Pete Dye’s Design Legacy (feat. Scot Sherman)

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Pete Dye had one of the most unusual and fruitful careers in the history of golf architecture, and in this episode we're digging into it. My guest is Scott Sherman, the lead designer at Love Golf Design. Last year, Scott and Love Golf Design carried out a major restoration of Pete Dye's Harbor Town golf Links, and they're also in the midst of a multi year series of renovation projects at TPC Sawgrass, another pivotal Die Design. We're going to talk about all of it. I'm Garrett Morrison, and this is Designing Golf, all right. Today's big question why do golf architecture nerds love Pete Dye. If you spend any time looking at what enthusiasts say about golf course design, and since you're listening to this podcast, I assume that you do, you might have noticed a contradiction. The same people who criticize golf courses for disregarding the natural terrain or being too difficult for the average player, or having too many trees, or being too narrow to accommodate strategic angles, or relying too much on water hazards, those same people will often tell you that Pete Dye was a great golf architect, which is strange because Pete Dye's courses did all of those things that I just mentioned. They usually feature a lot of water, some of them are pretty narrow and have a lot of trees. Most of them are very difficult for an average golfer to play. And obviously, if you've ever seen a Pete Die course, you know that he wasn't all that interested in naturalism. So what's going on here? Why is Die so beloved by people who would otherwise seem inclined to criticize them. I think there are three main reasons for that. One, Pete Dye was genuinely original and innovative. He was constantly trying to find new ways of doing things. So, for example, in the early nineteen sixties, Die and his wife Alice made a trip to Scotland to study the Classic Links courses. And I should point out here that this itself was unusual for a golf architect at the time. So when Dye came back from Scotland, he had this foundation of knowledge that not a lot of American golf architects shared, and he processed that knowledge in a really interesting and original way. He didn't just go about trying to replicate Scottish links golf. Instead, he came up with his own versions of certain features that he had seen. Famously, he started building pop bunkers and shoring up hazards with wooden bulkheads, often made out of railroad ties, but he also experimented with contour. He captured the eccentricity and irregularity of links undulations without just reproducing links undulations. He created a variety of rugged textures at his golf courses. A lot of these have faded over time, but initially he used many different kinds of grasses, different kinds of bunker sand. Even basically after his trip to Scotland, Dye reintroduced some wildness to American golf course design, and the results were completely different from anything else being built at the time. This is a fact that he was very conscious of. Pete Dye was a contrarian. He wanted to be different. I often think about the famous story behind the inspiration for Dye's design at Harbortown Golf Links on Hilton Head Island. At the same time he was designing Harbortown, A Robert Trent Jones golf course was under construction on Hilton Head as well. This course was called Palmetto Dunes. Robert Trent Jones, of course, was the dominant golf architect of the era. Everyone was trying to catch up to him by imitating what he was doing. But Die, instead of just imitating what he saw at Palmetto Dunes, thought to himself, I'm going to do the opposite of that. Here's how he describes it in his book, Bury Me in a pop bunker, which I would highly recommend to anybody. He writes, as I watched the big machinery carve out long teas, huge bunkers, and large greens, I wondered how I could design something that would separate my identity from his. Somehow, the concept of designing small greens and a low profile course crept into my brain. Instead of long teas, flowing fairways, and elevated large greens, I deliberately chose to design multiple tea positions, small to medium size, shot demanding greens, undulating fairways, long waist areas, and abrupt, steep pop bunkers. So, in other words, Di was intentionally zagging on the Harbor Town project. He was thinking like an artist rather than a business person or a member of a resort development team, and that's something that golf architecture nerds really appreciate. Now. It is true that I could occasionally go a little too far in his effort to be novel. A quick example would be the so called volcano bunkers that he built at French Lick in Indiana, which are unique and memorable and I would imagine have their fans, but I consider them pretty silly, and I can't imagine that they're easy or cheap to maintain. Even in cases like that, Though I like that Di went for it, his missteps came from the same source as his best work, which was a genuine willingness to push an experiment, and in a field full of people who play it safe, that quality stands out. Another reason design enthusiasts love Pete Dye is that he knew how to make difficult courses interesting. Anyone can design a golf course that produces high scores, but it takes real ingenuity and skill to design one that's enjoyable and engaging while it's dishing out punishment. And that's what Pete Dye was able to do over and over the stadium course at TPC Sagrass is maybe the best example of this. When Die designed it, his brief was to build the most difficult golf course in the world. Usually that kind of brief does not result in interesting golf courses, but the stadium courses stood the test of time, and a big reason for that is that the holes don't just punish poor shots, they also test decision making. They test risk tolerance. So consider the eighteenth hole, by any standard, a very difficult finishing par four. At last year's Players Championship, it was the second hardest hole on the course. But it's not just straightforwardly sadistic. It's actually a very nuanced hole. Off the tee, what you're looking at is a fairway running on a right to left diagonal, with a lake hard against the left side and trees on the right. The fairway is at its widest point about two hundred and sixty yards from the back tee, But if you play to that relatively safe spot, you'll have a two hundred yard approach into a green that tilts toward the water and is also guarded by mounting in a pot bunker front right. That's a really tough shot. So most players try to push up a little more. But the problem is the more you push up, the more left you have to go, because that's where the fairway is moving. So this means you either start your ball over the water or carve a right to left t shot into the fairway, both of which are very uncomfortable plays, especially for right handed pros who are used to hitting a fade. So a lot of players end up in the trees on the right, which is obviously better than the water on the left, but still a very tough spot to be you're making par or bogie from there pretty much certainly, so every year we see a surprising number of players flirting with the water. And I think that's because if you pull off that te shot, a three is there for the taking its base a short iron or even a wedge into a decently receptive green from that angle, and on the final whole of the day, when you're trying to make the cut, or win the tournament, or just make up ground on the field, that is a very tempting proposition. So, yes, a difficult golf hole, but fascinating to play and watch. All Right, we've talked about Dye's originality, and his way of achieving difficulty and interest simultaneously. Another big reason he's so beloved by golf architecture nerds is that he reintroduced design build methodology to the game. Now, this topic deserves a podcast of its own, so I won't go as in depth here as I want to, But the short of it is that when Dye started his career, Robert Trent Jones was turning golf architecture into an office job. His approach was to draw up a set of plans and then hand them off to a construction company, usually a construction company that he himself owned. This allowed Jones to scale up his business and to design a tremendous number of golf courses across the world. Die didn't work this way. He was famously averse to formal plans and he much preferred to work things out in the ground with a shovel and a bulldozer. He was intensely collaborative. His wife, Alice, his most trusted design advisor, made critical contributions to every project that Dyes company was involved in. So the courses evolved as they were being built, and the effect of this is that die'es courses have a handmade quality to them. Yes, they are clearly manufactured, but they're interesting to look at because they're shaped with such care and individual attention. You don't see a lot of cookie cutter stuff at Die's best courses. His features are really varied and irregular. His mounding, for instance, is chaotic and unpredictable, very different from the tidy containment mounding that was typical on courses built during his period. There's just an appealing strangeness to Dye's shaping that I think comes from his devotion to the on site boots on the ground craft of golf architecture. And this approach turned out to be very influential because Die passed it on. He was like an NFL coach who produces a lot of other really good NFL coaches. Pete Dye trained Bill Corr, He trained Tom Doak. He trained Rod Whitman and Jim Orbina and Tim Liddy and Bobby Weed and many others who in turn a huge number of the up and coming designers who will define the next era of golf architecture. Often their courses look nothing like Dies, but his methods are in their DNA. So that's your answer to the apparent contradiction that I started with. Certainly, Pete Dye did a lot of things that current enthusiasts claim to dislike, but he did it with such originality and such a contrarian spirit and such a sense for the nuances of strategy and psychology that people who are passionately into golf architecture just can't help but love his courses. And on top of that, he introduced a design build workflow that has produced most of the greatest golf courses of the past thirty years. That's why golf architecture nerds appreciate and respect Pete Dies so much, even if his work doesn't really resemble what we usually like. All Right, I'd like to dive deeper into a couple of specific Pete Die golf courses. For that, I'll bring on Scott Sherman, who is the lead designer at Love Golf Design alongside Davis Love the third and Mark Love. Scott has developed a kind of specialty in Pete Die renovation and restoration. He helped to prepare the Ocean course at Kiawa Island for the twenty twenty one PGA Championship, and he restored an excellent early Die Design called Delray Dunes in Florida. Most recently, and most relevantly to this episode, he and Love Golf Design carried out a restoration of Harbortown Golf Links last year. This is the host of the annual Heritage Tournament on the PGA Tour, and they are also heading up an ongoing renovation plan at the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass, the annual site of the Players Championship. Basically, there's a lot going on in Scott's world related to Pete Dye, so I thought this would be a good time to bring them on and talk specifically about what's happening at Harbortown and Sawgrass. Let's get to it all, right, Scott Sherman, Welcome to the podcast.

