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 Friday Egg, Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday Frida Egg, fridagg Bride Egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run.
Off of the Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson. Today I'm excited. This is like an immediate reaction podcast. I'm joined by Garrett Morrison, former co host of this podcast, now as his own pod, Design and Golf. We just got done, both of us playing Oakmont for the first time. We played in the USGA media day for the upcoming US Open, so I figured we could chat a little bit golf courses. We're going to talk about Oakman here
at the top initial thoughts. We aren't gonna get like super nitty gritty. We're gonna give the high level kind of takeaways. Then we're going to talk a little bit about my trip to Scotland on the back half of this which was an exciting, exciting trip. I've been on a kind of a marathon trip here, rolling from Scotland right into Oakmont and now and then I'll go home. So jet lagged fresh off a Links golf extravaganza is definitely the best way to experience Oakmont, especially because I
had my Echo Bio H five. Echo is a partner of ours and they'll be sponsoring a lot of our US Open coverage. It was great to be out there. I got more weather at Oakmont. I dealt with like more weather at Oakmont in one day, and I did for a week and a half in Scotland. So my Echo Biome h fives were killing it. These shoes were actually inspired. Their design was inspired from the rugged Scottish Highlands and these are some of the most innovative and have some of the most technology in a golf shoe
that you can find. So it features they're all new echo texts, waterproof membrane that's what kept my feet very dry today. And it also has the next generation biome golf shoe, which it's a sporty, modern aesthetic, but it's crafted from that premium Echo performance leather. They have a seam knit sock construction, so the way that works is it's not really like a tongue, it's more like a sock at the top. I found it pretty nice because sometimes like a tongue can move around cause you a
little discomfort. This is more like just like having another sock and you tie it on it. So if you're interested in the biome h five, check out us dot Echo dot us dot Echo dot com slash golf. All right, Garrett, welcome on Oakmon. First uh, first time there, first time on the property? Like me, what was your initial I guess actually, like, what did you expect Oakmont to be like? And what what initially was different than you expected? Well?
I expected it to be hard, right, because that's what you hear about Oakmont, that it's hard, And I suppose from reading a little bit about it, I expected the land to be kind of what it was just brownie impressive, heavily sloped, big, The whole course felt big. I expected to be able to see across the whole corridors because I've heard plenty about the tree removal at Oakmont, heard that story many times. So the course kind of looked
how I expected. When we arrived. I wasn't surprised by anything I saw out of the windows in the clubhouse when we were in there listening to the USGA presentations during media day. We went during media day. I'm not sure if you mentioned that. When I actually got on the course and started playing the golf holes, a number of things surprised me, and we can get into all of them, but first and foremost, the greens shocked me.
I'm not sure if I had anything in particular that I was expecting from the greens, but they're different than any greens I've ever played on. They're different in construction, they're different in how they play. They're much harder than anyone could ever imagine to play with any precision whatsoever. So that was the thing that really jumped out at me. And some other things did too, but that was the big one.
I had always heard that the greens were awesome, Like I'd always heard that they were, you know, one of the five best sets of greens in American golf.
When people say it's a great set of greens, you know to expect something special, but it's not exactly clear what you should expect.
Right, Yeah, I thought they were like wildly unique too. Yeah they are not. They're not like your your template or like your you know. I think it benefits because phones the designer has only only designed one golf course. Yeah, so you don't see any similarities to like other sets
of greens really out there. They are very unique to Oakmont. Like, for me, one green that just like jumps to mind is the ninth that has this channel that kind of like is like an L shape through the green and it's incredible and it's like, Oh, that's really cool green. And it kind of goes through like the middle of the green and then it goes along the back that l like trough and and I'm like, God, that's so cool.
I haven't seen anything like that anywhere else. And I'm like, oh, well, that's because he hasn't designed anywhere else, you know, the guy that designed Oakmont. So I think that's like one of the reasons I think I was like pretty shocked at how much I liked the golf course. I think I just generally have an aversion to like contrived hard.
I really dislike when golf courses are just trying to be hard, like their identity is that they're hard, and then they do almost gimmicky things to make it hard, such as.
The reason that they're hard is gimmicks. Yes, not because the land and the and the bones of the design make.
It so yeah. Yeah, And I just thought Oakmon's more just like, no, it's just really hard, yeah, and it's every SHOT's achievable. And I think that's where I like struggle with some courses that are hard, Like it's just like, well, like I probably would only hit that fairway like once out of like five balls anyways, so it's not a big surprise I missed the fairway here, But at Oakmont, I did feel like I could hit every fairaway. I did feel like if I executed the shot, I could
hit a really good shot. I felt like I had good looks at birdies occasionally if I hit good shots. But I also like as soon as I hit a bad one, I was like, oh no, that's gonna go. And then in some cases the recovery was a lot of fun because of the greens.
Yeah, the course puts you in a blender super quickly.
If you're in the wrong place off the tee, then you're super lucky if you can make bogie, you know, because I mean that's this is partly because of the rough, but even if the rough were lower, the way the course works against you once you get off of the garden path is something that comes from the slope and the design the slope of the property and the design of the course, which makes it feel like an honest challenge, right, because it's the property, because it's the way the holes
are laid across the land. Because that's the primary reason that it's a hard course, and that the rough and the deep bunkers are sort of additions to that. Because it feels naturally tough. That's why maybe it's not bothersome that it is so hard, but it's I mean incredibly hard.
It's it's very hard. It's very hard. But I agree with you, it's naturally hard. Ye. What the reason it's hard is because you are having to navigate this extremely rugged piece of ground. And I think like the way they're kind of broad, it's I think you could think of a rugged and you might think of like England where you have these like kind of rollly glacial like movements and that's like you know, you go up and down.
Like one of course that would jump to mind would be like Shinnecock Hills where you have like some chop to the movement.
It's almost doonesy. Yeah, it's like big versions of dunes.
