Growing Grass at Sullivan County and Leveling Up a Golf Architecture Business

golf and life in general. So it was great to talk to him about his life and his life in turf. And then in the second part of this interview, we talk with Tyler Ray. So Tyler, it's been a number of years since I last talked to Tyler, and since Tyler's career has really exploded. He's gone from being a shaper and occasional solo architect to really a solo architect

that has a number of high profile jobs. So it was really great to chop it up with Tyler about growing his business as well as some of the projects that they are working on have in the hopper and you know, new build versus restoration, all sorts of stuff. So this is a jam pack podcast with a couple interviews and yeah, let's get right into it. Here is Sean Smith. But first let's take a quick break to

hear about our sponsor, Toro. For more than a century with cutting edge turf equipment and irrigation solutions, Toro has had your front nine covered and your back nine two. In fact, Toro's always had your back period. Toro is as committed to your long term success as tour pros are committed to their shot. That's down to top notch customer support from Toro and its dedicated local distributors, both of whom are passionate about delivering turf equipment and irrigation

solutions that solve real world problems. Follow at Toro Golf on Twitter and reach out to your local Toro distributor today. Now on to Sean Smith. All right, Sean, i'd love to know from your perspective where modern agronomy has gone wrong.

I was looking at old I grew up. I didn't start playing golf until like the late nineties, and I grew up watching like senior golf on the couch, like after high school, and it was I was watching some of those YouTube videos and the courses look so different.

I mean, they don't look bad from my eye at all, But just the conditions everywhere have been raised so much that I think it costs so much money to get the equipment, maintain the equipment, maintain the workforce that if there's anything that's gone wrong, it's just the scale of it all, and it's become very hard to provide golf for current people's tastes. That's maybe a little bit toned down.

that I inherited was from the late nineties. You know, it was already all of it was pushing fifteen twenty twenty five years old. It was only being maintained by the skill of like one person who also was responsible for you know, more than half the mowing out there. Parts very hard to get. And they were operating on a negative budget. Like there's no board meetings, there's no green committee to approve budgets. It's just ask for what

you need and don't ask for much. And that's that's still the reality at a lot of places.

still a lot. So it's just like priorities triage. You know, you get the greens done, you take care of the greens first and foremost. We only have nine irrigation heads. Each greens it is serviced by like a roller based sprinkler, but it's you see a lot of things you want

to do, but it's greens. And then it's getting the fairways cut and brings are very hard because it's growing faster than you can mow it, and the course looks bad until you can finally turn the corner and on on a larger crew at a you know, on a course with a bigger budget, all of those things. Just because of the number of people involved, you're able to keep mother Nature under your thumb a little bit easier

throughout the twelve months. You know, we don't work for four or five months out of the year, and hopefully that changes, but you know, that's just been a budgetary reality up until now. So it's just you have to learn to relish your victories. You know, take care of what you can take care of, do your best with everything else. You know, with hard work and repeated mowings, it does all come around. I mean, the course looks

great right now. It's middle of July. You know, we came around a few weeks ago, but things don't happen as quick at the snap of a finger. You know, bunkers don't get don't bunkers don't get raked at the same time, greens get mode at the same time, teas get mode, at the same time, fairways get mode. We

have the gracious, gracious help of Toro this year. They set us up with a greens mow or a fairway mower or a blower, a work card and just it's been a it's night and day of the difference it's caused, but it's still we have one fairway mower and there's only three people to put in those five or six seats, so things don't get done all at once, you know, at the snap of a finger.

it would be silly, you know. So my job's not normal from that standpoint. But there's a huge, huge, like intense pride that me and Chris share, especially this year, seeing the change and seeing like all the new golfers who are happy, but even more so like the old Liberty golfers who have been around the whole time and have are seeing the change and they you know, they know it's just us still, but it's like with a little bit of extra help, and it's so it's it's

a lot of pride. I love being out there, like being on a fair way mower or mowen greens are doing whatever it is out there is exactly the same as golfing to me, like being on the golf course. It's you could put me on the tee some golf I say, National Golf League's never played there and first t and hand me a fairway mower. And my golf bag. And it's a coin flip on what I might choose

that day, like what I want to do. Like it's very much, very similar feeling I get out there anything I'm doing on the golf course.

we can't water every day here. When we water, we have to water a little heavy, and if it's hot and dry, we got to do it two or three times a week. And it just sucks, Like I'd rather be golfing, But that's the time when like you can't do anything else because it's life or death.

it was crazy and we were having to water. A lot of the grass was slow to come in because that's normally when it fills in and tries to grow. So it was very obvious. Then a lot of it's just experience, and a lot of it is your course. I have nine greens, They're pretty tiny. I don't have like a ton of traffic. We don't cut at exceptionally low heights, so I have some leeway and they never get out of control in the sense that I can turn around really quick. I don't have acres of greens

out there, you know what I mean. I have less than an acre of green space. But you just, you know, you know what you're shooting for. Generally, you're trying to maintain a dry product. Dry greens mo better, they perform better, they're less disease prone. But when they start to turn colors in the high spots and the spots that you know from experience are dry, you know when you start to see the grass go from a nice vibrant green to maybe a shade of blue or gray like that.

A lot of guys are looking at footprints. You make a footprint on a hot, sunny day and it stays there and the grass just kind of stays put. That's when it's time to hit them. I don't use water meters.

a restaurant ketchup on the table. Like if you go into a nice restaurant and you ask for ketchup on the table or something, that's like coming to me and asking for a ball washer on a tee. Like there's like, I know you like ketchup, I know you like your balls clean like whatever, but that that's a bad one.

had just been getting into the game of golf. I was working at a skateboard shop. My dad always took me to the putt putt and he always took me to the driving range. So I was doing that stuff growing up. And he was a guy who played a couple times a year with the company and stuff, and we were heavily into sports, but golf wasn't our thing so much. But I was getting into it right out of high school, teaching myself to play. Got to Dayton, Ohio. My aunt lived within.

a lot of the work on the fields there. So we always did a bit of that and traveling around as a kid when we'd go to like different cities. He would take me to like Yankee Stadium, or like La we'd go to the Rose Bowl, or like Notre Dame Stadium. Wherever we're at, we'd go, even if it was like the middle of the day, nothing like we'd be at like the chain link fans trying to look in at the field and stuff. So we were into that. But I I was just getting the golf as a player.

It was the Tiger Woods era. Wanted free golf. Because I was broke. Me and my cousin were working at the bagel shop up the street from Morain. I put in an application at Moraine, thinking it was INCR. And then I went up the road and put in an application and asked them what course it was, and they said it was INCR. And I filled one out anyway. And then by the time I had gotten home, the superintendent at Moraine, Jerry Overbay, had already called and left

a message with my grandma. So one thing led to another. He hired me. I was probably twenty ish, this was ninety twenty twenty one. This was probably like ninety eight, and I started working the crew and lucky for me, Moraine had like a super open culture, at least at that point. I haven't been back in a couple of years anyway, but I could play once he knew I wasn't gonna quit after a couple of weeks, and I

was into golf. Like he got me on the course like immediately, he'd get me on the course on week you know, normal weekday afternoons. And it got to the point where, you know, I was there for seven years. The better part learned everything there, really, the learned love of golf. You know, this was pre it wasn't pre Internet, but it was like early Internet.

