Fried Egg Stories: How to Slay a Monster (The Open Doctor and His Monster, Part 3)

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Speaker 1: What's up? Quick note here that this is part three of a three part documentary series. You can definitely listen to this episode on its own, but you'll get a bit more out of it if you start at the beginning. This episode of Frida Egg Stories is brought to you by Precision Pro Golf Rangefinders. I don't need to tell you that Father's Day is coming up June nineteenth, but I do need to tell you that Precision Pro is having a Father's Day sale. Go to Precision progolf dot com and save up to forty dollars off their award winning rangefinders. Swing with confidence, hit more greens with Precision Pro Golf.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: The Frida Egg requires a different technique. What you need to do is actually square the face so they'll dig down underneath that bad lie and propel that ball right out onto the green. Here's the thing.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: Playing out of a buried line of bunker is completely different than playing out of a night and clean line of greenside bunker.

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Speaker 4: You need to be aggressive on any show, whether it's sitting cleanly for its pride egg.

00:01:05
Speaker 5: Well, we've all paid that.

00:01:06
Speaker 4: The dread and Friday not to be feared, though it's actually a pretty easy doctor hit.

00:01:18
Speaker 1: So for the purposes of this podcast, would you rather be known as Richard Howding or Dick Houting?

00:01:23
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: And are you the club historian at Oakland Hills or are you a club historian at Oakland Hills.

00:01:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I'll tell you I am the not because it's a declared fact. But if you go over there and ask anybody, they'll say, well, Dick's really the only one who knows any of this shit.

00:01:43
Speaker 1: Dick Houting's parents joined Oakland Hills Country Club in nineteen forty nine. The year after that, Robert Trent Jones transformed Donald Ross's South Course into the famous Monster of the nineteen fifty one US Open. It was, as the historian Bradley Klein puts it, a reputiation of the past. The architecture at Oakland Hills had become modern, and modern was better. So when Dick was a kid, he found himself in a somewhat odd position. Even though he was young, it seemed to him that he was one of the few people at Oakland Hills who was curious about the club's history.

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Speaker 3: I was always interested in the history of the course. I used to even as a kid go around the place and say, you know, I don't d tell me something. Why is it Oakland Hills has had all these great tournaments and all this stuff that's really interesting in the history of golf, and there's not a damn thing anywhere in the club, on the walls or anywhere that would let you know any of this. You know, you go in, you look in the walls and here's you know, here's George Washington shaking hands with somebody at Mount Vernon, and over here's a bunch of pictures of castles and trees and garbage. There's nothing to do with anything. And that's the way I think that most clubs back in those days, in like the fifties and sixties treated golf. It was like after every tournament Oakland Hills had, they said, okay, gather all that crap we got left from the tournament and put it in that dumpster.

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Speaker 1: This blase attitude toward the past could also be seen in the South course itself, which continued to evolve away from its original ross design. Yet within the club, more people were becoming interested in the history of Oakland Hills. One member, Kay Healy, took it upon herself to collect a few artifacts, and she made.

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Speaker 3: This display in the second floor hallway at Oakland Hills that had all sorts of things I'd wondered about, you know, just hints of them. And I said, man, this is great, This is great.

00:03:46
Speaker 1: Dick Hotting became a member in his own right in nineteen ninety one, and about a decade later he was asked to join the new Oakland Hills Heritage Committee. Suddenly there was real momentum behind the effort to learn about the club's history, and soon many members began to wonder whether modern actually was better, or, to be more specific, whether Robert Trent Jones's renovation of the South Course in nineteen fifty was in fact a huge mistake. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is Frida egg Stories. Today we conclude our series The Open Doctor and His Monster. The first two installments told the story of how Robert Trent Jones became the Open Doctor and went on to define an era of golf architecture. In this episode, we focus on the era that came next, when a movement emerged that challenged Jones's ideas, a movement that didn't start at Oakland Hills but eventually made its way there and eventually brought the name of Donald Ross back to center stage. In the Scottish Highlands. In the nineteenth century, some lucky towns had their own seaside golf course, and Dornick had a good one. It would later become known as Royal Dornick and acclaimed as one of the very best courses in the world. But when Donald Ross was born there in eighteen seventy two, Dornick was not nearly as connected with the outside world as it is today, and his prospects were likely to be local.

