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 fried.
Egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Friday, Frida Egg brid Egg, Frida egg brid Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course. Welcome back to the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson. Today we are going to talk golf course architecture. There's been a minute, you know, the pro golf season gets cooking and uh, you know, the topics kind of find themselves and we haven't talked golf course architecture for a while. I'm excited to do that. We're going to do one
of our mail bags. I'm bring in Garrett Morrison, one of our talented personalities at Friday Golf, the host of the Designing Golf podcast, a podcast all about golf architecture. So if you like this podcast, you should go check out Garrett's podcast Designing Golf. So we're going to dive into a bunch of different questions that were submitted about golf course architecture. But before we do that, let's take a quick minute to talk about our friends at golf Genius.
Golf Genius is a tournament management software. They are the industry leading platform for managing golf events and tournaments. We use this for all of Friday golf events. I can say it has greatly improved our events. It has greatly reduced some of the stress induced in our events. As someone along with Will who ran the events pre golf Genius, I have to say that post golf Genius a lot smoother.
We aren't turnaround cards. I mean I always remember us having like these, Like you know, we were just like going through the scorecards as quickly as we possibly could. And that doesn't even get to just registration. So we used to register with Google Sheets and then transfer it into golf Genius. Golf Genius has made it so much easier. And it's not just us. It saves the pro shop hours of prep work and helps deliver a great experience
for golfers. If you're interested in all of the things that golf Genius can do for you, visit golfgenius dot com. All right, let's bring in Garrett. Garrett, welcome back to the podcast The Friend. This has to feel like you're home away from home of.
Course it is. Yeah, it's always very welcoming here, and I'm glad to be on.
You know, you're a former resident of this podcast.
Now like going back to your childhood home and saying hey, and you know, noticing that they remodeled the kitchen and being like, oh, that looks better, you.
Know, or worse or worse the backyard the landscape project we've done. Then turn out turn out well, no, yeah, it's all good. We need your guidance back here. All right, We're going to dive into a bunch of questions about golf architecture and and we we got some really nice submissions, so let's just get into it. Usually we have grand hopes of getting through like twenty of these questions, and we get through five. So we'll see how many of these we get through today.
That's so true. That is so true. But we got a lot of good ones. We got a lot of good ones, especially in Friday Golf Club, where we put out a call for questions. A lot of our members there in Friday Golf Club came through with some interesting topics.
Let's let's go with He asked, actually two questions. We're going to get to both of them. I thought they were great, but we're going to do this one first. The debut of Field's Ranch East in the LPGA Major seemed to get a lot of criticism. I think that might be an understatement.
That's fair, that's an accurate, an accurate characterization of what happened.
Just looking at the golf course architecture and how the players played the course. Do you think negative critiques were warranted or overdone? What if any changes would you make to the course to make it better for the PGA Championship in twenty twenty seven.
There were a lot of critiques. Now you have been to this facility, I have not, so that creates a difference between your and my perspectives on this issue, or at least a difference in the validity of them. I thought that there were a lot of critiques of Field's Ranch East. You know, a lot of different tax were taken by the critics of this course. Some of those critiques were valid and some I found less valid. I
don't think the course was unfair or too hard. I don't think it failed to showcase the skills of the competitors. That was the big claim made by the telecast by mel Reid in her very expertly delivered piece on this issue on Golf Channel, I just didn't see that. I saw a tough golf course that brought out the best from Minji Lee and the others who were around even par. It was difficult to score on the course, and I
don't think that embarrassed the competitors. I think it highlighted the ones who were really playing well and made it seem more impressive because they were actually administered a difficult test. I do think from my perspective, at least, you know, looking on the telecast and studying some of the imagery from the course and just looking at the whole designs, I think there are a lot of interesting holes out there, and that the telecast really failed badly to understand or
highlight what made those holes interesting. Now, admittedly this is not a pretty golf course. They are in the middle of some housing construction, and I think actually once those houses are finished that it will look a little bit better so that you don't have kind of this chaotic half finished look to some of the sightlines and the horizons on the holes. But Fields Ranch East is just never going to be a beautiful course to look at. I don't think, and that's partly because of where it is.
This is not beautiful land, so it's really not going to be an overwhelming esthetic experience at editing point. And to me, a lot of the criticism on social media Fields East was really essentially rooted in esthetics because that's what people were seeing on the telecast. They weren't seeing anything pretty, they weren't seeing anything especially eye catching or impressive, and so they didn't like the course. And that's understandable, but you know, you have to look a little deeper
to really assess a course. The final thing here, and this is something you've talked about, Andy, that you've referred to that Joseph has talked about Joseph Lamania, our colleague at Friday Golf, this is apparently a bad spectator course and that's a huge miss. And in order to stage big championships, it seems like some holes will maybe need to be re routed, There might be an issue with where nine and eighteen are, and it just bewilders me that this was not better executed as a spectator venue
because that is one of its big purposes. Now, I guess my question for you is the other course at Fields Ranch, Fields Ranch West? Do you think that course is going to be better in some of these respects. My understanding is that the Field's Ranch East layout is sort of spread out and wandering, and that's part of
the reason why it's a tough spectator venue. Fields Ranch West looks maybe a little more compact, even has some spectator mounds, which, while they maybe don't look that good, will at least serve the purpose of concentrating the gallery in certain spots and giving them places to watch the tournament. So do you think Fields Ranch West is actually going to be going to be superior in some of those ways?
There's a lot to unpack here. I've spent actually a decent amount of time at Fields Ranch. I was there before it opened for a couple of days doing some photography and videography, and I played it then, and then obviously played it for the YouTube video that I did with Luke Colton and Bones, which was super fun.
And to play it in like video, really cool video it was.
To play it in a competitive setting I thought was very.
Illuminating.
And maybe where some of the criticism comes uh is that I having when I played it the first time around, I was like huh, all right, like got around okay. I think one of the things that happens when you play in a competitive environment, even though, like I mean like YouTube filming, YouTube golf like is like a half competitive environment because you're kind of like you're trying to, like I was trying to like administer a show while playing a match, right, But what I felt when I
played it in a normal setting, it felt very spacious. Uh, when you play it in a competitive environment, and I think everybody that's played, like you know, any slick of competitive golf, even like club championship golf beef like club championship, when you get little bit when you get that competition in, everything kind of shrinks down. And I think the thing that I noticed was that you felt, really felt that hazards.
