Yolk with Doak 13: Memorial Park and the PGA Tour

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Frida Egg podcast and another episode of the Yoke with Doak. Today we have an exciting podcast as Tom shed some light on his most recent project, Memorial Park in Houston. This course will be the host site of the twenty twenty Houston Open, or at least planned. It will be the first project where Tom designs a course that the PGA Tour will play on. As part of the project, his player consultant will be Brooks Koepka, the number one rank player in the world. So Tom shed some light on his conversation with Brooks so far and some of his thoughts on the design and testing the professionals while still having a course that's a municipal that sees sixty thousand plus rounds without further ado. Here is Tom Doak.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: Doc is back and as usual he's not holding back. But don't toss the yolk and the famously candied Doak doesn't pull any punches.

00:01:12
Speaker 3: How do I make natural looking contour, hire the biggest pool in the village and tell him to make it flat?

00:01:19
Speaker 1: First? Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years, let's talk about Houston.

00:01:35
Speaker 3: Okay, so so well, by the time you air this because you'll get in trouble if you wear it before then.

00:01:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, because we're in the trust tree here.

00:01:46
Speaker 3: Yes, it will be announced that we signed up to do a renovation of Memorial Park off course in Houston, which is the big, huge woods park right downtown, right close to the Bayou that runs through Houston and drains the whole city. It's an old It was built in the thirties by John Brettamus, the same guy that did Colonial and a couple of the other courses in Texas at around that time when oil money was the only money driving any golf course construction in America at all. It used to host the Houston Open back in the fifties and sixties, and I don't know when they left. I haven't heard when they left. But the whole reason we're being hired to do this is because the tournament sponsor wants the Houston Open to go back to Memorial Park. And so the tournament sponsor, Shell pulled out a sponsor in the tournament a year ago, and they almost lost the tournament entirely because they didn't have a title sponsor for a year yea. And the guy who stepped in was the owner of the Astros Jim Crane, who is in the oil and gas business there, and you know, he didn't want you know, he doesn't want it to be the Houston Astros Open, nothing of the kind. But he you know, you know, Shell pulled out because they were having tough times financially and having to lay people off in their business, and yet they were in this five year commitment to put millions of dollars into sponsoring the Houston Open and plastering their advertisements all over of supporting of promoting this golf tournament. And that was just a horrible thing for them corporately at the time. And you know what Jim Crane has tried to explain to the PGA Tour is there's a lot of companies in that boat. Now. You know, signing a really long term deal to do this is hard to do.

00:04:06
Speaker 1: It's a lot of money.

00:04:07
Speaker 3: It's a lot of money and and and that's just that, it's you know, it's a long term commitment and in business that's harder and harder to make if you're running a company and you have to answer to shareholders and pr and everything else. So you know, what he's doing is find in several companies in Houston to help sponsor it at a smaller level and just pull their money together. And you know some of them, you know, some of them are companies that are in the oil services business and they have absolutely no interest in having advertisements about their company on the telecast. They don't sell to anybody who's watching the telecasts. They sell to other companies. Yes, but yeah, they want to do it for they want to do it for a hospitality, and they want to do it to support, you know, a charitable cause in the city. But they all want it to be back in the city. It's for years the tournament has been way up north in the suburbs. Yeah, and people don't go, you know, they want it to be like Scottsdale where a lot of people go.

00:05:12
Speaker 1: This course is one of the busiest courses in the country too.

00:05:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like, you know, I've heard sixty thousand rounds. They don't know the exact number, but it's it's a lot of rounds. It's a very busy public golf course. It always has been. The driving range makes a fortune there. I mean, it's one of those kind of half netted things that's really not on quite a big enough footprint, but they just print money. And it's what that golf course and the profits from that golf course support all the other municipal courses in Houston. Yeah, you know, it makes a lot of money every year and they spend it maintaining the other ones.

