What to Know About Perry Maxwell (ft. Chris Clouser and Colton Craig)

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 bright egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg, egg, Frida egg, bride.

Egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the.

Hum all right, Hello and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast.

Snow and and uh, you know, lack of childcare. There's two things that the modern u modern parent has to deal with it this time of the year.

Yeah, no, especially recently. All right, So why don't we get right into it so you can get back to that. We're talking today about Perry Maxwell, the golf course architect who worked mostly in I don't know, would you call it the Midwest, would you call it the South? I'm not really sure what to call it.

I think it's the Great Plains, right gat yeh.

Texas is its own place, so you know, we we can just refer to it as Texas, right they don't you know when you think about it, they aren't the Southeast, they aren't the South, they aren't the Southwest.

They're just Texas. They aren't the Great Plains.

Texans will love to hear that too, because that that's I think that's the belief in Texas as well.

I'm playing. I'm playing to the audience here.

Yeah, there you go, Texans. All right. So Perry Maxwell, of course, is the is the architect behind Southern Hills, Prairie Dunes, Old Town Club, great architect. We've talked about him before on the podcast, but today's episode goes a little deeper into it. We talked to Chris Klauser, who's a historian who has done a lot of work on

Information important if you don't have a handicap index, if you're part of the resistance of handicap system.

And you're included in this, in this community of very brave people.

I just haven't gotten around to signing up for one.

Nobody can handicap dox you.

The only well the only way reason and I would have it is I needed it for tournaments, you know, yeah, right, but uh, listen, you don't need a handicapp dos me.

You just doxed me.

The uh but anyways, just put your estimate in there and we'll we'll crutch it down and listen, don't be a sandbagger. Well, well will boot you out if you if you shoot way under your your alleged index and you don't include your.

Index, everlasting shame is not worth it. Uh, just ask about what happened at our soul Park event last year.

And is this a handicapped podcast and not a prayer Perry Maxwell podcast.

We have we've we've done. I mean, people who really want the Perry Maxwell podcast. I'm going to put a little time stamp in the show notes so that you can just skip ahead to it.

But Dornic Hills is important because it's Perry Maxwell's home course, is first design, that's the banker. It's an ourd More, Oklahoma. It's an hour and a half from Dallas Airport. I flew down to Dallas, like you can fly down and be up there in a jiffy. It's also an hour and a half from Oklahoma City. If you can get directed at Oklahoma City. I hear that's a really easy

On top of the thirty six holes you get with the event.

This should be a really cool, unique event at an incredible golf course. Now, yes, so Dornic Hills is Perry Maxwell's first golf course. He built it on his property. We're going to go into greater depth about Dornic Hills later in this podcast with Chris Klauser. But one thing that people should know is that it has been freshly restored.

Yeah, the club's doing their opening day, opening, Grand Open, reopening ceremonies the weekend before, so it is it's going to be.

It's wonderful.

I went down in December and saw it and it's a really cool property. It's got some really neat golf holes, some great greens. But you know, the cliff hole the sixteenth, the par five is one of the most jaw dropping holes that I've ever seen in my life. So that is a that is a neat hole. It's a neat golf course and should be a great event.

YEP, special place. So the Banker at Dornick Hills. The rest of this podcast isn't all about Dornick Hills. It is really about Perry Maxwell, about his life and about his courses. So I hope you enjoy it. So, Chris Klauser,

So I got interested with Perry Maxwell when I started researching just the history of a golf course. I was going to go see and found out that he was the architect I was going to go up and see Crystal Downs, so I was just curious and I found out, Oh, it's Alister Mackenzie and Perry Maxwell. Okay, well I've heard that name because i'd heard it associated with southern hills

So it just kind of captured you.

Yeah, yeah, his story specifically I mean, after researching it a little bit, I was like, well, nobody knows anything about this guy really from a from an architectural standpoint, because the people I talked to they were either convinced that he only did like a handful of course, or he was really just Mackenzie's associate and didn't really do anything on his own, or just so I was like, Okay, well that's definitely a story I could tell.

