Deep Dive: Cypress Point

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I don't know what the best course in the world is, but if you were to narrow it down to two or three candidates, Cypress Point would be one of them. Let's dive deep. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf, all right. This is a big one. We're talking about. Cypress Point Club in Pebble Beach, California, the venue of the upcoming twenty twenty five Walker Cup. This golf course was designed by Alistair McKenzie, with some key contributions from his associate Robert Hunter. There was also input from members of the development team, which included Samuel Morse and Marion Hollins. Construction began in late nineteen twenty seven and the first round was played in August nineteen twenty eight. Since the day it opened, Cypress Point has been one of the small handful of the world world's most remarkable golf courses. The properties mixture of Duneland forest and seaside cliffs is unique and extraordinarily beautiful, and the routing of the course alternates between those environments seamlessly. Every golfer knows about the ocean holes, the miniature fifteenth, the huge sixteenth, and the strategic par four seventeenth. But what makes Cypress Point Cypress Point is that the holes in the dunes and the trees are just as good as the ones on the Seaside coast. And if you ask a member what their favorite hole is, they're just as likely to name an inland hole like the ninth or the thirteenth as a seaside one. Alistair Mackenzie himself was thrilled with the course. He wrote, not only is it the best golfing terrain I have ever had to deal with, but it is the only course I have ever been associated with which has given me complete satisfaction in regard to the details of the construction work. Mackenzie went on to compare Cypress Point to his ideal golf course, the Old Course at Saint Andrews. He wrote, Cypress Point has similar strategic problems to Saint Andrews and is infinitely more spectacular and beautiful. For years, I have been contending that in our generation, no other golf course could possibly compete with the strategic problems, the thrills, excitement, variety, and lasting and increasing interest of the Old Course. But the completion of Cypress Point has made me change my mind. So today we're doing a deep dive into the golf course at Cypress Point. We'll be joined for part of the episode by the author of the club's upcoming centennial book, David Normoyl. David and I will talk about the history of Cypress Points founding and construction. Later, we'll bring on Joshua Pettitt, a golf architect and the founder of the Alistair Mackenzie Institute. Josh and I will discuss a few fun stories about specific aspects of Cypress Points architecture, and for the other parts of the episode, I'll just be talking with you directly, with my producer Will Balsam kind of as a sounding board. With me, I'll just be monologuing essentially about the courses, land routing, strategic design, greens and restoration work and so on. Now, before we get to all of that, I want to talk for a minute about some of my personal history with Cyprus Point, if you'll indulge me just for a couple of minutes here. I've been fascinated with this course since I was a kid. I've told this story before, but my interest in golf course design really started when my dad brought home a copy of the World Atlas of Golf and the map. This book has these great beautiful maps in it. The map that I looked at the most was the map of Pipe Point. It was just the most outrageously cool looking course I could imagine. I could barely believe that it was real. But it was also in a setting that I was very familiar with. I grew up in Santa Barbara, California, which is about a four hour drive from Monterey, and I obviously started to wonder, will I ever get to play this golf course? Is that even possible? Fast forward about twenty years later, and I moved to Pebble Beach to teach at a boarding school called Stevenson School. Stevenson is right next to Spyglass Hill golf Course, which in turn is right next to Cypress Point. So it was about a fifteen minute walk to the forest holes at Cypress Point from where I lived on campus in a house on campus. It was faculty housing at Stephenson's School, and I lived and worked there for five years, and I walked by Cypress Point many times. The funny thing about Cypress is that it's not really hidden from public view. The first thirteenth and fourteenth holes are right next to seventeen mile Drive. You can even pull to the side of the road and hang out on Fanshell Beach and you're literally one hundred yards from the thirteenth Green, And if you wanted to take it a step further, there's a public hiking trail that runs along the top of the dune ridge above the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth holes. It's called the Green Trail. You can park in the Pebble Beach Equestrian Center and within a few minutes you're looking at Cypress Point. So it's not one of those courses that's concealed behind gates and completely inaccessible. But of course it is not easy to get a tea time at Cypress. It's a small membership club that likes to keep things very low key and low profile. So during the five years that I lived in Pebble Beach, within literally eight hundred yards as the crowflies of the fifth Green at Cypress Point, I actually never played it. And this was around the time that I was getting back into golf, getting interested in golf course design again, starting to write about it, and that eventually led to the career that I have now. But at the time, I often thought to myself, how funny it was that I had this passion for golf courses, these things that I could look at and maybe get close to, but not actually experience. In a few key cases. It's sort of like if you were a movie lover and there was a film that you knew to be one of the greatest ever made. Everybody thought that it was the greatest, but you couldn't watch it. You could just sort of hang out outside the theater and maybe catch a few lines of dialogue or a few hits.

00:06:48
Speaker 2: Of the score.

00:06:50
Speaker 1: That's what it felt like for me with Cyprus Point, and I didn't feel that with any bitterness. I wasn't angry about it. It just amused me a little bit. How have I put myself in this position that this is what I really love and it has kind of this weird dynamic. And I think the reason that I wasn't that I wasn't bitter about it or angry about it, is partly because I figured I probably would eventually get a chance to play the course, and that did turn out to be the case. I've been very lucky to play Cyprus Point a few times now. But the reason I'm telling you about all of this is that I know that some of you listening are probably in the same position that I was a number of years ago when I loved this golf course that I didn't have any way of playing. I know what that's like, and I don't take it for granted at all that I've now gotten to study this course in person, and I'm thrilled that I'm in a position to relay what I've learned to you. I'm very grateful for all of that. And I just add that if you have, if you have a real and enduring passion for golf architecture, if you become involved in the community of fellow enthusiasts, you will end up getting opportunities that you never thought you'd get. And that's that's what's happened for me, and I think that that's a true thing about about this community that we're part of. So that's it for the For the personal section of the podcast, well, we'll now properly get into the deep dive on Cyprus Point and we'll start with some history. My guest for that segment is David Normoyle. But first I want to talk about our sponsor for this episode, Best Day brewing. Best Day has a really cool origin story. It was created by Tate Hufford and launched a little over three years ago. Basically, Tate led a very active and social lifestyle and he loves a good beer. But as he got older and got more responsibilities a career, a marriage, kids, those mornings where he had to get up and get after it after a couple of IPAs suddenly became a little more challenging. Getting up to motivate for an early surf session or tea time just became more difficult. So he did some research, found a brewery that had the latest and most modern equipment to d alc beer and started developing recipes to make non alcoholic beer that could go toe to toe with a solid, full strength beer. It took some time, but once he nailed the recipes after testing multiple batches with his friends, he took it to the market and three years later, Best Day is in almost forty states with one of the fastest growing non alcoholic beer brands in the country. It's delicious stuff, and you know, I'm a lot like Tate. I like having a beer in the evening. It's just a ritual that helps me put a cap on the day and relax. But I found that in recent years I just slept better and functioned better overall if I wasn't consistently consuming alcohol. And what Best Day does for me is it allows me to have the ritual without the side effects. So here's the deal that Best Day Brewing is offering to our listeners. You can get twenty percent off your first order at Best Daybrewing dot com with code fried Egg twenty. This offer excludes subscription orders, but otherwise for your first order twenty percent off with fried Egg twenty. All right, let's get to David Normoyle. All right, David, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

00:10:38
Speaker 3: Pleasure Garrett.

00:10:40
Speaker 1: So, in talking about the history of Cyprus, point I'd like to start pretty broad, bring some characters onto the stage, and then finally get to the building of the golf course. So, first of all, who was Samuel Morse?

00:10:58
Speaker 3: Well, Samuel Morse was a man from the East who found himself in the West. And that's the theme that I think runs through all of the main characters of this story, whether it's Samuel Morse, Marion Hollins, Roger Lapham and even Alistair Mackenzie. They all came from somewhere else, and because of their experiences at Cypress, at Cypress Point, and in particularly the Monterey Peninsula, but at Cypress Point, they made the rest of their lives on that portion of the world. So Samuel Morse was raised in Boston, educated at Yale. He was the captain of the undefeated Yale football team in nineteen oh six. And his hero was Teddy Roosevelt. And because of some connections that he made with classmates at Yale from the Hammond family and then more importantly the Crocker family, which is one of the Big four California families from the eighteen hundreds, the railroad barons and industrialists, he got a job working on ranches in California, and following in the model of his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, he loved being on horseback and working the land. And the Crockers happened on this huge piece of land as part of the Pacific Improvement Company, which was an outgrowth of one of these great industrialist conglomerate corporations that owned thousands and thousands of acres on the Monterey Peninsula, including Pebble Beach, Cyprus Point, and the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey. Unfortunately, because of a variety of different land complications, this del Monte unit was hugely unprofitable, and so the Crockers were trying to get rid of it, to liquidate it. So they hired sam Mors to come and be the manager of this land and to gussie it up so that it could be ready for sale to benefit the inheritors of this property. Except the problem was Sam Mors didn't want to sell it. He wanted to buy it because he had a vision for creating a new port of the West, a sort of grand resort on the most beautiful piece of land. But unlike what had been and done previously through the Pacific Improvement Company in Pacific Grove as an example, chopping up the land into small pieces of real estate, what Morse wanted to do was preserve the best pieces of land for golf, which would then drive value of the real estate further inland. And he oversaw all of this as the Duke of Delmonte from nineteen fifteen until his death in nineteen sixty nine.

00:13:24
Speaker 1: The Duke of Delmonte. I like that. That's how he was actually known. That's not your term for.

00:13:30
Speaker 3: Him, No, No, He was kind of known as that around town, and some people say that he didn't like it. Some people say that he secretly embraced it. But he wore a lot of different hats as the developer of del Monte. He from his father, who fought in the Civil War, had a kind of pugilistic instinct, and from his mother, who was a sculptor. He was an artist, so a number of his original paintings Charcoal and Oils are hanging on the walls of the clubhouse at Cyprus Point. So he balanced both. He approved every single planning or architectural plan in the Delmonte Forest from nineteen fifteen to nineteen sixty nine, and he had his fingerprints on everything, including Cyprus Point.

