Yolk with Doak 20: Sedge Valley, Drivable Par 4s, and the State of Restoration

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Fridagg Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at Summit Golf brand. You know, it's been tough couple of weeks for the entire world. Here with the coronavirus breakout. A special thanks to the team over at Summit Golf b Dratty, Zero Restriction and Faraway and Green. They have turned to making masks them along with some other golf manufacturers I've seen Seamus Golf has done the same where they're making mask but really shout out to the team over at Summit goolf. They are headquartered in New York City, so the epicenter of what's going on right now and thankfully they are helping the cause. Here we'll be making masks. If you guys want to go support them, we have a promo code Fridagg fifteen that will get you fifteen percent off any of the merchandise they have on any of their websites, whether it be Bdratty dot com, Zero Restriction dot Com or Faraway and Green. So check it out and thanks to them for pitching in and using their expertise in the fashion world for a good cause. Here with the coronavirus. Another edition of The Yoke with Doak. This is the twentieth episode. Pretty crazy that we've had that many. In this episode, it's from our recording a couple months ago up in Traverse City, so it'll be the extension of the last episode. We recorded about three hours straight. So if you listen to episode eighteen, nineteen and now twenty of The Yoke with Doak, these are all kind of a continuous conversation. So without further to ado, here's Tom Doak.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.

00:01:50
Speaker 3: In a Friday Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg Egg, fridagg bride egg.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Lie, I'm about ready to run off with the hump course.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: You know, especially with with younger you know, don't have the means or the ability to get to a lot of these famous golf courses that you've seen. How what's the best way to study them without seeing them.

00:02:22
Speaker 3: Well, the one thing that we have now that we didn't have forty years ago is Google Earth. You can learn an awful lot from Google Earth, you know, you can't. But the one thing that you can't ever get even from Google Earth. You know, there is topo information on Google Earth if you zoom in really close, but it's still hard to visualize what those those are, those are like in three D from the ground. I mean, even even their little feature that lets you put the guy on the ground and spin around and see what he can see. It's it's it's pretty amazing considering what the information that they have, but it's not the same as being there, so that part, you know, at some point there is no substitute for getting out on the ground and seeing it in three D.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: You know.

00:03:11
Speaker 3: I hope that this book I'm working on is a little bit of a heads up on that. It's got topo maps of all the projects that I've worked on. You know, it would be great if everybody had three D topo of famous golf courses that they could really figure it out and follow along, you know. And I write in my book that one of the one of the great things for me in my career was that it's actually when I was still working for the Dies.

00:03:41
Speaker 2: I think it was still working for the Dies, we.

00:03:45
Speaker 3: Were in Jacksonville at the TPC and Bobby Weed, who'd been the construction superintendent at Long Cove, and Peebe and I were together and Bobby was rooming with a guy, Harrison Minshew, who worked for Arnold Palmer. So we went over to their office and Harrison dug out they were working on the project that wound up being Golden Ocala. Palmer's company eventually was not involved, so they hired Ron Garl to do it instead. But Palmer's company was going to do the golf course originally, so whoever the client was, it paid for them to fly topo and do topo maps of Oakmont and Marion and Wingfoot and you know, all the courses that they were going to try to copy holes from for Golden Ocala. And Harrison pulled one out, pulled out the topo map for Augusta, and I spent a few minutes looking at it and then said, well we got we got a bunch of other ones too.

00:04:45
Speaker 2: He took us in the back room map room.

00:04:47
Speaker 3: And pulled out Baltusrol and Wingfoot and whatever else.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: I was like, do you mind? Can I make blueprints of these?

00:04:55
Speaker 3: He's like sure, they're in that office right back there. All of all of my interns have been very interested in seeing those, and you know, and I learned a lot from him because I'd already seen those golf courses. So I would think, like, Okay, what's a really uphill shot.

00:05:15
Speaker 2: That still works? And then I could go see how far uphill that was, and what's.

00:05:24
Speaker 3: A really uphill shot that just seems like it's a little too far uphill? The approach shot to eighteen at Augusta. Damn, the eighteenth of Augusta is seventy feet upill from tee to green. I never would have guessed it was that much, but I got a map to prove it. You know that fifth fairway at Marion with the severe right to left tilt which they probably just changed when they redid it, that's ten percent. That's kind of like you can't have more tilt than that or the ball won't stay in the fairway. So I picked up a lot of things like that from a havn't seen the golf course and thinking that's cool, but that's right at the limit of what you ought to be able to build, and then be being able to look it up and find out exactly what I was dealing what they were dealing with on those holes.

00:06:16
Speaker 1: It's funny. I uh, it's funny. You say. This guy on Twitter is the handles gorse Nod. He just his name Sean Smith and he just put a you know, Moraine, he just put that routing over a topo. And it's so funny this conversation because I was thinking to myself about it's the fourth hole that goes this apar five that goes up this huge hill, and I was like, and like, the first thing I saw this, I looked. I zoomed in right on that because I'm like, that was too far uphill per a hole and it's like the one spot on that on that golf course where I'm like, that's where that the hardest spot to get over. But it was interesting because I zoomed in to see what the topo looked like right on that, because then it like, but topo maps are incredible. I wish there were more of them around just floating around.

00:07:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are more of them.

00:07:09
Speaker 3: I mean nearly every one of those clubs has a topo map now because if they've redone their irrigation system in the last thirty years, that's the irrigation contractor or the irrigation designer wants that to start from. And obviously I've done a lot of consulting work at a lot of famous clubs, so you know I have topo maps for Roal Melbourne bel Air.

00:07:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't have one for the old course at Saint Andrews. It would be crazy to look at as wrinkly as up and down as it is. You know, a lot of that stuff your.

