Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg podcast. Today we have part two of our actually three part podcast with Yale golf coach Colin Shean. This podcast was supposed to be two parts, but then had to wrap up the pod after I already posted part one and then Colin and I talked for like another forty minutes.
So Part three.
Will be out on Monday night, Tuesday morning ish.
And hope you guys enjoyed this episode.
I had a lot of fun talking with Colin, and without further ado, here is part two of the three part podcast.
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 Frida egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg Frida egg, Frida egggg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off the course. Once you graduated college, you started writing and editing golfing magazine.
Yeah, it was the golfer magazine. I got this. I was, I was.
I originally wanted to get into architecture. I sent a few letters. I didn't In hindsight, he didn't really pursue it as more aggressively.
I was too, I was too shy.
I guess God bless ron Force at least he he replied. And we we had a series of long phone calls and he was trying to figure out a way to help me out, and and you know.
I wound up.
I used to I used to help when I was sort of out of college, looking for work, living at home. A neighbor of mine, Tom Graham, this wonderful guys like twenty time club champion and country go to Fairfield, great player. You know, he's an RNA seminole national guy. He occasionally would ask me to, you know, drive him to the airport or pick him up in the city or whatever. It was almost like just welfare for me. And he'd
give me one hundred dollars. And one time I had to go into the city to pick him and this other guy up. They were at some black tie event at the Metropolitan Club. It was like a Robert Burns night in January, and they were having a laugh and they mentioned they had served hagis and I casually said, oh, yeah, that's what Sandy Lyle served at the for his Masters for his Champions dinner in nineteen eighty nine, and.
They were like, how did you know that. I'm like, oh, I just I don't know.
I mentioned when I when I worked in the backroom at the Patterson Club one year I worked for Brenda Walsh when I was fifteen and sixteen, and I was They asked me to help clean out the attic and there was this cash of like Golf Digest from the seventies a box. It must have been every issue from like seventy two to seventy nine, and I wound up reading them all. I wound up having a sort of an unnecessary expertise in golf trivia and or just loving the game.
It's really what it was.
And I was very lucky to caddy the country go with Fairfield growing up, and my town had a nine hole part three course, a public course at Jeff Cornish Part three course that was a.
Dollar thirty five to play.
So I was always really a golf and then and this guy in the backseat was the publisher of the Golfer magazine, and he asked me if I wanted to come to work on Monday.
And I was like sure.
I started in early February of ninety eight, just as an editorial intern, and by the end of that year I was managing editor of a small magazine.
But it was a great time to be in New York.
It was was it was wonderful to be sort of writing and editing and traveling, still a healthy publishing circuit of books coming in. We'd get the galleys to four or five books every week. I remember just constantly reading them all on the train. It was like a master's degree in golf and golf architecture in those years. And the one thing I really noticed was I was sent to play a lot of new courses and they were not good. They were not and they weren't nearly as
good as the old courses. It's when I really started to see a sort of develop a sort of you know, a sort of an opinion about modern courses and and versus new and old. And it was just, you know, it was it was. It was fascinating. It was fascinating to see golf in that sort of era and interviewing, interviewing architects and players, and it was I was living paycheck to paycheck, but I was like a poverty jet set lifestyle, going on press trips and and.
Checking in like to hotels and stuff.
It was you know, it was a good It was the only time I could have done that when I was sort of twenty two, twenty three, twenty four, and but I still had an ambition to move beyond that. As much as I enjoyed it, and I really did, I wanted to get into uh, you know, design and development projects eventually. The and the one sort of moment that really sort of helped kick that along was visiting
Kingsbarnes in two thousand. I was so impressed with the course in the context of what I had seen the previous couple of years, when generally just seeing as just a string of poor and mediocre new courses, uninspired, unwalkable, artificial, just a litany.
Of just sort of.
Of demerits on every every course you went to. Kings Barnes was amazing. And I was equally impressed by the sort of restraint on the clubhouse, sort of small scale of it.
