Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, managing editor at the Frida Egg, and we have a fun episode for you today. But first, today's podcast is brought to you by the Frida Egg Pro Shop. You can find it at proshop dot Thefrida Egg dot com. And we have a bunch of cool stuff. One item I'd like to highlight is our Friday Egg Alternate logo T shirt. We do have a logo other than the egg and golf ball themed one you're used to.
I can't really describe it, but it's basically like a putting green surrounded by sand and it just looks really cool. It looks like it was designed by a good architect. So you should check it out and if you like it, get one. It's a great way to support us at the Frida Egg. So that's proshop dot Thefrida Egg dot com. All right, So for today's episode, Frida Egg founder Andy Johnson and I sit down for an extended chat about a recent trip he took from his home in Chicago
to his temporary residence in Florida. He spent some time in Ashville, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina and basically just saw a bunch of interesting courses. So our conversation is going to be coming to you in two parts. In this first part, we focus on the ocean course at Kiowa Island Pete Dye design. He built it for the Ryder Cup in nineteen ninety one and it's going to host the PGA Championship this year. It's a really interesting place and we just discuss it from every angle
we can. Part two of the conversation should be hitting your feeds in the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that. And with that, let's start the theme music.
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 Frida egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Frida, egg Frida egg, Brian egg bride egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off with the hump course game.
All right, Well, welcome to your podcast, Andy. How's it going?
Oh as well?
It's nice to be on the other side of this this podcast, you know, not having to do the intro.
Mm hmm.
Those are the things I loathe.
Sometimes pods still get posted for a couple of days just because I'm putting off doing the intro.
Just because you procrastinate on it.
No, just because I don't I don't want to do it.
You know. I think that's what procrastination is, isn't it.
Ah, you could procrastinate something like I procrastinate things I intend to do or want to do all the time.
Yeah.
I'm also I could put a masterclass on for procrastination.
So yeah, procrastination is not logical. It just it just kind of happens to you. Yeah, all right, So anyway, we've got We've got kind of a big podcast to do here. You had an interesting golf trip pretty recently where you drove it sounds like from Chicago to Florida, which is an insane thing to do with a small baby, which is what you did. Nonetheless, you made it.
When we left Chicago and we were like three hours into the trip and we were just in northwest Indiana, I was like, what have we done?
What are we doing?
Listen, I'm very familiar with that feeling. I have young children as well. Those car trips can be absolutely brutal, but you managed to see some pretty interesting golf courses along the way, mostly concentrated around Charleston, South Carolina and Asheville, North Carolina, and we thought we'd just spend some time
discussing those courses. This first podcast, we're going to really go in depth on Kiowa, on the Ocean course at Kiowa, which is going to be the site of the PGA Championship this year, so we thought we'd do a nice, in depth kind discussion of that. But there are also some other places that we thought we'd hit on as well. But first we do have some business to get out
of the way. It's a new year, it's a it's a new era even it feels like twenty twenty one, and we're hoping that things are different in a number of ways this year, including in terms of our ability as a company to hold events. We love holding events, and we've got a number scheduled for this year and we just wanted to let people know about those. So, so what have we got on the docket here?
Yeah, that was one of the biggest bubbers about twenty twenty.
There are a lot of bubbers. I'm not gonna, not gonna this was.
This was a huge one though. Having the cancelors events was heart wrenching.
It but in this spectrum of bubbers, oh yeah, twenty twenty very small one.
But for everything is relative when it.
Comes to golf, frieda Egg was we didn't host events, we obviously postponed them, and it's been a yeah, we're excited for toy toy one optimistic. I think, you know, it seems like we're trending the right direction to be able to host these events and feel safe hosting them and feel responsible hosting them. But we've got an awesome calendar. We're wrapping up a few final pieces of the calendar and then we will have this out hopefully hopefully within
the next week or two. We've got, you know, some really good venues, and you know, I think one of the things that we get asked so so often is where should we play?
And how can I play these places?
And all.
What we're trying to do with these events is provide opportunities to play some of these courses that we talk about a lot. So we have the steam shovel and you know, for everybody that's part of the Yale event. And I don't want to make get too narrow here. We are working hand in hand with the university to get that reschedule.
We're trying her best.
As you can imagine, with universities, COVID is a very touchy thing, and with the golf course being university property, it makes it extra complex for scheduling because, you know, just think of it from the university, a bunch of outside people come on property and a large group. So it sounds like, you know, we should have a date in the fall. They are very optimistic about that, and we should have a date for the Dog Bowl, which I know whoever everybody that's been you know, signed up
for that. Thank you for your patients. I appreciate that. But you know, some other venues that we have lined up this year. We got Seth Rayner Blue Mound in Milwaukee. We've got Davenport, a great Allison course in just about two hours west of Chicago. Prairie Dunes will be hosting an event in October early October that will be awesome. Rolling Green in Philadelphia, Lancaster in Philadelphia will be hosting events.
Those will be in different times of the year, So I guess Lancaster is not Philadelphia.
I know.
I don't want to get corrected as Lancaster.
It's in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, whatever, you know, we got a ton. There are many more pine hills up in Sheboygan. We're hosting event the day after the Ryder Cup, so that will be a lot of fun the Monday after the Ryder Cup, and I think we're going to just make
it a giant Ryder Cup event. So look out for the event calendar release that will be sent out via the newsletter in social media, and well I'm sure we'll talk about it on pod after we release it, you know, in an intro that I will put off for a couple of days doing so that we're really excited about the events. And sorry to any event that I didn't list. I don't have it in front of me, which I should have had.
Did you mention meadow Brook?
Oh yeah, meadow Brook and Detroit early early June.
Awesome looking course.
And for those of you who club in Minneapolis.
Of course, another amazing looking course that I'm really looking forward to seeing. But for those of you who have heard of like say Prairie Dunes or Blue Mound, but haven't heard of places like Davenport, Pine Hills, meadow Brook, just maybe just go to the Friday Instagram. I think we've we've published pictures of those courses all pretty recently.
