The History of Winged Foot with Neil Regan

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at b Draddy. The twenty twenty US Open is just around the corner, and Billy Draddy over at b Draddy has a lot of history at Wingfoot, which is why he thought it would only make sense to honor the course in his own history hosting the US Open with a limited edition heritage logo available for a limited time on some of our favorite styles like the Liam Polo, the Russell Corter Zip and the Willie kru Neck. You can pick up your piece of history today exclusively at bdraddy dot com. Today I am joined by Wingfoot Golf Club's historian Neil Reagan. Beyond an infinite knowledge of the happenings at Wingfoot over the years, Neil was instrumental in the restoration of the golf course, which will be on display at this year's US Open. A quick note before we get to Neil, we have a couple of new videos worth checking out over on our YouTube page. The most recent is a deep Dive into the Greens at Wingfoot West. This is narrated by consulting architect Gil Hants and two thousand and six US Open champion Jeff Ogilvie. This footage of Wingfoot was probably the best drone footage that I have ever captured. It was a idyllic fall morning and afternoon when I shot it, and the context that Jeff and Gil add to the footage is tremendous. It's a video I'm very proud of. The other video is a new thing that we're trying out. It is somewhat of a hybrid between one of these podcasts and a video. It's a new series we're going to call Digging into Design. It features an interview on a golf course. So the first episode is with Andy Staples, who is the consulting architect at Olympia Fields of course UH and Olympia Fields in general. So that's the topic that it's on, and it's a twenty minute interview, much like you'd enjoy on a podcast. But what we did was we laid over drone footage and historic visuals to the conversation to add context, so while you're listening, you can also see what we're talking about. So we're hoping to do more and more of these and make this a regular series to never miss one of these subscribe to our YouTube page, the Friday Egg YouTube page, and without further ado, here is our conversation with Neil Reagan.

00:02:37
Speaker 2: I miss a 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 in a brid egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida Egg, Frida egg bri Egg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run.

00:02:50
Speaker 1: Off of the hump. And how did you get the job as the historian a wing foot.

00:03:05
Speaker 2: I don't know if job is the right word.

00:03:07
Speaker 1: It's not like a job.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: If anything, it's a negative paying job. But more than that, Actually, a lot of this stuff it costs money, you know, when you collect things. And the club has been fantastic in recent years about that. But there was a period where well a lot a lot of our recent acquisitions were just acquired by various members out of our own pocket. But in recent years the club has really really come on board and now they support us like you wouldn't believe. It's just fantastic what they're doing, supporting our history. But I got involved with the history. Doug Smith was our historian, and if you know anything about Doug Smith, he wrote the history book that you may have seen. But he was a great man, a hero, and you had to respect. I mean, he spent the last thirty five years of his life dedicated to the history of Wingfoot and I loved telling telling it this way. He was a great man. In World War Two, he signed up as a young man to go to Germany right at the start of the war and he spent his entire the entire war years. He broke his back, got sent home, basically broke out of the hospital, went back and ended up a lieutenant infantry lieutenant in Germany and the worst fighting of the war. He saw everything you could see. He fought against the SS. His unit broke one of the toughest units of the SS in late summer forty four. He had seen it all and when he came back, when he retired twenty five years later, he brought his life another twenty five thirty years to Wingfoot's history and people would ask him, Doug, you've seen everything worse the work could offer. How can you be so into such a trivial thing as golf history? And he had a phrase he would say, this, he would say, you know, we fought We didn't fight for freedom, We fought for free people. We fought for the right of free people to do whatever it is that free people want to do. One of the things they want to do is play golf. And it's a great game, and I love it. I like telling the histories of what golfers do because that's what free people do with their freedom.

00:05:30
Speaker 1: What attracts you to golf history, It's the.

00:05:34
Speaker 2: Same sort of thing. I've always been into history. I was a classics major in college Batin and Greek, in ancient Roman history and ancient Greek history and basically every other history that I can read. I love reading it. And you know, once again, once you spend a lot of time on what seems like a trivial pursuit golf history, but you realize, if it doesn't matter what little people do, as Doug Smith said, the small histories keep us free. If it doesn't matter what who won the club championship, that nothing else matters in a way, you know what I mean. If we're if life is worth living, then it's then it's worth living for a round of golf.

00:06:19
Speaker 1: So you've been doing this for a while obviously, and you've been a history buff for a long time, what's your favorite piece of wing Foot, trivia or fact that you've come across that you like to tell people?

00:06:34
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think anything is trivia with Sorry, okay, sorry, I guess they can't see me smiling. I don't know what. Uh, there's so many great little stories that come in and out. You know, my passion is the golf course itself, So when you ask me that sort of question, I tend to float towards answering something about the golf course itself, the greens actually, uh, and the club is just it's the people there. I guess I'm straying away from the answer to trivia question because once again, I seriously don't know if there's anything.

00:07:12
Speaker 1: Trivia doesn't have to be a trivia question, just favorite little nugget.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: About wing Foot. Yeah, well, I find myself. I'm also a big baseball fan, so I find myself telling the story of Big Ruth at Wingfoot and Bobby Jones all the time, and of Mickey Mannle at Wingfoot, And you know, those are two great stories and everybody who loves them still because Big Ruth is still the biggest, you know, most famous athlete in American history. And Mickey Mannell in New York is still the man, you know. So those two stories. People never get tired of here, and I never get tired of telling them.

00:07:49
Speaker 1: What are they?

00:07:51
Speaker 2: Oh? Well, where do you start that? You want to hear the whole Baby Rue story. It's just a fantastic story.

00:07:57
Speaker 1: That's what we've got all the time in the world.