There are a ton of hazards at Fields Ranch East, the guild Course, and typically those hazards are in the form of like little like ravines or rivers, and if you hit your ball down in them, it's kind of like a lost ball. Not a lost ball, it's a hazard. So it's a drop, it's not. But what's happened the golf is like you see that and you're just like very afraid of it, and you start aiming away from it. Gill's like design was really smart. I've talked to Zach
Blair a ton about this. Zach obviously has a lot of golf architecture chops, and I've always you know, through the years, he's been so consistent, Zach with what he says is the thing to challenge pro golfers with.
Today.
He says, like, I don't think you can design a golf course that is really strategic without a lot of hazard lines, is what he says and feels. Ranch East has a ton of hazard lines. Now you can go down and like find your ball. Oftentimes you could play it. If you watch the YouTube video, you can see me attempt to play it from some of these places not well, and you can go find your ball, you can play from it. But what happens with pro golfers is they see a red line and they aim away from it.
This is what all this strategy coaches teach. Just aim away, don't even mess with it, move your shot distribution cone so that you can't hit it in there. So what Gil did was he put a bunch of red lines down sides of fairways and with red lines like they aim away, and then what he did effectively was build greens that countered it that run away. And I think that for that standpoint, it's a really actually interesting golf
course for pro golf. It's different. It's really different. I can't think of many pro golf courses that have as much red and that have strategy that relates so well to the red. I get why people didn't like it, and that's because they didn't take the time to understand it and the fact that it's different. You know, Like if you think back to new golf courses, new challenging golf courses, they've pretty much all been met with like stark criticism. Think about PGA West, the peat die design
called it to described as golf on the moon. Like Mark, I think people were saying that pets his mind kiw same thing.
Pretty much all of Pete Diye's courses got a pretty angry reception at first.
TPC sawgrass go back to when Robert Trent Jones redesigned Oakland Hills. It was called a monster, and not in like a nice way. If you're more interested in that story, check out Garrett's documentary podcast series around it.
That's a built in promo there.
Maybe it wasn't a good course, maybe it didn't stand the test of time, but it was new and it got criticized. So the pattern that we're saying is that new is disturbing to a lot of people.
Fast forward, Chambers Bay, I think was criticized for a lot of things, like the criticized beyond the greens, which were separate issue to criticized the fact that the par changed on eighteen. There was a ton of criticism for Chambers Bay. The golf course.
Yeah, now it's beloved, Like all these people pretending that they liked the course at that US Open, ninety percent of the people who are calling for the US Open to go back to Chambers Bay didn't like it when the US Open was actually played there.
That's my theory. Aaron Hills.
Criticized greatly, Trinity Forest criticized completely, just criticized. So like, just if you look at the theme here, I think there's somewhere in between the player criticism and is this course good? Right, there's somewhere in between. That's probably the right place for it. It probably needs some tweaks, there needs to be some stuff done, but I think it's actually a pretty interesting golf course.
It's just different.
And now, like if we get to just the overarching there are some issues. Like the housing development around it is awful. I have the first time it went they hadn't been built yet and going back and like seeing it with houses it sucks. There's no way around it.
And like I don't know if they can do like a stop work order for the PGA where like the trucks don't show up, but that would help, Like if there wasn't just like a ton of construction going on around the golf course, it might help with like some of the atmosphere. Yeah, and then and then like aesthetically yes, it's it's not going to ever win any like beauty contest. This is not Cyper's point, but there are a lot of like unesthetically like, not all great golf courses are
aesthetically pleasing. You know, there there are tons of places with houses all around them. You know, Oakland Hills has houses all around them. Now they're nice houses, Uh, they aren't kind of like the McMansion houses that are going to go on going and Frisco. Uh, but it's also new, so you always have to remember, like stuff needs time. To grow in uh stuff. But all in all, like the spectator experience not being great, that that's not good. And I think like one of the reasons is and
I notice, is it at Oakmont? And I'm curious your take. You just did a podcast all about trees. I think trees are super important for the spectators.
A little shade.
At Oakmont, I was like dying and it's like, oh, like I just the week after Oakmond, I went played golf in like one hundred degree weather, hotter than Oakmont, humid, and I realized I was more comfortable than Oakmont because I could walk into shade.
Gotta go stand under that elm by the third tee basically at Oakmont.
I remember, you know, like my early existence on Earth was filled with playing competitive golf in Chicago in August. And you know what you do. You just go under trees and you hang out in the shade. And I'm not suggesting plants a ton of trees all over the place, but I do think trees by tea boxes in particular have the most are the best place to put a tree.
Yeah, because to be careful about canopy management when you're putting them by tea boxes. Because you don't want the shade to get on the surface of the tea box too much. But if you manage the tree and make sure that the shade is around the tea box as opposed to right on top of it, and given how how good arborists and agronomists are at their jobs these days, they can accomplish that, then then you have something that's useful for a spectator venue for sure.
So for like Frisco or Oakmont for that matter, like ways to make the spectator experience better is trees that are placed like well out of play, that are in areas that you know, people want to congregate and.
Watch golf shots.
Because to me, that's the biggest issue with the spectator experience is they're hosting this event at the end of June, which is not a good time to host. But it did provide delightful conditions with like the wind and the bountiness and the you know, the the temperature though was one hundred degrees, Like who wants to go watch golf in one hundred degree weather? Like, that's not something I'm
interested in actually when there's no shade. One other thing I think, like if you were going to have like a critique of Frisco. I think that the surrounds of the green need a little work because I do think like those need to play, especially for the women's game, very bouncy, and bermuda.
Is hard in this standpoint.
It's sticky, but you have to figure out how to make that bermuda really bouncy so that it really allows for a lot of run up shots. I think that there were run up shots available that weren't attempted, but that needs to play like electric around in the surrounds, and I don't necessarily think it did and I and this could be just like you know what, the grass this time of year can't do it.