00:14:09
Speaker 1: Could you give me a sense for the scope of his vision for del Monte properties, for this kind of big, you know, sort of resort attraction that he wanted to build in the Monterey area, just the size of it, the extent of it.

00:14:24
Speaker 3: Well, he started with the Hotel del Monte, which was this grand Victorian structure built by Charles Crocker in the eighteen eighties and in the mid nineteen twenties it burned down, actually, and he was able to rebuild it in his preferred sort of neo Spanish Californian style, and that's what really set the tone for a lot of what he was doing. But if you think about it, he realized that the best way to sell real estate was to people who had money, and he knew from the nineteen sixteen Western Amateur, which was played at the old Delmonte Golf Course historicalf course from the eighteen nineties right next to the Hotel del Monte Marey. He knew that wealthy people tended to travel to golf tournaments, and so he created this tiered structure where beginning with the public access historic old Delmonte Golf Course, he then added a public access Pebble Beach Golf Links in nineteen nineteen, which would drive visitors' bedstays all of that to the newly rebuilt lodge. And then if you keep going up the pyramid, the idea was to build a thirty six hole country club, the Monterey Peninsula country Club, which came about starting in nineteen twenty five, and that would be for local landowners, retired military people, people who wanted to buy smaller pieces of land. And then at the very pinnacle of his golf pyramid would be the exclusive Cypress Point Club on the most beautiful piece of land, limited to a smaller number, again driving people to buy the most expensive and valuable lots. The only problem was he, as the president of the del Monte Properties Company, couldn't be seen to promote both this private Cypress Point Club and del Monte Properties. There needed to be an intermediate, and in Marion Hollands, sam Morse found his ideal.

00:16:05
Speaker 1: We'll get to Marion Hollands in a second. That was an excellent segue, but I'm gonna jam that for a second and ask about the kind of general role of golf in Morse's vision, because I think that maybe some listeners right now would be surprised to hear that these great golf courses, including Cyprus Point, were sort of part of a real estate scheme, and real estate driven golf has a bit of a bad name now among golf architecture enthusiasts and golf purists. How was what Morse was doing with the combination of real estate and golf maybe different from what modern people would expect from that mixture.

00:16:49
Speaker 3: Sure, when Sam Morse inherited the Delmonte unit project and turned it into the Delmonte Properties Company. There were plans to have hundreds of row houses on the headland where the sixth hole and seventh green at Pebble Beach are right now. So if you want to know what that would have looked like, go to Google Earth. Look at what Pacific Grove looks like just slightly to the north on the Monary peninsula, and imagine Pacific Grove on top of Pebble Beach golf links, because that's what the del Moni Properties Company inherited plans for that. But what Morse realized is if you preserve the most beautiful pieces of land for golf, open views, etc. And move the real estate further inland with a view of the golf and the sea beyond, that real estate will only continue to increase in value again and again, whereas the small properties you can only sell once. And one person who he convinced to do this was Robert Hunter, who bought and built a house designed by Wallace Neff on the thirteenth hole at Pebble Beach, overlooking the golf course with Point Lobos in the distance, and he became central to the Cyprus Point story.

00:17:52
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get back to Marion Hollins. Now who was Marion Hollins.

00:17:58
Speaker 3: Marion Hollins was another child of the East who found herself in the West. She was born in New York City to great privilege in the eighteen nineties. Her father, if you can imagine, was the founding president of the Metropolitan Golf Association, Harry B. Hollins HB. And one of his great friends was the son of the Vanderbilts, who at the time were the wealthiest family in America, and he really saved their bacon on a finance deal in the eighteen eighties, so as a consequence, he was able to build a six hundred acre family homestead out on Long Island where Marian grew up, including having a small golf course on this amazing piece of land. And she did everything. She had only brothers, and she did everything. She was the classic tomboy who rode horses, learned to play polo, eventually became the only woman in America with a man's rated handicap at polo. But her strength was as a golfer, and she emerged around the same time as Bobby Jones on the national scene, finally breaking through in nineteen twenty one and winning the US Women's Amateur. And during this time as one of these great polo players and golfers, she would make occasional visits, including before World War One and after out to Pebble Beach for the purpose of playing polo at del Monte. And by the way, Sam Morris was captain of the del Monte polo team, so he dabbled in this as well, so he knew Marion and he engaged Marion slightly after she won the nineteen twenty one Women's Amateur to sell real estate, and essentially she was I don't want to use the word shill, but she was the front person who would get her wealthy New York society friends to come out to Monterey and buy expensive real estate, which she did herself. And having developed the Women's National Golf and Tennis Club on Long Island with Dero Emmett and ultimately Seth Rayner and Charles Blair MacDonald in the nineteen twenties, she was perfectly poised to develop this exclusive private club at Cyprus Point for Sam Moore.

00:20:01
Speaker 1: Women's National was an incredible looking course. There are some vintage photos of this course that make it clear that it was a high quality golf course. Clearly Hollins had very good taste in golf course design, knew how to choose a piece of land, and so she would seem to be very well suited to this new role in Morse's overall scheme. So, how then, was Cypress Point conceived? How did all the parties kind of come together choose a property and come up with the idea for this club.

00:20:37
Speaker 3: Well, if you go back and do some research. In late nineteen twenty three and Pacific Golf and Motor, there was an article by a guy named Francis Macomas who became a Cypress Point member. He was an artist and he was best friends with Sam Morse and in December of nineteen twenty three, this is before all the things that we think we know happen. He said that the history of the Pebble Beach courses dates back to nineteen fourteen when Crocker, one of these men and more started talking about the possibilities. So they investigated a few holes, and they also said that favorable mention of the site of the present course Pebble Beach and also the land around Cypress Point, where eventually a third course will be built was explored. Seth Rayner, one of the world's most distinguished golf architects, with Miss Marion Hollins, recently spent time studying Cypress Point locality and reached the conclusion that as a material for a great golf course, it cannot be surpassed in America. So the idea of developing a golf course at Cypress Point began with the whole development of Pebble Beach and del Monte in nineteen fourteen, nineteen fifteen ish, but finally the time arrived in twenty three, twenty four and twenty five to develop this golf course. Marion Hollins was engaged by Sam Morse to do the selling, and Seth Rayner was engaged as well because he was doing the work at Modera at Peninsula Country Club for the del Monte Properties Company. And I would add also that Hollins would have known Rayner and McDonald because not only was her father the founding president of the Metropolitan Golf Association, but he joined every club in the New York area and was a founding member of the National Golf Links. So Marian had loads of access to the National Golf Links. Understood the whole theory behind it. And when she went to develop her women's National golf course, she too traveled overseas, playing in amateur tournaments and studied the great holes of the UK, just like Charles Blair McDonald did with National Golf links. So at the beginning she was very much in the National school of thought, and you can read this in some of her writings about the Women's National not so much the Mackenzie naturalism, which we'll get to in a bit.

00:22:44
Speaker 1: What can you tell me about how far SETH. Rayner got into the design process and which aspects of the current Cypress Point course might be linked to his initial efforts? What can you tell me about all that?

00:23:00
Speaker 2: Sure?

00:23:01
Speaker 3: Well, in nineteen twenty three, twenty four and again in twenty five, Rayner made visits from Monterey Peninsula and also visited the land at Cypress Point. And one of the pieces of interesting pieces of evidence that we found during the research is a newspaper article from the Lassie Los Angeles Evening Express in September of nineteen twenty five. So Rayner still very much alive, and the headline reads wonder golf course. Miss Holland's creation will be delightful one hole carries calls for a long carry over a lake. Interestingly enough, that lake was the sixteenth hole and.

00:23:40
Speaker 1: It wasn't a lake.