00:14:21
Speaker 2: Good morning, Garrett. How are you.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: I'm doing pretty well. How about you?

00:14:25
Speaker 2: So keeping busy but as I said, better than I deserve.

00:14:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, you you have certainly been very busy lately, and we're going to be talking about a little bit of what you've been doing lately. But first of all, I want to I want to chat a bit about your your history with Pete Dye. The subject of this episode here is Die his design style, some of his courses. You began your career, as I understand it, working with Pete and Alice Dye at Kiwa Island.

00:14:58
Speaker 2: That's where I met them. Actually, like a lot of us, I was captivated as a teenager by the first watching TPC Sawgrass on television, not knowing that I would want to be a golf designer one day. Fast forward many years in the first time I really thought about being in the business was in college. And the first time I had ever set foot on Harbortown, ironically, was in nineteen eighty nine. That was called the Nabisco Championship back in those days, the forerunner of the Tour Championship walked that golf course after the fourteenth hole, I thought to myself, I need to go find Pete and Alice. So made my way to Kiowa while it was under construction, and that's really where I connected with some of their staff. To be honest with you, some of the guys out in the field, but Pete and Alice had moved there to do that project at Kiowa. So I wrote them a letter and got a response from Alice, a letter I have to this day kept in my file. So that would have been you know, late eighty nine, early ninety and lo and behold, they connected me with Perry Dye who was working on some projects with them, and I first, you know, went to work with the Die family out in Denver, Colorado as part of their bigger staff, and got together with Pete and Alice out there actually, and then was sent to Hawaii to build my first golf course, which was not bad duty, but it was a very difficult project. So that's how that sort of happened. And ironically having been at Harbor Town and now all these years later helping them with their work there and the ocean course at Kiowa and as you mentioned, TPC Sawgrass as we're working right now. So it's just crazy.

00:17:03
Speaker 1: What are some of the initial experiences you had in the kind of Die family system that taught you things about golf course architecture and construction.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: Well, so my first memory of anything at all would have been walking on the ocean course, which was just it looked like the moon, you know, just a big old moonscape out there of sand and movement and whatnot. So I didn't have a clue what I was looking at. And when I got to Denver, it was hired properly Perry their son, their older son, said hey, look, you need to understand what we do in our style. And I had a feel for it. But he was gracious enough to send me to some of their golf courses that were well known and had been built years before, and he immersed me in photography that was sort of archived at their office in Denver. Their their photographer, Kenny May, their family photographer, availed me of any any golf course that they had ever built all over the world, and so I immersed myself in photography, which many years later, ironically has has come back. So that's where it sort of started. Get a feel for what we do, and then they started teaching me about the strategy. Here's how we think about golf holes. Pete always mentioned building in a third dimension, you know, as you know, there's there's lots of features that cast shadows and look more intimidating than they really are. So my earliest memories are of really studying their golf courses over a pretty short period of time. And then off I was sent to Hawaii to build this golf course in the middle of the Monowilly Valleys as they call it, and that's where it's or started.

00:19:01
Speaker 1: Do any stories come to mind from these early years about, you know, how construction was done on a Pete Dye golf course. I mean, clearly, this firm, this family had an approach to golf course construction that was different from that of other golf architecture firms. You may not have been aware of that because this was your you know, this was these were some of your first experiences in building golf But what was distinctive about the way that construction was done in the kind of die method?

