Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. This edition of the podcast is slightly different as it was hosted in front of a live audience at the Sand Valley Golf Resort in Wisconsin. Bill Corr and Jim Craig of renowned Core and Crenshaw Design joined the podcast to discuss their brand new seventeen hole par three course, the Sandbox, and their eighteen hole Sand Valley design, as well as other topics. The podcast starts with an introduction
from Sand Valley General manager Glenn Murray. Without any further delay, Here's Bill Coourr and Jim Craig.
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 frid Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg.
Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course.
I've got the distinct honor to introduce tonight's panel.
You know.
First, I'll start with the team of Core Crenshaw Who and Craig Who are an acclaimed design firm in the world of golf, spanning over the last thirty five years. Their record really goes without saying. I could rattle off a lot of you know, very renowned courses like the sand Hills or Banded Trails or stream Song Red or Old Sandwich or Cabot Cliffs, and I'm not even doing that list justice. The thing that really strikes me the
most about your firm is the work ethic. I you know, as we I've been in the golf industry for the last twenty years and you work with a lot of different partners, and your firm works as hard as any anyone that I've seen in the industry in my twenty year career. The other thing that has always been a common theme with working with anybody from Core Crenshaw is just how they, you know, treat everybody with you know,
they treat everybody like ladies and gentlemen. From my Ritz Carlton background, I certainly had that burned into my training, but you guys really have that throughout your firm. So the sandbox open today and Ben Crenshaw had another commitment.
But as we joke about the Sandbox, we often call it, you know, the short name for Core Crenshaw's Ben C and C and you know, they often refer to it's a C and C design, but we've kind of internally called it a C, C and C design because Jim Craig has really been the champion behind bringing this course to life, and if you had any fun on it today, I'd like to hear a little round of.
Applause for that court.
So while Core Crenshaw's been around for thirty five years, there's a new brand in golf that's been growing over the last two three years called The Friday. So they've amassed quite a following in terms of social media and blogs and their followers. So I get to introduce our moderator tonight. I give him a lot of credit for
following a dream. Had a career in tech, a successful career in tech, but knew that golf was his real passion and so he kind of jumped two feet in to becoming a a golf writer, a golf blogger, and he writes on all things about golf and travel, but he really focuses in on golf course architecture, which is what we're here to talk about tonight. So I'd like to introduce the founder of The Friday, Andy Johnson.
All Right, thanks, everybody, and what an honor to be here with these two gentlemen that have done some incredible work across the world. Playing the Sandbox, you get the feeling I grew up playing at a UNI course, but I also played a par three course down the street, and it makes me think, you know, when I play there, Wow, if I had gotten to play the Sandbox on a regular basis, how much more golf I would have played as a kid. And I played a lot of golf,
So it's really a great core. I think from just hearing people walking around the first tea, walking around the resort, the biggest question out there is why seventeen holes?
Well, I am going to immediately defer to Jim and Michael and Chris Kaiser who were back there in the back, because they are the ones who came up with this idea, because we had just we were finishing the sand Valley course and the next thing I know, I get a call from Jim and he says, you know, Bill, would you and Ben you know, what do you think about a short course here? I said, well, if they think there's a market for it, absolutely, But I know, particularly Jim,
I'm going to let you finally answer this. But I know particularly you and Michael had had discussions about the attractiveness or potential attractiveness of that. Now and Ben and I just tagged along. Man, We just said, we think it's a great idea. Let's see out. Let's see what we can do. So Jim, you can, you can explain how this idea actually originate.
A sorry, we're fancy. Yeah, you're good to go.
Is it live?
Okay?
Well, thanks for being here tonight. It's nice to see all your faces and know that you actually got to play out there. Thanks to Glenn and his staff for everybody. They do a great, great job here at Sam Valley. And I'm glad you guys all came. I think we should give a nice hand to those guys. I have no idea how we ended up with seventeen holes. It was started to be a part two course. I didn't have no idea what a part two courses. I've never
seen one. We had twenty holes that you could put to we called it we had twenty twos, and that didn't work. So Michael is more or less less eighteen Well it's too conventional. Well, let's go see how many good ones we can find. And we found seventeen good ones thanks to him. Yeah, I think it's a good call. We enjoyed this opportunity to find that many holes. First of all, is great material out here. It's a wonderful opportunity.