00:07:42
Speaker 3: Normal like two foot contra interval topo map, A lot of that stuff wouldn't even show up on there, or it would just be like a few little squiggles that you couldn't make heads or.

00:07:51
Speaker 2: Tails out of other than oh there's something happening there.

00:07:56
Speaker 3: You know, there is a level of detail that goes you know, that gets beyond the maps and you just have to like, those are the kinds of things you have to you have to work with when you're on site that you're never gonna be able to figure out. The little contres greens contriers are kind of like that. I mean, I have topo maps for a lot of famous greens, but it's still like harder. You know, the more daddy you have, the more complicated it gets. You know, I couldn't, like, we don't build greens based on topo.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: Maps at all.

00:08:28
Speaker 3: You know, we don't plot out like, Okay, the back of the green is going to be two point one feet higher than the front of the green, and it's going to come at two percent, and it's going to go four percent, and then it's going to be two percent again. We just do it as sculpture in three D. When I went to the The first time I saw one of those greens books was when I went to the Women's Open at Sabonic and I had offered to like walk around in the practice rounds with Stacy Lewis one day and Paula Kreamer the next and just you know, answer any questions they had about how to play the golf course. I wanted to see them play it close up and whoever they were playing with. And the trade off for that was, you know, if you want to ask me a question, I mean, I'm not hitting the shots for you, but I'll tell you what I would do or you know, or how I think the ball will react. And it was a cool couple of days, but one of them pulled out a greens book for Sabonic and Sabonic has some of the most diabolical greens I've ever built. I can't remember which one we were on. The first time I saw the book and she showed it to me, and I was like, God, damn, this has like ten times more detail than I would have ever thought. And it's all right, you know, I built this so I know it's got every little bump and contour and place where the green changes direction right there. You're not going to get fooled by your eye.

00:09:58
Speaker 2: That's a big advantage, you know. It's just just for confidence, you know, like, well.

00:10:05
Speaker 1: That's the hardest thing when you when you're not positive about your read and you're wondering in your head about it, when you're when you're trying to hit the putt and pretty good.

00:10:14
Speaker 3: Look at that book and it's you know, and it's like, yeah, it's going right. It's like, okay, I can hit that with a lot more confidence right now.

00:10:23
Speaker 1: It's yeah, Like what, I'm like, not sure. I've never used the Greens book.

00:10:27
Speaker 2: I never have either, never never tried to play golf courses one.

00:10:31
Speaker 1: But like when I'm not sure, if I have a caddy and I say, like, what do you think, right? Edge, and they say something that's wildly different. Right edge, there's no way I'm gonna hit. But anywhere near the hall you're not making that putt is exactly right.

00:10:44
Speaker 2: It's uh.

00:10:45
Speaker 1: And that's that's the thing those books tell you. Speaking of, you know, old courses you consulted at. We got a question from Tony Ross uh, Wisconsin State am at Milwaukee Country Club. You consulted there for years. What can they expect about about about from Milwaukee Country Club?

00:11:07
Speaker 3: When is the event to the summer? We're supposed to do some more work on it this fall. I guess it's just after his tournament, so he won't have to worry about the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth getting changed one last time. You know, I've actually not spent a lot of time in Milwaukee Country Club. Brian Schneider, who's from Wisconsin, and Don Placik, who runs my office, have been consulting there for years, and it's been like I worked on the master plan, but I have not been back there to see the changes for like seven or eight years. So we probably should have had Don on today to give the little details. You know, it's a really beautiful place, piece of property. For golf Clubhouse up on the hill. Nice rolling movement, but nothing too severe. River running through it in play on three or four holes, four or five holes.

00:12:12
Speaker 2: Kind of typical.

00:12:14
Speaker 1: You know.

00:12:15
Speaker 3: If there's two or three Allison courses actually they had they feel like kind of the same property that Davenport one is not much different with the river going through it. And there is another one and I'm not thinking right now what it is, maybe the Park Club in Buffalo or something. But you know, Allison had a few sites that felt almost interchangeable. And then as you know, the greens and the bunkers pretty similar to a country club of Detroit and a couple of the other courses we've worked.

00:12:42
Speaker 2: On, So.

00:12:44
Speaker 3: You know, very classic. Nothing you know, nothing super severe. It's funny, you know, in Japan Allison is known for super deep bunkers, but most of the courses, at least in the Midwest United States that he worked on, there's nothing like that.

00:13:01
Speaker 2: There's nothing that deep.

00:13:03
Speaker 1: It's interesting, like the Allison work in Japan has talked about. And then you know, he designed so many courses around where I grew.

00:13:12
Speaker 3: Up, and yeah, I mean he he pretty much lived in the States, in the twenties and you know, built courses as a partner with Colt, but he was really doing his own thing over here. Colt never came back here after World War One.

00:13:26
Speaker 1: And it is the thing I'm always astonished by allison courses are how how the greens and how for the time, the how subtle they were compared to many of the other architects with these bold contours, and how that it almost was like you can tell how the game changed with you know where getting to the green was such a big ordeal, you know, when he was designing courses and now you know today it's almost one year on the green. That's where you know, the challenge really begins for a lot of players, the top player.

00:13:58
Speaker 2: That's true.

00:13:59
Speaker 3: And you know, I don't know enough about Allison's golf game to know if there is a you know, usually usually the golf game has something to do with why you design a certain way. I don't know enough about Alison. I know he's a good golfer, but I don't know what his strengths or weaknesses were. But you're right that like Milwaukee Country Club, the only greens we've touched are ones that somebody else changed thirty or twenty or thirty years ago, and we're putting back, but all the older ones we haven't. We haven't even had to think about. Okay, do we make this less severe now? Because it's so fast, we haven't had to worry about that at all.

