool in the village and told him.

00:00:45
Speaker 3: To get flat first?

00:00:47
Speaker 2: Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years.

00:01:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, what do you What do you think about Yale? Uh?

00:01:04
Speaker 2: Well, I'm a Cornell person, so I have to temper it with their yalies. But I've always loved that golf course. It's so you know, I grew up in Connecticut and it's the only really good golf course in Connecticut, and it's and it's about the What's one of the few courses I played that actually feels like Connecticut.

00:01:25
Speaker 3: I mean, Connecticut is.

00:01:26
Speaker 2: Woodsy but also really rocky, which is why there aren't a lot of great golf courses there because it cost a fortune to build in that kind of land and very few people did it. But you know, they built that golf course in the twenties blasting and you know, blasting off the tops of a ridge to build a green, some pretty intense construction for those days, and it's and but they could only do so much with it. So it's still super dramatic compared to most of the courses in that day and age because it was built on such a rugged side.

00:02:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels like you're like constantly having to tackle wilderness out there.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, in that eighteenth hole is probably the best example of that that. You know, that feels just like you're playing across country and you know, it's so much longer if you're playing the back teeth than a typical part five like that. You know, usually you'd use that kind of severe land for shorter holes instead of like the longest hole on the golf course. And the joke's always been, well he got to seventeen and the clubs was all the way back there, so they just had to get back there with whatever. But you know, I mean I kind of feel like that whole place more like how golf used to be where you're hitting long clubs and a par five is a really long hole and you have to get three good shots on it, which is almost never true anymore, you know, And you know that's what that's one of the things we've lost with the people, good players being able to hit it so much farther is they never have a hole like that, and they never have a hole where they have to lean on a threewood or a four wood for the second shot.

00:03:10
Speaker 3: Why would they bother just.

00:03:12
Speaker 1: To get a wedge in like that, lean on a three wood fourward just to get a wedge. And that was a question I had was with the modern golfer. Is are par fives becoming the most difficult hole to design because of the gap?

00:03:30
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:03:31
Speaker 2: Well they always have been. I mean, you know, you've always had some players that are thinking about getting there in two. So if you design a tiny green or you guard it really closely, they think that's preventing us from trying to go for the green. And at the same time, if you've got your typical golfer just trying to get there with a third shot and a short iron, you know he's got to be able to get the ball close to compete. And so if you give the good golfer too much space where it, you know, if they go for it and two and they miss it, they're still going to make four all the time. Then the other guy has no chance of competing at all. So that's that's that's half the trick. And then the other half of the trick is a part five. More than any other hole, you really have no idea where somebody's going to be after two shots. You know, they could be they could be right next to the green, they could be two hundred and fifty yards away. You know, Pete Tye said to me when I work from they can still be on the tee hitting their next ball, hitting their next drive. So you can't predict it at all, and so you kind of have to make the hole playable all.

00:04:41
Speaker 3: The way in.

00:04:42
Speaker 2: You know, it has to be. It has to be a decent approach shot from two hundred and sixty yards. It has to be a decent interesting shot if you're twenty yards off the green, and with a part four you don't have to worry about that as well, you could, you know, with a short part four you can predict well you know, I'll either like, guys, go for it, or they'll probably lay up to here, but there's there's really only like two or three different places they're.

00:05:06
Speaker 3: Likely to be. Yeah.

00:05:08
Speaker 1: I look at shot link data from the tour all the time, and par five's are definitely the most scattered on second shots you see people in your I'm always looking over dustin these are the best players in the world, and sometimes I like find a dot and I'm like, how is he hitting his third shot from here? And it's funny, but no other hole it's like that, Yeah.

00:05:27
Speaker 2: And that's because he was probably trying to hit a forward out of the rough that he shouldn't have ever been trying to do anything with it. But he's like, well, I'll still be able to get to the green and three even if this messes up, so I'll go for it.

00:05:40
Speaker 1: It's an interesting psychology that for the elite player, and it is now par fives, like if you make a par almost on any of them, it feels like you're losing shots. So I would assume that players are more aggressive than ever on par fives, So that could be a way to counter as knowing that people are going to play really aggressive.

00:06:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, we were just I was just up at Sam Valley yesterday and you know, we're talking about building a golf of course with no par fives or just maybe one part five. And you know, some of the part fours are going to be really long, so there there will be some holes that the average guys like, you know, playing out like a three shot hole, but they're getting those are the number one and two handicap holes also, so they're getting a stroke so they're still pretty competitive at that. But but it'll be interesting to have a you know, in theory, you would almost never have anything but mid or short iron approach on that golf course if we don't have any par five, you know. O. You know, for the for the tour pros, you know, par fives are the only place they hit more than a seven iron approach. That will part three. They always ask us, why do you build long part three? So it's like, because it's the only holes we can make you hit a long approach shot.

00:07:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I hate doing it.

00:07:09
Speaker 2: They're right that shorter part threes are more interesting and cooler and more people can play them. But you know that's just that's just the reaction that's the biggest reaction I think to how that distance gap is, like, you know, the par four's and the par fives don't play long at all, So the only place you can make a guy hit a long shot is a part three.

