¶ Intro / Opening
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 brid egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg, bride egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course. Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's episode is a little different one. I'm pretty excited about this one. I had a lot of fun putting it together. I am making my first trip over to Scotland. It will be the first time that I see the old Course and I can't couldn't be more excited. I as we get closer and closer one day out, I can't wait to get on the plane and get over there.
And you know the open should be a ton of fun. But for this podcast, we over the last few months and you know, a lot in the last week I have I've called up some people or when I've been with them, I've asked them, you know a question. You know, what brought you to the old course the first time and what were your impressions the first time you played the old course? Or we're at the Old Course so in this podcast there will be a collection of short
stories centered around those questions and they the participants. Thank you to all of them for giving me a little slice of their day. Tom Doak, Gil Hans, Michael Clayton, the Australian golf architect, former European Tour player and golf writer. Also Zach Blair PGA Tour, Shane Bacon the Great Golf Channel announcer and host, so he also caddied at the Old Course for a part portion of his life, which is pretty neat. And then James Duncan, who is who
worked a long time associate with Core and Crenshaw. He is a really great guy. We've got a future podcast coming out after the Open Championship with James, so that'll be the first time you hear his voice on this podcast. But a wonderful golf architecture and golf mind in general. So those are the guests. This is all about the Old Course. I hope you guys enjoy and we will
see you this week. I've got we've got some really neat stuff planned for the Open Championship, so be on the lookout for more pods and articles on the Friday dot Com I'll post a post something with my first impressions of the Old Course on on Monday or Tuesday on the website after I get out there walk. I can't wait, And without further ado, here is golf course architect Tom Dough.
¶ Tom Doak
The first time I saw the Old Course was when I was fifteen. I went over with my parents and my brother. My dad worked for Unilever Lever Brothers in the States, which was part of Unilever, which is a Dutch and England based company, and the job he did was important enough that he would go over to the European headquarters like once a year to just discuss strategy
and discuss what the US Office was doing on buying commodities. So, you know, by then we'd you know, we'd gone to Pebble Beach and Pinehurst and places like that on family vacations. But you know, my parents thought, oh, let's you know, let's go to your So we spent three days in Scotland, we spent two or three days in London on business, and then we went to Holland for three or four days.
So I played the Old Course as a fifteen year old with my parents and my brother, and at that time you know, I mean I you know, I knew about the road hole. I knew about this the same sort of basic knowledge of it that everyone would have. And you know, probably the two most memorable things were, you know, one if you get in Bunkers, you're really screwed. And two if you don't get in bunkers. It's a very open golf course and you can get around it
just fine. You know, there's there's kind of some tricky contours, you know, some of the little up and over type shots you might play on some of the holes that are almost like mini golf in terms of just up over something and then the ball is going to keep going past the whole no matter you do. But you know, not enough to you know, and it was it was
a super busy place, was the other thing. But you know, it was hard not to fall in love with the town and just everything about the town, even though the town experience is really very different. You know, when I
lived there. The two months i lived there was also the middle of the summer, and the town's very different in the summer when it's mostly tourists and the university is not in session, and you know, if you go there in the fall or early spring and the universities, and it's kind of it's very different.
How is it different? Is it just like it? Would you compare it a little bit to Traverse City in the in the off season versus the in season.
Yeah, I suppose, yes. I mean in the summer, you know, you just hear a lot. It's not only Americans that are going there. You get people from all over the world, but you can't help but bump into other Americans, and you tend to chat up other Americans and generally you meet mostly Americans instead of except for your caddie, whereas in the rest of the year you're typically going to interact more with the locals and the people from the UK, and you know, so just entirely different conversations.
That's interesting. It's uh, maybe that's a that's a sneaky piece of advice. Is for a more authentic experience, go go off season?
Yep, it's yeah. And you don't have to worry about the ballot so much either. I mean, you know, it's really hard to book a tea time in the old course in the middle of the summer. Now you either have to pay a lot of money to somebody that hasn't in, or just go there for several days and hang around, you know, and play other courses around and take your chances in the lottery every day until.
Maybe you get on.
And here is James Duncan, who works for Cork Crnshaw has worked for core Crnshaw for a long time. Is
¶ James Duncan
Danish and Scottish and spent a substantial time in Scotland himself.
The first time I went, I was a student living in Copenhagen and I had arranged somehow to go to Scotland for a few months to do an internship at a company that consulted on golf courses. And somehow I my professor had signed off on the paperwork to say I'm not quite sure what it is you're doing or why you want to do it, but you seem to be pretty keen, so go ahead. We'll call it project management one oh one, some class that you could get credits for to go and do an internship in Scotland.
