I miss a green for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday, Frida Egg Egg, Frida Egg, Bride Egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run off.
Of the hump.
Hello and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison. I am here with Andy Johnson, or at least a portion of Andy Johnson. You've had a rough go of it lately. How are you doing, Andy.
Garrett, I'm doing well. I feel like a million bucks compared to however I was last year. I or last week coming out of health and safety last year protocols from from the Masters. So it's been a it's been a long last few days. But we're back here.
Good. Yeah, No, it's it's great to have you back at near full strength. So thanks for being here today. So today we are going to be talking about Pas Tiempo, probably my favorite course, and I'll get into why it's my favorite course, but is it up there for you as well? Just as a general impression.
Yeah, I think I would. Yeah, it's one of my favorite golf courses. Would it be the course that I'd play every day? Probably not. It's a bit of a bit of a physical challenge for everyday place. But in terms of bucket list golf courses, and especially when you start to look at courses that anybody could play any day of the week, pas Tiepo gets near the very top of the courses you must see before you die.
And I think in terms, you could make an argument that of any American public golf course, you can make an argument that this should be number one on your bucket list because of the significance of the architecture, the architect and where it sits in kind of American golf architecture.
Its main competitor for that number one spot I feel for the public golfer would be Pebble Beach.
Right, I would say, I would actually argue, I think Pebble Beach obviously has you know, the architectural significance of Pebble Beach is rather small in comparison. I mean, Pebble Beach's significance has been founded through its beautiful site and its historic moments of championships that have happened there PASTA Tiempo is probably the greatest architect of all time and public access and mostly almost everything there is original of
what was built. I would say the place that rivals it Pinehurst number two.
In terms of architectural significance significant.
I'm saying from pure design standpoint, I don't think because you could go play a lot of there's a lot of Bill Corr or Tom Doak public golf out there, like you could you know beyond if you want to take bandoned trails and Pacific dunes and put those is to places, right, but there's there's very there's very little
public access Alistair McKenzie in America. And then with with Pineers number two, it would be you know, one of maybe the top doll ross golf course right where another legendary golf architect of the Golden Age that you can go see. So from an architecture standpoint, I think you can make an argument this should be number one on your bucket list.
Yeah, I mean I think I would put it there. I would say that I am biased, and just to give an idea of my relationship with this course over time, it was probably the first truly great golf course that I played. I played it when I was thirteen or fourteen. I believe it was nineteen ninety eight with my dad. This was prior to the work that Tom Doak and his team at Renaissance Golf Design did there, and so the course was, you know, had a ways to go before it could get to the course that it is today.
But even then it made such a massive impression on me, and throughout my life, I've had the opportunity to get back there a number of times. I lived in the Monterey area for a few years, and I would get up to Pas Tiampo two or three times a year and play it. This is just one of my absolute favorite places to go, and I think it really is
my favorite golf course. It's probably not the best golf course that I've played overall in terms of its capacity to meet its full potential, but just in terms of the place and the design and what it has meant to me, it's my favorite course. You know that this is the place for me, and so I truly love this golf course. Now we are going to have a
honest and nuanced discussion of this course. It's not going to be all puffing Pas Tiempo up because this course has some flaws and also the club has made a decision recently about the future of the course that there could be a debate about. You know, they're about to rebuild their greens essentially, and they're doing this with the best of intentions, apparently to you know, restore some of the Mackenzie features that have supposedly been lost over time.
But there is a again, an honest and nuanced discussion to have about that decision. So those are the places that we're going to go in this podcast. But I think first we just wanted to talk about the course itself and some of the design features that really make it special. So why don't we start with the front nine. The front nine gets somewhat underrated because the back nine is so brilliant, and we're going to get to the back nine, but the front nine is really remarkable.
Yeah, it's it's super good. I think the back nine obviously is one of the best nines in all of golf, and I think that's where you get obscured a little bit. But the front nine is kind of one of those instances where you sit and there's a lot of great holes on it. There's a really great stretch of holes. I think two through five is phenomenal. But what I always kind of go back to is, man, I wish one was the way it should be. I wish six was the way it should be. I wish seven was
the way it should be. I wish nine was the way it should be. And that's what kind of holds me back from kind of truly loving the front nine. I always find myself though, what I'm either in, like the second fairway or the thirty or the second green. At that point, I'm just like, God, the front nine is really great, is what I always think to myself.
Well, okay, so I've done a poor job of setting this episode up. We've kind of gone straight into talking about the golf course, but should mention it's an Alistair mackenzie design. It opened in nineteen twenty nine. It had an opening day where Bobby Jones played alongside a few other great players of the time, including Marion Hollins, who was a fantastic golfer, and she was the driving force,
the visionary behind the Pasa Tempo project. She was also a very important figure in the building of Cyprus Point Club. She worked for Samuel Morse was the director of athletics. I believe for the Pebble Beach Company. Pasa Tiempo was Marion Hollins's baby. Marion Hollins was recently inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame posthumously, but it was a great moment to appreciate her incredible career and contribution to golf.