00:07:31
Speaker 1: That's something that I think about all the time because it's in Donald Ross's book Golf Has Never Failed Me. One of the quotes that always sticks with me is, you know, Donald Ross was a great player, and he said, the greatest skill in the game of golf is the ability to hit long irons, like accurate long irons. And then you talk to a guy like Mike Clayton. Mike Clayton always talks about how Sevy could hit these towering long irons, how Jack Nicholas and Arnold Palmer, how their greatest skill where it was. It wasn't just the ability that they drove it far, but it was their ability to hit towering long irons to tuck flags and nobody else could hit right.

00:08:13
Speaker 3: And and then that all of a sudden.

00:08:15
Speaker 1: The angles matter so much more when you're hitting the long iron and uh, strategy wise, So speaking of that's obviously a big news. I mean, congrats on the Sand Valley thing.

00:08:26
Speaker 3: Thanks.

00:08:26
Speaker 2: It was you know, it was kind of a hard decision because I was talking to mister Kohler and to mister Kaiser at the same time about doing projects, and for a while, of course I didn't tell either one that I was also talking to the other one.

00:08:42
Speaker 3: And then.

00:08:46
Speaker 2: You know, we were, you know, feeling pretty good about both projects and starting to talk about contracts, and then one of them wanted me to choose, you know, because once I once I brought up, yeah, I'm talking.

00:08:58
Speaker 3: To the other one too.

00:09:00
Speaker 2: Oh well, we'd rather you don't do that. And you know, very hard choice. You know, I've known mister Kuhller for thirty years because I you know, I he started building the first course at Blackwell Front just after I'd quit working for Pete Dye, one of my ex roommates, was the construction superintendent of the golf course, and I came over and visited a couple of times, and then I just moved to Traverse City to do High Point and mister Dye told mister Kuller that he should get me to come over and take pictures of the golf course for the publicity stuff on it, because Pete always liked that, you know, he could look at one of my pictures and know what the hole was and kind of tell how you're supposed to play it. You know, other guys would take great looking pictures, but you didn't even know what hole it was. So so I went over and spent three or four days hanging out there waiting for good light, trying to take pictures. And so this is like nineteen eighty seven, I think, and mister Kuhler was pretty new to golf at that point, and he would have lunch with me.

00:10:15
Speaker 3: Pretty much.

00:10:15
Speaker 2: I remember having lunch with him two or three days in a row, and he was just asking me tons and tons of questions about the golf business because I was young and I'd been around a little bit, and I would just, you know, say whatever was on my mind. So we've been you know, I've kind of kept in touch with him for years, and you know, once or twice we've talked about doing a project somewhere. He's looked at doing tons of different projects in different places around the world, but never really pulled the trigger on anything outside of there. And you know, buying Saint Andrews, which included the Duke's course.

00:10:52
Speaker 1: So.

00:10:55
Speaker 2: It was really hard to tell Mike yeah, to tell Mike yes, knowing that meant telling herb no, because he's got a beautiful piece of land for a golf course too. He's kind of in a battle over you know. I think he's got basically got permits to build it, but he's also got people suing him trying to stop it, and you know, nobody he has no idea how long that'll take. And it's frustrated.

00:11:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, who knows, I'll come back, you know.

00:11:21
Speaker 2: But you know, so so the you know, the only difference to me between the two jobs, there are two great clients, two people I like a lot.

00:11:30
Speaker 3: You know. Mister Kohler's project is a really cool.

00:11:37
Speaker 2: Sand duney site right on the lake, and everybody would think, oh, you know, he's just got another one of those, another waterfront site with dunes and great, you know, great piece of land for golf. And I probably would have gotten for that except for Michael cot Or started talking about doing one of the concepts that I've wanted to do forever, which is build a shorter golf course, don't even make it par seventy, you know, make that a strong point of it. Instead of apologizing for it, you know, which it's an interesting case. We just spent two days talking about it, like, what are people going to say about this? Because we don't you know, we don't have to do that. We have plenty of land to make it longer and more like a regulation golf course. So everybody's going to ask, aren't you compromising? You know, why would you do that instead of building three par fives like anyone else would do?

00:12:44
Speaker 1: So it between you, You've built some great golf courses on you know, ocean front duneescapes. You've built an incredible reversible course that's a completely different concept. You've got the Rolls course, which was you know, manufct actual earth was moved to build. How is it? Does it help you artistically and creatively to change it up all the time, you know, and do different different types of projects.

00:13:14
Speaker 2: Absolutely, I mean we don't want to do the same, you know. I don't want my courses to all look alike. I don't want to be like Seth Rainer. I think against Seth Rayner, but I don't want to be like Seth Rayner. Where you know par three's coming up, it's two hundred and twenty yards long. I know what that's going to look like. And he's not the only architect that was ever like that. He's just the most famous. But there are a lot that do think. You know, they get in their comfort zone, and everybody likes their comfort zone, so why would they go outside that so much? And you know, for whatever reason, I'm not like that. I think the main reason I'm not like that is I've seen a ton of really great golf courses that are way different from each other. Like you know, we were talking about Yale. The Yale's a rain or golf course, but it's not really like his other golf courses.

00:14:07
Speaker 3: It's more dramatic. You know.

