Bandon Deep Dives: Pacific Dunes

that we're talking about today. Was that the most professional segue you've ever heard?

other things to cover. So we're getting back to the series now, and this is our second to last episode of this series, because we've been going backwards through time through the courses, backwards chronologically, and so we are at the second course that was built at the Bandon Dunes golf resort, designed by of course, Tom Doak, opened in two thousand and one, and it opened to rave reviews. You know, this was a pretty immediate success for Bandon

Dunes almost right away. It outranked Bandon Dunes on the magazine rankings, which you know, take that with a grain of salt, obviously, but I think it's significant that in most you know, sort of general rankings of courses in America, Pacific Dunes is usually second to just Sand Hills basically among modern courses. And so this is perhaps the most highly regarded course at Bandon Dunes, but it's also one of the more controversial. You know, we talked about Old McDonald.

Old McDonald two has had its detractors, but I feel like there's the biggest split when it comes to Pacific Dunes between people who love the course and people who really don't like the course. Would you agree with that?

is some bite. And if you look historically through the great golf courses, you know, you think about National Golf Links, you think about Shinnakok Hills, you think about Pine Valley, you think about you know, the great American golf courses. When they were designed, they had bite. They were controversial, they were pushing boundaries of what was considered fair. I think Pacific Dunes is the one course Abandon that has real bite. And you know, my first encounter with Pacific

Dunes was broadcasting. I played it, but I brought I spent a week broadcasting a college event.

time runner up at the US AM. You you know, you have real quality golfers and you see them go around this golf course on three idyllic days, you know, wonderful weather and it's sixty six hundred yards and you know, the scorers were not great. They were right around par for winning. They were not they not lighted up despite really good weather conditions. And I think it's a testament to the golf design in the sense of without a beefy yard, this golf course is really challenging and for

the best of players. But I think like regular people can navigate their space, and especially if you understand the design and where you need to get to. It's a golf course that if you're out of position, you need to get back into position. It's not a golf course where you can hit it anywhere and be fine. Like that's not the type of golf course it is. It's a golf course, and that's what makes it great. That's

the enduring thing. The routing's phenomenal. We talked about it at length in our video that we did, the roundtable video that we did on it that I highly recommend checking out on YouTube. We also have it on the website. We talk about the routing, the routing's phenomenal, but really at the core of this golf course is such a

wonderful strategy. From hole to hole. Each hole has its own story, and there are repercussions when you play certain ways, often away from trouble, and when you play away from trouble, you find yourself in positions where you can't attack. You need to be defensive, you need to get yourself back in position and to make pars. And where you can get in a lot of trouble is when you're out of position and try and bite off too much that

you can chew. And when you think about the great golf courses, the greatest golf courses in the world, this is the thing behind them, is that the strategy is what drives them. It's the timeless, iconic stuff that lasts forever. It's why the road hole at Saint Andrew's is one of the greatest holes ever. Is not because of the hotel that you hit over. It's because of the what happens if you hit it over the hotel versus bailing to the left, and what the repercussions are and what

you have to do after that. So with Pacific Dunes, what I love about it really deep down is that you're playing chess.

land outside. You have the ocean on your right side, so you're playing along the cliffs. And this is a perfect example. And most people would say, oh, if you take the ocean away, that holds a nothing burger. But if you put an out of bound stake and you had a train line right there, this is one of the great strategic holes in all of golf. It asks you to hit the ball as close to the hazard as you can if you can hug it up the right side along the cliffs there, every contour around the

green helps you. You're hitting a mid to long iron depending on the wind, maybe a short iron depending on the wind. If your downwind versus indo. You know, you can have a range of things. But this whole strategy works regardless. So you have the cliff running along the right, the ocean on your right, which is a very daunting

thing to take. On to the left, you have tons of space, heaps of space, a couple fairway bunkers that are very much in play, and if you find those that are deep, you're gonna have a tough time getting even to the green. But you have all the room in the world left and it's flat and the green

