Yolk with Doak 25: Is Donald Ross Overrated? and Other Questions

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at b Dratty. All right, it is We're heading to the n to summer and they've got a ton of polos up on their website. My favorite is the Liam polo. It is that classic B Dratty polo with the pocket. And one of the neat things on the website is they have the ability to monogram it for yourself or for a friend. So you want to buy somebody else a polo, nice.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: Thing to do.

00:00:34
Speaker 1: What's cool is they can put your initials on the pocket, so instead of having a golf club logo. You know, you always got to worry sometimes about overlogoing. You know, if you if you got a hat on from somewhere and you don't want to wear a shirt from somewhere, or if you got a belt on from somewhere, you don't want to be the guy that's overlogoing. So the B Dratty Monogram collection is a great way to break things up with that you can use right now. They've got a great sale going on big sale. It's thirty percent off just about everything on the site, so use the code Brotherhood thirty and that'll get you thirty percent off everything on the site at bdradty dot com. I would recommend the monogram collection. You can monogram the Liam Polo. You just go on the site and it is prominently featured on the homepage.

00:01:25
Speaker 2: So check that out.

00:01:26
Speaker 1: We are back with our final episode of this batch of the Yoke with Doak. So Tom and I sat down for about three hours last week in Traverse City, and it just I didn't feel like it made sense to break them up and split them up over over months. So this is your gain. I think we're going to do more since we've got the uh, the kind of limited travel schedules in our lives and uh, we're just going to do more virtually in the coming months. But this episode we cover a bunch of listener questions and as a reminder, his new book Getting to Eighteen is out. Highly recommend it. You can buy that at Dope golf dot com. Every copy comes signed and it is a book that you will certainly understand golf course architecture more after reading.

00:02:17
Speaker 2: So without further ado, here is Tom Doak.

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Speaker 3: I miss the Green for example, I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker. I'm really upset.

00:02:25
Speaker 2: And when I find my.

00:02:26
Speaker 3: Ball in a brid egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg Frida egg fridagg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course.

00:02:59
Speaker 1: Let's get this a listen our questions here. You know you're gonna love this question from Will Bardwell. Is Donald Ross overrated?

00:03:09
Speaker 3: No? Donald Ross is not overrated, you know I don't. I mean, we've talked before. I don't really like ranking architectsas like, you know, not not in my wheelhouse at all, because it's it's only about what did you do with this piece of ground? You know, Donald Ross gets The people that don't think Donald Ross was a great architect point to the fact that he laid out four hundred golf courses, and obviously he didn't spend much time on a number of them. True, maybe all he did was a routing and then turned it over to some locals to build a golf course. But Donald Ross was really good at routing a golf course. That even that is a lot better than you know, letting some local guy go out there with a bunch of steaks the hammer them on the ground and say that's a green. So yeah, there's some there's some courses that Ross built that he didn't spend a lot of time on and that aren't as great as his other ones. But you know there's also I would also certainly say, you know, if you judged a golf course architect by his fiftieth or one hundredth best golf course, there's only two guys in the conversation for that, Colt and Ross. There's nobody else that did that many really good golf courses over you know, part of the partly because they were in the business for thirty or forty years they started early instead of waiting until nineteen twenty to get going, But you know, partly because they had a really good operation behind them, and they had other talented people who, in Colt's case, are more well known. He worked with McKenzie, he worked with Alison, who worked with Morris, and he worked with a bunch of good people that did enough on their own too that you know who they are. Ross His business just kept going through, so all of his associates you never really heard their names at all because they did nothing but work on Donald Ross courses. Their whole life. So, but you know, it wasn't all Ross anymore than it's all McKenzie or Cole or me. But Ross and the people that worked with him did a ton of good golf courses and they are not overrated a bit.

00:05:36
Speaker 1: If you were given the title golf sar, what.

00:05:42
Speaker 3: What the golfs are? I thought? I was. I thought that's what this podcast was all about.

00:05:47
Speaker 1: What are the one or two things you would immediately do immediately? And that's from Cemorrow too.

