All right, we're back for the first Frida Egg podcast of twenty seventeen, and we're excited to have our esteemed guests, David McLay Kid. David is one of the most sought after modern day architects and the man behind masterpieces such as Bandon Dune's Nannia Golf Club and Gamble Sands. David, thanks for coming on my pleasure. So, I think with New Year's in order, I'm kind of curious, do you have any resolutions for twenty seventeen?
Hi? Going, that's a good one, And I think my resolution for the last pushing ten years now has been to get golf to be fun again and not to get sucked in by a desire to chease rankings or difficulty or any other particular fad or idiosyncrasy that can be to the detriment of golf and golfers and fun, which is the reason we all do it. So I'm going to keep going on that one and try and build golf courses that are ridiculously good fun for everyone.
You know, It's funny. I wrote a lengthy article about golf digest Rate ranking system and how like the criteria is so flawed.
And I read it. I had to break through that, and I've just the second Golf Diject down with their ranking stuff, and I was just emailing Roan Whitten. So funny that you should mention.
That, yeah, is the one defense to par Is. Kind of that one just gets me because like, why should a golf course get discounted, like, you know, get downgraded because it's really fun to play and not necessarily.
Hard, you know, you know, I get where Golf Diject and Roman are going with the defense of a you know, I'd.
Like to think of it more as the defense a birdie. You know, I'd probably argue that as a golf course designer, I should be putting up my best defenses against your best attack. And your best attack ends up with birdie. Right for most golfers, And even if you're a lousy golfer, you're getting a net birdie because you've got strokes. So I'm going to put up my best defense. If we take Gamble Sands as my best example today, I defy
you to easily make birdie on every whole. I will contend that gamble Sands put up puts up a very healthy defense against birdie. You've got to thread the driver exactly in the right place. You've got to put that ball in the green so that it rolls out to a makeable putt. What would we say a makeable putt is six feet eight feet ten feet and then you've got a hole on an average part four. I've put
up more than a good defense as that par. Now I'm just asking you to put it in the middle, get it somewhere around or on the green, and tupa So I'm not trying that hard to defend par. I think that a golfer's own inability to perform defends against par, and certainly when it switches to bogie and double bogie, I reverse gears completely. And now I'm trying to be your friend. I'm trying to make sure you can make
those scores not end up with snowmen. So I see where Golf Digest tries to go with the defensive par, but I'd rather see it as defensive birdie. And the whole resistance to scoring. You know that again sends a message to their ranking panel that a higher score is better. And I've had my debates on Twitter with a couple of guys in the media in this. You know the message that's being sent out one way or another is that harder is better, and it's still continuing to perpetuate
that harder is better. That golf digest you're talking about has Pine Valley Ranks is number one. That's a really really hard golf course.
Yeah yeah, I mean it's uh got incredible architecture lineage, but it is one of the hardest golf courses in the world, you know. And I think with when it comes to, you know, kind of fun and the mass public, like, you know, a scratch player can play any golf course from any t and have fun. But it's the fifteen that gets hurt by hard golf courses continuing to get
built over and over and over again, you know. And if it's not savage, yeah, and if it's not fun to play, why why would you play the sport?
I think that all too often. You know. That's where golf course is full down. Is there are lots of golf courses that the average golfer is invited to, wants to play because he sees them the magazines. He goes, he plays for whatever reason, and somewhere on the front nine, when he's lost a few balls and his buddies are helping him hunt his third ball in the rough. He thinks to himself, too much for me, I'm really not having that much fun. I wish these holes would run
out quicker because I feel embarrassed. And this reminds me why I don't really love this game. And so he finishes his round out and decides not to play again for a while. And I think that that happens all too often. The number of courses where that same guy goes out and he's told you're on the twelfth hole or the fourteenth hole, and he says to himself, oh, hell, the holes are running out already. I'm having so much fun. I want to do this again. That happens far left
than the opposite. And my job, my peers job, is to create golf courses where that average golfer wants to go and do it again, is upset that the holes are running out. And that's what Bandon Jun's, all of the courses of Bandon Jun's do so well, is the average golfer has an absolute black and wants to play over and over and over.
So you know, outside of Bandon Dunes, in your travels, what would you say are some of yours and other architects best examples of you know, that fun golf course where they want to just keep playing.
I'm not sure I understand outside of.
What outside of outside of Bandon Dunes, you know what would be some other examples across the States and also abroad of courses that kind of fit that description.
You know, weirdly enough, I want to be contrary, you know, in my my business, I would like to be as best I can be some kind of a disruptor. And so in order to be just those two things, I'll throw Oakmont at you as an example. Oakmon is the perfect a example of why I would argue that playability and challenge are not two sides of a scale of justice. They're not linked. Oakmont is incredibly difficult, but yet incredibly playable. The average golfer can go out and shoot one hundred,
but you'll do it with the same golfer. The course is wide and playable. The target zones to chase burghers or even pars are very tight. The course is really long, so to a good golfer it is a hell of a stiff challenge. But to an average golfer they could still have a whole lot of fun. Pine Valley, on the other hand, which I've had the privilege of playing a number of times, really good for a good golfer. I'm a sick handicap, so reasonably good, I can have
great fun. I can aim at the spots you're supposed to aim at. I can hit it to roughly where I was supposed to. One mistake on any given hole, and hear me, it can double triple snowmane. I mean, it gets ugly, really really fast. There's little chance of recovery because of the severity of the rocks. The severity right in the greens, there's there's it's very severe. The the playability is low and the challenge is very high.