00:08:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, you're ready for this. This is a little bit of a long story. Here's nineteen twenty nine US Open at wing Foot. The nineteen twenty six, seven and eight Yankees were the greatest team in the history of baseball. Babe Ruth Luke Garrigan there. I think they had seven or eight Hall of Famers on their team. They were unbeatable. Nineteen twenty nine starts They're going to go ahead for forever. Ruth's wife dies in the tragic fire in January. Meanwhile, Connie Mack has put together his last great baseball team, Athletics, as it turned out to one to three Penance in Roil twenty nine, thirty and thirty one. But nobody knew that was coming. So Babe Ruth's kind of down because his wife had died. He gets remarried, he plays, he plays the best baseball, but he kind of doesn't play for Ruthie. And then then he disappears. He goes a won and the report is that he's sick, and so the newspapers are tracking him. He basically misses the first three weeks of June or the last week in May, the first week in jewe two weeks and journalim newspapers are tracking him, and doctors are reporting that he needs rest and he needs relaxation. But in fact, he is playing a lot of golf, including a lot of golf at wingfoot, and he shouldn't be doing that, but that's he's big, ruth. So I have him playing at wingfoot a lot, including in practice rounds at the same time as Bobby Jones. And at one point he's playing a practice round, he's playing with Bobby Jones, is playing with Johnny Farrow, and he shouts across and Mike Brady and Joe Kirkwood, I think, and he shouts across the fairway to Bobby Johones, come on, I'll take all four years on, I'll beat you. I'll be all four years. And so he was that sort of guy. So what happened was this that he open started on the Thursday. One of our founding members was a man named John Kieran. John Kieran was a sports writer, good friend of Babe, Ruth and Luke brag and many others. He started the New York Times sports of the Times columns that ended up being Arthur Daily and Red Smith and Dave Anderson and probably the most famous sports column in America. And he received the Golf and Babe on Monday night saying, Babe, I'm gonna John, I'm gonna play golf at Wingfoot tomorrow. You want to join me? John. Karen says, well, Babe, you know you've been sick. You only just return to baseball. The weather it's been hot. You got to get your strength back. You shouldn't be playing golf. And Ruth says, to mind your f and business. I'm gonna play golf. You want to meet me at Wingfoot? And Karen says, well, I'm a member. He says, I'm just gonna, you know, but I'll sure I'll meet you at what time? Ruth says ten am? So Karen writes, he says, I show up at ten am. What do I see. I see Babe coming up the eighteenth fairway, and I say them when he gets on the green, Babe, I thought you said ten am, And he says to me, I know, I said that. I just wanted to be get eighteen holes in and get warmed up so I can kick your butt. So they go out and play again. Then they have lunch, and now Ruth's played thirty six. The other guys have played eighteen, and rusays, come on, we'll go out and playing more. And the other guys say one of the other fourth part of the four ball was HB. Martin the golfing story. And they say, Bib, you can't do this. You already played thirty six. You got an important series coming up with the Athletics, who we're starting to build a big lead on you. So Babe says, I'm gonna go out and play play anyway. So he does, and one report says he played fifty four, the other says forty six. The newspaper had one of those sports cartoons of the babe swatting the ball away, saying the last time he got sick, he played forty six holes at Wingfoot on a hot, steamy day, So the way John Curet finished the story goes, I was worried about Babe hot Weather coming off his illness, Yankees independent race. I shouldn't have word because this is big Ruth after all. The day after that, all day at Wingfoot, he played a doubleheader against the Senators, went five to nine with a home run. And then two days later they had the day off he played, he walked around a wing foot inside the ropes with Bobby Jones. We have a great picture of him there that day with a cigar on the nine tea with Bobby Jones swinging and Root smoking a cigar right behind him, and he walked around with Bobby Joe Homes. And then the next day, when Jones and Espinosa tied, Ruth played against the Athletics in Philadelphia against Lefty Grove, the greatest picture perhaps of his zero and candidate for of all time. And sure enough he hit two homers, one offul left to Grove. So the newspaper headline says Jones espin also tied. Playoff, Ruth hits two homer speeches and Kieran goes, you know this is Babe Ruth. You should have known, you know.

00:12:32
Speaker 1: It kind of reminds me a little bit of the Michael Jordan's stories of the golf before big Games and you know, playing fifty four holes and then dropping fifty points on on Craig Low. Like you know, there's the It's interesting how certain athletes have that remarkable quality of never being tired and being so competitive that it never gets.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: To him exactly. They they were in a different world than the rest of us, I think. So I loved that story.

00:13:00
Speaker 1: Great story. What's the Vicky Vanial one?

00:13:04
Speaker 2: Well, this is also even better in a way. The fifteenth poet win Foot. I don't know if you remember, I'm sure you do. It's a great part for you hit down about two hundred and ninety yards off the tee is a brook and then the fairway. The ground slopes up and the fairway picks up again another thirty yards later, and you reach the green at about four to twenty from the boot tees. Maybe three ninety when Mickey was playing this particular day, just left to the green as a house with the fence in front of Every member knows that Fred Corkman lived in it for many years. Fred Corkman was a member at Wingfoot. He was one of the men who invented the the business is being sports agency. He was a go getter, so he was at the nineteen twenty nine Open as a teenager scoring walking with Bobby Jones. He was one of the founders of the PGA Tour and the LPGA Tour. He ran the PGA Tour for a while. His clients who we put in all the magazines for Ben Hoage, Sam Sneed, Stan musual Ted, Williams, Ben Crosby. So he was the biggest sports agent and he was an Irish man from Boston who could just tell stories all day long. So every single member knew Fred Gorkord's yard right next to the fifteenth Green and he had an open door there and a lot of rounds never finished because Fred would just invite you in when you're on the fifteenth toll on a lot of rounds and never finished. They would just sit and drink and tell stories. So Mickey Man and Weddy Ford were best buddies. One of our members, Donnie Scandal, who passed away a couple of years ago. His brother George in nineteen fifty one, had been in the army and by coincidence, had been Whitey Ford's bump me and they became lifelong friends. So Mickey and Whitey would come up to wing Foot and play with George and Donnie on occasion. So Donnie was a very good golfer club champion I believe it's Shinnecock in Westchester and Pine Valley, but never at wing Foot. He was a really good golfer and he played with Mickey. So the way the story I had heard all my life was this that Mickey Mantle had driven the ball on fifteen West into Fred Corkoran Joy And if you do a Google Earth on that, it's about three hundred and forty yards in the air. So that's the story we all all heard, and everybody would tell it, and you'd get there other fifteenth tone and the caddies would tell all the visitors. Mickey Mannell put in Fred Cork, et cetera. So we all knew that story. So about ten years ago I was sitting talking to Donnie, said Donnie, Okay, for the record, I need to have this story. What's what's the whole story, what's the true story? And this is the way Donnie. Donnie said it. He goes, well, we were playing with Micky and Whitey Mickey really really could hit the ball farther than anybody had ever seen a ball, because he was Mickey Mantle. And this is with persimmon and boladas. And Manell really could hit the ball three hundred yards of the air when he got a hold of it, which is unheard when you think Jack Nichols was crushing it at two eighty. And he said, on that particular day, Manna was hitting the ball far than he'd ever seen and on that particular hole, yes he did. He hit it over the brook and well up into the fair where Donny said he had never seen the ball anywhere near that. And this is Donnie scan On talking, so he says, we had never seen a ball lay in there anywhere near there. But by the time we got back to the clubhouse, that ball was in Fred Corkman show and for fifty years, fifty years, that was the story.

00:16:34
Speaker 1: This is generally probably a pretty good piece, like a pretty good standard for stories in general. How how the ball will always move forward as the year, as time goes.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: On, as TLEs. And one of the beauties for the archives is Donnie has gave me the scorecard of that day. It was a couple of weeks before the fifty nine US Open, the course was in incredibly difficult shape and Donnie had the little round of the day. I think he was seventy eight, and Mickey did Birdie. That whole man shot about a ninety two. But he has a big fat three circle on the fifteenth doll.

00:17:11
Speaker 1: He should with that drive to get it up there. Indeed, you think anybody's going to try and drive it over the brook this year we.

00:17:18
Speaker 2: Were talking about that it is possible. During the US the Metal Open a few years ago, we saw a couple of the kids try it, or maybe it was a four ball. I forget it can be done. But we asked the pros when they come in and they say, what's the point? Yeah, should you happen to get up there? If you're at the bottom of the hill, you have a wedge or a nine iron for those guys. And if you happen to get across up the hill, you have one of those quartered wedges, you know, sixty yards or something like that, And who wants to and you're coming over a steep bunker unless you're happy to be perfectly situated in the right spot in the fairway. So who wants to hit a sixty yard flop shot over a bunker when he get hit a full wedge same shot, it'd be much more like having the possibility and you know, you mean much easier shot to hit a four m or three arm to the bottom of the hill than it is to crush a driver three forty. Yeah.

00:18:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't think it was possible to carry it on for the kreek on fourteen in the Olympia Fields, and then I saw Bryson do it, and like that little Wednesday match was unbelievable. But that's what made me think of that. So aw Tilling cast obvious legendary architect, one of the five architects in the Hall of Fame, and probably the most revered championship golf architect, and especially in terms of longevity of his championship golf courses. When he built wing Foot, Where exactly was he in his career? You know, if you if you could baby put some notable courses before and after where it fell in there.