00:05:57
Speaker 3: M I honestly do not know how to answer this question. The one thing that comes to mind right away is I don't think that everybody who plays golf should have to walk, but I think that the more people that did walk, the better off they would be. And the reason that a lot of people don't walk is because of golf cart revenue. So if I was a golf zar, the one thing I would do would be insist that golf courses charge for the golf cart, what the golf cart really what it really costs to have a golf cart out there, and the damage that it does to the golf course, and let people choose whether they want to pay extra for that or not. Instead of jamming it in the price and insisting that it's part of the deal, you know, just give people a choice someone, you know, a lot of golf operators would say that they are doing that, that you have a choice to walk or not. But if you include the golf cart and the price, and you're not going to save any money by by not taking one, then most people are going to take one. Oh yeah, why not take one? But yeah, if the economics, if you could just separate those economics out realistically to make it cheaper to play golf, if you walked, more people would walk and we'd be better off. Now. The golf course operators will say, oh, but we couldn't afford to do that, you know. But they can only not afford to do that. Maybe they have to charge five ten bucks more for the green fee and a little less for the golf cart to incurreage. But the idea that golf can't exist without car revenue is a lie, you know it. It did fine for a very long time before there were golf cards, So it can work. It's just they've they've manipulated the numbers to make it look like it can't. Uh.

00:08:17
Speaker 1: Car for the course asked, is core is course architecture more appreciated slash noticeable when a golfer has less clubs in the back.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it is, actually, you know, I mean, I play with somewhere between five and ten clubs on any given day, you know, just because it's it's lighter to carry on my shoulder, and it's you know, and you know, one of the few things I'm still in decent shape physically, but one of the few things that I wind up being sore is my neck and shoulders, partly from carrying golf clubs as much as I do. So I've tried to lighten it up as much as I can. It wasn't I didn't do it so I would appreciate the architecture better. But the one thing that it does make you do is realize that when a hole has bunkers that you have to carry in front of the green, it's really hard when you're between a five iron and a seven iron. You know, It's like, I can't quite carry that bunker with a seven iron. But if I use a five iron and try to take something off it and I'm not spinning it so much, will it hold this screen? And now you start to understand the importance of why having an open front to part of the green is important to people, but to people that can't spin the ball so much. You know, if you're a good player, you never think twice about you know, when I'm old, I'm not going to be able to approach the screen anymore. But it doesn't until you're like sixty or seventy. But at some point it I'll hit you that, you know, when I can't hit the ball in the air and make it stop fast, this course sucks. And a lot of courses are designed like that, where they're just not thinking about those kind of players. And you will appreciate that when you have five or six clubs in the bag and have to try to hit those shots.

00:10:22
Speaker 1: I lost my six iron in March of twenty nineteen. I haven't replaced it yet, but what I you know, I just have played so many rounds with all my evens out, so I play a lot of half suck golf. Yeah, And one thing I noticed is like exactly that when I when I've got what would be a perfect eight iron into a tough pin, one of the things that I look at now is I look for contours that I can use to hit the soft seven and run it off of so exactly kind of what to your point, when when there are those contours present and you, who don't have the exact perfect club, you all of a sudden have to look for the contours to use to get it close. And it makes you, you know, it makes you less of a high trajectory hit it at you know, at or really close to the target all the time.

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Speaker 3: Player right, funny ironic too, you lost the six iron. I lost my six iron out of my ping set when I I was playing golf with my wife and son when he was like four or five, and gave him the six iron to play around with and into the round gone. We never found it. So I played around a six played around my six iron for ten years before I started throwing other clubs out too.

00:11:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been like liberating I.

00:11:43
Speaker 1: I I miss it only when I'm playing like a very intense match, but I play so few of those now that and I've gotten so used to like. Well, the other thing too that's nice about is I know I get less mad at myself because I make way fewer bad decisions with half the club, because it becomes you have a lot less decisions to make, you know, with half the clubs, right, Blake Conant, what did you listen to on your two week road trip through the Midwest?

00:12:14
Speaker 3: You know Blake Blake works with us on construction projects and he knows, you know, like one of the great interview answers of all time. Golf club atists did an interview with Kay Goldbi years ago and there's like what piece of technology has affected golf course construction the most in the last twenty five years since you've been doing it? And Kai said the iPod. Before the iPod, I had to listen to bad local music and it was hard to get keeping a good frame of mind, you know, what's sitting on the bulldozer all day to build stuff. So you know, all of the guys that work for me, they listen to music all the time while they're working and they really love it and they feel like it makes them more artistic. I personally don't do that at all. You know, I'm walking around thinking about the thing the whole time instead of you know, operating something. So you know, I don't I don't even have music on my phone, so so I listen to like local radio and all the Obstina. You know, doing that in June here in the United States was really interesting, you know, trying to avoid some of the politics, but you can't really avoid it where you're going and driving through the Midwest, it's like you get a lot of different viewpoints on the radio in the Midwest, and you know, and listening to whatever music is works locally, which was the full spectrum. But I kind of like, I kind of like the random element of it a little. Instead of having my three hundred favorite songs of all time on loop that I'll just listen to over and over again, I'm weird about that.

