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The fried egg requires a different technique.
What you need to do is actually square the face so they'll dig down on underneath that bad lie and propel that.
Ball right out onto the green.
Here's the thing playing out of a buried lion of bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice and clean lion a greenside bunker. You need to be aggressive on any show, weather it's sitting cleanly, or it's a Friday.
Eg well, we've all faithd it the dreaded Friday not to be cleared though it's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
All right, testing testing.
Can hear me?
My name is Jim Gandy.
I'm oftentimes referred to as South Carolina's weather man, and of my forecast, probably the one that everybody remembers is my forecast of Hurricane Hugo.
So tell me about tracking Hurricane Hugo in its early stages. This was in nineteen eighty nine, right, I.
Mean that's right. At the time, I was the chief meteorologist at WIS Television in Columbia, South Carolina, and it was not a big concern until the weekend before before it hit, I saw a note from the Washington office of the National Weather Service which indicated that the weather pattern was such that this is a storm that might affect the southeast. So obviously that that piqued my interest. And when it hit Puerto Rico, it was a powerful storm.
It had maximum sustained winds I think it was close to one.
Hundred and sixty miles an hour.
My biggest concern was the fact that the National Hurricane Center was forecasting a turn head towards South Florida.
But everything I was looking at was telling me that it was headed more toward the Carolinas.
So what do you do?
And I decided right now, it's not doing what the National Hurricane Center says it's going to do.
So here I am.
Going on TV saying, well, I don't think it's going to hit South Florida.
I think it's gonna hit South Carolina. It's a big difference.
Granted, there were some things that happened with the storm that I wasn't expecting.
I didn't expect it to pick up speed like it did, but I did expect it to intensify, and that was a pretty cutsy call. It turned out to be pretty accurate.
So give me a sense for the threat of a hurricane hitting the coast of South Carolina with winds of one hundred and thirty miles per.
Hour, particularly in the low country of South Carolina, There's going to be a tremendous amount of flooding. You have to get out of there long before the storm arise, because many of the escape routes get cut off by rising water. The coast itself, when you're going from from the beach out into the ocean, the slope there is very shallow, so as the water piles up, it rises quickly. The center of the storm, of course, it hit down, you know, near Charleston. Probably the best story that we
covered was at the high school near mcclellanville. That was north of where the storm came in, but it was also very close to where the highest storm the storm surge was over twenty feet in Hurricane Hugo, and the high school was right there, ground zero practically. And it's the storm came in, the water was rising, and it was rising quickly. It's nighttime, it's dark, and people have huddled inside the cafeteria trying to take shelter from the storm,
everybody in that area. And the water now is getting up to the windows, and the principal of the school decides to try to find a better location for everybody.
So he gets his way up to the roo roof, goes out on the roof, but then the door behind him latches shut and he can't get back in, and he had to ride the hurricane out, holding onto an exhaust pipe for the duration, and he had to hang on for dear life because the winds were so strong, and of course he was just getting tilted by rain even some of the roofing material that was out there.
People were really getting concerned because they were having to put people up on tables because the water that was rising. The water, if you could see out the windows, was higher on the outside of the building than it was on the inside of the building.
What happened to that poor man who was stuck outside In the.
End, Surprisingly he survived it, and so did the people inside the building that were scared to death. But everybody survived. At the time, it was one of the costliest storms. I think it was one of the top ten calls his storms in US history. I think in South Carolina the damage was estimated at six billion dollars and it affected the coast from Hilton Head to Myrtle Beach.
And right in the center of that path of destruction was Kiyo Island, where just a couple of months before Pete Dye had begun to build a golf course. The site was destroyed obviously, the landscape was mangled beyond recognition, and in almost exactly two years, this course was supposed to host the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup.
I'm Garrett Morrison and I'm Andy Johnson.
And this is Frida Egg's Stories on today's episode, the story of one of the biggest craziest challenges in the history of golf architecture, the making of the Ocean course at Kiowa Island. So here we are Friday Stories, Season two. And there are a couple of new things about dispatch of episodes. For one, there's a theme, and that theme is the modern championship game. We're planning to tell stories that look at championship golf from a number of different angles,
The tournaments, the personalities, should be fun. And the second new thing is that Andy's here with me. How you doing, Andy, I'm doing great.
I'm excited to try this out. Garrett's kept me kind of blind to this whole process, so I don't know really what's going on, but I'm excited to be here.
