Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today we have golf course architect Mike Davrees on the podcast. We did an earlier episode a couple of years ago with Mike. Since then, I've played all of his North American golf courses, so I felt like it was time to talk to him since I've seen all his work here and hopefully I'll go to see Cape Wickham sometime soon. But Mike has designed some really good golf courses across in North America. If you're in the Michigan area, there
is a tremendous Mike Divrees golf trip. He's got three courses in the Grand Rapids area, He's got Gray Walls and obviously then Kingsley Club up in Traverse City. Gray Walls is up in the Upper Peninsula. So we talked to Mike about about those projects, what else is going on in his life? And uh, without further ado, here is Mike Direes.
I miss the 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 ag egg fried egg egg egg bright egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run off the Well, I'll ask you my favorite, you know, my favorite test question. What's what's your favorite fruit?
Oh, let's see, it's interesting. Uh probably blueberries.
Blueberries, Yeah, I haven't ever gotten that.
Respond either, Well, it's either that or maybe black raspberries.
Black raspberries. I've never even seen a black raspberry.
It's like a red raspberry with black or really really dark purple.
People probably confuse them for blackberries all the time.
Uh yeah, yeah, so and kind of similar with they grow in clusters a lot easier to like pick. So when you're a kid and you're forced to go out and like pick fruit with your you know, with your mom in the summer because she's gonna make jam, which is not a bad thing, but you know, as a kid, you want to be doing something else. Well, when there's black raspberries, you can grab a handful at once. It's a lot better eating and a lot better war material when you're you know, there with your brother.
I imagine life is a black raspberry is uh is frustrating because they're always confused.
Probably, yes, very underrated.
That's that I haven't I haven't even heard of a black raspery. I'm gonna have to do some investigator. So you you've built I guess everybody likes to talk about municipal and public golf and affordable public golf, and I don't know if there's a living architect that's built more affordable and compelling public golf with your work here in Michigan. And I just I'm just curious that you know, you've
you've built Kingsley Club. Also you've built Cape Wickham and you know, world class golf courses and gray walls obviously I think falls in the same bucket. Is there anything that you go about differently when you're building course like say Diamond Springs from Kingsley.
Well, certainly, I mean you've got to consider getting people around and if it's going to be public play and there's a certain amount of play going on, you've got to be cognizant of, you know, the flow of that golf course, making sure that there aren't some you know, unusual bottlenecks and things like that. And you can't always predict that. You know, everybody has this formula. You know, you have to start out and you can't have a
par three in the first three holes and stuff. Well, there's a lot of great golf courses that blow that out of the door. So that's maybe not necessarily the best golf course, and is you know what's your priority and how you're doing that. So I think for me it's still everything has to be interesting and compelling.
That's the first thing. The golf has got to be really good.
I mean, you could, you know, make something super cheap, you know, inexpensive to maintain, inexpensive to play, gets people around all the time. But if it's not interesting or there's no intrigue at all and the golfer's part, not many people are going to play it, so then that's a failure. So you still have to keep For me,
you still have to make it interesting. You have to do things that are really really good from a golf standpoint, and that's that's number one, And then you've got to figure out how to fit that other stuff in.
Yeah, that was something that I was really We did Will Knights, who worked for the Frida Egg and I did the the Grand Rapids Trio of your courses in that area. I mean we were we were exhausted going to Diamond Springs. It was our last stop on the way back to Chicago, and I mean we both like just were all of a sudden infused with energy by the work there. It's one of the courses that's made one of the biggest impacts on me since I started this, because of not only the way it's the design of it,
but the way it was presented. But something I was enthralled by was the work you did on the flat property that you kind of kick the golf course off on and you know, you have those beautiful ravines that you kind of held from people for the longest time, and you get through eight and then all of a sudden,
there's this unbelievable reveal. But those holes won through eight on this flat land was almost just as you know, compelling, if not more than the holes that play along that ravine, which is absolutely stunning and reminded me a ton of short acres.
Yeah.
So, well, first of all, Chris Schuemaker, he deserves a lot of credit because it was his project. And after we had worked at Pilgrim's Run together and he was the superintendent there and kind of the coordinator for all the owners, you know guys that worked for the owner stuff, he ended up, you know, finding this other project and wanting to do this and he sort of you know, evolved into him you know, wanting to co design and
stuff like that. So he deserves a lot of credit because he was the guy that built it.
You know, every day. I wasn't there every day, and.
So so a lot of the concept, like, for instance, because he's a superintendent, he's focused in trying to figure out how to maintain this golf course and do it on a on a you know, a really tight budget, and to make it simple to maintain but still make it interesting. So the idea of having two cuts of grass basically three quarters of an inch bluegrass wall the wall and then bent grass greens you know, was his
and how to carry that kind of stepped out. So uh that was something that you know that we worked with. And you know, you have to figure out, Okay, here's this big, wide playing space and the average golfer you hit it anywhere, find his ball really quickly, take it, you know, hit it, move it up, advance and whatever. The really good player has to figure out exactly where he wants to be to try and attack the hole, you know, or what's you know what that strategy is.
So still you know, building in multiple levels of interest or playability or decision making I think is you know, that's what makes compelling golf, and that's what makes it more compelling for more people. So the thing that's really cool about Diamond Springs properties, you have all these eskers going across the property and basically an east west direction, and the clubhouse sits sort of on one of those. So you've got one T, the base of two green, three T.