Well, it's interesting too. I guess the foundation of that whole concept started with Mike Kaiser, who I remember when we were He had the idea that we would do the short course the preserve at Bandoned Dunes, and there was this triangle of land that overlooked the ocean in the dunes that Ben and Mike and I all wanted
to put into abandoned trails. And we realized if we did it, the dunes were very closely configured in terms of contours, and if we tried to build regulation length holes there, we were going to have to bulldoze them away to make them work. We thought that site was just simply too pretty to do that, so we skipped it, and it was it was a bit painful to skip
that and not use it. And then when Mike came back a few years later and said, Bill, Ben, would I think we need a part three course here for people who are coming to play, and just you know, there comes a point they can't just walk and play thirty six holds a day. He said, I think we need a Part three course, and I think we all know where it should be. He remembered that that particular
piece of ground where Preserve is. But I guess what I'm getting to Jim is I remember distinkly the day Michael Chris that I was with your dad and I said, Mike, so you want to build a Part three course. How many holes do you want it to be? And he said, I don't care. As long as it's not nine or eighteen, any other number is fine. Just find the best holes you can find and do that and build the holes.
He said, I don't care if they're sixty yards long or one hundred and sixty yards long, but bill holes that are good enough that you could take any one of them off the Part three course and put it on one of the regulation courses and it would be very well accepted. So that's when you look back to Sand Valley. To me personally, that's where I trace it.
Back to that idea.
And then Michael Chris, you and Jim took that and ran with it here and produced what you played today.
So thanks to the success of the Preserve and now and many other short courses around the country. It's become really a big trend, and I think the demand for short courses is up. When you guys go about designing a short course, how does it differ from that of a regular well, I.
Think andy for me, you get an opportunity to do some things that you probably would not be able to do on a regulation link course. For those of you who played today, a prime example of that is the third green, which is what we refer to as the double Plateau green. To those who might not know that concept, it's the green out there looks like it's got two match boxes buried entered with a trough in between. And that's a very famous green at the National Golf Links in Long Island, and it works.
There on the eleventh hole.
But generally it's hard to make something that extreme work in a regulation golf course, and we just felt like that we could do those kind of things on a short course. And Jim, again leading this whole thing with the Kaiser family, said let's come up with some of the neatest stuff that we've never been able to do.
So it gives us an opportunity from a design standpoint to do that, it also gives the opportunity from a playing standpoint to plague golf in quick fashion and not spend half a day or the entire day doing it.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
You know.
Actually, when we were we were deciding on some holes out there, I think that you and some extra gentlemen over there talked about what we should do for a for a trophy for the event out there, and it's kind of like the same thing. We had some ideas kicking around with a bunch of folks, and you know, I think that's the way we did here.
We talked to.
The folks around that that that we're all in for a part three course.
And thought, well, now, what would you like to do if you had your your pick here.
I'm surprised that we only only kept with seventeen holes because if somebody had to say stuff, because I'd probably still be out there building holes.
But it was a collaborative effort, no doubt.
And I guess andy too.
From the standpoint if you're in our business, and particularly if you're one of the younger guys working in this in this business, so much of that time is spent just trying to fulfill someone else's concept, or someone else as the principal for whom whom you work or something. Not so much for Jim, who's worked with us since he was five years old. But there was a young guy working out here named Ryan Ferrell, who is an
extraordinary background in golf architecture and education and implementation. But as we would go through out there, I remember walking through and it's the twelfth hole right there. We had walked past it numerous times. No one had ever done a sketch, no one had ever done a concept for it. We just kept walking by it, and finally we walk by there one day and Jim and Ryan and are walking by and Jim goes, well, what are we going to do here?
I had no idea.
I had never even thought about it, and I just says, well, what we're going to do here is walk to the next hole, and Ryan's going to figure out what this is going to be. So we kid about it being the pharaoh Hoe. But you know, that's that's interesting for people who are involved in this business of building stuff to be able to go I've had an idea, I would like to try to implement it, and then to implement it and see folks like you come and.
Say that's pretty neat. I enjoyed that.
So it's a it's far of the really positive aspects of this whole business.
Jim.
If you ever had an idea that you were really nervous to show Bill that, you know, whether it was on the sandbox or sand Valley or any other course that you know, you had this idea that he was just talking about with, you know, Ryan's idea of the whole.