00:23:41
Speaker 3: Yeah, it wasn't a lake. But the way to think about it is this, from the beginning, the founders, Hollands, Morse and everybody else knew that the clubhouse was going to be where the clubhouse was going to be, which was on a rise on a relatively flat piece of land overlooking Cypress Point on one side, overlooking Fanshell Beach, which is the cove where the first green is. It's Fanshell Beach on the other side, and then the Cypress Grove. So there was always going to be the clubhouse there on that beautiful spot. And then when you think of the name of the course, the name of the club, the Cypress Point club holes were always going to be played along Cypress Point. So the big question is if you know where the clubhouse is, and you know that you're going to play the holes along Cypress Point, are you going to play them clockwise to begin, down the hill around them and then go play the inland holes or are you going to play them counterclockwise to finish? You only have two choices, and from beginnings of recorded history, photographs before there was ever a golf course were always taken from the land looking out to Cypress Point for the sixteenth green. There were never photographs taken from the point looking back to the land because it's inherently less dramatic. So from this beginning point Seth Rayner was in, Marion was involved. They always knew that the sixteenth hole was going to be played in the direction that it is counterclockwise to finish. So the big question becomes what do you do with the other fourteen holes on the other side of the road. Because if you're going to have those four holes along Cyprus Point, which with all due respect my mother in law would have designed exactly the same way that Seth Rayner and Marion Hollins and Alistair McKenzie did, because there's really only one way to play them, the question is what do you do on the other side. And Seth Rayner did a routing of the other holes, and it was described in this article, and I'll tell you some of the things that were said. So this Los Angeles Evening Express from September of nineteen twenty five reads the former champion Marion Allins is convinced, with the assistance of Seth Rainer in Golf Architect of National note that she hopes to construct a creation which will even surpass such notable links as Leedo and the National. National was always held up as the standard which new development we're trying to match. It reads, the first nine holes will lead into the virgin forest, which contains innumerable kinds of trees of great age, and is interesting to learn that those which are doomed to be cut down have been sold to private parties by Miss Hollins. The article continues, from the forest lane, the lynx will lead down to the water's edge along mountains of that glorious white sand, which particularly belongs to that district, as do the cypress trees. The greatest hole in the lynx will probably be the sixteenth, which calls for a carry of one hundred and eighty yards clean over the bay. So the article describes the routing as going nine holes into the forest and then back along the mountains of sand. If you want to know exactly what Seth Rayner's routing was, in the upcoming centennial history book that the club is producing, there will be a routing map so that you can see exactly what he did. However, the more interesting thing is not what Seth Rayner may or may not have done, but what Alistair mackenzie actually did. And when you think about the four holes that go around Cyprus Point, we've already determined there's really only one way to do counterclockwise to finish. Then the question becomes what do you do inland. You've got one hole leading away from the clubhouse the first, You've got another hole leading back to Cyprus Point the fourteenth, So you have twelve holes that you have to do something interesting with And according to that article, Rayner took nine of them and went into the forest. Well, if you think about how Mackenzie ended up designing it, and this is where the story becomes remarkable. When Alistair Mackenzie got on a ship in January of nineteen twenty six to sail to New York City to visit America to see his design partners Perry Maxwell and Robert Hunter in San Francisco. Ultimately, when he did this, Seth Rayner was still alive on the way across the country on the t Seth Rayner dies six days after Seth Rayner dies and Marion Hollins no longer has an architect for Cypress Point. Alistair Mackenzie arrives in San Francisco to meet Robert Hunter, and a couple of days after that, February second, he comes and visits Cypress Point for the first time. He's there briefly but long enough to create a new routing map and a new design with details of bunkers and greens, and a routing that incorporates some of the features we're about to talk about in a way that makes it possible for Albert Barrows to draw that famous aerial map that you see in nineteen twenty six. And mackenzie didn't return to Cyprus Point again for another year nineteen twenty seven, so he was there only briefly, but long enough to design all of the features and change the routing to a degree where it looks kind of like it does today. However, there were a few changes during construction. So the key thing to think about when you're trying to understand how Cypress Point works as a golf course is there are three main environments. You've got the see, the sand, and the forest, and you're constantly moving from one environment to the next. See sand forest, and only when you play the holes at Cypress Point do you visit those once, and all the other elements from two through fourteen you visit those features multiple times. You come to them and from them and away from them. And the way that Mackenzie and Hunter made this possible is that every single hole on the other side of seventeen mile drive from Cypress Point, so holes one through fourteen, every single hole plays to a dune or from a doone, every single one except for the fifth. And the reason the most dramatic bunkering on the entire golf courses on the fifth is because it's the only hole where you have no contact with a natural dune. So one plays to a dune, two plays from a dune, Three plays to a dune, four plays from a dune, five you're truly in the forest, six to the dune, seven from it, eight over and in it. Nine plays to the core of Mackenzie in Hunter's central dune, ten plays from it, eleven plays to it, and twelve plays away from it. Thirteen you rejoin the fanshell dune, that first central dune, the first bit of the dune, and then fourteen plays away from it. So all of those holes are really dune holes. And Mackenzie talked about it in March of nineteen twenty seven, writing in Game of Gossip, Game and Gossip, which is Sam Morris's local magazine. Mackenzie said, and this is before construction ever began. We shall play over inlets of the sea, turn into the pine woods, and then into high dunes, and back again to a club looking into the endless expanse of a great ocean. Five holes skirting the sea or flirting with its waves, five holes in the pine woods, and eight greens in the dunes. Where else shall we find all of this? And So if you want to try and understand the difference between what Mackenzie did and what Rayner may and may not have done, just think of the description for Rainer nine holes led into the forest. For Mackenzie five he also planted eight greens in the dunes. Do you have any of your grandmother's old recipes? So if you know the ingredients, you know the recipe, when you make it, does it taste the same? No, because just knowing the recipe or just knowing the routing is not the same as creating the whole thing. I mean architecture is a combination of routing, yes, but also design, so the shapes of the bunkers, the people who shape the bunkers, and then ultimately construction. And I think one of the remarkable things about how Cyprus Point was created is that mackenzie acknowledged that almost all of the greens and fairways and teas were artificially constructed. It's just that you don't know it. He was the magician trying to hide his work, complain sight, and that was the intent it was.

00:32:02
Speaker 1: It was that kind of contribution of naturalness and seamlessness, which was, you know, Mackenzie's trademark. Obviously, many of our listeners will know who Alistair McKenzie was, but you know, if we can backtrack a little bit, who was he by the mid nineteen twenties, How would you characterize the stage of the career of his career that he was in at that point that he got the Cypress Point commission.

00:32:32
Speaker 3: So he arrived in San Francisco in February, late January February of nineteen twenty six. So this is ground zero from an American golf perspective. He had never built a golf course prior to that moment, And so when Marion Hollins and Sam Morris want to build Cyprus Point, they of course would not have gone to Mackenzie. They would have gone to Seth Rayner and Charles Blair McDonald because they were the leading architects in America at the time. But with Rayner's passing, a pivot was required. And it's not just that Mackenzie was an interesting character. It's also that Robert Hunter, his design partner, who lived in Pebble Beach and at the very same time was coming out with his own book on architecture, The Lynx, which in April of that year, just a couple of months after Mackenzie and Hunter visited Cyprus Point for the first time. Hunter hand inscribed a copy of the Links to Samuel Morse. So as much of an expert as Mackenzie was, Hunter in California was equally so an expert in golf architecture. But at the time Mackenzie had designed or he designed a number of golf courses in the UK, but really had not expanded beyond that. He hadn't gone on his trip to Australia yet, he hadn't built anything in America. He had just done the UK based work and wrote his book Golf Architecture, along with a number of other articles, and so it was really this opportunity to make his debut in California in nineteen twenty six that set things running. But at the time he had nothing special to claim on his own, so it was really an almost providential visit that he happened to be en route to California at the time of rainers passing.

00:34:14
Speaker 1: So a lot of luck factored into his earning of this opportunity, in other words.

00:34:21
Speaker 3: Huge amounts. But then he went and reconstructed or constructed a number of golf courses in California, starting with the Metal Club. He did bunker work at the California Golf Club cal Club, reconstructed a number of greens after the initial construction was done by Vernon McCann, did Cyprus Point, did some work at Pebble Beach, did some work at Moderate Peninsula Valley Club, on and on and on, and ultimately Pasa Tempo, where he resided towards the end of his life. Number of other courses in California two.

00:34:51
Speaker 1: So this mackenzie Hunter partnership was very dynamic. How would you characterize the work that they did generally in California from a stylistic perspective, In other words, what was distinctive about the work that they did together as opposed to the work that Mackenzie did with say, Perry Maxwell in the Midwest, or with Alex Russell and others in Australia. What did this kind of partnership produce well.

00:35:22
Speaker 3: The key unifying feature in all of this was the company that Hunter and Mackenzie formed, the American Golf Course Construction Company, and Neil Crafter and Shawn Tully have done far more research and written about it far better than I ever will. In fact, there's a great article in the Australian Golf Course Architects Journal that from twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen that Sean and Neil did that covers all of this. But I think the key thing is as Mackenzie was building golf courses in the UK, he was dissatisfied with the quality of construction, so he and his brother founded the British Golf Course Construction Company and then this created the model for Hunter to do the American Golf Course Construction Company, and Mackenzie brought over a number of his associates who all happened to be Irish for whatever reason, to be the lead shapers and builders. So it was Hunter Hunter's son, Robert Hunter Junior. And then the key names at least on the Cypress Point project were Jack Fleming who stayed and they all stayed in California, by the way, Jack Fleming, Dan Gormley. The key bunker shaper in all the Cypress Point work was a fellow called Patty Cole, and then Michael McDonough, all irishmen, and I think extreme naturalism is the word that I would.

00:36:29
Speaker 2: Use to describe this.

00:36:31
Speaker 3: These were high flying times where real estate was going for immense amounts of money and even though they were trying to be very responsible with their costs, and actually Mackenzie felt it was outrageous how much money was being wasted on golf courses. They took risks, and they had pieces of lamb on which to take remarkable risks. But it was everything having to do with the American Golf Course Construction Company and these core people who built these golf courses. While you see a different style than you might see elsewhere.

00:37:00
Speaker 1: Okay, So Mackenzie had this great crew with him capable of producing incredibly naturalistic shapes in the landscape. Now they get a hold of a property like Cypress Point. Let's talk about construction a little bit. What were the major changes that mackenzie and his crew made to the landscape at Cyprus Point. I think, you know, to contextualize this question a little bit, I think people regard the Cypress Point property as one of the great natural golf properties, and it is probably that. But unless I'm mistaken, they did, you know, move some dirt around.

00:37:45
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they moved a lot of dirt and they had to. So Hunter worked. So he was a professor at the University of California before he retired as a sociologist, and he had relationships with the University of California professors. Is not that far from the Monterey Peninsula, and he worked with a number of scientists at Berkeley to develop test plots for what types of turf grasses they would want to use. So some of the sand dunes are beautiful for native grasses, but they're not great for building brand new turf. Charles blay MacDonald found this to be the case at National Golf Links. George Crump at Pine Valley establishing great grass on sand was one of the key breakthroughs in American golf course construction. So from starting point you had see sand and forest. You had the rocky cliffs, you had the sand dunes, and you had the forest in this ancient drainage ravine. And so you had to find a way to move essentially arable land to grow grass to all these different places to make that happen. So that was thing number one. Thing number two is the property lines for this development were in some ways shifting. You had seventeen mile drive, you had some lack of clarity about exactly where the dunes on six, seven and eight are, and so originally the sixth hole was not meant to be a back to back par five like it is today. It was meant to be a par three. But during construction they realized that actually the property line behind the seventh green and the eighth T made it possible for the seventh green to become the par three that went up into the dunes, the eighth T extending up above it, allowing for an even more heroic carry over that shoulder of the sand dune. And so that's why you have those back to back par fives in five and six, so changing changing six and seven and eight to be what they are would be one of the major changes. And then the other one was the consequence of the rerouting of the road, about which I think there's more confusion than there needs to be near the fourteenth Green. So if you look at the earliest plans, the green for number fourteen was going to be about where the middle of the curve of the road is. It was like a four hundred and twenty yard hole instead of a three hundred and eighty five yard hole. Of the sharpness of the curve that was going around the green, almost encircling it like an island. This was part of the source of frustration from Morse and his highway foreman, thinking that people were going to be killed with traffic coming so close to the edge of the green. So what they decided to do was soften the curve slightly, which required Hunter. Mackenzie wasn't there by the way to move the fourteenth Green down to its current location build it up. There's a letter on Mackenzie and Hunter letterhead which is in the book, which describes all of his thinking about this. Moved the fourteenth Green down, which slightly shortened it. Took the thirteenth hole, which was meant to be a par three initially made it into a par four, took the twelfth meant to be a par five, shortened it to a par four, going all the way back to that tee. So there was a sequence of changes as a result of that. But the other thing by routing the road where it was is it didn't allow them to build the tea out on the water on fifteen like they had perhaps originally intended, I mean early, early, before they got to where they are with Mackenzie. Plus there was the cost of doing so. So that lower T that you play today that was installed installed in the nineteen fifties. So that's one of the we'll call it major changes. The other major T change will be the creation of the ninth T. So when you look at the eighth green, that upper tier to the left that used to be the ninth T. There's a great photo that we did in the book of Mackenzie playing it sort of smashed together with the guys coming up number eight, which really shows how the connection was made. But other than that, for the most part, few things here and there, but the golf course is essentially as designed by Mackenzie and Hunter. When it opened in nineteen twenty eight.

