I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.
In a bride Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Friday, Frida Egg, Brian Egg, Frida Egg, Bride Egg Lie.
I'm about ready to run off of the hump course.
Welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. My name is Garrett Morrison, and today we're talking about what's next in golf course architecture. We came up with a few things each that we hope or expect to see out of golf architecture in the next I don't know, call it ten or twenty years, maybe even longer term if we really want to engage in some science fiction here. But basically we're just trying to read the tea.
We're burning this topic.
You know, if you're saying ten to twenty years, we can't days for ten to twenty years, so we gotta be careful, so to ye.
But I like the time. The time frames for golf architecture are pretty long, like this stuff. It's not like you know, making an album. And by the way, that voice you heard is Andy Johnson. I'm Garrett Morrison. I don't think I introduced myself. I'm just all discombobulated here. Andy Johnson, how you.
Doing, I'm doing great, doing great. I'm excited to talk about golf architecture and Trent. I think that this is we're at this spot right now where there's never been more work going on since pre economic collapse in the mid two thousands or late two thousands. So at this point we're at the stage of golf architecture where there's
a lot happening. There's a lot of courses being planned, there's a lot of development, there's a lot of work that are being that's being done at existing courses because clubs are full and flushed with cash. Obviously, with what's going on in the Karri It'll be interesting to see.
How long this lasts.
But for the time being, there is a lot of work and a lot of enthusiasm for new work in golf and new development in golf. So I think this is a timely time to have this conversation.
There are a lot more new course projects going on right now in North America than there have been for a long time. Now, we're nowhere near the heights of like the nineties or the sixties. Obviously, I don't think we're ever going to see something like that again unless something huge changes in the world. But we are seeing a major uptech in new development, and of course the
restoration and renovation market is pretty active as well. But there's also some uncertainty when it comes to the economy, so we'll see what happens with that. Now. Another factor that I think makes this sort of a hinge moment in golf course architecture is a lot of the highest profile golf architects are getting on in years, right. Bill Corr and Ben Crenshaw are both in their seventies now.
They're both really you know, they're going hard still, Like if you see Bill Corr, it's not like he's slowing down when he's walking around courses, but just you know, facts are facts. They're in their seventies. Tom Doak is sixty one, Gil Hans is fifty nine. David McLay kidd is in his early fifties. These are not old guys, but they're also not super young guys anymore. Now. You also think of Jack Nicholas, you think of Tom Fazio.
I think we're at a moment when the architects who have really been the leading figures for the past even forty years are now starting to get to the tail end of their careers. And one thing that I'm looking for is who's going to emerge as the next big architects. I think that's a question on a lot of people's minds. That's not one of my things, by the way, that I'm hoping or expecting. I think that's just something that makes this moment interesting.
Yeah, I agree.
I think like besides just age, I think the influx of work has booked these architects out also, so you know the capacity issue. You know, Bill, Bill Core and Ben Crenshaw aren't going to do you know, ten courses in a year. That's just not how they operate, right, So you know they have they have they are booked out and they can't. You know, there's only so much work they can accept. Same with Tom Doak, same with Gil Hands and uh, these these people, these.
Architects are busier than they've ever been.
With that that means that there's more overflow and that is where young people, younger architects are going to get their chances. And that's what is very exciting about the next five, six, seven years, Like you said, the one of the things with architecture, and I think this is, you know, it's an important lesson, and I think this is not meant as a shot at David Kidd's career, but if you look at you know, the way a golf architects legacy like career works. David McClay Kidd built
Banded Dunes and it was obviously deservingly so celebrated. It was a tremendous golf course, a huge golf course, and as David Kidd said, he lost his way. Then after that, for a little while he built some courses that he himself would say are not great golf courses, are not fun golf courses to play. Now, the thing about that is he was riding the high of abandoned dudes, got hired for many, many jobs and built some mediocre golf courses and by the time people realize this, he has
been hired for numerous jobs. Like because of the time span of a golf course being built, right, it takes really end to end. You're talking about on the very fast end, maybe two years, on the slower end, three to five years, and these developments take a lot of time, so you could get hired for a lot of jobs in that interm mediary area where we haven't even seen
somebody's second work or first work. So it's going to be I mean, that's what's so compelling to me about it is that we're going to see architects who who might build one great golf course, get an influx of work and then you know, how do they follow that up.
It's just like a band, how you know, the iconic bands come up with albums flashing, the pan bands come up with an album and in building that that legacy that you know we talk of Bill Korer, Ben Crunch or Tom Doak, like where you have a effective roster of great golf courses is so difficult to do, and that it's not about the one course, it's about the
collection of courses. Because you know, what I think is amazing is how some of these archet and I think Tom Doak is probably at the forefront of this, continues to push new ideas right like he seems almost restless with building a course that's anything like another golf course. And some might quibble with, hey, this golf course isn't my cup of tea, but it's always different. And I think that's the thing, is that building lots of great courses is way way more difficult than building one course.