And I.
Made it a point to find out who was involved in the project, who developed it, and and I eventually got in touch with Mark Parson, and super smart individual, someone you should definitely have on your podcast, and we became friends, and I eventually tracked him down. You know, I tracked him down and we had a series of just you know, two hour long phone calls, and he
told me about this. His next project was going to be Castle Stewart in the Scottish Highlands, and you know, I sort of agreed to you know, two or three to be an intern on that project and move there. And eventually, with a little bit of delay in the permitting and entitlement process, it led to a moving there
in two thousand and six. I was there for the majority of two that I was there for most of two thousand and six and in portions of two thousand and seven getting a witness a really complicated project from the from the sort of ground up.
It was really cool.
So so at that point you're probably thinking you want to go dive into golf architecture and that was your big break?
What what uh?
Why didn't you get all the way into architecture.
I guess I'll admit that, you know, it's in hindsight, I wasn't I wasn't willing to live the sort of.
Constant road warrior lifestyle.
I I probably should have been doing that and first six ten years out of college, but you know.
I love living in New York.
I loved having all of my friends from from college, you know, a lot of a lot of friends from college there.
Eventually met my wife. You know.
It's just being being on the road, being living out of a living out of a suitcase. I guess just wasn't just wasn't practical, and I understood the trade off and I but really it was about seeing things from the point of view of the developer, and I was
I was more intrigued. I was interested by this concept of maybe being only involved in five projects in a career, but having them, but having them, but being involved in the sort of on the development side of them as well, and having them, you know, having a much longer and relationship with those projects, sort of how I had envisioned it at the time, you know.
And and then then.
That sort of fuels aspects of what I'm you know, what you know, what we're what I'm trying to do now, And in some way or another, that's what led to me to sort of try to put the you know, try to get the project in Cobtown going. It's sort of what interests me about Kanka Key, That's what interests me about uh, you know, those types of projects, maybe having them come fewer and fewer than sort of idea of coming in building something and leaving.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like having a long term connection, because that's one of the saddest things is you go, yeah, I go see a ton of places, and most of the places I see that are public and once were great are now at year sixty of the demise of them. But I was in Philly recently and I saw Gill's first project, Enniscrone, and I was walking around, and you know, for what it is right now, it's a great public option.
But like you're walking around and I was just looking at it and you see bent grass, long bent grass and rough, you know, in the rough, and you realize like, well, this is really this is almost more depressing because it's ten years into the fifty or sixty year slide that you see most courses.
And yeah, yeah.
That's the thing is architects, once they're done with a project, it's kind of done, you know, It's it's out of their hands then, and that that aspect of the business is is almost the more important aspect, right.
That's interesting, Like you they don't have control after the fact of how it's presented or but you know, it's it's. It reminds me to an extent of the helplessness I felt when I was sort of arguing with my publisher about how he was going to present the book and he wanted to do you know, three three volumes and a slipcase, and and you know, I in the end
it was he was the publisher. I didn't have a choice, even you know, in spite of the sort of you know, all the hard work I did you hear that from you definitely hear that from architects. You know, they spend all that time working on stuff and then it's up to the owner of the developer, or you know, the market forces take place and the next thing you know, it's right, it's been compromised.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's brutal.
It's I can only imagine how that feels like as an architect, it was when you know something's going the wrong way and and you can't do anything about it. I saw one of Mike Devreeese's early courses and on one of the holes a center line bunkers now a center line pond. It's like, couldn't drain the bunker, so
you just make it a pond. It's like it makes the it turns the hole from like a spectacular hole that you know you could you felt like you were on at Prairie Dunes once you get past the center line pond on but instead like it's just offensive because there's a pond in the center of the fairway right, it's like exactly, and it's just And I remember texting him, I'm like, I'm sure the center line pond's not Originally He's like, yeah, dot dot dot. You know, it's just
you lose so much of it. So you're you're a big student of golf course architecture. If you were going to put together a mount rush for more of architects, who would it be on it?