00:41:47
Speaker 1: What was the basic time frame of construction.

00:41:53
Speaker 3: So one of the ways to think about the gestation period of Cyprus Point essentially is it was a five year period from nineteen twenty five to nineteen thirty. So key things happen in each of those.

00:42:06
Speaker 2: Years which are worth noting.

00:42:08
Speaker 3: Nineteen twenty five is the kickoff, because that's when Marion Hollins takes out the option on the land from the Delmonti Properties Company and starts signing up members. In fact, the routing from seth Rayner was February of nineteen twenty five, so very early. However, a number of things happen in nineteen twenty five and twenty six which slowed things down, including Marion hurting her back purportedly playing polo, and so the membership drives stalled and the whole thing was in danger of collapsing until a young salesman named Harrison Godwin, who ended up being a local fixture in the Carmel area owner of the Pine Inn. He was the one, as a twenty something who took the project over the line and signed up the one hundred members required in order to fund construction. So McKenzie comes in nineteen twenty six does the design, but again it's not until the next year, in nineteen twenty seven, when they finally have enough people signed up to pay for the thing. So construction begins after the club is formally incorporated in July of nineteen twenty seven. Construction begins that fall in October November, and is largely completed by April of the following year. Mackenzie came just for the third time to check it all out and to take photos when that was occurring, and the golf course opened for play in August of nineteen twenty eight. So once they got going from late nineteen twenty seven to opening in August of nineteen twenty eight, it all happened remarkably quickly.

00:43:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, is there any sense of how that happened? That is such a compressed timeframe for the construction of a golf course.

00:43:46
Speaker 3: Well, one of the reasons why it happened is because Robert Hunter lived in Pebble Beach. He was there, he was overseeing, along with his son, Robert Hunter Junior, all of the construction, and so he had a deeply vested interest. And not only it's sort of like hair club for men. Not only was he a client, he was also a member of Cypress Point, so he wanted it to go particularly well. And at the same time, there's another character in the story who I think does not get the credit he deserves, and that's Roger Lapham. So Roger Lapham was so called the Brahmin of San Francisco golf. He was the USGA Executive committee member on the West Coast from around nineteen twenty two to nineteen twenty nine. He was the one responsible for getting the US Amateur to come to Pebble Beach in nineteen twenty nine. He was part of the three man committee that redid Pebble Beach in nineteen twenty eight in preparation for the Amateur. The other people were Robert Hunter and Chandler Egan, who ended up being McKenzie's design partner after Hunter retired. So Lapham was the director of Cyprus Point who was responsible for golf course construction. There's a great letter in the book from Lapham to Hunter Junior thanking them for the work that they did. And so I think it was really it was Lapham being there it was Huunter being there, was Hunter Junior being there, and it was also the incredibly favorable growing climate of the Monterey Peninsula for year round golf.

00:45:10
Speaker 1: In addition to the quickness of the construction period, Mackenzie also ended up being very proud of the economy of the construction process, how efficient it was financially. So how did the crew achieve this? Was it part of the same reason that you know Robert Hunter was there overseeing things. Are there some other factors we should be aware of of how exactly Cyprus Point was built so cheaply and as I understand it, under budget.

00:45:43
Speaker 3: It was under budget, and it came in yeah, under budget and ahead of schedule. And they used modern construction techniques, They used equipment that they could be more efficient instead of having to use manual labor, though reported they still used up to hundred laborers at a time to dynamite trees and clear forest and all that that sort of stuff. But I think it was just the efficiency of the team that had trained and worked together, and also Hunter's advanced research on what grasses would work, and so when they actually went to plant the golf course, it took unlike Pine Valley which failed, unlike National Golf Links which failed, all of which adds cost.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, growing is probably the single most underrated factor in golf course construction. In this golden age of golf architecture. It was always growing that was the problem.

00:46:38
Speaker 3: They and they nailed it. And if you look at the descriptions of the golf course from nineteen twenty and twenty nine, they say it was the most perfectly conditioned golf course in America. Now, I mean, you didn't have the mutations and one hundred years of introducing all sorts of other elements and the coastal challenges, but it was when it opened, it was perfect. It's a miracle that Cyperu's point even exists. I mean, if you think about it, and this is something that we talk about in the book, is there was a small moment in time when it became possible to hit a golf shot from one precipice of a great ocean to the other. Because if it happened any other time during that gestation period from nineteen twenty five to nineteen thirty, So you've got Marion Hollins the option in nineteen twenty five, Mackenzie enters the picture in twenty six, the club incorporates in twenty seven, the course opens in twenty eight, the US Amateur twenty nine, and then the clubhouse finally opens in nineteen thirty. If it happens at any other moment between that narrow window of time, it's not possible because anytime before that, Pebble Beach was immature and would not have been ready from a real estate standpoint to have the number of people required to support it, So it would have been dead on arrival anytime after nineteen thirty, and because of the depression, I mean, the club barely survived in the first place. Now, imagine coming out of World War Two and just assume it was claimed by the military. There was a naval sea observation tower which was placed on the property for viewing the submarines during the war, So think of its strategic location. Imagine that clubhouse, understated George Washington Smith is owed to old Moterey stucco with white stucco and green shutters. Imagine that in the modernist fifties and sixties, Imagine the Coastal Commission making it possible to build a golf course in the seventies eighties and nineties or today. The point is, if it didn't happen in that narrow window of five years, you would never have had a chance to hit a golf shot on the sixteenth hole.

00:48:38
Speaker 1: So how was the course received when it opened? Was it immediately recognized as as one of the world's great courses?

00:48:47
Speaker 3: Immediately and astoundingly somewhat to the disappointment of Alistair McKenzie, who was looking for more criticism, and the fact that it withstood no criticism whatsoever kind of made him feel like maybe he missed something. But when you take that setting, and when you take those elements, the sea, the sand, the forest, the routing, the setting of the clubhouse, and then what evolved over the next hundred years, it was remarkable. However, if you go back fifty years to win, say the late nineteen seventies in the Walker Cup. In nineteen eighty one mackenzie had fallen out of favor. There was a letter that Lewis Lapham, who was the son of Roger Lapham and who went around with mackenzie as a teenager with a carpet and hit tea shots to determine what the carry angles should be on various holes for where the tea should be possised. In the nineteen seventies he wrote a letter suggesting that half of the members of Cypress Point wouldn't know who designed the golf course. They wouldn't know who McKenzie was. And so it was really because of a lot of things independent of Cypress Point and Alistair McKenzie. The discovery of his manuscript and the publication of the Spirit of Saint Andrews in nineteen ninety five, the formation of the Alistair McKenzie society, various books, whether it was by Tom Doak and Raymond Haddock about Alistair McKenzie, or the work and the research from George Botto that's gone into MacDonald and Rayner. That this revival and interest of these people has in turn created a kind of revival and interest in places like Cyprus Point, which when you look at the rankings from the seventies and early eighties, it was outside the top ten and barely in the top fifty in various rankings, But since the mid nineteen eighties, post Walker Cup and beyond, it's consistently remained in about the top five in America.

00:50:36
Speaker 1: Well, David, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure talking to you, and good luck with finishing the book. I'm very much looking forward to your centennial book on Cyprus Point. It'll contain I think a lot of answers to many questions I've had over the years.

00:50:52
Speaker 3: Well, the good news is the book is finished, but we're just waiting for the Walker Cup to be played because we can't quite write that chapter yet. As soon as it is, then we'll go to print.

00:51:09
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by Red Rooster Golf Gloves. So I want to tell you about a very cool opportunity that Red Rooster is offering. You can win a golf getaway to stream Song Golf Resort in Florida. No purchase necessary. This is something that Red Rooster is running really cool. So from August thirteenth to October thirty first, twenty twenty five, that's the year that we're in right now, you can enter for a chance to win a two night golf getaway at the world renowned stream Song Golf Resort in Florida. Courses designed by Tom Doak, Corn Crenshaw and Gil Hants. Really cool place. Red Rooster is sending three lucky winners, and each winner can bring a guest. That's six people heading to one of the coolest golf destinations in the world. The trip takes place December thirtieth, twenty twenty five to January first, twenty twenty six. There are three ways to enter. One the Golden Glove contest. You can buy any Red Rooster golf glove. If a golden glove arrives with your purchase, you're on the shortlist for the grand prize draw. One of twenty eight Golden Glove recipients will be randomly selected to win. The golden gloves are real Cabretta leather gloves. They're not photos or stickers. The second way to enter the contest you can refer a friend. Go to Redrooster goolf dot com and click refer a Friend, share your unique referral link. Each successful referral that is your friend makes their first Red Rooster golf purchase, earns you an entry. One winner from this group will be drawn and they can also bring a friend. The third way is to enter with your email, So visit redroostergolf dot com slash Win a Trip all one word Win a Trip. Enter your email address for a chance to win. One winner from this group will be drawn and yes, they two can bring a friend. So learn more about this great golf getaway opportunity at redroostergolf dot com slash win a trip. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, So it's just me and my producer, Will Balsam. Now, Will, welcome to the podcast.

00:53:38
Speaker 4: Thank you. Excited to make the first appearance.

