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The website is proshop dot Thefridagg dot com. That's where you can get to it proshop dot Thefridagg dot com. Today's episode is with golf course architect golf course owner Mike Young. Mike has been in the business for a long time. Mike built his first golf course, the Fields in Lagrange, Georgia. Talk extensively about that. That was built in the late eighties. He built it by himself. He was really, you know, one of the first design build guys,
along with Tom Doak and Bill Corr. So Mike's got a lot of experience and after a year's in architecture, he has bought and manages some golf courses. So we talk a lot about the golf management side. So, without further ado, here is Mike Young.
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 bright egg Frida Egg, the dreaded Frida, egg Frida, egg Frida, egg brigg Frida, egg bride egg lie.
I'm about ready to run off of the course.
I'm interested to talk to you about how you got into golf design in the first place. You know, in general, you were you were a turf equipment sales rep.
Right, Yeah, But I did that on purpose. I did that with the intention of getting into golf design. But I was I'll go back to the start, and I was in boy Scouts and I had a I didn't have one of the freaky Scout masters, but I was in boy Scouts and I had watched him build a golf course near me, and I said, I want to learn to design golf courses. I'm sixteen. So my senior year, my dad said, you can't get out until you become eagle.
So I had to do the Eagle Scout thing. So they take all the Eagle Scouts in the state and they put us up at the High Regency in Atlanta, and they bring a mentory in for two days and he talked to you about what you want to do, and I said, well, I want to design golf courses. So they bring me this guy. He's a big architect, that John Portman, who did all a lot of the big buildings in Atlanta and all over the world. He says,
I don't know anything about that stuff. But there's a guy out here's supposed to be good that's building the Athletic Club, and he's building a place down here on the side of lind And it's Robert Trent Jones Junior, Robert Trent Jones Senior, and his guy was a guy named Ron Kirby there. And I went out there and I was picking up rocks and doing all this one day, and then they had me go out and meet Ron Kirby,
and I was just a little kid. He says, well said, if you're going to get into stuff, you got to go through the turf business or something like that. And I'm like, yeah, right, whatever. So it went away. Never thought about it much anymore of getting in it that way. And after school I started thinking about it, and I remembered what he'd said. So I started researching, and I found the Toro to distributor, and I said, hey, you
got to let me go to work. I want to call on golf courses where I can see everything and and learn this business and I do not, And he's like, well, nobody can be a golf architect. It's just not that many. I said, well, that's what I want to do, and I don't want to work for one because I don't want to be in an office. So I started taking pictures and going around seeing superintendents and calling on new construction. Uh, And I liked it. I did it that way.
That's obviously a unique approach. I mean, most people go and work for an architect. What what you know doing it that way? What advantages do you think you get?
It gave you.
Well, I'm not the first one to do it that way, but there were some there's some others who have done that. But it if you go work for an architect and you sit in the office and you're drawing or rendering or whatever. You've got his thoughts, his ideas, and you follow that family tree or something. But if you're calling on these guys, you can walk in every one of them's office, which I did, and you can see you
come to your own conclusions. And then because you didn't work for him, whenever you come out of the turf business to start your own thing, it sort of pisses them off. And they don't consider you qualified or whatever.
Yeah, that's it's interesting because I kind of think about it. I got into golf from outside of golf, and I came in without certain notions that get built in. And if you work for an architect, I imagined a certain extent, your thoughts and opinions and ideas get shaped by that architect, whether you know it or not.
Yeah, I think that. You know. I had four or five years where every day I would see four or five golf courses and I would take slides and I've still got most of them. And you would see the old classics or the old courses, not all of them were classic, and then you would see some of the new stuff as being built and you're like, man, I don't know that I'm into that or whatnot. And so you weren't shaped where if you were in that office, you were sitting there learning things that were modern golf.
For instance. I just remember being at one architect's office and I was talking to him one day, just driving him crazy, you know. And on all your old courses, because people walked, you always walked into the front of the green, so you approached the green from the front, but with golf cars, you approach it from the side.
And so they would design these golf courses to where they made sure there were no bunkers or anything, or they had an easy way to get into the walk onto the green from side the hole.
And I'm like, they decided around the cart path.
But that's common when you start. Yeah, it's designed around the cart path. In other words, Hey, they're gonna get out here, so let's don't put a bunker here, because we want to have plenty of room for not to wear it out. And I'm like, that's not what all this is about where And so naturally I was if I if I built one where you had bunkers or something there, then I didn't know what I was doing. That kind of that kind of stuff.
You know, when you're seeing five courses a day, I assume you were mostly around the southeast. Were there any courses that really stood out to you old or new that you know from you know, obviously the bunker story with the cart path, But were there ones that stood out to you and said I like this? And then were there ones where You're like I don't like this? Yeah, distinct ones, you know, Yeah.
You know, there were some of those, plenty of those.
Any examples of the good ones.
Well, you know, Palmetta Club definitely stood out and people weren't really talking about it. The Dick Wilson course that nobody talks about called Mountain Mountain View down at Callowi Gardens was really in good shape. Then it was a good golf course. It stood out. You could see that it was it was thoughtfully done. Atlanta Country Club is one you don't ever hear about. That was that I liked.
