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 bride egg Friday egg, the dreaded Friday Friday, Frida Egg Egg, Frida Egg, bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump.
Welcome to the Friday Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about municipal golf with the architect Gil Hants. This conversation took place a couple of weeks ago at the third annual National Links Trust Symposium on Municipal Golf. The NLT Symposium is basically a gathering of people who work in and advocate for municipal golf in America, and for the twenty twenty three edition, I was very honored to serve as the MC and host a couple of
the conversations on stage. As the closing event of this year's symposium, Gil Hans and I got up in front of a crowd at the Pearl Street Warehouse in Washington, d C. And we talked about Gill's various municipal golf projects, which date back to the building of Rustic Canyon and
the renovation of Seoul Park, both in California. More recently, Gil designed the new park in West Palm Beach and he's currently working on projects at Maggie Hathaway in Los Angeles, Rock Creek Park in d C. And Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia, which, by the way, that last one, Cobbs Creek, I mistakenly forgot to ask him about. It was a really fun conversation.
I was a little nervous. I'd never done anything like this before, getting up and kind of performing a conversation, but Gil is so good in these situations, and we just ended up kind of nerding out about golf like we usually do, except this time it happened to be in front of an audience. So great experience, and I really want to thank everyone at the National Links Trust
for inviting me to be involved. They have a fantastic team over there, and I truly think they're going to help shape the future of golf in a very positive way. So if you ever have a chance to attend the NLT Symposium next year or the year after, you should absolutely do so. Now, before we get to my interview with Gil Hants, I want to say a few words about our sponsor for this episode, Fat Cork. Fat Cork works exclusively with small, family run grower champagne houses to
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get the vibe here. There are various packages on fatcork dot com slash golf that are targeted at our audience specifically, and we'll make you laugh and we'll also get you some very delicious champagne. So Fat Cork is offering free shipping on any of their products with the code golf, just simply the code golf. They handwrite all gift notes on nice stationary and a human will answer your call or email. So check out fat Cork. And with that, here is me and Gil Hans at the National Links
Trust Symposium on Municipal Golf. Please welcome to the stage, Gil Hans, All right, Gil you ready? Yeah, all right. So the focus of this conversation is municipal golf. So I want to take you back a couple of decades. This was before the Olympic course. This was before you had to tell people not to call you the open doctor, which I'm still resisting. You were an up and coming golf architect and one of your first handful of new
build projects was at Rustic Canyon. Now, I think Rustic Canyon is one of the best municipal courses in the country. So could you tell me a little bit about how this project came about, just to get right into it.
Sure, Thanks everybody for being here tonight. By the way, the green room is not green, in case anybody was interested. More of a darkish, bluish yeah, kind of, yeah, actually it was. It all came from Jeff Shackelford. Jeff his father, Lynn had worked for American Golf and then he had partnered up with Craig Price on a few projects, and so Craig was looking at bidding for Ventura County to get to do Rusta Canyon, and so he talked to Lynn Shackelford. Jeff then talked to us because I had
done the sketches for his book Grounds for Golf. So Jeff and I had become friends at that point in time. And it's really just one introduction after another. And I know at the time they had talked to several sort of bigger name architects and they said the site was too flat. It's too flat for good golf, wasn't interesting. We kept hearing this over and over again, and you know, the more we walked around out though, the more we realized that it was flat if you weren't really looking.
But it was seriously tilted. I mean from the high end to the low end was well over one hundred and fifty feet, so there was tons of elevation change. The little dry wash that ran through the middle presented tons of opportunities. Jeff being George Thomas's biographer and intimately knowledgeable about Riviera bel Air, not so much lacc at that point in time, but he had these concepts of let's build these Thomas holes, and we've got the branca
and the opportunity to do that. And so we were eventually selected for the job, and you know, said to it. As you said, there was maybe one or two projects we were working on at the time, so we spent a lot of time on site. It was a dusty, dirty site because you know, it doesn't rain in California very often, and so it was just but it was a fun site. We had the freedom and the opportunity, the ability to build golf holes that we thought were
interesting and special. And I think that was one of the best lessons of that project was we've never set out to dumb down our golf courses because they're public. We've never set out to say, well, it's going to be the average golfer, a municipal golfer is going to play here, so let's just give them the vanilla version. Thought,
why should we do that. We should still build the golf course to the best of our ability, put the most interest we can into it, and really design it to the standard, whether it was private or public, try and create some things. We worked really hard on width out there. We had the opportunity to build wide corridors, to create options. You know, with for WID's sake, isn't
that interesting. But when you have with it and it gives you options and gives you better angles and different ways to play these golf holes, I think that that
that's it made a lot of sense. Early on, it was probably the biggest site we had gotten our hands on, and then it was also, you know, the site of our biggest pop culture phenomenon in that those any Entourage fans out there, all right, So one of the episodes they were talking about going to play golf and they asked, Johnny Drama, he said where are you going to play golf? And he said Russa Canyon, the best public golf course in southern California. So I had that from a ring
tone for a little while. But no, it was an amazing opportunity. You know, Jeff was such a great person to partner with on that. Jim and I would be stuck into the machinery and work and then people say, well, what did Jeff do? And he actually was like a hole ahead. He was walking and looking because he didn't really want to work on equipment and he didn't want to work with a shovel, I mean want to damage his hands. But no, he was a hole ahead, looking
and thinking and brainstorming. So that when Jim and I finished a hole, we went over and it was like okay, instead of going now what do we do? I was like, Hey, what about this? And I think it fueled a ton of great ideas and a lot of great energy out on the site.