And yeah, back in the day, I'd tell you Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, that whole stretch and there's some competition there. I still think it holds up pretty good, but there would always be that competition and I didn't know what it was because I couldn't talk about it then like I could now, but it was definitely there was something about Morain that was like you get in like streaks with your game

or something. Have you ever have you ever been to a course in like your game you knew it wasn't on or something, or maybe you knew the course was long or something, but somehow the course conditions are just the course itself kind of like negated all that and you could either punch it around and get around or like distance didn't matter like as much as you thought it does on the card or something. Morange just has

a way of kind of negating styles of play. And I think it's because it's one of the more natural courses in that area. It's a very I mean, it's an up and down course like and it goes up and down like twice. And I don't know, I could just always if you're playing really well, it could kind of hit you around a little bit. If you weren't playing well even back in the tree days, like you weren't losing balls there when you got on those small greens. You always had a chance there, but it was really

hard to get there. And there's also like just kind of intangible things. There's like a rhythm to that course, the way like the kind of the sixteenth and the seventh green sit there next to each other, and they meet at kind of the same spot in each nine and they're kind of like weird cousins of each other. They sit in the same spot out of the land, their push ups with bunkers on each side. They come down a hill and then the next two holes do

the same thing. It's two par fives now, and there's like this cool symmetry and almost a sense of humor to the design. Every hole is very different, but there's a lot of familiarity out there. It's a very very good golf course.

Like I was a pretty serious guitar player at that time, and my friend will Cope him and I played like at bar joint and like beard like beer joints in Dayton, Ohio, and even traveled around like West Virginia and Kentucky and Pennsylvania and stuff, and we were kind of serious musicians, drank a lot, party a lot. So after Morain, you know, I was kind of my life kind of was getting more and more unsustainable and the alcohol kind of got

out of control. Ended up going back home for a little bit, ended up coming back to Morain for a little bit. The guitar and all that kind of art life eventually led me on a trip to New York. As soon as I got there, I kind of fell in love with it. That's kind of how New York City is. But like I was only going to stay there for two weeks with some friends and ended up and that's I essentially never left, you know, I kind

of picked up my things and stuff. But I between more Rain and New York City, I kind of lived a hard life and lived even a harder life my first few years in New York City before kind of getting my stuff together, and it was just alcoholism. It was just you know, selfish living and drinking too much and not listening to anybody, and one thing led to another.

started using my skill in the city in horticulture. Ended up doing at a pretty high level, like terrace gardens and green walls and all the kind of plantings that you see in like big cities. Yeah, even like like even like down to like Brownstone gardens, you know, people's backyards and stuff. But a lot of like big, big downtown Manhattan stuff, tech companies and stuff, huge green walls and terraces way up in the sky. Worked for a great company called Blondie's Treehouse in the city under an

amazing horticulturalist. Her name was Boshana bud buzz Budzick. Sorry I still have trouble spitting that whole name out. We call her bo but she was a Polish horticulturalist and she had she was in charge of all the interior plants for Blondies that they did, and I think we had like eight hundred accounts in the city. We had a crew of like twenty five thirty interior horticulture techs. And it was kind of like a crew at a

big golf course, you know. We'd have weekly meetings, not morning meetings, and like crews would go everywhere and it was a really cool job. When I left there, I was kind of doing My job ended up being when they would do a new install, I would kind of show up on the scene, check the plants, and kind of scope it out and take care of it for the first couple of weeks, see what it was going to need, what it was going to take from, like a personnel standpoint, a water standpoint to maintain it, and

kind of set up the maintenance program with both. And it was really cool. Worked at places like Google and their campus down there. We did Facebook, we did Museum of Modern Art, Big Greenwall there, World Trade Center, all those buildings. There's really exciting job, very difficult job.

especially when these buildings are going up. Everyone's trying to do everything with these buildings at the same time, from fleshing the offices out to doing the electrical and you're trying to get up there with bags of soil and live plants and bags of malt or what have you up freight elevators, and the logistics are just really frustrating. And then once you get them in there, they're beautiful projects, but the stresses that the plants are under are very unique.

It's a lot of expos The sunlight can either be non existent or almost like omnipresent. You're dealing in a huge heat island effect. So I learned a lot just about like plant physiology, what plants can take, what they can't.

Because you're you know, you're doing you know, a multimillion dollar install that's you know, a half acre of new groundcover or flowers or something, and it's ninety two degrees on the ground, and you know your plants are up there on the fiftieth floor on a south facing highly windy and they're in three inches of like soil less plant mixture. Like it's just it's really under the gun like it and a lot of like at golf courses,

really high end golf courses. Like the most stressful job on that whole property will be like the assistant superintendent's on a hot summer day, chasing around keeping greens alive, you know, under heavy play and never never getting them too wet. But that's very equivalent to that, and you

but you're trying to do it. You might have So it's like having greens spread out all over Manhattan, and one green's on the fiftieth floor down here on fourteenth Street, and then you got to go to the other one that's on the twelfth floor on you know, East seventy ninth, and you got to check two or three of these spots in a day. You gotta be taking the subway, you got it's so it's it's it's crazy. You got to argue with the freight elevator guy, or you gotta

you've lost your id or something. It's just it's always it's a whole different level of like logistics and things you don't think of that goes into it, just like little plants and offices.

where all the air conditioning and stuff. It's like the brains of the building that go through like the middle floor. It was a fourteen story building. So I would pull this cherry picker down through the hall and pull it up there early in the mornings, and these things were like sixty seventy feet in the air, and you'd go all the way up and you'd get vertigo because the thing starts rocking and stuff, and people are starting to filter in and look at you do the work. It's

like kind of part of the fun. But that stuff like that. But nothing crazy, no, No.

a public green at Bryant Park. And at times when I was either like essentially homeless or CouchSurfing, like, I would stop and play a little bit. But as I got healthy, like and I got my body back, and I got my sleep patterns back, and I had a regular job and had a bank account and all that stuff, it was like I could golf, like I was living in Queen's and everything. But we do have I mean, I was only once once we got the car in Queens. You know, I could get to Forest Park in six minutes.

We were really close to Forest Park golf course. But I worked in Manhattan, so I would play, you know, I'd go practice at Chelsea Peers. The We found some real treasures that are up and down the beaches there near the city, some great par three courses like Rhese Park and Nickerson Dunes, yep, exactly. And that was another But that's what I mean. It was like kind of that whole community that I rediscovered, putting language and thought, because you guys had kind of a head start, Like

I'm older than a lot of you guys. I'm forty five, now, But I was kind of checked out there for a little bit, and a lot of you guys in those later years, like right when I was kind of getting my shit back together, you guys were busy studying and busy researching and traveling and seeing all these golf courses and doing the historical connections and putting language to it.