And we're just hoping to see some of these young guys get a chance to build one great golf course. But then it's building off that.
Yeah, And as you say, it takes a while right for the shape of an architect's career to become clear. You really only see it in retrospect, and by that point the architect is already pretty deep into his or her career. So you know, think about how Corn Crenshaw emerged. Essentially, Bill Korrer had been working in the golf architecture industry since the seventies, right the late seventies, at least with.
With Pete Dye Dolphins era, was there you go to start with Pete's good.
That's a good reference point.
Yeah, because he that's how he met Pete Die. You know, Pete Die came into his hotel room to watch the dolphin.
To just watch the dolphins. Wait, was that a Tom Doak story or is that a Bill Cory story, a Bill co story? Okay, that's yeah, that's that's a really good one.
I love that.
The pee Die was like mainly interested in saying the Dolphins game, you know. That's that's the main thing that he was doing there. He's like getting away from somewhere so that he could go like just sit and watch the Dolphins game for a while. That's that's hilarious. So yeah, So Corr was grinding away for years and then finally broke out with Kapalua Sand Hills and other projects in the mid to late nineties. Tom Doak, I think you
see much the same trajectory. And so these architects who have just sort of come on our radar within the past ten years, it might take a little while longer for us to understand who they are and what they're going to contribute to the discipline, to the art form. And so I'm really looking forward to seeing some some course openings within the next few years by architects who haven't gotten big new build jobs before. That's going to be exciting to me to see what what new is
going to be contributed. But that said, we're trying to read the tea leaves a bit here, spot some trends and talk about some things that we hope or expect to see in the near future. So what's the first thing that you came up with. Why don't we start there?
Yeah, So, I think one of the things that I'm craving is developers and developments that might inhabit less spectacular sites. I think the dominant trend in golf architecture has been these far away lands of swaths of sand and and this is great. I'm not saying I'm not advocating for less of these. What I'm advocating for is more balance where we do have some less spectacular sites. Not every site has to be crazy in order for you to
have a really good golf course. And one of the things with that is that less spectacular sites are usually closer to large centers of population. So you know, to me, one of the things that I got thinking about a lot at Frisco at PGA Frisco was how nice it was that a development was actually like near a city. And obviously that was a unique case, and there are
going to be lots of unique cases. But the idea that the golf course can only be built on sand and in a spectacular place it has to be this remote, far off destination golf course is a bit silly to me because if you go through the you know, the best course in the world, A lot of the best architecture, a lot of the architecture that you really want to
talk about, you know, is on less spectacular sites. It allows architects to do a little bit more with their greens and create a little bit more big features and such. So I would love to start to see, you know, a trend of like not everything has to be built
on huge, massive piece of swaths of sand. Like we can build a golf course and it can be a very very good golf course on a less interesting piece of land because we have you know, I believe that this era architects could build more interesting stuff, the most interesting stuff ever. You know, it seems like they have the education levels. What it requires. One of the things that would require is developers to allow them to do that.
And I think actually to push architecture more forward. Less interesting land could do it because we get funkier architecture.
Yeah. No, I was just gonna ask, what kind of architecture do you think we would see on poor sites? Would there be a move toward something different than what we have seen on ideally suited sites for the past twenty years or so those have been the highest profile courses, courses that are subtly created on great sites for golf. What do you think architects need to change about the way they think about how they do their work if they're building on sites that are not well suited to golf.
I think one thing we've talked about on this podcast is like above ground features ramping, like where you have like just quirky stuff, you know, you can get a little bit more aggressive with greens. I think, like you know, and I think there's some pushback with greens and people, oh, it's not fair, like if they hit a green and
it's really hard to put that's not fair. But really, I think like from a day to day playability standpoint, you want greens that have a lot of different spot different pockets, and that drive strategy back When it's just a simple flat tilting green, you know, it kind of plays the same every day and you have to be precise in everything, but you know, the more dependent you are on natural features such as topography and things to
take over. I think the other thing about it is everybody is like obsessed with these big dramatic sites, right, more subtle sites lend itself to being more walkable, more easier to get around, like just they don't sap as much energy from you.
You can play quicker, you can play more golf potentially.
And the one of the big things I noticed is a lot of the greatest courses in the world really are centered around like one or two key geographic features.
And almost every plot of land has those types of features, right, Like Chicago golf is a good piece of land, is not a sublime piece of land, but it really just you know, if you drive around that area, you see that type of land in prairies all over the place, and it's like there's a central knoll that a lot of the holes play through, there's another ridge that you
play off of, and that's really it. And then it leans more on golf architecture, and I think there's a huge talent in routing a golf course on a dramatic, spectacular site and getting the most out of spectacular site. That's one facet of architecture. There's another facet and skill of architecture to be able to, you know, ring out every ounce of interesting architecture from a less spectacular site.
