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, Frida egg Brian egg Frida egg.
Bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump.
All right, Hello and welcome to the Friday Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and I'm here today with Andy Johnson. How you doing, Andy, I'm doing great.
Just uh, you know, it's pretty cold here.
In Chicago, so you're all bundled up.
I had to walk across the street to the office, so it was, uh, you know, one of those it's one of those mornings where you gotta kind of be be Bundy. It's like one of those mornings your your house is letting in coal there you're just ever warm the whole day, no matter what.
Yeah, we're we're getting some of the same in Oregon right now, but it's nowhere near the level of what I'm sure it is in Chicago. So I don't I don't really have a place to complain about it at the moment, but it is.
It's chili yeah, plain a fake winter.
I think that there's some there's a check the temperatures, there's there's a hint of real winter in the air. I did my I did my years in Chicago. It has felt similar these past couple of mornings. But I'm sure it's not as bad.
Oh whatever.
Yeah, we don't we don't need to.
We choose, We choose where we live. So you know, that's the that's the reality.
So we're talking today about Old McDonald. This is the second of our Bandon Dune's Deep Dive podcasts, and so we're going to go into detail about Old McDonald, which opened in twenty ten, was built in two thousand and eight and nine. As you may have noticed, we're doing these backwards. We started with the most recent course at the Bandon Dunes Resort, which is Sheep Ranch, and now we're too Old McDonald, which is the second most recent
eighteen hole course that was built at the resort. And the architects were Tom Doak and Jim Urbina co credited. They built this in the midst of a recession. Kind of incredible that the project happened at all, but a fascinating course and looking forward to digging into it, all right, So why don't we start by talking a little bit about the origin story of old McDonald. So a lot of this information that I'm about to give I got from the book Dream Golf by Stephen Goodwin, which is
a good read. So originally Kaiser, Mike Kaiser, wanted to build a replica of the Lido, which is this great lost course designed by C. B. McDonald and SETH. Rayner on Long Island. It was lost during the Depression. A lot of people at the time thought it was one of the great golf courses in the world. Mike Kaiser had gotten obsessed with it and just wanted to resurrect it on this piece of land that he had just
north of Pacific Dunes at the Bandon Dunees Resort. So, yeah, his idea was to build a replica of the Lido, and he started kind of circulating this idea amongst his friends, and he didn't get the reaction that he was expecting. A lot of people thought that it would be kind of lame. They were like, a replica course, you know, that doesn't really sound that exciting. We've seen replica courses before. They're usually kind of cheesy and so Kaiser ended up
shifting gears and pursuing other ideas for this property. And around the same time, this must have been in the mid two thousands or so, Tom Doak talked him into doing a course with basically fresh renditions of Cebe McDonald's ideal holes or templates as they're often called. And so before people can really understand what's going on at Old McDonald, they need to know a little bit about the templates. I think Andy, you've written about the templates pretty extensively.
Could you give just a basic introduction to what the ideal holes are?
Yeah, for sure.
So Ceeb McDonald obviously people have probably heard of Ceb McDonald. He's considered by many the kind of like the godfather of golf in America. He was instrumental in building, you know, getting golf started in America. He had studied abroad in Saint Andrews and that's where he picked up the game. And he came back to America and kind of, you know, after years of not playing, started picking up the game
in the Chicago area. So he built Chicago Golf Club, which you know, there's seventy five courses that claim to be the first golf course in America. It's one of the ones that claims that, you know, I'm not going to get into the semantics of all of them. But anyways, you know, golf architecture at that point was was pretty medial,
and you know, people were building courses. And before he built National Golf Links of America, which is widely considered his greatest course, what he did is he went back over to the British Isles and studied all the great golf courses of the British Isles and some in Europe and formulated these ideal holes. Basically, he just picked out his favorite holes that all had strategies and different features about them, and that became these what now are called
temple holes. Now these are inspirations off of these ideal holes from Great Britain, Ireland, maybe France, that's a debatable subject about the Burritz. And basically he came back and started building golf courses around these principles.
So you see these golf holes.
All over the place, whether it's the Radan, you know, the Buritz, the alps Hoole which is from Prestwick, or the you know, he got the Bottle Hole, and you have all these different hole a road hole from Saint Andrew's seventeenth which everybody would know. And and what he did was then he took you know, these holes and he and he built golf courses using these holes, which essentially was a fail safe way to you know, inject
good strategic golf. Right, these are sound holes from principles and adopted them over a wide range of golf courses in different settings. And Seth Rayner was really somebody that you know, did this at a large scale.
See B. M.
MacDonald only built a handful of golf courses for his rich friends that he wanted to appease, and he never took a fee. So Seth Rayner then and Charles Banks later kind of replicated this model, and you still see it today. You see a lot of temples used by modern architects. So it's you know, it's not necessarily like a replica hole, if that makes sense. It's more of
like principles and they're adapted to their landscape. And I think that's a good way to describe old mac because these are these do not look like Seth Rainer and CB McDonald's templates per se. The shaping is much more
I don't know, modern, but much more natural. They aren't as manufactured an engineer, which makes sense, you know, today's machinery allows you to build things a little bit more subtly and fit them into the ground more than more so than when Seth Rainer and Charles Banks were building these with steam shovels. So I think the old Mac is a modern rendition of what CEB McDonald would build.
Is kind of the premise behind the golf course.
Tom Doak essentially did to Cbe McDonald's templates as Ceb McDonald did to the original versions of his templates, right. He took this inspiration and remixed it and made it his own, And that really is what McDonald and Rayner were doing. Rayner, by the way, I don't think we introduced as McDonald's protege. He was an engineer and he ended up building a great number of courses after his partnership, his initial partnership with Cbe.
