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 in a brid egg.
Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, fridagg Egg, Frida egg bride egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson. Today. I am very excited about this podcast. We have a comprehensive look at Oakmont Country Club. I was thrilled to be joined by their consulting golf architect who completed a historical renovation of Oakmont,
Gil Hants. Gil joined for the first thirty minutes of this podcast to talk about the project and uh, kind of the new look Oakmon and what we can expect.
Uh.
And then on the on the the second guest is Oakmont's superintendent. They're head of agronomy, Mike McCormick. So quite the uh the crew. Mike talks about the golf course, the agronomy obviously that's going to be a big talking point as always with Oakmont, is the conditions, the world class maintenance, the you know, really they have an identity of being the toughest golf course in the world, and
they do everything to to feed into that identity. It's an interesting aspect of Oakmont, right, is like when I talk to you like golf courses or greens committees, one of the things I always stress is like finding your identity so often in the country club or the golf really and across the play across the spectrum the golf
course space. What happens is golf courses look at maybe the most most famous course in town, or you know, if it's in the public sphere, like the public course down the road, and they look at that golf course as, hey, let's base our let's try and do what they're doing. They try and mimic rather than finding their own core identity. One of the things I you know, I would say I was not like super excited to see Oakmont because of the identity of heart, but I really love the
golf course. And one of the things I've thought about since seeing the golf course was, this is what the identity of the golf course was from the founding, and it's got one of the strongest identities in all of the world of golf like Oakmont knows, unapologetically knows who it is, and Oakmont does everything to amplify their individual identity, which is challenging, and I find that actually quite refreshing when you take a step back and think about it.
I think that's why it's really hard to find people that dislike Oakmont, even though it is one of the hardest golf courses in the world, is because it is so true to itself. And I think that's like probably a you know, when you think about your favorite golf courses you've ever played, the likelihood of it being really clear, like intentional with its own identity as a course as a place is probably a correlation there. It's probably a strong correlation value. So anyways, this was a fun podcast
to put together. I will be at Oakmont all week. This kind of kicks off our US Open coverage. We will have our preview podcasts. We'll probably talk a little bit about the golf course there too. Obviously always a huge story with the US Open since they rotate courses and go to the greatest American venues. So we will have our preview episode which will drop on Sunday morning leading into the US Open week well of this one.
Garrett Morrison on Designing Golf is also his podcast Designing Golf is also prepping a comprehensive podcast about Oakmont, so that will also be airing and worth your time. Anything Garrett does is always worth your time, So I'm excited. I haven't listened to that, but I'm very excited about that. So if you listen to this and what's your appetite and you say I want more, I've got a couple
of good options for you. Our Oakmont video on YouTube, which thank you to everybody who's gone watched that and shared it. We're really proud of our work putting that together. That was a lot of the work. It was done by a lot of people, but a lot of the work was done by Cameron Hurtis are great producer, and yeah we are. We are really excited for this major and and can't wait to get there. And then the
other thing to check out is Garrett's Oakmont piece. He'll also have a written course profile on our website, Thefrida egg dot com to check out. That will be the back half of this week. So lots of stuff on Oakmont coming from us, and this will be kind of the the kickoff of that. But big thanks to Gil and Mike for for taking time out of their very busy schedules. Both of them are very busy right now. Also, before we get to Gil, a big thanks to our partner, Toro.
This episode is brought to you by Toro, the only brand with a full line of equipment and irrigation products to keep your golf course in top condition. Toro is serious about research and develop and they're also out there listening to superintendents so they can develop products that help you solve your biggest challenges. And when it comes to local service and support, their distributor network is second to none. See how Toro is always solving problems and always evolving
at Toro dot com. All right, let's get to Gil. All right, Gil, You've worked at a number of the world's best courses, a lot of what people would consider some of the best US open venues. What makes Oakmont unique?
You know, I've said Oakmont was born and from day one has been unapologetically difficult. I mean they set out right from the get go. Henry Phone said we're going to build something that's going to be very, very challenging, and I think it's maintained that all the way through its existence, so it has been unapologet cleate challenging. And you know, they you know, the old mantra, they set it up less extreme for the US Open than they do for the membership is sometimes not that far off.
But I think Oakmond has has always had that ability to set itself as one of the more difficult tests in golf.
And I think that, you know, the US Open setups.
Have evolved over a long period of time, but when the US Open setup was what we refer to as the old US Open setup, I think Oakmont was the perfect test.
Yeah, I mean that that old setup that you reference is if you look at kind of old photos of past US Opens at Oakmont, sayre pre ninety four, that really thick, rough and you know, kind of narrow fairways. And I'm curious after your work there. You know, there are obviously people can sit and it's hard to put every golf course in a box, but there are three schools of golf architecture penal, strategic, and heroic. Today as it stands, which school would you put Oakmon in?
Well, Oakmon still has really thick, rough and really narrow fairways, even after we finished our work, but I think I think everybody would normally relate Oakmont to the penal school of architecture. You know, basically put up obstacles in front of you and you just need to overcome them. I think in our study of the history and the evolution of that golf course, it was significantly more strategic in
its earlier days. And you know, there were certainly penal aspects to it, but there were certain holes that we've restored that had just amazing sort of choices to make off of the tea. And I also believe that one of the things that is really underreported and under discussed as it relates to Oakmon is the topography and the requirements to place your ball to a proper side of a fairway in order to keep your in the fairway
and utilize the slopes, et cetera. So I think the phones has always use those slopes as a critical part of the design. And while it looked like it was bunker bunker bunker everywhere, and so that would make you think it was more penal, the strategy was actually more involved in Okay, how do you hit your ball in the fairway when you get it there? And where does it ultimately wind up in?
What position does that put you in?
Yeah, and it's shaped also with that topography, like being able to hit a ball that counters, you know, with spin, counter some of the slope because you know the gravity out there. You talked about the property being under talked about what stands out about the property and how the golf course uses the property.
Yeah, you know now that the trees are gone, and when you stand up there at the clubhouse and you look across, you realize what the scale of the landscape is massive, and the scale of the features are large, right, The greens are big, the fairways are numerous, so they sorry, the bunkers are numerous, so they're everywhere. The scale of
the topography is pretty pretty bold as well. So now you've got this the ability to look across that landscape and see what they saw and how they took the scale of the features and the scale of the property and married it into ultimately what is a pretty strong landscape. I mean, you get the holes, the upper parts of one and nine and eleven and ten all sort of feel when you're in the clubhouse looking out, you feel
sort of flatish and plateau up there. But you know as they drop away one as nine climbs, as ten drops, as eleven climbs, and certainly twelve. As it drops, there's a lot of topography going on. And then you look across the turnpike and you can see how tilted, you know, the elevation change from three green down to seven green is dramatic.
It's funny. David. Before I played the golf course, we interviewed David Moore and this was my first visit, and he talked about how phones really wanted it to be a links course, and I was kind of like, you know, I've never heard any reference to links course at Oakmont, and like, that's kind of crazy just because of the nat I think it's because of the nature of like
how America describes Oakmont. But then you go out there, and I was also fresh off like ten days in Scotland, and you go out there and you look once you get out there and really look at the holes and the way they kind of drape over the land and the minimal you know, earth movement, but the way that I I was stunned at how naturally so many of the golf holes sit on that property, because you know, if you think about building it in the early nineteen hundreds,
it wasn't really a time where you could alter land.
Yeah, and I think the way they drape over the land escape is a great description.
I love that.
I mean that sounds perfect because it's absolutely true. And when you start to peel back some of the layers of the design, like the tenth hole. Obviously the green runs away and also runs hard to the left. In their design the opening to the front right of the green, you're supposed to land your ball short and let it feed on and in sub in various renovations, after the phones is left that was blocked off by some put a bunker in there, So we remove that now and
slid that back over its original position. So now you can actually utilize the land You can use the landforms to feed balls in the same thing it happened on number one where a bunker had been drug across the approach. So they utilize the landscape and understood that frequently, especially before irrigation. And you've got that hard Pittsburgh dirt, you know, balls are going to have to bounce and run and
then feed their ways into these greens. And now that linksy characteristic has been restored to the golf course.