Oakmont is like very broad slopes that the property just navigates, and it's like you're not really ever playing over them. You're just playing along them or down them a lot.
And it makes it very hard because you get these very uneven lies, and for the most part, the design counters the lies where you're on a down slope and then the green is screaming away, or you're on a side slope and the balls below your feet for a righty but you really want to keep it up the left, you know, or keep it toward to the left side of the green.
You know.
Those are the ways that the slopes kind of interact. I thought it was interesting. We had a chat with the club historian and he talked about how phones designed this golf course after a trip to Scotland to see Links, and I was like, huh, Like I never thought of Oakmont and Links golf in the same realm, But I think like maybe this uniqueness of this trip that I just went on. I came back and I was looking around.
I was like, you know, the way that this golf course interacts with its natural ground is so similar to the way Links golf courses interact with the ground in the sense that like a lot of stuff was not built. It just was kind of like plopped on top of the ground.
Yeah. I think that's my biggest take away actually from the course, the kind of overarching takeaway I had, which is that this really is a lay of the land golf course. This is, in a funny way, a highly
minimalistic design, even though it doesn't look like that. It doesn't communicate that in its esthetics because the bunkers are so built up, and because they have these ditches running through the course that look somewhat constructed, and there's a slight Victorian flavor to the construction style of the golf features. But if you look at the course in its totality, take a bird's eye view of it, it's basically these
two hillsides that feed toward the Pennsylvania Turnpike. At the bottom the Pennsylvania Turnpike behaves almost like a river in this property. It's the low point, and you have these two hillsides that are kind of facing that low point, and the course works down up across these hillsides on
diagonals across it. And that's where its variety comes from, not from moving earth and making holes look different from each other because they're artificially constructed in different ways, but because the holes are using those hillsides differently, and it's a pretty simple piece of land, like it's not, as you said, like Shinnecock Hills is more of this rolling, tumbling piece of land that's more conventionally what a really good golf property would be. Hillside properties can be a
problematic because they can be repetitive. If you don't have a good routing, you can just be going up and down all day. But here every hole is immediately distinctive because of its relationship to the land. There are some varieties of undulations out there, Like it's not just completely flat hillsides, you know, tilted toward one direction. You know when you get back into sixteen seventeen and there's sort of a dip there and some more variety in the landforms.
But for the most part, it's a fairly straightforward property that the routing just manages to find infinite variety in. And I think that's the brilliance of the course. And then that extends even to the greens which are lay of the land, because you know, they didn't build up these greens very much. If you walk around them. You don't see these big ledges that the architects used to make the greens flatter. Right, If you go to Augusta National,
for instance, this is maybe the best example. Augusta National represents a more modern way of building greens, I think on a hilly site where by nineteen the early nineteen thirties, Alistair McKenzie had figured out that he could use certain kinds of equipment to make routing a golf course easier and make his greens more And one way to do that would be to prop the greens up against the hillside. In other words, you have a high point and a
low point. If the green is sitting on a high point and a low point, then you just lift the low point up with some dirt and you have a flatter surface to work with, and then you can contour that surface to make it interesting. That would be the method that architects in the nineteen twenties and thirties came up with to build greens, and that method is still used today at Oakmont. This was built in nineteen oh three.
That's so early in American golf architecture. That's so early in golf architecture period like Sunningdale had basically just been built a couple of years earlier. This was in.
National Golfleet's got built basically ten yeah, eight years later.
Eight years later, nineteen eleven, I think is when it opened. Nineteen oh three is ancient days in America golf architecture. And you can see that because the greens are not constructed in the way that architects learned how to do later. They're very lay of the land. They sit flush with the land, and that's why some of them have such amazing slope. But the solutions that Phones came up with to make those greens lay of the land but also
playable and interesting are fascinating. You know. He basically cut channels through them to drain them and also to create pinnable sections. He did a bunch of weird things out there that architects after nineteen twenty didn't really do at all. And so, yeah, a very lay of the land course that just finds different solutions for its property than most courses built later would have.
I think that the thing about the lay of the land aspect, there's obviously like great long views, especially from like the higher points in the property, whether you're up by the clubhouse on on the I'm not sure what directional that side is. It would be the south side of the turnpike.
Or I mean on the other side from the clubhouse you're talking about.
No, No, that'd be the north side on the other side, I think.
So the same side as the clubhouse, the clubhouse side.
So well like it whether I'm just saying, the long views from the clubhouse really area, right, and then the long views from up on like three.
Yeah, which is on the other side of the property from the clubhouse.
They're amazing, and I think like one of the things I was thinking about while I was out there was like if you just like if you if there were no fairway grass, if it was just rough, you would just look at it and be like, oh, it's just there. You wouldn't see any like construction, right.
Yeah, it blends back in. Yeah, it really does, which again people might find weird because bunkers are not created in a way that looks naturalistic. Now, but for the most part, the golf course kind of if you take away all the agronomy and all the color contrasts from bunker sand and rough and fairway grass and green grass, the golf course kind of disappears back into the landscape because they just weren't able to move that much dirt.
They just it was like little bits at a time that prop up a little section of the green there. Maybe dig a bunker here so we could lift this up here. But very simple moves. And when you look at it from a long view, as you're saying, it's just it's almost not there except for the agronomic presentation, which is very eye catching, you know.
Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, with regards to the greens, I don't know of any golf course that I've ever played that has more greens that run away, Yeah, and like viciously run away.
Really yeah, not not your you know, not your sort of kindergarten level runaway green. These ones run away with the slope of the hill that they're on.
So I counted six run greens that run away, and that what I mean by that is they slope from the front of the green to the back of the green. And I think that's like super interesting when you start talking about championship golf, because the best players in the world at this point, particularly now, thrive by command of the ball and understanding. They love the predictability. They love when the ball's in the air because they know it's
where it's going to land. Like when they get flustered is when the ball when they don't have control of the ball. And I think six fallway greens is a fascinating way to Like, a heavy amount of fall away greens is a fascinating way to challenge these players because to to hit into a fallaway green, you have to get the right trajectory, the right amount of spin, and you have to hit the shot solidly, like if you hit it off the toe, then the spin won't be right.
