Yolk with Doak 46: Social Media & Golf Course Architecture, New Zealand, and Listener Questions

00:00:00
Speaker 1: I miss the green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.

00:00:06
Speaker 2: In a Frida egg Friday egg, the dreaded Friday Friday Frida egg brid Egg, Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the Friday Golf Podcast and happy New Year. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break and I'm excited for twenty twenty six, excited to get this podcast back up and running in the new year. And we have a big one for you today. It had been fourteen months since I recorded with Tom, so we got together right before Christmas and recorded a three hour session. I was thinking about breaking this up and spacing it out over a few months, but decided that it was best if it was just one episode, so enjoy. It might take a while. It's a little longer than our usual episode, but I thought the conversation just worked better as a singular episode rather than being split up. So one thing to note in the episode apologies, I had a bad mike cable. My cord was malfunctioning. It's since been thrown into the garbage. But if you notice that there's a little hollow audio in a few parts of this episode, it is because of the bad mic cord. We had to kind of toggle between camera audio. This whole episode is up on YouTube also. You can view it there. You can see the whole conversation with Tom. But big thing. Thanks to you guys for a great twenty twenty five. Can't wait for twenty twenty six. We're going to have a bunch of new stuff rolling out and here I think we're going to add some stuff to the format after this show. This was really a great conversation with Tom. I can't wait to get back up there and do some more podcasting with them. But enjoy And as a quick reminder, if you enjoy this podcast, I think something that you would enjoy greatly is Friday Golf Club. That is our membership. A lot of the questions that I asked and this podcast came from our discussion forum. You can go in there and talk about golf course architecture, talk about pro golf, talk about just golf in general with a bunch of other diehard golfers. The membership is one hundred and twenty dollars a year. It includes access to all of our course profiles that we do. We do one weekly. It's mostly Me, Garrett and Matt Rush's that are right those Cameron Hurdis pitches in You can see all of our great photography from those courses also in there. So just a reminder check out Friday Golf Club. Big thanks to Tom for the time. And here's the latest episode of The Yoke with Doke. I think this is I think we're right around fifty hours with Tom, so I think this is episode forty six.

00:03:25
Speaker 2: Of this.

00:03:33
Speaker 1: Tom, welcome back. It's been a while a lot of people have asked me in the last year if this is doad, if this podcast series is dead, and I've said no, I think I've been the problem. I've been too busy. But this was great to make it work in the winter. It's always nice to visit Traverse City and see you. Tell me, how have you been the last year? What have you been up to?

00:04:03
Speaker 2: Well? I've been busy, but actually not quite as busy with building golf courses in twenty twenty five as the two three years before that. Really, the only things we built this year were wild spring dunes kind of from start to finish. We had been clearing on at last fall, but we actually started shaping like just after New Year's and we were done shaping by the end of May, and they put sod down in July and August, and I played golf on it two months ago. So an amazingly fast project once it finally got going. Brett messerl who was the one who called me about that project and the first time, reminded me when I was down there to play it that it was four years to the day after he and I first set foot on that property. It was much longer after that before Michael Kaiser ever saw it. So got that done from start to finish. And then the other project was Punta Brava in Mexico, which took three years to build from a start to finish. Parker Anderson and I went down there with Eric Iverson in December of twenty twenty two, and you know, they had hired this big project management firm that built stuff in the middle of East and everywhere, and they had one of those crazy I don't know if you've ever seen this, like in construction project management scheduling, they do these timeline things with it's like this big long graphic bar of this will take this many days, and then this next step cannot start until this milestone, and then it goes like that. I just happened to find a copy of that while I was cleaning up my my home office last month, just before I headed back down there, so I brought it to Parker, showing him how these project managers who left the project pretty early on had us having everything done by like late twenty twenty three. But in fact, when you're working in Mexico and you're building something out of solid rock, things don't happen very fast. And really most of that first year we could have just waited until they got more organized and got more stuff. But you know, the project had been gonna happen since off and on since two thousand and seven. So when we were finally ready to get going, Brian Tucker, the client just wanted to get going, even if it wasn't going to be that productive for a while, to just show that we were out there doing something finally. But you know, really hard project to build. We can get into that more if you want, but it took three solid years, and this last trip we only had one hole left that the archaeologist had not cleared until a month before. So it's December seventeenth today, I think, and by this time next week that last hole will be grassed and they'll be done, which is amazing.

00:07:27
Speaker 1: I remember in astute listeners of this series, we'll remember you calling that part golf architecture project, part archaeologia archaeology project, since you know, the area had to be kind of like it had to be effectively searched for archaeological things before you built golf. Is that the longest project that you've been a part of in terms of when you started construction to end.

00:07:58
Speaker 2: Actual construction. I'm sure it is. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that's been close to that. I Mean, sometimes projects get you know, you're you've done all the plans and you're ready to build it, and then delay, delayed, delayed, delay. So you know, I've had I've had projects that took There was one that that one of my early courses, Riverfront of Virginia. The first time I was there, my first wife was pregnant with our son in the in the car kind of bouncing around the site when we went to go see the site and I took him to the grand opening when he was eight years old. So there were some twisted trds along the way. But that's like. One of the things I'm working on now is for a project in the Dominican Republic called Tropicalia, and we were going to build that in two thousand and eight, and obviously, when the economy hit the fan, they shut it down. But they said they were there. You know, I had like, I think six projects I was going to build in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, and that was the only one where the client even said, we still want to do this, it's just going to be a while. Everybody else disappeared into the bushes and I never saw them again. But you know, we've we've gone through a couple of cycles of we're going to build it soon. Oh no, we're not. You know, the last one was COVID hit so but they are finally going to do it now.

00:09:30
Speaker 1: That's amazing. It's I imagine it's kind of like coming back to an old friend, you know, where you've you've done a lot of work, you've thought about the topo, the design, It goes away and then they send an email or whatever and it's like, oh yeah, and you have to like rejog your memory.

00:09:50
Speaker 2: Well actually down there, you know, I mean the site was it's it's inland a mile from the ocean. It's not right on the sea. And and I actually volunteered to build it up on this plateau a little bit inland, so we could build a core golf course where the whole thing was together. Otherwise it would have been like two holes along the sea and then a bunch of flat inland stuff working around houses. And I didn't want to do that, but you know, we thought that working up on the plateau would be easy. And it was kind of a mixture of open land and trees, but it's had fifteen years to grow in the tropics, so most of it's a jungle now. You know, I barely even recognize it. And you know, after all the false starts and stops, it's like, do you want to come back again before we start clearing. I'm like, no, I want you to like tear down a bunch of trees. You know, it just it just looks the same but worse to me every time because it just keeps getting thicker and thicker. It's like, we need to get clearing and you could clear a bunch before you need any input.

00:11:09
Speaker 1: We did a really fun experiment on Garrett Morris. Since podcast or not experiment a topic. Matt was part of it. Who's here today? Me and Garrett. We went through the last fifteen years of golf courses built and we're kind of talking about what the most influenced in, you know, in the future, what the most influential courses.

00:11:33
Speaker 2: Was fifteen years so just starting since the pandemic.

00:11:36
Speaker 1: Basically since the crash. I'd be curious. I was thinking about this when I was driving up here. What's the golf course that you feel like you've built in the last fifteen years that's influenced you the most.

00:11:53
Speaker 2: That's influenced me the most. I'm gonna have to think about that a little bit. I thought you were going to ask what one has influenced everybody else the most? For me, that's Terry Edy.

00:12:09
Speaker 1: That's what my number one pick was.

00:12:11
Speaker 2: It's you know that sandy everywhere. Look, that seems to be all the rage the last few years. I'm not going to say that's the first golf course that did that, but that course got a lot of attention and everybody saw that it got a lot of attention, and they're like, oh, we should do something more than that, something more like that. It's interesting. I'm actually like the other thing that I've been doing this year, since I only had two golf courses to build, was working finally working on the last volume of the Confidential Guide, which means I traveled in Europe quite a bit this year, and in Sweden I didn't actually see the golf course, but there's a new garson Sweden that Henrik Stenson and his architectural partner at bill that flat sandy ground very close to the sea. It's called Crownwood, and from every description I've seen and picture of it, it's like they're going for the terry dye of Sweden. And it's the first, you know, as far as I know, it's the first really private club in Sweden, you know. I mean, there are a lot of clubs that are member run and owned, but none of them are closed outsiders at all, like the American model, and this will be the very first one. And they're all excited about that, like it's a good thing. I'm not sure. I'm not sure they should be careful what they wished for.

00:13:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you wonder. I always I often think about if you could just reset American golf and every course that's private became public, what would happen to golf?

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Speaker 2: I don't even think about that. There's fantasy and then there's that.

00:14:02
Speaker 1: You know, it's just an interesting thought experiment.

00:14:05
Speaker 2: I would think, like, we have to go deep on that.

00:14:07
Speaker 1: One, you know, I'd be curious how how it would change, like the public perception of places, Like in fifty years, what would the top ten courses in the world, because.

00:14:17
Speaker 2: I just ex exclusivity had no bearing up.

00:14:20
Speaker 1: If there was no exclusivity, Yeah, how what would the what would people consider the top you know, twenty courses in America? I think it'd be dramatically.

00:14:30
Speaker 2: Different, possibly, you know. I mean I've always felt the flip side of that was the reason Pebble Beach and Abandon are so famous is because they're the rare ones that are that level of great and they are open to the public. So they're they're up here compared to everything else that the public can see, and they wouldn't be if you had your wet Yeah.

00:14:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's something. It's a topic for another day.

00:14:59
Speaker 2: Possible. The uh yeah, the So to get back to your question, I'm trying to think. I don't think Terry Edy at all is the one that's been. It's been, it's certainly been the most influential on my career path. And you know, kind of getting back to being at the top of the pyramid instead of number three or whatever. I was there for a little while, and you know, we've we've been really busy since the pandemic, really busy. But you know, I mean that was a harder golf course to build in Pacific Dunes because it was covered with trees to start, and we had to like just you know, tear it all down and and revegetate the whole thing, which is much harder to do than you know, Pacific Dunes. We were just like picking away at the gorse and leaving exactly what we wanted to leave. And there's there's grass growing in the roughs that's just always been there, and there's nothing at Terry Edy other than the general contours of the property that's always been there. But you know, it was harder to do. But I don't think it was like a different level of construction than what we'd been doing before that. You know, certainly Leeda was a totally different experience, and you know, open my eyes to technology some That doesn't mean that I'm going to build a lot of golf courses like that. You know, Leeda worked. Lido made sense to do it that way because we had data to do it that way. If you've got to design the whole thing yourself, you know, I would still rather go design it on site than design it sitting at a computer screen. But it showed, you know, what it showed me was that someday somebody who likes sitting at a computer screen a lot more than I do will be able to do something really dramatic and exceptional. I think probably better if they start from something pretty flat and boring, so they don't. You know, I still think translating from a real site to the computer and back to a real site is harder to do than you imagine. Yeah, so when you're starting from scratch, you don't you don't have to worry about how you're tying in that little natural bump or those native grasses that you want to save, and to try to take that into the computer and save it and design around it. I'm sure it can be done, but you know, that's a big leap to come that way first and then go back.

00:17:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's our first two picks for influence on it, you know, overall industry, you know, golf industry as a whole in the future where Leedo was second and Terry Edy was number one and the massive Matt had the second pick. His reasoning for Liedo was the technology, and my reasoning for number one for Terry Edy was if that didn't work, you know, tri I doesn't happen and New Zealand doesn't become. What I think in twenty years is like this massive hotbed of golf destination, you know, as they as in.

00:18:33
Speaker 2: Twenty years, you think it's going to keep growing.

00:18:35
Speaker 1: I think it's going to keep growing.

00:18:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I'd be surprised. But because New Zealand's still a very small market for golf. There's only four million people that live there. Yeah, and you know, nearly everyone has to travel from a long way away to get there, except the Australians. So I'm not sure that the numbers support a ton of golf courses in in New Zealand anymore than they you know, Tasmania is another one, but even that, like barn Google is successful because the same people come back two or three times a year. And if they are going to six other golf courses and they're not coming back, I'm not sure any of them will be that successful.

00:19:21
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just think without Terry Edy, New Zealand isn't as prominent as a golf destination.

00:19:27
Speaker 2: I think that's true. And yes, I mean Kidnappers and Carrie Cliffs kind of set the tone for that, but they were still very expensive and they seemed like very one off things. And those you know, those those little lodges at both places are tiny. There's twenty people there on any given day. So tayor I is aimed at a broader market, you know, that feels more like Bandit or Sand Valley. And there's there's a market for that in New Zealand now that there wasn't ten or twenty years ago. But I don't know if there's a market for a lot of them.

00:20:11
Speaker 1: No, I'm at more of just that the entire tourism of the idea of going to New Zealand has become way more prevalent because of that. I you know, this this podcast has always been you know, listener question driven on top and top of kind of what's going on in your life. The Jeff Shellman asked the question, how long is your social media hiatus going to last? You're announced on on Instagram You're going to be taking a break, which I'd like to take a break.

00:20:46
Speaker 2: I announced on Instagram that that was my anniversary president to my wife was getting off social media because because I mean, I knew it, but it was starting to become very clear that like, you know, want you know, I travel a lot. When I'm home, I don't need to be distracted by that. I need to be present at home. And if you're always like checking messages on Instagram or hitting the you know, I can type the log in for golf Club atlass without even thinking about it, And so I've put those deep deep down on my phone and computer where it's really hard to do and I have to think about it. I have to willfully go through like three stops to actually do it, and so I'm almost never doing it. It's only I'm into it, like about a month now from my anniversary. I think it'll last. I think I'm I think I have will power and I just needed to like decide that I didn't want to do this anymore. You know, I was, I was a social media other than golf club Atlas. I avoided social media entirely for years. I never had a Facebook account or any of those other things, and I didn't have Instagram either. And then it was Angela Moser who like practically begged me to get an Instagram account or something because she was she was tired of hearing all these other architects talk about all the things that they were doing when we were doing more interesting thing, you know, more and more varied interesting things that they were. But it was never online anywhere, you know, Like I haven't even updated my website in like four years. If you go on it now, it'll show you what I was doing in twenty twenty. I've built like ten new golf courses since then. But you know, I just don't. I don't feel like it has anything to do with like getting business. I never did, you know. I thought like, people aren't gonna hire me because of Instagram. And I've been shocked that I would occasionally get like a it's like some personal message on Instagram from some potential client, and I'm always like, just please email me. You know I can't. I don't want to. I don't want to try to keep track of a whole nother channel. You know, first it was just the phone, and then it was the phone in email, and then it was the phone in email and texts, and then as personal messages on like eight different systems. I don't need that. But you know, I've I've been shocked to meet clients and have them say things like life listen to all your podcasts. I'm like, that's like fifty hours of podcasts or whatever the heck it is. By now It's like, seriously, people with lots of money who are thinking about building a golf course listen to that much. So clearly it's good to have it out there. It's in some form, but I think my time is done for Instagram. You know, I'm not worried I'll turn sixty five in March. I've got enough work to last me until I'm seventy. If things don't fall apart again and all these projects happen, I would guess that probably one or two other people will call me in the next five years about something cool. So so I'm not worried about generating future work, and there's no reason for the social media If I'm not.

00:24:52
Speaker 1: Golf architects is a very fascinating job to me in the sense that I think you guys, especially the smaller firms, you know, I think it changes is if you get you know, really big, but if you stay lean, you're really kind of an entrepreneur in a way.

00:25:12
Speaker 2: We all, i mean, who's really big by your definition, we're all fairly small shots.