I feel like, uh, I feel like when you're on the best of Alice mackenzie, I feel like you're on the work of genius. I do love Ah, I do love McDonald. I do and it's even with this relatively small sample size. Always always loved coult I've always loved his work in the UK.
He was blessed with sort of sort of wonderful sites.
And then I do think and I think that I probably could come up with a better answer, But I still think Ross is sort of somehow underrated. He gets like knocked for having so many courses. There's some in his but the sort of I think that would be my quick answer that.
You only get four for a Rushmore comparison.
Is yeah, yeah, yeah, we uh, who would be who would.
Be the one that is you'd say underappreciated where you'd say, like, you know, he's not Mount Rushmore guy, but he's a guy that everybody that the general public doesn't understand or or that his you know that their work wasn't you know it was misinterpreted or lost whatever.
Well, I agree that I agree with you that yeah, you know, Langford, Langford and Moreau we're building, We're we're building. We're ambitious in their in their projects in there, in the degree of difficulty of the sort of shots around the green I put them in there, I don't know, So you have to in the in the met section, you just you can see all these debreuemic courses that are just sensational.
Walter Travis.
I can't even get over how good everything Walter Travis ever did was fabulous, and I love his variety of bunkering. William Flynn is there. I mean, there's not a more perfect golf course than Shinnecock. You know, then his best work. Who else isn't getting you know, he's well covered.
Perry Maxwell, Harry.
Maxwell, jeez, I just took the team this fall. I took it.
The UH old Town had an event. For the first time in the history of Wake four and in fifty years, Old Town hosted a Wake Forest tournament this past September on a Monday Tuesday. The practice round was the Sunday that Tiger won the Tour championship. By the way, that place is sensational. That's what Augusta wants to be. The width of the course was incredible, that the sort of and yet the angles that the critical sort of preferred angles were or something my players.
Love figuring out. I'm blown over.
Perry Maxwell's sensational.
So how do you how do you go about building a schedule?
Did you see that they were going to host an old Town and immediately or like we have to go there?
We got invited? That was an invite? UH coach hoss Uh, he's a friend. But maybe Dunlop White their their golf care recommended Yale. We always bring a little you know, we bring a touch of class to an event when when Yale Yale's there, we bring our twenty one national championships to the UH. But UH, that was just an honor to get invited. And we went down on Saturday morning. It was a Monday Tuesday event and so we we flew down Saturday morning. We played an extra practice round
which was which was really useful. And but yeah, so we we we we generally play in the Northeast. Were limited to sort of a certain number of degrees on the road. Days on the road, you know, dates of competition are limited, uh to an extent. We definitely have a sort of a cap on our Monday Tuesday tournaments.
We basically try to play one of those a year.
But so that was a cou to get in it. We played the team the boys were boys played great. They played their way into the final pairing for with with Wake and Louisville. On the sort of final round on Tuesday morning, we stubbed our toe a bit and finished sixth. But it was a fabulous experience that that that there needs to be more events like that, and you know, and I and we're invited back, but the club only gave Wake a.
Two year contract.
They you know, yeah, there one more year than augustin National gives CBS.
But hopefully that becomes a fixture because that that was a.
Perfect example of an event where, you know, seventy five college golfers were treated to a pre World War two gem. Those walkable, fabulous scores were low, but who cares? Best best team won, the best player the best player one.
I kind of feel that way with like great architecture. It's rendered you know, it's rendered less, you know, challenging by distance and technology, but I feel like it still separates the class because of the green complexes and the angles that they force, Like especially at really great golf courses, like you still have to play them really well to take advantage of the distance because you can be in positions on a good you know, well designed great greens
like Maxwell greens. If you're out of position, you know you have you just have no chance. It doesn't matter if you're fifty yards or two hundred and fifty yards.
Absolutely you get the I love the sort of the the scoring, the elasticity of scoring, where a player plays well shoots sixty seven and someone else plays poorly and it's seventy seven. It's like you can and then you could. Those two golfers could flip roles and flip scores.