Where Oakland the playability is pretty high and the challenge is also pretty high.
It's it's interesting. I was just writing a review today about a course here in Chicago that I thought, you know, it's very easy to make bogies at, but making pars and birdies is really difficult. Similar to the way you describe Oakmont, which is, you know, you know, it might be the only person that's ever described Oakmont as being very playable, but it makes complete sense.
I didn't play it before all the trees came out, so with the with it covered in trees, it may have been a completely different story. But I played it post the tree removal and thought to myself, this is great. I want to play again, you know, I think I can do better. And of course next time I went out to see if I could do better, I did worse. But I had great fun. And I don't think I lost the ball because you can't it's open.
Yeah. So with that, you know you touched on with as one of the reasons Oakman is playable. What are some other strategies that you employ and use that kind of create that playability while still challenging the scoring and the birdies.
Well, here's a stat for you. The average player misses the green more than half the time, right, They just don't hit the putting surface with their approach shots. And yet golf course designers rarely spend as much time thinking about the surrounds to the green as they do with the green itself. And yet more than half the shots are played from around the greens. So as a golf course designer, it behooves us to make sure that those golfers that miss the green, which is every golfer, you know,
it's just a question of percentages. Doesn't get put in jail because they missed the green by a few yards and our you know, the kind of rule of thumb that I come up with now is if you're doing an irrogated golf course, those heads are space sixty feet apart, and anything inside that you're actually spending more money to irrigate. So if you have the space on the site, you may as well leave. You know, somewhere you're in the up to sixty feet around the green for someone to recover.
So take that step further. When they're recovering, are they recovering to make Birdie? No, no, of course not. Are they recovering to make par well? They'd like to. So I'll go back to my argument that defense of birdie is what I'm about, not defense of par. If I can let someone miss the green, not put them in jail, and give them a you know, maybe a fifty to fifty chance so they could still get up and down, is that not going to lead to more fun? You
missed the green take Plain Valley. You miss the green at Plain Valley? How many times would you actually lose the ball if you missed the green at Plaine Valley a bunch mm hmm. I mean you could actually lose the ball. Yeah, you'd lose stroke and distance. Now you're scrabbling for double.
Yeah. It's the places that are overly penal around the greens, and I think that's where the good players are infinitely better than the average and the bad players is around the greens with their recovery capabilities and shots. So the tougher it is around the greens, the wider the separation you would get.
Correct, that would be a reasonable analysis to make. Yeah, so.
To change gears a little bit, I think I think I'd love to hear about how you got into golf course architecture in the first place. So was it growing up or you know what, guy you into?
Okay, growing up? My father was a greenkeeper in Scotland. So my father as a young man worked at ran Furley Castle Golf Club on the west side of Glasgow and then from there went to Glasgow Golf Club, which is the sixth or seventh, maybe the fifth that somewhere in there, oldest golf course in the world seventeen to ninety odd and he was the hey greenkeeper there for twelve years, so that was most of my young childhood through elementary school that's where he was the head greenkeeper.
And then in the early eighties he went to glen Eagles which had just been sold by the railway company who had kind of run it into the ground, and a new private equity company bought it and they wanted to bring it back to its former glory in the twenties and thirties, and so my father was instrumental and renovating the James Braid courses at Gleneagle's back to their former glories, and then working with Nicholas to build the PGA course which hosted the Ryder Cup the last time
it was in Europe. So that was my background, my childhood in and around golf, the son of one of the most influential golf course superintendents, certainly in Scotland, possibly in Europe, and if I could be so bold, you know, maybe across the world. He did a lot for his peers. He brought a professionalism to it that didn't exist in the sixties and seventies, and you know, I was raised with that as a model. I loved everything about golf courses and when I got to decide my own path.
I worked for a golf construction company and came to really love the creative part of golf, the creation of new golf courses and the adjustment of existing golf courses. So I took another step on from what my father had done at Glen Eagles with the Braid courses and the new Nicholas course, and I've been doing that ever since. That's a very quick pricie on how my career has moved from early childhood to today.
So you got the Bandon Dunes project at was it age twenty eight? Correct?
Twenty six? I think I was nineteen ninety four was when I first saw the site and met Mike, and then ninety seven we started building it. In ninety nine it opened, So I was thirty just over thirty when we finished it.
Huh. So it was it was your first solo design, correct, not.
Quite close close enough so it was not to matter.
So did you have kind of a feeling of you know, what you were onto there, like you know where you were kind of where the first course to revolutionize what now is becoming what resort golf is all about and destination golf is about, and you know kind of did you feel that magnitude when you were you know, in those early stages, No, no, at all.
It didn't have a name, you know, no one knew what it was going to be called. For a while. I tried to convince Mike call it McKenzie National or Whiskey Run or something else, a few other names that we kicked around. Mike KUIs there was you know, some you know, relatively successful businessman from Chicago with no pedigree in golf. It's not like Mike's a ex pro golfer or a developer of notes. You know, he did recycled paper for his entire career and made some money at it,
and he enjoyed playing golf as an average golfer. So and he's hiring a young Scottish guy who's got exactly zero pedigree. Well that's not quite true. I had the pedigree of my father and that's really what Mike was hiring. So there was no expectation. We thought that the tiny little group that was part of it, we thought that we could build something really really cool, something off the hook.
