John Fields on NCAAs, the La Costa Redesign, and Coaching Spieth and Scheffler

I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

And when I find my.

Ball in a bride egg, Frida egg, the dread and Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg, Brian Egg, fridagg.

Bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Welcome to the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison and my guest today is Coach John Fields. Coach Fields is a legend in college golf. He's been the head men's golf coach at the University of Texas since nineteen ninety seven, and he's coached players like Cody Gribble, Dylan for Telly, Jordan Speith, Scottie Scheffler, Cole Hammer, the

How are you doing today, I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for having me on.

You guys have done a great job for golf in general, so I'm excited to be on with you today.

Well, thank you so much, and of course I very much appreciate you taking some time out of what is a very busy day for you because the NCAA D one Men's Golf Championships are coming up very very quickly here, So let's get right into it. What has the story of the Longhorns men's golf season been so far? How would you summarize that?

Well, it started off fairly solid in September.

We had a couple of finishes that were okay, and then we won a couple match play tournaments, the Big Twelve match Play in October, and then we actually tied Arizona State for points at Cypress Point, which is a phenomenal golf course. By the way, our kids get to play great golf courses so throughout the year, whether it's Olympia Field, Cypress Point and others, exceptional golf courses, so

We didn't get the trophy. And then we started in January and had.

A bump in the road at Hawaii and that right that was really a turning point for us. We kind of started doing things a little bit differently. Like all coaches do, you make adjustments and you try to do some things that would be protective for your team. Fortunately, some of those things kicked in and did a kind

We finished third in UH.

Late February at Las Vegas at at the Southern high Collegiate Masters, Southern Highlands being another great course that we play. And that third place was done without Christian Moss, who was simultaneously playing in the African Amateur.

And he lost it a playoff there.

So you would think, as one of our best players is not there, we wouldn't have had that third place finished, but for some reason we did, and really that kind of kick started our entire season from there. We had one bump in the road at Sea Island, or actually at the Floridian, another great golf course, but we've been

Who are going to be some of your key players this coming week in the tournament.

I would say they all are.

Whether it's Kristin Moss who won the NCAA regional. You have Brian Stark, who is a graduate transfer from Oklahoma State that has really started to play super solid. Another graduate transfer from SMU, Nathan Petronzio, has closed out the season in great fashion. And then you've got six foot nine Tommy Morrison from Dallas. Kind of an anomaly in golf still, but the athletes that are coming out, we may have more like him that size, strength and ability,

Little under one hundred and forty pounds.

I would love to be able to eat like he does and not put on any weight, but that's not possible for me. But Keaton's done a great job and he's a young person that's a great player. And right there from Austin, Texas. And then our substitute is a freshman named Jack Gilbert, just a wonderful guy that knows what his role is right now, and that's to help us anyway.

That he can.

He's doing that and couldn't be more appreciative of Jack Gilbert. He's a wonderful kid and just won our Inner Squad tournament, so he can play as well.

If you put Keaton and Tommy side by side with each other, there would be a little bit of a difference.

Well, Keaton could probably fit in one leg of his pants.

That's how Stan Keaton.

Is so beyond your own players. For the viewers at home, who are some players at this tournament that you think people should keep an eye on.

Oh gosh, You've got Gordon's Sargeant from Vanderbilt.

You've got.

Christo Lampprig from Georgia Tech. You've got Austin Greezer from North Carolina. You've got multiple players in this field that played in the Masters, and they'll be recognizable. One thing that we're doing this evening, we're having a Fred Haskins Award evening with Ben Crenshaw. Ben won the Fred Haskins Award nineteen seventy one, seventy two and seventy three. That's when it started that award. That's our Heisman Trophy of Golf. We'll have ten individuals and their coaches in that room

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, and of course the Longhorns team with Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kaide. What has been the presence of those players in your program.

Well, Texas Golf, just so you know, is ninety eight years old. It has one hundred and two victories on the PGA Tour by sixteen individuals. It has ten major championships, with six major champions we have four national championships and a multitude of regionals and conference championships over time. So there's been a lot of great players play at Texas. It certainly is not John Field. I can tell you that right now. I'm one of five coaches that have

And was the world renowned.

World Golf Hall of Famer that wrote the Little Red Book, and he was our coach from nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty one, and then George Hannen took over an unbelievable coach from sixty one to just about nineteen eighty, and he was Ben and Tom's coach in college and they won the nineteen seventy one and seventy two national championship.

