I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a fried egg.
Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday, fridag Egg, fridagg bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump.
Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson. Today I'm joined by a friend of the program, a former big part of the program, former co host of this podcast, Garrett Morrison.
Hello, Garrett, Hello, how's it going Andy.
It's going great. It's going great. We're going to talk golf arct texture today. Always exciting, always fun to open up the mail bag and and kick around some big topics in golf. So we each picked four questions to bat around, so we should have a a pretty full I feel like we always have, like a big aspiration. We're gonna get through a lot. I figured if we just picked four each that it would probably fill up, fill up the pod.
Aim small, miss small exactly exactly.
And before we get to the mail bag pod big big news in the Friday Pro Shop, it's black Friday It's that time of the year. It's time to save, it's time to shop. That's the way this works, you know, load up on your holiday gear. The Friday pro Shop has a Black Friday Sale. The code is b F Sale, which gets you twenty percent off everything. As as a reminder, Friday Golf Club members, you guys get a little bit
more so if you use your normal code. It's very secretive for those that aren't members, but you know, if you use your normal fried Egg member code, you get twenty five percent off this week. The only things that aren't included in the sale at Proshop dot thefridagg dot com are our book, our new coffee table book that is going to ship pretty soon, and golf bags. So those are the only two things that are excluded. Do you have a favorite pick, Garrett from the pro Shop.
I mean, there are so many, and plus I might not be totally up to date on what we actually have in the Pro Shop in all honesty, because it changes pretty quickly. Items sell out pretty quickly, and we have a great crew led by Meg Atkins and Abby Libenthal that keep things really fresh in there. But I recently in a newsletter recommend getting a humble koozie. A not interested in fighting kuzzi, which I think could be very useful for some people because if you're using a kuzi,
you're probably drinking a beer. And if you're drinking a beer, you might be in an environment where people might want to fight, you know, because they're getting a little lubricated, and you're just telling people with this kouzzy. I'm not interested in participating in that, and I think it could could help people evade certain situations.
Yeah, I could save you, could really get you out of a jam. I like that. I got a couple of recks. I love the bet dratty they got that. We got a bunch of andy hoodies check that out, and a bunch of other dratty stuff. But then I'm a huge fan of this Friday Golf American needle hat. It's just got Friday Golf in block text on it. I'm just a big fan of it. So that that's my wreck, and really earnest reck. It's not on sale, you can't save money. I think the book's gonna be awesome.
I'd recommend the book. Check out the book. Garrett put a lot of time and energy into that book and it is. Uh. I think it's gonna be a beautiful book to have and to read through. The pictures are are spectacular, the writing's great, and I think it I think it looks really good. So I would I would recommend the book.
The book's so cool. I mean, yeah, I was. I was charged with editing a lot of the words that are in the book. But the design of it is so cool. And the photography that we have in there, mostly taken by Andy obviously you Andy, Cameron Hurdis and Matt Ruschius, is beautiful and I think the way it's displayed in the book is going to be really fun.
Yeah. Did you do you have any photos that's snuck in?
I think I must have. You know, I photographed like like Victoria Golf Club in Australia is in there, and I was the one who photographed that one, and so people, well people might be people might notice a decline in the quality. I would assume, like it's definitely not my specialty, but you know, pretty much everything looks good in golden hour light. So as long as you get good light that that sort of compensates for a lot of sins.
Yeah, so check all that out. Pro shop dot Thefrida egg dot Com. It's BF Friday, and while we're at it, I know it's not summer anymore. But Maui Nui, our friends at Maui Nui have an always summer sausage and it's the cleanest, most nutrient dense lunch meat on the planet. And it's crafted from one wild harvested access deer from Maui uh seasoned with Hawaiian red sea salt and pink peppercorn. So this tastes great, it fuels performance, does good for
the planet. And listen, it's not you know, it's not always summer, but you can always eat summer sausage. It's not a deli beat. It's a completely new way to have a sandwich. I had one of these recently. It was delicious. I recommend it honestly, like I didn't know what I was I was getting into, and it was a delightful sandwich beat, a lot healthier than your typical sandwich meats, you know those those deli meats, and like high in protein and it's super clean nutrition, unlike your
typical deli beat. So if you're interested in in uh, Mali Nui's always summer sausage. You can go to Maui Nui Venison. That's m a u I n Ui Venison v E n I s O n dot com slash egg. And when you're asked about how you heard about Maui Nui, make sure to mention this podcast because it helps support the show. So go get your always summer sausage even though it's the winner. I'll revolutionize your lunchtime sandwiches at Maui Nui Venison dot com slash egg. All right, big
thanks to Maui Nui for the support this year. Garrett. Let's get into the golf architecture discussion. Since you're the guest here, let's give you the first question. I get my influencer, Mike.
Oh my goodness. Okay, where do I start? Well, there were a lot of great questions. We each chose four, so we chose a total of eight, and so there are many we're not going to get to, but that always happens anyway, so we just did it by design this time. The first one I'd like to talk about is from Brian Decker on Frida Egg Golf Club. So we put out a call for questions within our new community forum and Frida Egg Golf Club, which has been
a lot of fun so far. Whatever you may think of message boards on the internet, this one one is is I feel like so far it's one of the good ones. But in any case, Brian asks on FUGC, the privately owned ultra premium national membership club model seems to be the most common source of quality architecture over the past few years, beyond the obvious examples like the park.
What are some other forms of developer slash ownership models that you've seen that have produced good golf and might be scalable elsewhere.
I don't think there's been a lot of diversity in the in the type of types of models. I think one that jumps to mind is the public private partnership for for public golf.
This is the.
