The Four Golf Courses That Shaped Geoff Ogilvy

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Jeff Ogilvie is a US Open champion and firmly in the pantheon of Australian golfers. He also happens to be one of the sharpest thinkers and most engaging talkers in the game, as well as a golf course architect. His firm OCM is behind some really exciting projects, like the recent redesign of Course three at Medinah Country Club. So today I want to learn more about how Jeff Ogilvie's golf brain developed, and to do that, I'm going to talk to him about the four golf courses that most influenced him. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is Designing Golf, Jeff. I gave you an assignment for this podcast. I asked you to think about four courses that have shaped you or influenced you in some significant way. They don't have to be architecturally great courses or anything like that, but I had you think about that subject before where we talked. Was that was that kind of a fun assignment or was it a pain that I asked you to do this?

00:01:04
Speaker 2: No? It was It was interesting actually, because I mean you would instantly go to childhood and growing up and obviously grew up in this area, and then other stuff I've played overseas, But if does it really influence you if you haven't played at a lot of times, you know. So I've got one from oversas and three from rod here.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: Actually, Oh interesting, Okay. I was wondering what percentage might be in the Melbourne area, which is where we are right now. We're actually filming this at Victoria Golf Club. We've just played around out there. Absolutely delightful course and one of many really really good courses in the Australian Sad Belt. So you have kind of a rich array to choose from among childhood courses. I would imagine a lot of people their childhood courses might not be good courses, but for you like it, there might be some some of the world's greatest courses among those you played when you were pretty young.

00:02:01
Speaker 2: Oh, and I was so lucky. I grew up I don't know, two miles from this spot, probably just over the other side of Royal Melbourne. I was about probably a driver five iron from the fence at Royal Melbourne. So and I was playing golf at a very young age. And when I got my first little golf clubs. I was chipping around in the back garden with Dad following around, and then I think he saw that I was really interested, so I got the little half cut down set out of the mixed barrel, you know, like back in the old days when the pro shops had the loose clubs and the mixed barrels of clubs. Dad made me up a little half set of those, and he used to take me to Sandy which is now Sandy Lynx, but it was centering him golf Gold Golf Club, I guess public golf course most Sundays. I seem to remember. He'd go and play his club golf on Saturday. He was a member at Yariara at first, and he ended up being a member at Victoria, so he would go play on Saturdays, and then Sunday was dad Ny day. And this was from probably seven or eight. We were doing this what felt like to me every weekend. I'm sure it wasn't. When you're a kid, your memories are a bit I think, so Sandy I would have said, I think I told you today. I think eighty of my first one hundred rounds of golf were probably at Sandy at that age, because that age, public golf is the only access you could back then. It's a little different now, but accessing these sand belts and the private golf clubs in Melbourne was pretty much impossible until you were sort of fourteen fifteen sixteen. So the first course that I ever really sort of played a lot and fell in love with it was my home course for Sandy, which is right next door to Real Melbourne. And at the same time while that was happening, there was tournaments. This is in the eighties, sort of from early eighties through to sort of early nineties, there was a tournament at Royal Melbourne. It felt like every year there was a Strain Open. In eighty four there was I think this Rain Open. In eighty five, this Rain Open eighty seven. There was a tournament called the bar Centennial Classic in nineteen eighty eight, which was half a million dollars to win. In nineteen eighty eight was a mega tournament. It was the biggest tournament in the world. I think that year Nicholas came, Norman Game, Fred Kupeles ended up losing in a playoff to a guy called Roger Davis. In Australian Crenshaw was there Payne, Stewart was there, Tom Watson like everybody. Watson won the Australian Open in eighty four. Like the who's who of golf were here in the eighties, at right next door to where I grew up. So I used to sneak up the side of the fence at Royal Melbourne and jump over the fence to get into these golf tournaments to watch these guys play. So I would play golf at Sandy, but I would watch the best players in the world player Royal Melbourne. So those two sort of go hand in hand. One and I was playing a lot, and the other one I was watching the best from the world play. And then eventually I became a caddy at Royal Melbourne where they still had They don't really have caddy programs here anymore. There's caddies that you can get if you sort of order them in then they will caddy at all the courses around. But back then they were the last Melbourne course to have a caddy program, and I was I think thirteen. You could start becoming a caddy and you would caddy on the weekends. You would turn up and you would sit out the back of the pro shop and be beckoned when you were required and go caddy for one of the members. And we've got ten dollars I remember, which I thought was all the money in the world, but maybe not as much money as I felt like five hours out dragging someone's clubs around, and so I caddy a little bit. But the best deal about being a caddy was they let us play the East Course at Royal Melbourne after four thirty full access. You could do whatever you want because the course was empty. None of the members went out there after four thirty, So at four twenty nine one would drop me off at Roll Melbourne and I would go play the East Course every day in summer. For years, we weren't anywhere we went anywhere it allowed anywhere near the West Course, because that was sort of the deal with caddies, which which at the time everybody kind of has always given it. Well, the West Course is better than the East, but it's really not that different. They're really great. The best part about the East Course for me was six of the composite holes, and the composite course is the one that they played the tournaments on were on the East Course, so I got to play these holes that I'd seen Nicholas and Normal and Tom Watson and all these guys play. So those two courses especially were the beginning of my golf. I had the local municipal public course and I had one of the best golf courses in the world. It's right next door to each other. For the experience, it was pretty amazing.

