Trees and Golf

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Golfers have strong feelings about trees. Take the venue of last week's US Open, Oakmont Country Club. Between the nineteen nineties and twenty ten's Oakmont removed almost all of the trees on its golf course, and today in twenty twenty five, this is still a controversial subject. Some people are still mad about it. So in this episode, we're talking about trees on golf courses, why they get planted, why they might be removed, and what effect they have on the game. My guest is Bradley Klein, a veteran golf architecture writer and consultant. Brad has been thinking about the tree issue for decades now, and few people are more knowledgeable about it. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf. So, Bradley, in addition to writing prolifically about golf courses, you have a lot of experience consulting with clubs about golfer chitecture. I assume some of these consultations involved tree studies. Am I right about that?

00:01:06
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure?

00:01:07
Speaker 1: What do those usually involve? How does that process look?

00:01:11
Speaker 2: So? Without? You know, I could get into various details, but this started about twenty What is it now? It's twenty twenty five. So it started twenty five years ago when I started writing about trees and realizing that almost every course I was looking at, including one I was a member at, was completely overtreate. And at this time there were already rumors are not the right word, but murmurings of what was going on at Oakmont, which was just beginning to under the guise of their superintendent, Marque Markuns surreptitiously with They had the sod squad out there at four in the morning with a couple of boxes of Krispy kremes the laborers and they were taking down trees and taking the root ball out and sotting it over and tapping it down, and first group out wouldn't even notice anything. Took a while for that to happen, but for them to get caught, But that was the start, and generally, you know, I was very involved in the restoration movement, if you will, early on as a writer, championing that and trying to undo in my mind and editorially, what I had seen was a lot of reckless modernization of golf courses, whether lengthening, stretching, overgrowing, making them straight and losing a lot of the character, and so I started writing about that and then I got called. One of the early ones was Sciota actually nineteen ninety nine or two thousand. I still have these reports, and you know, you sort of walk them through what was happening, and you try to develop criteria of evaluation. And it helped listening to Gil Hands back then. I have known Gil since nineteen ninety four when he was probably making five hundred bucks a day on a dozer over at Engineers Golf Club on Long Island, and we spent a lot of time walking and talking, and I went to a presentation and he developed these criteria that I'll never forget about the priorities when you're looking at trees, and it was a matter of the agronomic impact, impact on strategic flexibility of the golf course, the esthetics of the view shed, the health of the tree, and also issues of safety of personnel on the golf course. And so you start thinking about these trees and what they're doing, and the species and the appropriateness, and you start realizing that most golf courses, and this is in the northeast, Midwest, Southeast, were wildly overtreated. You know, in my background. I think it's helpful to know. I'm an educator by training. I have a PhD in political science. I was a university professor. I'm very dogmatic in the classroom. It's probably why I quit. I got frustrated. But I believe in things and I believe in advocating them, and frankly, I didn't think that was happening in the golf industry. I thought the other people writing about golf architecture, in particular Ron Whitten, to be fair, he's very knowledgeable, incredibly knowledgeable, but he wasn't advocating. He was more the kind of a neutral attorney sifting through information, and I was more going to be an agitator. And I had a platform at Golf Week. I was writing articles like crazy, and I've had a following. You know, as you know about five or six percent of golfers really care about architecture in an unbelievably passionate way. And I had people who started asking me about, Hey, what do you think about our golf course. I said, well, let me go take a look. So I started.

00:05:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, And obviously, you know, as part of the larger restoration movement, tree management programs were a big part of that often the most controversial piece of any given restoration projects. So well, we'll get into some of the details of why trees might be removed or managed. I think that that sort of Gilhand's playbook that you briefly refer to would be a good structure for us in talking about trees on golf courses. But I'm curious, first of all about the history of trees on golf courses. Maybe we could just give a broad overview of how things have evolved over the past one hundred years or so as it relates to trees on golf courses. What were some of the attitudes of Golden age golf architects toward trees on inland golf courses specifically, and by Golden Age I mean the architects who are working primarily in the first four decades of the twentieth century. What were their feelings, both expressed and implicit through their work about trees and golf.

