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 fridaggg fridagg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the course.
Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson, and today I am joined by Bob Crosby. Bob is the chairman of the USGA Museum Committee, which encompasses museums at Liberty Corner and Pinehurst and it's archive in Library. Bob is also one of my favorite golf course architect extra minds to have a discussion with, so it's it's super fun anytime you get to talk to Bob. I'm so happy you joined. He kind of comes at golf architecture a little bit
different ways than I do. He's very history based and it's super It was super fun to have a chat with him. Before we get to that, I got to say thank you to everybody listening. We today is Monday the ninth, when I'm recording this, we turned nine, so nine years of Friday Golf today. It's been quite the journey. And I, you know, we turned an idea into a full fledged company at this point with staff and everything, and I wouldn't be able to do this without all
of your support. It's been an incredible ride. Every every December, I start to think like I never can remember the exact date that we sent our first newsletter out, and I always end up searching, but I always think about, you know, nine years ago before I was in golf and you know, life then, and I'm living out a dream and and I want to thank everybody that listens and has supported this podcast and the newsletter and our
membership through the years. It's it's what's allowed us to continue to grow, continue to I hope, provide better and better content over the years. And I'm really thankful for all of your support and making this this little idea that was crazy. And I was so naive when I when I started the company, I no clue what I was really getting into. And the only reason it worked is because people read and people listened, and and a lot of people helped. I mean a ton of people
helped along the way. It would have been impossible to do this without the help of a lot of talented people through the years, and and help from just a conversation, help from a note saying that they like their stuff, they liked reading the website when not a lot of people were reading. All all that stuff is what's allowed this thing to keep going. And I'm super excited about about the future and where we're going to continue to push this thing. So I really really appreciate all of
your help. And this time of year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I always find myself thinking about all the people that have helped me along the way. It's it's a huge long list, and and you know, I want to thank everybody that listens. So let's get to Bob and our conversation. But first let's talk about Club Champion. They are our club fitting partner, and I've been working with Club Champions
since like high school. I was one of their first customers when it was an operation out of a garage. Now they have grown into i would say the world's premiere club fitting operation. They have studios all over the country, one hundred and twenty nationwide. When you go into Club Champion, I think my favorite thing about it is that you know you're going to get the best club and shaft
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like track Man. So if you are interested in getting a Club Champion fitting, go to club Champion dot com, use the promo code Frida Egg and that will get you a one hundred dollars full bag fitting or fifty dollars for or any other fitting type with the club purchase. That's promo code Frida Egg. All right, thanks, let's get to Bob Crosby. All Right, Bob, I am I'm really excited. You usually talk with Garrett, but I told I stole
you for this episode. You're one of the people that I enjoy talking golf with very very much, so I'm excited to talk a little bit about golf architecture, what's happening now, and also how it fits in the larger context of the history of golf architecture. So I give you an assignment here to come up with some three points of interest and one point of maybe I don't really love where this is going. And I did the
same on my end. So I'd love to hear you know, with golf course architecture, where we're at today, what's the what's the one, what's one of the things that you're thinking about.
Well, let me just begin with the disclaimer. I don't pretend, and in fact I have not seen as many of the newer courses as you have, so I am pleased to defer to you on a lot of that. I do come to this as a historian. While you're doing fancy tours of golf courses in your long black limousines, staying at fancy four star hotels, I'm plugging away in old issues of golf illustrated in the bowels of golf libraries.
So so you got that exactly right. That's that's how I move around the world.
If it sounds if I sound resentfuless because I am. But but I come at the more modern stuff from that sort of historian's perspective, and I think Andy, we are at a major turning point in golf architecture right now, and I think that major turning point can be described as what comes next after minimalism. Coor Crenshaw Doak have dominated, I think the field for the last twenty five thirty years. Their calling card has been a minimalist approach to golf architecture.
I love it, you love it, we all love it. How does the next generation distinguish itself? Doak has talked about how early in his career that was very important to him. He decided at high point in some of his other earlier courses to completely reject the idea of building mounds the way Reese and his father had done in so many courses. He rejected a lot of Pete di'es pots and his sleepers for a different approach to golf architecture, all in the name I think of him
trying to distinguish him self from his predecessors. That's I think the struggle right now that a lot that the next generation is is dealing with the Brian Schneiders, the Blake Conant's, the David Zenkin's, the the Rob Collins. I'm leaving many out, I'm sure, but but they are trying to distinguish themselves from what has been an incredibly successful
run of golf architecture, perhaps even a timeless one. But so there isn't there is a natural instinct for them to say, hey, look at this, Look what I just did. You know, there's that book of famous last lines of here, hold my beer, watch this, there's there's there's that aspect to some of their newer courses. Uh, and I and I take it that some of that is just an attempt to find their own feet in the discipline. I think some of it is over the top. I think
some of it is absolutely wonderful, but it is. It is they're trying to strike out in a new direction. And I don't think anybody is trying or anybody that we respect is trying to out minimalize or minimize the Doaks and the core Crenshaws. They're trying to find a different path, and I think that's very exciting. I think they're going to be some successes, they're going to be some failures, but I think it's an exciting moment.