And like these sites are usually a little bit more available closer to population centers, which I that's my big thing that I would like to see. Destination golf's great, but can we get stuff that's like within an hour of places?
So this is something that you hope to see but maybe don't necessarily expect. Yeah, because I'm not sure I see that trend emerging right now. I would love for that to happen. My concern is that a lot of golf development right now is targeted at the very high end of the market. We have these small clubs and these premium resorts. That's where a lot of action is happening right now. To my mind, I'm not seeing enough activity at the local level city courses, you know, even
middle class kind of public courses. I would love to see more being done in those areas, but that portion of the market right now seems to be a little bit quiet. Would you agree with that or do I have the wrong impression?
No?
I think so.
I think there's there's stuff that could be coming that might be a little bit closer, but almost everything's always driven around private model unfortunately.
Yeah, and that's I mean, this is the world we live in where you know, income inequality is ramping up right that money is being more and more concentrated in the hands of a few people. And so I don't want to be labor that point because it's not that kind of podcast. But I think what we're seeing in golf is reflective of what's happening more broadly in the world. Now.
This sort of my first thing. This is both something that I hope for and something that I sort of expect to see happen within, you know, in this next wave of golf architecture, and it kind of aligns with what you're talking about building courses on more subtle sites. What I'd like to see is more experimentation with what I've heard you call in the past Golden Age maximalism.
And what you mean by Golden Age maximalism is basically a lot of aggressive shaping around certain features on the course, mostly the greens, but also you know, some bunkers in the fairways here and there, where the architects really go to work and build something bold, build something that is sculpted and that doesn't necessarily blend into the natural environment. But then the move elsewhere is to keep things natural right, to maintain the natural terrain aside from those concentrated spots
where you do a lot of artistic work. I would like to see more of that, because I think that the trend recently has been toward making everything blend, making the greens blend, making the bunkers blend, making it all seem like it belongs. Now, some architects are better at that than others. Core and Crenshaw are the gold standard. Not all architects are as good as they are at
making everything look like it belongs. But I would like to see more architects, and I expect to see more architects start to do some more aggressive shaping around greens and un bunkers. Build these vertical features that you were talking about, you know, whether they're little kind of berms or you know, edges to the bunkers or built up edges of the greens like we see it Walter Travis courses.
That kind of stuff is really cool. But I think that the way to make it really work, and to make it different from the overshaped stuff that we saw come out of big firms in the eighties and nineties is to leave the rest of the landscape undisturbed. Okay, and this is what you know, you've called this golden age maximalism before. This is essentially what Langford and Moreau did it a lot of their courses, right, the fair ways were often very natural, sat naturally on the land,
but the greens and bunkers were super boldly shaped. This is what Seth Rayner did it a lot of his courses. This is what Walter Travis did at the courses that we saw on the East Coast when we were last there. I would like to see more, you know, work inspired by that, and I see some architects moving in that direction.
Yeah.
I think that this is kind of a best of both world situation in a way. I think I love natural golf design where it's really you know, everything ties in. I'm not saying, but different forms of the art of golf architecture are essential for things to push forward. And I think why this works so well is because when you're being very natural with the land, that's going to require and I think where a lot of maximalist projects fall short is the routings end up being very clunky.
They don't work with.
The land right, and they're they're moving earth to fix problems rather than solving the problems with the routing.
And they grade too much. They flatten too much out in the fair ways. Everything is shaped. I'm talking about just shaping in particular places and leaving a lot of stuff alone. My problem with the course is that the maximus truly maximalst courses you're talking about, is that once you're in a completely created environment, then you really start to feel alienated from the land.
Well.
I think the other thing is that the routing. There's no routing exercise because you can build whatever you want and the idea of finding the best golf holes doesn't exist because it's we can go create the best golf holes. And what happens is that that disrupts the way that you go on, Like I think the walk and the journey of a golf course is the most important part
of it. And when you're not even concerned with that, because you can just bulldoze your way too a routing that you like, rather than hey, you know, I'd like to go over here, but it's kind of like I don't know how we're going to get out of there. And it's that work and that effort that goes into figuring out how to get in and out of places. I think that truly makes you know the great courses greater than you know it.
There are little corners.
That they get into, a nook that they get into, and you wonder, how am I going to get out of there?
And it's the.
Creativity and ingenuity to get out of there. When you just bulldoze your way around there, you lose that journey a little bit because every thing, as you said, is kind of a made believe environment. And I think that is a that's a essential thing. That's why I like about it is go crazy everywhere else, but build the golf course. Let the land be the land, because that's what makes the place special.