Pas Tiempo is at the center of that contribution. She was behind every decision about this entire development, and it really is a development. It's not just a golf course. It's also a residential community and it was imagined that way from the very beginning. Okay, so that's just laying some groundwork in case people didn't know about the backstory of Mackenzie and Mary and Hollins. These are the major
driving forces behind this whole creation. Okay. So the front nine, it kind of has two sections, right, there's this upper section and there's this lower section. And in the upper section our holes one to nine, most of six, seven, and eight, and then the lower section consists of holes two, three, four, and five. The lower section is brilliant and very much intact.
The upper section. Those holes were originally designed to be have these big, wide shared corridors and since nineteen twenty nine, there have been trees planted to separate out the fairways, and so those holes no longer share fairways. They have their own fairways, and a couple of those fairways are pretty narrow, pretty restricted, and the holes just played differently than they were designed to play, and that's just kind of the reality. I'm not sure that's going to change.
And so there are some places in that upper section of the front nine that feel cramped.
Yeah, I mean, and that's I think the big question about the golf courses is what makes what happens with those holes over the next, you know, fifty years. Obviously the reason that they were planted was safety. Somebody lost their life on the eighth green from a wayward t shot from the seventh so they planted a bunch of trees to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
As there's a fence up there too.
You might want to do. You know, you don't want people dying on your golf course. And you know the thing about it is the trees really mask how good the greens are there. Like the sixth Green is a terrific green, you know, with so many neat little kind of nooks. You know, you have that left nook and then you have the back one that that part of
the back that runs away there. And what happens is that that hole gets so narrow that you lose the dimension of really wanting to push up and go for it because it's so narrow at the green because of the houses that came in. And then you have the trees on the right, and then the seventh, Like the seventh is one of the best greens on the golf course and it's really obscured by the trees making it you know, opening that up would be make it such
a fun little drive and pitch hole. And I think that that that hole, you know, you when you're at seven green. The only reason I know this is because I'm flying a drone, you know there, But the you're right next to the third green and the fourth tee, and it's really an amazing thing. Like you get spun around by that routing a lot, but it's a really
cool little focal point. And you talk about the upper and the lower holes, you're effectively just on the ridge above those those greens there, and it's you're no more than fifty yards. You're basically there's just a house between.
You, yeah, And what separates the upper section of the front nine from the lower section of the front nine is this hill and the hill and now has houses on it, and so it's a little bit hard to see the natural feature, but it is this little hill in the middle of this general down slope, and a bunch of holes play around this hill. So the second hole goes along the side of the hill. The third hole, a long par three spectacular hole, plays back up into
the hill. The fourth hole plays off of the hill, the sixth hole plays along the other side of the hill, the seventh hole plays back into the hill as you were saying, and getting pretty close to the third green and the fourth tee, and then eight plays off of the hill. So in that way, this is sort of a classic Mackenzie routing. He did this at Cypress Point. He did this at Valley Club, where there was a hill or in the case of Cypress Point, a dune, and a bunch of holes play into and off of
it in different ways. The same thing was done at Pasa Tiampo on the front nine, but it's a little bit hard to see because of the trees and the development that has happened on the fringes of the golf course, but it's certainly still there. That principle of that routing is still there.
What's interesting, too, is that the back nine actually plays in and out of a valley. Effectively. The focal point on the back nine isn't a high hill. It's actually a low valley, and everything kind of spires off of that. It is a meeting point. If you think about the back nine, the tenth, the sixteenth, the twelfth, the eleventh, t the thirteenth tee, all of those that area right there is at kind of a low point.
Yeah, and well the Baranka runs through the lowest point of all, and so all those holes on the back nine center around that, you know, that low point where the water runs through. So in any case on the front nine, if you were to point people to a hole that you think represents the best of the front nine, where would you go?
I really like the fourth It's a short, shortist Part four. One of the things I like about it it's got a few key McKenzie features. It's got the layered bunkers that everybody likes to point out, the camouflage. It's got a bunker in the fairway that's probably about ninety yards away from the green. Seventy to ninety yards, I don't
know exactly off the top of my head. And then that bunker appears to be kind of like stacked right up against the green side bunker, and it looks from the tee like it's all one big bunker complex, but in reality there's a huge gap between them and the green side bunkers. There's a bunker also short and right off the tee. And what I think is really interesting about it, and you know, kind of picked up the latest time that we went around it, and it's because
you hit your shot over to the right. I hit mine way up just short of that bunker. Perfect spot the left.
The one on the left.
You hit yours over kind of over the right bunker, but you know, kind of shorter off the tee, and we both had really good avenues into a right pin. And what was interesting was your shot. You were able to use a feature on the green, which is you know, it kind of is built up on the left to funnel your kind of slingshot your ball towards the middle of the green from that right side. Well, mine, I'm staring right down you know, perfect angle to hit to that to a middle right pin, and you know it is.