00:06:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. The first thing is that trees weren't even an issue until golf moved inland. So the basic structure of the game is founded upon coastal golf links. Golf and even though it's a small, tiny percentage of the golf courses. It's a strong component of the early foundation of understanding what was going on, and golf architecture really was trying to take those design principles of flexibility, of using the wind, of using ground contour, of using hollows that had been created, and taking it to a land that was not ideally suited, but that's where people were, namely inland, and so around just before the turn of the century, lateeteen century, you would say the game started moving into onto land that really needed to be worked. It had to be drained, it had to be cleared as well. Now, initially many of the sites that were picked were treeless. I'll give you an example because I just saw at Huntercombe, which is Lillly Park, Junior's great inland course an hour west of Heathrow Airport, was a completely treeless site, fairly flat, low lying, and the contours that were created were essentially ditches and hollows and barrow pits for coal and for mining that had been established on site. And he worked the whole golf course around it. And the trees came in later, but it's not till a tree clearing was required for wooded sites on farmland where you had rows of trees that had been used as boundaries. You know, when you're assembling a golf course property of one hundred and fifty eight as you're often involving different parcels of land that are divided by trees, and that's when the removal process started to take place in a heavy handed way. Ross was one of those. Mackenzie was similar McDonald. As I recall not most of them didn't write very much. You know, the writings we have are from the Occasional Polemical book by Hunter or McKenzie and McDonald. Ross himself wrote very very little, but they made it Tillinghast was more prolific about this. They made it clear that trees were acceptable and appropriate, but not to be central. They had a character, you know, they that first of all, delineating the boundary of the property the occasional dog leg around. But I think it was Ross who said that it was a mistake to make a tree a central component of the strategy of a golf hall. So while they accepted, and partly that's an economic when you when you when you're on a site with trees, you decide how much you're going to cut down. They wanted generous fairways, and it has to be said that even their inland golf courses back then were fifty sixty yard white fareaways. The narrowing of fairways was a function of the introduction of fairway irrigation, which could only throw water thirty yards, and everything else outside of that starff. So they started to fill that space of dead grass. You know, they put an irrigation system and thinking it's going to irrigate the golf course and only irrigated thirty yards. Everything else was dying. So they then filled it up with trees. And that was after World War two for the most part. So you look at the history of the planting, which is part of this. The aggressive planting program didn't take place till after World War two. So what it tells you is when you look at the early images, and we do this all the time, I'm thinking of a wonderful Donald Ross's a nine hole golf course in Massachusetts called Whitonsville, and there's an aerial from nineteen twenty seven twenty eight, and it shows about eight pine trees out there, all clustered between the first green and the sixth faaraway, and that's it. Everything is also wide open, and the heart was they had, by the way, were many of them graceful oaks and American elm. And the American elm was a fantastic golf tree because it had deep roots, It had a tall main trunk with a beautiful kind of champagne glass canopy, and you could play under and around the whole under and around the tree. And so as a majestic, gracious tree, it actually allowed you to incorporate that and still have an element of grace and beauty and strategy all combined with that kind of a tree. Unfortunately, when the American elm started to get the Dutch elm disease around and after World War Two, and of them came down on golf courses, they were replaced. People got nervous. They started planting spruce and sugar maples and swamp maples and all sorts of trees that were not indigenous to clutter up or fill up the golf course. Brookside Country Club was a great example of this in Canton, Ohio. It was one of my early projects that I was involved with. And you go out there on the aerials from nineteen twenty it's just sand, open blast areas, no trees anywhere. And by nineteen fifty seven, fifty eight, these kind of you know, it looked like German prisoners of war had planted trees every nineteen and a half feet in a dead straight row down both sides of every fairway. So by the time television came along to show what golf courses looked like, people thought that that look of the enclosed, narrow, thirty yard wide, straight tree covered canopy was the norm, and it wasn't.

00:11:55
Speaker 1: So you've you've laid out some history for us here. You know, we start in the first deck of the twentieth century, where the general attitude of most golf architects is that trees can be appropriate on a golf course, but not too many. We're certainly not going to have rows of trees enclosing golf holes because that sort of chokes out the character of the land and of the strategy of the whole and creates other problems as well. But then in the post World War II period we have these planting programs, sometimes motivated motivated by so called beautification. Other times you refer to the to the elm disease, the elm blight that happened in the middle of the twentieth century, and sometimes clubs would react to that by planting a bunch of trees to replace the lost elms. Except those trees were not nearly as well suited to golf as the elms, nor as beautiful, And so we have a variety of factors leading to pretty aggressive planting programs at many classic golf courses in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Now we get to the eighties and nineties, and this is when you're starting to enter the industry yourself and writing about golf courses. I've always been curious, what do you think are the roots of the tree management programs that started in the nineties and really picked up pace in the twenty first century. And specifically, I've always sort of wondered when I read about the history of Oakmont's tree removal program, it always the story always begins with, well, the club's board and green chairmen were strongly in support of restoration and removing trees, and the members really weren't. And I've always wondered, Okay, well, why was the club's board in support of it in the first How did momentum build in the first place to start removing trees at Oakmont and at many other clubs. I don't know what do you have to say about that. What do you think the what do you think the kind of underlying factors are that that led to tree management becoming a popular process.

00:14:17
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think it's I wouldn't say it's popular. What I would say it's widely accepted among people who know what they're talking about. So the couple There are lots of different strands and converging moments here, So I'll give one. One stream is that restoration generically became a buzzword. I give the founding moment, and I'm proud to have caddied there at the eighty six US Open at Hinnacock. That was a big watershed in the moment in which we discovered at one hundred year old golf course could still be relevant.

