Why Aren’t There More Stadium Golf Courses? (feat. Tim Liddy)

00:00:00
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass made its debut. Seven years later, another stadium course, this one at PGA West in California, hosted its first PGA Tour event. It seemed like the idea of a stadium golf course was catching on, but then it didn't. So in today's episode, we'll talk about what a stadium golf course is and why there aren't more of them, And to dig a little deeper into a particular stadium course, I'll bring on the architect Tim Liddy, who recently completed a renovation at PGA West. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf, all right, So today's big question is a two parter, what is a stadium golf course and why aren't there more of them? And I'll just say right off the bat that I think the notion of a stadium course is really interesting. It might be one of the most original ideas that has come into golf architecture in the past fifty years, but it hasn't actually spawned that many golf courses. And I'll explore some reasons for that later, but first let's tackle the question of what a stadium golf course is so when golf fans hear the term stadium course, they'll immediately think of the stadium course at TPC Sagrass side of the Players Championship, first stadium course in many ways, the definitive stadium golf course. And then after that some might think of the PGA West Stadium Course near Palm Springs, California. This is one of the courses where the PGA Tour's American Express Tournament is held. So yeah, those are the two big stadium golf courses that most people are familiar with, both designed by Pete die TPC Sawgrass opened in nineteen eighty and PGA West opened in nineteen eighty. Now, the initial idea of a stadium course was developed in the late seventies by Dean Beaman. Dean Beaman was the commissioner of the PGA Tour from nineteen seventy four to nineteen ninety four. I interviewed him a few years ago and he told me that his basic goal with TPC Sawgrass was to build a course that was just as focused on the gallery as it was on the players, and for him, that translated into two big design principles. One put the spectator areas on the high ground and the playing surfaces on the low ground. This is obviously a fundamental principle of any sports stadium, but typically golf courses have not been built in that fashion. The second big principle of a stadium course, according to Beeman, was routing the golf holes to create hubs of activity, in other words, having the holes move back and forth instead of being strung out along a single line. This way there will be areas that spectators can watch the action on multiple tees and greens at once. Right, if the golf course is constantly doubling back on itself, inevitably there will be places where the golf course converges with itself. Now, these weren't totally new ideas. For instance, the idea of spectator areas on the high ground. I think Beeman probably got some inspiration there from the Links courses in Scotland and England, where you have dunes around a lot of the fairways and greens. And then for the second principle of routing to create hubs of activity, this is just something that golf architects have been doing consciously since at least the golden age of golf architecture, it's just a smart practice to have a few spots where there are these clusters of teas and greens. For one thing, it allows for easier maintenance because you don't have to walk as much when you're mowing. And for another, it allows an architect to take advantage of particularly good landforms. Right, so if you have a wonderful ridge or knoll or whatever, you don't just want to visit it once. You want to put multiple greens and teas there so that you can really get the most out of it. Augusta National is actually a great example of a course oriented around a few hubs of activity, and incidentally, that's one reason it's such a great spectator venue. I think you can just hang out on that hill where the second, seventh, and seventeenth holes all come together, and you'll have a great time for a few just you know, watching the action on those different holes. This is what Beeman wanted at a stadium golf course, just these places where you could sit above the players and see more than one group at a time. So if you look at the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass, you can see these principles in action. The holes are surrounded by massive mounding, and in the original design there were actually these grass bleachers in a number of spots. They're really cool. They're no longer there. They were removed over time because I'm not sure that the grass bleachers ever drained especially well, so they might have gotten a bit too soggy when it was raining. But in general, I would say the PGA tour has leaned less on permanent infrastructure for spectators and more on tents and grandstands, which is a bit of a shame because the original earthworks of Pete Dies design at TPC Sawgrass, we're really cool and distinctive. On the bright side, though, the elevation of the spectator areas is still there and the sitelines are still there, So the original stadium course does follow through on that Dean Beaman principle of spectators high players low. Now for Dean Beaman's second principle hubs of activity, TPC Sawgrass does follow through somewhat on that one. The routing doubles back on itself pretty frequently, so you know, you can walk the course fairly easily, and then there's a big hub of activity at sixteen, seventeen and eighteen which is just one of the best designed spectator areas in golf, and certainly the greatest and clearest example of what a golf stadium can look like and feel like. But aside from that one spot, there actually aren't that many hubs of activity at TPC Sawgrass. There are some good places to sit and watch, but you don't have those kind of Augusta National type gathering points where you find a bunch of greens and teas in the same place. Sawgrass is a little more spaced out, and maybe that's a bit of a miss in the design, but all in all the course has stood the test of time very well. It's still a fantastic, unique spectator venue and still an exacting and entertaining golf course. Importantly so that brings us to the PGA West Stadium Course, which will host two rounds of the American Express Tournament this week. There are a lot of obvious design similarities between PGA West and TPC Sawgrass. You have the playing surfaces low and you have the spectator areas high. You have classic strategic angles like TPC Sawgrass. You have fair ways that kind of move unpredictably. You have visual intimidation et cetera, et cetera. And of course, the finishing stretch at PGA West is very similar to the one at Sawgrass. Sixteen is a risk reward par five with danger around the green. Seventeen is an island par three, which, by the way, Die was reluctant to build because he didn't want to repeat himself, but he was talked into doing it by the developers. And finally, eighteen is a par four with water on one side and an angled fair way, less severe than the one at TPC Sawgrass for sure, but superficially similar overall, though I would not say that PGA West embodied Dean Beaman's principles of the stadium course. The routing at PGA West is very strung out. It's kind of out and back with each nine, and there aren't really any significant hubs of activity that might have been done to create more real estate frontage. There are houses at at PGA West up and down the golf course, so perhaps that was a priority more than the stadium idea. And in fact, later in this episode you will hear Tim Liddy say that he thinks the name stadium course is just a name, more of a marketing label. Than anything inherent to the golf course. In any case, As with TPC Sawgrass, DIY intended at PGA West to build a very, very hard golf course. Here's