Answer where you know a a private group ideally that has the you know, aligned intentions with a with a municipality or a county. You know one the would jump to mind as Rustic Canyon. This is an example of this, and don't you know, I don't know the exact intricacies of it, but it's a lease and you know, one of the big parts of the lease is a is
keeping the golf affordable. And what you get there is you get a ownership group of the lease that is aligned and you know, maybe it's not an ownership group, it's a leaseee that's aligned with the municipality or county where it is, Hey, we want to provide an asset for the community, and we're going to give you the key here is that give them a long lease that's
very manageable. A lot of times you see these and it's a dollar, you know, a year, you know, some structure, different ways there could be profit sharing, but anyways, it sets up a situation because the problem with so many of these you know, municipalities or public golf courses when they go to a you know, a lease model is if you give somebody a five year lease, there's no time to put capital improvements, significant capital improvements in place and recoup the money. You need to have a long
term lease. And this is where fifty seventy one hundred years is really beneficial because then all of a sudden, if you want to do a major project, let's just say, you need to do the irrigation it is it is worn out, and you also want to you know, redo the bunkers, and some greens and make some big changes with the golf course. Okay, if I put eight to ten million dollars into the golf course, I now have the opportunity to recapture that that revenue over ten fifteen years.
What the issue is when these at leases are short is you have no incentive to do that because you're just going to lose money and the person leasing the property could change who they listen to, you know. So I think that's that's probably the model that's worked the best. I think there's room for other models, we just haven't really seen it yet. I think the model I'm kind of most interested in is the idea of extremely low amenity golf.
That's new. Yeah, mom and pop golf. I'd love to see how mom and pop golf might work in the current environment. Mike Young at the Fields outside of Atlanta is a big advocate of people trying this. It's not a big profit business, but you can make a profit if you save costs and if you operate at a very you know, efficient according to a very efficient philosophy, and you might be presenting course conditions that aren't luxurious,
but they're serving a certain segment of the market. You're providing affordable golf for people, and you're not relying on the backing of a municipality to do it. So I would like to see more people try mom and pop golf because there are a lot of people out there who love golf who really would like to own a golf course and run a golf course, but are scared to do it because you know, they think that they might lose all their money, and that's a legitimate worry.
But you just have to be smart and efficient, and I think you can do it. There have been, there are a number of examples out there of people who are doing it, and you know, they're relatively rare, and not all of them are the greatest courses in the world. But I wish people weren't as scared as they seem to be to pursue this.
Well. I think some of it is such a follow the leader type situation, and I think, like I think also where people get wrapped up is they feel like if they own a golf course, they have to have the most luxurious, most talked about golf course, and often what gets propped up in golf is exclusivity, opulence and over the top features not necessarily even the golf course.
I'm not talking about the golf course features. I'm talking about the comfort stations, the clubhouses, the amenities, and sometimes what gets lost. Is one of the things I talked about this with KVV a little bit, is there's a startling lack of development across the different markets in golf. All the development right now is at the high end. Yeah, and I'm curious to see if people could make different
models work. And I understand the construction industry and materials industry has made some of that difficult.
There's also a startling lack of development in high population places, but and that's another issue having to do with land costs and a number of understandable factors. So a couple of thoughts on models. Quick thoughts. One, you mentioned the lease agreements that many municipalities have for their golf courses. Those are pretty common. But the lease ees that I'm most interested in, or that I tend to be the most interested in, are not the big companies that do
that have a lot of these management contracts. There are efficiencies within those companies, and some of thempanies are better than others, but that's kind of the usual thing. Is that a municipality is going to give the lease to a company that has a lot of other accounts and a track record, and that can work out fine, just depending on the specific people who are there. Sometimes it's not so great. Sometimes there's not a lot of heart
and soul put into those projects. But I tend to like the leases that are taken by individuals or very small businesses that want to make something of their golf courses invest in their golf courses. Those ones can have really really good results. Public private partnership you mentioned this,
There are a lot of different versions of this. There are groups in cities like Nashville that are fundraising and pulling off pretty ambitious renovation projects at municipal courses because they've gathered together a bunch of golf enthusiasts who have some money and they've decided to support their municipal courses. And that is definitely something that we saw at the park and something that we're occasionally seeing popping up in various cities across the country, but I wish it were
a little more common. And then the final one I want to mention is the possibility of a community oriented, very low cost private club I wish there were more of those. I think those are that's a feasible model, probably not as hard to work out as the mom and pop course. But if we had a greater supply of affordable private clubs, a lot of the pressures on public golf and a lot of the movement toward really high end private golf wouldn't be as worrisome.
I think you hit the nail on the head a little bit with that one. One of the reasons we don't have that as much anymore is that the demand for private golf is so high in metropolitan areas that what were the affordable options have gotten more expensive since COVID.
Yeah, everybody's everybody has really high initiation fees right now.
A fascinating study would be, it would require somebody with you know, a little bit of intel in relationships in a city, would be to compare the costs of membership between dues and initiation of clubs in a major city like New York or Chicago or LA. If you could get a full list of a good list of clubs, compare pre COVID post code and what they are, I think it would be shocking how how much the price has gone up for clubs that are that used to
be considered very affordable. Yeah, and it's really just a demand thing, I.
Mean huge in the twenty twenties. This has been a recent change.
This is just economics at work. Yeah, it's not anybody's fault. And what they've done is they've improved their club with the Capitol and they're more amenities than ever. But I think one of the things that's happened in golf is it's really I wrote about a course that I was a member of in I was probably a member from I don't know twenty thirteen or twenty fourteen through twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, probably twenty seventeen Calumet Country Club, which closed
this this past week. And you know, there's I found out after I wrote the piece that there was a lot there's a lot more going on potentially with it. You know that maybe a story to come. But but one of the things I think about is I was in my late twenties and a great woman, Lorraine Skodro, who runs tournaments for the CDGA, the Chicago District Golf Association, that I played in a lot of those. She runs ran ternaments for him. And she said, Andy, you know,
you're costing your money. You live in the city, You're costing yourself money every year that you don't join Caliumet. And I was like, what do you mean. She's like, you play all this golf, Like why wouldn't you join there? The deal's great. So I went down and I looked at it, and at the time, you know, and this was probably a harpinger for why they had financial problems and that we were in financial crisis. It was one hundred and fifty dollars a month for me to join.
Yeah, and this was, I mean, okay, twenty thirteen, still in the blast zone of the Great Recession, and still at a low point for golf, right, and so this was probably the best time in the past, I don't know, one hundred years to try to join a private golf club in terms of finances.