Yeah, yeah, Well, there are a lot of advances happening in bermuda grass science these days, and so I'm sure some experimentation can be done there. But the main thing is that if there is a turf type that would be bouncier or function better in the surrounds at Fields Ranch, then they should definitely consider just having that turf type around the greens and not being devoted to having the same turf type in the fairway as they have in
the surrounds. A lot of people shy away from that because of the esthetic consequences of having a transition when you approach the green. But there are some great golf courses worldwide that are doing this right now, including Royal Melbourne where they have those fscue approaches and they look different from the couch grasses they call it there, the Bermuda grass that's in the fairways, but it plays really well.
It's a great feature of that golf course, and I hope that more courses start to experiment with this, especially in Southern California. Riviera, let's let's see some let's see some bouncy surrounds there that would really improve that golf course, even if it has a set of consequences that are not all that appealing to.
We're going to talk about Riviera a lot next year with the Olympics going there. Yeah, it does feel like a huge myss that we're hosting the Olympics there, Like Rio got a brand new golf course.
Yeah, you know, and I wish we had.
Wish there had been some some kind of push to to restore the place, but I don't think there's any apple well for that among the ownership.
What about not restoring the place, but what about renovating Rancho Park or.
Or Griffith Park. Doing something with Griffith Park. Griffith Park would be would be perfect, and Rancho is very centrally located. I'm not sure what they would do about parking there. I really no idea, but uh, but Griffith Park they could, they could do it. There's a lot of space out there, and and that course could use some love.
Like part of the Olympics coming to town. Just generally is you get all these like great community.
Assets that are the benefit.
Yeah, and LA has like incredible potential. I would say that, you know, behind San Francisco maybe the most potential. You know, DC obviously, which is well underway with with what the National Links Trust is doing there, but LA, and and LA has just incredible public golf potential when you factor in all the courses, Rancho Park, Griffith Park, you go to the county, they have Santa Anita, which is a really cool golf course that could be you know, just
some some light touch ups. Not talking like twenty million dollar jobs too, but these there's just it just feels like a tremendously missed opportunity in terms of creating a public set when the Olympics come and just kind of going to RIV, which I like RIV. I love RIV, but I think that there was an opportunity to do something good for the community as well.
Yeah, it's just sort of the easy way out, I guess for choosing a.
Venue as far as Frisco West, I guess it's maybe a better spectating option, but it is not a better golf course.
Yeah, there are signed by bo Welling, So bo Welling did West, Gilhans did East.
There are some wild greens out there. My main critique of Frisco West is there are some really cool greens, but the every so many holes are lined by bunkers on the right and left side on the exterior, and it's almost as if the architect doesn't want the cool greens to have to doesn't want to amplify some of the cool greens that were built by allowing people to push to the edges, and it's more like hit it
down the middle. And I think that, you know, there's also some like construction critiques that I would have, and there's a big hill that they have to navigate that it can get a little redundant. I you know, I'm not I'm not an expert. When it comes to routing, I think there probably could have been a better routing.
They're also.
I think there was a time at which they thought that maybe the PGA Tour would be going there. So the mounding you see was actually a PGA Tour directive.
So there's life and then they just said, uh, never mind.
Yeah yeah.
So it's actually like a great story. This was like right after Trinity Forest when it was being constructed, and you'll see if you played, if you played the West Course, there's like some really cool like shared fairways with minimal mounding, like cool like break mounds and bunkers. The PGA Tour fresh off of Trany Forest was like no, no, no, no, we need containment mounting, we need these hole siloed.
Yeah, if you look at it.
And by the way, part of the issue with Trinity Forest, where the PGA Tour went for like what two or three years?
Two years, two years, it was a short instant.
Is what you referred to earlier, the lack of shade. Spectators really didn't enjoy not having trees to stand under a Trinity Forest. But it was but it was a really cool golf course and in other ways, and so so maybe a bummer, but anyway, going gone with the story.
So anyways, they they then then were like you have to build these mounds, and they so they built these like mouths like basically like three holes. There's like all these containment mounts and then nowhere else and they're on the back nine, so they just come out of nowhere, like wait, worm these where did these come from? But it's I I think, like I think that West Course there's some like you know, catch basins, which I don't
need to go and do. I think everybody knows. I'm not a fan of that, like are awful around the greens, But honestly, if you got rid of like all of like almost all the bunkers at the West Course, it would get dramatically better. Like that golf course should have like twenty five bunkers and it would be really cool because the greens are really neat, like there's some wild neat greens. It's just like completely over bunkered for what it is and I just don't I don't understand why
there's so many bunkers. But anyways, so that's those are my thoughts on the West Course is would it be a better spectator course.
I don't know.
I think you're kind of you're taking change out of one pocket and putting in another pocket.
To be completely honest.
It doesn't really make any sense to me that these courses are not better spectator courses. But maybe that's a discussion for a future future episode or or an investigation of why things went the way they went.
One other question I have is like, why can't we build grandstands with more like roofing? Is that just like exorbitantly expensive?
No idea?
That would be Like Another solution i'd have is can we get more grandstands with roofing? And then all of a sudden, like you can sit in shade? As someone who's gone to a lot of golf tournaments, I mean you just can cook in a grand stand.
Oh yeah, yeah, well because of the reflected light.
Yeah, it's like a different level of hot when it's hot.
It's like that's not.
The place I want to be either, right, I'd like like to be next to the grandstand in the shade. So really the key is shade. There needs to be more shade, and people wouldn't complain. So there we go. Oh we're twenty five minutes in one question one question. Perfect, here we go. I've got this question for you.
Here.
Many of the best funded new projects This is from James Roth. So many of the best funded new projects on the best sites tend to go to the Big four of golf course architects. Does this limit innovation? Also? Is Gil Hans the new open Doctor?
Also, oh my gosh, three questions.
Just focusing on sites that that are to host championships force architects to the middle.