00:14:37
Speaker 1: He was a forward thinker. Maybe saw the green speed.

00:14:41
Speaker 2: I doubt any of those guys saw the green speeds get into what they are now. Yeah.

00:14:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, So let's see. So we talked a little bit about the the old Actually here drew Gus thirty six, which course we're going to throw out all constraints. What's the thirty six that's his Instagram handle. Okay, we're gonna throw out all constraints here for this question. I thought about this one, and I thought it would be more interesting and more interesting answer if you had no constraints, so no cause for infrastructure, no need for you know, it being somewhere close to major city, or it could be abroad, it could be anywhere. What course would you most like to see a major at that hasn't hosted one?

00:15:34
Speaker 2: Who you know? I gave up thinking about that a long time ago because I know how much of where they play.

00:15:49
Speaker 3: Events is driven by all that infrastructure and logistics, and you know, you know, like like you know, I mean, any of my courses. Honestly, I don't know that it would mean more to me to see it on one than another, but you know, to see them play, you know, I mean, I've watched tour pro level players play kid kidnappers and Pacific Dunes, but seeing a whole bunch of them do it for a week, Honestly, I almost don't know if I want to see that, because it would just make me want to build golf courses harder, and we don't need that, you know, I mean, you know, right early in my career, when I went to college, I wrote letters to Robert turn Jones's office as well as Pete Dies and didn't get much of any response from them at the time. But then after I came back from my year overseas, all of a sudden, it was like, you know, mister Jones was up at Cornell and he heard about you, So do you want to come into our office and meet us and interview for a job. And I went, you know, I knew I really wanted to go back to work for Pete, but I never met mister Jones.

00:17:07
Speaker 2: I wanted to meet mister Jones, spent a half a day with him, and.

00:17:13
Speaker 3: Met him a couple other times too, and had dinner with him and his wife and stuff, and you know, I'd try to get him talking about Stanley Thompson or whatever else, because I know, you know, mister Jones was the only person I've ever met.

00:17:27
Speaker 2: Who knew Donald Ross.

00:17:30
Speaker 3: And worked with Stanley Thompson and spent a day with Alistair McKenzie when he was working on that project in Long Island in the early thirties, and Jones was still a student. He knew all of those guys personally, which was a pretty fascinating connection that you know, the more I could get him to talk about it, the better. But he just had a different take on architecture. And of course by then he was I mean that was nineteen eighty two, eighty three, so he'd have been seventy five years old even then, and you know, he didn't play much golf anymore.

00:18:17
Speaker 2: And when he built I saw him again when he was building tree.

00:18:22
Speaker 3: Tops in northern Michigan in the mid eighties and I was just starting high Point, and you know, Rick Smith was really involved in treetops, and Rick was a great player, and mister Jones would have Rick go out and hit test shots and stuff, and I just felt like he was he was getting to the point that he was so far away from being a player himself that he was losing touch with how hard is this? You know, the hardest thing we've talked before, The hardest thing to do on a when you're in the middle of a construction project is to step back and think, what's this course going to be?

00:19:00
Speaker 1: Like?

00:19:01
Speaker 3: You know, you're too busy trying to do cool stuff, and you're just like, is this going to be too much? You know, is it too easy? Do I need to make it a little harder. Mostly everybody that comes out and tries to give you two cents worth of advice is you know, oh, make it more severe, turn up the dial and whatever.

00:19:19
Speaker 2: And it's a lot of times that is not what it needs. That's how things get so hard.

00:19:23
Speaker 3: But I thought treetops, there were a bunch of places on it that like, if you hit a bad tie here, it's just that ball's gone, you know, it's down the hill in the trees. And I kind of felt like he was, you know, all the golf he was watching now was either watching Rick Smith hit balls in the dirt, or we'll turn it on the TV on the weekend and thinking, my god, these guys are so great. I've got to make the golf course even harder. That's why I don't watch the tour very much. It's like, those are not the people that you need to see if you're an architect. And the funniest story about that, because you know, Die's been accused of that more than anybody, but.

00:20:04
Speaker 2: Pete did this this exhibition.

00:20:06
Speaker 3: Golf Magazine in the eighties for the centennial of Saint Andrew's Golf Club had this huge event in New York for the centennial of Golf in America, and they've named the one hundred Heroes of American Golf.

00:20:20
Speaker 2: And they included mister Jones and mister.

00:20:22
Speaker 3: Die and a couple of other architects on there in addition to all the famous players. But they had like a big pro am thing at Saint Andrew's Golf Club. And I hadn't been working for you know, it was eighty eight, so i'd stopped working for him two or three years before. But I was still dating my first wife then. But she'd never had she just heard me talk about Pete. She'd never met him, and I'm like, I'll take her out to meet Pete died. And we walked around like nine holes with Pete Dye, which is always just you know, being around Pete was grady, funny and and what Peebee was there too, And at one point Pete Pete was playing he was playing in a five some, like every one of these heroes of golf was playing in a pro am with four corporate guys. So Pete was playing with four guys from John Deere. They were not very good golfers. And at one point they're teeing off on this long downhill T shot and Pete drags me and Peebe over there to watch these four guys hit their t shots and he's like, these are the guys you have to actually build a golf courses for. You know, you're not building for pros all the time. Watch these guys for a half an hour and then tell me you want to make the golf course harder.