00:06:15
Speaker 1: So your first two of four would be Sandy Golf Links or Sandringham.

00:06:19
Speaker 2: It was Sandringham Golf Club golf course at that point. Yeah, and then it's evolved in the Sandy LINKX Yeah and.

00:06:24
Speaker 1: The East Course at Royal Melbourne. Well, let's talk about Sandy a little bit more for people who aren't familiar with this area or that course. What is kind of the role of that course in this area, what's the course like, what are some of the basics about Sandy Golf Links.

00:06:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I guess it's a city course owned by the council or it's it's government land, so it's it's a public access golf course. Always been pretty cheap. It had the best pro shop in Melbourne at the time, back when pro shops were really really exciting. Now we've got Taylor made Titlist. Galloway stricks On and a few little bits and hangers on, But back then you had you'd have all the it had sort of there was fifty different companies that made golf clubs. Back you'd have Links and like Honmar was in there, and the Mazino stuff, and we'd have exotic Japanese stuff and all the different Ballada balls, like the rec Stars and all the different stuff, and all the gloves, and they'd have foot Joy Classics in there, and all the pink putters which we used to bore over, and the ping wedges were really cool in the day. And they'd have Walter Hagen Crenshaw grinds, you know, remember those, the blades and Persimmon woods, and he'd had everything. So we'd hang out in the pro shop after the round. Dad loved to pro shop well as well. So it had a great shop that was sort of the we're here at the Ray Drummonds, which is the big golf superstore in America's like Nevada Bob's or something like that. That was one of those that was one of the original, one of those where you would go to buy golf clubs. So it was a great club from that respect. So it was sort of a public golf shop, but it was also a public access golf course that was very busy. You'd get on the phone seven o'clock in the morning on Monday to try to get a tea time, a good tea time on Saturday morning, like all the great busy public courses around the world. And it was not sand belt level golf at that point. It's sort of become that way now and I'll get to that point, get there. But it was sort of where everybody could go play golf because surrounded with all these great sand belt courses, they were all super private and if you didn't know a member, you couldn't get on. That was a way to play golf on the sand Belt for everybody, you know, and pretty cheap. I think I used to I used to be able to play nine holes. I remember when I was really young, we could nine holes during the week was two dollars, which is pretty accessible for anybody. I mean, it's it is two dollars. Isn't what two dollars used to be, but it was probably the equivalent of four or five dollars now. Thirty or so years ago, we could go out and play nine holes with our friends after school and it would cost us two dollars. It was amazing.

00:08:46
Speaker 1: And when you say that it's next door to Royal Melbourne, it's not like down the street or you know, a little ways away. It's right in there. There's a part of the West Course that's kind of kind of pokes into the property at Sandy a little bit, so it's really now. Yeah, it's part of the same kind of land that all these great courses are part of, which is kind of amazing for it.

00:09:10
Speaker 2: It's kind of the same like I, like I said, if you could, if you look at the Google Maps, especially when you do it on the satellite version, and you just see all the green and all the golf course around here with Victoria Sandy and Royal Melbourne. And Royal Melbourne has thirty six holes. There's seventy two holes of golf right in the middle of suburbia, all touching each other. It's pretty incredible. Yeah. So the gates of Sandy are directly opposite the gates of Royal Melbourne. And they used to have a great cafe too, and it was used to be we'd watch all the pros like Norman and these guys hit balls on the range and they would go and have lunch. This is pre when this is pre pros didn't get looked after at that point. They would all walk across to Sandy to the cafe to have lunch while they were playing the Australian Open and then come back and play there round at the Australian Open. So Norman would be walking down the drive at Roll Melbourne, across the road up the driveway at Sandy to go have his lunch before his round. So this is sort of how I grew up. With Sandy being the public access version of the sand Belt. It was just sort of your introduction to the game. Really, if you want to get interested in golf, come play Sandy for a while, and if you really get into it, you'll meet a bunch of people and you'll end up knowing a few people who are members at one of these places, and then you can come play you can join one of these clubs. So it's been a really important part of the landscape because golf can be quite exclusive, and in Melbourne aspects of golf is very exclusive and sort of closed door and hard to get in. But right next door is an open arms policy. Everybody can come in from little kids to old people first time you've ever played golf, to beginners to everybody can go there and play pretty reasonably high quality golf course for the price, right in the heart of some of the best golf golf in the world. It's incredible.

00:10:51
Speaker 1: Now your firm OCM has had an opportunity to do a bit of work at Sandy Can you tell me a little bit about what you did there.