I think that's one one of the neat things. Obviously with ten and one, you know, it's you don't this is not something that normally is in play, but like US Open, you start on ten and one and both of those holes having that kind of welcome to Oakmont. I Jeff Ogilvie in our video that we did on Oakmont described it as like you're playing you're fighting against gravity, you know, and that that that one in ten, those
second shots you know, are similar. They're obviously very spread out, but similar in the sense of like right out of the gate, your face with kind of gravity. And if anything, I think the second shot on ten might be harder than one because you're gonna be hitting from a downslope, you know, you're hitting from a severe lie, and on one you at least have the opportunity to be like, oh, I can stay up on top and have a flat lie into the screen that's screaming away.
Yeah, it's it's interesting, you know, the word gravity. And one of my favorite descriptions of oak was, you know, the late great Jim Finnigan I think it was the eighty three wrote about the green speeds and we're at Oakmont where the laws of friction were held in temporary suspension. It was, you know, just that's a great way to describe, you know, the green speeds.
And I think so you've got gravity and friction and everything sort of those surfaces being so slippery working against you. It's you're right, it's for the first time you step on that golf course and you look out over that landscape and then playing those you starting on one of those two holes, it's got to be a bit of a shock to the system.
You talked a little bit earlier about you know, holes with great choices. Now with with some of the features you've put back, what's a what's a great example of one of those whole of a whole that presents a few different choices.
Now, yeah, I think number seven is the one that probably most people will will look at, and I think probably the one we're most proud of as a Really it's a significant sort of strategy changes from a T shot. So we've restored the cross bunker about anywhere from two ninety to three ten to carry it uphill and kid
could be into the wind. So I mean it's a choice you have to make as a tour player to go over that, and then that gives you the opportunity to be up at the elevated portion of the fairway seeing the green complex, perfect angle in the way that green has set up, perfect angle into the green, probably with a shorter.
Iron in your hand.
Or then we restored you thirty five forty yards of fairway to the right side of that cross bunker, so now you can play out to the right. Now the ground is tilting and moving further to the right, so you've got to control your shape as we talked about. But when you're down there, you're at a lower elevation. The fairway bunkers make the second shot blind, and you've got that green side bunker which is in your way.
So it's it'll be interesting. I think we worked hard to try and figure out with the club and with the usgas. So what's that carry number is? That doesn't make it? You know, Rory and Bryson are probably not going to think twice about it, but you know what is that the average guy out there, can they get up and over that? And so it'll be it'll be a challenge if the wind doesn't come up. I think
most players will be able to do it. But it's I think it gives a lot of different choices and obviously the rewards are fairly significant.
We talk obviously a ton about like when you talk about distance, the distance gap, and I hadn't thought about this until you just brought this up. The distance gap in like an average golfer to a high level golfer. When you talk about golf design, there actually is like a widening golf. It feels like in the pro game of carry gap, like where you know, a bunker you're talking about for Bryson or Rory is then becomes completely irrelevant for like a lot of the rest of the field.
Right, It's very true. Yeah, you have to kind of balance. You know, I don't want to get into Frisco, but that was a lot of the conversation at Frisco. You know, setting up a building a modern golf course for major championship is how do you regulate between those guys and the rest of the field. And you're just not constantly hammering the rest of the fielding giving them a free pass. But then if you're constantly hammering those guys, then the
rest of the field gets a free pass. So you've got to mix it up in certain areas, and I think we're hopeful we got the yardage just about right where it allows every player to have at least be able to think about that question.
You guys, when you do restoration historical renovation work, I think that's your word, historical renovation work, you typically try and find an era or a year to go back to. At Oakmont, where did you, guys land with that? How was the exercise of figuring out what to put back and what to model the golf course after.
So we looked at it and we tried to figure out, all, right, the period when the phoneses were involved, whether it's HC or William would go win from nineteen oh three to nineteen forty seven, so you had forty four years of basically constant change and evolution, but the family was involved
in that. So we looked at nineteen oh three to nineteen forty seven and we started to think, well, there's just no way to pick like a certain timeframe, like if you're dealing with a wingfoot or you know, Tillinghast was there to start. He came back and made modifications for the twenty nine US Open, and then that was pretty much it. So you've got you know, narrow windows George Thomas at LCC, et cetera, et cetera. Here you got forty four years of history with the original architects
being involved. Probably Piner's Number two would be the only place where you'd have something somewhat similar or maybe national
with McDonald. But you get to a place where we started to go, listen, we it might be best for us to figure out an eclectic eighteen and look at the first hole and say, in our opinion from a membership standpoint and also from a US open standpoint, the best version of the first so I'm just going to make updates because I don't remember what version it was, but it comes from the nineteen thirty seven aerial photograph, and the best version of the second hole came from
the nineteen twenty seven plan, and on and on and on. So now you basically have the greatest hits or an eclectic eighteen of Pokemon. But the constant is the Phones family's involvement. Anything after forty seven we really didn't consider.
So we took that to the.
Membership, which is kind of an out there concept, and they embraced it. They really liked it, and we'll see. I mean, hopefully we were able to select the greatest hits versions of each hole that will provide a very comprehensive test in two weeks.
Do you remember, by chance, offhand what the earliest hole and the latest hole were.
I don't, but I do remember that a lot of the imagery for the greens came from very early on, early beans. And when we looked at the way that the tabletop nature of the greens and the putting surfaces and what they had evolved into kind of curled up on the edges from bunker sand and top dressing the imagery and really the only two greens that moved in that forty four year period were eight and sixteen, so
you had basically consistency across the property. The only real consistent factor was for the green locations and the green pads themselves. So you looked at how can we take those back? And so the earliest images showed us the green complexes in great detail. I think the latest would have been the late thirties.
What we're on the greens now? What are the kind of the new dynamics people should expect from Oakmont's greens? This year, and you know kind of where where did your work center on the greens on the edges.
We didn't rebuild the greens. We basically expanded green and try to push them out into areas where they originally the footprint originally was. And then we took down all of the evolution the sand build up around the bunker edges,
and now the greens flow right into the bunkers. So if you used to be the only sort of respite as it related to the putting surfaces was around the edges because balls would feedback in, and now everything if the gravity and if the slope of the green is sloping towards the bunkers, the ball will go towards the bunkers. Whether it will get in or hang up in the fringe, I don't know. But now the edges are back in play.
It's a lot of the same concept we talked about as Southern hills, where you had to start to really respect and almost fear of the edges of the greens, whereas before they were your comfort zone to play balls into it. So I think seeing the way the greens
relate with the surrounds is very very different. And then also the expanded areas allowed us some opportunity to create new hole locations because by going into those areas, we weren't really touching areas where the Oakmont membership had ever putted before because it was rough or it was bunker edge, and so we could flatten those areas and get them to a place where and frequently they flattened out on their own because the tie in from the green slope into the bunker edge was And so we've now I
think you're going to see some whole locations I would say on average, and I don't know where they are, but you know, a lot of the conversations with the USGA, I think probably two new whole locations per green for during the four championship rounds. So I think they're going to look at a lot of that new flexibility and use it.
Are there a couple new sections of particular greens that you are most fond of?
I think back left on two, I mean two was always the hardest to find whole locations. You know, if you looked at the pins sheets over the US opens, they were all clustered. You know, there was maybe one far back right and then three down on the sort of middle right and that was it, and now they've got the opportunity to get several up on the upper location if they want upper left and upper right, So I think that'll be Those will be great from a
practical standpoint. Being a short part four, I think it'll be interesting to see how players approach some of those whole locations, whether they try and get it closer for some trying to stay back for others. I think that the most fearsome one would be front left on three. There used to be a bunker sort of holding up that whole edge, and now that bunker has been moved off to the side, and so there's basically a false front in front of that, and it's just there's nothing
behind it because the elevation change in the skyline. So I think, you know, when I've been there and that whole location has been there, it's like WHOA, that's going to be really really interesting and challenging.
And then the biggest change will be thirteen Green.