00:14:10
Speaker 2: I'm going to Woodhall Spa next month. We've been consulting for them for the last couple of years and rebuilding six holes at a time, so this will be the last stretch of it. And that golf course is like nowhere else that I've ever been. It's maybe a little bit like Garden City, but because it's fairly flat overall, and then the bunkering is really dramatic, but in a different way than Garden City. You know, Garden City has just those little tiny hazards. Wood All Spy has great big pits, man eating pits, but they're really really deep and and gnarly native vegetation on the faces of them, and so so I think, you know, why would I keep building bunkers the same way we've been doing them when you know, I see so many other there are things that nobody's trying to do. Why wouldn't somebody try to do that in America? And I don't you know that might be a hard sell in America? Would all spot You can get in some really nasty places when you miss. And I'm sure there's some people in America that would just be like, no, this isn't how it's supposed to be. You've got to clean that up, But they don't apologize for it over there.

00:15:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, it's It reminds me of Mark Cuban. I was listening to a podcasts like maybe five seven years ago. He said his theory on his NBA team that Mavericks, when everybody's Diggs, he runs as far zagging away, you know, always if everybody's going one way, he's always trying to go the other way. And it's that they've owned one of the best franchises. They've had struggles lately, but that was working.

00:15:51
Speaker 3: For a while. Yeah, not so much the last couple of years.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: But he's got a championship with it doing this that theory. But so they the course to tell me a little bit about the land and what drew you to that specific part of this massive property. I mean, they've got thousands of tens of thousands of acres there, and how do you kind of find that plot of land like what drew you there?

00:16:20
Speaker 3: Michael As actually suggested I look at that piece. I mean, they've had at least half a dozen.

00:16:28
Speaker 2: Different architects look at the land that's left up there and do routings for all kinds of different things and concepts, and you know, I honestly, you know, I don't know who will be next on the list, and I don't know how fast we get to that, but they've got some really interesting ideas and they got a lot of land to do it on. You know, the piece of land that I had kind of gravitated to is it's south of the David's golf course basically, and the problem is that it does there's no good way to get to it from where the resort is. You know, we all kind of like the routing of it. We weren't one hundred percent like that's the perfect routing, but you know, to operate that course, they would have to build a new you know, small clubhouse or large clubhouse or something, but they'd have to start shuttling people all the way around to get to it, or they'd have to build a small road that went through David's course that you'd see in a couple of places, and they really don't want to do that. So so now it's like, oh shit, now we've got all this other infrastructure we have to deal with to get around there, and that's a pain. You know. Isn't there anything we could do that's still a proximate enough to the lodge it's there that we could get another golf course out of it. So there's one place, there's kind of a little knoll. It's right above where seventeen Green is at sand Valley, And at one point i'd done a routing for them that used that piece of land for a couple of holes out and back and then down across and into the property where David's course is now. And you know, so that's where the sandbox is and David's course, you can't use that, but those two holes are still there, and you can go there and then go the other direction west and kind of out to the far western part of the site and around the back of Bills course, around the back of Bill's back nine. And Michael said, why don't you look at this and see what you could get out of it, And he mentioned again the concept of doing that shorter course, you know, and I started playing with it, and it didn't take long to see. Yeah, you know, the land for the first few holes and the last few holes is pretty rugged, so it's hard to get a part five out of it, you know, It's just you kind of run out of room a lot of the places you want to be. It's you can get a four hundred and forty yard hole out of it, but trying to get a five hundred forty yard hole of it it doesn't really work. And then it gets into a really narrow slot where you kind of have to have a couple of short holes just to get through the little gap between the property line and where Bills courses without essen with Bills Course at all. And then it opens up again and you know, from there we could make it longer if we wanted to, but the land's not really that exciting, so we tried to cram as much good as we could into that first part and get through our little gap, and then we're pretty happy with having a couple of long part threes and a couple of short part fours to you know, make up the rest of the golf course.

00:20:00
Speaker 1: So it's it's you said, it's going to be kind of inspired by the heathland courses where you see a lot of you know, the UK heathland courses where you see a lot of par sixty eight sixty nine. Harry Colt Swinley Forest would be one.

00:20:16
Speaker 2: Right, Swinley Forest is one. Rye is a Lynx, but it's but it's it's the hardest par sixty eight in the world. West Sussex. Polborough is another one. The Addington is another one. There's there's four or five of those kind of courses southwest of London that are all really fun golf courses. You know, I hadn't thought about it at the time, but you know, when I wrote the first volume of the Confidential Guide, you know, now that I've broken it up into different sections, I'm picking you know, I'm picking eighteen courses per book to put in the front for my gourmet's choice, and I picked Rye and West Sussex and Swinley Forest and a couple of others that were all parse sixty eight or sixty nine golf courses. Not deliberately, I mean, they really are some of my favorite courses. And more than that, you know, I'm picking one. I won't pick more than one for any architect in the front of that, and so those are all different architects. That's Simpson cult Abercrombie. Ry was designed by a bunch of people. I can't remember who I was thinking. I could say maybe sir Guy Campbell did the last version, so I assigned that to him, so I didn't have to disqualify it as being another cult course. But you know, I think those are some of their best work. Harry Colt said about Swinley Forrest, you thought it was his least bad golf course, which is a very modest way of putting it. But you know, he really thought of it as being equal to some of his best work, even though it's a par sixty eight golf course and it's barely six thousand yards long.