00:11:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it was a very it was a big project on sort of master planning sort of sense in the Golf Australia, who's our version of the USGA and the PGA of Australia sort of got together with the state government of Victoria and wanted to create sort of a head office for those guys, a center point for the high performance golfers in the state. So great training facilities and they wanted to build it all in the heart of the sand Belt, which is right across there from Royal Melbourne. Role Melbourne was involved because they now sort of have they operate Sandy Links, so they help maintain the course, look after the greens, look after the fairways. So there's an efficiency there with the with all the machines and stuff and it's right there across the road, so it's kind of roll. Melbourne's kind of looking after fifty four holes. So we got a chance. And part of the development is they wanted to build a driving range, one end for public driving range and the other end for the elite golfers. Like I said, so we lost the first and the ninth holes at the traditional golf course and that became the new driving range aslong with a big old clubhouse they built with all the gyms and then all the admin officers for basically golf is run in Australia from that building at Sandy Lynx. So we had to now fit eighteen holes. We thought maybe could we be twelve holes, do we do nine holes and a little path three course or there was lots of sort of options on the table and it seemed like the appetite was really for let's have an eighteen hole golf course. So we then had to fit eighteen holes into the spot where sixteen holes were just in. So we had to make it a bit shorter. There's lots of path threes. It's quite a short course. But we built sand belt greens, especially sand belt greens raw Melbourne like greens. With Rawal Melbourne bunkers and the same turf, the same construction and turf as Royal Melbourne because they were going to be looking after it, and so there was an efficiency in having the same eighteen greens over the road. So now it's even better than what I grew up with. I grew up with typical municipal conditions as you imagined in the eighties, as anyone who did that can probably remember to Now you've got eighteen Royal Melbourn level greens that are firm that bunkers cut right up to the edge like you'll get on the sand belt. So you have a true sand belt experience for forty dollars on a weekend probably for a round of golf and quite short lots of path threes and a really really fun golf course to play, and it's the most it's an even better entry to the game, entry and exit from golf and beginning plays to learn how to play. There's enough there for all the elite players who like playing there. There's sand belt type green so you can have some really tough pins and a lot of slopes and if you want to get good at playing sand belt golf, that is a really good place to sort of learn your craft. It's like a small version of the Biggert sand Belt courses, so it's it was a great place when I was a kid, but it's evolved and there's a great driving range and I said, all the great players will hang out there every morning and stuff and get better. And as I said, it's sort of the heartbeat of Australian golf, all in the one spot, which is very appropriate. That's right across from Royal Melbourne and right in the heart of the sand belt. So it's evolved into a really special place and it was a really fun project for us because all three of us spent a lot of time there when we were kids and sort of we knew how important a place and sort of the Melbourne golf landscape. Sandy took and it came out and it's the finished product is better than we could have imagined to have. All the parties that were involved would usually turn into a bit of a mess, but it actually worked out amazingly well, and with Royal Melbourne sort of the custodians of Sandy, it's sort of preserved, you want to think for a really long time because they're going to look after it like it's their own, you know.

00:14:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think everybody fantasized is about going back to their childhood course and being able to prove it. So it's it's pretty cool that you got an opportunity to do that basically.

00:15:04
Speaker 2: You know, yeah, amazing, it was. It was a dream job really. Yeah. Cool.

00:15:08
Speaker 1: So the second course you mentioned is the East Course at Royal Melbourne. This is the first course I actually played when I came to the sand Belt. I mean this kind of second day of my trip right now. The East Course was my first exposure to to sand Belt golf. Remarkable golf course. Obviously you got to play it a good bit as a as a caddy. This was sort of the accessible, more accessible course of the two at Royal Melbourne. What are some things about the I mean we're getting in now getting into extremely advanced golf course architecture and talking about real Melbourne East. What were some of the things that you noticed about that course when you were playing it in your early days that that helped you learn about what a good golf course is.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: It wasn't really and I think I'll we chatted about this out in the golf course when we were talking about something else, But I think it wasn't really I played it. I thought that was normal because I'd grown up next door to this. Everyone would tell us, oh, Jeff, you're very lucky you live next door to one of the best courses in the world. But Australians don't really ever believe that sort of thing. We're just like, oh, yeah, it's good. But like you look at the courses in America, they're all green and the sanders white, the big pine trees, and you sort of the grass is always greener, so you aspire to go to other places. Yeah. Literally, in this sense, it wasn't really until so I grew up playing that course, and then obviously later on I got to play the West Course a lot, But it wasn't until I went away that the longer I've played, and the more different courses I've playing, the longer the further I get from the beginning experience, the more I see the genius and the amazing thing that Roll Melwyn actually is. To me, it was just amazing fair ways and incredibly fast greens and really tough bunker shots, and as a kid, you're a little bit sort of sadistic about it. You're always going to try to find the hardest shot you can, and I'd always take my dad's blade one one out there, and I always wanted it to be hard. It was less about the golf course, and it's just stuff. I knew I was getting spoilt having access out there and playing it because it was better than all the other public courses that I'd got to see. But I didn't have any sense of how can you know that it's so special until you go everywhere else, and everywhere else isn't quite as special. You don't know until you've seen the other you know. So I just thought, well, this is the great course that I li vix door too. I didn't appreciate how well it would stack up against the old courses or the Shinnecock's or Augusta National or Cypress Point or whatever it's like. Genuinely, after I twenty years into my traveling golf career and I'd got to all those sorts of places that I sort of realized, Wow, all the things I'm seeing at these top ten, top fifty of courses in the world. That's what I saw at the beginning, but I haven't seen it in the middle. You know, so it was really seeing the other stuff which made me appreciate what I grew up on, if that makes sense.

00:18:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean when you're a kid, you kind of take things for granted. Whatever you're exposed to early on becomes the norm. And it's hard to convince anybody that what they grew up with is particularly great or even particularly bad, because that's just the standard by which you judge everything else.