If you hit a little thin, it'll skip a little bit further. Basically, fall away greens magnify the the great shots like it. It is a natural way to create a large like amplifies the dispersion of good or bad.
It's like firmness, Yes, it's like it's the same similar effect to firmness, except it's just done with with slope.
And it also has a way of getting in your head too, because you really start to think about like if you have one that runs through the green, then you're thinking, oh, I gotta be careful on the next one. And they're graded differently I just like I can't get over I read putts with my feet and I I cannot get over how like I'm not an ame pointer.
I know on an ame point, but I just walk around and I feel what's going on in my feet and then I read the putt like I get behind and I could not get over how my feet felt today. There are a few greens at Augusta National that made my feet feel this way, but like form the most part, my feet were just they were. It was nuts all day because like you could just feel how much up certain puts were, how much down certain puts were, the immense side slopes. I think that's it. It just you
have to be in the right spots. And I think we can get into kind of the the gill work that's been done. But I think adding a little bit of width has amplified these greens because there's a little bit more space and real estate to play and the and obviously recapturing also part of this restoration that happened last year. They recaptured really the last two years, recaptured a lot of green space that they didn't have, So the greens have gotten more interesting and there's also a
little bit more space. There's not that. This is not like a really huge wide. It's not like we're playing at eighteen at LACC here. But there's just a little bit more space to operate in the fairway.
Yeah, and just in spots where you might want to play toward the edge of the fairway to gain some kind of advantage. So it's not like an overall widening of the fairways. I think if people look at the aerials and compare them between you know, twenty twenty and twenty twenty four, that they won't see that much difference
in the fairway wits. It's just in particular places where they've recaptured some fairway, often in the run ups to greens in cool ways, so that now you have short grass running up to a green side bunker instead of rough defending that bunker basically, So there's some of that. But then in the landing zones for drives, yeah, there's some more width here and there, but it's just in spots where maybe you would want to find a new
angle into the green. And then the green expansions are sort of done in the same spirit, where you push the green to the edge of the green pad, not with the intention of creating more forgiveness necessarily though it may do that for amateurs, but for pros who are going to be playing this course when they have the hardest pin positions, those pin positions are just going to become harder because now they're out toward the edge of
the green pad like hanging over these bunkers. And so part of the reason that you then recapture some fairway with in certain areas is to allow good players to attack certain pins by trying to find these new sections the fair way. And so it doesn't necessarily make the course more forgiving, but it does make it slightly more dynamic and interesting. I think, yeah, I.
Loved some of the new pockets. I thought that, you know, one of the things like us when we play these media days, like you never know what you're gonna get from the whole location standpoint. They were showing up. They were showing off the pockets today like sometimes you get just dead center of the green every hole. Today they were they were flashing some some whole locations. I thought, like, I got right out of the gate. The we teed off four, but the fifth hole had like some some
left hole. They it was the back left hole location, and it was funny. I was like right down the middle and I was looking at it, and I was in just the short rough. I was in like the first cut, and I was looking at it. I was like and I had like a little wedge into the green, and I'm like, God, I like I needed to be on the right side to really like have a good go at this hole. Like I had to just like hope that I caught the slope to turn it in,
but like I couldn't play at it. And it's just it's interesting because if you get into the right spot. This isn't, by no means a golf course where you're going to be often thinking about trying to hit it and do a different spot, but there are opportunities, especially, Like I think what's neat about this golf course is it does have some shorter par fours that are not necessarily driveable, but they have like three fairly short par fours that are like really interesting decisions off the tee.
And I think that's like it is a big, tough golf course, but there are holes that like you can get it. You have three sub four hundred par fours and you also have two par fives, like where you're going to get wedges in your hands or you're gonna be able to push it up by the green, and how you decide to attack those holes, I think is going to be one of the more interesting aspects of the tournament.
Yeah, that's a good point, because I think the green expansions on the short par flours in particular were very successful and notable, like notably different from what they were before, and I think part of the reason for that is to create that day to day variability where you can move the tee up, bring into play another section of the fairway, and then put the pin in a really tough place like way out on a tongue that has been recaptured and was formerly rough, and now you have
kind of an interesting situation for a player who may have played the hole in a completely different way when the pin was in the middle of the green. And I think for short part fours in particular, where players can make a choice between hitting a three iron to the left side of the fairway and or hitting a d to the right side of the fairway, having those really distinct different pin positions is super.
Helpful, and I think that's gonna be important because of the consideration of the rough. It's not just like aiming down the right side of the fairway. It's also understanding like, hey, and this is one of the one of the things that makes Oakmont different, I think than a lot of places is also the ditches. So you found one of these today, Yeah, it was awful. You're hanging off the edge of it. Yeah, it's an athletic feet what you're doing. I would not I would have been that. That was
my best part of the day. This is great. The uh, but theh the ditches, I think you like, you really have to favor sides in the sense of like getting to a side because you're not gonna be able to hit all the faraways out here. Getting to a side that allows you the chance to run a shot in from the rough, and that that is an important thing. But then there are so many holes that have these ditches that run along one side of the fairway or
cut across the fairway and some aspects. And these are multifunctional, one of the more cool features on a golf course. You know, they're multifunctional. They also drain the golf course really well.
Yeah, they're all kind of running you see them running down toward the turnpike, basically, yeah.
And they run and they run on low sides of fairways so that they capture the most water. But these ditches then like immediately shade you to the other side, and those are often that side is the bad side to miss in the rough, right it it is. It is such a difficult golf course because you just look around and you see all these places you don't want to go, and you just have to make really great swings.