In two thousand and three, our golf course was unveiled.

Since then, we've had twenty seven victories on the PGA Tour and players that have played there and five major championships. So you can tell golf has changed. In college golf, there's a lot of great facilities. But Austin, Texas, there must be something in the water, because something's happening right here.

So coach Fields, this will be the first men's NCAA Championship hosted at the refreshed Omni La Costa. You were involved in making this switch away from the former venue for this tournament, which was Greyhawk in Arizona. So could you tell me that story. Why did that all happen?

Well, there's a lot to it, not just do the short version. But in twenty sixteen, we played the National Championship in Eugene, Oregon at Eugene Country Club, Oregon's home golf course, and we lost to them in the final. Part of the reason we lost and who knows how it would come out anyway, but Bohostler, who's now on the PGA Tour, tore up his shoulder on the fifteenth toll in the semifinals and was not able to compete. He was able to finish out.

His round and win. We beat usc that particular.

Round and he was able to finish, but he was not able to go the next day, so we had to give a point to Oregon. And you only got to win three matches to win the national championships, so given a point, it's pretty difficult. But we lost to him in a playoff, but Bo won the Fred Haskins Award. What we're going to do this evening and they had us down to the Golf Channel in Orlando and they told me that viewership had been up one hundred and twenty percent over the year before because we had the

US Open this last year. So I was out there to watch the.

I was out there to watch Scotti, Scheffler and Dug Kgim playing the Walker Cup on this really refined golf course by Gil.

And I was enamored by that.

And I was talking with Jeff Shackelford, who is kind of a golf dignitary here in California and did some work for the Golf Channel.

Anyway, I told him, wouldn't it be.

Great to have a national championship in southern California where the weather's perfect and you got the East Coast time slot? And he said, yeah, but where would you do it? Because most of the golf courses are dated. There's not really a great place to host a championship like that. And the courses like a Riviera or La North, they're not going to give you their golf course for three weeks because it's not just the men, it's the women.

They loved it.

They loved the idea, and we convinced them that this could be the permanent site and the home collegiate golf going forward. So they invested thirty million dollars in the golf course with Gil Hants, with this refined new golf course that's now seven five hundred yards for men. The women played it right at sixty three hundred yards and they finished over par. So it's obviously a really good golf course as a team twelve under one individually, but

So that's how the University of Texas came to host a tournament taking place in southern California. That kind of kind of makes sense now. So when it comes to the course and the redesign that was done there, I'm not sure how much you were privy to that process, but could you give me a basic idea of how Gil went about renovating this course, what he did well.

When Gill signed up that he was going to do it, because that was a higher level meeting than coach fields, that was with the rollings. But he decided that he wanted to do it and he came up with an initial design and then we had about twenty coaches from around the nation, both men and women, walk around the golf course with him, and he kind of gave his vision, but he listened to feedback from the women's and the

It has everything to do with that. Those are the two best teams playing right now. That's all there is to it.

We won the national championship at Riviera and we're certainly not from California, So how do we do that?

If you've got home field advantage just because.

Of the fact that the you're in Sullner, California, makes no difference.

You got to play.

Yeah, I think Stanford probably would have gotten there even if they were I don't know, playing as far away from California as possible. That's that kind of team.

Yeah.

Ann Walker has done a great job. She's the women's golf coach there. Alison Brown has done a great job. She's the head rules official for women set up golf course. Flying blind and two over wins the medal for the team, twelve under wins the medal for the women individual and twenty over made the match play the elite eight teams. We didn't embarrass anybody, but you had to come to play.

So with all of this happening, obviously there has to be some amount of money involved. A lot of this takes funding. So tell me about the role that the College World Golf Championships Foundation plays in all this.

Well, thank you for asking that.

So I knew once we secured the event that most likely Omni La Costa and the University of Texas would not want to be the benevolent godparents or grandparents of

Really thrilled about that.

The PGA Tour, the PGA of America, and the LPGA, So there's a lot of entities that really focus around collegiate golf. And if you will, I would tell you that I believe that we've never been able to market ourselves just simply because the NCAA will not allow you to compete with their eighteen partners, So even on site, you can't sell sponsorship and give people the kind of

So we're going to do all those.