00:14:52
Speaker 1: And that was the first US Open to be held at Shinnacock since eighteen ninety six. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:57
Speaker 2: Now, I mean you look back at it, it was it was heavily trigued a lot more than now, but still it was really cool to go out there and the wind swept links courses. You know, it was windy, it was very difficult, lots of fescue a little tall off everywhere, and it was rough conditions and it was not what you would call a well manicured, beautiful golf course. They were still back then, they were still triplex mowing the greens and gang mowing the fairways and fairly rough conditions. But the point is that the USJ made a commitment there, maybe by accident, whatever, it doesn't matter what their motive was. The impact was people started talking. And then two years later eighty eight the country club at Brookline was really important because that's where Rhys Jones made restoration a focal point of his presence, and he spent a lot of time there and established his repation as a restoration is now in retrospect, the kind of work he did is now seen as a little bit timid and passe, but for what was going on in the industry at the time, the use of those fescue mounds, for example, reclaiming some of the surface some tree management in areas that were heavily shaded that open also became for marketing purposes alone. Good reclaimed the reputation and more importantly, that word entered into the vocabulary, and that's really what started the conversation about these things. Now. The other thing that happened is that with environmental management and crackdown by the EPA and the use of chemical pesticides and basic heavy chemistry mercuries for example, and there was a concern about the overuse of chemicals on golf courses. The environmental movement was manifesting itself. There was a lot of resistance in the industry to be fair, but still people realized that from a cost management standpoint and from a toxicity level, because a lot of environments now were being tested. New York State came out with a report called Toxic Fairways in the I think mid nineties that basically was a scathing attack upon the overuse of fertilization and chemistry on Long Island golf courses where the water table, you know, golf courses were sitting on an aquifer that people were using for drinking water. So there became more of a conversation about, well, maybe we need to back off this, and then the superintendent's developed a more culturally oriented program of relying upon sunshine and wind and sand and top dressing for not organic but more or cultural practices as they were called. They were cheaper, they were efficient, they lasted longer, and so you had now a realization that there are things in the environment that we can manage without chemical applications that could help promote healthy turf. And a lot of that was simply doing shade studies. You didn't have the apps back then, but you could figure out where sunlight was and you could realize that because of the azimuth in the shoulder season the sunshine was lower, you had much more shade issues. Shade tolerance was a big issue turf grass, particularly on grain. So the superintendent's from a micromanagement standpoint, realized they needed to do something and they started paring back trees fairly modestly, but still because if you want bent grass, you need eight hours, You need eight hours of sunlight. If you're just going along with the perennial poe, you can get by on four, five, six hours. But if you want quality turf, if you want greens roll, you know, people don't realize the conditioning has changed so much. Back in nineteen seventy seven, Oakmont was the fastest golf course in the Country stip meter speed registered by the USJA was nine point eight. It was two feet ahead of Augusta National. Augusta National was averaging seven point seven. That's in nineteen seventy seven, before they converted. They're greens at Augusta. But in any case, conditioning was different. So when expectations went up and it's like we would like something faster, the new vents were a little better the old. The old perennial poem was not performing as well. Pen cross bent grass was not going to deliver anything faster than eight and a half or nine. Once you want to go to ten or eleven, you needed the new high performance bent grasses. They needed much more sunlight, they needed more top dressing. All of these converging factors and demands and expectations. Television as well. People started to see really cool golf courses on television and thought, why can't we have it at our house? You know, they kind of call it the Augusta syndrome, but it's more popular than that. It's realizing that, gee, we could be doing better than what we have and so and the other thing that happened is that superintendents became professionally trained you know, they used to be greenkeepers, make in genes in they were like farmers. I can remember when I started writing in the industry, superintendents were making thirty thirty five thousand a year maintenance budgets for two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. Now, you know, the numbers are astronomical, But the point is that the superintendents are now professionally trained turf grass scientists, many of them, many more than ever. I would say most have four year degrees or at least they've been through a two year turf program, so they have a better understanding of war, chemistry, sunlight, the factors that are really required. And so the whole industry has changed. The professionalism has changed, set of expectations have changed, and then the sense of travel. I do think that the golf course ratings process has exposed people with better photography and video and media. People are more aware of what's going on with other courses that are really cool that they either visit or that they would dream about visiting. I think that Band in Dunes had a lot to do with it as well, because that essentially popularized the idea of links golf in a way that had previously only been available to those who had gone to Scotland. Of course, as you know, or most of us know, getting to Bandon is just as difficult as getting to Scotland, but at least it's in the United States and it doesn't involve quite the schlepp. But the availability of that kind of a golf really struck a nerve with a certain percentage of elite people who then I think became more prominent in decision making in their home course. And so what happens at every club to get to your I knew i'd get to your point, is that the people making decisions about these things were more and more exposed to a variety of golf courses that had not been the case at every club that I've been to. The people who are happiest with the old Parkland tree laced, you know, heavy polar conditions are the ones who don't travel. They've spent forty years playing this golf course. They think it's always been that way. They love it. They had their same group, they play five days a week. They remember the tree that they bounced the shot off of, or you know whatever. They remember all these things. They don't want anything to budget they're not making decisions anymore. The people making decisions are they're course raiders. They've been debandoned. They've gone to Cabot, they've gone to stream Song, they've been to Scotland, they're going to Australia now. So there's much more what I call architectural literacy. They're reading the books that we write. They understand that superintendents are professionals. They're not bossing them around. They're starting to listen to them. And the superintendents have become better about communicating and a little bolder in their articulation of their expertise and what they need. That's the other thing. They're more professional. So the people who are making decisions have changed. I think increasingly we've found that a more informed decision making apparatus has developed at these clubs, so that they're working with superintendents rather than telling them, you know, hey, you should mold the left side of the fairways wider because I'm hooking the ball and I'm tired of being in the roof. That's what you You don't see that as much. So it's a big, big change at many, many levels.