Yeah. Yeah, I thought it was interesting to go around the course and try to figure out which holes were truly strategic in the sense that you had options and those options carried some kind of risk reward question with them, versus holes that were just purely penal, where there were hazards, bad stuff on both sides and you just wanted to be down the middle of history way. That was the only question. Yeah. Oakmon is known primarily as a penal
golf course. That's even the line from the club itself. This is a this is the penal school of design, which I don't know, maybe people need some background on what penal school versus strategic school means.
I didn't penal school means it's just hard. If you mishit the shot, then you will be penalized. If you hit a good one, you are rewarded.
Yeah, but it doesn't always have to be hard necessarily. It's just that the hazards are on both sides of the target, and the idea is you need to be the only thing you're thinking about is I need to be not in those hazards. That's penal school strategic. There are more questions about risk and reward that enter the equation. Strategic holes tend to work on diagonals and maybe across side slopes. Penal holes tend to go up and down
and work on linear concepts straight up and down. And I thought it was interesting at Oakmont that the most penal holes, which I thought were basically one nine ten, the ones that really had those linear hazards down both sides of the fairway where all you were thinking about was okay, middle of the fairway, I'm not trying to
play any angles here. Those were the holes that ran most up and down the slopes, Whereas I thought the most strategic holes at Oakmont were the ones that ran along side slopes, that ran along diagonals and kind of had a high side of the fairway and a low side of the fairway. Those holes were were hazarded differently, they were bunkerd differently, they had more staggered bunkers, bunkers
kind of eating into the fairway. They had diagonal running fairways in relation to the te and so something to look for when when people see the telecast of the US Open, is looking trying to see is this hole one of those that runs straight up a hill or straight down a hill or is it one that kind of goes across on a side slope, And usually the ones that are on side slopes are the kind of more strategic holes.
I well, I think I found I was just sumbing through my yardage book here the eleventh might be one of the more strategic holes because the ditch cuts out.
On a diagonal, ditches on a diagonal, and the green.
Is also on a diagonal.
Yeah, so you have kind of like two fairways that are all so on diagonals where you can choose am I going to go to the short side on the right of this fairway or the long side on the.
Left, and those all depending on where the t box is. You can also carry it onto you know, the the next you know part of the fairway, you have like decision of right versus left on the front fairway. Then the ditch cuts across and you have the option to maybe carry it past that and get yourself a shorter shot. I thought that might be like the most from a strategic from a t shot standpoint. The other ones, I thought twelve was a really interesting one.
The par five classic example. This is a side slope hole with staggered bunkers. So you have these bunkers that are like high left side and bunkers low left side, and they're always offset from each other. So you're always thinking like how much do I want to challenge that high side bunker in order to prevent myself from running
down to the bottom of the fairway. And if I if I don't challenge that high side, then I might end up in a bunker on you know, on the on the bottom side of the fairway, on the low side of the fairway. So that one's really interesting, and again it's has the staggered bunkering pattern as opposed to the kind of lineup of bunkers along the side of the fairway.
I loved the second shot on twelve. That's one of the most severely most severe greens in terms of running away from play. And I thought what's interesting about that shot was that the worst place to be was to miss short in the rough, which is where I missed.
It's it's one where you like feel like you have to get it passed, and if it's not going to be passed, you are praying for it to go into a bunker something that offers you some sort of spin control, because if you're in the rough, you have no you're you know, hitting a chip or a pitch or a thirty yard shot from thick rough, You're kind of variable
is how far it's going to fly. You generally know it's going to release and everything, and on that green it is just so vitally important to fly it exactly where you want with the spin, otherwise it's going to run through the green. You will see so many players that don't get it to that green, chipping from the rough, chipping again for their fourth shot.
Yeah, maybe missing also on the left side of the green, which is the high side, because the low side of the right side of the green lower looks bad like it looks like it kind of drops off a cliff there. Everybody in our group ended up on the left and that's a terrible, terrible place to be around the twelfth green. We said we weren't going to get too detailed in our analysis of the golf course, we've already gotten close
with the eleven and twelve. Speaking of the rough, that is kind of where the golf course loses me a bit. I understand why they have it. I mean, it was solid four inch rough out there today. It is a true Oakmont experience. I'm not bitter about having the experience. It's good to have that experience, you know, somewhat similar to what they'll see in the US Open. Obviously it'll be harder at the US Open. But the reliance on rough, I understand it.
It would be really fun to play it with like one inch rough.
Be so fun to play if there were more short grass out there, more short grass around the greens. I know I'm a brooking record on this, but this is where I think Pinehurst number two's magic really becomes clear. Where that course is extremely hard, but it's a joyful kind of hard. It's the kind of hard that makes you want to go around again and play the course again.
I can imagine playing Pinehurst Number two multiple times in one day, but Oakmont, I really can't imagine playing thirty six holes at Oakmont, partly partly because of this dependence on Rough for challenge.
I'm gonna I'm gonna zig here, and I'm just gonna say, I think it's important for us opens to go to different venues that have different values and represent different cultures.
I agree with that. I agree with that. I'm just saying it's not my preference. It's not my personal preference.
I think, you know, Oakmont, like I kind of appreciate a course with really cool greens, thick rough and immense topography. I think it's cool, it's unique. Like I like that this is wildly different than Pinehurst Number two what we saw last last year. I think in general, this championship should be wildly different year in, year out, you know, because it should reflect different areas of the country that
have different types of you know, agronomy. And I think like, obviously, Oakmond is like the king of the Pittsburgh golf culture, and you are coming into Pittsburgh's golf culture and this is what we do in Pittsburgh, you know, And I kind of appreciate that. I kind of, you know, like I am. I think anybody that's listening to this podcast for a long time, like, I'm not a fan of just thick, rough, narrow fairways like and necessarily penal architecture,
but I kind of appreciate this one. This one is like the og. This one is the They've always been kind of the outlier in the system in terms of like how they've pushed agronomy and set up and everything, and I think it kind of all works.