What did did you?
You know, your early days and this is obviously these travels are shaping the way you're thinking about golf. Were like the common things that you saw and courses that you liked?
You know, what would did? Did you?
Were there threads about, you know about the things that you saw, and I imagine in many ways those were rarer than the ones that you kind of looked at and said, ah, you know golf course.
Yeah, the I guess I had my eye for art, and whether you know, you don't ever know if it's a good eye or not unless people hire you to do another one. But I heard somebody once say that a lot of people want to find the golf course and then other people want to move the golf course there, and so, like you sort of, my philosophy is is to start with that steak and build out a lot
of the signatures and all. Because they're used to marketing themselves to sell real estate and all that, are given a piece of property and they start on the outside and build in. In other words, I got to put the hole here. So they start moving a lot of dirt and holds get up in the air, and I probably my biggest thing was trying to keep it down on the ground. And when I built my first one nineteen eighty eight eighty nine, everything I kept it down
did we didn't do it. And so people are like, well, you can't do that. You got to get the greens up, you got to do this all these technical aspects. And I wasn't worried about the technical aspects out it because my ground was sloping and I knew I could drain the water. So uh, I just I just think you got to find the hole and then carve it out from there. I'm not into bringing dirt in to build a hole.
Let's let's talk about your first designed the fields. How did you get that opportunity?
Well, I was in the turf business or the equipment business. So you'd go to the trade shows and I'd met guys you had a I was building a network, and I knew a guy that was a seed salesman, and he grew up in the pecan business, and he was determined. He wanted to build a golf course. And I knew that people weren't gonna let me build one, so I just I said, look, let me build this thing, and I won't charge anything. We'll trade for a lot or something like that. And he said okay. So I routed
it started going down there. In the afternoons. We'd we had a skid steerloader and we had a small dozer and we'd work on it, work on it and have guys move rocks during the day. Took two years. And then while I was building it, I got two other jobs.
It's yeah, and that's hot and the the uh.
The first one, the first one I got. This guy's name. His name was little Boy. He had one of these El Camino trucks.
Was he a little boy?
No, not at all.
Most people of the nickname little boys aren't little boys.
No, So little boy, little Boy comes down of the course and he says, I hear you're building this golf course and so and so liked it or something, and he says, I want to build one. And it was up in Atlanta. It was where Atlanta was developing, up four hundred. He says, can you come look at my land? So I said sure, he said, he said when I said when do you want me to? He said tomorrow. So I go up there the next day and I look at it and I said, this just won't work.
It's solid rock and it's straight up and down. He said, okay, hold on, let me find some more. I'll call you back. Well, I start home. By the time I get home, he's called. He said, I got another piece. Can you come back tomorrow. I go back the next day and he says, how is this? I said, this will work. We can do this. And so he had a big country music park on the lake in Atlanta that had a lot of big country music stars come there. And that was what they did,
was that and chicken processing. So he says, well, how much is this going to be? Said, well, it'll be a couple of million dollars. Uh, you know, to build what we were doing it. So he writes me check for me, and he said here and I'm hold on the side. We got a we got the latest thing. You know, we got to permit it. He says, well, we don't want to do all that up here. You don't have to do that, and I'm like, yeah, we do.
So we started that. And meanwhile, I go back two weeks later and I go up to the hill and there's one hundred golf cars there. I said, what the hell have you done? He said, I'm digging a basement over there for the clubhouse, and said I went down to athletic club bought all their used carts or something they were turning in so we'd have some cars. That was my second one, and it was just a matter of me. They were really good clients, but it was
just keeping them under control. These guys they were rolling and.
Then it sounds like they were very impulsive.
Very pulsy. But we went from there. So it was it was not the refined country club client.
So with the fields, you get this job and you hadn't never done any of this before. No, so the dozer gets delivered or there. What how talk me through like the first few days when you're just getting on the dozer and doing this.
Well, we had a we had a guy that could run a dozer, and I'd start sort of showing him what I want to do, and then I'd learned the dozer and this was an old dozer, and then I'd get on it and mess around some and then the other guy would get on it and then we'd get it. You know, it's like taking a log and making it into lumber and finally seeing it down in the furniture. So we probably took five times the amount of time a guy that knew what he was doing could do.
And then we just kept doing everything. We built USGA greens and we that was a process. We got a guy to help us with that. Once we learned how to do it, we did the rest of ourselves. But floating them out and everything took a while. We put in the irrigation, uh and one of the partners was a dentist, and that that guy would go out every afternoon put the pipe in the ground. He had a ball doing that and it was I mean, it was done just just that way.
So this is before and you know for everybody this project, everybody gives obviously Todd, who is it regular here? A good friend of yours. All the credit for being the first design build guy to come back really, you know with high Point and corn Crunchhaw obviously with sand Hills, and but this is before both those, and it's just you and a couple of guys out there building the golf course.
Huh yeah. And I think that those guys were we were all about the same time. I think Tom and I really the first good pieces of land and Goodman's I got. We've always done design build, and it's it's a delicate subject because for so long it it it was like, well, you can't do this. It's not fair to the client. You know, you could you could be screwing the client or whatever. And you can't be an architect if you're also building it. And I just didn't care.