Okay, let's tackle these one at a time. So the Big four question, whether the a lot of the best jobs quote unquote going to David McLay Kidd, Gil Hans, Corn Crenshaw, and Tom Doak. Does that limit innovation? I'm not sure that that's where the limitation on innovation comes from. I think what really limits innovation in golf architecture is cost and risk, which makes clients conservative. And so it's yes, that's part of the reason why clients choose the same architects,
the same successful architects, over and over. But the main thing there, the main dynamic there is that the clients ask the architects to do what they did before that made those courses successful.
I'm gonna I'm gonna step in here. I'm gonna I'm musa say something else limits innovation.
Okay from specifically or the paraple shotgun, start soundboard, making it into the fried egg pot.
Oh, people are gonna be so mad.
The fair police. The idea of fair is the greatest. I mean, we just talked about fairness at a major championship where you had genotitical and and MinJe Lee, two of the greatest women's players of the last five years, duking it out, the only two that really had a chance to win on Sunday going into Sunday on a course, and they were both like under par one, and we're talking about whether it was fair or not fair. Golf
is unfair. If you live your golf life with the lens of understanding the game is inherently fair unfair, you will play better golf just in general. But it also if every golfer lost the idea of fair from their dictionary of golf terms, golf architecture would would go nuts. There'd be just wild golf courses, wild bad, wild good. But the problem is people. People believe that if they hit the green, they should automatically be like guaranteed a
two putt. You know what, one of the greatest short par threes in the world is National Golf Links Short par three, and it's got one of the craziest greens in the world. And one day I hit I played there, I hit a terrible wedge to like forty feet. It was just a bad shot. The pin was front right, and I was standing over the putt and I said, if I hit it at the hole, it's going off the green into the bunker.
If I try and make this, I laid up.
I laid up the putt because I knew I hit it in the wrong place. I was in a place I hit a terrible shot. So like people like believe like if I hit the green, I should I should be as long as I don't screw up, I should be able to putt like this is one thing that limits innovation in golf architecture. The idea of par in handicaps limit the innovation in golf architecture. We've begun to
see some golf courses that don't have scorecards. But like, the number one thing that is limiting innovation in golf architecture is absolutely the public in America's perception of fair The game is unfair. And as soon as you every golfer that's listening to this podcast wraps their head around it accepts that the game's unfair, you will play better golf. You will without a doubt. Like when you get a plugged line in a bunker, you say, oh, this is fun.
This is an opportunity to hit a great shot when you roll into a divot. If you accept it that that's just part of the game and that these are moments that are giving the opportunities to hit a once in a lifetime shot that you will never forget, you will play better golf. And that is also would allow golf architects to build better golf courses.
And also probably be a happier person if you just accepted that certain things are unfair, because even on a course that's designed with the idea of fair baked essentially into it, unfair things are going to happen just because it's golf, you know. I think any golf course design needs to balance randomness and quirk with a sense of fairness because a completely or you know, absolutely unfair course would just be ridiculous, and so there needs to be
some idea of fair play. You know, baked into the design, but probably a lot less of it than people think or than people want to accept. And so, yeah, completely agree Andy preaching to the choir, and so I'm not sure how to begin changing that, but it is certainly an epidemic in the discussion of the pro game, whether golf courses are fair or not, and it makes people conservative, you know. I think about this a lot with comparisons
between golf architecture and other art forms. If you look at an art form like like pop music, like rock music, the pace of innovation and the variety of experiments that musicians have done over the decades are so much broader and so much bigger than what golf architects have done. And part of that is because not only be famished. Part of that is because there's way more of of
production of music than there is of golf architecture. But also part of it is that there there aren't like the same limitations on what musicians do that the consequences don't seem to be as severe for a bad experiment.
In that.
Right, And that's what I'm talking about with cost and risk, right where where the client has to be conservative because you put out an album and it flops. Well, you know, that's a bummer and you might lose a little money, but only a little bit. You put out a golf course and it flops, that's a disaster.
There's there's so many great like essays centered around especially like I think Elsa McKenzie wrote about it, but like the finality of design, how it's like it's done, especially when you get to the municipal space at like a big time resort, at a at a at a private club or at a you know, so of course that say a very wealthy individual's building, you can always make changes at a municipal golf course, you know, municipal golf course saves up, gets the funding and spends you know,
fifteen million dollars. That's that's it. The course is what it is for the next sixty years.
Yeah, you don't you have to earn the money back, you know, you don't have that more.
That's that's the thing that is like the there is like this idea of design, like once you lock in a routing and build it, it's really hard to change it anywhere, you know. But I think like preconceived notions just generally are bad for art. The idea of like rules and limitations. If you wanted to talk about, like how would we get the most abstract innovative ideas in
golf would be to throw away the preconceived notions. So you think about things that limit, like that limit your innovation, number of holes, the idea of score, right, the you know, I think you could go into equipment like fourteen clubs limit, Like I think you'd get more innovation with like if you created golf courses that were like four club courses,
people might find that really interesting. But that would be against like the handicap system overall, very huge limit or inhibitor because you can't even do interesting setups because if it's like, well, what tea did I play?
Yeah, well you have to rate the separate courses and yeah.
So and then if you start to think about it, it's like all right, well, like if I wanted to build a golf course, I've always thought about this is like build a golf course and have like I'm gonna have like thirty two different unique setups with like whole locations.
I guess I'll tell this this is.
Like one of my like far fetched ideas. My favorite restaurants in the world are the ones with no menus to me, Like, why if I'm going to a great restaurant with a world class chef, like just give me whatever. You're gonna do whatever you want, you know, like you're the chef, Like you know I'm not. It'd be like me getting in a New York cab and being like, well, like I've spent like five days in the city, I think you should go this way, right, Like that guy
knows where to go. The chef knows how to make the food. So like one idea I've had is like build a golf course with like a lot going on and then have like a unique setup that like so many of them that are like and you they're just like this is what you're eating today, and you know, you could play one whole six hundred yards one day and then the next day it could be two hundred
and fifty. But make it like really diverse and that all the setups work together and the architect who designed the golf course lays it out like something I think that's kind of weird is that architects design these great golf courses and then like superintendents set them up. And I love superintendents but like over time, a superintendent's like job is rooted in becoming efficient, and golf course setup is the way someone experiences a golf course, and that
should not be efficient. It should be very intense. It should be like, Okay, this hole is doing this, like this is how I can get the most out of it and maybe put somebody into like a tough spot by setting up this, or make a hard decision that they have never had to make before.