Ten T.
You know, all these things sort of feature off of one of those, and then they play over and around another one. So by utilizing those in different ways as as T spots, green locations, six greens on one of them, as a as a hazard to you know, drive over like like on eight.
Yeah.
So all of that works to be really pretty simple, but in the same breath, it is complex because you're trying to figure out how to best utilize that.
So that's the fun.
That's a fun part of trying to figure out the routing and how things best fit together. But it also makes for you know, compelling simple golf. Yeah.
You know, I I couldn't help when I was when we were playing it that I you know, I was like, holy cow, Like the whole time I'm walking around the golf course, thinking about, man, this this place, if you gave it a a country high end country club budget, would be absolutely incredible. But then as I thought more and more about it, I became, you know, the way it's presented and maintained is absolutely perfect for you know,
providing affordable and great golf. And the more I thought about it, I was like, this is actually doing This is the best iteration of itself in a way because everybody can go experience it for less than fifty bucks, which on you know, when you're looking at best values in the country, that's one of them. And I think obviously Chris, the way he maintains it is incredible, and
I think some people misunderstand. They go there and they're expecting the shortcut, but it plays so perfectly, and you know, the single row irrigation, the native there was essentially I'm just dropping a fusive praise, but the native there was what every country club wishes it had its native played like. And I just I think that place is one of the you know, the best public golf courses in America for a lot of reasons, you know, and it's really
enthralling golf course. So something there you know, and I've seen a lot of your golf courses. I really love the the greens that you you there are a lot of compelling greens in the idea you have a lot of golf courses is playing away from the pin to hit it close. Talk about that idea and how tough it is to get you know, kind of buy in on that from like the commercial golfer.
Well, I think it's.
You know, if that's the buy in from the commercial golfer or someone who's going out to play, they may be they're maybe just confused when they fire at the pen and all of a sudden the ball moves away because they didn't you know, they didn't know or they you know, hadn't really experienced something like that. But I think multiple plays, you know, over and over, they start to understand that, Okay, there's a different way to do it.
There's a different option, or there's a different opportunity on how to play golf. So that's how golf is in the UK, right. So you know, when you're playing links golf, one of those one of the things there is just you're trying to figure out how to get as close to the hole as possible and that's going to vary depending on the speed of the ground, you know, the
time of year that it is and what's happening. So getting the ball there, whenever you watch any old scotsman, getting the ball to the hole isn't necessarily, you know, a one dimensional shot. It's three dimensional. It's first of all, where you hit the ball, how hard the ground is when it hits, and then what it does on the ground after that. So there's all these different factors that
are involved in that. And we can still do that even with our americanized maintenance, you know, sort of expectation level. But I think what we've got to do is, you know, people just have to be exposed to that, and they have to like, you know, don't think of it as tricked up, think of it as Okay, I've got to think about what's the best way for me to get
the ball close to the whole. So when you can do that, and when you can emphasize something like that or give people ways of doing that, they just have to experience it. You know, the experience at one time it's like okay, the second time they get a little bit more. The third time, you want their sort of golf IQ or their experience level to sort of expand every time they play.
That's the success to like, you know, the great courses.
That's why Marian's fascinating endlessly. You know all the great courses, Pine Valley, Crystal Downs where I grew up, you know, Royal Melbourne, the Old Course or whatever. Every time it's different, there's something you learn. That's why it's great golf. How can we bring a small part of that just to you know, to regular, you know, everyday public public golf.
Yeah, the uh, what you were just talking about made me think about that passage in the beginning of The Links Robert Hunter's book where he talks about playing I can't remember the guy's name he played with, the old, you know, gritty player that knew all the ways to get the ball close to the hole. And you would, you know, you'd think you were going to beat him in a match, and he'd just hit this ridiculous shot
that rolls his way in there. I guess, you know, one of the things with with golf, I feel like the world of golf is people are trying to see everything and they're not, you know, and especially sometimes the way golf courses are are rated in rankings. Is most of these people have only played them one time and and they're missing out on you know, that learning process. Does that, you know, frustrate you at all?
Ever, well, you want him to play your courses more, obviously, that's just the way that that's that's the nature of the beast though, I guess because some of these places are Cape Wickham's a destination and as remote as it is for someone in the US, it's not remote for someone in Australia because it's a forty minute flight from Melbourne.
So you know, if you think.
About that way, you got four or five six million golfers there or you know people and a lot of golfers, so they have a golf culture there. Same thing with Sydney, you know, which is a little further away, but there's a lot of you know, pretty easy access for people doing that. So now for the international traveler that goes and you know, it's a one off deal, they're going to make one trip to Australia to play golf kind of in their life. Maybe yeah, maybe they're only going
to play it at one time. They're going to want to play it maybe more, you know, maybe they're going to go there. That's why I always try and tell people too. It's like, you know, try and spend a night there, get you know, because it changes day to
day too. The weather changes day to day. Going to have a blowy day and you can have like a mildly blowy day, but if you're there for two days or three days, you're going to get all different kinds of sort of fields of the golf course just because the weather and the weather changed from the morning to the afternoon easily just depends on how it is. And
that's kind of the nature of links golf. You know, squalls come through the ocean has its own sort of deal and that that helps, and that makes it even more variable and more fun.