But some of the so called professional architects considered it a no no to build your own courses. And now looks like they're coming full circle. But I still have my theories that that's when Dick Wilson was doing his thing, that was he was not professional enough for some of them. That's when him and Jones started having their conflicts.
Yeah, it you know, for you had to be you know, obviously you alluded to the fact that you took a night traditional route into architecture, which probably you know, rubbed
some of the profession of the wrong way. And then you get into architecture and you take a non traditional route of constructing a golf course, which you know probably saved a lot of money for your clients, and you know, but it also you know, you were you were somebody doing something different, which always you know, ruffles feathers, right.
Yeah, I think so. I think it's as you get older, you realize you might have ruffled them, but because you were taking a job that they would have otherwise gotten, and naturally they're going to tell them you don't know what you're doing, and you did this wrong or you did that wrong. And that used to just really piss me off. Now like, well, I don't know that there is any wrong in this business, dude.
Yeah. Yeah.
So the field, you know, it opens and it eventually, you know, lives the course of life a different owner, and it comes up for sale and you you purchase it back. Talk about that whole experience, and now you're now you're not only a golf architect, but also a golf course owner.
Yeah, we've owned four different courses different times. And you know, my son when he got out of school, he came to work with me and probably knows as much as he's been building golf courses and designing with me for twenty years now. He's forty two years old. And Ashley, I said, hey, let's put our office down here, and you moved down here. So office is upstairs and he does everything from there. It's just a base and he's
learned the agonomics off of Google. I mean, he's he's got a finance degree and he likes being outside, so he got on Google and we've he does the superintendent work and then he's travels to the different sites wherever we're working on golf courses. I mean, he was in Costa Rica for two and a half years building that course, and uh he's been designing and building and might be a lot better than I am because he's uh oh, he's a little more laid back.
Oh.
You know, it's not necessarily better for certain things, you know, not always the uh it could be, could be, you could be better for different situations, you know.
That's right, That's and that's what I think often that's how it happens.
He might not have been able to deal with little Boy the way you deal dealt with him.
I had little boy rowing little boys, and little boy was a big concrete pumper. That's what he did. He pumped concrete. He was a mess.
What was that golf course called?
It was called country Land and it's still there. It is. It's six thousand it's right in the middle of all the growth in Atlanta. It's six thousand yards long, and they cover it up. I mean they play. I don't know how many rounds they play. But it's on Georgia four hundred and it's just a little golf course that we just shaped out. And the guy had shaping with me. There was a guy named Craig Mitz, and Craig had
been with Fozzio and Craig was an architecture nut. And he got out of Houston and his father had been the head pro at Westchester and the head pro at Shady Oaks, and he traveled tour with Hogan and he was like second in the master. His name was Dick Mitz and you'd look up Dick and Dick was so Craig was a nut. All he did was take pictures on the weekends of golf courses and he's a really good shaper, and he would take the Hispanic dudes and
at six point thirty they'd do calisthenics. He'd have two that'd cook lunch every day. Craig just worked on that deal with me and he really did some good shaping. And it's a six thousand yard deal that's just nobody hears about, and they covered up with people playing it. It's right up and coming Georgia.
It's interesting you talk about Craig mess and how he was like a serial photo taker of golf courses. You would go to all the different potential customers and customers and take photos. And you know, not a lot has changed because I go to golf courses and take a ton of photos, but you know, the mediums and the access the information has changed. How was it watching kind
of the internet and how golf architecture changed. Talk a little bit about that because obviously from you know, your time when you started in the late eighties to now, you know, the spread of information is just completely different.
Yeah, you know that book Outliars, You might have read it. It's I was born about the right time. So we're to where there was opportunity to do golf courses. Guys now don't have that opportunity. So when I'm selling, man, there's one or two golf courses a year coming along at the most. And then when I started building them, it just happens to hit. And when that was going on, there was a magazine called Golf Course News, which was a big magazine, came out every every month, and everybody
would put everything they were doing in there. You'd want to go in there and say, Hey, Art Hills is building over here, Fasio's over here, you're over here. And photography got big, so the photographers would would photograph these holes and they would photograph sort of from the air up on the ladder, where you get these totally different views than you would on the ground. And it became
a big promotional deal. And you're sitting there where everybody's hyping this stuff and hyping it, and you're shut in the back of your head. I think everybody in the business knew, man, this shit can't go on. This can't go on. You're just playing it's it's gonna blow. And so I put an ad in the mac in one of those magazines one time that it said we create dreams, not nightmares. And it was talking about and it, uh, it really ticked off a lot, and uh, but it
got me some work. And I realized then that this that you don't tell people where you're working because all you're doing, all these guys are advertising, and next thing you know, they're running around trying to get the developer of whatever. A guy come in, say, I work for so and so developer blah blah blah blah blah. Next thing you know, there's ten guys calling that developer, you know, wanting to want to see if they can get his
next project. So you just don't. It's changed. For so long, everybody was hyping in and there was so much stuff. And when they started that one course of day thing, I'm sitting there thinking to myself, Man, this is crazy.