And I think.
That these preconceived notions are what limit golf course innovation. I will say though that like, yeah, like having like the same arts, Like if you have the same they're only four rock band, you would see a minimal amount of innovation. Now like the flip side, as you said, there aren't a lot of projects.
Yeah, yeah, I mean if you look at the number of songs that have been released since nineteen twenty versus the number of golf courses that have been built since nineteen twenty, there's there's a big difference. But what made me think of this is that I've been reading a really great biography recently of the Beatles. Really it's like an eight hundred page book just about the first the first five years of the Beatles, like Mark Lewison, it's
called tune In, and it's extremely detailed. It's almost like a day by day, week by week account of the Beatles. So if you're you know, if you've already read some other stuff about the Beatles, maybe this would be the book to read. But I found it completely fascinating. You know, where did this band come from? How did this band become so great? When did they become so great? And one thing that's so interesting about them is the is
the pace of their changing styles. If you look at the Beatles, but you know, in the late nineteen fifties, they were just a bunch of teenagers. They had really they were very talented, but they were just like a skiffle band. They were playing on really basic instruments and playing in a style that was very easy to applicate. And by nineteen sixty seven, if I have my years right, they were making Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band. That's
seven eight years. How does that happen? How does one band progress that quickly and just become so different so quickly every few months. In the nineteen sixties, the Beatles were changing who they were and there's really no comparison in golf architecture for all the reasons that we've laid out, but it does make the art form less dynamic overall.
And so if there's any way that we as a golf community can allow golf architecture to be more vital and more dynamic like music and film and literature have been historically, I think that the better off we're.
Going to be.
I would agree with that. I think, like when you when you get into it too. There are certain architects like I think Tom Doak's been probably the most experimental. He's brought the most new stuff to the industry.
He's been intentional about about changing. Yeah, the way he does things.
And he's it's in response is to what's going on in the market, kind of like the way the music
industry happened. He brought in with and he's pushed back on with and he's gone like much more economical in recent I mean his newest design in Texas, like so few bunkers, right, so few, so little earth moving, and you know, I think like that's such a that's such a you know you think about like compare that to stream song blue or something it's such a big change from that over the course of I mean that would have been almost twenty years now, you know, fifteen years.
Stream from string Soong Blue to now is fourteen fifteen, fourteen fifteen years. Yeah.
Yeah.
But then you have like I think, like Bill Krer and Ben Crenshaw, like they kind of have like their methodology. They they find they build like really great natural holes.
It's about the land for them. I think Bill cor trusts in the distinctiveness of each piece of land, and that is what he's about. He's about capturing whatever that is in the land, and so it's just a completely different approach to the art form. It's very interesting that these two architects who are considered similar to each other or or standard bearers of the same movement, are actually very different in the way that they approach their craft.
I don't think.
Michael would care be sharing that I was. I went and saw Rodeo Dunes a couple of weeks ago, and one thing that Michael said that he pushed Bill Bill Corrers doing the first first course there. The site's incredible, it's unbelievable. One thing he pushed Bill on was like, and we can we try and do stuff differently, and and his his directive was make it less neat, you know, like you have such an elegant like elegance to your designs,
like just leave weird stuff. And I think it turned out pretty interesting.
That's a good directive from an owner to say, here's something I've noticed about your designs and that elegance that that all tied in kind of smoothness is a feature of Corn Crenshaw's designs that would be interesting to see messed up a little.
That that site. I can't say enough that site's extraordinary. I like cannot believe that it was just sitting an hour from Denver.
And then found on Google Earth.
Yeah, it's it's awesome. You know. There are other questions in here that I think, like in terms of innovation, there's been a lot of new golf being built that will open in the next year or two, and I think you're going to see a lot of new artists, new architects attempt to build or you know, possibly break through with their with their designs. Is Gil Hand's the new open doctor.
Not really. No, He's not nearly as dominant as Robert Trent Jones was, or even as Rhys Jones was in in, you know, shaping the destinies of these championship venues. But of course he's become a go to architect for both USGA venues and PGA of America venues, which is interesting, right. It's not like he has a relationship with one organization or the other. It's more that he works with these courses that happened to show host championships, so the connection
is less he worked. I think he works well with those organizations, but but that's not the primary relationship. And then Andrew Green, of course has a lot of the jobs that either gill Hand was unable to take on or just got those jobs, like he got the o Kill job, he got the Invernous.
Job, and got the Olympia Field's job.
Got the Olympia Field's job, and he there's there's an equally strong argument that he is a kind of open doctor PGA championship doctor at this point, the one that flies under the radar. The real open doctor in the world of golf right now is the open doctor. Mackenzie and Ebert. They have a close relationship with the RNA.
Martin Ebert is a member of the RNA, has served on committees in the RNA, has served on committees that choose championship venues for the RNA, and if you want to host an open championship, basically it's known that you need to hire Mackenzie and Ebert. That's an open doctor, not really what what Gil Hans and Andrew Green are doing.
And that's that's more similar to the relationship that Joe Dye and the USGA had with Robert Trent Jones and one fifties.
Yeah, where it was like an exclusive relation relationship. You know, here there's nobody else that that Joe Die was going to recommend than than Robert Shen Jones.
And maybe maybe it's similar also. I'm not I haven't seen all the work all over the place, but I think you could categorically or pretty emphatically now look back and this is all trends, but you look back now and you say that, wow, Robert Trent Jones and Joe Dye together ruined a lot of great golf courses.
They didn't do a whole lot of good. And I mean the thing that can be said without a subjective assessment, an assessment that I agree with, of course, but the thing that can be said, is that pretty much all of their work has now been redone. Yes, all of it doesn't. It doesn't none of it, almost none of it remains. And I think maybe not maybe, I think probably we'll see something similar with the open road of venues in a couple of decades.
I've numerous numerous architects. This is don't try and play, this is numerous architects. Other people said to me, have said to me offline, thank god for Rhese Jones because he is making my job easy.