what Dye said in his book, Bury Me in a Pop Bunker. He wrote, and I quote length alone would not be the ultimate test for the new course, but I believed strategic hazards, deep bunkers, difficult angles across fairways, slightly offset greens, parallel lakes, and desert plants, when combined with cross current wins, could provide the type of course Joe and Ernie expected. Joe and Ernie refers to Joe Waalzer and Ernie Vossler, who were two of the main developers behind the project. So when the PGA West Stadium course debuted at the Bob Hope Tournament in nineteen eighty seven, it did seem like Pete Dye had succeeded in building the hardest course in the world. A lot of players were very, very angry. Raymond Floyd referred to the course as spiteful and belligerent. Tom Watson said, I'm sick and tired of these courses. It requires you to execute shots that no sane golfer should be expected to play. And then after the event, a group of PGA Tour players actually signed a petition to remove the course from the PGA Tour and it was removed. It didn't host the tournament again until twenty sixteen. Now today this all kind of seems funny because it's very clear that the PGA West Stadium Course is not the hardest course in the world. Since twenty sixteen it has actually been one of the easier courses on tour, so it has not retained its difficulty, and I think there are a few possible reasons for that. One is that the American Express is a pro am, so the setup just can't be too hard, otherwise rounds or are going to take too long to complete. Two, the course doesn't really penalize wayward driving all that harshly. PGA West doesn't have trees, doesn't have much rough, and there's water in play on nine holes as opposed to seventeen holes at Sawgrass. The upshot of all this is that PGA West doesn't really take driver out of the hand of players in the way the TPC Sawgrass does. And you know here in twenty twenty six that's a big deal. Right back in nineteen eighty seven, the length of PGA West was a real defense. It is no longer a defense, especially when players can hit driver and then more generally, I just think the PGA West design is slightly watered down in a few respects from the one at Sagrass. The greens are definitely more receptive, you know, they have these kind of feeding contours and maybe fewer rejecting contours. You can just look at the island green at seventeen at PGA West. It's longer than the TPC Sawgrass hole, but the green is bigger and flatter, and the hole just doesn't have that intimidation factor at all. Now I still think the PGA West stadium course is very architecturally interesting. The built features are super cool looking, the strategic concepts are very smart, but it does represent a backing off from the original stadium course of vision. And then after PGA West, we just didn't get the wave of stadium courses that people might have been expecting. Maybe you could call TPC Scottsdale Tom Weiscoff design a stadium course, but it's really the build out there that creates the stadium effect. TPC River Highlands in Connecticut has some stadium aspects designed by Pete Die, but the front nine is really just a housing development course. And then you do have you have some of the recent European Ryder Cup venues like the Golf National and Marcos Simone, which definitely take inspiration from TPC Sawgrass. Maybe don't go all the way with like the permanent spectator infrastructure, but I do see the stadium idea living on a little bit in those venues. For the most part, though, the stadium course idea is basically dead, and there have been some opportunities to revive it. Recently, the PGA of America just built a new headquarters in Frisco, Texas, and they hired Gilhanson bo Welling to design a pair of golf courses meant to host championships. But for reasons that surpass my understanding, neither course appears to be all that well suited to galleries. I mean, this would have been a great opportunity to build a modern stadium golf course, and they just didn't. I'm not even sure that it occurred to the PGA of America to do that. So why is it that the notion of a stadium course has withered on the vine in this way. I've got a couple of thoughts about that. One is that PGA West might have become sort of a cautionary tale. The developers went to all this trouble to build a stadium course in the desert and then the pros rejected it. For thirty years it was just hosting Skins games and Q school tournaments. It's a major risk to construct a stadium course when this might be the outcome. And relatedly, another theory I have is that the PGA Tour, PGA of America and USGA don't really have an appetite for the golf course business anymore, and the risks inherent in the golf course business. They are chasing TV rights deals right now and in the case of the PGA Tour, private equity money. These are much bigger pots of cash than the golf course industry can provide now. Obviously, the PGA Tour does have the TPC network, but it's not clear to me how committed the tour is to that network. They have been offloading some courses recently, so with the exception of PGA Frisco, I just wouldn't expect to see a lot of new, purpose built tournament venues in the coming years. Finally, I'd say that the major golf organizations have just lost a little bit of verve and ambition and vision. It wasn't that long ago that Mike Davis and the USGA were putting their weight behind a big renovation at Bethpage Black and then a big municipal new build at Chambers Bay. That kind of thing just isn't happening anymore, you know. The PGA Tour, the PGA of America and the USGA have grown pretty tentative, pretty conservative, and that means that they're going to go to tried and true traditional venues for the most part, and they're taking fewer big swings at creating the great new championship golf course. Even the PGA Frisco project, which was ambitious in some respects, doesn't seem to have had full conviction behind it. The PGA of America should have been trying to build the next great championship golf course, but it seems like they were just kind of fine with a couple of okay golf courses. And that ultimately is why the idea of a stadium course appeals to me. It's a big vision for a different kind of golf course. The stadium courses at TPC Sawgrass and PGA West weren't just trying to be acceptable to as many people as possible. They were trying to be the hardest, baddest, best championship venues in golf. And they may have fallen short in some ways, but the developers and the architects behind those courses went for it, and I want to see more of that attitude now. If you'd like to see more in depth analyzes of both TPC Sawgrass and PGA West, you can find our profiles of both courses on Frida Egg Golf Club. Fridagg Golf Club is our membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and members get a lot of benefits, including access to our growing library of course profiles. This week, we just published my colleague Cameron Hurdis's profile of the PGA West Stadium course. It has Cameron's thoughts on the course as well as his terrific photos of every whole. So if you're an FEGC member, you can check out that profile right now. If you're not a member, go to the Frida egg dot com slash membership and join us. All right, Next up, I'm bringing on Tim Lyddy to discuss the PGA West Stadium Course. Tim is a veteran golf architect who worked with Pete Dye off and on from nineteen ninety one to mister Dy's death in twenty twenty. Tim also has his own solo practice, and in twenty twenty four he completed a major renovation of the PGA West Stadium course. So I thought it would be fun to get Tim's thoughts on the course's design and learn more about the work he did there. All right, let's get to it, all right, I am here with the architect Tim Lyddy. Tim, thank you for joining me. How are you doing today?

