Welcome to another edition of the Frida egg Podcast and to another episode of Frida Egg Stories, our audio documentary series. This is the second of these you've gotten in a row, so it's worth noting that this is not the permanent format going forward. You'll get just as many interviews and conversations as usual. Today's installment of Frida Egg Stories focuses
on Royal Melbourne, the venue of this week's President's Cup. Specifically, the episode tells the story of doctor Alistair Mackenzie's ten week visit to Australia in nineteen twenty six. During that time, the great architect not only planned the West Course at Royal Melbourne, but also managed to have an influence on golf architecture throughout Australia. So right off the bat, I want to thank the experts who talk to me, Mike Clayton,
Mike Cocking, Neil Crafter and Sean Tolly. I had long conversations with each of them, but used only brief excerpts for this episode. That's just the nature of this format. But many thanks to those four gentlemen for their generosity. All right, let's get to it. Here is the Doctor goes down Under.
It requires a different technique.
What you need to do is actually square the face so it'll dig down underneath that bad.
Lie and propel that ball right out onto the green.
Here's the thing.
Playing out of a buried lion a bunker is completely different than playing out of a nice clean lion a green side bunker.
You need to be aggressive on any show.
Weather it's sitting cleanly, or it's Frida Egg. Well, we've all faked it, the dreaded Frida Egg. It's not to be feared, though.
It's actually a pretty easy shot to hit.
There's a particular sound that I love that we hear in golf tournaments only a few times a year, sometimes at the Open Championship, frequently at the Masters. It's this one.
It's slow down, slow down.
To right on the edge.
Yeah, that's gone. It's the unmistakable sound of a gallery and a broadcast crew reacting to a ball. In this case, Bubba Watson's rolling off the green and into trouble. There's a reason we usually hear this just at the Open and the Masters. Those events, unlike most these days, combine firm conditions with plenty of short grass around the greens. Firm means the ball rolls. Short grass means it rolls
a long way. That's just fun to watch. The clip you heard isn't from the Open or the Masters, however, it comes from the NBC telecast of the twenty eleven President's Cup held at Royal Melbourne. On the final day, conditions got fiery and multiple players actually putted off the treacherous third green at Royal Melbourne's composite course. This week,
the President's Cup returns there. For those interested in golf architecture, this is the rare December event that's one hundred percent appointment viewing because the West Course at Royal Melbourne, which makes up two thirds of the composite routing used for tournaments, is one of the very best golf courses in the world. It embodies much of what we at the Frida Egg love about golf course design. Each hole offers a distinct
and memorable challenge. It's wide, so there's plenty of room for everyone to plod along, but if you want to go low, you'll either need to challenge the hazards or hit great shots from bad positions. The turf is firm, so your ball is going to run out after landing, which means angles and shot shaping really matter. Finally, Royal Melbourne is just charismatic in appearance, the undulations, the varied colors and textures, and those flamboyant bunkers which cut right
into the greens. So who's responsible for this course? The name you'll hear most this week is the familiar one of Alistair McKenzie. In late nineteen twenty six, Mackenzie sailed to Australia and stayed for ten weeks. In that time, he left an indelible mark not just on the Melbourne sand belt, but on golf throughout the country. Today, many Australian clubs boast of mackenzie heritage, and one form or another, these include Kingston Heath, New South Wales, Rural Adelaide, Metropolitan,
Rural Queensland. Basically a role call of the finest courses in Australia, and Mackenzie never even saw any of them in completed form because he never went back. And so I've always been curious, how did Alistair mackenzie have such an impact on Australian golf in just one two and a half month visit or are we all giving him too much credit? Prior to Mackenzie's visit, golf was popular down Under, but golf architecture wasn't particularly advanced.
Billy Day's golf design was done by golf professionals, and you know, they were checksable trades if you like. You know, they could teach, they could make clubs, they could design golf courses where they necessarily terribly good at it. Well, that's sort of arguable.