Yeah, I have. I have.
It's a pretty regular thing. I have to kind of ask permission to do much of anything.
Five.
I wasn't really five. I was actually like twenty five, but I acted in five. So there's a lot of that could make you a list of things, you know, but the patience that this man has shown me.
Who you know him?
How does your day to day work, Jim? How does building a green you know, the manner and what you do it, How does the process work?
Well?
I think it's it's different. You know, everywhere we go. We obviously have good direction.
You know.
Hogan used to say, you know that the swing was nine tenths over it set up, and you know the way we've been lucky, you know to have sites that were you know, very conducive for golf. And and William and Ben have always on a way to you know, get around that property with with as you know, as gracefully as possible. So depending on what the materials like, it's it's if we could say it's all the same.
We talk about concepts and and the way it would would match with what's behind it or what's in front of it. And uh, and and we we rough something in working at the green, working at all the green sites, and and kind of a place to start that may move a little bit here or there, but start at the green and then and then work backwards, I think is what we do.
It.
Sometimes it moves, sometimes it evolves, but it's fun.
Shane and Michael had a great conversation last night, and uh, Michael really talked about how you guys like to use and highlight the land. What were the core aspects of both Sand Valley and the Sandbox that you wanted to highlight about the natural features of the land here at Sand Valley.
Oh, I think Andy it was you know, anytime you've given the opportunity to work with a truly gifted piece of property, of property that seems like it can yield a very interesting.
Golf course without a lot of alteration. You want to work with it, not against it.
So we come with the philosophy, as Jim said that we come with no preconceived notions as to what the length of the course is going to be, what the style of the course is going to be, what the whatever is going to be. We try to study the property and say this is We're going to let this guide us in terms of what the course will turn
out to be. So with sand Valley, I remember out here, Ben and I'd be walking with Jim, and you know, when it cleared the trees off of it, it took on a very similar appearance because it's ridges and valleys, and of course it's all sand, so it's happly named
in that regard. But I remember the first time we walked through and talking to Jim, man, we're gonna we're going to have to figure out how to make these holes where they don't all look alike, because when you started looking at the landforms and the big scale of the landforms, it would have been easy to become very very repetitive out there run all the holes down the valleys for example, run on all perpendictor over the hills,
or whatever the case may be. And so we we tried to study and say, all right, if we were out here walking around, how would we walk around this property without being too physically taxing, and how would we then lay holes out that would be different and still and still interesting but complement this site. So in that case, that's that's what we did with Sand Valley. In the case of the Sandbox, it was almost the complete opposite.
When Jim said that he and Michael and Chris and had been thinking about, you know, the possibility of doing the Part three course, went out there and looked. It's much smaller, it's much smaller scale, it's much flatter, and we thought this is perfect because Sand Valley, the golf course sand Valley is a big scale. The golf course Mammoth Dunes is absolutely perfectly named because it's mammoth in scale.
And so we thought the Part three course, the fact that they had chosen this site that was down here, much smaller scale, much more intimate, much more level, would give the opportunity to do a golf product that was completely different than the other courses. So in a sense, both of them. The big scale of sand Valley the smaller, more intimate scale at the Sandbox was driven by the sites who were built on.
You've done a lot of work with the Kaisers, and obviously since nineteen ninety nine when Banded Dunes started, the golf industry started to have a seismic shift. Obviously Sand Hills was a big part of that. In ninety five, what about working with the Kaisers is different than say, other clients.
Oh, this is hard to say, but these guys sitting in the room, but you got to ask you question.
Yeah, I know, Andy, you did. You did.
This family has done so much and been so positive for golf, not just in America but in the world.
They are changing the way people perceive golf.