Davenport is just an incredible looking course. The places where we're trying to hold events are where we think we'll find really interesting architecture.
Yeah, that's the thing.
We want to expose people to awesome architecture. And in a lot of cases, some of these these golf courses, like Davenport's a perfect example. If Davenport was in Chicago, people would talk about it all the time and it's so close, Like I had put off going there for so many years, and I'm so mad.
At myself because I literally I woke up. It was in the fall. I went and I.
Wanted to you know, I always shoot photos early in the morning usually, and I wanted to get out there. I didn't even have to wake up that early to get there by sunrise from my house. I mean, I was there in two hours, and I was like, what, how did I not get here till now? Once I went on playing, It's a it's a really it's growing up. Caddying On and Allison. They have a few they have three I think non original holes. But in terms of Allison's work in the US, and I think I've seen
just about all of his Midwest work. I'm missing one or two. It's the best Allison that I have I have seen. The topography is just unbelievable. And the greens. The greens are where I usually have abode to pick with with mister Allison. They get a little repetitive. They're kind of just slope one direction on holes and it's just big, broad slopes. These greens were had a little bit more internal contouring to them that that kind of
caught my eye. And then the topography is just absolutely stunning. I mean it's like, I think from the clubhouse you could hit a golf ball into the Mississippi River, so you can imagine that rolling topography that you see right off that and Pine Hills. The you know urban legend with Pine Hills is it's in Sheboygan obviously where Coler Whistling Straits and Black Wolf are. But Herb Cohler's longtime member there, tried to buy that course rather than build one for the resort.
So you tried to buy that golf.
Course and it was designed by Harry Smead, who was you know, didn't design a lot of courses. He had to have been tied to Langford Moreau somehow.
You just it's totally obvious when you when you look at the style of the architecture, for sure.
And those greens are some of the craziest greens, Like they make Lusonia's greens look subdued.
Yeah, so you know, the.
Lesser own places are. We wouldn't put an event a course on our event calendar if we didn't feel like it was really worth your time to see, for sure.
All right, So that's on the event side of what the Frida egg is doing this year. Obviously, we've got a lot of things going on in content side. We're going to be bringing you all the usual stuff and more. I'm working on a new set of Frida Eggs stories right now. I'm not going to say what the topic is, but it is going to be a mini series five to six episodes, telling one media story all the way through.
I'm excited about it. It takes a while to make these things, especially when you're doing a big story like this, and so I'm not sure when it's going to come out, but it'll come out in the first half of this year.
Hey, how much how much tape versus what we hear. Would you say, what's the ratio of tape that you go through recorded interviews versus you know, say we have a forty minute episode, what's what's the what are you that down?
It's like atrocious, It's like ten percent is what I use maybe less honestly, For like one episode of Frida Egg Stories, I usually interview four to five people, and this is a what thirty to forty minute episode where a lot of it is taken up with me narrating it. And so yeah, I mean these take an incredible amount of work, and we get help from Jay Virick and from j Fischel, who are kind of part of this production team for these fridagg Stories. But you know, we
love doing these documentary episodes. I think it's a really compelling format. Obviously, episodes like this where we just record a conversation and put it out are a lot easier on the production side. Anything else we want to talk about on the content side, anything, I don't know.
We're just going to be hopefully with the state of the world, we'll be traveling more. I you know, a couple of places I'm really excited to see that I haven't spent time in that. I am definitely going to our Minneapolis and then also Boston.
Those are two.
Places I'm really excited to see, So the Northeast and Upper Midwest. I did spend time in Minneapolis a long time ago.
And we've got an event in Minneapolis with White bear Yucht Club, right, and then you went and saw Rochester, which is the second course that's going to be on there as well. But that's I don't actually even know where that is.
And it's like two hours or it is an hour or two south of it's kind of in its own spot. That says, such an interesting town. So Tilling has designed this course Rochester and it's where the Mayo Clinic is, which in like everything seemingly in that town, there's a tie to the Mayo Clinic. So Tilling has daughter, I believe, married a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. So he designed the golf course for free so that he had a place to play when he went and visited his daughter.
Allegedly, it sounds about right. Tilling hast designed a lot of courses for weird reasons. Yeah, so yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, Minneapolis is it is a place that I'm looking forward to seeing as well. I've never been to the city. I hear great things, so.
We don't forget Saint Paul. I always wonder about that, like, you know, it's true. So Alwa's my question is there does one of the Twin Cities feel shade like? Does Saint Paul feel like it gets discounted because everybody says Minneapolis.
It's got to be right, right. I think Minneapolis probably gets more attention just because it's more fun to.
Say Saint Paul has a chip on his shoulder.
Yeah, I don't, I have I have no idea we would. We would have to ask somebody. But that's very true. It's the Twin Cities, you know, really we should be calling it the Twin Cities now. I'm looking forward to a lot of the same stuff this year, just getting out and traveling. I didn't do any traveling this past year. I did one kind of quick trip out to Sylvie's
Valley Ranch in eastern Oregon. But yeah, really looking forward to getting out to Philadelphia, which is a place I've never played golf and has a ton of incredibly interesting golf courses. I'm hoping this year we're not having an event in Texas. But I'm hoping to get out to Dallas and finally do a trip that I've been planning for a while. There.
This was a COVID casualty.
This was a COVID I was gonna do it in May of last year. I think, like April or May of last year. I was just like, man, sorry, I can't do this now, but would love to go see some of the work that Calligan Golf Design UH and associate Trey Kemp have been doing it some of the public courses in the city at Stevens Park and Texas Course, Squad Creek, Texas Rangers new build.
One of my favorite things about Texas of Dallas is the propensity for professional sports teams to own golf courses.
Texas Rangers, and then and then there's there's yeah, yeah, it's kind of hilarious. That's Jeff Browner course, right, Yeah. And then and then like the don't the Astros basically own Memorial Park. Memorial Park, now don't they? Maybe they don't own it.
The event is yeah, I don't know exactly what it. They obviously paid for a lot of that renovation. And Texas Texas is a sneaky good public golf place like Austin is just the worst public golf city maybe in America.