The next day. You know.
It's I find that interesting, Like it appears easy until it's not. Until you're out of position and you're making bogies. It's like there's something. It's it's not always apparent, like why you're able to stay underneath the hole, it's because you set it up with the good t ball. And I was blown away by Old Town being like probably as close to what Augusta National looked like, and when when Old Town opened in nineteen thirty nine, it had to.
Be like a twin with Augusta.
National in nineteen thirty nine, that had to be so remarkably similar.
It's I'm really kind of bummed out.
I always make like every start of the year, I have five courses that I want to see for the year, and it was like one of the five that I wanted to see just because of like the way Bill Krr talks about Old Town. It's like that's the place you got to go see and now you're hearing that, hearing you say that, and I was talking to a guy and he was like, Oh, they a flood washed away one of their holes, so they have to rebuild
one of the holes out there. And I'm like, he's like, yeah, you can't, can't go down there until the next year. I'm like, ship, you know, I didn't. I didn't get that one. Get that one done this year?
How recently was that?
Like, I think it was like a couple of weeks ago. Wow, so you might must have gotten it right before. I think it was the hurricane. It was hurricane enough, it was flow.
Oh well, the major. It's possible they had just they had sidestepped the one that hit the hit.
The coast, but maybe I don't know. Yeah, you know the one that came up.
So uh you you I know you love golf in the UK. Have you been to Australia?
Definitely?
I went on one trip in March or April of two thousand and three. It might have been there thirteen days and played like eighteen courses. It was an aggressive visit.
Very the way it has to be, though, when you don't know when you're going to go back there, you never know.
It was beautiful.
Fell in love with the Seven Sisters loved New South Wales, could live in Sydney, enjoyed Newcastle, did not get to and then finished in Natelaide, did not get to any of the islands. At that point I sort of figured out I'd have to get back.
You got to take a team dream trip down there.
I know we're allowed to do so.
One of the great sort of legacies of my predecessor is the international trip. I was so fortunate to go on it in tw nineteen ninety six as a junior coach. Patterson began in nineteen seventy five. He took the team in nineteen seventy six on the first of what must have been eight quadrennial trips. So the ENNSAA allows you to have an international trip to compete internationally once every four years, so essentially one time in your undergraduate experience,
and he takes them to England and Scotland. He took them to England and Scotland for two weeks and played matches against Oxford and Cambridge and the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh and equally fun like club matches against the Old Buffties at Mierfield and Royal Sinkport's and Royal Liverpool and that trip to me in nineteen ninety six,
our spring break trip. We went in March, two weeks a fortnite in the UK during March where we played alternate shot and played winter golf and we got snowed out at Oxford and that was the sort of most important two weeks of my time.
Yeah, that's where you.
Know, it's like golfing diplomacy. It was just fascinating to play links courses, to play Heathland courses, to just just completely fall in love with the culture of golf, the pace of play, the way they sort of the way everyone had a crooked swing and they were all so competitive, the ground game. I just love the camaraderie, you know,
just and that became I sort of spent. I returned in ninety eight, and then I between ninety eight and sort of two thousand and eight, I probably made thirty five trips to the UK and lived over there for you know, it's probably easily spent over a year and eighteen months of my life over there.
So I was gonna ask you, like, if you could play one area the rest of your life, where would it be. But I almost would say, like if you at ten rounds and you're in the in the UK, where would it be?
Everywhere?
There's not a There's there's literally seventeen regions with a week's worth of golf that you could play. But I would say, uh, every time I want to say I'm partial to Scotland and Ireland, I sort of realize I'm partial to England. I've only spent one week in Wales and it's beautiful there. But I guess I would. To me, I would have told you in two thousand that I would.
My goal would have been to retire with a or have a small house in Ireland near Ross's Point, County Sligo Golf Club, or a sort of a dream would be to sort of spend six weeks in Sligo every summer playing Ross's Point at five pm, playing.