00:13:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm a big podcast listener. I listened to podcasts outside of outside of golf. But it's the in the recent you know weeks, like with so little going on that you know, you can tell that everybody struggled with creating you know, content, and you know, to a certain extent, I can only handle so much of what's going on in the world. And I've been I've been listening to like old playlists and it's funny to think back to, like what my life was like when I'm listening to these, like music from when I was just out of college, I'm like, wow, I remember what I.

00:14:30
Speaker 2: Was doing back then.

00:14:31
Speaker 1: It's funny how music can sometimes like trigger moments in your life. But another question from that, all right, guy, I tweaked this a little because I know you you hate the five best, So I said, how how would you spend ten rounds in Minnesota?

00:14:50
Speaker 3: Honestly A really hard question for me to answer because most of the courses around Minneapolis I only saw once in the late late fall, and like twenty five years ago, so so silly question for me to answer, really, I mean, I don't I have no idea what Minnicata and Interlock and then a couple of those other courses look like today. I know they've all been worked on since I saw them, but I can't compare them at all. You know. The only thing I the only thing I drew from my from my trips through Minnesota where the three courses that were really worth seeing outside the outside the well known ones in the Twin Cities were white Berryacht Club, even though it is in the Twin Cities, but you know on the fringe north of Saint Paul, Northland and Duluth and Rochester that we just worked on, which is an hour or two south of the Twin Cities.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: That Rochester's got to be one of the most severe Golden Age courses in terms of the elevation.

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Speaker 3: It's a really hilly piece of ground. I did not, you know, when they asked me to come back two or three years ago and look at it for doing work on it. You know, I think I have a pretty good memory for golf courses, and I didn't. Really it was twice as hilly as I remembered. I mean, is there's some big slopes there.

00:16:16
Speaker 1: The par threes are interesting, how they connect there the ground, How those are all the holes that you know they're You're always going down and up on those because of how severe the property was.

00:16:30
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's I mean, there's one of the more severe uphill par threes that I've ever seen. I'm trying to think with that, you know. I tend not to, especially the courses that we work on, I tend not to think of them, and I think of the routing. I don't think of like what the par threes are or what the par fives are so much so I have to go back and think about what you're saying now, because I'm not really what are the four part threes.

00:16:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, what was the inspiration for the fifth green? At law students? Pat green blows my mind? Exploding head emoji, just shy of rock bottom.

00:17:11
Speaker 3: Are we talking about the fifth or the fourth?

00:17:14
Speaker 2: Might be the fourth?

00:17:15
Speaker 3: Okay, so I have to explain them both. The fourth, which I think the fourth gets most of the common law students, has a bunch of severe greens. But I remember when we were building it. Jeff Shearer, the client, Jeff was I talk about a little bit my book. Jeff was a great one of the best clients I've had to work with. He wouldn't ever come to me and say I don't like that. He would say, can you tell me what you're thinking about there? Or are you sure you really want to do that? Or you know, just explain this one to me. So the fourth green is the one where he said are you sure you really want to do that? And I said, well, the bright side of it is if I build this green that's severe, people won't talk about how severe the other.

00:18:06
Speaker 2: Ones are, so condition people early.

00:18:13
Speaker 3: So I'm going to assume that it's that, although you know, there's a bunch of severe greens in the fifth, which is a long Part three is really tough too, and I will mention that just in case. So the fourth is it's a very short part five. If you just measure it from the tee to the turning point and the green, it's like four ind and seventy five yards.

00:18:31
Speaker 2: I think I hit like a haighte iron and the last time I played.