Talk about a little bit, you know, designing with it. Do you do you when you're laying out a golf course or do you keep that weather in mind with wind and stuff when you're you know, putting together you know you're routing.
Yeah, well, first of all, you have trent, you have you know what's the predominant wind. So okay, it's a westerly or southwesterly, and you know it blows hard and you know X amount of time or whatever you know, some places are different than others, so you're always trying
to think about that variable. But in reality, weather changes so so here in Michigan because primarily because of Lake Michigan and the fact, and you know what kind of impact that has on our weather because most of the stuff comes from the west or the southwest, and in the summertime, probably sixty percent of the weather comes from the wind comes from the south to the southwest kind
of pushing that way. But when you get to the fall or the springtime, you know, it'll turn around and it comes out of the north and northwest and pushes hard that way. So that's maybe a third of the time, you know, off season. So you have to think about
those those general sort of guidelines. And that's as relevant as something that's right right on the coast, you know, like Crystal Downs versus something that's that's inland, maybe only twelve fifteen miles at Kingsley, or something that's even more interior, like the courses in Grand Rapids, which are you know, sixty miles away from the coast.
The routing process is interesting and what you know, one of the courses there in Grand Rapids, the mind obviously it was a situation where you had a lot of obstacles to deal with road power lines.
In a way?
Do you feel like those how do you work around big constraints like that? And do you feel like sometimes that it yields you know, they're the famous line of constraint yels creativity. Do you feel like it something you learned something working at at sites that are a little bit tougher to route right off the bat?
Well, well, you're're constantly learning, so yeah, and constraints do they come in different in different ways? So big, huge power you know lines, I mean the big, the big.
Things, not just like a regular and you know, at the.
Minds we're thinking, oh, you know visually that's so you know, such as scar on the landscape. But for a while you sort of become immune to that. It's like, hey, yeah, they're just there, you know, and you kind of deal with it. So is that like looking at the Southern Ocean or you know the bass strade It No, it's not the same thing, right, but but those you know, you just figure out that, Okay, I've got to work around those, and that's like a no, you know, no zone.
I mean, we could have put holes underneath those lines and connected the sections of the property a little bit better because there's kind of four sections, three for the main golf course and then there's another another section down near the range for a future part three hopefully. But those are things that you know, I talked with the owner about, you know, hey, do we want to have that,
and he's like, no, because we don't. Really that's our land, but we don't really totally control it because the right of way and they have to have access and stuff, so we didn't we didn't utilize that part of the property. You know, we just pass under it, which is kind of a problem because you sort of go from one section and then you you know, have this big long walk or cart ride and then you go to another
section that you got to come back through. So that's not perfect, it's not ideal, but you just you try and figure out a way to do that and then utilize those sorts of things to maybe give you a different, different feel or different section. It's kind of you know, it's an interesting start because you're on one side of the road going this tunnel over and you play four holes,
four part fours, you know, back and forth. They're parallel but the land is moving and changing and doing all this stuff, and then you got across the road again. So it's kind of disjointed, but at the same token it works. And having four part fours to start works also, just from the stan that they're all really different and they have different sort of things that you have to deal with. So the first holes, you know, sort of semi blind t shot, but then you have this kind
of cool downhill. You know, look at the green that sits across this this gully, no no bunkers. Second holes like kind of a big up and over Part three, the third holes like a really difficult green to hit, maybe too hard, and the fourth is like this short driveable Part four, you know, with a pretty good sized green but like a big valley in front of it,
so a lot of guys can drive the green. But you know, it's a compelling kind of second shot too, where you have a half wedge in your hand and you're hitting up hill and you.
Know, semi blind if you're down below.
It, absolutely it's ale.
Yeah, So that opening stretch really makes you go wow, And I mean that that's another great affordable golf course. It's funny. I had a buddy who really got the golf bug this summer. He's not, you know, a beginning, beginning golfer, not like a you know somebody that's and he was he works in Grand Rapids, you know, he had his headquarter there, but he lives in Chicago. So he goes up to Grand Rapids a ton and he was telling me, oh, I'm playing in this court. I'm like, hey,
you should go check out the mines. And next time I saw him, he's like, that place is unbelievable. And he's like, and it's only like ten bucks more than the place I was playing, And it was just it was just a cool moment to have, you know, where he doesn't know why he likes the minds more than the other course he was playing, but he knows there's something different about it. And I think that's one of
the neat things with architecture. Even if people can't articulate it, a lot of times they can they can under they understand it at a at a you know, a core level when they see something different.
So and he's a real beginning golfer, I mean just kind of started playing, you know, picking the game up, which is cool, which is neat to hear that. You know, Wow, I don't really understand why I like this, but this is more compelling, you know. And maybe it's because of the lands, because there are some cool landscapes and some wild stuff there. But at the same token, you know, ten bucks is ten bucks, right, So if he's just trying to learn the game, that's cool that he's turned
on by something like that. I mean, to me, that's like a super high compliment. That's that's fun to see that happen.