You know, there's just different methods, different routes. And something I think with Alistair Mackenzie is he's one of the few not great players truly great. Now he could get the golf ball around, but he wasn't a great distinguished amateur champion. And I think one of the things that that did was it created a sympathy for lots of styles of play, and he accommodated different types of players with different options of play. And that's a perfect example.
On the fourth is that being long and left is ideal, but if you're short and right, you're not out of the equation yet you still have a shot if you understand the contours of the green, and that green's really cool. It's kind of got a left tier, a front leftier, a right mid right tier that's depressed down into kind of a bowl, and then a back right tier. It embodies those those Mackenzie greens where that bolpin is really
gettable and everybody can kind of get at it. It looks harder than it is because it you know, if you if you didn't understand the contours, you might think that's the toughest pin. But then that back right pin is so hard. It's such a small little target. So it's got this malleability about it where it's got these pins that are really difficult, really hard to get at and make birdie. But it's also got some pins that are really fun funnel pins that you can make a lot of birdies.
With great hole. Now the second green, the fourth green, the fifth green, all are really good examples. I think of how Mackenzie was designing greens when he was building Passa Tiempo, and they have these kind of amoeba shapes to them, where there are these little fingers that kind of extend out from the center of the green, and then there are bunkers that kind of fit into the
notches that those fingers create. I know I'm mixing metaphors here, but just imagine these sort of amoeba shapes with bunkers kind of stuck into them. And a lot of the greens that Pasa Tiempo have these shapes, and it just gives a great variety of pin positions and all that kind of stuff. Now, in addition to the weird shapes that the greens have, they have wonderful contours as well. They're all very different. This is a truly kind of memorable, wonderful set of greens.
Yeah, the greens are I think on top of the topography is jaw dropping, but the greens are really you could just spend so much time putting around hitting different little sections, and you know, it's the perfect example. I always talk about how hard it is to have bad holes when you have great greens, and how great greens
are fun to play from anywhere, like any yardage. If you put like truly world class greens, you could play from twenty yards, you could play from two hundred yards, you could play from six hundred yards, and the hole is going to be fun because of the green. And I think about a lot of the greens out there and how enjoyable they would be to have in your backyard because they present so many different quirks and shots in places where you can use slopes to bank them
off into little pockets. You know, there's easy spots, there's difficult spots, and you know, the greens have a wonderful variety and cadence to them. They are intense. Let's not be you know, let's not beat around the bush. These are probably some of the most difficult greens to put on in the country, just because of the combination of their slope as well. Is there different positions that these pins you can find them in. It just they have these pockets. They're so hard to get at.
Yeah, they're almost sort of experimental. And you know, coming off of this podcast that I did with Bob Crosby recently, Bob was a contributor to the Postmasters episode that I did, and he talked about how Augusta National late in Alistair McKenzie's career, was part of an attempt to find a kind of new way of doing architecture. You know, Mackenzie at this point was looking for other options, ways to
kind of change what he was doing. Now. By the time he got to Augusta, mackenzie had become convinced that golf courses that were built in the twenties just had too many bunkers, and he was looking for ways to reduce the number of bunkers. Pasa Tiempo does not reflect that mode of Alistair McKenzie's thinking. There are a lot of bunkers out there. They're very artistically presented, a specially around the greens. There's a kind of excess to them,
but a real beauty as well. So we're not dealing with a Mackenzie who was kind of trying to limit the number of bunkers that he was building on his golf courses. But I think where you get the experimental nature of mackenzie's later career at Pasa Tiempo is in the design of those greens. They are just different from what he was building earlier. You just have to go look at Metal Club, which is a beautifully restored course,
a wonderful golf course. So I don't mean to slam Metal Club for having uninteresting greens, because they're certainly not that, but they're really really different. And Metal Club was built just really a few years before Pasa Tempo. But by the time McKenzie got to Pasa Tiempo, he was just clearly looking for different ways to do things, you know, and these greens are a great example of that attempt I think.
Yeah. So one other thing that I picked up on Big played Pasta Tiempo a couple of weeks before the Masters of that's spending a week there, you know, I'm particularly enamored with the ground contours that Mackenzie built. They're all over the place at Augusta, nashvill and a lot of them have been taking out, taken out, you know, some of them. And they are all over the place at at Pasta Tiempo. And what I mean by that is like mounds that are by no means natural, but
they were created to influence play. And there are these contours that they help you if you're approaching from the right angle. They hurt you if you're approaching from the wrong angle. But one place where if you see an old photo of one at Pasta Tiempo, you see those beautiful mounds that were kind of littered the fair away, and particularly the right side of the fairway, and the obvious play was up the left, which is now a driving range was the ideal play, and that got you
kind of over by the left. There there was that first Ranka really showed up there on the left side of one, but you saw all these mounds, and the mounds are still kind of there now, and those mounds are on the un the safer line, and it's I just love the randomness of that, Like, oh, you hit it over to the right, you play safe, and you're in effectively a mogl field. It'd be like if you were doing a ski race and you know you had one one route that was barren of moguls, but it's
a much tougher route to take to get to. And then you know you have the safer, the wider, easier route to get to, but it's filled with moguls. And that's kind of like this this. You know one as a fully restored hole. If they ever got rid of the driving, rage would present. And and these are why that I think the front nine comes up shorter of the of the back. Lind Is you look at things like that one hole, the first hole is severely compromised from what it was.