00:18:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I guess underneath all that I was learning the lessons, you know, and the sand Belt and especially Roal Melbourne I think teaches you so much sort of deep nuanced golf, like you're sort of getting right down to sort of very high IQ golf is the wrong way to say it, but that's sort of deeply nuanced sort of strategy and all those shades of gray that golf. The better golf is the more it exposes all those little shades of gray that was there at the beginning. For me, I didn't know that was all the shades of gray. But the first hole at the east was the third hole on the composite now and they've changed the order so many times, but I'd seen it played a lot. It's a big, wide fairway typical of a sand belt course, but you just had to be left. If you weren't left, you only had fifty yards of the green, but you couldn't hit the green from the right hand side. You had to be left. So growing up, I didn't know I was learning that, but I learned that some holes you have to be on the left hand side of the fairway, some holes you have to be on the right hand side of the fairway, and when the pin's over there that day, you really want to be on this part of the fairway. And that just became the way I looked at golf without me knowing, I was looking at golf like that, and so many golf courses I ended up playing on tour were if you're on short grass, you're good, and if you're in rough you're bad, or if you're in a bunki you're bad, whereas roll Melbourne, sometimes the rough, if you're on the correct side of the fairway, is better than the fairway on the other side. And I just grew up that was just the way it was, So I didn't know that that was right or wrong. It was just my most efficient path around this course isn't straight at the hole. Sometimes it's over there and sometimes it's over there. And I think that that I didn't learn that lesson until later on. But the DNA was put in there, like the at the beginning of my golf, that was a part of the course that was presented in front of me, that there was questions being asked of these holes, and I have to learn how to answer these questions. Whether I knew I was answering questions or not, I just I was, you know. And I think you could play your whole life and not get to courses like Royal Melbourne or the Old Course or Augusta or any of these sort of those amazing courses and not even know that those questions exist in the sport. They were the first questions ever presented to me. When I played golf. It became more about playing the whole than it did swinging the club in a way, which there's probably advantages to both, but for me working out golf courses, I think was right there at the beginning.

00:21:01
Speaker 1: How would you compare the East Course to the West Course? And I'll give you actually a take that I heard from Lucas Michelle about this. I played with Lucas at Royal Melbourne East and I told him I was going to steal this take, but I'm credit it to him now. What he said basically is that the East Course has very good land and amazing greens. The West Course has amazing land and very good greens. Do you think there's something in that the greens at the East Course might be even better in some ways or even more interesting than the ones at the West Course.

00:21:46
Speaker 2: Yes, and no. I don't think it's a fair. I don't think it's fair to split the two courses. They're a little bit like Wingfoot, where the East and the West you could kind of play thirty six of any of them and it would all be great, right the East Course, I feel the East Course is a bit of a journey's It feels a little bit more like a sort of Scottish Links, where you disappear off and you cross the road, then you cross another road and you end up so far away from the clubhouse you're in the whole nother neighborhood, and then you play all the way back and you see the clubhouse at the start and at the end. I feel more about the East Court without I don't really think of it as like a inner, which greens are the good greens and which are the less so good greens, and the holes. I feel like the East Course is a journey, whereas the West Course is just pure golf hole challenges. You know, you stay around more around the clubhouse. The routing is a bit more sort of around the one spot. I think that the land on the West Course is definitely better for drama. There's a bit more that's greens up tops of hills, and you hit through valleys, and you've got some hero carries that you don't have on the East Course. I would say the West course everyone if you played them both. If you play them, you play the East Course yesterday, you may say you played the West Coast tomorrow. You would initially say, all the West Course is way better. But I think the longer you played there, the more the East would start to level itself out with the West. I just and it might be a hallmark of I just used to lovingly look over at the West because I wasn't allowed to go out there, you know. But there's a few runs of holes on the West I mean four, five, six, seven, ten, eleven, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, there's just no run like that in golf anywhere, and the East doesn't have a run like that. The best hole they they stick the best hole you've ever seen, Like four, five, six are the three best holes you've ever seen, and they're all next to each other. And then seven, I think is better than those, you know, and then ten. You look at ten from the back of the seventh and it's like just an unbelievable hole. It's like it's just a hole that you just cannot imagine anywhere else, but it's so perfect. So I lean towards the West because of the drama of the land, and I think it's thirty six amazing greens and it's thirty six amazing holes. I think the routings tell the stories and the journey you take on the East Course is such a different style of journey. The West you sort of leave the clubhouse, come back past the clubhouse, you leave the clubhouse, you come back past the clubhouse, you leave, you know what I mean.

00:24:22
Speaker 1: So it's a it's intertwined, interlocking. It's yeah, the West Course is that style of routing, whereas the East Course is almost out and back.

00:24:30
Speaker 2: It's kind of an out and back feeling, and it definitely has a different when you get way out the back there on nine and ten on the East course, you feel like you're a long way away from where you started, which is nice. You're on your own, you're out there, there are a cool hole, You've taken a journey. There's some incredible holes out there, So I don't like to compare them against each other. And when we are at the start and you said we picked three courses, I'm going to put all of Royal Melbourne into one. I see at one course because I grew up watching the composite course, which has six the east and twelve on the west, and that isn't a preference thing. That's more of a we don't want to cross roads when we play a golf tournament thing for all the logistical reasons. So there's two different sixteenth holes I've used over the years, so it's almost nineteen holes in the commons. Of course, I would put Roll Melbourne into just one big basket because I think it's thirty six incredible holes and I grew up watching a combo of both. So when you ask me, what do you think of when you think of Royal Melbourne, I think of Royal Melbourne. I don't think of I don't separate the East.

00:25:29
Speaker 1: I don't think of East West. Yeah, it's just all It's almost like there are all those holes out there and there, and the East and West courses are ways to play those holes. But you could do it in a bunch of different ways, including the composite course obviously, but I'd imagine you could come up with any number of eighteen hole routings that would be highly interesting.