So I and they had a referral program which knocked it. I knocked it down. I was paying one hundred bucks a month and I had I think one hundred dollars food minimum a month. And it was an amazing deal. I I was. I played so much golf, I got so many of my friends to join, and it was a great place. And I don't think like I'm not saying that's the model. I want to be clear. I
know that that's not a real model for golf. But I think about today, where do you know, you talk about what's going on in the world and the way the costs have gone up, where does it we've seen all this growth, Where does the twenty eight year old young professional play golf, who is you know, working their ass off to just house themselves at this point if they live in a major city.
Where where does the regular forty year old dad play golf? I don't know if there are even those places right now, like middle class, middle aged people.
And it's a great it's a great situation. The game has has grown so much in terms of participation, but you've done some stuff with it with the NGNGF. It's I think we're in such a similar position to the nineties when they recommended, was it the nineties they recommended a new golf course need to be built every day?
Was that?
I know that you have you have this in your vault of oh right.
I bring it up from time to time with my friends over there at the ENNGF. I think that they learned a lesson from that prediction slash recommendation, and are more cautious now in their kind of prognostications about where the industry is going.
But golf has this huge supply issue at every level, and there's no I don't foresee any way of fixing it.
Yeah, aside from increasing the supply, which has proven to be I guess too expensive. Land costs are the big factor there. Yeah. Where I would just like to see some work done is on economy of construction and economy of maintenance. I'm not sure that really that many people are thinking about those things. People just sort of seem
to accept that right now. Golf courses cost a certain amount to build, build, and maintain, but a lot of what people think of as needs of construction and maintenance are actually once And I would like to see a perspective shift among golfers about what constitutes good conditioning. And I would like to see a perspective shift among developers about how much these projects actually cost, because I don't think that they need to cost as much as they do. So that's at least one area I'd like us to
work on. But I recognize it's a tough situation. Nobody can afford to build an affordable golf course anymore, and it's a real problem. But the current economic conditions that we have right now won't last forever. Things will shift and the golf industry will shift with it.
And if the economic conditions shift, it'll be interesting to see if golfs demand issue shifts.
Yeah, let's hope that the shift isn't disastrous. But of course, the trend in economic shifts over the past number of years has been you know, they've been a little more severe than you would want.
Yeah, all right, let's get to the next question.
We just finally Yeah, right, we're gonna even fall short. We've gotta, we've gotta, we've got to knock these knock these out here, all right.
This is a question about how we rate courses. In case anybody doesn't know, we rate courses in Friday Golf Club. If you join, you can get access to I think we're probably at like one hundred and fifty reviews at this point. With ratings. We do a zero, one, two three egg system. It's very similar to a Michelin Star system.
Yeah. I saw I saw on the app known as X recently that this would be a great idea for how to rate golf courses and somebody should do it. And I think it was our friend and colleague, Brendan Porath who put his hand up and said, actually we do that.
Yeah. So a question from Mike, I'm I'm is it?
I'm okay, I apologies.
I was told by the whole family at an event. Okay.
I haven't met him in person. He's a he's a big contributor to Friday Golf Club and a very it seems like a very nice.
Guy, great player, great player, whole family great players of their own right.
His brother is a coach, right is that his brother at the University of Iowa.
Yeah. Yeah, played played on a bunch of developmental tour like the Latin America for a while. They all, they all can get her around father, father and sons. How do you, guys, egg? I guess you know that I would say, rate.
How do you how do you? Yeah? Yeah?
Nine versus eighteen? And a follow on question from Ben Dennison is how to evaluate nine hole courses that later a different architect comes in to make up eighteen holes. This is the happen stance place, Yeah, especially on the East coast and in the in the Midwest because a lot of farm towns have only needed nine holes and the reality is they only ever needed nine holes.
Yeah, I mean any place where golf was developed before say the nineteen seventies, even this is a pretty common situation.
So it's how should we how should we think about ranking and evaluating these courses when maybe these courses would be better off staying nine holes? And what is your favorite nine hole turned eighteen hole later course in the country.
Okay, so kind of three separate questions there, how.
Do you let's just start with how do we how do we raise nine hole.
Versus eighteen Yeah, I mean we can I can you know, knock out these questions pretty well. It's uh, it is a tough issue when you rate a nine hole course and you're trying to figure out, Okay, if this is America's best nine hole course, does it have to be
three eggs? And we recently actually asked that question with a with a course profile and rating that our colleague Matt Rushis did on Culver Academies, the golf course at Culver Academies that it's an excellent Langford and Moreau course that has been beautifully restored, gradually restored, uh, you know, owing in large parts of the efforts of the of the superintendent there over Bobby Bobby Bobby Bobby, Bobby Weed
and recently Brian Schneider has made some suggestions there. So credit to credit to everybody involved.
But Michael is the superintendent who's done an incredible job.
Yeah, so the the you know, Matt gave uh Culver one of the most aggressive ratings that I think we've we've ever given. He gave Culver three eggs, and he made an argument as to why it deserved it, and I support that argument one hundred percent. I would say I try to rate courses according to what they're trying to do. If the course is trying to be a great nine hole course, then I'll rate it according to
how well it is a great nine hole course. So yes, I absolutely think that nine hole courses can get a top rating. I also think that short courses can get a top rating. And I actually gave three eggs to the short course at sand Valley, the Sandbox, because I think that that's the best par three course I've ever played. I think it's an incredible work of architecture. The Green shaping there is so good it kind of blows my
mind how good that golf course is. But a lot of people would hesitate, I think to give a short course a top rating because it doesn't contain par fours and par fives, and maybe to a lot of people it's not a completely satisfying version of.
Golf shot values?
Yeah, correct, how do you determine how do you talk about strategy, strategic design, or shot values or protection of par our favorite criterion. I'm just kidding about that obviously, how do you rate a short course? And again, my philosophy is, and I don't always like stick to this one hundred percent, but I think my basic philosophy is rate a course according to what it's trying to do, and that extends to affordable courses versus high end private courses.