So by the time I had practiced up a little bit and was kind of like, hmm, you know, I'm getting a little tired of doing this in the city, and you know I have some relevant skills. When I started getting on the computer, you guys would be the first thing that would come up. I always knew about golf club at lists now golf Club at list I can remember coming across probably and two thousand and five or six is when I started reading that, and that might have been my first kind of entree into the

real architecture stuff. But that's still a little traditional based. I mean, there's I mean, it's all of our best resource right, but like this new younger guys talking about it and kind of approaching it from a less stuffy way was just it was a It gave me a lot of optimism because I didn't want I wasn't the person who was gonna step into like a conservative, like

preppy kind of new pastime. I needed some sort of plausible denial in there, so like cool guys like you and not to like sound so cheesy about it, but just like in plain language, kind of gave me cover to get back in and like at least be enthusiastic and like at least knude know that there were some people out there different.

courses were basically we've done. This is one of the greatest, like untold stories in golf course architecture, what John van Kleek did of styles in Van Cleek. By this time he was on his own the new deal projects like the WPA projects or whatever you want to call them, that he did in New York City during those eighteen months where he did. He redid Van Cortland, he redid Split Rock, he built Cassenna, redd Forest Park, built Douglas Town,

built Reese Park. All golf courses built, constructed and like up and play like in less than two years with all this labor, and any of those golf courses are a blast to visit, but go online first and do some research. The New York City government has a really great time lapse thing like the NYC ven And now if you google that, it'll give you like a slider aerial where you can look at some twenties and thirties aerials of these golf courses and see how crazy they were.

The stuff that he built and a lot of it's still there in the ground, although it's been grasped over grown over. But they're all really really cool Golden Age golf courses, and he had a real flare around the greens. You know, they're generally smallish, but like all all of kind of the template styles are represented throughout his courses.

There's a lot of mutations of them. He just had a real fun style when he was doing these courses, and I think it was probably due to some of the speed he did it in It's just some of some of the architecture is almost kind of frivolous. It's kind of fun.

the other the more. They're both really good. They I think they were both golf courses like from the late eighteen hundreds on and just kind of permutated and that was the land that they used for the Van Cleet courses. But a lot of that, I'm trying to think of stuff that's maybe a little farther out. I didn't get to play golf on Long Island too much, as far

as I was fortunate enough getting back into golf. My first job back into golf from doing the hort of culture work was at the Creek and Locus Valley under Adam What ye.

I was living in Queens and he said, come on try it out for a little bit, see if it would be a fit. And I loved it. I spent five or six weeks. It was nice. I could leave Queens in the morning and be at the creek in forty five minutes. But if I didn't leave the creek by about two thirty three o'clock, like that drive home could go to two and a half three hours pretty easily.

So at that point I had like a you know, fourteen month fifteen month old daughter, My wife's working from home, so I kind of respectfully declined to, you know, start the spring out with them, but it gave me a big boost. And that was kind of concurrent with you guys publishing my piece on Nickerson Dunes and getting to know Garrett and talking to Garrett quite a bit through that process, and both of those things gave me a

lot of wind in my sales. So after that it was just kind of a matter of when we ended up moving out of the city to get some more space and put some projects together up here until I found this place.

and was getting Aerys Jones makeover. So I ended up helping a little bit out there for him, just kind of part time, did some work here in the clubhouse. And that was all before working at NS which is Rob Collins Place. So the whole time we were like shopping for houses up here, I had known about the project it was going to happen. I kind of checked out the old golf course it was going to be on. By that time, I had been introduced like to Rob a little bit online and we had texted a little bit,

so just going back and forth with him. Ended up having a friend who who I also met online from Knoxville. His name is Kyle. He ended up helping Rob and that crew during the construction. But I always had a kind of a pulse on that, and when it was all completed, I ended up working with Anthony the superintendent on the growing at ANSS and did that and worked there through their first season and into all through their first off season, and that was when the job here

opened up. So I did get about a year and a half in at a ness in between the city and here. So that was a really fun experience.

So they completed the course more or less late in the season, and they had kind of hydro seated a cover crop and by the time I got there the next growing season, you know, there was a winter involved and they had started the serious hydro seating of the grasses that were going to be the turf, and so I participated in kind of the end of the hydro

seating process. That golf course was in a sense kind of built to perform in a way that was a little bit different than most like clay based, soil based courses. It was never going to be sand capped or anything. You know, the greens were sand based, but Rob and Ted wanted that course to play very firm and fast. So they had that place rock hard before we idro seated it, and they got the irrigation in the ground, and the process was just there were going to be

two cuts. You have a fairway cut that's almost, you know, infinitely wide, that leeds into a native cut, and you know the the fairway cut was going to be. It was rye grass and bluegrass, real tightly moan, and all the natives were fine fescue, and we just painted those things on and really growing in a golf courses of struggles,

things don't stay put, even in soil. I know, they say it's worse than sand, but you know when you go that there were tropical storms involved, thunderstorms, you know, wipes out work that you took you hours to do, you know, just on repeat. You know, there were spots of that course that we had to rebuild, not large spots,

and through no one's fault. It's just a natural process, especially on a course as voluptuous as that, but you know, just sex that you have to just keep hammering on and the grass just gets a little bit closer and a little bit closer and a little bit closer till you finally have a surface, and then you finally see it start to knit, and then you're finally taking the mower down and it's really cool, and it's a real struggle.

It's just seed and sand and dirt and water. And the whole time you're working out of a shed because they're building your new maintenance barn and then you're moving into that and you're learning how to set up a

maintenance barn. And we didn't have a mechanic, so Anthony was learning, you know, the hard way, how to do it on his own and then teaching me how to do it just so we could keep the mowers out and stuff, you know, assembled a little crew, but eventually got up to where it needed to be really really fun process, especially on a course that's so cool and fun to look at, like every day.

and stuff. But it didn't sink in until a little bit later in the spring when it dried out a little bit and they got it mowed out, and I could kind of see what the idea of the course was. I always kind of wanted to take care of my own place, but I never really had the guts, Like it was always going to have to be a perfect situation.

And like you're talking to me like I'm a superintendent, and I am, and I I appreciate, you know, the skills that I have and everything, but there are thousands of superintendents right now doing the job at a higher level than me at their own place, and you know, they're managing people, they're managing members and everything. And this was the perfect situation because it was just the two owners.

And they asked me, when Tony and Mary decided to stay in Florida, if I could just come and mow it to keep it from going to see, you know, because they didn't think that I would want to kind of give it a go, or they didn't want to like put that on me right off the bat. But I was kind of like instantly like, if you give me Chris, which was Tony and Mary's helper, and now my guy, let's just keep it open, if you don't

mind doing one more season. You've lost this much money, you know, and maybe we can get some interested people. And they trusted me enough to do it, you know. But it was a situation where I knew I couldn't meet the expectations here. I wasn't stepping into a place

with very high expectations. And I even knew that I had the skills that I could probably you know, raise it a little bit with my experience, but I knew that I wasn't gonna have to have a lot of the stuff regular superintendent for lack of a better term, would have to. I don't have Greens committee meetings. You know. Tom coyn is on board now, But since he's been on board, he hasn't given me thirty seconds of grief.

We're both on the same page. We just wanted to look better out there, and we spend as much time as we can do in that, but it's also a really cool golf course. It was built by two guys who knew exactly what they were doing and had seen about everything. They were kind of builders for the first

wave of Golden Age builders. Lynn Rayner no relation to seth Rad He was the original head pro and superintendent at Leatherstocking Golf Course in Cooperstown, which is a Devereaux Emmett and by all accounts, essentially built that course for

you know, within for Emmet. You know, he was there the man on the ground for the development of that course and the other architect of they worked together, Lynn Rayner and then Maurice McCarthy, who did like the original layouts at Hershey, is on record in some records doing like courses like Knickerbocker. He pops up a lot of places as kind of like perhaps a builder some credits on his own. But these weren't well known guys, but

they were definitely around kind of that first wave. Lynn Rayner built five greens under Walter Travis at nearby Stanford Golf Club. So these these were guys who built our course, who definitely were in the loop back then and kind of that first Golden Age crop you know the Emmett Travis, you know, before the Rosses and before the Tillies kind of that. So we have a really cool golf course. It's just it's pretty wild land, a lot of elevation change.