I didn't know that story about entourage, his rust of Canyon really a Johnny Drama kind of course, I wonder, I.
Think so, I mean, it's one of those places we get you know, I run into people here and there, obviously, and I get so many comments about Usta Caanyon. Soul Park is another one. And then the strangest one of all is Swanee, the University of the South. We did a little nine hole makeover there, and the people who go to that school love that school. They're like so attached their school and so proud of it. And I'll
just run people say you did Swany, didn't you. I'm like, yeah, that was not you know, in the pantheon of courses that you mentioned, it doesn't get mentioned very often, but you know, Rustic Canyon, Seoul Park, and Swani are ones that people come up and say, thanks for doing that.
If you go out to Sweden's Cove, you should go up to Swanee. It's not not much if you go that far, you can go a little bit farther. So with the rust of Canyon project, we've talked a lot this week during this symposium about methods of building and what the best practices for that are the theme of the symposium was in house and large scale projects, and we learned about a number of different approaches to that.
For the Rustic Canyon project. This was really a design build effort, wouldn't you say it was.
We had a project manager, we had basically hired then our own crew in house. I think when we figured we tali died it all up. We moved seventeen thousand cubic yards of dirt and it was basically with a front end loader and a pickup.
Could you compare that to like give people an idea of how little that is.
Yeah, I mean it's minuscule. It's barely even shaping. You know, we just did a golf course in Palm Springs where we moved two million cubic yards of dirt, So I mean you can in comparison that was the most rustic. Canyon was definitely the least. And so it was just, yeah, it was a small crew. Some of them had golf experience, some of them didn't. We had an irrigation contractor. But it was sort of every day you show up and there were fifteen guys out there, and today you're going
to drive this piece of equipment. Today you're going to do this. And because it was in essence very minimal earth moving and the shaping was really all we did it. You know, the holes came together pretty quickly.
And part of that minimal approach, and if I can use the term minimalism, it seems like it's a little bit out of fashion. It was a little bit more in fashion and a little more cutting edge feeling when you did the Rustic Canyon project. I believe this really
is a minimalist project. But it was minimalist for a reason, right, I mean, there were a lot of environmental sensitivities around this site, and so, you know, can you talk about how your approach to your philosophy of architecture fit with this kind of project.
I think early on, having worked for Tom Doak for for four years, you know, he was the first architect to be associated with minimalism. You know, Bill and Ben, we're doing golf courses that were considered minimalist. Tom was the one, I think who sort of introduced that into the you know, the phraseology of lexic.
He wrote a minimalist manifesto, it was the whole thing.
So I think having been exposed to that and having had all those conversations with Tom about how you build minimalist golf courses, we set out at Rustic Canyon with what we thought was a really good piece of ground and didn't want to mess with it. I mean, I think all architects look at pieces of ground and they try to maximize the potential for them. Some architects see potential in a two foot contour through the middle of a fairway. Some architects don't, they miss that. Some architects
see the potential in a dry wash. Some architects look at that as an environmental nightmare to have to deal with. So I think what we looked at is how do we maximize all the potential positives in that property before we revert to moving dirt. You know, if you can maximize all the potential, I think there we were probably more patient having Jeff out in front identifying these things. Really, I think lent itself to us being more minimalist on that site than we might have otherwise been. So I
think all the stars were aligned. It was a very low budget project, so that also helped to keep the aspirations of moving a lot of dirt down. So I think all of those things coming together on that particular site lent themselves to that minimalist build.
So correct me if I'm wrong, But I think Rustic Canyon was your first experience being an architect on a municipal project.
Yes, right, yep.
And so how was it different working within that system as opposed to working with a green committee or with a particular client. Did it introduce any more complexities into the equation that you then had to negotiate?
Not really, Because Craig Price was the he had gotten the lease from the county. So once we were approved and he was approved as the leaseholder, we didn't really have to deal with the county very much. And I think I don't know how to say this without saying it. You know, California is not easy to get stuff done, and I think the county, Ventura County, helped us dramatically to get things through and to move them through in a more timely fashion than would have might have been
the normal time frame in southern California. So I think they were the aided us dramatically in getting it started. But once we started, very little input.
So Rustic Canyon is owned by Ventura County. Another Ventura County property is Saul Park, a few years after Rustic Canyon, and there is a connection here involving Craig Price, whom you mentioned. But a few years after Rustic Canyon, the opportunity to do some major work at Seoul Park, another municipal facility popped up. So could you take me through how you got involved in this project and then what the scope of it was.
Yeah, that was Mother Nature basically brought us to Seoul Park. It was I can't remember exactly the years six or seven where it was very heavy El Nino winter and basically the golf course was just ravaged. I mean there's a dry wash that runs through it and it flooded, tore all the bridges out that go across it, tore a bunch of the greens apart. And at this point in time, Craig had taken over the lease, and so
it became an emergency. Hey, we've got to get this fixed, because right now, instead of eighteen holes we have, I think there were maybe about eleven that were playable. So and again here Ventura County a little bit to the rescue and the Army Corps of Engineers, they passed an emergency ordinance that allowed for these areas to be reclaimed.