00:19:25
Speaker 2: Great? Great? It's eight degrees with twenty twenty miles an hour wind, so it's a bit brutal here in Indiana today.

00:19:34
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, you're in Indiana. It's pretty cold here in Portland, Oregon, so I can imagine that over there in the Midwest. It's savage right now.

00:19:43
Speaker 2: It's crazy, it's crazy. All right.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about some warmer climbs. PGA West, the Stadium course you recently did some renovation work there. But before getting into that, I'd like to just discuss the course. Generally, I find it to be a fascinating golf course and just you know, in general, the notion of a stadium course is very interesting to me as well. So what to you is special about the design of the PGA West Stadium Course.

00:20:17
Speaker 2: What is special? Well, how much time do we have, Garrett.

00:20:21
Speaker 1: Well, maybe you could just imagine that, you know, you're talking about with somebody who's never heard of it before. What would be kind of the angle that you would take on talking about why this course is distinctive.

00:20:33
Speaker 2: Let's go big picture and we can go down smaller and smaller. So big picture, what's cool about it is that it's a flat, desert desert environment. Flat is you know, anything you're going to see. So the first thing they did is they the routing is two golf holes wide. It's a residential golf community and so that's about six hundred seven hundred feet and they cut that down four feet, and they flipped the earth up on both sides and brought the homes up four feet. So now you have an eight foot of vertical separation, which really helps, you know, separate the homes from the from the golf to a large degree. Then they had all kinds of earth left. And so they mounted in between these two corridors typically, and I think this is where Pete was in his career where he said, okay, just go, you know, just go carve it up. I'll look at it. We'll carve it up some more. And they would do several, several, several iterations of that until they got something that they liked. And I think mister Die was just then learning about three dimensions and and and he would call it double dimension. He'd like to see a mound and another mound behind it, and another mound on and on and on and see that dimension which would give you some depth and all the shadows in the desert that you get. Really, you know, it came alive. And then he had a client that said, we want the hardest golf course you can build, bar none. And these were golf pros, which you know, most clients are not golf pros. So having a golf pro as a client is wonderful because they get it. They understand golf is first, you know, that's that comes first, the housing a second, and so they talked about how hard it should be and what makes it hard. And you know, so the bunkers are deep, the holes turn, you know, aggressively, the greens are or severe in some areas, typical die greens where they would turn hard right to left or left or right. He was a big proponent of kind of dictatorial design. You know, I'm gonna make you had a cutshot or I'm going to make you hit a draw, and we're going to balance those shots. You're going to have nine cut t shots, you're going to have nine approach shots the same way. So so it didn't really give anyone an advantage if you hit a draw all the time or you hit a cut all the time.

00:23:18
Speaker 1: Something that's notable about the stadium course at PGA West is its use of angles. Right, you can look at the golf holes there and sort of see where the green is oriented, trace that back into the fair way and and see, you know what dangers there are for getting to that position that will allow you access to the green. This is maybe something that's that's not noted very often about Pete Dye, but he did seem to incorporate a sense of kind of classical strategic angles into his designs.

00:23:52
Speaker 2: Very much so. And I guess what you could say too, is that all good architects use angles. They all do some disguise it better than others others. And to me, mister die was very literal. You know. He'd put that hard edge angle across the fairway and juxtaposed it against whatever is out there, you know, mounding and all of that. But you'd have that he loved that hard edge and that was a shot value to him as well, is that he wanted you to see that ball go over that edge and where it should be, you know, where did it land. He didn't want to wiggle because it would be blind and you couldn't see where your ball went over the edge. So he do that on a green. He'd do it on a fairway and usually would counter those edges right to left one way, left or right the other, and vice versa. So he loved that hard edge, and again is for the golfer. The golfer could see if he made it over or not. And then he would do it hard on water, you know, which everyone hates because oh no, right, you're in the water. And I think he brought water to golf design, you know, to scare everybody to death. I think that's the fear factor that that he really brought. So how would you how would you.