00:18:55
Speaker 2: He was peak at that right in twenty three. He was peaking like an athlete peaks. He was a prolific writer. He had written from I think the first article that's been discovered that he wrote might have been eighteen ninety eight. It's that long ago that he started writing. And he wrote up until his death in nineteen forty forty three, was it. He wrote anonymously. He wrote daily newspaper columns for the newspapers. He was the editor of Golf Illustrator. He wrote books. He just wrote more than anybody. Tom Doaks is the only one who rivals him in the amount of writing that he does. And he wrote about his thoughts. And nineteen twenty three is when he was peaking, because he said around nineteen fifteen he had a revelation. He had already been building and redesigning golf courses and American golf architecture at the time was mostly coming through McDonald and also coming through all the old, less creative golf courses of the eighteen nineties and the early nineteen hundreds, And he said he had a relation where he decided that there were way too many bunkers, way too much artificiality, and it was much better to make the golf greens look like they were part of the land. So he had an ongoing argument with McDonald's. Seeing McDonald for the rest of their lives about that because McDonald was well, you know what style he was. You could definitely recognize McDonald green wherever it is. And it's not that they're not tied into the land, but they're definitely, you know, it's different than the land around them for the most part. And Tilling has wanted to make his his golf courses look like they should be on the land, and he wrote about it that the method of doing that, one of his methods was when he was blending slopes. He was adamant about any feature on the golf course, say a sand trap or a green, shouldn't look like it was just placed there, but you should trace the content whereas all the way back forty to fifty sixty yards and start blending the slope of the ground all the way so that you don't just come upon a bunker. Say my god, here's a bunker. And if you look at wingfoot, you see that every single bunker, these huge bunkers on the side. If you can trace the contours of those bunkers fifty yards back and they dissipate and they look so natural, they look like they should have been there. And they and the same thing with the green sites too. Even though they were risen up dramatically, they don't look like they were just placed on that ground as a dramatic plateau. They look like they rose out of the ground.

00:21:39
Speaker 1: Do you have a specific example that's your one of your favorites at wing Foot of that shaping into a bunker from forty to fifty yards out.

00:21:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I certainly have several. And this is one of the things that gil Hans was so good at during the restoration. He knew this, he saw this. So when you stand now on the tee of fifteen West, you can see the fairway, it drops down the brooks at the bottom, and then the fairway picks up. We were just talking about it with Mickey Mantle's long ball. Over the years, like every hole at wing Foot and pretty much every golf hole in America, they had changed from one piece a tilling has golf hole at Wingford anyway, is one piece from te to green, and they had been what I call become more like placement golf courses, where if you drew the hole, you drew a tea, you drew a fairway, and you drew a green and there were three separate pieces. So fifteen West fairway had become narrowed and narrowed and pinched. There was ten feet of rough between the side of the fairway and the green sight bunkers. There was no connection straight from the fairway to the green, and there was no connection from the tee to the fairway, and the fairway on the other side of the brook just picked up at a certain point. So when you're standing on a tee, you saw fairway, you saw rough, then you saw a fairway again, and Gil realized that wasn't supposed to be that way. So when you now stand on fifteen West, it's back to the original design. There is one line. If you start from the back of the green, the left edge of the green becomes the left edge of the fairway, and it comes all the way towards the brook until it drops out of sight, picks up again immediately on the downside of it. On this side of the brook, it comes all the way back to the tee. So when you stand on a t the fairway, the tea merges with the fairway, the fairway merges with the green, and it's all one sculpture. It's a beautiful thing to see, absolutely beautiful.

00:23:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, just because it connects those two landforms which are divided in a way right.

00:23:52
Speaker 2: Yes, and right next to it. This is one wead more about every single time. Killing us didn't do this on a hole by whole basis. It throughout the course, so very often the connecting lines go from one hole to another or three holes. So when you stand on fourteen West Green, it's a plateau and you're generally speaking your head and forward to the fifteenth. But if you turn around and look back at the thirteenth, it's an absolute marble. How the thirteenth green is there about? You know, three hundred plus yards away from you, the two fairways, the fourteen West Fairway and the thirteen West Fairway merge in your eye. You don't you know from memory that there's a forty yard lower piece of ground between the two, but you don't see it. You just see the fairway. The two fairways look like one fairway, and the two greens look like the end of the same fairway. And it's an stunningly beautiful picture, especially when the sun is shining on it. And gil Hans realized that. And the way you make that happen is it's a choice on where you actually mow the contours of the fairway. So all we had to do to not have that was to do what we had done when you narrowed the fairways, to narrow it in the wrong spot. And if you bring that fairway over, you know, say fifteen yards this way, all of a sudden you lose that line connected to the other hole.

00:25:19
Speaker 1: So you know, really, what do you think about it? He was the pioneer of what modern architects would call the tie in process.

00:25:27
Speaker 2: I guess I think I wouldn't downplay anything at Donald Ross or McDonald did. They were really good. McDonald did tie in his greens sights to the ground, and Donald Ross did similar to what I mentioned about tilling has he often has long viewpoints, but I've never seen anything quite like this. Maybe it's a matter of both concept and success of doing it. But I think one of your drone videos shows you that exact same thing. I'm talking about two West and three West Green. If you stand out one yards from two West Green at the right time of day, you think two West and three West Green are the same piece of land, and they're separated by one hundred and ninety yards.

00:26:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, I noticed that the fronting bunker on three. It looks like it's a back I think left bunker on two exactly.

00:26:19
Speaker 2: Your your wine is you go. Your eye is brought to the entrance of two, through the back of the green of two, through that bunker, right into the entrance of three, and you don't see anything but the putting surfaces and those bunker lines.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: You think about the time when it was built. Obviously there weren't these detailed yardage books. That weren't wasn't Google or Earth, and there wasn't rangefinders that would spit you out the distance exact distance right away. And you think about the advantage it would give somebody that had played the golf course before that would know that that bunker wasn't there.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: Well, it's funny you mentioned that, because one of the things tilling Hast and other architects love to do this is to deceive the eye by raising the foreground hiding a space in between so that you get foreshortened in your distance. So on eight West I do this. It's a little bit of a trick I do to some people. It's a long haul. It's now five hundred yard Part four. When you get past the bunker in the fairway. You're now into your last one hundred and twenty yards and you're trying to judge the distance. People think wingfoot is flat ground, but there's nothing, but it's mildly contoured, but it is there. So the fairway at about sixty yards short of the green actually dips down just about a solid foot and extends along to the entrance of the green, and tilling has shaped it so perfectly that you don't see it. You see that last piece, say about six yards in the green, and the next thing your iices is the front of the green, and the foreshortening effect can cause you to be confused. And it's so successful before the ranch fighter said, sometimes I'll ask a candidate to go ahead and drop four or five, six, ten balls in that spot at a fairway, And as I'm walking with my guest up there, I say, you see those balls in the fairway, They go, what are you talking about? And it's not until you get within about twenty yards that you say, holy cow, there's like ten golf balls there that we couldn't even see, just because that's for shortening effect. The architects, a lot of architects use that trick. It's a great thing any A lot of artists use that trick, but it's a great thing to see in the land.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: I got to go back, and obviously tilling Has was well known, his escapades was well known as a strong personality in McDonald likewise, a strong personality. Is there anything about this contention between the two of them about how golf court? Was there any kind of public knowledge or any disputes between the two of them.