What happened is people would inquire to Stebe McDonald and Rayner would go build the course, you know, like if it wasn't one of Cebe McDonald's rich friends or somewhere he wanted to have a house, he didn't build Rayner, right.
So I think that often people misunderstand McDonald and Rayner's templates in that they think that they're copies of these holes and that they're just sort of replicating them at every course they build, and that's not quite accurate. These templates are always being adapted to individual landscapes, and then the ideas for the templates themselves. What the template holes were is often very different from what the inspiration was in at whatever course it was in Great Britain and Ireland.
You know, they were really C. B. MacDonald, Seth Rayner designs these template holes. They were fundamentally their ideas just based on these original examples. And so I think that a good way to understand the template holes or the ideal holes is that they were really a powerful marketing device and an educational device for the American golfing public. They're saying, you know, this is what golf architecture is.
It's kind of incorporating some of these strategies into different holes, and it's a very easy way to understand what makes a well designed golf hole for a public at the time that just really wasn't very knowledgeable in general about golf architecture.
Yeah.
I mean, that's a great way to explain it. Because National Golf Links changed the landscape of golf architecture America. It was really like what many considered the first great golf course in America and it led to so many courses that existed being redesigned. This is kind of right when Donald Ross was starting to you know, build his design career in America, and you know, he brought a lot of ideas from being you know, living in Scotland, you know, and the this took golf out of the
Victorian kind of era of golf course design. This this idea and you hit it on the nail on the head. It's about the principles and if you study the templates, you you start to understand, you know, what strategy is and the ideas of variety.
You know.
One of the things that the templates do, you know, with the par three's, and I think those are the holes that become most famous and synonymous a because they're easy to remember. They're one shot holes. You know, they
have you know, very defined characteristics. But like one of the brilliant things about the templates and the par threes is you get one hundred and thirty yard Part three, one hundred and seventy yard part three, hundred yard par three and like a two thirty part three, you got variety. Like it's just like a simple thing like that. But it doesn't mean you're not going to have four two hundred yard part threes unless the templates are playing nothing like the principles of them, you know.
Yeah, it was just a way of sneaking solid architectural principles into courses and being able to communicate what they were doing.
Now, some would say, you know, there are opinions that Rayner wasn't that talented and this was a way for him to be a good architect, was just simply following these rules. But like that's the point of the templates, is like if you build these golf holes in different landscapes and you don't you know, and you just like kind of fit them to the landscape these these strategies, you're.
Not going to build a bad golf course.
And I think there's definitely an opinion out there that Rayner is overrated or that Rayner wasn't a very talented architect.
There are definitely people who hold that opinion. I think maybe the more nuanced version of that opinion is that McDonald and Rayner represented a transitional stage and golf course architecture and the ensuing generation of golf architects in America, the golden age of golf architecture as we call it, moved beyond that, kind of took that initial breakthrough that McDonald and Rayner made in strategic golf architecture, ran with
it and made something original out of it. And so there are some people who say that, yeah, McDonald and rain are important, but we've moved beyond that. Now we've moved past that, let's leave that behind. Let's come up with truly original whole ideas.
Yeah, and I think, you know, that's that's a good way to put it.
And one of the things with like Rainer and McDonald golf courses, every single golf course has holes that aren't tepplate holes that are you know, you know a lot of them occupy some of the best ground, you know, I think of like Saint Louis Country Club, they have a part they have five par threes and one of which is called the Crater Hole. It's the only only one of it and it's it's set into this hillside. It's a really dramatic. You play from one one ledge
to the other ledge. You go to Shore Acres and you've got the eleventh hole and the fifteenth hole, two of the greatest you know holes in America that are not template holes. You know there they are you know, original designs, so you know there the templates were a guide, you know. And I think at Old mac you see the same thing, like, there are you know, template holes, but there also are a few that are not template holes.
Yeah, so we could keep going down this rabbit hole for a while discussing MacDonald and Rainer.
I think that's important.
While we're here, we can call this out. Is our website, the fridagg dot com has extensive materials on each, not each, not every template, but maybe one day we'll get to that, get back to that, but a lot of the templates, and we have profiles on McDonald and Rayner if you want to read more.
And I think, by the way, one of the reasons that you wrote this template series is that it was a relatively easy and accessible way to introduce the basic principles golf course architecture. The template series is often where people start on our website, and I think that's that's really representative of how the templates functioned for McDonald and Rayner in the first place. They were using these as educational devices, and it's pretty amazing that they still function
the same way today. And one more thing that I should add before we move into old McDonald is that, you know, in this debate about whether Rayner particularly was a talented architect, I think that when you go actually play a Rainer golf course, you see why he was so well respected and why he remains so well respected. You know, the courses don't feel like a bunch of
replica holes at all. They feel like these holes kind of belong in the landscape, and there are little subtle adjustments here and there that Rayner makes with every hole to adapt them to the land that he was working with. And so I think the idea of rain as a guy who just kind of pasted certain template holes on top of a landscape and didn't give much thought about how to weave them into that landscape is pretty unfair
to what he actually did at these courses. This episode of the Frida Egg Podcast is brought to you by Zero Restriction. So on our trip to Bandon Dune's last November we encountered all kinds of weather. We played bandoned trails and torrential rains and gale force winds, and we played Old Mac on a beautiful, clear, but somewhat chilly day. So we needed performance apparel that was really versatile, that could handle anything that the Oregon Coast threw at us. Thankfully,
we were outfitted on this trip by Zero Restriction. Zero Restriction makes excellent cutting edge outerwear, and we actually got to try a couple of new items from the ZR collection on this trip, including the Mayweather Pullover and the
Wave Hybrid. Both of these pieces have high ten fabrics that are water repellent, moisture wicking and all that good stuff, and they're nice and stretchy and comfortable, and finally, both items can function really well as either a top layer for a mild day or as a middle layer for those colder and wetter days. You can find the Mayweather Pullover, the Wave Hybrid, and all sorts of other apparel right
now at zero Restriction dot com. And if you use the code old Mac at checkout that's one word, all caps, old Mac, Old Mac at checkout, you'll get twenty percent off at Zero Restriction dot com. All right, so into old MacDonald. One note about the design team. Kind of a unique arrangement that they had here. First of all, Mike Kaiser requested that Tom Doak and Jim Orbida share
the design credit. Jim Orbino was a longtime associate of Tom Doaks at Renaissance Golf Design, and this time through Kaiser said, why don't you guys design course together and you'll get a co credit on it. Essentially what happened is that Urbina supervised construction and Doak made regular visits, so it was similar to an arrangement that they might have had in the past when kind of.