Though, but they even they have that historic you know, maybe the design isn't isn't much anymore, but the historic Lions municipal golf course.
It could be awesome if they ever let Ben Crenshaw do his thing, you know, you think you'd have a legend.
Yeah, He's like, hey, I'll do this for free. Yeah, you would, hope. But there's problems with the university, I guess.
And yeah, and housing housing down there is having having Bensave that lived in Austin roughly ten years ago. I really wish I had bought property in Austin ten years ago.
Everybody's moving there right now.
Yeah.
Yeah. No. Texas and a lot of the cities in Texas, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio there are really cool historic public courses. So there's a lot of cool stuff there, and it's not so much on the private club side. There are plenty
of well regarded private clubs there as well. But I think it's fairly unique among states where there's truly interesting architectural work going on on the public and municipal side, a lot of it done by call again Trey Camp and I just like to go see what's going on there. So do you want to move on to talking about golf courses, talking about your sure, your.
Trip, let's talk about it. What do you want to talk about for Kiwa?
Yeah, let's start with Kiwa before we get your thoughts on the golf course. You got to go see the golf course and photograph the golf course. Play it. But Pete Dye has a great autobiography called Bury Me in a Pop Bunker, And whenever I want to find out more about a Pete die course, I go read one of the chapters in there, the one on Q I just read in the past couple of days, and it's a lot of fun. There's a lot of interesting stuff about it that people either didn't know or may have forgotten.
Ocean Course at Q initially was not supposed to host the Ryder Cup in nineteen ninety one. You know, a lot of people will remember the War by the Shore nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup one of the best Ryder Cups of all time, maybe kind of the beginning of the modern Ryder Cup era, the modern kind of televised Ryder Cup. In many ways, just great rivalries, awesome action. Americans won narrowly, but initially the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup was supposed to be held at the Stadium course
at PGA West, which opened in nineteen eighty six. I'm not sure it's ever been confirmed.
Why it's got to be the band, right, the player.
Van, I mean, who knows, Like nobody has gone on the record is to why exactly it moved away from PGA West or can I get.
Something off my chest real quick? You just triggered something with what Web said the other day.
Yeah, so Web Simpson is responding to the USGA's distance statement.
So he said this stuff about the distance, you know, like, oh, we need better architecture. You know, he injected his thoughts on what the architecture should be. I was thinking about this, and this is the stuff I think about sometimes when my shower is you know, this kind of ridiculousness. But you know the thing is, every time somebody tries to do something interesting or different, it gets like.
Banned from the tour.
Is absolutely so the players are saying it's the architect's fault and they need to figure it out. But when any architect presents something different, than the status quo. It gets kicked off the tour or banned or changed. It's absolutely ridiculous. And West is a perfect example. Now granted, like the Developer, one of the hardest golf course ever die built in and the players just bitch about it,
get it, get it banned from the tour. You know, Gil Hans puts the Centrallite bucker at TPC Boston on the twelfth hole jt All. The players complain, it gets removed the next year.
They're never gonna be happy.
Trinity Forrest players complain.
The thread of them complaining they manipulate the course to play completely the wrong way.
You know, they get raids.
It never plays the way it's supposed to. You know, they have some venue issues, like with just location and stuff. So anyways, Trinity Forrest is gone. It's just like it's a repetitive thing. Anything that's different. These guys that are obviously paid by equipment companies. There's a good reason why the Frida Egg has never been sponsored by an equipment company m HM.
Is because they tell you what to say.
You know, in this situation, this guys giving reasons in the history of the reasoning is completely flawed, they complained about whenever something's different, it goes even like Harbortown was just the players hated it after the first year.
And these courses then get softened, right, which is clearly what's happened at PGA West as well. Right. So too, it's not just I mean, obviously the equipment has made a difference in how the players play a place like PGA West, but also it's not as hard as it was when it opened. And so yeah, and Pete Dye was trying to do this stuff in the seventies and eighties. He was trying to build courses that challenged the best golfers in the world, and he figured out a way
to do that. It's not the only way to do it, but he figured out a way to do that where there was an extreme emphasis on accuracy into the greens. Right, You had to hit these little sections of the greens to really have a chance of getting a birdie or in some cases.
A par and there's an angular accuracy component to.
It, absolutely, so you had to place your drive very accurately in order to have a nice clear shot into the green. This is what he was doing. He figured out a way to not only challenge the physical skills of players, but also challenge them mentally to kind of get in their heads and force them to be tough in order to win a golf tournament at his courses.
And it pissed them off, and they complained and they rebelled, and the courses got softened, every single one of them, and so you know, they're just You're never gonna make them happy. But we'll see what goes on with Memorial Park. For me, Tom Doaks renovation at Memorial Park, the host of the Houston Open, is maybe the most interesting course venue story right now on the PGA Tour. How are players going to respond to that course? It seemed to go pretty well the first year.
They had such perfect weather too. It played firm, you know, like that's the always. I think the concern with anything in Houston is rain and soft and god, they got just beautiful weather in last November.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And I think the important thing too there with like Memorial Park, is not judging a golf course anymore based off of the scores they shoot. I would prefer and I think there's a difference and needs to be a clear delineation between what's hard and what's challenging and what I think golf courses and setups should strive for is challenge rather than hard.
You know, I think it's perfect.
Like a hard golf course that punishes you for missing off the t five yards right or five yards left of your target, that's hard. Is it challenging, It's it's more it becomes more luck whether you pull the shot off or not, you know, whether you hit it absolutely perfect. Like challenging to me would be where it's an extreme difficult shot, but if you pull it off and it's very attainable to pull off, you reap a large reward.
Yeah, And it can be a form of challenge. Can be a player expects to make a birdie on a hole, but it's really really hard to make a birdie.
On a hole.