00:25:18
Speaker 1: I think, like you think about like Fasio Nicholas before Oh yeah, yeah, you know, like where do they have teams? And you know, it's just that the figurehead just shows up to cut the.

00:25:29
Speaker 2: Rest and that pretty much doesn't exist anymore. Those guys are still doing golf courses, but they don't have a huge team. All their team are kind of independent now like all my people are, and you can bring them back together when you've got something for them to do, or you hope you can.

00:25:46
Speaker 1: But the you know, you know, you guys have to find the work. You have to sell yourself as the architect that does the work, you know, win the job in certain cases. Then you have to run the job. You you know, you're then become an operations manager and then at the end of it and part of during it, you're also the marketing arm of it. And I think that, you know, like there is a part of your job like I struggle with this is like part of my job is promotion, Like I don't like to promote my stuff, and it's like very difficult, Like you don't get into doing often. I think oftentimes you don't get into doing what you love doing to promote what you're doing, which is you know, it's just a challenging thing, but it's absolutely part of you know, the architecture world, and the golf architecture world is the promotional piece of it.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: It is and it isn't you know. I mean I was going to say that golf course architecture is not any different than running a media business or running a rest. You know, you're in it for the one little piece that you love, but there's all these other things that come with it. If you're going to be successful, you have to know about all different aspects of business that you don't probably really don't care about. But it's part of running a successful operation. And you can either you could try to hire out all those other somebody to do all those other pieces. You can't really afford to, but you can try, Or you could take on a lot of load that you don't really want to do for quite a while to get over the hump, and then maybe you don't have to worry about it so much. But it's interesting because as much as you say all of that and how important self promotion is, you know, on the one hand, I said to all of my employees when I gave them the company a few years ago and you know, sort of abdicated myself from being responsible for making sure that they had work a year or two down the road, was that the one thing that I thought they were that they didn't do enough of was self promotion. I'd been doing all that, and you know, back in the day before Instagram and Facebook and all this other stuff, it wasn't so much self promotion. You had to attract attention from golf magazines and golf writers and those people, and you had to spend time with them and talk to them individually. I couldn't just put out a podcast where everybody could hear it. I would do an hour interview with a writer who would distill it down to the same fifteen hundred words and you wouldn't learn anything. But that's the way it worked, and the only way you would get attention for your work. Was when a bunch of those people all knew you and thought, he's a really sharp guy. He's gonna be really good someday. And it wasn't that you you were already good. It was just that you didn't have the chance to show that you were good. But ultimately you didn't. You couldn't be recognized as good without those people all agree. It's like, you know, when Golf dy just started their Best New Courses thing long ago, the first private club had built Stonewall in Philadelphia. I thought, yeah, that has a pretty good chance of you know, that's a good golf course that should get some kind of attention. Not one of their panelists even went to rate it, because Jack Nicholas and Tom Fazio were building ten golf courses a year, And what chance did unknown me have of why would they even go look at my courses? They were trying to pick which was the best Tom Fazio course to nominate us the best course of the year. So, and you know, Stonewall, because it was a private club, they didn't really have a marketing budget. They didn't give a crap about being in golf magazines. They just wanted to sell their memberships and build a good membership and be done with it. And that's when I learned that, you know, even though I thought that was a really prestigious job, that it was not the kind of job that was going to get attention. Doing things in the public sphere gets way more attention. It maybe doesn't matter quite as much now because you could put out mostly whatever you want about anything you build, even if it's totally inaccessible, like you're saying, Tara Yedi is the most influential golf course. I can't get you on there now unless I go with you. You know, it's very private now that they for a while, to their credit, they did the Sandhill model, and you know, if if they weren't busy and you stayed on property for a couple of days, you could stay for three or four days if you wanted to. It was eye wateringly expensive. Some very wealthy people complained to me about how expensive that was, which sort of shock be. But but you could for a while play it. But now that they've got two resort courses down the beach, no, it's completely private. It's August the level private. You have to play with a.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: Member maybe that's the model to get the most attention, is you you allow people at the beginning.

00:31:39
Speaker 2: Yes, and then you have actually yes, they have the best of both worlds now for sure.

00:31:46
Speaker 1: It's like where everybody everybody that needed to go see it has seen it, you know, effectively, then you close it off so like everybody can talk about how amazing I've experienced it is, but then you know it's it's inaccessible now and super private for their members.

00:32:01
Speaker 2: But I want to get back to social media because obviously I started in an age where didn't exist. And you know, I think most young architects today would go like, well, how what would you do to sell yourself and generate work and get your name out there? And you know, I'm not really very comfortable at self promotion, very comfortable about talking about what I love to do, and I look for opportunities to do that. I'm terrible at chasing jobs. First of all, I don't I don't really know how to do it. Eight percent ninety plus percent of my clients have just called me out of the blue, and I try to find out why they called me. But I've never had any control over that. And with Mike Kaiser being one one of the very rare exceptions. You know, I knew that Mike. I heard from several people. I knew Bill Shea in Chicago, Fred Muller at Crystal Downs, knew that Mike had bought the property in Oregon for being the Dunes, you know, like nineteen ninety five, like well before anybody had heard about it, And so I asked them to introduce me. And David Kidd was already out there, you know, trying to figure out course number one. But I had my foot in the door for course number two long before people knew about the place at all. But in general, I never I didn't go out and chase jobs. You know, Julian Robertson called me because he played Pacific Dunes the second day it was open. You know, what I did was spend a lot of time on the road going to look at things and just sort of putting myself out there to the point that you know, people in Australia knew that I was interested enough to keep coming back, and that's how I wound up getting asked to do new golf courses there, and how I wound up consulting at some of their best golf courses. I never you know, I never asked any of them if I could be their consultant. It was the other way around. And the reason they act and the reason they asked me was because I'd been going around there for ten years already, or more like what we were talking about a cricket stick, you know, by the time they were looking for a new consultant when Pete I had passed away, I'd been going there for like forty years, not a lot, but enough for them to know there was a consistency there and I'd seen the thing all the way through. So that was the way nearly all the consulting work came about, but it's really the way most of the new work came about, too. And then the other thing is because I've because I've spent a lot of time with media people, but not just media people, I mean a lot of it's just like the attitude of it's funny women talk about life this way much more than men do. But just manifesting what you want by putting out there, you know what you're after, and that's kind of what's worked for me. I never it was never really a strategy. The first time somebody said to me that's what I was doing. I laughed, But it's true and the best example I could think of. You know, like eight or nine years ago, when I had Elliot Ross working for me for a while, who introduced us. You know, Elliott worked as business manager for me for a while and also helped set up the deal to do Saint Patrick's in Ireland. And you know, when he started working for me, he asked me to write down what was my list of dream projects. And I've kind of always done that. Like you know, if you look at any version of the Confidential Guide, there's always a list in the back of the you know, courses I'd still like to see or the newer ones, courses I'd like to see actually get built. And a lot of those have been built, and you know, they've been built partly because I knew about him years ago and put it out there that somebody should build this thing. So so when Ellie asked me, I thought, you know, I mean there's some concepts, like we've talked about, there's some concepts for golf courses that I'd like to do. I didn't get into that with him, but like you know, I've been talking for thirty years about wanting to do something like Swinley Forest, and Michael Kaiser finally gave me a chance to do that. But for Elliott, I said, well, the best sites that I've seen that I really wanted to do and it never happened were well high point being gone was very personal to me. The best site that I'd seen at that point was Punta Brava. I went there with Billy Getty in like twenty fourteen, after the Tiger deal had all fallen apart, and it was the land was still there, and you know, Billy took a look at he wanted to he wanted to build it, but he couldn't get the deal done with a landowner who was still alive. The deal only finally happened when the landowner passed away and his heiress, you know, wanted to make some money off the thing. I was selling it to whoever was standing there at the time, and so that and then you know, when we built Cape Kidnappers twenty years ago, there was a second piece of ground down in a valley beyond the first one.

00:38:15
Speaker 1: You wrote about that in Getting to eighteen.

00:38:17
Speaker 2: I did, and see that's an example of me. I didn't think of that as self promotion, but I knew in the back of my mind I'm trying to manifest this one to happen. And you know, we talked about it. I talked about it with Julian in like two thousand and eight or ten before he passed away. I didn't really sell him on it hard enough. You know, I think he might have done it, but I sort of downplayed, like it could be really simple and we could just have the animals out there grazing around. And you know, I didn't know if they would have enough water supply for a second eighteen hole golf course because we had to pump all the water up the hill from the bottom, so they're limited there. But you know, he didn't go for it, But now his suns are thinking about it, like I'm going to I'm going back there in April, and I hope I'm going to convince him to do something, whether it's a full on eighteen hole golf course or a shorter course of some kind, because it is it's one of the most dramatic pieces of land I've seen, and that sounds crazy, you know. Kidnappers is up on cliffs four hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. That's a pretty dramatic piece of land, and that's kind of a one off. I can't really think of anything else. I would compare that place too. But this other land is down in a valley, really rugged features and like ravines running through it that are one hundred feet deep and one hundred yards across. I mean, it's a really cool piece of land for golf. And you know, if we were there today, we could go hit balls around it because all that's out there right now are sheep and cattle gray and that all down to about half an in time. So you know, it's just a beautiful piece of land and part of the world that I've always loved going to. So I hope that gets done. But again, all of those projects have happened, and I think the main reason they've happened is just because I wanted them to happen. But instead of like chasing around billionaires, you know, ringing their phone off the hook to try to convince someone to do it, you just keep saying why that's important and why it would be really cool until somebody goes, hey, I got an idea, why don't we do that.

00:40:45
Speaker 1: I think you hit on like a great point here people get obsessed with like I can't tell somebody this.

00:40:54
Speaker 2: Idea, oh yes, that might take it.

00:40:57
Speaker 1: You know what the reality is like order for normal human beings. You know, if you don't have like extraordinary financial means in order to execute an idea, you need a village of people that help, you know, create allow the idea that you know, and you have to put an out there into the world so somebody can say yes to the idea.

00:41:22
Speaker 2: Right I was young, you know, I thought maybe just deifiably that you know, I was really afraid to put routings out there for something, for a piece of property I'd looked at for fear that you know, they in the end they would hire Jack Nicholas or Greg Norman because their name was much bigger, and just steal my routing, you know, because once you put the routing out there, you don't really control what's going to happen anymore. And tons of projects, you know, like somewhere between twenty five and fifty percent of projects fall through and wind up with a different developer who has zero obligation to go back to the original architect and usually doesn't want to because they you know, they're the ones developed in the golf course. We don't want to look like we're stealing the idea from the guy who was there before, so they just want to find their own guy. And you know, even if you did a great plan for it, they're probably just going to ignore it and come up with their own so they can say they did it all. So, yes, there's really not the same reason to be afraid that I always thought there was, And you know, that's really helped me over the years, Like Sabonic, when Michael Pascucci called me about that, at the beginning, I didn't know if there was any way. I really doubted there was a way I was going to wind up co designing the golf course with Jack Nicholas. And I knew Michael was personal friends with Jack Nicholas, and the idea that he would fire him and hire me was pretty much a non start. So you know, I did a plan for it in like a day or two, and then I was like, should I let him really look at the plan? And then I was like, well, what have I got to lose? I mean, if he winds up hiring Jack Nicholas, there's nothing I could do about that. Maybe it'll be a better golf course because he saw my plan. But I just trusted him to not steal from me, and it worked out. Punda Brava was the same when I looked at it with Billy Getty. You know, Tiger Woods had done the original plan for that, and I was counting up the other day because I do give. I mean, if you looked at Tiger's plan and you looked at our plan just side by side and not look at you know, from on the opposite wall, they look pretty similar if you look really closely. I think I moved like ten greens, a little bit here, a little bit there, changing that, having a crossover with the first hole in the Athols, some weird things that you know, and maybe Tiger would have done some of those things if he'd been the one to build it ten years later, but because because you're always refining as you go anyway. But but so I did that plan for Billy and Brian Tucker saw it and I thought, oh crap, now it's out there, and whoever does that is going to take those ideas. But when the money finally came gether together to do it, they call me back because I'd done the plan that they were interested in, and so that's how I wound up getting my job.

00:44:48
Speaker 1: When you've won a job and you've gone up against other architects, have you ever looked at their plan? Like, do you ever just look at them even if you're like done with the project. Have you ever looked at them and just, oh, that's interesting they went there or there is there ever? And has there ever been a plan that you've looked at and been like, I wish I would have thought about that, even if you you know, like I'm not saying built it, but like you you just saw it. Maybe you know later and you said that that was pretty clever.

00:45:16
Speaker 2: Right. So, first of all, I've almost never won a job where I had to compete with like three or four other architects. I'm like one For the only time I can remember interviewing where they interviewed a bunch of architects and I wound up with the job was common ground, and that was sort of a done deal because Eric and Don were such good friends and known ed made from the CGA for so long. But most of those other design competitions, not just the Olympic thing and the famous things, but like a dozen projects I could name that we did not get the job.

00:45:54
Speaker 1: I think what's interesting about what you're saying, though, is like you earlier said, I never have chased. You've never And if you think about architecture and chasing a job, you're basically a sales You're a salesperson. Then I used to do sales, and my first job out of college was I would just go into an office and pick up a phone and call people all day long.

00:46:17
Speaker 2: And I could never do that. I could never do that. But Dave Richards, who was from Michigan and did the pr for all the golf courses up here for like twenty five years, and and he didn't bring you know, I came and saw Crystal Downs on my own before I met Dave. But Dave called me in nineteen eighty six to ask me to come up and see all the new resort courses, you know, hoping I'd write something about it about them for Golf magazine. And so Dave helped promote the two projects I did here, and you know, I paid him for a while to help with some of the other stuff and like introduce me to golf writers and get articles written about them. But Dave said to me at one time if you had to sell shoes, you'd starve. And I said, if I had to sell shoes, I'd want to die. You know that that is just not me at all.

00:47:16
Speaker 1: And that's what I think when you get these like, hey, it's a five person race, it becomes a sales competition.

00:47:24
Speaker 2: Yes, it's not about you know, we could put five plans on the wall and you you know, and talk about them all, but most people looking at those plans, they don't understand the topography or how any of them are actually fitting the site. So that's a pointless exercise. And it's all about how they're presenting themselves and what they're saying and how they make the client feel. And that's not worthless. I mean, you know, you do have to find like minded people to work for. It doesn't help you to be if you're a great salesman. It gets you jobs for people that aren't on the same page with you. That's not gonna work out well. So you don't want you don't want to be that good as salesmen. In the end, you're trying to identify people that you would actually want to work for and are gonna let you do what you do.

00:48:22
Speaker 1: You know, I was I was sitting. It's funny. I think like clients and architects, you know, you do this song and dance where they talk to people, but it's almost a lot of times like self selecting. Like sometimes I think, you know, having spent time and gotten to know you know, gotten to know architects as well as like a lot of the developers, right, they kind of self select who they're going. Like you could meet somebody, you met a developer and you sat down, like sat down and talked to them for an hour or two about what they wanted or what they wanted to do. You almost be able to type pick who they should hire.

00:49:07
Speaker 2: Sure, and there's been there have been guys that I've tried to make a living consulting on that and telling the developer who to hire.

00:49:14
Speaker 1: It is like it's very much like a personality thing. Like to me, like somebody that's going to hire you is going to be somebody that is like a golf nut, Like that's a really good match. But because you had like or who didn't know anything about.