00:22:14
Speaker 1: Do you feel like the Heathland courses of around London are underappreciated in the world of golf, certainly.

00:22:25
Speaker 2: I mean, I think golf courses in England are tremendously unappreciated or underappreciated in the world of golf because they don't market them like Scotland and Ireland do, and a lot of them are you know, they're closer to London. They're private clubs. The members pay more and dues, so they're not as interested in having a ton of overseas visitors to pay for it the way that clubs in Scotland are. You know, in Scotland they keep the dues really low because the visitors essentially paid to maintain the golf course.

00:22:58
Speaker 3: But it's sunningdwn.

00:23:00
Speaker 2: Well, now you know, we'll let some visitors come, but this is really for us and we can afford to maintain it ourselves.

00:23:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the It seems like Positive Tempo is the only club in the US that's like even close to UK model at this point. Maybe there's a few others, but they do it seemingly the best. That dudes are really low for members, but you know, all the public can play and they put pay a premium to play it right.

00:23:28
Speaker 2: And you know, in positvemfo's case, that's just a it's just a remnant of their checkered history. You know, it went bankrupt in the depression and it had to be a public course for a while. And when they kind of reincorporated and made a private again, they were like, wow, you know, we don't want to make it entirely private. None of us would none of us would even be able to enjoy it if they hadn't kept it public for years. So we want to keep that component as part of the memberships. And you know, so why when they recapitalized it, everybody was understanding of that model. You know, a lot of clubs now, you know, if you try to do that, at most clubs, the members all joined it because it was private. So there's definitely going to be a strong faction of the membership that doesn't want to see outsiders be able to come in just whenever.

00:24:26
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to me because there's so many clubs that are in financial situations where the revenue would be unbelievably helpful for their business, and and the fact that they aren't doing it, it just it boggles my mind. It's like this is the lowest hanging fruit in it.

00:24:46
Speaker 2: Right, And I've always heard there's tax consequences to that that they you know, they they're in a different category of paying taxes is a private club up to the point where I can't it's like five or ten percent of their more than five or ten percent cent of their revenue is outside business than there, then they're paying taxes like a business does. So they're trying not to go over that line.

00:25:10
Speaker 1: That's that's that's interesting. I never had thought about that. So we got here's a question from Garrett Ford, and this kind of plays into the Sedge Valley. Do you do you believe that modern architecture has gone too far in the direction of with and playability?

00:25:31
Speaker 3: Hm hmm, well yeah, I mean.

00:25:37
Speaker 2: In I'm an American and my whole life has been marketed to me that bigger is better in everything. I mean, you know, golf is just falling into that too. You know, the idea that every every public golf course should be seven thousand yards long so it can host a championship, even though there's not many championships per year, and they tend not to go to the new public course down the road.

00:26:13
Speaker 3: You know.

00:26:14
Speaker 2: So the length part, you know, I've been kind of a conscience is subjector to my whole life. You know, when we did Pacific Dunes and some people were pushing mister Kaiser to make you know, it's great, but why don't you make it seven thousand yards long too, I would just shrug my shoulders and say, you know, the other course it's already seven thousand yards and this is just a resort. You don't need them all to be if you ever had the US amateur here, you'd use the other course, which they're going to do when they have the US amter there. So you know, I really resisted making that seven thousand yards long.

00:26:57
Speaker 3: It would have been hard.

00:26:58
Speaker 2: There would have been a couple of really odd, awkward tease to get it up there, and you probably we probably would have had to change one or two of the holes on the more the less interesting ground, like fifteen, in order to get to seven thousand yards. And I just thought it was a point. You know, in the wind, nobody would care. And and you know, only five percent of people play from the back teas anyway, you know, and everyone in the golf marketing business will tell you even so it almost matters more to these guys that are going to play from six thousand yards that it says seven thousand yards from the back tee than it does to the guys who would actually play from there.

00:27:43
Speaker 1: I think it has to do with people's, like the general golfer perception of like the way they put the best player at my club on a pedestal or the best player of my course, so they look up to that player. I never thought about it that way till then, is like, I think that's where a lot of this goes. Is like, you know, people will ask the best player at their club what clubs they should buy. You know, why would you ask somebody that plays a completely different game what kind of clubs you should buy?

00:28:13
Speaker 2: And the most you know, and the most I think I've said it on the podcast somewhere before that. The question I'm asked the most often when we're going into a club for consulting work is anything we propose taking out a tree, making a fair way wider, making there, you know, making the greens bigger, and trying to get the old corners of the greens back. The question is, isn't that going to make the course easier? Like that would be the worst thing in the world. And but the baffling thing is the guy who was asking it is like a fifteen handicapped guy. You know, it's not this it's not the best player in the club. It's this other guy. And it's taken me a long time to think it through.

00:28:57
Speaker 3: But I think.