How he's got it set up with all of his associate.
Yeah, that's absolutely the usual arrangement. Just in this case Kaiser was saying, this is a co credit, so sort of interesting. I think one of the reasons was that Kaiser at the time didn't want the same architect to design two courses at Bandon Dune's and Tom Doak had already designed Pacific Dunes, and so Kaiser was like, let's
do something new. Let's have this be a dok Urbina project. Now, in addition to that, there was an old McDonald advisory panel consisting of Bradley Klein, who is a golf course writer, George Botto who was a historical researcher who wrote The Evangelist of Golf, which is a biography of C. B. MacDonald. It's really a landmark work and I think golf course writing. So he was on the advisory panel, and then Carl Olson,
who was the superintendent at National Golf Links. And Olsen is one of the kind of early restorers of a classic golf course. He was doing work at National Golf Links to bring it back to the original design in the early eighties. I believe Carl Olsen was just in his capacity as a superintendent. So that was the old mac advisory panel and they were involved in this process as well. It was a very kind of collaborative design process.
I think at times it was combative. You know. There are some stories in Dream Golf about debates that this team had about various features on the golf course. They all kind of had input and obviously there would be disagreements. One disagreement was about this burn or this little waterway that Jim Orbino wanted to put in on the seventeenth hole, and Urbina was really pushing hard for this. He was bringing his case directly to Mike Kaiser and saying, I
really want this burns. It's daring, it it's audacious, it's a memorable feature. And then Tom Doak was on the other side of it, saying, I don't think this really belongs in this landscape. There's nothing else on the course that really tells you that this might be here. And so there was some real disagreement about this particular feature, and eventually Tom Doak's side of the argument won out, and they did not build the burn on the seventeenth hole.
But if you read Dream Golf, there's a whole, really kind of in depth narrative of this disagreement that they had, and I think it gives you an idea of what this design process was like. So maybe we should get to the course itself. Now, just talking about Old Mac in general, what do you think makes it distinct from the other bandoned courses. I think, well, aside from the templates, I mean that the ideal whole, that whole concept that
makes it unique. Just like if you didn't know about that walked out onto the golf course, what would be different about it?
It's the biggest golf course there in the sense of it's got the biggest fairways, it's got the biggest scale. I want to you know, I think scale gets thrown around a lot. It's kind of a buzzword. But it's got the biggest scale, it's got the biggest greens. It navigates over this huge ridge that is a it's a dune that runs all the way from you know, Old mac through Pacific Dunes, through band and dunes and through
bandon trails. It plays over this ridge and it's just a it's a large scale golf course where all the features are are pretty much big. You know, you have big greens, you have big wide fairways, and you have some big hills that you kind of play over, dunes that you play over and onto.
And this is what you mean, by the way, when you mean when you say this course has big scale, you mean the combination of big golf course features like greens and fairways and bunkers and big landforms. You don't just mean there's big landforms, because there's big landforms on every band in Dune's course. But Old McDonald is different in the sense that the scale of the fairways and greens competes with the scale of the.
Landforms exactly, so it's a big ballpark. And then you know, with that, it's the only course that doesn't like just have you on the ocean outside of trails. You know, trails kind of plays you go up into the forest, but it's the only coastal course that's not really you're not staring at.
The ocean most of the day.
So it's the least if you go to the resort, it's the least popular at golf course. It gets the least amount of rounds. That is very true. Should it I don't know. I don't think it should. In my book, I wouldn't have it be there. I think the conversation about Old mac always kind of tends to revolve around what it doesn't have, which is ocean views, rather than what it does have. And I think this is like an important thing with with Old McDonald and understanding it.
It's arguably got the best starting holes in the best finishing holes. It also has the best playing conditions at the resort in my opinion, where it's it's fescue, it's firm and fast almost all the time. And then you know it also has the most day to day variety because of the large scale that it has, the wide fairways in these greens, they're huge. That really can set the golf course up wildly different day to day. Now, at a resort, you know, day to day variety isn't
really a big deal. But if you're thinking about like as a golf course, you know, in evalue evaluating it as a golf course, like day to day variety is really important. And and like you could go out you can see yourself out at Old McDonald playing one day to the next and playing a few days in a row and really getting it wildly different experience every day. You know, the middle of the golf course I think is where it loses some people. It gets very hard.
I'd say that, you know, it's it's probably the hardest stretch of golf outside of maybe Pacific dunes in spaces on the golf at the golf resort, and you know, it traverses some of the you know, less interesting land and it doesn't look at the ocean while it while it goes across this uninteresting, relatively uninteresting land like anywhere else. This land would be very good. But you know, in
the grand scheme of abandon. You know, it's less interesting, you know, meaning that it doesn't have as many you know, humps and bumps and and and stuff, and you're not looking at the ocean. So I think that's where it kind of it rubs people the wrong ways.
The difficulty of it.
People probably shoot a lot of their higher numbers at this golf course on their trips, and you know, I think that's that's how I would, you know, describe Old mac just in general.