is guarded. What it has is a dune on the left side of the green short left that kind of runs along the left side in there is set some bunkers and the green kind of sits in this pocket a dune, a pocket, and then the cliff and all the slopes go at the green, go left to right off the dune towards the cliff. If you play up the right, you all of a sudden have a sideboard. You play close to the water. You've taken on the challenge and your reward is that you don't have to

take on the water again. You have a helping slope and you can play to the left part of the green and it's going to funnel you back to the middle part of the green. You can also get at left PINNs from there, which you know if you play away, which is really easy to do, and I think that's where most people do it. It's just so hard to get yourself to hit it up the right. And this is this, this is brilliant strategy. So you decided, I'm not taking on the water. I'm going to pass. I'm

going to pass the buck onto the next shot. So I hit it over to the left, say I'm in the fairway on the left half of the faaway, or say I'm in the fairway on the left side and I'm trying to attack that green. All of a sudden, every single slope that was helping me from the right side hurts me from this side. It is going to shoot the ball. It's not going to kind of funnel it back because I'm not landing into the upslope of

the slope. I'm landing on the down slope. And what happens is that ball can shoot off the green into the water if you're not careful. So what you're kind of presented with its decision, especially if you have a long iron in like, what do I do? Now? You have a couple options. You can try and hit that shot. It's really hard. You probably need to draw it, you know, and you need to draw it against it and try and get something working against the slope to do it.

You can hit it, dump it into the bunker, but then you've just passed along that problem again. Or you can play it short of the green and get yourself back into a position where you have a reasonable up and down attempt. And that third decision is probably what you should do, and if you did it ten times, over,

you'd probably walk away with the best scoring average. But that's the hardest thing to get any golfer to do because it makes them say to themselves, I can't hit the shot, and it forces you to play against your own ego, which is what Pacific Dunes does over and over and over again, is that it foils you against

your ego. And I think that's where a lot of animosity comes, is that people realize they can't hit these shots, but they don't realize that they put themselves in the position to where they shouldn't be able to hit the shot because they didn't take on the first shot and they didn't confront the problem off the bat.

because guess where you're playing. You're playing right to the edge of the cliff, and your tendency is going to be to pull that left and you might end up in those dunes on the left, or in that bunker that's cut into the dunes. I was there last time. I can tell you that's not the place to be because you're not hitting the green with your recovery from there. You are doing the same thing that an approach would do. You're running through the green. Second thing is that the

prevailing wind enhances everything that you're talking about. Four In the prevailing summer wind plays down wind, and so that means that your approach is going to have less spin. It's going to roll out more, and you really need if you want to hold the green to be on the right. There you have that little slot up. You can land it way short of the green, and your

approach is going to run up. It's not a hard shot from there, but it's an incredibly hard shot from the left down wind because everything that the design is doing is enhanced by that wind. Your ball is running out there's just really nowhere to stop it. So those are the two things i'd add to four. I agree it's a brilliant hole. There are other brilliant fourth holes at the Bandon Dunes Resort, and that's what we got

talking about during the Dream eighteen exercise. But for sure the angles on that hole are exemplary and they represent a lot of what Pacific Dunes is doing throughout the course.

a very interesting one. Tom Doak wrote a book called The Making of Pacific Dunes that he has talked about on the Yoke with Doke podcast with you, and it's a great story, you know, it's a really fun story about the various kind of compromises and experiments that you go through when you're building a course of this importance

and on this kind of piece of land. But the main thing that happened early in the process of the routing of Pacific Dunes was that Doake realized that a couple of the holes that he had routed in his initial plan wouldn't work because David Kidd had put his seventh and eighth holes at Bandon Dune's over the land

that Doake was planning to use for those holes. So Doake basically needed to not completely scrap his initial plan because he was able to save some of the holes from there, but really reconceptualize the routing of the course. He had to find some new holes somewhere and a new way to make the course work overall. So it's a great story, and we have some tape of Doak describing this in one of those old episodes of Yolk

with Doake. It's about ten minutes long. So why don't we cut to that tape and just let Tom tell the story.