Well, why don't we talk a little bit about Perry Maxwell's early years? Where did he come from in the world.

So he was.

Born in Princeton, Kentucky, grew up there. After he graduated from high school, he started trying to find some other place to go because he suffered from consumption or tuberculosis or whatever you want to call it. So he started looking for places to go. He attended some college in Kentucky, some in Florida, and kind of was an itinerant for a few years. And then he found a place in Oklahoma, Ardmore. Basically settled in Ardmore with his new wife there and

And that turned out to be Dornic Hills. This was Perry Maxwell's own property at this point. You know, Perry Maxwell was It sounds like a fairly wealthy man. And he came from wealth as well. He grew up in a fairly well healed family, is my understanding.

Yeah, yeah, I mean I don't know if you would really consider them extremely wealthy. I mean they were, they were, They were well off, but obviously going to Ardmore being involved with the banking industry and Ardmore during the oil boom in the southern Oklahoma and northern Texas area. Uh,

So yeah, I mean it was it was way out in what would have been at the time the middle of nowhere, but it was a financial center of the middle of nowhere. Yeah. And so in any case, Perry Maxwell starts building this golf course on his own land what would become Dornick Hills. But at first it was a very different looking and different sized golf course than it is today. Right, So could you tell me a little bit about what this course was at first?

Yeah, So originally he built four holes that were really close to where his house was on the property. Basically, he could walk at his back door, tee off on the first hole, come back up in the second hole, go out to the road on the third hole, and come back on the fourth and three of those, the first three holes are kind of the layout of what's there today for holes ten, eleven, twelve, kind of not exactly but close enough that you could say those are kind of what he was looking at at the time.

Over the property.

And then he expanded that to basically a nine hole design, which is what opened in nineteen fourteen as the official Dorni Hills Country Club. And then Maxwell decided, Okay, I want to expand this even further, so he expanded it and took up part of the property that actually went out to the dairy farm that they had out there

This was a sand green territory at the moment.

Yeah, sand and oil green territory.

Very hard to do proper greens in this climate and on those soils.

Yeah.

And that stretch from when he opened the nine hole course to when they built eighteen holes, he had gone around to a lot of places around southern United States trying to research what kind of grass to use because he really wanted to have grass greens if he was going to have an eighteen hole course, he wanted to

Now he was also, in addition to doing kind of agronomic research, he was also doing some architectural research. He mentioned earlier that he was influenced by Charles Blair McDonald. My understanding is that Dornic Hills, the way that it developed sort of reflected what Perry Maxwell was learning along the way. And so could you talk about some of the trips that he took, what he saw and then how he implemented those ideas on his own land, on his own course.

Yeah.

So the first thing he did was he went out when he decided he was going to do this occupation.

He decided to go see.

Charles Blair McDonald because he was influenced by the famous Scripters article about National Golf Links and wanted to go see the father of American golf course architecture, and so he went out met McDonald, studied a little bit with him and came back with some mind with the mindset of Okay, this is how you build a golf course, because that's the on person he talked to. So he started laying out these original nine holes at Dornick.

Hills, and some of them involved some of.

The template concepts that McDonald used at national golf leagues. A little bit of like eleven hole on the tenth, the knowle hole concept is like the fourteenth, a little bit seventeenth was probably a little bit of something like that. So he incorporated some of these concepts in his golf

Yeah, that the high and dry idea, right, the teas need to be high, the greens need to be high. You can play through the valleys because that's not as important to drain those areas. And so that's it's low cost basically a low cost way to build and then maintain a golf course.

Right, And that is one of the big things that Maxwell is about low cost and building a golf course.

I mean, he was very.

Proud of the fact that he could go out and build a golf course probably cheap cheaper than anybody else that he was competing against. Wayne would go out and bid on places if he ever had competition. There were a few places like hard Scrabble and uh or not Ard Scrabble, Hillcrest and Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He had a little bit of competition there and that was how he won the bid.

He was the cheapest, cheapest.