They just kind of built teas and greens and worked with the land. We have twelve thirteen bunkers, depending on how you want to count out there.

organic matter that's been built up. So that's one of the bigger issues we've been tackling, and we'll continue to tackle because that's they play better than they should for that much thatch if you keep them dry. But it's not good, you know. We want to get some of that stuff out there and even them out a little bit. The grass lines have all been had all been lost.

There's a couple of fairways here that I tripled in like square footage because they had just gotten so narrow, little tiny approaches going up to the greens and flaring out. So I worked on bringing everything out. It's a neat stand of grass it's an old mix, but there's really no difference in the stand from the fairway to the

rough or anything. So I had kind of and really at the start of each season you kind of have free reiin to do grass lines and it takes to a fair cut really well if you can get on it in time. But that's kind of how I expanded the fairways and they look great now. But getting those, especially the approaches out wide so the ball can come into these greens from different angles, because that had all

been lost is just bottlenecks. And then just we took down, like we have a lot of tree work still to do. At the start of this year, we took down twenty five thirty trees, especially on our third hole, which had become kind of broken just because of the tree encroachment. It's on a hill that you need to be able to play it up so far, and you weren't able to do that. But our corridors are still nice and wide.

We don't have any like super egregious trees, you know what I mean, it's just too for it's just too forested through. We have really nice vistas that we'd like to get back. So the general stuff trees, grass lines. We have drainage that we need to work on. I don't know. If they offered to put in a brand new irrigation system for fair ways and everything, I don't think i'd do it. I think we'll stay with just greens only, even if we do get a modern system.

You just never last year we went like twenty two days in some heat without any rain, and they got pretty nasty looking, you know, but cool looking, you know,

but you don't get too much of that anymore. Like it's fun, Like where where can you go in that middle class say that forty to ninety dollars round in America where you're gonna get like burned out un irrigated fairways, like public access, there's just not There's a few Northeast, especially if you're gonna find them, you'll probably find them up here, but there's no there's no like resort for a day doing that.

So I kind of put things into overdrive. I had actually seen a post on Twitter where Tom Coin was now working with the architect Colton Craig and kind of forming a venture, you know, kind of starting the starts of a company, and I was I had never considered reaching out to Tom Coin, but I had heard a lot about Colton Craig through the podcast and some of his projects, so I just blindly reached out to Coin

on that post. I d M him on Twitter and send him an album of pictures of the course, explaining, listen, we got like, I got like five months to try to turn this thing around or it's gonna get sold. Here's the cast of characters, here's me, here's Chris, blah blah blah. And we started a dialogue. One thing leads to another. He gets to see the property, he's into it, hunky dory. He meets the owners, They're like, take it from us. You can run it for a season. So

that's what we're doing. You know, it's a simple property. I'm sitting in the clubhouse here. We have a cart barn and we have a maintenance bar and those are the only structures on the whole property. We've did a little bit of tree work. We got new equipment from Toro, so instantly this year, like the quality of cut and the mowing was better. Last year, my maintenance to mowing time was like one to one, just like turning wrenches keeping the old ones like literally, and this year it's

just much better. So the course looks better, greens are putting great. And then you know someone like Tom Coyne moves the needle so much with his connection, so you know this year silly stuff that every golf course has. You know, we have golf shirts with our logo on it.

You know. He's friends with Lee y Branski, who does the Great US Open art, and he calls them and we get Lee y Bransky to do our logo, you know, with the Propeller and the golf club because in nineteen thirty one we had a transatlantic flight take off from our eighth fairway and it's kind of a big part

of a club lore. Yeah, we got Aquatrolls who like supplies fertilizers and wedding agents who he had a relationship with, and they're kind of sponsoring me from the standpoint of helping me with our soil health and the right kind

of nutrition out there. And they approach it very much from an environmental point of view like I do, so I don't have to be too scared of like what I'm putting down or spending money on things I don't want to spend money on anyway, two three weeks ago, and these names will mean something to the superintendent's listening to us now. But I had Scott Ramsey, who people might know best Yale from Yale. Yeah, then I had

Tom Valentine, who is of the Marian superintendent lineage. His dad and his grandfather were superintendent at Marian for sixty seventy years together. And then the guys from a patrols, you know Aggie Young, We got Chris Pogi from Toro, Grassland, Toro. All these guys are like behind me now, like if I have a problem with the mower, or if I'm running out of a fung just side and bad weather's coming, it's like that which we had none of those resources earlier.

So the course, there's just obvious benefits. It's just been brought up to kind of more of a level that you would expect when you come in and pay thirty or forty dollars for a round of golf and there's just kind of a buzz. It's fun. People are coming from a lot of people are coming from the city. A lot of people are coming from Philadelphia, a lot of people are coming from Boston. We're two hours from New York, three hours from Philly, four hours from Boston, essentially,

but they're making the trip. They're staying in little hotels here. The cat skills, this little part of the cat skills is it's like Heaven. Like the hottest temperature we've had all year, We've hit eighty seven twice, like I'm sitting here today, the high temperature with sixty eight degrees. We got some of the best like fly fishing and hiking

and outdoor stuff literally in the world. This is to fly fishing, what like Long Island is to American golf, Like this is the hot spot, like so we we just hope to capitalize on it with courses like NS and hopefully the course, the new Reese Jones Course, and there's a couple other projects that I don't want to talk about too much, but there's some good golf to

have up here, and there's a little golf trail. So I would definitely like tell people who are within a hollering distance to spend a couple of days and check out all the courses here. It's really nice part of the country.

sixty eight or something like that. Like it had water everywhere, like it was like Island fairways. It was like that Ryder Cup course from.

the ground over there. And then it was a twenty seven hole facility. It's been closed for nine or ten years. They still mow the fairways and the greens, but all the resort buildings and everything have been wiped out. But it's just sitting there. They still have a crew like mowing it. You could go sell tea times there right now, but locked up. Yeah.

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local Toro distributor to schedule a demo. Now onto Tyler Ray. Tyler, it's been a little while and uh, you know since we last talked, you're you're quite quite a busy man.

Airbnb and you have five emails, three emails. Your phone's not really ringing during the day because Ron Pritchard was handling that and he was getting the calls and I I was just the guy kind of out in the road doing a lot of our work, making a lot of sight visits and we tag team that really well. But now it's the change is the twenty emails a day, the ten calls, the invoices, you know, paying five full time employees. You're really running a business, really a business man.