Yeah. I mean, you're basically in the same position as any other listener. I didn't tell you anything beforehand about what's going to be in this episode, and I'm just curious to get your reactions as we go along. So we have the twenty twenty one PGA Championship coming up that's at the Ocean Course at Kiowa Island, widely considered one of Pete Dye's best designs, if not his best. Would you say this is Pete Dide's best course.
I think it's one of his best sights. Yeah, I think it. Ex said in his book that he would have, you know, possibly given up his wife to design this golf course. So I think it's a it's a great golf course, and he did what he was asked. He built a really hard championship golf course for sure.
Also hosted the twenty twelve PGA Championship. But I think the Ocean Course will always be most associated with one tournament, and that's the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup, the War by the Shore. So Andy for you, what comes to mind when you think about this Ryder Cup. I mean you're probably just four or five years old when it was played, so you didn't like watch it when it was happening.
It's the Golf Channel documentary that they did on it. Yeah, And I just I think, like the tension between the two teams, and also obviously the disaster, the meltdowns that happened. It was it was the sight of numerous meltdowns on Sunday, And I think that's probably what I'll remember most is this golf course that invoked chaos throughout the event. Yeah, Calcovecia, Mark Calkovecchia, who is two up with you to go
his opponents in the water, Are you kidding me? That might have been a stranger chef I plow I've ever seen.
And then there's just like the visual of the ocean course itself. It was a brand new course. It had been built for this moment, and the look of it, the ruggedness of it, the sea and the sand, obviously, as you said, the way it played, how difficult it played. All of this is a big reason why this rider cut became so iconic. Like if you had held it at another course, it wouldn't have been the same, right.
So it was really striking for me to find out that as the ocean course was being built by Pete Diana's crew, a lot of people thought that it wasn't going to get finished on time, and some were expecting that the ninety one Ryder Cup was going to be an absolute fiasco. All right. Backing up a little bit, the first big question I have is why this was all happening at the last minute, Like why had the Ryder Cup been given to a course that hadn't been built yet? So I called up one of the main
decision makers. Hello, Hello, mister Autrey, this is Garrett Morrison calling from the Frida Egg. How are you doing good? Who is Jim?
Ots named Jim And in the late nineteen eighties I became the executive Director Tournament Operations for the PGA of America and later became CEO.
And Jim explains that it all started with this contract that the PGA of America had with Landmark land Company. Landmark was a big golf development firm, definitely one of the most powerful and influential of its era. It had done oak Tree, National, Mission Hills, Lakinta, many other courses. And Landmark had this deal with the PGA of a Man America to hold the Ryder Cup at one of its properties, PGA West.
And the Desert at the Stadium Course, and that was set for nineteen ninety one.
Now, when the PGA started reconsidering that venue choice. It was around nineteen eighty seven, which happened to be the first year that the Pete Dye designed stadium course had hosted the Bob Hope Classic now known as the American Express. And Andy, you've looked into this story before. What did the pros think when they played Pete Dye's PGA West for the first time.
It didn't go well, They complained, they thought it was unfair. There was utter outrage among so many members. Is similar in a way to what happened after the first playing of the players at TPC Sawgrass, except you know, they went a little bit further than just saying the course needed to be tweaked here and there and the greens needed to be softened. At Sawgrass, That's what they said. At PGA West, they just they went straight for the juggular.
They said, no more, we didn't have We never want to see this place again.
Right. What you're referring to is they submitted a petition to the Commissioner of the PGA Tour, Dean Beeman, demanding that PGA West not be used again. They hated it. So my assumption has always been that the ninety one Ryder Cup was moved away from PGA West for that reason, you know, to placate the pros. But I asked Jim Autry if that was the case. We know that not all of the pros were in love with the course.
No, I don't recall that being having anything to do with the move.
Basically, he says that PGA West was problematic mainly from a fan and business perspective.
First thing I noticed was the Ryder Cup being played in the desert in September. And upon reflection, thinking it's one hundred and ten degrees in the desert, there's no one there in September, and they have an overseer of the golf courses, I didn't see how that was going to be very successful.