00:19:36
Speaker 2: Well, and of course I knew nothing different other than when I got to my first project. So I was partly a design associate and partly construction manager as it were, and I was put in a ditch right from the beginning and told you need to learn how to build these golf courses from the ground up, which has served us well to this day. So I really didn't know any other way than to really build a golf course and designed it. At the same time, I think Pete would have even said he was a golf course builder much more than a golf course designer, and certainly didn't use the term too much golf architect. But we learned to build golf courses, and that's how we still do it. Yes, we have to deal with AutoCAD and plans and permitting and all that sort of thing, but that only gets you about eighty percent of the way. And we build a golf course and the features sort of reveal themselves as we impose our will here and there and work with sites, you know, somewhat minimalistically sometimes, but sometimes we have to impose our will. But we're really, we're really at the heart of it, golf course builders. And that's just how I learned, and of course is I got to know other people in the business and other people that work for the Die family. That's exactly how they learned to bill golf courses, folks like Bill Coohr and Tom Doak, and you go on and on. I'm really sort of the third generation, you know, Pete and Alice being the first generation, and folks like Bill Cooorr being you know, the second generation. I'm a younger generation, and I certainly didn't work on as many golf courses as lots of other guys did and gals, but certainly was very very influenced by the building process, much more so than the design process, and to this day it's a necessary evil to get things on paper and be able to permit and land plan and all that sort of thing. But I guess the instinctive part of what we do is the building part, the part that's fun, the part where you just feel, I feel comfortable standing on the ground and making it happen. You know, with all the fellows that we deal with the golf course builders at this point one.

00:22:01
Speaker 1: Were you building greens at this point?

00:22:05
Speaker 2: Yes? Absolutely, you know, how did.

00:22:08
Speaker 1: That process go?

00:22:09
Speaker 2: It was?

00:22:09
Speaker 1: I mean, because different architects have different approaches to building greens, and it's pretty interesting. I mean, Bill Corer and Tom Doak approach building greens differently. Tom Doak kind of has his associates go out and mess around with it and come up with these ideas, and then Tom comes in and edits. You know, these are very broad strokes here. Bill is more like, you know, he'll he'll figure out the concept of the green and have a pretty specific idea of what he wants done, and then they go out and execute that. What was the nature of that process for you in the die system.

00:22:40
Speaker 2: Well, at the beginning, so interestingly enough, I was sent to Hawaii, and the crew that built the ocean course at Kiowa for the ninety one Ryder Cup left Kiowa, picked me up in Denver, and we went to Hawaii to build this golf course. So that crew of folks, Steve Mann, Keith Sparkman, lots of guys that were at Kiawa taught me here's how you do it, and they would hand me bundles of flags and put my rear end on a sand pro or a tractor. I tried to do some work on a bulldozer' maybe too a d D and too impatient to sit on a bulldozer all day. I've got to be roaming the site. But I did learn to run some small equipment and do that a little bit less now these days, but still enjoy doing that. But we would literally you have a green site that was roughed in, and the guys would flag it out or I would flag it out, and we would just start playing with the dirt. As I say, the construction part of it have kind of a concept. I guess I have personally moved on to doing some green sketches, which helps us sort of anchor where we start and move the dirt around back in those days build in USGA green, we would build the core of the green, in other words, sixteen inches down in the in the dirt. And I always struggle with that. I like to like to build the whole green complex with all of the features as they would be finished, and then core it out and build, you know, ourselves a green. But so you know, it's always very different how we do these things. But that's that's the way. I started, just out in the field flagging out greens and figuring out the best way it fits in there strategically, and then we would mess with the contours physically with the sand pro, with the box blade and the tractor.

00:24:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've heard I've heard versions of that from various people who have worked with Pete Dye and with Perry Dye and others associated with the family, that that is kind of the problem. You really go out and play with it for a while and see what works, and then and then you come in kind of with the critical mind and shape it from there, which is a very interesting process, and it's it's got to be one that's that's tough for clients to deal with sometimes because you don't know what you.

00:25:08
Speaker 3: Have no idea yes, they're scared to death, but you know, at this point in our career we have a history, uh that that sort of shows them that that we kind of know what we're doing.

00:25:20
Speaker 2: But yes, it can scare them to death because and I learned some freedom from Pete by watching him answer questions of clients who would say, well, what are you going to do here? And what are you going to do there? And why did you do this or why did you do that? And he would just say, I don't know. Just felt right, I don't know, Okay, I mean, it is a creative process, you know. It's it's you're not building a four wall structure that walls have to be in a certain spot. So it just gave us some some freedom. And I guess to carry that on a little further. And I didn't see Pete do this much. He did it a little bit and taught us how to float greens. Originally, we would take a sand pro in a three by eight by about ten feet long board that was drug around with the sand pro that he stood on. It was like he was water skiing, and we would call it skiing the green and he would float contours with his feet and again I didn't see him do it much, but the guys that came from Kiowa taught me a little bit about how to do that, which is a very tiring process actually, And so Pete would make changes in the green, sometimes substantial. You know, you're supposed to only have twelve inches or so of greens mix in the profile of a green, and sometimes it would be a little less or sometimes a little bit more. But that was again part of the creative process contouring. You know, Bill Koorr calls it grading the green. So just right from the beginning, I was so fortunate to dive right into everything that was under the ground building this guy course in Hawaii, all the way to the finished contours. And then we were in charge of the whole construction process, so grassing and irrigating and the whole deal. So it was it was quite the education. I got my master's for sure, building two golf courses in Hawaii.

00:27:19
Speaker 1: All right, So we've got the Players Championship coming up soon here, so let's talk a little bit about TPC sawgrass, all right, And I love golf designs work. There you are in the early phases of what I understand to be a very long renovation timeline. So could you give me an idea of what the overall vision for the stadium course is and the changes that will be made in the coming years. Is this a restoration, is it a modernization? What is it?