00:18:33
Speaker 3: It in yeah, so you know, And it's the green is like right up against the fence property fence, and the tea is like back in the trees with the third green pretty much right behind it. So it couldn't get any long. And we wanted to make it a par five instead of a long part four because we didn't it's it's the only part five on that side of the road the first seven holes. So so we made it kind of a you know, double dog leg thing, you you know, the average person that can't reach any par five in two place. The second shot to the left around some bunkers, waist area kind of thing short of the green and then comes into the green more from the left. But any good player, you know, even I get to where I can go for that green. Some of the time. The bunkers aren't that severe, you know, most of the stuff between the landing area and the green is like, you're not going to be there unless you top a forwood, so you know, you're only really worried about the green. And I figured, okay, a lot of people are going to And the green was like the fences behind and there was this steep bank to the right of it coming down, and it was just all flat to start with, and I thought, well, okay, so I can I'm not gonna make a flat and I got to build it up a little bit so you can see it over all the stuff in between. So I'm gonna build it. I'll build it up and kind of just tie it into that big bank on the right, but it's still you know, if you miss the green right, you're on a very steep bank on the rough. You don't want to be there. So the idea, the idea for it, a little bit of the idea from it is exact, is actually from a green I did a high Point, the eighth green at high Point, which had it was a two tier green with a big low front area and then a really high tier and not much space in the back. So if the pin was in back, it was you know, it was hard to fly it there. You know, you wanted to think about trying to land it in front and let it run up there, which is hard to do. And the thing I like about that with a par five is you can't do that with an eight iron, and I might be able to with a forewood, So it takes some of the advantage away from you being able to reach it so much easier.

00:20:51
Speaker 1: Does Is that green similar to fifteen at the north course at Stonewall?

00:20:59
Speaker 3: I'm trying to think what fifth the.

00:21:00
Speaker 2: Center line bunker hole along.

00:21:02
Speaker 3: The Yeah, no, I wouldn't know. I wouldn't call it.

00:21:06
Speaker 2: I was just trying to think because they had that really.

00:21:09
Speaker 3: Small green Stonewall. Is it's a really severe green. You know, that's actually Brian Schneider's green. I mean I didn't tell them what to do there at all, so it didn't evolve from these other two at all. That's just his idea. Pretty damn wild. I think it was based on something from Pine Valley, actually, but I never asked what. But yeah, I mean that's it's a severe back shelf. Yes, but that's that's so much of a false front, you know, you don't you can't really land it short and run up that thing and it's a it's not that power for it, yeah, but not not long enough that you're really going to try that shot very much. So you know, that was some of the idea behind it. And then there is like an intermediate level at the right too, so it's low left, front, medium to the right, and this severe shelf in the back that most of the people that complain about the green either the pin is there, which it is maybe one day out of three, or the pins down front somewhere. But they were trying for the green in two and they hit it through and it got up there, and now they have to figure out how they held a putt down, which is really that's the severe part, because if you're in the back, you got to putt to the middle or the front. It's really hard to do, and you have to I've had people, I've had a ton of people tell me you can't do it. You can't keep the ball on that tier at all. It's just going to get away. And then I show them what I do to keep the ball on that tier, and they're like, you know, you could putt in forty five degrees to the left of where they thought to take a gentler slope and roll down there and then they're like, okay, I never would have figured that out in a million years on my own. So you know, it's not like there's no way to put on that green. It is a really severe green, but it mean, you know, par there might be get there in two and three putt for some people.

00:23:02
Speaker 1: And you know, I don't understand why that's not okay for most golfer why they can't it's not.

00:23:08
Speaker 3: Okay because for most guys, if they they get there into they think they should be rewarded because they don't get too many par fives in two. And I understand that. I just don't.

00:23:18
Speaker 1: Agree because like, if i hit a shot into a par five and I'm one hundred feet away, I realized that I might not two putt.

00:23:26
Speaker 3: Right. It's a really severe green. It's the talking point of the golf course. Finally enough, that was one of the few golf courses that wasn't shaped by the guys that work for me now. It was the client wanted a firm contract price, so we built the course with landscapes unlimited, and this young guy named Jeremy Miller was the shaper for most of it. And he was an art student getting on a bulldozer, and you know, just loved having more freedom to build stuff instead of having grade stakes for everything and having to follow up plan really really I you know, usually he would get a grading plan in detail, and I would just give him a quick sketch of high, medium, low, you know, four percent in between these two tiers. Go at it and I'll come see what it looks like. So he loved doing it, and then he wound up working for Jack Nicholas after that. And there's a course down the road. Harbor Shores has a really severe par five with a green really like that. That's because Jeremy Miller built them both. It's not because Jack was trying to copy me. It's because Jeremy had already done something. And that's another it's a par five that's pretty short, and you know he just kind of wings something in there. What about this, Jack? And Jack said, okay, we'll work with that.