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Speaker 5: His father was an alcoholic mason, struggled to make a living, came to the United States and helped build the Capitol Building in Albany, and whatever money he was going to send home, he ended up drinking. My name is Bradley Klein. I'm a longtime historian of golf course architecture, written lots of.

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Speaker 1: Books, including the biography Discovering Donald Ross, which is one of the key books that reintroduced people to Ross and convinced them that his work was worth preserving.

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Speaker 5: And Ross was living in a two room house. Left high school. I don't think he graduated, but he was an intelligent although not a well rid person, but intelligent and he could form judgments very quickly. I met Old Tom Morris went to apprentice with him at St Andrews for a year and he learned the trades of club making and greenkeeping, and he became recruited by the long term secretary at Dornick, John Sutherland, to become the pro greenkeeper at Dornet. So at the age of twenty three, he was the head greenkeeper in the pro which was always the same job in Scotland in those days, and he stayed there for three years and then he met a professor from Harvard University, physicist Robert Wilson actually documented this book. Wilson and his wife stayed for a week in November of eighteen ninety eight and they invited Ross to come and become the head pro at Oakley in Boston. So he comes over on a boat. He's got a suitcase in one hand and he's got a golf bag with six clubs in the other. And he lands in New York off the ferry, takes the train up to Boston and then walks. It was four miles to Robert Wilson's house.

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Speaker 1: Like many scotsmen who became club professionals in America. Back then, Ross did a bit of everything. He built and repaired clubs, gave lessons, played at a high level, kept the greens, and when necessary, designed or upgraded the courses themselves. After Oakley Country Club, Ross moved on to Essex County Club near Boston, and then a fledgling resort called Pinehurst in the North Carolina sand Hills. He would go on to have one of the most productive careers in the history of golf architecture.

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Speaker 5: And he designed a total of about four hundred and ten golf courses. At one point he was building fifteen percent of all the golf courses in the United States.

00:07:41
Speaker 1: In this sense, Donald Ross was the Henry Ford of golf architecture, just as Robert Trent Jones would do a few decades later. Ross scaled the business of golf course.

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Speaker 5: Design, and by the mid nineteen twenties he was the highest paid person in the golf industry. He was making more money than Walter Hagen in those days. He was probably making sixty or seventy thousand a year, which was close to Babe ruth salary. But he comes from nothing, but he happened to live in the right town near a golf course, with access to international trade from tourists, and they brought him over. So he became part of the Scottish wave that came over with nothing to create a world, you know, that's what he did. It was an amazing American success story, if you will.

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Speaker 1: All right, let's back up a bit and zero in on how Ross's design at Oakland Hills came about and why many consider it one of his best. When he was working at the Pinehurst Resort, Ross came into contact with a lot of wealthy and influential people, and he was savvy enough to recruit them as clients. That's probably how he met the auto executives from Detroit who would eventually hire him to do the south course at Oakland Hills.

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Speaker 5: Back around nineteen thirteen nineteen fourteen, Detroit was a boomtown. A lot of money was coming in, a growing industrial center, tremendous population, and you had a growing upper middle class and golf was taking off.

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Speaker 1: The property that would become Oakland Hills was in Birmingham, Michigan, a Detroit suburb.

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Speaker 5: And it was an old farm field and it was about two hundred and fifty acres, as I recall, straddling both sides of Maple Avenue. Bross had his pick of the land, and he picked about a one hundred and eighty eight or maybe two hundred acre parcel on the south side with just fantastic rolling terrain about forty feet of elevation, and he extolled the site as ideal in terms of the contour, in terms of the sandy loam, and the construction began took place during World War One. He was aided in that process by his newly hired associate, Walter Hatch.