00:25:51
Speaker 2: Yes, you could come up with all sorts of different all sorts of different ways around it, which I'm sure now golf is getting more popular and there's more people out there, it's probably harder to do. But I'm sure there's a bunch of members over the years who have started on the East, jumped onto the West, jump back onto the East, like gone around, because it's really is thirty six incredible holes, and I would put any of them on either of the courses, you know what I mean, Like they're all great. I feel Wingfoot's very similar in that you lovingly look over at the East holes when you're playing the West, but you lovingly look across at the West holes when you play the East. You know, They're clearly so closely related that it's really the same entity in a way. Everybody always plays them the same way. But I just think Raw Melbourne is a whole property and a club and everything that sort of represents and sort of shows you when you play golf. There isn't a bad hole to play there, and I enjoy playing them all. But if you said where do you want to play tomorrow, I'd choose the West Couse just because I think that hallmark of that was the one I wasn't allowed to play when I was a kid.

00:26:58
Speaker 1: So we have Sam Golf Links, we have Royal Melbourne the Fall thirty six. As opposed to one course or the other, what would be your third course.

00:27:08
Speaker 2: Well here has to be arguably as influential. So Victoria Golf Club as influential as those two, because I was a member here from just before sixteen until current day. Still remember so I've probably played the most the most rounds I've played in Melbourne around here, and Victoria is it's an incredibly great golf course. I'm I'm deeply sort of moved by Royal Melbourne in such a way that that to me is an outlier, and that just sits on its own and this will be so spoilt around here. But Victoria, as far as the course that I know, every blade of grass on it, intimately, I've seen it sort of evolve, stay the same, but totally evolve with sort of trees coming out and bunkers getting reinstated from what I grew up with, and the turf changing, the turf conditions just getting better and better better over the years. And we sort of redid the first hole ten fifteen years ago now and now it just feels like the first hole. I kind of remember the old first hole and little bits and bobs. I just that development period between sort of sixteen and twenty one. I always here every single day, so this has to be a big part of the whole thing.

00:28:27
Speaker 1: How do you think this course has has shaped your views on golf architecture? Has it? I mean, you've been in a member here for a tremendously long time. Any course that you play as much as you've played Victoria, you know, over as many years as you have has to have, you know, shaped your thoughts on golf courses and golf course architecture in some ways? Is there a way that it influences you that's different from what Royal Melbourne does, no.

00:28:59
Speaker 2: Sim I think the sand belt just in general, the use of short the firm ground, I think is the number one thing which all golf, at least in my experience, golf is just a more interesting game when the ground is firm, when the ball does something when it lands and it keeps going or it stops as the player might have struck the shot, because it matters now how you strike the shot. It matters the flight, it matters the spin, it matters the shape it's coming in. It doesn't just end when the ball lands. I think if the ball stops when it lands, it doesn't really matter how you hit it, as long as you land it in the right spot. But when it's firm, and we grow up with ultra firm conditions here pretty much even in winter when it's soft, it's firm here relatively speaking to everywhere else. It matters how you strike the ball. Like the strike if you get at one groove low, well it's going to be a bit flat, it's going to take a bigger bounce. If you just flub it a little bit and there's no spin on it, well now you're going to be in the back bunker. If you cannot fade it to a right pin, you just cannot hit the green. If you cannot draw it to the left side, you just cannot hit the green. I think that aspect of sam Belt golf is the most important. It is a great development tool because you have to strike and quality of shot, shot shape and flight and strike is so important here. You cannot conquer these. You cannot improve your score and get your handicapped down and improve as a golfer unless that's a big part of it. It's not just hitting it straight and high or long or low, or whatever the case may be. It's you've got to have it all if you want to actually start shooting lower and lower scores. So there's that aspect, and that's it's sad Belt in general. I think Victoria the bunkers. I think it's a bit of a hallmark of Victoria that people seem to be in bunkers all the time, and sam Belt bunkers. People talk about them on tour. We have very uniform bunkers. It feels like we play out of the same sound, of the same depth, of the same rake everywhere. And it's generally speaking, you've got a pretty good lie. And if you get good at that sand, you get good at bunkers. But here that's a very sort of narrow band of skill, and it's not necessarily an easy skill, but once you learn it, you've kind of learned it. Yeah, there's variety. But here the bunkers here have firm bits soft bits. There's sometimes it can be firm under your feet, but soft under your ball. Your ball's always sort of on a downslope or upslope or above your feet. You get the we call them gum trees, but eucalyptus trees in the US would they dropping they're dropping sticks, and they're dropping leaves, and there's like little nuts that fall out of them. And there's always sort of a bit of junk in the bunkers and learning how to read lies and play variety. You'll get up slopes with the sand wet in the morning and you'll get all the spin in the world, but then it'll get dusty in the afternoon. Off a downslope and the ball sits down and all you can do is the ball's going to roll out twenty feet. There's nothing you can do. And learning how to navigate that and read lies and understand. It teaches you how wedge works. It teaches you really how to understand the bottom of a wedge and the bounce, and sometimes you got to have a square stance and square the face up. Otherwise you're just going to bounce the club and it's going to go across the other side of the green. And sometimes, wow, I really have to open this one up, otherwise there's too much sand for my normal act. It teaches you variety out of bunkers, and as I said, the real golden thing is learning how to read lies. I remember, as I first started drifting away from Melbourne and playing high level am of a goal from pro golf. You'd get the pro every now and then would blade a bunker shot and start complaining of the sand. I couldn't see that there was no sand under there, And to me it never made any sense because it's easy to see there wasn't any sand under there. I could have seen it from the other side of the green, but only because we had to learn that here. You know, I'm not saying that that guy did anything wrong, It's just that he never had the experience of learning it with all that variety. So I think those two things from a playing point of view, I think are great and just architecturally, the holes just make sense, which I didn't know again until I went to other places. When you play holes, it don't make sense. But the bunker, usually the fairway hazard is exactly where you want to be coming in from. It's usually on the inside corner of a dog leg, which you have on the second and the third and the fifth arm, And usually the best line into the green was from somewhere near that bunker, so you had to go just short of it, just next to it, or try to go over it. And if you went the wide side of the fairway, you'd hit the fairway all day. But it took you a while to work out, well, if I'm on the wide side of the fairway with the easy t shot, now I can't really get the ball close to the hole. So it taught us to From an architectural strategy point of view, it was just it's a great example of hazards where they should be, and hazards that relate to the green that's at the end of the hole. And it's a great set of greens, and so you learn how to put fast greens and read big breaks, and it's a detriment are on to put on slower grains because we just grew up on crizy foster grains all the time. But when we get to chrysy FoST grains, we get to our pond host it feels like we're at home. So there's advantages and disadvantages, but it's an incredibly amazing place to learn how to play golf, Melbourne in general, but Victoria was a great example of it.