Yeah, it's funny. He like, you know, I must have told him that Midsummer because he was like, I've played the mines like fifteen times. When next time I saw him, I was like, well you should try. He's like that one's a little too far away. But it's uh, you know, the it is an interest from my perspective too, I love you know, because you you listen to him talk about it, and it's a different perspective than I would have, you know, but it is uh, you know, ringing endorsement,
and that's what you're kind of looking for. So with growing up at Crystal Downs and having seen a lot of your work and now seeing a lot of Maxwell's work, it's it's very evident that you the influence that Perry Maxwell had on your on your like just talking about the first four holes that at the mines, it reminds me a lot of some of Maxwell's holes and how they kind of drape over the land and the blindness of the first shot and the way and then obviously
when you look at the greens, I'd love you know, you consulted for years at Mackenzie's course Metal Club, and then you grew up working grounds at Perry Maxwell, at Perry Maxwell Mackenzie's Crystal Downs. Can you contrast the difference between the mackenzie courses that Maxwell was, you know, essentially the construction foreman and those with Hunter.
Yeah, So the.
It's a really well, it's a it's a small subset. It's really Crystal Downs and the University of Michigan golf course where Maxwell was really more involved. I mean, he may have done some other stuff, but that was that was sort of the major impact. So the bunkering style is a little bit different, the use of like you know, donut holes, which you see and it's like some other Maxwell stuff, you know, in donut bunkers you see that. So that's a little bit different as far as how
they do that stuff. I think he also, you know, he he's known for his severe greens and stuff that he did when he did renovation work. You know, he built heavily contoured greens. And you know, we weren't talking about stimping at X Y or Z and things like that. But the things that's interesting about that also is that we talk about speed a lot, and we assigned this
STEMP meter reading to him. We're just capable of of manicuring grass to you know, such a fine fine margin of error that that's really different than it was eighty or one hundred years ago. But downhill down green on one of those old greens was super fast. It was thirteen or fifteen on the stimpmeter and going uphill was like three. So there was there was a lot more variability. You had to kind of figure that kind of stuff
out too. That's local knowledge. That's like knowing where to miss on the green because if I'm going downhill, I have no chance, right so I think and Metal Club being the first thing that they did in America that Mackenzie did in America, and that was kind of hitt the beginning of his evolution with Robert Hunter. You know, I think mackenzie was in you know, he was around more. He was more involved with the stuff in California because he was nearby than say it, you know, the stuff
here in Michigan with with Maxwell. So Maxwell, maybe you know, he's executing or carrying out certain things with less direction or less direct injection maybe from from McKenzie.
But I think.
Robert Hunter also had you know, less experience, you know, he wasn't Maxwell was already doing stuff, so he was already involved and he was sort of already dabbling in it, and that's how he got it, got involved with with with Alister, and the Hunter's deal was, you know, it was more of this sideline and stuff like that. So I don't know, I don't know enough about Robert Hunter and how directly you know, he was implementing or or
you know, personally like executing certain things. So that's a little bit different, whereas like Maxwell was the guy on the ground every day. He came to Michigan for three summers. The first year in twenty nine they built the Front nine. Then the crash hit, and then it took a couple you know, a couple more summers to build it just because of lack of labor funds.
It sent me.
It's a miracle that got it done. Now, there's also a rumor that, you know, he had a girlfriend up here because he was widowed, so so you know, maybe that was the incentive to come back for a couple more years. It's hard to say.
And there's a similar story with tilling Hass in Minneapolis, Like why tilling Hass got to Minneapolis a few times, it is because he had either a mistress or a girlfriend there. I don't remember the exact story, but I never.
I never heard about that about Tilly. Yeah.
So, but that's why there's a few courses in Minneapolis that are telling Hals or Minnesota in general, because he had, you know, somebody that he was going to visit there all the time. Talk a little bit about of U of MS. Course I got to see that this summer and can it what's there now? And in some stuff that stands out in terms of of of what it could be.
Uh well, again, it's a phenomenal set of greens, really really good greens. They're all a little bit smaller than well, with exception of ten, but ten's expanded in an section where it wasn't. So they're all a little bit smaller than they were originally, and some significantly smaller than they were. So they've lost a lot of that green and and
hopefully we're going to be able to restore that. I did the plan in twenty eleven or twelve or something like that, and we need a donor, so anybody that's a big UFM fan and wants to donate. It seems like donors want to put their name on buildings, not necessarily, you know, for the golf course, So we need that and hopefully that's going to happen and it's going to be committed. But the greens are really exceptional. The ground is also a really interesting.
Piece of lants.
Yeah, this high point in the middle of the property, sort of low at the clubhouse where it's at, and then low at other portions where it goes down and then goes back up. So the thing that Mackenzie always did was that he worked around those landforms and he built things valley clubs like one of the best examples of that, one of the greatest routings here. You play one and two, you cross the road and then on that stretch of three through eleven. You've got two knobs,
and like each knob effects four or five holes. You know, it's an amazing structure with how that works. Three greens at the base of a hill, four t's on that hill, five passes by that hill, seven green comes back to the base of that hill. Eight his tees off from one hill to the next hill, and then ten comes by and finishes on that afterwards too, So that one hill has three greens around and three sets of teas. I mean, it's amazing. It's just one little simple knob
and everything else is kind of flat. So and he did a lot of that at the University of Michigan two where he came off of this central spine. So the tenth hole goes up the greens up there, seventy
eighteen T, seventeen green, six green. Just on the other side eleven greens, So all of these things, those are all within one little section, and then off of the spine kind of draped down from that, you still have four T, three green, eight green at ninety So it's pretty impressive how you know you work off of that. It's it's a simple basics, I mean, just trying to do that and figuring out how to do that. But
he did that better than most people. And Maxwell did a great job of, you know, of executing and doing that.