00:49:32
Speaker 2: So so I'll tell you the one thing that I've been pretty pretty good at, if you know, I've had some lapses over the years, but in general that one of the things that I've done well is like at the end of the project, talk to the client about what should I have charged you? Why did you pick me? You know, trying to figure out, like, you know, how I got the good job. And you know, I said, like, when I've gone up against three or four other architects, I generally do not get the job. But luckily for me, like you know, a lot of developers, now, if you made them list their first three architects that were that they wanted to talk to, they're going to say the three usual suspects, the three, the top three, the big three, because that's what all of media reinforces to them. Oh, these are the first guys you would consider. But luckily, you know, we all have different personalities, and we're out there. We're out there in media enough that most of those potential clients, instead of calling all three of us and saying, yeah, I want to sit down with you and talk through this, they have a sense of which of the three resonates with them the best. So instead of calling all three of us, they'll call the first guy in their list and go walk the site and have a meeting, and if it goes, well, that's it's done, and if it doesn't go well, then maybe they'll go to the next guy on the list. But they don't make us all do proposals and fight it out for the job. We wouldn't We wouldn't do it if they made us at this point, but they, you know, they're really good clients pretty much never asked us to do that. It's the other you know, when a job is more political, and there's like you know, and the best example I can give of this Trinity Forest in Dallas. When the developer called me the first time about it, I said, well, why would I even interview that for that? You're going to hire Bill and Ben they're in Texas. That makes all the logic in the world. You'll never hire me. And he said, well, we can't get them interested. It's on a landfill and they're scared of that and they're busy, and they just they won't even come look at the site. So will you please come and look at the site? I was like, okay, and I went down and looked at the site and I said, it's interesting. It's kind of a complicated site, but I still think you're going to hire Bill in Ben, and he's like, well, we still can't get them interested, so we want you, you know, so we're going to have like a couple other architects make proposals, so we want you to go back and make a proposal too, and then come back and present it in a couple months. And so I did that, And when I got back to present my proposal, I was like, oh, Ben was here yesterday, so we're going to like, you know, we'll listen to all the proposals, but then we're going to give them time to make a proposal too. So when he called me to tell me that they'd hired Bill and Ben, which I expected from the beginning, I said, do you mind if I asked you a couple of questions about this? I was like, I don't think you were lying to me. I believe you. I know them like, you couldn't get them interested for the longest time. But why when you couldn't get them interested for the longest time, I said, I said, I always kind of had the feeling that if you weren't going to hire them, you were going to hire me. Is that true? And he said, yeah, that's pretty much true. I mean, when we started talking about the thing at the beginning. Bob Deadman said, well, those are two guys doing the best work right now. Why would you not hire one of them? So I said, so, why did you have three or four other architects make proposals on this thing? And he said, well, there were a lot of stakeholders in this, like SMU is going to have their golf team facility there, and AT and T had money in it, and the tour was going to be involved with it, and there was another big stakeholder too, I can't remember. So there are a lot of people involved. So they didn't want it to look like they'd only considered one guy. They wanted to at least look like they went through a process, and when Bill and Ben weren't part of it, they needed some other guys. So he said, you know, you and Bill and Ben spent by far the least amount of time on your proposals, Like everybody else came in here with like flyovers and you know, lots of renderings and drawings of what they were going to do. And he said, I kind of felt bad that they put in all that work. And then he said, and I kind of felt bad that they didn't understand that they didn't really have a chance to get the job. And that's what I went, Holy crap, never going to do that ever. Again.

00:55:25
Speaker 1: It's a bad feeling when you know you're.

00:55:27
Speaker 2: Wasting some time, it is, but that's you know, that's really how most of those things go. So so that was a clear like, no, you should never even consider going through a process like that. Again, they already know what they want to do. They're just making it look like they were thoughtful about it, and you're a prop for them if you're not the guy.

00:55:54
Speaker 1: And I mean that's basically how every club runs their thing. Yeah, all they all are like, we're down between these three, but we're gonna pick this one. And it's like, well what about the other two? Like they're gonna come in, They're they're gonna take three days out of their lives to fly here, you know, persent and but you know going in, you're hiring somebody else.

00:56:18
Speaker 2: Well, I think the nda on it has expired and I'm not gonna get into much detail, but you know, the only reason I put in a bid to do the Olympic job in Rio ten years ago was that I knew one of the four people on the committee was a Brazilian guy who had worked in New York for years, and I met him when he was he was working for George Soros, but he was the green chairman of a club in New Jersey as Seth Rayner. Course, I think it was Morris County, and he had just asked me to come in and I did, like a one day consulting thing, and as far as he was concerned, that made me the front run or for the Olympic job in real because he was always so grateful for that, and he was one of the four votes and strongly encouraged me to bid on the thing. You know. So he gave me feedback about seeing all eight of those proposals, and the feedback was crazy. I mean the feedback was like two of the proposals that he was most impressed by had no chance of winning because none of the four people that were voting on it were in their corner. You know, that's just they look at the proposals, but they don't act on the proposals. They act on the people and the relationships they have.

00:57:54
Speaker 1: I did a friend of mine a favor once and I sat in a committee me that they were picking you know, a new architect and I was just saying, you know, I had no vote. I was just sitting there and I was listening to him. Bed the ball around a little, and the consensus came down there. They were doing a project, you know, and they were like, if if we were going to build a new course, we would hire this architecture firm.

00:58:30
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.

00:58:31
Speaker 1: If we're going to do the project that we want that we were doing and to sell our membership, we need to hire this firm.

00:58:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:58:40
Speaker 1: And like to me, I was sitting there, I'm like, this is bananas. Like your your spending, you know, enough money that you should go with the people that you would hire if you were building a new course.

00:58:53
Speaker 2: But all clubs are all clubs are super political. So that's exactly how that's going to go all the time. And that's if you get back to what I was saying before about you know, clients have their favor of the of the big three. You know, I've sort of realized over time, who's the personality profile that's going to pick me. The more political they are, the more likely they are to go with Gil. He's i mean, his dad was a mayor. He's always been really good at the political side of stuff. That's why he gets hired for all the big club renovations. And you know, PGA tour. You have to be a master of politics to deal with the PGA tour, whereas both Bill and I would get pretty frustrated with them pretty fast. So and the tour wants somebody that they think is reasonable and they've worked with before, and sort of, you know, push comes to shove, we'll do what they say. So, you know, Gil gets a lot of jobs like that. And then Bill and Ben and I, I mean, obviously we've worked for a bunch of the same clients. We're not that different in terms of the personality. But I've noticed, you know, Bill and Ben, they also have a subset of like real estate developers that love Ben's name as part of that package that's going to help sell homes a lot more than my name is still to this day. So so you know, so there's a certain segment of Bill and Ben's clientele that didn't really consider me very heavily. And then the other guys are I mean, you can call them billionaires. They're really wealthy guys, but at the end of the day, they're entrepreneurs and they really like that I started my business from scratch with no connections in the golf business. If they're comparing me to Bill and Ben, they think Bill and Ben's advantage is Ben was famous in golf and that doesn't mean anything to them. That's almost a negative to a certain group of guys that didn't have that themselves in whatever business they're in.

01:01:20
Speaker 1: It's uh, observing this, I think like a lot of the general observations are similar. The one thing I would add in which I think, you know, we this ties kind of everything together is there's also when it comes down to you know, YouTube and GIL to a certain extent, is all of your consulting work when there were no jobs, you know, or when you were starting right then it's like, oh, you know it's a you know, it's someone who would profile for you or or Bill. And it's like, but they but builded the consulting work at the club that they were.

01:02:01
Speaker 2: A member at.

01:02:02
Speaker 1: And it's like, if you are you did that you met this person at some event, like there becomes this one like thread that they that they have.

01:02:11
Speaker 2: For sure, the more people you meet, you know, it's it's like building the pyramid, and it takes a big base.

01:02:18
Speaker 1: And I feel like that's the you know become and maybe you know you more so than maybe I would say. I'm just trying to think. But like you, Bill and you know, Gil obviously came after you guys, but you guys built this new model of how you get new builds, and a lot of it is through the consulting work is if you think about But I'm trying to think, like because like, I don't know how many of my jobs would actually trace the consulting.

01:02:54
Speaker 2: Not that many.

01:02:54
Speaker 1: But that's how you built your career.

01:02:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, well I mean that and writing or reverent things about golf courses in a book that I gave away to a few people. Yeah, and yeah, a whole I built my career a whole bunch of ways. But again, it is entrepreneurial though it's number one by being out, you know, just you keep just putting yourself out there, which is different than promoting every construction visit you make to a new golf course and showing more pictures in the dirt and more renderings of what it's going to be like in five years. Is that's kind of a different thing.

01:03:38
Speaker 1: What do you what do you think of those renderings. I have mixed feelings about them.

01:03:44
Speaker 2: I will not look at them because they're a cartoon. You know, even if the architect does work, you know, I don't work that way. So for us, anything that we draw in advance is I just call it a cartoon version of what we're going to do, And you know, it sort of bothered poon de Brava. I realized one of the one of the things that got me to want to stop doing social media besides my wife most important, you know, years ago when Tiger was going to do the project, and then again at the beginning of our project, Poonta Brava, trying to sell very expensive memberships, put together a sales package with flyovers and renderings of what the golf course was going to look like based on the routing plan. They wanted me to spend a lot of time with those guys to tell them how the bunkers were going to look, and I was like, I'm not going to do that. I don't That's not how you do this. You have to get out here in this rock and build the thing. And so so I realized at the end of this job, after three years of hammering away at the RAH that a lot of people go, oh yeah, it looks just like those flyovers they did three years ago. That just makes me angry.

01:05:10
Speaker 1: You know.

01:05:11
Speaker 2: That discounts how much work all of the people that work for me did out there, how much, how much they had to listen to a rock camera going for days and weeks at a time so they could build the ninth green, and a lot of people just think, oh yeah, it's just like this this cartoon version that somebody did a long time ago. So you know, that's what I think of all plans for what we're going to do with the new eighteen hole golf course. It's like, if that's really the finished design, you should spend a lot more time on it. And if it's not, then quit pretending it is. But that's that's what clubs, especially in the consulting business. You know, a lot of my associates are really struggling to get consulting work now because they're going up against that. You know, we don't do that kind of work, and and other firms do. You know, we always got consulting because we were the guys that could actually go build it, you know. You know, and if you're rebuilding bel Air, all you need is a black and white picture of what it looked like and a guy who can get on a machine and make it look like that. Doing any drawing or rendering of it is pointless. You know what it looked like, but it's all that's all sales. That's one hundred percent sales. It doesn't have anything to do with actually being able to go build that. So, you know, I think a lot of clubs are barking up the wrong tree there.

01:07:05
Speaker 1: The one that stands they'll never forget, a kind of like the very beginning of the rendering kind of boom, which I think is like it's only going to get bigger at this point with a like you know, these clubs are going to be playing the video game version of their course before the courses.

01:07:25
Speaker 2: Oh oh yeah. Somebody told me that the other day that they they had done that and were we going to do that for this next course and I was like, no, nope, we're not, because.

01:07:35
Speaker 1: Then when the green changes, like the green site changes, but the one that always sticks out, I'll never forget. When Cabot Citrus Farms was like in construction, they had the one rendering of I think it was like a par three and it was like it went it went insane on social media. Everybody's like, oh my god, and you know, you're looking at this and it's like I now, like, you know, three years in, I've never seen that photo reproduced. Like nobody's taken the real the photo of which.

01:08:04
Speaker 2: Hole was supposed to be and what does it actually look like now?

01:08:07
Speaker 1: Actually like that, like it's not it hasn't been presented and it's like, what this is?

01:08:12
Speaker 2: You know? Well, and they did the same thing for Old Petty And I told Ben what I just told you, No, I'm not going and what I told the guys that pumped a profit. No, I'm not going to spend any time on that. That's not in my contract to do the cartoon, and they did one, and I think it helped them. I think Ben wants to keep doing that because it sells at whatever level he's trying to sell to future visitors while there's still nothing to look at. But that is at the end of the day, all architects. The one thing that an architect has to be able to sell is the client has to believe that you can build something great on that site. Usuals help, you know. Tom Simpson did his little pen and ink drawings are beautiful. Mike Strantz was a really good artist and could paint exactly what he wanted. Supposedly they use those paintings when they're out there in construction. I don't know that. For a fact. Robert tren Jones could draw. He could draw a lot better than I could draw. Pee die, and I had the credibility of No, they go out and build stuff and they make it work, and they've got a long now, they've got a long track record of making it work. So I may not know exactly what it's going to look like, but I have confidence that they can build something really great because look at all these other projects they've built. You know, most architects it's like, yes, I'm calling you because I liked this golf course of yours that I saw. And most architect's response to that is I'll build something just exactly like that for you too, which is sort of an embarrassing answer and a creative profession, but in a sales profession, in a business that is what sells.

01:10:14
Speaker 1: And is scalable, it's easy to build the same thing every time, you know. It's easy to you know, create some sort of template to follow so.

01:10:25
Speaker 2: You know, I won't name all of the many architects over the years that that's been their mL. It's like and even if they had no intention of actually building the same thing for the next client, that's still what they would tell them.

01:10:39
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, you're quitting social media, but you know, I I have a very complex relationship with social media. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing without it. That being said, when you spend ten years on it, it kind of wears you out. What I think is I feel like golf courses and developers and architects alike really started to understand the power of social media in like the late twenty eighteens, you know, that's when they really started to see it. And I think, like, it's not just you know, it's not just architect Like, there's a huge like golf. The golf development piece of this has never been the way it is now, where golf developers can effectively push what they're doing so often with video and reach so many people. You know, it used to be like, you know, you get one shot, what this whole conversation, You get one shot with a magazine writer and you bring them down they you bring them to the course when the course is humming, and like in a great in a great place for them to see it and for them to photograph it. But now the way that I think, the way media is so readily available has led to it's just it's it's an overload, and like I you know, I'm not going to sit here. I think I contribute to this.

01:12:18
Speaker 2: So you know, we put you have and you should probably give yourself more credit. I mean, if I have no idea of the history of it, but if it if that really changed in the late twenty teens, it's because you and a few other people started actually making deeper content than just here's a photo, here's a rendering, here's a photo, here's a rendering, no commentary on what it was like. And you know, but putting those photos and renderings out there, now that people have heard all the content, people see more in those drawings than they used to. They're more effective now because a lot of a lot more people pay a lot more attention to the topic.

01:13:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's I mean, there's so it's it's so good in so many ways. But I do think like sometimes like where I I struggle is like I don't necessarily the promotion, Like you end up seeing the same thing from the same place all the time. And I guess this was the same way it was when it was magazines and you get one shot. But it almost like every every create, you know, everybody that you know shoots it. What I notice is like, oh, I see this, this is a cool picture, right or but then it becomes you know, everybody shows the same four pictures effectively.

01:13:54
Speaker 2: That's always true. You know, you hired a photographer back in the day and they took a by pictures and you identify kind of three of them that were really great and the light was perfect, and that was your signature hole and that was that. And people don't talk about it quite the same way now, but there's still a lot of that.

01:14:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, while we're here, what do you think are going to be the things that people talk and put out into the world about Wild Spring Dunes?

01:14:24
Speaker 2: Oh? Well, I have no idea, you know. And that's what people always want me, you know, writers, media, people want me to simplify it for him and tell them and and I'm like, it's like the last thing I want to do. I mean, here's another way that people over promote their stuff is I don't see it quite as much now as like ten years ago, but like you do, like those yardage books which have like a long description of every whole and why it is such a genius design with this alternate fair way and that, and then the pin is over here, you go this way, and it's like, you know, don't you want to leave something for the golfer to figure out and like decide for the you know, I want them to decide for themselves if they're going to appreciate it. I don't want to tell them like all of the point. You know. It's like same as like if I was making movies, I would not want you to listen to a bunch of reviews of my movie before you went and saw the damn movie. I would want your emotional reaction to watching the movie that I meete. And that's what I want for golf. I want, I want your reaction to actually playing the golf course without all that other bullshit. And that's why I don't like doing this anymore, because because more and more people are trying to pre check, you know, tell you what to think before you ever get there.