00:24:49
Speaker 2: What about the fifth?

00:24:51
Speaker 3: The fifth? So the fifth is a long part three, and it's one of the more unusual greens that I've built. And that's why I thought, well, maybe maybe he is actually asking about that. So it's like a two hundred and twenty yard Part three. If you're playing all the way back the middle ties are up pretty far. There's there's a bunker right in front of it, like right smack at the front of the green, and a shoulder on the left fairway fairway coming in from the left, and a shoulder that could like kind of kick you into the green and then running along the left side of the green and it runs away. Yeah, the green. The front of the green is high, the front behind the bunker is high, and then it drops into a swale. But it's not quite like a bea ritz. It comes up a little in the back, but not really. Most of it just kind of runs to the back. So when they put the pin in the front behind the bunker, you have to either be able to hit a shot that carries two hundred yards and lands fairly soft because you've only got about forty feet forty fifty feet to land it before it goes off the tier to the back of the green, or you can try to play it to the left and leave yourself kind of pin high. Nobody ever thinks about that shot. I mean, I've been watching people play it for years. They they you know, they hit a forewood. It lands near the pin and it goes all the way to the back of the green and they're like, that's unfair. There's no way I could ever hit this close. I'm like, no, you probably can't hit it close, but you could have hit it to about thirty feet if you'd just hit the right distance over there. And they never thought about that.

00:26:33
Speaker 1: And the flip side of it is any backpin is you actually only have to hit it to the front of the green. It didn't have it just run back there, and it's a much shorter shot than the yardage.

00:26:45
Speaker 2: So it's a give and take, yes.

00:26:48
Speaker 3: And you know, and even if you're back there, it's just an uphill. It's just a big uphill pot. It's not like it's an impossible pot to get it back if you if you can't hold it, you know, the people people aren't used to I mean, that's a shot that I don't put in many golf courses, but you know, I I'll try to do that every once in a while and put in at least one shot that. Okay, if the pins here, you have to be really good to think that you're gonna pull this off. You know, the average person cannot do that, and I know they can't. I gave them some way to play the hole and still make three. But to try to make two there without making a fifty foot pot, you have to hit the kind of shot that only single digit handicappers can play. And sometimes single digit handicappers are the most bummed out about it because they think they hit it perfect, but they you know, they carried it just a little too deep there, and it didn't stop fast enough and it winds up all the way in the back of the green.

00:27:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:27:56
Speaker 1: How does drainage This is something I wanted to talk about earlier with a couple with one example in the book, How does drainage force you to change ideas?

00:28:07
Speaker 2: And that's from Hunter Golfer.

00:28:13
Speaker 3: Well, really, you know, you should never come up with an idea that makes it really difficult to make the drainage work, Like you know, putting a green in a valley with all that, with a bunch of drainage coming at it, so you have to shape the hell out of it to keep the drainage from running onto the green. You know, why would you Why wouldn't you just put the green at the top instead and save yourself the trouble again. In sand, you don't have to worry about that, But in clay, it's like, don't put the green right at the base of a hill. That's that's going to be a problem. Stay away from doing that, put you know, tack it into the hill, someway, or you keep it twenty feet away from the hill so there's some place for the drainage to go. You know, the design should be a golf course. Architects should be thinking about that right when they're doing the layout, instead of getting to the point of, Okay, now I've got the green here, and I've got some drainage issues, and what do I do about it? But you know a lot of golf course architects they think about golf first, and then it's like, how do we solve this drainage issue? And you know, and you can, but does it really work as well as you want it to? Usually not, So, you know, to me, the big thing is just don't stick yourself in those positions as much as you can avoid it, and you could. You know, it's rare to be in a position where you just can't avoid it.

00:29:50
Speaker 1: At the Legends, you talked about using a burn that you created obviously that helped with drainage, but then also served as a strategic and an ode to Scottish golf already. I feel like our ditches wildly underrated on golf courses.