What are some examples of your own work where you've taken that type of principle of you know, repeatedly using a feature that you liked on one of your sites.
Well, Kingsley's a pretty good example of that, because like when you lead out and you go to to get to that South forty which is like holes two through seven T, that area there, you know, is really strong in itself and trying to figure out how that worked best, but to get to that that spine that's two green or two T six T. But then that goes across and goes further further to the east and that's you know two green, four green, three and three and five
combination T and stuff. So how that sort of thing fits in and sort of divides the front nine you know from the first hole and then the south forty and the split coming down. So those types of things recurring and going to that that stuff's really important. Same thing kind of that that we think about diamond springs, where you use these eskers to like feed off of and play onto those particular things. So one goes out, two comes back greens at the base of that escer
right near the clubhouse, which is a nice return. You know, if you have a private club and you know you just got to play a couple more holes or you're just going out, you know, it's nice to have little return routes that somehow fit back and come back to
the clubhouse. It's a public golf so not maybe the same thing, but then the third t is right on that or the tenth d so you could literally play one too and then just skip to ten if you wanted to, you know, not play three through you know eight or whatever, or three through seven, because kind of ten, you could play down ten and you could play eight, you could go. I mean, there's different ways of doing that. So places that have different multiple routings where you can
do certain things. I think that's you know, that's a complexity that you can add in or you can figure Out's like we were talking about with Mark the old course at Marquette earlier today, in that the original nine holes there is intermixed with the with the holes that
were added in the mid sixties. So but we could go back to the original routing of the front nine, and we can have the you know, we can have the Langford holes for one set and then have the old then the newer nine, well fifty years old, so we could we could separate those and then keep them, or we could keep them intermixed kind of like they are. So it's it's interesting to be able to try and do that.
Yeah, it's uh when you're when you're routing the course, I mean, I assume that and tell me if I'm wrong. You're thinking about like the cadence of a of a routing, you know, where where things kind of fall with relation
to other holes and and such. And I'm say, say somebody just rerouted your course where you have multiple ways you could route it, would that kind of is there a story that kind of changes if somebody said just jumbled up your routing and you know, change the order of holes in which you play them.
Oh, absolutely it does. It affects that a lot.
So I'm always trying to think about how that cadence works from a human's scale, human standpoint and walking the golf course. So even if even if most people take a golf cart, you've got to think about how that flows from you know, someone walking and experiencing the game that way. And the interesting thing about that is a couple summers ago, I had some guys that came up,
and these are young fit, you know, thirties. These guys go to the gym, they train, they do all this, and they take a golf card every time they play golf. So one of the guys is really good golfer and he's you know, he's gonna walk with me, right, And this other guy he's like, oh yeah, it takes it, and we're kind of like, you know, his friend started like, come on, you walk with us, man, you know, checking out, and he's like sort of finally badgered him into walking right.
And after that day, my friend would tell me he's like, yeah, I guess what. He walks all the time.
Though. He's like, you can't believe how good that is.
So it's like, you know, he was he was experiencing something in a different way that he just hadn't been exposed to. So I think from the standpoint that when you're designing or you're figuring out the route, you have to figure out how that cadence works, because that's going to flow better.
And I think you know.
There are a lot of golf courses where you have restrictions, whether it's a mountain course and there's so much elevation that you're going to take a golf cart. But those things tend to get disjoined too because oh I got a big cart ride, or I'm going through development. You may have really a really good collection of holes, but that might might not be a really good golf course. You know, it's just sort of these separate individual kinds of things.
Now.
You could say that about the mines too, where we're divided up into these sections where you play a group of holes and then you've got to have a big walk, you know, because we're restricted by the power line of the road or something like that. So you try and figure out a way to make those things kind of work together or make that return a little more reasonable.
So there, you play one through four, you go buy the clubhouse again, Hey, grab a drink or hot dog or something like that, and then you know, you go out to the back nine. You get this, you know, you play four holes, then you play five holes, you finish the US again. Then you go and you play the back night and you've got to break there where you've got to go through after eleven and after seventeen to across the power lines.
Not ideal, but.
You know that's we sort of were stuck with that, so that's what we got to deal with.
Yeah, let's say, you know, it's an inherited problem with just having power lines in that case, as I remember, the walk out is a little bit more taxing than the walk back. Is that a way that you kind of mitigated the two walks from going by the power lines?
Well, it just happens to be kind of how they fit. Yeah, because you're kind of you're more downhill coming back. Yeah, And there wasn't it wasn't an easy You had to sort of get to that point to sort of start the routing of the other holes twelve through seventeen and that.
You know.
But when you get there, though, even though it's a taxing walk, you kind of like, wow, that's a cool hole because you're standing on this hill and you're looking down at twelve and you know, you sort of got a little glimpse of seventeen when you were kind of coming up. There's some trees between them there, but you know, you get a sense of wow, Okay, this is this is worth it, right, this is neat and then you get down to the green and it's like, wow, this is really cool.