Neil Crafter is an Ozzie golf architect, historian and one of the writers of the Mackenzie Chronology. He has more knowledge about this subject than just about anyone. Crafter told me that by nineteen twenty six there were some good courses in Australia, but a lot of them, including Royal Melbourne, felt distinctly old fashioned. The shaping of the greens and bunkers was somewhat simplistic, and the philosophy of design was more penal than strategic. That is, the courses were designed
to punish poor strikes rather than to engage players minds. Overall, by the nineteen twenties, golf architecture in Australia seemed to be stuck. In the late eighteen hundreds, the Victorian era. So when Royal Melbourne decided to relocate and expand its golf course, the club looked outside the country for help. They probably reached out to the famous English architect Harry Colt first, but they found Colt's former partner Alistair Mackenzie
more willing to travel. In nineteen twenty six, mackenzie had not yet done Cyprus Point or Pass Tiempo or Augusta National, but his career was on the upswing. He was the consulting architect for the RNA and he was starting to become well known internationally.
Up until that time, his work had been restricted geographically to England, Ireland, Scotland Wales, but nineteen twenty six saw him, I guess, branch out on the world stage.
Getting to Australia from Great Britain was no mean feat back then. On September nineteenth, nineteen twenty six, Mackenzie boarded the ss A Toronto in London. The ship rounded the Iberian Peninsula, traveled east through the Mediterranean Sea and passed through the Suez Canal before the long trip across the Indian Ocean. It stopped in Ceylon or what is now
known as Sri Lanka. Mackenzie actually visited a golf course there. Finally, on October nineteenth, the Toronto birthed at Fremantle in Western Australia. It had been a month long journey. Within a few days mckenns he arrived in Melbourne. While his primary task was to reimagine the golf at Royal Melbourne, he visited many other clubs during his stay.
Very cleverly, the Royal Melbourne made an arrangement with mackenzie so that they wouldn't effectively loan him out to other golf courses in Australia while he was here and take half the half of the fee a two hundred and fifty pound fee they settled on Mackenzie would get half and Royal Melbourne would get half, and effectively the net result of that for Royal Melbourne was that McKenzie didn't cost them anything at all, because they made his feedback
up out of the fees from the other golf clubs that he consulted to while he was here.
Those clubs ranged through the most populous parts of Australia, from Adelaide to Melbourne, to Sydney to Brisbane. In addition to his busy travel schedule. Mackenzie had one other major method of spreading his influence.
In nineteen twenty Mackenzie had put out his Little Green Book for golf archey and it was sort of his calling card, and so it's very clear that he bought a stack of them out with him when he came to Australia and probably part of the deal of Mackenzie designed for your course, you got a copy of his book along with it. There were many extracts from that
book published in the newspapers in Melbourne. Mackenzie also wrote regular columns for these newspapers, so he was very good at marketing himself and his ideas.
These ideas were essentially those of the strategic school of architecture, the ones that the old course at Saint Andrew's embodied, that John Lowe had articulated in his ratings, and that Harry Cole, Mackenzie's ex partner, had widely put into practice in the UK.
The two ideas that I guess caused the most interest and controversy were the first one that there should be no rough. That was very controversial because I think there were a lot of golf courses that had rough thick Rough and liked the idea. Maybe the golfers themselves didn't, but the powers that we did that was one that was particularly promoted through some newspaper articles. And I think the other one primarily was the different lines of play
that Mackenzie had promoted. That you could have a harder, more challenging direct line of play that the better player could take with a degree of risk associated with it, while providing an alternate, much safer, but longer line of play for shorter hitters to take to go around hazards rather than over them.
In total, Mackenzie spent about ten weeks in Australia, about half of those at Royal Melbourne. He then sailed to New Zealand where he designed tit Orangi, and from there to California where he planned Sapress Point. But the impact those ten weeks in Australia had on the future of golf in the country was profound.
At the end of it, you had more courses in their genesis of Royal Melbourne, New South Wales. These courses hadn't existed before Mackenzie, and people couldn't really imagine what they would be like. So very much a watershed moment for golf in Australia. And you know, to this day, the West Course a Royal Melbourne is still in Australia's best golf course. And you know we're talking about ninety
years on, nearly from its opening. So you know, if that's not testament to McKenzie and his the impact of his trip, then nothing is.
Yeah the course player's birth.
I thought I watched Savvy play there in nineteen seventy eight. I watched pretty much every hole and Savvy just know Kensie built that course for him.
Mike Clayton is a former European tour pro now a golf architect and for him, the artistry of Mackenzie's work at Royal Melbourne comes fully into relief when someone plays it with artistry.