00:30:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like you can't do that anymore. It's like you know, people, I think most people look at it as like, uh, it's too utilitarian, and you know, it's it just it isn't pretty and you know it's the it's the cheap way out. So you should never do that. You should never just dig a ditch to solve a drainage problem and let it look like a ditch when you're done. You should you should, you know, make it a nice swale and have you know, and have short grass rolling down into it on one side or something. Or you should bury it all underground and you know, have miles of underground pipe. I mean miles of underground pipe. Are just ditches that are covered off after the fact, and that's you know, that's the standard. Now make it go, make it go away visually. And yet Oakmont still has all those drainage ditches. They're real features of the golf course. Garden City has some, they're not as deep and nasty but they're there. You know, quite a few of the old you know, golf course is built before nineteen twenty. There's a lot of that kind of stuff still out there. And you know, it's it's kind of got nice, rugged grass growing on it now and you don't notice it. It kind of looks like it was there. It wasn't there. It was the most utilitarian way to build a golf course, and it's just evolved into something that looks okay now so people don't think twice about it.

00:31:40
Speaker 1: A few years ago, I know, there was like a massive water main break or something that right next to LACC and it just sent gallons of water into LACC, and one of their members sent me videos all the barancas just filled up with water and just moved it all off the property. Yeah, and it's like to me, it just seems like one of the most easy ways if you've got to place the floods to get water off the place, as long as it's got somewhere to go.

00:32:15
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, you that that example from the legends. The reason it worked was the whole site was pretty flat, but one corner of it was lower and it was a development and there was a there was a pond and the development that the low you know they had they had turned a ditch into a pond, saw all the water from the parking lots and everything would go there. But that water was enough lower than where we were building that I could kind of drain everything to that and make it work. And there are restrictions on doing that in different places. Like you know, in theory, the rule of thumb for any new development is that you can't at when you build something new, to run off from the property onto the neighbors. Property can't be any faster than it is now. That's why you see like a shopping mall, you see all those like dirt bathtubs by the parking lot at the edge. That's to stop all the water running off the parking lot and across the street and flooding what it's ever across the street, it's like it goes in there and there's one big pipe in there that size to let the water trickle out the same as it used to off that site. So golf courses do have some restriction there. But when you're working in someplace like Myrtle Beach that everything's flat and low, you know, generally the rules all favor or just getting drainage off the property into the big you know, huge swaps tidal marsh areas that you know, it's not a problem.

00:33:54
Speaker 1: Anymore, all right, level neb I think Nebraska maybe ask thoughts on enlarging greens past sprinkler heads.

00:34:16
Speaker 3: Well, the simple thing is move the sprinkler head if you can. And most of them, you know, sprinkler heads are you know, the irrigation systems designed so that there's supposedly perfect spacing. You know, all the heads are sixty or seventy feet apart, and they overlap perfectly so that every square foot of the green gets watered the same. It doesn't really work. You know, usually there are a lot of greens that because of the shape of the green and the size of it, that doesn't really work that well. And they've stretched so that the spacing is not perfect. And you know, and then you know when you go to the when you go to the best golf courses, it's like they don't they they never used the sprinkler system on the green anyway. They only handwater the greens if they can afford it. You know, it's like they never they use this. They just turn on the sprinkler system for the fairways, but on the greens, they they barely use it on automatic. They do it all manually so they won't overwater. So that sprinkler head be on space five feet further out makes no difference at all. Sometimes. Now, we did build Old McDonald has some huge greens and there was no way that we could build you know, that we could that we could water the whole green. You know, the green was one hundred feet from left to right and one hundred feet deep, so space and sprinkler heads at seventy feet wasn't going to cut it, and so we did build. You know, have there's like six or eight greens there with sprinkler heads in the green, and you know there's a local role if you're if the sprinkler had well, some of them are like tiny little heads with astro turf on top of them, so you don't even see that they're there. But if there's a big head that's ten feet inside the green, you use the local role that if that's in your line, you you move it. It doesn't really come into play very often, but most of the time you can get away with moving the sprinkler head five or ten feet to get it outside where you want the green to be and it'll be all right. So you have to have really big greens for it to really be a problem.

00:36:28
Speaker 1: All right, last last question Mike from Micah Pouschelle, And I know you don't like favorite, so I'm changing this. What's your favorite Scottish par three, four and five?

00:36:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, those are the kind of questions I don't like because there's.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: We're gonna say that you have in your backyards.

00:36:52
Speaker 3: Okay, I mean.

00:37:00
Speaker 1: And it could be this answer could change depending on the day of the week it is.