00:28:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm aware of several times tilling has writing about it, not going into detail, but he's says things like I'm requoting from memory here, but I have a an ongoing argument with my good friend mister you know see McDonald or something for that effect. It seemed all very cordial. I don't think I don't think there were enemies. I'm sure they weren't enemies. And unless the rumors are true to Charles McDonald had no friends, but I don't think that's true either.

00:29:23
Speaker 1: Definitely did have anyones at the eighteen ninety four Amateur.

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Well, was it is that the third try friend?

00:29:34
Speaker 1: It was? I think it was. It was one of the ones that he uh contended successfully where he uh yeah.

00:29:42
Speaker 2: He was a due overdue now I win.

00:29:44
Speaker 1: I think ninety five was where he won, and he got the two duo first before.

00:29:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know Donald Ross and Killing has we're old friends going way back, and one of the most touching letters you probably have seen it. Killing Has wrote it to Ross shortly before Tilling has died. It's a real sentimental letter. Killing has had the last seen Ross six or seven years before when he was doing this touring of the country and he stopped in Pinehurst and spent a few days with Ross and Ross show him around Pineer's number two, which is a heavy transition period because they were, you know, modern technology. They were able to grasp the greens and everything. So Ross had worked on it all for thirty years and that was kind of when Pinehurst was becoming what it is now, you know, perfecting, and they spent some time there, and Tillinghas wrote a wonderful letter, say to my old friend Donald Ross, remember that time we spent. It's good to hear from you, good to see you, and et cetera. Have you seen that letter. I'll send it on to you if you want to want to look at love that it's a great one. I only have the text I don't have the affects some way the letter.

00:30:56
Speaker 1: I only have the text, and I think he had all his relationships with the other Philly schools. In Wakfoot in a great area for golf, and then it's got a bunch of different Tilling hats right around it. Obviously right next door you got quaker Ridge. Just down the road you got Fenway. I think one of the unique things, and obviously Ross probably shared this also is the variety of his designs, and nothing could be more evident than those couple courses right around you know Winkfoot there talk a little bit about the variety and his designs.

00:31:31
Speaker 2: Well, they were all roughly at the same time. Quaker Ridge had been there a few years before nine Holes by a previous designer, so Tilling has first worked there. I think he only he readdesigned seven holes and designed eleven new and then in the twenties did some more work on the recently purchased land. But right when he was first working at quaker Ridge was when he was transitioning into his revelation, which he said had coming in nineteen fifteen I think in Texas, so he was just starting to develop his full fledged theories. So they weren't fully realized at quaker Ridge as they were seven years later at Wingfoot and Fenway two. He wrote, for example, this is this is This was our guiding theme at our restoration at Wingfoot. I'll give you the core from memory, killing us Ruger. If I have contributed one thing to golf, of course architecture, I think it's this, the notion that the approach to the green should be designed and maintained with as much care and intelligence as the green itself. And then he elaborated on that. He said, I don't mean it just should be short grass in good condition, but that the shaping of it should be reward the intelligence, shot with a purpose, and that he said, in recent years, he's writing this in nineteen twenty nine. In recent years, I have devoted as much time the approach to the green as to the putting green itself. And he called it the gateway to the green. So, if you see it Wingfoot, almost every green, not almost every majority of them have a bunker that's not in play off the tee and not really in play as you approach the green. They're forty fifty sixty yards out, sometimes on a par three. And that was his gateway to the green. He treated everything past that point, and sometimes it's not a bunker's just the landform as it is on fifty West, but everything past that point is part of the green. He called it the semigreen or the approach, and it's they If you take any contour on any green at Wingfoot and you follow it off into the fairway, it does the green doesn't end at the fairway. The contours that you're putting on on the green continue out into the fairway. So that means that the approach shot from thirty forty to fifty yards out at Wingfoot can be treated like a putt, whether it's worth a bouncing five iron or seven hours with a putter itself, but it shakes the same way that you would play a fifteen foot break on a big slope on the green itself. You can play the fairway too, and Tilling has proud of that.

00:34:13
Speaker 1: With the greens and surrounds, obviously, that is Wingfoot's calling card. I think that would be the thing that everybody first jumps to mind with Wingfoot is the greens in terms of the golf course. Is there any other Tilling cast work that you've come across that you would put in the same realm of the greens at Wingfoot.

00:34:41
Speaker 2: Yeah. As a matter of fact, I haven't been there in twenty years, but I remember playing Baltimore for a few days five farms, and I was flabbergasted how good those greens are. I fell in love with them. I could cut there forever. And they share with Wingfoot this thing, this feature. Every single contour at Wingfoot, every single contour at wing Foot on the greens comes in from outside. It comes in from the corners of the green, the sides of the green, and the entrance to the green. So if there's a knob on the back right corner, for example, that will come into the green for a certain distance fifteen twenty thirty feet, sometimes all the way across the green. But there's nowhere virtually on Wingfoot's greens where he said, okay, right here, we need to put a little brake or shell for a ridge, which is a very common thing when people design greens. The green putting surface is onto itself. It's a separate piece of work from the land around it. Even if the surrounds are well tied end. All the contours that you put on you can actually read a wing foot green from fifty yards away, because if you see the big shoulder coming in, you know that shoulder is going to kind of slowly dissipate. But that's the break, that's the dominant break on that line. So a lot of times when you when you get to a portion on the green where you're not sure whether it's going right to the left or left right, you look around it and you say, well, this this big shoulders coming in and it's almost gone now, and this big shoulder on my other side is gone. So therefore I'm going to use the shoulder on my left as the break. And you can actually read the greens from from a long distance away that way, and you can the corollaer is you can make fifty sixty foot pucks if you read them correctly, because they're so true on that you know there's no no wavy lines, no ridges to go over, and if you're missing you go one way, and if you miss them, you go the other way. You can follow it. If you read that line, you can follow eight west. If you know the ridge you can put from the front right corner to the pin at eleven o'clock, and you can put it within a foot every time if you know the line.

00:36:49
Speaker 1: So in a way, it really rewards those that know how to read greens.

00:36:54
Speaker 2: Well, absolutely absolutely, because it takes a good stroke, but it rewards the guy who reads the green as well as the guy who could stroke the ball straight.

00:37:07
Speaker 1: Gil hands gives you tons of credit for the restoration work. You know, he said, I think he calls you the greens whisperer. Is that right?

00:37:17
Speaker 2: I never heard that before today, but now a thousand people have told me that. Thank you.

00:37:25
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear about the work that you did to get ready for that project from a historian standpoint, and what you did to get ready to work with Gil on those greens expansions.