In other words, it's going to be deathly hot, everyone's going to be out of town, and the golf course is probably going to be brown. And on top of that, there was pressure. There's a lot of pressure to make this particular Ryder Cup work. You have to keep in mind that in the eighties the Ryder Cup wasn't nearly as big of a deal as it is now. It didn't make that much money. It just wasn't a massively valuable media property like it is today, but it had
at least become competitive. Nineteen eighty five, Team Europe won for the first time since Team Europe was created. Eighty seven, they won again, so there was some juice behind the competition, and the hope was that nineteen ninety one would take it to the next level. Because nineteen ninety one would be the first year that NBC would televise the Ryder Cup. This was the first time there would be truly extensive live coverage of the event on a major network in
the US. It's sort of surprising to think about this now. The Ryder Cup wasn't very well covered before this. You know, It's kind of on at weird times. It was tape delayed, it was on USA, you know, it wasn't on the major networks live. So Jim Autry and the PGA of America were looking at this and thinking, ninety one could be our year. It'll be a competitive match, it'll be on everyone's TV. But for some reason, we're giving them the Coachella Valley in late September. It just like was
an ideal. So they decided to try to move the Ryder Cup away from PGA West. The problem was this this contract the PGA of America had with Landmark Land Company to hold it there. Unfortunately for Jim Autry, he actually had really close connections with Landmark.
I had grown up in My first job out of college was with Joe Walser, who was one of the principal developers of Landmark, and I had lived with him run out of college, and he was just like a second father. So I remember go going to Joe and I said, Joe, I don't think the desert is the place to be playing the Ryder Cup. In September, he said, well, Jim, what do you want to do. And I said, well, Joe, I think i'd like to see if you'd let us
out of the agreement. And Joe looked at me. It's typical and said, Barger, I don't think we can do that. After we talked a little bit reflection, he said I got an idea. He said, we're getting ready to build a golf course and build a development on the east coast in Iowa Island, and he said, I think that'd be a great place for the Ryder Cups.
This was the Kiowa Island Resort already had three golf courses, and when Landmark Land Company bought those courses in nineteen eighty eight, it also received land for a fourth course on the southeastern tip of the island. This was what would become the Ocean Course now. Joe Wallser passed away in twenty twelve, but I was able to get a sense of Landmark's perspective from Chris Cole, and.
I was the project director of all the recreational assets on ko Island plus the land where the ocean course is going to be built.
What Chris says is basically the main thing Landmark liked about moving away from PGA West to Kiowa was the time zone difference.
I think it was the understand the commercial ability of if you have it on the West coast versus having it on the East coast in Europe. Do you understand those three hour changes? The people can come home in Europe and watch the ridici now.
In other words, if it's at PGA West in the Pacific time zone, most of Europe is asleep during the matches, especially the afternoon matches, whereas if it's at Kiowa in the Eastern time zone, a lot of it's in primetime. More European eyes on the Ryder Cup, more international publicity for a Landmark property, more value for the company. But now Landmark had to convince the PGA that the Ocean course was going to actually get built.
And be good.
The PGA, not just Jim Audrey, but certainly Jim Audrey, all the officers are. They went, wow, what if we did it? But the can we trust? And they said, we're going to have Pete out a building first, come look at the cut.
So I met Pete. He put me in his truck and we drove out there on the foon line and Pete had me out walking through the weeds and the bushes that like Pete, only Pete would do. And he would have me stand up on a mound and he would say, see, Jim, this is a dog leg right far for and it turns right off that mound. And I'm looking out there and I see nothing but crust. So I said, Pete, I can't see it. He said,
move over here a little bit, Jim. He said, right there, can't you see if dog legs right off that mound? I said, Pete, I'm sorry, I cannot see it.
Come at two miles Ocean's on property. You'd think he's not gonna build a great gulp course.
That was how we started. And when I saw the dude saw the ocean, he described the course because he could see all this and it is. He said, this is going to be a great buck And.
They said, yeah, but you got two years. We said, we have no problems. You'd got to trust Pete and us. We're gonna get her done.
So we agreed to move the Ryder Cup to Iawa Island on a course that hadn't been built, and we announced that we we're going to vote.
So that announcement was made in May nineteen eighty nine and the tournament was scheduled for September nineteen ninety one. I think this is one of those situations where you make a series of what seemed like logical decisions and somehow at the end of it you find yourself in this crazy predicament.
I mean, what a risk.
I know.
And of all the architects too to do it with, I would be just the worst one in the world to work with.
You know what.
He drew plans for townships. He would give them plans from other golf courses. You know, he would just you know, if somebody, it would make him angry and he would not want to work with somebody anymore. And now all of a sudden, you've got not only Landmark on his schedule, but you got the PGA of America and NBC all worried.