00:21:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's that's crazy thing. I was, you know, everybody, all these a lot of so many projects happened, you know, and all the bunny spent to keep up with the pro game. It's just crazy to me, you know, and like the all the distance gains comes from one percent of people. Like you look at the stuff the USGA puts out in the LPGA over the last twenty years, the distance has gone up three yards for them, and then you look at the web dot com. The tour below the PGA tour is up eighteen yards, and it's just you know, all.

00:22:20
Speaker 3: That's amazing for the LPGA because they've used every trick. You know, they're playing with a shaft that's three inches longer too, to try to get more distance.

00:22:27
Speaker 1: Well, and it's all because the speed. You know, there's this exponential gain that happens when you from equipment when you hit one hundred and ten miles an hour swing speed, and it's it's there's the amount of golfers that could generate that speed is so small, and that's where and so you know, what you talk about with this is who you who we should be designing for when so many projects go the opposite way and are designing you know, all these millions of dollars being spent for the for the one percent.

00:22:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's funny, you know, even my clients, most of whom you know, I mean even Banded Dunes. I mean, when we were building Bandon Dunes, Mike Davis from the USGA was coming around and looking at Pacific Dunes under construction and telling Mike Kaiser, if you had some more back tees, we could play almost any event here. And I was thinking, yeah, but they're not playing, you know when you know that's code for we could have the US Open. I mean, you know, they've had the the mid Am and the four Ball and the Curtis Cup and a lot of other events there and they've all worked great. And I said to Mike, well, you know, if they ever tell you you can have a US Open, I'll come build some more back tees, but for now you don't need them. And the US Opens never go into the Oregon coast.

00:23:54
Speaker 2: There's just no way.

00:23:56
Speaker 3: I don't care, how you know, I don't care what they say. I will believe that the day I see it happening. It's just it's a little too far out of the realm.

00:24:05
Speaker 1: I can already see golf media members complaining about the two hour shuttle ride.

00:24:12
Speaker 2: Oh god. So but.

00:24:19
Speaker 3: You know, even my clients like mister Hayden that I built high Point for said at one point early in the project, what if we had a pro event here, And you know, I'd been around the tour a lot working for mister Dye enough to just laugh at that and say, that's not you know, unless you're gonna put five million dollars a year up, they're not coming. Yeah, you know that's you know mister Die always, you know, he's very self deprecating person.

00:24:53
Speaker 2: He had almost no ego.

00:24:54
Speaker 3: And I heard him, I heard him more than once say to somebody when somebody would say to him, aren't you proud that this golf course that you built is hosting this big event?

00:25:03
Speaker 2: And he would just do the aw shucks thing.

00:25:06
Speaker 3: And but what the line he would say is those boys would play in a parking lot for five.

00:25:11
Speaker 1: Million dollars, you know, all well conditioned parking lot.

00:25:17
Speaker 2: They're pickier than they used to be.

00:25:22
Speaker 3: No, forty years ago, they would have played on pavement for five million dollars.

00:25:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's uh exactly. The thing I always go back to is like, if you just changed par then none of your none of the problem.

00:25:37
Speaker 2: Well, let's not go down that rabbit hole again. We have before. Yeah, but it's not you know the bottom line is that's not what I do.

00:25:51
Speaker 3: And for the most part, I had to be thinking about a memorial park. I have to be thinking about it for the Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club, and luckily I had a lot of training from mister Dye, so I kind of understand the game at that level. But you know, most of my projects are not for those guys, and when they come, you just wanted them to see a few shots that are challenging and they have to grind on it a little bit.

00:26:18
Speaker 2: But you know, if you if you.

00:26:23
Speaker 3: Lost any sleep about the fact that they're going to shoot sixty three when they have a good day, you're not going to get much sleep.

00:26:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:26:31
Speaker 1: So from mac Golf, have you noticed a change in what Green's Committee's value over your tenure? Oh?

00:26:41
Speaker 3: Yes, certainly, you know if I mean when I started consulting, the word restoration was not even a thing.

00:26:49
Speaker 1: You know.

00:26:50
Speaker 3: The first place I ever consulted, mister Dye sent me to Camargo Club in Cincinnati when I still worked for him, because he had tried to talk Camargo out of changing golf course in the sixties and failed to do so. When they called him in the eighties and said you were right, would you come back and fix it? He said, hell, no, you wouldn't listen.

00:27:09
Speaker 2: To me the first time.

00:27:11
Speaker 3: I you know, I don't want to wase think even more time just trying to put it back together. But I do have this young guy that works for me that's seen a lot of rainer courses, so I'll send him. But even then, the idea that we were really restoring the golf course with a capital R, nobody wanted to hear that. At that point it was still you know, all those courses were changed in the sixties. They were being modernized to get to come into the present age, the space age, and restoration in the eighties was still too close to that. And you know, it was like, you know, you were a luddite if you wanted to restore a golf course, you were just like crazy.

00:27:57
Speaker 2: The game wasn't like it is. You know, it's not like it was in the twenties anymore, So why would you want to do that? And now.

00:28:06
Speaker 3: Most clubs that call or at least the call us, they use the word restoration in the first sentence. They might not mean it, or they mean some very different things when they say it, but it's a thing now and it's kind of driving a lot of the work that's being done. And thirty years ago it was not a thing, not at all.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: I imagine in a way from what you're saying was thirty years ago it was hard to convince a club that should restore their golf course to restore it, and now it's almost difficult. It's almost become the opposite, where courses that shouldn't restore their golf course want to restore it.

00:28:47
Speaker 2: That's yeah, that's kind of exactly right.