You know, it was a perfect stage for Sevie to play golf, because that was the golf Mackenzie wanted people to play.
He wanted people to play with freedom and flair.
And you know, if you hit the ball out of place, he gave you a chance to recover if you could hit.
The great shot.
But if you tried for the great shot and didn't pull it off, then you're in a whole, a whole part more trouble Sevi. You could hit it out of place, but McKenzie gave him a shot and gave him a chance, and he was great enough to pull it off because he would.
Hit those towering high middle lines and long lines and get him on the greens.
And if you missed on the short side, he was great enough around the green. So please give himself a chance to get up and down.
He was building.
He wanted people to play golf like Sebie. When people criticize Sebie, that's how mackenzie saw people playing golf, play with flair and imagination and you know, don't play tight, restrictive, pokey golf.
For Clayton Royal Melbourne and encourages this kind of golf as well as Saint Andrews does, or as well as Augusta National did before Tiger proofing. And one big reason for that is the preponderance of short grass around the greens.
When you miss the granite roll Melbourne, you get a really difficult shot played off a perfect lie was in the PJA two. With all that ruffer and the grains, you get really easy shots my difficult because they've played out of terrible lives. It's kind of obvious which one is A better option to me is that difficult shots played off perfect lives where you can hit anyone of literally twelve clubs.
Probably difficult shots from perfect lies. I'd never thought of it that way before, but so often those shots are the most fun to watch because if the lie is easy, the golf course has to do something else, often something subtle or delayed, to make the situation hard. Both the player and the viewer have a more complex puzzle to solve, and that's what you get at Royal Melbourne that you so rarely get at PGA Tour venues, real complexity.
Last time with they were one of the pg I rules officials told me this would be a much better course.
They would have more rask, which.
Was just a mind boggling misunderstanding of what the course is. It needs with and it needs the boat to run out to the bad angles, and it needs a bolt to run away from the grains if.
You miss them.
So if the PGA Tour had its hand and set the golf goes up exactly the way they wanted to, that would kind of ruin it. Really, I'll just grow rough everywhere and just the whole point of the place would be lost and be like growing rough around the grains of Augusta.
Thankfully, the club at Royal Melbourne, like the one of Augusta, has a great deal of institutional pride. No one's going to tell them how to set up their golf course. So if the weather cooperates at the President's Cup, we should see the ball doing all sorts of things around the greens. The key to this is not only short grass, but also the firmness of the turf, something Royal Melbourne has in common with all of the best sand belt courses Australia.
To me right now, there's the reason why a bunch of superintendents get excited when in you know, in golfers as well, but more so for the for the superintendent is we get to see a golf course that's playing firm and fast and you just get to see the ball move.
Sean Tully is the superintendent at the Meadow Club, a Mackenzie course in California.
It's important to have firm conditions and instead of being green and lush, the idea is to not worry about color, and you're not playing on color, you're playing on turf, and again it doesn't matter the color. It just matters to the furnace. So you can get it firm with green, and you can get it firm with brown. The most important part is to find that firmness to hell with the color, you know, figure out how you get to that firmnace, if it's strainage, sand, top dressing or different grasses.
I think if there's one thing Australia's got.
Right, it's that.
And as Ozzie golf architect Mike Cocking explained to me, the firmness of Royal Melbourne is key to its strategic integrity.
You know, one of the challenges as an architect is you can create the most strategic golf haul in the world, but if the grains is soft, you can't defend it. The ability or the way that guys can hit short eynes these days and stop them quickly even if they're out of position, you just can't defend some of these
holes against that. But at Royal Melbourne's it's the firmest, fastest golf course, one of the firmest, fastest golf courses in the world, and that just further enhances that strategic notion of being in the right position or the wrong position. For every yard you are out of position, that shot into the green just becomes more difficult with every yard.
So it's an incredibly strategic golf course.