But I imagine you had that perspective a little bit too, coming from you know, where you were kind of in a golf turf business, a different line of the business where you're you know, going to clubs and working with them and working around their needs if you're selling something, you're starting to understand how a golf course works. And I imagine you know, an architect at that time, they
are the one course a day thing. They're just thinking this is the biggest swoon ever for their business and probably look at you're looking at it through different lens at that point.
Yeah, I had, And let's go there for a second. I'll tell you this. It's one of those businesses that you're like, this business shouldn't exist because it's it cannot sustain itself. And when I say that, you go back, you think, and let me rephrase this. I think that if it wasn't for God superintendents, none of us would be in business. And those are those guys are the key, and I think the world of them. My father in law is a superintendent at some good clubs, and I've
got a great respect for those guys. But I don't know of any superintendent's curriculum that gives these guys that says, hey, here's how you operate that golf course for profit. So often the guy comes out and the first thing he wants to do is go to work for a big club so that he can get some interviews at another club. And the first thing he asked is how much budget
do I have? You take that budget, you do everything you can do with it, so you can go to the next club and get more budget, and you work through about three or four clubs and it's great. It's the way the industry is set up. But in the modern world, I don't know that most corporations are set up to function that way. They want you to make a profit. And so I'm sitting there watching and I'm working for these companies, and not to name any companies, but they'll go give a grant to Uga Turf School
or Penn State Turf School. Well, obviously, by the time that guy gets out of school, he's been using that equipment or that fertilizer or that irrigation and you've been taught a certain way. And it's like, hey, if I come in there and say, look, we're not gonna put in a two million dollar irrigation system because economically we can hire one guy to come around and do this, this, and this, and it'll be twenty years before you ever made up the difference. And the young guys look at
you like, well, you can't do it that way. And the biggest thing to me, and the thing that still stands out to me, was I remember, I remember working for Toro when John Deere was getting in the business, and at one of our seminars, we had this guy that would come Ken Peters or something. He wrote a book called a One Minute Manager or something. He'd come and speak to us, and it was the Toro seventy two inch Groundsmaster was a rotary mower that superintendents used.
And he said, you got to realize, if John Deere sells one of their mowers that's seventy two inches, why to every distributor, every dealer they have, they will have manufactured more mowers and Toro sales an e year. So we're like wow. And then I was I was calling on Augusta National every other Monday. I'd have to be there and I'd go call them them and the mechanics spend a lot of time in the mechanic and Paul Latshaw was coming in as the superintendent. He was coming
from Oakmont. He had taken one of our Toro greensmowes called a G three, and he'd welded two more reels on it made a five gang greens Moore that he could mow fairways with. Well. In nineteen eighty five we mowed the masters with a Toro eleven blade transport frame. It pulls behind a tractor and Lightshaw's bringing this thing up to another level. Well, Toro and all the other companies they love that because the transport frame the gang more.
It would last you twenty years at a normal golf course, but if you could get a lightweight fairway unit in there, you've got about five years out of it, and you'd sell the cost of the machine and parts over that five years. So we were taught to, you know, don't be pushing these gang moars. So now what I use in my fairways is game moors. And I go to a young superintendent. He's like, I would never have one of those things on my golf course. And I'm like, okay,
how much you want for it? It's like I take a thousand bucks. You go get a gang more that you can't put buy them for a thousand dollars, put to a three thousand in them. The thing last year from now on where we've taught people to spend more and more money, and we've the guys that are in charge of these clubs at all now are their fathers. They didn't borrow money and spend money at these private clubs like we do today. I've got a picture from
nineteen ninety, either ninety seven or ninety eight. I'll send it to you. Sometimes it's a five gang Jacobsen pull frame behind a Willis jeep on the sixteenth hole at Cyprus Point.
Unbelievable.
And I took that picture of him and this is awesome. And that was you know, that's twenty four years ago and these guys are still still pulling this jeep and got a jeep out there pulling this five game. I'm like yes. And and you'd go to some of these modern resort residential places and't it have all this modern equipment, these maintenance buildings. That was so we've just we just let all that get out of hand.
I used to work in the restaurant industry.
We still this.
I sold this like loyalty program as a startup. But I remember talking to a experienced restaurant tour and he said, you know, the biggest mistake that all new restaurant owners make is they want they want the shiny new ovens. They want to go buy, you know, all these shiny new ovens. And the first you know, what happens immediately is you know, they sink all this costs and what I do is I go buy all used evens from the people that buy the new ovens and then go under.
And it's it's interesting how you know, you know from your experience in a way like what you do, especially at the field, as you maintain a very good golf product for a very low cost to the consumer. And you know to do that you have to get creative and take shortcuts and do things differently than the modern trend.