Yes, And if you try to make a birdie on the hole then and you fail, then you might make a bogie. Those are the kinds of situations that are really hard, of course, where you miss a fairway and you're in big long rough and you have to lay up in front of the green and try to get up and down for par I don't know, like truly
how challenging that is. To use your nomenclature. If this is what challenges if we're really trying to tax the mental and strategic abilities of a player, I don't know if that scenario where there's a penalty if you miss a fairway is particularly challenging for those guys. I don't
think they worry about that. I think there are other things that they worry about on a golf course, and they don't necessarily have to do with the score that they're shooting, because they know as well everybody else that scores a relative You're you're not trying to, you know, just shoot a low score. You're trying to beat other people. Yeah, and so you know, good good tour venues are the
ones where it is. It is very taxing in a variety of ways to beat the other people, not just to shoot a low score.
Look at that. We're way off, way off subject.
This is this is your specialty that the shotguns start is slipping into the Friday podcast back to Kiwa. So it went away from PGA West for reasons that were never particularly clarified. In his book, Die says it has something to do with the time zones, and that the Eastern time zone is better for the Ryder Cup telecasts than the Western time zone.
Whatever that doesn't seem like would be true.
It seemed the most reasonable explanation would seem to be that the players absolutely hated PGA West and complain to the PGA of America and it was moved away. But it wasn't even moved away to a course that existed. It was moved to a course that did not yet exist. This decision was made in August nineteen eighty eight for the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup. In October nineteen ninety one.
Had any of the courses that the resort been built that I don't know.
Was Kiah with it. I think there were golf courses on the island before the Ocean course. I don't know if they belonged to that resort necessarily, but in any case, this was clearly a stunning property. I'll have you to describe it in a second if it can, but you know, this is how Dye puts it in his book. For the first time in history, the heralded event, the Ryder Cup, had been awarded to a course that did not exist, and there was less than two years to build one
worthy of the event. All right. So the site was Kiowa Island, a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina. Having been there recently, Andy, could you just describe the piece of land that this course sits on.
Oh, it's absolutely gorgeous. I being northerns we went down there and we found like a rental house for cheap on VRBO.
It's January.
You know, it's a pretty not peak season for Kioa, and I couldn't recommend the time of the year enough. I know everybody likes going there when it's warmer, but it's it's awesome. This is a side note from you know what you asked me. But the dog it's it's leash free on the beaches. Our dog loved it and the beach is one of the coolest beaches in the world because it's hard packed. I was not put up by the resort, by the way. This was all, you know,
funded by yours truly. But you know, so I'm not saying this to say this, but God, I just want to go on a vacation to Kioa, play a little bit of golf, maybe not all on at the resort, maybe just maybe one round drive back into Charleston.
One of the coolest things.
It's really close to Charleston, but anyways, the island is just like the most stunning place. So you have obviously the low country, the Charleston tidal marshes, and then you have the ocean, and the golf course is this thin strip of land that plays basically between these stunning tidal marshes that as somebody that doesn't see them every day, I'm like mesmerized by them. I think they're so beautiful.
They get that kind of like reddish brown color. I'm colorblind, so if it's a different color, you know.
I think you're right. I think that's about what the amazing like variety of textures and colors in these marshes. They're just beautiful.
And so the front nine kind of plays mostly through that, and then it turns when it turns, and it plays. The way the course is routed is more similar to a Lynk's course than a lot of things in America, where it plays really like out and back on the front and then out and back on the back nine.
And in both cases, the out portion is along the marshland and then the back plays along the beach, So you know, literally sand dune beach, and I guess one of the things in talking to our caddies, had great caddies, was they had recently cut down. They've cut down a lot in Native so you can see the ocean from so many more holes that are previously the marsh had grown up a lot and restricted the view. But there are some really great golf holes out there. It's really hard.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it, but it's not. It's hard because you're just playing in a really strong wind, even if it's calm for four straight hours, and it just gets you eventually right. And the greens are pushed up, so like you have to hit really good shots to these elevated greens or else you're dead, Like you're just
in bad spots. And so playing the combination of wind with pushed up greens is kind of what you talked about with Die in general, like it makes you have to be so precise with your irons in order to play well. And then you know there's a decent amount of with but if you're spraying it, you're gonna lose some golf balls.
If you're if you're off of the golf course, then there's basically no point.
There's gaters and snakes, yeah, which I have no interest in. So like, if my ball goes all right, I'm not going to go in there, all right.
So yeah, amazing piece of land, but probably a pretty difficult piece of land to build on.
It had to be.
It's marshy, it's not like immedia. It's not like you can just grow grass and have a golf course. You had to really do some engineering here. So this is how Pete Dye puts it. When PGA officials first visited the site for the course, they almost threw up. So it was just like not a golf course as of nineteen eighty nine, you know, and the Ryder Cup was in nineteen ninety one. They began clearing the land in
July nineteen eighty nine. Then Hurricane Hugo hit in September nineteen eighty nine and completely transformed the landscape, turned it into a completely different place. Basically, here's how again Die puts it. All our marking stakes were blown away and many of the oaks on the property were wind burned so badly they never recovered where there had been one continuous sand dune along a two mile stretch before Hugo. There were now many smaller ones six to eight feet apart.
Nearly every single person who visited the site told us that the course would never be ready for the Ryder Cup. So I can imagine that he just sort of had to completely change his design plans mid stream. Now, he dies pretty well suited to this, because that's what he does.
Also, he'd never had design plan never. I've heard numerous numerous tales of him, you know, giving just like five year old design plans for a design like design design plans for somewhere in a completely different city and state to satisfy local governments that asked for a design plan, just giving completely opposite design plans for somewhere else.
So he was well suited to this. Like, you know, the site got re arranged by Hurricane Hugo, and he obviously had to adjust to that. But this is kind of what Die did anyway in his builds. So it
was six weeks before the Ryder Cup. Ryder Cup players visited the course, Lanny Watkins says, no way this course will be ready for the Ryder Cup, And as Dye puts it, Lanny's comments were mild in comparison to those of other Ryder Cup hopefuls, including Tom Kite, who abandoned his car when it got stuck in the sand near the clubhouse site. In any case, it was a hectic build obviously, and it had to be done really really quickly.