All the different whole locations they're available there, and that really interesting kind of valley and two ridges that the phones is put in that green, So if you happen to get front right, you're putting to back right. You can actually use that to kind of kick and swing your ball up through there. I mean, if players of that class will probably not miss it that far. But I'm hoping they figure out how to use that versus thinking about chipping it back there, because it works, but
it takes a lot of creativity. Somebody like Jeff Ogilby would figure it out and probably just absolutely love it.
Yeah, they'll they'll have to utilize their their time in the practice rounds. You know, they gotta they gotta hit some big platsa around and swinging around there. With the twenty twenty one USAM, one of the big stories was players playing down alternate fairways on a couple holes. I know this was not the impetus for the work, but I'm sure that it it became one of the one
of the talking points. What what kind of changes and alterations did you guys make to turn that Besides just twenty five times has made people on property as the US maybe more than twenty five, twenty five might be small exactly.
Well, I think that that's definitely a factor.
I think there are two factors that can play into the psychology of the event. We'll talk about what we did on the golf course, but I think the amount of gallery and hitting balls over people's heads. But also I think tour players are a little bit more cognizant of hitting balls into adjoining fairies when they're gonna have to see the guy in the in the in the locker room afterwards if they happen to buz somebody's tower. I don't think the kids are that thoughtful about it.
But I think the big things, I mean, the biggest thing architecturally or maintenance is the rough, right. I mean the rough for the US Amateur was like what they keep it for the members, like two and a quarter. So if the guys went for alternate fairways then they missed and they were in the rough, it didn't matter as much. I think the players with you know, four to five I venture rough are gonna think twice about
their misses if they can't hould the fairway. So I think the rough will be a big factor as well. The one that seemed to be we could I mean, players played from one down nine and we couldn't quite figure out why they would even think about doing that. But I don't really think that's going to be an issue. The ones we're ten and eleven the way those two played,
and so on players playing from ten down eleven. We shortened the start of the fairway on eleven, so you know, there's that big hill, so they'd be landing on that hill and there's no way, I mean asson, unless it's sopping wet, there's no way the ball will stop on that hill.
It will run through into the rough.
So I don't know why anybody would go that way now, because I don't see how they would stop it. And if they could try and hit the top of eleven fairway, then why wouldn't you try and hit ten fairway? And then going from eleven up ten, I think that we added a back tea so significantly further back for them to try and make that carry. It's like two hundred
and eighty yards uphill to the actual tenth fairway. And then we expanded the fairway on eleven over and did some earthwork to kind of hold up that side so balls aren't feeding towards the ditch. So I think eleven fairway, while it's still challenging, is a little bit easier to hit. So from both of those perspectives, and you play eleven if you hit eleven fairway, you've got a wedge into
the green. So we think combination of backtea, altering, grassing lines and then the rough will be the big factors.
If you were a golf fan and you were out watching the US Open, what would be a couple holes that you'd post up on to watch and why?
Yeah, I think two just because of short part four. I think it's really interesting one to watch the players. We've created some different landing areas now, so there's a little bit more width for them to play into, and I think that green has got enough teeth that it's interesting all the way through through the putting. I'm going to be curious to watch seven t shop, but I don't know that that's a great vantage point for anybody to watch golf from. But I'll be curious to see
how that plays out. I think thirteen is going to be phenomenal. I think watching them play, you know, it's always fun to watch a par three, and then I think up seventeen up around eighteen t where you can watch them play seventeen and then look down eighteen. I think would also be a really good vantage point to watch them all.
Right, Gil, thank you for making a little bit of time during your busy schedule and congrats on another renovation project that will be in the spotlight. We look forward to catching up with you soon.
Thanks and can I can I?
Since this is mostly for golf architecture nerds, Kevin Murphy, who works in our office design partner did amazing work with us, and then Kai Golby and Matt Smallwood where our guys on site, and they were not only super talented but really really fun to work with. And so
I think we had a great team out there. Jim and I both appreciate all that those guys contributed, and Mike McCormick and his team and totally you know, yeah, I get to do the interviews and talk, but I mean there was an amazing team to pull together and got this thing done.
I think that might be one of the underappreciated aspects of all these projects is just how important all the team members are along along with you know, the superstars like yourself and Tom and Bill and Ben and you know David and all the teams are are integral.
Yeah, And it was it was an interesting project because it was we had the front nine closed and we did the front nine greens in the in the spring, and then they opened the entire golf course for the summer and we worked on fairway, bunkers and teas while they were playing golf. And then they closed the back nine so we could do the back nine greens in the fall.
So it was live fire going on out there while.
You're working, and it was it was what worked for Oakmont, and it ultimately worked out great from a pacing standpoint and a timing standpoint, but it wasn't the easiest or almost the way you would normally move through a project. So those guys had to deal with, you know, some some hiccups, but they did great work. They really didn't. Yeah,
and you're right. It's that's why I figured. I always think I'm gonna want weave them into the story, and then we get talking about other things, and then I forget and then so thank you for giving me the opportunity to take take what.
Is now a few minutes.
You piqued my interest. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna ask another question, because you guys did it in two phases.
Was there anything that happened over the course of the year that that might have changed your thinking and led to a whole being tweaked a little bit in the time that you had, because I feel like whenever you I'm a big procrastinator, and if I pushed something off, it inevitably like changes it a little bit with the time because I just am thinking a little bit differently when I finally come to the point where I have to make a decision, I don't.
Think so because you know, all the time in the master plan, you know that we we basically did all the research and all the time and implementation. I mean, were there little tweaks that happened here and there, or some things that we uncovered, like that we found it, we've a bunker line, you know, we found old sand and we just chased it. Yeah, stuff like that happened all the time. The club put together a really cool video of about the whole thing, and it's funny to
watch the process. I mean literally like working with Frozen Sod in March, I had a full beard and we're like out there it's snowing and we're shoveling in the snow, and then you see the pictures from the summer where and then you know, wrapping up in the fall. It was It was a cool timeline because I generally stayed in one of the cottages up there by the clubhouse, and to mark a year. I know it wasn't a full calendar year. And this is going to sound I mean,
you'll appreciate this. To mark almost a full year of literally waking up and walking out at Oakmand watching this unrise in certain places and watch the weather change, and then kind of wrapping it up right before Halloween and seeing the lead, you know, the very few leaves, the leaves around the around the clubhouse change. It was a cool way to market a year. I mean to just
kind of see that golf course. If there was a time lapse, it would have been really neat, but it was a different It was a slow motion time lapse from season to season to season.
It's funny when when I look back through like photos on my phone and yours is probably like way way crazier than mine. Like you just see like historical markers of time based around like golf courses. It's like, oh, yeah, that's like when I was there a couple times or there.
You know, we just made a site visit to a really cool site that we're hopefully going to build a golf course on I think we will and Ben Hillard and I were looking at it was like when was the last time we're here? It was like, Okay, pull the phone out and find that it was like, oh my god, it was like eighteen months ago. It felt like it was six months ago. So yeah, it's definitely a way to mark time.
All right, Gil, thank you again, and we'll look forward to this year's US Open and uh all of your new golf courses that are coming along online. Very cool time to get to see a lot of your new work.
Thanks, come alive.
So thanks Gil.
Always good to be with you. Thanks cheers.
All right, big thanks to Gil again. This This was recorded on a Sunday morning, so he made he made some time, uh to to get that done for us and uh and ahead of the US Open, so big thanks to him. He was he was on a dozer this morning. So Sunday morning morning dozer session that you know that might be some semblance of of of church for for a lot of people in the golf course architecture industry. Before we get to Mike here, this episode is brought to you by Toro. Big thanks to them.
One of our longest running partners, and I really appreciate them renewing another Superintendent series. Mike is obviously a superstar Superintendent, but this episode is sponsored by Toro. Did you know Toro has a full line of work vehicles. Whether you're hauling materials, towing equipment, or shuttling VIPs, Toro has a vehicle for just about any need. Their Workman series is a go to for power and payload capacity, and the Vista series is perfect for guest transportation with a super
comfortable ride. Plus, Toro has tons of options to customize your work vehicle, including all electric models, so check them out at Toro dot com. All right, let's get to Mike McCormick. All right, So I was reading up on your life in UH I found it. I was obviously spent a lot, a lot of time on the grounds at Oakmont, But one of the things I love to see was that you're a You're an active musician, You've
been in bands. Are you still playing music and and how does that work with your your your life at Oakmont?