Yeah, yeah, I mean Pete Dye made a habit of driving corporations crazy, and now here he's working with several massive corporations and they have a really difficult project that they're about to do, you know, because it wasn't just
about getting the golf course built. It was about creating a course that could immediately host the Ryder Cup, and not just any Ryder Cup, but the first one to be broadcast live on NBC, the Ryder Cup that was supposed to re establish the reputation of the entire event. And so the worse, as Chris Cole put it.
To me, actually born in miss America.
No awkward adolescence. It has to be born miss America.
And I think this is the thing, like all resources obviously want to get you to see their courses right off the bat, you know, opening day, but in reality, if you're if you're a wise consumer, you want to wait two three years. Let that course mature over time, and none of these courses are very few, very rarely do they open in mint condition. And that hosting a major golf event is you need a whole different level.
I mean, you talk to superintendent's superintendent's focus for two years on their golf course to get it ready for the championship, when it's already like a mature golf course. This one, you had two years to get a golf course that didn't exist ready for a big tournament agonomically right.
And if you're thinking, and if Ladmark is using this as an advertisement for the newly relaunched Kiowa Resort, what if the golf course looks terrible, you know, it's a big risk. They just have to sort of roll with what they had at the end of the process. So that was the challenge, and right away Pete Dye started doing what I think maybe Pete Dy did best, and that was assembling a team.
Yeah, my name is Scott cool I worked for Pete for ten years and during the Kioa project, I was brought in with a lot of the different people to help build the golf course. I was there primarily as a shaper.
Jason McCoy and I was project manager for the ocean course at Kiola for Pete.
So what was the first you heard about the Kiwa project. Do you remember the first time you heard that it was like a possibility.
I was I was doing the cooler courses.
I was working in Richmond Hill, Georgia, down the Ford Plantation where Pete was doing the redesign of it.
When we got done and cooler, we'd be headed down there. He wanted me to go down take a look at it.
Jason, let's go.
We're going to get in the car and go take a look at Keel, which was obviously a short ride from there.
Well, you know, I've seen a lot of good property that Pete would get, but this is by far. You know, when you put a golf course on an ocean, when you have that much ocean front, you couldn't ask for a better sight.
It was pretty spectacular.
I had really probably never seen anything like it other than on television.
But as beautiful as the site was, it wasn't exactly easy. And this is where it starts to seem truly insane that the PGA Landmark and Pete Dye took this on as a two year project. What you had was a property way at the end of Kiowa Island, just this narrow strip of land between marshes on one side and dunes on the other. It was hard to get equipment out there. You had a lot of environmentally restricted areas.
You had drainage issues. You had water that could come onto the golf course from just about any direction from the marshes from the ocean, and he needed a way to get that water off. Those are the main difficulties. It was nothing Pete Dye couldn't handle, like he had built a lot of courses in the South on swamps, on marshes, but the ocean course was different. Because of the deadline and because of the pressure to be great right away. So July nineteen eighty nine, construction started. By
September things were coming along well. Jason McCoy says, they have the site cleared and four or five holes roughly shaped. And at that time September nineteen eighty nine, the PGA people and many of the Landmark people, including Jim Autry and Chris Cole were not in South Carolina.
Well. Actually, yeared I was in England.
At the Ryder Cup.
I was at the Rider Cip we're at the.
Ryder Cup at the Belfry in England.
I took the layer and a bunch of the involved people and stuff. We went to the Rider Cup in England to understand how big of the of this is going to be.
And I walked into the bar area, and of course the Mayor of Charleston was there, and people from all over America were there for the Rider cap and I walked in. They were all around the TV and the bar and they said, what's going on? They said, well, major hurricane is getting ready to hit ki Island.
And as we're watching the deal, they said, it's a dead eye for Charleston. We said, oh lord, well this ain't gonna work, so let's get out of here.
And for Joe and all the Landmark people were getting ready to leave. The Mayor of Charleston was there. They were getting ready to leave.
You shouldn't fly into Charleston, you had to fly into Atlanta. By then, Charleston and especially Kio Island Kila Allen was under National Guard.
Wow.
Chris actually blew out with Joe. They flew out.
He blew out, and.
Then we met Chris and Joe at the airport.
We drove to Charleston, Jason and all of us. We went from Atlanta and stopped from there. We didn't got all supplies flashlights and batteries, food, and drove to Charleston fire.