Things, and essentially what we're going to try to do is put rocket fuel in college golf and then give the twelve thousand kids who annually play college golf at those different levels Division one, two, three men and women, NEI men and women, Junior college men and women, Division one and two an.

Unbelievable opportunity to grow.

So I believe that college golf is kind of the center of the sun, and nobody even knows it because we've.

Never marketed ourselves.

But if you think about it, the junior golfers and high school golfers in America want to play college golf, and their parents want them to play college golf, and they want them to go to college. And so from there, out of that son comes your golf professionals, your golf instructors. You're you're agronomous, You're there's just so many of them, the ones, the guys and gals that come out and

To collegiate golf and junior golf for that matter.

And then there are those individuals that matriculatea like a Tiger Woods who played at Stanford, or an Onnica sorn Stam who played at Arizona, or a Jordan Speed or a Scottie Scheffler that rise to number one in the world. So there are those individuals as well, and all those individuals have had so much success because of college Golf, so we're hoping that they'll come back and help us

Hey, I wanted to take a quick break here to talk about some videos Friday Golf did for this week's Charles Schwab Challenge on the PGA Tour. As you probably know, the Charles Schwab Challenge takes place at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas. Now, over the past year, Gil Hans's renovated Colonial, restoring some of the features that it

First of all, gil Hans wanted to create a golf course that would be challenging for both the men's and women's teams. He also wanted to give us an opportunity to help us identify the best college golf teams in America on an annual basis and the best individual players on an annual basis. So he created length. He added a lot of different opportunities for trouble, but also a

The golf tournament.

Yeah, so the Mercedes Championship as it was not act and.

So those two holes in particular are going to be exciting. The eighteenth is going to be exciting. It's a six hundred yard part five and the seventeenth is.

A five hundred yard part four.

So this what we did want to do is we want to make sure the guys got a chance to hit drivers.

Nothing against Greyhawk. They did a great job for three years.

They overseated their golf course, They created a championship value. But the kids can only hit two or three drivers around here. Bring that driver out almost every home.

All right, Coach Fields, let's talk a little bit about your own career. After you played college golf, which you did in New Mexico, you spent a year, i believe on the European Tour, and I'm curious whether there was a particular event or anything that made you DECI I had to end your playing career and pursue another line of work in the golf industry.

Yeah.

That was financial reasons for continuing, because I couldn't continue to fund it. My wife and I were already married at that time. She was my caddie, so I saved money there.

But I did go to.

La Manga, Spain and played the tour school there and made it finished seventh. If you saw me play golf right now, you would say you're a liar. You can't play golf at all. But I haven't played in the last twenty years. But a long story short. At that time, Sebi bi Asteros, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, Jose Maria a Lot the Ball, Bernard Langer, Ian Woosnam, they were all full time on that tour. So these are some of the greatest players that have ever lived, in Masters champions

So we decided to start a family.

At that time, my wife and I got pregnant and she delivered a baby boy, and my career was pretty much over. I didn't want to be one of those golf professionals that you know, went through two or three wives and maybe wasn't the kind of family man that you could be. So I decided I'm done with playing. I'll be a golf professional teaching instructor, and so I worked really hard to.

Get my class A in the PGA.

Did that over a three year period and was a head pro at a small club in northern Arizona, Control Valley Country Club for a moment in time, and then Dwayne Knight, my coach at New Mexico, decided to leave and go to UNLV. That left the job open at New Mexico, and lo and behold, the Good Lord smiled on us, and I took that job August first of actually December first of nineteen ninety seven, eighty seven December first,

I've heard you speak before about how important Cody Gribble was to the golf program at Texas. And this is fast forwarding a little bit from nineteen ninety seven, obviously, but for people who don't know, Cody is now a veteran player on the PGA Tour and Cornferry Tour. Why was he such a key figure for you and the university.

Well, in ninety seven when I came in, we recruited extremely well. In fact, the five guys that we got were David Goss at number one junior in America, John Cloud number two junior in America, Russell Server was number seven junior in America, and Matt Rose was eleven and Kulli Bragon was top fifteen. So the golf we called them the Fab five and we went on to do

At baseball had won two times in the National championship.