It's baked into its identity. The rough is part of Oakmond. I'm not saying they should get rid of it. I think that would be a little disappointing, even because it's so much a part of the core of this golf course. It's just not my personal favorite thing, and it is why I love certain courses and don't love other courses. And I think the US Open, as you say, should go to many different kinds of courses, some of which
some people will really like and others won't like. And that's Good's that's where the National Championship should be.
It's part of the charm of the championship. I wish they had more geographic and golf course architectural differentiation within it. I think like the one thing that the anchor site. The bummer about the anchor site is like how repetitive Pebble and Pinehurst are. I loved last year's Pinehurst one, but I'm not ready to see it again in four years.
And I think, like I think once every ten years, this kind of like should be the cadence for an American US Open because it's just there's so many venues to go see.
They're going to Oakmont a lot too. Oakmont's one of the top anchor sites as well, but any US Open rooda should be anchored on on Pinehurst number two in Oakmont Country Club. I think those are the two greatest US Open venues.
Shinnakok I thinks pretty rate.
I don't know. I mean, I think I think Shinnakok Hills is I need to I need to actually go go play Shinecock Hills. I've never been there. Yeah, I've just seen it on TV. I think it's a fairly recent entry in the in the canon of US Open. But so is Pinehurst number two for that matter. I don't know, for for one reason or another, maybe because they're so opposed to each other, maybe because they're opposites
in many ways. Pinehurst Number two in Oakmont just kind of seem like the the patriarch and the matriarch of the US Open.
At this point, I have to admit that walking around seeing Oakmont today with the with the with the greens restored, the fairway with widened in some parts, I was thinking about Pebble Beach a little bit and how it could have a similar look and feel to it when you like have those long views and thinking about how small it looks because of the presentation.
Pokemont is a great example of meeting the scale of your property. Yeah, that course belongs to that property, and it's the greens are properly big. These are big greens, right, but they're not easy to navigate. Everything about the course, from its bunkers to its other golf features, is scaled up properly, and yeah, that's something that Pebble is missing a bit.
Right now, let's end this discussion with what was your favorite? What hole are you most looking forward to for the tournament.
We've already talked about twelve, really looking forward to that. I'm kind of curious about eight long par three running downhill with some ability to run the ball onto the green, and a green that tilts away from the player a significant amount at the front. Just at the front, it kind of there's a little of a rise at the back.
I'm just curious to see whether players fly the ball to the green there or whether they actually try to run it up because it's going to play pretty long and the court and the whole design really invites that run up play.
So yeah, I just just depend on how firm it is.
Yeah, if it's firms, they'll have to they'll have to run it up on to one and ten too, if if those greens are firm. So, but yeah, eight is there's something about that hole that I'm just charmed by. I think it is really simple and it fits its piece of land in a very kind of low profile but interesting way. I like that whole lot, And yeah, I just want to I want to see pros tackle a long part three where a run up play might be might be beneficial to them.
I'll do. I'll naminate one in ten just because I well, I love just.
How how tilted away those greens are.
And I love it from like Thursday and Friday of a tournament. Is that that's your first hole. It's like, oh, it's my first iron shot and I and I'm having to like figure out where to land it there they both play way downhill.
Just imagine imagine like finding finding out that you're that you're starting on ten and you're like, oh god, thank god, I don't have to start on one.
But then you remember, so I think that's like my favorite. I just like, I love the idea of just hitting just this absurd shot right out of the gate that you don't see anywhere else in pro golf. They never see a green like that in pro golf on the first hole where it just screams.
Away and twelve is insane as well.
It's funny because I just I, you know, the Scotland trip. I I just realized how many how many courses have these like the first two holes or just nothing holes that were like built in you know there in like eighteen seventy because the little warm up holes.
Yeah, it's intentional, there were warm up holes. And also they're usually sitting on the least interesting land because the most interesting land is what you were getting to know.
But it's like the one in ten. In terms of starting a championship or like the complete antithesis of a warm up hole.
Yeah. Yeah, the opposite of a gentle handshake.
Yeah. Also, seventeen's really cool. That green was way more interesting than I thought it was.
Seventeen is going to be the cat and Itpy hole for sure, and for good reason. It's a it's a very very cool golf hole. I wonder, Yeah, I don't know. I wonder. I wonder if everybody's just gonna go for the green or what witch tees are going to invite that play most.
I don't think you want to be around.
I want to be around it, that's the thing. Yeah, But we had three longer hitters in our group, all basically go for the green from the tea and turn out pretty well as I recall.
Yeah, I think they were outliars.
Yeah maybe, so you know.
All right, let's talk about Scotland, but first let's talk about Maui Nui. Maui Nui makes this great venison and you might have heard a recent major champion talk about game meat. But one of the reasons that Maui nui is so popular is that venison is one of the healthiest meats that you can get, like the protein density and it is like through the roof. It is like
the cleanest red meat you can eat. And Maui Nui they harvest the access deer on Maui, which is a like a sustainability kind of crisis on Maui uh and it is it is one wild harvested meat that is completely stress free and responsibly sourced. So this is a way that you can elevate your meals with delicious, high quality protein and that's very very good for you. I brought a bunch of the sticks they have like almost they're just like you know, great snack sticks. They are
like ten ten grams of protein. Kept me going throughout Scotland, like I would just snap into those. It's that's not necessarily the easiest country to eat healthy, and it provided some healthy nutrition for me. You know. One of the things that the nature of Maui Nui is they have like limited supply of their stuff. So Maui Nui is offering Friday listeners a limited collection of their favorite cuts and products, but supplies limited by nature of their work.
So don't wait, head over to Maui Nui Venison dot slash egg. That's Maui, like the place in Hawaii, m a u I n u I Venison v E n I s o n dot com slash egg. That's Maui Nui Venison dot com slash egg. Thanks to Maui Nui. All right, let's talk about Scotland.