Yeah, so yes, still play music. I started playing piano when I was six years old, so my parents kind of like brought me up on you know, the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen and stuff like that, and I took piano lessons from town. I was six all the way through high school, you know, up to I guess I was eighteen years old, and I just loved it. And the guy who taught me piano, I actually played in a piano bar behind Fenway Park on Lansdown Street. So
I didn't learn like classical music. I learned like rock and roll, billy Joel Elton, John Beatles, stuff like that. Growing up, and as soon as I got into college, I played in classic rock blues bands. When I graduated from UMass moved to Pittsburgh, I played in a full time blues band here for a while, and then the whole like playing gigs till two in the morning and work, waking up at you know, four in the morning two hours later. It was starting to catch up with me. So stop doing age.
What age was that at.
Like probably twenty two, give or take, and so kind of ever since, like I've always played music myself at home. I'll get home from work and it's it's my release, Like you know, I kind of like when I'm playing music, I played piano, I play guitar. I mess around on a few other instruments, but like when I'm doing that, like I'm not really thinking about any anything else. So it's a it's an incredible like mental thing for me.
And to this day, I play at an open stage across the river every couple weeks in the off season, and it's with the same guys that have played in the full time band with, So we don't practice. We kind of just text each other, Hey, let's play this song, this song, this song, and we get up there and wing it and sometimes it's it's really good, and sometimes it's it's not so good, but it's certainly fun every time.
What kind of music? What are this? What are the some of the favorites on the set list.
I'm a big like Almond Brothers, Leonard Skinner type guy, Tom Petty, I mean goes list goes on and on, like I like everything from classic rock to The Grateful Dead to Fish to I could you know, like rap music. I mean I listen to everything. If you if you looked at by a Spotify playlist, you would probably say, like, you know, what's what's wrong with this guy? Well?
You know I I I kind of agree. I like very music. Agnostic like I just I can hop from anything, like I can enjoy some country music, I can enjoy rap music. I listened to classic rock, I listened to alt rock, like you know, the main one that I've never gotten into is like heavy metal.
But for the most would be the same.
Like I generally go across genres a lot, and I think about it a lot. It's like, it's kind of it's a variety. Variety is the spice of life. I just saw that there's an article on Scratch about like how all part three should be short, and yeah, it's like, well, that wouldn't be very fun because be literally the same every everything would be the same. Like you know, you're constraining you know, the artist of work of what can be something, which I found that to be a humorous thing.
I think about golf a lot when I think about business and making business decisions. Yeah, I'm wondering do you think about music at all with how it relates to your profession.
That's a great question. I think a lot of what we do is golf course superintendents. A lot of it is, you know, we develop a game plan, we try to stick to it. But there's all these uncontrollable variables, right, that pop up, mainly being the weather. Right, So especially a year like this, when we're approaching a championship, you put this game plan together and almost immediately like you
have to throw that out the window. So I would I would think about it as like, you know, it's a lot like improvisation in music, right, where like you're playing in a blues band and you know different people who start doing different things. You have to adapt all the time, and you got to listen to what's going on and and like be really like cognizant of your surroundings. So I think in that way, it's, uh, it is certainly similar.
Yeah, I think the improvisation is an interesting topic because obviously, like great, so retain the core of the song yep, right, like there you it's not a full on departure from what you've been listening to for the last three minutes. It retains like the fundamental principles, but allows for adaptation of those ideas and right, I think, like with with turf, right, you have to be founded in certain principles. For you guys at Oakmont, what are kind of the guiding stars of your turf operation?
So I know, but everything revolves around producing the firm as fastest, most penal conditions possible, right, Like they're like Gil Hands put it best, you know, when when he approaches a restoration project, you know, typically like his number one thing is to make it a more enjoyable golf experience,
you know, and he's he's on record saying that. You know, his approach to it at Oakmont was probably a little bit different, where like, yeah, I want it to be an enjoyable golf experience, but at the same time, like it better not be easier than it was before. So everything we do revolves around that, and we're constantly trying to set the standard in the world of golf conditioning
and playability. And you know, you can go back a long time, like back to the Henry Phones days, where you know it's well documented like he would drop a ball in back to the second green and if it didn't roll off the front back down in the fairway, the greens weren't fast enough, so they were cutting them again or rolling them again. And back in that day, they were probably rolling five or six on the Stimp meter.
And you know, now our fairways roll probably faster than that, So We've always kind of evolved our operation from an agronomic standpoint to make sure that we were kind of leading the pack in that regard. And to do that, you know, you're constantly like reassessing the science behind what we do and then more importantly than that, the team that's doing it. You know, because it's not just me.
We have a team of fifty guys sitting across the wall from me right now that they're the most passionate, dedicated, motivated guys you're ever going to see, and you know, the majority of them are aspiring to do this for their careers. So like it's way more than just a job. And you put all that passion and roll it up into a ball, and like that's what allows us to do what we do on the golf course.
Yeah, I mean, the passion and within an organization is always going to produce the greatest work. I think something I admire and I'm like not, I would say that I've been very on the record of not being a fan of the pursuit of hard I think so many clubs across the country get wrapped up and trying to be the biggest that we want to be, Like the
championship course in town. You know, in Chicago for years that was Madonna or Butler National, right, Like, we want to be like them, and it's like, well, you're you're categorically not them, right, They aren't trying to be like you know they you know in a way, they're trying to be you Oakman of this city. But categorically you need to find your identity and and operate off that identity of could we be the most fun golf course
in Chicago, because that's something that's attainable. Right, You're never going to be harder than them. But what I think is what I appreciate about Oakmon is like we are literally the hardest golf course and that is our guiding light. Right, there is a clear identity, and you operate around the identity and are maniacal about the identity of the golf course.
And the version of hard is not gimmicky. I thought Jeff Ogilvy and our video kind of said it best, and that's kind of the way I felt about playing there, is like, you know, every shot is very hard, but every shot is very attainable. And I think courses get in trouble when that when it becomes gimmicky with you know, the innovation and the idea of continuing to push. Yep, you've been working. You've worked at Oakmont for a very long time. You got your start, really is an intern
at Oakmont. How would you what's like an example of a way that the turf program at Oakmont has innovated since your start as an intern to what it is today. What's it, you know, kind of something that you guys have changed that have improved your pursuit of being the toughest most penal golf course in the in the world.
Yeah, so I'll start with the team, Right, So our industry has changed a lot over the last college fifteen years. Right. I can remember a day when I started at Oakland as an intern, and you know, you'd see a jab posting and you'd send your resume in and we probably used to get thirty forty resumes a year for roughly ten twelve internship positions, so you'd be turning guys away.
Where that's changed in a major way, Like when I graduated from UMass in twenty eleven, I think we had like some like thirty five people in our graduating class. I think the last couple of years it's been more like eight So there's just less people going into that, and that's a whole nother like podcast, like why is
that the case? Right? But I think the reality of the fact is there's just not as many people signing up to work seven days a week, eighty hours a week year round, Like there's just not that many people anymore that are interested in doing that. So then becomes a question like how do you attract guys into your operation, right? And the only way to do it is build an educational program where they're learning both on and off the
golf course, and then build an incredible culture. And we've done that here at Oakmont where we have initiatives from our intern of the Year we call our assistant and trainings agronomists. We have Agronomist of the Year. We pair agronomists with interns Big Brother Little Brother program and they work through a series of like a curriculum all year.