Twilight like golf there.
It was before, of course was probably uh modified by Pat Ruddy and I don't.
I don't have the same affection for it anymore, but I think now I might.
I probably would probably sort of live somewhere in the west of Ireland, probably in St Andrew's. I also could see myself down on the coast near uh Sandwich, any anywhere yeah, I couldn't. You know, you can't spend enough, You can't spend enough days of your life golfing in the UK and Ireland. You really can't.
What's what's your favorite course that you've never nobody ever talks about?
You know, Well, my whole, my.
Whole advice everybody when I send them is is to make sure you you you you pace your itinerary with more than a few hidden gems. And it's not just you know, Open Rota World Top one hundred courses. They're all great, but in my experience of running running tours, they are taking groups from the Outpost club or even the Yelle golf team when we've gone we went in two thousand and eight, in twenty twelve and sixteen. For every Royal Dornick, there's a there's a Brora, There's there's
losty Mouth, There's Montrose, Kraale, London, leaven Ely. You know, you can name the whole all of the courses in the in Cornwall and dev and I took my seventy seven year old father this summer on a on a tour of a few courses in England and we and we played Polborough and Broadstone and Saunton East and Burnam and Barrow and Minchhampton Old and Wentworth East, and you could have and they were all short and fun and
they were a delight there. Even there's something so gratifying about a course that's where you're the only Americans there that day, and and there's one hundred and fifty examples of that.
I love.
But of course, if I had to say one, if I had to pick a course where I actually I realized where I would live now, I would play my
golf at the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club. I'd play Brancaster while it still exists, and I'd live somewhere in Wells next the sea, on the sort of on the North Norfolk coast, and and I would hide out there and I'd play my two ball golf and and wear long socks and uh and have and have and have my golfing days be spent with, you know, playing singles and foursomes golf with friends and family coming in to visit.
That'd be a good answer.
That that course has the original short hole right is the fourth hole right correct?
And the road is only accessible to the club during certain you know, is occasionally inaccessible during high tides, and it's probably the most vulnerable links to coastal erosion of any course in the UK or one on the short list.
And it's fascinating.
It's just how beautiful and fragile it is, and how sort of quirky and unusual, and and how much and how much fun it is. It's really incredible. I took a group of sixteen I think I took twelve players there in twenty seventeen and they all loved it.
They all loved it.
And then of course around the corner is Hunt Stanton and on that trip we played Jeez, we played Royal Worlington, played around at nots hallin'well and then maybe England's best inland course, Woodhall.
Spa, which is like a pine valley, which is unreal.
Yale and Woodhall Spa are some our two courses that could sort of be compared favorably and they should both be in any world top thirty if the if you know, or top forty in terms of the just design the uh.
I've seen pictures of Woodhall. The scale of the bunkers is just out of this world, you know, and when it shows in photos it's like you know, it's big like Yale's scale and photos shows, but then when you're there you're even more like, oh my god, this is out of this world.
How big this is, you know, and.
Then you think about how they played it back in the day, and it's like, God, if they could play it now and they That's the saddest thing to me when you play these courses like Yale is like you realize that no modern architect can even do this now because of the critics and the way people will just be like.
No, you can't do this.
You can't have a blind shot off the tee and then a blind shot over a blind twenty foot bunker into a green like that doesn't work.
We can't do that. It's like, why what everyone's you do?
Yeah, well everyone's are right, because you get in trouble. All these self important critics out there, like you know, the not Andy Johnson's of the world are gonna say that this is unfair. You know, I am all for this presentation of fair, fun and fair. But you know, like when golf was played in the teens and twenties with with the equipment they had now, granted they weren't as long and the ball did roll on irrigation less fairways.
You know, when the game was challenging, it wasn't patronizing, it wasn't dumbing itself down. And the literature of the game was never better. The architecture of the game was never better.
The it's its.
Attention as a mass, as a sort of you know, as a as a headline grabbing sport with Bobby Jones and others.