If the course is trying to be a great forty dollars eighteen hole golf course, then I think that you have to approach it from a slightly different perspective than you would approach a course with a you know that's trying to be the world's greatest high end private course.
Right, Yeah, I think I think determining their I identity is such an important piece of evaluating a golf course. And I don't want to be pretentious about evaluating golf courses to a certain extent. How I think about my what I rate golf courses. A lot of it is like do I you know, and I don't want this to sound too simplistic. I think about all the you know, various things that go into a golf course, like the routing, the bunkering, the greens, the turf, the you know, all
of that. But really when it comes to putting a score on paper, I think about how much do I think about going back there and dying to go back and play it? And you know, for me, courses that I just dream about going back and playing. And this extends to places like you know, Diamond Springs, which is I believe they've they've gone from thirty five to maybe like fifty dollars now, but I dream about playing there.
You know. I don't want to give to too much away, but I was going through the event calendar with Will we have an event there this year and I said, I saw it on the calendar and I said, ooh, Will, I think I got to go to that Diamond Springs thing. And he goes well, stirring at the US Open, I go, I won't be there.
And you've already been to Michigan a million times, but you still want to go to Diamond Springs.
So for me, now we could get really uh I think the right the right word would be pedantic, right, yeah, on the different you know aspects that go into it. But at the end of the day, if I'm jumping at the opportunity to go play somewhere, to me, that that is a core part of it, whether it's nine holes, six holes, twelve holes. And I think Culver is a
great example of that. Anytime I am within you know, really, anytime I'm in Chicago and I'm thinking about going to play golf, Culver rattles around in my brain and it's three hours away. Anytime I'm in Chicago, I'm like, uh, I could go to Culver, And to me, if it's three hours away and I'm going to just drive down there, it's got a very high appeal in the in the rating. So for me, holes don't matter whatsoever. Type of golf I don't think necessarily matters. On like, I'm not going
to dock a course because it's a short course. On the egg scale. I'm going to rate it, you know, against other and I think it makes it a little bit cleaner when you do it that way, because if you're thinking about rating restaurants, you wouldn't be like, well, I like Italian food more than more than Ramen. So so all the places are tough.
Sorry Japan, you know, like.
Like an, I think these different forms of golf, and likewise, like what you brought up, you have championship courses like Shinnacock, and you have really fun golf courses that are private and well maintained, like Cape Arundle and Shinnacock. How do you rate those? They are two they have two completely different objectives.
It's apples and oranges. And that's part of why we don't really love ranking courses one, two, three, four, five, six, right, because that really forces you to say, Okay, you know what's better Cape Arundle or Shinnacock, Like, how do I come to that decision? Putting courses in buckets allows for a little bit more flexibility about how we're assessing courses, and we like to change our mode of assessment depending on what the course is trying to do.
Yeah, I've seen like all these like very intricate scoring systems, but you have to rank out of ten a million times.
No offense to anyone who does this. I know people who do this, and it looks like it's just a hobby. It's just fun. I could not be less interested in doing something like that, Like trying to mathematically work out the perfect rating system for a golf course. I just don't think. That's just not how I go about assessing a golf course.
I also think like it becomes very formulaic, and there are certain things that certain some golf courses have that's just this like special sauce to them. A good example of a course that I'm particularly enthralled with is Brambles in California. It's been a very long growing period, and you know, at different points I was kind of like, in my head, I don't know if it's ever going to get to where what they're telling me it's going to get to with the turf and I play. We played.
We had an event up there a couple weeks ago and we played and the turf was just so incredible that I am. I'm just enthralled by it. But if you looked at it from like a site standpoint and
a hole by hole. Maybe it doesn't like it's not going to just wow people off the page, But for me, as they keep getting it more and more dialed in, the next thing they have to get it done is the native It's just going up and up and up, because there's just that it has an intangible quality between the place, the turf, the architecture, the setting that all melds together that if I grated it out on point
by point, I would find a lot of distractions. And by doing that you get so specific that you almost lose the plot. And I think like this might be similar and I, I, you know, to if you're evaluating a prospect for a for a for the NFL or for the you know, NBA, and you get so I would think like grading out really in depth is kind of kind of similar to being enamored with measurables but
just ignoring on field production. And for me, how I feel about the course and oftentimes one of the best things to me is is do I just want to just keep going and playing golf? And am I sad if I can't just go play more? And that's kind of like watching somebody being like, yeah, they're they're just
great at this. And to me, a great golf course is you kind of know and I there are all these things that go into it, and you could talk in depth about the greens and the variety of the greens, the routing, but there is just that intangible nature to great golf courses that maybe if you broke it down you could nitpick on things, but they just have a special sauce.
Yeah, this is supposed to be about golf course appreciation, and when you get too deep into rating golf courses, you might lose sight of the fact that it's supposed to be about golf course appreciation. But to get to the other aspects of the question here, which we're asked by Ben Dennison.
He's a great question.
Yeah, it's a really good, really cool question. Yeah, how do you evaluate a nine hole course that later became eighteen holes? And I will say my belief is that I evaluate the course that exists now regardless of what its history would be. But I also acknowledge that, yes, a course can become word sometimes when it's expanded to eighteen holes if those eighteen holes are not as good as the original nine, even though all nine of the
original holes might still be there, still be intact. The course as a whole can decline, in my estimation if it now consists of eighteen holes, nine of which are not nearly as good as the other nine. And this is the case that a lot of courses. The one that always comes to mind for me is I haven't been to, but I've heard a great deal about Thindara
in New York. I think that's how you pronounce it, you know, great original Donald Ross nine hole course along with an additional nine that was built in the fifties or sixties that just has a completely different architectural philosophy behind it on a completely different kind of piece of land, and just as the opposite and in many ways and is really not very good, has not stood the test of time. Well, well, that original nine holes is still there and it's terrific and it's a great reason to
go play the course. But I would probably rate that original nine hole course higher than I would ever rate the full eighteen because again, you know, I'm rating the course that is in the ground. My favorite course that has gone through this kind of transformation would maybe be an obvious one, and that's Prairie Did's where the original nine by Perry Maxwell there is a masterpiece, maybe the
greatest nine hole course ever built. The additional nine by his son, Press Maxwell, built in the nineteen fifties, is missing a little something of the magic of those original nine holes by Perry Maxwell. But really are pretty good.