Well, so just to clarify the reason that you're not staring at the ocean the whole time at Old MacDonald is that, unlike Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes and Sheep Ranch, there's a big ridge next to the ocean, and the golf course sits on the inside portion of that ridge, and most of the time you can't see over it to the ocean. There are a couple of holes that kind of climb up that ocean side ridge and you
can see to the other side. But the great majority of the golf course, especially that middle portion that you're talking about, feels like it's inland. It doesn't feel like you're necessarily at a seaside course, except for you know, the wind and the smells and all that kind of stuff, and so that's why you don't have those ocean views.
It reminds me the property a little bit. I said this one when we were out there. I called Seminole a salad bowl, you know, And Seminole's got two famous ridges that I say are like the forks the tongs, but like it's it's just like that in essence, like Seminole, like you're right on the ocean, but you don't see the ocean that much unless you're up on one of
the ridges. And it's very similar here where you know, you've got the big ridge that you play over on the third hole and then you're down into the bowl and then you come up onto the edge of the ridge at seven and eight T and then also sixteen T but like in fifteen Green, but that that's very it's very parsed out. You're you're on the ocean, you're playing coastal golf, but you just can't see it because of these ridges.
Something that you mentioned earlier also is the conditioning of Old McDonald, which is really delightful. It is truly firm and fast. It drains incredibly well, and it was the first course at Bandon Dunes to be seeded with one hundred percent fescue. Now, one advantage that Old McDonald has in this regard is that it's a newer course than Bandon Dunes, Bandon Trails and Pacific Dunes, and at those courses at some point in the past they were a little bit firmer because they didn't have as much poa
coming in and kind of pushing out the fescue. But Old MacDonald still has as really great linksy playing conditions. And part of the consequence of that approach, of the one hundred percent fescue approach, is that there is what Jim Orbina calls in dream Golf a seamless look to
the course. And what he means by that is, at most golf courses, you see the green is distinct from the fringe, is distinct from the rough, and the fairways are distinct from the rough, and there are these kind of different colors and different textures, and it directs your
eye to the places where you're supposed to play. You know, you had for the lighter green fairway, you had for the lightest green of the putting surface, right, and and the whole the seams of the core show you where to play, and that's a consequence of the way that the grass is kept right at Old MacDonald, there aren't really those cues. In fact, a lot of the time
you can't tell the green apart from the surroundings. You can't see that the green is necessarily different from the fairway, and so there is a kind of seamlessness to the entire look of the course, which is different even from Pacific Dunes or the other courses at the resort. There is a real sense of like there's a lot of openness here and I don't necessarily know where to play, right. I kind of have to go out there and figure it out.
And I think that's a really cool adventure aspect of it is where when you're just trying to figure it out, like the idea of bewilderment the first time you go around a place, I think is a pretty neat feeling, but it's also it kind of gives you an uncertain feeling, and I can see how a lot of golfers might feel like they're a little lost, and that's and that's
a you know, can be a bad feeling. And I think like those defined lines what you're talking about is what kind of creates those pictures in people's minds, and it adds to memorability, especially when you throw ocean into it, or or towering trees like in the back part of trails, you know, like where you have these towering trees and it's just like, you know, it's gorgeous, like Pacific Northwest forests,
like you know that that's memorable. And it's why so many courses in the Midwest add this, you know, add the fescue strands to their you know, in between holes. Is to create those defined lines and those pictures in people's minds. And I think that's where you know, you know, what I think about Old Back is I just think like a lot of like what I hear people talk about it, I think it's a lot it's really misunderstood.
And I think that's you know, one of the things that gives it a knock is is just like all these things combined together are what what lead people to, you know, look a little bit past the substance of the golf course and lead to you know, it's my least favorite because and not well, like the thing that's crazy is like is the course maybe you know, I think, you know, seeing Pacific Dudes again is really worth it.
But like outside like Pacific Dudes to this, I think are the courses that you most need to play a second time.
Do you think that Old MacDonald would be more highly regarded if it weren't a resort course, because the whole idea of one of these destination resort courses is that you play it once, and that's something that David McLay kidd as an architect, has really figured out later in his career. People are going to generally play this course
one time. I'm going to let them have as good of a time as possible shoot their lowest score, and that's that's kind of where Mammoth Dunes comes from, the idea that you're going to play this course once and have a blast. I'm not sure that Mammoth Dunes would be as fun on replays as Old Mac is. Old Mac really does reward those repeat visits. The problem is people aren't doing many repeat visits at Bandon Dunes and so they don't get that experience.
Yeah, there's a couple of courses I think that fit this bill that are resort courses where I think there's a lot of stuff that that once you scratch and get below the initial surface, there's a lot of really neat things going on. The loop is one that comes to mind where the first play, first time around, it could really rub you the wrong way. But the more and more you go around, the more you realize stuff.
I think Kingsley Club's one that does this too, where it can kind of punch you in the face and you get some bad breaks and you but then you realize, like if I was over here, it would be a lot better spot and things. And I think Old Max that way, where like the severity of some of the contours could and the way the ball can just roll and trundle away seemingly to nowhere good all the time
is it can really frustrate people. And but like the more you play it, the more you see where the spots are that that would funnel it right to the hole. And in order to understand where those spots are, no matter how good your caddy is, you know your caddy's gonna tell you, hey, you should hit it here, but like you're not gonna believe them all the time, or believe her all the time. Like it you know, once you see it happen. That's when and that's where the
repeat plays happen all the time. And I completely agree with your with your commentary about David McClay kidd, Like, Mammoth Dunes is so popular, but I think personally, and this is just my personal opinion, that it gets less and less interesting every time I go around it because it's really just fourteen punch bowl greens and of eighteen holes. And you know, punch bowls are great. I love punch bulls.