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Speaker 1: Now at other courses Ross was hired to build, he delegated a lot of responsibilities to Hatch and other associates he had to. He couldn't personally attend to twenty twenty five projects at once, So according to Bradley's estimate, Ross never even saw about a third of his courses, another third he visited maybe once, and the rest he took a direct ongoing interest in Oakland Hills was in that last fortunate bucket.

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Speaker 5: He was there repeatedly through a construction and opening, and it showed he was able to use the scale and the width of the property and the brilliance of Oakland Hills South Course as a routing is it's all organized around three or four high points, kind of primal nodes of activity. So if you think about the topography, the club us sits on a shelf on a high point that is shared by the first T, ninth green, tenth T, and eighteenth green. They all converge right there, and then as you radiate out, there's another high point that contains the eighth grain, the ninth te the eleventh green, and the twelfth T. And then there's a third high point that contains the tenth grain, eleventh tee, seventeenth green, and eighteenth T. And you can see that, or you could see that from the clubhouse, so you had a sense of heading out and then these shared nodal points convergence and then separation, and the routing is absolutely brilliant. It's one of his best uses of land. It's not a back and forth. There's not parallel holes. They're scattered all over the place. You're shifting with the wind, you're tacking, you're always tacking. That never changed the bones of that golf course, as we say, the skeleton of it is absolutely solid and unshakable. The other thing he was great at was building interesting greens that had lots of dramatic contour, and Oakland Hills always had that.

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Speaker 1: Oakland Hills was a well regarded course. Just five years later it hosted the US Open, won by Cyril Walker with a score of two ninety seven nine over, And at this point the reputation of Ross's design seemed secure. But then a depression and a war happened, and by the late nineteen forties tastes had shifted. Ross was no longer held in his high esteem, and that enabled Robert Trent Jones to come in and modernize Oakland Hills without much pushback from the membership.

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Speaker 5: Trent came out of the war in an era when the game was starting to change in terms of the swing and the equipment and distance, and he became very aggressively promoting himself and in effect turned his back on that whole pre war generation of architects and architecture. And that's where what happened at Oakland Hills is so fascinating, because that was the paradigm of that repudiation of the past.

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Speaker 1: And a repudiation of the past is exactly what a young Dick Houting observed at Oakland Hills in the fifties, sixties and seventies.

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Speaker 3: They said, okay, gather all that crap we got left from the tournament and put it in that dumpster.

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Speaker 1: So for decades, the proverbial dumpster was where the original ross design of the South Course at Oakland Hills stayed. But by the early eighties there were signs that the tide of opinion was shifting once again.

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Speaker 5: The big step really is first the publication by Jeff Cornish and Ron Whitten of a book called The Golf Course in nineteen eighty one, which essentially opened up everybody's eyes. All of a sudden, there's this new attractive study that documents the classic architects and which courses were designed and who did what. That started a big conversation in the industry.

00:13:47
Speaker 1: Another crucial moment was the nineteen eighty six US Open, which was held at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. Shinnecock Hills was an old design that had more or less retained its vintage identity.

00:13:58
Speaker 5: And it was a hell of an event.

00:14:00
Speaker 1: It proved that a golf course didn't need to be modernized in order to be relevant.

00:14:05
Speaker 5: So all of a sudden, now people are thinking about golf courses.

00:14:10
Speaker 1: And that set the stage for the nineteen eighty eight US Open at the country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. The country Club was another antique course with roots going back to the eighteen nineties, and it had a new consulting architect, Rhys Jones, the younger of Robert Trent Jones's two sons.

00:14:30
Speaker 5: Oh, I was there at the country Club in nineteen eighty eight.

00:14:34
Speaker 1: Do you think that was the moment that he became the new open doctor?

00:14:37
Speaker 5: Absolutely? And interestingly enough, as I just realized he was forty seven years old at the time, which is with the exact same age as father was at Oakland Hills.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: But Reese at this particular moment was singing a very different tune than his father had at Oakland Hills in nineteen fifty one.

00:14:54
Speaker 5: Reese made a big thing out of something he called restoration.