So we were able to go back into what would have been untouchable from a dry wash standpoint and go and rebuild these golf holes, put them back together, and in the process of doing so, we were asked to kind of give our thoughts as to how we can improve the design, how can we could make it more playable,
more interesting. Once again, Jeff was part of our team up there, and once again we kind of looked at the George Thomas playbook and tried to figure out how can we do things along those lines that would maximize the potential of Soul Park. Which Soul Park's setting is
just beautiful. You're tucked right up against the mountains. You've got a much broader, wider rank or running through the middle of it, as opposed to the one at Rustic Canyon, which was a little bit narrower, and so there it was an opportunity to play more along flank, along the side of it, go across it, but then start to introduce more bunkering, new green complexes. So it started off as a let's put this place back together, and as the momentum built, it became okay, what can we do
with the next toll? With the next toll? And I think Tracy and I that was one of our favorite summers living in OHI was nice. I mean, it was really it was a special place and we enjoyed the time that we got to spend there. And you know the evolution of that place now it's no longer in Craig price is, he's no longer the lease holder. But I think it's one of those things where peep golfers will go to discover fun. They'll go to discover a
good vibe, a good place to hang out. They'll go to discover places where other golfers of similar mindset are. You know, their skins games are legendary now where people are just showing up and keep driving from all over southern California to go and play and participate, and they're hanging out after golf. And so it's become one of these really kind of sleepy golf courses that now has this wonderful undercurrent of serious golfers, serious architecture enthusiasts go
up there and and you get to play. You know, you know, a golf course that has interest and architecture, but it's municipal and it's you can play it for it's very affordable.
It's become a hot spot right now. Soul Park is the place to go if you're a golf enthusiast living anywhere in the vicinity. Basically people drive up from Los Angeles to play it and to be part of the men's club out there and the and the various events that they hold, and so it's you know, and for the reason that it has really interesting architecture, I think that is what's driving it. So that's where soul Park has gotten. I think it's worth being frank about what
happened immediately after your work there. After you and Jim made the changes there, there was some pushback from various long time constituents in the soul Park community. What was your reaction to that.
Yeah, thanks, I'd forgotten about that.
I got to give you a tough.
One here and there, right, No, I mean it's true. I mean you have players, and I think that's one of the most difficult things to try to figure out how to get right when it comes to municipal golf is there are people who are part of the landscape who love where they play, and you don't want them to feel like they're just pushed aside, you know. And all of a sudden, now all the cool kids are showing up and the food trucks are showing up and the beer as well, and it's just wait a second,
what about me? I'm now I don't enjoy this place anymore. And I think there was honestly a little bit of a pushback as it related to center line bunkering. You know, what do you mean there's a bunker in the middle of a hole? How you know? That's I hit it perfect,
That's right where I was supposed to go. So I think there was and there was a little bit of some In some ways it was easy for management to cave versus fight for it because they were wanting income, and they were wanting the basically all the revenue and the people to show up. And if all of a sudden you're getting a group of people who are not happy about it, you know, they weren't thinking about all
the people who were happy. So it became a bit of a battle, and it really was unfortunate how that all shook out. But I think that's ultimately what led to the current management group there, and they've embraced it. In fact, they've asked us to come back in and restore some of the things that were taken out after the renovation of the golf course. But it's it really
is an important part. I think we're going to talk a little bit about Maggie Hathaway later on in Los Angeles, but it was something that also happened at Swanya, Like you're bringing that up, but you know, when you go back someplace, there's a bit of nostalgia that you want to have for it, and you want it to be recognizable. You want it to be the place that I love fell in love with, and when that's changed, people take
it very different ways. And so I think that's something you know, We're going to obviously talk a lot with the National Links Trust about how do we retain play, how do we keep people there who have supported it for a long period of time yet introduce new people to it without dispossessing the people who've come to love it.
Well, how do you do that? Because you are really good at this stuff. I know this from talking to memberships where you've worked, you can negotiate these situations quite well. Is there a similar approach or set of tactics that you bring to speaking with conversing with the people who play a public golf course where you're going to make some big changes.
Yeah, I think a lot of it is listening early on, is listening to the people who are involved in either taking over management or who have played there for a long period of time and get their sense. You know, we're gonna talk about the park, Well, the park was closed, so it was kind of hard for you know, there's only one way to make it better was to get it reopened, no matter what we did to it. And I think same thing with Rock Creek. You know, had
fallen so far downhill that I don't can't imagine. There are many people that are, you know, adamantly defending the old fifth hole. So ultimately, what it comes down to, and this is going to sound fairly simplistic, but it's the truth. It's maintenance. If you put a better maintained product out there, you're going to win a lot of
people back, whether they like the design or not. They can't argue with the fact that, hey, greens are better than they've ever been, the fairways are mode, the bunkers are raked. There's all this sort of good things that are happening to the golf course, and they can put up with a little bit of changes or maybe significant changes, as long as actually there's two things, as long as the golf course is maintained and as long as you don't charge them more money for that. And I'm I'm
not trying to be funny, it's true. I mean people want they don't want to have a public facility that they've supported and been involved with for a long time, and all of a sudden, we've tripled the greens fees and now they're economically moved on versus just moved on because they don't like the product.
Yeah, absolutely, that's a Those are the two big concerns right that you hear about from golfers is the conditions and the green fee, and both are completely understandable when it comes to some of the architectural moves that we as architecture nerds love having a wide fairway that you put a bunker right in the middle of in order to create some interesting possibilities for play and angles and
some freedom of choice off the tee. When you talk about it that way, it sounds great when you're somebody who's played a course for years and you hit your drive in the middle of the fairway and it ends up in a bunker where you have to kind of splash out and then keep playing a hole, it might
hit you a little bit differently. And so, you know, after that experience at Seoul Park where some of the center line hazards were modified or moved in or made more conventional in some ways, what were some of the things that you thought about or that you did in the future to help people understand what you were doing architecturally when it came to things like, you know, wild
greens or centerline hazards. How do you help people understand what you're doing without seeming condescending about it.