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door with code fried Egg five. That's fried egg and the number five all one word. The fried Egg is brought to you by Elijah Craig, Kentucky. Straight bourbon whiskey, Bardstown, Kentucky, forty seven percent alcohol by volume. Elijah Craig reminds you to think wisely, drink wisely. All right, So why don't we get to the back nine. It's a brilliant back nine. It's it's just about close to perfect. What are some of the virtues of the back nine that you think of? First?
I think, just in general, the variety of ways that a central hazard is used. So the central hazard is this baranka. It's a dramatic baranka. It's not a small, little dried up creek. It's a canyon baranca variety. So it's it's wide. The general variety in which this is used in the ways you play along it, over it, through it in different parts of the back nine. So this is the central theme of the back nine. Is this you're effectively your adventure or battle with the baranca.
It's going to ask you right off the bat to hit it over it on ten. And this used to be a much larger carry when it was a par five, so you know today it's not a huge part of it. But when when the t shot was in the middle of that parking lot like it used to be, this was a imposing carry and you know the So you start with it and it runs up the left on
that hole on ten and up into the green. The eleventh that cuts up the left and across the twelfth that plays up the left and then in front of the green, so you're contending with it on a different shot, different part of the shot. It's kind of you know, on the approach, you know at the green as opposed to eleven. It's it's over early on and off the tee that you're dealing with it. Thirteen it runs up
the left. Again, I guess one of the things that I would say is that it does run up the left a lot.
Yeah, so that's the orientation of the nine. It kind of goes counterclockwise, and so the baranca is often on the left.
Yeah. So thirteen is up the left, fourteen it's up the left, but it's also in the fairway. One of the things I love with thirteen and fourteen is the way that Mackenzie brought the baranca feature out into the golf features that weren't necessarily, you know, baranca features. So on thirteen, if you kind of look at the way he built that hole, the dramatic bunkering around the green is unforgettable. But really what that is supposed to do
is to mimic the Baranca. So it's supposed to kind of feel like it comes right out of that Baranca on the left, which it does a great job of
like that. It's supposed to be resemble that. And then on fourteen it across the fairway and makes just such a compellingly strategic golf hole with the you know, hit it over this on the left and you've got the perfect spot to hit a shot in, but you have to deal with you know, you could lose your ball on the left, and if you don't clear over that central fairway feature, which is kind of about probably like eight feet tall, you're going to have a blind shot
with a potentially really awkward lie. And then and then obviously fifteen is the par three in the baranca, and then sixteen you're coming out of it with it up the left and it cuts across the green again, and seventeen you have it behind the green, and eighteen is that one last shot over the biggest part of the baranca to a green that sits right on the other side of it.
You mentioned seventeen and eighteen. They can be controversial holes. You know, if people are trying to pick nets about the back nine at Pasa Tiempo, they'll often focus on seven, a shortish par four that a lot of people find somewhat undistinguished compared to the other holes, and then eighteen, which is a par three finisher, and people often don't like par three finishers. Could we briefly say a couple
of words about seventeen. I'm not saying it's the best hole on the back nine, but I think it's a really good golf hole that gets underrated, and especially if you haven't been there since they restored the green, since they extended that green all the way back essentially to the Baranka. It used to be a much smaller green. It had reduced to that size, but now it's this long, strange green. Kind of I think it's kind of a cool hole.
Yeah, it's super cool. I think, Well, here are the reasons. The topography is pretty syneicially severe. You're playing significantly uphill, but also that that slope, that side slope is pretty severe left or right, and you're hitting a shorter iron in and it's this long, narrow green that presents a very hard shot for a shorter iron. Your tendency is
to miss it short right. And with that lie and with that green, it's an awful shot to miss short right because you're you end up way below the green with all the slope in the ground, so the green kind of sits high up and if you miss short right, you're kind of dead. And the other aspect is then it gets you to bail left, and if you bail left and you miss it over on the left side of the green. I cannot tell you that I've had the putt probably three times, and every time I end
up like ten to fifteen feet past. It is so unbelievably fast. Even when you know it's so fast, it's almost impossible to not hit it past the hole, so you end up I also like that the green, this long, skinny green. It's so different from every other green on the on the back nine and the whole course in general, and those backpins are impossible to get back to it is. It's a cool hole, it's a connector. Yeah, sure it
gets you to set eighteen t. It's not sixteen. It comes like when you think about it, in the stretch of holes it comes in. It's understandable why people feel like it's a miss. But there was no way you could build a hole set from seventeen to eighteen green.