00:53:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, I'm not doing you very much justice here because basically I have a lot of notes that I want to get through. I'll be talking a lot here, but it's also nice to have a sounding board, so I'm not just in my head doing doing a monologue. It's nice to have somebody to bounce things off of. And so you know, jump in whenever you want ask questions. You're kind of the audience surrogate here. Is that a'll sound good?

00:54:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll do my best for the rest of the listeners.

00:54:09
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, So you know, as usual in these deep dives, I like to break things down into categories. So we'll touch on the land, the routing, the philosophy of the design at Cypress Point, the esthetics, the greens, the agronomy a little bit, and the restoration work that has recently been done. So let's dig in here. Start with the land. So there are, as David Normoyl mentioned in my chat with him, three distinct landscapes at Cypress Point. You have the ocean cliffs, the dunes, and the woods, or as David put it, see sand and forest. The dunes are part of one large formation that cuts like a wedge into the course. The dunes hole is actually at Spyglass Hill on through five and two through four sit on the same dune formation just a little bit to the north within Cyprus Points. Section of this dune formation, there are a couple of specific sub sections. So there's a high, very prominent ridge. The eighth and ninth holes sit on top of this, The third, sixth, and eleventh greens are either benched into it or near it. The twelfth hole plays around it. So this is really the focal point of the property, this very obvious abrupt dune ridge. But then there's a lower set of dunes and sandy material kind of off to the side, and that's where the first, second, thirteenth, and fourteenth holes are. And finally of separate but related very large dune ridge running east to west. So the dune ridge that I talked about before, that's kind of in the middle of the course runs north south. This one runs east west, bordering the north side of the golf course, kind of near the sixth hole. This is where that trail is that I mentioned earlier that I used to load my son into like a hiking backpack and we would go hike on this dune above Cyprus Point and this very big dune ridge. It's less abrupt, less dramatic to look at, but it's very large. The seventh Green and the eighth t sit on this ridge. So that's the Duneland section of the course. Does that kind of make sense these different areas of the dune.

00:56:38
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can see it, okay.

00:56:41
Speaker 1: Then you have the inland forest section to the west, pretty large scale, undulating topography. And then finally you have the seaside portion of the property to the west, a spectacular series of capes and bays, very well sized for golf of dunes in the middle, forest to the east, ocean cliffs to the west. It's just an extraordinarily varied and beautiful property. And that's basically what was there before the golf course was.

00:57:13
Speaker 5: Built, seems like the perfect piece of land for a world class golf course.

00:57:18
Speaker 1: It was a great piece of land for a golf course, and Mackenzie recognized that right away. He saw that this had huge potential to be his best golf course potentially. But at the same time, I think it was also kind of tricky because it was I mean, it's the variety of the property is both a strength and a weakness in a way, because yes, it is exciting that it's so varied, and you have these great ocean cliffs, and you have the dunes, and you have the it's all there. You know, you can use all of it, but it's also a little bit disjointed, and so there's the potential that the golf course could kind of be awkward. Right. It's not like it's not a a piece of Link's land like Royal Port Rush sits on, or that the old course sits on at a lower profile where there's kind of this consistent rumple and you can almost put golf holes. You can't put them anywhere, And there are some combinations that are better than others, but there are a lot of options to make a golf course work. There at the Cypress Point property. I'm not sure there were many great solutions to the equation of the property because it was it had these different characters to it. You had to do something to make it all work together. So that brings us to the routing of Cypress Point. Now, David already discussed this beautifully in the history section of the episode. I don't think I could really improve on that description. But basically, what's brilliant about the routing of this course is how it alternates between different landscapes without ever feeling disjointed. As David pointed out, all of the inland holes except number five have some relationship with that central dune formation. The course is continually playing into, off, of around, and onto this big slice of dune land. And what makes the course a unified and coherent experience is that there's not a clean separation between the duneland holes and the forest holes. Holes like two, three, four, six, ten, eleven, and fourteen are part of two environments at once, or transition between them. They're both part of the forest and the dunes. They have elements of both landscapes in them, so they sort of function like segues and writing right They provide these links between different ideas so that the whole piece hangs together and doesn't seem choppy. But that sort of changes after the fourteenth hole. There is a clear separation between the first fourteen holes and the last four. On the ocean, you literally walk across seventeen mile drive and down a little path before arriving at the fifteenth tee, and then you walk through another path to get to the sixteenth tee. And for me, this works from a dramatic perspective. There's this pause while you're being set up for the big finale, and of course the ensuing reveals on the fifteenth hole in the sixteenth hole are incredibly exciting. To get to both teas you walk along these really compressed paths lined by cypress trees, and then boom, everything falls away and you get these panoramic views of the cliffs and the ocean. So there's a sense of compression and release. And this is an example of how the routing at Cypress Point, I think, creates anticipation and drama and just has a beautiful sense of rising and falling action. Right you start off with some excitement on the first hole with a downhill tea shot, a view of the ocean and a green benched into dune. The next two holes show you the big dune ridge and a lot of the rest of the course, giving you a preview of coming attractions. Then you wander away from that environment and into the forest for a couple of slightly quieter holes. Those still plenty dramatic because the bunkering is so outrageous on the fourth and fifth holes. The sixth hole brings you back to the dunes, and the seventh, eighth, and ninth play right on top of them. This is the most exciting stretch on the course aside from fifteen through seventeen. Then it quiets down a little bit. Two side by side longer holes in ten and eleven, playing out to the forest again and then and then back, and then twelve starts the journey out to the ocean. Once you round the corner of the dune ridge on the twelfth hole, you see the amazing thirteenth green and the uphill fourteenth hole behind it, and you know what's beyond those holes, but you can't see it, so the anticipation is building and building. You hit the ocean on fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, and then the course decides not to end with a huge flourish. Instead you get the eighteenth hole climbing back up through the trees to the clubhouse. And I think that this is sort of an unexpected choice for a golf course. A lot of great golf courses end with a bang, right, the eighteenth a Pebble Beach one of the best examples. But it's not an unusual choice for narrative art in general, like movies and novels. Often movies and novels end with falling action with a de numont, right, which is the word that may maybe an English teacher made you learn it at some point. The routing of a golf course is a narrative right. It can be compared to storytelling. So ending with a dan numont like eighteen at Cypress Point can work well, and I think it does work well. I think the line that Cypress Point is the best seventeenth hole course in the world is a little wrongheaded because Cyprus is a complete eighteenenth whole experience, and every hole plays its part, including the eighteenth. Not every hole is trying to be the most spectacular. They're just all working together to create this beautiful cadence and a wonderful story. So that's the kind of dramatic element of Cyprus's routing. How do you, I mean, what do you think of ending with an eighteenth hole that maybe seems a little bit out of character and is clearly not as spectacular as the holes that come just before it. Do you do you find that to be something that you would like or know?

01:03:34
Speaker 5: I have recently found that I'm not as hard pressed by the eighteenth hole as long as you have a stretch leading up to it that gives you some dramatic climax and ending. I think there are a lot of great golf courses that fifteen, sixteen, seventeen are like these great finishing holes I really test you. But sometimes it's all right for eighteen to maybe not reach those those standards.

01:03:59
Speaker 4: All routing is such a tough thing.

01:04:01
Speaker 5: You have to most of the time end up back where you started, so you can understand why that may be. But my preference, though, is not to end on a par three, So as long as it's not that I think you're okay.

01:04:12
Speaker 1: There are some good courses that end on par three's though, Possa Tiempo being one.

01:04:16
Speaker 4: Of them, but yes, Boston Golf Club as well.