Did I've done videos on punch bowls, But you know, the variety of different green complexes and restraining yourself to maybe one or two punch bowls is fun. But if you wanted to build a golf course that everybody shoots their lowest score ever, you build wide fairways and punch bowls, and then it doesn't matter where you are to hit into the green.
Most people are not going to play Mammoth Dunes as many times as you've played it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, so it serves its purpose exactly the point, like as a resort course. You know that that's a great question. You know what is it supposed to be? You know what makes it great is should we look at resort courses and judge them differently than we judge you know, a municipal course or a member's course, like you know it. And I think that's like something like everybody always says like, oh, that's a great tournament
golf course. And then this is the same discussion that you get into with like say Wingfoot and Quaker Ridge. Right wing Foot West is just a ballbuster. It's gonna punch you in the face all day and that's not something I don't I would necessarily want to.
Do every day, but yeah as a member.
But then you go across the street and it's like Quake Ridge is like it's a joy, It's got a little bit more interesting ground, which which leads a little bit more day to day variety, And it's like which one's a better course? Well, they're different types of courses, you know, Are we judging them on the same scale?
You know? Are we?
It's a it's a really interesting debate because the theory is like it shouldn't matter what type of course they are, but it does matter, you know, because businesses are tied to these things, and the realistic thing is like, you know, Mammoth Dunes for Mike Kaiser, the Kaiser family. Mammoth Dudes
is a more successful resort course. Probably, I'm not fully pertinent on the details a more successful resort course than Old McDonald, But in my opinion, as as somebody who looks at a lot of golf courses and talks about golf courses, in my opinion, Old McDonald does is leafs and bounds a better golf course than Mammoth Dudes.
And but part of the reason for that is that it's better on repeat plays, right, Yeah, because this is an entrenched criterion for evaluating a golf course that golf course architecture afficionados have, how well does it do on repeat plays? And I think that that comes from a legitimate, you know, philosophical basis that you know, a really good golf course can reveal itself over time through many different rounds, and and there's a genius to designing a course that
can do that for a player. But at the same time, the whole resort model is is kind of based on the idea that you're you're really just going to do this once or maybe a couple of times in your life. This is a dream golf trip. You don't do a dream golf trip a couple of times a year, you know, it's it's far more rare than that, and that's what
makes it special. And so it kind of that that whole model, that business model challenges the philosophical conviction that we have that a course should get better on repeat plays as opposed to just ingratiating itself to you on the first play.
Yeah, I mean, like I think a good a good thing, A good way to think about it. Just for everybody that's gone through you know, life, dating life and finding your partner is like there's a reason usually you don't propose after one date.
You know, you you.
Marry someone after years of experience life experiences with them, is that you you really know this is the right person for you, you know.
And I think I think that's like something to like.
That's the way I think about golf courses personally, and I and everybody should think about it differently. But if you're looking at purely a business standpoint, and I think that's like a big topic of golf architecture that I talked with Tim Jackson and David con about it. You know, the interesting thing about golf architecture is like it's different than every other art form, right, if you're if you're
going to become a big musician or a big artist. Like, the reality is so many musician origin stories start with them just making music for themselves in their garage, you know, and those are the big hits and everything.
But they do it.
It's a self fulfilling process and their biggest hits. Like the hardest thing with musicians is they get famous, and it's like, how do we come up with new material?
That's real?
Yeah, selling out? Selling out is a big deal in music, right, the idea of an indie band selling out by signing on to a major label. Golf architecture from the beginning has already sold.
Now sold out unless you get that just great client that just lets you do what you want to do. We very almost never and and the Kaisers have done wonderful things, but I would say that they are they're very heavy handed in the design process, which isn't a bad thing. It's not a know, I'm not saying that it's a bad They have good taste and everything, but hardly is the architect provided a canvas to just do
what they want to do. In these situations, they you know, the Dream Golf Book and it goes into great detail about tweaks and revisions and all this stuff, like very rarely is a golf architect actually allowed to do what they artistically and create, like fully unleashed their creativity on site because you know, the owner, whatever it may be, the club committee has their own thoughts that get injected and almost you know, I don't want to say poison,
but they they some much alter it. Like if I had somebody that was like over my shoulder while I was trying to write something telling me what they think, Like the piece isn't going to turn out the same as if I just write it myself.
Yeah, but you send it to me and I edit it right, well, I edited with the audience in mind, like is this is this idea coming across clearly to the audience.
A writer I used to work with at a previous job once told me, Andy, everybody's writing stucks until it guests edited. So and I think that's or revised at least.
Yeah.
I think that's the thing I was impressed most about about, you know, not to diverge into Scottsdale National was the Bob person has just left him alone and then came back and edited at the end.
You know, that's like he named the holes and he did his well.
He did.
He did say like I don't like this, Like you know, I like this, you know, but it was after they had done the majority of the creative process.
Yeah. Well, And to bring it back to Mike Kaiser, he does oversee the design process, or he did when the Band in Dunes courses were being built, But I'm not sure it was necessarily from a place of ego. You know, Ego is always a factor with these tremendously
rich people. It's inevitable. But what I think he was trying to do in the design process was represent the perspective of the quote unquote retail golfer, and whether or not you think he had a truly clear idea of what the retail golfer wanted, Mike Kaiser was devoted to having that perspective be heard while these artists were designing their courses, because I think probably Kaiser's belief is that Bill Kohrr and Tom Doak are artists and that's their job to be artists and to try to make great
works of art. But that's not all that these courses are they are part of my business and they're meant to serve the retail golfer, and so that point of view needs to be present in the design process. I think that's what Mike Kaiser sees himself as doing.
Yeah, and I don't think he's necessarily wrong.
Yeah.
Now, like what you're talking about this that makes me think that, like, you know, the full blown version of selling out is just designing what you think people think is fun, Well you think people think they want.