00:37:04
Speaker 3: It does. Yeah, So I mean, what's the best part three in Scotland? The radan is there, the Eden is there, the postage stamp is there. Those are all pretty good. Hard to argue with any of those. You know. One of my favorite holes in Scotland, and I won't claim it to be the best, is that first part three at Cruden Bay, where you're like right by the the stream that runs out to the sea, and there's this little fishing village there over to the left that you could take a foot bridge across if you feel like going to get fish and chips or a soda or something. Before eat tee off. You can just take the bridge over there and walk back, and you know, it's just a beautiful hall, all isolated by dunes from everything else. There's big dunes all the way to the right of it, so it's just it looks like just one golf hole next to the town at the edge of the world. It's such a unique setting to me that that the very first time I saw that, I just fell in love with it. And I wouldn't say it's one of the best holes there. It's not even one of the best holes at Cruden Bay, but I love it. It's, you know, so a favorite. That's the one that comes to mind Part four, the pit hole at North Barrack where you have to hit your approach shot over the little stone wall next to the green. You know, we've we've done a couple of courses that have stone walls on him that we tried to use them as futures of play, but not we did. We haven't copied that hole yet, even though that hole is a way better use of the stone wall than the ones I've done. You know, it's just it's so good because the whole kind of plays up the line of the wall. So the more confident you are to play left off the tee and close to the wall, the easier it is to hit the second shot over the wall. You know, if you hit it on the left side of the fairway, it's just like you know, you're playing, you're playing from one side of the road to a green one hundred yards away on the other side of the road along the road. You know, it's not hard at all to not hit it in the road. But if you've play you know, if you've bailed away from the wall off the tee way right now, you're coming not straight across the wall at it, but enough that you're anything short is going to hit the wall and rebound at you. And it's you know, it's only three feet high. I mean, it's it's it's so minor, really, but it has such a psychological impact. And of course it's a it was there. It was it was just part of the land when they built the golf course and they're like, yeah, let's just put a green on the other side of this thing, like the simplest thing in the world for them to do, and nothing else like it. So that's always been one of my favorite holes in golf Part five. I have to think harder about par fives. There's not I mean there's not a lot of par fives in Scotland. Most courses only have one or two or three. Trying to think if there's one that's really not that people don't ever talk about that I really love And nothing is immediately coming to mind, just like you know, nothing's coming to mind that's worth discussing more than the fourteenth at Saint Andrew's with hell Bunker, where you're pretty much better off playing over into the other fairly than trying to then trying to go straight at it like most people do. Or are the sixth at Carnoustie or or the ninth of the seventeenth at Mirrfield, they're both terrific. Hoalle one of those?

00:41:03
Speaker 2: That's good.

00:41:05
Speaker 1: So you we've talked a lot about your book. Where where can people get your book?

00:41:11
Speaker 3: Well, it is a limited edition. I only printed fifteen hundred copies and actually this is the one time ever when they do when they print books, it's like you know you the printing machine goes prints fifty or one hundred pages every minute, so they never get the exact right number. They turn it off and you know, it comes out somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred copies. We actually got a few less than fifteen hundred copies for the first time ever. But it is a limited edition, and it's a very expensive book. It costs like three hundred and fifty dollars retail, so apologies for that, but you know, that's what you pay to a great golf course. So hopefully some people can justify. You know, it's not like a typical book. There's a lot more insight information about what golf course architects actually do in this book then I think most of any other book that's been written. So hopefully it's worth the money. And it's large, and it's huge. Yeah, it's I mean, there's a coffee table book that's the size of some people's coffee tables. My son rasked me to no end. He's like, I didn't even have a table in my apartment big enough for this.

00:42:31
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna lie.

00:42:32
Speaker 1: I had to I had to go to different reading places than normal for.

00:42:36
Speaker 3: The dining room table. So but uh, you know, I've sold about a thousand of them pre selld and to friends and stuff, so so there's still there's still some available, and it's you can only buy it from me on my website, actually two websites, either the Renaissance Golf website or mynew Dope golf dot com website that's still kind of a work in progress, but getting there, and you know, eventually that website will have, like I'm trying to round up everything I've ever written, all the old magazine articles from twenty to thirty years ago, and the things that I've written for yardage books, and the things that I've written for forwards for other people's books. It's quite a project, and it's still not quite it's not all there yet, but in the next year it all be there.

00:43:28
Speaker 1: Websites aren't fun, A lot of work, something to do during a pandemic. All right, Thanks Tom, and we'll talk soon, all right, Andy,