00:25:09
Speaker 1: Describe his approach to green design at the PGA West Course.

00:25:17
Speaker 2: Let's start at the beginning, I guess. So almost ninety nine percent of his greens are open in the front. So why is that that's the average golfer can bump it on the green. Uh, And he usually would have a shoulder. If the green was turning to the right, he'd have a big shoulder on the left that would kick that ball, feed the ball for the average player to the you know, back right er middle of the green. Then he'd have shoulders around the greens to kind of just add confusion, add some blindness. He would like to blind the middle of a green, but he always wanted to see the back hole location. So we did that quite a quite a bit and and recaptured some of that in the restoration of the stadium. His greens always play smaller than they look, and so a pet die green in the middle of the green is relatively flat and soft, like one two percent one and a half a lot that we found at the stadium. But around the edges they go off three or four percent, five percent, shoulders would come in five percent, so forth up to seven all the way off the green. So what does that do, Well, you have a straight put you're in the Don't tell anybody this because it's kind of a secret, but you'd have a straight put in the middle of the green where the whole locations would be, and your eye is looking at the edges of the green. You're you're relating the surface of the green to the outside perimeter, and so it looks like it's going to break more than it breaks, so it might be one and a half percent. It looks like it's going to fly off the edge of the green. So a combination of that, and he would turn the back corners of his greens so that he really was asking a good player to work that golf ball into that corner left or right, right to the left. There was not a lot of depth in those back corners, but a lot of big area in the front of the greens again for the average player to bump it hit it on. So then at the stadium, the surrounds of the greens. You know, I did a lot of work with him on club golf courses, so we'd have a lot of trouble on one side, and we'd have, you know, a bailout area on the other. Stadium course, forget it. You know, there's trouble everywhere left, you know, left side, right side. You've got to have to pick your trouble. And depending on where that whole location is, a bunker might be a better bailout than a chipping area. Right.

00:28:00
Speaker 1: So you have these greens, you have this highly manufactured environment that you were describing earlier. You have this use of angles, so this is kind of These are sort of some of the component parts of the of the PGA West Stadium Course. But you know, I'm curious about this term stadium course. Oh obviously it's also applied to the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course. But when you look at at PGA West, what makes it a stadium course in your mind?

00:28:34
Speaker 2: You know, I'm guessing that they had nine golf courses eventually, so they wanted to have one that was more of a tournament golf course. And so I think stadium and tournament is probably the same as it, you know, are the same kind of terms. That'd be my guess, because it doesn't look like a stadium golf course at all.

00:28:55
Speaker 1: Right, Well, if I'm comparing and contrasting TPC Sawgrass with PGA West, TPC Sawgrass is much more overt about its stadium elements. I mean, especially at the beginning when they have those you know, grass bleachers and those those big islands in the middle of the lakes where people could stand. And you know, they've gotten rid of some of that over time, but you can still see the kind of stadium bowl effect at a lot of holes at TPC Sawgrass that doesn't seem to have been carried through at PGA West as much.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: I think it's just a term I really do to designate it differently than the Nicolas Court. I think there's a Nicholas tournament course. Yes, well, I think it's just it's more of a name than it is anything that's actual.

00:29:43
Speaker 1: In my very interesting Yeah, So that the last thing I'm I want to pick out of of what you're saying about about the Dye's design approach at PGA West. It has to do with his use of artificiality. You know, if you there, there are many you know, architects both current and past, who very much prize and prized naturalism trying to make everything look as though it had always been there. I don't think that was a priority for Pete Die at this particular golf course, or at many of his golf courses. So what would you say about Diye's attitude toward artificiality and he's his use of the kind of obviously manufactured in his designs. Is that something kind of he thought about consciously and implemented at his courses with some intention.

00:30:37
Speaker 2: I'll tell you a story. I'm working with him on the design of a golf course. I'll keep it unnamed. And there was an old housing pad part three. Go down and back up to this housing pad, and there was a wandering creek along the left side. And I roughed in or I had the crew rough end a grain on top of this pad where the house was look great. It looked great. And he walked out in his typical language, you know, what what are you doing here? I go, Well, it was there, you know, hill was already there. I go it was natural, and he said, he said, he goes, No, the green belongs over there, and sometimes mother nature needs a little hand. So I got the hint, right, I got the hint. And he would also say if it was natural, golf course wouldn't be here. So so what he what I'd like? And it's a total. You know, there's there's some people like vanilla, some people like chocolate. So what I love about what he did is that he just said, if it's abstract, let's just go for it. Let's just keep it going. How far can I go? Yeah, I wanted to look like Scotland. It's never going to look like Scotland, but I can have those design elements and I can have some of my thoughts behind, you know, the balance and the shot value. So I would argue that every golf course is an abstraction, no matter how natural it's supposed to be, It's an abstraction. Everything we do is as golf course architecture is an abstraction. And I love this. I had this quote about Dan Kylie, who was my favorite landscape architect. I don't know if you know much about landscape architecture, but he went to Europe, went to Paris, all the alleys of trees and the grids of trees, and he brought that back and did it in residential design. And he did it. He worked with Sarazon, a very famous architect he did the arch and all of that. Well, he did all these beautiful grids throughout all these great, big parks throughout the nation. So Dan Kylie was a great guy, and he didn't shy away from the hand of man. And when you have that hand of man again, juxtaposed against the natural environment, it's it's strong, it's you know, it's a great statement. It's powerful. It's powerful. When everything is natural, it's like a counterfeit. It has no power. Yeah.