Yeah, And I think that architects can free themselves from the notion that they have to tie everything in. Right, Do you have to tie every green in or tie every bunker in make it look like it flows into the natural landscape. No, I don't think so. Like I think that sometimes you can do something that is really audacious and sculptural with a golf course design, but there needs to be enough of the natural landscape left intact so that you allow the golfer to connect with the
natural terrain. I think, in my opinion, now your point about routing makes me think of you know something that I I often like to say about Golden Age architects, and that's that, you know, why is it that so many Golden Age architects from the tens, twenties, and thirties were so good at routing. It wasn't because they're smarter than today's architects. It wasn't because they're smarter than Tom Fazio or Jack Nicholas. It was because they had to be good at routing right to make the courses work
at all. They couldn't move stuff around that much, so they had to figure out how to make their courses linked together, and in order to do that, they had to be really good at routing, had to work a lot on the routing. I think that the ability to move a lot of earth kind of made that art a little bit lost. And that's why we see Maximal's
courses that sometimes have these clunky routings. If you can build everything, if you're just creating everything, sometimes you just get a little bit lazy with the routing of the course. And also golf carts have had an impact here. Obviously.
All right, my next one renovations.
Yeah, I knew we'd talk about it.
This is absolutely going to happen.
This is an expectation.
Yes, this is what i'd like to see one before about less spectacular sites. Renovations are absolutely going to happen, and I think that this is extraordinarily compelling the just to give people an idea that don't know. Like, the life cycle of an irrigation system is about thirty years, So if you think about that, that's the best time
when you have to redo irrigation. That's the best time to renovate your course because you're already going to be doing a lot of disturbance, right, So that's when you if you think about like it's like, oh, we're going to do the bathroom and it's connected to the living room,
but we want to do the living room. We're going to save money by doing them both at the same time because we aren't going to just you know, we're going to disturb the house either way, and we i as well do them both at the same time.
They're already there. We're saving money, right.
So this is how renovation will work, you know, so irrigation, So if you think about it, thirty years roughly, right, some lasts longer, some some goat could put earlier, but you're looking at like late eighties, nineties early nineties golf architecture that needs to get work on, and really like,
that's not good architecture. I mean there's a lot of a lot of housing, lots of mass production of golf courses, lots of housing golf courses where like the purpose of the golf course was to sell houses along it, on both sides of it, And who's going to be doing this work is a one question I have, But be like, who's going to be doing really cool? Like what do you do with a golf course that's got like a forty yard wide fare of corridor and houses on both sides?
How do you retrofit these and make them more in interesting and better golf courses? Or do they cease to be golf courses? Do they become less than eighteen holes because the ball goes further and more offline and more balls are in houses, or like there's also another aspect
of this, you have, like the bad courses. What happens with like the really like kind of the purpose of the golf course was to sell homes and the golf course was an afterthought, and you have this kind of a disaster, right but then you also have golf courses on great pieces of land that are just kind of mediocre. If you took that golf course and you renovate it,
and you go like, hey, we're gonna start over. We have the infrastructure of the clubhouse, but we're gonna reroute, rebuild, Like we could have some courses that go from being kind of afterthoughts to really good golf courses because they're on good piece of land. And some of these like like there are existing sites that are very good for golf in population centers that have a very mediocre golf course on it where if you take over and you pour five ten million dollars into it, you could then
all of a sudden have the talk of the town. Right, this is this is going to be a thing. And figuring out like one of the hard things with doing big renovation work. And I kind of picked this up at when I visited Pinehurst four years ago when when Gill's crew was Gill Hans's crew was was renovating it. They put so much effort into undoing the bad work.
Like you says, somebody bulldozes and ruins a great landform with with really bad shaping, right, you have to spend so much time just putting back the natural landform.
Yeah, or you don't even know what the natural landform was, which is really really tragic.
Yeah, so you know this is not this is not this is a different skill restoration. This is a different skill than new construction. It's almost like you put things back and then you start building.
Another idea.
I kind of have always thought about when I go to golf course that's got containment mounding and all these artificial mounding, how much better the golf course would be if you played over those mounds instead of in between them. And I'd be like, I think about this all the times, like, could you take a golf course that's got like stricken
with containment mounting? So what that means is big mounds on either side of the hole that kind of off yeah, the wall off the hole, right, and like you're kind of playing in this environment.
Now, what if we took that and built the golf over.
Those mounds, and then those mounds would all sudden kind of be really neat golf whole features. You could put greens on top of them, You could put greens over them, you could you know, you could have fairways that go have these big undulations through them if you're playing over
them and not in between them. So I am this is the thing that I would say that I'm most interested in with golf design is finding the golf courses that are are pretty mediocre that inhabit really wonderful golf golf sites, and exploring what those golf courses could become with the right combination of architect and redesign effort.