00:24:05
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to put a bow on the historical narrative here. The rise of the superintendent, which you've referred to, or the increased prominence and education of the superintendent, is a big part of this story because now you see superintendent's the head superintendent, being often the most important and in some cases the highest paid employee of a given club. That wasn't really the case in the past. They have a lot more power now and a lot more authority, and what they're saying often is, well, listen, if you want me to use less chemicals, less inputs, less water, then we have got to get our turf in the sunlight. And if you want that turf to be of the highest quality, then it needs sunlight and air circulation. And if we have trees surrounding every hole and putting all of our turf in shade for most of the day, then we're not going to have outstanding turf conditions, especially if we want to reduce our dependency on chemicals and various other inputs. And so that's kind of the logic that has started to win the day a little bit here.

00:25:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the great moments I saw actually witnessed this conversation. A fella comes into the superintendent's office and says, you can't cut down the trees down? Can you manage this without the tree management? And the superintendent says, you're a dentist, right, yeah, I said, do you want to pull teeth without novercame You could do it, but you might kill the patient. And it was a great kind of response of a professional, and the guy backed off. Realized, you know, so I think the professionalization and I have to include the golf prost too, because they have you know, I noticed, starting about twenty five years ago, the PGA of America at the convention would start running seminars on architecture, on maintenance and instructing golf pros a little bit more about that component of it so that they are on the same path. And every club where there is ongoing tree management, there has to be a collaboration among the GM the golf professional, the superintendent, and the green chair. And the more they collaborate and they're starting to do that, well, they've been doing that for a long time. The architecte leads the conversation, but the professionalization of this relationship means that those people are listening to what's best for the facility rather than listening to who's going to make who on their board is going to help them keep their job. The boards are not effective in that kind of planning. Just people don't have the time, they don't have the expertise. They might have some expertise in financial management, but not in terms of the agronomics of it or in the strategic or historical site. So my job as an outsider was easy because I didn't you know, I would go in for a day or two for set fee. If they didn't like what I had to say, I don't care. I'm going to get paid anyway. So it's I had more latitude to say what I needed to say rather than someone who was a full time employee who was trying to get his kids through college and needed his job. So that gave me a tremendous freedom and I and then you begin to build allies with the resources that you have, and all of a sudden, the superintendent feels like, boy, nice to be able to talk to someone about this sort of thing because they know these things and they've got their network of some people. But that network is getting has been steadily getting bigger. So and again the travel the band and Dunes kind of experienced the television exposure of the websites that golf club, Atlas and fried Egg and that kind of conversational stream has just been absolutely crucial. I'm not pandering here those names. Your names come up all the time when I'm meeting with clubs about things that they've seen. They did not have those resources thirty years ago, so I think the social media component of it has also created a reassurance that they're on the right track.

00:28:37
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by the USGA Green Section. One of the biggest trends in golf course maintenance is data collection, and no management system today makes collecting data easier than Deacon from the USGA Green Section. Data collection tools like the GS three ball and the new USGA Moisture meter seamlessly connect and instantly upload data. In the Deacon app. You can use the data to make decisions to manage inputs and resources more efficiently, to provide consistent playing conditions, improved playability, and increased golfer satisfaction. With the latest upgrade to Deacon, you get enhanced navigation, robust reporting tools, and decreased testing time. Measure what matters. Get your Deacon tools bundled today at gsshop dot USGA dot org. Again, that's gsshop dot USGA dot org. All right, let's get back to the episode. In any case, I want to get to some of the specific topics that are often covered in discussions of tree management programs. As we've mentioned a couple of times, Gil Hants has kind of his taxonomy where he talks about agronomic benefits, strategic or playability concerns, he talks about esthetics, he talks about safety, he talks about the history of the site, and maybe missing a couple here and there, maybe budgetary concerns factor into this as well. So I'd like to touch on some of those. I think at this point most people listening to this podcast understand the basic agronomic calculus here. If you have light, if you have air circulation, you tend to have healthier turf with less intervention necessary from the ground staff. So why don't we talk about this in terms of ecology. Trees are obviously great assets to the environment, and so there is a sort of, in my opinion, simplistic, but a very common and common sensical argument that cutting down trees is bad for the environment. So why are we doing it at golf courses. What would be your response to that line of thinking when it comes to tree management at golf courses. What are the ecological implications? How do you think all that through?