00:29:00
Speaker 2: That guy doesn't want the best player in the club to think. He wants it to be easier for himself. So he's kind of defending the other guy so he can look like he's not you know, he's not just trying to make it easy for himself, which is crazy, but so so the length thing. You know, we've been dealing with that forever. Now, I started building why golf courses. You know, High Point was wide. You know Bill Corr from the very first course he did on his own cap applied we you know, some of that was a reaction to windy environments, some of it was a reaction to terrain, but some of it was just we really felt like you needed to give the average person more room to play golf. That that, you know, because you know, you watch tournaments on TV, and fairways keep getting narrower and narrower. For championships. I mean, I remember when you know, when I was a kid, wing foots fairways were like thirty eight or forty yards wide, and then they narrowed them to about thirty or thirty two for the US Open. Now they're like twenty three. And you know, that might work if the if the rough is really playable. But you know, if I played eighteen holes on twenty three yard wide fairways and I hit driver most of the time, I'd hit like three or four fairways around, and that would be and you know, and if the rough is tough and you're you know, you can't go for the green if you've missed the fairway. That would be a really excruciatingly boring round of golf to just miss fairways, hack back out into the fairway and go from there.

00:30:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, pitch it up or hit a wide gen.

00:31:01
Speaker 2: So so I've always built wide stuff. And when we did Old McDonald, a bunch of people said, isn't that too wide? I mean, isn't that just with for with's sake? And no, it was, you know, at Old McDonald, it was more a function of the whole thing was covered by gorse.

00:31:18
Speaker 3: We want to clear. Mister Kaiser by that point wanted.

00:31:20
Speaker 2: To clear get rid of all the gorse, except if it was really out of play on a ridge. But if it was if it was on a surface that you could maintain, let's maintain grass there instead of fighting gorse all the time, because it wants to take back over the whole place. Tends to get wendy there too.

00:31:40
Speaker 3: It does, you know.

00:31:41
Speaker 2: So you know, all of those courses are wide, but Old McDonald is that much wider because it was just kind of an open gorse field. When we started and clearing up all the gorse. We had to plant grass. And when we planted grass, we thought, it doesn't really cost that much more to mow most of this grass. And you know, let's let's build a course where it's really hard to lose a ball. Now, you know, pineer's number two. It's really hard to lose a ball. But they do it with pine needles and and like open sandy. Yeah, and well not the native wire guys. That's the little thick, clumpsiest stuff. That's where you could lose a ball. But you know the you know, pine straw type stuff, and you know, they can have like an open sandy area and it'll get a little weedy and they have to spray it every once in a while. But you know, in band and that blows away and it becomes a giant crater. So you really can't just leave an open area like that that you're not maintaining. If you don't have some kind of native vegetation on it, you better be mowing grass. That's how Old McDonald got as wide as it is. But we felt like, okay, it's wide, but if you're way over on the right side of the fairway, you're not going to be able to hit a ball a shot anywhere close to the green or anywhere close to the hole.

00:33:06
Speaker 3: You'll get it.

00:33:06
Speaker 2: You can get it on the greens, you can't get it close to that whole location or that whole location on the right. So we were fine with that. It gets people around, you know, it maybe makes it easy for him to make a bunch of bogies, but it doesn't make it easy for him to make a bunch of pars and birds.

00:33:24
Speaker 1: That's when I know I'm playing bad is when I make a ton of bogies. It's like the most frustrating round of golf is when you tell but like, that's a good distinction is when you're it can be really wide, but there has to be a spot. You have to there has to be good and bad spots if you have it with right.

00:33:44
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean ideally it's ideally it's like there's a great spot to be, you know, and then varying shades of gray out of you know, the further way you are from that spot, the harder that approach that gets.

00:33:59
Speaker 1: It makes me think of like the twelfth hole bally Neal, where it's really pretty wide, but the further you play right away from that, the worse and worse that angle gets into the end of the green you get blind. And then also like the way that green, especially if it's a left flag, it's it's nearly impossible to hit it close from way right.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, that that hole.

00:34:21
Speaker 2: Most people won't know that hole, but it kind of plays the left half of the fairway, which is about twenty five or thirty yards wide, So it would be it would be that would be all the fairway there was. It wing foot is you know, there's there's a little ridge on the left and then bun some bunkers into it and there's about twenty five or thirty yards of relatively flat, actually bowled out a little bit fairway, and if you can keep it on that bline, that's a pretty good angle to the green. And then there's a bunch more fairway, but it goes like over a little ridge and then just down and down into a big bowl to the right. And if you you know, if you miss it down there, you can barely see where you're going. You may not see the top of the flag at all. And you know, because that green is the opposite the right side of the green is high and the left side of the green is low. If you've driven it right and the pin is left and you've got to go over the high side of the green to get at the low one, you just you know, you're just trying to make sure you don't leave it on the high side and leave yourself at impossible putts, like just get it over what a feet off the back of the slope of the back left maybe, but that's a hard shot to visualize when you're down there and you can't see it though.

00:35:35
Speaker 1: Well, so with this case, like do you think Americans have just been conditioned because of the way courses have been maintained where twenty five yards of fairway. If you're in the fairway, it means you're good. Do you think That's why with a wider course or like a center line bunker, it natural reactions of golfers are like, this is unfair if I'm in the fairway and I can't hit it close to a pin.

00:36:03
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, I mean most people, you know, everybody that you know, when they when they play the course for the first time, they don't know, you know, they don't know it's better to be right than left. And unfortunately, a lot of golf courses, a lot of the new courses that are built are for resorts, and you know, you might only play them a couple of times, so you might not you know, if you're not interested in architecture, you might not figure that out right away. And you just dismiss it as a bad hole because you drove it in the wrong spot and it was really hard from there, and why the hell did they do that to me? And you never looked at what you know, well, if I had driven it over the other side, I wouldn't have had that problem, you know, And and very you know, there's lots of clients that would be really afraid of building a golf course like that had a bunch of holes like that, because you know, the client might walk away bummed out and not come back, you know.