People for so many years perceived that the very best golf courses in the world were exclusive, they were private, they were hard to get, you know, to get access to. And their whole concept is exactly the opposite. Let's find sites that are site driven, not demographically driven. They're driven by the contours of the ground to produce the most interesting courses, not the population that happens to be or not be adjacent to it. And so they took that concept and then said, and we want it to be
public access. Mike Kaiser was a founding member of the course we did at Sandhills, and that that in the self is special. But the fact that you know, he looked and said, I wish, I wish everybody could see the Sandhills. I wish you could could happen. But then to say, now my family and I are going to go try to present opportunities for people to experience that type of golf, but do it in a in a
public access arena is truly special. And you know, in our business, Nandy, the best you, the greatest thing you could ever hope for, is to be given a truly special site and the freedom to work with it, not work for an owner who lords over you and says I want this, I want that that's going to be this. I don't like that that type thing. And and Mike and now Michael and Chris and the family, they don't do that. They give you the opportunity to work with
something extraordinary and the freedom to work with it. And are they involved, absolutely, And that's the for the betterment of each project. But I think history will record that this family will be hugely impactful in the in the evolution of golf in the most positive way. And I you know, Michael Chris, I've said to your dad numerous times, Mike, you've given us so many opportunities, maybe it's time for somebody else to get the experiences. And Michael and Chris's
dad same age. I am so we you know, we kind of look at each other and and he does they do. They're giving opportunities for younger architects and different people to be experienced. But at the same time, once a while, Michae Lexeme goes, Bill, I'm getting old, I'm kind of getting set in my ways, and I go there's a part of me feels guilty about that, and there's another part that.
Just goes, thank you Lord.
We're just gonna follow these people wherever they want to go, as long as they want us.
I imagine, like we talked about this when we talked earlier about when Dick Youngskap called you about sand Hills, like you want to build in Nebraska. When when they said, hey, we got a great site in central Wisconsin. What was your immediate reaction.
Well, my metior action is Mike on the phone was Mike. The last time I looked, I didn't see an ocean next to Wiscon And now maybe at one time, many millennia ago, there was, but I just don't see it there because Mike had told me through the years, he said, I'm only going to go where I can find sand next to the ocean, dunes next to the ocean. That was the cornerstone and the thing that he looked for most. And so coming here was a bit of a not just a leap, but it was it was off on
a different tangent. And Craig Halton, who's out here, who came and discovered this property through research, through the you know, over the entire state of Wisconsin to find a sand site and then was able to meet one person in particular, Australian guy whom we both know, but who who said this could be neat and introduced him to Mike. And I remember Mike telling me he said, Bill, I'm going to go look at the sight up in Wisconsin.
Where's the ocean, you know?
And he came here and he called afterward and he goes, well, I went there with every intention of saying no, and he said, I walked around the site, and he walked to Craig Halton and you know, Chris Michael. I don't know exactly who all was here at that point, but some of the Kemper sports people and Mike at least the way he conveyed it to me was I went there to say no, and I came away ready to say yes.
Getting back to short courses in the sandbox, what is it do you think about these courses that are making them so popular in today's game?
Well, I mean my personal perspective is it's and I grew up playing on some Part three courses and in North Carolina many years ago. The problem was at that point in time and a Part three course was more often than not considered to be a second choice, a second rate citizen, a second something, something that was you did if you couldn't get to a primary course. And what's happening now is that concept has been flipped and
turned on its head, so to speak. And with things like the Preserve, like the Sandbox, like the Cradle that Gil Hanson the people at Pinehurst had done, like what Tom Doak has done, like these things that are now coming online Part three courses that are ever as interesting as regulation scale. Golf is exposing people. In this case, most of us in a room played a lot of golf.
He exposes us to interesting golf on a small scale, but probably more importantly gives people in this room and people like gym and you know, with with younger families, the chance to expose them to really interesting golf and in such a way that it doesn't become so frustrating they can play it faster. It plays into this whole idea, how do you get people involved?
How do you do.
It without taking up an entire day doing it? But the ability to to do that and and then do it in a in a reasonable amount of time. With today's well, particularly with young folk who have opportunities to be exposed so many things, the attention span, for natural reasons is is much tighter so and shorter. And so this gives people a chance that this is this is
real golf. It's on the small scale, this is the real thing, and uh, you know, it's it's just neat for us to trust to see and as we said, it's a it's a chance for us to do something on a smaller scale that we might not be able to do on a bigger and Jim, I don't know how you would expand.
At I think that's exactly right. You know that the frustration can sometimes be caused by.