It's real. It's real. And so to me, like the other night, I was at Wakanda the last couple of days building greens and all the bunkers, teas and stuff there in des Moine, and I mean going to bed at like twelve thirty, you know, and then you get up at four thirty and try to sneak a work out in in the morning just to stay healthy. And so it's real, it is real.

little bit similar to mine. When I travel, I'm out on site at courses all day long and and at very early hours in the morning and late at night because of photography, and you know, you get home and it's like, oh, I still have to do all this other stuff, and it's just you know, you just kind of you get home from a trip and you know a lot of people say this with you've got young kids. I've got a young kid. A lot of people are like, well,

at least you got some sleep while you're away. It's like, well, I got less sleep than if I be home.

finding good staff? And then also you know, contractors and different things when there's you know, just in general a little bit of a labor shortage out there, what's what's that been like?

you know, the clients understand that. So it's okay. But it's hard to secure really good guys. All the best are really busy, you know, and that's like the best green finishers, the best bunker guys, the best those are operators, you know, they're just all really busy and uh and they're happy. And so when you're trying to pick and choose for certain projects, it's hard to retain really good help,

you know, really good people. And so for us, every year, we we've just like, you know, our staff, I mean, we're paying them more and more and more, and I'm starting to raise my fees. The clubs, you know, and they're kind of like, oh, okay, I get it, you know, and I'm like, well, we're just paying so much for our great guys to retain you know, top notch talent, and but no, it's hard. It's really hard, Indy. And but you know, everything's cyclical, so who knows how long

this wave is going to last. But it is good because you know, inflation every year three four percent. It's good to see people making a little more money in our industry too. It's such a hard industry. The road life, there's not it's not a long life. I mean, you see some guys do ten twelve years on the road and they're like, all right, I can't have a family, I can't have a life. I can't have a wife,

I can't have kids. I'm never home. And so it's good guys are making a little more money because then they can spend a little more time at home. So I'm seeing a lot of guys work like eight months straight, take four off, you know, or or or work for straight then take a couple, or you know, work three months, three weeks straight, take a week, things like that. But you have to be creative.

changing them and not changing them but modifying them. And you know, one was, probably when I was twenty five, was I wanted to work for two top five architects at some point and I felt like, you know, with Corn Crenshaw working a little bit with Dog, Keith Foster, Ron Pritchard, you know, I tried to work with Gil We almost had a deal for Durrau back in the day, so I almost had something going with him. But I feel like I achieved that goal, you know, working with

two top five guys or teams. And then another one was have like five top one hundred clubs by forty. That's the one I'm working on a little bit. We're lucky to sign Brookside Canton recently in Ohio.

was heading down to see it soon. But yeah, so that that's another one. And then I think, you know what else. Gosh, you know, some are personal stuff, some

are you know, relationship stuff, stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I guess business, you know, we're trying to hit different numbers and stuff like that, you know, with those top one hundred things, and I guess you know, I always categorize every year by the amount of work we do by dollars, So like last year we did thirty three million worth of projects, and the year before we did like twenty four million. In the year before we did

like eighteen million. So we're trending. And so you know, a goal was for me was to do fifty million in a year, and in twenty twenty five we have that lined up. We have like fifty five million lined up. So that's a goal. It sounds like an odd goal, but but.

But I just think of like people always say, oh, how busy, Oh, you know, how busy architects are, How busy? So I think of the top five of how busy they are, And it's a direct correlation to how much project totals are.

I love. I love it so much. I can't wait to go, like you go photo, I bring my drone on the road. I have it sitting in front of me charging because I was at Mount Lake this week in Wakanda and Ansley Club in Atlanta, and it's like I can't wait to get up there and beat everybody out there and take the shots when the sun's coming up like you do. And then I'm the last one out there, you know. But I love spending time. I'm playing my own golf course, you know, Bitterman Golf Club

in Wilmington, Delaware. And I love seeing my friends. And there's just more to life than work. And I worked from like eighteen to probably thirty three. I lived on the road in different localities. So I lived in Oregon. I lived in Charleston, I lived in Dallas, I lived in Chicago, Boston, London. I mean, I've lived in so many places that I almost became just this gypsy my friends. So my buddies would call me just like this gypsy. And so I value friendships a lot now in this

part of my life, because I just didn't. For so many years. Everything was just work and I neglected everything. I didn't have girlfriends and I have athing. I was just sobly focused on building golf and trying to build my career and making relationships and visiting and seeing everything I could. And now I'm like taking a step back. I want to enjoy watching my kids grow. So I turned down twenty seven. I was adding it up in

the last couple of weeks. It was like between twenty seven and thirty one clubs last year that we turned down, Which is cool. Okay, that's great, And I'm not I'm not saying that because I'm you'll being I'm bragging about it. It's it's answering your question of how much how much work is enough. I just looked in the mirror and said, well, if I keep taking all this work, or if I keep going after because they were just calls that said, hey,

we'd like you to interview. It's not like, you know, I had the job or something like that, but these are just interviews and you know, X, Y and Z club and you know, somewhere in Kentucky or somewhere in Boston or Florida. And but I had to say no and politely decline because it's like, you know, we want to work with, you know, a smaller nest egg. We want to have a small boutique firm. We want to be hands on, but we also want to go home

on Fridays. Like I'm in my office. It's a Friday, and it's delightful and there's dust gathering because I haven't been here enough. But I flew home yesterday from Wakanda, and it's like I'm going to be home Friday, Saturday and Sunday. This is great. I can play golf tomorrow morning. I can hang out with my family, go to the pool. And so that's to me what life is like and what life's about. It's more than golf, and it's more

than trying to get all these clubs. I don't want to be dope and have all that work and I mean he travels so much. I talked to him last week. I was in Traverse City last week and you know, we couldn't wake up for lunch because he was I think gone for like six straight days. And you know, so those guys are awesome, and Gil's killing it. These

guys are off the charts busy. But I just want to take the right amount and the select ones that I really want to work with, the special properties like Brookside, like Wakanda, like Beverly, like Mountain Lake, Brayburn, Detroit Golf, you know, and then some of these new builds that

we're doing finally, like in Charleston. You know, just special places that we're really going to enjoy going to because I care a lot about where we like where we work, and because we immerse ourselves in the scenery, you know. Like Jim Ryan Junior, our design associate. You know, we were out in Des Moines the other night and we're trying different restaurants and walking around and exploring the city. It's like, Wow, the Moins really cool. You know, I never would have experienced the Moines.

life because you don't feel like you're working. You know you're doing something that you love and you don't feel like you're working. But like sometimes you just have to take a step back and be like, wait a second, I still need a little bit of balance because you know, all the other life things help you relate in all the other situations, right, And if you if you get too down into the rabbit hole, you don't have any relation with society, right, That's the way I feel sometimes.

a lot this year. I don't know the number, but I think when I was young, I you know, walking all these courses, you'd always think about the pine valleys and like what are the greatest sets of greens in

the world. You know, you're thinking about Saint Andrew's and Augusta and they were always you know, like Chicago golf has a phenomenal set of greens putting surfaces, you know, and and so traveling around you know, World, Melbourne, stuff like that, you're always thinking about the best putting surfaces. But the problem is then when you get your chance to build greens, you're usually building them too crazy, a little too wild, because you're thinking of the best ones

you've ever seen. And I sketch, So I have like a ton of sketches of greens, and I'll sketch the high points and the lows and where water is going, and then the shape. So it's really easy when I can pull up my phone or iPad and I can pull up, you know, a green at Royal Melbourne or you know from like say more Fontaine or something like that, or door Knock, and I'll pull it up and I'll kind of look at the highs and lows and kind

of the composition of the green. But to me, what I've gotten better at I think when I was younger, you're trying to stuff too many things in one green and you're trying to shoot for the stars. And when I was younger we built, I think people were like, oh, these greens are just a little much. They're cool. When I go back and see stuff from twenty twelve, twenty ten, you know, fifteen years ago, I'm okay with them because the concepts were I've tried really hard. They're tied in