00:28:50
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I just wonder, like how many hundreds of golf courses are worth restoring instead of taking a critical look out, like, you know, that's not the best exact sample of Mackenzie's work. Why would you want to restore that exactly the way that you know, there's some things that just don't work very well here now because of how far people hit the ball yea, And it's a tight piece of property and this is dangerous, so you can't really restore it exactly. But you know, I've always been very outspoken on the other hand that some golf courses should be restored or better yet preserved the way they are and not get into this race of having to move the te's back every ten years because somebody made a new driver. You know, I'd like to see I would have liked to see at least a few Mackenzie courses that were really untouched.

00:29:47
Speaker 2: You know.

00:29:48
Speaker 3: One of the reasons Crystal Downs is so near and dear to my heart is because that was pretty much untouched because they didn't have a lot they you know, it was a very informal place and they didn't think about spending money to change it around over the years, you know, and it wasn't hosting tournaments at all or anything like that, so there was no pressure from the outside of put more back teas in.

00:30:12
Speaker 2: It was just a member's place, and those.

00:30:15
Speaker 3: Members they were only here for two or three months in the summer, and they didn't want people mucking around with the golf.

00:30:21
Speaker 2: Course while they were there. They were there to enjoy it, you know. So the same people that were.

00:30:27
Speaker 3: On the you know at Crystal Downs were on the green committee at Saint Louis Country Club or Oakland Hills or wherever else, you know, overseeing changes to those golf courses.

00:30:39
Speaker 2: But when they came up here, we're on vacation. Let's not deal with any of that.

00:30:45
Speaker 1: So nobody wants a big bill from their vacation club either.

00:30:48
Speaker 2: No it's the second club. No, you don't want big dus. So so it was mostly left alone.

00:30:54
Speaker 3: And you know, I just wish there were courses like that for every architect could really see what they built and he didn't have to like stare at greeny black and white photos that were ninety years old to try to figure out what the guy had done, because they've changed the golf course so much you can barely tell anymore.

00:31:11
Speaker 1: It's the uh, the ironic thing I think about with crystal downs. And I've gotten to know Nick Hardy really well. Who's playing on the corn Ferry, who grew up going up there every summer? Is that that golf course? You know, if you'd if they had modernized it for the modern game, I don't think it would hold up as well to the modern game as it does as it is now. Because he talks about it, it's like he thinks it's like the hardest golf course he's ever played from, Like a just puts him in all these uncomfortable situations.

00:31:46
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and that's.

00:31:50
Speaker 3: You know a lot of times the holes that give the pros fits are kind of the awkward length foals. You know, well, I could drive, I could hit driver up around the green. Boy, I could get a lot of trouble if I hit driver up around the green. But if I don't do that, I'd be hitting like six iron off this tee to get myself in position for for how people used to play the hole, and that seems silly to hit six iron when I could hit driver right up there around the green. And it just you know, they caused some indecision. And then you know, some guys overpower the hole, but they usually don't do it four days in a row. They usually mess it up at least once or twice, and then the real doubt is they're like.

00:32:33
Speaker 2: Uh, oh, that got me in trouble yesterday. Now what do I do?

00:32:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, you've talked about that with the short your short par par fource that you build where you know, it seemed like it almost goes the good player into going for it because they're going to pull the shot off every once in a while and that's gonna carry them and make them make catastrophic mistakes.

00:32:55
Speaker 2: Every once in a while too. Yep. And you know, and those holes were not, but I mean the cool ones.

00:33:01
Speaker 3: Were not designed to be drivable par fours. I mean tenet Riviera. You know, it's it's two hundred and eighty five yards to the front of the green. But there weren't a lot of guys in nineteen twenty seven hitting it two hundred and eighty five yards to the front of the green. Most of them were playing at the conservative left way. Very few guys were tempted to just smack it right up there to the green, you know, and the green obviously is not designed for you to hit driver and have it wind up on the green.

00:33:34
Speaker 2: That's almost impossible, Yeah, because.

00:33:36
Speaker 3: The whole the green is it's skinny, it's at a bad angle to the tee, and it's tilted away from the tee, so that you know, the odds that you're going to roll one on there are almost zero. But you could hit it right in front there and just be putting or chipping right up the length of the green right at it pretty easily.

00:33:57
Speaker 2: That's the temptation.

00:33:59
Speaker 3: You know, all these drivable par fours that are the rage now, people are designing them like okay, guys are hitting driver and they're actually gonna get here so the green needs to be receptive to that, and the green needs to be big, and that kind of defeats the whole purpose.

00:34:15
Speaker 1: You know.

00:34:15
Speaker 3: Mister die always said, well, that's just a long part Three's.

00:34:19
Speaker 1: That's a good you know, It's like it is a long part three or a short part four. The uh, there's that great McDonald quote about when the Haskell ball came out and needs to talk about how you know, the distance of the new ball is rendered a lot of great par fours ordinary, and a lot of ordinary part fours have become great from it. Yes, And in a way, I think Riviera is almost like they're hitting it so far now that it's kind of become less interesting, you know, like in the last three years, where everybody just goes for it, hits in the same spot and then you watching I watched the President's Cup a ton and I was thinking to myself that first hole at Royal Melt has become way more interesting because of how far they hit it, because they can get it up there.

00:35:05
Speaker 3: Right, and I'm trying to think, now, what what's the Oh, it's the third hole in the West Course. It's the first hole for the President's Cup, And yeah, that that hole, the green just goes away from you pretty hard.

00:35:19
Speaker 2: And it used to be that you you.

00:35:24
Speaker 3: Know, instead of driving it up close but short and having like a fifty yard shot with the green going away from your heart so there's no way you could spin it and stop it that good players would hit it way out to the right where they could try to kind of hit it back into the slope a little bit. Yeah, but if you could drive it and have it roll through the green to the back and ship up hill at it, that's the easiest place. And now that there's a bunch of guys that can get there, it takes a lot of the strategy out of the hole. It's like, you know, the only thing is, you know, if you try to do that, you can wind up, you know, getting caught in the bunker's front left, or in the junk short of them, or in the little bushes next to the bunker on the right.