And this company consulted with golf courses. They were a branch of the Scottish Agricultural College, and they when I arrived, they said, here's what we'd like you to do. See
that green Fort Taurus in the parking lot. Here's a diesel card, go fill it up, drive around and visit as many golf courses, meet as many superintendents, secretaries, people in golf in Scotland as you have time for, find out what kind of problems they have with golf course maintenance operations, and write a report and come back to us. I mean, so that was such an opportunity to go around, crash around Scotland and see as many golf courses as I could. Of course St Andrews was high on that list.
And a friend of mine from Copenhagen was in a petrochemical engineer. We were both engineering students. Was chemical, I was civil and structural. He had come to Dundee right by Karnusti and he wasn't a golfer, but I was going to show him s Andrews. Let's go to s Andrews together. And we went down there and we picked the week where they had the Jubilee Vaz Tournament, which is one of the big amateur events they had, and it was such a neat way to see the old
course for the first time. I read about it and all the books and all that stuff, but to see it firsthand while top amateurs were playing. It was just a very special occasion. And since then I haven't missed a chance to go back.
With Saint Andrews the first time. So you're watching these amateurs play it in the Jubilee and what was the one thing that stuck with you the most from that first visit to the old course?
The old writers will talk about the keenness of the turf, the burnt out fescue turf. I think that to me was the most striking, Like this is the firmness of the ground, the way the ball would run on the ground, just the look the true links conditions. And mind you, this is in ninety two or three or something like that, so you know it was it was just authentic golf and as I had imagined it, and you finally had a chance to see it and to watch these guys.
Yeah again just like you see it today. I mean, how do you have to work your way around the course and make up shots and deal with the conditions, deal with the different bounces and situations you get in It was just it was magical.
¶ Shane Bacon
All right.
Here is Golf Channels. Shane Bacon and former caddy at the Old Course Shane Bacon.
I was actually studying abroad in London my junior year at college a University of Arizona. I was studied at a school called University of Westminster, and I didn't have my golf clubs. My mom actually flew over with my golf club Shout out to Eliza Bee. She came over to see, you know, in experienced London. Her and my aunt came over. We went to Bath, we went to Stonehenge,
but she traveled with my golf clubs. Also maybe the only time in the history at golf where she did she put iron headcovers on their irons because they were brand new irons, and I was actually happy to see iron head covers. But she brought the clubs over in about three four weeks later, my uncle Doug, who is one of my best friends, you know, my dad's brother. Unbelievable guy, one of the people I've probably played the most golf with in my life. He flew over and
we did the whole London experience. Then we both went up to Saint Andrew's and we had a tea time at the Old Course. We stayed at a little bed and breakfast in town The guy that had owned its name was James Yule, and he took us out. He was a member at the new club there that's kind of you know, borders the eighteenth fairway, and we had a great day. We played obviously, played all eighteen beautiful weather, and I was instantly in love with the place. You know,
I was still in college. I didn't know anything about architecture, anything about golf courses, and not a ton about golf history outside just what i'd read in my you know, youthful days. But I was hooked. Actually, a funny part of it was, I think two or three days later we played Kings Barnes. One day we played the new course. We had Carnoustie on the schedule. We woke up and it was awful outside, raining, sideways, cold, windy, and my
uncle's like, I'm not playing golf in this. You know, you're going to Scotland, right, You're you're playing weather, You're playing in all weather. And he wanted a bail on Carnoussie. So I went over and snuck out on the old course again and I ended up playing with uh with three guys from from Denmark. I chipped in for eagle on ten, which is like the highlight of my trip.
So my first experience in the old course is actually two rounds around the old course, unexpectedly since I thought I'd be playing around at Carnoustie.
If you know, if you can think back to that first trip after year round, was there anything in particular about the place that resonated with you, that stuck with you.
I thought I was shocked at how flat it was. And then what's interesting is now kind of going back a few times and seeing the sunset over all the mounding, you know, on those fairways, you realize it's not flat at all, but relative to a lot of kind of the championship golf and the places we know Stateside. I mean you think about the Masters, which as a young person, right the Masters is kind of the end all be all what you watch and what you love and all
the mounding and movement. I just remember walking off thinking, man, this place was flat. I fell I remember I fell in love with the par fives. You know, for whatever reason, the par fives kind of stuck with me. I just thought they were so cool and so unique and so different. They required so many different types of golf shots. You know,
you think about fourteen. Now, especially with modern equipment from the te's that were the old open tees, you probably couldn't even hit driver, you know, with any helping wind at all, but you could take it down another hole. I just thought it was like a controlled chaos in a way. The whole golf course was so controlled in
terms of the chaos. But I just remember I walked off and we were sitting up there having like a tenants beer after with James, and I remember, you know, looking out in the fairway, just thinking it's pretty flat from one to eighteen. Like you don't go up and down you much, you know, your stair step around, your Apple Watch isn't telling you climb any flights.