Air and we followed the Guard, the National Guard into the island. And it was the most eerie thing that I've ever been around.
It was.
It was.
Not pretty.
It was like a bomb went off.
You know, pine trees snap. You couldn't already drive down the road.
We were going and you got turned around. You had to get the machines to clear your way to get us through. We had a flat tire, typical. They put me as a driver for what reason I do not know.
Once Jason, Chris, Joe Wallzer, and Pete Dye reached the golf course site, what they saw was an unfamiliar piece of land.
The storm basically took out three quarters of the live oaks and really just massacred the main doone line.
It was gone.
So we've got a total bit of intrusion of saltwater all over the golf course.
So, yeah, you were scared to disk. You were scared of this that now we only got a year and a half.
You know, all of us and listening to our voices or like, you know, this thing's probably never going to happen now.
But by the time Pete I talked to Jim Atry again, it was a different story.
And Pete, only Pete Dye would do. He said, Jim, I'll have this built back, and I'll build it back and we'll have it ready.
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Right, Yeah, I would assume that the players are going to be out there with rangefinders that don't that don't have a slope function. Like I'm just imagining going out there with my slope rangefinder and accidentally leaving the slope on, like not intending to cheat or anything, but I zap the first flag and I see the slope number and I'm like, oh god, now I'm dq'ed.
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at precision progolf dot com. Give it a try. So right after Hurricane Hugo, Pete Dye was making his way around the site in a little rowboat with an electric motor. And what I think you figured out pretty early on was that Hugo might have been a blessing in disguise for the Ocean course project, not for anything else. It was a devastating storm, but for the ocean course project. So one of the main problems facing Die and Landmark
initially was how restricted the landscape was. It was highly environmentally sensitive the wetlands, certain habitats, certain kinds of vegetation. A lot was protected, and you had government agencies and environmental groups keeping a close eye on things. And there was even a real possibility that this project would get completely bogged down in permitting issues. Well after the storm, a lot of that changed, And I think there are
a couple of ways to look at what happened. The positive take is that the ocean course became an environmental reclamation project. Diane Landmark actually got permission from the Army Corps of Engineers to reconstruct the dune ridge along the beach. Like I don't know if you noticed that that the dune ridge along the beach there is artificial like that was made. Yeah, and and it looks great.
It looks yeah, it looks different than other places on the island.
Yeah. So they renourished the dunes with native plants, seayoats. They also installed weirs on the waterways to protect the marshes from being overwhelmed by storm water, big tides. I mean, they essentially stabilized that piece of land after the hurricane had wrecked it. The slightly less charitable take is that the hurricane fallout distracted all the oversight groups enough so that Pete and his crew had way more freedom to do whatever they wanted. And there is some truth to that.
I did a lot of interviews for this story, not just the ones featured in this episode, and I heard from more than one person that the crew would get heavy equipment to the site by driving it directly down the beach at low tide, which would normally be a big no no.
And we did things that you just weren't allowed to do.
So in a way, did the hurricane loosen up some of the environmental restrictions that might have been there, no question.
I don't know if it necessarily loosened them up in their eyes. I think it loosened them up more and our eyes.
So that's Jason McCoy, and he went on to tell me a story that I think illustrates the kind of liberties that Die and his crew took at times. This was later on in the construction and Alice Dye had come up with the idea of raising the fairways so players would have better views of the ocean. But in order to do that, they needed to get a lot of dirt from somewhere. Usually you'd find this kind of dirt at the bottom of a body of water.
So a couple of foggy mornings, Pete would call me and he said, Jason, the FOG's heavy.
He said, get every piece of machinery. We have dozers, trackos, loaders, whatever.
It may be.
I need them all over here in this littlelarry. And this little area was a wetland. Well, this wetland became a pond, and we did it under the cover of a fog every morning for about five hours, and then we'd get out. All the machines would leave and go back to doing what we were doing on the dolphins. So we did this process for about three weeks, and we got a whole heck of a lot of dirt out of that particular wetland to be able to creat some of the features that raised all the fairways up.
But I mean, it would just not be something that you would ever be able to do again.
No question, that wetland would be kind off limits. You'd be like, you can't go.
Absolutely, absolutely, you know, you'd go to jail kind of thing. I actually hunt the environmentalist now bird hunt with him, and I was actually with him last week. Duncan Newkirk environmental and he's like, you guys broke every law you could possibly break, And I'm like, duck, and that's not true. There was a law that was put in place for Hugo, and it was that you could go in your marsh and you could retrieve your boat.