01:16:09
Speaker 1: The I'd love a yardage book that was like you know, it gets a part three and it's like this part three exists because I had to get out of this corner and this was the only way to go.

01:16:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, that would be a more honest yortage book for some golf courses. But but no, that's not what they're gonna say. So Wild Springs Dunes, I'm afraid people are gonna look at it and think that it looks like a bunch of other modern designs because it's sandy around the edges. Because it's a really sandy property. And if you keep looking for sandy property, you're gonna get a lot of that pine trees. Yeah, and you're gonna get pine trees. I mean I thought of it when we you know, when we were starting now on those two Texas projects three four years ago. I thought, this is great. I've got like two completely different sites. They're one that they are, they're very different. You know. Childress Hall is like, you know, you're you're up on a bluff overlooking the Red River and it's going through gently undulating ground and then you're really only in the big sand dunes for like the last three or four or five holes at the end of it, where it feels like a dune's course like bally Neal or somewhere else. The rest of it is Texas and then wild Springs. You know, it's hillier. It was much more forested when we started. Now that we've cleared it back, it looks a little more like some like Pinehurst or Sedge Valley, but it was pretty thick with trees when we started. It does have some little ravines that start out as springs on the top of the site and wind up eroded down to rock and being a pretty wide gully that is a hazard on the holes at the bottom end of the golf course, and I thought that would make it really feel different than the other golf courses. But that was when, you know, the first plan I did for that was thirty six holes with a golf course around the outside on the more rugged land where the ravines are deeper, and then a golf course on the in the middle that was gentler and neither The first guys that were trying to do the development, Brett Messerl and his partners nor Michael Kaiser, went for letting us do you know my idea, My original sales pitch was let me do the outer course. The really rugged one and let my associates do the inter course. But you know, they wanted to hire Bill core or like Debrees or somebody else to do the second golf course. So I had to pick my side my side of that instead of you know, I couldn't just make somebody else stay in the middle of mine and you're and then you're stuck in this. You got to stay in your bubble. My associates would have done that. Nobody else is going to do that. But then then when Michael got involved, you know, he went back to his dad's mantra of just design me the best eighteen holes you can, don't worry about stepping on the next guy's toes, just go wherever, and then we'll have them do the next thing. The only problem was that Bill Corr had already been there and done a plan, thinking that I wanted this part and he wanted this part, so he was he was over here, so and then he used some parts that I wanted to use. So so three or four of the holes on Wild Spring Dunes are a hole that Bill cor came up with. I said to Michael, I can unsee this. That is a really good hole for that part of the ground and it fits. If we're trying to get as much variety as we can into eighteen holes, I want to use that. And I didn't feel as bad stealing from Bill this time because I let him keep the ground he wanted for Pinehurs number eleven. And to be fair, I found you know, Brett Messerl found that la in for wild Spring Dunes. But I was the one who spent two years figuring out how to put a golf course on it so that everybody else could come along and go, yeah, this is a great project, we should build this. So if that meant that I got you know, I had to put my foot down a little harder to get my way on that one. I didn't feel bad about that at all. Everybody else is coming in behind me.

01:21:07
Speaker 1: Well, you know he got to build the first one at Taur too.

01:21:11
Speaker 2: Right, And uh, yeah, we've traded over the years, and then.

01:21:14
Speaker 1: You had the stream Song. You had the stream Song joint build, which was you know, you both wanted to build in the same place.

01:21:21
Speaker 2: It's uh, you.

01:21:22
Speaker 1: Guys have had to probably make trades and concessions over the years to each other.

01:21:27
Speaker 2: You know, I don't think I actually don't think it's making concessions. Other people look at it that way. I think I think if you asked Bill, it'd be the same. At the end of the day, we we just keep holding out for what we really want to do, and we usually get our way on that. You know, the hardest part of Stream Song was that neither one of us wanted to be the one to decide which holes he was going to build once we got that all sorted out into two golf courses, because we'd worked on it together and we you know, the goal was we would both be happy building either course, and we were going to be so then it was like, well who decided, you know, who's going to do which course? And neither one of us wanted to pick, and then Crenshaw didn't want to pick either, and you know, rich Mack finally made Bill pick. But you know, we could have done it the other way around. And that's what I mean. I have so much appreciation for the Red Course because I had an idea what I would have done building all those holes, and they did some really different things that I wouldn't have thought about.

01:22:38
Speaker 1: Back to Wild Spring Dunes, I you know, I think like I got I went down there a couple of weeks ago, and I had so many people ask me what I thought about it, you know, and I think the thing that stood out to me was like how much diversity there is, Like, you know, it's easy obviously to compare it to other sandy sites, and I kind of settled it's, you know, it's got really similar topography to Sand Valley, but then it also has some really interesting ravines and creeks that run through it that give it a little it's almost like a little bit more diversity in terms of I think the type of hazards and that, and just the the your ability you can build more varied golf holes there.

01:23:23
Speaker 2: I think that's true. I mean it's there's a lot going on on that property and some stuff going on underground that you don't think too. But yeah, it's a beautiful it's a beautiful site for a golf course, and it took a long time to get traction, but but I'm really excited for people to see it now.

01:23:45
Speaker 1: It's neat too, I I you know, I have personally, I was in my mid twenties. I lived in Austin, Texas for a while, Okay, and you know, mid twenties and no connections. Living in a city that you didn't grow up in like golf golf there is hard for somebody in that situation. There's like I used to drive and meet a friend halfway between Houston, and you know, we'd be you know, constantly scouring to find like good places to play golf. And I think one of the neat things about that place is that it's bringing you know, there that is a golf architecture kind of desert for a lot of that area. You know, that's in terms of accessible and affordable. You've obviously built Memorial Park in the time since then for people to go see, and I think that that is going to kind of change the way people view public golf in that area of the world in terms of uh, you know, the uh, the the experience out there playing golf on sand.

01:24:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, like we said before, I mean children saw would be that too. But that's very private and not many people get to see that and or even know much about it other than it's ranked really highly now. But Wild Springs is just the opposite. It's like everybody's going to see that and see it a lot, which is great.

01:25:08
Speaker 1: You were building two golf courses at the same time in the same state. That had to be the furthest apart possible within the same state, maybe maybe California. If you went east to west.

01:25:23
Speaker 2: I mean, you could certainly be a lot further west in Texas even than the Childress. So but yeah, I was shocked. I mean, you know, I get spoiled every once in a while now and a client picks me up and flies me somewhere. And Michael Kaiser came down to look at Childress when we had most of the whole shaped, and then we flew over to Nagadocha's for wild Springs, and it was a long plot. It took more than an hour in the private jet. It only took two hours in the private jet to gift from them here to Childress, and it took more than an hour to get from Childress to Nagadochius, which shocked me. But yeah, I mean they're just very different properties in every way, and you know, one's private and one's public, so they don't really compete with each other directly, which was which was a bonus of that situation. But I do, I mean, I'm not sure Texas is a golf desert, but maybe for public off it.

01:26:35
Speaker 1: Is as a as a mid twenties person with no connections. I can assure you it is as a big of a desert as you got.

01:26:43
Speaker 2: Fair, But that is changing fast. There's a lot of stuff happening there that's you know, got a lot to do with state income taxes. And people move into Florida and Tennessee and Texas because it saves them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on their taxes. But you know, all those places are booming with new construction, and you know, from people moving there and don't want to wait on the waiting list to get into the whatever is the best course there now? And you know, like you know, after the pandemic, I think I had six calls about different projects in Texas, the one that David Kidd just opened. I looked at that. I looked at something else around Austin that I don't think has happened yet but still might probably. I looked at a thing on a game ranch that was not that covey thing, but another similar type property, and every single client, we want to build the best course in Texas. I was like, what's your goal? We want to build the best course in Texas. And I was like, I guess that's possible. It's like I don't even know. There was no clear like this is what you got to beat. There isn't an obvious consensus best golf course in Texas, and maybe there won't be after everybody builds all these new things. But but I thought, well, there is a moment here where somebody will do it, and maybe somebody will do it, and then somebody else will beat them two years down the road and it'll keep going like that. Who knows.

01:28:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, in this, you know, the whole idea of like what's best, you know, like what's the best restaurant? Well, yeah, I don't know what kind of food are you in the mood for? Because like, you know, it's interesting, you know, like with those two projects, they are so wildly different, you know, and some people I don't think it's crazy. Like some people will say Wild Spring Dunes is way better than Childress if they play both them, and some people will be like Childress is way better than Wild Springs Dunes, And like, I don't think they're necessarily either one of them is wrong, And I don't think that's like everybody always wants this defiant this is the best golf course, but it is totally what you're in the mood for. And it's like to me, you know, Childress Hall, you go there, you're going to have a raw golf experience where you are, you are battling elements and you are like if you don't like playing, you know, golf where your mind is fully activated with with wind, what the ball is doing on the ground, and be ready to be uncomfortable in positions like that's not going to be for you, you know, if you go to Wild Spring Dunes, Like, if you really like that, you know, then like nobody's ever gonna be able to talk you about if you really like that type of golf, nobody's ever gonna be able to talk you off Chiulder Saul being. Nobody's gonna say Wild Spring Dunes just leaves and bounds better than Children's Fault, you know, and that.

01:30:10
Speaker 3: But like for a lot of people that don't like to that.

01:30:14
Speaker 1: When golf gets really really challenging.

01:30:17
Speaker 3: They will maybe like Wild Spring Dunes more because I think there's more more natural beauty, more elevation, and more.

01:30:28
Speaker 1: More maybe memorability. One time around with the exception of those clips the hoils right over the river at Childress. You know, one of the things I loved about Childress And this is just anecdotal opinion here. I love golf courses where you I when when I played the first time, I was completely disoriented as to where I was on the property, Like completely. You could have told me I was pointed in any direct and where we were, you know, before we teed off was in any direction. I would have believed you. Like that was one of the things I found the most fascinating. That's got to be one of the courses that you see the least amount of other golf or bearing points that you've built.

01:31:21
Speaker 2: I guess so. And it's more half of it's the little trees that are out there are just big enough to stop you from seeing two holes. You know what's you know, the holes aren't right together, obviously, but but they're not so far apart you couldn't see them except there's just enough stuff kind of blocking your way. But yeah, I mean the fact that the routing's kind of unconventional and it makes a little loop back to the clubhouse at five and then it's gone. You know. Usually you know, like I've I've gotten and seen hundreds of golf courses where I've never seen a map or anything, And a lot of times I wouldn't even ask permission of the pro shop. I just go walk because like something in the pro shop might say no just because they were scared, but nobody really cares if I'm out there or not, so I'm just going to go. So I think one of the ways I got good at routing was by doing that so many times, because you start walking and you're like, Okay, this is the first hole. That must be the ninth over there coming back to the clubhouse, so you know, you can after you get two or three holes out, you can start to feel like how this is going to piece together, if it's going to work, But you know that's because you're expecting the ninth comes back to the clubhouse, so it's it's sort of evenly balanced, and you know, when you throw that out the golf it could go anywhere, and that one really does. And yes, there's no way I wouldn't expect people to remember, you know, other than once you get to the river you kind of know where that is in relation to the last few holes before that. You have no idea.

01:33:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, Children's Hull came in really high in the Golf Magazine World Top one hundred. It is brand new. More holistically, when these rankings come out, are I you know, I assume you look at it. Are you ever like surprised where things come in? Are you like? What is that like when you see your courses on there? Like? What is that process? When when they come out? What do you what are the thoughts going through your hat?

01:33:37
Speaker 2: Well, I'm lucky, you know, once you have I don't know, I.

01:33:41
Speaker 1: Think you got ten in the top one hundred, So you got ten percent of the top world top one hundred on golf dot com, which is kind of cool.

01:33:49
Speaker 2: And ten of my forty nine courses are in the top one hundred in the world. It's kind of crazy. And I don't that's that's a glass ceiling that I didn't think it was that high. You know. The last time I had eight courses in the list, and I thought that's probably as many as you can get. And if Childress Hall makes it, it will be at the expense of Rock Creek or kid Kidnappers or whichever other of my courses people want to bump down to my ninth best course. You know, like if Punta Brava makes the list in a couple of years in it as spectacular as that property is, I don't see how it doesn't. But you know, does that mean that Tayaai will drop out? It's the lowest length one probably, I mean shouldn't have anything to do with each other. Ones in Mexico, ones in New Zealand. But you know, people have all different kinds of logic for how they put their own personal rankings together, and you know, it's just individual opinion is all it really is. So I don't like, I mean a thought from the time we started building it that Childress Away was going to be one of the best golf courses we've built. And you know, it's a great piece of land. We had a great relationship with the client, We had a lot of fun doing the project and everything ran really smoothly. And those are those are the ingredients to doing something really great. How people are going to compare that to bally Neil or bar and Google or some of those other golf courses I built, I don't know. I mean, all I know is it was a really special project for us to build, and you know, the best way I can describe it. Well, the contractor told told me after we were all done that we'd only moved, like you know, we had a little line item in the budget if we he asked the contractor to pick up dirt from one hole and move it, you know, move it from the tee to the green, or move it to a different hole. You know, they got paid X dollars yard for that. They got paid for five thousand cubic yards of that, which is not very much.

01:36:22
Speaker 1: Can you put that into perspective of like, let's just say five thousand cubic yards at Chiulder's Hall compared to like another course that you moved very little earth.

01:36:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't really know, you know, like high Point. The only the only dirt I moved the first time really was digging out the pond on the eighteenth hole and having to get rid of all that dirt and putting it up in what were the old first and second fairways and reshaping that. But other than that, I did everything myself on a small bulldozer, so that, you know, that doesn't really count for anything. You know, shaping is shaping is shaping is you're always going to shape stuff, except if you have sand hills. But this contractor told me, well, you moved less dirt than sand hills. I'm like, don't ever say that to anybody. It's just, you know, there's no real way to quantify it. All it really means is you didn't have to do a whole lot. And the story I was going to say was when I did the routing for it. Originally I knew Eric was going to run the job for me. He lives in Denver, much easier to get there from Denver than from here, so I was going to take him with me to work on the routing. But we were working on Sedge Valley at the time, and Eric got the flu Fortunately it wasn't COVID that time, it was just influenza, but he was down and could not go, so Brian Zaeger went with me, and he and I spent like three days, you know, being on site with the clients and then going back to the Hampton Inn in Childress. It's just not the nicest Hampton in I've ever stayed in, but they did have like the breakfast room with the big tables, and we just like camped out at that those tables in the evening and worked on the plan and trying to figure out what we'd seen and how to put it together. And obviously I'd done like a lot of preliminary routings before that, because you know, the gil Han's just finished building the second course there. They may do a third some day. But to figure out like where I wanted to build my course before I started doing looking at the ground, it was like I kind of had to do a fifty four hole routing to see what would fit, so that I didn't like, you know, take this bit and then gil would be stuck with less than eighteen holes on this side of me and less than eighteen holes on that side of me that would not work. And in the end I took I think it's the farthest west part of it, and you know, the very holes that we when we first drove on that site late in the afternoon, and it was not the first site we looked at. They flew me down there to look at another site, which nobody was super excited about, and then Blaze herman who had helped Colin she and find the ground, said well, we looked at this other site, should we go look at that too, and we drove in there and like fifteen minutes later, we're like, this is the site, this is the one you should be chasing. But we drove in kind of golden hour in the afternoon when it was really pretty, and the very first things I saw were where the eleventh hole and the twelfth hole and the eighth hole are today, right down that two track that you drive in the club entrance. That's the road we drove in on, and I'm looking at the ground like this contracy is really good right here. And obviously that first view of eleven is really dramatic, and so, you know, emotionally, I was very attached to that end. And you know, if I'm sorting out where I wanted to do, yeah, I wanted to get all the way out there and use that. So I kind of knew that, you know, I kind of knew what part of the routing was going to be before we got down there, but I hadn't figured out the one hole that I hadn't found in the maps at all. It was the eighteenth hole. It's very rugged and we had to fill in some you know, we had to do ten foot fills in the fairway to get you know, the bowls and the fairway were so deep you couldn't you know, everything would just wind up in the same spot and then you couldn't see where you're going. So that is where most of the earth a lot of the earth moving was done. And it wasn't it was just filling up the bowl to make it less deep so you could see out. But anyway, you know, by the summer, you know, we were well the next summer because it took them a while to get the water sorted out. But when we were finally talking seriously about building the thing, I realized Eric and I had never been on the site together. He had gone and looked once or twice and kind of seen the routing, but he and I had never walked through it, and we were both really busy at the time. So we met out there in July because it was the same It was this same weekend that Roy McElroy won the Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club, and we only had it, We really only had a day together, and I was like, well, let's at least walk these first seven holes and talk through everything I want to do on these seven holes, so you can get a good start on all that before I come back again. And we walked through all that in like two hours. Everything I wanted to tell him about what needed to change two hours.