00:27:54
Speaker 2: Yes? Yes, yes to both, that's right, and so we we're engaged in the process. Gosh, it's been almost three years ago now, so we have done some summer work for the last two years. We were all just there yesterday preparing for the summer work that's coming up this year. Partly we go there during tournament set up so that we can see how I mean, obviously it's built for tournament golf, so see how what we are about to do would affect circulation and the fan experience and obviously the architecture of the golf course. So this was a tough thing to start because and I have to be very careful how I say this. I don't want to be critical, but I just want to be factual about what's happened over the years, over these thirty some years to the golf course. I think the tour recognized that they were they have taken everyone's input over these thirty years, players, rules officials and administrators, fans, TV folks, media folks. They have slowly but surely over the years taken input from lots of folks, and one little thing at a time. The golf course changed and changed and changed. And the thing that we've noticed the most is and of course I know a little bit too much to be dangerous when it comes to the greens, but the greens in particular have become softer. The slopes are less pronounced, the transitions are less pronounced, the greens are generally bigger than they were originally. And as you know, I know, you've traveled all over the place and you have seen everything in this day and age. To challenge the best players in the world, it's all about the greens. We can keep moving teas back as far as we want. But the great golf courses that host majors, that do a great job of trying to challenge the player but yet still be enjoy for the member are the ones that have some really interesting, maybe severe greens. You think of the oak monts in the wing foots of the world, well, tpc sawgrasses. Greens really have become soft, slope wise, whole location wise. They're just not as difficult as they were, so we sort of start there and eventually in twenty twenty eight, as we understand it, we will focus on the greens and the green complexes. But leading up to that, there have been so many changes. For example, originally the golf course was very rough, you know, and how far back in the roughness do we go? And we have lots of documentation from day one really during construction. We have lots of documentation of the golf course plans to the extent that those are helpful, lots of photographs, lots of tournament video and so forth. We have lots of influence that you know, it's sort of like when Marion had to decide what era were they going to go back to, and we have sort of settled on about nineteen eighty nine as far as features go. And so for example, you know, there was lots of quote, waste areas, areas where you could ground your club, that were sandy shelley, areas that were strategic and a little you know, gave you a little uncertainty when you hit a shot out of those areas. And of course you fast forward to today and there's none of that. Every bit of sand, there is a bunker a bunker proper. So we're going through the process of deciding what if any of those areas do we restore as native through the green shell sand screening areas. And then you look at the architecture around all of that, and so much has changed, partly because it needed to. Some of it was too severe for you know, fan use, spectator use, some of it was too severe to maintain and that sort of thing. So we walk around constantly, and I have a computer full of photographs and photographs and miss Alis sent us their family photographer, Kenny May, who's photographed the place for years the tour, and we look, you know, really, square foot by square foot, what were those features like and how different are they today? And why can't we put this back? So it's really it really is more of a restoration. But again to keep up with the modern tour player who is six foot six or taller and looks, as Davis says, looks like a linebacker when he goes to the locker room, they all look like linebackers standing in the you know, golf locker room. So these guys are physically, and I would even say women are physically very fit and capable of hitting the ball a long way. They have a lot of certainty about their game, and so you know, as far as a restoration goes, the architecture is restorative. But again we have to think about it in the modern context, not only playing the golf course, but also maintaining the golf course. We are not going back to nineteen eighty three. You've probably seen pictures and how really really rough that place was. It was rougher than Pine Valley ever thought about being, to be honest. So there's a happy medium there. But there are so many neat features that we are picking up here and there that we will restore throughout the golf course. And honestly, there's some golf holes from nineteen eighty nine in a little bit earlier we don't even recognize. The second hole is completely different than it was originally, the sixth hall. I could just go on and on, and so it is really a massive download of information that we have. Aesthetics that Pete created, funkiness, strangeness, coolness, you know, you know, funky good stuff that we're trying to slowly but surely put back into the golf course and will really more effectively be able to do it when we close in twenty twenty eight. That's a very long answer to say that we are locking arms with the tour and their agronomy staff and their rule staff and their competition staff, and walking down every golf hole with them leading the process and really relying on you know, Pete's the golf architect here. He was the builder. He and Alice designed and built this place, and we're just being totally influenced by what was there and trying to make sure that we can be respectful of that and make it work because it was, you know, for its day and even for this day, it was crazy. We want to go back a little bit more to the crazy and a little less to the perfect. And if you're a keen observer of that tournament and that golf course, you're slowly but surely seeing that, partly due to the agronomic staff who is taking a lot of the ornament ornamental material out, bringing more native landscape material in and trying to keep with that more native look of the golf course.

00:35:23
Speaker 1: There's a lot of interesting stuff in there in that answer. Okay, this episode is brought to you by the new Cobalt QZ six slope rangefinder. The QZ six represents a significant leap in golf rangefinder technology. Most rangefinders have a kind of fixed magnification right, but the Cobalt QZ six has an optical zoom feature ranging from six x to twelve X, so when you're on the golf course, you can just see your target better. You can identify your exact landing spot more clearly, You can assess the contours of a fairway or a green more easily. You can actually see the characteristics of a pin placement, which is helpful. All that stuff is just very useful and not something you typically get with a rangefinder. Now. In addition to zoom, the QZ six has COBALT's proprietary pin sense and surge technologies which make locking onto the flag fast and reliable. And it offers a total performance ranging from five to twenty five hundred yards, including six hundred plus yards to a pin and two thousand yards to trees. This thing is just built for golfers who prioritize accuracy, consistency and trust in their equipment. Every Cobalt rangefinder is backed by a lifetime warranty and sold direct consumer, which ensures uncompromising quality without the usual retail markup. So go to Cobalt dash golf dot com and enter the code fried egg Pod fifteen for fifteen percent off. That's fried egg Pod fifteen all one word at Cobalt dash goolf dot com. Check it out. I'll pick out one idea at a time here. I think maybe we should start with the the former ruggedness of Tpcsawgrass. Right, as you mentioned, the course originally had a pretty wild look.

00:37:40
Speaker 2: You know.

00:37:41
Speaker 1: I remember talking to Jerry Pate about it one time and he said, you know, you were you were almost thinking that wild animals were going to come out of the jumble attack.

00:37:51
Speaker 2: And we've seen pictures that really look like that.

00:37:53
Speaker 1: It's just oh yeah, I mean it's a it's a Florida swamp. It felt like a Florida swamp initially with some I mean, there was something pinehursty about it maybe towards the beginning as well. Yes, and so it was it was. Yeah, it was pretty raw at the beginning, and it gained some refinement over the course of the eighties, But even even by nineteen eighty nine, which is the year you've pointed out, the course was much more rugged looking than it is now now. It's kind of like Augusta National, Florida. In a lot of ways. You can see the influence of Augusta National's maintenance practices on what the stadium course has become. So how do you find that happy medium? What are the features or what are the presentation practices that allow you to reintroduce some of that initial wildness without pushing it to the point where the PGA Tour says, hey, hey, we don't want our home of golf looking like it's downtrodden or dilapidated. Right, because clearly the PGA Tour has an interest in presenting the courses as as very shiny looking. And so what do you what do you do there? What are the places where you can can bring back some of that original look, and what are the what are the things that you just can't do?