It was. It was this true golden age.
And I don't remember, you know, think about those think about how difficult it was, and I think that, you know, that's what Yale was partially about, like in this this sort of old fashioned Victorian you know, ethics of of just you know, you're it wasn't recreation, it was it
was this. It was this sort of process that helped, you know, a Teddy Roosevelt style kind of battle of self improvement and overcoming adversity and you know, you know, over you know, you know, responding to the challenge and the task at hand without any sort of whimpering or or you know, complaining. Then I think that's what how you how they must have played it must have thought
of Yale in its difficulty. It's like, well, you only have to beat your opponent by one whole or one stroke, and it's out there, and in some ways the architecture is there to break you, to get you, to get you to give up, to capitulate. You know, that's partially what was going on there. Can you can you can you sort of persevere through this, through these challenges, through these bunkers, through these seemingly unfair shots.
What fastest it fascinates me is like the popularity of golf at that time was insane too. You know, in the twenties and the thirties, it was become before the Great Depression, it was becoming one of the biggest sports, I guess you could call it in America. You know, it was on the rise, and it was all centered around this. It wasn't like the the difficulty of.
Golf is what makes the game great. It's not.
It's not like if it was easy, people wouldn't have these sicko obsessions, like I wouldn't.
Like I just would be bowling.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, Like it was, Uh, it was a challenge. And by the way golf like it took off, it populated throughout America, like they went from they went from they went from three holes in an apple tree to like five hundred courses and clubs within thirty years. Like it was incredible. The way it spread to every.
Corner of America. It was it was unreal.
And I and and I think they were able to take exist they were taking They took advantage of beautiful properties, often you know, existing land that had been existing, farmland.
That had been already drained, or beautiful coastlines.
I'm fascinated by how the game grew, by how they even just watching architects, shapers and construction crews rebuild a bunker and imagining them building the amount of golf courses they did in that era, and how hard it must have been to just just to move soil, and it's it's really incredible. We have to, you know, some ways we should that, you know that we have to honor that instead of trying to sort of remove bunkers, dumb down courses, make them easy.
Your make you know, fear losing.
You know, even these rule changes are all sort of geared towards kind of softening the game.
It's not it's not.
It's there's no way that should be the sort of the sort.
Of trend that we're going in.
But see how it is, Yeah, it's a.
It's that's like I think the biggest problem with municipal golf and in general is like they think it because it's for the public, it has to be dumbed down and boring. If anything, it should be like more interesting and more captivating and and so much wildly more different than your status quo golf because it's for people that are just you're trying to introduce the game, to introduce them to the best type of golf, don't introduce them
to the to the worst, most watered. Like if you were going to try and get somebody to be interested in drinking coffee, would you give them the worst taste a cup of coffee?
Like it's kind of crazy that we think this way.
Well you know what, but I you know, and then yet it's such a it's such a beautiful game that even in those moments like when I used to take the when I was living in Brooklyn and take the R train out to Uh out to Dyker Dyker Beach, uh and it would be like the winter solstice and there'll be forty golfers on the course playing a muddy wet, you know, golf course, and yet it's it's just something even even I'm blown away by when, even when it's
presented in such poor conditioning, how the appeal just still shines through. How there's still one hundred thousand rounds at Rancho Park. Or you know, I'm always driving when we go to our visit my family, my, my, my, We we drive to Long Island and we on the sort of throgs Neck bridge. Is that is the clear you see the you see the public course from the bridge, and it's it's the wind. Sure, it's Christmas Day and it's there's there's four there's golfers everywhere.
And then we pass a driving.
Range uh in Bayside and there's and there's every stall is filled with golfers in the winter.
It's like incredible.
Yeah, they're sickos. You know, we're all sickos, We're allis and it's.
All because you're trying to trying to get better. Nobody ever feels like they're the best they can be ever.
You know, that's the whole.
That's everything in sports though, it's all about overcoming adversity.
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