Really really, Press did a In fact, he did a great job considering the context in which the time period in which he was doing all this, he did a great job of matching the new holes to the old holes, to the point where you know, ninety nine point nine percent of people playing the golf course would not be able to tell that one portion of this course was built twenty or so years after the initial portion of
the course. And so I think Paridians is an example of a course that went through the nine to eighteen transition and came out.
Very nice, definitely the best example. And I sat and listened. I had a friend who who wanted to make the argument that the Press nine was better than the Perry nine. And I sat and listen.
A lot of people do make that argument. Yeah, and I don't agree with it, but I get it, okay where that comes from.
I don't think it's like insane. There are a lot of people tell me a lot of insane things. I actually might think it's a little insane, but I listened, and.
I only think it's I only kind of disregard it. I don't disregard it. I only disagree with it confidently because the I think that original nine is such a master work.
The I think what sucks about this is oftentimes I think like less golf is better just in general, the less you build, the better the result. Now I get, so I get the point of you want more utility eighteen holes in the standard, but just in general, I think more facilities, specifically public facilities would be better. Office
nine hole facilities and eighteen whole facilities. And the case of this is basically through the Midwest, all these there's so many great public golf courses that were built by Lafe for Moureau that were turned into eighteen holes that the new nine is an utter disaster, in different varying levels of disaster, to be clear, but one that jumps
to mind. There's a there's a plate place in northwest Indiana called Legacy Hills that used to be Laport country Club, the Front nine, and and it's not in great shape. The front nine is pure lang for Moreau. It's it's not well taken care of, but it's amazing the landforms everything. Uh, it's amazing. The back nine just don't even bother. Just pay the ten dollars to play the front nine. I think it's fifteen, like don't even go, don't even go
across the road, park, don't go go Coke. But then you have like other ones Marquette, people go to Gray Walls, don't skip Marquette, which is the sister course to Gray Walls in Marquette, Michigan. Uh, it's leg for Moreau nine. And I think it was Uh, I can't remember the guys. I think it was David gill Is the is the other architect he did He actually did West Bend, another length from Morose other nine as well.
Yes he did. Yeah, he was. He was a specialist, Yes, in this very particular art.
Yeah. And then another one. Another example of this is Harrison Hills, which had an additional Tim Lyddy design. Tim Lady's holes are i would say, on the offensive scale, a little bit lower than say Legacy Hills. But he you know, he messed around with some of the some of the length of Moreau holes, which is a shame he tried to match the style it. You know that.
I think you could go both ways on that one as to whether the golf course is better, you know, but I think nine hole, as you see with Culver, I think Culver is unequivocally the best nine hole golf course that I've seen. Now, I haven't seen Whitonsville. Unfortunately, Cameron has seen Whitonsville on our staff, but he hasn't seen Culver, so we we can't get the definitive. But for me is the unequivocal champ when it comes to
nine hole courses in America. And Harrison Hill's Marquette in West Bend would all be able to challenge if they were just nine holes. And you think about it, is like, yeah, the best nine hole golf course in America is a nice, nice ring.
Yeah, And if you're a nine hole course, then go after that crown as opposed to wanting to be something else. You know, something just occurred to me. I can't believe I didn't bring this up initially, but Pacific Grove is a great example of a course that evolved in the opposite direction where the initial nine holes was fine. But kind of hasn't aged well because of tree plantings and neighborhoods springing up around it and all that kind of stuff.
But then the second nine in the Dunes, designed by Jack Neville in nineteen sixty, is spectacular and has become the clearly superior nine and one that people will often play by itself and not even go across the road.
Neville's an interesting character in golf architecture.
Yeah, I think he just he just lived his life in the Monterey area, routed Bubble Beach, and then in nineteen sixty got hired by the municipality of Pacific Grove and did another really good routing he did.
He built Glenn Eagles too, and around that time he worked for the city for a number of years. I think what happened was the depression hit and he got this city job. He was, I think the superintendent of their golf courses, and then after he retired from that, he got back into building golf courses. I didn't know that that was Tom Shay, the great proprietor of a lease holder of Glenn Eagles, told me to that story.
Well, that would be interesting to know more about My impression of Jack Neville until this point was just that he was kind of like a gentleman amateur and just kind of was in the golf world.
Yeah, that's how I think the story. All right, let's take a quick break. Let's talk about our friends over at groove It. You know, everybody's looking for great gifts. One of the things I find myself always looking for great stocking stuffer. Let me tell you I got great stocking for stuffer for you. Head over to groove it brush dot com. That's groove it g r oo ve it brush dot com and use the promo code fried Egg for fifteen percent off any purchase. You might be
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All right, do we want another question, Yeah, let's go. Question from Randy Sierra from FUGC. He says, there's plenty written about naturalism and the blending of manufactured features into the natural landscape. What makes visually manufactured architecture great and what are some examples? Okay, so he's basically this question kind of challenges the common the conventional wisdom that beautiful golf features are the ones that are natural or indistinguishable
from nature. But we all know that that's not the end of the discussion, because there are manufactured looking courses that we all like. So what is it that makes a good manufactured looking course stand out from one that from one that is offensive looking.
Oh, there's a lot of varying degrees of manufactured. I'd also I'm mixed up Jack Neville and Jack Fleming. Fleming.
Oh okay, well that makes more sense to me now, yeah, yeah, Fleming is the guy. Fleming did some work. Yeah, he added the nine to or he added some holes to Sharp Park. He did a few other things. He was an associate for various architects, and.
He met Alistair mackenzie at an Irish pub. Yes, and that's how he got into the architecture world. But I just mixed that up. He built Glen Glenn Eagles I got from Jackson.