But lots of people think that everyone you know, there's I don't know anyone in that in my business that doesn't think that what they're currently building isn't going to be great, just the same way any musician or our film director doesn't think what they're working on isn't going to be the next Uscar winner. So I'm not sure that we really truly believed in our hearts that it was going to be what it ended up being. No
one did. I mean, we thought we're going to build something cool on the Oregon coast that a few people might see and think was cool as well. But we lived in a time where golf courses were lush, green lakes, car paths, perfect service. You know, Ben and June's back in the mid to late nineties when it was conceived and created, was the polar opposite to what golf was. Everyone watched Augusta and everybody was pushing towards that economy
was bringing. And this unheard of guy from Chicago hiring an unheard of Scotsman is going to build a golf course and an unheard of place in America. Where do you see your recipe for success in that description?
It's it's interesting. You know a lot of people in tech say that the greatest ideas are the ones that people think are the craziest. I mean, take Uber for example. Who would have thought ten years ago we'd be getting in random people's cars, you know, and not taxicabs.
Yeah, and I'll give you another one that you know. Mike's genius is his ruthless simplicity. He is ruthlessly simple. If you come up with an idea to Mike Kaiser I'm talking about that is the best idea on planet Earth, and you can absolutely prove it to be true, but it has came moving parts. I don't think he'd be interested you come up with an idea that's got no moving parts, He's going to pick that One's uh an analogy,
of course. But simplicity is what he's good at. And I've had the pleasure of working for Mike twenty years ago and today and in the twenty years proof that in between. I've worked for so many incredibly smart people around the world, some of the richest, some of the smartest, some of the most celebrated, and none of them have the raw simplicity of thought that Mike has. And that's where I think his true genius is. It is just really really he simplifies everything, and the simplicity of that
he how do I want to say, he forcibly. He enforces it on those that work with them and for them, and he brings out the very best in those people because he forces them to come up with the easiest, simplest solutions to every problem.
That makes a lot of sense. So you're currently working on another Mike Kaiser project, sand Valley up in Wisconsin, A you know, another kind of crazy unknown site. Sand hills abound over this great piece of land in the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what we can expect when the David Kid course opens up there.
Well, the first thing is, you know, I said a few times now that an Engines was the edge of nowhere, and now Mike found the middle of nowhere in Rome, Wisconsin. Uh. And it is shocking for those that visit for the first time. You're driving through rural Wisconsin with flat dairy lands on both sides and then maybe some timber and in the middle of the state there's a few thousand acres all san juans and they're not even elbows, they're
they're dunes. They're steep, they're sharp on one side, they're soft on the other. Side. They look likely to be on the Irish coast. That it's very, very surreal. And the sand that's on them is white sugar sand. It's the most unusual thing. It's not the same sand that exists through the sand Velvet Nebraska that's very fine, gray brown sand. This is white sugar sand. And then the vegetation that grows there these think whispy sedge grasses and
prairie oaks and pines. I mean, it's it's amazing that this exists at all, and I'm amazing yet that no one built a doll course on it. As a student of golf and golf course development over the last one hundred and fifty years, we all look at the Augusta Nationals or the Pine and we think, oh, wouldn't it be great to find a site like that, But of course they don't exist because these were all built on one hundred years ago. That's why they don't exist. They're
aren't built on. And yet here we are, one hundred and twenty years later about Mike Kayder stumbles right into a few thousand acres in the middle of Wisconsin that could have been built by Crump one hundred years ago.
So that course is going to be open for preview play next year.
We have six holes on our course that are grafted, the first and the second, and then the fifteenth, sixteen, seventeen to eighteenth, So the very beginning and the very
end of the golf course is completely done grassed. People were hitting golf balls around them at the end of last year, and by this coming summer the Kaiders intend to open those six holes for preview play the same as they did with the cre Crenshaw course, and incrementally through the summer six holes will lightly turn into nine and name twelve, and by the end of the summer maybe a few people mic and a few frames might get to hit a ball around all eighteen, although it
will be extremely young at that point. The final fudels, which are likely to be around pan eleven, twelve that sort of area, and then twenty eighteen the start of that season, the course WILLI open up to everyone.
So with a site like with a site like or with a site like banded dunes or sand valley where you have kind of an expansive landscape, what are the challenges with a big, you know, land site versus where you're kind of constricted and you may might have to route around housing developments. How do those two different types of projects like, what are some of the tough things about each of those?