00:34:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, Victoria. You know, there's it's very playable for average players like me. You can get around out there. You might end up in a few bunkers with shots to greens sloping away from you that you would have a hard time with, but it's not like you're getting punished over and over, and there's usually some space to play on holes, so if you know your way around then you can then you can have a fairly pleasant time of it. But if you're a good player and you're trying to score out there, it seems like one of those relentlessly intense tests of golf. You can score low out there, You can shoot in the mid sixties or low sixties if you're a great player, but you really have to focus the entire round and kind of walk the tightrope constantly because there's no kind of mental letup out there. If you're looking to make birdies.

00:35:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're looking to shoot a low score, the better you get. The scarier these causes get, I think, because if you're looking to challenge pins, hit it close to the tournament pins if you like, or the challenging pins you really have to take on, like you have to kind of take on the fairway hazards a little bit, but you also have to take on those short sided situations. You have to make decisions. It's like, well, like we talked about sixteen out there, which is this great little uphill par three that just disappears off over the back and it's just terrible. We all end up hitting it way short there because of the fear of hitting it over the back. So the firm conditions and all the short grass it asks a really tough question is that you have to be really brave to shoot low scores out here. When it's set up tough, you have to be brave, and it's it's a learnt brave by getting burnt so many times, by getting it wrong, you know, it's not that obvious seventeenth that saw Grass hit it and you're good. Miss it and you're bad, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's a great question. Sometimes they ask them. The seventy first hole of a tournament's like, well, you better hit a good nine one, you know that's and the eighteenth of saw Grass, for example, it's like left is bad, hit a good shot, whereas here is You kind of have to learn what's good and what's bad. You know, it's not always obvious, and you'll be getting not necessarily long. They're not long in the big scheme of things, but you'll get seven eyes and eight irons and even wed shots that you know, you know what, I'm happy with twenty feet here because if I get this wrong, I'm going to make a five. And if I make a five with a wedge in my hand, I'm going to be annoyed for the next three holes. And so you end up playing really nervous, even though it sort of presents beautiful and it doesn't really look that scary. You get burn a couple of times, and you end up playing nervous. And that's one of the great I feel like, sort of signs of a great golf courses. It makes the good players a bit nervous because they don't want to get it wrong. You know, you think the Masters and the second shot in to thirteen or something is like, guys get all twisted about that shot, and really, on a Tuesday with nothing on, it's really not that scary a shot, but like you get in the masses all of a sudden, it makes you nervous and it makes you make a bad swing. These courses do that a lot.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the and there's no there's no letting your guard down after a miss. On some courses. If you miss the fair way, then the test is sort of over in a way. You've failed the test and now you're going to have a fairly predictable recovery. It's not gonna be pleasant, but you know what you need to do. If you miss out here at Victoria, then there are any number of things that could happen, any number of scenarios that you could be facing and shots that you could be hitting. And so the test is just beginning after a.

00:37:58
Speaker 2: Miss, absolutely, so it can be exponential. So I mean, there's good misses out here and there's bad misses out here. And if you make a good miss, it's like, well, maybe I don't make Bertie r par, but I can get myself a reasonable par partner if I make it. Great If I miss it, oh well I made a mistake. But sometimes you can miss in some spots. It's like you go from wanting to make birdie on your second shot, but all of a sudden, how do I not make double? Like how do I get this third shot somewhere where I can get the ball up and down from And you can. It's a compounding error place. If you follow an error with a sensible shot, generally you're okay. But if you follow an error with another error, you can rack up a big number with no water, no lost balls, no nothing, really really fast. It can expose your sort of bad decisions and bad execution really really quickly. So it can get scary. And because you know that you're playing like that and it ends up making you play you have to be brave, you know. And if there's a couple of guys in the field who are running away with it and making lots of birdies as well, you've just got to do it. I've got to be brave. But like it's it's a risky thing. Now. It's a fascinating way. It's sort of a delayed penalty.

00:39:16
Speaker 1: Yep.