By just maybe having your young youngster with you on a course that might hold up play or something. You know, you kind of feel a little bit like, oh, we got to scoot along here, unless it's late in the day I grew up, you know, if I could reach the gas pedal, I was hustling carts for candy bars or something, so I could get out and play when
everybody was gone. But this, if we all hit t balls off off of a hole, one of us may be over there, and one of us may be over there, and on these short you know, playing at the green from all different spots, which is which is great, it's fun, but these short, these shorter ideas that they seem like, you know, you can have a collection of holes that you could all walk out there to the you know, short of the green and all drop a ball and say let's go from right here, and it gives you
a nice way to learn the game, whether it's with your kid or your grandma or or you know, just anybody. And they if it's if it's Grandma, she might just beat you, you know, and that's pretty neat.
I can think of when the when the Preserve opened and I'm standing on the first tea with Mike Kaiser and there was one group there Andy that played had four generations from players went from an eighty some year old man to an eight year old and each.
Generation you know in between.
It may have been actually five now I'm thinking about it, but it was a fascinating thing to see.
That's something you wouldn't see.
On a regulation like big course, and it's just a it's a neat aspect of what you're talking about.
Yeah, I think that's the coolest part of the par three courses and the short courses is at levels the field you know, you could you know, the eighty year old could win, the eight year old could win, and everybody is.
On the same level.
What did you guys learn from doing the Preserve that you might have changed or you know, made better doing the Sandbox.
Well, the one hand, they're completely different because the terrain's different than The thing they have in common is that sand base. But the biggest thing of all is the I'm not sure any of us knew how well received the preserve would would become and so it was on a bit steeper terrain. So when we were doing the teas, the tea surfaces there are somewhat smaller than here, and through the years we found it quite frankly, they're too small and been trying to expand some this, that and
the other. So when we were about to embark on this, one of the first things Jim and Michael Chris went out and walked the preserve, talked to the superintendent out there about what the issues were, and it was absolutely we need more t space.
So you will see teas here.
Although they may not look big any individual level you're on, when you start looking, they they spread out and they meander here and there and all around and uh, not only provide different angles, but more usable space.
Jim, were there any unique stories or or challenges that you encounter during the construction phase?
You know, just seeing my face every day is a struggle for everybody. You know, it's it's like, oh, Lord, here he comes. How long is he going to stay today? You know, I think taking.
Everybody's ideas that that we were.
Presented with and and and uh and making them happen.
Was was It's it's easy to talk about stuff.
You know, but but actually making it happen is another thing. So it's it's a it's it's a hard you know, it's it's a lot of it's a heavy load to to to have a great idea and starting there at it. You know, it's a tough one. So I think everybody gave it there all. I mean, it's a pretty pretty darn neat deal and I think it's only going to get better out there when the surface gets a little
like this. I think for the game, it's a good a good thing to take your eyes out of the air and put them on the ground and you start to make sense of what's out there.
So yeah, yeah, I went around and was hitting just a six iron in this afternoon. It was a lot of fun.
You start to get.
Imagination back, and it's funny. I was recently watching like a nineteen forty PGA championship and that was the only shot these guys were hitting. Were along the ground. It's so weird, you know, guys one hundred yards out and he's just like running a ball up to the green. It's something you don't see today that is all a sudden acceptable and it's there, you just nobody uses it.
You know.
It's like it's like somebody asked Michael about golf carts last night, and and and and I love it. He said, well, how much do golf carts cost? How much do you pay for around and he didn't know the answer. I thought that was great that, you know. The thing that wasn't really in there was the opportunities that that that.
Also offers with turf.
You know, you can you can't hardly have a golf cart on fescue unless you have a card path. And and when when you can grow fescue, that that creates a whole nother game. The ground game is a game that you know, if the course were solid bent grass, it would certainly limit you, you know, as to how that ball is going to react. And and I think that's that's a great, you know, tribute to their belief in the game. And it gives us a chance to
hit those shots that we see in Scotland. You know that that that are super fun and on that ground you can you can play over.
It's just it's just a different game.
It really needs open it up from for questions from the crowd. I got him so The question is how much of your design is done on the computer versus the field, and then once you get out on the ground, how much does it change.
Well, if you're asking me, I'm he.
Has no email address.
Yeah, yeah, I.
Don't think he could turn one on.
Look, look his wife counts the steps.
He can't even charge.
This sty He does use emojis.
Though he does, he does.