Yeah, I think there are several ways to communicate. I mean with social media now, there's a lot of you know forums. You know, we don't necessarily have like forums where there are a bunch of people who play the golf course and we sit down we talk about what we've done. But a lot of the places have asked us to narrate hole by whole flyovers or talk about different things or different angles or aspects of what we were trying
to do. The other thing that I've just been thinking about as we're sitting here is this is not dissimilar from when you restore a private club. Right, You've got all these members are used to playing things a certain way, and all of a sudden you put it back to what Donald Ross had and Donal Ross had a bunker in the middle of the fairway, and they're like, wait, I don't like that. So it's not it like crosses
all the spectrums as far as architecture is concerned. But I think it's really more communication through social media, trying to just put forward the best possible plan and hopefully people will embrace it and understand it.
All right, let's talk about some more recent happenings. Your most recent completed municipal design is the park in West Palm which we heard a little bit about during the symposium today. So this was an ambitious project. If you compare this to Rustic Canyon or Seoul Park, it exists on an entirely different scale. It took a hefty amount of capital to carry out, and the transformation obviously is pretty stunning. So first of all, what was the funding structure behind this project?
Private donations? I mean, I think this is ultimately and again, West Palm Beach is a different universe. It's different. You know, the money that was available there is not available everywhere around and we understand that. But I think it is the perfect public private model that can be successful as we move around the country and trying to restore, renovate, improve public golf courses. It's basically a model where individuals were asked to contribute. There was a vision that was
put forward. It was centered around the renovation restoration of this golf course that was beloved. It was an old Dick Wilson golf course that had been modified and had fallen out of favor, but it was a willing participant in the city of West Palm Beach. The mayor, the city council were all one hundred percent behind this. So
you had the public side pulling hard for this. Then you had a group led by seth Wan, Dan Stanton, Dirk Ziff, Tommy Frankel working hard to go through the community down there and find golf loving people who had the wherewithal to contribute to it. And not only did they contribute enough to build the golf course, the clubhouse, all the teaching facilities, but also to have an endowment that would ultimately, you know, fund future maintenance or future
golf programs. But I think really the most important part of it is also the vehicle it provides for the path at the park, which I know Dave spoke about today. What we've done. Hopefully, we've played our role in creating a facility that people are interested in and that want to come and play, and that you know, will hold golf architecture geeks, but also the sixty dollars around golfers from West Palm Beach are going to go out there. And one of the crazy things about it is they've
we fought long and hard. Those of you know me, well, no, I'm a huge ab kid for walking golf. You know, obviously, if you have a physical ailment you can't walk one hundred percent, you should take a cart, But if you're able, you should be able to walk. And we got it through where there were going to be walking times only up until noon and then Caddy required times, and we thought for sure that the city of West Palm Beach people were not going to do that. They've done it.
They've booked all those tea times. They love it. So it's also been a vehicle to somewhat talk about what we think golf should be and how it should be presented, and that the game, you know, the walking game golf should be played at three miles an hour, not twenty and that you know, you see, you talk, you have social interaction with everybody else. So I think within the golf there are things, some things we've accomplished, but the path is ultimately going to be the most successful thing
that comes out of it. And the opportunity to bring children in, to have them be in a safe, nurturing environment, to be taken care of after school, to be taught, to utilize the game of golf as part of the teaching.
You know, art classes can center on painting golf holes, math classes can talk about math as it relates to golf, and then to actually bring them into the game of golf and teach them about golf, but teach it in a fun and welcoming You know, a lot of us know that golf is sometimes not the most welcoming sport, and there are barriers to entry, and there are barriers to feeling good about going out on a golf course.
I think this will drop all of those barriers. And so I said, while we're proud of our contribution on the golf end of things, I think the path is going to be ultimately the most significant and important thing that comes out of this. So to have the opportunity to have an invested public partner, a willing and able private piece that puts the money forward and does it in a way that's caring, and then to have created
the educational aspect of it. So it's not only giving to the golf community, it's giving to the community at large. It checks all of those boxes, and I really feel strong it's going to be an incredibly successful model.
What are the fundamentals from an architecture perspective of making a golf course walkable?
Well close tea and green proximity I think is a good start, you know, getting you basically moving off of the green right onto the next tee. I think we you know, one of the things we all love about these great old golf courses and that you know the three here embraced that is that golf was originally designed to be a compact landscape. Right. You weren't having a cross roads or cross through housing developments to get to
the next golf hole. You were basically moving through a landscape in a way that made a lot of sense, and that did so in a way that was walkable. And so I think green and tea proximity, I think monitoring elevation chair. I mean, when you've got a site like the park, it's thirty feet of elevation change, it's pretty easy to walk. It's not that not that difficult, but I think it's managing those opportuity ups and downs. But I think it's it's it's understanding just the flow
of the way the game is played. And then you know opportunities like if you've got a big dip that you're playing over, provide an opportunity to walk on the high side of it. You know, maybe that's not the straight line, but at least you can kind of wander your way around where you're not having to tackle some of the more abrupt topography out there.
I think that's an important thing for some municipal facilities to consider. Obviously, Kurt golf is enormously common in America, and that includes municipal golf courses. But I think we all know that if a lot of people choose to walk, the golf course does reap some benefits.