The Coastal Council of South Carolina came up with that.
So I just told him, I said, we had a heck of a lot of boats in the marsh, so that's why we were in there and getting them out.
So I'm sure you could have a vigorous debate about all this, you know, whether suspending the normal environmental procedures is justified in light of hurricane recovery. But the general point is that Hugo, while clearly a setback in many ways for the Ocean course project, ended up creating a
kind of chaos that Pete Dye absolutely thrived on. I mean, this was an architect who made plans but didn't like to be held to them, liked to make changes without asking permission, liked for his crew to feel that they could experiment and not get in trouble. And after Hugo, that was more or less exactly what I had at Kiowa.
Yeah, I mean I think every artist watched people to get out of the way, and obviously the hurricane made it really hard for people to get in and out of the property.
Right, So when I asked people like Jason McCoy and Scott Poole about what it was like to work on the ocean course, they do talk about long hours in a sense of urgency, but mainly they remember the fun times and the sort of wild parts of it. But were you carrying around a shotgun on the construction site?
I carried a piss. I carried a pistol.
So there's told me about too much. He enjoyed basically making Pete Dye fear for his life.
He would walk anywhere he was spearless. He just didn't. He wasn't thinking about it.
He was thinking about that golf hole and thinking about what he was going to do. And and I mean there was a rattler three foot from him, and I shot it and just scared to live and hell because I didn't tell him.
Obviously there was a snake.
I didn't, you know, don't jump, you know, that's always so I just shot it. And I mean he had a heart attack, not only you know, it wasn't.
About the snake. It was about me too, you know, and he's.
Like some I'm a bitch, you know, you kill me, you know, like Pete, there was a snake, So I killed the snake and we had the snake, and we had the picture of it, you know, holding a snake, that kind of thing.
So it was great.
And Scott Poole described almost like a Neverland type of atmosphere.
Well, we found a shipwreck one time. There was a sailboat that apparently washed up on the beach, but over time the beach had grown and covered it up. And as we were digging a lake, sure enough we could see there was there was wood coming up and we could see there was a boat. And one evening we decided to have a few beers and go up and
try to you know, look for treasure. We were looking for the prop, you know, so we kind of worked into the lake and we dug up the whole thing, and somebody had already salvaged the prop.
You know.
But when they weren't screwing around, they were doing some really strong innovative work. You know. Jason came up with some ingenious ways of revegetating the site and combining drainage and irrigation system so that stuff didn't run off into the marshes. And then Scott was the lead shaper. And you look at the ocean course now and it's got to be one of Pete Diye's best shaped golf courses. Wouldn't you say?
Yeah, I think it's it's not necessarily natural, but it feels like it fits. You know, the shapes are eccentric, but they have a very artistic quality to them.
They're exciting shapes, right, they're not. They don't look cliched. There's kind of a weirdness to them and a fun to them that really works. So they were doing great work. They were doing it quickly, and a lot of the credit for that has to go to this freewheeling culture that Die encouraged after the hurricane.
It's it's amazing to me what he surrounded himself with. He surrounded him with young guys that had no fear.
You know, he liked it when you make a big mistake, because that'd give him an idea. You know, he told me, had whatever you do, don't build a golfl you've seen before, show me something. He says, I don't care how bad it is. I'll take the heat and fix it if I have to, or maybe i'll like it.
He made us feel like we could conquer the world. And you were fearless because you knew he had your back.
I became fearless real fast to what I was doing on the golf course because I just tell well, you know, Pete told me to do it, and he always backed me up.
He made us think there was nothing we couldn't do. We were too naive to know better, and that's what he liked.
So this sense of fearlessness that the course builders are describing was not shared by others involved in the project. Whenever people visited the site, they usually went away thinking that the golf course would never be finished on time. So that brings us to nineteen ninety one year out from the Ryder Cup and the PGA Cup kind of the club professional version of the Rider Cup.
Arguably the most underrated event in golf.
Is it even televised PGA Cup?
Sometimes it's kind of like the walker, I've got PGA Cup.
Hat did you go to the PGA Cup on time?
No? Okay, PGA just knows how much how big of a supporter I am of the PGA Cup.
PGA Cup was held at Turtle Point nineteen ninety. Turtle Point is also part of the Kiowa Resort. Jim Autry was there and British PGA officials were there and they visited the ocean course site.