really well, they make sense. There's a bunch of flags, but it's like some of the little details are just off, and maybe there's too much going on in them. So I have gotten a lot more fine and softer and like elegant and maybe maybe easier, you know, because I worry about all the different handicappers, you know, all the different levels skilled levels playing, and I realized that golfers

are not that good, and so like Northmore. We redid Northmore last year and it just opened a couple weeks ago, and I was really proud of the most subtle greens there. Like there's one that's falling away, that's really a head scratcher that you really can't tell, but it's falling away. And then there's another one that has like the most gentle spine in it, but you'll have a putt and on the left side of the green it just wanders at the left, and on the right side of the green,

it just wanders a little right. So I've almost found like the most confounding fun greens are the ones you just don't immediately walk up to and go, oh, look at the spine there, look at that, look at that. So I've been really into subtle stuff, but trying to mike match. So like north Moore, I tried to have, you know, we try to. I always say six sixty six, so like six pretty darn interesting fun greens. But they

have to relate to the length of the hole. So shorter holes par three this or that reachable part five. If it's a long part four, I want it to be very subtle, you know, because guys are hitting in guys and gals are hitting in long irons or woods, so it's all length driven from the hole kind of determines the funnest funness meter that we put in there. But I'm really cognizant now, you know, fifteen years later of shape and greens of like less is more, let's

be a little more subtle. Everybody's maintaining them so quick these days. You know at eleven, twelve, thirteen on the stamp that you put a little bump in there and it's it's enough. And then you know, working with some really good guys and watching great green builders, I was always a fan of like one movement in a green, how it affects every pot on the green. Like there was a green at Mountain Lake that rainer, you know, obviously I think it's like number fourteen, and it had

this gentle spine in it. And they always said to me like, hey, whatever you do, just don't screw up fourteen green, you know. And it was their favorite greens the whole, all the members favorite green, and it has that gentle spine. But it affects every single pot on the green. And so I'm a big fan. Sometimes in one movement affecting everything, I think that's really cool. But yeah, and then the last thing off, I don't want to

talk too long some of these answers. I know, I can get long winded because we love talking about this.

world class Lawsonia Culver level greens. So I'm looking at those, and I'm looking at like kind of what we're building. The whole time I'm thinking while I'm building greens is Tyler, don't get too crazy. We want to blend want. I want you to play one to eighteen in Wakanda and not be able to pick a Tyler a greenow. I want them to blend in. So here's the only problem. Though, this is a nineteen twenty one early Langford before Monroe Moreau,

kind of before they were really cooking. He met Moreau in like nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty when he was when Theodore Moreau was working for the American Park Builders, and so this was an early Langford. He really didn't start really knocking it out of the ballpark till like twenty five. So Conda has like the best land in America for a golf course. I mean, it's absolutely, I'm so in love with it. It's so crazy and bowl and the

holder off the charts. But the Langford architecture wasn't like his peak yet, you know, his like high point. So it wasn't the Lawsonia you know, like nineteen twenty nine, thirty, the Culver, really great stuff that we see, Kanka Kilks, those three I think are the top three in his repertoire.

So I'm I don't want to pull greens from those clubs and then have like eighteen off the charts, like mind blowing Langford greens because I don't think it would fit with what he built in twenty one and what's there. So see how like it gets, So it gets so hard to like make judgment calls on some of this stuff. So I'm sitting on like the second green yesterday, I'm like, ah, this is a little over the top. I got to tone this down a little. It's got to blend in

with the landscape. It's got to make sense for this course. So I was being a little more muted.

greens work, I mean you just don't want outliers. You don't want Tyler ray greens to so many courses where you see three or four greens that were blown up in the eighties or nineties and they don't fit at all. It's like what were the architects looking at? You know, it's like you got three moonscape or four green scape.

of decisions. It doesn't scare you. But then B is kind of there's been four or five blown up or six, and you have to somehow blend them and then do the green expansions thoughtfully. And that's the wakanda that I'm in B. And then C is like, oh they've all been blown up. You can do whatever you want. So like Northmore, they were all blown up, Tyler Rae could rebuild them all and I kind of could go with my own theme and I wasn't held to some standard same thing like at Detroit Golf. I just go off

a zoom with them. And we finished the master plan and everything we've met with the PGA tour and we're working with them on that, and the rocket mortgage was so great. With Ricky winning this year, I was so happy about that. But their greens were all rebuilt by Art Hills in nineteen eighty eight, and they're failing, you know, drainage all that. They're thirty some years old now and they were early kind of takes on USGA greens, so they're getting ready to fail. And so we're going to

rebuild them. And guess what I get to redo all eighteen or twenty because I'm doing the putting green and chipping, so twenty greens and I get to do my take on Ross. So it's liberating. It's very liberating.

have much juice and the greens. You know, it doesn't have the topographical interest of its neighbors like Oakland Hills or Franklin Hills, you know, you know, even Barton Hills, which I know you've worked at, really stunning piece of ground there, but you know, the greens just like they you know, It's like I've always watched it and was like these just I would expect a little bit more

going on here given how flat everything else is. And that makes a ton of sense, especially when you go to like Canton Brookside, which has wild ground and wild greens. I mean that might be his his most extreme golf course out there right.

that truthfully. I didn't know of the job. I didn't know if it would ever come to fruition.

don't have an ego. Sometimes I've worked with a lot of people who have big egos and it's like you tell them you'd like show them something, and they just ignore you. And I never wanted to be that person. So Jim Ryan actually came up with like an alternative routing on our Charleston Charleston job, and I was like, Tyler, don't have a big ego. Let's just go look this out. Let's see if it works. And it ended up being

absolutely off the charts routing. So most of the routing on like my third new build is going to be from one of my associates. But it was so good I couldn't say no, you know, but so he's got like probably eleven or twelve hole corridors there and then eight of seven or eight of mine. But it works so well. But you know, I guess where we were going with this was, you know, new builds and all that. Yeah, I mean, so it's just so hard to get them, I mean, all secured and they're so expensive. Land is

so hard to find these days, and good land. I mean you can find flat land kind of anywhere in Florida, like they're doing everybody's flying. They're just going inland a little bit from Hope Sound and everything, but into.

It's unbelievable. And I don't mean hot temperature.

is new builds are really tough. And I've said it before, maybe even on that the prior podcast we did way back when you know, they suck the life out of you because they take eighteen months to two years, and I mean it's there's so much open dirt and and so we first started talking to Charleston clients back gosh August last year or September, so it's almost been a year already, and then we're planning the break ground in October and then it'll be another year of construction, so

it won't open to probably November twenty four. So there's that two year timeline. Even longer than that, you know, from kind of first talk to fruition, you know, playing hit and hitting the first t shot. But there's so much work involved. There's somebody layers of it. I love them,

I really do, because it's liberating. I can't wait. I just cannot wait to showcase like what a Tyler Ray I don't know golf courses, but kind of like my style and like all the things that have influenced me, the more Fontaines, the trips that I've taken, you know, the Valderrama stuff, the all the stuff from New Zealand and Australia, and all the all the stuff out west, you know, the L A. C. C. And the bel Airs and the you know, the cool stuff you see

in California where you are. And so I just can't wait to show, you know, like super fun bold par threes. And then like I have, I've had ideas forever on part five because everybody talks about part fives how they're so hard to make meaningful, and I've had ideas cooked up on part fives my whole life, and I can't weight. Like I know, there's going to be some absolute stunners. I mean, it's impossible to make eighteen incredible golf holes, you know, even Pine Valley. I mean, it's just so hard.