Hey, you caddied out there and you probably shepherded a lot of first timers around. Is there something that you remember, you know, is there something that seemed to be a consistent theme from first timers out there was you know, I've heard from a lot of people. You know, if you don't have a caddy, you have no clue where the hell you're going, just.
Zero clues starting on about three. You know, if you don't know what you're doing, I would say, you know, one of the things that was hard to sell to the player, but they would almost all buy into and then eventually love doing is the putting from well off the green and the bumping runs from well off the green.
I mean, you get a lot of American players that were obsessed in love with their sixty degree and from the jump right after the first hole, because you can't really hit a bump and run on one because of the bird. But after the first hole, you know, all day it's it's let's use putter, you know, let's use six iron, let's use hybrid, those types of things. And it normally took till about eight or nine until the
player really bought in. But when they'd eventually buy in, the misses and the bad shots were so much better. So I would say that was probably the number one thing to try to sell to the player, and everybody was first of all, I mean I was twenty three, so they're looking at this twenty three old American thinking what the hell does this guy know? And so I was trying to minimize the doubles. That was always my plan. Let's not make six, we can put this and make five.
It's amazing if more people, just if you have a good caddy that could get you around a golf course. You end up doing a lot of things you don't want to do. But then you look at your scorecard at that end of the day and you're like, oh, they knew what they were doing.
You know.
It's you know, for the higher handicap, it's just like just let's just minimize the disasters.
And the bunker. And i'd say one other thing, Andy, was when you hit it in a bunker, which is inevitable obviously around the old course unless you're Tiger in two thousand. I mean, you're gonna find yourself in sand talking people out of trying to be a hero. And the funny thing is it's not, you know, not right against a lip, you know, on a really layered bunker.
It's the sands different. The feel of what you're having to do to get out of it is different, the amount of swing you must put into a short shot is different. And a lot of people mid handicaps, high handicaps try to be heroes out of there, and I would just consist and consistently tell them, if we just get it back in grass, we can play from here. But let's not try to be a hero, and again that would typically start to happen about nine or ten when they go Okay, fine, I'm sick of hitting three
shots out of the bunker. I'll start to believe you.
Today's episode is brought to you by the Fried Egg and the Fried Egg Pro Shop. We have long sleeve T shirts, regular T shirts, and then we have some head covers, all sorts of goodies from Seamus Golf, all with the Open Championship in mind. We have a logo a little play on the road Hall Bunker. So check those out at Proshop dot Theofriday dot com. They're really neat. I can't wait to get my T shirt and headcover. And now here's former European tour player, golf commentator, writer
¶ Michael Clayton
and golf architect Mike Clayton.
I qualified for the nineteen eighty four Open there, so Steve Williams was cutting for me. I had a a burtie. I think I buried five in the last seven holes that leave and to make it so, I turned up at Sonata's Wayne Grady, Ian Bakervench and I was sharing a house, so grades and I missed the cut, but we went to bed on Saturday night thinking that this guy in the next bedrooms might win they open tomorrow, which of course you didn't. But it was a pretty
amazing week. So I you know, I loved hit the history of the game, but it didn't strike anything with me at all. I just went there and I didn't understand the course. I made thirty two pars, tripled the second hole, and made three bogies, missed the cup by about three. You know, I just I didn't get it at all. I didn't think it was a bad course or a great course, or I was just a typically dumb you know, mid twenties golf bro who just played golf.
Do you think do you think you thought that way because of your because you were playing it in a professional setting?
Yeah, And I the only times I've played three opens there, and I think you kind of missed the fun of it because you're playing. I mean I would I much more enjoyed the opens when I went there when I wasn't playing.
Well.