I like that. I wonder where the money is going to come from to do these renovations, And if it's only a little bit of money, then what does a renovation that costs I don't know, three to four million dollars look.
Like not that much now because the rise and costs, it's like the irrigations like double what it used to be. So I think that's like one of the things, right, is like cost are higher than ever and that's the tricky thing, and that is probably what's going to constrict doing a lot of these things.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder, I wonder what the floor is now for a renovation budget that could do something great, because I'm always impressed by how little money they spent on the work at Common Ground and how much they were able to do and how little money they spent on the work at Seoul Park when guilded that years ago after a flood absolutely destroyed the course and they had to spend most of the money just recovering the golf course and doing you know, some basic things to
get the place functional again, rebuilding bridges and oh yeah, they completely transformed the golf course in the process, and they did it on a fairly tight budget. I feel like these things are possible, but they have become harder recently because of inflation and rising costs, so that that is kind of a red flag there for the possibilities around the world renovation of courses that are more recent.
But yeah, I kind of wonder at some point whether there's going to be a craze for restoring Tom Fasio courses, right Like, are we going to deify those architects at some point. I don't really see that as a as a great possibility right now. I don't. I don't see
any building momentum towards that. But you know, once golf courses get old enough, then they're going to start to be considered classic to a degree, And so I wonder if we're going to stick to our guns as a kind of golf architecture nerd community and say that you know that.
We've got to restore that catch base and back left of the grid right exactly.
There used to be a lovely catch basin over there. Let's put that back in.
You know.
Well, the houses around the course get bulldozed, we have to we have to do something to recreate the feel of the houses being there. Yeah, I mean, there's there's like ridiculous stuff that you could think of, But I just wonder like where the where the fashions are going to go with which archex are deified in, which aren't.
What the good news I think from my taste is that what's the phrase of like the time away makes the heart grow fonder?
Yeah, so I think.
We've at least got a period a decade or two of time away, you know, before before the heart grows fonder.
And at that point, I'll be, you know, i'll be pretty old.
Well we'll both be pretty old. We'll we'll be we'll be phasing out anyway. So maybe maybe that's fine, all right.
We could be the we could be the one saying what are we doing at that point again, it could be a full circle.
All right. My next thing, this is another one that is both kind of a hope and an expectation, sort of links up with these ideas about low cost renovations of courses that are you know, not necessary. They don't necessarily belong to private clubs, but we're built you know, say thirty years ago, and that are going to kind of cycle aroun because the irrigation system needs to be improved, or the bunkers need to be rebuilt or something like that. So this is about those courses, that crop of courses
that needs to be worked on. There's another factor here that's going to change the nature of the work that's done on those courses, and it's going to change the nature of golf architecture in general, and that is climate change. It's going to get hotter, it's going to get drier, water is going to get more expensive. Now, these are big questions for agronomy right now. These are big questions
for superintendents. So that's kind of another subject. But where I think it becomes a question for an architect is just the fact that it's going to be more expensive in many places to run a golf course. In the future than it is now because of the cost of water and other things. And so a huge question that architects need to ask themselves when they're building golf courses now are renovating golf courses, is how expensive is the work I'm doing and how expensive is it going to
be to maintain? And so I think when an architect designs a bunker now or designs a green, that the first question question one A should be is this interesting golf? But question one B should be how much is this going to cost to maintain into the future? And how hardy can I make this feature, this bunker or this green while still making it interesting for golf. So I would like to see more and more economical forms of
golf course design. And I think that the nature of running a golf course in the future is going to necessitate that owners are asking architects how cheap can we make this? And let's try not to lose the quality in the process. I don't think we have to lose the quality, but I think that architects need to have in their minds more how much it's going to cost
to maintain a certain feature that they're building. And for public courses, in particular, I hope that they start asking themselves and I expect that they'll need to reckon with this. Do we need sand bunkers or is there another possibility for hazards that we can have throughout our golf course, because I mean, I just look at the cost of maintaining bunkers. It just sinks public courses right now.
The flip side is expectation changes with golfers. Which one which one is the more difficult?
Right?
Yeah?
And I think one of the things that should be included with this is like, to me, one of the things that doesn't make sense is we judge best new course like the day it opens. And to me, that lets two people off the hook. It let's the architect and the owner off the hook. Absolutely, the golf course should be built so that it ages well.
And this wouldn't be much fun.
And I contend that this would make this would steal a lot of the fun of a new course opening away.
Right, But like the.
Golf course should be you know, I want to know how it is five years in because does the architect, does the design work, does the construction work hold up? Like has there been so many washouts in a bunker that they decided to get rid of the bunker. Has you know, did a green not work so that they just decided to stop, you know, cutting one of the corners of the green and that's that really cool green doesn't exist in the full capacity anymore?