00:33:14
Speaker 1: Well, I think most, if not all golf architects would would acknowledge that the use of the hand of man is necessary in order to create a functional golf course. But I guess the difference of opinion comes in what you do after the hand of man has intervened. Do you then try to blend the artificial work back into the natural environment and make it look as though it hadn't even been manufactured? Mackenzie right camouflage? Or are you okay with the viewer recognizing the distinction between the surrounding natural environment and what you did at the golf course? And I suppose that that die more than many golf architects working now, including architects who trained with him, was comfortable with kind of leaving artificial looking stuff in a golf course environment that people would recognize as artificial. But it's kind of interesting looking, right, and that's that's the justification for it being there.

00:34:27
Speaker 2: And it's great to have both. That's what's great, you know, to have. You know, look at Rayner. You know, we all love Rayner. I'm sure Rayner influenced Die. I mean that, you know, strong, bold, simple statements into the you know, against the natural environment. I think we all love that. Look, we don't know exactly why. I mean, I I know, I think I know why because it's simple number one. We can understand it. It's not too complicated, and it's just you know that juxtaposition is a great art form.

00:35:02
Speaker 1: So yeah, And at PGA West there there wasn't a whole lot of a natural environment to work with. It was beautiful, but the ground itself was not particularly well suited to golf. And I think that something I wish they would show better on the telecasts of the PGA Tour tournament that's played there every year is the ground level view of the features at PGA West, which are very interesting, right, They're really compelling looking shapes in the ground, but when you have that camera view from up above, it all kind of gets flattened out and becomes less interesting. But it's actually a really cool looking golf course from the ground, isn't it.

00:35:43
Speaker 2: It is? And it brings up this point that I love about Guy's work at that golf course is that there'd be a lot of stuff going everywhere, and then there'd be a piece that's very contrasting, big shadow mark, you know, be a bunker, let's say, a huge bunker, and then right here it's really steep, so that's strong. Well, that's your that's your shot line. He would he would show you that shot line in all of this abstraction, you know, boom, and he would do that at Greens he would do that fairway bunkers, which I just thought was, you know, genius stuff. Yeah, that's shaping, that's sculpture.

00:36:20
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about the work that you and your team did fairly recently at at the Stadium course at at PGA West. This was a twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four project that had its debut at last year's American Express Tournament. And I'm curious about what you did at the course, because it is kind of part of this what I'd call a micro trend of Pete Dye restorations that have happened recently. You don't typically think of Pete Die courses as being the subject of restoration. That's usually applied to courses, you know, that were that were built earlier. But recently we have seen you know, Tom Doak work at at Crooked Stick, We've seen Gil Hant's work at the Honors Course. We've seen Jim or Bina at lob Lolly and kind of and we've seen Davis Love's firm work at Harbor Town and a little bit at TPC Sawgrass and so there there's a little bit of momentum building for bringing back some of mister Dye's original features and your project, to my mind, is kind of part of that micro trend. So what was the impetus for this this renovation project from the perspective of PGA West, Why did they want to have work done and why did they bring you in?

00:37:40
Speaker 2: It was built in eighty six, really had not been touched since then, so the greens had shrunk a lot twenty feet in some areas, So greens that were originally against the bulkhead. We're now fifteen feet away from the bullhead, so your whole locations were twenty feet away from the water. So they wanted to get the whole locations back to the water's edge. So even though the green would get larger, it would play harder. You'd make it. You can have harder whole locations. Agronomically, you know, you've got to. In the desert, you get a lot of organic material. And so we took six inches of top top dressing off the greens, went down to the original green surfaces, which were very easy to find, floated them out, you know, checked them, tried to some of the longer slopes we would shorten to add some whole locations. But they were relatively soft. I couldn't believe how soft they were for nineteen eighty six, except the edges, like he loved to get them. So the biggest challenge for us on the desert was to make sure the water surface the surface water got off the greens because they were that soft in many areas. So that was the big challenge, and did that very well. The PGA tour was involved a little bit and they wanted some whole locations for the tournaments that we helped, you know, accommodate, and so really I think we restored the greens to what they were in eighty six. And I asked the client, what do you want? You want eighty six, you want twenty twenty, you want nineteen ninety five, what kind of die do you want? You know, I was around you for thirty years, and they really wanted it to be eighty six. So that's what we did. So there wasn't a lot of design to it. There was just a lot of archaeological you know, discovery. Oh look what look what they lost here, you know, look what's gone and put it back.