Of course I wish I would would have been playing, But you know, it's great fun to go to an open and enjoy the week without having the stress of playing in it because playing and it's the older ones, so you want to play, and I really enjoyed laying
in it. But I didn't really get to understand the golf course until well, not that anyone ever really fully understands it, but when I started to walk around it and read about it and write about it and think about it and realize how great the holes were, because when you're playing, you're just trying to play. You're trying to get the ball in the hole, and you're not standing on the fillith hole thinking this is one of
the greatest long part fours in golf. We're just trying to avoid the bunkers and get on the green and get out of there. So, you know, I remember going there with Peter Fowler, Simon Owen and I were playing the senior tournament Famine up the road. We had we had we finished dinner early one night at the house and we we said, Sid, take us down there and
show us what happened in nine to seventy eight. So he took us down to the sixteenth tee and he walked through he and Nicholas play the sixteenth hole and where he drove it and where Jack drove it, and you know what happened on seventeen because simone was a
shot in the lead. He chipped in at fifteen to go a shot ahead, and he said, we walked onder the sixteenth tee and Jack just stared me in the eyes and basically he said to me, you can have this thing if you're good enough, but you're gonna have to play me the last three hours. Good luck, son, And he said, I just completely fell apart. He said, I was just there was no way he was always going to beat me. But so, you know, that was
kind of a cool experience. But just walking those holes and thinking about why they're great and the questions they ask and the multiple ways of playing them, and how they change in the wind, and how much different the shot is from one side of the fairway versus a shot from the other side, and you know, it's the
model for every course, really, I think. Yeah, And it shows It shows why bunkers in the middle of the fairways work so well, shows way out of bounds is a great hazard, shows why bunkers are great when they're at one shot penalty and to be avoided at all costs. Yeah, and they're just great holes all in one place. It's incredible. And then eighteen is the best place to It's not the best hole, but it's the best place to finish around the golf, and I think you miss all those
things when you're playing. As Tom said in that You Know the podcast with Tom, the best way to see the Old Course is to walk it on Sunday when there's no one out there, and I've often done that, and go on there late at night, go out there at eight o'clock at or nine o'clock at night, and walk around it when there's well, there's always people out there, but when you're not worried about balls flying around your head.
So that's you know, the great lesson of the Old Course is it's probably the best course in the world, but you could never build it now. There's no chance that you could. One if you built the seven and told they think you were crazy. Build bunkers where you've got to play out of backwards, they think you were mad. Built holes with out of bounds hazards all the way down the right, you know, holes where you play, you know, the seventh hole blaze over the well, the eleventh plays
over the seventh. You know, it's just you know, the legitimate second shot at the fourteenth holes straight down the fifth fairway, and there's so much stuff that you could never get away with. Now, there's no chance that would be playing the eighteenth hole in Australia right now. The whole that hole would have been shut years ago by
shop owners complaining about balls going through their windows. Yet that is what it is, and they're going to be playing the hole, you know, two of years now, they're going to be playing well, as long as the sea
doesn't go over the over the golf course. They're going to be playing that hole for twenty years from now, and the shops will still be there, and the road is still going to be there, and there won't be a fence there, and the green will still be where it is, and golf just interacts with the town.
Yeah, so you you illuminated something that you know with your answer. I didn't even get to ask the question because you went right into it, like you know, what did you take away? You took away nothing, which I think I feel like for some people that happens for
some golfers that are and I think it. You know, you when you're playing competitively, you're playing and open, like all you're worried about is like golfing your ball and I think that's you know, what most golfers worry about is they are just thinking about scoring and getting the ball in the hall.
Well, I think Gerald Micklem the oh great r and a guy gave Fouldo, you know, a long dissertation written of how to play the golf course and what to study and what to think about. And Felder I probably knew that course in relation to his contemporaries better than any of them, and I understood how to play it better than any of them. And Tiger, you know, I think understood it aside from the fact that he was the best player, understood how to properly play that golf course.
Now here's PGA Tour player Zach Blair.
¶ Zac Blair
The BYU golf team and some of the boosters kind of take an international trip every four years, I think, and that year they were going to Scotland. So we rolled over there and saw a bunch of cool places.
That's so it's like your once, everybody, it's like your once every four years. So everybody that plays on the program for four years gets to go on like a cool international trip.
Kind of missions sometimes kind of throw it off so someone could maybe get to or maybe not go on any but yeah, yeah, theoretically it's kind of once once a you know, one time each for when you're in college.
What other courses did you see other than the Old Course?
Played in North Berwick a couple of times. Trying to think where else we played. We've played like the Castle Course, and we played the Renaissance Club where they have the Scottish Open. Are you sure the Renaissance It might be that for sure, Yeah, trying to think. We played the New you know, at the New at Saint Andrew's, played Carnoustie right off the plane and got you know, got killed. Basically I've never played good there ever since then. And
then I actually didn't play the Old Course. A couple of the guys on the team, like you know, went out and did the whole lottery and waited all night, and I think at that point in my life I was kind of like.