They present to a mock grounds committee, they write mock Grounds Committee reports, We bring in guest speakers, we do a turf ball at the end of the year, there's a final exam to take notes. We evaluate those, so it's like a learning program they're learning on the course, they're learning off the course as well. So everything we do is about advancing their careers, getting them to that next step step. And we don't try to retain guys
for fifteen years. We want guys to come in here, learn everything they need to know in a few years, and then you know, they're either moved moving into a management role within our own organization, or they're moving out of here and moving into a top assistant job at another top club in the country. So that's what it's all about. Like from an agronomic perspective, you know, there's
all these sorts of technology coming into our industry. You hear about, you know, people using drones from a moisture management perspective, drones to spray. There's all this GPS technology, you know, there's all these like apparatus for collecting moisture data and firmness data and green speed data and all
that's incredible. But I think what we do at Oakmant is we practice fundamentals and doing the fundamental stuff right because at the end of the day, our business really comes down to watering properly, mowing properly, making applications properly, and that's it. Like, when you can do those three things really well and not self induce injury, you're going to be in a great spot one hundred of the time.
So you know, do we use some more modern technology here, Yes, but we also use greens bowers that haven't changed in the last thirty five years, so we're relatively old school. But we just practice the fundamentals.
A couple thoughts off of that on both both ends. But the the idea of fundamentals, I think, like, I think that's like just an incredible it's it's it runs through any profession, and I think everybody is at this moment caught up in the greatness of sky Scheffler. But if you watch Scott A. Scheffler practice, what he's doing is he's practicing just the pure fundamentals of the game.
Yeah, grit check the script before every swing right.
Like scrip set up, you know, stance like and then just the swing plane on the way back. And if you like, it's an incredible if you become a master of the fundamentals at any pursuit in life, Yeah, it's only infinitely easier to layer stuff on top of that.
Yeah.
In terms of you guys, what are a couple of things that you've layered on top of those those core fundamentals that in particular in a US open year, I think.
When you get the fundamentals right, the next thing is details, right, So like, and we do this every year, but especially this year. Like you start way back in February, right as you're coming out of the winner and myself, our assistance, we're walking the golf course every morning and we're just making lists like, hey, you know, this year needs to be addressed. This year needs to be addressed. And that list becomes like several hundred items long, and it starts
down the middle of each golf hole. It works to the very perimeters of the property. I think it's all in the details, and then it's all about being as efficient and productive each and every day that we can. Like the weather we've had the spring is constant rain, right, so like there's there's been a lot of days where we'd have we've had to really pull back on mowing and rolling procedures. And you know, you take those days and you say like, okay, like what can we do
today to stay ahead and be productive? And a lot of times it's those details things and then you get a good period of weather and you put the gas pedal right back down and get caught up, and you know, we're we're in a great spot right now, you know, less than two weeks out from the championship, but you know, now it's like we'll dial it in more and more and more, and then next week during the advanced week, we'll have fifty five volunteers, and then during the championship
we'll have almost one hundred and ninety volunteers in to help us on top of our team of fifty guys. So that's when you know things really really get tuned up.
You mentioned walking the golf course every day. I think this is this is not a common practice, you know in terms of you know, one of my one of my good friends, Brian Palmer, this was something he did every single day. I think he still does it every single day. What what are the things that you pick up walking a golf course versus riding around in a cart.
Yeah, so, like, no matter how you slice it, when you're riding around a golf in a golf cart, you're
you're not seeing everything. It's impossible right when you walk in the same path that all the golfers take and I try to split it up, like one day I'll walk from the champee straight down the middle of the fairways through the middle of the green, and then the next day, like you walk left side of holes and the right side of holes, and like that's the only way you see everything, and that's how you pick up pick up the most molecular details that need to be
addressed as possible. But I don't I don't think there's another way to do it, you know. I it's like you go back to technology, right, Like there's technology now where you can fly a drone in the air and get real time infrared photos of your golf course. And that's again, that's a great tool, but that thing still to this point is not seeing things that we see with our own eyes. And the more and more you do that, like your list just starts getting shorter and shorter and shorter.
What's the what's the balance between your teams feel about what the course needs versus what the technology is telling you the course needs.
Yeah, So we do a lot of testing at oak Blunt, right, So we we test for you know, diseases, We check soil for fertility, tissue, fertility, We do full physical analysis tests every year that look at the particle size distribution of the soils and the infiltration rates and the organic matter levels and on and on and on right, so like we use that data as a baseline. But oak Wand is a really unique property in a lot of ways. But from an agronomic standpoint, we don't have USGA spec greens.
There are natives, heavily modified native soil greens that have been airified and top dressed for decades. And like each green is in its own micro environment, and then within each green, every area kind of acts differently. So the only way you like truly learn this golf course and all the different playing surfaces to the point where you
know them like the back of your hand. It just takes time and repetition, right like when you're learning how to hand water here at Oakmont, Like I always tell guys, like you want to push things past limit a couple of times so you know where that line in the sand is. And you don't get really good at hant water and greens until you push the green too far from a moisture perspective, And you could say that for any other playing service on the property, it's like a
you know, big music guy. I'm a big artist guy.
It's like a canvas, right, And like you're constantly evaluating this, and the more time you spend on the property, you start seeing things and you're like, oh, like you know this area, this intermedia is yellowing out, Like I know, like this area, this area, and this area throughout the rest of the golf course is probably doing the same because you've seen the turf do that countless times before, and like it becomes like almost like you know your kid,
Like it's acting a certain way. Here's how I fix it, Here's how I address it. And that's what makes our job so fun, is like you're just constantly adapting to all these different variables.
With your greens. Specifically, I think like widely considered, you know, some of the best playing surfaces in the world of golf.
Right.
Obviously, the contouring is incredible, some one of the best sets of green green complexes in the world. One of the big trends in golf architecture has been the rebuilding of greens. Can you talk us through kind of the decision to keep your one hundred plus year old greens, your one hundred plus year old greens rather than kind of going with the idea of rebuilding.
Yeah, so the first consideration is, like to rebuild our greens here at Oakmont, we would have had to shut down the golf course probably for an entire season. So like that was dead from from from start, right, like, not even a consideration, not an option. At Oaklant, we don't have another eighteen holes that we could flip play onto.
So really like that was a non starter. Secondly, you get into you know, you hit on it, like the undulations within these greens, they're iconic, right, Like people don't
talk about this as often as they should. But like the way that Henry Phones laid out this golf course to surface strain one hundred and twenty years ago, like absolutely mind blowing, Like when we get three ages of rain here, like it goes from being like standing water everywhere to zero standing water insanely fast, right, and that's all eh Phones now, you know, And he built his golf course on native soil, so there was little to
no internal drainage back then. You know, as mowing heights and standards have increased over the years, you have to have internal drainage, So there comes in the aerification and top dressing and organic matter management and on and on and on. Where now we have surface drainage and we have really good internal drainage as well, and that allows us to push you know, the plants really to the
brink of death day in and day out. But yeah, I think again, like just the fact that Henry Phones designed this property, laid out the golf holes the way he did, and the way that this can handle weather. I'm not sure there's there's much like it. But the last thing is, you.
Know our.
Poa on our greens, right, perennial poa. You know, I always like roll my eyes, like you watch these like golf broadcasts and people rip on poe but like all staying here till the end and say that good poa. There's no better putting surface on earth. And you know, the way our poa performs on these modified native soils, like probably wouldn't be the same if we rebuilt the greens. Then lastly, you know, just as much as green speed is a factor here, firmness, especially during a championship, is
way more of a factor. Right, So when our greens are at their driest and at their best, probably firmer than you could ever get a USGA Spec green. Now, like on the flip side, when we get rain events, they're softer, they're not as consistent as a USJA Spec Green. But we really felt the right thing to do for Oakmon was to keep our native soil greens so that when we do get the right weather variables, the greens are like concrete.
I think it's such a delicate situation with with old greens. And I think like one of the other things what you brought up about your grass is like simply retaining your old look and feel like that is something like the I think Bruce Heppner uses the word patina, that old patina like and I love that descriptor. And and like I think like one of the things that I don't love about some of the new restorations is you that come out and it's like, wait, is this one hundred years old or is it brand new?
You know?
Because and and when you lose those core grasses that you know, and you go to one of these newer, newer grasses or you have to do something with your existing grass, like you generally just lose something. I would I question about the greens. Yeah, I've heard of this is basically a proprietary strain. At this point the poem, why is it that? Why is it basically a proprietary strain? What makes it effectively not you know, replicable in the world of golf.