Let's do it. Let's have you talk about Scotland. You just you just came back. So you mentioned this, but you went on a Friday golf club trip to Scotland. Have been away from home for a while now, a little more than a week, almost two weeks, almost two weeks. Yeah, God, and you flew back to the US, flew into Pittsburgh and went and played Oakmont in a rainstorm.
Well, I was presented. I had an interest. I was It was like, am I gonna fly back from Scotland?
Yeah? No, I mean Stanford.
It's going to fly all the way back to oakslond.
The eternal question do I go home first? Yeah? Clearly this was the best choice, but.
I don't know if it was. I'm not sure it's true.
Yeah, yeah, people probably can't tell it because of our enthusiasm, but we're a little worse for the wear at the end of this day.
Feed up by Yeah.
In any case, Uh, your Scotland trip just like sounds awesome. You've been to some of these courses before, which course was the star this time on the itinerary and maybe let people know what the itinerary was first, just to give them.
A sense of Yeah. So we went to Saint Andrew's area, Fife and for the trip, and then I spent a weekend in North Berwick which was great, uh and we can talk a little bit about that. But in Fife, what we wanted to do we did not do the guaranteed access to the old course. So we wanted to give everybody a chance to enter the ballot every day. So in fact what the itinerary was was outside of Thursday, the we we on Thursday we played Panmuir and Carnoustie.
That was our only scheduled thirty six old day. What everybody had was an afternoon afternoon tea time at a golf course, so we played Crail Balconi Court Balcony Course, which is the old golf course, the old Tome golf course. There we played Ee twice uh and then we also played Kings Barns and then uh Pamir and Carnoustie. But the mornings were free so every day you could go enter the ballot. I also played the new course when I arrived, which was delightful if you didn't win the ballot.
Like the the the point was like you can go play the new course, or you could go play Eden or Jubilee at the Lynx Trust or the Castle Course because you know, one of the great aspects of like new courses you can just walk up and get a tea time. It does not have tea times, right, you just walk up and they say, oh you're you're out in ten minutes.
World class golf course.
Yeah, that was kind of actually probably to me the most the star. You never hear anybody talk about the new because of the old.
Yeah, and whenever you hear somebody mention the new, it's to say something like you never hear anybody talking about this course, but it's amazing.
Yeah, it's awesome. I mean it's basically on like very similar land to the old. And like I think part of the name is like this is an old golf course.
The name is a problem. I'm just gonna say this. I think the name is a problem. I think people think that this is a new, modern golf course. This course was built in the eighteen nineties. Yeah.
Yeah, it's old Tom Morris golf course.
Yeah, veteran old Tom Morris designing.
There's some incredible holes on it, and it gets out some of the best holes on a play right along where the loop is on on on the old course, so like seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven that they keep going, so like where you see you know the eden and the seventh green, so eleven and seven that double green there, like right on the other side, there's like an epic par five on new that has these two dunes like that you can run in and then and then a par three that plays right along the estuary to like
this punch bowl green. It's like two hundred and twenty yard par three. It's really cool. The next hole is that eat too, but like so it is. That was like actually a revelation. So like the point of the trip was like everybody enter the ballot. So we had sixteen people. Twelve people won the ballot, which was incredible. I think we were like very lucky with that. I was very happy that I was not one of the twelve people that won it.
Because you've already played the old course.
I've already played the old course. But you know the so the you know, people went and played the Eden, people wouldn't played the New and stuff like that. But like for me, the New course stacked up like very high on my list of the courses I played, and that was the one that I hadn't I hadn't been on that. I was like, wow, Like nobody talks about this, and it's because it's like the classic like Big Brother
with the old you know, Big Brother Little Brother. Other course that like kind of I had heard a lot about that I really enjoyed was was panmir the It's it's an interesting place. It's where it's most known for where it's where Hogan practiced before Carnousti. But six through fourteen or four through fourteen there is like one of the best runs of of golf holes of anywhere in the world. And you know, the first three holes that
go out are pretty mellow. They're just flat, boring ground and pretty you know, they are not gonna win any architectural interest awards. But then you get auto to four and it's like, okay, this is pretty cool, and it just starts rashing up five's and awesome part three and then you get to the Hogan hole six, which you know is one of that you know that is one
of the most vicious part fours in the world. And it's on like incredible links land and then you just start playing on this amazing links field for for a series of holes. So Panma a really great club too, like it was they had We had a big lunch there and that that is a great place that should be on more people's itineraries. I personally enjoyed it more than my trip to its more famous neighbor Carnousti. Carnousi is an interesting one to talk about in terms of like Oakmont mm hmm.
Is Cornelisty the Oakmont of of the Roda.
So like that's where like we talked, you know, I said this, like, you know, forty minutes ago. I get when when something just like contrived hard, I get very turned off by it.
Oh so you're you're putting in an opposition to Oakmont.
Then yes, yeah, Like to me, it just was like we're gonna do everything we can to make this hard and it and it comes to the detriment of the golf course where like I was looking around and you know, it was nice, we played it without the rough was down so that made it like at least like we
could find golf balls. But I was just looking at us, like God in the middle of the summer when these fairways are humming, like I don't even know how you hit some of these fairways, like it's done, and if the rough's up, like we're just gonna look for balls. And I think it's just it's an interesting aspect of links golf is people run to play the places that host the rotos. Yeah, I think the other thing with Carnousti And like, I liked a lot of the greens.
There are some really cool greens out there. There are some really cool holes. I love playing sixteen, seventeen eighteen. I love fifteen too, you know, like there's a really good three is a really cool hole. Two's a cool hole.