Without without like blasting out the hillside. You'd have to like if you if you put not to pick on Tom Fasio, but I'm gonna pick on Tom Fasio. If you put Tom Fazio out there and said build a long finishing hole from seventeen t to eighteen green. Then he probably would have blasted a valley through that through that hillside there to open up the visibility to eighteen green, but that wasn't really an option and they decided not to do that here fortunately, And the landscape is intact.
Yeah, And that's the thing. So if you want to make that a hole like the that's the problem is that it would end up being this really awkward like for long hitters, it would be fine, but for anybody that's not a long hitter, they'd be laying up to like the edge to where the eighteenth tea is just to have a shot and hitting like a fairway wood long iron into that green. It would be a silly, silly hole for the vast majority of golfers.
And the baranka is like one hundred and thirty yards wide at that point. Would you say, that's that's about what it is.
I think. So, I mean it's from like that forward tee to the green effectively, what's that just.
To the front of the green. Yeah, it's about one hundred and thirty yards just to get across the baranka. And so if you're trying to build a par four where the landing zone is somewhere short of the baranca and then the shot is across. There are a lot of players who are going to be in situations where you know, they have to like hit a little you know, pitch.
Well, that's what I've seen. My mom have to do this on numerous occasions, and I always like think about it. I'm like, what a silly golf hole is? Where, you know, sometimes my mom will hit a layup shot and the layup shots not quite good enough and she has to lay up again, right, and it's like, what are we doing that? Some people have to play golf this way and I could just blast it over it, you know.
So I think that's the problem that you would run into the seventeenth hole as it stands, though, is I would say, it's not in my it's not in my bottom five or four holes at pass a Tiempo.
Yeah. I think there are definitely holes on the front nine as they stand right now, they're weaker, and I think that is an actively fun, cool golf hole to play now, the par three finisher. You asked me at one point, why do you think people don't like having a part three as a finishing hole? And I came up empty. I was like, I don't know why. I'm
not sure where that objection comes from. So I asked on Twitter and I got a bunch of responses and they were all, you know, it was an actually a nice Twitter moment where where people were sort of explaining their preferences and nobody was judging anybody else, and it didn't turn into an argument. It was just a very satisfying,
you know, finding out of people's opinions about this. And the most common responses that I got to this question were one, A satisfying finishing hole on a golf course should assess all aspects of the game, so the drive, the approach, and the putt and whatever other shots come, you know, as a result of poor shots or whatever. That it just feels more satisfying and more complete for a finishing hole to assess all those aspects of the
game instead of just the approach and the putt. Another argument that people made against par three finishing holes is that par four and five finishing holes have more variants, more a greater variety of outcomes for the end of a round or a match, and so they're more dynamic. Another common response was that people just enjoy hitting driver on the last hole, just one last chance to smash it.
And then finally people were saying that a par three just feels like an abrupt way to end the round, sort of like an anti climax, like you're being rushed out the door, like here's the end, ook there it is.
I always think about the eighteenth hole. The eighteenth hole is a means. The first and eighteenth hole to me are means to get away and get to the clubhouse. Those are the ways I think about the first in the eighteenth hole, and I rarely you rarely see great first holes or eighteenth holes. Yet everybody always likes to be like, you know, is the eighteenth hole like if the architect did his job, you know, probably should be
just like kind of street. Unless it's like an unbelievable site with great holes everywhere, the eighteenth hole is probably going to be underwhelming. Like when I think about the great eighteenth holes, the truly mind blowing eighteenth holes, the one course that pops into my mind is Sandhills, And you know what, there's mind blowing golf holes everywhere you turn out there.
There's a million great golf holes, and they could have my impression of that project is that they could have put the clubhouse anywhere a lot of different places. The other thing, they had a huge array of options.
Yeah, all right, can we talk about the eighteenth at Pasta Tampo. Yeah, here's how.
I let's talk about the why is why is it a good golf This.
Is just this is a personal A lot of people use personal examples there, and I'll give you one of me is that I was I think I was playing a match against Zach Blair, friend of the program there, and it was it was a close match. It was we were tied going into the last hole, and I remember You're standing on that tee and you're just thinking, God, I got to hit a perfect shot here. I got to hit a truly great golf shot here, because if
I don't hit one, Zach's probably gonna hit one. And from a match play standpoint, I think it puts the ultimate emphasis on hitting a golf shot. And at the time and moment, and this golf course was designed when match play was the dominant form of game of the game. You know, Bobby Jones was the first person to play the golf course and he made his career in his fame playing match play and winning matches, and the eighteenth
hole as a finisher. While it might, you know, let people down from a stroke play sense, if you're playing a match, it will not let you down. I guarantee it. If your match takes it to eighteen, it's so fun. It's like the best way to finish. And I remember I hit a shot that rolled up the slope or landed past the flag and spun down the slope two time true kick and range and Zach did the same thing, and it was just like the most fun minute of golf watching the two shots do it. And it was
you know, we both executed a shot. And but you know, an average shot there if you don't hit a great shot birdie is an easy task to accomplish if you hit a great shot there. If you don't hit a great shot there, fours and fives are easily in the ballpark. Like you know, you're one misstep away from a double bow gear warse.