That's a cool stretch of holes on that back part of the property. Yeah, it's funny when you talked about golf and walking. And I've got a lot of college buddies that got into the game in the last three
or four years. And you know, it's funny how you know they play with me and I walk, and sure enough, like they all walk now, because I think it's almost like walking comes from like how you get introduced to the game in a way and it or like experiences where like you alluded to a king where somebody just saw his friend walking and you walking, and they they also started walking, And I think that's like really the you know, when you talk about people walking more, it's
just a matter of someone in their peer group walking.
Yeah, And you know, I grew up taking a golf cart, you know, I mean I walked, I mean by myself when I was playing like the little nine hole course. But when I went with my grandparents, you know, they were in a golf cart. So we're playing crystal downs, which is not an easy walk. I mean, there's a lot of elevation things like that. But we were always in a golf cart, and we didn't have caddies. When I worked in the pro shop, you know, it was
basically caddies were gone, carts are in. And there were four guys that walked the golf course. They were all like eighty years old. It was this one for it some and they would come out and they'd pull the trolley or I think one of them carried their bag, and sometimes they'd walk the front and then ride the back or something like that. But they were the only guys that walked the golf course. And now we got a lot of people that walk the golf course, and
we have a good caddy program and stuff. And my son who's worked in the backroom and caddied and stuff, when he goes out and then you know, they can grab a cart and you know, speed around and do whatever they want. But he walks, and and his buddies like walking. You know, they enjoy it. They like the camaraderie that you get with that too. When you're in a golf cart, you're kind of speeding to the next thing.
You're only talking to the guy in the cart, and then you kind of meet at the greens and the t's with the other in your group.
But if you're walking along.
You know, and you know, two of you hit to the right and to you hit to the left, you know, and maybe it's switched different different guys. Doing that, you get to like sort of experience and talk about it. And golf's a social game, so you know, it makes it more enjoyable that way too.
I think, yeah, there's such a greater sense of you know, you're playing with your you know, the guys in your group when you're when you're walking together, and that that you diverge less in that situation than rather you know, the just the guy that you're riding with in the cart.
And it's it's also you know, walking is actually it's also really fast because you're going to your ball and you're playing your ball and you're moving on, whereas when you're in the cart, a lot of times guys are like, you know, they drive over the thing, then wait for the other guy. They don't like, leave their guy there, and then go to their ball and hit and come back. So you know, you can play just as fast unless you have these super long walks between you know, greens
and teas. So it's actually very efficient too.
Something that stands out to me with the court the courses that you've built in Michigan is the superintendents that work at them, like Craig Moore who is on the podcast, I mean total golf, not how how much goes into
you know, the present. From that sense, have you had experiences where you know, a superintendent maybe less golf inclined than say Craig gets you know, the playing conditions, like the surfaces and the way it's presented is drastically different than say Craig at Gray Wall, where you know, you can tell he plays a ton of golf because of the way it's presented around and on the greens and what he thinks about when he talks about the golf course.
Yeah, I mean it's yeah, there is a difference guys that play golf or you know, grew up playing golf and love golf. There's a different way that they sort of look at it. I guess I'm you know, I'm building the golf courses, you know, with these guys and hopefully they're on board, like you know, early on. So
in Craig's instance, when we were building Kingsley. He was one of Dan's assistants and he'd worked with Dan before and so he was groomed, you know, kind of into that and we were building the golf course and stuff, so he saw that process. And when we built Gray Walls, he was he was there taking care of the old course while we were building it because the superintendent was kind of the project manager on that one. So and then he went back down state and was maintaining a
golf course there. And a couple of years later, Pete, who was the superintendent that built the Gray Walls with us, left and they hired Craig, which was perfect for me because you know, he knew exactly what was going on and he knew how to dial things in. He's a
great turf manager and stuff like that. So I think part of that has to do with the experience that they have, maybe if they're involved in the project early on, so they're getting they're getting exposure to what we want to do, how we want to do it, and why, and they have a lot of input into that too. I mean I'm always asking a lot of questions to them. You know, hey, I want to do this, how are you going to maintain that, and they're like, well, you know, if a guy just says no, I can't do that,
he's probably not the right guy for the job. But if there's someone who's trying to figure out a way to do it and say, yeah, we could do that, but we got to do this, then yeah we can do that. You know, he's trying to figure out a way to do that. Great example of that is when we were doing Kingsley, the seventeenth Hole, which has this huge drop off from the ridge and in the landing area down in this valley. It's about sixty or sixty five feet down this hill. Great sledding hill by the way.
I've been greywalls and probably sliding hill.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. So there was an old gas line going. It was full mature, old forest hadn't been cut and there was a gas line and a trail that went through there, and so you could see this hillside and I walked through there with Dan and I said, you know, can you maintain this? And he says, you mean, like for a fairway And I'm like yeah, he goes, yeah, a four wheel drive, I can do that. But I'm going to have four wheel drive because all the other
crazy stuff you're building. So that's okay, we can do it. So there you go, there's a solution, right, you just have to figure out a way to do it.
Talk about the challenge of routing courses that are like heavily wooded where you can't when you walk around, you're looking at dense forest rather than you know, an open prairie setting.