David Kidd was already working on his plan for the first golf course at that time, and instead of trying to like elbow him out of the way, I just figured, well, you know, Mike's talking about doing two golf courses. Hopefully I'll get a chance to do the second one. So so I just, you know, I just spent some time with Mike. We played golf a couple of times when I actually went on a golf trip to Ireland together,

got to know him a bit. He saw a couple of my other golf courses, and as Bandon Dunes was being built, he acquired the land for Pacific Dunes, and so Mike sent me topo of that land. But we both agreed that it probably wasn't right to go out there and start working on the planning while David was still working on his golf course, and you know, and you know, having another archae ticked around while David was still you know, making decisions and changing stuff just wasn't kosher.

So so I didn't. So I had the map for quite a while to just play around and try to find golf holes. But I didn't go to look at the site until David's course was all done and a month or two away from opening.

my routing just flat did not work. From the moment I set foot on the site that the circulation of it didn't work at all, And I was like, so I never showed.

and eight abandoned dunes. And you know, we were spend a lot of time walking the site, the parts that we could walk because a lot of it was still covered with gorse, and then coming back and working on the maps, and so you know, we found like the sites for the first hole and the second hole, and the and the seventh green, and the eighth and part of the eighteenth because those weren't under gorse and you

could walk them pretty easily. But the north side of it was almost you know, once you dropped off three t onto that flatterplane, that was all eight foot high gorse. You really couldn't walk through it at all. So we just you could see the dunes on the far side, and we had a topo map and it's like, okay, it's five hundred yards to there, so we could play a hole here. But it was still hard to get a feel for and Mike was feeling nervous about it.

But you know, I said to him, after like three days, you know, I really like this, but you know that that little corner there that we gave up, you know that means I'm gonna wind up with three or four holes inland away from the water that I just I don't think they're going to be good.

just all gorse and you couldn't walk through it. So Jim and I drove around to the beach actually where you drive into the sheep where you can drive into the Sheep ranch and hike back up along the dunes to get in, because there was you know, a sandy along the dunes and there was a there was a little bit of a trail and I wasn't solid course, so we came in and we we wound up where kind of where fourteen Tea is now, and that was

our first view of thirteen. I was from up there, like Alex, pretty dramatic going back there toward the tee and then you know, I look the other way and I was like, holy crap. But you know, it's just you know, there's this this giant dune coming down in just enough space for a green site between that and the water, and really a green site just sitting there.

wound up in the book. But you know, we immediately went right back around to the resort and said to Mike, yeah, there's a great hole there. You should come see it. And I don't think he'd ever seen it. He might have for all I know, but but he was excited

when he saw what we were pointing at. And then you know, we showed it to him from fourteen and he said, could the next hall be like a part three up up in the dunes here where so you're still looking at the ocean instead of like you know, teeing off and playing down into the land world McDonald

is and not seeing the ocean at all. Because Mike at that point was still his idea of how great the golf course was going to be was how many holes were you looking at the ocean from You had to count in his head the whole time, and I said, sure, you know, we'll just you know, we'll have to like do some earthwork on the dune over there to build fourteen. And we actually had to do more work to build that hole than most of them, but you know, that was basically Mike's idea for a hole.

where it didn't quite cover the green. But we had to sand cap that hole and four and twelve with about three feet of sand and when we did that, you know, the faaraway was going to come up so much relative to the green that that it wasn't going to the visual wasn't gonna be good, so we had to like knock the fairway down a little bit so the sand cap didn't ruin the view. But it looks what's there now looks almost exactly the same as what was there at the start.

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 tech 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 the takeaway from that story for me is that the addition of that land in the northwest corner of the property where thirteen and fourteen are it basically established what the entire concept of the current routing of the course is, which is that there's this great land at one corner of the property, and then there's this great land where the so called sandy bowl is and some of the cliff side stuff is on the other end of the property, and essentially

the job of the course's routing is to get over the land between those two sections of the property and make those holes that you get over the less interesting land good in their own right, but the priority is to get quickly from one section of the property to another. That's essentially what the routing does really well, I think, but it's it's the problem that had to be solved. This is what we talked about in the Pacific Dunes roundtable.