00:39:23
Speaker 2: Okay? Well, So in defense of the tour as our client, you know, I would compare TPC sawgrass Uh currently in a modern context in a similar way, I would think about what we see at Oakmont. You know, I remember one time hearing John Zimmer's I think, say to Paul Latshaw or someone, you go out to that golf course the Monday of the US Open a few years ago. You go try and find something that's imperfect about Oakmont, You're not gonna find it. I mean, we we are so good, I'd say we the agronomic staff everywhere in the world, especially at these high level of facilities hosting big tournaments, are so good at creating perfect that that's a standard that that's going to stay, you know, the perfection. You go to Pinehurst number two. Although it's rugged, there are times when teas, fairways, greens are you know, they may be a little off color, but the conditions are great and then it sort of fades to its you know, native look. So in defense of the tour, they're going to create conditions that are fabulous for the tournament. For sure, because it's in March, it will be overseated as long as it stays in March. I'm sure that's the case. So having said that, you know, again, we can't go back to nineteen eighty three, just can't. It's it's you know, there was massive areas of the golf course that you know, spectators couldn't get around in. Really it was a coadd It was really a kind of a mess, honestly, and when you're hosting, I don't know, three hundred thousand people at an event, You've got to be careful about that. But having said that, slowly but surely, as I mentioned, first off, there was a landscape palette that sort of crept in that was more ornamental, honestly, literally knockout roses and tea plants and things that were, you know, too much color for this native of a sight. So that's slowly but surely going away, maybe not completely, but as we think about how we fade into the native Florida swamp, you know, we are replacing a lot of that vegetation with things that were there before, wire grass and mully grass and things that are native to the area. We're certainly moving big trees. You may be aware of some big trees that we've moved there.

00:41:54
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that in a second, okay, you know.

00:41:58
Speaker 2: And preserving the oaks, the palms, and the pines that are indicative of that site. And then as we get closer to the golf holes, as we get closer to the center line of the fairway, that's where we're in sort of a discussion about as I said, these native quote waste areas that once were that at least give the golf course a little bit different contrast. Again, I don't want to be critical, but if you were to view the golf course maybe two years ago, it was so perfect and so contrasting between green and white. It was just as you say, Augusta National is wonderful, it's marvelous. I have no bad things to say about their esthetic. But TPC Sawgrass was not that, and it just seemed a little sterile to us. So as we started the conversation and we had a very receptive audience who said, yes, we look at these old pictures, we see what this used to look like, and so let's try to use that. But there's going to be a limit, you know, there's going to be a place or two where we just can only go so far with that. And the tournament is growing. I think that's always going to be the case. There will be more and more interesting to some extent, and maybe they will allow more more fans. So again, you know, Pete had the idea of sort of unique to him, these big long waist areas. One of our discussions yesterday is back in twenty sixteen, the waste areas were removed and the ones that were waste areas stopped and then the bunker, for a rules standpoint, picked up. So there was always a separation between the waste area and the bunker, and those don't exist anymore. So we're trying to understand what we would be allowed to do to bring back the waste areas and separate them from the bunkers aesthetically, rules wise, and again that's very restorative. I mean, we're working on the fourth hole right now thinking about all those details. So again as a as a place to start as an anchor, you know, Pete and Alice gave us an anchor from nineteen eighty two or three, and we will navigate that whole by whole, area by area to get that look and that strategy into the golf course, which is already there. You can see it, but it just looks. It looks a little bit more perfect than maybe it should.

00:44:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can. You can even see that contrast between what are intended to be waste areas and what are intended to be bunkers in the design of the course where you have these huge, long bunkers often along the fairways, and those are now maintained as bunkers and every inch of them is has become perfect over time.

00:44:47
Speaker 2: Right.

00:44:47
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, there's a difference between those and the smaller bunkers that are off in green Side, and so that's that's an interesting contrast to TPC sagrass. And it would it would seem to stand a reason that you would present those two different types of hazards differently. So that's that's pretty cool. I'm looking forward to to seeing that change for sure. Now. The most talked about change at TPC Sawgrass last year was, as you alluded to, the replanting of this massive oak tree next to the sixth te so that players were forced to hit a kind of relatively low trajectory t shot from a certain tea position. It wasn't all tea positions that were affected, as I understand it, but but yeah, so but you know, if you put the tea in a certain place, then then players kind of they couldn't just blast away with their towering you know, hit up on it driver. They would have to to carve a different type of shot under the tree limbs and add onto the fairway. This was a restorative project. This wasn't just a you know, a funny idea that that you and and love Golf Design had. This was there originally, and the and the tree was it was I think it had disease or something.

00:46:02
Speaker 2: And yeah, the previous one was leaning and leaning, and they cabled it so it wouldn't lean too much. And then I forget whether a storm or just decay took it out and it was gone for several tournaments.

00:46:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, so how do you feel that that change worked out? What were some of the impressions that you got from the tournament about the effects of that replanting.

00:46:25
Speaker 2: Well, so I'll let the statistics speak for themselves, but before I say that, you know, one of the things I learned, and I didn't know that I was learning this until well into my career, as I would build golf holes and take direction from the Dye family and my future design partner Bobby Weed. You know, sometimes all you have to do is get into a player's head, and especially when you're talking about the highest level, they have so much certainty about their game, especially today, that the mental part is what you're Realllian challenging. So whether this was intended on the sixty by Pete or not, it was there visually and you know, shot tracker back in the day would have been really great to you know, tell us how much did it affect the flight of the golf ball. Well, now we know from last year's tournament. You know, prior to the tree being moved and replanted, I believe that hole played during previous tournament or the previous year. I believe that hole played thirty under par for the field. And then last year with the tree in place, and only one player actually hit the tree all week, that hole played twenty over par. There's a fifty shot difference. And all we did was create a visual. We didn't build a bunker, we didn't put a wall, there's no railway sheds or anything. But it's just the visual. And now that we do have shot tracer and shot tracker, we could kind of predict how it might affect their ballflight. And everybody hit everything. There were players that hit driver. I played with a tour player prior to opening the golf course and he hit driver, no problem, just a little bit lower. But they just had to think about it so visually, so then mentally, this is where I guess Pete taught us how to maybe affect a player's game and the way they think about playing the golf o.

00:48:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, the psychological dimension of design was something that Pete Die thought about a lot and implemented at his courses better than probably anyone who has ever designed courses for elite players.

00:48:41
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:48:42
Speaker 1: Right. He knew exactly how to bother top level players, and that's right. I think that's part of what makes his courses stand the test of time.