Bid and up building a really nice golf course. So and then after after doing Dorna Kills and getting that really going and he did a tour of Scotland in England not so much. I think he could visited a few places in England, but it was mostly to go to Scotland, uh and see Saint Andrew's and and that's where he met Mackenzie and then so I think he

That houses seventeen and eight I believe at all Old Town spectacular. Now getting back to Dornic Hills real quick quick before we move on. By the time he finished that course, what do you think was distinctive about it? What were some of the features that would stand out to people if they played it and were remembering it. Oh, yeah, that's that's something that I saw at Dornic Hills. That's pretty unique.

Well, I think number one.

Be the cliff hole. The cliff hole the sixteenth of part five. It probably was the longest hole in the state at the time. And then you have to conquer this cliff face that goes forty feet up in the air, and if you mean it's it was nothing that was seen up until that time, and definitely in Oklahoma and in most of that part of the country. I'm sure

They were a big.

Change in the mindset of how to build a golf course in that time frame in Oklahoma, and then the course was very difficult. It's funny because Maxwell joked that he had the course record for a time being well, he was the first guy played at once it opened, so I didn't speak to how good of a golfer he was. He was a decent golfer, but like Charlie, Coe would come down and actually struggle to break par at Dornic Hills. And he was a well known amateur

All right, So Perry Maxwell up until I guess when you sort of started doing your research, and maybe when Old Town was restored. I'm not exactly sure when Perry Maxwell's reputation started to ascend again. I mean, Prairie Dunes has been well known as a great golf course for a while, but it wasn't necessarily considered among the very top echelon of American golf courses until maybe the past couple of decades. For a long time, people just knew

Yeah, so when they were when he was in Scotland, they made the decision to Mackenzie was ready to move to America and start working here, and he knew he needed at least one person to be a partner when he came over here, because he didn't know anything about America really other than why he had read Impress clippings and stuff like that. So he happened to be introduced to this guy from Oklahoma wherever that was for Alistair mackenzie. He probably had no clue, but Maxwell had one thing

University of Michigan.

These things kind of start steamrolling, and they got a lot of courses right away in the under contract. But once he got over here, he and Maxwell actually formed a really nice friendship. They constantly wrote letters to each other. When I was talking with his family, his daughter remembered a couple of times when McKenzie actually came to Ardmore

He saw Cypress Point pretty good one to knock off when you when you go out to California.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's the one thing he wanted to go out there and see. And there was some argument that maybe he did some work out there with him. I don't know, maybe he helped build a bunker or something. But yeah, so they were friends, and I think it was out of that friendship that he also continued to do the work at Ohio State because that was a contract that they also took on, and I think he felt a

Yeah. Yeah, And for those who don't know, Perry, Maxwell did a substantial amount of work at Augusta National in the late thirties and early forties about that time frame.

Yeah, thirty seven, thirty eight and a little bit thirty nine I think are the dates the most people agree on he did work on. I think most people agree he did work on a double digit number of holes. I mean it could be argued at where between eleven to fourteen holes. Of course, maybe he might have touched all of them by just doing some little work here and there, but his noticeable work and it's probably eleven or twelve of the holes.

Yeah.

So okay, getting back to the partnership with Mackenzie, what kind of influence I know it might be hard to hell this necessarily, but what kind of influence do you think Mackenzie had on Maxwell? What is visible from Mackenzie's style that Maxwell started to incorporate.

So I think the immediate thing is some artistry with the bunkering most people think of when they think of Maxwell bunkers. They actually think of the wrong thing. They think of those big moonscape type things that used to be like Southern Hills and other places like that.

Those weren't even Maxwell bunks.

Southern Hills had those saucers with the really crisp badges. It was sort of augustified a little bit, you know. It was like the like the modern Augusta there for a while with the bunkers. But that's that's not what they were originally, for sure.

Yeah, a lot of people think of that as a Maxwell bunker. That's not His bunkers were a lot more rugged, like he just basically took a plow and cut into the ground and set up made the bunker that way and dug it out, and then he gave it some irregular shaping. I think he did give him a little bit more of a mindset of gaining away from this this template driven style that he had studied under MacDonald and trying to just fit to fit the landscape and

Town Uphill Part four.