So you didn't play the first time you were there.
Now we went around and you know, I don't know if you've seen the pictures of like me and Ryan Smith relay racing on eighteen, jumping over this, you know, the burn and everything like that. Yeah, but I didn't play WHOA So second time. Like, so the first time I went to play the old course was during the Dunhill.
So that so your first time playing was in a competition. Yeah, what what you know, what were your what were your did you have any takeaways from the time that you were out there you didn't play, and then what were your takeaways after the first time you played? Like, what was the one thing that kind of stuck with you the first time you played it? And was there something that stuck with you when you were in town but didn't play it.
I mean the first time that I was there, you know, it's a park on Sundays, you know, so you're just like walking around and people were having like a picnic in the road hole bunker on seventeen, like in the bunker, yeah, like dogs everywhere, you know. So it was cool to just see all that stuff. And I think this was you know, pre understanding or having any sort of you know,
ideas about golf course architecture. You know, you obviously knew that it was a cool place, and you know, you understood the history and it had a lot of you know, big golf tournaments and you know it was the home of golf. But you know, I didn't understand it from an architecture standpoint that first time, and then the first time I played it during the Dunhill, I mean it was just like, you know, I think we played like a bunch of practice rounds and we just kind of
kept looping around and just seeing cool stuff and walking around. So, you know, obviously a pretty neat place and kind of one of those places that it seems like the more you go around it and the more you see it, the more you play it, the more you kind of understand and learn and see new things, and it's kind of that endless journey of you know, finding new stuff every time you go.
So the first time you played at what what? What is there anything that's kind of etched in your brain from that that experience, I.
Would say the first so I missed the cut both times I played the Dunhill, so I only played it once, I think, each time during you know, during the actual tournament.
And I'll just never forget the first year I played it, it was like straight down, you know, going out, and then straight in you know, coming home, and it was just like, you know, there are certain holes and bunkers and you're just like, I don't even understand like why they would have that there, and then playing it the next time and being like straight in going out and straight down coming home, and then being like, okay, that's why,
that's why that bunker is there. I'm talking like hitting drives like two hundred yards into the wind and hitting drives like four fifty downwind. You know, it's just like it never never ever stops. So it was pretty neat, you know, getting both sides of that, and you know, just seeing how much the course can change and how different it is whether you're playing in or you know, in or down, so that that'll kind of always stick with me.
Now here's golf course architect Gil Hants.
I was really kind of surprised. I thought it was going to have a lot more undulation, big ups and downs,
¶ Gil Hanse
and the contours and the undulations are on much more human scale instead of a big scale, so that surprised me. And then secondly how many blind t shots there were, which I actually kind of like and that has We've been criticized occasionally for having a lot of blind stuff in our golf courses, but I think having seen that the first go round and also just not really knowing where to hit it. You know you've got two fair ways wide and you're just sor right what's the best angle?
And having had the opportunity to play there more frequently, you learn there are different ways to play each holes depending on the weather. But yeah, it's a little bit of not really knowing where to go. And then the scale of the contours.
What's good about humans scale undulations as opposed to like bigger landforms and land movements.
Yeah, I think it's nice to have a variety of both, But I think it's one of those things where you just feel more comfortable, like the contours feel more manageable and maybe more conducive to shop making because you feel like, Okay, I might be able to manage the scale or howl ball is going to react off of that slope versus I'm not sure what it's going to do off of something that's fifteen feet above my head and how much
that's going to come off. So I think it in my mind it opens up a lot more possibilities and a lot more creativity when it's at a human scale versus the much bigger stuff. More manageable law too. Definitely, Yeah, great walk unless you're playing the back teas. I think it's spend half your round walking back for your fifty yards.
Let see other courses exactly, see a lot of the new courses.
Thankfully I never have to worry about playing those states.
Thank you for listening to another edition of the FRIDAYGG podcast. This one was edited by Meg Atkins. She had to do a little bit more than my usual episodes, but Meg, thank you for all the hard work and putting this episode together, and thank you guys for listening. As a quick reminder with the Open Championship, here go sign up for the FRIDAYGG newsletter Will Knights and others mostly Will Knights.
We'll be pumping out daily newsletters about the Open Championship, so you can sign up on the Friday dot com. Just enter your email in there right at the front, and we will not miss a beat this week or any other week going forward. Thanks, and we will be back on Sunday with our preview podcast previewing the one hundred and fiftieth Open Championship. So thanks, and we will
talk to you soon. And we've got a really really cool Open Championship week planned out, so look for another pod midweek that week, and I think it'll be a fun one.