Yeah, I think obviously this moment, I think I don't think we expected to have this many new golf courses being built on an annual basis. I mean, if you start to think about like where we were five years ago, six years ago, it was a handful you know, you could count them on two hands new golf courses being built per year. And I think, like we're at this as you kind of illustrate, and this is you know, one of my this fits into kind of one of my larger points is that we are now getting the
opportunity to see fresh blood in golf architecture. There was a I think like a lot of people that are very into golf course architecture new golf courses were asking for this six years ago, but the reality was there just aren't enough new builds for that to be the case.
Because if there's only eight golf courses being built, a couple are going to go to Fassio, But then for the other ones, it's like, why wouldn't I hire Tom Doak, Bill Corn or Gill Hands Right, Like, I'm I'm not going to take the risk on the twenty million dollar investment and hire somebody new. But now we're seeing those guys, the big names, and I think like one of the things that I think is interesting is I think that the first people called are now Tom Doak, Bill Kor
and Ben Crenshaw and Gil Hands. I think that is a seismic shift in golf architecture. They are the clear kind of across the board people the bona fide number one golf architects, and I don't think that was the case ten years ago. But now because of the influx of builds, there is this huge opportunity. There's a huge opportunity to identify, to begin for architects to begin to showcase what they can do and maybe where golf architecture
is going. And I think that is a very interesting topic because you see different things like I think Brian Schneider is a really interesting example of this, where he has introduced some he is not He's building golf courses in a minimal fashion from the sense of you know there he's attempting to use the land. He's not just blowing up, you know, a piece of property and re engineering everything about it. He's attempting to use the land.
But he is creating a lot of very clearly man made features, mounding you know, greens that are pushed up. They do not look like they were just sitting there as it, but they do you know that that is
a different style, right. You obviously have Rob Collins and Tad King, who I think have made a name for themselves for blowing up properties, moving earth, and I think like one of the things that they probably would push back on is we've never been afforded a site that's good enough to not blow up and push dirt around.
Yeah, I mean, there's there's also just the the the theoretical problem that the younger generation faced, which is you can't out minimalize a minimalist.
Well, I can't get that. I think you could. I think I think we haven't seen somebody go like completely like, you know what, I'm not doing anything.
Well, well, but that becomes a driving range, you know, at some point it just becomes a place where you hit balls into an open space. And that's a very hard road to hoe for the for the younger generation. I mean. But the other thing that I think, and I agree with you entirely, the go to guys are the sort of the three key guys who all come
out of the quote minimalist school. They may debate that, but I think they buy and large do the issue facing the golf industry, and it is huge right now is that that group of golfers with gills maybe a little bit younger, but Core is pushing eighty Doak is already talking about slowing down in his early sixties. I've always thought Hanson's a bit of a hybrid, but he's young,
a bit younger. But they are truly aging out at this point, and whether they like it or not, in the next ten years, maybe five years, they're going to be doing a lot less work. And it's because they want to do less work. But and that's where the new generation slides in because there's the demand I think is going to be there and they're the ones that are going to have to fill it.
So I think, yeah, and I think this ties in to one of my other topics that I had here and I kind of wrote down some names. This is me some fresh blood in golf architecture with less than five original designs to their name that are kind of popping up. You've got Ogilvie, Cocking and Me the Australian firm. They're They're big opening this year was the Medina three renovation.
They have some new builds on the way. They have the ones at fall Line thirty six holes, near you, as well as some other ones coming on board online in the near future. You have Kyle Franz, who did the redesign at Cabot, also was part of co designer Broomsedge. You've got the Love Sherman combination, which I think is like a diametrically different kind of firm. Then you're than
some of these other ones where they come. It's the PGA tour Player and then kind of out of a big design firm partnership that we saw very much, you know, prolific in the nineties and eighties, not as popular in this era, but I think they probably they're They're a lot different than the Nicholas companies, you know, or Arnold Palmer Design. You've got Rob Collins, uh and Tad King. You've got Brian Schneider. Tyler Ray is starting to get
some new design work. He's been doing restoration work for a number of years now, and Uh it's certainly in that young, up and coming bucket. Ky Goldby is building a new course and obviously was heavily involved with Tree Farm. H Andrew Green got his first new build. He's been obviously a huge, huge force in the renovation restoration world and then uh. And then I've got Jackson Kahn on here, which is like kind of like the next iteration to me of the Fasio school. And I you know, I've
played their Scottsdale National. It's completely it is so diametrically different than minimalism, like as far away from minimalism as you could get. But I thought it was fantastic.