00:14:58
Speaker 1: That is, he claimed at his work had taken the country Club back in time, not forward.

00:15:04
Speaker 5: He kept talking about naturalizing indigenous shapes, going back to the original landform. It's not clear to me how much historic restoration he did, because aerials were hard to find in those days. I don't know to what extent. There were plans, but what he tried to do was bring back a lot more natural grasses, give it a scruffier look, and introduce a kind of a quirkiness to the rocks and the outcropping, and expose some of the native terrain. Certainly, at the time it was a welcome relief from all the modernization that had been going on. The restoration of the Country God was a big story, and Reese made it a big story. He literally spent the entire Open in the press tent.

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Speaker 1: I should note here that we reached out to Reese Jones for an interview, but we didn't get a response. In any case, the nineteen eighty eight US Open did for Reese Jones what the nineteen fifty one US Open had done for his father. It made him a star. But oddly enough, Reeston ended up doing many more restorations instead. He became almost exactly the kind of open doctor that his father had been. He even worked at many of the same clubs, and his focus was on modernizing, not restoring. But the idea of golf course restoration had taken hold in the nineties. Architects like Ron Pritchard, Ron Force and Tom Doak began to convince historic clubs to restore their courses. Superintendents like Carl Olson at National Golf Links and Bob Ranham at Garden City recovered greens and bunkers and fairway lines that had been forgotten for decades. Writers started to speak of the Golden Age, a period from the nineteen tens to the nineteen thirties when American golf course design flourished, and they told readers about brilliant architects like Charles Blair, MacDonald, Seth Rayner, Alistair Mackenzie, aw tilling Hast, and of course Donald Ross. Season two of Friday Egg Stories is made possible by Precision pro Golf.

00:17:16
Speaker 3: All right.

00:17:17
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00:18:34
Speaker 3: Boy, that story would probably start in two thousand and six when Rhys Jones came in.

00:18:40
Speaker 1: That's dickouting again, and he's remembering when Oakland Hills hired Rhys Jones to toughen up the South Course for the two thousand and eight PGA Championship.

00:18:49
Speaker 3: So Trent's not with us any longer. We better get the next best thing, which would be Reese, his son. And basically he just took the whole philosophy of his dad to streams. The narrow fairways became narrower, the deep bunkers became deeper, the bunkering around the greens was pulled in tighter, and it was just like he had taken the monster and made it into a parody of itself. Almost immediately the membership started to complain. They said that I can't get out of these damn bunkers. These are the most penal things I've ever seen. I can't play on this.

00:19:27
Speaker 1: And at the two thousand and eight PGA, the feedback from the players is less than positive.

00:19:32
Speaker 3: It was like, you've ruined the course. Do the members really like this? And you know, it was like, no, they don't.

00:19:40
Speaker 1: In addition to all of that, the now one hundred year old greens aren't draining very well.

00:19:45
Speaker 3: So it was like a coalescing of real physical problems with the course, like the way the bunkering had been done, the greens not draining, together with the dissatisfaction of the members, and they finally said, you know, we've got to have a new set of architectural eyes look at this.

00:20:04
Speaker 1: So in twenty fourteen, Oakland Hills interviews four architects. One is Rhys Jones, another is Sean Smith, who renovated the club's north course, and the last two are architects known for their restoration work. Tom Doak and Gil Hans.

00:20:21
Speaker 4: We believe wholeheartedly that what we're here to do is to restore ross, and that's what we're.

00:20:27
Speaker 3: Going to do.

00:20:28
Speaker 1: Gil Hans studied golf architecture at Cornell University, the same school where Robert Trent Jones had taken classes in the late nineteen twenties. But whereas Jones had essentially invented his own course of study, Hans took part in a formal program. After he got his degree, he went to work for Tom Doak's firm, Renaissance Golf Design. Doak was also a Cornell grad and in about nineteen ninety one, Renaissance started consulting for the Creek Club, a seth Rayner course on Long Island.