But even though they did it in a short amount of time, they used some pretty innovative methods of recreating dunes, putting vegetation back on the dunes because the hurricane had stripped everything, draining the course without contaminating the saltwater marshes. You know, this is one of those golf course projects in the modern era that had a lot of environmental
restrictions that's become a lot more common now. But they had to come up with a whole drainage method to make sure that chemicals from the golf course did not reach the marshes. And so basically they built this huge system of pipes where the water would go into these drainage these catch basins and would go down into these pipes and then be recycled for irrigation. And so in
many ways, this is a very modern project. You see a lot of the kind of environmental measures that current golf course projects almost always have to take into account. Being a factor here as well a couple of other details about the design. Alice Dye is the one who suggested raising many of the holes so that players could have unobstructed views of the ocean. If they had just kept it at the level that it was before, you
wouldn't have been able to see over stuff. And even now, as you mentioned, when the vegetation in the marshes gets too high, you can see over them. But they actually built a lot of those fairways up so that players could see the ocean. But what this ended up doing is making the golf course quite a bit more difficult because you're more exposed to the wind when you're higher.
The wind's crazy.
Wind's crazy, and that's and Die talks about that what makes it crazy is not only its strength, but the fact that it switches direction. Yes, it goes in opposite directions on different days. And he says, by the way, that this is what made the nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup so difficult. It was because the wind was blowing one way during the practice rounds, and then on the first day of competition it switched directions, and so players
plans were completely different. Holes that played into the wind were playing downwind, and holes that played downwind were playing into the wind. And when the wind is as strong as it is on Kiawah Island, it just completely changes the golf hole, turns it into something totally different.
And I think this is you know, I had been to Kiwa in so long, and I remember the Rory Pga a few years ago, and I remember I was, you know, I wasn't in golf media. Then I remember kind of being in a blah because, you know, Rory ran away. And I think that wind does not get enough credit because he absolutely dusted a field on a golf course that was really hard for everybody, but Rory, like there were not many players under par, he ran away with it. And I think I was a little blind.
I remember, you know, I was at high schooler. I didn't remember that much. I didn't know what I was looking for. But when I went out there, I you know, after playing it, I was like, Wow, I'm really excited about this. And one of the reasons I'm really excited is because of the wind. And I think, just in this modern era of golf, conditions have to be so perfect, and really, if you don't have wind and you don't
have firm. It's gonna be the professional golf we watched week in week out where wedges just stop and everything and you don't see the shot making as much because they can play driving range golf. And I think one of the things with especially you know versus in August PGA in May, you get more variable winds out there, and you get stronger winds in May than you get in August. And that is what I kind of walked away.
It's really a compelling design. It's got really some really neat holes, some really fun holes, and some holes that you know for people that like watching guys kind of scirm, Like there are some very very uncomfortable t shots out there, and like you can play a perfect round of golf and run into an eight pretty much anywhere on that golf course. And I think that is something that people loved about Shinnakock is the the opportunity for a twenty
car pile up at any point in the round. And we saw the best thing about Shinnacock was we saw it right out of the gates on Thursday, people making
sevens from centers at fairway. At Atkiwa, you could make a seven all over the board there and I think with the wind being that added spice that we don't get a lot at American Majors is something that I'm really excited about now, you know, if we wanted to get into critiques, I wish that Kiowa would go back to a bermuda grass and maybe allow in the winter for it to go dormant and play more links like let it go dormant, like country Club at Charleston down
the street goes dormant. I would play there all the time in dormancy because it would play so fun and fast and different if they allowed it to go dormant.
Rather they've got past palum.
So it's really the one thing that kind of stinks is it's a slow grass and it gets a lot of water.
So is it slow around the greens too, like on the approaches to the greens and stuff like that. Is yeah.
So it's the one thing though, is the greens are all built up, so it's not a place that you're going to be running the ball up for the most part anyways. So I will say that it's just more off the tea. It would play so much different with fast of faster grass.
Yeah, yeah, I mean in Pete Dye's career. There's this interesting thread where clearly he was inspired by the links of Scotland and Ireland, and he wanted to recreate some aspects of that style of golf course in the United States, and he brought certain elements that he saw over there here. And when he was building Kiowa Island, he was quite aware of trying to emulate the links. He wanted to
leave greens open to approaches. He knew there was this wind, He had this out and back routing idea, these two loops for the nines, and so there are some aspects of the course that vaguely recall the links, but in some essential ways on this course and on pretty much every other Die course, he didn't quite get the links feel, mostly because his courses are pretty much aerial, and that's maybe the most essential thing about the links, to be fair.
He lived in the aerial technology though, like you know, and as much as we romanticize the links and running the ball up, you know, for especially what he was oft in tasked, which you know in this case was hosting a professional event. It was an aerial game at that point.
Yeah, So you mentioned some that the t shots and probably the approaches to are really visually uncomfortable. Could you say more about that? How does he do that?
It's just angles that he sets you with and decisions right, you know. Thirteen is a perfect example. And I think I think Jim Furick ruined around here and maybe the last PGA, I think he made like an eight or something and he played like just a flawless round of golf, and then he made a seven or eight here. I myself made an eight here and I just was standing on the tea box.
You know. It's a middle ish.
Length part four and for me, I was playing into the wind. And so you want to hit driver, You've got bunkers on the left and a diagonal hazard down the right, and the diagonal nature of it is just I think that's the thing that Die did so well, is the use of these angles where it just makes you uncomfortable because you know, if you don't hit a cut on that t shot, you're going in the bunkers. But if you over, if you hit too big of
a cut, you're going in the water. But then you could take them all out of play and hit like an iron and a lay back short, but then you're left with like a mid iron into a really small green that's angled again with water. So it just puts you in a position where you don't feel like you ever are winning right with a decision. If you make one decision, it's going to leave you with a tougher
question the next time around. You know, if you take the safe decision, then you're gonna have a tougher question the next time around. If you push it, you bring in all kinds of risk. And I think that is just a general characteristic that flows throughout the golf course. Obviously, pins can change the way you play them in the wind. The wind is such a big factor where if a t shot doesn't fit your eye and then and then it's blowing in a direction that makes it even worse.