Yeah, and we're all in it. I mean, what you're doing. You know, the golf magazines they don't. Y'all do it a much better job than golf magazines and they don't know what to do about it. But it's it's the golf business. If you don't know how to there's eight hundred I think one of the guys was saying not long ago, there's eight hundred courses in the United States that have a waiting list that are considered exclusive clubs that have a waiting list and can still charge an
initiation fee and can build projects. Only then you got another two thousand clubs that are private five oh one c three privates with a board and they might be struggling but they're all wanting to do projects. They want to assess people to do projects. And the difference in those clubs is those top eight hundred, the club is there for the member, and in these others, the member is there for the club because the club's gotten where
they've got to have that member. They got to you know, you're there when you start seeing wide screen TVs over the urinals because the clubs that can do the widescreen TV ural thing, they're right at the top. That's when these and that's what that middle group that doesn't know any better, they're just doing all these things. And the new thing is we've got to be a family club.
Got to be a family club. Well, if if you don't have a set of dues to where a guy that doesn't play golf can't join, then you're not a family club because the golf is the number one thing. And if your do's are up where you are, what are the fifteen grand a year from clubs up there?
Yeah it depends, but yeah.
Let's just say if but down here seven hundred bucks a month and if you don't play golf, you're not going to join for the swimming pool and the tennis you're gonna go to another place. And so we've gotten into this deal where everybody's selling everybody on the clubhouse and all that other stuff. And while all that's going going on, you got twelve thousand golf courses out there that are either run by management company or individual owners.
And those individual owners, like me, they're not gonna get into magazines. They're not gonna run around to everybody and tell them how they do it. They just gonna keep doing it and keep their mouth shut. And every state's got that, and you can find it, and it's it might not be as gloom and doom for them as some people make it out to be.
Well, I think if anything twenty twenty has taught us that with clubs and club golf, is that the golf has got to be your core product because all of the other stuff, if it goes away, you know what, at the end of the day, all you have is
a golf course. And you know, with with obviously social distancing and what's happened the popularity for golf, and you know, all these places are posting record rounds and I'm sure I'm sure you've seen it on your end where more people are playing golf because it's a way to get away and safely, you know, get recreation and do something.
And at the end of the day, I hope one of the long term impacts of it is that these clubs have windfall from you know, they lose all their weddings, but they get windfall from golf and the revenue generally by golf, and they think to themselves, wow, you know this golf thinks the most important thing we have.
But it probably won't go that way.
I think it could, but I think what determines that's the square foot the size of the clubhouse. Some of them they don't know how to get rid of that clubhouse. You know, if you had, if if your generation's gonna end up saving golf. As far as I can see it coming, they don't really want to go join the big club. That's they don't want to be burdened with that. First,
they're too mobile. There's no way to pay a big initiation fee here, stay three or four years, move to another town, do it again, and do it three or four times. Not gonna happen. They would rather be at a club with good greens, good teas, some architectural merit to it. Go on a golf trip to Bandon here, sand Valley or wherever, and you can see that coming on, and you can cater to that guy and create a
product that works and they're gonna they're gonna use. And I think it's so good to watch these kids that that are that don't mind you know what I mean by edges? When when they don't mind the edges, if my cart pads are broken over here, and uh, I don't have all my ob steaks up, or I don't spend a fortune on my edges, but give them a good product with good greens, good teas, bunkers and let them go play golf. They understand it and they're fine
with that. And you can give it to them at a price that lets you make money and lets them play. That's where we're going.
It's the expectations, the set of expectations, what people value in a way that is changing.
Yeah, it's like hippie girls that didn't wear makeup. You have real good looking girls with no makeup on, just a little hippie girls. Then you get these damn girls with all this makeup on, all this stuff, wanting to be a step for wife. And you you you see that. It's your generation is more in the hippie hippie gulf. It's where the edges are just it's just natural. I mean I'm a one height in the yeah, and then thirty yards in front of the greens. We really soup
it up. We primo it. We go ultra light. Fairway mowers, chipping areas, everything are mode that way and that's where everybody plays. But in the in the fairways, we're a little over half inch with game moars and doesn't it lets us do it? I mean I could, I could take it up another level of two, but I had to charge more.
How how does that you know? And relate?
Like, say you you want to make what you're doing around the greens all the all the way through the fair away what you know in the end cost, how would that translate to the golfer? Like you know, I'm going away from gang mowers. I'm going to the lightweight mowors that can I can get this thing down a little bit more, you know on a greens feed basis. Are we talking a five ten dollars increase to the retail golfer for all times?
Probably probably ten to fifteen. And I say that let's think about that. I've we maintained with three people. Ashley does that. He as we have three people. One guy's been there thirty years, needs great, and that's our crew. If I go to mowing fairways, I'm gonna go to the lightweight fairway mower. I'm gonna have to mow it more frequently. I'm gonna have to sharpen it much more because the gang mores. We sharpen those once maybe twice
a year if we get some knicks. But other than that, you sharpen that real mower, and then you come in for the winter, rebuild it and go again. We're gonna fertilize more. We're gonna we primo the entire course. Anyway. The primo is a growth retarding that tightens it up, and so we would end up getting that look and and mow and wall to wall like that would take considerably more time and probably another two to three people on the crew.
You know, Garrett Morrison just did a pod for us, a story on you know, the pursuit for green grass, and you know, kind of related around Augusta, and he related it to people's lawns. And I think everybody can understand it from a long standpoint is you know, you go out, you get the fertilizer. You know, you put all these inputs in and you start mowing it lower. All you're doing is you you just need to do more for the lawn because you're opening it up to so many more you know.