Right, Yeah, it's good for maintenance, it's obviously good from an exercise standpoint. I think, you know, one of the things that we're also very proud about there in most place is the push cart or the pull cart however you want to. I mean that has had a stigma in American golf for so long. But it's easy. I mean, it's the easiest way if you don't want to put it, throw it over your back, to go ahead and push
and walk work around the golf course. And I think that seeing American embracing that and saying yeah, go ahead and take that, it makes your walk so much easier. We'll lead more people to walking.
What was the thinking behind the design at the park? Now? I haven't been there, I've looked at a lot of pictures and to me, it looks like some incredibly bold architecture happening out there. No holds barred. This is a Gilhan's golf course. So what were some of the discussions that you had with your partner, Jim Wagner. What was the theory behind the design here?
I think it was take advantage of some of the better topography in South Florida. I mean, the thirty feet doesn't sound like much, but in South Florida that's a lot. And so we were able to look at those ridges, how we could maximize some of those spaces and Dirk Ziff, who I mentioned earlier, is he was a design partner with us. In fact, he was very very responsible for the routing of the golf course, which was also another
really fun part of it. But I think it gets back to that mentality I talked about earlier on that we don't want to dumb down golf courses because they're public. We want to give people opportunities to work their way around it. I still think that golf, the playing of the game of golf is I know this was used somewhere else, and I don't want to draw attention, but
it's aspirational. When you play the game, you want to get better, you want to have challenges, you want to be able to You know, if all it was was a straight turf mode from green to tea would be bowling right, It wouldn't be interesting. And I think that average golfers get as much joy and satisfaction out of overcoming obstacles and hazards in a way that gives them
an opportunity. I think from that aspirational aspect, if you are within you're able to understand the limits of your game, and we give you avenues to play within those limits, then that's great. If you choose to go outside those limits or test your limits and push it to a place where now you're flirting with bunkers or you're flirting with different angles, then that's learning thing about architecture is well, I don't want to go over there again, so you
kind of start the process. I just remember Tom Doak talking about the thirteenth hole. Now we're really going to get geeky, you know, golf architecture nerds get excited about this, the thirteenth hole at North Barrack where there's just that one little bunker out there sitting by itself. And he said, you know, you get close to it. Now you can play your second shot along the wall. And golfers always
start off going over here, closer, closer, closer. Then they get in it, then they go back to over here, and then they kind of slowly but surely it's that sort of opportunity to learn as you're playing a golf course that there's something going on out here, there's something to think about. It's not just hit it wherever you want.
There are things in the way, you know, and I think beginning golfers, you know, one of the things we talk a lot about is if you get in a deep bunker, most golfers will they'll figure it out after if they hit take two or three, they'll just pick it up and they they'll go ahead and move on. But it gives them at least an understanding of what
that is. If every single bunker was two feet deep and they became then there'd be no differentiation and there wouldn't be an understanding of Okay, yeah, there are penalties, there are different ways to go through this, and with putting on some of the greens, I think most golfers are comfortable with a putter in their hands, so they don't necessarily mind having to play up and over, around or through. Some people actually think that's kind of kind of fun. But we wouldn't do it just to do it.
Hopefully it is meaningful. The topographies in relationship with the golf hole, it comes before it.
It seems like what a lot of you A lot of what you're talking about here is how to make a golf course playable for a broad population of golfers but still challenging for excellent golfers, which has been something that pretty much every architect in the history of golf has claimed to be able to do. This is tough for your expert player, but it's still easy enough for the hacker that they won't get totally frustrated. But it seems like what you're talking about is a little more
specific here. How do you carry out architecturally a golf course that is truly challenging and interesting for a scratch player but can be perfectly playable for any level. Is it wide fairways? Is it hazards down the you know, down a particular line of the whole. What kinds of greens are we talking about? How does that play out architecturally?
Yeah, it's a little bit of everything. I mean, what Jim and I talk a lot about is a level of precision. Right, The level of precision required to play literally just go play golf should be fairly low, should be able to hit your ball, find it, hit it again, find it, et cetera. And then the level of precision required to score, like to play the course well, should
be high. And we see that every year at Augusta National Right, I mean the level of precision required to play there, if you can fortunate enough to play there, is not that high. I mean the wide fairways, But if you want to score, you've got to be on the proper side of the fairway, you've got to have the proper angle into the green. And then the you know, they're tilted and or they're blind shots and you're trying to figure out where to hit it. So the level
precision required to score is high. Then you take that to the greens and if you're trying to hit, you know, you got hit to the proper quarter of the green to score at Augusta National. But you know, if you're just playing, you're going to three putt and it's okay.
And I think that's one of the things that we were very fortunate that, you know, Tiger has been a big booster for the park and he was there for on opening day and he hit the opening t shot and we were chatting beforehand and he said something and I'd never heard before, which he said, yeah, this is a one ball golf course. And I'm thinking, what do you mean. He said, yeah, anybody plays here's one ball. You're not going to lose a golf ball. You're really
going to be able to start and finish. And I'm thinking, well, most golf courses are one ball course for Tiger, but the thought process was, Yeah, actually, that's true. The more you went around it, you'd really have to work hard to lose the golf ball at the park. And so I think that also lends itself to the level of playing a golf course and the level of enjoyment. Constantly searching and looking for golf balls. You've lost to half
a dozen golf balls, that's just not fun. Mark parsonon who we co designed Castle Stewart with, who was one of the smartest guys I've ever been around, and just an amazing thoughtful person about golf, talked about and Jim and I constantly remember this and we talk about is
keep the golfer hopeful and engaged. Like if you can keep a golfer hopeful that they're thinking, Okay, I can actually hit this shot, or there's a place where I can go that I know I can hit a shot with my next shot, then they're engaged in the match, they're engaged in the playing of the golf course. They're engaged. But if their balls in their pocket and they're just walking down the fifth hole in a row that they've lost a golf ball, they're no longer hopeful and they're
no longer engaged and you've lost them. So you have to create playing grounds that give you the opportunity to keep the average golfer hopeful and engaged. And they also talked about the third shot for an average golfer, even tour players hit fifty sixty percent of greens in regulation. You know, what does that third shot look like? How is it is the golfer again hopefully and engaged, are they despondent, how do they or how are they looking?