And I think that's the direction most of these guys are going to go in to distinguish them They have to distinguish themselves or their careers are going to be very short lived. And let let's recall this is the historian my speaking that at the at the outset of the strategic golf architecture, early on, say, pre World War One, McKenzie, cold and many of it and Simpson were designing wild,
radical features on golf courses. The examples, you know, the Well Park greens, the famous pictures of those greens that mackenzie did, McKenzie's Uh, some of his designs for Cyprus Point are crazy heading the Headingly greens that the Colt did were wild. I mean these, all of these, the fangs have been taken out of almost all of them since the Saint George's Hill, the famous eighth Green, the
par three Saint George's Hill that Colt designed. These were crazy, crazy greens, and I think that was in part trying to find their feet in a new kind of discipline. They were pushing the envelope to distinguish themselves at the time, I think, largely from Victorian golf architecture. There's a whole different ballgame now, but there is that temptation, and I think some of the newer guys are doing some of that more bold Dare I say radical sorts of features for that reason, you.
Know, I've got a couple thoughts on this, and I think that your general inclination when you're a young architect is to build bold because it is a opportunity you've you've worked like and young architect is interesting because young architect in golf is forty year old, right, right, So you're talking about you're talking about a professional career where you have worked for other people for at a minimum, usually fifteen years without being able to express your ideas.
So when you get these early opportunities, it is the natural. It was like, let me show you what I've been thinking about. Hey, watch this fifteen twenty years. Like, I don't think there are many professions like that where your ideas, you know, like, sure you have some like individual ability to do things on a right Sure you might be the lead associate on a project, but at the end of the day, you are not putting everything out there.
On a recent yoke with Doke, Tom talked about like a A really told a really great story about Riverdale Dunes of course in Denver, that he worked on with Perry Die and he said Perry had a coinciding project that paid more money in Denver, so he had two projects in Denver, and he said to Tom, just go built cool stuff at Riverdale Dunes, like go crazy out there.
And he said that Perry came out the first visit he came out, he was he was like, this is it, Like I told you to go crazy, right, And like Tom was like, yeah, I was like a little worried about like what I was doing because like at the end of the day, your name's not on it, so like you're gonna hold back, right, And then from there he went nuts, you know, and he built some really
wild stuff. And so I think like when you your natural inclination, when you're a young golf architect is you're going to say, look at me, but like part of what I always think about and like this is like so true at a place like Brambles, for example, where they went I mean, super minimal, some pretty wild greens. But there are some occasions where you you know, you look at some of these holes and you're like, God, like, how did he know? How did bild know that this
was going to be enough? Like to me, it's way harder to know when you have just enough that it's not going to be dull and boring, but you have just enough features in a hole that it's really a wonderful gentle pull the play.
The supreme talent in golf architecture, and only very very few people have it is how to play the restraint card. Yes, that's hard to do because it takes extraordinary amounts of courage not to build a bunker there, or not to build a mound over there, just leave it alone. That's hard. That takes guts. It's like silent parts of Mozart symphonies. It takes guts just to have nothing going on for a moment, and it's yeah, I agree, Tyling.
My other thought on what you said about the wildness is I think one of the things and this was probably the case. You could tell me if I bright or wrong in the twenties or you know, I think roughly that's the period of time you're talking about here,
nineteen tens, nineteen twenties. But I think like one of the things that's not talked about enough is how modern agronomy practices have limited the amount of ability for architects to innovate, to do things differently because the playing surfaces are just so fast now that the slopes that you can use in the fairway and on the greens and
around the greens are just less. You don't have as much room to play with because of how fast our playing surfaces and how well maintained our playing surfaces are now. Like I'll never forget the old course at the Open, the last Open they held. Yeah, the fairways were amazing,
they were fast and firm. But I looked at it and it's like, well, every hole, every ball goes to the bottom of these really amazing contours, They go to the low spots, so the contours aren't even working the way they should.
Yeah. There there there are a couple of I agree with that there there are a couple of along the same lines. Uh. I guess my response to that is that, well, you can always just let not cut the grass so low, but I do.
But that's but that's not what the consumers demanding. The consumers demand, although that's what they think they're demanding.
Although at some point cutting off greens starts to become tiresome. But but for some people, yeah, well for me in particular, but.
I think both of us think that way. But then I hear people are they'll tell me it is awesome. I put it off four greens. I'm like, wait, what, what's awesome about that?
But let me let me, let me, let me talk because I was thinking about this last time. Let me talk about two lost threads that that I think the younger generation, whether they know it or not or are sort of picking up on. And one is the original Augusta National from nineteen thirty four, Mackenzie's original course. I have always thought, and I've had this off the wall theory that Augusta in nineteen thirty four was strategic golf
architecture on Acid on LSD. It was crazy shit. It had relatively few bunkers, lots of contouring and just wild greens. I think Mackenzie had hoped, and this is towards the end of his career, that he would take strategic golf architecture in a new direction, one that would have boomerang greens, all sorts of crazy stuff. It turned out that the Great Depression in World War II interceded. Nobody had any money for new golf courses until almost nineteen sixty or so.