00:36:10
Speaker 2: There's some things that can go wrong if you do that.

00:36:13
Speaker 3: But yes, the strategy change is totally once, you know, once guys are able to actually get through the green on a hole like that with the green tilt in away.

00:36:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't see. It didn't seem like guys were getting through. It was that that one I thought was one of the more compelling ones, just because you saw guys hitting iron and some guys hating driver, which is you know, at riv you know now it's just just driver, And that change happened so quick it so it's interesting because they there's some people that have charted out how it's changed over the last five years.

00:36:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, it's like, well, it's funny last year at Augusta with all the guys going in the water on twelve and we hadn't really seen that much for years, and I guess we hadn't seen it, and so long the guys forgot that. You just have to take that out of play and never do that under any circumstances. But it's like when the conventional wisdom gets so strong that when the pin is back right, you can't go for that and you just have to hit it to the center of the green. You know, that takes the interest out of it. When you know, when everybody's done the math and everybody decides the same way to play the hole, that's boring. And of course that happens more often in a place like a gust or Riviera that they go back to every year.

00:37:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, because you know, because everybody's seen that.

00:37:37
Speaker 3: That's you know, you're stupid if you do that, because everybody's been talking about it for years. How stupid it is that people attack the hole in a place where they really shouldn't be attacking it, where Roy Melbourne's different. You know, most of those players have not been around there that much, so they you know, in five days of practice, they hadn't all decided what's the best way to play this hole. And you know, honestly, you look at the American guys who were who were less familiar with it, they figured out a lot. From Friday to Sunday, they did they they attacked those holes a lot better on Sunday with a couple of days experience of them in a tournament. It's like, man, I really can't afford to miss it over there. I'll have to do something different here.

00:38:23
Speaker 1: I mean, that was one of the most interesting things to watch just because of the I think I think a lot of it had to do with the firmness of the turf, you know, and then coupled with the design that that golf tournament was was absolutely compelling from an architecture angle to watch. So uh, here's a question from mister Carter. What hole designed by another architect? Are you most envious of one hole? You could you could say you could put it together a handful if you wanted.

00:38:59
Speaker 3: There's no way to answer that, and probably everybody gets offended that I don't pick theirs. So I'll tell you what. I walked around sand Hills with Jim or Beina in nineteen ninety three or ninety four. Before they built anything. They just had steaks for tea landing area green and most of the halls were just laying on the ground and they're already you know, where the steak was for a green, there was a green already there just from the natural landform that they It didn't look like they had to shape much at all, or maybe they just had to, you know, make the five percent slope into three percent slope.

00:39:55
Speaker 2: But they, you know, like.

00:39:57
Speaker 3: Some of them are gonna just you know, play a bent grass on them, given it a few months and opened it, and there were by my account, there were fourteen greens like that at eighteen. There were only four that we saw the steak. And it's like, I wonder what they'll do here, and one of them was the eighth hole, the little part four that turned out so well and that they like so much that they've built a version of that green on a bunch of their other golf courses. But all that green was was, you know, the whole kind of played into the head of a valley at the end, and there were some kind of steep dunes on both sides of it, and where the green is now, it was just low and there was no contour, nothing there at all. And it's that it was probably five feet below the height of the green now. So all they did was dig out all the bunkers and throw it into the middle and build that valley up to get it to sit up, and then get the shape and build a one bunker in front of it. And I had no idea when I saw it the first time that that's what that that's what they would do. And you know, so that always sticks out to me because I know what they started with, and I don't think I ever would have come up with this solution that they came up with, which is a lot different experience than just seeing another hole and really liking it, you know, because you know, most of us always think, oh, I could have done that.

00:41:28
Speaker 2: You know, it's the same for routing.

00:41:29
Speaker 3: It's like when you see the solution, it's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. You know, same thing with a blank piece of paper and not so easy.

00:41:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It'd be like seeing all the answers to the tests and then taking it versus taking the test without the answers. All right, uh Dodd twenty four to sixty eight? What hole keeps you up at night? I don't know what this means. This could be taken a done a different way.

00:41:59
Speaker 3: It was the eighteenth all high point because my wife hated that golf hole. You know, it was like she was a beginning golfer and you know, it's the only hole on the golf course they had water on it, and the water was in play on a major way and it could just wreck your round of golf.

00:42:15
Speaker 2: And it would frequently wreck her round of golf, and I would.

00:42:19
Speaker 3: Hear about it, so that one, you know, it was kind of like that hole is out of character from the rest of the golf course. We kind of needed to build a hole down in there to save some of the other land for other stuff. Didn't make sense just to leave a wetland right in the middle of the property with nothing in there.

00:42:35
Speaker 2: Just like a oh, there's a bunch of mosquitos in there. Don't go in there, you know. But we couldn't. We wound up, you know.

00:42:44
Speaker 3: I wanted to build kind of an S shaped hole, and by the time the Department of Natural Resources was done with it, it was a Z shaped hole and it was just way more severe than it needed to be and way more frustrating at the end of the round.

00:42:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's got to be hard at this last hole in a way, because.