Jack Fleming didn't have anything to do with Pacific growth, but he did have a lot to do with a lot of other courses in the area.
The uh so different scales of of manufactured something that I found interesting spending time with h with the architects of Tim Jackson and David Cohn who I went to Scottsdale National with. That is an extraordinary manufactured golf course. I think that's actually probably one of the more underrated or under you know, talked about really great uh modern designs, and it's I understand why it's because nobody sees it.
Yeah, let's did you mention that it's who it's owned by, Yeah.
Bob Parsons. It's a very high cost to get hit. I don't think the.
Guy just in case people in them, you know, But the.
Guy did a great job letting these guys build it.
Those guys did an amazing job. It really is Bob did. Bob is an awesome owner because you just let those guys do their thing.
Yeah, but I mean they said they had a big budget, and obviously this goes into it. But something they told me about manufacturing golf because if you went out there, you never believe that it was just all built. But it was effectively a plot of land. We have a YouTube video all about this if you're more interested in looking at this. But it was a plot of land that was like flat graded for houses, and they moved heaven and high earth to create a really cool place
to play golf. And I'm I'm not I don't have the exact number, but they made roughly a this is just rough numbers off of memory, a sixty foot tall, six hundred yard mountain. And what I was like that that had to be here and They're like, it wasn't And I was like what, And they're like, the key to manufacturing something is to make it so big that you could never believe it's fake.
And in that kind of a Fasio principle, this is what they learned from Fasio.
Yeah, but I don't think Fasio went ever went that big, but they.
Created this maybe a couple of more modern places. But yes, you're right, and I don't think he ever did a even as far as I've seen, quite as well as as Jackson con did it there.
It's so outlandish that it works that it feels like you're playing in a natural setting. So I think that's one end of it. But then there's a more natural, less earth moving, but creating artificiality. And I think a lot of the greatest golf courses in the world are actually very artificial golf courses. Every seth Rayner golf course is extremely artificial. It's artfully done, but you know the shapes and such are are artificial.
Yeah, I mean there there are. Every golf architect since the Golden Age basically has manufactured features. Some put an effort into blending those features in and making you think that they were there previously. Others don't make as much of that effort and are willing to let some of their work stand out and show from the natural terrain. And I think both methods can yield good results. For me, the difference comes with the taste and the skill with
which manufactured features are generated. And this doesn't necessarily mean the skill of making them look natural, but just the skill of making them look interesting. Right, So, if we're talking about overtly manufactured features, features that are not trying to fool you into thinking their natural, then I really like looking at the work of Walter Travis McDonald and Rayner Langford and Moreau Pete die and then from the
current era, Brian Schneider and Jackson Kahn. I think all of those architects do an interesting job of making overtly manufactured features that don't feel just lame. And I think they do that by introducing some unexpectedness, some surprise into the shaping of these features. They are interesting to look at in and of themselves because they're not just trying
to be pretty, they're trying to be interesting. They have something about them that is maybe a little weird, maybe a little off, maybe even like a little ugly, right, They're a combination of ugly and beautiful in an interesting way.
And so I think that that is what separates those architects I mentioned, and what separates their work from from the work of like your you know, your your your Jack Nicholas's, or your Rye Jones's, or even your Tom Fazio's, because I don't think that you know, when Tom Fazio is such a skillful architect and his firm does such enormously expert work. He is one of the best at the industry at tying everything in and making everything feel
coherent aesthetically. But to me, it looks like Tom Fazio is just trying to make everything look pretty and look right, and that ends up being a little bit boring after a while. That's just just my personal reaction to it. So I prefer architects who are a little have have something about the the esthetics that is that is just slightly off kilter, and and that's to me what makes it interesting.
I think, I think you hit the nail on the head. It's an irregular irregularity when when something looks like it's just copy and pasted over and over again.
Yeah, and this is a this is a Reese Jones problem, which is a separate thing, right.
Well, yeah, a lot there are a lot of architects that yeah, yeah, it's always always easy to swerve into that lane.
But easy target easy.
It's when you get like the monotonous. It look that's very similar one after another. I like, if you're going to make stuff, make it all look different, and that's going to be a better, better result. I will say architecture has gone, like the trends of architecture has gone to much more lay of the lay of the land, even on more mundane sites. And I think a lot of the monotonous comes from masquerading when you're trying to
artificially create a site. And what happens in that situation is you hire a giant earth moving contractor and that's where you get the monotony of the the mounds that kind of just you know, flow, if that makes sense.
Mm hmm. Yeah. Well pretty much every modern every golf course that's been built right now is being reshaped from wall to wall, and some take that opportunity to do something interesting and and others don't really know what to do with that opportunity, and and so you end up with a with a site that everybody can tell is not because you can feel that it's not natural, but but it's also not doing anything interesting with it, which is can be a problem.
Here's a question for britch Headache.
I think Rich Henning, Yeah, r Henning Twitter.
When do you think the first AI golf course gets commissioned?
Oh? Boy? I mean, do you think it has already been? I don't know.
I think it would be fun to talk about what I could do and design.
Yeah, I mean, I'm I might be biased on this because I really don't like a lot of the AI shit that that we're seeing right now. I don't like what a lot of AI focused companies are are doing with the technology. But what could AI do in design? What would I like it to do in design? I think coming up with a variety of options for a routing on a certain piece of land would be an interesting use of an AI system. I would imagine that
it could give you. It could just like spit out according to certain parameters, one hundred different routings of possible routings of a golf course that would work, and that might generate some creative ideas for the architect. I think that AI could be used to look for opportunities for efficiency and economy of construction. Those could be great gains that you'd find possibly with AI. I mean, I don't know.
I wonder if like a drainage plan or irritation could actually be AI.
Some of the more technical needs of a golf course you would imagine could be done by a robot. I mean, the funny thing about new AI stuff, especially the chatbots, is that they're not very good at practical stuff, but but really convincing it creative tasks, which is, you know, kind of makes their application to golf architecture a little bit difficult to fathom. I do know that AI has already been helping architects with renderings, with responding to RFPs,
with presentations. I think that a responsible use of AI to those ends could be good in the golf architecture industry. But you know, if you're just using it to do your homework, then then that's probably not good.