00:48:50
Speaker 2: Right, that's right. And you know I learned early on to try to get certainly the best players to think about shots. You want to make them move the ball back and forth with every shot. That's where sort of the idea of an S shaped golf hole came from. You want to make the player work the ball in one direction off the tee and another direction into the green.

00:49:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. I like to call them switchback holes.

00:49:17
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:49:17
Speaker 1: You see a lot of these par fives at Pete Die courses that kind of move one direction off the tee and then come back the other direction like a switch, like a you know, switchbacking road going up a mountain, that's right.

00:49:28
Speaker 2: And you can go all the way back to a place like a teeth of the dog in the Dominican and you can see that all over the golf course. Even if you want to really study par threes, you know there are it's always great to have different hole locations on a par three. So very often he would build a par three that sort of had an S shape to it. And at TPC sawgrasp between Dean Beamon and Pete and miss Alice and Bobby Weed. I learned originally his thinking about how to set up greens. You know, originally when the greens were built, they were a bit smaller, and he had in his mind four whole locations for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And he was trying to make you realize that it was best to attack a whole location with a proper shot shape. And if you didn't, you know, come into that whole location with the correct shape, it might repel the ball. If you use the right shape, it might hold the ball in place. And so some of that has been lost. We're trying to understand how what kind of whole location cupping slopes we can create. You know, you go to Wingfoot, I don't know if there's a two point four percent slope on any green at Wingfoot. And we've always i say always for a long time we've been concerned about not putting whole locations at TPC on anything greater than a two point four percent slope. Well, I think we have some freedom to exceed that now, regardless of the speed. These players are so good that's the place to really challenge them at the greens. And so we're studying and we have maps, believe it or not, from nineteen eighty three with shots of every green meaning great shots of every green and the shapes and the sizes. So that's where we're really starting to focus on. How do we recapture these compartments that Pete had originally, but yet still keep these greens fair.

00:51:33
Speaker 1: So will there be anything new at this year's players, any changes that have been made since last year?

00:51:39
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, we've been tinkering a little bit this year. So the twelfth hole is an interesting hole out there, and Pete himself changed that booger over and over.

00:51:53
Speaker 1: And just to give people some background here, the twelfth hole used to be kind of a drive and pitch part for with some kind of semi blind elements. It was not a particularly popular hole. I would say some had some affection for it. I'm probably one of those people. I kind of I kind of, I kind of liked it, and but it you know, with distance gains it it it lost a little bit of its strategy, probably it and it just kind of became a drive and pitch exercise for the pros. A number of years ago, several years ago at this point, it was turned into a driveable par four with water along the left side, and the idea was that that we would create some excitement here. So that's the context. But but yeah, I was gonna ask about the twelfth hole. Is that what? What are your thoughts about it?

00:52:40
Speaker 2: Well, so the like on the left at the green has now been extended all the way back towards the tea, so it's much more visible from the tea up the right side. We built a much larger bunker that sort of as you talk about angles there, there's now a bunker in the ridge on the right side. That gives you sort of some decision points. Again, you know, I always talk about the five decisions on a drivable par four. Do you go whatever the hazard might be, do you go left of the hazard, right of the hazard, short of the hazard, over the hazard, or do you go for the green and so this is introducing some more decisions. So it's a fairly large bunker along the right side that is at an angle from the tee, and it's reminiscent of a bunker on the sixth hole. And we're sort of testing here a little bit, to be honest, because we're going to have another shot at this entire golf hole in twenty twenty eight. So you'll notice that the water is much more visible. The bunkers on the right did not exist before. And you know, all in the context of and I know this for a fact, sitting with Pete and talking about drivable par fours, he would say, well, then it's a par three.

00:54:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is what This is what Alice said after this version of the whole was initially built. She said, well, you know, Pete didn't didn't really believe in drivable par fource. He thought that was just the long part three.

00:54:17
Speaker 2: Well, and and so you know I I in my youth, uh, and probably improperly said to him, well, then, Pete, how about the sixteenth hole at TPC Sawgrass. It's a reachable par five, So do we call it a par four? And he scowled at me, And you know, it's it's a risk reward. It's sort of the same good.

00:54:40
Speaker 1: Point though, it's a good point. Why why why that double standard?

00:54:44
Speaker 2: Exactly? And and so he just sort of scowled at me. And so we never really dove into that any further. Uh So, suffice it to say, there's a lot to study there. You know. Again, there's a lot of constituents that that brought that into the into the golf course. I think there's some minor things that we will probably do once the green is rebuilt, to maybe make it feel like it fits in with the golf course a little bit better. It's not it's not a complete outlier for sure. It's certainly not the golf hole that he built originally. And and to give your your listeners a little bit of context, that golf hole was somewhat repeated multiple times. The original twelfth. You know, there's the fifth at Long Cove. It was similar to the original twelfth at TPC. I believe it's the fifth at Old Barsh was recreated. Yeah.

00:55:35
Speaker 1: Old Marsh is like an alpshole almost, that's right.

00:55:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I've seen you know, now, we've worked on so many of Pete and Allie's golf courses. We've seen some of their I'll put in quotes templates, you know, they they did take a general idea, you know, a theme, and did variations on that theme and a few few different designs. You know, island green. I put in quotes that were surrounded by sand or surrounded by water. This alpsehole he created, you know, various places. Sixteen at TPC Sawgrass, he created various places. So you know, they had a theme and a strategy that they would vary everywhere. So the twelfth hole is not what it was. But we we hear what the tour is saying. We understand what the fans like to see. As far as excitement and going for the green. I love, I personally love a drivable par four. I have been chuckling for a week now about this whole discussion of ten at Riviera. You know, it has been so revered for so long, and you know, our modern tour player is so intent on certainty, you know, knowing that if they hit the three hundred and ten yard tee shot with you know, only three yards of cut or fate, that I'm going to be rewarded with a golf shot that goes exactly where I wanted to go. Well, the tenth at Rivier is none of that. It might repel a perfect golf shot. Okay, that's golf. So that's one of the reasons why I love the dragable part four because a bad player like me, you know, somebody that's a handicapped player, and a tour pro, we kind of come together when it comes to that kind of golf hole because length is not the determining fact.

00:57:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it'll be it'll be interesting to see if the twelfth hole can be manufactured into into something that creates that that kind of tension that the tenth hole it at Riviera has. It has been tinkered with a lot over the past several years. But but I I trust that it'll get it'll get figured out in the in the next few years. So looking forward to seeing those small changes work out this year and then twenty twenty eight, I guess we'll probably see a larger kind of transformation of the of the of the entire course, not just the twelfth hole.