Because all I have to do is be better than that.
All I get to redo is work all the time. So just just.
So we're you know, I wonder if Riest Jones takes that as a genuine compliment.
I still get work himself.
That's true.
He's busy, busy guy.
Everybody's busy at seventy nine eighty years old.
And then this final I would just get to this real quick. Just focusing on sites that are that are to host champ championships, force architects in the middle. Yes, because their fairness. You have to balance fairness. You have to consider infrastructure. It's a lot to what we just talked. There's so many things you have to think about that
lead to like constantly making concessions on design. Championships naturally lead you to watering down the design or the the restoration of a place because oh, it can't be this wide, Oh we need we need a car path here for access for equipment. Oh we're going to put a grand stand here. I mean, like think a lot of these open courses. Like the one thing that Mackenzie and Eber comes in, Like the first thing they do is like spectator flow, we need to move this green.
Right, even if it's a good hole, we're getting rid of it because because we need to build up this this championship hosting infrastructure.
So I think like you could unequivocally say that modern championships are bad for golf courses if you're interested in the golf course design.
Especially for old courses that are or were what they were and were designed to be what they were. To retrofit those into a modern US Open or PGA championship venue often does a lot of damage to what those
courses are. And I think you just have to look at the difference between gil Hans's work for championship hosting courses and gil Hans's work just as an architect for the amateur player, I would say he takes a lot more risks when he's designing a place like the Hoopy Match Club or Rustic Canyon than he does with even Southern Hills Country Club, which I love.
In that one was the one that.
I love that course. I love that course. I think it's terrific and there's a great kind of ingenious compromise between the requirements of a modern championship venue and just a restoration of a Perry Maxwell golf course. But if the PGA Championship or the Ryder Cup or whatever else they want to host wasn't a consideration, I think there would have been some other things that gil Hans was able to do there.
I agree, and I think that transit. Here's a good question. I really like Trent Godby. Besides the old course, what Scottish courses have had the most influence on golf courses in the US.
That's an interesting question, isn't it. It's such a historical question. I think probably the first place I'd go would be North Barrick, not just because of the template holes, not just because of the Ridan, but just in general as an influence on especially modern golf architecture. I think North Barrick is a kind of guiding light for quirky golf course design. I think that course freeze architects up to try things because certain aspects of North Barrick are so weird.
The other ones that I think of would be would be pressed Wick, just because Presstwick really represents the the professionalization of golf architecture. That was one of the first courses that was really designed by a person who was devoting himself or at least devoting a portion of his time intentionally taking on golf course design as a profession in Old Tom Morris and so just as a as a statement of early golf architecture, pressed Wick very influential.
And then we're all Dornick is the I think say that, Yeah, because because of Donald Ross and and whatever influence Dornick might have had on Donald Ross's, you know, sort of budding ideas about golf architecture.
Yeah, Dornet Royal Doric being the place that the most prolific American architect spent a lot of his early life playing and seeing. I think, uh, then there's like themes that people bring over from it. Unfortunately, like usually it's all all the wrong stuff that have an influence I think, like Ireland Irish golf like influences rough in America.
Oh interesting, Yeah.
Like Iri Irish golf, they're very like steeped in competition and hard hard, like they like the idea of hard and competition and metal play, which I think, like listen, like I love. One of the things I think is intoxicating is when you go to Ireland or Scotland is like how much they love competition, like you're always playing a match, but they play a lot of like you know, metals and and I think like one of the things that Ireland like, one of my criticisms of Irish golf
would be like how much lost ball rough exists. It's obviously a place that gets a lot of rain, so the rough gets very thick and you're off it's wetter.
It's that's one big difference between Irish links and Scottish links, right, Irish links are wetter so that the rough is kind of thicker.
Yeah, So I think like that that is something like people we'll take at that come back with that nobody thinks about like oh wow, like you know, the green speeds here are like delightful like I you know it helps with their pace to play, like why did they play golf faster than us? And in general whether greens are slower, so it's like you get off the green quicker.
You know.
These are things like you know, a bunker as a hazard, like there's not this like notion that you should be able to just get out and and and have a perfect lie all the time. The people don't take away the good things generally with with with golf in Ireland and in Scotland and England, they take away the things you don't want don't want to take away. So that
that would be my my other thing. Let's go back to uh to Dale Miller here Henry Phones Phones, Henry Phones never built a golf course, then goes to Scotland to study the courses. He comes back and build Ougmont. Hugh Wilson never built a golf course, then goes to Scotland to study the golf courses. He comes back and built Marion. I think you could add Cebe McDonald goes over to Scotland.
Well and George Crump. It might be the best example within.
This is golf courses built in National Golf Links George Crump. Similarly, Pine Valley is tons of experience needed to create a world class golf course.
This is a really interesting and well set up question, so thank you Dale. There are different kinds of experience. I think there is studying golf course design, and then there's actually practicing it. There's actually constructing a golf course. And so, first of all, the extent to which cebe McDonald, Henry Phones, Hugh Wilson and other kind of first time architects of the Golden Age were immersed in and utterly fascinated by golf architecture, would I think stun twenty first
century golfers. The amount that these guys read about golf courses, studied golf verses, talked about golf courses with their friends. It was unbelievable.
And so.
Yeah, you know, actual experience in golf course construction didn't prove to be crucially important to them, but they had experience and knowledge in other ways. And then on top of that, Hugh Wilson, George Crump, and CB McDonald especially sought advice and enlisted help from a lot of smart
and experienced people in designing their courses. The Oakmont story is a little different because the Phoneses really did just kind of build that course after having not done anything like that before, and that's part of why Oakmont is
so distinctive and interesting. But they also spent four decades refining the course and turning it into the course that we more or less know now, and so that there was that kind of just time and effort spent on the golf course design that maybe compensated for their initial
lack of experience. And then the final point would be comparing these kind of first time golf architects of the Golden Age to what an amateur golf architect might do now is tricky because golf course architecture has become a
lot more complex since the early twentieth century. Just the amount of earth that gets moved, the machinery that gets used, the agronomic expectations of golfers, the drainage and irrigation infrastructure, the planning, the environmental regulations, all that stuff has started to require I think a degree of professionalization that wasn't
as important in the early twentieth century. But I do think that a certain kind of amateurism or naivete might be interesting to introduce into golf architecture, because once you get experienced, maybe you start to become a little more conative, because you know all the pitfalls when you look at the early work of certain architects like Somerset Hills Aw tilling Hast, when when you look at that course, you think, this guy didn't really know how he wanted to design
a golf course. He didn't really know what a tilling Hast course was yet, and that makes the golf course more interesting probably, And so allowing for a bit of inexperience to come back into golf architecture maybe wouldn't be a bad idea, but that needs to be tempered by or informed by experienced advisors and people who just kind of, you know, teach you how to do the thing.