We don't need to go super in depth on it, but it is important to mention because that that is essentially the idea of the routing of this course.

dramatic bunkering that takes you from the tee. You walk up to that tee and you see all the bunker and you see the ocean in the background, and it makes you forget that the land you're going across is very flat. And then you know twelve is you're playing along. You can see the ocean, but it's a really good strategy hole, and they did a lot with the angles of the green. And then similarly fifteen you have a combination. You have some very big bunkers off the tee that

you have to look at. You have a lot of like micro movement in the fairway that's very cool. But then at the green. The green is the star of that hole. It is a you know, kind of a turtle back green that repels in every direction and you have to hit a really great shot if you're going for that in two, otherwise you're going to have a tough time making a four. So it really you know,

and they have a big cross hazard there. So these holes make up for it with built features, whether they're bunkers or greens, they make for this and what they

are is connector holes. And by making them, you know, by building and spending so much time on features, that interest is generated, but they're all that interest is only generated really for three holes of the golf course, which is incredible because if you routed it differently, you could put seven or eight holes on that less interesting land. But this really only takes up three golf holes, even though it's a vast space that needed to be moved across multiple times.

by one of the greens that at Dornick. I believe it's the hole that's called Foxy. I think it's fourteen. I apologize for my lack of knowledge of Scottish golf. That will be rectified hopefully sometime soon. But in any case, there is a kind of a template notion. There almost an inspiration from a Lynks course, And you know, once you really look at these greens and look at how they relate to the hole, you realize that these are

well designed holes. All right, So why don't we talk about some of the holes in the so called sandy bowl, which is which is really the great landform at Pacific Dunes, aside from maybe the land at thirteen has. I mean, there's the ocean, yeah obviously, but as you mentioned, you know that four at Pacific Dunes runs along the ocean. But the land itself is really nothing special right there until you get to the green and you see some

of those dunes. But yeah, to me, the really distinctive landscape at Pacific Dunes is this sandy bowl where there are a bunch of short par fours. Do you want to talk about the short par fours at Pacific Dunes and some of the strategies there, because I think that's where this course really shines, really gets to the next level.

par three. And then there's also like holes like four that play that's that's almost closer to par five than a part four, right, depending on the wind yeaheah, mixed in thirteen, two, yeah in thirteen and mixed in here are copious amounts of scoring chances if you play the whole the proper way and you get into the right spots to attack. So ones obviously right off the bat a short part four, I think it's a pretty deat hole.

You have the gorse and like the junk on the left that runs along the hole, and you know it's your opening T shot. Everybody's afraid of hidding it in there and having to kind of retee right off the bat.

take the tough shot on. So meanwhile, if you play up the left side there, it's going to rock at your ball. I mean, there's a huge speed slot that can carry your ball almost all the way down to the green. It's definitely drivable from the regular tea for longer hitters, but it gets you right into the pock. It where you're hitting right up the green. It's a small target. It's an undulating green. And if you're over on the left coming in there, you're gonna be in

a really good spot to attack. And otherwise, if you're over to the right, you're gonna be semi blind. You're gonna be hitting from a sidehill. Why and I'll never forget you know, I'm doing that telecast. It was the final group, so it's the leaders and I want to say, the best score on this hole was a five. I mean, there was doubles, there's triples that were made, and it's

all because that that T shot. People that hit it right just got into a terrible place off the start and it puts you right on your heels if you get into the wrong spot. But it's a wonderful introduction to the golf course with the idea of Okay, I'm gonna need to, you know, hitch them shots that I don't necessarily want to hit off the tee, so that I don't have to hit shots that I definitely don't want to hit on the on the second shot, and the first hole is a great example of that.

place I want to be. Do I want to be high right? Do I want to be low left? And I think depending on the pin position, you might want to be different places on different days.

much trouble. Up the right, there's a bunker, there are some dunes to the right, there's a dune ridge sitting there on top of which is the ninth fairway, and it is very uncomfortable to try to hit up that side. But if you go out to the left, if you go away from the stuff that looks scary, then your next shot is going to be over a massive bunker to a very narrow green that is super shallow from

that angle. So if you're going to have a reasonable look into this green, and it's often going to be a wedge or a short iron, if you're going to have a reasonable chance of stopping your ball on this green,

then you really do need to be right. If you decide to go left, as most people do, chances are you're going to come up short in the bunker which is dead, or you're going to run over the green where you're going to be chipping back onto this plateau green, and you might end up going back and forth a little bit.

can really do it. Just put you know, a pitching wedge in your hands or a nine iron and bump and run it up on the green. It will stay there if you hit a proper shot from down there. But I think that what people sometimes do is they get down way down below a green and they pull out their lob wedge immediately and they try to flop it up and hit this fancy Phil Mickelson shot. That that's not the shot you should be hitting from down there. You should be bump and running it up onto the green.