Clearly, Royal Melbourne's turf conditions are integral to its greatness, and obviously Alistair mackenzie isn't responsible for that. He was never out there attending native areas or edging bunkers or sprinkling sand on the greens. In fact, he was present
for the construction of only a couple of holes. So while the firm and fast turf and the fascinating green complexes we've been discussing, Embardi Mackenzie's ideas were put in the ground by others, specifically at Royal Melbourne, by a pair of supremely talented individuals, Alex Russell and Mick Morecombe. While he was in Melbourne, Alistair Mackenzie boarded at the
Royal Melbourne Clubhouse. Just across the road was the home of Alex Russell, a well to do young member of the club and one of the best golfers in Australia. Although Russell was twelve years younger than Mackenzie, the two men had a lot in common. Both had served in the British Army in the Great War, both had attended Cambridge University, and both had an absorbing passion for golf architecture.
By all accounts, they got along famously. Mick Morecambe was the superintendent at Royal Melbourne and as it turned out, one of the most gifted shapers in golf history. Together, Morecambe and Russell learned what they could from McKenzie in November and December of nineteen twenty six, and they proceeded to build the West Course according to McKenzie's plan, certainly,
but also using their own career creativity. From there, along with Mick's son, Vern, they essentially created what we now know as sam Belt Golf, and Mike Carking, for one, would rather not see their legacy overshadowed by mackenzie's.
So every single sad Belt course bar Peninsula, either Vern, Mick or Alex Russell was involved with at some point
in time. You know, some courses really heavily involved, like Yaria, whereas at Russell Design and the Malcoms were involved in constructing it, you know, to Commonwealth to Woodlands, so really they are involved basically everywhere, which is why they deserve some credit or at least a part in the discussion of when the sand belt comes up in the look and the feel of sam Belt golf, which is particularly
the particularly the bunkering. You know, those two guys really need to be part of the discussion.
In fact, as a solo architect, Russell produced a remarkable quality of work.
You know, Russell probably has the best strike rate of any architect in history. Really when you consider he did his four main courses were like carrying out the ace course at Real Melbourne, Yariara and Paraperomu.
In New Zealand said great strike right.
So for my fellow Americans out there, strike rate is a cricket term, we would say batting average. Basically, every time Russell tried, he at least got a triple. So clearly Russell, as well as mcmorcam had serious skills. They're the ones who actually built the courses. The same is true of many Mackenzie courses. In fact, think of Perry Maxwell at Crystal Downs or Robert Hunter at Cyprus Point. That kind of thing makes the issue of credit at Royal Melbourne and elsewhere somewhat complicated.
And that's where it gets a little bit hazy, because you can sort of look at Mackenzie and look at his primary influence, the plans he drew and the things he did while he was here, and I mean really other than those plans, which aren't always that accurate, and he you know, he had a tendency to exaggerate of his green drawings and things like that. So a lot of it was how he communicated it to the guys on the ground. And when he was here he only saw a couple of things being built and that was it.
Then he left.
He never wrote about his time in Melbourne in the spirit of Snandrew's. He had a picture of some dunes at Royal Adelaide and made a comment about, you know, how great it is as golfing ground, but never talked about how good the land was at Royal Melbourne or how well he thought the design was going to turn out. So it was really left to the Morcams and to Russell to execute his plans, certainly at Real Melbourne and then at some of the other courses just to the Markhams.
And it's hard to know, I mean, how much did he how much did he actually teach him in ten weeks and did he really teach them much at all?
I mean did it was just some passing comments.
So did they really deserve the credit for a lot of the work, particularly for the style.
Of the sandal bunkering and for some of the green complexes.
So it's kind of murky when you start trying to apply credit for specific things.
At the same time, a lot of fantastic golf courses in Australia started the same way with a visit from Alistair mackenzie.
I guess if you look at the bigger picture, would any of that work have ever been carried out the way it has been if he had never come?
And you would have to say, well, now.
There's no denying Mackenzie' Johnny Appleseed effect. Wherever he went, world class golf courses seemed to sprout up in his weak.
If you want to know.
Having fluenil McKenzie I was look at the places he didn't go in Australia, person terrible golf Prisbone. He went to Royal Queens and that's the only decent golf course there. And well that Slides did a new course that we did, So you know, McKenzie's influence was. It's definitely not a coincidence. Where he went he left great golf and where he didn't go there isn't great goal.
Mike Clayton goes as far as to say that if mackenzie had spent more time in Western Australia, things would have turned out differently there.
If mackenzie had gone to Perth and had the influence he had in Melbourne, Perth of the best course in the world. It's got incredible lamb and Melbourne's got shiplamb for golvit to Sandy it's not ship lamb, but that's exaggeration, but low It was flat sand that Perth had, undulating sam with much better vegetation. So his influence had been the same in perthos that was in Melburn, Perth would have an incredible golf.