I just don't want to have a duzz out there, but I want eighteen really good golf holes where it's hard to discern what's the best hole. But anyway, but I want to you know, new builds are super liberating, They're very fun, a lot of freedom. I mean I'm picking the bunker style, I'm picking the green style, and picking grasses, soil, I mean everything. You know, this ownership has given me really a lot of carte blanche. And

then on spir Ring that was another new build. And then I call Northmore a new build because we rerouted the property. I mean there's nothing that looks anything similar. We raised parts of the golf course eight feet. We cut two five acre ponds, so it's like a Tyler Ray golf course now. I mean there was no ross left. When people say, oh, you took a ross course and you know, yaday, and it's like there was nothing left. And so North Moore was probably our first new build.

Inspiring now Charleston, so you know inspiring it's different than Charleston. Charleston is going to be super private. You know, they're going to overseed and be like a winter club. It's gonna be the first private club built in Charleston, I think since Bull's Bay. You know, there's like a six year waitlist everywhere in Charleston for golf. Where's spir Ring on Long Island Port Jefferson North North part of the island fifty miles out from the city.

lot of money to do everything right. You know. It's like a little gated community, beautiful pool like almost like Cape Cod style housing with the beautiful like cedar shake, you know, siding and all that, and so at least it looks really good. And then the golf is just big fairways, big gnarly like corn crenchall style rugged punkers, and then big fun greens, not like Augusta so much,

but I wanted them. I wanted you to have like twenty different flagsticks on each green, so it was it was different every time he played it, so that one's just not going to look anything like Charleston ironically, you know, so that one's more like public. I wanted to get people through it. Not many hazards, there's one or two bunkers a hole, but super fun. Like everybody that I've talked to, it's just like the fun factor, you know, really fun greens, fun shots. The land is really cool.

But we just wanted people to come back, like repeatedly, and Long Island there's so much hard golf, like you just mentioned, you know, Saint George's and you know all those clubs out there. It's hard, you know, it's really hard golf.

Mountain in that project. Obviously a crazy place. I mean, as the name would suggest, Lookout Mountain, it's in it's on the Georgia Tennessee border, and uh it is. It was Seth Rainer. I I mean, there are a million courses that claim this. I feel like the Seth Rainer's last course. I believe he died during construction, and it is, you know, at the time of its build, I believe it was the second or the most expensive course being built. It was it in Yale, so too, you know rainer

golf courses there. So this golf course, as the name would sugges, is a Rainer on a mountain, on a freaking mountain. It is is a wild place, you know, despite I think it was you know, I always when I had gone there, I was like, God, this place could be so good with a with a brush up, because you could you could see what it could be. But you know it had gotten some good work that had gotten it from one era to you know where it was where it was a really good golf course.

And then you know, you guys just finished that project. I believe you paired with Kyle Frantz there to to to create that that project. And if you were going to just you know, give a short description of what Lookout Mountain is, now, what is it?

have a plan, a rainer plan. A seth rainer plant is like the rarest of the rare you find them. With Donald Ross at the time, telling asked Okay, great, Perry Maxwell Rainer. It's like we have a little bit of a plane at Mountain Lake, and I think there's two or three four others. I mean, there's not much that survived. So we had the full plan with every single bunker green shape, even the green templates, like eighteen was the maiden you know, we knew sixteen was a short.

We knew seventeen was the double plateau. I mean, we knew the punch bowls knew, we knew what every template pretty much worked. Funny funny thing is, though the club on the scorecard had six of them wrong, just because you know, it's hard. People don't have no people aren't as crazy about this stuff as we are. But so we worked with Doug Stein, the Green past Green chairman and everything, and he's like one of my favorite guys in the world.

little bit. But Andy, it is so bold, it's I can't wait. It's fully grown in now. The greens are off the charts. I just can't wait. I hope people don't think it's too crazy, you know, but it's because it's the land is so insane. But I truly believe it's gonna be right there with the Yale Chicago Golf Fishers. Is the best, the best that Rainer has to offer. And I think it's only going to get better with age. You know, it's slowly going to get better every year,

like four or five years from now. I think people are going to go visit and go, okay, you know, like this is, you know, a masterpiece. And we spent so much time down there. I personally shaped eighteen out of nineteen greens down there. There was one I didn't get on because my son was being born last August seventeenth, and so that week I didn't get on the fifth green, but I got on all the others and with the dozer shaping and finishing, and so we put our heart

and soul in there. And we had Ben Warren and I can't say enough about Ben Warren Artists in Golf, that's his company, but he works a lot in Japan and he's worked for Gil and Doak. I think he did for corn Crunchhall. He built the one out there north of Meadow Clubs Brambles. He built brambles with them. And he's my age and we got along like De's and carrots. I love the guy. So he's from North Barrack, Scotland, and one of the most talented shapers I've ever seen

in my life. We'd go out to dinner every night, we'd hang out, we'd talk about everything, and I couldn't have done it. And you know the same with Kyle. You know, Kyle obviously super talented. You know, has worked for everybody and does a lot of great work on his own. And so we teamed up because we felt like we were just so busy in both of our careers that if we could team up for a couple of jobs, maybe we can they could be masterpieces, you know. And I said this probably a couple of months ago.

I think looking back on my career, I think in twenty years I might look back and lookout mountain and same with Kyle, We're probably going to be like, I don't think we could do any better. You know, it might be the best work even then. So but Kyle, yeah, he was. He's great, such a knowledgeable guy. I mean

he put his heart and soul into it. And Ben Warren, and then we had a really great shaper, Eduardo Rojas who shaped with Kyle a lot, and rich lebar Like he did all the bunker work for Andrew Green at Oak Hill stuff like that. So he was no joke. So we had a fricking crew US four pretty much, and it was like every day you'd build a green, you do this and we'd all come look at it

and and just meeting of the mines. But Ben Warren, I'm telling you, like he built the Redan because he grew up in North Berk so he built the Dan. He worked on the Barritz you know some of those the ones that are so good. I think it's the best radan in the world now, you know, right there with National Golf Links and then a real one at North Bari.

that's Louisville Air Kentucky. Like that's how far you can see from there. So anyway, but to round off on that too to finish up. You know, Doug Stein, I think the really cool part about this is he calls it a completion, So it's not a restoration or a renovation.

It's a completion because SETH. Rayner died during construction, and then they ran out of money, and then they had a hurricane that came up from Florida and everything the Panhandle and then just sat on Lookout Mountain and washed everything off of the golf course they had just top soiled and spragged it in twenty I want to say, I want to say twenty six was when that happened, or early twenty seven, because Rayner died in January twenty sixth.

He did the plans in twenty five, and you know, so they had like a horrific ten inch rainstorm washed everything away, and they ran into so much rock, Like we had two rock cammers going the entire time, and I'm talking Andy like the biggest excavator you've ever seen. Yeah, we had two of them going the entire time, just rock hammering. And so I think they never built the fairy bunkers because of the rock and the granite, and they just built the fill pads and then some of

the bunkers around the greens. So he calls it a completion because the plan was never completed because of the money and the rain event and all that, and so Doug Stein's got a great take on it. It's really cool and anyway, but that's Lookout. I try to be as humble as possible, but it's hard to be humble about Lookout because we're so proud of that one. We really are.

called Charleston and a couple others. And when you see untouched Rainer, like at Fisher's Saint Louis, Chicago short acres, there are there's not one square or rectangular corner and any bunker on any aerial that you'll ever find. And then when you look at the Lookout Mountain masterplan from Rainer in twenty five, there's not one square bunker. They have beautiful shapes and round it they look like submarines.