00:39:36
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, so you're talking about some of the green expansions just you know, pushing out mowing lines. This classic thing that happens to a lot of golf courses over time, that the greens kind of creep in because of just maintenance attrition, and then you know, you can do a lot by just pushing them back out. You get some pins back. And it's a good esthetic too, right, because that it may be a little more intimidating because there's not that buffer of rough between the you know, the green and the surrounding hazards, so that was one element of the project. Of course, there was also quite a bit of bunker work as well. Tell me about that.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: Bunkers and a lot of new drain each but bunkers, and this is typical of all Bermuda golf courses. Bermuda over time, you can't really verify it out. So the organic layer, you know, bermuda grows up and up and up. So can you imagine over you know, thirty forty, fifty sixty years, you know, so, and the sand in these bunkers are flatish. In a die bunker, you know, grass faces flatterish. So in a matter of five years or less, the front of the bunker, the organic material, the bermuda blocks the sand. So all of a sudden, no one can see the sand in the bunkers, and so the members are complaining. So that what's the superintendent do. He goes and edges up the backside of the bunker. And that's a continual process for twenty years, and all of a sudden they look like fasio bunkers when you're done, you know, they're all flashed up in every cove in the end. So so explaining that to owners is half of what I do on a project like this is what do you mean? It's not? This isn't what he built. You know, you've got to explain how bermuda changes. So it actually looks like you had these sharp edges when you build it, and then over time it just kind of melts. The bunker looks like it just melts in place. And so just putting back the green edges, the bunker edges, you know, those edges really made the golf course pop. And I even tried to make him as edgy as I could. But with a sand, we you know, we went back to what was there originally.

00:41:46
Speaker 1: So what what was kind of the style of the original bunkers at PGA West. You know, you mentioned that they kind of evolved into more of your kind of flash faced, scoopy bunk that you might might see it at many courses, But what was what was that aesthetic and that that shaping style originally?

00:42:08
Speaker 2: So the floor of a die bunker is typically about a foot above the fairway the floor, and then the sand is in that floor. That way you can see that sand even though it's flatish, and then there's a I call it an eyebrow behind that bunker that usually is directed at the target, whether that's the green or fairway. And why mister Die loved those eyebrows is he said, pretend I sand, just like at Scotland, had been you know, hit out of this bunker for one hundred years, what would happen. It would just build up and point at the target. And so that's that's the look that he loved. And that's you know, we put that back where it was gone. You know, it was gone and a lot of times superintendent's over time, the second or third Superintendent's go I'm tired of moment on this, I'm gonna knock it down right. And we had original photos, so that was that helped us quite a bit.

00:43:07
Speaker 1: So that's interesting. He wanted his new bunkers to look as though they had been used over a great amount of time.

00:43:15
Speaker 2: Yes, and so when you when you hit sand out of a bunker for one hundred years, it gets really steep at the edge of the bunker and then really long towards the target. It's kind of it'd be easy to explain, you know, if I was showing you a bunker bit anyway.

00:43:29
Speaker 1: No, you can see it.

00:43:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, so it's I call it an eyebrown, and then there are shoulders around that it also do that and you know the other thing. I don't know for sure, but I don't know when the knuckle bucket came about. But there's some such there's some like cool stuff here. I'm going, I wonder if they did that by hand or with a knuckle bucket, because you know, it's changed. It's changed golf architecture, the knuckle bucket. Yeah, especially in the last decade or two.

00:43:57
Speaker 1: So well, describe what a knucklebucket is for for people haven't seen it before.

00:44:01
Speaker 2: Knuckle Buckets usually on a smallish excavator and instead of just doing a bucket like this, you can move it like a hand. You can carve anything you want. And of course these guys get so good, you know, they can shave us with that bucket they wanted to. They get so good at it. The hardest part though about that is they're sitting in the machine, so they have a hard time looking beyond what they can see, you know.

00:44:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the knuckle bucket has become pretty popular in recent golf architecture. Actually, I've talked to the restoration architect and he does new courses as well Andrew Green about using a knuckle bucket to kind of pound out little details in bunker faces. Absolutely, Basically, what it allows you to do is kind of like detail work with a big machine. So you know, typically when you're using big machines, it's a little hard to do the kind of fiddly little stuff. Well, when you have that knuckle bucket, you can kind of get then there and and do some nobbly little details. And so that's so you don't even know this. You know, it's possible that that I was maybe doing some of this with with his bunkers and that's how he got his details, or or maybe it was done by hand.

00:45:13
Speaker 2: I would think it was done by hand or just very diligently with a straight bunker, you know, a straight bucket.

00:45:21
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:45:21
Speaker 2: Wow. And then because you can turn the machine then and you have to turn the machine instead of the bucket.

00:45:27
Speaker 1: M that's very interesting. We're getting very in the weeds there, but that kind of stuff is uh, that kind of stuff is fascinating to me. So we've talked about bunkers, we've talked about greens. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on with the renovation project?

00:45:42
Speaker 2: That you did. Oh yeah, look at notes real quick.

00:45:45
Speaker 1: Sure.

00:45:45
Speaker 2: I think I think we covered covered it as an overview pretty well. I guess the trees we took out a lot of trees, and for a desert golf course, I think it helped the look of the golf course immensely, especially on television. You know, a desert golf course line with trees didn't really look like a desert golf course. So as tough as that was initial step, it really helped, you know, that particular golf course quite a bit.

00:46:16
Speaker 1: So trees had kind of been planted over time at at PGA West, just you know, just gradually, and you you stripped quite a few of those away to recapture the feeling of that desert environment right right.