Yeah.
I think that, like a lot of the fresh ideas come from when somebody doesn't know any better. Yeah, I think like again, like most innovation in society comes from outsiders. So yeah, I think that's why you see like a lot of the great golf courses our first time efforts or like you know, and in the case of CEP McDonald, if you throw out Chicago Golf Club's first attempt, his greatest golf course is probably his first golf course.
And National Golf Links is so different from the original Chicago Golf Club that it might as well have been his first course.
Yeah.
And I think like the you know, the reality is like innovation, and then what happens is like especially with modern designers, I think they get beat down by the developers, like developers are actually like in owners are constraints and they beat down on them, and over time it warps their idea of whether they can what they can and can't do. When they have been told by or a owner developer numerous times that they can I don't want this, it becomes built in perception that people don't want this.
The best way to innovate is to have a clear conscious, uh in free of preconceived notions. I think it's what's like fascinating is you know, Corn Crenshaw hired a lot of shapers who had no golf experience. And one of the reasons that one of the you know, huge advantages that presents is that they had never built golf for for Fasio or for you know, Robert Trent Jones or for you know, Pete Die and you know, and had those like built in memory of what they were building
and they should do that. That's how they were able to get a new look. Outsiders provide new ideas, and that's why it's like really important for like young architects to get chances because they are going to be the ones that usher in the next style of golf architecture.
So yeah, I.
Think I think that are there's like a lot of credence to you know, the idea of early golf courses being sometimes the best, but other architects get better, they get more refined, and and I think like always like there are gonna be like issues with like first builds from people like that are going they're gonna learn more elegant drainage styles and different things. But some of the the ideas, the ideas behind the golf course are going to be the best ideas because they've thought about them
for the longest period of time. Right. You think about somebody who's like I've spent ten years thinking about this golf course I've been built. The first time I get a crack and it's those ideas and then it's you know, it's a lot like music music forres. Yeah, that made like how hard is it to have the second album is because they've the first album is a compilation of ideas their entire life has been devoted to, and then you have to create a second album in a year or.
A golf course architecture song. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So So anyways, that that's that answer Grant Gates had had. He's tying this to our previous pot. I don't know if you listened, Garrett, but with Joseph we talked about the PGA Tour building a new slash mega site. What part of the US would you like to see it.
In, Well, the Pacific Northwest, of course, that would that would never happen. You know, they're going to build it in the southeast, but or they would build it in the southeast if they were to do this. I don't know, ideally. I know people get frustrated with the kind of West Coast bias and emphasis and golf tournaments, but there's no doubt that West Coast venues occupy a nice little viewing window for at least most of the US, and so.
They just have a big challenge in land costs, available land, natural resources, environmental restriction.
Not to say there aren't some limitations, but the PGA Tour can just bust right through those with private equity and you know, a little bit a little infusion from the sovereign Wealth Fund. Right.
Well, yeah, I'll tell you where I don't need another another championship venue.
Texas, Yeah, Texas or you know whatever, Florida for PGA Tour events, but.
Line up probably not either in terms that they've got a lot of terms there.
Yeah, I would say my real answer here is is a big city somewhere outside a big city somewhere.
It's gonna be hard, I know, I.
Know, but we're being asked where we would want about. Oh, Cobbs Creek would be great. But I think they're doing something different there than looking for championships.
Right, Yeah, I feel like that would have been that was a golf course that was when it was built, considered as good as anything else.
Yeah, And in Philadelphia for people who don't know, but they're currently doing something there that is more focused on community, giving back to the community as opposed to attracting championships necessarily.
All right, let's take a quick break here before we get to our next question. Talk about our friends at mob Jack. That's mob Ja, K. There's no c in mob Jack It's actually named after mob Jack Bay in Maryland, I believe a famous bay there. It is a family run company and they make awesome belts. I got a couple of these earlier this year. They have been fixtures around my waist. I got a couple of colors. They tend to go with everything. They're really cool designs, they're woven.
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Dogwood Maple's question here. Which of the upcoming men's major champion venue championship venues are you most and least interested in viewing?
And why?
Fascinating name? First of all, Dogwood Maple? Is that a Is that a real name or is that a that a non de plume? What is a Dogwood Maple? Was that on Friday Golf Club? I think it was, Yeah, Dogwood Maple. Maybe maybe that's the the guy or Gal's given name.
If so, makes me, makes me think of Maplewood Brewery in Chicago.
Makes me think of the Yeah, makes me think of of Augusta National mainly. But in any case, Dogwood Maple. Most of the least interesting upcoming US Open, PGA slash Open venues, I would say the upcoming PGA championship lineup, which is at this moment for the rest of the twenty twenties, ironomanc, PGA, Frisco, Olympic Club, Baltis Rawl and
then Congressional in twenty thirty. All of those I'm pretty interested in, really, once we've gotten past quil Hollow here, I'm I'm pretty in on the future PGA Championship venues. I'm not saying that they're all going to be super interesting, but they're I'm looking forward to seeing all of them in different ways. Maybe Ironomank the least, because we have seen that and we've seen at the PGA Tour events that IRONOMC has held that it doesn't necessarily do anything
that interesting. I'm hoping that it'll be firm, but in May, I'm not sure that that's a reasonable expectation for Philadelphia. But Olympic Club has been restored slash renovated by Gil Hants fairly recently, saying with Baltus Roll Congressional has a brand new design courtesy of Andrew Green. So all of those I'm kind of looking forward to. But of them, I would say Baltus rall I'm most interested in. And then of the future US Open venues, Marion in twenty
thirty is one that I'm really looking forward to. Shinnecock Hills next year is going to be great, but we kind of know what to expect.