Because they're most likely not going to hit the green in two, So what kind of recovery options do you give them? And then within those recovery options, if there's creativity, if there's different ways to play it again where they're hopeful in the outcome and they don't pull it off, they're still okay, I messed up, I didn't hit a
good shot. But if you put a golfer in a position where they have no hope of hitting a good shot, then it becomes why this architect sucks and this is a bad golf hole, And so you want to keep them, keep them moving along. And I think that that translates not only to public municipal golf, but it also translates to private golf.
Hopeful and engaged, even if it's foolish hope. Yeah, even at they're even if they shouldn't be that hopeful, that is true.
Yeah.
All right, So let's talk about some future projects of yours or ongoing developing projects, ones that haven't been finished. One is the National Links Trust's first major improvement project, which is going to take place at Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC. So, first of all, this course has an extensive and very interesting history. What is that history and how is it going to factor into some of your work there?
Yes, so it's a William Flynn golf course. Originally nine holes by Flynn, and then he came back and eded eighteen and then it was changed to as a military road went through and took some of the golf holes away. So it's been modified ever since. It was William Gordon who was one of Flynn's associates, so at least they kept it a little bit in the family to try to try and emulate Flynn's style, and then over a
period of time, I mean William Flynn. Obviously we live in Philadelphia, having spent my adult life in Philadelphia, so many great Flynn golf courses around there, Huntingdon Valley, Rolling Green Philly Country Club, on and on. So when Will called us and said, hey, we've actually got a Flynn golf course in a public setting, it was like that was exciting number one to think, Okay, great, we'd love to work on a Flyn golf course. We'd love to have the opportunity to do it in a public setting.
Tell us more. And so we came out I think it was three years ago. Four years ago. It was before COVID walked the site and thought it was really interesting.
Worked with Will and Mike mccarton about how you would route this, what you would do, what ultimately would yield the best result for Rock Creek's golf course, And given how far downhill it had gone and some of the holes had been abandoned, it became important to understand that the best way to utilize Rock Creek to grow the game of golf, to make affordable golf accessible, but then to also hopefully give the opportunity to create some revenue
that would allow the these other projects to go forward might not be necessarily a pure William Flynn restoration because it couldn't happen number one because the holes were gone, but what would be the best use for this? And so we all worked together and came up with nine holes, which aren't exact replicas of Flynn's, but all the green
sites are Flynn Green sites. Seven of the nine greens are Flynn Greens, even though degraded, but to the point where we could at least bring them back create a nine hole par three course, which I think is an amazing amenity for kids. And again that sort of introduction, that's one of the things we have at the park. And then also Himalaya is putting green and a full
scale driving range, so you basically one stop shopping. You've got opportunity if you're just learning the game, you can putt and have fun, you can play on the par three. You've got a real driving range where you can come and work on your game and learn. And then you have a serious golf course of nine holes. And so we went out there today and walked around and the ground is better than I remembered. I mean, it's hilly,
it's got kind of that old school. There might be some blind shots, They're going to be some fairways where you're gonna have to hit your ball to the left sides and let it run all the way across to the right side to stay in the fairway. But I think that character and interest in golf is really part of that kind of local knowledge. And I think the best golf courses reward thoughtful study, they reward local knowledge.
They reward multiple plays to say, hey, I'm going to play this all I'm going to play it differently next time. But you get excited about learning those things versus just it's the same thing every time you play it. And I think the topography at Rock Creek gives us the opportunity to have a golf course is going to play in any number of ways, given whether it's wet, whether it's firm, whether you know it's spring or summer or fall,
and so I think that's really exciting. So all those things combined, plus you know, the passion we see in the in National links, trust and trying to do the right thing for the game, made it easy for Jim and I to say, yes.
We've seen a few of this type of project cropping up lately, and it's pretty exciting. It's also an interesting idea to work out, as I'm sure a golf course restoration specialist or just as somebody who really loves the history of golf courses and is devoted to trying to bring back the great work of the greatest architects. And so I'm curious how you figure out a project like Rock Creek where it's clear that the best solution for the facility is to move away from what the golf
course was. Well at the same time, respecting what the golf course was, how do you think that through.
If all eighteen holes were still in place and they were available, I don't think National Inkstros would have asked us to change it anyway. So I but the way the golf course has evolved or devolved made it quite easy to make that decision. And ultimately I think we're going to be able to present nine really good holes of William Flynn golf, will be able to educate golfers who William Flynn was. They'll obviously be able to see
his work. And I think that's one of the cooler things too, is that back in the day, you had the William Flynn's, you had the Donald Rosses, you had the best architects of the time doing some of their best work on public golf courses. It wasn't always the private club. It was basically, hey, this golf course is worthy of our effort and our attention, and they gave it to it. And I think that's something that really
drew Gemini to this project as well. To think if on certain level, our restoration or renovation of those Flynn holes creates a spark or an interest in somebody else's to what architecture is or what William Flint who he was, or what he meant it, then that's a win. That's
a great outcome for us. So I think having that opportunity and focusing on those nine holes versus worrying about the thought that, well, you know, we're not doing a true restoration, I think for the benefits that it's going to eat that it was an easy decision.