You know, Funnily enough, when you're giving no constraint, it can have its own struggles. When when you're giving a piece of land that's got no boundaries. You know, Michael Kaiser, Mike's sun is the one that we that my team deal with on a day to day basis, and and he's really been the driving force of this project on the ground, him and his brother Chris. You know, they told us right from the beginning, you know, well, pick
any piece of land you want. You know, it's somewhere proximate to the core crunch of course, any side you want, Well, where are the boundaries? Well, we've got kind of a deal with the existing landowner that you know, we can buy up whatever we want. We've got options on it, so that with no limitations. It becomes a real struggle because you're spoilt with choices, You're you're not quite sure where to go. And believe it or not, that can you can end up like a deer in headlights where
you just don't know where to go. So what we did is we knuckled down and we used a little bit of technology to help us. Because the land mass was so large, we looked at it on a much larger scale, much larger than you could ever do on the ground with your feet, and we looked at Google Earth and aerial mapping, and we figured out where the major landforms were. And we saw from the satellite photography that there was a giant ridge slightly to the northeast
of the core Crenshaw Course. And this ridge V shaped ridge that points effectively due east with the open end of the due west, was pretty big. Each part of the V about a mile long, ranging up to about eighty feet high. You couldn't see it walking the ground. You'd see a hill, but you wouldn't understand that this was actually part of this giant landform. So we decided that we would take this giant, imposing landform and see if we could figure out how to root an eighteen
hole golf course around it. And that's when we got out on the ground and we really started to hike, and over a few weeks we hiked and hiked and hiked and figured out how to get a golf course around it and threw it and over it, and we had the clubhouse at the head of the V, the eastern end at the sharp point if you like, looking back out the wide end of the V. And when all was said and done and we won the bakeoff that Mike ran between ourselves and Tom Doak and a
couple of others, he said, yeah, I like the plan. I love all the holes. It's all great. That could you flip the clubhouse to the other end of the site and keep all the holes just the way they are? And that's the kind of thing that Mike will do.
You know.
He changed the fundamental pore of our design by flipping the clubhouse and then said, I don't want you to redesign it. Figure out how to make it work. That is no easy challenge.
You know.
I really like the car you designed. I really like only to have three wheels. I want everything you gave me. I want the sixteenth steering wheel on the same spot everything you've given me. I'll just rather it only had three wheels. That level of difficulty. But you know what, he figures that we're smart people and we'll figure it out. Sure enough, we figured it out. The holes are all pretty much exactly where they were on the original plan. The only thing that we really changed were the numbers.
So now and it's current routing. It goes out up the landform, down the landform and back kind of that's correct.
Yeah. Now the clubhouse, which will actually be the main clubhouse for the whole development, is on the western end of this giant V, at the open end of the V, basically at the I haven't thought of this before, but the clubhouse is really at the the stock end of the arrow and you're looking down the arrow.
That's cool. So that's that's I mean, it's got to be kind of a crazy thing to have all that land and just have to figure it out, do you So when you found that landform, is it? Then? Do you work from the greens back? Or how did you know? I've I've read, you know, different architects route holes and courses different ways. How how did you kind of go about laying out the holes?
You know? For me, it's more about laying out the circulation. The rooting, if you will. You know, people think about rooting and they immediately think about par three, Par four, Part five. I would prefer to think about rooting as just a thrade, a pathway, if you will, through a landscape. You know, how are we going to circulate our way around this in a pleasing fashion? And we know that along the route of this wonderful walk there are some
very obvious green and tea sites. But the first thing to do is to get this flowing path, if you like, around the piece of land. And because without that we might fall in love with half a dozen green sites but not be able to connect them together. So you really need to be able to come up with a thread through the site. And then from there, you know, well, you know, I know I've got that green or this set sees that I really want to get included. That's why the thread goes the way it does. But is
that green site apart three or a part five? You know, that's going to figure itself out as you start to add flesh onto that skeleton other routing, and so that's
what we end up doing. And to be honest, working with Mike, he's so in tune with that process that even now after having built six holes in shaped another six, there are individual holes on that thread of a layout that we still don't fully know are going to be what we initially thought there are par fours that might might end up with par five and vice versa, because we still haven't quite decided what the best sequence will
be where we're still making those little adjustments. And I can I know for a fact that that's exactly the way that core cren Shall work, and I'm sure Tom don't work the same way, and a few others that they're constantly looking for improvement in their design all the way until the design is truly built. They're willing to change things right up to the last minute. And I
guess that's where the core crux of change comes. When you're working on projects that are more defined, when you're doing mass engineering projects and housing developments, you know that your ability to work on the fly gets reduced and reduced. I mean, we try hard to maintain as much flexibility as we can, but as the projects get more complex, engineering wise, cost wise, your ability to do things on the fly reduces.
So with the design process, what are some of your favorite and least favorite aspects of it?
The most fun part of it is the shaping. You know, when you're taking the bones of whatever drawings were done and you're actually putting them down in the dirt for the first time in their rawest form, there's no drainage irrigation, and yet there's all you've really done is clearance and you're roughing it in with big dozers. That's probably the most fun because it's highly creative and there's no such
thing as as as wrong. There's there's a lot of things that you might want to do differently, or things that you might want to add in that are challenging, but there's nothing wrong at that point. Where when it gets down to draine and irrigation and graph and things that you know becomes more technical and again you're less able to change at those points. The mass shaping operation is where the most creativity and the most changes can happen.
That that shaping area is kind of where you know this you can make it look natural with that with it being man made or correct with the right kind of ter All right, yeah, you.
Can, and you can. You can do all. There are so many tricks to that that are very difficult that that's where the real skill lays is that a relationship between the design guys, the shaping guys, even down into the maintenance guys to make that shaping speak to the player, so that they feel something, so that they get that sense of whatever it is you're after, excitement, trepidation, thrill, hopefully all of it, memorability. It all comes at that.
That's the core stage right there, that nothing else before or after can make such a massive difference.
So, and what's the aspect of your job that you'd be happy if you never had to do again? Not saying you dislike it, but.