There are a lot of cool holes. But I think like one of the things that you do lose when you go to a lot of the ROTA courses is you lose the authentic kind of experience of visiting like an old club and there are no like is especially juxtaposed with with Panmuir where they had like a traditional lunch set up for us, and you like kind of felt like you were experiencing what it might be like to be a member there, right, And then you go into Carnoustie and it's just the a line of buses
that you know, you get off and you know it's a modern club house and and.
The golf course maybe reflects that in some ways because under the RNA, over the past couple of decades, a lot of the road to courses have evolved away from their older forms and have become more modern themselves, which I think in a lot of cases is a shame. And I think it accounts for why courses like North Barrack have risen in people's estimation and started to go
on bucket lists more often. I think that's because the Open doesn't go to North Barrack and it's not subject to the same pressures.
That was an interesting, like little thing I was thinking about putting together like a notes article, and this was one of my notes. Is like, there's like a lot of you know, there's a lot of Scotts at various places that openly wonder why North Barrick is popular and like why it's surged up the list. Yeah, and I think it's like because it's I think it's just like the changing tastes in in the golf culture.
Yeah, more to quirk, more fun, more emphasis on those you know things that north Barrick has.
Yeah, and I think it's like it's it's fascinating to me that that there's like I heard it from probably like five to ten people. Oh really that And I, you know, I don't I talk to like some people. I don't talk to a ton, but like, and these are all locals that are members at various clubs and really good clubs, like openly like, I don't think north
Barrick's that good. Is like was there like general sentiment, like I think that there are a lot of other courses that are a lot better, But I kind of like think like it offers something so unique in the sense that it's so fun, it's got so many, you know, unique aspects of it, and it's like embraced just being kind of weird.
Yeah, it's and it's relatively intact. That stuff hasn't been smoothed over by by modern methods or tastes. So I think that's why it's risen lately, and other courses like CARNUSTI maybe aren't maybe aren't as appealing to I'm sure many people still want to go play the place because it hosts the Open, but it's not surprising that Carnousti would would seem less appealing to you than Panmier. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean Carnoussi is just like there's just rough everywhere, and then the bunkers and I get like that's the It's Carnasty right, like it's baked into the name, and the bunkers are just like insanely deep.
Yeah, you know, super narrow fairways, like you know, improperly narrowed fairways or that's not the right word. I guess fairways that feel narrower than they should be based on the landforms that they sit on. That's like a problem right now with road courses. You see it a lot. Mm hmm, it's i you know, you see it roll Troon, you see it at Brokedale, you see it a lot.
I mean the old course could be wider too.
Yeah, yeah, there's two there's too much rough of the old course. Yeah. I think I think there's an issue there that people don't really talk about that often, but I've heard, I've certainly heard, uh you know, certain British or European golf architects discussed that issue, but mostly mostly behind closed stores.
Yeah, and we we played Ee twice and that the reason we played Eely twice was that was like one of my favorite courses I've ever played.
Yeah, you had a great experience there a couple of years ago.
Yeah, and went back and yeah it was it was awesome. I love that golf course. One of my favorite golf courses in the world. And uh, it was fun going out there. We had we had like an absolute blue bird day. The weather we got was incredible.
It seemed like you got a great run.
I mean, we played we played Eely and Ely is like a like a beach town in five Uh. We played it on like a seventy degree sunny day with no wind and it was just idealic And uh, is.
That where you would join if you were to join one of these clubs?
I mean, I you know, I don't think you can ask to join, but I would.
I mean, I'm just tying hympathetically. Fantasy is like if you if you were allowed to join one.
I think I would love to. I would love I would love to joy Dally that would.
Be your place. That's the place that that that fills your heart with joy. That's the yeah.
And it's even like down to like they have. There's a pub off the off the seventeenth Green called the nineteenth Hole, and it's just like the we ate there one night. It was great. It was like, yeah, it's that place is amazing. I love that. You tee off and you look out, ah, you know, a periscope on the first hole to see if the next group's clear, and it's just like, oh, here's your first hole. Hit it over this giant hill and you don't know where where it's going to be when you get over the hill.
Periscopes are underused. It's funny.
I had, you know, someone on the trip was like through two holes, I was like, what where am I? Why am I playing this golf course? Like and then he and then he was like yeah, and then I hit that shot on three, which is this downhill, dramatic downhill part three that you see kind of the the Firth of Forth and where you're going, and he's like, and from that point on, I was like, oh my god, I love this place. So eally was you know, outside the old course. The resounding favor of the group.
Was it was that partly because of your influence.
I feel like I had some influence.
At the host of the trip.
Yeah. I think I think I might a poison the well at at King's Barnes too, because of a you know, ill timed joke on the on the bus. I uh, you know, we were driving in. I said, uh, you know, here's a little slice of America for everyone.
So it's hosting one of one right there.
Yeah, I will say, you know, Kingsbarns was not my favorite. You know, I just think it's like kind of stilly to go there and play a modern American golf course.
This is the question there.
It's got some really good golf holes on it, and it's got some holes that I could do without, and it's beautiful, like you just like stare at the water all day. It kind of feels like a Scottish whistling straits a little bit.
Yeah, not hard to not hard to see the appeal.
Yeah, And I think it's interestingly it's like, I think it's like one of the most commercially successful, uh golf courses over there. It's always charged, you know, the highest amount which attracts. That's a fascinating topic. Is these clubs just realize like if we charge more money, more people come, right, it becomes more desirable. It's a wild thing going on.
Yeah, and that's and and yeah, it explains why prices have gone gone up so much. You know, we occasionally see those tweets pop up on our timelines that give the latest reports on what the prices have become at various you know, Scottish clubs and Irish clubs. And yeah, they've definitely, especially since COVID, have have gone through the roof. And it's kind of sad. But also if they can charge that and get that, then you can't fault them for doing it. Yeah.
And and and if they charge it, if they charge more, they're getting more.
Demand, which is insane. Yeah. Yeah, that's the thing is that golf continues to to sort of kill it right now with with demand. We'll see if supply can keep up, I think. Yeah.