You're just standing on a tea box feeling like I have to hit this perfectly or else I'm I'm screwed. And I think you know, obviously, professional golfers are way better than I am, and they feel differently about this, But I think it will put them and we saw it like if you watch The War on the Shore, which is a great little golf film on the Golf Channel.
I caught it.
I caught it a couple of weeks ago, one early in the morning, I like turn on the TV in my office and it was just randomly on and my work day didn't start for an hour later because I sat and watched it.
And you know, these guys, the wind just gave them fits.
And obviously they were playing a little bit different technology, especially the spin near golf ball. And I think that's something that gets missed, is like how little wind hits these golf balls of these players. And I've noticed it just from when I played growing up, how much it's changed to now. But that wind, it just makes all these shots with trouble places, it makes you bail out.
And the case of the War.
On the shore, a lot of guys were talking about the seventeenth hole, which is a long part three and it was playing into the wind and blowing to the right, which water is short right of this long par three, and players were just like aiming at sand dunes left of the green, like sand dunes with thick rough grass, praying to get the ball on the land, you know. And that's the things that this golf course can do to you, is that you look at shots and are just hoping that the ball land on ground.
And the severity of the hazards plays a role here too, because, as you said earlier, if you're in those hazards, it's over. There's no recovery, and you're aware of that when you're making the shot.
The other thing, too, with the angular nature of them, is a lot of times if you hit them into these hazards, it's not like you get to drop up by where it crossed because you crossed off the tee because they're angled, so your ball may never cross over ground, so it's like an out of bounds.
Yeah, so you mentioned the war on the shore. We didn't really even conclude the story about the building of Q. Yeah, it opened, it worked. It was they managed to get the golf course done and have it host that tournament. And it seems to me that even though it was an extraordinarily hard course and guys were faced with the kinds of shots that you're describing, it seems like they liked the course generally.
I think they liked it. It's fun to watch that event, you know, just so much a change with golf. The bay the ball hit the ground and moved in that event was really cool, and obviously it was Bermuda grass then, but you know, I think they for the most part liked it. They all thought it was extraordinarily difficult. One of the things is like it is a perfect match play golf course, and I wish a Ryder Cup would ever would go back to it, but I think for
business reasons it won't. I think infrastructure is an issue obviously, with environmental and titled marshes and not enough space for grand stands, you know, because the Ryder Cup is way bigger than the PGA in terms of a setup, so unfortunately like it it would be such an awesome Ryder Cup host because of that. The variance on holes can be so great. You know where good shots are rewarded very heavily there and you know, make you can score
out there. But scoring for eighteen hole holes is the challenge, especially when the wind's up.
Are there any other holes that stand out to you? You talked about the thirteenth, what else.
The third hole? These are inland holes. The ocean holes are spectacular, they're beautiful holes, and they all have strategic interest. But the third hole is a really cool short par for It's probably about three hundred and fifty yards and it's got this nice little ridge that it plays up and over.
There are two little trees short of the green.
But I'm really compelled to see what players do because if it's playing downwind, it's very drivable for a lot of the longer hitters. But the green is extremely small and it's raised really high up. It's almost like an hole, almost volcano like, and it's green. But it you know you can hit three iron, you can hit such a wide I think you're gonna see players play such a
wide variety of shots. The thing is when you have a wedge in your hand and if it's blowing, that shot is no easy picnic because the targets raised up. It repels on all edges and it's a really small target. It is a tiny green. So that is will be a really interesting hole to see how different players strategize and play it, because I think you're going to see there's obviously hazards, there's marsh around it, but there's a
decent amount of space up there. I think you'll see some guys try and drive it, hit it as close as possible, other guys lay back, and I think it'll be dependent on the wind too, But that weg shot is not fun if your downwind is almost harder because you just don't know how that wedge is going to react, and you could get big first hops. So that is probably one of the holes that I'm most excited about. The par threes are extraordinary out there. They all kind
of go in a little bit different direction. I think they all play in distinctly different directions, which is neat. The first one has almost like an hour glass type green. It's similar to seventeen at Pebble, except it's got more space have as small as a neck, but it's if you can envision that one, and so you have a lot of variety in terms of length that that can play. And it's kind of where the routing turns on the
front nine. So you're playing out and this one turns and it kind of brings you starts the process back, but it it plays in a distinctly different angle than every other hole on that nine. And that and then it got a great little shorter par three with a raised green, very very volcano esque par three the eighth hole, and it's a really neat hole. It's just like a do or die shot, and like everything, I feel very repetitive.
The wind makes it extraordinarily difficult. If you've got a crosswind, it's not a fun shot to hit on the back. Nine fourteen is a cool green that's got it's almost got a little bit. It's not a radan at all, but it's got that kind of slope where it runs back from the right, so you can you'll see guys hit it away from the flag to get it close to the flag there. It's kind of like right in the middle of the green. It's got this shelf that runs away in back allah radan.
Yeah, yeah, Well, it's funny you say it's that it's like a radan but not a radan, because in his book Pete Dye says it's a ra dan, but looking at it, you know, not really. What are some of the things that for you differentiate it from a true radan.
I think it's just the front part that the shelf kind of comes more in the middle of the green.
Yeah.
Right, it works well. It works like a radan.
You can run it back there.
It just doesn't have the aesthetics that you would be used to. It doesn't have like the same angular nature as your traditional radan, but it does work well, like you have to aim short right to get it close to the to the left flags.
And it's it's the first hole that comes back on the back nine along the ocean that comes back toward the clubhouse.
It's really it's really the first right on the ocean hole on the golf course, because that front nine is detached from the ocean.
So this starts your stretch of just like basically straight holes on the ocean.
And then the seventeenth turns back in plays the opposite direction of the fifth, and that hole is a long par three and there's there's no bail out.