Different diseases, diseases.
Yeah, it becomes so much more susceptible. And it's so different than especially a public golf course where you know, you're you're an hour fifteen south of Atlanta. You're not in you know, you're not in suburban Atlanta, where like you could just you know, you could throw a stone to one hundred thousand golfers and you're you're you're providing a you know, affordable golf product for you know, the masses.
But you in order to do that, you have to do things certain ways, and you know, and this is a perfect example of a way that nobody's It doesn't provide any real difference, Like the amount of money that you have to essentially pass on to the consumer doesn't equal the increase in playing experience. Right, I'd rather save fifteen bucks and have fairways that's you know, a half inch, rather than have it be you know, like a you know, a fringe and pay fifteen dollars more in my personal opinion,
but you know, somebody else would say that's great. I want the fairway to be this.
Way, I think. I think you're exactly right. I think that. And the other thing is that I think so many people now they equate that level to the quality of the course. They can't under they can't distinguish or differentiate between maintenance and architectural strategy. So lots of times, the higher your maintenance and the better your maintenance, they consider that a much better course design wise and everything. So you got
to get past that. But the number one thing in my opinion, and we'd have to talk to a superintendent about this. But by the way, I listened to his podcasts on the green grass and it was good. The number one thing is high to cut. You think about it all the way through. If when I was growing up, bent grass was nowhere near the problem in the south it is now, but fast was eight and the grass
was mode at a quarter inch or more. So the grass didn't have near the disease issues or near the problems that it had once you started cutting at an eighth one inch or a hundred or whatever you're going to call it, and so everything. When you start lowering heights, you get more disease, you get more issues, You got a different mowers, more expense, more people, and so height to cut has so much to do. And the number cuts.
If you've got a fairway cut and then you've got a short rough cutting and a rough cut and a tee height and a cut around the greens. Look how many mowers you got, Look how many people you got? We just mow everything just like just like they do in Europe. If we can't to use that.
With so you the field is doing really well, you know, and now you're to the point where you're reinvesting money into the club, Like how are you thinking about rein putting money back into the golf course and the different projects that you're doing, whether they're on the course or off the course.
Well, this is Ashley's doing all that. He's on site with me doing projects, but his his the fields is more like his thing is. We're trying to create a a millennial type golf is what I call it. And everything we haven't taken anything. Everything we've put back in there, we haven't taken anything out and it's it's it's a
a different environment. And the the restaurants more like a pub with the fire pits and what's the cornhole stuff y'all do and all that corn but uh but uh, the bags, the boats ball or bochi ball or whatever. And we've we're doing music. We had three hundred people at a concert the other night where we had a really good band in from Mobile. And we're focusing right now
on specialized in barbecue. Got a smoker coming in, built a barbecue shed, deal, really focusing on the practice area and and understanding that that we're not a country club, but we're going to be where the guy that wants to play golf and then wants to see his kids play softball or soccer or whatever later in the afternoon can come out, pay, come back the next day if he wants to, or walk away, and we can still make it. We're not we're not dependent on having a
five hundred person membership or something. And so it's it's a it's a totally different venue than a club. It's very simple. Inside we're doing like a little dormitory upstairs, trying to decide whether to do airstreams or do little cabins out in the woods where because we've got guys that come down and you know, they would stay there, and we can build those things fairly reasonable. So it's it's just back to basics.
Are you surprised that it has become a place where people travel to to play from, you know, sometimes eight plus hours away?
Yeah, I am. I think Sweeten's Cove helped us and everybody with that. They really did a good job on that social media and all that stuff, and I wouldn't I wasn't aware of how much that helped. But I see these guys coming in and like one night and like, well, you know, well, what's that Harvard bag dude? It's like, well, I played golf at Harvard. And I'm like, well, so what are you doing down here? And he's like he's like, well,
we love it here we come. And and then I've I've found that that guys that are good players that are playing in the mid Am and the us M and all one day I see that and he's gone back about one hundred yards because I'm fairly open, he just crossed over a hole and teed up on a hole there and says, man, I come in here and play all the time to practice from a tournaments because it's firm and fast, and I can step back on these teas and make these holes have a long I wan't.
So I'm like, well, maybe we're onto something. Maybe it's me that has the issue of thinking I got to be nicer and nicer and nicer. Maybe these kids do understand, because a lot of the guys my age don't understand that. And they don't they don't want that they my age group. I grew up playing golf. I see too many guys that now that are my age. They don't care about
really getting better at golf. It's more of a social thing where they can hang out, smoke some cigars, get their handicap where they can win this, that and this, and they're not into it. The kids now actually walk and do things, and it's hard to get four guys my age that will walk, even our golf trips. When we go on a golf trip, you gotta get guys that'll go walk. So y'all's generation is gonna change it.
Yeah. I think about my dad.
He's you know, he's golf nutt plays every chance he can.
He's like a fifteen handicap. He walks.
But you know, I'll send them to places. You know, they'll ask me when they're going somewhere where they should go play. I'll send them. You know, one time he went to places in Wisconsin. I send him and he goes.