00:31:15
Speaker 2: Okay, so here I'm going to differ a little bit with common currency. I don't think the Oakmont conversation is actually all that helpful. I think it's paralyzing part because the numbers that I've seen are crazy. People talk about ten thousand trees coming out, nothing like that.

00:31:29
Speaker 1: That's not the usual. Oakmont is a kind of outlier when it comes to well tree it's not a representative example. Really.

00:31:36
Speaker 2: Well two things. First of all, that number is completely irresponsible, So the actual number is far fewer, and at most places, what you're talking about is about two to three percent of the tree stock that's actually there. I just finished I'm working with a landscape architect. We're teamed up in the Campanelli. We're doing the restoration of Shuttle Metal Country Club, which is Willie Park Junior's first US golf course, which is why I went to Hunter Compe to see it. And we've done a tree management plan and now we're getting criticized because we didn't do enough, and I can't exactly count the number, but roughly of about three or four thousand trees on that site, we're looking at one hundred and fifty and they're going to make a big difference because they're central, but the periphery the woods. So I think the first thing is that the Oakmont conversation makes it look like your tree you're removing all trees, whereas at most clubs. Now it varies, but in most clubs you're talking about a very marginal tweaking of the tree stock to open up views, to open up areas. But I'm I don't think it's helpful to talk about wholesale removal, and so the percentages that you're talking about are very small. The other thing is, while trees have an important ecology in terms of habitat, the cost agronomically and chemically of having them in areas where you're trying to grow turf grass produces reliance upon chemistry that infiltrates or has an impact on the environment in terms of the watershed. So you're trying to limit and remove and reduce the chemical reliance. The other thing is, of course you're going to be very mindful of certain special habitats of nesting sites of rare birds or nesting areas for eagles and egrets and so and habit water and watershed areas. So you're respecting a lot of the environmental issues. What you're dealing with is essentially the marginal intrusion of trees upon central lines of play, So the percentages are very small. The other thing is that in many cases what you're doing, I've seen lots of times where you propose an area where you're basically culling some of the trees that are impinging upon the growth patterns and the canopies of the large mature trees. And so what you're trying to do is essentially allow the more mature specimens to thrive because right now they're constricted either at the root there's root girdling, or there's a constrict of habit of the canopies. So you're kind of helping open up the area for more air movement than sunlight so that these trees can thrive. And so that's a big component of it as well.

00:34:31
Speaker 1: And often the native trees as well. Right if you have a bunch of non native trees surrounding an original indigenous tree, and you're remove the non natives around it, all of a sudden, the original native tree might be in a place to thrive.

00:34:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. So all of those are components of the responsible tree management. Okay, and that's why I don't the olkmont one is scarce people off. Rightly, that's not what's usually intended. Now, there are cases where it might be appropriate to do that, but and but that's an extreme exception.

00:35:14
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some playability or strategic issues. Again. I think there's a broad understanding that tree removal on classic golf courses that were designed to use with an angles restores those with an angles. If you have a dog leg hole to the right and you put in trees on the inside of that dog leg, the risk reward equation of trying to cut the dog leg is no longer there. That's a basic example. You remove the trees, you get back some options and some strategic complexity. That's appealing. Again, I think I think most people understand that at this point. Something that's interesting though to me is that there is another brand of this discussion that has to do with how golf courses are played by elite players. Now, if you take away trees from a golf course. Then elite players are especially now with the equipment that they use and the way that they hit the ball, are going to feast on most of those golf courses. If you don't constrict their line of play in some way or another, it's it's going to be tough for the golf course to defend itself. And I think a lot of people looked at Roy McElroy in the fourth round at the Masters and looked at his The most memorable shots that he hit that day one on the seventh hole where he kind of had to hit this miraculous shot around the trees to get to the green, and then of course on the fifteenth hole, where he had to shape a I don't even think it was a long iron. I think you hit a seven hour, but you know the thing with two and thirty yards or whatever it was. And but that shot only existed because those trees were there. Now, in the original design of Augusta National, you would have seen a couple of trees in approximately that position in the fifteenth fairway, but most of the fifteenth fairway would have been way more open, of course, and then those trees on the seventh hole that he played around wouldn't have been there initially. So I think people looked at those shots and said, well, trees have to be good for strategy, at least for elite players because or at least for the interest of the golf tournament. They have to be good because if they weren't there, then we wouldn't have gotten those shots. So I wonder how you balance in your thinking opening up strategic lines of play versus retaining some challenger the opportunity for spectacular recovery from great players.