By then all the Golden Age grades were gone. Certainly, Mackenzie dies I think in thirty four, so golf architecture really at that point sort of started over with Robert Trenchones Junior and that sort of thing. But Mackenzie was suggesting, I think at Augusta something that because he did it Augusta he had an owner, Bob Jones, who understood him. I think he was trying to push architecture to a place that hadn't been before, and it turned out, because
of other historical events, it never happened. I think the younger generation is sort of going down that same road. Let's take things to a different place, and I hope they do. I hope, but I'll stop in a second. The other lost thread that nobody has picked up, or at least well, I take that back. I'll give you a caveat in a minute. The other lost thread is Pinehurst US opened twenty fourteen, single line of irrigation. They let instead of growing rough they just let the natural
vegetation grow. Much of it is sandy the idea and God bless Mike what's his name, the usg head, Mike Davis. Mike Davis, who wanted that to be a model for how golf courses were going to be built in the future because they are easier to build and hell of a lot cheaper to maintain. It didn't happen. I mean, domestic every day golfers didn't like under maintained golf courses like that.
You know who didn't like it? Donald Trump didn't like it, absolutely, he tweeted about it.
Although doakes Pinehurst number ten has got some of that. The roughs are not really rough so much as just unmaintained areas. Yeah, but that's another lost thread that I think, knowingly or not, the younger generation is sort of picking up on, and that may be that may give us
a hint of where things end up going. But both Mackenzie and Macgusta in nineteen thirty four a lost opportunity, it seems to me, and the Open twenty fourteen at Pinehurst, we're all suggesting there are different there's a different way to do stuff, and maybe somebody ought to pick up on that.
There's a lot of directions to go on your two comments here, and I think like one of the things that I dislike the most about the golf industry right now is the chase that is currently happening on the
agronomy side. And I think like what you hit on with with pine HER's number two is a great example, you know, the chase for perfect on the agronomy side, right I don't think anybody if you, if you, if you said there's a scale of you know, one of your potential on the agronomy side, I think like a lot of people are chasing that one hundred percent because the amount of the amount of money that it costs to get to seventy five percent is let's just call
it a million bucks depending on your property, the amount of money to go from seventy five to ninety let's just call it is seven hundred thousand. So you're you're all sudden and These are just rough numbers. I'm not an agronomist. Every property is different, everybody's systems are different. So you're talking about, okay, it's a million dollar to gip me to seventy five, and is seven hundred thousand
for fifteen percent. To go from ninety to ninety five is like another million dollars, right, and then you know to go the next five percent depending on your property and how crazy your membership is, how crazy your greens German is is like another million or two million dollars, right, And you see these maintenance budgets just pushing up, and it's like, what are we No golfer knows the difference between ninety and one hundred. Very few golfers care about
the difference between seventy five and ninety. And at the end of the day, all these costs get pushed back to the to the game and the individuals that play the game, and like you know what, like you can say, oh, like uh, like it's my club. This is the way we do things like who wants who wants two thousand dollars a month? Dudes? Does anybody? Does anybody want that? But that's that's where we're going that's where the where like, you know, why why are neighborhood clubs like that that
are like just they're dokee fives? Why why are the dues on these clubs over a thousand dollars? Like it? It's crazy to me where this is going and where it reflects. Also is like there are clubs now with
guest fees. Like if I'm a member and I spend you know, a couple hundred thousand on my initiation, I'm spending thousands of dollars every month when I want to bring a guest out, which is like part of like being a member, like sharing your course is Oh, it's it's four hundred dollars to bring a guest out plus caddies.
You're not slunch.
It's like, oh what like And obviously, like a lot of people in this case like maybe this isn't a consequential sum of money, but to me, that's just the wrong direction for the game of golf.
Yeah, I know, I think absolutely. And having been a green chairman at a large Atlanta metro area golf course, they have unlimited capital resources.
Yes they don't care.
They just don't care. You know. You see it at every level in terms of the toro machines they buy, in terms of the money poured into agronomy, including the number of staff they have to maintain the golf course. It's just they don't really it's just whatever you need. It's just whatever you need. It's it's it's an amazing business privates, particularly large successful ones. It's an amazing business.
But let me, let me, let me there's another There's an underbelly to that which I think is absolutely fascinating. And this gets back to my new generation thesis, which is that there are a lot of people your age who travel in these in normal packs to play these good, solid public courses to hang out. They aren't you know, they aren't maintained to the nth degree, but they enjoy
being with each other. They enjoy the golf courses, and and and and that ranges from at the high end the Bandon Dunes types to Mike Young's the field and.
Well abandoned dunes. The greens are maybe tens. That's what I don't understand. Everybody goes to abandoned dunes. Everybody goes to Scotland, Everybody goes to Ireland and is like, oh, these are the golf there is just so amazing. It's the best golf, it's the best golf all those places for the most part, outside of like a deer, outside of the tourist traps, and in the UK, their their maintenance budgets are fractions right of the American country Club
and these That's what I don't get. I don't understand how there's no corollary here, right, I don't.
I don't either, other than you can do it, so do it. That's that's that, you know, if if you can stamp your greens at twelve or thirteen on a daily basis.
Do it.
Here's the money, by the way. Yeah, and and and it's it's it's nuts, it's it's totally nuts. But but but the other phenomenon, and I think you know this is the younger general. Is it a There is a cohort of younger girl golfers, people in their late thirties, early forties maybe who are just not buying the private club model, who would rather get in a car or an airplane and travel to play these golf courses that are not so impeccably maintained in part because of the camaraderie.