You know, I just struggle with those wide open places. I just I kn'tck it on. He's like, you need more trees. I'm like what. I'm like, that's gonna help you.
You're you know you're for you don't really know where the ball's going, like evinent wide open. It's only gonna make it more fun for you. But he almost struggles with the juxtaposition.
I think that's yeah, that's the other and they don't get it. It's just just I'll had guys. I was going to take some guys down to Hoopy a few months ago, and when they found out they had to walk, It's like, no way in hell am I going there.
Little boy wouldn't be going to Hoopie.
A little boy, little boy didn't he play golf. Little Boy, little boy didn't play golf. He'd come out there and ride around drink beers. But uh, when you've got that el Camino and you got that thing waxed up and you don't play golf, you just ride. But it was so I don't know, but it's it's changing.
So you've operated, you had a different perspective coming into architecture because you were on the turf selling turf equipment side. You get into architecture and then your journey gets you owning golf courses. How did owning golf courses, you know, did that bring another level of different way thinking of the architecture side, which you still are building, you know,
redesigning golf courses. How did your views on architecture change once you got in the weeds of owning and operating golf courses.
Not much, you know about the time that we were starting, like Tom was starting, and I knew who Tom was. He probably didn't know who I was, but I was regional and and my goal all along is I saw a niche there for public golf. And if you remember, you might not be old enough to remember. When I started, the signatures didn't touch it, they wouldn't go near it.
There was never it was all resort, residential. And then then when things started changing in that you started seeing the Nicholas's and all go to the public, and they called it upscale daily fee, our country club for a day, and that was the new hike. But for my first five or six years, nobody wanted to go near the
public stuff. It was all and so you could. The big boys didn't didn't touch it, and I thought there was a niche in public golf, and I just started sort of championing that and seeing what was out there because I saw a lot of owners that were doing okay with it, and they were individual owners. My theory's always been, if God's doing well, you really don't need management companies that much, because most a lot of the management companies there were there to say, hey, I can
lose you less money and you lose yourself. And that was brought on by a big builder that had a thousand acre subdivision wants somebody to run the golf while he sold the houses. And that's and so I just said, hey, my focus is going to be public. I'm going to try to make it where they can make money at it, or if not make money, at least not lose money. And so we went at it that way. And it's sort of like a guy that owns McDonald's versus a
guy that has, uh, Peter Lugers in New York. Everybody's heard of Peter Lugers or whatever, and they want to go there and spend all the money. But the guys at the McDonald's are doing okay. So you're both in the restaurant business. And the golf in this country is public. I mean, there's twelve thousand golf courses. I had a guy tell me the other day we're down to we've got twenty eight thousand golf pros in less than six thousand of our golf courses now have a class A
head pro, you know, because the way it's changed. You got a lot of resorts. I might have ten of them, but the whole industry people are saying, hey, I don't need this, this and this, I can run it. So golf pros are having to change. And it's it's the business. Business is just getting more and more efficient, and it's you're never going to hear about public golf. You're going to hear about You're going to hear about Bandon and I don't have a problem with that. You're going to
hear about whatever. A new course is being built on the right kind of land, but not many people even get to play those courses when you weigh it all out, I mean, those of us that are fortunate enough to play them see it. But so many other guys just go from public course to public course.
Yeah, I mean, that's the way ninety eight percent of the golf worldy not ninety eight, but ninety percent of the golf world interacts with golf.
Everybody always loves to look at the twenty.
Five million golfer statistic in America and they've failed to recognize that, you know, twenty of at least twenty million of those people are just I go play public golf course around me. Like, that's the way almost all my buddies are that have just recently gotten to the game in their early thirties. They just go play public golf course to public golf course. They don't play the same public golf course every week they go. You know, it's
just like, oh, I'm going here this week. They invite me all the time, and I'm like, I don't play golf on Saturday mornings.
You know, I'm in the golf business.
But like it's like, they go here, they go here, they go here, and it's just and I ask him about like why do you choose that? And they're like, well, you know, I wanted to go see this place. So they had a good deal on golf. Now, how did how is golf now being somebody that was in the in the owning golf and operating golf before and after?
What has that done?
I think it's the worst thing ever happened to public golf. And that's my opinion. They did a couple of years ago they did fifty nine million dollars in revenue and Golf Channel lost six or seven million, own by the same company. And all they've done is take the average public golfer and make him a commodity. He has no loyalty to you or anything else. He looks for the deal. And their system is based on barter, where they're not out there to make money on you selling around off
their software. They're out there to take if you know how it works. They get two tea times, sometimes three tea times a day. It's twelve players at three and if they sell that at twenty bucks while you're trying to sell it at sixty, you know they've made two hundred and forty dollars a day off of you and
you'll see people. I was on it for six months and you'd see the same people come in and by that time, if they couldn't get that time, they would go to another course where they could get the deal. But they were not going to pay your full green fee. So I stopped and it helped me, and I think more and more people are changing now. I think the eventually somebody will figure out another t sheet that works, because.
It's have you ever thought about doing like a punch card? I know it sounds stupid, but you know, like in a way, it's kind of like, oh, I got the Field's punch card. I get a free round or a free card every five rounds or something.