00:37:48
Speaker 2: So the first thing I would tell you is that the trees you're talking about that were influential, particularly on fifteenth, that's a couple of trees somewhere the elite player hits the ball in the air. So if you're if your if your dominant obstacle is trying to create a hazard that an elite player has to deal with, the last thing you want to do is create a sixty foot high wall that they're going to hit over it anyway. If you have a big corner dog leg and it's two forty to carry, they'll launch it over there anyway. Whereas you're actually punishing the high handicapper or the mid handicapper much more because they can't hit it that high. They're chipping out all the time. So the first thing is if trees are your dominant form, if they're the dominant form of a hazard for creating interest, you're actually counterproductive by using trees in that way. The second thing is, I don't really think it's a helpful guide to use a tournament course as your guide for your every day golf course because that event takes place once a year. So I you know, how should it with this? At most clubs, one percent of play, no more than that takes place from the back teem. So if you're designing a golf course for the back te player in some big event, you've got your priorities wrong and you're going to go bankrop. So I like to think primarily of how is this going to play for the fee paying everyday golfer, and then where you can you put these elements in that for an event or for an elite player. But the most effective way to defeat an elite player is not in the air. It's on the ground. Because golf, my little mantra took me years to develop. This is that golf course architecture is what happens when the ball hits the ground. It's going to kick some way at oakmand it's going to get eaten up in the rough. It's going to kind of get some weird bounce that you might think is unfair. But by opening up contour, you create uncertainty. Whereas the elite player can pretty much dominate aerial space. They know where it's going. They have a launch monitor that every shot they're registering now, they know the spin rate, they know exactly how far it's going within one or two yards on irons. So if you focus on the aerial component to defeat a player, I think you're misguided and you're actually punishing the higher handicapper. The second thing is that the ground contour is what is most determinative. And finally, the hardest thing for a golf for a good golfer to do is to create a target when you get I'll put it this way. My favorite example seventeenth augusta National. They lost the part for they lost the Eisenhower Tree, which is about two to ten down the left side, which hung out over the fairway, and everybody said, oh my god, they're going to eat up the golf course. It's going to change it. So what happened. Average scoring didn't change, but the range of scores changed so that you had more birdies and more bogies because previously, with that Eisenhower tree, you either hit a little light cut or you took a three. Elite players hit three, which because they're desperately trying to hit the fairway. That tree is gone. The target area is larger, more of them hitting drivers. Some of them land in the adjacent in the adjoining I think seventh hole, others bail out to the right. So the actual impact on scoring was more diverse scoring. Although the average didn't change, the diversity of the scoring did. So. Gill showed Gil Hands showed me this at the TPC Boston. Once he showed me the data for the ninth hole, the par four doug let. He said, the wider they opened it and the more room there was, by definition, the fairway was a smaller percentage of the available space you were looking at. The more difficult or the more the less people a fair way that the ball wandered because they weren't able to focus, so they felt that they had more freedom. It was more difficult for them, so you're actually for the elite player, and they are in a completely different world. We're not talking about three four handicappers here. We're talking about plus six's and plus sevens who know exactly within one or two yards where their shots are going, and for them, the trees are less of an obstacle than the ground contours that they're dealing with.

00:42:31
Speaker 1: So I think, especially if it's firm, what elite players really don't like is that if they don't know what's happening once the ball lands. But I think you know what you're saying about the effect on elite players versus regular players of trees is really important to point out because that's an argument that many Golden Age architects made about trees. To them, trees were not a desirable hazard to use constantly because they are a relatively inequitable hazard, as in, they affect regular players more than they affect really good players. And the goal, the goal that a lot of Golden Age architects had was to figure out how to design courses that were fun to play, that were playable for regular players but still challenging for elite players. So you tried to find elements that were hard for elite players to navigate, but not, you know, necessarily preventative to a good time for regular players. And trees are pretty much exactly the opposite of that because.