You've got to learn that shot if you're going to expect to play Pacific Dunes and many other courses at Bandon.

around the greens. It's just a matter of refining your touch by trying it a few times and not being necessarily discouraged if the first one doesn't go well. You know, yeah, I promise you. It's like riding a bike. You every kid who's played the game has has hit that shot a million times, and it's just, you know, a matter of getting that that feel back into your into your hands all right.

place for a nice alternate green green site. And the hole really changes when you're going up to the right versus down to the left. Now you're teeing off over a big ridge. It's completely blind. You're down below in the sandy bowl, and your exit from the sandy bowl up onto this ledge is just to hit straight over it, So it's blind. You need to ask your caddy where you're supposed to go here. But if you're going up to the green on the right, then you need to

keep that drive way to the right. If you're going down to the green on the left, then your goal is to hit a big sweeping hook that kind of runs down the hill to the left, so it's completely different plays off the tee depending on where the green is that day.

so it's going down into the bowl. So anything that's not that's a little left of center, or maybe even that's that's right center close to center is tumbling down into the bowl. So that's what makes this the t shot.

When you're playing to the original location the right high right side, which I think is one of the best holes at all at the entire resort, is playing to the high right side because again it infuses this timeless strategy of play where you don't want to play which is up the right, because then you know, if you miss right, there's some native grasses, some you know, some fescue and just some longer stuff that's scary. And it's a ridge right, you could end up way right. You know,

you just don't want to end up. You don't want to miss there. You know, you see a bad miss there versus the left, you have all day left. I mean hitting to that bottom green and having to get it to the left, that might be one of the

easiest t shots on property. But hitting it up to the right and you're hitting like an iron, a fairway wood, you don't need a driver here, and hitting it up to that right it's like hitting a good shot on a long part three, Like you have to hit a really good, good iron to get it to stay up there. And it's really intimidating. So you typically bail left and

then from there you're completely blind. You cannot see anything at all, and you're playing up over this big ridge to a green that does not receive shots well from the left. It's just it's just beautiful. It's wonderful strategy, and it especially once you've learned this stuff. And I think this is one of the things that we could talk about, is this is a golf course that every

time you play it gets better and better. Because of things like this, because of the strategy behind it, where you start to understand these things and you're standing on that tee and you're trying to get yourself to hit it right, and when you hit it left, you immediately go, oh no, and somebody that might not know be like, you're in the middle of the fairway. But it's like, oh no, that's not where I want to be though,

And I think that's the cool thing. The green is really neat, it's long, it's narrow, and it plays off a ridge. So anything from the left you're hitting. You know, the last time we played it, I had I think a sand wedge in it was and I hit a really good, nippy sand wedge and it landed about pin

high and ended up fifty feet past it. But you know what, I expected that because I was out of position, and even though I hit a really great shot, I knew that I had screwed up my chance at making a birdie, my good chance at making a birdie, by not playing the right shot off the tee.

the ocean, and it's beauty, it's wonderful. But if you go down below, what you see is the massive scale of the sand dune, the dunes to the right of the green, and from up top, because you're above them, those just get squashed down and you don't feel that you know the magnificence of the setting you're in. You get the magnificence of the expanse of ocean view. You miss out on the dune, so you know, if you go down to the left, that's going to be much more like a dramatic shot in Ireland.

legitimate in some ways. On the No Laying Up podcast, specifically, in the last episode that they did on the Bandon Dunes resort when they were doing tourist sauce out there, they mentioned wind, the prevailing wind, as something that might make Pacific Dunes worse. But ten when you're up on that elevated tee is a crosswind, and a lot of the holes at Pacific Dunes run north or south, so they're either downwind or into the wind, and you don't

get a whole lot of crosswind at the course. So in that sense, I agree with the No Laying Up guys that you know, when you're playing in a really strong wind at Pacific Dunes, you can see a lot of similar winds because so many of the holes are roughly along that north south axis. Now, the reason the holes are that way is that the winds are that way, yes, but that also means that the dune ridges run that way.