I guess, and sort of being condescending and your idea of what you think people want, so believing that people are stupider than they actually are and designing to that.
Yeah. So I don't know. It's a uh old mac is.
Everybody's got an opinion on it, and I think that that should I think it falls into that bucket like other courses I think about that fit this kind of mold, like one that jumps to minus tobacco Road, where it's got like a really wide range of opinions on it. I don't think anybody is necessarily wrong. It just it kind of is a barometer for the type of golf courses that somebody likes. And again, like I reiterate this
all the time, like golf course tastes. There's nothing wrong with disliking Old Mac or like like, or liking loving Old Mac like, there's nothing wrong like this all personal taste, right, And that's what's the makes golf courses and talking about it so fun is that there's such a wide range of taste. And I think that's the thing about Old
Mac is it's super divisive. But like you know, because it's so polarizing, that's why I think of almost all of them out there, it deserves some of the most study because there's a lot going on that evokes reaction, and any sort of art that really evokes a wide range of emotions and reaction is onto something.
It's worthy of being preserved at the very least as part of the collection of courses at Bandon Dunes. It's really cool that, you know, whether you like it or not, it's really cool that Old McDonald is there. Maybe we should get into the specifics of the course. So what are some holes that you think really do their job well at Old McDonald? If you are to point to a couple of holes to say this is an example of Old McDonald at its best, which holes would you point to.
Well, oh man, there's so many.
A lot of them are really solid. We discovered this when we went through the Dream eighteen exercise that we did in December. You know, you could make an argument for a lot of different holes that old McDonald as being among the best of their number at the resort.
The first seven are probably the best first seven holes at any golf course. It starts off with a bag like it's over dead like. One of the things I think that it does really well that's emblematic of Rader and McDonald is the least interesting ground is on the starting and ending holes, So seventeen eighteen one to two, it's on the backside of this of the big.
Dune that you go over and into the bowl.
So those holes have very bold templates, and that's something that Raider and McDonald did a lot of is like where the ground was less interesting, they put really big features and templeates that like work no matter what the ground is. So you start with the double plateau. It's really fun. As a short part four, what it's maybe one of the best green concepts in golf and why I think it's one of the best green concepts of golf is that no matter what type of approach you're
hitting into it is really fun shot. And in this case, you're hitting like a short, little wedge shot into it
and with the firm conditions, like that's the thing. You come there and it's a little bit like one of the things that does right off the bat is pops you in the face a little bit because it's firmer than everywhere else and you're hitting this little wedge like a lot of times a half ledge in there, and that first bounce you're like, WHOA, this place is a little different, like it's a tone setter, and I think that's you know, it gets people on their heels a
little bit right off the bat because of the firmness of the turf. You're hitting a wedge off that firm rescue is not like a shot a lot of people are comfortable with, and it kind of you know, the eating hole, the second hole.
Eden holes one of the best edens.
Like I think where the templates of Rayner and McDonald fall short, like the Eden's holes are across the board. A lot of them in America aren't that good, and this is probably one of the best Eden templates.
Why don't you think the typical McDonald and rainer Eden is particularly good? Is there not much going on at the Green typically?
I think part of it's just modern technology has rendered them a little bit. And I think, like the thing you know from pictures of Saint Andrews, like, I don't think they captured the severity of the of the eleventh at Saint Andrews, which is what it is modeled off of very well in a lot of cases. And I think, you know, that could be just something the way they have aged, you know, and maybe tinkering. But this, this one, this one is one of the most memorable holes out there.
And then you know, if I fast forward a little bit, I think, like the sixteenth the Alpshole is pretty unforgettable and embodies the golf cours because it's a spectacular version of the Alpshole, which originally is the seventeenth at pressed Wick. It is a hole that it's just got these gargantuan landforms. You've got a dune cutting in from the left that
provides the blindness. If you play over to the right, the hole gets longer, but you can see into the kind of the bowl, the hollow that the Green sits in. It's not a bowl because it rejects a lot of different ways, but the hollow where you can actually get a look at the pin. But then if you play left, it shortens it dramatically and you get but you're just
so blind. It's the blindness of blind shots where you literally like are the caddy's telling you where to go and you're just hitting it on that prague He's right, you know, Like it's where you have to put full trust in it. And I think that hole does such a good job of encapsulated like the gargantuan nature of the property.
That the dune is huge that you play over to get to the green. It is true a blind shot if you're not way out to the right. If you are way out to the right, then you can kind of see around, as you were saying, into that hollow. But I think what you discover is that the blindness is not really a big deal on that hole because if you play out to the left and you just kind of hit a decent shot over the dune, if you get the ball over the dune, it's going to
run down and be on the green. Yeah, everything kind of feeds onto the green from that dune, and so if you just get in the vicinity, you're going to end up in a pretty good spot. And so the blindness really isn't that big of a deal, but the first time you play it, it's really intimidating and you don't know where the hell to go. And so that's where I've played Old Mac. I've been lucky enough to
play Old Mac three times now. It was only on the third time, this most recent time that we played it that I realized this about the hole, that yeah, just hit your drive out to the left, it's not a big deal and loftier approach over the dune. It's going to filter down there and be in a pretty good spot. That was a late discovery. I did not know that the first time I played the hole.
Yeah, and another great hole for repeat plays, the leave and hole the thirteenth where you know you've got to the green really dictates everything back. It's just in this beautiful little pocket and it's got wild contours. It's kind of got a high, high left side and a lower right side that's bowly, and you know you can you can shorten your route by playing up the left always, but it leads to a little bit more tricky of
a golf shot into that green. But if you play right, which is over by these bunkers, you you know, you get a real big bowl and you get a little bit easier of a shot into that left side of the green.