00:43:33
Speaker 2: They dictate a line of play. As soon as you dictate a line of play, you take away the strategic flexibility. Just as it's a whole other conversation if you want to make a green interesting, take away the bunkers, because then the elite player has to think. As soon as they start thinking, they're in trouble, whereas myself mid handicapper would much prefer chipping or putting on short grass. Now that's a separate conversation, but to the extent that trees dictate a line of play. Having said that, tilling Has has a wonderful drawing that he provides in one of his articles from the twenties early twenties, and he says, there's a proper way to do a tree clearing. He shows a straight line with trees on each edge, you know, and he says that's not going to create any interest. He says, show that there's a slice opportunity where you open up the tree line on the right, there's a deeper one on the left. Have some variety in the tree line to conform to the way shots roll, so that you can recover. It was the art of recovery. And that's why if the trees are scattered, not dense forest, but if they're scattered light. You know, you think about Mickelson's famous shot on the thirteenth of Augusta, the six iron he hit to the green on the Saturday and the Masters that he won. He didn't make the putt, but it was a fantastic escape. It's only possible because there's room and a possibility. The most boring shot in the world is getting down with forearn and hitting it out sideways. That's not strategy, that's not a shot, the opportunity to create an escape, and so a lot of that has to do with the density of trees. You know. The right side of eleven at Augusta National, to me is a nightmare because there's a solid wall that they planted which obstructs, by the way, the view of spectators, and yet they left enough of an alleyway to the right of it. Tiger Woods always seemed to bail out there and then hit a shot. That is such an ill thought out way to go about the tree on fifteen on the left, brilliant thinning out the tree so that you have the opportunity to play that is appropriate. So those are the elements that also go into these sort of things.

00:45:49
Speaker 1: Scattered trees can be a very compelling hazard. And you know, even if you I know, there's a quote that everybody likes to take from Alistair McKenzie that talks about how these straight lines of tree down every side of the fairway or are not desirable. But mackenzie goes on to say, in a less quoted passage, well if you have scattered trees, if you have kind of these isolated little copses and things like that, those can be really really interesting. And so I think there's it's it's very important to introduce nuance to this discussion. It's not about clear cutting versus forest. There's an in between a state for a lot of golf courses that can be the ideal solution. All right. Finally, here I'd like to touch on aesthetics. This is such an interesting topic to me because the again there's a common sensical argument here that seems persuasive at first, but but might not be after further analysis. Many people might say trees are beautiful, therefore taking them down necessarily makes a golf course less beautiful. How do you go about responding to that.

00:46:55
Speaker 2: Well, the trees are not the golf course. So the really beautiful part part of being on a golf course is scanning the horizon line. Your eye moves left to right, and by the way, as the evidence of this to I love giving this example. I've done this all the time in lectures. When you have newscasters, you got the older, scruffy guy on the left and the beautiful young woman on the right. Your eye is always moving this way. In horror films, your eye is moving left to right, so the knife always comes in from the right. And Psycho, when Janet Ye gets killed in the shower, she's coming in from the left and the knife's coming in from the right. And the impact of your eye moving is part of the esthetic experience. That these these are actually true physiological components of the human body. The beauty of a golf course is when you can scan the horizon line. So that Dunlop White talks about raising the canopy, and he's.

00:47:56
Speaker 1: Lop White, the great longtime green chairman at Old Town Club.

00:48:01
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And He wrote about this a long time ago, about raising the canopy so you don't need to remove trees, but you can trim up the canopy so that you can see the horizon line and get a feel for how the land moves. A solid wall. You go to northern Minnesota and look at a solid wall of pine trees. There's nothing particularly beautiful about that. What's great is when you can when you're in the woods, then you see the sunlight and the clouds and the color of the sky through that. So that's the beauty of it. But an undifferentiated woodland that doesn't have the character so that you want to thin it out, open it up, raise the canopy being able to move this way, that's the beautiful part. And also the occasional view behind where you have, say an infinity edge, so you have this dramatic you know you're in North Carolina in the mountains and you have a and behind it is just miles of sky or ocean. I think about the at Sebonic, the fifteenth hole of the par five, where they gradually lifted the canopy behind so that you now have this beautiful vista of a great pliconic bay behind the green that they didn't have until they thinned that out. So what you're trying to do is use the landscape features as a canvas and not simply impose this vertical structure upon it, because that doesn't have any kind of distinctive, site specific esthetic to it. So a lot of it depends on what you're looking at and what's there and what you're hiding. But exposing that and allowing golfers to see that from various vantage points, that to me is where the beauty and the variety of a golf course come out. It's the most varied canvas of any sports field. The only regulation for the esthetic is or the structure is that the whole you're playing to is four and a quarter inches across. Everything else varies. You might as well utilize that opportunity to experience the landform and the sensibility of where you are as part of that. And if you rely upon trees to create the curtain, you know, you might as well be in a in a darkened room for all that matters. You lose the sense of place and of what's special about the golf course.

00:50:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what you're talking about right now, the term of art for it is view shed, which is and that is the idea that you can you can see across a landscape or have a long view from from multiple different vantage points, and that is that is beautiful. That's the thing is that there's there are different kinds of beauty. The beauty of an individual tree is undeniable. But but but certainly when you're on a golf course, the ability to see, to have that view shed is a power esthetic experience. And I think that's that's probably the factor that makes a lot of club members who might initially oppose a tree program eventually endorse it once they discover the wonders of the view shed. Then then it's all over. Then they're suggesting more trees that can be taken out because they have that kind of emotional experience of being able to see across.