00:43:02
Speaker 3: I mean it just leaves a bad taste in people's mouth. I mean, one of the things that's at Sabonic the eighteenth hole. You know, when we started, it was like borderline a lot really long, Part four or part five, and it was prevailing downwind. So Nicholas right away thought part four downwind, you know, really good players will be getting there in two all the time. And Michael Pescucci, the client, was like, no, it's got to be a par five. If it's par four, people are going to walk off making double all the time, and they're gonna be pissed, and it's going to ruin their day, So just make it a par five so we you know, we we got another tee back a little further so you know, it was five forty or something, so you could call it a legitimate part five. You know, nearly everybody plays it from four eighty or five hundred.

00:43:58
Speaker 2: Yards, but.

00:44:01
Speaker 3: They like it a lot better that we called it a part five. There's no question it's a much more popular hole because of that.

00:44:10
Speaker 1: All right, say you're like a recent or you're a college student, recent college grad. Are you saving up for a wedding? Best reasonably priced golf trip?

00:44:25
Speaker 2: What depends where you're starting from.

00:44:27
Speaker 1: Let's just say a state.

00:44:28
Speaker 2: Okay, best reasonably priced golf trip.

00:44:36
Speaker 1: And this is from Brian Nourri.

00:44:38
Speaker 2: You caught me off guard a little.

00:44:40
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, honestly, one of the dirty secrets of the golf businesses. Most of us don't have to pay attention to what golf courses cost. You know, you get a whole lot of business advice from people that never pay for golf and never worry about is that affordable for people or not. They're just like they don't relate to that question at all because they're in the golf business, and they get comped wherever they go. So, I mean, northern Michigan, where I live, is a very reasonably prized place to play golf. We have such an oversupply of golf courses that once you get past Arcadia Bluffs and Forest Dunes, which are the you know, they're the two premium places, and they can charge a couple hundred dollars to play golf. But even those are like, you know, our highest end golf courses are a lot less than some of the more famous places around the country that I've worked on. And then once you get past those, everybody else is cutting their prices, and you know, they're in a race to the bottom. It's you know, it's like a knife fight for who could have the lowest priced golf course, which is terrible for the golf business, but really good for golfers. So there's a ton of golf courses up here you could play for fifty bucks in the summer and the height of the golf season that are pretty good.

00:45:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, like Belvedere, it's like sixty five bucks or something, and that's an extraordinary experience.

00:46:03
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's closed for a you know, it's private for a couple months and then the rest of the year. It's like, we'll take all the visitors that want to come. But there's a lot of very good golf courses in northern Michigan. They're pretty inexpensive, and you know, if you if you want to come in January, this.

00:46:23
Speaker 2: Is this is not the place.

00:46:26
Speaker 1: I mean, you could come and probably walk around them all for free at this.

00:46:29
Speaker 2: Time, yes, with snowshoes today.

00:46:34
Speaker 1: All right, let's see, uh so, brad rap under if you could put a par three, four and five, so you get one of each in your backyard, which one would it be? Which ones would they be? It could be from all different courses. It's another impossible question.

00:46:54
Speaker 2: Let's just make it more complicated.

00:46:58
Speaker 1: And this could probably change every day of the week.

00:47:03
Speaker 2: That would be really expensive to keep changing around like that.

00:47:08
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I've always said that one of the one of the things that grabs everybody about Amen Cornered Augustus so much is it's it's a part four and a part three and a par five and it's you know, I described it to somebody in a book years ago. As you know, eleven is about as strategic a hole as you could get there's just a ton of fair way, and you just got got to stay away from that water hazard at all costs. Twelve is about a penal hole as you can get. Thirteen's about as heroic a hole as.

00:47:41
Speaker 2: You could get.

00:47:42
Speaker 3: So there there's a lot of variety there that that would not be a bad thing to have in your backyard.

00:47:59
Speaker 2: If I go over to Chris Downs and I get done and.

00:48:08
Speaker 3: There's nobody on the golf course, and I just got a little more time, and I want to go play a couple of holes. I play the loop of want I play. I play the first hole and then I cut over to seventy and play seven.

00:48:20
Speaker 2: Eight and nine.

00:48:22
Speaker 3: And that's a great long part four, a great short part four, my favorite part five in the world, and I hell of a hard part three. So for this poster's question, we'll just cut number one out of there and play seven, eight and nine. You know, that's that's the closest I have to three great.

00:48:41
Speaker 2: Holes in my backyard. It's forty five minutes away.

00:48:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, those three are really good. Both both examples are great, great examples outside the Surrey sand belt. What course is a must play in the south of England? And that's from Ropes.

00:49:03
Speaker 3: Oh, outside the Surrey sand belt, so the heathland, outside the heathland courses. There's four or five great lynks courses on the you know, southeast of London is where roll Saint George's is, and Deal right next to it, Princes.

00:49:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we're all.

00:49:28
Speaker 3: Saint George's is the best, the best or greatest lynks course in the in England, you know, so that's a pretty good choice. My favorite one is Rye, which is further west along that south coast. You know, par sixty eight sixty three hundred yards tough as nails. I mean, you know, it's famously said Rye has five part three and it's famously said that the key to playing Rye well is the second shots and the par three holes because you're not going to hit all those greens, and when you don't, you know, you could make X on pretty much any of them if you hit a bad second shot trying to recover from where you miss the green.

00:50:20
Speaker 2: I love that place, and you know it's.

00:50:25
Speaker 3: Forty five minutes or an hour from Sunningdale and Wentworth and all those great Heathlin courses, so it's pretty easy to get to, of course, it's not. It's it's one of those there's a few clubs in the UK that are what they call two ball clubs, Like you can't go there with three of your buddies and all four of you play your own ball. If if you're more than a twosome, you have to play alternate shots, and so that turns off Americans, and a lot of Americans don't go. You know, they can't even get their brain around that that we couldn't like all play our own ball and post a score. No, we're not going to do that, which has kept it relatively free of Americans and American influence. So it's still you know, it's still a wonderful, relaxed place, and you know, they don't they don't worry about catering to American.