No Ben and I Jim not so much. But Ben and Ire lumbering dinosaur is waiting for extinction who do not either use a computer nor have an email address or anything like that. So I've never used a computer in my life. I wouldn't know what to do with it, and just open it and look at it and wonder what to do next. So we're we're still very much the old fashioned way, and I'm not sure saying this
is right. You know, if you were if I were Gym's age or Andy's age or something and really trying to get established in the golf design profession, obviously I couldn't do it. But given the background and things, can still go out there and just wander around with topographical maps and make notes on it, but mentally just visualizing and getting a sense of the property, and how do you walk across and if this does it have any attributes for.
Golf or or not?
And if it does, how would you start to visualize a golf course being laid out on this I mean, in our case, it's generally trying to figure out a circulation pattern. How would you go out there and walk around the property? People do it with computers all the time, The vast majority of people do. We're still the old way of well, let's go out there, let's take two or three days or four or five days, and let's
walk around. If I were coming out here not even thinking about golf, how would I want to walk around this property to see the most interesting elements and do it in such a way I don't feel like I'm it's so physically demanding. I mean, yeah, it's I still to this day believe that's a good way to go. And once you can get a kind of a sense of the property and a sense of how you would travel around it, then you start to try to figure out how to break that into into terms of golf
and golf holes. But we, I guess, specifically to your question, we use the computer as a zero and the rest of it is, you know, depending on what.
So when when Bill has an idea for a whole how does he present it to you? Does he just you know, does he just say, hey, you know, this is what I'm thinking, and you you go do it?
Yeah?
I think so, yeah, yeah, you know.
I think every site challenges us a little bit to come up with something on our own. And like Ryan's hole out here, you know, we kept walking past it and finally we said, Ryan, do something, and he did. So, you know, there's all kinds of ways, but he has so much direction. His mind is like a computer, you know. He makes it sound like it's just, oh, just a little pleasant. He's like that ross guy that used to do the paintings.
Oh, and here's your happy little tree over here.
But yeah, he puts there's not a minute or a place that he doesn't think about. And I think one of the greatest things you see is I don't know that I've ever actually done what he's asked me to do. He gets there and goes, so, cheez, how are we going to make chicken salad out of this?
And somehow he does.
He finds good in just about everything that we do, and it may be exactly what he was thinking. But it's we were able to do something different, and we keep changing every day. We don't ever do it the same way. I can guarantee you that they saving grace for me is I forget most things, So forgiving things is really easy for me.
So he's a fun man to follow. I can tell you that.
Well, I will say this.
I won't get off too much on a tangent here, I hope, But Ben and I for years have said we are so fortunate. I mean, Jim is sitting here tonight. There are other There are other people who've worked with us for years who are equally talented and extraordinary people. And one of the great misconceptions in GoF architecture is that there's some one person who walks out on this site has every idea, every concept reconceived or figured out, and gives it to a someone one to go build.
That just simply does not happen, and if it does, the golf course is not going to be very good. We have, through all these years tried to work with extraordinarily talented people and give them the freedom to work too, just like the Kaisers give us the freedom to work. We try to give Jim and the other guys the freedom to work because you know how talented they are.
While on earth, if you were a jockey, would you get on a horse try to win a race and be there telling the horse pick up your right hoof, put down your left, pick up You know you don't do that. And you say, we're going in this direction, this is the goal, this is what we're trying to do.
You run for it, go for it. And so many times we end up being yes, we have ideas, but so many times we end up being editors as well and observing the work the talented people do and then saying this fits, then the concept, let's go with it.
It's like one of my friends as a writer, said that, you know, all writing sucks until it gets edited. So the question is mentioned national Golf links. What are five or six other courses that you and Ben have been inspired by?
Oh, I don't know.
I mean probably we would pick many of the ones you the folks here tonight would pick. But Ben and I both grew up playing.
Well.
I grew up playing as a kid some around a lot of Donald Ross courses. But then when I was in school at wake Forest, there was a Perry Maxwell golf course literally adjacent to the campus, and that course influenced me so much. Ben when he was a kid grew up playing on the Austin the original Austin Country Club, which was a Perry Maxwell course. So we had that in common. Is to Perry Maxwell did some most incredibly artistic greens. Ever he worked without McKenzie on number of
projects and things. But so we had that in common. Perry Mixwell courses, but you know, we we would just go see things.
We'd all see them. Gymstam.