Basically, Clayton acknowledges the importance of Russell and Morcambe, but he maintains that Mackenzie's philosophical influence was the decisive factor.
Mackenzie deserves the credit for the principle of the golf he wanted to play. He deserves the credit for the holes he routed and re routed. He deserves the credit because the type of golf it's on the ground was his.
In this light, what's even more impressive than Mackenzie's ideas themselves was his preternatural ability to communicate them, to persuade others to adopt them, and to teach others to give form to them even in his absence.
His skill was being able to articulate both through his book and through the meetings.
He had with him.
What they spoke about together was how he wanted the golf to be. Between Morcambe and Mackenzie, and Russelle came up with a unique kind of.
Look to the bunkers, which works incredibly well.
So his influence was profound, but it was profound through his book and through what he articulated to.
The guys about how how he wanted the golf to be.
Certainly a masterclass in short term instruction on how to build the golf he life, and he trusted him.
To do it.
So one takeaway here is that a great golf course architect needs a peculiar mixture of personal qualities. On the one hand, Mackenzie was brash, and the way you have to be if you're going to show up in a part of the world you've never been and start telling everyone what to do.
It didn't sound like he was that charming, Like he was pretty sure of his own opinion, which in his position you had to be. I mean, you know, he wasn't going to be swayed off what he thought, and he certainly wasn't going to be told by committees what to do.
He was interesting, he was a mattock. He was full, so he was arrogant.
He was all those things that attracted people who had gride it what they did to their croft.
In other words, mackenzie was a gifted leader. No doubt he could be cocky, but he was also good at building friendships, and he did so with, among others, Robert Hunter, Perry Maxwell and Alex Russell. Those are three very brilliant and very different people, yet Mackenzie managed to connect with each of them to convince each of them to follow
through on his vision. On top of that, Mackenzie was secure enough to allow all of them Hunter at Cyprus Point, Maxwell at Crystal Downs, and Russell and Morcombe at Royal Melbourne to use their own judgment. So while those three courses are mackenzie designs through and through they're best understood as interpretations of his philosophy by his associates on the ground their collaborations. You could say the same, in fact about a lot of the greatest golf courses, not just Mackenzie's.
The old course at Saint Andrew's is the result of many contributions from many people of many different generations. In designing Pine Valley, George Crump continually sought out the smartest people he could find and asked for their feedback. The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the most underrated skills in a golf course architect are
the interpersonal ones. The ability to identify talented collaborators, to get along with them, to mentor them, and to inspire them to be the most capable and creative versions of themselves. That's what Mackenzie could do, and it's why his single ten week visit to Australia had such an impact. Now. Then again, if Mackenzie had lived in the twenty first century, I bet he wouldn't have been his hands off with Royal Melbourne.
In today's world.
It'd have flown back to see it, jumped on a plane and gone back at you allowed to check it out, and he would have said to us, I've got this job at sarbers Point and now, gous they have a jumping on a plan land, let's go and go that.
Yeah, those courses to get when you can jump on a plane and be there in an off of die.
Now, that's essentially what Corn Crenshaw, Tom Doak and Gilhants do today. They have crews of associates and shapers who follow them from job to job all over the world, and after finishing the course, the architects can go back regularly to check up and make tweaks. This has probably helped with quality control. In the nineteen twenties, every time Mackenzie went to a new place he had to assemble a new team just out of the local population, and
sometimes after leaving he never returned. So yes, the modern approach does make things a bit easier and less risky, but there's always a price for comfort. Is it possible that we've lost the notion of local variations of a great golf course architect's work? This week we'll see the
most distinctive of the Mackenzie variations. Royal Melbourne is one of the world's best golf courses, not just because Alistair mackenzie planned it brilliantly, but also because, in adapting that plan, Alex Russell and mc yorcumb used their own knowledge of the indigenous landscape and their own eccentric artistry. The result was a one of a kind golf course, and now ninety years later, we get to see it on TV far more clearly than its designer ever got to see
it in his life. This was the second episode of Friday Stories. It was created and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with editing from Jay Vick. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson. Thank you, as always for listening.