00:37:01
Speaker 3: But the.

00:37:04
Speaker 2: You know, what makes a golf course really successful is when you get a clientele that keeps coming back. And these kind of features that we're talking about with strategy and with those are the things they get people to want to come back. You know, the guy that doesn't dismiss it for the first time and he comes back the second time, and he goes and he drives it over the other side of the fairway and then he's like, oh yeah, this is way different. Holy if you hit it over here, then he keeps coming back and that makes up for the guys that dismiss it the first time.

00:37:41
Speaker 1: In a sense, a polarizing golf course where it evokes reactions in both ways, is almost like the fact that like great art, if it elicits reactions is that's considered great art. Is when it elicits a lot of different reactions from different people. For some reason, it seems like in golf architecture, polarizing courses are kind of like where they elicit, you know, extreme reactions, whether good or bad, or you know, all across the board are thought of negatively.

00:38:16
Speaker 2: They are, and you know, it goes down to you know, developing golf courses is so much different now than it was seventy five years ago when all those great old courses were built. It's a commercial venture now every time. You know, even if the even if the clients really wealthy and it's you know, he's not really doing it directly for the you know, to make money off it at all, but it's still a commercial venture and he doesn't want it to flop and lose money. So it matters to him if people don't like it and dismiss it. And so you know, the feedback that you get from clients a lot is to be concerned itive and avoid that. I mean, you know, we don't we don't want to deal with those kind of reactions, and you know, and that leads to boring, same old, same old work. You know, if unless you're a good designer and you you know, you learn kind of when to you know, you learn your client's tolerance for that kind of stuff a little bit, but you also learn when not to listen to them and just go ahead and you know, make it a little more interesting. Anyway, and you know know that there will be some pushback on it. But it's okay because if the client, you know, the clients are way into golf, nearly all of them, so you know they're going to ask you about those features while you're building a golf course. It's not like we're just going to, you know, pull the gates open an opening day and nobody noticed that the fourteenth hall is really controversial. You know, you you you ought to know.

00:39:57
Speaker 3: It's uh.

00:39:57
Speaker 1: I feel like that's the situation. Municipal courses get themselves and so much as like they're afraid of doing something bold.

00:40:06
Speaker 2: Oh exactly, so it ends up being and they react to every criticism. I mean, you know that that that other great American phrase, the customer is always right. There's golf courses that try to operate their business like that, and that's crazy because you know, I mean, people that aren't in the golf business don't know. But if if you sat behind the desk at in a pro shop at any golf course in America for one day and listen to all the stories of people that come in and play the golf course and how conflicting.

00:40:40
Speaker 3: They are, that hole was trash.

00:40:44
Speaker 2: The next guy, Oh that was great, that was the best hole on the course. And it's it's usually because the first guy made seven and the next.

00:40:52
Speaker 3: Guy made three.

00:40:53
Speaker 2: But you know, but the opinions on every single feature are all over the map.

00:40:59
Speaker 3: So to try.

00:41:00
Speaker 2: To to try to aim to please all those people at the same time as ridiculous.

00:41:06
Speaker 1: I've got a buddy that's got he's got his own rankings that and they's somewhat dictated off of how he played the day, and it just I can't, I can't stand it. It just drives me crazy. It's like, you got to take your personnelity. It's like the most important thing whenever you're evaluating anything is to take your own personal bias out of.

00:41:26
Speaker 3: The situation, right, That's it.

00:41:28
Speaker 1: It's almost I sometimes think playing bad is like a good way to actually see more of the golf course because you're you're in you're like walking in different spots. Like if you're playing really good, like you don't see as much of the golf course. You don't see like you don't see the bad places.

00:41:44
Speaker 2: When I caddied in Saint Andrew's, you know, I'd learn things when I caddied for players that weren't that good because they'd hit it in all kinds of weird places and and and then you'd also see some hazards that you really had to steer him around that you'd never even thought about before. You know, there's like, you know, there's there's a little bunker on the third hole that's about I think it's like one hundred and thirty or one hundred and forty yards off the tee that's right in the middle. And you know, you probably don't know it's there because you never had to think about that for one minute, and neither did I. But I caddied for some people that if you just had him hit it down the middle, they were going to be in it.

00:42:24
Speaker 3: It's funny.

00:42:26
Speaker 1: So this is an interesting question. I like this one. It's from Zach Turik. And if you build an amazing course, we'll say a nine or a ton on the dok scale, doesn't matter where it's located.

00:42:48
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter where it's located in terms.

00:42:51
Speaker 2: Of, yes, it's a great golf course. It does matter a lot where it's located. In terms of will it make money and thrive? You know, the idea that build it, and they will come thing, the field of dreams thing. I mean, that's worked in some places where you wouldn't have thought it, you know, like so, I mean the sand Hills of Nebraska is probably the best example. You know, sand Hills is in a great golf course. It's a private club, national membership, you know, one financial model, and it works.

00:43:26
Speaker 3: But it does.