00:05:51
Speaker 1: That's the way that works. In Chicago, we have like Marivit's and the Drive Diversity Driving Range which overlooks the lake. You know, the driving range pretty much makes all the money for the rest of the courses. And that's the way I think it is a lot of a lot of places with it. I've actually have been to this course. It's it's it is always slammed, and it's Houston. It's it's kind of a different different gig. You've gotten reputation for great sites, you know, and you've done whether you've done work and you've done earth moving like the Royals Course, You've you've had done flatter sites like you know, the Loop is a pretty flat site. What what intrigues you about this project in Houston?

00:06:36
Speaker 3: Ah, this is very flat.

00:06:39
Speaker 2: I mean.

00:06:42
Speaker 3: There's like zero point two percent of fall on the site, So you know, we're you know, it's it's more challenging to figure out how we're going to make a drain well, because obviously want to host a tour event, it needs to take a rain event. And still I'm out strong the next morning. That's not easy to do on heavy soils in a rainy place, on a flat piece of ground. It does. The only thing that makes that possible is it does sit really close to the bayou, which is so there's a lot of relief right at the edge there that we can pull back into the golf course to help it drink. You know, we could start low dig into the site and then you know, make everything drained to that network. And then the city's got a lot of conservation goals for the park too, so we're trying to figure out how well we can engineer the thing to capture water for irrigation. Instead, it's you know what they don't capture, and they don't capture much of it now. It mostly drains out. They use city water for it, and they'd rather not. They can, but they'd rather they'd rather collect water instead of putting more water into the bayou when when it's already taken water from the whole rest of the city so it doesn't flood, you know, Memorial Park is a drop in the bucket to the whole city of Houston what happens in a flood, But it's still you know, why wouldn't we collect some of this water if we can't. So it's a it's a complicated project, but you know, for me, the attraction is I've always been interested in doing a course for the tour players, especially now that you know, the more people say, oh, you know, he's not the guy to do that. He doesn't do that's not his thing. And and especially the more people say it can't be done, they hit it so far now it's impossible. You just have to build entirely separate courses for them. We're not doing that here. You know, it's still going to be a municipal course that plays sixty thousand rounds the other fifty one weeks of the year, so you know, so it's a Now we've got a really complicated problem now because we need to figure out how to do all that without you know, we can't make tiny greens like Harbortown. There wouldn't be any grass on them after the sixty thousand rounds round. So we have to figure out how are we going to do this, and how long do we need to make a golf course to make it interesting for these guys? And and you know, when I went to interview for the job, Jim Crane happens to Bowen, the Floridian. He lives down there in the winter, and and he bought the golf course and redid it a few years ago. But he has a bunch of top named tour pros hanging out there. That's where they put That's where Dustin, John Brooks, Koepka and Patrick Reid and Ricky Fowler. They all played golf there quite a bit in the winter. And so I said to him in the beginning, well, you know, why don't we go ask those guys what they think we ought to do? You know, you know them all. Why can't we just sit down with them for a day and say, you know, what would make this work for you? Where it's not you know, where you don't dismiss it as a pitching pot, and you don't say it's tricked up, and you want to go play the tournament. It's an interesting golf course and you think you can compete there and you want to play it. So and he really generally liked that idea. It's like, has Ambay ever done that before? I said, I don't think so. Really. I mean, usually they assigned one guy to be the PGA tour consultant, but you don't get a range of opinions from diferent guys on what you ought to do. So in December, I'll do that and we do have a PGA tour consultant. He's the number one player in the world this week, Brooks Kafka. He's I've only talked to him a little bit so far. I'll get to sit down with him in December. But you know, to break the ice, I just send him a few questions to think about. You know, what do you like about tour courses? What do you really not like about them? What do you think you do well that is not rewarded by them? And you know, I thought, well, you just think about him and I'll talk about it. We'll talk about it when we get together. So I sent it to him like three weeks ago, and he got back to me the next day in the middle of playing that event in Korea. What do you want? So he's pretty interested in it, And either that or he was just having trouble sleeping in Korea at night and thought, oh, I'll answer these questions. Well, I can't sleep, but some interesting answers. So I'm really curious to to work with him and pick his brain and hopefully talk to some of these other guys too and just see see what they think. But you know, Memorial Park is already seventy three hundred yards long.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, and.