But I think in part because of the golf courses themselves. And I wonder if that isn't an early warning shot at the private club model, that that leading the sort of the thought leaders of your generation. I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing around forty the thought leaders of that generation are heading in a different direction. That's I find that encouraging.
I think that this was absolutely playing out, and this was playing out in the late twenty tens, and then COVID completely completely changed this movement. To me, one of my long standing beliefs is that no private club realized this, but the Kaisers completely through a wrench in their business model.
Right.
The Kaisers were, you know, unbeknownst to private clubs. The Kaisers effectively were killing the local private club. Because people of my age pre COVID, we're looking at like, you know, the role of the modern parent has completely changed. I am a modern parent. I if I you know, I'm sure some some listeners will say, well, like you're you're
you're just soft. But if I look at my wife on a weekend and say I'm gonna go play golf at eleven am or ten am or nine am, she looks at me like you're gonna work all week and then you're just gonna not be here with your kid, you know, like like it it's like it's easier for me to play golf on a on a Tuesday morning than it is to play on a Saturday morning at this point, and this is the This is not me alone.
This is the modern household with kids. So the way the reason that country clubs work, and like this is where it's completely flipped if you listen to old episodes of this podcast versus now. The only way I'm going to play golf is if there's a pool right involved, and it can be like bring the kid at the pool, to the pool at eleven, and I will be there at noon and I will just play with the kid all afternoon and you can just sit at the pool
right like that, That is how it works. But the Kaisers people were looking at it, and you know, there was this People were staying in the city longer, so there were more young, younger adults staying in the city longer, apartments in the city and in modern buildings in the city. There are more pool options in the city than ever. Less people wanted to travel out to the suburbs. That and what happened. COVID hit, and everybody's like, oh, I like green space, I like having my own space, and
this completely reversed this. But people were looking at the Kaisers, at the bally Nels, at the Prairie dunes, at the It's like I could spend one thousand dollars a month and have a big initiation fee and join here, or I could do two or three of these these cool trips a year, play a few rounds of public golf, and that satisized my golfitch, even if I'm a diehard golfer.
Right and Sweeten's cobes exhibit A one.
For that exactly. And I think that was the trend that really, like you know, if you're a historian, seismic events completely changed the direction of things that are happening. And I think the local the local club model was at like was on the verge of being in like a very very very bad spot until COVID hit, and that completely changed the whole way society viewed the suburbs and the whole way the younger generation thought of the local club and it completely has changed the golf world.
In golf business, well, I think, I think, I think it will. I'm still in touch with my club here in Atlanta and they still have a weight list and they're.
Still Did they have a weight list in twenty eighteen.
Yes, but I'll tell you where they didn't have a weight list. And maybe you don't remember this, but the real estate Wall Street crash in two thousand and eight and nine wiped out everybody's weightlist. In fact, we were a lot of members resigned or were bootered out for failure to pay dues. By twenty eighteen that had recovered, and there was a weight list back then, and COVID, it thinks, just accelerated. To everybody's surprise, things accelerated during COVID.
I mean, you wanted to get out in the golf course, but but you know getting back real quick to abandon and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this. I think Kaiser's genius, and I mean the word genius in its full sense of the word, was to develop golf courses that appeal to everybody, the golf architecture, nutcases like you and me, but also to wives who wanted to come out and play golf. It's extraordinary to put together a set of golf courses that appeals to
both and I've done it. My wife loved it. I loved it. It's just and dok has mentioned in the past that Kaiser has a knack for walking that tightrope and it's not easy.
I think this goes to one of the topics that I probably harp on as much as possible. But I think the Kaiser's the other genius they and obviously they have some leverage. They're building golf courses for cheaper than everybody else, and they're proving that great golf architecture does not cost more than shitty golf architecture. In fact, over time, great golf architecture costs way less than shitty golf.
Arc and they're also but they're also proving something that the I hate to sound condescending, but that the sort of the the everyday golfer has never really quite understood until maybe recently, and that is that a really great golf course doesn't have to be a hard golf course. Yes, and and Augusta National is a great exhibit example of that. But but also Bandon, I mean Bandon won't beat you up if you don't let it. I mean, you don't
have to play that well to to enjoy Bandon. You know, it's a classic course of where you if you want to play for score aggressively, it might beat you up. But if you want to just play your game, it's fine. And I he you know, Kaiser understands that.
All right, let's take a quick break from Bob and let's talk about our partner, launch Box by True Golf. If you're into golf architecture, True launch Box is a great product because you can play some of the best golf courses in the world virtually. Launch Box is a portable launch monitor and golf simulator, and it has a simple setup, instant shot registration, has a lot of measured data, and an easy Wi Fi connection. Now it's winter, it's cold. A lot of places I saw there are a lot
of places turned up the weather turn bad. I'm sorry for those places. But you could use launch Box indoors and set up a great indoor golf setup for yourself. You can use it also outdoors off a mat. So if you're interested in getting a launch monitor that's great that has great golf course play, launch Box might be for you. Go to True golf dot com. That's t R u g o lf dot com slash egg and you can learn that's true goolf dot com slash egg.