Does you know?
Does the owner not want to put into the time to maintain the golf the brilliant golf design that was put there, You know, that owner shouldn't benefit from getting the bump of like, hey, we're the best new course ten years ago and still market off that if they
aren't holding up there under the bar. And I think that's like something with it, Like it's it's the idea of responsible ownership and responsible architecture, right building something that you know might take a couple hours to mow if what if like what if they decide they don't want to spend that time mowing And it's like, uh that you know that costs us X amount of dollars over the course of the year, Like it's effectively.
One person's job for a year.
Like and obviously we have rising labor there's besides the water, there's rising labor costs obviously, like autonomous mowing and stuff. Is going to come, but there's still a cost with that as well, Like they're you know, all these things, everything that goes in and I think like one of the things is like scale is great, and I think that like big scale, but like some of the best courses also have small scale, you know.
Yeah, right, I mean, And so this is a restriction on an architect's art, and it may not be welcome because of that, but as we know, restrictions often produce really good art. And so what happens when architects are asked to build stuff really economically, I think that sometimes they could come up with interesting stuff. So I think there's an opportunity there, but it is definitely a looming
problem that owners are going to have to deal with. Now, just one more point related to your idea about how you know, owners and architects should be accountable for how their courses age. That's absolutely true, and it's something that's so not emphasized enough. But just think of the most successful restorations that we've seen, or the most genuine, authentic
golf course restorations we've seen. Generally, they've been restorations where the architect has stayed connected to the club for a number of years and where there's a superintendent who's given some authority, some freedom to do the restoration work as well, and really is there to be accountable for it and the architect is there to be accountable for it? And so that's a big deal and it's something that should be talked about more. And so, yeah, something to keep
an eye on. This episode of The fried Egg Podcast is brought to you by the fried Egg Pro Shop. This is at pro shop dot the fried egg dot com. We have a lot of cool stuff in there, Andy, What should people know about in the pro shop?
Yeah, for sure, we're stocked up and obviously we have you know, the holidays around the corner.
This is a great time to go in there. It's cold. You know, you can get beanies in there, you can get We just launched some new headcovers.
Most of them I believe are gone at this point, but there are a few left in different colors.
We will be trying to restock those.
But other than that, we have vests, we have we have pullovers, We have all sorts of stuff really for fall and winter as the temperatures get a little cooler. I know, like you know, I work out of a shed here. You know, I've I'm having to go out in the morning with a little bit more layers on than a few months ago, so I'm feeling it.
I was wearing a beanie this morning.
So you know, this is the time of year if your if your closet needs a little refresh. We have a ton of stuff in there, whether it be the Frida Egg, the shotgun start and uh you know we should have some more on the way, so check it out Proshop dot thefridagg dot com.
And thank you as always.
Let's go to your this is your third thing now, right, final thing? There you go? Okay?
Is shorter courses not short courses? All right.
I'm not saying I don't like short courses. I don't want to see short courses. I want to see shorter courses just in general.
And you're talking like how long.
I mean, I don't really care. Like I just think that like sixty two hundred yards is fine. I think fifty four hundred yards is fine. I think forty eight hundred yards is fine. Like, I just like the idea of shorter courses. I'm interest. You know, Sedge Valley will be a very compelling course to watch.
It.
Obviously, that's one of the new courses at San Valley. It's Tom Doaks. There's it's like a lot of short par four's, long par three's, par sixty eight. You know, kind of the idea this it touches on this idea. I'd like to see more golf courses that aren't like seven thousand, like the Champion. I mean, who's building a championship?
What does even a championship golf course mean anymore? Who what's the point when the USGA has booked out all of their tournaments and the PGA is booked out all what's even the point of building a championship golf course.
That's the thing that's the unintended benefit maybe of all of these majors being booked out years and years in advance. I mean, it's ridiculous, But also it might kind of free up golf course developers to say, well, we're not gonna get one of those tournaments, so we might as well make something fun.
I would love to see somebody that's building a destination club, for example, say you know what, we're gonna build a fifty six hundred yard course and we're gonna do it, so you hit every single club in your bag. And guess what, it's gonna be so fun because you could come here and play fifty four holes or thirty six. You're gonna play thirty six holes and feel great. You come play fifty four holes and feel and still it'll feel like you played thirty six because you know, we're
not taking up a ton of land. Our resources are gonna be limited that go into it, and we're gonna build just like a thrilling, fun, different golf course that still tests you the way a seventy two hundred yard course does. Because we can do this in different ways. We can make more long par threes. We can have one par five, we can have you know, a bunch of short fours, we can have some long force like
par really doesn't matter. We're just gonna go build fun golf that's varied, and you can do that at any yardage. It doesn't like, you don't need seventy two hundred yards to build a varied test, right.
I think you know.