Yeah, and I.

Just don't know that and it goes into the side of the hill, so whereas I think Maxwell pre mackenzie would try to go directly into the hill and go up it. So I think that's when he started using those side hill lies a lot more, which is really proven at Southern Hills.

Yeah, and and at Old Town the tilts to some of those fairways on the edges of the property for sure, you.

Know, Yeah, I think that that was probably the other big thing is how he routed his courses to to kind of go alongside the slopes of the terrain as opposed to directly into them.

And you know, it's something that always delights me about Perry Maxwell's career and the roster of courses that he worked on is that you have everything from Augusta National and from clubs like Southern Hills and Old Town to just really small, humble, local courses. I'm not sure that any architect pastor president has had such a diversity of classes of courses that they've worked on. I mean, maybe there's a few, But could you talk a little bit about the range of projects that Maxwell took on.

Yeah, I mean he.

Was he was very prolific in the nineteen twenties, and thirties in Oklahoma. He would go to little towns like pahuscab Ponca City. You could probably get a golf course

Cool right now, just a piece together the timeline here, the Mackenzie Maxwell commissions. There were basically five big ones you mentioned them earlier. The last one was Ohio State, which I believe Maxwell finished after Mackenzie died in nineteen thirty four. But a couple of factors got in the way of Mackenzie and Maxwell doing more courses. One was obviously the depression from nineteen twenty nine forward there just

Well, I think one thing is that a lot of his clients were in the petroleum industry and it was kind of insulated from the whole depression. I mean, everybody still needed oil, so the fill whoever else, they were still making money hand over fists.

At the time, Tulsa, Oklahoma still kind of ride and hide.

Yeah, so they were a little insulated from the whole depression ever thing. So so I think that's why he got commissions like for Southern Hills. I mean, he knew the Phillips family, so they made sure he was the guy that did the course.

So that was some of it.

The other thing is is, like I said before, he was very much budget conscious about building golf courses, and I think when he got to the point Host Mackenzie, I think that was when he really reached his highest points as an architect from a skill knowledge and just running running across ideal sites. I mean something like prairie dunes. I mean, you couldn't dream of a better place to build a golf course. Yeah, it's in Hutchinson, Kansas, and the owner was the Carry family, which was rich off

So then another big interruption in golf course construction happens in the nineteen forties. With World War Two. Things stopped for a while, but then after the war, Perry Maxwell is still alive at this point and still kicking and still taking on projects with his son Press more and more involved. And so could you just give me a quick thumbnail sketch of the latest part of Perry Maxwell's career.

Yeah, so after World War Two, his son came back from Serbia the war, wanted to be part of the family business and they started taking on contracts and they started in the local area but kind of ran out because of places to go, because the only connections that seemed to be wanting to build golf courses right after World War Two were actually like military bases. So they did a series of those in Oklahoma and Texas and some that was through contacts that Press had. Maxwell then

Now known as the Golf Club of Dallas, right, Yes, yeah, I.

Think it's actually owned by a church down there now, but it was a really it was at the time. It was a really nice golf course. They built another place there that they didn't finish before Maxwell passed away. That press kind of finished the design the construction of at River Hills. It's no longer existing. And they did a place in Oklahoma City called Lake Hefner, which is a totally different golf course now, So, but yeah, it was. They did a lot of golf courses together, I mean

Right, And what year did Perry Maxwell die?

Fifty two?

Fifty two?

Right, Colton, You're a man that has seen a lot of Perry Maxwell courses, have has studied a lot of Maxwell's architecture. Why should the general public care about Perry Maxwell?

If you want to do a Mount Rushmore of Golden Age golf architects, if you have to narrow it down before, in my opinion, you got to go McDonald for August reasons. Rainer's with McDonald, Let's call that Rayner, Banks, McDonald, Tilling has Ross and then.