With the rollbackball.
Yeah, yeah, it could be and recently again restored by our Open doctor Gil Hans. But I am looking forward to seeing what Marion does that's different from the last time it held the US Open, which was basically just all about rough least interesting. You know, Pebble Beach is just going to be what it is. They're not making any moves there to improve that golf course in any significant way, and so in twenty twenty seven for the US Open, we're just going to get Pebble Beach as
it usually is, and then next year a Rolldale. I am interested in seeing what mackenzie and Ebert have done there because it seems like they've done some provocative things, including a brand new par three that faces in an esthetically pleasing way at the clubhouse. So good thing they have that.
Now hopefully members can play it this time.
Yeah, yeah, hopefully they don't have to. I think I think the routing is a little better.
They don't have to walk backwards walk.
They just don't walk to the next hole.
They don't just skip the hole and make it a seventeen old round because they're like, I don't want to deal with that one but Royal Birkdale has always been kind of my one of my least favorite of the Open road to venues that there's there's not much there that I'm that fascinated by, but it's fine and so yeah, and then in the future for the Open, they're going to go to Portmarnock eventually, maybe before the decade is out, and I'll be fascinated to see how that goes.
I would say most interested. Listen, I'm just gonna try and dig here. This might be I'm actually I'll say most interested in twenty twenty eight wing Foot I'm very curious about golf course setup. Yeah, at that point.
What are they going to do differently than they did in twenty twenty.
I can't imagine they roll out what they rolled out in twenty twenty. That was a really bad setup. And I think like there's a lot of things with those greens. They pretty much they took one of the five greatest sets of greens in American golf and made them as uninteresting as you possibly could with their setup. And well, they're fascinating greens. And when you make the fairways twenty five yards wide and have very thick rough on each side, you kind of reduce what those greens how they can play.
And it became the strongest fastest player one because he he and I want to say that this was like an incredible approach to the golf course. He just hit it as far as he could to the side of the hole. That allowed him an open approach to the greens. Now, like people would say, like just grow the rough up more, that's just that's the natural thing to do, to think, and that will just play more into Bryson's hands. And I want to say it was an incredible game plan,
an incredible execution of said game plan. He played really well to win, and it was a championship well earned. But like a way I would mitigate that is with like less less rough because then it's not just like about getting to the angle and running it up and only one player or ten players have the strength and power to do said said strategy. I'd also widen the fairways a little, because nobody can hit a lot.
Of fairways there.
So I'm very interested in the setup of that one. I would say I would echo your thoughts on Birkedale.
It just like.
I get variety, I get different parts of the I know it does really well from like a venue standpoint, from financially speaking, but like the Open Championship is I want to go. I want to go to old golf courses. This is a nineteen fifties golf course and it's got a nice list of winners. But at the end of the day, I love the Open going to old links golf courses and this is this is this, ain't it for me?
And uh, you know what word the pros most often used to Berkdale.
Yeah, fair right in front of you.
The most fair course on the Open. Roda PJ right now, by the way, is requesting that we layer in the siren as a as a sound effect.
Just to make it clear who is the primary should not have even brought it up.
You really you really broke down the fourth wall there. That's not the right term, but something happened there that was a little disturbing.
Yeah, I'm very happy about the PGA, as you allude to. I'm quite happy that we're past Quail Hollow and Valhalla.
Yeah, we're getting We're getting to a cool stretch here, not necessarily of courses that are the greatest courses in the world. I mean a lot of them, are sort of like the the US Open cast offs, the courses that were that were not deemed worthy for the the new US Open Rhoda. But the fact that we're going to good quality courses that have recently recently had interesting work done is appealing to me.
One that is actually I was just thinking about that could be extra fascinating is that one of my one of my favorite things about the Olympic Club is that it naturally rolls you back. When you go play the Olympic Club, you do not hit the ball very far because of the weather. It is cold, is damp always, it's experience. Yeah, it just the ball goes nowhere. And uh, you know, I play there a couple of times a year, and I can attest that the ball goes significantly shorter.
Twenty twenty eight, it will be the second major played with the roll back ball. Conditions are a roll back The ball could be going nowhere. It could be it could be awesome.
We might we might have some unhappy boys.
And you're playing on like the side of the mountain, which, yeah, which is like, it's kind of I think Olympic is Olympics kind of underrated. Is it my favorite course to play every day. No, does it ask you to hit a very very wide range of shots throughout throughout the course of a round. Absolutely. I think like there might be a case that like very severe topography, while not enjoyable for everyday play, is actually very much a quality that would that would be good for championship golf.
That's sort of what the Olympic Club brings to the table, right, That's its X factor is how severely tilted that land is and the fact that you're hitting some of these crazy shots with the ball way below your feet or the ball way above your feed. It's a characteristic national Yeah. Two and fairly petite targets, right, And so what it brings to the table is kind of what Pebble Beach
brings to the table. That's interesting, these tilts and these small targets, But Olympic Club does it in a more severe way, and so it's probably more interesting in that regard.
All Right, I think that does it. Well. We can get to more of these questions maybe in club TFE.
Yeah, I'll get.
In there and answer some questions, and yeah, a lot of a lot of good, good material here from from Friday Golf club members.
That does it.
Big thanks for you guys for listening, but also for PJ Clark. I promised him no cuts, but I forgot to do our second ad, so he's gonna have to put it in there. Bigness by me the host. The host blew through the break, and big thanks for PJ making up and work extra hard today. We'll be back next week.
I think I'm gonna do something.
On the Ryder Cup next week, so we'll we'll get a couple of guests and batter around the Ryder Cup where we stand what we're hoping to see for each side coming down the stretch, and it feels like the right time for a little Ryder Cup check in on this podcast.
Thanks Garrett for coming on.
As always is a pleasure to UH to have you on.
Thanks Andy,