00:46:31
Speaker 2: The other thing that I guess you would enjoy a lot is that Pete was a big proponent of the line of charm. And he didn't talk about it like that, he didn't have a term for it, but he was always you know, there's nothing more more boring than standing at the end of a straight fairway and looking and there's nothing between you and the green. So he would always swing something in front of of of that view to support again usually the right to left or left or right. So he was he was a big proponent of that, and that added the fear factor and the you know, the foreshortening and did all those great things that he's known for, you know, hiding stuff all all over the place, hiding.

00:47:15
Speaker 1: Visual deception. Yeah, well, you say, line of charm. This is a term, you know, invented by Max Bear, you know, more than one hundred years ago, and essentially what Bear meant by it, and I should devote an entire episode just to this term because it is kind of complex, but essentially Max Bear was saying, you know, the line, the true line that the players want to play shouldn't just be straight down the middle of the fairway. The architects should always be doing something to break up that that direct line to the whole and kind of motivate players to swing out to edges of fairways and take an interesting path to the whole. So part of the role of the architect is to is to just like break up that straight line to the whole and make golf more interesting and dynamic.

00:48:08
Speaker 2: And a very simple way to do that is a center line bunker m and mister did hardly ever did that. I found that interesting. He'd want to slide the whole fareaway one way or the other. He wouldn't say, let's put something he wouldn't he wouldn't want to do it.

00:48:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean maybe maybe because he knew clients, you know, would would sort of rebel against that idea. And in the time that he was designing courses, I don't really know.

00:48:32
Speaker 2: So the reason for not doing center line bunkers is that you put him at maybe three hundred yards, Well, that would be the second shot of a lady, and so he would he didn't like that. You know, you're going to catch the second shot of a lady more than you are the t shot of the back teeth player.

00:48:52
Speaker 1: That's that's interesting. That's good to know. Yeah, okay, Well, he was very attentive to how different types of players would play his golf courses at PGA West specifically, I know he did a lot of work with the with the forward t's, making sure that they were well positioned. And this was of course something that that his wife, Alice Dye would would insist upon and was kind of a guru for the placement of forward ts.

00:49:18
Speaker 2: Yeah. She was great and a great player. You know, a better golfer. He won the Indiana Amateur, but she I think she won the Florida Amateur a couple of times. Yeah, Ary player a great team. You know, they were a great team, no question.

00:49:32
Speaker 1: So looking at the course post renovation, Yeah, it's not to me, it's the It's not as important to say is it tougher than to say.

00:49:46
Speaker 2: Is it better?

00:49:47
Speaker 1: But let's start with whether you think it is tougher for the pros to play this this golf course post renovation? Do you think it has become more challenging?

00:50:00
Speaker 2: Can I can? I let me turn the discussion a little bit, because I think this is an interesting question I have. I have that you could develop, and that is was this the last course ever built that was stronger or more tougher than golf equipment? You know, in the eighty six the pro say we're never coming back here to play this golf course again.

00:50:23
Speaker 1: They signed they thought it was too hard.

00:50:25
Speaker 2: Right, Okay, Now they love it and it has an amateur tournament on it. You know, it's a pro am. It's not even a professional tournament. I mean it is, but it's a it's a pro am tournament. So so golf equipment has just you know, gone right by it right with middle heads and cavity back irons and you know, great teaching. So I think it's a discussion. Is this the last, the very last course that was stronger than than the pro golfer? I don't know.

00:51:00
Speaker 1: It depends on what you want to say about setup. You know, there have been US opens since nineteen eighty six that overwhelmed the pros, but mostly for reasons other than design, right, mostly for reasons of the firmness of the golf course or the narrowness or the height or the rough Yeah, yeah, et cetera. It does It does seem that, you know, what was remarkable about about the Stadium course at PGA West in nineteen eighty six is that it was really kind of pure design that made the golf course so hard, and that's that's pretty rare now it's in fact, it's hard to do that now.

00:51:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So back to your question, is it harder today than it was? I think they can set it up a bit harder. Again. They've got access to edges or they didn't have before, so they can put whole locations to the edges. I added a few bunkers on the on the bailout side of a couple par fives, so that they're not hitting wedges to a par five now they're hitting a nine iron to a par five. So so I don't know, you know, you just can't stop. These guys are too good. I don't think it plays any harder. What's great, though, is that this developer hired a or a management company, hired a couple of great superintendents, and so the conditioning of the golf course is probably the best it's ever been in you know that I've been aware of it. It's really good. Brian Sullivan was at Wiltshire and bel Air before he came, and he's the director of golf and they've got a young guy that's Denver Heart. He's again the golf courses, and I think the pros get that, you know, they appreciate it. You know, they say these are the best greens we play all year, because in those two weeks in the desert they could be the best. You know, just like in any climate, there's a certain window where you can get every thing perfect right, and when when you oversee grains in the desert, this is your window right here is.

00:53:06
Speaker 1: There a specific hole at PGA West that you think people should pay attention to it when it comes up on the telecast and kind of look at as an interesting hole at the stadium course.

00:53:21
Speaker 2: Well, sixteen, I think sixteen, seven and seventeen are great, great holes, and you know the pucker factor is strong on both of those, especially for the amateur. You know, it's a pro am so the amateur player, eighteen is a bit of a disappointment to be because they hit three woods I think typically off the tee to avoid the bunker complexes. But it's a fun golf course. It really is fun for these people that you know, the greens are fun. They can get out of the bunkers that used to be you know, awful. You know, now there are sixty degree wedges. You can get out of these. They can get out of them.