01:04:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, Boston Golf Club exactly, very good. Yeah, it's a rarity I suppose in general, though, Yeah, I think the eighteenth of Cyprus is interesting because it has to get you back up to the clubhouse, and that's what a lot of eighteenth holes do. That's kind of what you're referring to, right where. The eighteenth hole, unlike the holes before, it has a job, and its job is to get you back to the clubhouse, get you back to the starting point. And at Cyprus it does that job. And clearly nothing that could be built on that piece of land could possibly live up to fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. There was no possibility that that whole was going to feel anything but slightly disappointing in comparison to those holes. And so Mackenzie made an interesting choice not to force it, just to kind of route this hole through the trees. It's a very tight hole. It requires a really precisely shaped shot. A lot of people just don't like the hole at all, but I think it's kind of kind of different. It really makes you shape your tee shot right to left or choose maybe to go over the trees, find that left side of the fairway so that you have a clear approach up the hill through the trees. And yeah, it's it's a different challenge and I think an interesting choice to end the golf course. He didn't try to over exert himself design wise with that hole. All right, So now that we've talked about land and routing, let's get into some of the philosophy of design, so individual holes and how they're designed. And I want to touch on three aspects of Alistair McKenzie's design. First, his use of strategic art chitecture, Second, his commitment to playability, and third his approach to the visual and esthetic composition of his holes. So, first of all, Cyprus Point is very much an example of the strategic school of golf course design. You always have an option to play safe, but if you take a risk, you're rewarded with an easier next shot. Big diagonal natural hazards appear on holes two, eight, twelve, and seventeen. This is a classic strategic dilemma where because you're hitting diagonally across a natural hazard a dune or a rock ridge like on two, or the ocean cliffs like on seventeen. Because that hazard is oriented diagonally to the te you have to choose what line to take, and you're free to take the easy route, the short carry, or you can take on the long carry, and reliably on each of those holes, you gain an advantage if you bite off more of the hazard, So strategic architecture one on one basically on those holes. There are also holes where bunkers are positioned right where you want to play. The sixth hole is a very interesting example. I think it has a big bunker off the tee on the right side, but the hole bends to the left. Jeff Shackelford actually talks about this in the video that we released a couple of days ago on our YouTube channel. There's you know, the whole bends to is a dog leg left, and so you'd think that the advantage would be cutting the dog leg, but you actually get an advantage from carrying this bunker on the right because beyond that bunker, and concealed by the bunker is a kicker slope that can feed your ball down to an ideal position to attack the hole from there. So that's an example where a bunker just sits very near the landing zone that is most advantageous again strategic architecture one oh one. The ninth hole is a classic strategic part four. The Sir, you push toward the green, the more trouble you can get into. But the green is so severe that you really don't want to be approaching it from a long way back. So nine definitely a hole to keep an eye on in the walker cut, because I think it'll be pretty exciting, and I think that the telecast will probably be aware that this is a hole to focus on that they don't need to keep the cameras always on fifteen and sixteen seventeen. So Cypres's point really does. It represents Mackenzie's commitment to strategic design, and Mackenzie himself thought very highly of the tactical questions that the course puts to the player. As I mentioned toward the beginning of the episode, he compared Cypress Point favorably to the Old Course at Saint Andrew's, which Mackenzie saw as the exemplar of strategic risk reward architecture. Another and I think related similarity that Mackenzie saw between Cypress Point and the Old Course was playability. He wrote, Cypress Point share with the old course at Saint Andrew's the distinction of being just as pleasurable to the dub as the scratch man. At no place is there a compulsory carry of more than eighty yards, but at many holes there are voluntary carries of two hundred to two hundred and fifty yards, tempting the long drivers to great rewards. So Mackenzie believed very strongly in golf courses delivering the greatest pleasure to the greatest number, And in Cyprus Point you have a course that can be navigated successfully by the average player, but also provides optional but tempting challenges for more skilled players to keep their interest and deliver them the pleasure of overcoming challenges. The most obvious example of this is the famous long par three sixteenth hole. So yes, very difficult to reach this green with one shot, even today with our juiced up equipment, but you always have the option to hit one hundred and fifty to one hundred and eighty yard shot out to a generous fairway on the left and play a pitch into the green. Almost anybody could play the whole pretty successfully that way. So Cyprus Point is appealing to many levels of player, though, I think, as you'll see in the Walker Cup, it's not a long golf course, and some of those wonderful strategic elements that are relevant to me and to and to most of our listeners might not be super relevant to twenty year olds who hit it three point fifty. But that's a technological problem. I think that's a USGA problem in RNA problem, not a Cypress Point problem. Yes, they're going to be carrying bunkers that Mackenzie may have never imagined that they would carry, but look, it's not really his fault. He did his best to create a golf course that would stand the test of time and for most of us, I think it has the last part of Mackenzie's philosophy of design at Cypress Point that I want to touch on is the visual element. So first you have some classic Mackenzie visual deception on many holes. Mackenzie believed in creating golf courses that looked more difficult than they actually were, so that mentally strong players could gain an advantage over the merely physical, physically strong player, and so that players could have the pleasure of overcoming a difficult looking hazard, even if the task wasn't as hard as it appeared, right. We all like to do something that looks difficult, even if we're just kind of fooling ourselves that it actually is difficult. And that's mackenzie's use of a visual deception or why he does it. And the best examples of this at Cyprus Point are the fourth and fifth holes. I think both appear from the tee to be just these fields of bunkers. It looks like there's a very little room to play between the bunkers, but when you get up to the fairway, you realize that the bunkers are shaped and arranged in a way that conceals how roomy the landing zones actually are. But I think even more than visual deception, which is something that people talk a lot about when it comes to Mackenzie, his greatest visual accomplishment at Cypress Point was the blending of the artificial and the natural. Obviously McKenzie's associate Robert Hunter and their construction team deserve a lot of credit for this too, But I would say Cypress Point is the most beautifully shaped golf course that I know of from the golden age of golf architecture. I don't know if it was ever done better than this. Maybe more recently Corn Crenshaw and Tom Doaks's teams have kind of reached this level, But in the nineteen teens and twenties, I'm not sure anybody got to quite this level. It's just pitch perfect tie ins between the bunkers and the greens and the surrounding landforms.

01:12:51
Speaker 4: The seventh hole, I feel like is on that one.

01:12:54
Speaker 5: You just can't believe where that green is for such a it seems reasonably short part three for nowadays, and it just it looks like it was, you know, meant to be there.

01:13:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's so beautifully blended into that big dune ridge, right. And that was actually a hole that came about later in the design process. Initially there was a par three sixth hole that was kind of in the forest, but I think they probably just got up on that on that dune and saw this shot across to the bigger dune ridge and we're like, well, look at that. That looks amazing.

01:13:32
Speaker 4: It looks so daunting but beautiful at the same time.

01:13:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a good way to put how Cypress Point looks. In general. It does look like a very daunting golf course. But it's just it's gorgeous. It is esthetically fine tuned to a degree that that I'm not sure golf architecture is ever equaled. Okay, I want to say a few things now about the greed green designs at Cypress Point. By Mackenzie's standards, and especially by the standards of his late career work, the greens at Cypress Point are fairly subtle. They're not huge, and a lot of them just tilt in a certain direction or have a single big tier. Some of them are quite severe, to the point that it's hard in some cases to keep the ball on the green if you're putting down a slope. But they're not nearly as intricate as the greens Mackenzie and Hunter are built at Pasa Tiempo or Augusta National. There are a couple of exceptions to this at Cyprus. The eighth green is pretty ambitious. It's a lot like a CB MacDonald and SETH Rayner Maiden template, which means there's a low front section and two raised platforms in the back with a channel between them, so three basic pin positions front, center, back, left, back right. So that's a fairly crazy green, and then you have the fifteenth green, which has this odd amoeba shape with the tongues jutting out between bunkers. It was a style that Mackenzie and Hunter later used at Pasa Tiempo, and that Mackenzie employed at Augusta National as well in the original version of that golf course. And you see it there on the fifteenth green at Cypress Point, but not really at many other greens. In general, Cypress's greens are simple and elegant, and I think that that suits the property and the course. Well. There's so much interest in the land and the bunkers, so much interest in what's going on with the routing, the undulations and the fairways. You just don't need wild greens, and in fact, wild greens might distract from what you want the golfer to be focusing on, which is those big strengths of Cypress, the land and the routing. That said, I do think the greens were slightly more complex in Mackenzie's day, and that leads me to the issue of restoration work at Cypress. Now, Cypress is a very well preserved golf course and this is something that the club emphasizes We never rebuilt our golf course, is what they say, and that is true. Cypress Point still has its original push up greens and the turf, which was initially astoria bent grass has evolved over the past century just basically stayed in place. There's more poa now than there used to be. That's mostly just an inevitability on the California coast. You know that bent grass is going to evolve into this kind of poa mixture. But there's never been a big returfing project where some modern strain was installed. Clearly though the course did gradually drift away from its original design. Some trees are planted, some bunkers got smaller or were just lost. A lot of greens shrank to basically circles. So just you know, attrition over time maintenance practices is they didn't rebuild anything but the course, but the course just sort of grew in at the edges. So if you look at photos of Cyprus in the in the seventies and eighties, it's still recognizable, but it had changed a lot since the twenties and thirties, and so Cypress has definitely done restoration work over the past few decades, and they had to do restoration work. This was initially in house and for the past decade or so with Bill, Bill Kohrr and Ben Crenshaw consulting, and their approach has been very careful and very slow. They've gradually restored bunkers, put bunkers back that had been lost, or reshaped bunkers to their original style, or enlarged bunkers that had gotten smaller. They pushed out mowing lines, They took out a tree here and there. One of the biggest projects the club did recently restoring the Dunescape. Actually they cleared out a lot of the vegetation that had started to cover up the sand, and so the dunes now look amazing because they've been revealed again. At one point they were pretty grown over. I love this approach because the course still feels old, it still feels like its original self. It's never been rebuilt or redone still has the actual Mackenzie and Hunter architecture in the ground. They've never torn it up and replaced it, and I think that's amazing. But if you look at the earliest photos of Cyprus Point, especially the ones taken by Julian Graham in the early nineteen thirties. You can see that a lot of the greens used to be a bit bigger even than they are now, that maybe some of their contouring was a little more detailed, some fairways used to be wider, Just little things like that, Right, So, I do think there's more restoration work to do, and I'm not saying that I think everything should be put back to exactly what it was in nineteen twenty eight. You have to let courses evolve, and you have to trust some of your own current preferences. But those Julian Graham photos are pretty tantalizing, and I think they show a few details that would be good to bring back.

01:19:18
Speaker 5: You mentioned that some of the greens used to be larger, and obviously you've also mentioned quite a few times the technology differences that we have now than they had in nineteen twenty eight. Is that one that you would like to see restored or you like the added challenge of a little bit smaller greens?

01:19:33
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. Is are smaller greens actually more challenging. I guess it depends on what's immediately on the border of the greens. If it's just rough for short grass, I don't know that they are necessarily more challenging if they're smaller. But I think what you do when you expand greens back to their original size, and for the most part, Cyper's Point has done a lot of this over the past couple of decades. The greens had really gotten to be small by the eighties and they've definitely enlarged them since then and recaptured some of their contouring on the edges and the size. But what you do when you recapture more green surface is that you allow for pin positions out on the edges of the greens, and those pin positions can be very challenging. It means that you give your golf course more flexibility to challenge skilled players like the ones who are going to arrive at the course for the Walker Cup. If you I mean in a match play event, maybe there's no reason to try to manufacture a score to par that you want because that doesn't matter. But if you really want to make these guys bleed a little bit, then expanding your greens can be a good idea because it allows you to put some of those pins in scary places. And I think that in a few cases at Cyprus Point that's what they could do specifically on the seventh. It's funny that you mentioned the seventh hole earlier. It is such a beautiful hole. If you look at an early photo of that hole, you can see that there's more green in front that could be recaptured there. There was a section of the green in the front a little bit lower than the rest of the green that was there in the late nineteen twenties.

01:21:24
Speaker 5: Yes, now like fringe, right, it said run up for almost false front, run up fringe.

01:21:28
Speaker 1: That's right exactly. So that's a key question for the club looking at those details and considering, hey, do we want to bring that back? All right, So we've covered land routing, design philosophy, greens, restoration work. That's my overview of Cypress Points architecture. I think it's time now to bring in Josh Pettitt to tell a few fun stories about specific holes and design ideas. Here's Josh Joshua Pettitt. Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing.

01:22:05
Speaker 2: I'm doing great. Always good to chat with you. Garrett. How are you.