00:37:42
Speaker 2: Well, the first thing was this Doug Smith. Back we had a fire in nineteen seventy. I think it was Doug Smith. Ted Horton was our greenskeeper, and Doug Smith was already interested in history, found an album from opening Day that basically was on its way out. It was been put in the attic and nobody knew was there anymore, and it was actually on the dumpster. It was gone, and they rescued it from the dumpster and Doug more or less started collecting everything else that he could save, including our opening day programs and anything you could find. That album was the starting point, without a doubt, a professional photographer six by ten photos that you can boil up to five feet wide because they're that high quality of most of the not most, but I think it's eighteen of the holes on the opening day nineteen twenty three at ground level, where you can see the shoelaces on the golfers, on the greens, high quality, you can see every ridge and when when you look at them, and then you our course was still beautiful. But when you look at those pictures and you say, WHOA, what's going on here? What did we do? You know? These as good as what we had was in nineteen ninety nine. This was five times b and so that's what kind of got it going. The members started seeing these pictures and realizing that it should be back that way again. So we started collecting. And then this one, the internet was first coming in in eBay, so newspapers were dumping their old morgues where you could find old press photos through the years. So I started collecting every photo i could from in that era of wing Foot and gathered enough really good ones. Plus with the opening day photos and everything else we could find the dug attract down and the magazines and stuff. We had a real good collection of almost every hole at extraordinary levels. And then we were blessed, lucky and intelligent. The club was that when our greens had shrunk, it was a one time event, mostly the depression that caused us to cut back seriously on staff. So I say you have a seven thousand square foot green that kind of what we have now goes out into the corners. They were given orders basically just always quick as you can't starty mode and circles more or less. And our greens trunk radically, but we never ever changed the contours that was underneath what was now long grass, so we had the original contours there in ninety five percent of the cases. For Guild to restore. He had to pull the grass off, massage and work it back, you know, work the soils back in on ninety five percent of the cases. And it was amazing how good he could do that. So we're lucky. Most places that go through that sort of shrinkage of greens end up somewhere along the line somebody flattens They what they had lost, and we never did that.

00:40:48
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it. A buddy of mine always talks about like a golf club atlass thread about Yale where in like nineteen fifty a superintendent just went around flattening all the all the mound and stuff. And at one point I think George Bottom might have gotten him back to the property and drove around with him and asked him to tell him everything he did to the golf course. So it's a you know that, that's the story of that tones of mind, that's so related to that.

00:41:15
Speaker 2: I suspect you're talking about Colin Yeah, yeah, so yeah, I think the words were in the interest of fairness. Yeah, the guy who ran the golf course, and I understand he was a good man. Not to speak with him, but yes, the first hole, the second hole we flattened, the eighth hole. Yeah. Is one of the great courses of the world, without a doubt. It's it's bones are as good as anything there is. And some people just don't understand that, and they want flat greens. They don't want unfairness.

00:41:51
Speaker 1: That's the thing is that the fair that's what has caused so much of the flattening was the idea of fair tell us a little bit about the green expansions and what they add, because obviously some might look at some of the slopes at Wingfoot and say that's unfair. But what makes the green expansions that at wing Foot unique and how they play in is because a lot of times people will look at them and say, hey, you can't put a pin there, why is that green?

00:42:19
Speaker 2: That's true, Actually a bunch of the fronts you can't put a pin there. And the answer to the question why is that a green is what I mentioned before, why is that green? The approach is what we think of as fairwell or actually part of the green. So that unpinnable area, the false front is some people call it is actually just a transition to the next part of the green, which is the entrance the approach, even though it's motor fairweight height, it is part of the green. So when you have a steep ridge on a green where you know people like on twelve West, where you're either up on top of or down below, people don't say that slope that you can't put a pin on shouldn't be there. Well, it's the same thing with if that same slope is at the entrance to the green. It's actually just a transition to the fairway approach. So that's my answer to that question, because we did have a lot of questions about that. The expansions of the greens were restored those fronts, and a lot of balls were coming off that didn't used to come off, but in fact they actually did used to come off. It's just that they weren't on. If you know what I mean, a guy would A guy would hit hits three yeasts now ten yards onto the green and if he doesn't bounce forward, he might come back down into the fairway. And he says that's not fair because I was ten feet onto the green. That never happened before. And we have to explain to the world when you hit it to that exact same spot on the planet Earth, it was fairway before, so you weren't on it.

00:43:49
Speaker 1: Something you talked about earlier was that the fairway with shrinking over time, and how wide were the fairways when it originally open, and how they shrunk as the as the ball went further and players got better, they they got narrower.

00:44:08
Speaker 2: Correct, Yes and no, I mean, yes, yes, that's true. But actually that was a single event thing that happened throughout American golf the introduction of center line of irrigation systems. So when an architect designs a golf course, and if you see any course designed by gil Or nowadays, you'll see leaving fairways that get wider and narrower, et cetera. So Tilling has to design the fairies that went with like that too, is many architects. But once you put center line irrigation in the throw of the water is x number of feet, and anything outside of that becomes rough. So the fairway width was determined by the throw of your water and it became with X instead of If you stand in a fairway now once again at Wingfoot, the width of the fairway might be thirty yards where you're standing, and then you go up twenty yards, it might be eight yards, and it might be thirty five again as you go farther. But when you have centerline irrigation and you don't know exactly what you're doing, which a lot of people didn't quite in the fifties, your faily line becomes a standard with based on the throw of the water. So in Wingfoot's case, it was about thirty five. We uced to thirty then twenty eight before we went back.

00:45:22
Speaker 1: So with the different width when you approach the restoration, was there, what was the discussion like around where to go with it?

00:45:32
Speaker 2: Well, see, this is one of the things Gil also realized, which was great. The evolution of our fairly widths had always been based on that center and irrigation, so as they got narrow or by choice, it was always down that same center line. When we went back with the reconstruction, will realize, Okay, we're going to keep relatively narrow fairways, even though as they do kind of weave get wider and narrow, but we have a fifty yard wide corridor to choose what that thirty yard width is. So two West is a perfect example. You take the original with of the fairway and you put a centerline irrigation system down and then narrows and arrows over time, and it's a slight dogwig. Once we did the restoration, Gil had kind of an option to make instead of the new narrower fairway with straight down what it had been my lifetime, he said, when we shift it over to the left half of the original fairway, so now it's more of a dog like right which means that it's a lot harder to cut the corner. It's not a severe dogway, but the current fairway line is the left half of the original fairway line as opposed to the dea center of the original fairway line.

00:46:45
Speaker 1: That's an interesting thing that I've never thought of, really, is the idea because all fairways were so massively wide when they were constructed, and you go to these courses and you're like, well, that probably was connected to that hole, and then you start looking at the next hole and you're like, you could connect that hole. But the idea of using the corridor and part of the corridor and adapting it for modern game because the other aspect of what is shifting that to the left is somebody trying to cut that corner. They're coming in in the angles, working against them keeping that ball in the fairway like they have to hit such a good t shot. Maybe shape it even to keep that ball from running through the fairway.

00:47:31
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, And it's interesting thing. Killing us did this, and other architects do this too, but not all two west is per example, it's a dog like right. And you will hear a zillion people say, tell newcomers it's a dog like right. You probably want to cut this a little bit to the right side of the fairway, but in fact there and on numerous other places that went for it. If it's a dog like right, it's a proper shot. Is a draw off the two to the left side, and it's you know, if you're smart enough to realize that, which a lot of golfers are, you do that. But if you're not smart enough to realize that, you think the bend in the fairway is the way you should shape your shot, and sometimes it's the exact opposite.

00:48:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's the counterintuitive nature of golf in general, you know.

00:48:17
Speaker 2: Exactly, Yeah, you know this whole turns right, mister Smith's I want you to get to the left. You know what?

00:48:25
Speaker 1: I what are a few the the greens and holes in particular that you're looking forward to watching in September at the US Open with the expansions or restored features.