Yeah, so I'm not sure that's the greatest term for it. But so poa, any POA greens in the Pittsburgh region are going to be unique. Right. POA loves this like that environment that we have in the western PA like like tumidity valley, not much sunlight, like cool temps. So
POA thrives in western Pennsylvania. Like I always say it, like it's a weed, right, Like you go out and dig a hole anywhere on this golf course or wait long enough, poa is going to grow out of the side of that hole, right, And like that's the greens I'm sure were originally seated to bend grass. You know, then poa is going to outcompete any other grass out
here no matter what you do. So over time the greens transitioned to poe anua and then you start throwing like doctor Hoff out of penn State did this incredible research study really over like the last ten years, and you know he actually like put science behind it. That poa adapts to the way it's treated. Right, So like the more you cut it, the lower height of cut that you go out with, the more you roll it, it's going to start getting used to that. And that's
what happened at Oakmark. So since the beginning of time, like people have been cutting grass too low at Oakmonth too many times, rolling too much, rolling with rollers that were really heavy, and through generations, our poa adapted to that. And what we have here on our greens is, you know, we have hundreds of different biotypes of Poe on our greens, but we probably have more of this perennial Poa annua that you really don't see many other places on larger
percentages of our greens. And it's super tight. It doesn't grow hardly at all, and it doesn't seed head very much like there is like this poe. It's really cool. Sometimes it will encroach like into the intermediates around the greens that we cut with rotary mowers at one inch, and it like that grass literally never gets cut by a real mower or rotary mower and it will not
grow above like a quarter inch won't do it. So I always think about that, like if we were to you know, God forbid, like something happens right in the world and like we can't mow the greens at Oakmont for three months straight as yeah, exactly right. So it's a really remarkable grass. And you know, we probably have a higher population of poa art the greens than probably most courses in the world, and that poet itself is very unique.
One of the biggest differences in the golf course from twenty sixteen is going to be the greens and how much bigger they are. You did you recaptured a lot of different corners and nooks and crannies, pinnable areas, unpinnable areas on on your great greens. How did you go about the process of getting grass on those new areas with like what was the process of expanding those greens to match that same great grass that you had on the you know, existing smaller greens.
Right, So that was that was a major question as we approached this restoration. Certainly can't go out and saw them with bent grass, right, you'd see it for the next thirty years unfortunately, Like that that does happen in the world of golf restoration. But here at oakwom What we did was we harvested all of our core aerification plugs and sent them out to a sod farm and
way western Pennsylvania. Colin Boyd he grew in those aerification plugs and grew in about four acres of poasod with our our own POA that we were able to harvest, saw it, cut, bring back to Oakmont, and saw it all of our Green Approach fairaway expansions with so like we saw at those expansions with our own grass. So that was pretty pretty unique thing.
Did you guys have a clause in the agreement that this guy could only harvest x amount because so he's not selling Oakmont Oakmont poe.
Well, that's a funny thing, and this ties back to your earlier statement. So this guy has collected Colin Boyds collected verification plugs from Oakmont for decades, okay, and he certainly grew in a lot more of it for our restoration project. But he's collected it for decades and he
does sell it all throughout the Northeast. And I would tell you that that Pittsburgh POA when you take it to like the met area or Long Island or wherever it might be, it does not perform the same way that it does in the Pittsburgh region.
Wingfoot screens are poa too correct, right, I Mean you're talking about what I think probably widely considered two of the best putting surfaces in all of golf, no doubt.
And I think you know, what Wingfoot did with their restoration was truly incredible, and they they really kind of set a new standard in like okay, like we have these super old school greens and you know, Bancraft certainly isn't the right thing for us, and they did, you know, rebuild those greens with new technology, new mix, laid the poa back down, obviously did the whole green scan thing, and they turned out unbelievably well. So yeah, like, but their poe is going to be a little different than
the poe that grows in Pittsburgh. The poet Shinnecock can be a little different than the poet at Wingfoot, the poet at Pebble Beach, like on and on and on. So the same guy from Penn State eight, you know, has been working on this for thirty years, but like he went around the country and collected poa from all the best poe greens on Earth and basically like bread, those into this super poa and he's actually now producing poe a seed and he's the first guy to ever
do it. And it's it in the preliminary phases. But you know, I've heard some rumors like guys might actually seed greens with his poa, which would be a really cool thing to see.
Interesting, that's uh fat, it's you know, it's there's like because what you talked about with like the the if you dug a hole and this grass would just win out. Yeah, there, I imagine a lot of a lot of your job sometimes is just fighting what the environment wants to dictate versus like what you're trying to do. Sometimes those butt heads is there? What are the fights that are worthwhile versus the fights that you just eventually give up on.
Yeah, so I think, uh, Poe is a very temperamental grass, right, and it does really really well in the spring and fall. Here you get into July August, and you're you're always like fighting a losing battle to some degree, right, no matter what you do, that Poe is losing root depth density over the summer months. Like what I always like tell guys like if attempts over eighty five, POE is
going backwards. Now, over years, we've developed erconomic programs that help, you know, prevent any turf health loss, and you know we're able to sustain our POA through the summer. Knock on wood, you know. But it's it's it's like I always love POE because it's it's more of like an art, right, it's an art and it's a science, but there's a lot of art to it, and you it's it's you know, you could push it. You have to know where that
line in the sand is. But it's a really fun plan to babysit per se.
You guys obviously did a renovation project with Gil Hants. What what was what was the process about? You know obviously you know you guys have this, You're you're hosting major championships, you're a anchor site of the USGA. What was the process and ideology around the project?
Yeah? So, you know, so I was here from two thousand and ten through twenty sixteen. Left right after the open sixteen, got my first superintendent job at the Apple Wallmas Club. One of my key mentors in life that Dave Delsandro took over like right after I left here. He was the superintendent here for six years, and he really like he did the bulk of the planning for this project, right, And then I came back in the fall of twenty two. Dave stayed on for a while,
helped me through this project in twenty three. But what the impetus for the project was the bunkers. The bunkers hadn't been rebuilt since two thousand and five. They weren't performing well from a drainage perspective. They were very contaminated, very inconsistent, a lot of like the steep phones, bunker faces were starting to erode, the lips were deteriorating. So the club, the club knew that the bunkers had to be rebuilt prior to the twenty twenty five US Open.
Then the club enlisted Gil Hands, Right. Gil Hans comes in and says, okay, well, like you know, there is an intimate relationship between every bunker on the golf course, every green side bunker and the putting surface, every fairway bunker in the fairway surface, and you know, then he started showing these pictures like, hey, look what this green used to look like one hundred years ago. Look how big it was. Look how many whole locations there were.
Look at the elevation of the green. So then became like the concept of okay, like let's dig into these greens, return the perimeters to their original elevation, and that inherently is going to lead to whole locations that haven't existed in generations, maybe one hundred years. So that was the
first step. The second step was, Okay, there's features out here, fairway bunkers, runoff areas that are not original to the phone's design, So let's remove those and then let's reintegrate some of the phone's features that had been taken out over the years. And then I think one thing that you know, guys like you would recognize, but a lot
of people won't. Really, a lot of people who aren't intimately you know, involved with out wont won't realize this during the championship, But like Gil brought a lot of the strategy back in the golf course where the golf course had kind of become like you know, twenty five yard wide fairways to bunkers on each side, like straight up the middle, and there's holes out here that phones
design that had a ton of strategy into them. Like number two is a great example where Gil actually widened the fairway in the landing zone where you know, now, like if the pins on that middle left of the green, like really the only way to attack that pin is to hit a drive down the right side of that
fairway right. Number seven is a great example too, where he put the cross bunker back in and you can play it safe up the right side, but then you have a blind shot into the green over a pretty penal front right green bunker, or you can carry the cross bunker and have a clear view of the green and hit straight into the middle and you're not hitting
over any trouble. So Gil brought a lot of that stratg back and that included widening and increasing some of the fairway areas back to what they were in the phone's era. Then lastly, Gil added about two hundred and fifty yards of length to the golf course two to make sure that the Phone's features weren't play for the you know, the best players in the world as we host all these championships over the next three decades. So
that was kind of the thinking behind the project. It was really the first time that the club had touched the greens to that scale. Some work had been done at two over the years, six over the years, but it's really the first time that all the greens were touched in a major way. So pretty incredible thing to be a part of.