Well, you know, we have topo maps and things, and so I'm really good looking at squiggly lines, so that helps, but it's always there's always, no matter how good the topo maps are, there's always stuff in the ground that so Kingsley was it had been clear cut like fifteen twenty years before we were there. So it was a thicket, I mean it was it was tighten up brush. I mean it was im penetral. You couldn't get through it.
Versus if you have like a full mature like that section on seventeen was an old forest that hadn't been cut, you can see, you know, kind of what's going on underneath, because you know, at that point, if you have mature trees, you have high branches and you don't really have a lot of low brush. So it's a difference in trying to looking at stuff gray walls fully forested, you know, some big you know, a lot of big old trees and things like that, and then there's all these rockout
croppings and crazy stuff. So, you know, there we similar sort of thing trying to figure out. You know, we got up to kind of where the seventeenth Green was, which is this really crazy wild green, and there's this there's this valley that's left of the green, and that was kind of a bunch of hemlock trees up there, which are pretty dense, and they they maintained their lower branches a lot of times. And I was getting really
excited looking at this thing. And Pete, the superintendent, was like, what do you what do you I'm like, see that that's gonna be really cool next to the green. He's like, I don't know, I any idea what you're talking about. But then when it got built, he goes, oh, now I see what you were saying.
And so.
Part of that sort of recognizing things finding things in the field, so you use the use atopoman. You spend a lot of time on the ground and then you try and you know, piece all that stuff together and figure out the best way for it to.
Work with you alluded to like sometimes the topo maps that doesn't have everything. Is there an instance where you say clear cut trees and you found something that just made the hole infinitely better that wasn't on a topo map.
Uh? Yeah.
So at Kingsley, the thirteenth Green, which is the big crazy you know short part four with this huge green. The original concept for that was it was going to be in the bowl and behind the bowl that's left of the green was going to be on that ridge there, and it was going to be and that ridges. You know that that came up in the topo. I mean, we knew there was a bowl, and we knew there was this reach, but it was a thicket. It had been clear cut and it was really dense, and so
I was just clearing where the green is. I was just clearing the brush off there, and all of a sudden there was a lot more micro.
Stuff in there.
So you just you're not seen a lot of times, depending on how dense the foliage is, and when they shoot it, a lot of times they can't. You know, there's the general land form, but you can't see the micro stuff. And so I'm like, hm, Wow, this is really cool. So, you know, I did a little manipulation there, but not very much at all. I mean that green, you know with the big dip in the middle, the
dip was there. You know, the backshelf was there, and you know, we added little things in to make it, you know, to put in these little you know, pin locations and things like that.
But I didn't. I didn't know it was that complex or that intricate.
And basically after clearing it, I was like, Wow, that's that's just all green.
We just got to do that.
It's totally anti short part four. You know, you're supposed to have a small green, little target. It's like we're gonna have this huge green, but they're going to be small targets within the green. And so that works and you know makes it you know, highly variable every day, which is cool.
Yeah, it's and it was like an improvisation in the field. Have you ever run into an instance where you know, you I'm assuming kind of this is the plan, and you've had pushback from a owner on implementing, you know, making a change to the you know, plan that they've agreed to because you saw something in the field like that sense situation.
Yeah, I'm sure there. I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of information that goes back and forth.
But I.
You know, owners, you know, it's their baby too, right, It's not just my baby. So they certainly have a lot of input. And I think that's just a communication thing, that's just talking to them about you know, hey, I'm seeing this.
This this doesn't seem to you know, work, and you.
Know I want to try and you know, massage or manipulate this, and you kind of work through that. And you know, owners have certain things that they want to see and you know it's our it's our job to try and you know, achieve that and to give them all these things that they want and then also make it, you know, do all the stuff that we want to do right or something that might you know that we feel might make it better or you know, more more interesting,
et cetera. So yeah, you have you know, there's little things here and there. But I got to say, I mean the owners I've had have been great. You know, they've been super people to work with, and a lot of them are you know, very good friends, you know, and people that you know that I talked to on a regular basis, So you know there's that side of it too, you know, and they you know, you build
trust too, just like anything else. You know, they've probably most most owners have not been through the process ever before, so you know, they you don't really know what to expect, and you know, you when you start like blitzing trees left and right, you know, they're kind of like freaked out in some ways, and you've got to be like, you know, okay, well we've got to open this up. We've got to have room to play, we have to have sunlight for grat you know, there's all these different
things that you have to do. In the case of number one at Gray Walls, they thought, well, we're going to have a tree lined you know, northern Michigan typical golf course, right, that's what we want because their other golf course is kind of wide open.
You know, it's pretty gentle.
There's a lot of movement, and there's a lot of cool stuff on the old Langford that I think that they didn't necessarily appreciate as much as maybe they are getting to now. But we're standing up on that big hill and I started clearing all the trees to the right of the tee because I know Lake Superiors right there and it's you know, it's a couple of miles away, but the view is fifty five miles all the way to Pictured Rocks. And they're like, oh, you got way
too many. I'm like, we just got started. Come back tomorrow. And then they came back like a day or two later, and they said, okay, we'll shut up now.
You know.