00:12:26
Speaker 3: He said he really thought that was probably long enough. He didn't think that you needed to build much longer courses to test the players. He thought you should do the details different. But it wasn't about length.

00:12:40
Speaker 1: To what was the most surprising answer he gave you that where you were like, wow, were you that you were either impressed or surprised.

00:12:50
Speaker 3: I'm gonna hold off on that because I don't want to I don't want to put words in his mouth. I don't remember exactly what he said about some of the things. But you know, obviously we want to think a little bit about how we talk about it, and we haven't really gotten together on that yet. But he's he's thought about architecture. He has some definite ideas on what he'd like to see. You know, there wasn't anything in there that I really disagreed with. There were a couple of things that I thought they're going to be that's going to be hard to do on this particular site, for this particular event, you know. I mean he didn't say anything specifically about green size, but I got the impression from some of the other things he said that he thinks smaller greens or skinnier angled greens is part of the solution, and he can only go so small given given the the the logistics of what we have to deal with there on a on a year round basis.

00:13:49
Speaker 1: So Brendan or Brandon Horrorvath has a question I and this is kind of from left field, so I'm not sure if you've thought about this, but he's a big strokes gained guy, So do you think how do you think taking the idea of strokes gained, which is, you know, a theory based on the fractional remaining length of shots, could impact design choices for architects. So it's essentially like a three hundred and twenty yard drive down the middle of the fairway, you're going to gain strokes on the field. It's all based off the field, right, So you know, if you're approaching from one to ninety and the rough, and you hit a shot to ten feet versus one thirty from the fairway to ten feet, you gain a lot more shots from that one from the rough.

00:14:41
Speaker 3: I understand the idea. I've never really, I've never thought about it in those terms. I mean, I think about what I'm thinking about things technically. I'm thinking more about trajectory and three D things, and you know what happens when the ball lands. Yeah, but so so I'm probably totally unqualified to answer his question. But you know, the first thing that came to mind listening to you hear it. If you're talking about the fractional distance that's left after you hit a shot, you know, I go back to what I think about greens in the first place, that you know, that's where a little change makes a lot of difference. Yeah, you know that that a tougher green, where a misput runs a little farther away because it's a little steeper, that could cost you a whole shot. Whereas even that one hundred and ninety yard shot back in the fairway that you were describing out of the rough, you know, they're not in a full stroke on the field with a good one, Yeah, so so it's you know, it goes I think so, I think of I've always thought of that the same way in terms of Earth movie. You can get a lot more bang for the buck on Earth. Moving on a green where a couple of feet makes a huge difference, then you know a couple of feet doesn't make any difference back in the fairway.

00:16:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it makes sense because you have to move so much to back in the fairway versus a green, right, it goes a.

00:16:28
Speaker 3: Lot further right and the surface is slower. Yeah, so you don't have to you know, you can't get above a certain point of the ball won't stay in the fairway. But once you're once you've got it to there, flattening it out a little more doesn't really make that much difference.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: It's it's the Mark Brodie that, you know, kind of the Bible of the tour. He does it develop the strokes gained theory, and like everybody follows it now and it's essentially been like what is proven with this technology thing is like just hit driver all the time because like the shorter you are in is so important, so valuable for the most part, and that's kind of what it's turned into so I get a ton of questions in here about distance. And you know, with Cameron Champ, this new kid on tour who's hitting a three sixty three seventy, what's your take on the state of distance and the current trajectory it has on the future of golf.