You know, there's a reason that the land is the way it is at Pacific Dunes, and it's because of the wind. The dune ridges run roughly north south as well, and so in order to have more holes that were cross wind Pacific dunes would need to either be going over these huge dune ridges more or they would have

need to needed to alter the land more. And I think that both of those solutions are worse than what they came up with, which is having holes that are generally oriented north south but have subtle variations within that. But at the same time, it's it's a tough problem to solve. I mean, you know, what can you do.

really close sequence together. Those two part threes are effectively the same yardage, but they play in completely different directions. So if you play in the winter, you know you're gonna get eleven dead into the wind, which is a really really hard shot one, but then you get fourteen downwind, and that makes that shot a lot easier. Now if you flip it, you know you get eleven down one. Neither of them are picnics either way. I'm just going to put that out there. They're difficult shots to hit

either way, but you get the complete other dynamic. And one of the things I think like eleven and fourteen signify, like the idea of getting up there and hitting a shot on par threes. And you know we played when

we played. When I think about like turn golf, you stand on tee when you play tournament golf, or you play in your club championship, and there there's a pressure that you feel that you know you need to pull something off, you need to hit a shot, and you get those moments in golf where you need to hit

a shot. And I think when you look at eleven and fourteen, depending on which one's playing in the wind, if you you know, if you play in the winter like we did, playing eleven into the wind, I think I want to say I hit something like a choke five iron from one forty and you know, you stand on that tee and you know, I got to hit a real, real golf shot here. And if I don't hit the real golf shot, I'm gonna be in a tough spot. But there is areas to bail out, like

right of eleven. It doesn't look like you can bail out there, but you can, and it'll funnel your ball back into the middle of the green. And but the thing I do appreciate is the idea of occasionally golfers having to hit golf shots and not everything being a funnel and not everything being you know, having width off the tea on par fours, but having preferred spots and having repercussions of not getting to those preferred spots is a brilliant way to create playability but also preferred lines.

I think that's the the mix, is that you can you can build all the playability in the world, and I think David Kidd has done this at Mammoth Dunes, where he's built supreme playability, but there's no actual strategy. And that's a problem. Is that when I don't have a place where I can get an advantaged position to attack something, then what are we even doing hitting t shots.

I'll just go up there and drop my ball in the fairway roughly how far I'd hit it, and it doesn't matter if I drove the ball.

lost shots to your competitors that find those places. And I think that is really brilliant because then it becomes I'm hitting a really hard shot from a perfect lie or I'm hitting a you know, significantly easier shot from a perfect lie, which I think is a great It gives you opportunities to recover with brilliant shots. You can always overcome your position. If you're in the fairway at Pacific Dunes with a brilliant shot, you just a lot of times have to hit a brilliant shot.

both directions depending on what side you miss on. But you really do have to look at that little bit of fair way short of the fourteenth green when it's downwind and make sure that you're hitting that and that you're not taking, you know, too much spin off your shot. It is a tricky shot for good players.

be successful there. And so I think the ground, you know, the ground play is really a big factor at Pacific Dunes, and it's always a dimension that you have to be thinking about when you're you know, contemplating your shots and and so you know, and that's where the accusation of unfairness often comes in, is based on what the ball can do on the ground At Pacific Dunes, it goes in unpredictable directions. But from another perspective, that's exactly what

makes the course dynamic and fun. And if you play well at Pacific Dunes, it's really satisfying. You know, if you hit those precise golf shots, then you really feel

like you have achieved something. And that's ultimately what I like so much about the course is that when you hit when you play great golf and you shoot a good score at Pacific Dunes, you feel like you have accomplished something and you can and I would accept the sort of punishment that you sometimes get at Pacific Dunes as a you know, a completely fine trade off for that.

if this would have happened. She goes, yeah, she always would reply, yeah, but that's what happened. And I think that is something that golfers I struggle with it. Every golfer struggles with is real is accepting the fact that maybe I didn't hit the right shot.