All right, let's get back to Bob Crosby, going back to your augusta national topic and the idea of Mackenzie that kind of getting into the mid thirties where golf architecture was going. I think you could probably put it in the bucket of like the start of the thirties where golf architecture was going that was halted by two
massive events, the Depression and World War Two. You know, you talk about a an art form, a practice, a a really a new industry that was evolving and new ideas were being shared and it was getting more sophisticated and more you know, more professional. You know, if you think about like the whole practice, like there weren't professional golf architects until like basically the nineteen tenths, and it was.
A whole new it was a whole new profession exactly.
You So you have twenty years of a profession and then it gets wiped out for effectively twenty five twenty five years because of a couple massive world events, and that that exchange of ideas, the natural evolution of it is halted and everything starts fresh with a whole new set of technology for doing the job. I think like
there were other schools emerging at this point. Also beyond the Mackenzie Augusta National, there was also like one of Mackenzie's associates, Perry Maxwell, wrote very harshly about the use of steam shovels, and I think this this was directly shot a shot at Charles Banks and Langford Moreau, who came from a different school than Mackenzie. It was kind of more the Rainer McDonald mole of building golf courses. But they were evolving. They were building bigger and bigger things.
They you know, there was still that they weren't altering landscapes, but they were constructing large features. And that is another with heavy machinery, and it was rudimentary heavy machinery to what came out of like nineteen sixty when the bulldozer technology got to a point where it's like we can literally just flat in a fair way if we want, we can make this flat.
Well, we can road grade the whole place.
And that's where golf architectural lost its way. But that other school of not minimal not minimalism where like you know, the greens were wild at Augustin National but the general thought with the bunkers and allowing the land to really be the star was this idea of of minimalism. But on the other end of the coin you had this Golden Age maximalism movement that was also evolving and changing,
and then that was halted. And I wonder, right now, are we at a similar point in golf architecture where we have You know, if you look at it, you have like disciples with Jackson Kahn of the Fazio. You know, we can move the world, you know, and we can
create any landscape that you want. You also have the disciples of the Dope Core Crunchhaw gil Hand's movement of minimalism, where you have their younger associates that might push it, push a direct different directions and offshoots from that school.
I think I think you're right. I think we're at a pivot point. I don't think any of it sitting here today know where that pivot is going to go. I think there's some hints, but I don't know that the route has been set out, and there's we can with any sort of reliability predict where things are going to go. But it is absolutely a pivot point and I'm kind of looking for I hope I live long
enough to see where it ends up. One of the things I hope this younger generation of architects pick up on, and I see very little evidence for it, is there's just a rich treasure trobe of ideas in the history of golf architecture. If they want to go back and dig through it, and I hope they do. It doesn't mean overturning fundamental principles, but there's just an awful lot of ideas out there that are lying on the ground
for somebody to pick up. Which which can Which leads me to another topic I wanted to touch on real quickly. And one of the things I am disappointed in, and this is I guess we put this in the disappointed bucket is compared to the teens in nineteen twenties, writing about golf architecture is impoverished, particularly by architects themselves. And Tom Doak is a clear exception to that. He was a brilliant writer and would stand, you know, on an equal footing with some of the best writers of the
teens in nineteen twenties. But he's the only one. I mean, there is no other buddy, There is no other architect, and relatively few other people writing about golf architecture. And by that I mean not just about the esthetics of the course, the look of the bunkers, how nice the clubhouse is, how smooth the turf is, but you actually writing about structure, about the architectural structure of a whole. I mean, why is this bunker here and not there?
But why is this bunker here at all? Those are the kinds of questions people argued about an agonized over page after page, and I love it. In the nineteen twenties, Simpson, you know, Cole low John Lowe, all these guys were battling back and forth about the rationale for putting a bunker here and not there. That sort of discussion doesn't take place, And I think one of the reasons is because the whole golf course rankings ratings thing has just
swallowed it up. It has taken so much oxygen out of the room that there's almost no place left to talk about anything else other than whether Old Barnlow should be fifty first in the ranking or fifty third I mean, you know, should it be I'm silly, should it be ahead of Highampton or below high You know, it's ridiculous. I think, I think, and you know, God blessed. Oh he says, it's all subjective anyway, so what the hell?
But it is the focus on whereby course ranks is a topic that everybody's eager to argue about, rather than the inherent features of the course and do they work, do they not work? Why if they do work, why do they work? There is so little writing about that, and that was the main fair of writing on golf architecture in the nineteen twenties, and it just doesn't exist
right now. And I blame part of that on the main magazines beginning and say the eighties and nineties, where they did a lot of rankings, and their golf architecture writers like Ron Witten and others really fairly quickly on began talking about basically in terms of rankings and not so much any direct discussions of golf architecture itself.