00:39:17
Speaker 2: You know you don't necessarily get penalized on your first on the first bad shot, but the penalty is now coming and you don't know it yet. But you've got to kind of know you've made the mistake before you carry on, because if you just keep making them, you're just going to rack up some really big numbers and be ping ponging like bunker shots across greens or living yourself in spots where how do I get this into a spot that I could actually two put it from? Because it only feels like I can hit this into a spot where I'm probably gonna three part. No, it's fascinating and it sounds really really scary. It's not always like that. That's when it's set up really really tough. But it's kind of a hallmark of these places. It's the firmness and the way the bunkers are and the way the rough is sort of unpredictable that if you start going off, if you start going wrong, if you don't realize you've gone wrong, which is not always obvious at the start, and you don't sort of right the ship or be smart from that point. Yeah, you can rack up big scores really quick.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: So what's course number four? We're going outside of Australia, Now, I.

00:40:16
Speaker 2: Gather, yeah, it has to be the Old Course. And I hate to be predictable, but.

00:40:21
Speaker 1: I think everybody, if I do this interview with a range of people, I think everybody is going to talk about the Old Course at some point. But it's the particular ways that people relate to the Old Course that are interesting, because I think it's different for everybody.

00:40:36
Speaker 2: So, I mean, I think it's fair to say I kind of wanted to love it before I ever got there. I mean, I was a bit of a golf nerd, I guess, growing up, and I'd read a lot of the books so Jones who tore up his scorecard the first time he went there and thought it was ridiculous and then ended up loving it, And like that, there was always this story that people hated it at first and then ended up love The ones who loved it the most are the ones who hated it the most at the start. So I kind of loved that whole narrative that this place could grow on you so much, you know, but I was very fortunate Dad's my father was from the UK and his mum was getting a bit sick, and in nineteen ninety three I was sixteen, he wanted to go over and see her because he hadn't seen her for fifteen years, so and he took me. Fortunately, whatever happened, he wanted to have a travel mate. My sister had a trip with mum somewhere that year, but I got to go over with Dad and we had a bat a week of him catching up with his mom. But in the meantime he's like, oh, wow, we're here. We might often a playd of golf, and we ended up at the old course and we drove up into town, and I was already in love just driving up into Snatas for anyone who's ever done it, you get closer and closer, and then you see all the signs, and then finally you start seeing glimpses of the town, and it's just it's almost a religious experience just going to the town itself, especially when I'd read so much about it already, and it was clearly sort of the it's the genesis of the sport really in a lot of ways. So I already kind of wanted it. We got up there. We got in there late, about five pm. Obviously it' since summer and it still feels like the middle of the day at five pm and we go up to the start. It's like, well, we're going to be here for the next two days. Is there a chance that we can play the old courses? Like, oh, well, you've got to enter the ballot every night, but you're too late to enter the ballot for tomorrow. So of course I'm devastated. But he's like, well, if you like, you can come here straight away in the morning and you can stand around and if there's a two ball they and I ask, I'll ask if they don't mind if two people join, but they're allowed to say no. But if they say no, we'd be happy to play with two more. You can go on. And we've got there at six thirty in the morning or whenever we could get there, and sat around that little putt and green next to the first tea, and eventually this Swedish couple came along at ten or eleven o'clock in the morning and say, yeah, we'll play with these two. So we got on. So the first morning in St. Andrews, and I loved every moment of it. Shot seventy four. I remember being disappointing because I had a double buggy late on sixteen, but shot seventy four and I was just blown away. The experience of a bit like I talked about with the East Course, sort of starting in the town and disappearing out into the middle of nowhere, and then gradually you see the town get bigger and bigger and bigger you get back in. But I just loved I loved everything Sonandrew's when I first got there, so I played it. I was very lucky and then I played so I played it when I was sixteen, and I got back three years in a row. I played the Snandra's Lynx Trophy, which was the greatest amateur tournament in the world as far as I was concerned, and I think it still happens. It was seventy two holes at Snandrew's. You would for forty pounds you would enter, and it was hard to get in. You were getting ballided out off scratch. But I got lucky at sort of eighteen nineteen twenty. I played it three times. You'd get a practice round around the old you would have eighteen on the new and eighteen on the old first two rounds, and then you made the cut and you got thirty six on the old, So you would get seventy two holes on the old course and one on the new, which I just thought was miraculous for forty pounds. And it was competitive, and that was in the fields where Sergio, Justin Rose, Trevor Immlman like guys who all had great careers. So it was that era. So the highest level British AMAA tournament you could play two weeks before the British AMNA. We would play at the Old Course and I played that three times, so by the time I even turned pro, I was well versed with the Old Course. And it was playing those tournaments that started showing me the genius of it, because if you play it once, you know it in those conditions. But it's different every single day. It changes multiple times during the day. As all the stories everyone'st everyone's told, the tide changes and the wind changes direction. You play the front nine into the wind and then you play the back nine into the wind, or you play the front nine down wind and then you get the back nine down wind. And I've had all, I had all those experiences quite early, and I just I started It helped connect some of the dots that Royal Melwyn and Victoria had taught me about. Bunkers are there because that's where you want to be coming in from and it doesn't really matter today, but what's that bunker doing there? But it's not until you come back on the back nine that all of a sudden, it's that bunk is exactly where you want to be. And it it just showed me how good you needed to be a golf to answer all the questions that a golf course could ask. And I've eventually I sort of I regarded as sort of like the It's almost the Rosetta Stone of golf. I mean, you can't replicate it, and you probably wouldn't want to replicate it. But if you want to build golf courses or understand architecture, just spend a bit of time there. And I think a whole lot of stuff that might have been a bit fuzzy starts coming into focus because I just think all the examples are there. And the coolest part about it, I think was that it basically was just an evolution. It evolved how they were playing the game, so it was almost like humans and nature. Nature taught golfers how to play golf, and golfers taught the Old Course what it needed to be. You know. It was kind of a both. It's sort of a collaboration between nature and humanity to come up with the sport that we love. And I just think it's it plays a bit too short for the way we hit it now, but it's such a It's why the sport is such a great sport, because it started off in such a great place. You know, it's just to me, it's perfect. I think if everybody, I think it's the greatest teacher in the game, I think the golf course, the golf coaches and stuff along the way might disagree with me. Hopefully some of them agree. I think the golf course is the best teacher of the game because that's the questioner the golf course is asking you questions. I think the Old Course is the best teacher of golf. And I think if everybody played their first hundred rounds of golf ever at the Old Course, the level of golf in the world will be a lot higher because it teaches you how to play golf. The correct way, unlevel lies and understanding angles and shooting for pins when you're supposed to shooting away from pins, when you're supposed to give you any choice of loft or no loft or It's very democratic. It lets anybody play any way they want, but it begins to teach you how to play the game if you played enough times. I mean, I just I could speak about it all day.