You can four pet that green so easily. If you're in the wrong section of the green.
Yeah, And if you're chipping from the wrong spot, you could be in if you say the pitt's back left, do you miss long left, you might not even be able to keep the ball on the green.
Yeah, it's probably gonna run off the front front right. Yeah.
So it presents this high variance situation for an end of a match, which is it's thrilling, it's and you're hitting over this baranca. It's it's symbolic because it's the final conquest of this hazard you're playing against all day and it's like your last you know, jolt of the theme and what makes past tempo pasta tiempo.
I agree. I think it's a it's a thrilling last hole, it's a great par three, and that would address a lot of people's concerns. I think that you know, it's hard to play that hole and think that's an anti climax or that's an unsatisfying way to finish my round. I mean, there's even a great walk that you do across the baranca. You walk across this bridge and you have that moment of like the round is coming to an end and I get this one last wonderful walk
across this bridge, across this beautiful natural phenomenon. And so I think a lot of people's concerns about the way that a par three eighteenth hole might feel just anti climactic our address just by the fact that this is a terrific final hole. That said, I understand some of people's arguments about not having a par three final hole.
We had some really intelligent responses from you know, Kevin Clark saying, I don't care whether a pro course finishes on a par three, but when playing, I want to play a full hole and rip a drive one last time. It's the culmination of the day. Smacking one on eighteen feels great. We have one from Cameron Ford, who's actually my cousin. I enjoy the longer walk on the last hole at Chambers twice a week used to carry At Chambers Bay, they used to start people on the back nine,
so you'd finish on nine a par three. The ending just sort of happened versus on eighteen, where you get
to soak it in. I find those arguments like pretty reasonable and in a sense persuasive, but in the end I think that they're all sort of overwhelmed by the principle of an architect should be allowed to find the best possible solution the land that he or she is given, and so I'm just really glad that Marion Hollins, as the visionary behind this project as the owner, allowed Alistair mackenzie to finish this course on a par three and
didn't say, oh, no, we can't do that. That's you know, try to think of any other great course that ends on a par three that that people wouldn't like that. I'm glad that she was open to the idea of this unwritten rule being broken. And I would hope that in spite of people's general and in some ways understandable preference for finishing on a par four or par five, that that preference isn't so ingrained that future owners, that
future clients aren't telling architects. Yeah, I know that having a par three eighteenth hole might be the best solution for this property, but we can't do that because people
would reject it. The more we put golf architecture into a box, the more architects have to, you know, kind of work around these rules rules and reject what the best routings would be, just because they have to achieve a certain par number, a certain number of holes, and this requirement that the eighteenth hole be a long hole. And so I think that there is that potential danger of being too firm in one's preference for a non
par three eighteenth hole. And I think that always the question should be, well, was it the best solution for the land, and if it is, then great.
I no complaints here, I you know, I think the most important thing you said there was putting architecture in a box, because Pasita Tempo is an example of architecture not in a box and an architect that wasn't afraid it wasn't afraid to experiment and try new things.
Let's talk about the future of Pasa Tempo.
Oh, what a delightful, delightful topic. So the club announced that they would be undertaking a full restoration, which is, you know, a historical renovation really when you look at it. They will be taking the greens that are original to nineteen twenty nine in their current form, like they are original greens. They have not been you know, monkeyed around with.
They are they're you know, they've been monkeyed around with a little bit over the years, but they are the original Alistair Mackenzie greens and they will be rebuilding them. On top of this, they will be doing some you know, they'll get new grass in the faraways, they will get new irrigation, they will rebuild bunkers. They will also do
a significant project on clearing out the barancas. So overall, you know, this is a golf course that's investing in its product, which is overall, you know, generally a good thing to do. They've obviously seen a rise in popularity over the years. Of recent years, they are are charging a much more significant greens fee than even three years ago. I believe now it's around three hundred and fifty dollars
or so to play this. Their membership, which is one of the most unique memberships in all of golf, kind of operates as a lot of NFTs operate now, where it's a you buy a membership share and you own the membership and you can sell the membership share for however much you want when you want out. So if you bought a membership, say in two thousand and eight, I think I've heard that they were going for like twenty five grand. Today these membership units are going for
like two hundred and fifty grand. And one of the unique with it being open to the public every day, what it does for the membership is that they never are going to be assessed ever. Their their fees are capped effectively like this is what you pay every month and you're not gonna get hit with charges beyond that. And then you own the membership, you can sell it for whatever you want. And the market values obviously been
going up for that. For example, this membership because of their structure with the public play, which is why more and more memberships should allow for public play, is they aren't paying a dime. None of the members are paying out of pocket for this restoration, which will be a significant dollar amount. I believe the plan is to do one to nine next year and the other nine the
following year. So they will take one nine out of play, renovate it, and then they'll put the put the other nine, take the other nine out of play the following year. So what are your initial thoughts?