00:43:27
Speaker 2: You know, they don't make a killing off it because this golf season is so short that you know, they only do they do less than ten thousand rounds a year. And for most like public operations trying to do trying to make money at less than ten thousand rounds a year, that's almost impossible. The pro former would say, that's kind of anything less than that and you'll lose money every single year, never mind paying to build a golf course, just on operations year over year. Now they've got it crammed into like a four and a half five month season, so it's not quite as bad for them as if it was spread out over longer and they still had to staff everything all year. But yeah, I mean, there's certainly places that you could build a great golf course, but you'd also better be ready to subsidize it for a long time or maybe forever if you wanted to stay there, because it will not attract there's not enough people willing to travel there often enough for it to make money and support itself.

00:44:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think people see the places like Bandon was obviously a success story building something in the middle of nowhere sand Hills, but it's so important also to look at the people that were behind the project.

00:44:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it wasn't just.

00:44:51
Speaker 1: Like you know, Joe like they were very sick, They had a vision, they were you know, entrepreneurial people in most cases, like there there's a reason, there's there's beyond just the course. There's important factors.

00:45:05
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and you know, and they understood the risks of what they were doing, but they also had a plan for how to deal with those that most people wouldn't, so, you know, So there's several courses that have built been built out in that part of the world since Sandhills, and I've done two of them, and I don't think any of those other courses have ever made money. You know, they you know, they they're still surviving. A couple of them have been bankrupted and reincorporated once or twice, but you know, just trying to make make positive cash flow, any positive cash flow year over year is really hard there, you know, and then people are naive too. I mean, you know, like when when we talk about Barnbougle, the American's perspective of Barnboogle is Tasmania. It's an island off Australia that's as remote as you could possibly imagine it could be. You know, one of the attractions of Tasmania to Mike Kaiser from the first time I mentioned it to him was but if you could make a project work there, that would almost prove that you could make a project work anywhere, because that's so remote. But that's not you know, if Barn Google depended on overseas visitors to make money, it would be dead in the water. Yeah, I mean, there's no you know, they overseas business is like five or ten percent of their business. What makes it work is there's there's lots of golfers in Melbourne or Sydney that are only an hour flight and a little drive away and they go two or three times a year. If it wasn't for them, it wouldn't make money.

00:46:50
Speaker 1: Let's say people will say sand Valley's remote, it's remote it's remote, but it's got three major three of the top thirty metro areas within drive distance, like a day's drive, So it's not that remote. Same thing with stream Song. You're you're within an hour of Tampa and a little over an hour of Orlando. It's not remote remote, No, it's no.

00:47:13
Speaker 2: I mean you know when people started saying stream Song was remote at the beginning, you know, I mean, I've worked in Mulla, Nebraska, and in Tasmania and in Montana, and and I'm like, shit, we're an hour.

00:47:27
Speaker 3: From disney World. Come on, Well, that's the thing. I mean, it is. It is.

00:47:31
Speaker 2: It's in a place that nobody was going before we built the golf course, but it's not that far from a lot of people.

00:47:38
Speaker 1: That's the thing. It drives me nuts as a Chicago golfer. Like so, you know, I've lived in the city of Chicago. If I want to go play golf, I'm probably going to be in the car for like an hour because of traffic, you know. Same thing for New York golfer. Same thing like so for these certain big urban areas, Like if I could drive to stream Song an hour in Chicago, I'd be there all the time playing right versus But then it's always interesting to me. And you get into some smaller metro areas, like thirty minutes outside the city is like a big hike for people.

00:48:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean where I live in Traverse City. You know, I live an hour from Crystal Downs that I join. You know, that's one of my favorite golf courses in the world. Of course, I joined there, but I don't get there that much because it is you know, driving an hour each way and playing golf for four hours and taking any time to chat with the pro afterward, or you know, they make me consult there now, so the superintendent wants to know what I think about something or other.

00:48:43
Speaker 3: So it's all.

00:48:44
Speaker 2: Day and you can't. I can't do that that often. You know, I travel a lot away from home a lot already. If I'd lived in northern Michigan and worked there all year round, then it would be easy to get over there more often. But it's pretty hard, and there's a lot of people in the same boat.

00:49:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, Landon wants to know, does that inaccessibility of architecturally significant golf courses hurt the game?

00:49:15
Speaker 3: You know?

00:49:16
Speaker 2: I used to when I was young, I used to think about that that, especially after spending a year overseason seeing how nearly everything over there was accessible, and then knowing how inaccessible the Augustas and Oakmonts and those clubs are here. But no, I you know, I don't think it hurts the game. What hurts the game is there aren't more courses like that that are accessible.

00:49:44
Speaker 3: You know, it's not.

00:49:48
Speaker 2: You know, we were just talking about sand Hills. If sand Hills was just open to the public, it probably would have failed. You know, there's a membership that supports it is the only reason that it's there. So we can't blame those people. It wouldn't even be there without them. And if you know, they're putting up all the money to keep it alive and they don't think that you ought to come for a day, that's kind of their business.

00:50:19
Speaker 1: Would you say also that some of the places I think about this a lot is some of the places couldn't be what they are if they were public courses.

00:50:33
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, I mean there's you know, there's there's certain things that we do in design because.