Yeah, the leave and hole is delightful, and it's in an area of the property that's sort of like that other side of the dune ridge that you were talking about, where the land is a little bit less interest and so a lot of the most recognizable and extreme templates are in that area where the thirteenth hole the levin is. So the eleventh hole is sort of in that section of the property. It's a road hole. The twelfth hole is in the same section, it's a redan, and so
those templates were saved for that piece of land. Now, two holes that I keep thinking about are the fifth hole, the short hole, and the sixth.
Hole the long hole.
And these are part of that opening stretch that you were talking about, and they're so wonderful. You often ask people if you were to pick a green to put in your backyard, what green would it be? And I would have a hard time choosing between the fifth and the sixth At old McDonald, But I think it would be one of those two. Probably the sixth green. There's just like so much variety, so many little nooks and
crannies to the green that Doakes team designed there. It would just be endlessly fun to kind of hit shots around there.
Yeah, I mean, I think the fifth is such a smart hole too, is like in terms of a modern adaptation on short holes. Like one of the things that happens with short holes is especially at resorts, they just get beat to shit because of you know, so many people playing them and hitting the green. It's a green that everybody hits, so you get you know, ball marks
all over the place. This green is just massive, and it's got all these different pockets, Like you could play it ten days in a row and it wouldn't you know.
You could find ten pins easy out there that are wildly different in different sections of the greens, and it really all of them pretty much really reward great shots, which I think is the you know, when you think about the short hole template and the short whole concept, what great short par threes, what encapsulates them is all of them the great ones is if you hit a really great shot, you can make it two. But if you hit an average shot, you're gonna have to work
your ass off for four. And if you hit a bad shot, you know, the range of outcomes can get.
Very high, very quick.
And you know, like you could be staring like how do I get out of here with a double? You know, if you get into the wrong spot like where like you know, we've all been there, and you know, depending on what you know, all levels of play where you you all of a sudden start to think about like how do I get out of here in acts?
And that's the thing that that hole can do.
And and with regards to the six, I think one of the cool things about the six is like the shot types that come into it. You know what we talked a little bit about. One, whether you're hitting a three wood in there trying to get home in two, or if you lay up and you're hitting like a little wedge. That green is so fun to hit hit shots in two.
Yeah, you can do it in a bunch of different ways. You can run it on, you can try to hold a particular section of the green. Yeah, it's great that the short hole, the fifth hole. You're so right that a lot of the great short par threes are do or die propositions. But the way that most of them do that is by having a really small green with a lot of trouble around it. Right, That's just what a lot of the most famous short par threes are.
And the short hole has an absolutely massive green that it shares with the tenth hole, So it is the opposite in some ways, but it's still do or die because there are these small sections of the green that you need to hit if you want to have a really good chance at a par right, and if you hit it, then then you have a good chance at a birdie. If you don't hit that small section of the green, you're going to have such a crazy putt that you're going to be looking at a three put
more than likely. And so that's how it introduces that danger, that that sense of peril that a lot of the great short par threes have.
And this is also another point of where I think golfers get rubbed the rogways they feel I hit the green, How did I make a four or five? Like they get frustrated, this is a stupid green. But like when you think about the hole, you didn't hit the good shot, you didn't hit a good shot. You got a wedge in your hand, you didn't hit a good shot like that's like you should make a four. You know, the person that hits it fifteen feet away and is in
a good spot and walks away with three. You should have to really hit a great shot to match their three.
And that's the irony of it that if there were rough around a much smaller green and it was still do or die, people might not have as much of a problem with it. But because it's all green, they just have the expectation that if I get on the green, then I should have a really good chance at two putting. But that's just not an expectation that's going to be
fulfilled at Old McDonald in general. And I think that is a big reason why some people react poorly to Old McDonald, because you're just going to three put a lot.
So I one thing I wanted to talk about is I think the stretch of nine through twelve is where Old Mack loses people. I know, it's one of your least favorite stretches of golf at the resort. I personally I like some of the holes. I think one of the reasons I think is like I'm a little bit longer player than you, And you know, I think I
like having to hit long irons and degrees occasionally. But you know, I think the tenth they're very, very hard golf holes if you play them to their assigned par and I think that is where I kind of fall on them. But I would love to hear, you know, kind of your critiques on holes nine through twelve.
You know, I don't have a big problem with really hard, long golf holes. You know, I think that four at Old McDonald definitely fits that description. It's it's basically, I think, on many days a par five, but it's a par four on the scorecard. But I love that hole, and so I don't really have a problem with a hole being long and difficult, and I don't hate holes nine through twelve. I think actually ten, the bottle hole is has a terrific green, the road hole, the eleventh is
a really well functioning road hole. I think the redan falls short of whatever it's trying to do. But at the same time, we hit drivers into that radan. On the day that we played, all of us were hitting driver into it, and a couple of us hit the green, and so the problem with that a lot of people have with that Redan hole is that it's incredibly, incredibly
difficult to hit the green. On the day we were there, the wind was pretty still, and so that was probably a factor, but we were able to hold that green. The ninth hole is not one of my favorite holes that at Old Mac. I think that it's a cape hole, and the general idea on the approach is that you know, you can really sling it in there if you hit it left to right, and you can run the ball from well before the green to the very back of
the green. But I think the way that the contours are right now that it's just a little too unlikely that you're going to hold that back section of the green. Even if you hit a great shot in there, it's just really frequently going to filter off the back of that green and into the little chipping hollow beyond. I think that outcome is just maybe a bit too common for my taste. But at the same time, it's a fun shot. It's a fun shot to try. I'm sure
that it's accomplishable. I think in general that those holes are a little bit harder to love because of the relatively featureless land that they're on and I say relatively because on many other golf courses that might be the best stretch of land on the course, but at Bandon Dune's it doesn't really grab you as being a great piece of golfing terrain. And that's why some of the boldest templates are there. But I think the holes that are around it just work better.