00:48:40
Speaker 2: Oh, I will always be most interested in watching them. Put West number one. It's the most fun green in the world to put. You can stay there forever and ever. And I watched it six for a couple of hours. Was ever real? Oao In a practice round wouldn't leave the green. He let three or four groups go through as he said, I'm staying on the green. And he was just putting every which way, the same thing I do. And a lot of my friends to we're just put on that green. And he was trying to every put he was turning his back to it was the group was coming along. He was saying to them, look at this, you know, and turn his back and he put it to the back of the green and have it come down on the other side. And it was laughing and everything. And I want to see those guys again do that sort of thing, but I want to see him do it in the open, which might happen because when jose Marie was doing it the wild putch, you couldn't really pin because we didn't have the perimeters. In order to make those wild puts work, you got to be able to take a big sweep and change your direction across the fall line, so sometimes you go past the cup and return not in the straight line, on a big curve. And now that we had to restore perimeters, we could put pins where your line might be. If it's say you have a twenty foot put you might have to play it ten feet high, kind of go five feet past the cup and do a sort of a semicircle back to the cup. And yeah, that's sort of put on one West more than anywhere else. Jeff Ogilvie and your your video puts it great. The video you released today where he says you get to one West and it's sort of like, I forget the exact words it use. It goes, but you see everything on this screen. It's like two kids who had been given a pile of sand and some.

00:50:22
Speaker 1: It's like a homemade thing. He called it. I think a homemade thing.

00:50:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then he goes and you see this, and then you've seen everything. And every other green at Wingfoot has a part of that. But one West has everything you say on all the greens that went.

00:50:36
Speaker 1: For I think I've said on a podcast before, but there's greens that you think about the if you get invited to play somewhere, you think about greens and it's immediately what comes to mind, and for Wingfoot, without a doubt, for me, it's like the first green. When somebody says wing Foot West, it's like I just immediately think about the first green and it's it's just so wildly unique and it's unlike anything. And somebody asked me what green I would want in my backyard, that that one would be there with you know, maybe the short hole at a at ah at National Whole six at National Golf Links would be another one of mine in the same mold.

00:51:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's that, that's right, you know. And I use the analogy the great athletes and other sports that you take the Hall of Fame in baseball, who or basketball or something, and anybody in the Hall of Fame is great, but but you always end up saying, Ruth and Mantle and Maze and guys like that are that much better than the rest, And the basketball end up with, you know, Chamberlain and Michael Jordan and Bill Russell are better than the rest. So too with the Greens National short hole wing foot number one, a few others at wing foot are just better than all of as great as some of those other ones are.

00:52:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, what are a few the others that you'd you know, maybe they aren't number one, but they deserve special recognition.

00:52:11
Speaker 2: Well, fifteen West is just phenomenal. It's it's also candidate for the best green in the world. You could stay there forever. I think I slept there a couple of nights. I'm not sure. We were doing this yesterday with a friend of mine. We were. We do this a lot. Actually, we put a pin down. It was a good piny, so we didn't have to put it down. But sometimes we put a club down where the pin should be and we stand in the same spot. We play a game. We go, okay, four putts. The rule is you have to go to a different route than the other guy. And it's true at Winkfoot you often can find three or four routes to the whole. But here's the beauty of it. Only one of them is the one that's going to go in the cup. And that all that will change depending on exactly the speed of the grass and exactly where your ball was. So you could move your ball five feet and the line that goes in the cup now becomes, you know, twenty foot break right to left instead of a twenty foot break left to right. And we' do this all the time. It's astonishing. And my friend yesterday was going, I had never seen that before. He goes, that's unbelievable. He was talking to all those friends at dinner afterwards, I'd never realized that. I'd never seen that before, but we did three different putts to the same hole, you know, totally different lines, and that is almost unique. I know many greens around the world that have features like that, but I don't know no collection of greens that has that as a universal principle.

00:53:46
Speaker 1: Other than yeah, it's so cool. It's the imagination aspect of goth and visualization really comes alive on those greens, and I think obviously with with the technological advances and in the game, having those greens, it retains artistry. For anybody that wings that wins at wing Foot has to have some sort of artistic flare to their game.

00:54:19
Speaker 2: I agree with that one hundred percent, and I think that's why I'm so excited about after the restoration. I think that was always true, but never more so true than now, because the greens had shrunk already by the thirty so even in the fifteen, nine, seventy forty four and six open that feature was always there, but it was restricted because we couldn't put the pins in some of the spots that they will be putting them this year, and the spots that we will be putting in this year will require the man to be creative and you know different. And we're not talking to you know, playing in a foot out further right, We're talking to playing forty five degree anngle different than the other guy.

00:54:59
Speaker 1: With the two courses, how are how's the identity of each course? Is it different? Is it similar? Is it you know from a when they when they set out to build the two golf courses, was there an intention to make them feel and look the same or be unique in their own right.

00:55:19
Speaker 2: The same? There's not a single hole on either that wouldn't fit perfectly on the other. There was no intention to distinguish. Most golf courses that have most clubs that have two courses do distinguish between them. Even Balta shroule lower and upper. For example, Abandon of course identifies itself with four or five. No, I forget uniquely distinctive courses. Value Bundy and Old and Cashing are vastly different, Port Rush, Ballet and Donald Ross are different. St Andrew's All the courses are different from each other. When could I think is the only one that for the two courses are intentionally designed to be thirty six holes. Any hole can be as if it was part of the other. Of course, there's no absolutely, no stylistic difference.

00:56:04
Speaker 1: Has there ever been a composite course created?

00:56:09
Speaker 2: Every day? Every day members are out there doing this and that in Yeah, in the afternoon, it's very commonful for people to go out four holes on the East, you play, you play eleven, twelve, thirteen on the East, and then you drop a ball in sixteen, seventeen eighteen on the West. You do that sort of thing all the time. And that's what I'm saying. It's not like you're going on to the easier course or the harder course. It's just that's what you want to do today, you.

00:56:33
Speaker 1: Know, eactly. So, yeah, how do you personally split ten rounds between the two?

00:56:40
Speaker 2: There's the saying you vote with your feet. So I think about that a lot. A lot of people ask that question, and if you came up with a thoughtful answer, it would be different than actuality. I think. I think it's true for most members we play the East more than the West. It's definitely true. Right now, I can tell you.

00:57:02
Speaker 1: Up a little bit less.

00:57:04
Speaker 2: That's the East is just so fun. It's a perfectly fun course. And there's no doubt that the East. You're talking about the different from the East and the west cumulatively. The East is way easier, especially now, just because at the end of the day it's two strokes, three strokes easier. But there's no doubt at all that the back of the West is a perfect that is definitely the best line on the property.

00:57:35
Speaker 1: I mean interested changing gears a little bit away from the course of about the club and the culture. How over the time of history, has it obviously, you know, it's it's a highly regarded club. Has the culture evolved or is it has there been a resounding kind of theme of the culture throughout its history.

00:57:58
Speaker 2: I would say, well, it's only in the same way American culture has evolved. It's always been about golf, and it's the friendliest club in the world. You walk to the groom and you feel like you're a member, and you treat it like a member. It's evolved just the way American society has evolved. It used to be a men's girl and now it's been mixed for thirty years. But we always you know, we were had women members from day one. The locker, the clubhouse, greatest clubhouse, one of the greatest clubhouses in golf was built with women's lockers rooms, you know, so it's not like we were men's club at the beginning, and it was always it was just guys out there having fun playing golf, barbecues, golf, you know, rag each other. It's funny when I read the board minutes from the twenties, Nigs Nobles and those guys, I think I'm listening to the guys I just had lunch with. You know, it's the same sort of rib sticking people in the ribs. You know, Old Doc Celton thinks he can hit the ball, but he can't hit the ball, all that type of stuff, you know. Mike Brady, you know, giving lessons, wishes he could grow hair as well as he could strike a wedge. Can you click that? It's good stuff. So it's very very family. So I would say now the culture is probably if you could transplant yourself magically with the time machine, similar to the holes you put one on the other course, you wouldn't know you would change anything. If you drop a guy from the twenties into the twenty twenties and vice versa, he'd be right at home.