That's challenging. I love all of it? Which part do I like the least? The administration part is not that much fun. I try and have people really really good at doing that stuff so I don't have to do a whole lot of it because that stuff is challenging. And in the world we live in there's lots of bureaucracy, yes, twip requirements, USHA requirements, contractor licensed requirements, insurance requirements, on and on and on and on.
So with you being kind of of the minimalist school of design and natural you know design, how do you view a place like Shadow Creek in Nevada, where everything is manufactured and you know it gets a claim for how much earth they moved, and the incredibleness of how lush it is, how do you view courses like that when you compare them to say, Bandon Dunes, I.
There are two different things, you know, they're different. Genres No. When you say minimalist, you know, I think sometimes that does at service to what we're really doing. I mean, how much minimalism is there. Sometimes there's probably less than you think. But when we're done those that you would put in that camp, you would think that we did almost nothing. Where it's very difficult for Tom Fazio to
try and make you think he did very little. When you drive in the gates at Shadow Creek and you're out in the flat Navada desert and then you find yourselves in yourself in the foothill put over the rockies. I've played Shadow Creek and I thought it was absolutely incredible. I mean, an absolutely incredible example of the skill set that exists in the golf business. I mean, it's unbelievable. You can get into all sorts of debates about whether that whether someone likes it or not, or whether it's
sustainable or not. But I don't think any golfer would ever play Shadow Creek and say, well, I just thought that was crap, you know, I thought it was terrible. I think they don't play it and say that was that's incredible. It's not for me. I want to play something that's real like that. But I played it and thought it was wonderful, and I'd play again tomorrow, especially it's snowing here.
Yeah. So you know, in terms of your influences, who are some architects of you know, the Golden Age and past and even present that you really look to kind of as some of your influences.
Well, I get tired of reading how my peers are influenced by the Golden Age architects, because the Golden Age architects were.
The guys that came after the architects that influenced me. Because none of those guys, or very few of them, ever worked in the United Kingdom. So my childhood was spent around courses done by old Tom Morris and James Braid and Colt Varden and Taylor and you know all that kind of stuff. You know, it wasn't McKenzie or McDonald.
So those courses have obviously influenced me in my early or middle career if you like, now that I live in the US, But my early influences were not those They were you know, mostly Old Tom Morris and James Braid. Those were the courses I hung out on on Eagles and the old Macrahanish course on the west coast of Scotland turn Braid Braid again, those are the courses I hung out on, and they fit in the model of
what came after very well. They didn't move much dirt, they worked on great sites and they put a premium on golf course architecture strategy.
Well, it's interesting because you know, a lot of the great you know, the Mackenzie's and the you know, Donald Ross's and the cb McDonald's, learned from old Tom Morris. So you growing up and playing brave courses and old Tom Morris is kind of like going through the same education they did back in their day.
I would like to think. So that would be good. So, and currently we live in an absolutely fantastic time. I wonder if you know, the past generation of designers could truly have said the same thing in the eighties and nineties compared to what we live in today. You know, since the mid nineties, you know, we live in a time where golf courses have become golf courses again, a premium on walkability, naturalism, shop making strategy, raw beauty, simplicity
in the grassing, sustainability. You know, these things all exist today. It didn't exist in the late eighties, early nineties. They were trumped up gardens. You know, it was all waterfalls and bluegrass and you know, there were things that looked pretty on a plan to sail real estate by the billions. Now, so many golf courses have been built for golf's sake, and that's a great thing. You know that my peers, my competitors today are the strongest group, I would argue since the Golden Age.
So if you were building a course and you couldn't pick yourself to do the project, who would you pick? And then who? And then also name one you know, kind of up and coming young architect that nobody, you know, we may never have heard of.
Well, that's a tough one. If I couldn't pick me, I think a lot of it is. You know, you'd have to see the reaction of that particular designer. You know, you'd bring them out to your site and you'd see how they reacted, you know, and that's going to be a product of their experience and their current position in the world, in their career. You know, if they're super hot and super busy and there is a site that they like but don't love, that that vibe is going
to come off. And yet the opposite would be true. You know, they're full of passion and not that busy and desperate to pour every ounce of their heart and soul into something. You know that ViBe's going to come off. Who would I pick if I couldn't pick me, Well, I hate to be further biased. I'd pick one of the two guys that has been working with me for the last ten years, because one day they will be the guys out there doing it and I'll be sitting in my armchair and at fifty later this year, that
might not be you know, that's not forever. That's ten years away, twenty years away, and that probably exists for a few of those guys. You know, whether it's Tom Doak's collaborators over the last twenty years or Bill Kurr's collaborators. The next crop of enthusiastic young designers is right there. You just don't know their names yet.
Yeah, definitely, one of your guys, Casey has been helping us out with our ass that ask an architect series and just seems like a really bright guy.
Yeah. Well, Nick Sean, who's also been with me for ten years, he did he and I did all the rooting work at Sand Valley, And it was Nick and I that were the two guys that did all the work to get to that bake off that Mike ran, and then once we got to instruction, Casey has been the guy on the ground taking that initial vision and making it a reality. So it's a team effort. Although I get to play the band leader, I'm certainly not playing all the instruments on my own.
So we talked with Keith reb who does a lot of shaping for Core and Crenshaw, and he he said that, you know, those guys have a pretty hands off approach when it comes to their associates, where you know, if he sees something at the site and he's on the dozer shaping it, they let him kind of just rip and say, you know, have your freedoms. Are you kind of that same way with a little bit of hands off and you know, trusting your people.