01:42:11
Speaker 1: How long would that normally take?

01:42:13
Speaker 2: I don't know, but but like most of it was already there in the ground, other than talking about the greens, and you know, some of the greens were pretty close on the ground, but like you know, the fifth green there, which is one of the wilder ones, it was wild, but it was too skin It was even skinnier than it is now. So it's like you have to, you know, we have to make this wider out to the left for it to work. We'll keep the right side and just make the bowl X wide and you know, get a little you know, just shove the bowl out to make it bigger so you could play it. But you know, so two hours we were done with the first seven holes and it's like, well, we got the rest of it. You know, we got to like four o'clock until we have to drive back to Dallas, so let's just walk. You know. We walked the whole thing and most of all the instruction he needed to build a golf course was right there. And yeah, I mean, we did some things we didn't expect to do over the course of construction. That's why I spent eighteen days there or whatever I spent during construction. But it's probably the of all my best courses, is definitely the one I spent the least time building. I was only on site like sixteen or eighteen days during construction, and I just didn't need to be. It wasn't because I was too busy. It was like, this is just laying here of.

01:43:46
Speaker 1: Your course, of your best sites. You know, how do you ever think about, like what your favorite sites you've worked on are? Like if I you said you get one of the you get to build one more course, you know, and you haven't built it. You know, I'm doing all these stipulations.

01:44:09
Speaker 2: No, I know. Well, you know, like people ask me all the time, what's your favorite course? What's your favorite projects? And you know, it's funny that I find myself a lot of times. You know, I've got all these courses that are ranked really highly and I and I'm naming places like Saint Andrew's Beach because I just loved the property and it was really simple to build. And do I think that that should be ranked higher than Pacific Dunes. No, it's not nearly as spectacular a piece of ground, and Pacific Dunes has a lot more intricacy to it. But you know, St. Andrew's Beach was just a cool project. And you're out there with the kangaroos and it's a cool place, and you know, that's the course I wish I had in Traverse City, especially if it came with the kangaro that would be a real selling point.

01:45:04
Speaker 1: You had your Renaissance Cup at a high Point this year and one of the things that I was taken back that I guess, you know, playing it, I didn't expect you got to really drive the ball while out there like it's it's pretty like I felt like in areas fairly narrow.

01:45:23
Speaker 2: That's been the year we try. But yeah, I mean I've well a little of that is the original version of high Point. While it was very wide by the standards of nineteen eighty eight, it was pretty narrow by the standards of twenty twenty four. You know, that world has changed. I started it going that direction and it just kept running off into the distance and and you know, and we've been guilty of you know, I don't think We've been deliberately building bigger and bigger, but everybody else has two, and so that's drawn us that way too, and it's like, now, any chance I've got to ratchet that back. I'm really trying to ratchet it back because I think it's gone too far. You do want you don't want people to drive the buck, hit their drive and be looking for their ball all day. You want them to be able to find it and play it. But I personally don't think I need to guarantee them they can hit it on the green wherever the hell they drove it. And that's what a lot of modern courses are like, you could drive it anywhere and still hit it on the green.

01:46:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, I noticed that. I you know, I didn't notice it. I think this is a thing that happens in competition, so I didn't notice it when we played practice round. But then this has happened to me a couple times where I've played practice rounds course before like a real tournament. I'm not, you know, and all of a sudden I get on the course and I like kind of breeze through and I'm like, oh, that was nothing. And then you get out on when the tournament starts and you start to see stuff that you didn't see in the practice round. And I noticed this there, and I and this isn't This isn't a critique. It's more of a like, you know, in a casual setting, it doesn't feel narrow. But when I had to hit shots under the gun and had some expectation, all of a sudden, I was like, oh, I have to hit a really good t shot here, like I which holes the first hole right out of the gate, the first hole. I was like, oh my god, Like I just like was looking around. I was like, I got to hit a really good shot here because like, you know, you have a bunker there, you have you have native on the left. Like where I want to hit it is the right, but there's the bunker there and and it's a part five and I'm not getting home into if I hit in that bunker, so I have to hit it over here. But then I have this stuff on the left, And to me, you're right because like on a part modern par five, I'm you know, especially with the way the trends are going, I'm never not thinking about hitting driver. But I think if I played there all the time, I would start to hit a club short of the.

01:48:25
Speaker 2: Bunker because you could still get home.

01:48:28
Speaker 1: But it would be a lot longer of a shot. But like, I just like I think that swing out of the gate, like and I just started to think about other shots on the golf course.

01:48:38
Speaker 2: It's funny because at the Renaissance at the Renaissance Cup, no, it wasn't the Renaissance Cup. It was they had they had a memorial tournament to honor Fred Muller this fallen and I was standing with Nick Joy, the pro is, standing on the tee while the groups went out, and and I said something about, you know, one group hit it weeds right, weeds left everywhere, And I said, it's a harder T shot than people then people give it credit for it. Nick was like, yeah, I've I've watched awful lot of people tea off here this year, like standing on the first tea getting members, tournaments going and stuff. He's like, this is a hard te shot. There are a lot of people in trouble off the first ta.

01:49:26
Speaker 1: He was standing there when we teed off. In our entire I think Frank Casey hit a good T shot, but everybody else had very poor te shots. So it was he saw some wild ones there. But you know, in the in the pursuit of width, I think something that's ben lost is the idea of strategy and club off the tea.

01:49:57
Speaker 2: Yes, the idea the first version of high Point, there were two holes that I thought you should never hit driver on the old fifth, which was out in the middle of the hops farm, and the Old tenth, which is now the eighth Holl, that was originally narrower. There were more trees on the left, it was tighter, and you were coming from the a little more of an angle to the right on the old tee. But I liked to get it just on the top of you know, just before the crest of the fairway, which left you you know, this was with a persimmon clubs, and like not being able to bomb it over the ridge. You know, the new Bactia is forty five yards longer, and yet I see lots of guys hitting it over the ridge and down in the valley on the other side, and you did not. You were not able to do that from four shorter back in the day. But I didn't like the idea of getting it just over the crest and leaving myself a downhill lie with a fairly long club hitting up to that green, so I hit you would hit three wood off the tee and leave myself just on the upslope with like two hundred yards to go. But I still was like, that's just a solid forewood for me, and that green is a bowl and it's super receptive. So you know, all I have to do is get this thing airborne off this nice uphill lie and I'm all set. Why would I try to drive it to the other side of that equation? But yeah, I mean having a couple holes like that, or like or a hole where you're thinking about trying to hit a bit of a draw or a fade. You know, there is no reason to hit a drawer a fade if the fairway is sixty yards.

01:51:54
Speaker 1: Why none.

01:51:57
Speaker 2: The only reason to hit one is is that's all you can hit, and you need the room to start it out right and hit your hook. But the ball doesn't hook the way it used to for for the kind of players who who would want to do that consistently.

01:52:15
Speaker 1: As a former drawer, I can barely draw a ball now because the modern modern driver.

01:52:22
Speaker 2: Clubs and balls both Yeah, you know, high points back you talked earlier in this recording session about being a manifestor.

01:52:35
Speaker 1: Of of the courses that aren't that never got finished. You're you're building one that started that never you know, really got off the ground, never got finished or closed. What would be the next one you would want to come back? If if somebody waved a wind and you can bring any of your courses that aren't around anymore back, or that you got to the finish line and didn't finish.

01:52:57
Speaker 2: Oh, you know, the only one. There's a lot of people around Philadelphia and Baltimore that loved Beech Tree and we're sad to see it go, you know. And then that felt like a Parkland golf course, you know, and like nothing you look at now feels like you're going to build another Parkland golf course. Sites like that just don't come around that much anymore for whatever reason, partly because everybody's looking for sand and you know, you're not going to get those same kind of trees on sand. But of all of my courses that have closed, the best one was Apache Stronghold, which the tribe just never really took very good care of. It's a hard place to grow grass. It's kind of like at an elevation where the if it's Bermuda, it's dormant for a long time in the winter, and it's if it's if it's cool season, grass struggles through the summer and you overwater it like crazy and then it doesn't do very well. So it's a tough you know, that part of it. It wasn't just the tribe. That would be really hard for anybody to do well. But that was a really cool piece of ground with you know, a lot of little natural ravines running through it that we used as hazards. We tried to clean them out and make them like where you could you know, you could take a drop, or you could go down in there and try to hit it. We'll keep it, try to keep it free of rocks where you can hit a ball out of this if you want to. And you know, very cool, varied piece of property. So it's too bad that they could never figure out what they were doing with it. And then I guess there's a couple that we you know, we were building and got pretty far along, and then you know the one in Bend, Oregon, Wicked Pony. Some of my crew played the front nine holes there. I never got to it was gone again by the time. Actually, I've never been back, you know, once they pulled the plug on that, I've never been back to Bendoric and it was beautiful town.

01:55:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, you think about like if that had happened and then you know, basically twenty ten on or twenty fourteen on bend explodes in popularity.

01:55:25
Speaker 2: Well, it was, I mean it was the boomtown of Boomtowns in two thousand and five six seven, when we were building that like finding a place to rent for my crew as impossible. It costs just an outrageous sum of money to us. At the time, we couldn't believe how busy that town was and how fast it was booming. And then that crashed completely when people were not able to sell their home in California to move there. And then you know, once that finally started getting unwound, five or six years later, Ben went back to booming again. And it has been for a while.

01:56:05
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:56:07
Speaker 2: Probably, like the oil business, they'll see another bust at some point here going forward.

01:56:22
Speaker 1: All right, let's take a quick break to talk about good Walk coffee. Good Walk coffee is fueling the whole team here at Friday Golf. If you're ever wondering how are we pumping out so much content? How are we making so much stuff? Well, i'll tell you what. We got good coffee, and you can have this coffee too. We've got a couple different blends. I'm a divided household. My wife likes the shotgun Start blend, which is a medium dark roast. I am a fan of the frieda egg blend medium light roast. To be honest, I generally lose the argument. I find myself making the shotgun start blind the Shotgun Start blend more now than I did six months ago. The nice thing is, depending on what your taste is, whether you're like dark or like coffee, we've got you covered. So the way I have it set up is I get a couple bags delivered every month, and you can have it. It's set up differently. You could have it delivered every week or every two weeks or monthly. You don't have to think about going to the store and getting coffee, which is a great, great life to live in. You know, there's nothing worse than when you wake up and there's no coffee. I had that happened to me a couple of times on the break when I traveled for the break and it wasn't fun. So if you're interested in our coffee, you can head to Goodwalkcoffee dot com slash fried egg to subscribe. That's Goodwalkcoffee dot com slash frieda egg to subscribe, and if you use the code fried egg at checkout, you save twenty percent off you're higher order subscriptions. You get ten percent off every order, but you'll get thirty percent off your first order if you use that code frieda egg at Goodwalkcoffee dot com. This goes to support what we do. We get a we get a cut of all the coffee order. So go check it out. It's a it's a really good product and it helps us and something you probably are using every day anyways, So big thanks to good Walk Coffee. And let's get back to Tom Doak. All right, well let's do some Q and A Tom. This is you know, one of my favorite parts of this pod is getting a wide range of questions, a lot of questions that sometimes I'm like, well I'm not going to ask that, but these are these are a collection. We're going to start with our right now, hard working cameraman Matt Rush's wants you to think back to your Drear scholarship tour of Great Britain and Ireland. Yes, and he's asking what was the most profound and impactful golf course outside of the old Course and conversely non golf course kind of like your cultural experience epiphany moment. So what was the most impactful thing you saw from a golf perspective outside the old course and the most impactful non golf thing of that time in your life. And for those that don't know what the Drear a scholarship tour was, Tom got to spend was a year semester in Great Britain.

01:59:43
Speaker 2: A year, a year, nearly a full I came back a little bit in the winter when it was cold and nasty over there, but I was there most of the time from July of nineteen eighty two to July of nineteen eighty three.

01:59:55
Speaker 1: So you got to just as part of got college credits to go visit.

02:00:00
Speaker 2: No, it was actually a post graduate scholarship, so I just got a cash award. They gave me five thousand dollars to last a year in written and it wouldn't last you five days now getting over there and back. But it cost me nine thousand dollars to live over there for nine or ten months and play golf and shoot one thousand dollars worth of film and get it processed. Golf was amazingly cheap over there forty years ago. I can never forget that. So I don't know, you know, trying to pick like one other golf course besides the old course that was hugely impactful on me. The first answer off the top of my head is North Barrack. I love that place. I loved it since the first day I saw it, and you know, and that's I think that's a little bit of the reason why it's much more highly thought of now than it was then because back then, people, you know, people knew the history of the golf holes, but all the good players dismissed it as being easy, short and easy. And if you look back, like even Bernard Darwin, as much as he loved it, well it's really short. You know, we have to caveat like, we can't really compare this to the great championship courses, and now people don't need to as much. But by far, you know, I thought, you know, my whole I wrote like a twenty page application for the scholarship because it's like the scholarship was for the landscape, architecture and floriculture departments, and I knew basically they were going to look at my application and think, he's asking us to give him money to go play golf in the UK for a year. So I really had to justify like why that was going to be really important to my career. And I thought it was about seeing all the best golf courses and seeing all the US golf holes, but at the end of the year, it was about being over there and understanding what golf means to them and how much more a part of everyday life it is, and just their attitude toward golf was so different than the attitude toward golf in America, and I had a profound impact on me.

02:02:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, every time I'm over there, I get like when I see a kid walking down the street with like a golf bag to the golf course, and just like the idea of like that connection to town. I always am just like it, just like I have like photo. It's like I could watch it as a movie in my head. All the kids that I've passed over there, like driving from a course and they're walking to the course with their bags clearly like from around the corner, and it's like, what a different culture it is here than in America.

02:03:04
Speaker 2: Right.