So de Los Dodds, my boss, was kind of bulletproof at the time. So there was people for calling from my head because we were between fifteen and twenty five, and we weren't a terrible golf team, but we weren't the kind of golf team that we'd like to be, and so there were people calling from my head. And then Cody Gribble came along. Man's man, great young man, fantastic player. I could back up everything he talked about and was just super visible and everybody wanted to be

Or they're not. It's just one or the other. There's no in between.

And so, long story short, we were very fortunate to get these guys to be our kind of the base of our game again and that was started with Cody Gribble, and then Jordan Spif came along. After Jordan Spieth, it was Bochastler and from there Doug gim and it's just been a change since then with Kramer, Hiccock and others and Dylan for Telly and my goodness, its just it's just manifested itself. But really, my center of the sun really is uh his code Gribble.

Do you remember when you first saw Jordan Speith play call? Yeah, and what your first impressions were.

Yeah, I was on a Perry Maxwell golf course Dorna Kills.

It's it's been renovated. We actually held an event there, our company held an event there.

Terrific golf course, it really is, and Perry Maxwell is actually buried on that golf course.

But yeah, I saw Jordan.

I was a little late to the first tee, so he'd already played in the first hole.

Number one.

Number two is a part three over water and he missed it, short sighted himself, right, and then he hit this magnificent chip. He was in ninth grade at the time, hit this incredible chip shot and the ball just spun right down to the hole to about six inches, and I'm like, I want that guy on my golf Hm. That's the first time I ever saw him play.

Wow. And then, obviously, as you got to know him over the years he was in ninth grade, you said during that tournament, he was by the time he was sixteen, sort of a widely acknowledged prodigy in golf. How did you go about convincing him to go to college and specifically to go to the University of Texas.

Well, you have to be relentless in recruiting, and so we did everything could. He probably got a letter from me every day for two years. And you have to be relentless. You've gotta communicate, and we did that. But I will tell you a funny thing about Jordan, and it's apropos for Scotty because neither one of them use their phones hardly at all. Scotty's not even on any kind of social media, so neither one of them use their phone very much.

And I called up Sean Speith.

Really kind of in the middle of Jordan's junior year, and I said, is Jordan interested in Texas?

He goes, yeah, Coach, why would you ask?

And I said, well, I'll email him and I might not hear back from him for ten days, or I'll text him and I might not hear back from him for seven days. And if I call him, I really can talk to him on the phone. I said, He's just it's just really hard to communicate with him. He goes, Coach, don't worry about that. He does that to his parents. He just doesn't use his phone. And I would say Scotty's in the same boat. And what that's done, that's

Talking about Scotty Scheffler, what is something that you think people don't yet understand very well about him? Because I think in a way golf fans, golf media even are just getting to know Scotty Scheffler. Yeah, we're just starting to come to grips with who he is as a person from what you saw as his coach. What do people not yet understand about him?

Well, first of all, he's got great parents, Scott and Dienergy is absolutely wonderful and raised a wonderful son and three great daughters. They did a fantastic job, and they did it their way. Scotty Scheffler is a six foot three and a half great athlete, but he's also blessed with the opportunity to be an unbelievably great person.

So he was always those things.

At Texas, he grew significantly when I recruited him. I started recruiting him with his eighth grade he was one hundred pounds and he was five foot zero in eighth grade. When he turned up on campus five years later, he was six foot three and a half over two hundred pounds, and his little tiny hen had gone from tiny han

So he played great for US.

He was the NCAA Freshman of the Years, three time All American.

He played in two US Opens. He played he was.

A low am you're at Aaron Hills in the US Open and he played in the Walker Cup team.

And people ask me all the time, why do you play better for you? We don't understand. I'm like, guy won multiple times. What do you want? You know?

Well, they were comparing him to Jordan's me. Everybody did at the time. But now look at what's happened. I mean, everybody compares himself to Scotty Scheffler now, so everybody takes their own path. But the way he arrives he's just such a great person, cares about people. Jordan does two and that's the bottom line. They just they really enjoy people and they care about people. It's not all about them, you know.

Jordan and Scotty are both extremely well behaved individuals, polite and genuinely so right, this is not an act that they put it, Yeah, exactly, and they you know, this is who they are. I think everybody who has interacted with them acknowledges that at the same time, they are both extremely competitive, right, do you have any examples that come to mind for either of them of the extent of their competitiveness.