01:22:09
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. Just putting the finishing touches on the Cyprus Point deep dive. Here we've gotten to the point in this episode where we want to get a little more fine grained about a couple of issues related to this golf course. We've kind of gone through a bunch of material, but here's, you know, where we can kind of get more specific about a few things that happened during the construction process or particular holes that have interesting backstories. And so you and I talked about this beforehand, but we have kind of three topics to cover quickly here. The first is the story behind the sixteenth hole. So what do you want to tell me about the famous long part three sixteenth hole over the ocean. Everybody knows this whole? What's the kind of interesting backstory here?

01:23:05
Speaker 2: Possibly the most photographed hole in golf? I think the interesting backstory is the question of was it intended to be a short part four, a two shotthle or was it always intended to be a part three? And there's been a lot of conversation and debate about this, But if you look back through the correspondence, if you look back at some of doctor Mackenzie's writings where he wrote about this in the spirit of Saint Andrew's and also in a few other articles that he published, and if you analyze all the various routing maps drawn by McKenzie, Rayner before that, other surveyors that surveyed the routings after McKenzie had put us together. If you look at all those various routing maps, there's all these clues. And then you combine that also with scorecards at different times in those early years, and there's sort of this mystery. But when I put it all together, I think it was clearly it was always at the end of the day when the course opened. It was a part three. But certainly mackenzie initially thought it would work better as a short part for the story that he recounts is via maryon Hollins from Seth Rayner before Seth Rayner passed away. So as you may have already talked about or people may know, is Beth Rayner laid out the original routing on the property. But then he passed away in January of nineteen twenty six, right as mackenzie happened to be making its way out to California. So when Seth Rayner was on the what they identified as like the tea pad, there was this perfect little spot for a tea box with Marion Hollins. Seth Rayner said to Mary, it's a pity that the carryover the ocean is just too long. It wouldn't make for a part three. And Marion said, I don't think it's impossible to carry and then she teed it up and hit it and cleared it and hit it right to the center of what they had identified as the ideal green site. So that was recounted to mackenzie later when he was on site with Marion Hollins, and he was a bit suspect of how it would play, but ultimately because the main thing that he was concerned about was ensuring that there were enough routes to the whole, safe routes to the whole that golfers of any skill level could get there if they wanted to take an alternate, longer route. And so when they ultimately played with some different tea positions and they looked at that fairways zone where that lone cypress tree is, McKenzie finally acquiesced and said, I you know, I think it'll work quite well. So there's a quote you know that Mackenzie has in his books saying, and he says, to give honor to where it's due I must say that except for minor details and his instruction, I was no way responsible for this hole. It was largely due to the vision of Miss Marion Hollins. So he's kind of like saying, you know, I get no credit for this, This was all her. And then he said, you know, I doubt that this hole could be considered ideal because of what we said. How you know, there may not be the opportunities for the shorter hitters to clear it, because I feared that with other Cyprus Port holes there was not sufficiently easy route for the weaker player. My mind was set at rest a few months ago. So this is when he was on site in nineteen twenty seven, his second second site visit. So but the interesting thing to me, going back to the routing plans, is that he still depicted a route for a two shot hole with a te much further back that would have played it like three point fifty. That was the yardage that was listed on some of the routing plans, and on the scorecard was that three fifty yardage. And what's peculiar to me it could have just been a misprint, is that in an article that was published after the course had already opened. It was lifted as three hundred fifty yards from the back tee. So the question in my mind has always been, was there ever a back tee pad to begin with, like maybe an optional thing or or not. It's kind of unclear. I've never seen any photographic evidence to show that that tea was ever built back there. But oh, and the other interesting thing I think Mackenzie lays out is that he realized if you look at that fairway, there's that one the lone cypress tree that's hanging.

01:27:47
Speaker 1: Over and the lap lay up fairway on sixteen.

01:27:52
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the landform is such that if you kind of aim at that tree, if you're if you're trying to take the safe route, if you aim at that tree, and if you're a writing handed player, you hit a bit of a fade, then that landform will like kick you right down to the green and you'll probably end up like just short of the green, and you'll have a fairly easy up and down or reasonable chance of getting up and down for a par.

01:28:18
Speaker 1: All right, So the eighteenth hole. I understand that the par four eighteenth hole cypress point much maligned. In fact, you know, cypress I often called, as I mentioned earlier in this episode, the greatest seventeenth hole course in the world. I don't like that line. I think it's unfair to the eighteenth hole. That the eighteenth hole is actually quite interesting, and so I'll defend it. But on a separate subject from whether the eighteenth hole is good or not. There was an idea for a tea box on the eighteenth hole that was pretty provocative, right.

01:28:55
Speaker 2: That's right. If you're ever fortunate to be out there standing on the eighteenth tee and you look behind you out in the ocean, there's this island rock that's isolated from the rest of the coast, and the idea was again looking at all these routing maps, to have a tea box back there, and the whole would have played significant. It would have played I measured it out. I think it would have been about an extra eighty yards and that hole already plays uphill, so you know currently from the back tee it plays like three forty five, and had that tea been built out on the rock, it would have played four twenty five or four thirty. The tea didn't get built, and there's always been this cartion as to why, and my sense is there's a couple of factors there. One we do know that you know, after the course opened in twenty eight and the course was in play, then you know, obviously the depression hit end of nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty. But by nineteen thirty one they had engaged an engineer to do a plan for a suspension bridge. So in the back of Jeff Shackelbert's book, which is a beautiful book I highly recommend it, there's a detailed plan by an engineer for a suspension bridge to be built, and that's from October nineteen thirty one. So they were still looking at it as an option at least at that point, and it never got built. And my sense is Mackenzie probably this is sort of my speculation, he probably liked the idea that it would be a cool alternate tea but probably was always a little suspect of how practical it would be to build and to maintain. But nevertheless they did a plan for the bridge. It didn't get built. I do recount a story also that there was a a land swap at one point with the adjacent land that sits right next to the tea box, which is now used as like a parking lot for tourists to stop there and look out at the ocean. And so I don't know if it was just a factor of like that. If you look at the property line now, it kind of cuts in in a way where the angle from that rock. Even if they still own the land where the rock was, technically it would have been just a crammed angle. So that could have been ultimately the reason, or it could have just come down to the fact that they decided they didn't want to spend the capital, you know, in the early thirties, in the midst of the depression.

01:31:47
Speaker 1: Here, by the way, is the plan in Jeff Shackelford's book. I'm holding it up to the camera. This is a very good audio. But if you see the YouTube version of this episode, then you'll see that page in the book. But you know, it's one of those kind of fantasy ideas that we all have when we look at a piece of coastline and we think, well, wouldn't it be cool if you could put a tea box out on that little rock.

01:32:19
Speaker 2: It's always easy to be an armchair architect, yeah, when you actually are tasked with building and maintaining something. There's all these other practical considerations not to mention, you know, like budgetary stuff that you have to deal with, you know, like you guys touched on it with regarding the fourteenth hole.

01:32:38
Speaker 1: So the last subject, Josh, that that you wanted to get into here for you know, a little more detail on a on a specific topic regarding Cyprus Point has to do with the construction process. Now, David Normoyl and I in the history section of this episode covered some of the the issues how how economical construction was coming in under budget and in a time frame that was astonishingly quick really. But there's there's more detail here. There's a lot of interesting stuff about what happened during construction and the various methods that were used to build this course so efficiently. So what do you have for me there?

01:33:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, you know, if you read Mackenzie's writings, his books or his two books, and many of his articles, there's this reoccurring theme of economization, conomization of construction, economisation of design, economization of greenkeeping. And you and I have talked about this before, Garrett on another podcast, but specifically when it comes to Cyprus Point. You know, he wasn't just talking to talk. He really walked the walk. And I think this is a very underappreciated skill set that Mackenzie had as an engineer and an economist. Was his way to economize or value engineer a project, to get better results for less money, and to do things more efficiently and got it. Keep in mind also that at this point in time nineteen twenty six twenty seven, when he first started laying out this property and building it, he had twenty years of experience building golf courses under his belt, you know, starting with all of the nineteen oh six nineteen oh seven, so it'd been twenty years where he had really honed his craft. I mean, there was the interruption with the Great War, but he had a lot of experience under his belt trying different construction methodologies, figuring out what worked what didn't, and that that became that earned that earned insight was extremely valuable when it came to the construction of Psychrus Point, because this was a club that started from humble means. You know, they didn't have an unlimited budget to build this golf course with. And uh, you know, he pitched when when he met with them, he pitched him on this idea of let me bring in my own construction team. This is sort of what we would refer to today as like the design build methodology. And he'd said, like to the club, to the founders, let me bring my own team in and we could build this for a lot cheaper. And at the time they had they had bids from a couple of different contractors, and they said that the cheapest bid from all the experts would have been one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build the course. And mackenzie and Hunter said, now we could build it for one hundred thousand dollars. And they thought that that was like unduly optimistic. And but as you know, as it turned out, they they built it themselves with the American Golf Course Construction Company, which were his guys, managed by Robert Hunter's son, Robert Hunter Junior, and they're guys that they brought over from Ireland and from Britain, and they built it for ninety thousand dollars, which was, you know, forty percent less than contract value, which is very significant, you know. And I did I did some I did some math on you know, converting into inflation adjusted dollars and it's pretty astounding that one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in nineteen twenty seven would be about two point eight million dollars today. That was what the bid was. They said they do it for one hundred thous they did. They ended up doing it for ninety thousand dollars, which is like one point sixty five million in real dollars. I mean, if you understand what things cost today in the world of golf course construction. I mean, that's just astounding that they were able to do that.

01:36:57
Speaker 1: And as as David indicated earlier in that episode, it wasn't like this was a pure minimalist project by the standards of the nineteen twenties. They moved some earth around. They had to, They had to do some things to that piece of land in order to render it golf able andterfable, and so it's very impressive that they did what they did for the cost.