02:03:06
Speaker 1: We talked a little bit about rankings, but we got Lucas Michelle. Ah. I guess an interested party, interested, very interested party, has asked a question here. So is golf dot com just release their world top one hundred rankings? Why are rankings good for golf architecture and why are they bad for it?

02:03:32
Speaker 2: I have a harder time thinking of why are they good for golf architecture. I mean, they're good for business of peoples whose courses get ranked, both the clients and the architects for obvious reasons, and they draw more attention to golf course architecture, you know. But typically what you get is a list and no meat on the bones. No, you know. Now, because Golf Magazine and Golf dies have websites, if you double click on the courses, you'll get like a one paragraph description of the golf course, but it's still very superficial and you don't really learn a lot about why that's one of the best golf courses in the world. And that's all you get from them. So so you don't learn much about you just learn these are the places you should go see if you want to learn about it. And that's not a bad thing. Like we were saying before, it's like, don't tell me everything about it. You know, I need to figure out for myself why this is a great golf course, you know, or it's not. You know what's bad about rankings number one? You know, it's it's kind of a hierarchy of prices. Now, if your golf course just got ranked fifty seventh in the world, you look at what I sixty a thrank courses charging more than you you think, oh, well, we made a mistake. We need to raise the raids. And that has escalated tremendously in the last twenty years. Just you know, it's it's kind of like price fixing. It's a form of price fixing. And you know, as someone who is really involved with making those rankings back in the day, and I'm still on one of the panels, you know, but I really saw how the sausage gets made. And people, people who think it's significant that a golf course went up or down five or ten places and the rankings do not understand the math and how random. That part is all it takes is like one or two different votes of you know, one of the big supporters of that golf course passed away and his vote doesn't count anymore. It's going down. Thing changed from the golf course. Same the other way. Someone new on the panel, this is one of his favorite courses. It's going up just because you've got one more person involved who happens to like that particular course a lot more so. A lot of times, it has nothing to do with anything that's happened at the golf course the last two years. And of course most of the votes are older than two years. Like you know, I'm voting on some courses that I haven't seen for twenty or twenty five years. And some people would say, well, that's stupid. You know, your vote shouldn't count, and all these restorations have been done and everything else. But I know Oaklann I saw. I played Oakland Hills once quite a while ago. It's a great golf course. It was a great golf course. Then it's been restored to maybe a slightly better version. I not giving it bonus points for that, but I'm still voting it for it as a great off course that hasn't changed the fact that my vote is twenty years old doesn't invalidate all the things that I saw twenty years ago. So and I think they give me maybe a little more leeway than some other panelists because they know I kind of you know, if it wasn't in good shape twenty years ago, I'm discounting that pretty heavily. You know, that's not the reason I'm voting for the thing. I'm voting for the underlying architecture. And maybe some of the people on there that pianel don't do that quite as much.

02:07:35
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I think, like I know, one of them has like conditioning as one of the one of the you know, rating criteria cricteria, right, And it's like conditioning, did I catch it on a did it rain three inches the day before?

02:07:50
Speaker 2: Right?

02:07:51
Speaker 1: And you know, you know, do I catch it right in the right time? Like do you know? And this is a panel that's got you know, a thousand raiders on it. It's like, do I know how the general public feels about aerration, like it's necessity?

02:08:06
Speaker 2: Right? Well, I actually and I think we may have talked about this before, but I actually think if they're gonna rate on conditioning, which I personally don't put much stuff. You know, if the golf course is well conditioned, I don't care beyond that. You know, if it's bad and you can't play the golf shots because it's not in good enough shape, you've got it. That's got to count for something. Yeah, But once it's good enough, better doesn't mean a lot to me. Green's being faster, the bunker's being perfect. That just doesn't mean anything more to me like it does to some people. But I do think if they're going to count conditioning, then they should base it on what everyone saw the day they were there. And they don't. They tell their panelists if they saw it in a bad day, it's a gus. You saw it in a bad day, that shouldn't count because it's Augusta. But you know Champion Hill, oh yeah, yeah, that was Yeah. Their conditioning really isn't up to par, So they fudge that a lot in what they tell their panelists to think about or not think about. And I really don't think they should. You know, if a golf course is wet twenty percent of the time, it's wet twenty percent of the time. You should factor that in everybody rarifies some of the time. That should just all go out in the wash, but it doesn't. You know, the courses even manipulate. They only want the they only want the panelists to show up when it's perfect.

02:09:47
Speaker 1: I had a buddy who's on one of the panels and he got he he didn't think a course was very good, and he sent an email or he rated it, and you know, he rated it, don't know what the curriculum score or whatever he did, and he got an email and they said, you know, we saw you rated this course outside are of the usual scoring range. So we've thrown yours out and we need to talk to you. And it's like, wait, what isn't that the whole point of this that we want a wide range of opinions.

02:10:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, they don't, they really. You know, if you're going to do that, you just take that guy off the panel. If you really don't trust his opinions, he shouldn't be on there. But that's how little they know they're panelists. Yes, they just they're just going to compare their scores to what the scores that they're used to getting and think, oh, this guy must not know what he's talking about. Or he has temporary insanity, or maybe they just you know, they do worry. They do worry about their own panelists too, that if they were treated badly or something thing that they might vote lower on that basis, and they're trying to make sure that doesn't happen. And what they wind up doing is just reinforcing their own list must be perfect.

02:11:09
Speaker 1: Exactly, so you just end up with the same list. If there can't be any outliers, then there's you're just normalizing everything in the same bucket. Like what you're doing is you're limiting how and what you just said. Somebody dies and their vote falls off, you might drop or go up, yes, and it's yeah, it's an interesting ratings. I would say. The other reason I think they're bad is that it leads to places making really bad decisions. Oh spend no, I forgot in order to have their ranking go up, they think, oh, we need to do a twenty five million dollars.

02:11:52
Speaker 2: I explained that the significance of dropping five places is shouldn't there should be no significant to that in the golf course's mind, but there is. And when they drop, they think they need to hire a new consulting architect and do some work to fix it, when what they're trying to fix is the panelist who died.

02:12:15
Speaker 1: And this goes to the state level. You know, it's like, you know, Neighborhood Country Club spends twenty five million dollars to attempt to go from the twenty eighth rank course in Michigan to the twenty fourth rank.

02:12:30
Speaker 2: Course, right, and that's where you know, on the Doke scale, those are all sixes or all fives, and trying to rank them is really pointless. You know, you can make distinctions that they're really high end to some degree. Now it's still all a matter of opinion, but when you moved down toward the middle of the pack, you know, it's like trying to pick the most beautiful person on the bus. You know, maybe there's one really good looking person on the bus, otherwise who cares. It's like.

02:13:13
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, you know, you have your exceptional restaurants, but then you know there's a lot of just like and there's a lot of pubs that you can go get a good dealing in every town in America, and it would be really hard to compile a list of ranking those pubs. You know, your ordinary pub. So we have a question from Tom Hertel on Golf Clube Atlasts. You referenced a current project where the client's goal is to build the best golf course in the world. How have you gone about building slash thinking what you and not necessarily the magazine writers think is the best golf course in the world. This is this ties back to the rating question a little bit.

02:14:05
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it does. So that project is on hold right now. I'm not saying it won't happen, but I don't think it's going to happen really soon like I thought. I thought. I thought we were going to get started on it in the next year or two, and I don't think that'll happen for a little while longer now, which I've only got so many years left, so I hope we can get around to it. But I think one of the things, you know, I put up something on Golf Club Outless about it because I was curious, like just the general topic, what people would think, what would you know? My question on Golf Club Outless is what would you do differently if you were trying to do this, you know what you know, you want to do something different? What would it be and There were a lot of interesting answers on there. The ones that resonated with me the most were about really taken a long time and or just building something that's too severe and then modifying it after once you played it for a little while if you decide that it really is too severe. But like airing on that being willing to err on that side, which we normally don't do. I think it's true that one of the reasons nobody's built something that everybody thinks should be number one is because when in doubt, you err on the conservative side because you don't want to have to tear that green up and rebuild it in two years. That's like professional malpractice. So you never really get to the edge of what you might want to do because you don't want to spend a lot of money and close the green next year, and to get to the top, you can't be afraid of that.

02:16:05
Speaker 1: I think every great great golf course is more severe old great, great old golf course is more severe and penal than the great modern courses. I agree with that, like they they.

02:16:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's one hundred years of maturity now, so you don't see it as much and you don't. It's not brand new, yeah, and there's no shock value to it anymore. Like if we do it on a new course, everybody's like, what the hell are you doing? And I guarantee you whatever the hell I'm doing is not as severe as some of the greens at Augusta and Crystal Downs. But you know, people aren't. People have accepted those. People don't accept it so fast when it's a new golf course. So that's the other thing you're fighting. No matter what you do on a new golf course, there's going to be a lot more debate about that than there is about a certain hole on Pine Valley.

02:17:04
Speaker 1: I think the interesting thing here too, is who's deeming it the best course in the world. If it's a magazine, If it's like the magazine Raiders, I think my answer is a lot different than if it's like a you know, a group of golf architects, you know, per.

02:17:25
Speaker 2: Se, Oh, don't make a group of the piano should never be a group of golf course architects.

02:17:31
Speaker 1: I just think that like the constituent who deems this the best golf course in America, right, is like super super important here, and like there's different things that I would do for you know, I think, I mean, well, no.

02:17:47
Speaker 2: No, I will, I will cut you off right here.

02:17:51
Speaker 1: I just think there's some tried and true methods that you could use to to boost your your ranking with without any subset in your golf course.

02:18:01
Speaker 2: And that's how you fail though, I know that's how.

02:18:04
Speaker 1: But if you build a great golf course while doing some tactics.

02:18:08
Speaker 2: I don't think so. I mean. Blake Koenan, who works for US, asked me two or three years ago if i'd ever heard of Rick Rubin or seen him interviewed, and I said no, so I saw his sixty minutes interview and now I used to see his Instagram stuff before. Right now I'm off Instagram. But you know, he's a music producer and he's worked with all different kinds of artists. You know, it's not he is not giving them a lot of suggestions about the actual substance of what they're doing because they're all over the map on that. He most of his input is you know, he's got a good year, so like he listens to a lot of stuff and he's like, you should do more with that, kind of like I do with my associates. When we're building stuff like that's a cool idea. Yeah, just let's work with that a little more. And then some of it is just do what you love and do not ever think about the commercial side of this. That is, we got other people for that. That's not your purview. You are here to do what you think is the best golf course in the world, and that is the only person you should listen to. And of course in this endeavor you'll have a client. You'll have you know, it takes a village to build a golf course. You'll have other people, so not everybody's going to be one hundred percent on the same page because you don't do it all yourself like you do well when you make music. You have other people involved too.

02:19:49
Speaker 1: Vocalists, yeah, who sings.

02:19:51
Speaker 2: But you know, it's not a piece of art you hang on the wall that one person created. It's a little more implicated than that. But at the end of the day, it's the artist's vision that's got to decide. And you know, the odds of really succeeding in the popular view are really small. But the reason the thing intrigued me is because I realized that nobody's ever asked for that they want one of the best courses in the world. And that means now you're you know, trying to fit in and thinking about how this compares to other places instead of just you know, we are shooting for above that and let the chips fall where they make.

02:20:49
Speaker 1: I agree with what you were saying about Rick Rubin, and I think I think I buy into a lot of what he says. I like I for the most part, the best content I make is going to be stuff that I want to do, you know, and like this is I love doing it. I would wonder if the way to create the best golf course is to have a client that has no input in said golf course. If that's one of the key ingredients, because you, as you know, in this case, the artist cannot if you're thinking about concessions or the client might not like this at all in your headspace.

02:21:40
Speaker 2: Well, you're just saying I have to raise the money myself, because I can't. I if I have to answer to anyone else that.

02:21:46
Speaker 1: We or the agreement has to be, you will show up. You can make no alterations, and you can make no suggestions.

02:21:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know many clients that would sign that.

02:21:58
Speaker 1: Well, this is So this is a with what you just said about Rick Rubin, This would be the gauntlet.

02:22:07
Speaker 2: I guess. I mean, you know, record companies don't sign deals where they have no control over what happens. You know, you can refuse to change the song, but they're still the ones that market the song and sell the song.

02:22:23
Speaker 1: Well, what's interesting is oftentimes, you know, artists first album are the best one where the.

02:22:31
Speaker 2: Where a Yeah, when you're a young architect, you make that argument to every potential client.

02:22:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, but with bands, they struggle. Like you know, the success rate of one album versus the bands that get to two successful albums and beyond is like super small. Sure, and like you know, if you have a good first album, you'll get a second, but like that band getting a third. And I think, like we've seen this with you know, I like David Kids talked about he got popped and he built a bunch of courses. Like I'm going to use his words, not mine. I think he would describe them as like some bad golf courses I believe he said, or maybe golf courses he's not as proud of, you know, and he but like this happens in golf architecture where people get like, build a course that people really like, they get more jobs because of it, and then sometimes the next batch of courses are not as good as or as loved as the first batch. But one of the things what you said, I think strike is your and this ties back to what we talked about earlier in this session, you know, which would be a couple episodes ago. At this point, is the commercialism of the profession gets in the way of the art of the profession because you're thinking about marketing, like you're thinking about marketing, you're thinking about sales, you're thinking about how the general public will perceive this feature.

02:23:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and I'm generally not I mean, the odd thing about this discussion is I am always making decisions about what I'm building because I love it. If I don't get to do that, I probably never take the job. So I've had a lot of practice at like picking, but I've never really thought about trying to break the mold and do something over the top. Yea, And that that is a little bit of me thinking I'm not sure if commercially is the right you know, somewhere between commercial and practical of you know, not wanting to do something that we really need to edit later because it's a pain. We've talked about. Like, you know, I've spent the last ten years, going back to the Renaissance Clack, spending more time doing tiny little tweaks that nobody notices than like I could have built a whole new golf course or two with that time. I didn't have you know, I didn't have the offers to do something else. But but you know, keeping tweaking with a golf course is slow and expensive. It's much more expensive to change a golf course than to build one. Strange but true. And so you're always like wanting to make sure you don't have to do that. And you know, so if you think about Pine Valley, which currently not everyone certainly, but currently that's that's that's the course you have to beat to be the best course of the world right now, spend that way for a long time. Think about Pine Valley. It took ten years to build it. George Crump killed himself six years in. He had friends, you know, he had he had all these friends that helped him out with the first part of it, and then things weren't going great and he killed himself and they were kind of stuck for a year or two, and then Hugh Allison and Hugh Wilson basically finished the last four holes somewhat mostly based on what Crump had talked about, But you know, it had to go through all that pain and all that thought when it was built, instead of let's build this perfect in a year and put it out there.

02:26:51
Speaker 1: Is there a piece of golf architecture in those years that was far less commercial than the way golf When you think about golf architecture and development and how intertwined the commercial aspect of it that limits and restricts the art today, this is esoteric, this conversation, but I mean.

02:27:20
Speaker 2: I remember the first time I did an interview with Eric anders Lang years ago. We were in Scotland at the Renaissance Club and he said, he said, what's so different about these golf courses than all the courses in America and all the new courses. I was like, nobody built any of these trying to make money. Yes, they were just all like, we want to go play golf on them. That's the only reason we're doing this. It had nothing to do with it being a business at all. And you know, by the Golden Age. That wasn't always true, you know, not just Pebble Beach. But you know, Cyprus Point was built not by it's you know, not by a group of two hundred founders, but by a developer to go sell two hundred to two hundred founders. So even by then it had changed. But George Crump, he was building it for himself and his friends, and yeah, he probably thought he could sell national memberships where people are gonna fly in and play. In nineteen eighteen, No, it couldn't be the same kind of commercial enterprise then that it is now. The world was so different. You weren't thinking about people traveling very far to play the thing. That was just not possible in numbers.