Oh, I remembered very well. I had a meeting with the officials. They were very concerned and they said, we're going to go back home and tell people not to come because it's not going to be ready. Wow, We're going to recommend they don't come. And I didn't take to that very well. Probably the most upset. And I've had some people tell me that the matterside maybe ben which I don't normally do, but that was their reaction during the Cup matches at Turtle.
And the next year, early in nineteen ninety one, more and more people were starting to drop by.
Yeah, Hi, this is Dave Stockton. I was the captain of the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup team that took place against the Europeans at Key Island in nineteen ninety one. I was shocked to arrive there in January, eight months before we're going to play, and literally there was no.
Grass, and I got.
Called from Dave Staunton after Augusta and he said, Jim, I'm going to take the team that's available and I want to take him to Kida when we will play the Gospel. And I said, Dave, you can't do that. He said, warn out. I said, the greens aren't credible, and I said, we don't want them looking at the golf course it's not finished yet, thinking we're going to be playing in six months. And he said, well, I'm
doing it. And to show you how bad at what, Tom Kite took a mastered Cadillac rove in and where the clubhouse is now. He buried the Cadillac up to the brane and sant.
I didn't know about that.
You did, never heard about it?
You could. I mean if you got in the wrong.
Spot, That's what I said. It was still extremely soft. It hadn't just hadn't turned up.
Heck, get a dozer to pull it out. Now the players are there, they got some beer, and they're in their short and they just have a bleass. They played the golf cook and no media were there. Nobody knew about it. You can imagine what would have happened if the media has been following them around on the golf court. That's not FeNiS yet.
Six months before the rider could, I wasn't too sure about the prospects of having a golf course at that point.
Honestly, you couldn't afford to spend much time thinking about the worst case because the worst case was would be an absolute disaster, you know. So yes, it was frightening, but once you made the commitment, I think that's what the Landmark people would tell you. Once you made the commitment, you had so much to get done, you never had time to think about it.
I think it's kind of in a way like if you're playing an event as a player, you know, you're obviously nervous and you know, but you're in the moment, you're doing job like and you have so much going on that the nerves go away outside of usually just like the first tier or maybe trying to get it done at the end. But if you're caddying in an event, you're so nervous the whole time and you're like you're the you're the onlooker that everything's out of your control.
But when you're in control, you're so much less nervous, and that is probably how those guys felt. And they were so busy, like there's so much to do, there wasn't enough time to be nervous.
Yeah.
Yeah, And it's maybe about perspective too, when you're in the middle of something like that, you don't have the outside perspective of like this is kind of insane, you know, this is like consider what Chris Cole was doing at the time. He was project director for Landmark at Q West, so he was handling a lot of the infrastructure and the logistics.
How do you get to the end of a ten mile You're gonna have twenty fi thousand people, You got to build a long city. Prior to the rider, we guaranteed every hotel in Charleston booked all the ruins. We went to Kew Island, which we had like three hundred and something rental units that you know people on that they rent them out, balked them all out, people wanted
to come in with a family or whatever. We even went to the next island, Seabrook, and said we will rent all year units and filled every one of them. Then we had one parking place. It was a tomato field, and everybody parked there and everybody was bussed to the ocean course. Throughout the island we had bus stops and you get busted to the court. No traffic. Everybody used to be bussed and let out right at the ocean course.
I mean, it was such an amazing event that, like I said, you staged the city four or five days and then tore down to figure out you're going to do that down in my eye, and then watch it happen. Then all of it happened was as exciting as the tournament almost for me. I mean to watch it and say.
Wow, I'm curious, how if you can put yourself back in your shoes at the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup. And then you know the event's about to start and you see the golf course, are there feelings of relief?
Oh? Absolutely. We got there and we saw everything was done and all the bust compound and everything was set up, concords flying in. You just had a feeling then okay, it's it's it's okay.
So there are plenty of accounts of what happened next. The sick Ryder Cup a dogfight all the way to the eighteenth hole of the final match, where Bernhard longer missed that six footer and the US reclaimed.
Then it slipped by the edge.
It slipped by the edge, and now things change.
Now things change, And.
The amazing thing about it is that the event really did do everything it was meant to do magnificent.
In ninety one, we launched some modern Ryder Cup to one of the best events in the world. And then you look at the background behind Kio Island and it almost reads like a fantasy store.