And so if you look at any historical data Fishers, Yale, any of this stuff, there's been this weird misconception by guys. They get to Rainer courses and they don't travel enough, they don't go see everything, and they just look on the interweb and they go, oh, that's Rainer, and it's very depressing. It bugs me more than you would ever imagine any because it's so it's like lazy, so lazy, it's so lazy.

I'm not sure you can see his growth, and now like a Metori, there aren't square bunkers and weird corners like that. I think he nailed it. And so all the kudos in the world because that dude he really shed the light on it and if you go to a Black Creek there, which where Doug Stein, you know, is the man down at Black Creek just two or three miles from Lookout Mountain Club. I mean, there are some unbelievable holes by Brian Silva. It was a Brian

Silva original and it's phenomenal. There are some great holes. The punch bowl there outs punch bowls like maybe the best there is and some of his takes on that on those on those holes are phenomenal. So yeah, all the kudos in the world of Brian you know, Gil is gil gets it. He gets Seth Rayner. You know, you see his work. I can't wait to see Yale, but you see his work at Fishers and stuff like that.

And Kyle understood that too. Kyle friends and I we both agreed and we totally understood where we had to go with that.

flew into Emmonsville, Indiana. Each way it's a couple of hours, but I want to see Victoria National two and I stopped in to see them, and that one maybe the best Fasio. But French Lick, I mean, it's just like it's early Ross too. It's nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen, Like for how bold he built the greens and the bunkering. It looks like a rainer course because it's so bold.

But Pete Die, I always like, before Pete passed, I wanted to ask him he knew who built that for Ross the constructor, and I never heard the name, and I wish I that was If I had one question for Pete Die before he died. You're like Pete who built French like for Ross because it it it influenced Pete Dye. That's how awesome it is. So that when Andy's number one, probably number two would be what has shocked me, like kind of like you know, definitely on

the Langford. When I've been on this Langford kick, I'm always I'm always shocked. Where you'll find a Langford or Moreau and there will be like two greens remaining that are just like mind boggling, you know, like like if sixteen holes of duds and then like two of the most incredible greens you've ever seen. There's a course called ozaki Yea in Wisconsin is just south of I think it's right around Milwaukee Country Club and all that, that whole district just north of Milwaukee.

kid out there. I was laughing, I was giggling. I was out there all by myself, like four pm to dark, maybe a month and a half ago. It was like the best day of the year because I couldn't believe it was identical to Wakanda in the sense that like there's six world class greens out there. Great it's like great Land, but then there's like six that almost don't look like Langford holes, like somebody totally blew up, you know,

somebody came into the eighties and like re routed. But the stuff that's sitting there, there's a fourth I think it's the fourteenth hole. It's a par three up the hill. It's the best part three that I've seen. It has so much complexity in the green and these big rolls and these big valleys. It's like Number two at Culver but better you know, Number two cover kind of the

radan that blew my socks away. Because somebody asked me recently, like Oh, where would you want to work if somebody calls you, you know, in the next couple of years. And I was thinking, like, man, I could really I could really have some fun in Ozaki, Like we could crush it there and like it would be like the number one course other than maybe Lasonia or Sand Valley and stuff in or Milwaukee in Wisconsin. We could bring it up to the stratosphere. And the funniest thing is

the other one. The third one is right up the road at Sheboygan Country clubine Hills.

I was like, where is this? Where's this guy called me from? Is it like pine Hills in Texas? Is it pine Hills in California? So anyway, so the funny thing, so long story short, I go up there and I'm walking around with the committee and I'm like, oh, one's good, Oh yeah, two's good, Wow, three is cool? Man four is great. I mean we got through like ten holes and I'm like, why am I here? This place is so good. You don't even mean me. Agen need to cut down some trees.

there are very few. Like you walk out to Pine Pine Hills is just insane.

come to mind. It's can't Kicky Elk's big run, and then you Spring Valley, which is technically in Wisconsin, but forty five minutes from the.

but yeah, that place, that place is amazing. There's you know, the the opportunity for great public golf in Chicago exists, but Unfortunately it is so far away from having great public golf. So sorry to end it on a diary. But a real quick, quick.

It's got some of those like holes that you could take and just put on National Golf links or Shinnakok and be like, oh, this is just one of the holes, like the twelfth hole out there, you know that finishing stretches amazing. But then it's got like that cool. I was at ten, the like kind of like sidewinding short part four that with the like punch bowl green at that right on the on the road like it is. Yeah, it's like so funky and cool, so I would put

that in there. Let's see, let me think about what else I've seen recently. I well, this is just going to be a New Jersey thing, because I mean New Jersey golf in general is amazing. But I couldn't believe how good Essex County was in New Jersey right like they're gonna do this Gillhands renovation. I kind of was like, Oh, we're going to see it before it gets renovated, and I was like, God, this isn't like very far off from being like really really good, you.

And it was just this like you know, Wednesday of the Open Championship, I had been at Saint Andrews all day and got on it and we're racing against the dark. But the the routing out there is just it's just a magical journey, you know, the way you stay that the whole I think just in general, the whole in the any course that starts in town and you venture away from town and you have like this this journey out just like it. You know, North Barrick has it.

St Andrews, the Old Course has it. Eely has it. There's just something so special about leaving town and then coming back like that. It just sets such a it makes the round a a trip right and and that's just such a beautiful thing. But with like eee the

way you bounce back and forth. I thought from the ocean versus like, you know, staying, like getting out there right away and like blasting it early, or you know, like the way it jogs between it, you know, gives you looks, takes you away, brings you back and then you think it's over like that. That one, to me, that's the one, you know, it's funny. I saw North Barrack, I saw Mirfield, I saw the I played the Old

Course the Tuesday after the Open. I think about all those courses a lot, but the one that I want to get back to the most is probably Ely in North Barrack. Those are the two that I really want to And it's not fair to the Old Course because I spent an entire week walking around the Old Course and then I played it right like so, I you know, I've walked around that one probably ten times at this point in my life versus Ely. It was just this one.

We finished in the dark. It was pitch black and it was just like, God, I just want to get back there.

out there. I'm taking the drone with me everywhere, so I people are going to see a lot more Beverly and Northmoor, Wakanda, not Lake, you know, look out, Charleston, spy Ring, Detroit so Brave Barn.

so I can I can say that. I guess I shot it a little bit of footage, but Cameron threw together and it's a video interview with Tom talking about routing bally Neil. It's really good. Right on top of that, one big announcement, we have a member guest coming to CLUBTFE we're going to be doing more events for members and clubtf and the coming probably next year, we'll we'll have more but you know, more opportunities for CLUBTFE members to play some cool places. We're doing a member guest.

It'll be in northern California. It's in October, end of October, so if you want to be a part of that. The best way to get involved with those events are through CLUBTFE. You can sign up at the Frida egg dot com slash membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and it's really the best way to support what we do here. So thank you guys, and we will be back next week with some new episodes of the Frida Egg Podcast.