Well, I think whenever we hear the term restoration, we get warm, cozy feelings inside like this is great. As you said, they're investing in their golf course. I think the Baranca clearance might be absolutely huge. That would be great.
Oh one quick thing, the projects being done by Jim Urbina important to point out. And then this is with Justin Mannon. They're great superintendent at the helm.
So yeah, Justin Mannon is fantastic. We spoke to him at length the last time we were at Pasa Tiempo. And then Jim Urbina has a lot of experience at Pasa Tampo. He has been working with the course for years now. I believe that when Tom Doakes firm Renaissance Golf Design started working at Pasa Teampo, whether it was the late nineties or early two thousands, I'm not sure, but I believe that Jim Urbina was there pretty much from the beginning. Am I right about that?
Yeah? I think he was the consultant that did the you know, a lot of the groundwork. Tom would come in and you know, give notes, and then Jim would do the work.
Very few people are more deeply familiar with this golf course than Jim Urbina, and so it totally makes sense that he is overseeing this process. I think that where alarm bells were triggered for me in the past week, specifically on Twitter and regarding the official Pasa Tempo Twitter account, is rhetoric like this, and let me just read this is a tweet from at Pasa Tiempo Golf, which is the official Pasa Tempo account. It's not a parody account.
This account says greens are ninety three years old and have never been rebuilt. Green complexes are not even close to the original design. Pin placement locations cut in half over the years due to sand splash build up, multiple band AID solutions over the years time to build the USGA specs and then followed up with this. Greens currently not Alistair mackenzie Greens. We will restore them as close as possible to his original design work starts in April
twenty twenty three. And that tweet was deleted because I assume that Pasatiempo doesn't want people who are playing between now in April twenty twenty three thinking that they're not playing on Alistair McKenzie Greens when they are.
I agree with the sentiment here is that they have Alistair McKenzie Greens, and you know, this type of rebuilt to USGA spec has been done very successfully in the past. Look no further than Winkfoot, and I think from what I've heard talking to people in the area is that recycled water that they use, which is a big part
of their maintenance program. As their recycled water practices, they have their own plant effectively that recycles wastewater from a nearby town, and that recycled water has been very, very harsh to the greens and has created an environment that's
kind of unsustainable long term. And that the USGA greens because of the amount of play, which is like sixty thousand rounds a year, because of the recycled water, and then because of the the climate, the USGA greiants present the best playing surface for pasta tempo the next hundred years.
Yeah, and who are we to argue with that? Obviously, Justin Mandon knows way more about the year round conditions of those greens than anybody, and so it sounds like this project to rebuild to USGA specs has a coherent rationale behind it. Now, there are those who would suggest that there are different ways to go about this kind
of project. Now, I personally don't know enough about rebuilding greens and USGA specs and the different options available to architects and green keepers to speak authoritatively about this, but there are definitely those who strongly believe that the right way to go about this would be to strip off the sod of the current greens, clear off some of the sandy build up that has happened over the past ninety three years, and specifically sand splash is is, you know,
an issue that the club is naming as one that has affected the shape of the greens and has reduced whole locations along the edges of the greens because when people play out of bunkers, obviously sand splashes on the green and over time those edges of the greens start to bulge up and that affects the amount of pin positions you can put on a green and just the contours overall. And so you know, a suggestion would be just to carefully clear off that sand splash and then
resaw the greens and keep the original builds in there. Now, the reason people would argue for this is that there is something about those original greens, and Pasa Tiempo still has them. That's a relative rarity. It's it's pretty rare that someone has an original set of Alistair Mackenzie greens,
eighteen original greens. It's amazing and they're awesome, awesome greens, as we've talked about, and so the purest would argue, you've got to do what you can to keep those and if it's possible to keep those and to do this work in a more kind of low profile, low impact way, then you've got to do that. And there are a number of courses that you could name that
have used this process. Maybe the highest profile one is that I know of his Royal Melbourne, which which has another great set of Alistair Mackenzie slash Alex Russell greens, and this is the process that they use to maintain the original greens. Rebuilding the greens to USGA specs is a relatively aggressive way to go about this, and it's risky, it could go wrong. You have to rebuild them really,
really well. And as anybody who has seen reproductions of certain kinds of artwork can can tell you, like, if somebody tried to re sculpt the you know, the statue like a Michelangelo sculpture, then it probably just wouldn't look quite right. Now, will Jim Orbina be able to recreate these greens as closely as possible? I would say probably,
you know, he's really really familiar with these greens. But where my concern started to kick in is when the official Pasit Tampo account was saying things like these are no longer Alistair mackenzie greens not even close to the original design. Well, of course they're close to the original design.