The other big takeaway I had from the trip was it was just neat because, like, you know, there's there's a couple of people that came by themselves. There was a bunch of people that came with like a friend or two, and like it was neat to see like a group of like everybody really into golf, like become like a group of friends by the end of it. So I don't know, it was it was a neat.
An adventure together. Yeah, that's the best way to make friends. It was an adventure and you know, either you're gonna gonna hate each other by the end of it or become close friends.
I think I appreciated how this like setting made it feasible for like one or two, you know, groups of one and two people that like go do a cool Scotland trip without having to do a ton of planning. So it's like kind of a mini ad. But it wasn't meant to be a mini ad.
Friday golf club events, yeah, trips, Yeah, I think we have a mother or going to open up this week.
So but but yeah, it was an awesome trip to Scotland. Everybody should go. I mean, the playing conditions are just amazing. I was I thought April was like, actually the end of all was like a great time to go. I think we got great weather, but I from what I had heard, it's actually like kind of a sneaky good time to go. So recommendation and then hanging out in St. Andrews is like just one of the best best places to hang out.
Yeah, we all wish we could go back in time and go to the University of St. Andrews. You don't what, okay, if we have the grades.
I've started to have this, like, uh thought more and more. It's like one of my big regrets is like not knowing how big the world was when I was nineteen years old.
Yeah, but that's a lot of people.
Yeah, you know, it's like, oh, this this was an option. Yeah, this was I could have just been here.
Yeah, but in the uh, in the in the odds too, when it was you know, really.
Cheap, Yeah, exactly, exactly.
It's still cheap for St. Andrew's students to play the links.
But yeah, and that, like being able to hang out like that was one of the other aspects of the trip that we wanted to do, was like just be in one spot. And I think that was also like super beneficial. We've made it easy, like knew where we were getting picked up, knew where we were getting dropped off, and knew by the end of the week, knew everybody knew where they were going. You know.
That's kind of one theory of the Scottish golf trip that you might do multiple trips in your lifetime. And one theory of it is that you go to one place and go deep as opposed to going to a bunch of places and going shallow. Yeah.
And then I did a weekend in North Beric and similarly like it was, it was great. It was delaighted that that's a great trip. Also, the East Lothian trip is like very easy to do and a.
Very good one. Everything's very close. Yeah.
I went to I think one course that nobody really talks about with Lothian because I went to a place called.
Gossick spelled g os w.
I yeah, you would think it's Goswick.
You would think it would be Goswick, which I did.
In fact, the Gothic or maybe gossip go sick. Yeah, but that golf course was really cool, incredible dunes that it plays in and maybe you know, like their fourteenth hole might have been the best hole I saw on the entire trip. Really it had. It had some of the best holes that I saw on the trip. So very good golf course that never is included in an
East Lothian golf trip. But it's an hour from North Berwick, so completely feasible and it's absolutely beautiful drive like you're basically just driving down the coast the whole time, which, yeah, delightful. So to go to gossip it's worth it and relatively it like, yeah, it's really cool, So I would I would add that perfect. All right, that does it enough about Scotland.
I can talk about Scotland.
We've talked more throughout the year about it.
But yeah, hopefully this will this is the gift that will keep on giving. And you have a bunch of photos too that.
I remember writing. Yeah, there will be a bunch of stuff on on on our new website.
On our new website, yes, our refreshed website, the Frida egg dot com.
What's one thing people should go look at on the website that they like. I think one of the things like, I have I exploreded a ton, I've explored a ton. I don't think I've got I've I've found everything on there.
Yeah, it's much more, it's much more navigable if you're interested in going down a rabbit hole. That was one of the big goals of redesigning the website, to make our content something that you could just continue to click through and go deeper and deeper, and I think a couple of great places to do that on the website right now are the course profiles. Go to the course profiles page where you get the list of course profiles that you.
Can and now we go through whether you're a Friday Golf Club member or not. You can read the about sections, which is pretty substanti is in.
Some cases very substantial. Yeah. So yeah, these course profiles were written originally for Friday Golf Club members and we're member content are still member content in their entirety, but if you're just a public browser of our site, you can see a section of them, and you can get some information about a golf course and some quick perspectives and some quick factoids and things like that, and pictures obviously, so that would be one section. I also think people
should check out the architect profiles. Go see those. Those probably haven't gotten quite as much run as the course profiles because people will understandably immediately go for the courses. But the architect profiles we worked on, you know, producing a bunch of new content basically for the new site, and those architect profiles are new to the Friday So if you want to learn more about particular architects golf architects.
Then that's a great place to go. And it's a nicely designed page that you can sort of click through and go deeper and deeper if you want. The fridagg dot com right there, the Frida egg dot com.
All right, big thanks to PJ. Clark for editing and and Cameron Hurdis from Filming.
For filming this. Yeah, we're getting lots of help.
Yeah, this podcast. We'll be back next week. I actually we'll be back on Sunday with five things about the PGA.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, PGA Championships coming up.
Barreling down, ready or not? Here he comes Coil. Yeah, any exciting things about Coil Hola, What are you excited about?
No, no, that's the answer. You know what. I'm excited to see major championship. I'm excited to see the best players in the world play a golf course and compete for a major championship title. So the storylines, you know, majors are always fun. I've I've never met a major that I genuinely disliked. Maybe they have been a couple, but yeah, that the golf courses is a known quantity and and we don't need to say that.
Hu like this is the thing. These events should not be at courses that host tour events every year.
Well yeah, and it's.
Kind of why like the Pebble US Open.
SCE, this is a problem with Pebble and but but the at least it's it feels justified somewhat with Pebble because it is the course that it is. But when you're going to the you know, to the host of the Wells Fargo Championship or I guess now the truest truest, Yeah, it's it's a little disappointing obviously.
All right, Well, on that note, No.
This was supposed to be an outro. We're supposed to end on a high.
We're out of here.