00:17:27
Speaker 3: Well, I'll start with I'm not really qualified to answer this at all because because I have made my career up to this point based on not paying attention to those guys. You know, when I work for Pete Die every single project he did, except for Long Cove, was going to host some big tournament.

00:17:56
Speaker 1: You know.

00:17:56
Speaker 3: I worked on the plans for the stadium of course at PGA West, I worked on plans to change you when they made changes to the TPC at Sagmass. But you know, when I got out on my own and the owner of High Point said what if we had a tournament off here? I just could laugh.

00:18:16
Speaker 1: I could laugh at.

00:18:18
Speaker 3: You know, I could just laugh and say, well, are you gonna put five million dollars a year into it? Yeah, because otherwise you're not playing a tournament up here, So don't worry about that and don't build for those guys. And I spent twenty five years not building for those guys. So now I have to change that, and I'm probably gonna learn I'm going to learn a ton about strokes gained and all that stuff from Brooks Koepka, who's not a short hitter either. So we'll we'll see what I've what I figure out about it in another year. But you know, in general, despite you know, all the governing bodies telling us, oh, you know, we've got the equipment under control and there's not going to be any more distance gains and all the rest, you know, I've never believed that. You know, that's that's you know, there's always slow incremental projects, and there's always guys that come along that just take another leap up and there will be another one in another ten, five or ten years. So you know that part of it's inevitable. And you know, and I don't worry about that that much because I tried to design a golf course. I've always tried to design everything so that wherever you're approaching from the hole makes some sense. You know, I don't want to build a hole that you know, it's a short part four and if you don't hit a good drive, you can't hit you can't hit the green. Yeah, you know, there's just no way to hit the green because it's small and it's at an angle and your trajectory just doesn't allow you to stay on it even if you hit it. You know, I'm always because I'm always thinking there's a lot of people that are back at their max distance, And for Camera and Champ that might be three hundred and twenty yards with a forwood or whatever, not a driver, you know, and for my mom that was one hundred yards. But at that max distance. They both have the same problem is I can't really make this thing spin or you know, So there has to be someplace I can land it and let it take off some steam and still stay on the green or around on the green somewhere, so I have at least something I can try to do. Yeah. So if I'm doing that, well, it's not going to matter that guys are hitting it that much farther. You know. It's not going to matter on the approach shots. It might matter on the t shots, you know, but again you don't you know, if Cameron CHAMPI hits it twenty yards farther than Brooks Koepka, that just means I need to have at least a couple of holes where I put a where I put a bunker even further out, so he has something to deal with. But you don't ever, you know, there's a huge range from him to whoever is the shortest hitter who can still survive on the tour. I don't know who that is, but the distance between them is probably forty five or fifty yards. You know, a lot of architects, you know, when it wasn't that long ago that I heard Jack Nicholas talking about trying to bunker holes at two hundred and eighty five yards off the tee to that's that was a tour player's landing area, I mean fifteen years ago, and he knew that. You know, Tiger Woods could carry it more than to eighty five, but you know, generally that was the place. And I always figured, well, Jack's Jack's airing on the downside a little bit, because A, you know, he still relates to what he could do, and B he really thinks that the best guy on tour should be able to clear most of the hazards most of the time, just like he could back in the day. I personally don't think that. I think I think there should be something out there that makes the longest hit around the tour, or even the longest hit around the tour twenty five years from now, who doesn't exist today, there should still be something to make him think a couple of times. He can't do it on every hole. You know, if you build those bunkers at two eighty five, like Jack wanted, that means Brian Gay doesn't quite get to them. Yeah, the next guy's up from him. There's fairway bunkers in play for them in every damn hole, and then everybody who carries it three hundred yards there's no fairway bunkers in play for them at all. Yeah, and you'd have to move all the fairway bunkers or build all new tees every fifteen years as things change. So instead of that, you know just kind of I'm not saying it's random, but you kind of scatter them around. Yeah, you kind of scatter them around. So there's two or three or four holes on the golf course where there's fairway bunkers they got to worry about.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: Well, it's kind of like what you said about the old course in another podcast, where when it's windy, one wind you see bunkers and you're like, why is that bunker there? But then when it turns and it's the other way, you're like, oh, that's why right there, And that's what the game's becoming is like sometimes like what I see at hitting at three hundred yards, I don't I would never see the bunkers the camera champs looking at Nope. So you might hit your second shot and then you're walking by and be like, why is this bunker here?