I was talking to Andrew Greed recently. He talked about how he's building like two hundred and eighty yard par threes on every golf course that he says it's the only time I can actually put a long iron in a good player's hands now and have consequence, because the only other time you're hitting long irons is off the tee on a four, and it's like, okay, I can make up if I don't hit it perfect. Or I'm hitting into forty thirty yard white fairway, like you know,
I'm not gonna hit that bad of a shot. Or you're hitting a second shot into a par five with a long iron and it's fine if you miss the green, but on a long par three you feel the pressure. You're like, oh, I have to hit a perfect shot here.
And I think that is the thing, is that actually shorter golf courses will lead to more consequence, like if you were playing with retro equipment at a regulation sized course where you feel the pres Like I've spent the entire year basically playing a retro bag of clubs, and what I've noticed is, man, I have to really really golf my ball to play well because I'm constantly hitting mid irons and long irons in holes. Well, you can
do that in different ways. It doesn't have to be you know, take the driver out of people's hands more often and you know, you're gonna get round faster, You're probably gonna end up hitting more drivers in a day of golf this way, because you're gonna be able to play more golf, and you're gonna be able to pack more golf in. And this doesn't have to be a club, this doesn't, but this can be closer to population centers.
There is more You can get less land and build golf on it, more golf on it, you know, with shorter courses.
I think one of the keys to what you're saying is take driver out of people's hands more often during a round of golf. Because we've somehow gotten to a place in the history of golf somewhere we went wrong where we have massively over emphasized the driver and that courses have to accommodate good players or strong players hitting driver on basically every hole except for the par threes. And I don't see why that has to be the case.
You know, we could really shrink courses and have people hit driver on some holes, but there would be other holes where you're not hitting driver. I mean, what's the big deal with that? Why are we emphasizing driver friendly holes so often? And what it creates. Is this expectation of a par seventy two course of seven thousand yards and you know, just think if you andy were playing
modern equipment. You know, you hit a driver up around three hundred yards, you're playing a seven thousand par seventy two course. I think that at a lot of those courses all day you're hitting driver eight iron. Yeah, you're just hitting driver eight iron over and over again. You could play a fifty five hundred yard course where you would hit a massive more variety of clubs, where you would hit some drivers, you'd hit some long irons. It just depends on the variety of holes that you have.
You can have a two hundred and fifty yard par three on a fifty five hundred yard course. You can have a four hundred and eighty yard par four on that course, but you would have to have some shorter holes as well. Well.
Seven par threes. Why can't there be seven par threes on a course?
Absolutely? Yeah, that's the big thing. There need to be more par threes on courses like this.
And it's if you have seven par threes all of a sudden, then you could have such variety. They could all play a little bit different direction. They could all have different yardages, like you could configure courses. So like, just let go of the idea of the championship golf course. It's like you could arguably make the more fun of a golf course doing this, because you'd have more variety in the shots you're hitting.
Yeah, this might be hugely oversimplified, but a big part of the blame for why we arrived at this firm notion that a championship golf course has to be eighteen holes and you know par seventy two ish is the old course at Saint Andrew's. Because yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, we all love the old course, but if you go back to like the eighteen thirties, the old course was like the longest course in Christendom. You know, like all these other courses had like, you know, thirteen holes, seven holes,
you know, half of which were par threes. You know, like there were all sorts of different kinds and but you know, eventually people just decided to settle on this idea that Saint Andrews was the gold standard. I don't blame him, because clearly Saint Andrews was better than these other courses. But you know, we've we've gotten to a point where we're just building the same thing over over again, and I'm not sure how we get out of it. I would love I would love to see that happen.
And maybe part of it is this, you know, developers just losing hope that they're going to get major championships. I think that could actually have a beneficial impact in some sense because they can just let go of that that's not the reason that they're building their golf course.
So with like Aaron Hills is a good example.
Like that's a golf course that went out of its way to host championship golf, and you know, it had a big piece of land and you know, I'm not sure exactly the total acreage, but I've heard numerous times they've had different architects out to see if they could
add golf to it. And because the golf was so spaced out and they were seeking to host major championship after major championship, that like the golf was spaced out to fit infrastructure, to have space for grand stands, to have big golf, a big golf course, a long golf course, and now like you look at Aaron Hill and there aren't many championships coming back to it, and you look
at the land. It's a tremendous piece of land. It's a piece of land that could easily house thirty six holes of really great golf, and right now they kind of have like a good golf course that occupies this huge piece of land that doesn't allow for more golf. So when you know, and at the same time, like they have a women's open coming, that's great, I'm excited for that, but there aren't any men's opened coming, which was the whole impetus to build this gigantic, gargantuan golf
course and use all this land. Now, like, long term, would the business of Aaron Hills be better suited to have a couple really great golf courses that are a little bit smaller, a little bit more in the vein of something that maybe Mike Kaiser would build and that occupy a smaller footprint, but they allow for thirty six holes over more over, and I guess similar, like you know a situation where people want to play more golf, you know that that's one of those courses that just
sticks out. It's like if if championship golf wasn't considered, what would Aaron Hills look like.