And there's going to be a short course element to this as well.
Yep, there is.
Could you talk a little bit about designing short courses. You've done a couple of a few of them, and they seem like they're a lot of fun to design. Are they as fun to design as it looks like?
Yeah?
They are.
I mean it's liberating, right, you're not worried about you know, somebody their shot values. You know, somebody going oh, well, you know the shot value on that par four was really not good because he didn't hit it here, or the architect asked me to do this. No, it's just put it on a peg and hit it and play. And it's so it's predicated on fun and it is that innocence and liberation. I think that comes with that.
It's the opportunity to just focus not only on how do we, you know, create the difficult test for the best golfers and how do we create an easier test.
But I think the magic sauce is if you can create something that allows the beginner to go out there and have a great experience the first time they've put a golf club in there, and yet still get a scratch golfer and his or her buddies out there going, okay, yeah, watch this, this is a fun shot and you got to hit it just right in order to you know, to stick it or to get it to play. That's
where the magic sauce is, and hopefully that translates. I think that's one of the things we did well at the Cradle was the opportunity to create something that's across the entire spectrum of golf. People are intrigued interested in playing that, and I think if we can do the same thing out here, that'll be all equally successful.
Speaking of little courses, there's one in the LA area called Maggie Hathaway that you have been brought on to do something with. I actually don't know a lot of details about this project, and so I'm really curious to hear you talk about it. What is the vision for it?
Yeah, So, Maggie Hathaway was a civil rights activist in Los Angeles. She was an African American actress in the sixties and seventies and love golf and use golf as as a really nice platform to advance her causes. And so from that standpoint, the city named this little nine hole golf course in south central LA after her. And
it is a very rudimentary nine hole course. And this is the conversation we're having Earlier, where we could have gone in and blown it up and started over again, but it became apparent to us listening to the people in the community who've utilized this and who value it and love it, that they didn't want that they wanted the routing to be the same. They wanted to step on a tee and see the hole the way they've
seen it. Maybe the green's a little bit bigger because it's where the greens are about the size of the stage. Maybe the well not. Maybe the maintenance is better, there's a little more interest, there's actually grass on the tees. But to make this place better, but keep it familiar. And so that was really the conversation we had there.
And so we've got some very i think, some pretty good ideas on how we can do that improve the overall facility, yet still make it so that that neighborhood can still utilize it and cherish it as as a vital part of their neighborhood. So the USGA Los Angeles Country Club is part of the outreach from the us OPEN decided to partner up and they've gotten pretty decent
response on the funding to do this. We've donated our time as we've done it all these projects, and you know, Game of golf has been so good to us in our family, and so it's nice to be able to give back in different ways to do that. And so when we were asked to be involved there, we thought, again, it's an easy one to put your hand up and say, yes, I want to do this.
When it comes to a project like this where you're asked to keep in place a lot of what the golf course has been but improve it a little bit. What are some of the things that you look at these specific things that can be done on a golf course that are maybe low cost or low impact, that maintain the character of the course, but improve the quality of the golf as much as possible.
Ground game. I mean, we try to really at the ground game into play and give people options and ways to bounce balls in. And you know a lot of short grass off of the tee, so if you top it, your ball's not stuck in the rough. It's kind of running and bounding and giving people the opportunity. And I'm going to say in every single hump or hollow around the green has got to kickballs to the green, but that there are some that do that, and if you're paying attention, you can hit a ball here and it's
going to go and feed that way. So in the level of precision, if you've hit a scruffy shot, it may have something that will help you and bring it back into play. But if you're playing and you're a good player, and you're just like, hey, this is gonna be fun. I'm going to aim at that little knob and watch it take a slope and go sideways. Those are things that I think really add a tremendous amount to the variety of the playability. Is just let people.
I mean, I'm sure most people in this room leveling scalf you know, the best golf is when the ball hits the ground. That's when it really starts. It's not when the ball's in the air. It's when it hits the ground. Give people the opportunities put the ball on the ground and let it do something, whether it's good, better, and but just there's that opportunity.
So we've reviewed about twenty years of municipal golf projects here. There were a couple in the early and mid two thousands, and now you've really started to take on more municipal golf projects at this point in your career. So I wonder if there's if there are any reflections that you have on how the municipal golf project world has changed over the past twenty years, and whether there's anything that excites you about what's happening in the space right now.
I think it's not only in the municipal golf space, but it's society. It's it's social media, right, It's the opportunity to get you know, hopefully nobody's taping this in here, but all of a sudden, you know, later an hour from now, somebody's like, hey, gil Han's just said this, and blah blah blah. There it is. And I think it's the opportunity to get the message out amongst like minded golfers to say, hey, you need to go check out soul Park, Hey you need to go check out
East Potomac. You need to be at these places. Really cool stuff is happening, and so I think within the golf community there's a much larger knowledge base than there would have been when Rusta Canyon was built, and so I think from that standpoint, the word gets out. I don't know that it's necessarily people care more now. I think it's cooler now, you know, it's kind of there's
a cool buzz and a vibe to this. And I think some of the things that you guys are doing, some of the stuff that John Ashworth did at Goat Hill, stuff that Tom Coin's doing up at Sullivan County. I mean, there's a buzz about these facilities, and the buzz will go away if it's not real or it's not good, But the buzz stays at places like that, and I think that's a good thing that gets people energized and excited and introduced to places where they might have never
gone before. So I think that just that information that technology from a municipal standpoint has been a very valuable tool.