Yeah.
Well, the temptation has to be has to be heavy.
Yeah, I can see you can see a lot of greens committees really going for AI generated uh wispy praise of a golf course. Uh. I think this is going to happen. It's going to have happen. I know, I'm just going to be excited to be here to watch the first few. Well, the reality with AI too is it gets better and better the more you use it and understand how to use it. But the issue is there's going to be the first one's probably going to be trash, and maybe the second one, may the third one.
And these things cost so much money that people just stop trying to use it if it doesn't, if it doesn't deliver really good results. But I do agree that AI, it's like anything, can make an architect's job a lot easier in some ways.
I would hope that it could be used to focus architects on creative tasks in some way. Yeah, right, if we if the great task of the use of AI is to figure out what can belong to the AI and what has to belong to humans than in golf architecture, I would love to see if it's going to be used. I would love to see architects figure out, Okay, what portion of this job that I have can I clear off my plate and give to this engine so that I can be more creative, be more innovative in you know,
the other areas of my discipline. And I think if it can do that, then great. But it's really hard to figure out exactly where the AI should stop and the human should start. Yeah, but that's why we.
Have to figure out, all right, what's the next?
Okay, what's next? We have got a good question from Grey Carlton, who is a young up and coming shaper. He says, lots of new builds on great Land these days. What current architects would you choose to build a great course on a dead flat site. I think we could address thisretty quickly because we kind of have gotten into some of related issues with a previous question. But what's your what's your first thought there?
Eddie? Oh? And see this is just I hate this question. This is my least favorite type of question.
Can we speak in generalities?
Yeah?
Can we say that it doesn't have to be a maximalist.
It doesn't. I think that your favorite course that you talk about on every podcast Talking Stick is Bill Koor and Prenshaw's.
It's become I've become too predictable with the talking stick talking point.
That that's a great and that's an example of really minimalist architecture on a dead flat property. I think in general, you got to have somebody that's really creative, depending up where where the site is, depending on the climate. If it's dead flat and it's sandy, I'd hire like anybody because if it's super sandy, you could move stuff around and create really uh interesting contours throughout. So you know, I'm going to totally punt here, which is not not a great answer.
I just you know, I want to see Mike DeFreeze go to town on a dead flat site.
All right, there you go. I love I love that you gave an answer. I'm punting. I'm being very political, which is podcast.
The industry has gotten to you. Andy, I think I think you just understandably resists the idea that you would name one person and not name something else. But there are many possible candidates who would do an interesting job with the dead flat site, and frankly, I think, Okay.
The reason I took an interest in this question is that a lot of the very best architects at this point have spent a lot of time working on pretty much nothing but really great sites or high potential sites, at the very least not dead flat sites, and so I think one interesting direction is to, you know, look at some of these architects who have been blessed in the land that they've gotten and try to see what they would do now with a piece of land that wasn't his west.
Yeah, I think you could go down the list of heavy hitter golf architects. I think what you'd like to do, what you'd like to have as a fan of architecture over the period of time is a wide array of varieties and sights. I really like seeing architecture on flat surfaces. To me, as a fan of architecture, it's sometimes more interesting than just the tremendous sight because the the land and does the work. But as somebody going to see stuff, I like to see flat golf courses to see the
clever solutions around what they did. Now. Am I saying these are better golf courses than getting the best site in the world. No, but it's it's it's fun and amusing often to see all of the tricks pulled out. That's to me what when you see the great architects work on dead flat uh properties, what they're doing is they're showing you all all of the things they've been thinking about for years.
Yeah, all the different Yeah.
Yeah, and sometimes if I tried to build eighteen holes of dead flat land, I'd run out of ideas, absolutely.
I mean, that's what Bill Cora was worried about it at my favorite course, Talking Stick. And the reason I talk about Talking Stick all the time is that, like, I'm very interested in the question of how an architect can be site specific on a bad site, on a supposedly bad site, what can you come up with to still be site specific when the site isn't giving you that much that would usually be considered good for golf.
And you know, people right now are very concerned about freshness in golf architecture or where it's going next, or where new ideas are going to come from. We're maybe not going to find new ideas on rolling Duneland right now. And naturalist architecture applied to such Douneland. Those are great courses, and I'd like to see as many of them built as possible, honestly, because why not, Like they're they're all it always turns out pretty nice.
You know, And they're all different because the landscapes and they different.
Yeah, every site is specific in its way. But yeah, if we're looking for something really different and really fresh, I you know, I want to see a smart site specific architect try to apply their site specific philosophy to you know, a place that you wouldn't expect to yield good golf, you know. And that doesn't mean like reconstructing the play, like just denying what the what the side is? It means looking for, Okay, what's interesting here and how
can we highlight it? And and to me, that's what that's what's so interesting about talking stick is that corn Crunch actually did that there? All right, next question?
All right, this is this is gonna be the last one. We are going to get through four each, Yeah, set out with our best intentions.
Apologies to the uh the ones left on the cutting room floor. I mean, obviously I'm gonna as I usually do, I'm going to get in the community forum and answer a bunch of questions that we didn't get to, because that's that's fun.
This is from Bob roll Tella on Twitter. Are there any architectural features or approaches that could be considered as a means of mitigating technolgical advances apart from sheer length? Surely, with all the improved ability that comes along with new tech, there might be innovations in golf course architecture to match.
Yeah, man, come on, golf course architects, keep up, keep up. This is a pretty it's a good question. This is
a pretty common complaint made by Ron Witten. I'm seeing within this question the seeds of a complaint that Ron Witten often made in the pages of Golf Digest, where he was the architecture editor, and that is that golf architects have failed to innovate along with the biggest change in the game of golf, which has been equipment technology and distance gains, and that instead of that, according to Ron Witten, they have just complained about it and said
the ball should be rolled back, we should roll back the clock. And he believed that this was a backward looking stance and not a forward looking stance, and he adbhored it. And I get that argument.