00:59:38
Speaker 1: You You talked earlier about finding old images on eBay. I've talked to other historians who get contacted by random people who have you know, sometimes routing plans. What's the what's the best discovery that you've come across in your time doing the archival work.

01:00:01
Speaker 2: Oh, I don't know, if or.

01:00:09
Speaker 1: Whatever, you know, whatever jumps to vibe.

01:00:12
Speaker 2: I'll tell you a couple. Doug Smith found it. It was actually published way back in the day, but before the internet and stuff. It took a lot of work to track down their old magazines. So Doug Smith found it, and then we found a much better copy of it. Ten West under construction. It's finished, but there's no sand in it, and every golf architecture has ever seen it just kind of sitting there like a little kid. Tom Martsoff looked at that. He was like jumping up and down, going, oh, this is the best thing I've ever seen. You know, Guild calls it the coolest thing you've ever seen in golf. It's just the greatest golf picture if you like golf course architecture, you know, And and it's the reason doing has it's always been considered his best part of three. You look at this and you go, how did he do that? How that's just a perfect call. Another great one found this luckily six years ago and it's now hanging five feet tall in our dining. Dining and Gil uses for the restoration is ten west from the tee a week before the US opened, and there's a golfer on the tee and the goal around the green, and it's just the most perfect picture. And we blew it up to four feet and we had it on the tee with us. And Gil's goal was to make it look exactly if he could like that, and he succeeded. But that took a lot of work. And that's one of the reasons we respect you so much is that he didn't just rebuild the bunkers. He went back to the team and said, you know that mine's got to be a little bit this way, and that mine's got to be a little bit this way, thirty forty to fifty times until we got it exactly right. So I contend you a picture where we put the two holes, the two pictures side by side. I duplicated the picture after the restorations. I found the exact spot where I'd been taken from, and I'd cut out the golfer from nineteen twenty nine, and I put him on the green from twenty nineteen, and then you virtually can't tell the two greens apart, except that Paul Callahan's house is behind the green now and it wasn't there back then.

01:02:06
Speaker 1: That's that's the cool thing with seeing the architects, you know, the great restoration architects at work, is that taking a picture and just really making sure, oh that lip tied in a little bit this way or that way, ducked in here, Oh I pulled that too much. And they're doing this with a bulldozer. It's just utterly unbelievable.

01:02:33
Speaker 2: And that's what I mentioned before about the lines that Gil saw the killing has to put in. It happens all over. A bunker line will merge with a bunker on a hole that totally on another hole. Like you mentioned, the bunker on three looks like it's backup bunker on number two. That's probably twenty different spots on the property. So in order to make that work, Gil would have to go back to the tee and make sure that and often that you know, you share a bunker based on the original picture, and you can duplicate it. But then when you go back to the t You say, okay, it's the duplicate of the bunker, but it doesn't quite line up with the bunker one hundred yards down. I could supposed it, and then you have to modify the slopes. And you know, part of that was also once again the visual deception of depth perception. If a fairy bunker, the next thing your eye catches is the green side bunker one hundred and fifty yards farther down. Your mind is fulled until you have a laser measure, you know, but you're the beauty of it is just something you see.

01:03:33
Speaker 1: Can we talk about the one unoriginal green out there?

01:03:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, my heart's not broken yet, but it's halfway there. For West, the most dramatic green on the front of the west drainage problems. It was filled in in nineteen forty ish. That whole corner four west, fifteen West and fourteen East have always been a low lying land was still air every greenskeepers had problems with it with grass growing. I found a Eric Graytak found this in the maintenance archives, a as built plan of the course in nineteen thirty two. Tilling has assisted in this. The depression it hit so we had to do some things, one of which was removed various bunkers. The other was installed drainage and an irrigation system. And so right there you see them with their drainage pipes and irrigation systems. Right across the fourth green there was a huge swale. The green was divided telling Us wrote about it folded like a paper in the middle. The back was about five feet high, the front was about three feet high, and there was a swale in between the two that went down to grade and it was just dramatic looking whole. And it got filled in because of the drainage issues. And then nobody in our lifetime i'd ever seen it because it was forty one that you mentioned before the fines. I found a picture of it when it had just been done in nineteen forty, so that was a good discovery. So that's when we were able to place one. Everything done and we wanted to put it back, but we made a mistake. You mentioned Yale before. There's one of the great holes that Yale was the beer ritz hole, the night Toll, and that's a hole that McDonald and Raider put on a lot of courses. It's a template hole. And as you know, it's a it's a seventy yard deep green or double green, designed to be played from two hundred and thirty to two hundred and fifty yards with a three to a driver bounding it in negotiating in the front, which may or may not be putting surface going through the deep swell four or five. I think yales might be six feeteo things coming out the other side. And there was a resemblance to a beer rich in our fourth green, only that it had a so it got labeled as a beer whitz, and various people were scared of putting a beer it's back because they had notions of hitting long shots and we're at going over the back and its side of bounce over the back. In fact, it's designed to receive a It was a four hundred yard hold down hill, so you designed to receive one hundred and fifty yard shot plus or minus, and the back of the swale behind the swale it was high green, and it wouldn't have been an issue, but there was a misunderstanding about about the dangers of going out of bounce basically, so it got vetoed. But now we have hopes I think because people are understanding, they're thinking more and more about it and saying, yeah, why did we do thirty five out of thirty six? And then when I remind them that we actually have a green still that's extraordinarily similar to it. Nine East has a big swale on it and then you go up, but it doesn't have the back flat portion for pins. So the nineties you go through the swale and then you have the back of the green, but if you did have a putting surface behind that, it would be extraordinarily similar to four West. And people say, oh, I get it because when we did the restoration, this is so cool, because Gil wanted to do it very much. When we got vetoed and we had to take the green apart and put it back together again, we went very very slowly on that one. Taken out of the part. We excavated inch by inch down till we got the swale. We put you ardsticks in and took pictures so we know exactly where the swale was, exactly we could put We can put it back, We could put it in there, and my hope is one day we will because the back of the green is original and the front of the green is very close to original. So basically, all we need to do is put the swale through and Gil, I'm sure would be happy to do that. Should should the club every you fit to change our minds?

01:07:54
Speaker 1: Hey hopefully you know who?

01:07:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, I hope. So. You know, the the people who were against it, they're they're really good. They were supportive of the whole program, and who knows, maybe they were right, maybe we shouldn't put it back. And I thank them all for the support they did for the whole process because it was tough and the membership supported it hugely. But anytime any questions arose, it was helpful to have guys on head of the Greens Committee and the president of the club and various other people stand up firmly for doing what we were doing, sticking to the plan. So if they vetoed that one hole, oh God bless them, they were right on the other thirty five.

01:08:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing that stands out to me. You know, you go see a lot of restorations and you see where concessions are made because of various things, and out there with the Greens, you could see so many places where a membership might in another situation be like you know what, we don't need that back left corner of X green or the back right corner here. No, but you know you get nothing to ever. You know, no pin's ever going to be there. We're just gonna we're going to keep that as rough And it's like that, all those little concessions add up over time. And there were so few, you know, the greens are so spectacular out there.