I don't think so. I think we're more hands on. You know, I think that from a shaping perspective, we certainly want shapers that are willing to collaborate with us and be involved in the process. But I don't think very often we're saying to our shaping guys, just go ahead and give me something, where that's not usually how it's working. We're usually giving them some kind of speer on where to start, and then we're manipulating that process
all the way through to the end. You know, A big difference would be when Bill and Ben, you know, their shapers are really a key core part of their design staff. They effectively have their design staff driving the dosers. Slightly differently, our design staff are in the field managing those dozers, and those shapers are I don't want to downplay that they're into it. It's huge, but we're not that saying Okay, you know, go ahead and build me something you think is cool and I'll be back next week.
We're usually saying, you know, cut that down and push that over there. I'll be back in an hour or two.
So something I'm curious about with the architecture industry is, you know, so I think you probably can speak to this as you're young and you're hungry and you finally get that first job and say yours was, you know, your big job was banned in dunes, and then all of a sudden, you're, you know, the hottest name in architecture and you've got more jobs flying at you than you can handle it. Like, how tough is that to adjust to?
Very very tough, very tough. I look back at, you know, my early thirties and realize, you know, how tough that really was, although I didn't see it at the time. You know, in any other industry, I would have had a support network to help work through that, to make the best choices, to be surrounded by the best, most supportive people. But because it's not really an industry, because it's you know, like a hobby gone mad. When that happens,
you know, you're kind of on your own. At least I was, you know, I was an immigrant into the US with no you know, support group, and suddenly, you know, I have this success on my hands and I'm being offered projects and you you don't. Really it was a difficult thing to looking back at. It was one of those certainly a first world problem, but you know, what to do? What would be the best choices be? Who am I talking to? Are these people good or bad?
You know, and I don't think I'd changed much, but I've changed a few things.
What it would be a couple of things that you've changed would have changed.
I you know, the the quantity of work is regularly related to the quality. And when you're when you're too busy, you know, you spread yourself too thin, and that has its obvious drawbacks. And at times, through my twenty years since bending GM's, you know, there are times when you're just too thin on the ground. And in hindsight, it would have been it would be easy to say, well,
I'll do this and this and not that that. And you know, I'm hopeful that with twenty years of experience, hopefully at the very highest level, I can give that experience to my small crew and past that experience and knowledge on so that they're vector equipped as they move forward in their careers.
It's it's interesting. I think a lot of what you said goes to like writing. I see, where when I'm trying to write a ton of content, you know, it doesn't get as good. You know, if I take my time and really put you know, a lot of time I'm into a piece, it's always going to turn out better than when I'm trying to write three things at once. And I think it's true with almost anything in life.
It is, and the only way you can deal with it is some sort of self limiting mechanisms. And if you can put some self limiting mechanisms in, then things get easier better. You know. I at one point I had two offices, one in the US and one in the UP. That was not a self limiting mechanism. That just made for more and you know, I deemed success as quantity, not quality, and so I did that for a few years and then closed the office that we had in London, and that made life a lot easier.
And when I was doing less, spending more time on things. I have a daughter, and I when she was young, I made a commitment to to be home as much as I could, certainly on a sort of every other week end basis, at least I would be at all. So that sort of limited my ability to go chase jobs in China or you know, far flung places in
the world. So that became a self limiting mechanism. So by putting a few of these in my own way, they started to hone down the number of things that I could take on and so by doing so, the quality increases.
Yeah, what would you say, is you know, I'm curious that is the ideal number of projects that you'd have in a given year.
Well, my answer to that question is always the same, that you need at least one, otherwise it gets really hungry. So you need one. I would say probably three. You know, if you've got three projects all at the same time, chances are one of them is just starting, one of them's midway through, one of them is coming to an end, and you've got your eyeball on the next one to
add to the chain. So I would say of three is the maximum capacity that at least my firm could cope with that are active in construction at any one time. We could be working on a dozen that are on the drawing boards because half of them will never happen anyway. But actually in construction, I would say three is the is the perfect number that you could get to, you could work on, and you could deal with. Right now, we have two major projects in construction at the same
time and a third that only opened last September. So for most of twenty sixteen we had three projects in construction all at the same time, and for me to spend significant time on all three. You can imagine you're not home as much as you'd like to be. You're on the road a lot, and so you add another one in you're never at home at another one on top of that, now you're never at the fourth job.
Yeah, I can imagine if you took some international ones, then you god the travel problems too. I mean that's almost like a job and a half in itself.
Absolutely, So you know that that is those other and maybe that's an answer to an earlier question that you had. You know, what's the thing that you like the least, and I said administration. You know, maybe it's the travel. The travel is a is a bear that can be really really hard. You're away from your family and the ones you love, and you're you're on the road. You know, I when I have done a lot of international travel, you know, my friends in town and say yeah, yeah, yeah,
but it's okay for you. You know, you're crying, you know, business class on a flatbed. And I'll remind them that the very next night when I'm climbing into United to see you know three a next to a stranger on a hard bed that's eighteen inches wide. They'll be getting into their super king with their fluffy down.
Yeah, that's very, very true. So you touched on one of your other projects, Rolling Hills in LA, which just got some big news with USC announcing they're going to host the PAC twelve Championships there next year. I'm curious to hear a little bit about that project. You know, it's a pretty unknown course when you're talking big names in LA and and kind of what you saw with that project.