Guys had a hard time with that hole in nineteen ninety one, oh a lot of guys. There's a lake in front of the green is kind of angled left to right, and there's a big lake in front of the green that Alice Die is the one who recommended. They initially weren't going to have that, but they put that there, and it comes right up to the edge of the green. Classic Die style. You know, I think
there's some railroad ties there. Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, and yeah nineteen ninety one Ryder Cup ball after ball in the water.
Yeah, and you know Mark Kalkovecia's famous meltdown happened on the seventeenth. Like I think somebody said, is the worst shot they've ever seen a professional hit. I mean that that that hole, it's scary, like you just stand there's nowhere to hit it. You have to just commit to hitting a good shot and pray that, like the wind is in a good direction for you. So there's really good variety and distances, and then the directions are so
they're they're a great set of par three. I feel like Pete Die typically builds really good par threes and and this is no different than than that.
It's just a lot of variety in them.
Yeah, you're king in on the variety and that and that was that's a hallmark for par threes. You would never mistake one part three on a course for another. When you're playing a Pete Die golf course, they're all totally different.
It's it's just such a neat place.
And I I wish in a way, you know, it's like one of these things with golfer right, it's a resort. It can get what it charges. I just I wish it was more affordable. But it's a bucketless place. And I think people like you know, I think the rest of the resort plays a factor. Like I played Turtle Point when I was in high school. I ran around it.
While we were.
We were there and I reminded it reminded me of how much I hated it, And I think, like, you know, the rest of the golf courses aren't.
I think that's where it lacks compared to others. But like the.
Ocean Course, I wouldn't want to play there regularly, but every once in a while it is. It is a spectacular golf course. It's a really great golf course. It's just really hard, and I think that it's okay to have a golf course can be great and really hard.
But at the same time, it has these two functions that are so different. It's a tournament golf course. It's an elite tournament golf course that is meant to be hard, and it is hard, has been hard. But for most of its existence it has function and does a resort course. And so how do you think it fares on those counts? Do people Do you think people just expect, like I'm going to get murdered by this course or is there is there some flexibility built into it.
It's so funny.
I you know, the I was talking to our caddies and the day before we played, it was just these insane winds. And I talked to a guy in the pro shop. I was like, yesterday I had to be wild out here. He's like, yeah, nobody even canceled. It's like if I was scheduled to play that day, I would have been like, no, no thanks. I mean, you're just like thirty five mile in our winds out there. It's insane and it's just extraordinarily demanding golf course to
play in that type of wind. I would have been like, no thanks. And I asked the cat. The caddy said that she said for the people she would carry for they lost a dozen balls by the third hole. It is it's not a place where it's not like all low handicaps, Like that's the thing is like the this is a type of place that you get corporate retreat, you get people that have never played golf. It's their
first round of golf ever at the Ocean course. Like could you imagine do you imagine playing your first round of golf at the Ocean Course? Like I would hate the game.
I can't. Yeah, I mean, and it's not just a it's not a resource cour resort course in the Abandon Dunes or sand Valley a sense where it's a golf resort exclusively, like where you're going there to play golf. It's a resort resort, right, it's a it's a nice place to go on a vacation, even if you're not particularly interested in golf, and so you can find yourself out on that course without having many skills at all.
And let me tell you something, all of everything I just said about Kiowa, about the Ocean course, it might be worse at Turtle Point. That's the most claustrophobic golf course. Yeah, and I couldn't ever imagine playing it as like a
twenty handicap. There's things that I love about Kiowa the resort in general, and then there are things I dislike, And one of them is like the Turtle Point and how they felt the need to squeeze three holes on the ocean And it's like anybody that saw the Ezema tournament and Bahamas the Web event where the winds just reaped carnage, and that you know, there's allegedly the story is that Greg Norman when he played the course and with Hank Keny.
They ran out of golf balls on the twelve hole.
That's Turtle Point, Like you get out on the ocean holes and there's like thirty yards of space to hit it.
And I watched this guy. You know, you could walk right through there.
You know, there's walking trails and I was out for a walk and I just watched this guy stand on the tea and he could just tell he was just making the most guy to swing. He hit it right into the houses, like it's just like a natural reaction. I think that does have to be some of the holes in America that people lose the most golf balls on, or those ocean holes that they just crammed in there in between houses beach.
It's an interesting relic. I mean, I don't think golf resorts are being built like this anymore, where the courses are super super hard.
I think about it, it's like they were really ahead of their time in terms of environmental practices land planning, like they did a great They did a lot of great things with like preserving nature there, which is great. That's what makes it so cool to visit. Just in general, if you're a person that enjoys like walking. It's amazing place. Like I've got a renewed or maybe even new passion for walks. That's something new for twenty twenty for me. But like I just loved walking around there. But the
the golf. From the golf standpoint, they developed this resort probably the worst time in golf history to develop a resort on like sandy soil near the ocean. You think about what could be, right, Yeah.
That said ocean course at Kiowa is a cool place. I think that's the that's the verdict.
Right, Yeah.
I think like people will pooh pooh it just because of the time it was and how hard it is. But like it's okay, a golf course could be very good and very hard like that is. That's fine, Like it's very demanding it but there's a lot of strategy and a lot of cool angular stuff within that demand, and it is a course that is is a one of a kind golf course.
Yeah. And something we haven't mentioned yet that I wanted to touch on before we move on to other topics is just the look of the ocean course at Kiowa. I think even in Pete Dye's body of work, it is a uniquely cool looking well shaped course. He usually did a good job making his courses look distinctive. But the just look at photographs of the ocean course and seeing the way the bunkers are shaped, the way the contours are done around the greens, It's varied, unexpected, it's strange.
I wouldn't call it natural necessarily. You know, there are other architects who have done a better job of emulating a dune's environment more exactly. But the way that the shapes kind of pop up off of the ground but still stay pretty low profile and don't look ridiculous. I don't know, there's something there that is that is cool about Kiwa.
It's not necessarily like you wouldn't imagine being natural, no per se, but it doesn't look out of place.