00:20:56
Speaker 4: Tom pitched to the club doing a restoration seth Rayner's work.

00:21:02
Speaker 1: This was Hans's first hands on experience with this new fangled process known as golf course restoration. What did you take away from that experience at the Creek Club.

00:21:13
Speaker 4: It was interesting. You know, everything I had done and studied or aspired to do was more new course work, and Tom was just starting out and we had we were fortunate we had a few projects that were based on new coursework. But so I didn't know going into it how much I would enjoy it. But I thoroughly enjoyed the process of trying to uncover older stuff and then find out exactly what was done and do it in as authentic a way as possible. The other part of the equation that was really fascinating to me was the club politics angle. Because I was the guy on site, I was dealing with committee members. The Green Committee would come out, and so that was a whole world that was opening up as well as that ultimately would become an important part of what we've done going forward.

00:22:00
Speaker 1: Enjoy that part of it, I did.

00:22:02
Speaker 4: I think the part of it was I enjoyed being around people. I enjoy talking about golf.

00:22:08
Speaker 1: Now, to put it mildly, not all golf architects like that aspect of the job, but Hans did, and he had a knack for it. Soon he founded his own firm, and he landed a series of restoration jobs at increasingly famous courses. There was the Catanset Club, the Country Club of Rochester, where Robert Trent Jones had caddied as a kid. There was Los Angeles Country Club, Winged Foot Golf Club, Marion Golf Club, and by twenty fourteen he was confident enough to walk into an interview with the green committee at Oakland Hills and tell them he wasn't interested in doing anything but a Donald Ross restoration.

00:22:49
Speaker 3: How did he put it. He explained, there may be a better green here or there, or some course may have a couple of better greens than you get, but there is no course on Earth yet has eighteen better green complexes in one golf course. And he said, if you don't take care of that, you're just throwing your money away doing the rest of this crap. And that got their attention.

00:23:14
Speaker 4: And I think that what we had to come to a reckoning with at Oakland Hills was that probably, well not probably the most famous moment in the club's history as it relates to their championships, was created by another golf course architect, and so we understood that walking in there that not only were we talking about restoring the work of one of the greats of all times, but reversing, you know, what Robert Trent Jones had done to it, to give it the name the monster, you know, as Ben Hogan called it, and to try to take some of the monster out of the golf course. And we knew that would be a difficult task.

00:23:50
Speaker 3: And then he went on to say, from the greens and the surrounds, I would move out into the course and I would restore what Ross had done. And they listened to him, and thank god that they said, yeah, we liked that. That's what we want to do.

00:24:09
Speaker 1: Both the Green Committee and the Board of Directors buy into the idea, which is on the one hand surprising. I mean, this is the South course at Oakland Hills, this is the origin point of the open Doctor era. It's the Robert Trent Jones Monster. On the other hand, by this time twenty fourteen, many other major Golden Age courses in the US have started or completed restoration work, most notably Pinehurst Number two, Donald Ross's most famous design. So the Neoclassical movement in golf architecture is mainstream at this point and by hiring Gil Hants. The leadership at Oakland Hills really isn't doing anything too radical, but then the members hear about it.

00:24:53
Speaker 3: And when the membership heard it, they were absolutely flabber gassed. I mean they didn't expect anything like that. It was like it was a really divided the club, you know, because there are some people who are absolutely committed to the Trent Jones course. They think of it as, oh, that's the monster. Oh, you can't do this is like mortal sin. You can't do anything to defile the monster, you know. And if you do that, if you go back to Ross, well what will happen to the monster? It won't be the monster anymore, will it. In the course of these debates of the club, I heard a guy say this course wasn't crap before Trent Jones got here. And my approach was God intended this for a golf course, and he intended Ross to be the architect, thank you. And so there was a big debate in the club do we want to go back to Ross or do we want to maintain the monster?

00:25:52
Speaker 1: Hans does his presentation, goes through his proposal, and in September of twenty sixteen, the membership votes it down to thirty percent.