00:57:59
Speaker 2: That's that's right, and we've done a few other things that are you know, less noticeable. Of course, for last year's tournament, we restored the right side of fourteen it was very gnarly and it had become less gnarly. And this year we've done some work at the fifteenth tee to get us ready for some work we're going to do this summer down by the fifteenth green and starting to prepare for hopefully reinstituting some of these waste areas. So nothing big like the tree deal on number six, you know, previous previously, but this year that's probably the biggest change that you will see is at twelve and again we're testing a little bit. The twelfth hole is sort of the one that's really given us the most to think about from the tea to the fairway to the green, So we're testing a little bit right now. We'll see what happens. I guess really two years from now.

00:59:04
Speaker 1: Hey, I wanted to jump in here to talk about a new partner that we're very excited to be working with, the Golf Course Superintendent's Association of America or GCSAA. This partnership makes a lot of sense for Friday Golf. GCSAA supports more than twenty one thousand members worldwide, from superintendents and equipment managers to students and educators. This year, GCSAA is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary, and it will continue to ensure that its members are on the forefront of research, education, innovation, and advocacy through a range of programs and services. One thing to keep an eye on is the gcsaa's program Rounds for Research, where you can bid on more than two thousand rounds at some of the most exclusive and well known courses in America. Rounds for Research addresses a critical shortage of fundation for ongoing university based agronomic programs. You can help foster sustainability with a donation or by bidding on rounds during the online auction. If you would like to support GCSAA through Rounds for Research, we'll have more information on the program in April. In the meantime, go check out GCSAA dot org. It's a great organization that does a lot for the game. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, let's chat a little bit at the end here about Harbortown. Now you have completed Love Golf Design has completed a big project at Harbortown, you know, whereas the changes at TPC Sawgrass recently have been have been relatively subtle, just targeting certain things, doing making adjustments here and there, preparing for a large project down the line. Harbortown happened all at once, basically last year. This was a major project at a course that the PGA Tour goes to annually. Now, this was characterized as a restoration of the golf course. So you know, going into this project, what kind of research did you do and what archival resources were especially helpful, Which era of the course was was especially inspirational, you know, given that this was restorative work.

01:01:32
Speaker 2: Right well, so there's lots of questions there. We had a lot of archives. One of the main archives we had was a Sports Illustrated article that was done in the early seventies that documented photographically the golf course as it pretty much was when it opened. And it was quite different, quite different, needless to say. Maintenance and all of that was one of those things. But it was a bit more wild than it is today for sure, And as we studied that for years actually, as you can imagine, you know, except for the superintendent, John Wright, who's been there for a long time, and folks like Kerrie Corbett who ran Sea Pines for a long time for the owner and John Ferrell. Those folks know that golf course intimately and have known it for forty plus years intimately. But when it comes to golf designed, folks that Mark Love, Davis Love, and Scott Sherman have probably spent more time on that golf course than any golf design people period, including the mecurate golf construction guys that they have worked at Harbortown a long time and they're longtime friends of ours and colleagues of ours. So having said that, we had a lot of information that we already knew. Like I said, I was inspired to reach out to Pete Alice the first time when I left the fourteenth Green and saw that pop bunker with the steps down into it, the latter that was straight down into that bunker, I was like, I got to call Pete or find out how do you do that? Where do I find them? So anyway, we were influenced a lot by the original golf course, to be honest with you. So for one, there were stack sawd bunkers everywhere, not just pop bunkers. There were edges sixteen that the big, the original waist bunker of all waist bunkers was the bunker on sixteen. Pete named it that for a funny reason. He had a pipe break and fill that thing with waste and that's where the.

01:03:34
Speaker 1: Name came from.

01:03:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, during construction, I don't know if it was a sewer line or a dredge line or whatever, but a pipe broke and filled that thing with a bunch of waste material, and so he coined the phrase waste bunkers. So that's where that name came from. And you know, it was a waste bunker for a long long time. But the edges there, certainly on the left were stack soad edge, and he back in the day used you know, real sod, meaning probably centipede and behavio grass and that sort of thing. And because it was natural sod in the South, it didn't last very long. So slowly, but surely, you know, some of the pop bunker, all of the pop bunkers, all of the stack side was removed completely, and for years they have been thinking about how do we bring that back but make it lasting. So we identified several bunkers, mostly what I would say are pop bunkers, to do a modern version of sod stacking. The industry has gotten much better at creating artificial revetting that looks pretty natural. It's off colored. We allow it to sort of age and you know, get some plant material in it or whatever's happening. And what's interesting is at Harbortown this is sort of a side thing, but these two all bunkers that we did sid stacking on are such a contrast between the oversea during the tournament, you know, we really we were really trying to think is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? You can see them, you don't. You can't miss these things, the ones that are visible from the fairway, you can't miss them. And if you look at the old photographs, same thing. You just couldn't miss those stack side bunkers that lasted for a few years in the original Harbor Town. So that was a restorative aspect, believe it or not. We moved a tree at Harbortown as well, on the fifth hole. That's a funny story. Apparently Pete originally built the green too close to the property line, and once a house was built there years after the green was built, it became a problem. So several several years ago he and mccurate Golf moved that fifth green to the left, still five, but the trees were really not in play like they were on other holes. If you think about the second hole there, your second shot to number two green, there's a big old tree, you know, that kind of hangs over and you've got to work your ball around that tree. So we moved I guess a fifty foot oak tree about thirty or forty feet towards towards the green so that it's more intervening and again creating more of that s hole or that switchback hole as you call it. So we took cues from the old golf course from We didn't really settle on a particular era, but we stacked up and added up the old and the mid life of things that we liked and restored it to that degree. As we rebuilt greens, we sped up some contours, which is very typical. Those are very small greens, as you know, so you have to be very careful about that. But by and large, to create some more challenge, we actually enlarged some greens. Those greens were small anyway, so we needed to get a little bit more space. So gosh, except for I would say, well, pretty much every hole was touched in one way or another beyond just the reconstruction. There was something restorative about every golf hole there and some things that we sort of updated. The ninth Green was elevated slightly slightly more. Pete elevated it years ago in one of his renovations, and we elevated it a little bit more, really trying to create a situation where the guys stand on the tee and don't just waiale away and think that they might hop up there. So things like that. But it was all over the golf course.