Yeah yeah, And why is that? Like I'm trying to trying to find my way to that answer, because it's it's not the way the bunkers are shaped. It's not like he's trying to fool you into thinking those were there before. I think part of it is that it's fairly low profile. The greens are pushed up, but it's not like he built these massive stadium course like surrounds.
Yeah, I think it's I think one of the things is because they have what Hugo did with the dunes and making all those dunes ridges. I think the term scale gets thrown around a lot as just like a buzzword.
Yeah, people don't know what it means. Scale. Scale can be. It's not just big scale that we're talking about. When we talk about scale, we're talking about the match between the scale of the environment and the scale of the course.
Right, So those dunes create a bigger scale, which allowed the features he built, which aren't super large, to blend in more because of their the surrounds being bigger, the natural surrounds being bigger, the things that he built up and these bunkers, these bunkers do not look natural at all, right,
but they work. And I think we see this sometimes with like a above ground features, you know, just a general they're the bunkers are some of them are almost above ground features, like like they pop up, they're like almost I know he got into volcano bunkers later in.
The French Lick era.
Yeah, yeah, but these might have been the precursor to the volcano bunkers.
Sure, this is getting late in his career here, right, This is This is fairly late period Pete Die, so he'd been doing it for a while and so this is a different phase of his career than Harbor Town or TPC Sawgrass.
This is Sawgrass today is not.
Necessarily Pete Die, yeah, because.
It's more TPC design than Pete Die.
But yeah, all right, So Ocean corsic Quio a cool place with some fantastic things about it, but also some questions to ask about its design, which makes it really interesting to discuss.
That's Pete Die for you polarizing.
He's polarizing, and he should be, and I wish more architects were, in fact, because he might be the most interesting architect to discuss of all time, mainly because you can't possibly play one of his courses and say I don't have anything to quibble with here, but you can't. You also can't play one of his golf courses and say there's nothing here that I like.
Yeah, I think that's you know where His contemporary obviously was Fazzio and Nicholas to a certain extent sure, And I think that's the thing that separated Die for me from Fazio is that Die was able to go outside of the box a little bit more, and he wasn't afraid to take risks where I feel like Fazio kind of just ouh, this works here, you know, do this here, all right.
This is another golf course. We do this and this and this.
And he did the thing with Fazzio too, is he built a lot of very good golf courses. But I just don't think, you know, he never was audacious enough to build, you know, whether you like Pete Dye or not, his stuff is memorable and that that in itself is worth going to see, you know, And I think that's what somebody. I don't think Mike Strantz is that great of an architect. Everybody loves him, but I think what people love him about about him is that the stuff's memorable.
You know, it's a it's a unique art form. And that's what architecture is. It's art. And I think, like you know, Strants, it would been really interesting to see how his career progressed, because that's one of the other interesting things things with architects that I really like examining and thinking about is how they progress from early stages
to later stages. And obviously this is like we just talked about, this is a later Die versus Harbor Town, early Die or you know Crooked Stick or the golf club, and I think or the stadium phase, like there is the stadium phase too. I think the thing with with Fassio was it was always kind of a Fassio, you know. And I think the thing with Strands was it was really cool to look at, but you wondered about some of the functionality. You wonder about some of the everyday
aspects of it. There are a lot of questions around the architecture. The architecture was more art than function, you know, more form than function.
Yeah, that's a good point about Strandson and Strans is actually a really good comparison with Die. Yes, if you're looking at the evolution of golf architecture, where the lines of influence go, obviously they go in a number of directions from Die. He mentored any number of great architects that you know now. But if you're looking for an architect who is truly carrying on that Die tradition of provocative work, then Mike Strants is a pretty good example.
I was kind of a I think I've talked about this before on this pot. I think one of the things I think about a ton is, like, how would Strants have evolved? Yeah, what would we have seen in twenty ten, Because when he passed away, he was just reaching the pinnacle. The commissions were getting better and better and bigger, and he was about to hit you know,
kind of the height of his career. And he would have been a really interesting foil to the minimalist style architecture that won out with Bill Khrer and Tom Doak. I don't think he would have built a golf course abandoned, like I don't think that would have happened, But he would have built a lot of other golf courses that would have been stylistically and philosophically built a lot differently than the style that really won out and today is the one that's in vogue, you know, the dominant style.
Yeah. If he didn't build a golf course for the Kaisers and he died in two thousand and five, right, so there was certainly maybe an opportunity to have done so and it didn't happen. And maybe that a place like Bandon Dune's would never have really jibed with Mike Strants, but he might have built something at like stream Song. Yeah, I'm glad that the courses at stream Song that are
there are there. Nonetheless, it's interesting to think about what he might have done with the property that became stream Song Black. Ye, what would Mike Strands have done there? I think gil Hanst did something really interesting and provocative in its own way there, but almost certainly Mike Strants would have done something very very different.
Well, I mean, that's the cool thing to think about with anything. That's a beautiful thing about architectures. Look at conceptual plans. If he had four architects draw them up, they'd all be wildly different, you know. And I think so it'll be interesting to see what happens with Maxwellis's architecture.
I think there's there's two.
You know, you got Jackson and Kahn kind of carrying out this tradition, and then you've got Rob Collins and Tad King that create and it'll be really interesting to see where it goes. And it's something that's kind of been missing from from the golf architecture discussion for the last fifteen years, where you know, minimalism has been the thing.
Yeah, golf architecture, it moves slowly, right, the influences move slowly.
There are that many projects.
Yeah, it has many fewer opportunities to evolve as an art form than like music does, for instance. And so if somebody right now is really influenced by Mike Strantz or Pete Dye and is drawing on different threads in golf architecture history than many of the architects who get all the jobs right now, then we won't really know
that for another few years. But as you say, King Collins, the Landman project, the things that they're doing in Mississippi, that might be the next sort of telltale sign about where things might be going.
Yeah, if they deliver and you know that it'll be interesting, because then it would you know, kind of prescribe and the notion of like you can build really dramatic stuff anywhere, right, you can create interesting The idea of creating versus finding