The combination of adding some width in places with the recapturing of the pockets in the corners of the greens. I think probably is the most exciting, you know, if you were going to say twenty sixteen open to now, Like why you should be really excited to see the new version of Oakmont is just the there's a little bit more maybe dynamics in the golf course, Like there's there's uh, you you have more a little more optionality. Was getting the fairways widened a a process?
You know?
Was was that a uh you know? And how did that go over with? Like the membership? Who you know, Oakmont membership is very proud about the difficulty. I was at media day your your president stood up, We're gonna overpar Yeah, you know, like, was that was that a difficult, uh hurdle to overcome? Was the adding of width?
Yeah? So it's it's funny. I think I think you look at the Oakland membership and Honestly, I'm biased, but I'm not sure you'll find a more passionate group of members. And that passion all comes down to how this golf course plays. They want it hard and it's never too fast, it's never too firm. Like that's what it's all about, right, Like, we have a member events here where our goal is to like we're going to go out and we're going to get the greens as fast as we could possibly
get them. Sometimes that means like cutting them eight times, rolling them eight times in one morning, right, and that's fun. But you know that's how we get these like outrageous speeds at times. But you know, to answer your question, I think you know I said it in the piece we did with you guys last year, like this project was either going to be a massive success or a complete failure. And you know, Gil really like you look at the bunkering around the greens, right, like the depths,
like the elevation of the green side bunkers really didn't change. However, he brought the elevation of the green surface around the perimeters down to what they originally were, so like it feels like some of the bunkers are shallower However, you don't have these backstops anymore, so like you're a lot more prone to hit a ball out of a greenside bunker and it rolls across the green into another bunker.
I think the faraway bunkers, you know, generally speaking, they're probably not quite as deep as they were, but Gil returned like the true flat bottom nature to the fairway bunkers that was here during the phones era. So you can hit a ball in now and it's going to roll up pretty close to that face, and they might not be quite as deep, but they're just as penal,
if not more penal. So I think, like you know, there was a lot of like kind of careful consideration as we work through this project that like a lot of things like the fairway wits and the bunker depths might have appeared easier at the get go. But I feel pretty comfortable saying that if you pulled the membership now, they would not tell you that the golf course got easier than it was.
I think that's I love the Jeff o'gilly's line in our video about gravity and how that's like the thing that you fight at Oakmont, and I think, like just in general, the thing that the restoration has brought out is more opportunities for gravity to work against you, you know, And there's some some opportunities if you're in the right spot, for it to work in your advantage, but it's become much more of a thought provoking decision of being intensible
about where you get to use the gravity in your advantage. Do you you know like this is just a hypothetical question, I you know, I think I think Wingfoot members after the after Bryson one, were you know, kind of shell shocked at what he would the modern golfer was able to do to their golf course. Do you think if, if you know, hypothetically, someone you know is able to play an extraordinary tournament and achieve a lower score than expected, is there going to be any kick like it will?
Will?
Then the question be what do we need to do to make it harder? Will that just immediately start after the championship?
I think I think that's a great question, right, So I think ultimately the true judge of the restoration is going to be how it plays during the championship, because Oakmond's all about a championship legacy, and even more so the champions who have won at Oakland, right, I think it's pretty cool. I think eight of nine US Open winners at Oakmond have won at least two majors. So
that's that's a pretty cool thing to say it. I really try to try to not get too locked up in you know what, what's the winning score going to be? I think the weather has a massive impact on that, you know. But I tell you, like, well, it's a unique course. There's there's certainly a plethora of birdie opportunities. But just as fast as you can make a birdie, you can make a double boatie too, right, So you know, my only goal through the US Open is to make
the Oakwah membership proud and the Phone's family proud. You know. So time will tell what the score is. But you know, simply put, I don't think there's many members here at o't want that. I want to see a score too much.
Under part, yeah, I think like it's it's just a nature of modern golf, right the game. The game has changed, and the marker of a great score has fundamentally changed. I was cus you guys lengthened the golf course. This is just like kind of an anecdotal question like is there more space or are you at now pretty much at your seams?
I think I think there's there's probably at most without doing something like outrageous, probably like two or three holes that you could probably still add some length. But you know,
to your point, it's it's a different game today. And you know, like our historian Dave Moore wrote this Parade article last year about Johnny Miller's round, you know, shooting is sixty three in seventy three, and he wrote in that article, like the irons that Johnny Miller hit into every hole and it was all like three four, five and six irons, not a single wedge, right Like now you look at today's game and guys are gonna be hitting wedges and short irons into most of the holes
out here. So's it's it's definitely a different different world here today. But I think the golf course has routinely held its own through its history.
I haven't done the math, but like if you were going to reenact the seventy three Open and had to make Oakmont play the distance that Miller sixty three was in, I have to imagine the yardage would be nine thousand plus yards, I.
Think it would. I think it would, and like you know, we certainly don't have. Yeah, I don't think it's meant to be a you know, seventy eight hundred yard golf course, an eight thousand yard golf course. Like that's really when you start looking at like, Okay, I think you can, you can restore the golf course and keep the phones, feel and vision. You start pushing t's in stupid places, then it's probably not a great thing for the club.
Yeah. So memberships, I think in general typically complain.
And you know, this is like.
I've done. I remember being in my twenties when I was a member at a club and playing regularly. I went to my our superintendent and said, like, what's up with that flag? You know, what's up with that whole location. So memberships generally complain about courses and setups are too hard. You guys have like the reverse culture, which we've touched on, where like, you know, it's like total acceptance. There's there's a sadistic enthusiasm among your memberships about a membership about
how hard it is. Are there any holes or conditioning spots that even Oakmont members have come in and complained, saying it's too much, I.
Would say it's it's extremely rare, like we have, you know, we have a spring swap party, a full swap party in you know, last year at closing day, the Greens are rolling eighteen right, and you might roll your eyes and say that's not possible. We have video footage like it was a really I.
Can't imagine some of the shots.
Yeah, you know, but the memberships they're playing in eight somems that better ball eat thems, like you know, so one out of eight of those guys is going to get the ball in the hole. And to answer your question, like you know, when the Greens are thirteen thirteen and a half, I get questions like hey, like you know, how come you didn't mow a roll in this morning? Like that's you know, and it's unbelievable membership like couldn't
be more supportive. But yeah, it's never Hey, that whole location was too hard or the Greens are too fast or too firm, like you do not hear that. I don't think the membership would want to play out of the like the rough that's out there in perpetuity, but like even that, like they're eating that up.
I would love to talk a little bit about the rough. Phil famously alleged that it was unsafe in two thousand and seven. Ye do you guys maintain it in a certain way to get it to like stand up more? And there are some rumors about experimentation with different strains in the last year. Are those true?
I would love to sit here and tell you that, Like, we have a plant breeding lab, and you know within our meeting special facility, we don't. I would tell you there's a ton of science that goes into getting the rough like it is right now from a fertility perspective, a mower set up perspective. So we've certainly done some things out there to the rough that you know we haven't done before. And but you know, did we invent
a new cultivar of grass? No, certainly not. I would love to take credit for that, but no, it's uh. You know, we actually like typically present our rough for the membership. It's very fair. You know, we typically cut it at two and a quarter inches. It's typically pretty lean. And then you know, going into championships we flip that
because it's it's part of the fabric of Oakmont. You know, that's a great like you want to talk about nasty rough, go back and look at the rough in nineteen seventy three when Johnny Miller won, and it looks like our native areas, like like twelve inches tall. There's sheetheads on the blue grass. There's weeds growing everywhere, like that's that's what it was. Now is like a much more manicured fair version of that. But it's always been part of the championship legacy at Oaklood.
What are you guys doing differently with the mowing and fertility? Mowing and fertility too.