00:51:21
Speaker 2: The views you have, they're either exterior or interior. They're either you know, whistling straight or looking at the lake or at aronomank. You're looking across the beauty of that slope and the holds behind it, so that you have to sort of decide what it is you're revealing. But it can be one or two or both that's available to you.

00:51:44
Speaker 1: Sorry, No, that's the great point. I was going to add that there's a there's an interesting issue also of scale here where, And I just saw an example this this morning. We're recording this the week of the US Open, and this morning Might Clay and the great Australian player and architect, just posted a before and after photo of the thirteenth hole at the Addington in England. And there's you know, the before photo has the tree very closely enclosed by has the hole very closely enclosed by trees. And then the second photos not every tree has been removed, but it has been opened up. And to me, in the second photo, the land looks way bigger. It looks bigger in scale, and part of the reason for that is that the trees are no longer overwhelming the scale of the land. The land as all of a sudden the bigger thing, or is at least competing with the scale of the trees, and so all of a sudden the golf hole doesn't look dinky anymore. It looks more grand by a lot. And that's another effect of tree removal that has that I think is it's something it's hard to understand unless you have actual on the ground experience of that before and after.

00:53:06
Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, yeah. I always I have this secret theory that at country clubs people started, they didn't really want to see their business partners, they didn't want to see who else was sleeping with the you know, their spouses. They wanted to just have this little isolated thing because they really were kind of grumpy about stuff, and they got so used to this narrow view that they forgot where they were. And it's it's just now we're allowing them in this grander view. I think of Inwood Country Club on Long Island. There's just a fantastic example. When I grew up there caddying, it was tree lined and you had no idea of downtown Manhattan, you had no idea of the marshland, you had no idea of the transition of the terrain through those landforms. And now it's the vital part of the golf course experience. It's just completely changes your sense of what you're doing while you're playing golf.

00:53:59
Speaker 1: So looking towards the few sure here, do you think I think there's a sense out there that that that tree management has won and that maybe even we've gone a little bit too far. And that in some courses we've removed too many trees. Where where do you come down on that? Do you think there is still a significant amount of work to be done, both both culturally and practically at golf courses toward the goal of tree management, or do you think that that there's a moment here when we can start to step back and say, how can we restore some trees to some of these landscapes that that might be calling out for them. Where do you land on that or is it just a club by club thing?

00:54:44
Speaker 2: Well? I am sensitive to the view. I know a number of architects have sort of tried to sit this one out and think, well, this is just a fad. This is like you know, island greens, or railroad ties or or drivable four parts. And I don't think it's that way, because I think the agronomic benefits, the management benefits, and the esthetic beauty that results is so transformative and so unique to the nature of the golf as a sports field that I think we're more or less this is where we are going to be, and then it's a matter of refining that. I do think that a lot of attention needs to be paid to how the site evolved on a case by case basis. I do think that's important. And again I go back to what Gill says. I was there when he was making a pitch to do the restoration of Worcester Country Club, where I just was. Last week they had the centenary of the twenty five US Open and this is back a few years ago, and they said are They asked Gill, of all people, are you an expert in what Donald Ross did? He says, I'm going to be an expert in what Donald Ross did to Worcester Country Club. And it was the perfect answer. And so that's what architects need to do. That's why I resist the notion of a certain expertise that you're so used to what so and so did that you know what he did. Everywhere That formula didn't play very well. I think the architects now who have come up either through the ranks or who have matured from the big companies and gone off on their own, I think a lot of them are much more attentive to the specifics of that site, that history, that evolution, and on a case by case basis. Having said that, I do see there's a need for tree replacement of existing trees. There's a need for tree planning and tree management really is a sustained commitment, not just about removal. It's not just a euphemism for removal. It requires a really comprehensive plan, you know, attention to the health and safety of the mature trees, including the elm trees that are still there. So I do think it requires a little bit more, a lot more than the notion of tree removal. It's planning what the landscape is going to look like. You know. Frederick Lahlmsted this when he built Central Park, and all of his planning was about anticipating thirty forty years of how that site would evolve, not just what it's going to be today. So that requires considerable technical training and planning.

00:57:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Brad, thank you for coming on the podcast. Always want to talk to you.

00:57:40
Speaker 2: Pleasure.

00:57:48
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. If you've been enjoying Designing Golf so far, then leave us a rating and review wherever you might be listening to us, whether that's Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and also make sure to check out Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see everything that you get with your membership to Frida Egg Golf Club. But one of those benefits is exclusive content. This includes updates on golf architecture news, so things that are happening in the world of golf architecture, you will be among the first to know what's happening there. And also weekly course profiles. These are in depth explorations of particular golf courses with beautiful imagery shot by our team, as well as some very well thought through words about the designs of great golf courses. So that's part of what you get at Frida Egg Golf Club. We're building a really fun community in there. I'm getting a lot of value out of it, so I would like you to join us. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode in the back