They are the original design, and so I would hope that those that people in the club have a really keen regard for what is currently in the ground at Pasa Tampo, and that everybody takes a super close look at what is actually there before they go about this process of rebuilding. Now. Of course I think Jim or Bean is going to do that. Of course I think
Justin Mannon is going to do that. But it's also important that the narve within the club is not we have strayed way far away from Alistair Mackenzie's greens, and we need to rebuild them because they're junk. Right now. The narrative is we have an amazing set of original Alstro Mackenzie greens. We're going to be so careful in the way that we reproduce them. We need to rebuild them in this way because of X, Y and Z,
but we understand what we have. That would be a more reassuring message I think out of the club.
Yeah, yeah, I think it would be. And I think, you know, when it comes to these types of you know, decisions, this this is it's just a it's a risky one. That's the thing. I think it all comes from, you know, a love of of that what's there right now, understanding it's a you know, world class set of greens right now.
And I think a lot of this centers around the idea of expectations with with maintenance and where it's gone, and the idea that every green needs to perform identical to the last green, which I think is a bunch of bullshit. And the idea of uniform conditions around a golf course, especially a golf course like Pasta Tiempo, I think is a fleeting race. It's a race to the bottom. It's it's conveying that, like the game should be fair, uniform and fair. I think the last thing you want
to do at Pas Tempo is create uniformity. That I love the way it looks. That's got this wild kind of hodgepodge turf look that I think they're going to keep. You know, you want that place to look old, you want it to be different. And I think one of the things that's that's masked in all this this idea of finding more pins is that inevitably there is going to be a softening of greens out there because of their you know, there aren't pins right now at the
current speeds that are maintaining it. And I think the club, you know, it was on display at the Western Intercollegiate last week. They keep the greens probably about four to five feet too fast for that tournament. You know, this is a course that could be a leader and say, hey, we've got Alistair McKenzie original greens and we're gonna keep them at eight and we're gonna have a lot of pins.
You're gonna they're gonna be slower on uphill putts then you're used to putting, but they're gonna be really fast on downhill puss because you're never gonna see as much slope and putts as we offer here. And I think that's the thing when I read everything that they're doing that's masked, is that this is a convenient way to soften slopes on certain greens that have become completely unpinnable because of the green speeds that are expected of the membership.
And UH to charge four hundred dollars around.
That is the kind of dark lingering concern here. And I guess we'll just see where it goes, and it would really be tragic to see the slopes of these greens softened because that is so much part of the character of this course. And you know, furthermore, people can point to successful rebuilds of greens. You know, Wingfoot's greens are famously were rebuilt and are are still terrific. But the thing is that Pasa Tempo is not Wingfoot. Yeah, Wingfoot is an entirely different type of club with a
very wealthy membership that they assessed for that project. Pasa Tempo, you know, makes ends meet off of these memberships and off of public tea times, and those green fees have gone up over the past several years. You know, five years ago there were about two fifty and on a certain tea time app you could reliably find about one hundred and ten dollars tea times at Pasa Tiempo. It was very possible for me as a high school teacher to go up there two, three, even four times a
year and play that golf course. If the green fees keep creeping up, then it's going to start to become a totally different kind of golf course. And if you know, that's the membership's call. If they want to be more a golf course where people make it a once in a lifetime destination and pay a premium for the experience and travel from far places to come play it, then I think that the quality of the course justifies that that they're going to be able to get that kind
of business. But Pasatiempo, for years and years and years, part of its charm is that it has been a little bit rugged. It has been an old feeling course. And I hope that it doesn't just feel kind of like brand spaking, shining new. I hope it doesn't look like Wingfoot. I hope it looks like Pasatiempo.
It's got Yeah, it's got to retain its old feel. I think the thing that gets me about potentially softening greens Is is losing the aspect of the wildness of Pasa Tiempo. Is that is with the Baranka. It's a it's an adventure. It's not a it's not a round of golf. It's it's an adventure against the elements. And that's the key to the golf course it is is what you're going up against is always not fair, and
it shouldn't be fair. And I think that a lot of this centers around the idea of fair and modern maintenance practices and beliefs that that you know from memberships in public play that greens should be X speed if I'm paying this much for my membership and this much to play around of golf.
That said, we'll see how it turns out. It could turn out great. I know that I'm going to go back there and play for as long as I'm able, as long as they'll have it. I mean, it is such a wonderful golf course. Great to discuss it with you, Andy, Thanks so much. This episode of the Frida Egg Podcast was edited by Meg Atkins. I'd like to include a plug here for the Frida Egg Pro Shop, which you can find at proshop dot the Fridagg dot com. Available right now in the pro shop is an aerial photo
of all eighteen greens at PASA TMO. It's pretty cool, so check it out at proshop dot the Fridagg dot com. And thanks for listening.