00:50:43
Speaker 3: That we could.

00:50:43
Speaker 2: You know, you can only build really small greens if it's not that busy. You can only build a golf course and not worry about cart paths if you've got a membership willing to support that, or a huge client hell willing.

00:51:00
Speaker 3: To support that.

00:51:01
Speaker 2: And people don't understand how different the golf course can be without car pass It's not just that there's no cart paths that you're looking at. We see, you know, I built a lot of golf courses that are built for walkers and there are no car pass and so now I'm so spoiled when we have to go back and do a course.

00:51:25
Speaker 3: That has wallawall car passed.

00:51:27
Speaker 2: You cannot believe how many things you want to do that.

00:51:31
Speaker 3: You would do. We'll just put.

00:51:33
Speaker 2: The green right there and the next tee right behind it, up there beyond the bunker, and then, oh shit, we can't do that because there's no place to put a cart path in between. We'd have to run the cart path around the other side of the green and around the back of the green and up that little hill to the next tee. But there's another hole over there behind this, so we can't do that here, and so we better not even put the green in this location. That Really, that happens more often than you think when you're designing a golf course and car paths are part of the program. And that's one reason that some of these dream golf places that are walking only, that's one reason those golf courses are as good as they are because there are fewer restrictions on what you can and can't do. If you don't have to worry about where a car pass.

00:52:23
Speaker 1: What would be the happy medium to wall the wall car pass versus you know, walking only a public like a high value golf course.

00:52:42
Speaker 2: First, let me say I've got zero problem with people that need a golf cart. Playing golf and using a golf cart.

00:52:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, I like it.

00:52:50
Speaker 1: If I'm playing golf a bunch of days in a row, getting a golf cart every once in a while is not the worst thing in the world.

00:52:58
Speaker 3: I personally don't do it.

00:53:00
Speaker 2: Very good, very old friend at this point, who who looked at me very hard ten years ago and said, I wish I had never gotten in a golf cart. He's Scottish, and you know they you know, he was like eighty or eighty five, and he finally broke that he couldn't walk eighteen holes anymore. He broke down, and okay, you know they do have you know, a lot of those blanks courses in Scotland, they'll have they have a handful of golf carts because there's members that need them, and so they you know, they were, they kept offering him, you know, just take the cart. You know, you don't want to quit playing golf, Just take the cart. So he did, and you know, he could get around and play, still play eighteen holes, but his health has gone downhill and he thinks it's because he doesn't go out and walk so much. He said, he said he would have rather just started playing nine holes or six holes or whatever the hell he could play instead of getting in a cart and riding around. So I'm pretty militant about it for my personal life. But but there's people who need golf carts and they should have them, and the number of people that actually need them, there wouldn't be enough traffic to worry about. If you only had ten rounds a day playing out of golf carts, you could do that anywhere.

00:54:22
Speaker 3: It would be zero problem.

00:54:24
Speaker 2: The problem is everybody sees those guys and then they want the golf cart too. And if there's fifty carts a day, there's a lot of places where the turf just won't handle that. Maybe not all the time, but when it's too wet or when it's too hot and dry, you know. I mean, you know a place like bally Neal or sand Hills in the summer when it's really hot, just the friction of tires on turf just desiccates the grass. You know. Anybody, anybody you know will probably have seen like brown tire tracks going over a golf cart, that going over a fairway. That's what happened. Is it just it wasn't even like spinning out or anything. It's just the heat of the tires is a lot when it's really hot out there. So, I mean, unfortunately, the problem is there's no happy medium. There is a happy medium in terms of how many golf carts could this could we take without it being a problem. But it's hard to cut people off right there. Yeah, you know, once you allow golf carts, it's hard to stop anybody who wants one from taking one. And more and more people want to play out of a golf cart everywhere I go. It's not just here. You know, we've infected Australia and we've infected uh.

00:55:46
Speaker 1: You know what, I'm surprised isn't it more popular is the the four bagg er card, you know, where you put four bags on one cart. To me, that seems like the ideal happy medium in terms.

00:55:58
Speaker 2: Of turns walking. Yeah, you know, you've got at least one guy who will move the cart if most of the guys want to walk, but you'll just get it around.

00:56:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. I mean I wish more courses had like you don't see those at any public golf But this is revenue of the cart.

00:56:16
Speaker 2: Too, that's right.

00:56:17
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:56:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, in the state's a lot of it's driven by revenue, which I think is is kind of a false argument to have. You know, they wouldn't they wouldn't be able to charge that much for a cart. You know, they could just charge more for the green fee.

00:56:33
Speaker 3: And less for the cart. Yeah, and say the profit was from the golf course. But that's not.

00:56:39
Speaker 2: But you know when they they have to advertise the green fee and they don't have to advertise the cart fee, so they tend to do it the other way around. Yeah, the off twenty eight bucks, the cart's twenty five.

00:56:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I mean some places force you to take a cart, which is crazy, and that'll do it for this episode of The Yoke with Doak. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review and rate us where you listen to your podcasts. With the holiday season around, be sure to check out Tom's books. He's got the new edition of The Confidential Guide, which we'll talk about extensively in the next episode of The Yolk with Doak, but check those out at renaissancegoth dot com. You've been listening to the Fried Egg podcast, we do the digging for you.