01:37:24
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, That's something that I think a lot of people don't realize is actually how much manipulation they did have to do to the site. They had to build a lot of those green complexes out of not much and a lot of the bunkering that looks very dunesy and natural was manufactured. And so just to give you a sense of what there when they put their bid together and all the work that they did were it included. It concluded that the hundred or the night what ended up being ninety thousand dollars out the door, included a complete underground irrigation system, which was like a novelty in those This is just when people were starting to build subterranean what they called hoseless irrigation systems. So they did that entirely, a massive drainage network, all the grassing, the seating, and fertilizing, amending the soils. He mentions they amended forty acres of soils clearing of twenty Initially the scope was twenty acres of pines. You know, back there on that portion of the property when you get out past three like four, five, six, seven, ten eleven, that zone was very very densely wooded with mari pines, and so they had planned to clear twenty acres, but they ended up clearing a lot more. So I think that's one of the interesting things is not only did they complete the scope of work for forty percent less than contract value, but also they significantly increased the scope of work. So they added on an additional fifteen acres of tree clearing. Instead of clearing twenty acres of trees, they cleared thirty five acres of trees, which really opened those holes up significantly and gave you those vistas out to the dunes and to the ocean. So just imagine how different do property would look and play and feel if there was like a lot of dense forests back there in those holes blocking your vistas. So I thought that was like a pretty important component in the fact that day, that's a significant increase of the scope of work. They built twice as many tees as they originally planned to to have optionality for different skill levels of players, and then they built all of these you know, turf walk paths that were irrigated, you know, so from from green to teas and from teas out the fairways. They had these walk paths like you'd see out in the British aisles a lot, and they enlarged the fairies significantly, Like on the front the beginning of holes, they significantly enlarged the fairways. Going back to again what we talked about on sixteen is that Mackenzie wanted to have plenty of play space short off the tea, so there weren't these forced carries. So that was like more soil prep, soil amendment, more grassing. And you'll be pleased, Garrett to know that they included every conceivable luxury, including drinking fountains in all the shaded places.

01:40:21
Speaker 1: Just adding that on. You know, got to have those, maybe put some ball washers out there. All right, well, Josh, thank you for doing research into these different specific topics around the Cyper's Point project. Always enjoy having you on the podcast and talk to you again soon.

01:40:43
Speaker 2: Always nice talking to Garrett. Looking forward to see you at the Walker.

01:40:46
Speaker 1: Cook Absolutely all right, So I'm back with Will Balsam, producer of design. That was Josh Pettitt, and we're here now just to wrap things up for this deep dive, and I want to just talk about Cypress Point's position in the world of golf, where not necessarily where we rank it, but kind of how it compares to the other great candidates for the best golf course in the world. And I think one of the best comparisons I can come up with is to the West Course at Royal Melbourne, which I saw for the first time last December, and I think it's an interesting comparison, partly because a lot of what Royal Melbourne does really really well, Cypress Point maybe does slightly less well, but Cypress Point still has the edge in other categories. So at Royal Melbourne, I think the preservation of that golf course and especially the turf presentation is absolutely top of the line, couldn't be better than it is currently at Royal Melbourne. That course is firm and fast, and they've taken a similar approach as a Cypress Point has to the preservation of their golf course. They have not dug up their greens and put in air conditioners. They haven't, you know, put in all the modern amenities. It is a vintage golf course and they've preserved it really really well with the help in recent years of Tom Doak, and so there are some similarities with Cypress Point, but I think Royal Melbourne might be maybe a little bit farther along in that process than Cyprus, at least when it comes to green sizes and things like that, and especially when it comes to the you know, the cultivation of really good golf turf. Real Melbourne might have a little bit of tree removal remaining to be done, but it's pretty darn close to its ideal self. On the other hand, Cypress Point is obviously a more spectacular golf course. It just clearly the dunes, the ocean, that the domination of all these things, the brilliance of the routing. There is nothing like Cypress Point in the world. So I don't know really if it's a better golf course than Royal Melbourne West or the composite course at Royal Melbourne, but it is a more wonderful golf course. I think the term the adjective wonderful is the one that I always think of when I think of Cypress Point. It is the most wonderful golf course that I know of. It is the most amazing one, the most stunning one, and I think that that shouldn't be discounted, even by golf nerds who are maybe a little bit past just esthetic appeal and splendor and maybe are looking at other things to indicate the quality of a golf course. Cypress Points wonderfulness is something that I don't think has any equal in the world of golf.

01:43:56
Speaker 5: Does it have the lore of Augusta National, Does it does it have that for the people who maybe aren't you, me and the rest of the golfers listening to this.

01:44:08
Speaker 1: Clearly it doesn't have the tournament history and the familiarity of Augusta National. Augusta National for being a club that's reputed to be very exclusive, it is one of the most accessible exclusive golf courses in the world.

01:44:23
Speaker 4: I mean, you and I can play with our eyes closed.

01:44:25
Speaker 1: Right exactly. You know we maybe it's hard to actually play the course, like get golf clubs out there for most people, but to walk the course and attend the Masters, I mean a lot of people do they open their golf course up so wide and to TV as well, especially in recent years now that they've gone to every whole coverage, and so that element of sheer familiarity, the connection to people's childhoods, their memories of parents and grandparents watching the Masters with them and observing this beautiful golf course, that's something that no other course can have that doesn't have Augusta National's history. And I think you can say the same about the old course with the Open going back there every five years, and there is a lore and a mystique that grows up around it. Cypress points, mystique is something different, right it is. It is so much more low profile, and that creates a lore of its own, right.

01:45:25
Speaker 4: Definitely.

01:45:26
Speaker 5: It's funny the added mystique. You would think, I don't know to me when the conversation comes up of what's one golf course in the road that you would play if you were given the opportunity, more than nine times out of ten, the answer I'm hearing is augustin Nashvill. But I agree to you where it's like, shouldn't it be the place that most people maybe have never even seen or know much about other than the sixteenth hole?

01:45:49
Speaker 2: Right?

01:45:50
Speaker 1: Yeah? And you know, Cypress points argument for being the last golf course that you would play is a very strong one because of the way the round ends and the build up to those incredible moments on the fifteenth and sixteenth holes. I will never forget my first shot on the sixteenth hole. It's a memory that is permanently with me and that I'm gonna have until I die. I'm gonna I'm gonna be able to see that ballfly. I hit a good shot, you know, in front of me, if I if I had duck hooked it, into into the you know bay on the backside of the hole. I might might, I might feel this differently, but I managed somehow to hit a good shot, and I'll never never forget it. It's gonna be one of the most special things in my brain until my brain stops working. And Cyprus can create those moments because of its splendor and the drama of the way it builds up to those holes, and and that's kind of what it what it offers as the as the course that you would want to play before you go to the electric chair, right.

01:47:04
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we know it's already a good match play course of course, so that helps as well.

01:47:10
Speaker 1: Yes, very much. Looking forward to the Walker Cup. I think it's gonna be so much fun to see these players take on this course. As I indicated earlier, they're gonna be really long for this golf course. I mean, they're gonna be playing from some places on these holes that are I mean, they're gonna be hitting wedges into four hundred and fifty yard par fours that you and I would hit seven woods or more into. And so yeah, I think I think that might for people are familiar with the course, there might be a little bit of heartburn seeing it that, I was.

01:47:43
Speaker 5: Gonna say, most people will be none the wiser, So I'm not sure it'll make a huge difference exactly.

01:47:48
Speaker 1: Just seeing the course on TV, seeing the holes themselves, seeing players take them on will be great. And guess what if it happens to be windy. If the wind kicks up there, it's gonna be hard. It'll be hard, and it's not a big deal because it's match play anyway, but that golf course can definitely be very difficult if the elements make for that. So I think there's a lot of a lot to look forward to with the Walker Cup, any particular holes that you're the ear keeping an eye out for.

01:48:18
Speaker 4: I think the par fives there are super interesting.

01:48:20
Speaker 5: I mean, I know for them it's probably maybe it won't be as interesting because of the length that they have, but some of the risk reward on the second shots or going for these greens, especially since they are kind of smaller greens, could provide for some interesting situations. I don't know, just going over through the washing the hole by hole and seeing kind of some of these t shots and the lines that you have to take if you want to get there and too I think it could provide some really interesting match play holes.

01:48:43
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and something to look out for is the eighth hole, which kind of plays diagonally across over the shoulder of the dune. And the question on the hole is how much of the dune are you going to take on? Mere mortals are just considering taking on maybe half of the den right instead of playing out to the left to the fairway that you can see the whole turns to the right. But I think a few players that the walker cup might be might have an eye on the green there, like might might be looking to cut the whole corner, and so that that would be something to look out for. On the seventeenth hole, the same thing. I mean, it's it's a long poke to get to the green from the tee. It's I think it's probably about three hundred and sixty yards on a direct line, but I don't know. Could the green be in play there? That would be one little bit of intrigue. But then there are plenty of holes that I think do limit distance naturally, will kind of force driver out of players' hands, have them lay up to a certain yardage a certain angle, and then play some longer more interesting approaches into the greens. So yeah, of course it is going to hold up fine, you.

01:49:54
Speaker 4: Know, definitely, And you mentioned eight.

01:49:56
Speaker 5: I feel like that could also be so pin position, depending right, if that pins talks BA left behind that bunker, that probably brings in a different drive and how much of that dune you're taking on versus if it's you know, a front center stick and you're okay with having you know, a short to mid iron in.

01:50:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's a there. There're gonna be such such a great number of subtleties to the golf course that I hope, I hope the telecast focuses on those a little bit and and maximizes the opportunity of an event like the Walker Cup being at a course like Cyprus Point, because it is it's a relative rarity. I'm not sure when the next time is that they will see the course on this kind of stage.

01:50:37
Speaker 4: And depending how it goes, maybe the last time.

01:50:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I hope it goes well. All right, Well, thank you very much for hanging out during these, uh these portions of of the episode that is our deep dive on Cyprus Point. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you will. If you like this kind of deep dive content on golf architecture, then make sure to check out Friday Egg Golf Club FEGC. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see everything that we offer with Frida Egg Golf Club. There's a lot more than just architecture content, but we do have architecture content if you're into that. We have weekly course profiles that provide really fine grained analysis of great golf courses, and we have another weekly segment that I do where I talk about what's new in golf architecture news and scuttle butt in the golf architecture industry. So those are just a couple of the things that we offer through FEGC. Again, the Frida Egg dot com slash membership. We're building a great community in the club, so we'd love for you to join us. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.