Yeah, we got to have the championships. So my last thing, this is something I expect to see in the near future, a transformation that I think that golf course architecture is undergoing, and it's this is a slightly different topic than what we've been talking about. I'm talking about the structure of
the golf architecture business, how architects do their business. I see in the future that there are going to be fewer and fewer megafirms that employ a lot of people that have a physical office and that do a bunch of different projects and kind of have a top down structure where you have the lead architect and then you have people working under that architect, You have office people, you have a division of labor. I think that what we're going to see more and more of is these
kind of free floating alliances between artisans. Now, this is not going to be all of the jobs that are done in golf architecture. This might be a little too romantic for to absolutely take over the industry. But architects who have worked as shapers can do their own work on equipment, and I see them sort of teaming up with each other to do kind of design build projects that they're able to do pretty cheaply and without a lot of the overhead costs that big architecture firms have.
So I'm thinking of architects like Brian Schneider, right, how many Brian Schneider has worked has been on the podcast a couple of times, I believe, and has worked for Renaissance golf design. Tom Doak's outfit he has. The way that he's doing work is pretty interesting, right, where he kind of teams up with other architects like Blake pent or Kai Golby and he does these different jobs with
these different alliances. And so I think that we're going to see more and more of that, where these architects are able to do kind of design build work and they have these kind of temporary partnerships collaborations with other shapers artisans who are in the same mold, and you know, that's how they can get jobs. They offer something at a lower cost and they do a lot of it themselves. So it's a different model than the megafirm.
Yeah, it's like a collaboration. You get like collaboration. It's almost like how breweries and different things do do work, right, like this craft artist in culture, it drives collaboration. Yes, yeah, I agree with this, And you know, maybe and we saw it a little bit at like stream Song where that golf course is kind of collaborative between Tom Doak
and Bill Core and Ben Crenshaw. Those they created a effectively like plan for that golf course and they work together, right I. It'd be interesting to see if we ever get to the point where we have like a big collaboration, right do Like, you know, four architects get together and you build a golf course, like it would be hard to imagine seeing more than like two or three get together.
Yeah, I mean, especially if you're talking about architects like Corn Crenshaw or Tom Doak or Gil Hants, Right, I think that those are for all intents and purposes megafirms. You know, they're different from the Jack Nicholas megafirm. They're different from the Tom Fazio megafirm. They aren't taking on nearly as much work. They pay a lot more attention to individual projects. But they are pretty big. You know.
I'm talking more about just like these sort of roving architects who don't really employ anybody, just sort of employ themselves sometimes you know, Brian Schneider is going to be the lead lead architect and Blake Conan is going to shape for him. And sometimes Blake Conan is going to be the lead architect and maybe Schneider will come out and help, or maybe Kyle Franz will come out and help.
And then on the next project it's Kyle Franz the lead architect and Riley Johnson is going to come out to I mean, I don't know, you know, it's that kind of structure to the business, which I think is very different from what Robert Trent Jones established in the post war period as to how you do golf architecture, and in my opinion, it produces more interesting work and more a greater variety of work. So I'm optimistic about it.
Yeah, I mean, that's how you get that blend of ideas, the collaboration. Really it's more is a throwback more to the Golden Age where a lot of guys weren't professionals, but they work together on things because they were just trying to build the best golf courses they could build. I think the thing that has to happen is like
the money has to work, and that's really. I think when you see people the silos start to happen and the firms start to happen, was when golf architecture really got professionalized.
And in a way, we're kind.
Of moving to where everybody's a little bit more of an independent contractor.
It's it's just really interesting how this business is structured. It's such a weird little industry, you know, like it's it's pretty small, but there's a lot of money associated with it, and so it's it's both small and big and there are so many different ways of doing it and uh, and just the way it's kind of changed over time. It's gone through these kind of extreme transformations and how the work is done. And I think we're in the in the midst of one of those again
right now, so we'll see what happens with it. But cool, I think we covered a lot of territory there. Yeah, and anything else to add or you want to wrap up there, wrap up there. This episode of the Frida Egg Podcast was edited by Meg Atkin. Something that I think you should do right now is go rate and review the Friday podcast. Those really help us find new listeners. Now, I just said that in a way that it sounded like I was ordering you around. You don't have to
do it. You really don't have to do it, but we would really appreciate it if you did do it, if you rated and reviewed our podcast, because it does help. So I hope that I've really given the hard and soft cell there. All right, thanks for listening, and we'll be back later this week or maybe next week. We'll see