You go to some place like Pine Valley, or you go to the National Golf Links. There could be two more different golf courses, and yet it's hard to choose which is which would I really prefer, you know more, And it's just that they have experience of seeing things and trying to appreciate things, and and and and giving
some thought to why do I like these more? But we've been so fortunate in the years to work with some just extraordinary places, not just new sites but existing courses, and you just go out there and you just marvel at it. I mean, I've I've spent more than a few days walking around Cyprus.
Point you know and be the.
Only person out there in the afternoon, the only person everybody plays it cryer in the morning. So in the afternoon it's just fantastic and you and you walk around and go and our best day.
Could we have ever thought of this? Could we have ever done this? And well, I don't know. I don't know about that, but it's.
Just those kind of experiences and those kind of courses. And I wish I could just say, oh, it's one through five, it was this, this, and this as soon as as soon as I would do that, if I picked one of them and said, oh, that's number one, this, two, three, four, these are the five courses, I would go to one of the other eight or ten or whatever course is and go ooh, I messed up.
That one should be that.
So we've it's just been a process.
The question is after a course opens, what's the process for editing and any changes that are made over the over the years.
Well, it's a very good one because that is a process that happens. If you're four enough to work for a club or an ownership group or a family who again allows you freedom to work with a with a good sight, you do the best. You know how to do.
I mean, right out of the box. You're doing everything that the way you think is the best way to do it as you're building the course, but it's still it happens in a fairly short period of time, and once that course is open, you hope that the owners for whom you've worked will absolutely observe how that course handles play, be it just everyday play or be a championship play, but how it fulfills or or perhaps doesn't
fulfill the goals it was intent that were intended. And over a period of time you you go back and you say, all right, how do we see this? How it is progressed and everything evolves, and you think, perhaps if we made a refinement here or refinement there, it would be better. And the best owners again allow you to do that, and yes, Bandon Trails was one of them. I mean Jim and Jim did so much of the
work at Bandon Trails. And yet once you see exactly how tight and firm that fescue got for those of you who played after years ago, like at number eighteen, and you would see it roll off the front of the green, and next thing, oh my god, it's forty yards back down the fairway with the wind blowing from
the north, and that wasn't really what we intended. So when you're allowed to opportunity to go back and work not really so much on the green but right in front of it to try to address those issues, and we appreciate that. And even if you see that, whether it's one of our horses or anyone else's, if you see that in process, that doesn't mean it was bad
the first time. It just means you've learned through the process and people deserve that, not that it was bad, but there could be a better way to handle some of the issues you've seen, so the best golf courses evolved and through.
That through time.
I know you're not gonna like this question. If you if you could put one of the holes in the sandbox in your backyard, which one would it be and why?
So that first I'll go for that, and then you can answer that I you know, it'd be the third hole, the double plateau thing. We've talked about doing something like that for years and we just never found the right situation to do it. And when we were walking out there and Jim actually the one who mentioned them. By the way, we could do one of those somewhere and there you go. You're right, we could do it, and what would be perceived is either unfair, goofy, or just
totally out of bounds on a regulation course. We thought could work here, and we watched enough play there today and Tim who made Ah, well you made on thirteen, I guess, but Mark Son, yeah, yeah, And so it's those kind of things that wouldn't be the only one. There would be other ones, but that one for me personally just stands out.
Would your wife like it? I'm sorry, would your wife like it?
Back there?
Sure the dogs could run over it and they yeah, yeah, she'd be okay with that.
That's good.
Well, we haven't talked about my cottage, but I think we could have all.
Of them in my backyard.
It just building my house right back there, and it could be my backyard.
Michael Michael Jim's cottage.
I can't say that I have a favorite. I mean, the third hole out here is a lot of fun, and we have looked for a spot like that, There's no doubt. You know, the National Golf Links has that green. Very it's different, but it's this kind of the same idea. There's so many of them. You know, I just I don't know that I have a favorite. I would just ask you to pick one, and I'd say, thank you very much.
Yeah, it's probably like picking your favorite kid.
Yeah right, all right, Well.
Thanks so much for being a part of this and awesome course, and congratulations on you know, another home run.
Thank Andy, and thank all of you for coming. We really do appreciate it. We hope you enjoyed the experience. And you know, David Kid's course is going to open here soon and sand Valley who would have thought the Kaiser to have done it again?
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