It's my sleeper that Rolling Hills Country Club was first created in the the sixties, I believe, and it was a small parcel of land that they built like a nine hole pitching put on, and then the local members built another piece of land and another piece, and over the course of thirty or forty years, they took a very small site, less than one hundred acres, and they inked eighteen holes out of it, but only just narrow fairways, peep terrain, no real design to speak of, you know,
cobalt together over thirty years and a very affluent and enthusiastic membership in pallasburd He's one of the wealthiest parts of LA. But they really didn't have they had a golf club, but not a golf course, if you know what I mean. What happened was some of the land that they had acquired, they really had leased, was from a bounding sand quarry to their north, the Chandler Sandpit, and the Chandler Sandpit is known throughout la as one of the best sources of sand to build golf greens.
So they mined out the Chandler sand Quarry for eighty odd years, and they filled it up with rubble, and then they crushed the concrete and sold that, and then he dug some more sand, and this went on for eighty odd years until they excavated all of the commercially viable sand out of it, and the Chandler's family were left scratching their heads wondering what to do with this
big hole in the ground in Palacebury's. And over the last twenty years, believe it or not, they've collaborated with the club and they came to an agreement where the club would put in all the land they owned, the quarry would put in all the land they owned, and a developer would be sought to develop the combined land parcel, which is three hundred and fifty odd acres, and so to pay for the development of a new golf course, one hundred and ten home sites were ear marked within
that three hundred and fifty acres in one core, pretty much in one big block. And the new golf course pretty well starts within the old quarry and wanders out through where the original golf course was and then finishes back into where the quarry is today. And the quarry is still a sand pit, so all of the sand that was remnants of the boring operation we harvested and
used to build a golf course. So many of the holes are sitting on top of sand anyway, because they're in the quarry and the rest of the golf course. We dug out hundreds of thousands of tons of sand and we cake the whole place in sand before we
finish the shaping. So by Hooker by Crook we have a sand golf course with acres of open sand areas and dried arroyos and our barancas as they would be down there, all with bermuda grass fairways and giant grass greens and green complexes that are all in band graphs. So the courses acres and acres of grass very wide
hopefully very strategic, not overly long. I mean, I think we're going to be north of seven thousand, but not by much, but a lot of green light holes that these young buck college players can go bowman after knowing that they can make birdies and eagles all day long, or maybe they'll make they'll trip themselves up. We'll see what I can leave in their path.
So with that, you know, how is it with dealing with the kind of changing game and the ball that keeps going further? I mean I play competitively, and these college kids hit it just I mean seemingly forever. I played with a fourteen year old that hit it over three hundred yards the other day.
Yeah, the ball is certainly the limiting factor at the at that elite level. The ball is an issue for the average golfer, not really an issue. And when I have these conversations with people in the golf media and they're going about the golf ball and the equipment's making the game too easy, you know, you have to kind of remind them that the average golfer isn't any better than the average golfer was ten years or twenty years
or thirty years ago. And so anything we can do to make the average golfer have more fun through equipment or ball, I'm all for as far as the average golfer is concerned. I'm all about what they did in tennis or what they did for skiing, Whether you can do so that the average golfer has more fun playing
the sport we all love, I'm totally for it. That's a totally different question to what do you do at the other end of the scale with the professional golfers and elite college golfers, where they can hit the ball so far that the strategy strategy of the golf course is nullified. I mean, surely that is completely contrary to
what the game's about. If the college player can hit it that far and now the golf course has no natural defense, you know, if there's nothing left and he's putting it to eighty yards on every hole and gap wedging it in. But what was the point Now it truly is just a plucking contest.
I think that's a great point. I mean, I go both ways, because there's still you know, as inn say you're an amateur, a high level amateur player, but not a professional. It's just there's just a it's a It's a very difficult topic because you know, at what point do you start playing with the professional ball? At what point do you play with the regular ball? You know, that's the tricky part of it.
Yeah, I mean it's tricky, but there's lots of tricky things. What do you do? I mean, how do you handle it? Eventually? You have to do something? Yeah, so doing nothing, I don't think if we can agree that doing nothing is not an option. Now you just have to figure out the something, however tricky it might be. There has to be a something.
I agree with that something needs I don't.
Know what the something is. You know. My thought has always been that Augusta would be a This would be a wonderful leading point by the Committee of Augusta National That the Arnie and the USGA don't have the money to defend themselves against a ruling against the ball. But Augusta don't have to answer to anyone invitation only tournament. If you want to come and play, this is the
ball we'll be playing. If you don't want to come and play, or highly welcome to turn down the invite, don't expect again next year.
That's that would be one organization that can do it and definitely would enforce it and people I think would fall in line for with us. Butting up here close to an hour, I wanted to get to some of our Twitter questions. Our first one comes from Simon and he would like to know what you'd do differently if you had your time again at the Castle Course in St Andrews.
You know, I would came for douting the putting surfaces. You know, the putting surfaces were just too reject to have too many slopes on the greens that pushed a ball away rather than allowed it to stay or even gathered. So certainly dialing back the greens you know by twenty five percent, wouldn't have hurt my feelings. And then the area around the greens, the ability to miss with your approach shot pin high and still have a recovery shot was something that wasn't as in the forefront of my
mind as it is today. Those two things alone would in r because the greens are being mellowed, make a huge difference. What I think is lost is that there were so many things that I think my team and I got right. I mean, that site was a potato field. There was devoid of any interest whatsoever other than the fact that it had a cool view back into Saint Andrew's.