00:51:13
Speaker 2: Visitors like some of the other courses do. So it's it's really authentic. It's like it's always been.

00:51:19
Speaker 1: It Rise one of the courses that you know inspiring such Valley, the next course at sand Valley. Talk real quick about some of the updates from that project and kind of what you've been working on.

00:51:34
Speaker 3: Oh, I was just they started clearing trees in November, so that hopefully the first of April next year, when the snow is gone, we can get started shaping greens right away. So they've got I was just over there last week, you know, we walked and tied ribbons around trees to save or cut down back last fall. Brian Schneider had been back once in between, but this is the first time i'd got over to see what they've done so far. And you know, when the first time you go through do something like that, you're conservative and it's like, oh, let's leave these trees and see what it looks like with everything else gone before. We It's like, I think I'm going to take these down, but let's wait. So I just went back and most of those ones that I had any doubts about, like, yeah, get rid of them, you know, open the place up more. There's no reason to like hit a really good drive on the second hole and hit it a little too far and peter out into the trees, and it's their view going through and up the hill without them, So take them out.

00:52:37
Speaker 2: So they've only got like.

00:52:40
Speaker 3: The first five holes are mostly cleared now, well, the first the first two and the last three.

00:52:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then and now they're.

00:52:49
Speaker 3: Working on like the third, fourth, fifth, and eventually fifteen, so so that we'll have that by the time we start in April, there should be nine is kind of clear in front of us, and we can just start shaping. And that's really you know, for sure, we'll get those nine holes shaped in grass next year, and we might you know, probably get ideally we get a little farther than that with the grassing, but then, you know, because it gets so cold over there so fast, you pretty much cut off the grassing kind of September first, and then you still have September, October into November where you could build holes. So you know, we'll plant nine holes or twelve holes or whatever this summer, but we'll we'll.

00:53:36
Speaker 2: Have them all shaped by the end of the year, so the next spring, all we have to do is come back and polish them off and grass them.

00:53:43
Speaker 1: So yeah, so that probably some golf soon for people.

00:53:50
Speaker 3: Yeah, probably, you know, if we plant those first nine holes by the middle of August next year, not next spring, but by next summer fall, there'll be doing preview play on those holes.

00:54:02
Speaker 2: I wouldn't think that they would be doing.

00:54:06
Speaker 1: That.

00:54:06
Speaker 3: Anybody would play the full eighteen until twenty twenty two, but they'll start looking like you can play them all a year and a half from now.

00:54:16
Speaker 1: I bet when you clear it, you probably see stuff that you didn't see before.

00:54:20
Speaker 2: Some but not much. You know, it's funny, you know, like the the fourth hole is in the fifth Hole are pretty thick with trees. They're about they're mostly.

00:54:35
Speaker 3: Like fifteen or twenty foot pine trees there, and they're pretty bushy compared to most of the others.

00:54:40
Speaker 2: Like some parts of the site.

00:54:44
Speaker 3: The trees are taller, but you're just looking through telephone poles and you can kind of see everything that's on the ground. But when the trees are like, you know, spaced out farther in, they're not that big yet, they're they're all limbed out, and you know, it's hard to walk through it actually, and so so you know, like Michael Kaiser hadn't walked those halls. You know, we walked it early on, but it was it was hard to see what was going on unless you were looking at the map pretty close.

00:55:11
Speaker 2: You didn't really know what was there.

00:55:13
Speaker 3: But the Fourth Green site is kind of like it's kind of like having the Tenth Green at Riviera already built for you.

00:55:20
Speaker 2: Except it's up against a bank behind the green, and then you.

00:55:23
Speaker 3: Go up the bank to the fifty and the fifties sits up and you're playing kind of along a ridge and there's this nice little saddle for a green and I you know it's I saw him on the topo map right away, and I was like, these are going to be two really good. You know, that's a cool green site. That's a perfect place for a short part four, that little fourth green site. And then you know, cause you've got it's not flat. You're playing from an elevated tee and all the ground so you know, imagine the tenth at Riviera if you were playing from higher and the whole fairway slope left to right.

00:56:01
Speaker 2: So so balls, you know, your your typical drive just sneaks keeps sneaking away to the right to the bad place, and you really gotta hit it way down the left edge if it's gonna stay there and give you the angle.

00:56:16
Speaker 1: Is that up by that like rock out cropping?

00:56:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, the fifth green is kind of right underneath where the rock out cropping will be in the corner. So from the beginning, those are kind of two of the first holes that I drew on the map, and you know, I don't just trust the map entirely. Brian and I went out there and walked around and we're like, yep, this is gonna be a good green site right here. But Michael never really hadn't really registered with Michael, so you know, they knock down the trees and open up the green site. He's like, wow, there's kind of a green site already laying here, and we're just like nodding and smile and like, yep, we kind of thought.

00:56:50
Speaker 2: That was gonna be the case because we actually knew that.

00:56:54
Speaker 1: I walked that routing with Jeff, a guy who Caddy's there, and it's fun because like neither of us knew where we were going, and at that point you were talking about the vegetation. At that point, I was like, maybe I shouldn't be trying to walk this because I'm just like going through these trees and I wasn't sure if I was in the right.

00:57:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's probably you know that, And like the fourteenth and fifteenth or the two would be the two easiest places.

00:57:17
Speaker 2: To just get lost out there and have no idea where you were.

00:57:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a fun experience, all right, well, we'll be back soon and thanks for the time.

00:57:27
Speaker 2: Thank you,