00:26:05
Speaker 4: And I think the way I've described it is we the process. In my mind, we had a committee that became enamored and fell in love with the master plan that we created. We had a board that became enamored and fell in love with a master plan we created it, and we didn't give the membership as the whole a chance to get enamored and fall in love with it. And I think that when the scale and the scope of it was put in front of the membership, they went, WHOA wait a second. You know, we think we've got something pretty good here, and now all of a sudden, you're telling us we need to blow the whole thing up.

00:26:36
Speaker 6: And I think.

00:26:36
Speaker 4: That's that's ultimately where we all failed in delivering the message and maybe being probably should have been more transparent and then a little bit more done a better job communicating to the membership.

00:26:49
Speaker 1: This is the club politics element that you're talking about you first saw at the Greek Club.

00:26:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, the thing that had really prevented it passing the first time. I think a lot of a lot of younger, newer members, they didn't know that much about the club and the history, and they weren't really that sure and confident about well, what made Oakland Hills the club you wanted to belong to. Is it because it was a Ross course or is it because it was the Trent Jones monster. And so what we did is we formed a special committee to investigate. There was like half the committee had been opposed to the plan and half the committee was for the plan.

00:27:30
Speaker 1: And that committee focused on reaching out to the fence sitters, the younger members who had voted against the plan because they weren't sure whether they should vote for it.

00:27:39
Speaker 3: And getting together with them in a one on one sort of basis and asking what are your concerns, what are you thinking about? Well, here's why we want to do this. The real roots of the greatness of this course, Donald Ross. These greens that you think so highly of, those are Donald Ross a plan that's going to take and expand out those greens to their original size. We want to broaden these fair ways out and here's why. We want to create ways for you to not have to always hit in these predestined, determined spots that Trent Jones created to test professional accuracy. We want to give all the players a way to play a fun round of golf, and I think that that sort of argument had credence with them.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: In twenty eighteen, the Oakland Hills membership votes again on the hands restoration. Like last time, it's seventy percent to thirty percent, but this time it's seventy percent in favor. So it's goodbye Monster, Goodbye Robert Trent Jones, and hello to Gilhan's channeling Donald Ross. Hey, everyone just wanted to cut in here quickly to tell you about another Father's Day sale. This one is happening in the fried Egg Pro Shop. Everything except for photography is fifteen percent off right now through June nineteenth. There's a ton of good stuff, hats, shirts, new headcovers, various accessories. You'll definitely be able to find something for the data in your life or just for yourself. Might as well make this an excuse to get something from the Frida Egg Pro Shop. All right, proshop dot Thefrida Egg dot Com Father's Day Sale check it out. So what does golf course restoration look like in the twenty first century. Well, first of all, there's a lot to do in order to get back the basic geometry and dimensions of the original design, there are greens to rebuild, bunkers to relocate, fairways to expand, trees to take out, and so on. But a lot of the time this work, at least in the way that the Hants team carries it out, doesn't look an awful lot like restoration strictly speaking. For example, here's how they did the South Course's greens. First, they got very detailed laser scans of every contour on every putting surface. Then they dug the greens out to the bottom of where Ross's workers had started building them. Then Hans's shapers contoured that floor level and lasered it to make sure it matched. Then they rebuilt the greens using current USGA recommendations for construction. In the process, they installed a high tech precision air venting system, and they finished by comparing the result to photos from a nineteen twenty nine program for the US Women's Amateur at Oakland Hills. In other words, modernization in the name of restoration.

00:30:45
Speaker 5: I always have to laugh when I think about the term restoration, because I've argued this many times, and I think Gil would agree with me.

00:30:52
Speaker 1: That's Bradley Klein again, who, by the way, was a historical consultant for Oakland Hills just prior to Hans's project.

00:31:00
Speaker 5: Storing the golf course to a condition that it was never in in the first place. But what you're doing is you're taking the basic strategy and shapes and honing them in with modern technology and agronomic techniques and maintenance standards so that they have a life and a vivid quality that really makes them stand out.