Something we.
Do, something like we sell a card where they they get twenty five percent, they can buy five hundred dollars worth of golf for four hundred bucks, that kind of stuff, and then they just it doesn't punch anymore. It works off the point of sale. But we do a lot of those different things like that.
I think there's value in the punch card.
I think there probably would be just having.
The physical card would be added marketing.
Well, why not. It's it's something to try.
It's something people carry around.
I got stuff in my wallet from all over the place, Like you never know when you pull it out and you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about.
That, and then you realize how many people just like you just said, they forget about it. So you might make more money with that than you do, you know, because they don't they throw it away or lose it or whatnot. But it's it's it's y'all are just gonna view that differently. It's it's y'all just view the entire entire thing is different. And if you're I've asked guys, if I'm a titleist salesman, I might want to call them the bigger clubs in Atlanta because Titleists is geared
towards that. But if I'm the bridgestone salesman, I might want as many of those public courses as I can get. Same with golf carts, I mean, golf cart people don't make their money selling just to the privates because there's not enough of them. They got to sell to everybody. And it's it's it's you can't. You can't come in and sell an irrigation system to a guy that's doing six or seven hundred thousan dollars a year. You can't come in and sell them a two million dollars irrigation system.
So you've got to stop it. You got to figure out how do I get this guy to where he survives or does he just have to shut down when everything quits working? And that's it's the gorilla golf or whatever. There's guys out there. There's a course will shut down over here in a one hundred and fifty thousand dollars pump station. Somebody might pick it up for five thousand dollars.
And he's sitting down there in Florida and he's also picking up the heads every time they change heads on a resort course in Phoenix every four or five years. And he's cleaning those heads up. And little Johnny Public he knows to call him, called in there and buy irrigation head for twenty bucks apiece and buy a pump station for this. That market is huge.
And it's like when a golf course closes, like you know, go get their green grass. You know, see if you can go scalp the greens.
You can do that, you can go. But look at the guys that go cut that dig the heads up the guy digs all the heads up, the takes the pump station. It's it's it's you know, and and and doing you see that all over and a lot of the renovation stuff or we try not to do that much renovation restoration, but a lot of it you you end up doing that way because they don't even know, they don't even know that's available. Mh.
I'm curious if you were going back, if you were Mike Young and you were sixteen year old eagle scout, now, how would you would you how would you get into the into the golf architecture business. If you were redoing it, would you do it the same way or how would you go about it?
I don't know that I would. I mean I think that it's it's uh, all these all these kids that come to you, good kids, smart kids that want to do it. I mean, I can we all know a lot of them show art kids that could go into business doing something else, and they considered a glamour job. It's not a glamour job. I mean for the average golf architect you're building stuff like I build, it's there's five or six guys that get the glamour and and
that's a brutal business. It's just that you don't know, you don't know where the next one's coming from, and and that's that's we'll get out of here. But the that's why I started trying to figure out how to buy golf courses or whatnot, because I don't think if you go back and look, I don't think any golf architect in the past was really what you'd consider full time. I mean, there's always been the old guys. They were either golf pros or doing something else that's at that
subsidized their golf design. They would do it when it was there. And that's sort of what I like to do is try to mix it in there where you're like a holistic golf company. We can we can do it all. We can operate it, we can buy it, we can build it, we can design it. But if you're not doing that, then you're going to be sitting there where your wife better have a good job or something, because there's gonna be times when there's just nothing to do.
And not just it's it's a business. That's it's a craft. It's not a it's not a profession. It's a craft.
You got to have lots of side hustles. You know, you've got to be a hustler.
It's basically you've got to be a hustler.
But in a way, what you've done is like you know, you a lot of I think a lot of people that build golf courses are don't know what they're doing.
You know, like they say, I want to build a golf course.
Is they It's not like they made their money building golf courses. So having somebody that you know, like you, you've got a nice perspective where you operate them. You've built them, You've sold surf grass equipment into them. You you know, you maintained a golf course with with Ashley and other golf courses that you maintained like you, you actually could be more of like a consultant on top of designing a golf course.
We can take them. I mean we've done turnkeys, we've done it where we've built clubhouse, we've done everything all the way through. And there's other guys that do that.
Mike, we we're gonna get you out of here. Thank you for coming on. Well, may do more topics like this. I think obviously unique expertise beyond just the golf course architecture standpoint, and being somebody that owns and operates and you know, has a wonderful place, I recommend the fields to everybody. I think it's one of the most best hidden gems in America. You know, there's it gets. It doesn't get nearly the traffic that it deserves. So you know,
it's only an hour fifteen from from Atlanta. My buddy and I my buddy who I went out there with, and I still talk about it.
You know. It's we went on a great winter day.
It was not, you know, a pleasant day to play golf, but both of us being northern nurse, we we had just the best time out there playing a match. And it is so so neat. So I love that place. I can't wait till I get back down there.
We'll come back down. Yeah, stop back next time. We'll talk about Johnson City. Ye see that while we're doing it.
It's my golf course. Yeah, there you go, Jath City.
That's it. That's it. Yeah, all right, I'll tell a little boy we talked about it. I'll see you