00:54:01
Speaker 1: That's true. One that's true on sixteen, where you know, essentially the world's deepest bunker just left of the green that used to be, you know, a place from which people had trouble recovering. Now you know, you can expect pros to get out of there if they get in there, And.

00:54:20
Speaker 2: We softened the left side of the green for more whole locations on sixteen. Whether they'll use them or not, I don't know. And you know how pros they're so smart, they're going to play off to the right and put back you know they're gonna they don't. They don't challenge much anymore.

00:54:35
Speaker 1: Well, when you look at the sixteenth hole, what is it about that hole that makes it great or interesting to you?

00:54:41
Speaker 2: The trouble is severe even off the tee. The bunkering is twenty feet deep. So but again it kind of comes back to things that we have talked about in the past, and that in this interview is that in eighty six, golf ball curve a lot. Right, it doesn't curve anymore. So I don't know if it's as terrifying as it is today as it was in you know, eighty six, or just because the golf ball doesn't curve, so these guys can hit. They probably aim at the middle of the grain and curve it left where and then off the tee again, there's plenty of room for them to aim at the right edge of the fairway and curve at their ten feet of curve, you know, of their hook, and they're they're fine.

00:55:30
Speaker 1: Well, this raises an interesting question to me if you were building a stadium course now and trying to create a venue that would truly put the fear of God into current tour pros with their ball that doesn't curve, and you know their their their equipment and their bodies that they make the ball go so far, what would you do?

00:55:54
Speaker 2: Like?

00:55:54
Speaker 1: What are what are some of the tactics that that you might use from a design side to to challenge them.

00:56:01
Speaker 2: You know, the best thing is firm and fast, don't you think. I mean, look at the old course. When the old course, when the fairways were as fast as the greens, they didn't score that well. So it's all about I think the ground surface more than it is angle. I mean, angles are important if it's firm and fast. If it's soft, angles don't matter. So firm and fast it's got to be. And I'm sure that this week it will be firm and fast. I hope it's the desert. You know, they should be able to get it firm and fast.

00:56:36
Speaker 1: Right. Well, when you when you bring overseating into the equation, that's when it starts to slow down a little bit, right.

00:56:41
Speaker 2: That's right, But for a week you can do it yeah, anyone.

00:56:45
Speaker 1: Well, they can do anything now with agronomy, right.

00:56:48
Speaker 2: Right, that's correct. And you know they got ninety degree weather, no humidity. It's come on. As we used to say, Red Charles can grow grass in this.

00:57:00
Speaker 1: Well, you know, they probably could dial it up a little bit more. But just the nature of the tournament has not historically been This is the most challenging tournament on the on the PGA Tour. Maybe that's part of what kind of holds the Stadium course back from being really vicious is just the setup is never going to be vicious. The nature of the event is not that.

00:57:27
Speaker 2: Maybe the last day, but you know they played the country club course and the Nicholas Course. You know the country club course they shoot sixties and it's fifty nine's and sixties, you know, so that but when they come to the tournament the stadium course the last day, I think they'll set it up. I think they'll shoot par one under. I don't think they'll because there's pressure too, right, that helps, That helps Furman fast and all that pressure. That's what you got to have because when they can hit it far, you know you can't. Length is not an issue.

00:58:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah, it's I mean pressure, pressure still still gets to the best of them. That's one thing that hasn't hasn't really changed. All right, Well, Tim, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been fun talking to you and hoping to hoping to see a firm and fast stadium course at the at the tournament this week.

00:58:22
Speaker 2: Garrett. Thanks, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

00:58:31
Speaker 1: All right, let's do some quick takeaways from that conversation with Tim Liddy. First of all, it was striking to me that he acknowledged that there's not much that pure design can do to stop tour pros these days. He said, basically, you've got to have firm and fast conditions and that's pretty much it. And I think that's relatively accurate, especially if you want the course to be playable for a golfers. Yes, you can make the fairways fifteen yards wide and have trees and water everywhere, but that's not the kind of work that most golf architects want to do. It's not the kind of work that most developers want out of golf architects. So we're pretty much left with firm and fast, and I would add wind if there's wind. That creates some substantial challenge, but that's not something that you can control. So in other words, we've got to roll back the equipment. The second thing I'd like to pick out of the conversation with Tim is his discussion of Pete Die's approach to artificiality. And what I heard Tim saying is that he likes and Die liked the juxtaposition between artificial and natural. For Tim, that's where the art comes from, and that is a kind of repudiation of popular thinking right now, which is the golf courses should blend into their environments, that the hand of man should be invisible. So it is interesting to hear Tim position Pete Die as the alternative to that approach, and I think he's right about that. Pete Die' is shaping doesn't look natural, but it does have a relationship with the natural environment in the sense that it contrasts with the natural environment, it responds to the natural environment, and it is interesting to look at for that reason. So that's an aspect of Die's courses that I think is definitely worth studying. Okay, that's it for this episode. Designing Golf is produced by Will Balsam. Thank you, Will. If you've been enjoying this podcast, leave us a rating and review wherever you might be listening to us. I like carrying feedback. I want to learn more about what you want to hear out of designing golf, and leaving a review would be a good way of doing that. All right, thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.