Golf construction is really starting to gain some momentum, and I think that's probably an understatement, especially when it comes to your firm's work. You have a lot of projects going on. A lot of firms that establish themselves after the turn of the century as design build one project at a time, kinds of firms are now taking on
a full plate of projects. And so you know, as somebody who is committed to the craftsmanship that goes into a golf course, whether it's a municipal course or an historic country club, how do you handle this increased workload and still maintain the quality that was your reason for getting into the business in.
The first place. It's a tough one. Somebody the other days said that I must be cloned there must be three of me, And they said, you know, you're always here, there, and everywhere. So the only other person that I wonder if there's three of is Michael Strahan. And I thought that was an interesting take on it.
So the first time you've been compared to Michael Strahan.
Yes, I think yeah, I think it is. But it it's tough. I mean, it really is the dilemma that we face. You know. I know we're busy and we jokingly say we say yes to everything, or we're doing every golf course in the universe, when the truth is, and I'm not trying to boast, I mean, we say no to ninety nine percent of the stuff that comes our way. But there's enough great stuff out there that it's hard to say no to. And you want to
do these projects. You want to work on the you know, the rock creeks, you want to work on the park, you want to work on Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia, our hometown, which is when we haven't talked about. So you want
to be able to know it's okay. We want to be able to say yes to these things, but we still need to be able to work on other projects and keep our team going, and I think that was one of the I first met Ben Crenshaw in nineteen eighty eight and we talked and so, you know, what's the hardest thing about becoming a golf course architect and he said staying small and I thought, well, that's a strange thing to say. And then, you know, as the years went on, we would hear more from people saying, well,
you'll never turn down a fee. You're going to take everything. There's no way you can say no to five hundred thousand or a million or two million, whatever the fee structure is. And we've been successful at that, but it's hard. I always thought, no, it's going to be easy. We'll be able to just say no. But you look at things and then you build a team, you know. And obviously Jim Wagner has been by my side for twenty seven years now, twenty eight years, which is crazy to think.
And I've said this now, you know, you still always get the question who's the most influential person for you design wise? And I say living or dead, and you say living, and it was always Bill Core, which is the truth. Bill is an amazing friend, but he's the most amazing golf Arket. But the person who's had the biggest influence on my career and my design beliefs is Jim Wagner. Without a doubt, he's been standing right next to me for two twenty eight years and it took
me maybe twenty to figure that out. But which is my fault. But so Jim is trusted. So you know, people say, how often are you guys together? And so rarely. Maybe that's why we've been together for twenty eight years, because you know, I'll go into a project and I'll be there and then I'll leave and then Jim will come in the next day or the next week, because there's no you know, occasionally we'll be there together because we need to work through some certain things and we'll
work on routings together. But I think then we've built a team of cavemen. And so these guys are all incredibly talented, and they've been with us, you know, Neil Cameron's been with us for eighteen years. So you start to have these guys and you and one of the things that Bill and Benn are so good about is they take work to keep their guys busy. They want to make sure that those guys aren't sitting at home now. Obviously they want to make sure they're going to build
great golf courses. But you start to then, all of a sudden, build this responsibility of not only am I responsible for my professional career, Jim and I are responsible for his career and Ben and Kevin, and that we're responsible for eight shapers who are out there, And so you start to go, how do we keep this thing going but not have its spiral out of control that you lose your fingerprints. And the other part of it, too, is just it It takes a commitment on Gemini's Park
to travel. I mean we're on the road all the time, and thankfully Tracy has decided that this nomadic lifestyle works for her as well, and we rent houses and home is where it is. And somebody asked me how many nights have you slept in your own bed in PA this year? And I think it's like twenty one. And so it's a commitment to saying, okay, that's important to us to make sure that we continue to do these things. And there are sacrifices, and don't get me wrong, don't
play any fiddles or violence for me. I'm incredibly fortunate and lucky to get to do what I do at the places we get to do it, but you're still committed. I had. I won't mention his name, but it was one of the most touching things to me. It was a figure in golf who a lot of people in
this room would know. He said, you know, I just want to let you know that I have so much respect for the fact that you are where you are in this profession, but you still do the work, and that just that resonated that we're not mailing it in am I on site as much as I was a rustic canyon know that's one hundred percent the evolution of where we've gone. But I still get in a bulldozer most days. I still have a shovel and rake in my hands on most days, and that's just part of
what we do it. And so I think that that's you just have to have that commitment to what you're doing. I just turned sixty this summer. I don't know how long my back and my bones are going to take care of this, but as long as I can physically keep doing it, that's the way we're going to do it. All right.
That wraps up our evening with Gil Hans. Thank you so much to Gil, Thank you, Thanks Garrett, I've got it. This episode of the Friday Golf Podcast was produced by Matt Rusius.
Thank you, Matt.
So you may have noticed that this was episode five hundred of the Friday Golf Podcast. Now we're not exactly sure if it's actually episode five hundred. The very first episode of this podcast is sort of lost to history. We don't know where it is, and we're not sure
if we counted correctly on our way to five hundred. Obviously, we're not really big into anniversaries here, but I thought it was as good an opportunity as any to just thank everyone who listens to this podcast for doing that, for sticking with us, for having fun with us, for you know, developing these inside jokes about golf over the course of months and years. Really has been so so fun. So thank you, thank you, and we hope you'll be back with us for our next episode.