00:31:19
Speaker 1: It's for this reason that Hands himself prefers the term historic renovation for the type of work his team does at Golden Age courses. It's classic architecture presented with a contemporary sharpness. In mid twenty twenty one, the South course at Oakland Hills with its new Old style reopened, so general impressions about how the work at Oakland Hills has come out.

00:31:45
Speaker 5: I was blown away and I know that course pretty well. I caddied there back in the seventy nine PGA have been there many many times for the Open and the Ryder Cup. You know, it used to be a tree lined golf course in suburban Detroit. Now it's this incredible piece of land that just is perfectly shaped and routed that you were never fully.

00:32:04
Speaker 3: Aware of.

00:32:06
Speaker 1: What was your sense of the reactions, the range of reactions from the membership to what they saw.

00:32:14
Speaker 3: Well, I think the reaction moten for the most part, was pretty good, I think, and I think these younger guys who were brought on board, I think they love it. And what's interesting is some of the guys my age who were against this. It's funny. I was talking to one and I said, well, what do you think and he said, well, you know, he said, I haven't played that often, maybe you know, half a dozen times. And he said, you know what, Dick, he said, I just it's hard for me to figure out how to play that course. What do you mean, you know, well, you know I played that other course for years and years. He said, I know exactly where I want to hit that ball and where I have to hit it, where I'm going to hit it after that, and he said, now I'm not so sure where I was supposed to put that ball. He said, so now you have to think about it. And he said yeah, And I said, well, that's what makes a ross course great. You have to think about it.

00:33:15
Speaker 6: I am not a believer that we are in a new golden age of golf. I believe we're in a nostalgic age, and nostalgia takes us back to some forgotten time when women wore flappers and the jazz era was.

00:33:27
Speaker 1: In That's the voice of Robert Trent Jones's older son, Robert Trent Jones Junior, a prolific architect in his own right, and when he considers a project like the Oakland Hills restoration or historic renovation, he sees something very different.

00:33:43
Speaker 6: Now, I don't know what. I haven't seen what's been done recently, but I'm told it was based upon a program for the nineteen twenty nine Amateur, which to me is like putting a classic Charleston dress on Royalty. When you have someone as famous as Hogan defining your golfers as a monster, and when you'd revert to something with an old dress on that monster, it's like bea wilf. You've killed the monster, but then you've also killed your history. So if you decide you want to erase that the minute you put a bulldozer on a golf course and take the greens down to their base to put in subair or some other technical need, you've lost the art. It would be like chipping away a marble statue. You can't put it back.

00:34:26
Speaker 1: In other words, Jones Junior believes that Oakland Hills has exchanged the concrete history of the Robert Trent Jones monster for a kind of airy, trendy nostalgia.

00:34:37
Speaker 6: So there's many many elements in here that I think are programmatic and a kind of fashion, and I think you should think very carefully if you want to erase your literal history at Oakland Hills. I haven't seen the work. I'm sure it's competent. The people doing it are knowledgeable and so, but it comes from a point of view of nostalgia.

00:34:57
Speaker 1: And it's hard to argue that we aren't in a somewhat nostalgic age, especially as compared to the restless, forward looking optimism of the first Open Doctor era. People of Robert Trent Jones's time, at least upwardly mobile Americans believed that the future would be better than the past. Today, maybe we're not so sure. In many respects, the modern world that Jones's generation built seems to not be working out very well. So maybe now we're more willing to turn our backs on the present and the future and take our cues from the deeper past. That's certainly the case in golf architecture right now. A few times in this series I've listed the Robert Trent Jones renovations that defined the open doctor style in the nineteen fifties Oakland Hills, Baltisrawl, Olympic Club, Oak Hill, Southern Hills. Today, Jones's work at all of those courses has been or will soon be, largely undone by Andrew Green, a restoration specialist at Oak Hill, and by Gill Hants at the rest of the courses. So we have this set of championship courses that all have kind of this story. And so I guess the lingering question I have is like, what guarantee do we have that that's over right or do we know that it's not over and that you know, things are just going to continue to cycle in and cycle out in fashion in golf architecture.