And I think that over time, the you know, I pushed the edge of the envelope to the edge and beyond with the Castle course, knowing that history would allow the course to be adjusted over generations to achieve its final potential. Whereas if I built something that was mundane, mediocrity could never be increased. Nobody would ever take mediocrity and improve it. Where they could take something that I made where the volume was too high and they could
dial it back, they couldn't dial it up. So you know, I've spent many many hours musing that very question, and I'll say that I'll go to bed, my final resting place, happy knowing that I pushed harder than I might have done, but the end result, long after my passing, will be the better for it. Yeah.
I think that's a great point. When you look at a lot of the great designs of you know, the Golden Age, they were the boldest courses of that era. I mean, you look at when McDonald started to use the Britz design they called it, you know, his folly. You look at Mackenzie's design of Cyprus, he was scared that it was going to be too difficult, too bold, but the natural beauty is what saved it.
I don't think that I you know, yeah, I agree with you. You know, the boldest of designs, over time have won out and nobody's going to be talking about mediocrity. And I knew going into Scenandrews that you know, you're you're going into you know, the Lion's Day, and everyone has an opinion. It didn't matter what I did. If I did something that appeased to most people, they'd say, you know, such a waste of a great site. It could have been so much more. And if I pushed
too hard, i'd get what I get now. You know, well, you know you just used every toy in the box, and you know, push too hard and build something it's just too much. I'd rather history painted it that way than the opposite. I hate, hate, hate to be called media over Yeah.
I mean everybody's in your business too. Everybody's a second guessing critic, like none of them were out there and you know, spending the hours on site. So I completely understand what you're saying. And I think bold designs, you know, over time, will you know prove to be better than what they originally were thought of. So let's move on.
Robbie wants to know when when you're building a course, what's the hardest part of the course to manufacture and have look natural, whether it's bunkers or mounds.
That's easy. Pease, tease peace. Who wants to hit off a sport?
It's not flat, that's true.
So how do I build something that's very minimalist and natural? And oh, by the way, it has to be flat. So, by far the ease the hardest thing to shape and make look good on any golf course or the tees. It's a good question and an easy answer. Bring more of those on.
Yeah. So, comparison of experience at Bandon versus Sand Valley, that's.
Another good one. Another question that I've thought about myself. When I did band It in my twenties, I knew what I knew through instinct. I didn't know why I knew it. I just knew that golf courses needed to be white because it's windy. I knew that bunkers needed to be deep because the wind blows the sand out of them. This was all born out of our childhood in Scotland that I just took what I knew and replicated it on a different site. But I didn't really
know why I was doing it. I didn't. I couldn't intellectualize it. I couldn't deconstruct it and explain it to you. It was all raw instinct and feel. You fast forward twenty years, with twenty years of doing this and to some extent experimenting and trying out different things. Now at San Valley, I think I know I'm twice the age I was when I was building band, and now I have a good idea of why things have to be the way they are. What you know leads to a
good end result of what doesn't. So there's I guess experience is the final answer, but the explanations more long winded.
Yeah, so one question before we let you get out of here. We don't want to take up too much of your time. If you were going to play five courses the rest of your life, what five courses would they be?
And none of them, mind, because that'll make it easier. Okay, Well, the old course at S and Andrews does have to be right up there, because that's just a great course to play. And if I could play with a different group every single day. That would make it even better because the whole world comes to the Old Course at some point, so I would get to meet the entire world and play on a great golf course if I only ever played the Old Course for the rest of the time. But that would be one of my five.
I guess Macrahannish where I spent my childhood with my father and my grandfather, and I'm still a member and my family have been members there for seventy odd years, so half its history. So I'd definitely take the Old Course at Macrahannish and put it on my list. So that would be two. If I jumped down to England, it'd probably have to be sun and Dale Old or Saint George's Hit Which one of those two would have pick.
That's tricky, you know. I might even pick Some George's Hill over Sunningdale, just because it's even quirkier than Sunningdale. And then if I jump across to the East coast to the US, I'd have to be National because that's another quirky one that's full of whimsy and probably everybody gets to it eventually. It might take a little longer than the old Course, but whoever I missed it, the old course would be playing at the National, so I'd go there, and then coming to the West Coast, well,
i'd have to be Cyprus Points. It's easy. That's that would be my five get me tea times at all, five of those for twenty seventeen.
I'm gonna try and get mine first, and then i'll let you know. I can bring us second.
I could get you. I could get you on about half of those.
Yeah, it's I think those are high on every golfer's bucket list, so you know, and then then it's the means of getting.
There, yeah, and getting on.
So hey, David, I really appreciate you coming on and spending over an hour with us, and we're my pleasure excited to you know, keep tabs on the progress of your new projects, and I'm excited to get out and see some of your existing ones this summer.
All right, I'll see you at Sand Valley sometime this summer, and you better make it to the West Coast and see band engines and gamble sands at some point.
Yeah, yeah, they're all on my radar, So let me know when you're up at Sand Valley. You know it's four hours from me, so it's not that bad of a drive. Would love to meet sometime.
I'm guessing this summer the chances are there.
Yeah yeah, all right, well, thanks so much David, and I appreciate it again.
No problem, to see you later. Go back bine.