I mean, they're both probably have an extra gene of competitiveness, if that's possible. There's been five guys in my career, those two, Scotti Scheffler and George Jordan Speed, Tim Herron in New Mexico, Bohastler, and Cody Gribble that basically have a volcano in them. And they all had their instances where maybe something came out of their mouth that wasn't very good. But that's what College of Golf is all about.

Well, can you tell me any of those stories with the with the caveat that these are good guys. We know they're good guys and being competitive doesn't make you a bad guy at all. But you know, I'm curious about this because you know, Jordan Spieth and Scotty Scheffler both have a great and well earned image as really nice guys. But I think it's important to remember that they're as great as they are, partly because they really really want to win.

Right In twenty fifteen, when we played the regional championship at Lubbock and Texas Tech golf Course, the Roles Golf Course by Tom Doak, we were invited to play a match play event about six weeks before the regional was going to be played there, and the way they did it. We were playing Texas Tech. In the final round of that match play event. Scottish Scheffler and Bo Hostler were in the same group and they were playing each a

Work to the next ball.

So I figured, well, that's that's Scotty's ball, and of course Bo was happy because he had out driven him by fifteen yards.

So Scotty hits his shot.

We're getting ready to hit or Bo's getting ready to hit his shot, and he looks down he goes, that's not my ball, and you would have thought Mount Vesuvius had just gone off about fifteen yards behind us, because Scotty recognized at that moment that he hit the wrong ball and he had just lost a hole by hitting

He didn't check it.

Bo says to this day that that's Scotty's fault, and maybe it is, and Scotty ultimately took.

Responsibility for it. He lost the hole.

But we got to the next tea box, which was a par three, and Scotty was just so mad he couldn't see straight. And I said, bow, we are not going to go another step forward until you apologize to Scotty. And he goes, what do I got to apologize to him for? He wanted to hit the wrong ball and I'm like, well, we walked right past it. You looked at it. He goes, Coach, he hit the wrong ball and it's his fault. And I'm like, we're not going

He was so angry.

Yeah, you know, speaking of things that people might not totally understand about Scotty Scheffler right now, just from seeing him on TV. Is that, as you've mentioned a couple of times, he's a big dude. This is he's bilk foot.

Three and a half pushing six foot four and over two hundred pounds, but a delightful guy. And he's got Ted Scott on his bag, he's got Grandy Smith teaching him. He's got the most wonderful wife in the world other than Pearl Fields, and that's Meredith Scheffler.

Yeah. So, you know, you've seen a lot of players when they're young, when they're up and coming, when maybe they haven't fully formed into the players that they eventually become. Is there some thing that you see in the ones who really end up being special? Because I'm sure you see a lot of great ball strikers, a lot of great ball strikers out there. Is there something different about the players who actually kind of rise to the top at the next level.

There is, and it's called it.

That coach Daryl Royal, that was our legendary football coach who won three national championships is in the sixties and seventies called it it. And when somebody would ask that, they would say, what is it that makes someone.

So so special?

And coach Row would say he's got it, and then that person would say, well, what is it? And he would say, I don't know what it is, but he's got And what that means is is that they are just absolutely exceptional in certain things. But I think the number one qualifying thing for them is that their minds are not limited to what they might be able to do.

A lot of players are.

Capable of winning the Masters, but your mind has to say it's okay to win the Masters or the US Open and the British or the PGA. So there's probably been many many players over the years that could have done.

It but didn't do it.

The reason they didn't do it was simply because their mindset is, no, you're not that good. These guys they're that good and they believe it. And how that got there, have no idea, but they have it.

That's such an interesting observation because it's not just confidence, it's almost like believing that you're good enough or that you deserve you truly deserve something. Absolutely well, Coach Fields, thank you so much for your time. It's been a really interesting conversation and best of luck in the tournament this coming week.

Garrett, God bless you and lookolm horns. We are thrilled to be Omni La Costa. Our team is going to rise to the occasion. We're gonna have a great time and I hope you can come visitors sometimes.

Thank you, sir. This episode of the Friday Golf podcast was produced by Matt Rusius. Thank you, Matt. If you'd like to do something really quick and easy that helps Friday Golf a great deal, you can review our podcasts. As simple as that. Just go to wherever you're listening to us and leave us a rating and review. Tell us what you think about what we're doing. We would really appreciate that and it does help us reach new listeners and continue to improve what we're doing at Friday Golf.

U