00:36:24
Speaker 5: Well, this is the big issue, and it's interesting. I know Reese has resisted the tree removal. He says it's a fad, it's going to pass. He's told me that before. I don't think that's the case. I think, for as all, we don't know, so some things are going to be But the tree removal is a matter of undoing years of destructive, reckless tree planting. So that's a little different than a fad. The opening up the ground game, creating more lateral play and angles, that's returning to value. So what's going on now is different than a fad, I think, because it's actually looking back at the history of of the craft and deciding these things are worth going back to. You know, a fad to me would be colored sand in bunkers, which was you watched the Bob Hope Classic in the late sixties. They had colored sand, island, greens, waterfalls. Those are fads, that's all. You know, the cherry on top of the Sunday kind of nonsense, that's.

00:37:21
Speaker 1: A fad, I guess. It's what you're saying is that the quality of the argument for why a golf course is the way it is really matters here. There's not a quality argument that we should have pink sand, but there is a quality argument that you should open up a beautiful landscape to the viewer if it has been blocked by trees.

00:37:40
Speaker 5: That is not a fad. That is a return to certain core values. That's different.

00:37:47
Speaker 1: So the final question, and I want to apologize in advance, for it, but I have to have to ask it. That's me trying to get out one last question to Gill Hands. Robert Trent Jones and Reyess Jones both embraced the title of open doctor. They actively promoted themselves as open doctor. You have now worked at a few different courses where a Golden age architect may have done the original design, and then Robert Trent Jones came in and did a renovation for a US open or something, and Reese Jones took over the reins from there, and then you have come in to those courses and generally done some restorative work. Naturally, people are going to start throwing around this term open doctor for you, and I wonder how you react to that. In case it's not clear, I'm asking gil Hans if time is a flat circle, and if he is in fact the new open doctor.

00:38:48
Speaker 4: I mean, I think if Trent and Reese enjoyed that Moniker, then they certainly deserve it and.

00:38:55
Speaker 3: Can have it.

00:38:56
Speaker 4: I'm not a huge fan of it. If we do our job, that all the conversation at wing Foot should be about telling ast all the conversation Oakland Hills should be about ross all the conversation at LACC should be about Thomas. Yeah, we're going to get mentioned as the guys that restored it. But it's one of those things where I think it's important the people who know know, and it's led to great opportunities for us that we get to do this kind of work, and I think we tend to be able to handle the pressures associated with it and the relationships associated with it in a way that I'm truly truly proud of. But I think ultimately, you know, I'm hopeful that that never gets attached to my name, or somebody comes up with something more creative or interesting. If there's some other moniker that Jim Wagner has one for me, but I can't say it in public, So that's when we tear off the mics. I'll let you know.

00:40:06
Speaker 1: Frida Egg Stories is produced by me Garrett Morrison, with transcript and editing help from Meg Atkins. The guests in this episode were Dick Houding, Bradley Klein, Gil Hants, and Robert Trent Jones Junior. In past episodes of this series, we also talked to Ed Gruver and Jim Hansen. One extra thing, as you may have heard, Oakland Hills Country Club's historic clubhouse suffered a major fire a few months ago. Fortunately no one was hurt, but a lot of history was lost. Recently, I had a conversation with Dick Houding about what he saw that day and what the next steps for the club might be. We'll put that out as a special brief extra episode in a few weeks. So that is a wrap not only for the Open Doctor and his Monster, but for season two of Fridagg Stories. The theme of this season has been championship golf, and we've viewed that topic through a number of different lenses over seven episodes, So if you haven't listened to some of them, I'd love for you to go back and check them out. I'm really proud of them all. I want to give us special things. First of all, to Precision Pro for sponsoring the season, and I also want to thank Meg Atkins and the rest of the Frida Egg team for their help behind the scenes and really just for their patience as I've spent months and months on some of these stories. They are truly fantastic people to work with. All Right, that's it. I hope you've enjoyed this season of Frida egg stories and thank you as always for listening