01:09:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we were lucky. I alluded to this before, how we were lucky, good and smart, those things you're talking about where a guy said we shouldn't have a pin there, so it ended up being long grass. If that drops down the historical memory hole, somebody comes along in the next generation sees the long grass and says, why don't we just fight it change the contours. We didn't do any of that, and it's because we were lucky, of course, But also I think our greens committees have always been really, really sharp. They don't want to change things. So even the bunkers that we took out, you know, in the thirties, are still there. You could see them. We just basically filled them men with grass, so you still see the form. So if we ever wanted to put back the bunker at the beginning of seventies fairway. It's just a matter of strift and terrific changing. It's there.

01:10:09
Speaker 1: Cavity just sat on there, yeah, just waiting.

01:10:12
Speaker 2: We put back together again and and the other way we were lucky is this the course was killing Ask built the course. His foreman in charge of it was John Elif who had built some courses for him. He was a greenskeeper from England who came over to America and built courses and he ended up staying with us. So he was our greens uh you know, superintendent for the twenties and the thirties. So he literally had built the course and he was able at all times to say exactly presumably exactly what Toying has had said to him. Also, his chief foreman was a man in Harold Le Fergie, a local guy who was a foreman for the construction. So he was there from twenty two on. When Ellaf retired, well Fergie took over and stayed with us in nineteen sixty. So for the first forty years of our time we could actually go to the guy who had shaped the green before we did anything to it. And I don't know specifically, but I can only say that it had to be invaluable.

01:11:18
Speaker 1: I built it. That's the ultimate defense. I built that because.

01:11:24
Speaker 2: Exactly and then you know, Sherwood Moore took over in the fifties and he's in the Superintendent Hall of fam he's one of the legends. And he had Lafergie as a special consultant during his time at wing Fit. So Sherwood Moore's mandate was to modernize the grass. That was when the grass revolution was happening with the irrigation systems, et cetera. And so when he was doing that, he had Lafergie as an assistant, as a consultant, and so he had to be talking to him saying, and I'm sure Lafergie was saying, well, don't don't do that. You know, if you ever had the notion of blowing up a bunk or green site or something, you know.

01:12:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, So that's what best thing that could happen for most clubs, just not to do anything, you know.

01:12:11
Speaker 2: I got to say that on the defense of most clubs, I don't think there's more than a couple of hundred clubs that are really worth the attention that we so fanatically gave to wing Foot. You know, some places are treasures, but I think the most architects going to places, they generally improve them. You know. Yeah, you know, it's easy to to pick up the guy a bit and made the disastrous mistake. But you know, I think that generally speaking, I'm going to say two hundred and three hundred clubs in the world where that the greens are really worth saving in the way that we saved ours. You know.

01:12:49
Speaker 1: Yeah, So prediction time, what's what's the winning score this year?

01:12:59
Speaker 2: I'm not but I will give you two answers.

01:13:04
Speaker 1: That's fine. I'm not ready to give advice.

01:13:09
Speaker 2: It goes like this mother nature. First, if if storms come and the fairways are soft, there's nothing anybody can do about that. So that means there will be that that would be a disaster case where you know, they get to hit the fairway, the ball plugs that get to lift and clean. So at that point, and yeah, they can hit every green with a nine hundred wedge, you know, so you can't do anything about that, No course can. But that being said, any any sort of normal conditions, it's based on how the USGA sets up the greens. In my opinion, I know I know the rough is going to be very, very difficult, so they will have to hit the fairways. Even even these guys will have to hit the fairways. But that being said, depending on where the pins are, it's a two to three stroke difference per round on pin position. And I do believe based on what the usg has been doing all year, I think they do intend to use many of the good spots, nothing tricky whatsoever, but a lot of the recovered areas that do require creativity and deep thought about where you're just hitting the ball. If they use these recovered spots, they you can't just hit the middle of the green. Imagine if you hit the middle of the green on two on one west and depends on left valley, Hm, you know you got to you got to hit a great putt.

01:14:33
Speaker 1: Might be grabbing a different club exactly, And I got it.

01:14:39
Speaker 2: I'm very very optimistic. The USJA has been fantastic. They have been paying very close attention to the course. I mean the course itself. They've been studying the greens. They're not just coming in and saying put in position A, B C D A. They're looking at the greens. They're putting the greens and they're they're learning that differences between not you know, if you move a pin five feet six feet seven feet one way or the other in the same zone, it makes a huge difference, and they're learning that. I got applaud them for really putting the effort. And it's great to see.

01:15:17
Speaker 1: It's great to see, it's exciting. I can't wait, and thank you so much for joining us. And excited I imagine you can't wait for everybody in the world to see to see the new greens.

01:15:32
Speaker 2: I can't wait. I'm just you know, that's one of the things I'm really looking forward to is you make lemonade out of lemons. Right this year, no spectators, no grandstands, the loss of excitement, but the ability to show where it's a hard thing to show on TV. And in that course, without dramatic contours, there's no mountains, and that's maybe even harder when you have tents and grandstands. But this year we don't have that, and as you're drone for those shows, you can really show off the land. And I'm pretty sure that the TV broadcast is kind of do a lot of that. They're going to show you how beautiful place went for days, and yeah, they won't be grand stands blocking your.

01:16:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm a big no fan go. I think golf better without fans. I think it's a better TV product and that's the way millions of people digest it. So I know, obviously there's some history and some the you know, moments that aren't the same down the stretch, but overall golf product I think is so much better, especially championship golf, where you know, if you miss a fairway big, you don't get the benefit of trampled down rough.

01:16:44
Speaker 2: That's a fact. And you know we've had various pros come through and just like the members of losing balls because the rough is bad and so are the pros.

01:16:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, it won't be ten minutes ten minute drops for VJ and the by the concession standard throw off.

01:17:04
Speaker 2: I saw that. I'm sorry, what can you say? It? Own? It is what I say. Don't blame the other guy, And don't blame the other guy by saying I'm not blaming the other guy. You know, that's the bad. I just wish I wish he hadn't done that.

01:17:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think he probably wishes he could redo the whole eighteenth hole after the t shot.

01:17:32
Speaker 2: You know what distressed me about this recent article I think you were alluding to, was so I missed the second shot. He's on the upslope, and he said, I looked at my mind and had no chance. I played that shot pretty much every time I played eighteen West because and I'm so bad at wearing enough. You have every chance in the world from there. It's not a hard shot onto the green to ten feet from the pit. At his level, he should have had a four or five from that spot here.

01:18:04
Speaker 1: To think about the mentality of thinking I had no chance when you're when the lead of the US up and on the last all and to think that way, it's just maybe you had no chance because of your mentality.

01:18:18
Speaker 2: Right, I guess. And I don't like to even hear myself talking like this, because he got there. I never got anywhere near that there, you know what I mean. So he obviously has the mentality to be in that position in the first place. So what do I know, how tough to put yourself in that spot in the first place. You know, it's not like you've got a bad mentality, just kind of didn't work at the very end. It's what do I not quite making it to the finish line. But he has to have a great golf mind to even get that far in golf. You yeah, yeah, it's even for all of us to just to say that the quarterback stakes, you know, but we all know the quarterback is better.

01:18:58
Speaker 1: The golfer, the great golfers. It's never their fault. That's part of the mentality.

01:19:02
Speaker 2: So well, that's true. That's golf, as they say, is the Scottish word for who are you blame?

01:19:09
Speaker 1: So Neil, thanks so much. I appreciate the the time, and uh can't wait to see wink Foot in a couple of weeks.