00:47:12
Speaker 1: Do you think knowledge of golf architecture does make somebody a better golfer? I kind of go back and forth about this myself sometimes I wonder if that can be overstated a bit. But do you think it should be part of a golfer's education beyond just giving people the pleasure of knowing about golf courses and allowing them to appreciate them, do you think it actually helps them develops as players.

00:47:37
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't think. Yeah. I go back and forward a little bit too, because I think there's disadvantages to knowing too. I think I think playing great courses is great for people's golf. As I said, I think to me, like these lists of course rankings, and we talked about this a bit earlier today, like we all have some people like them to look great. Some people want them to play great. Some people are in the middle. Some people like warm weather, some people like cold weather, wind, whatever it is. Everybody has different ways of measuring how they make their lists of what the best courses are. To me, I view them like their teachers. It's eighteen sets of questions or challenges or puzzles, and I think the better the golf course for me is the one that asks the most interesting set of questions. And so I think from that respect, everyone would get better if they had the opportunity to play the great golf courses, because you see more depth in golf. It's like if you go to a if you're lucky enough to go to a really high level restaurant or a Mischilin Star restaurant or one of those things, you think you've had a steak until you've had one of those guys make you a stake and it's like, oh my goodness, I had no idea it could taste like this. You know, I don't know if you need to know how to do that to a stake, but it's nice to have had the experience to understand how good food can actually get I think golf is the same. I think you don't need to understand sort of basic strategy of a golf course, an understanding while bunkers are better on the inside of dog legs and the outside or whatever the golf snobbery nerdery that we can get into, which really isn't that important for people who aren't that interested. But I think you need to play the examples of them because they'll teach you a better version of golf. They'll make you a better player because you're they're presenting you with more difficult questions or more interesting questions. I guess it's better. So I think they're great teachers. So I rate golf courses on how how good a player do I think I would be if I played this every day? How good would golfers get to play this golf course? Because it would have to make you. It makes you better in the mind, It gives you more shots. It teaches you that you have to move the ball left to right, or you have to hit the ball low, or you have to learn how to land this one short of the green. If you never get asked those questions, you never learn the answers. So I think the important thing about the architecture is it deepens people's sort of golf fight Q if you like, you don't necessarily have to understand why. But I think it's a really great advantage to have access to play them every now and then.

00:50:08
Speaker 1: So we've got Sandy Golf Links, Royal Melbourne, Victoria Golf Club and the old course at Saint Andrews. Yeah, pretty stout quartet there.

00:50:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a bit of golf snobbery there, but like Sandy's a new one that probably most people haven't heard of, which was probably arguably and a lot of ways, the most influential because I probably if that wasn't there, maybe I didn't end up playing golf.

00:50:31
Speaker 1: Right, you know, So in a way it's the most important one, the most important on border.

00:50:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:50:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well, thank you for coming on the show, Jeff.

00:50:39
Speaker 2: Absolutely yeah.

00:50:47
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by PJ. Clark, with special thanks to Cameron hurd Us. The next episode will be coming to you in two weeks now. If you haven't already listened to the first two episodes of this new show, those are waiting for you in the Designing Golf podcast feed, which you should subscribe to if you enjoyed this episode, you should also check out Club TFE. If you enjoyed this deep dive into the golf courses that influence Jeff Ogilvy, then I can almost assure you that you'll enjoy the content that we do in Club TFE. In addition to content, your membership with Club tf gets you access to Friday Golf events. We have an amazing roster of courses this year, which include Prairie Dunes Country Club, Lookout mountain Essex County Country Club, Burein Country Club, mid Ocean In Bermuda, Colorado Golf Club, lots of really great stuff. We hold events at courses that have architecture that we really respect. That's the main driving thing that gets us interested in having events at certain courses. And if you're a Club TFE member, then you get early access to our public events, so you get your first go at signing up for them, and you also get access to exclusive Club TFE events member only events that all comes with your membership. Go to the Friday dot com slash membership and see what that's all about. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you again next time.