Yeah, so you know, really that program starts about a year in advance, so we we we start flipping it and you know, like last fall, we put out a controlled release fertility source that you know, really kind of loads up in the soil over the winter. As soon as you start coming out of dormancy that fertility is are releasing, we make another controlled release fertility application back in or February. Then as soon as we got into April, we're out there spoon feeding several different nutrients on a
weekly basis, and we're constantly adjusting those rates. And you know, there's a lot of fun stuff you can do with fertility if you're trying to create penal rough and you know, starts with nitrogen to produce upright growth, and then you know your potassium silica sources. That's how you get the grass to spring back up and be upright, and you know that's how you build density and lea turgidity and
things like that. So that's a really fun part of what we do because ultimately, like you know, the tight cut playing surfaces, we really don't do much different for a championship here. It's it's really the rough.
So I think that's like one of the misconceptions is like when when people see the mowers come out like pre tournament, like the week of, everyone's like, what are they doing? What are they But like freshly cut grass stands up straight. Yes, and when it stands up straight, the ball goes to the bottom. And it's the hardest rough to play out of because of that versus if you don't cut it, then it's going to get trampled down and the lies are going to become a little bit easier.
Yeah, we actually, like you know, we we made some adjustments to our mowers, some custom some parts custom made, so like we can actually cut grass up to the height that we want for the championship for that exact reason. You know, if you just grow it up to whatever three inches and let it grow from there, it's going to start growing over itself and it's going to lay over then the ball sits on top. So there's a lot of thought and science that goes into producing rough like we have right now.
So the mower is custom so that you can mow with minimal cut but get the effects of the of the rough standing up.
So yeah, that the I mean, when you buy a mower from whoever it is, Toro, John Deere, you name it, it maxes out right typically at like around three and a half inches. So we want to be mowing grass higher than that, I'll say. So we one of our members actually owns a metal shop, so you know, we we took the arms that come off the rotary decks on our rotary mowers and three D scanned them and had steel arms made that were longer, and had shrouds made to wrap around the rotary decks so we could
maintain suction. So the rotary decks are actually standing the grass up as they're cutting it. So and that's not like revolutionary like thoughts it's it's just something we.
So we might see mowers out like every night.
I wouldn't say every night, but you know, I think we'll certainly be mowing the rough relatively close to the championship. And then you know, depending on you know, is it dry, is it windy, is it not like scoring? I think a lot of factors come into play there on what happens through the championship.
Kind of a last few questions, I want to get you out of here.
Yeah, but with.
The new course that you worked the twenty sixteen championship, what do you think the biggest difference will be in this year with Oakmont versus twenty sixteen.
Whole locations first and foremost, I think, Yeah, the way the greens were in sixteen, the majority of the whole locations were kind of on the interior of the greens because all the greens around the perimeters kind of flashed up. You have those backstops there. You didn't really have many whole locations around that three percent slope you could use
at championship speeds, you know, and now we do. So I think the players the golf world, they're going to see a lot of whole locations that haven't been there here for one hundred years. And then you know there's some incredible features Gil brought back into play that again didn't exist. You know, the ditch across ten Fairway, the eleventh Fairway expansion, all the way down to the ditch
on the right, Like there's several examples of that. So but I would say the greens will have whole locations on the greens will have the greatest impact.
Do you have a couple of favorite new whole locations that you hope to see.
Yeah, I think there's some really cool whole locations on the thirteenth Green. I'm not going to name names, but I think you could have some fun ones on there. There's some great whole locations on number two, now number three, Like there's a front left hole location that if you look at aerials from sixteen, like that whole location would have been in a greenside bunker nine years ago. So yeah, that's gonna be exciting to see what the USJ decided.
To go with.
I feel like Hole three is maybe the whole Like if you've never ever been on property, is like you get up to the top of that green. On media Day, we teed off four, So it was the last hole. You get up there and it's just like, oh my god, I cannot believe this green, this entire golf hole.
Yeah, it's ah, that's an incredible hole. And you know, like part of the challenge is you approach these championships is like slowing yourself down enough to actually like enjoy it and take it in right. So like almost every day I'll try to like, that's my spot. It's actually where I propose to my wife on the third green here at Aumont. So like you go up there during the Golden Hour, I'm not sure there's a better place on Earth, at least to me.
Hopefully we don't get rain so that we don't see anybody playing the third hole at Golden Hour, you know, because that'd be really the only way we would get somebody playing the third green at Golden Hour. So hopefully none of the viewers see that. Maybe if you're out for a practice round, out for a tournament round, that's a that's a spot to go watch. Any other favorite viewing spots.
Yeah, I think you know, eighteen t's incredible. Fourteen t's incredible. I think one of the coolest things about Oakmont and you know, I always stake back to this, like, you know, Henry Phones decides he wants to build a golf course, and you know, like I always think, like I'm sure he looked at other pieces of land, right, but the one he's settled on Oakmont. Like you talk about gravity, like everything goes slopes towards the turnpike, right, So it's
a natural amphitheater. So you know, especially without trees out there, like there's really not like a spot on the golf course where you can't see at least several other golf holes. So I would say there's some incredible vantage points, but in reality, like you have great vantage points from the first t all the way through the eighteenth green.
Yeah. I and you know this one of the one of the virtues of not having trees on the property. Yeah, it adds to the vantage points. This still seems to be a hot topic with the public. To be complete completely, Yeah.
You know, anytime a championship comes to oak Wand, the trees always come up. And at oak Wand it's really simple like when Henry Phones built a golf course, it was a farm before that, it didn't have trees on it, and that's how he designed the golf course, right, So, like trees were never part of this strategy of the golf course here at oakwond there's certainly not today. Is that the right thing for every golf course on Earth?
Definitely not, but it's certainly the right thing here at earth moment.
All right, last question if your music guy, what's what's the song what's the song that you should listen to if you wanted to think about Oak while listening to music to really feel Oakmont.
Oh, I'd really I'd really have to think about that one. But it's something it's something like sydnistic and I don't know, I don't I don't have a great answer for that right now. I wish I did. I really wish it.
I should have sent that, uh that email email to you last night. I'll propose, uh can't stop by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Like right from the start, it's just going and like you're you're gonna be like you It just gets your like heart pumping right.
Away, something about like you know, going to battle right.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like a song you would want to listen to before like you you got into like an alter case.
Yeah, I love it.
And then uh, yeah, what's the what's the what's the best time to get coffee at Speedway.
Four point thirty in the morning.
Is that when a fresh pot comes?
Oh it's you know, they get one of those machines where you walk in it grinds them for you right there and you press the button. It's great. Speedway coffee is great. Sheets coffee is very good too. When I used to come from the other direction, I stopped at Sheets every morning. Now I stop at Speedway every morning.
But yeah, uh, they don't have a big jug that can bring to you one one day.
No, no, they don't. But we'll have well, we'll have plenty of coffee and energy drinks kicking around the shop here, so.
Maybe I'll bring I'll bring some bags of of of our coffee for you.
Oh, that'd be great, that'd be awesome.
Good luck. I wish you well on your your week of sleep deprivation and yeah, and then then I also wish you well the following week when you're trying to catch up on it at home after being all gone for an entire week with young kids.
Oh, it's awesome, you know. It's something I think everyone on our staff has worked their entire careers towards and you know, my wife is incredibly supportive, you know, and it's gonna be really cool to share share this experience with my wife, my kids. You know, the fact that it ends on Father's Day, that's a pretty cool thing.
So yeah, yeah, it's amazing to have. So I'm praying for a home game US Open so I get a Father's Day you know, with the kiddos sometime in the future. But but yeah, have a have a great championship. We can't wait to see the the product on TV. And congrats on on all the work that went into this year.
Thank you so much. Appreciate you guys having me.
All right. Big thanks to Mike and Gil again and also to PJ Clark who edited this monster episode. This was a bigger episode, big lift for PJ. Big thanks to him for for being on the on the soundboard and putting this all together. We will be back, as I mentioned at the top on Friday or on Sunday for our preview podcasts about the US Open and look forward to rolling into US Open week. I hope this gets everybody excited about the upcoming major at Oakmont