Well, the rankings have become you know, this gets back to the club business. The rankings have become big business for all clubs. The rankings are rankings are huge business for the clubs in Great Britain and Ireland. You know, they are huge. It's huge business for clubs in America. I visited, you know, I think like Interlocking and Madina, they both had different reasons why they did their you know,
twenty million dollar renovations this year. But I think without a doubt one of the reasons was they saw their course falling in rankings and they know that that that leads to more members, maybe higher initiation, maybe more guests wanting to play their more Monday outings more like you know, you go down the line of all the things that
a higher ranking does and it's big business now. And I agree completely like the it's an overall end of like there's less nuance than ever with with the way people discuss things online online has it's almost making it a race to the bottom. It's commoditized the ability to publish written word.
Yeah, one of the I agree that one of the problems is the A s g C A prohibits its members from criticizing other members. So God bless Tom Doak for not joining the A s g C A because he he'll he'll criticize other members, other architects.
But yeah, I think that's that's become the general practice is like young architects, they don't think they should say anything.
But if you look at Tom, I think, like what's interesting is like I think like every architect that, for the most part, the developer that hires them is going to be a it's like a personality match almost like right like the there are pro there're clients that profile for a Gill, there are clients that profile for Tom, there are clients that profile for Bill, and they're like
all across the spectrum. They have different personalities and they kind of like fit into those buckets, right like, But like a Tom Doak, somebody the highers Tom Doak, I think for the most part, and this is this is not speaking, this is speaking in generalities. There's always exceptions to this. Somebody that hires Tom Doak is going to be a complete golf nut, like golf tragic to the
nth degree. They're going to have listened to all the podcasts that he's been on, They're going to read his writing. They're going to be and they are going to be so in the golf bucket because that is like, that is what is like you can tell the guy just loves golf all He thinks about golf all the time. And that's that shows in like how much time he devotes to writing about the about golf beyond what he's doing, Like that's what occupies.
His brain, right, And and anybody that hires Tom will have to have We'll have to know enough about golf architecture not to be intimidated by Tom. Yes, and because Tom could be intimidating, yeah, and but I agree it's sort of self selecting. But but I you know, I think the price for the emphasis on rankings, ratings, whatever the word is, the price for that is the absence
of good writing on golf architecture. It just it really has taken over commentary on the game, or at least architecture of the game.
And well it's kind of you know, we've got our membership that we write extensively about golf architecture, right, And I think one of the things that we wanted to avoid was the idea of rating golf courses in a one through one hundred fashion, because, as you said, it's so silly, like is is sand Hill's number six or
number ten or number four? It's like, well, what day of the week, is that I could could change my mind about whether it's something's three or four, one hundred and twenty two, or it gets even sillier when you get to like one hundred and twenty two or one
hundred and twenty five. Like you're talking about like literal, and with the way the ratings go is like literal, Like individuals who might have shot their worst score ever, their best score ever at a golf course will change whether it's one ten or one oh six.
Is it is beyond absurd. And I actually did a history of ranking golf courses that goes back to eighteen ninety eight, well nineteen oh one, but anyway, kind of but we're running out of time and I wanted to touch on one other subject. All right, yeah, if I could, and this gets back. I'm trying to drive home as the new generation theme, and I'm going to my last shot at it. We talked a minute ago about how many of this younger generation is working on restorations of
existing golf courses, and I think that's wonderful. It's a source of income, It gives them a great deal of experience, but an experience only in one aspect of golf. Architecture, and that is an experience of doing everything but a routing. And if there's a critical part of being a talented golf architect, it's being a great router. And if you can combine that with a sense of esthetics, with sort of skill of landscaping, you've got the whole ball of wax.
And there aren't many people who have all of those component parts. And the guyser of work for clubs are all coming up and their centenaries at this point, they all want to spruce up their golf courses.
They all they're all getting in line to spend fifteen to twenty five.
It's unbelievable, but and they're sucking up the time of all this younger generation of architects. But none of that, or very very little of that requires routing.
Skills, which is, as you illuminated, I think probably the most important aspect being building a golf course and probably the one that requires the most practice bingo.
And it involves not just an esthetic sense of I can lay out a pretty whole, It involves some engineering. You've got an issue, you've got issues with the you know, drainage, road route and locating clubhouse, all sorts of things.
It's problem solving at the highest degree in the profession.
It's the high and it requires an ability to read topos, you know, all sorts of skills that you don't normally associate with the look of a golf course. But it's it's at the bone. It is the bones of a golf course. I mean, if you want to criticize somebody's routing, it's like criticizing William Faulkner novel and saying, I wish
you'd written a different book. It's it's you know, routing is is so deeply embedded in any golf course it's almost it's hard to discern what it was, you know, what the decisions were at the outset, and so it it.