You know.
The truth is, I'm not sure that there's anything new under the sun in golf architecture when it comes to combating distance gains. And I could be wrong about this, since my job is to kind of react to golf architecture as opposed to design new courses. But I think that Pete Dye had a lot of good ideas about how to mitigate distance gains in the seventies and eighties. He was all about selective narrowness fair ways that kind of changed in their dimensions as the hole went on.
He was all about tree lines, like lots of trees, but paired with interesting angles and diagonals and shot shapes and things like that, So trees kind of getting in the way of what good players might want to do and therefore limiting the amount that they could just wallop away at the ball with their preferred shot shape. He used water hazards to thwart pure bombing, right, So water hazards would sometimes literally kind of cut off the landing zone.
And if you want to hit it three hundred and twenty yards, you're going to be in the middle of this pond. Fine, go for it, you know. And he used classic strategic angles, but he just used them kind of on a smaller and tighter scale.
Right.
That's TPC Sawgrass, that's Harbor Town. That was PGA West in its early iterations. Right, that's what he was doing with those courses that he was thinking about distance gains and how golf architecture could be used to combat it. That's how he did it. The problem with all of that is that it made extraordinarily interesting professional courses, but a lot of these innovations were not did were not good models for other courses that wanted to appeal to
average golfers. Right, those models were great for t DPC Sawgrass and Harbor Town and and PGA West, But once you start replicating them, you are going to start getting some frustration from average golfers, for whom a lot of these factors, like the trees and the narrowness, and the and the tight lines and the water hazards. You're going to start getting understandable frustration from those golfers about those kinds of features because those features tend to punish average
golfers a lot more than they punish expert golfers. So I'm not sure how much there is that golf architecture can do to stay ahead of the curve on distance gains. And that's why I think there should be a rollback.
Yeah, I was going to point out that the innovations are going to hinder playability for all.
Yeah, So that's right. I think it's almost inevitably you know.
I think if you wanted to build a golf course and you said to a designer, the only people that are going to play this golf course are high level players, I think it would look a lot different than what everybody gets. Is like, I wanted to challenge the best, but I want everybody to be able to have a good time playing. This is effectively the charge that you
know most golf courses give. And if you removed everybody's playing this, I think the golf you'd see, there's a lot of innovation to be done, there'd be a lot of crazy thoughts. It would look so much different than what we consider great golf. I you know, Zach Blair, a friend of mine who's I think, got a good golf architecture brain. We talked about this and he's like, I just put water everywhere.
Right, because that's the thing that is a strategic hazard of meaning for these guys.
If you think about the way that golfers play in the modern era, it's all risk averse strategy. What they're doing is they are trying to mitigate all risk. So if you wanted to put them in a blender, you put risk everywhere, and you put them in situations where they can't. They have no choice but to take on risk. But that would be miserable, an absolutely miserable experience for
a fifteen handicap. It's why one of the things I think would be interesting with the PGA Tour is if they tried to build a modern day, built out championship stadium golf course. I think that's an interesting idea for them to ponder, and people that go play it just understand this is you're going to shoot one hundred and ten and you're not going to have a good time, and people will line up to play it. But what the charge to the architect? What every charge to every architect?
And this is people get frustrated with the Golden age restorations and how they're not holding up to modern technology, and let's just use US opens. It's like, well, you know, this club is only hosting a US Open every ten to twenty years. And the reason they did the restoration was so that it's more enjoyable for their members to play every day. If you wanted to make really hard golf for pros, you could do that. It's totally feasible
to do. You just need a bunch of new golf courses because I don't think most people want to play what would be really challenging and hold up to modern technology. I don't think everybody would want to play it all the time. And that that's why a rollback makes sense, because it would make a lot more more golf courses, make a lot more sense for pro golf because a great example, Pebble Beach has been just completely passed by
by technology. And this is what you know. We're gonna see EUS open there every five years, and it's just like they hit wedges on probably like ten holes, eleven holes.
Wedge the only defenses you know, the narrow fairway is in the rough, which are which are sort of pathetic.
Think about it. Wedge on one, yeah, depending on when. Wedge on three.
Maybe a wedge on two maybe no, No, not seriously, I don't know that long of a hole and you can just blast it down it.
I don't think. I still it's not a wedge.
It might be like an eight iron, nine iron maybe in a couple of years.
Wedge on four, wedge on uh, you're sick. A wedge on seven, not on eight, not on nine, nine on ten. Then you got on the back and there's a wedge on fifteen sixteen.
Yeah, I mean also, I mean I think pros are hitting on wedges on holes that that you'd be stunned to see them. I mean, you know this, but that we're all stunned to see them hitting wedges on So it's not out of the question to me that a pro would hit a wedge on nine at Pebble, or hit a wedge on ten at Pebble, or hit a wedge on thirteen at Pebble like they're they're doing these things now.
But anyway, maybe this is why they should just play simulator golf, right.
This should all be the Sofi Center. Yeah, they're great. The great new uh, the great new course of the game is the endless courses of so.
We get new golf falls this year for TGL.
I know, I know, I've I've been hearing some some rumblings about the architects responsible, and I'm curious as to what's gonna.
I know, Piece is back, m Well, of course he's back.
He was the star. He was the only he was the only one who understood the assignment the last time.
Yeah, he was he was, all right, Garrett, everybody should check out your Designing Golf Podcast. Always a pleasure to break down these questions. Uh, I'll probably get in the forum answer some bat some of these around too. There's a forum now, we got a for it, we got place of bad stuff around with everybody.
It's been really fun for me. I've I've written a lot in the forum in the past couple of days and I'm really enjoying it. It might actually make me like writing again.
Yeah, I'm trying to start to love writing again too.
I know it can be hard sometimes, yeah, listen, it can be hard. But thank you for having me on the pod.
And always great all right, big thanks for p J Clark for editing producing this podcast. Go check out the pro Shop, Proshop dot the Friday dot com, and and check out our Black Friday deals. Big thanks for all the support. I hope everybody has a happy and say Thanksgiving.