But for Landmark it ended up being a bit more complicated than that. Obviously, the ocean course was very successful, instantly popular, but by nineteen ninety one, Landmark was in big, big trouble. Now there's a complicated backstory here, but Landmark structured its finances in a certain way in the eighties that suddenly, because of a new law, became illegal, and ultimately the government seized Landmark's assets and auctioned off the
resort properties, including Kiwa. Landmark did reform, started over, kept going, still exists today. But nineteen ninety one was this moment when the company's initial run of dominance stopped. And so symbolically, I think this gives the ninety one Ryder Cup the kind of double valance, because on the one hand it was the beginning of the new Ryder Cup, the beginning of the new PGA of America. But on the other hand, it was the end of an era as well for
a landmark land company. And it makes me think of something Jim Autrey said a few different times in my interview with him.
It couldn't happen in modern time, you would move it.
None of this would have happened today, But.
In those days it seemed like a legitimate option.
And what he means is that the Ryder Cup is a much bigger deal now and the PGA wouldn't risk it on a project like the Ocean Course. But another thing that wouldn't happen today, I think is the Ocean Course itself, Like, we're just not doing stuff like this anymore, at least in the US. Spending millions and millions of dollars to build the hardest held golf course on a sensitive piece of land to debut at a big tournament for the purpose of making a resort and real estate play.
It's crazy and it's representative of that era I think in the golf industry. And I guess the question is, are we glad that era is over.
It's interesting because it's kind of a divergence where the event became way more commercialized. And that's why it would never happen this way, Right, you have to have at least two years of leading all about the course. They need to have the content for commercials and social media and everything of the golf course. And then on the flip side, golf courses and trends of golf course development
of the last ten years are sands commercialization. We're going to build golf for golf's sake, like it's going to be just about golf. So I think that's the thing. You know what he says, it would never happen today. He's so spot on because just the landscape of both industries has shifted so much in the polar opposite direction.
Yeah, but I still do, like, occasionally, against my better judgment, occasionally I get a little nostalgic for that time in American golf course construction the eighties and nineties, not necessarily for the courses themselves or for the financial model they represented, but I do sort of admire the ambition of them. You know, these courses, they weren't the Pyramids or anything.
But some of these courses, like Shadow Creek, for instance, were massive achievements of art and science and industry together. And when a project like the Ocean Course somehow got done, you just had to tip your hat and say, wow, you know you did that. This episode of Fridagg Stories was produced by me Garrett Morrison and co hosted by Andy Johnson.
It was mixed and engineered by Jay Virik, with transcript help from meg Act.
And big thanks to Jim Gandy, Jim Autrey, Chris Cole, Jason McCoy, Scott Poole, Dave Stockton, and Troy Miller. Troy Miller is a Charleston based golf architect. You've heard him on this podcast, and he actually connected me with a lot of the people I interviewed, and I had a whole conversation with him that didn't end up fitting anywhere in this episode, So sorry, Troy, but we did use excerpts from that interview in a video we made about
the Ocean course. And Andy tell the people where they can find that video.
Yeah, you can find that on our YouTube page. If you haven't been there, just go onto YouTube and search the Frida Egg. You know, outside you might learn how to cook the Frida Egg differently if you click on some of the videos, But there is an account the Frida Egg and click subscribe there and the video should be up there, maybe most recent, depending on when you listen to this, it'll be the most recent video and
you should be able to watch it. It's about, you know, just about ten minutes long, and it is accompanied by beautiful visuals. So everything we talked about here about the site you'll be able to see.
You know.
I recommend watching it on your TV through YouTube, either stream it on your TV or airplay it up there, depending on what your setup is.
Are we going to have four K?
It is four K?
Yeah. The four K on the TV is just out of this world. So we'd love to know what you all think of Frida Egg stories, so feel free to reach out on Twitter or Instagram or maybe leave a review on iTunes, just an idea. Thanks for listening. You know what made me realize this was doing those doing the videos with you and like realizing that instead of scripting on we just needed to talk and extract the parts that we're getting.
I did that. Remember that boomerang video I did for registration a few years ago where I was sitting in the room.
Boomerang yeah yes, like yeah, yeah, yes yes.
So that video we did like twenty takes where I was trying to read from a script and I finally and Ka Kaylee was striving me nuts about it, you know, like she's like, you know, why can't you, and I just said I finally was like I'm just gonna wing it, and I the first take, I wung it and it was perfect.