It was a couple of guys on the board and they're really good guys and stuff, but they're like, okay, we we we have no idea what we're talking about.
Just do your job.
There's a similar story Trey Kemp who redesigned this Stevens Park down in Dallas. He cut down a bunch of trees and the condo owners behind this tea box were like outrage, and he was like, just just hold on, and he opened up this view of like the Dallas skyline. And it's so funny because he was telling me. He's like, yeah, and their property value went up a couple hundred thousand dollars and he's like, needless to say, they thank me later.
Yeah, yeah, thanks for much. Here's a bonus another forty bucks.
It's funny how like you know they're there are these that was an example of an unintended Consequently, like you know, they didn't know what was going to happen, and now they're they're sitting on you know, way more valuable property.
That it talk about.
You know with Greywalls, that dramatic land, you know versus a more subtle property. What what the you know what dramatic land allows you to do like the pros and cons versus a more subtle property where like you know, Diamond Springs with with the with the small kind of ridges that you were routed over versus you know, large scale movement.
Well, Gray Walls has a lot of both. But it's.
There's a lot of restrictions at gray Walls too because you know, we got granite rock walls and it's like we don't have a blasting budget. You know, they were not going to spend millions of dollars like creating holes out nothing. So you know those are sort of hard edges or restrictions and things like that. Just like at Diamond Springs, even though the ground is relatively flat and subtle, you know, there's the big gorge where the creek's going and the old mill pond area, that ravine. You know,
that's a hard edge. Can't do anything in there, you know, we we can't get down.
There and adjust it or do anything.
So how do you work over how do you take that and make that an advantage something that you can utilize and make interesting and provide impact.
And it does.
It provides a lot of you know, at the end of the round, you're like, wow, saw that at night, and then like you go away from it again. Then you come back fourteen through eighteen and it's like, wow, you know, pretty cool for thirty dollars off course, right yea, So at Gray Walls and you've got, yeah, you've got a lot of elevation change two hundred feet elevation change on the property, and you've got these super hard ridges,
vertical type stuff that you have to deal with. So that's something that you have to factor in and say, okay, here's a hard edge, how does something fit into that? And then you have to figure out kind of how to how to make that work. And I'd been working on the routing and trying to figure things out, and there were certain holes that I saw and stuff like that,
and it kind of it basically kind of clicked. Fred Muller, who was the old pro at Crystal Downs and stuff, and we were up there and we were going we were driving back. We'd been up there for a few days and we were driving back. Fred was driving and I was in the car and I was like doodling trying to figure out this section of the property, and it kind of clicked. And that was like the majority of the routing. It's like made it work. It made
it fit together. So sometimes, you know, it takes something like that where you know, one little piece of the puzzle makes the thing work, or you know, if we do this, if we impact that, you know, that makes the other stuff and trying to figure out those you know, sometimes it's one little piece. You know, where's that piece the thousand thousand thousand piece puzzle and like, you know, where's that one piece?
What piece was that?
I can't remember right now, I know exactly, I don't know. I mean it's probably I'm not saying that it was one piece there, but trying to get everything to jive, you know, where you're trying to make this corner work.
So in some like one of the.
Hard things there is that we're on this big high piece and we go down and then we play you know, basically one, two, three, four kind of on a level. We got to get back to that middle ridge when we got to get out, and we got to figure out how.
To do that.
And we got a property boundary edge over where number four whole number five is, and there was no property boundary line stake in the field or.
On the map.
And I was told, oh, no, you got like another hundred hundred and fifty feet over there. I'm like, I don't think so, because I was thinking. I was looking at the map and and thinking that, you know, I'm
pretty close to the edge here. And we were trying to figure out how to get to that corner, and four could have been a five, or it could have it could have been the four that it is now, and so it ended up being a four and having sort of this jog back to the tee and then this you know, short part four that went up to the green with a big rock wall and all that. I would have preferred that that tea was over another one hundred hundred and fifty feet, but that's not our
proper property lines pretty much right there. So but we still had to figure out how to do that and and that kind of you know, it sort of worked. It figured out a way for it to work. But it's to me, it's it's the most awkward drive there because you know, you got to hit it up so you know, so high. That's difficult for a lot of golfers.
But it's still like super exciting and fun and some people are like, that's my favorite hole, you know, and it's pretty iconic when you got this sixty foot granite wall right next to the green and you know there's full white pine trees growing on top of that, and you know, agonomically figuring out we could actually grow grass there was important because there's a lot of airflow and it gets morning sun and late sun and the gap works to where it you know, functions because you'd think
this that granite cliff is wall is on the southwest side, and you're thinking, how are you going to grow grass because it's going to be in shadow.
But it does work.
So it's, uh, yeah, that that is a thrilling stretch. It's well the uh that place everybody should go see. But we uh, we kind of wrap this here and we appreciate the time and we'll look forward to seeing more of your work here. I gotta get down to Australia and then i'll have I'll see all the original stuff.
And uh gotta get there. I get there. Maybe maybe that's a trick, ye maybe from America. But it's worth it.
I know. I just got to get on a plane.
It's a month long journey, you know. Do it hit Australia, hit you know, hit New Zealand. Just think of all the podcasts you can do from down there.
I know that.
It was in the cards.
We'll see if I get down there, all right, Thanks Mike.
Thank you, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.