02:28:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a piece of it, though, you know, is that the whole because you the things that you illuminated here about like interesting responses, take a lot of time to build.

02:29:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, well so another So another example would be Leedo Lido. That's a golf course that, according to Michael Kaiser, like half the resort guests that play at are like that sucked. I'm never going back there. Probably more than half he said. If he says half, I think it's probably more than half.

02:29:35
Speaker 1: The most disliked course at Sam Valley.

02:29:38
Speaker 2: And and yet that you know, there are some people that I know that are really well traveled and have seen a ton of golf courses, and that is the first golf that course that I've ever built that they're like, that is one of my ten favorite gol of courses in the world right now, because it does take those risks. You know, I always wondered at the start of that project it was so off brand for Mike Kaiser, you know, wanting the retail golfer to be happy. That's a very difficult penal golf course. When you hit a bad shot, you pay for it. There's a lot of cross hazards that make it really hard for the poorer player to get around it well. And I always wondered, like, how does he think that's gonna Is he even going to like that when he gets it? And of course by the time we built it, it was more about Michael than it was about Mike really unfortunately. But it's the people that love it love it, and there's enough of them that that works, and it has moved up in the rankings significantly. And that's not because anybody died. It's too new for that. So I think it really does resonate with a lot of people, even though it's difficult, and even though they don't care if some people are not going to like it. And that's the other thing about Pine Valley. I mean, the elephant in the room with Pine Valley is that like half the people reading that magazine cannot finish Pine Valley. They would not finish out eighteen holes. It's much too difficult for them. And yet that's the one that we rate as the best golf course in the world, and we're willing to ignore that whole other, very large part of the market. This is where I even though we say it's a consensus, you know, in theory, nearly everyone things Pine Valley is number one, even though like half the golfers in America would not couldn't play it. And the weird part is some of them would still insist that it belonged up there, even though they couldn't finish the damn thing.

02:32:15
Speaker 1: So I think, I think you're hitting at a part of the spirit of the game of golf and why people are so entrent. I mean, I don't you're You're not on social media anymore. But I don't know if you followed, Like Lebron James has gotten really into golf. No, he's horrible. He's like really.

02:32:33
Speaker 2: Bad Charles Barkley at the beginning, I think so.

02:32:36
Speaker 1: But he's like I mean, he's like he's in huddles during timeouts, like practicing and doing takeaways. The aspect of golf that gets so often like everybody's like, we we need to make golf easier for people.

02:32:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that's not why people love it.

02:32:56
Speaker 1: The magic of golf is the sheer unc conquerability of it, like the fact that I cannot perfect it. You know, I think about this all the time. The summer, I played one of the best rounds of my life at one of my favorite places in the world, and I got off the golf course and I haven't played this well in a long time. And I got off the golf course and I all I could think about was the couple shots that I left out there. That's all I thought about. I wasn't thinking about.

02:33:33
Speaker 2: I know, you were going to say you ruined it for yourself, and now you can't go back there because you know you'll never play that well again. I was, you know, like I.

02:33:43
Speaker 1: Missed like a short put on that whole. I can't believe I missed that putt.

02:33:47
Speaker 2: And every every competitive player will tell you that that. You know that one of my favorite quotes in golf. And I don't know that it's true. I heard the secondhand. But Johnny Miller when he was playing so well that one year and shot sixty one, there's sixty sixty two sixty one in the desert if Phoenix or two sons, whichever it was. He was playing with Tom Watts in the last round. They went in to sign their scorecards and Tom Watson said to him, if I'd have been putting for you, you just shot fifty seven.

02:34:19
Speaker 1: That was He won back to back weeks by ten shots or something on tour that that year. But the but the nature, I do. I think there's something about severity, Like to me, so if you took Cypress Point and Pine Valley and compared, like, why are they at the very top one of them? I would say, for me, at least Pine Valley does it based off like the severity and the spectacularness of the of the challenge? Yes, And I think Cypress does it with the sheer spectacularness of the setting.

02:35:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, although you know, even like all these golf courses that we're talking about, they're really challenging golf courses. I mean, Cyprus Point is not. Oh County Down is really.

02:35:10
Speaker 1: Hard, maybe harder than Pine Valley.

02:35:12
Speaker 2: Maybe harder than Pine Valley. And you know, like Augusta is famous for being really playable for the members, Augusta's are really hard golf course. Trying to hit the wed shot over the pond off a downhill lie and make it stop before it goes over the green where you're gonna chip back into the water unless you're a god, is it's super hard. I mean there's not. You know. The difference is Augusta doesn't do to you like every t shot, every hole, but there are enough shots out there that are super hard that you know you you're always gonna walk off a feeling you could have done better. But that's true of Cypress too, and b feeling like you're never going to be good enough to really conquer that.

02:36:05
Speaker 1: Yeah. So I think that those would be my two ingredients, though severity I think you're right on with severity being one of them. But then I would also add in beauty. Like the site the site has to be spectacular.

02:36:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that will be at least. What we've been discussing about this is that it doesn't have to be that kind of setting that you have. You can do anything you want, so you don't need that. And and to be fair, when you get that setting, that's when a lot of architects play it safe, when they know if they just build a good golf course on this site, it is going to be one of the top hunderd golf courses in the world. So why take a chance of doing something really kind of diversal that might screw that up. There's a lot of that. There's not a lot of that because there's there's not a lot of courses that start out like that should be in there.

02:37:12
Speaker 1: But it does happen, I think with Well, like one of your courses that is very highly thought of, like one of your best golf courses to me, Pacific Dunes is unique, particularly at Bandon, because that has some of the most demanding shots of any course abandoned. Like to me, like that golf course you have to hit really high quality golf shots in a couple places well, I know, and the fourth hole, the sixth the second shot on six eleven thirteen's approach shot fourteen and seventeen sixty sixteen sixty approach the hardest one on the golf course. Those are some of the hardest shots on you know, like those all those are extraordinarily difficult shots. And it's to me why it's like people complain about that sometimes about you know, in comparison to the other courses, Like if somebody was saying, like Pacific Dunes is my least favorite course abandoned, that's what they'll cite. They'll cite bad breaks.

02:38:27
Speaker 2: It's too hard, yeah, and they played it in the wind in the afternoon and it beat the crap out of them.

02:38:32
Speaker 1: But to me, that's also what makes it great is like there are in a round of golf, there have to be moments that that you stand over the shot and think to yourself, I have to hit this shot great.

02:38:46
Speaker 2: Or else I'm going to be well. I mean, you got a factor in I learned from p Dot. You know, if p Die did not talk about the retail golfer being happy all the time, P Die talked about like, you know, if you hit this shot, if you pull off this shot, you're going to remember it for the rest of your life, and it does take some of both. And you know, the funny thing is, twenty five years ago, when I was finished in Pacific Dunes, everybody was like, it's going to be too easy because you're like toning it down a little bit because it's a windy place and you didn't make it as long as you should have. And now people are like, well, it's the hardest course there. That's that's really it's kind of too too severe and too unfair. But that was that was me balancing the Pete Die influence and the Mike Kaiser influence. And I do think you you know, the best golf course in the world is some balance of that. But I think what you've seen for the last twenty five years is much more of the Mike Kaiser influence, much less of the Pete Die influence from nearly everybody, because the Mike Kaiser influence has been so commercially successful. And if you're going to build a great golf course, the greatest golf course in the world, you really have to stick your neck out. And you know, I think Leedo kind of shows that. And for Michael at least, it's made him think a lot more about you know, I don't I'm gonna build a project with five or ten golf courses. I don't want them to all be the same. You know, It's fine to have one that some people hate and other people love, as long as it's as long as there's enough people that love it that it stays busy and it's it's okay for them. It's okay that people are You don't have different adamant opinions about which is the best golf course and which is the worst golf course? Yeah, instead of they're all really good and I can't pick.

02:41:02
Speaker 1: To add to this. I you know, I think about like golf, and I just like rounds that I replay and memories I replay, and like think about the most. We did this Hickory event at Lido where we played the original tea boxes with Hickory clubs. It was the hardest form of golf I've ever played. I Mean, the thing about Hickory's is like you you hit two great shots and you're fifty feet away and you're like, how am I possibly going to two pot this? You know, and it was just so hard. But like when there's like a memorability aspect of golf, and I think the challenge does bring memorability. And it's almost I remember you saying this in an early recording about like forward t's and is like making sure that everybody encounters obstacles to overcome in golf, not just like putting the forward tea in a place where they can bypass all the hazards. Yeah, and that is, you know, like we have been in this huge era of playability and playability. Maybe playability has like the higher floor, but the lower ceiling, like if you built a course.

02:42:18
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah, But the I mean, the odd thing about this discussion is when I look at most young architects work, it's all way too hard, is my impression. And so so there are a lot of people that have been trying kind of the approach that we're talking about and not succeeding at it. And yeah, they haven't started with as good a sight as I've started with a few times, and they might not have a client who's quite on board or just saying the wrong things to them at the wrong time. But you need some of both.

02:43:03
Speaker 1: All right, let's we're on That question was a long question, long answer. Uh, Stephanie Martin as a female golfer. I'm often I'm so often left frustrated in how strategic intent of a whole is neutralized when I play the forward tis, as they seem like an afterthought on many courses. Can you talk about how much consideration goes into the forward ties and more specifically female golfers as your audience when you're designing day to day and also what are when you're designed day to day, but also what strategies you take personally to make sure shorter hitters can still experience the whole as intended. Somebody also chimed in and a reply to this that this also applies to older golfers that are playing sure. You know older male golfers are playing on sure.

02:43:55
Speaker 2: So that's a good question. And you know, I've seen, like I have friends and family, I've seen the full range of golfers from my mom who could barely get the ball airborne to the best Curtis Cup players and LPGA players, And there's just as big a spectrum among women golfers as there is among men golfers. So number one, trying to solve that all from you know, they only usually get one tee and trying to make that work from one T is hard to do, but you know, I've never been a big advocate of building eight t's, so everybody is on the tee that they need to be on. To me, the most important thing you can do for all classes of golfers is generally keep the green open in front, so that if you if you're standing in the fairway with a forewood, whether you hit a forewood one hundred and twenty yards or two hundred and forty yards, you've got something you can try to do. You know, if the green's an island and you're even your best shot lands on it and bounces over it into the water, that just doesn't work. There's nothing you can do about that. And the thing to remember is there's always going to be somebody hitting forward into that green. You may think this is a short part four and everybody I'll have a wedge in their hands, but that is not what most golfers are like. So you have to think about this full range of people, and you don't control it, you know. I remember having the discussion with Pete Dye. He said, people accuse me of building courses for only for good players. He's like, He's like, I just don't know how to figure out what the average player is going to be gonna do, Like after two shots on a part five, they could be anywhere.

02:46:07
Speaker 1: And the range outcomes as somebody who carried a bunch of their adolescence is very wise.

02:46:13
Speaker 2: Well, you know when he said it, I just laughed and I said, they could still be on the tee hitting there. You know, they just hit the first t shot out of bounds and they're they're teeing it up again three And he laughed and said, yep, so yes, it's you know the thing that some women golfers complained to me about, you know, the one thing that the worst thing that I see that some if you're not thinking about forward t placement, the worst thing you can do is you're up and you get the thing angled off from one side of the fairway or the other so that a decent drive will run through the fairway into trouble on the other side. There's no real way to you know, you just don't have like a straight laying down past the tree or the hazard or whatever it is that you're trying to avoid. And you know that's terrible. But you know, sometimes I hear women complain that the hole doesn't play the same for them as men like, especially in Australia, they play mixed of it club mixed events where everybody is playing with their handicap and a competition against each other. And of course the holes don't work at you know, the holes don't work out the same. Some holes are super hard for the women, some holes are super hard for the men, and the women get a big boost. Trying to make it all egalitarian just doesn't work. And the simplest example is, you know, if you're say you've got a four hundred and fifty yard part four for the men, and you put a bunker out there two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards from the tee to challenge them. The longest hitter is that bunker's in play. The shortest hitters, if they're back there at four point fifty, they don't get to the bunker, so you haven't penalized them. But now they're two hundred and twenty yards from the green and they have no chance to hit the green, so you want to move them up. The problem is, you know you can you can either put all the tea's relative to where the bunker is or where the green is but not both, so one of them is going to be wrong. If you get the women to get an eight iron in their hands for the second shot, they're going past that hazard that most good women say, we want that hazard to be in play, the same as for the men. But you can't. They can't really do that because if that wasn't play for them, they'd be hitting it foor wood into the green. So there is no perfect answer to that problem. You just have to see it as you're trying to balance that out over eighteen holes, but you cannot balance it out for every single hole.

02:49:11
Speaker 1: Have you ever thought, I don't know if you ever thought about taking I mean, I don't know if you do this taking the whole concept and then working backwards from the green and just trying to figure out where the best hole is for the for the for the forward T and maybe the forward T is like not even forward based off of the player profile that's playing the forward T.

02:49:44
Speaker 2: So that was a little complicated.

02:49:48
Speaker 1: Okay, So here here's where I'm going with this. All right, Let's just say it's a four hundred and four hundred yard part four from the back to they are hitting a lobe like a good player saying a wedge in.

02:50:06
Speaker 2: Ye're not me, but okay, okay, I.

02:50:09
Speaker 1: Can scale you up to get to a wedge as you know, the very forward player. And I'm thinking about, like my grandpa moved up to the forward tes the last years of his you know, golfing life. What if I moved him way back.

02:50:27
Speaker 2: I made it a three shot.

02:50:28
Speaker 1: It made it a three shot hole. And that's just the way that the forward t plays that hole. But you're getting the similar shot value where you're hitting a wedge into the green. It's just your third shot, right. A lot of old courses kind of were that way. I mean they they didn't.

02:50:47
Speaker 2: Riviera and La Country Club had like eight par fives for women in as far as seventy six, because they really they did seventy eight. They didn't really have ladies teas at all. They were just playing off the men's teas, and they any hole over four hundred yards was a part five. So if you had a strong golf course, it was going to be part seventy eight for women. And that made sense on some level, but that also means they're hitting like a dozen three woods or four woods out of the fairways on fourteen long holes, which is kind of boring. If you built a course like that for men, they'd hate it. Yeah, So again you've got to mix things up. I just I understand. I think I understand your concept. And yes, there are some times where it would be better to keep the forward t back instead of jamming it way up, just like there are some short par fours that get better if you make it a little shorter instead of a little longer.

02:51:52
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, and you could make the I've always thought that one of the issues with the handicap system is that it like constricts this. But if you were if you wanted to maximize the interest of a setup day to day on a golf course, I would move the tees around, and sometimes the black tee could be in front of the blue tea, even if the black tea is technically the back tee, because I might want to ask the players paying the back tee a different question on a hole when they get to a hole.

02:52:25
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, one of the interesting things about Childress Hall is we don't have you know, we have three or four or five tees per hole. There's only one set of markers. On the day. You can play it from wherever the hell you want if you want, but they put out one set of markers on the day that's like, this is, you know, if you want to compare your score to other people that are here today, play from here, and some of those teas are going to be up and some of them are going to be way back, and it's you know, I don't think obviously that your impression of the golf course relies a lot on the setup guy now and not just me, and a lot of architects would be really uncomfortable with that. But but I'm trying to think about how to make the golf course playable from anywhere, and so that does kind of work at some level. And you know, you jam some teas up so short that you know along here as to really stop and think, do I want to try to carry it up there? It's not really built for that. Or now do I really want to hit seven earn off the tee because that's that's where you know, I could still have a short approach, So why should I jam it up there? I think that's interesting for a day to day thing. And it's not like we're forcing you to play those markers if you don't want to. But I think the more people do that, the more they'll realize that, hey, these holes are good from more than one tea. And and if I play again tomorrow, I don't want to play all the part threes from the same place I played today. There's some really cool other te's that I should try.