My point. Here's the thing. If you criticize someone's routing, they say you didn't understand all the constraints, that's an immediate comeback. I know always, I know, oh you don't understand all the constraints, but I completely agree like a really well thought out routing, like I think like one of the coolest things that I saw, and I think like a golf course that if that I almost brought up in the in when you were talking about nineteen
thirty four Augusta National. I think the Tree Farm is a great example of a golf course that's pushing in a very different direction than its neighbor, Old Barnwell. Right like it is it is restraint, it is it is a beacon of restraint. Let's let the the golf the golf ground. And I think it's like, that is a fantastic golf course. And there are a couple and people are gonna show me a picture of one hole and
say this isn't restraint. But for the most part the golf course is really a study in restraint and allowing the land to be really the natural hazard throughout. But it was fascinating. I'm friends with Zach. I saw countless routings on that property. From Zach. He hired Tom Doke to do the routing. Tom came in and the biggest difference in the routing was Zach was consistently going over hills. It would have been an exhausting, exhausting golf course to play.
It would have been dramatic, it would have been you know, there would have been shots and holes that you would never forget. But one of the things this something, and this is Zach would, I think, be very very open about this. One of the things he said is like listen, like I didn't think about how to like use side hills and how to navigate a property along the edges and use the hills and kind of traverse them on the side. I was just going over all of them.
And this is like the perfect example of someone who's routed, you know, when you think about like projects that didn't happen. He's probably routed seventy golf courses, eighty golf courses, more more than one hundred and twenty, Yeah, versus somebody that was trying to rout a golf course for the first time, right, And that that's like the thing about the profession, and I think you hit the nail on the head. That's so hard is like how do you get good at routing without any opportunity to route?
Right right now? There is, to my mind a trade off between routing and landscaping. The better the routing, the less need for landscaping. And I think the tree farm maybe an example of that. I think Zach probably was paying deference to Tom and his routing by keeping by his restraint. That's that's a secret vote of confidence to Tom's routing. I think if you in too many cases sort of a B minus routing requires an A plus landscaping job or vice versa.
And yeah, well, I think one of the things that you're hitting on too, is a great routing on an above average property or better you know, above average or better. Right, if you have a great routing there, you have very minimal disturbance to the land the greater mature landscape because this land'smen sitting there, there's mature plant flora and fauna.
You have less of a disturbance to that mature landscape because you don't have to do mass earthwork and mass earthwork when you want to regrade a fairway that extends for you know, fifty yards into out of play areas because you have to tie it in, and when you do that, you remove all the vegetation. So that's why new courses often look really new, right, And I think that's like something that I was so amazed by Sedge Valley.
At Sand Valley was like, how beautiful the golf course is in the first year because there was very little disturbance to the native vegetation.
That's the main claim of minimalism it is. I'm going to leave micro contours, natural vegetation to the extent I possibly can, so when the course opens, it looks like it's been there for three or four decades.
Last point here before we get you out of here. And this ties with this, and I think one of the things that I love the most about what's going on in golf architecture, I don't my big issue with golf architecture is the cost that we're chasing and what it does to eliminate business models of affordable limit the amount of golf courses that could get built, opportunities a route. I think the thing I love the most about what's going on right now, I don't think there's ever been
better site selection for golf courses. Never in the history of golf have we understood what is a good property for golf. And that is leading to like, if you start with a great site, the bar is really low, and it's led to maybe the greatest run of really good golf courses being built ever.
And a final point, and it really supports that, is that there's also a willingness today, unlike maybe twenty years ago, to travel to those sites.
Yes, it's easier to travel to them than ever before also, which which allows for more remote, remote golf courses in everybody.
Yeah, they don't have to be located anymore near city centers.
Mm hmm. So that's one of my favorite. Obviously Google Earth is a huge proponent of that. But like and and then also just knowledge of what makes a great golf site. I don't think there's ever been as much information out there about what makes great golf, like the understanding of sand being important, the understanding of total fall on a site, what type of contours you're looking for. There's never been an it's never been easier to find great sites for golf. Right, So, Bob, I will let
you go. You've got a very important USGA History Committee meeting, so I don't want to get in the way of that. I don't want to get in the way of of that. But thank you so much for coming on uh and people can find you. You're on you're on Twitter, you're on Golf Club at list, You're all over the place.
I'm all over the place. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for having.
Me, Thank you for listening to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. Big thanks to PJ. Clark for editing and producing this episode. We've been on a pod ben Vender between the Shotguns start Year in review and the end of the year. With this podcast, me and him have been logging a lot hours together. Thank you to PJ. Congrats on your one Soto Mets signing. That's that's big for you. I know it's going to carry you through this this pod binge of editing. A great gift for
the holidays is Club TFE. It is our membership. We have events going live tomorrow. I think the mid Ocean event is live tomorrow. As a Club TF you member, you get early access to these events. So if you want to play in that sign up and you you get twenty four hour jump on everybody. I don't know if it'll be sold out by the time that twenty four hours is over, but that's an awesome event that you could get access to. We have a lot of other really great events that are coming down. Not to mention,
we have a ton of content in there. I just wrote a such Valley profile. I think we have another Dope course going up this week, and I think I'll have Mammoth Dunes up the next week. I believe, so lots of content in there. We put a ton of time in that. If you're interested in that, go to the Frida egg dot com slash membership. We'll be back
later this week with a couple interviews. In an episode, we've got Todd Dempsey and Chris Millard, so Little Persimmon golf in a little Pebble Beach history chatter on the pod for Thursday. Thanks four