Well.
I think the other thing too, is that those are the places where you lose the massiveness of the ridge. Those are the holes that are disconnected from the ridge.
From both of the ridges. They're in the middle, and so yeah, the ocean side ridge and the inland ridge, you're right in the middle. You're really distant from them, That's true.
They're really the only holes on the whole course that are are that disconnected because you know, maybe eighteen falls into this bucket, but then you have that punch bowl green that and you have the property line on the left. So I think that's one of the things too, is that like without really like noticing knowing it, you know, subliminally, you pick up on like you're you're not you don't you don't have this bordering massiveness, you know on those holes.
Yeah, you know, I think this again, this is all relative. They're really good golf holes, but they're just not up to the standard of the rest of the course. That four hole stretch in the middle just gets lost a little bit for me. And I'd also put the eighth hole the Beeritz and the fifteenth hole that goes from one ridge to another as holes that in the scheme of things, are relatively mediocre.
I think the fifteenth like you stand out of that tee and it's one of the few times in the round where you can really lose all sense of train of thought and just swing away it just you know, the t shot feels, you know, like a little bit you know, one of those moments where you just you don't really have to think and you just bash it away.
You know, I could be completely wrong, but like that's just the way I feel about it, is like that's one of the like I typically like when when you're really stimulated and you're especially the first time around, having to really think about, you know, is this the right spot do I want to in there? It just seemed like, okay, just just launch it, just hit it as hard as you can and you'll be fine. Because I had I had one off the planet right that bounced back into a fine.
Spot, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I think like we we also be rebiss to just mention really the fourteenth I think is one of the better holes at the whole resort, the maiden hole, which plays up like just a huge, rich, unbelievable natural blowout bunker on the right and uh and and that's a really dynamic hole that could play so differently based
off the wind. And I think that's the other thing with with Old Mac is like the different winds with with the size of the golf course and the way the pins can change from day to day with different winds, it really is a golf course that could play so so different And like I think, you know, that would be a fun golf course, a really fun golf course to go play from the forward tis on every hole.
Yeah, and you know, a fun golf course. This is cliche to say now, but a fun golf course to play a half set on and to just sort of liberate yourself from the usual expectations of playing a modern round of golf where you can kind of be creative about your drives and approaches, you know, especially your approaches if you're just if you're one hundred and fifty yards from a green at Old MacDonald and you're just choosing your one hundred and fifty yard club, you might be
missing a little bit of what makes the course unique because one hundred and fifty yard shot usually at that course you could play with any number of different clubs in different ways, and you know, taking a few clips out of your set might might liberate you to do that. But at the same time, that's not really an experiment that you're doing if you're playing the course once in.
Your life, I would I would say that, like, that's one of the magic. That's some of the magic of All Back is that it provides you with the most shot options of any out there. Every shot, Like you have the most avenues to get to the hole than any other golf course. Like you can hit so many
different shots and they're so off. There's some you know, stuff in front of greens that you have to think about, but a lot of times there's lots of contours there that you can move the ball off of in Like a lot of times you're just enticed to you know, if you're seventy yards out, like you're enticed to pull out your five iron hit a little bump or run.
And often you should, you know, often that's gonna work out a little bit better.
All personal, but you know, don't be afraid of it.
Yeah, exactly. So ultimately, where does where does Old Mac say? I think you disagree with me about the middle section of the course. I feel like you were more enthusiastic about that part of the course than I am, and so that might lead you to rate Old Mac a bit more highly than I do. If you're looking at the eighteen whole courses at Bandon Dunes, where would you put Old Mac in a list?
So? I think I I think if I was gonna split ten rounds, it'd be near the top, you know. I think I think Banded Trails is a better course. I think I think that's you know, but I think it. I think i'd have it pretty firmly in there. I think it and Sheep Ranch to me are kind of in the same I think i'd probably like Old Back a little bit more than Sheep Ranch, But like Sheep Branches, they're so different it's hard like it's a it's again, I'd put them in that same tier behind Bandoned Trails
and Pacific Dunes. You know, so I I think like in terms of places though, that the course I most want to play. That's the see, that's the thing that's
where like I think i'd play it a lot. Like if if I just had those courses in my backyard and I didn't work and all I did was play golf, is I think like, And it's impossible to know this because I don't you know, this isn't a thing, but I think that's one of the that might be the course that I end up playing the most, just because like how different it could play.
Yeah, that's why the exercise of splitting ten rounds that courses is interesting because it's a different question than what do you think is the best course or what do you think is the best design course. Yeah, it's really appealing the idea of playing Old Mac many times and having different experiences and different wins, with different pen positions and having the freedom to try some freaky shots. You know.
One of the things people do at Old McDonald that they don't do as much at other courses is after they hole out, they'll just kind of put around the greens and try different things and see how different putts go. That's something that's so fun about that place, and it's one reason why it's appealing to the idea of playing it over and over.
Yeah, there could be some really fun cross country holes out there too. Yeah, just like if you're thinking about like the course of like you know it as a member's course, like you know, like there there are some really really fun holes that you could make from you know, certainties to other te's and or other greens. And and
I think that's that's another aspect of it. Like I think it's a it's a course that it's a grower, right, It's a course that like the more you more time you spend out there are the more it's going to grow on you. And and I I always think that like in a way like that's you know, all of our rating systems in America, all of the course rankings are predominantly based off people that have seen a course one time. And and I think that's like one of the great flaws of the rating system.
You know.
I don't think that there's a real easy fix because nobody's gonna spend you know, it's hard enough to see a lot of courses, let alone see a lot of courses twice. But you know, to me a lot of the best courses are the ones that you you you might not like fully grasp the first time around.
Yeah, absolutely all right. I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you, Andy,