00:24:15
Speaker 3: I'd see them. They'd be a player for my second shot. Yeah. But you know, and we have the advantage in Houston that it's windy. But one of the things we're going to talk about really hard in Houston is why I have a lot of bunkers at all? Because they are the penalty value for the good players is almost zero, So why why have many? You know, they won't want us to have none. The golf course has always had bunkers around the greens, and and the average UNI player plays there is like, what do you do? You took all the bunkers out? But but I really I but I honestly think for the for the tour players. The tour players would be the first to tell you that they don't think about the bunkers all that much because even if they get in it, they can still hit a eight iron on the green, no problem.

00:25:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. That and also like from around the greens, they're unbelievable out of bunkers, right, you know, they're up and down percentages.

00:25:17
Speaker 3: So you know, if you did that strokes gain thing, not just for the tour, if you did it for all golfers, the strokes gained for a tour player out of the bunker compared to the average golfer would be tremendous.

00:25:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, the gap is massive, Yes.

00:25:40
Speaker 3: That's probably more. There's probably as big a gap or more of a gap there as there is on how far they hit it. And so that's the kind of thing if you're trying to design something to get the average guy around and make it challenging for a really good player, why put a bunch of bunkers in. They're beating up the average guy, and that chur player doesn't really give a ship if they're there at all.

00:26:03
Speaker 1: It's just like they get they're saying, get in the bunker a lot of times.

00:26:08
Speaker 3: Well, you know, Bruce Heppner when he worked for me, I was sitting with Ben Crenshaw and Davis Love one time when they had the buick opened down in Flint and they were they were it was they were going to play at Oakland Hills the next year for the PGA or the opener. I can't I think it was the PGA, And Bruce said to Davis Love because he was a really long hitter, so you know, and Oakland Hills was famous for having those bunkers pinching in the fair ways in the landing areas that Trent Jones put in and Bruce figured Davis could probably hit it past the bunkers on a lot of holes now, so he asked them, did you try to hit it past the bunkers or there are times when you when you lay back and you know, stay short of him because you don't really need the lane, you know, because it's still not a hard shot for you, even if you don't try to carry them. But are you, you know, are you are you trying to avoid the bunkers? You're trying to carry them on some holes? And Davis said, I don't even think about that very much, being in the bunkers waybur and being a rough at us off interview DA so so I'm just trying to hit it straight with, you know, whatever I feel comfortable with on that hole. And you know, honestly, if the bunkers are there doesn't even enter into what I'm thinking about doing.

00:27:32
Speaker 1: So I'm assuming you're going to do some significant earthwork at this course for drainage for you know, since it's so flat.

00:27:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, well we're not. You know, it's a parkland golf course with a lot of trees, and we don't want to change the character of it totally. And so so that's that's the hard part is, you know, how do you do how do you get it to dn anyway? Keep all those trees? Yeah, you know, like at the Raws course, we just graded the whole site wall the wall and then planted some trees after we were done. But here, you know, working around it means there's a lot of little areas that are only you know, around the trees. It's only like one percent like the rest of the site is. And but then you want the water to get away from that pretty quick, so you've got to start cutting right away, and you can't. You know, there's not many places that you can put fill to make a drink because you can't put three feet to fill right next to a tree. Yeah. So, like I said, it's a complicated thing. But but I'm not thinking, you know, it's going to be it's I think it's going to have to look more shaped than it is now. But I don't think it's like a big earth moving project. I think it's just a question of, you know, up and down three and four feet in a lot of places to change it. Other than you know, there's there's these ravines coming off the Bayou that that are kind of in play on the front nine. You don't see them really well because they're in the trees right now, but you know we're gonna kind of take off from one or two of those and you know, dig all the way up into the back nine and create some relief there so we have a low thing to drain to.