01:07:46
Speaker 1: So it's a really interesting project and not uncommon in this era of golf course restoration that we're seeing. In fact, actually Gil Hans's recent work at Oakmont was kind of took this greatest Hits right where you know, you have this sort of thirty to forty year period at Oakmont where the classic course took form but was altered many times over that period. So you know, do you choose one year or do you kind of look at a range of years and choose what you think are the coolest features and add up to the best golf course. Sounds like you did a little bit of that at Harbortown, but with the stack sad bunkers specifically. There was some chatter online about this when the when the course reopened. I guess some people were surprised to see this style of bunker on a Pete Die golf course because he didn't often do this later in his career. Though he attempted to do it a few times early in his career, it just didn't seem to work out practically. You know, using some artificial material, you're able to make those bunkers more durable, and I suppose that's that's part of why you can do it now. But you know, when you're making decision to bring back those stacked sad bunkers, you are saying, basically, the first few years of the course that these existed is what we're looking at here. That's the source of inspiration.

01:09:15
Speaker 2: That's right.

01:09:16
Speaker 1: We're not going to be considering the changes that were made later on. And you have to make a lot of judgment calls like this at a Pete Die course. Because he was a tinkerer, he made a lot of changes at his golf courses. And so when you're making a decision like that one, how do you differentiate between the early version of the course and the later version of the course that often die himself oversaw. How do you give more credit to one of those than the other when making specific decisions.

01:09:49
Speaker 2: Well, you know, to be deferential to Pete, Alice, I can just tell you site visit after site visit after site visit, John Fair, Gerrel, John Wright, Davis Love, Scott Sherman, Alan mccurric, Tom Webber. Those are the folks that made it happen. We stood there together and you know, we leaned on each other and just had discussions about how you know, we were afraid to make any missteps. But on the other hand, the best way to finish a project is to start it. So we had to make decisions, and we had so much information that we very much collaboratively. And I would say the same is true at TPC Sawgrass. As you said, the best of versions of Harbortown and Sawgrass. We very much thought in those terms and tried to as best we could. You can't think like Pete. He was original. He thought of things out of the box. So we tried to grab things that he himself did and institute them, reinstitute them where they were and to be honest with you, we had a as always, we had about an eighty percent idea of what we were going to do hole by hole. But as we stand there and as we take it all in, as we walk the ground, as we look at this documentation, as we talk about our experiences with Pete and Alice on that property, decisions came. Sometimes we would build something in the dirt and we thought we had a good decision, and we'd all get back together and look at it and say, Nope, that's not right. That does not look right. Everybody will look at each other and say, that's right, that doesn't look right. Let's tinker with that. Let's get Victor, our shaper, and let's tinker with that. Let's get Tom Weber over here, let's tinker with that. So it was very collaborative, which in a lot of respects when I lead a project on my own, I can make decisions, keep moving, throw flags, request things to be done, move on, move on, move on. But in this circumstance, there's so much we need to consider, and we are committed to considering that. It's actually kind of difficult to be honest with you. Is there a right answer? No, But there's also not a wrong answer. In the confines of what we have from Pete's history there and the documentation, we have something to choose from, as you say, the best of we have something to choose from that we're going to use to go back to he's the architect of the golf course. And in that context, that's where we were able to choose those tools. We didn't run off and do something crazy. We didn't go off the script. If it were if it was not there in the last sixty years, it really didn't get reinstituted into the golf course. Now, having said that, we did need to deal with some length. We didn't need to get a little bit creative. For example, the second t is now and has been for a couple of years left of number one green, so you hit across the street. The part five, you hit across the street now under a leaning tree, which was not original, but hey, in the context of the fifth hole at Harbor Town and the sixth hole at TPC, we were like, that's that's going to get into these guys heads. So it adds an added difficulty to the golf course. So anyway, again, even that decision was we're going to move this back. Pete would have added length, and he likes the fact that there's something to look at and something to think about off the team.

01:13:27
Speaker 1: Another constituent in this renovation you talked about all the voices that were in the room and the trickiness of that. Another constituent is the tour players. The tyre players love Harbortown, right. Why do you think they like the course so much?

01:13:45
Speaker 2: You know? Gosh, I wish I was of that ability to kind of understand it. But having said that, I've done this long enough and been around enough good players and worked for enough tournament venues, I think Harbortown is one of those where almost anybody can win if you're playing well. If you know, it doesn't cater to the long player, it doesn't cater to one shot shape, you know. There we we often say there is a there is an intangible vibe there, regardless of what the golf holes do. There's an intangible vibe on that property that is just wonderful, no matter what the golf hole looks like. Over the years they have they have curated that play so well. And of course Pete set the stage. Pete and Alice set the stage and Jack Nicholas set the stage. Charles Fraser set the stage for a very natural setting. So the setting is is fabulous. But I would say, you know, you've got Davis who won five times, very long player, but you know also his shot shape tended to be straight, so if he was in control of his ball, he knew where it was going. And if you're if you're not, that's not your week. And again, you know, the greens are tricky in that they're small and there's not a lot of contour, there's a lot of slow So as long as you're in control of your your putting stroke, you know, you don't have a lot of crazy double breakers and that sort of thing. So I would say if you look at both Harbortown and the modern version of Harbortown to some degree is TPC sawgrass, lots of different types of players can win there. If you're on your game, you don't necessarily have to be long, You just have to be in control of your golf ball in the air and on the ground.

01:15:38
Speaker 1: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing this renewed version of Harbortown at the Heritage this year. Congratulations on that project, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was really fun to chat with you guys.

01:15:49
Speaker 2: Oh, glad to you. Guys are so prolific and go so many places. I'm honored to be included in your in your discussions, and I've enjoyed watching where you been.

01:16:00
Speaker 1: Oh, it's very kind of you to say thank you. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam. Thank you Will. If you've been enjoying Designing Golf, then I can just about guarantee that you would love what we're doing in Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership to see what it's all about. But basically, in Frida Egg Golf Club, we're bringing together a bunch of avid golfers around our love of the game. We do a lot of architecture content in Frida Egg Golf Club, so you know, specifically related to the topic of designing golf. You'll find a lot more in FEGC. We do weekly course profiles on courses that we find incredibly interesting, and I also do regular columns and newsletters about ongoing golf architecture news. So all of that's available and more in f e g C. Again, the Friday dot com slash membership go check it out. Thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.