It was curving around coming in at the pin, it dropped in one of those trees and got stuck up in the tree. It was a lost ball. And here I'm sitting there thinking, I absolutely flushed that iron. It was a draw. It was coming around to the pin. It would have been close, but now it's a lost ball. And I got so mad at the golf course until I took a step away and realized, listen, dummy, you hit the wrong shot. If you were able to hit

a fade, then it would have worked out fine. But you decided that you're going to go at this pin with a draw, and you just can't do that on this whole. And so I think that's the moment of self reckoning that you have to have a lot at Pacific Dunes where you just need to step back and say, yeah, I hit that shot. Well, it was what I was planning to do, but you know what, my plan wasn't right. I got to come up with a different plan next time.

the shot and something can happen. An external facs, a gust of wind, a landing six inches on the wrong side of a contour can take you from a perfect, perfect shot to an undesirable shot. And I think that's

what you know. In a way, Pacific Dunes, more so than any other golf course at Bandon Dunes, embodies the true spirit of golf, where the line between ultimate success and brilliance and the line between mediocrity is very thin, and you are tight roping along it if you're If you were out there, you know, the last time we played, I played very very well. If you're out there and you're playing really well, you're not on cruise control. You're on edge. And that is a really, really great feeling.

When you're playing good golf, when you're swinging well in your it's not a mindless pursuit. You know, you have to do things you don't want to do. And when you go through the stretch of eleven through fourteen, in particular at Pacific Dunes, that is a stretch of golf where you really have to commit and hit shots that you don't want to hit, but you know you have to hit them in order to achieve you know, what you want, which is get Birdie looks and have you know,

if you don't make Birdie have really easy pars. And the only way to have easy pars out there is to take on some risk in places that.

I don't know what the solution is. I think the eighteenth maas I mind is the weak link, you know, I want to bring up. I think seven and eight are brilliant back to back holes that nobody ever talks about.

been the best use of that land. I agree about sixteen, where there are some pockets in that fair way where a lot of balls seem to settle. There are different places you can end up off the tea there. You can end up high left or low right, and both have their benefits and drawbacks, I think. But the problem is the land is so severe that balls are going to funnel to similar places, and so cool and rumply it is at the green site is so amazing.

You kind of feel let down potentially after you play the fourteenth hole because you you then venture away from the ocean.

book a tea time and go play it. Nobody can book a tea time to go play National Golf Links and c CB McDonald's best way. You know, nobody can book it tea time and play Shinnecock and see William Flynn's best work.

it's the best. I think it's the and I think part of it is the the idea, the pressure you feel over certain shots where you know that you know there. It's got the right balance of giving you space coupled with the idea that I do need to hit shots because that is what draws you to golf. That is the idea of trying to hit shots. And generally where you hit a shot two that's not a good shot,

you have the opportunity to recover. It might not be easy, but you are afforded the opportunity to hit a great shot. What about you?

creating something brilliant, instantly memorable. That is Pacific Dunes. For me, Bandon Trails is more of a full experience. It's you know, I hate this word. It's a vibe that that is the course where feeling kind of takes over and that sense of adventure, and often that's the thing I really want out of golf. I want to go on a hike and I want to be playing golf during it.

But the main point is to explore a landscape. If I'm playing golf, if I'm really zeroing in on the not the scoring element, not necessarily the competitive element, but just hitting golf shots and trying to be my.

get away for the world. That's the feel I have for there. But if it's Saturday morning and what my day is is, I didn't do anything last night, it's the weekend, I'm ready to play golf and I want to go out and golf. Pacific Dunes is is, hands

down to me, the most. Your brain has to be so engaged out there, and when it's not engaged, that's when you get in trouble, when you're not really dialed in to what you're trying to do where you're trying to get Because it's this course that if you're playing really well, you can really distance yourself from somebody that's playing average or mediocre. And I think that's really cool.

for that information in the wilds of the internet. All right, thanks for listening.