00:29:20
Speaker 1: And it kind of creates more of that feature.

00:29:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, the whole golf course will feel like that instead of just a few holes. I mean kind of one of the one of the models it's the opposite of flat, but one of the models for it is posit tempo. It has all those canyons that kind of reach up into the golf course.

00:29:41
Speaker 1: Do you think, will the routing stay mostly intact or will you reroute a fair amount of it.

00:29:47
Speaker 3: The routing will stay mostly intact, and that's because of all the.

00:29:49
Speaker 1: The trees.

00:29:51
Speaker 3: And the routing's not bad. I mean, you know, one of the things that we're really thinking about is how do we make this like good for gallery flow and you know, make little hubs where people can see a couple of holes and hang out and social areas, because you know, Jim Crane's number one goal is to get a lot of people to come and to do that, you know, you have to have some places that they want to go hang out and not just follow a golfer all the way around. You know, that's not that's not what people are going to Scott Steel to do.

00:30:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Well, it's like what where on like a lot of courses where you see a bunch of greens right around in the same area. Then they put a grandstand. It's like, that's the best place to sit and watch golf, right because you're not just sitting there watching waiting for the same shot over and over again. You're seeing all different types of shots. So that'll be cool.

00:30:48
Speaker 3: So the routing does work pretty well.

00:30:50
Speaker 1: For that.

00:30:51
Speaker 3: We're tweaking it a little bit for that, but you know, we're not changing it wholeheartedly. I mean, the golfers that the golfers that you used to play in Memorial Park will still be able to find their way around, no problem.

00:31:05
Speaker 1: How do you combat the soils down there, since they're heavier and you know, they get a lot of rain, like what you know.

00:31:12
Speaker 3: We're that's the thing we're wrestling with most. I mean that the knee jerk reaction is sand cap everything. But you know, not even sand capping really helps all that much. If if it's that flat and you've got you get a three or four inch rain, there's got to be somewhere for the water to you know, it needs fall for the for to get out of there. And you know, so we have to we have to move enough earth to get that, or move enough earth or shape enough to get that. And then if we do that, we're not sure that we really need to sand cap near as much as you know that as you would. And again, the you know, part of the problem with sand capping is how do you stand cap next to all these trees. They're not you can't have a foot of sandcap everywhere, and then a little pit every time there was a tree.

00:32:04
Speaker 1: So is this the toughest engineering project that you've You've had.

00:32:11
Speaker 3: Another one in China on the island in the middle of the river, or the flood flooded on a regular basis, that was an engineering problem. This is not that bad.

00:32:21
Speaker 1: That's cool. It'll be fun to watch. It'll be exciting project for all all levels of golf fans, you know, not just the architecture fans. New new course in Houston, new atmosphere. It'll be exciting. That does it. For this episode of The Yoke with Doak, we will have much more coverage of this Memorial Park project. That is, Tom and the Renaissance Golf team Mike Newso and Don Mahaffey are taking on down in Houston, so look for that. As always, if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe, rate us, review us in the app store, and we will be back with another edition of The Yoke with Doak in a couple week. Other News will have another podcast up later this week, so look forward to Big twenty nineteen and thanks for listening.

00:33:22
Speaker 2: Dok is back and as usual, he's not holding back. But don't toss the Yolk and the famously candid Doak doesn't pull any punches.

00:33:34
Speaker 3: How do I make natural looking contour? Hire the biggest pool in the village and told them to get flat first.

00:33:41
Speaker 1: Overrated, underrated, rough

00:33:45
Speaker 3: Terribly overrated over the years.