02:54:23
Speaker 1: All Right, we could talk about that. I have some other thoughts. I'm not even gonna get out there. I've kind of based off wait for.

02:54:28
Speaker 2: A reader a listener, excuse me?

02:54:32
Speaker 1: Do you the Gimes asks? Do you miss a couple of you know, probably five years ago, you basically got rid of consulting work. Yeah, you went. You know, I'm just going to build new golf courses because I think that's what you like doing the most.

02:54:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't tell Roll Melbourne. I'm still technically consulting there, even though I haven't been there for five years.

02:55:01
Speaker 1: This question is do you miss any Do you miss doing any of the consulting work that you've passed.

02:55:07
Speaker 2: Off the work? No, not at all, And you know, it's just it's just it really has reinforced on to me the last couple of years, watching it completely from the outside. How as soon as you let go, they just switch to somebody else and start changing the golf course again, So there's no permanence in it at all. You think you're perfectly restoring a golf course, and then they will turn around and hire somebody else to blow up all those bunkers and change them in five years. It's like, why did I waste my time doing those Why did I waste all my time at San Francisco Golf Club rebuilding all those bunkers If they're going to hire gil hands to line them with concrete. If your goal is to make money doing the work, then sure you'll do that all day. But if your goal is not to make money, doing is not about the money, there's there's no permanence to it at all. And you know, some people might say that about a new golf course. I don't. I mean, you know, you're creating something new in the world. Maybe somebody will screw around with that in thirty years from now and I will haunt them for the rest of their lives. But at least for a while, that's mine and it gets to prove itself whether it's worthy. And that's that's what you really want to do in this business. Hanging around you know, the opportunity to hang around really good golf courses is not to be dismissed. I mean I learned a lot from doing that. All the people that work for me learned a lot from doing that. Luckily for me, I got to do a lot of that before I even was doing any consulting work. You know, I just got to see all those places and play them. But yeah, so for some guys, it's just about access to those places. The only way they're getting to get to spend any time there is if they're working there.

02:57:28
Speaker 1: But you know, I was thinking about this while I was driving here this morning. You know, you have golf courses getting to like their age, where like you might if consulting work might be restoring Quail Crossing right.

02:57:44
Speaker 2: Well, unfortunately they don't have the money, but yeah, but they need it and they are starting to talk about that stuff. I got a call from Atlantic City reminds me I need to get back to them. They want to rebuild all those greens that we built twenty five years ago, be almost thirty years ago. Now there's superintendent just think he needs to rebuild them, not necessarily change them at all, but he wants our input on that and I guess I've got to give that a day to at least look at and think about. But yeah, it's not really, it doesn't. I'm not excited about working on my own golf courses. I just want them to be played.

02:58:31
Speaker 1: It's uh, let's get one last question in here.

02:58:37
Speaker 2: One last You've got to have more of them.

02:58:39
Speaker 1: I've got a time. Do you want to keep going?

02:58:42
Speaker 2: Three more questions?

02:58:43
Speaker 1: Three more questions?

02:58:44
Speaker 2: All right?

02:58:44
Speaker 1: I'm just trying. I don't want to. I don't want to burn time here.

02:58:48
Speaker 2: All right?

02:58:49
Speaker 1: This is from Cameron. Is there a greater notable golf course where you think there's a better routing available in the land, or is there a course where you think it could be much better with a different routing.

02:59:05
Speaker 2: I don't really think about that when I'm playing somebody else's golf course. You know, it's like very rarely, o't you know? Like there's a couple holes that I really don't like, and it's like, could they have done anything different? But if I'm not getting it's not really that. I think about it this way to say that, if I'm not getting paid to figure out that problem, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. Problem. But it's like, you know, when I am playing someone else's golf course, like I played, I didn't play. We just walked brambles last week when we were in California looking at our project in Napa, and that was great fun. I you know, I you know, not just Bill and Ben, but James Duncan, who was really involved in that, was an intern for me way back when. And it's cool not only to see it's cool that he he got to be part of the development of that, but you know that's some of his personality and his ideas on that golf course too. And I thought it was really good. But I don't when I'm doing that, I just want to enjoy that experience. I don't want to redesign it for anyone, including myself.

03:00:20
Speaker 1: This is a kind of a nitty gritty question and I've I've seen I've seen it in process, so I want to I think it's cool question. What do you look for when you get a topo map to determine green sites? And this is from Saucy Diasso.

03:00:46
Speaker 2: I think I've said before that I don't Oh no, it was a Sarah mess Is doing a class on golf course architecture at Ball State where she went to grad school. So I said it to her class that was working on routings, and somebody asked me basically the same question, and I said, I don't I'm not really just looking for green sites. When I look at a topo map, I'm seeing golf holes, you know. I'm seeing like that the fairway doesn't have too much side slope cross slope that I have to grade it for the ball to stop rolling. And I'm looking for a green site that generally, unless it's a very sandy site, generally as visible and the surface water kind of works away from instead of how do I get the surface water to go around this green? And then I'm looking for that in a place that it connects right away to another golf hole, so you have to be able to visualize the next hole too. Like finding a great green site where you got to get in a cart and drive three hundred yards to get to another place to play again is not a good solution to me. So so I just you know, but I've been doing it for forty years, so you know, back in the day, I might have thought about it as green sights and te sites and what have you more, and now I'm just seeing it all at once.

03:02:25
Speaker 1: All right, what Ben Ben Malick, What is the conversation that mid sixties Tom would love to have with mid twenties or thirties Tom.

03:02:37
Speaker 2: Hm, you can charge way more than you thought, far and away the most important comment, because I still have the problem of thinking what's fair to charge. And by the time, you know, I sign a contract now and we build the golf course in two or three years, and by that time, I'm like, God, why didn't I ask for more? You know, everybody else is getting paid more now. You know, the cost of every part of it has doubled, but my feed doubling seems like a giant leap to everyone. And you know, at the end of the day, it's like, you know, one of the best business lessons I got from any of my clients, and I've not capitalized on it as much as I should. Julian Robertson said to me, you know, we were talking about a feature on Kip Kidnappers the third I'd one of the first times we'd walk through it. I'd looked at building another tee for the third hole, like over to the left on a different little finger of land where you'd be carrying more into the green. And when we walked through during construction, he said, what about that tea over there that you wanted to build? And I said I didn't think it was worth it, and he said, hold up. He said, you should never say that to a client, because it sounds like you're not making the choice because you think it's the best choice. It sounds like you're trying to save money. And unless I asked you to try to save money, you shouldn't be thinking that way. I want you to build the best golf course you can, and it shouldn't be about the money. He's like, you think about this as a five million dollar golf course. I think about it as a fifty million dollar project that revolves around the golf course. So if that tea costs thirty thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars or whatever in fifty million dollars, that's like nothing, you know. He was really also talking about what I chan art. I think I charged five hundred thousand dollars for that design twenty years ago, and I should have charged him a lot more. And now I have to figure out what to charge his son if I do another golf course for them, and I'm trying to keep it as simple as cheap as possible. So I guess I didn't learn the lesson.

03:05:22
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that this is, This is what we were just talking about with the with like the building the best course, and we've gotten a discussion of art, right, Like when you paint something and put it on the wall, right, it's just it's it's a painting. Like what you do is a different art because there is an an like if you read you know, Alistair McKenzie's architecture book, there's like a whole thing about economy of construction. Yes, there's a whole like there's a whole aspect of you know, what you guys do has to be funk, It has to work. It's not like you paint something. You can paint anything, right, it's art like there is there is a distinct difference to what you do. But like part of I think part of being a responsible golf architect is having some realm of economy and what you do.

03:06:21
Speaker 2: I've always thought that too. And you know, the weird thing is like as we talked about before, like a lot of my best golf courses. Let's think about those top hundred golf courses.

03:06:32
Speaker 1: So you've got Pacific Tunes, You've got bally Neil, You've got Rock Creek, You've got Terry D. Tayyeh Childress obviously, Lido.

03:06:51
Speaker 2: Barn Google, Barmboogle, Yeah, Saint Patrick's. I don't know what's the one that we missed, but Barnboogle and the same Patricks or two of the least expensive golf courses that I've ever built, Like they cost two and three. You know, one cost two million dollars twenty years ago. Saint Patrick's cost three million dollars five years ago. You know, we're looking at building projects now that cost twenty five million dollars for just the golf course. And I just built one for three because it's in a place that doesn't need a lot of irrigation, so we didn't put it in. You know that the there are huge differences when you talk about economy of construction. There are huge differences from one locale and one site to another. And and yet my design fees aren't that much different. Well, you know, one of them there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done. The other one like Childress. I mean it took I could have you know, I could have spent given Eric one day of my time and left and it would be a really good golf course. So that's part of the confusing thing. Like, but imagine, like you know, that's true for art as well. Some pieces of art took a long time to create, and some pieces that are like throw a bucket of paint at it and or two or three creatively and say that's enough. That's just what I wanted to do. So you can't really charge based on like how much work it is for you. But the economics of the golf business they are all about like how much work did you have to do?

03:08:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I uh, I mean the cost thing's crazy, you know.

03:08:46
Speaker 2: With it's you know, I've I've been saying consistently for the last twenty five years, we got to be careful. We'll get it to where it doesn't make any sense to build a new golf course. You know. I think the rule of that I learned in the business in the beginning. I don't know why it wouldn't still apply even though the numbers are wildly different now that for every million dollars you spend on this project. That's ten bucks you're going to have to charge the users in order for that to be a decent deal. So when we were spending five million dollars, you could build a fifty dollars golf course. When you're spending twenty five million dollars, it's not going to be a fifty dollars golf course.

03:09:36
Speaker 1: And that's twenty five million dollars before you have a clubhouse. Yeah yeah, So it's like push.

03:09:44
Speaker 2: And again it's like and once you get to that level too, you can't like the thing. One of the things I admire most about Brambles the other day was that little clubhouse because what because what happens is if you build it's it's just like if you buy a f five million dollar house lot, you have to build a ten million dollar home, right. You can't just do that and put a nice, simple, small home on there. That The economics of how much the land cost drive what you're doing. So the same for a golf course. There's no reason a twenty million dollar golf course in NAPA necessitates doing an expensive clubhouse too, but it will because that's the way people think.

03:10:29
Speaker 1: I said this to one of the owners, and I said, I love your golf course. I love it, but I think the best thing you did is this clubhouse because it's so small. It's so perfect for like the size for the place you want. Like it's very welcoming, it's warm.

03:10:49
Speaker 2: But it can't remember how many square feet they said it was, but I was like really employing that. It's like twenty five hundred square feet or something.

03:10:57
Speaker 1: It's like a small ranch house.

03:10:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, smaller than my house and I don't live in a big house.

03:11:01
Speaker 1: And and like, to me, like they did so many wonderful things with that project. And I really like the golf course, but to me, that is the best part about the whole thing. It's like actually a house that you want to hang out in, you know. And I think there's something to it being small that makes it better.

03:11:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, it's I've always said that's one of the big reasons Terry Edy is my highest rated golf course is because of that clubhouse, which is tiny. It's just a great place to hang out.

03:11:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I you know, I think one of my big things that as I've thought about it more and more, is I wish the golf industry would move towards where we build golf courses, and we don't build all the extravagant add ons, and we just see how people use it before we we build the giant clubhouse, like you know, before we build a huge lodge, like do people want to stay here?

03:12:02
Speaker 2: You know?

03:12:02
Speaker 1: And starting in.

03:12:04
Speaker 2: Well, I've done that a lot, you know, the one place that comes up the most obvious in my work is the halfway house. Like I hear clients like trying to decide what they want, and then there's like there's maybe two or three potential locations, and now they're having to think to themselves, do I really want it to be at nine or do I want it to be over here on eleven because this is the best view, Or do I want it to be at the t of a par three because that's like you might have to wait on the par three anyway, so that's like the best place for it. And you know, sometimes they're going to spend a lot of money on the thing, and I'm like, don't you know, put a trailer out there for a year and then see if you like that location, and then if you don't, put the trailer at a different place next year and see how you like it, And like Terry Edy did that, and the trailer is the halfway house. That's all they needed. And you know a lot of the people that I've suggested, that's all they wound up with. And I feel so good about that because like a couple other projects, and I won't name which one specifically, but I've seen a couple of them spend more money on the halfway house than they paid me to design the golf course. And I'm like, I guess I should have charged more. If they can spend two million dollars and a half way house, I guess I should have charged more.

03:13:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, my lasting thought and like and this is if I built a golf course, it would be if somebody's asking me about like what the clubhouse is going to look like, I probably don't want them to be a member.

03:13:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, if I was.

03:13:41
Speaker 1: Asking me where the halfway you know, like where's it going to be the halfway house? If I have coolers out there, then you know what, it's probably not the right fit. Like all the you know, like that is what Julian Robertson said to you. You're building something around the main asset, which is the the golf course. And I don't get I understand from the business side why people build it all at once, but from like a functionality, what you end up doing is you end up everybody overbuilds, everyone overbuilds facilities. I don't think i've ever you know, like the.

03:14:18
Speaker 2: H I mean some of that is the planning and zoning process too. I remember the thing that shocked me most about High Point the first time was we went in to get permis to build an eighteen whole course, and they had all these questions about what the clubhouse was going to look like. And the township's view is like, we just want to make sure you don't build a terrible looking clubhouse. And I was like, if you're going to spend all the money building a nice golf course, why would you do that? But they, you know, they wanted a full set of plans, and the client had no idea what they needed for a clubhouse for a public golf course there. But you know, the club the town wanting to make sure it was up to standard, drove that thing much more than it should have because they didn't really Most people developing a golf course don't really know what the business is going to look like. In tenures. Yeah, they have hopes, but they don't really know.

03:15:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, well we got we got through these.

03:15:19
Speaker 2: Those are good questions. Those in questions were good. I'm glad we did three.

03:15:22
Speaker 1: I know they were good questions. We have one day I'm going to aggregate all of my documents with the questions that I didn't get to and every single match, and we're going to just do the questions that were selected but then didn't get asked.

03:15:37
Speaker 2: No, we're not one day. One day you can send me the list and I'll pick the ones to do.

03:15:42
Speaker 1: All right, all right, tom as always huge, thanks for coming on. Look forward to doing this, doing this some more in twenty twenty six, and have a great holidays and new year. Even though people won't hear that this will be in the new year, so all right.

03:16:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll be having a great twenty two.

03:16:02
Speaker 1: We'll be looking forward to seeing some of your new work. I loved Wild String Dunes and can't wait to see see see the new courses come online in next year. All right, take care, all right, thanks for listening to the Friday Podcast. Big thanks to Matt Ruschis and PJ Clark for tag teaming the production.

03:16:34
Speaker 2: On this one.

03:16:34
Speaker 1: It was a big one. Big thanks to Tom for doing it, and big thanks to you guys for listening all the way to here. We will be back next week. We'll probably be focusing in on pro golf. I think we'll be joined I'll be joined by Kevin van Volkenberg and Joseph Lamania to break down some big stories going into twenty twenty six and can't wait, can't wait for the year, And thanks to you guys. Well, uh, we'll talk to you next week. M