Mackenzie, Right, and so you have these four Mans, these four giants of the game, and then Max Well was about fifteen years behind them, So he was an early contemporary to the Golden Age.

And I think he largely is responsible for the transition from almost overly manufactured look to almost like flex the muscle and brawn of American ingenuity of the Dush Revolution, to something that's more subtle and more closer to home to the game of golf. And his clients ranged from as wealthy as you could imagine to as poor as you could imagine. So hit that influence in that style and that approach, I think is I think it's an important piece of golf's history.

Tell us about your Maxwell journey.

You're from Oklahoma, and I believe you embarked on a mission to play every pair of Maxwell course or walk.

Yeah, sometimes the super exclusive place is asking for around us inappropriate for someone of my access. But you know, I just kind of was looking at it one day on Google Earth and I started just signing mapping it out. There's half his body of work is here in Oklahoma and the other half is just kind of scattered throughout the Midwest. And I started trying to schedule, like, how could I plan this there, how could I get there? And then I started to realizing, like each course is

What what were some of the most memorable experiences. You know, walks, see you know, see them, play them, whatever, But what were some of the most memorable experiences from that from that journey.

You know, this is going to sound so cheesy, but it really is just meeting the people going to Arkansas Arkansas City Country Club or Arkansas City Country Club and the club president's getting off of.

A triplex to come shake your hand. You know, they're running eighteen holle golf course like a less than two hundred thousand dollars budget. But I guess, like the best memory I guess is Birdie in number two at Prairie Dan's. There's a tough pin and I stuck it like with him three feet and that's I think one of the best par three's probably in the world. That playing Crystal

He's a good man, were there any courses that you know, you know, whether it be say sand Greens or you know, just like kind of obscure experiences that you remember most, Like I, you know, for example, I think about around at north Woods all the time, the Mackenzie and the Redwoods. That isn't at all the best Mackenzie. It's hard to even call the Mackenzie today, but it's just the setting and the place really resonated with me.

Yeah, there's a lot of them. Neoshow is a municipal now it was a country club. Neosia Country Club is one of the more dramatic pieces of topography he ever routed on out in Missouri. And then Bristow Country Club between Tulsa and Oklahoma City. Those are kind of like what you would call a hidden gym, honestly, like most

He really did.

He really did nail the Parkland look, which I think is something that's being attacked a little bit. But I think it's also important that American golf looks like American golf.

I think one of the things that I find the most pleasing about his designs is just how they kind of embody where they are. It's not trying to bring a different look to an area. It's the design fits in with the look of the area. If that makes he's not imposing his will.

Well, he was an economist, right, I mean, he was a banker, so he was all about return on investment, and so he designed in an economic way that you know, he didn't move a whole lot of dirt. He also happened to come back to the clubhouse as much as possible, which pre bev cart I don't know if that was an economic play there to try to get people to like come back to the club more, but he did it. Like almost every routing comes back to the clubhouse multiple multiple times.

I noticed that, like a lot of his courses kind of situate on like a high hill and then he plays off the hill and back up to the hill a lot.

Is that something you noticed when you saw all the courses.

Yeah, I think it's probably not so hills. It works because it's such a high hill and the only way you can really get off of it is off the first tee. But you know, when you got members with egos, when they're going to build a clubhouse, they want to put it on the high point. That's just what's going to happen. So pretty much that's what a lot of his courses happ Yeah, isn't a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It does get repetitive, though.

What were some other common themes that you found with is designed, you.

Know, bunker design wise. Earlier in his career he is more of a grass faced guy, and then as he kind of got more involved with Mackenzie, he started to get a little bit more wild and creative. But then kind of post World War Two he'd started to do more of just like closer to what you like, just the clean oval bunker that you kind of see at Augusta National today.

With Augusta National, he's obviously heavily involved with the work that was done after shortly after for it opened, obviously like the tenth hole, moving that green up to the ridge, from the punch bowl where Mackenzie had it. Next to that bunker was a Maxwell change, And you know, I think like that that's a that's like a perfect example of a of a very Maxwell hole where you tee off from a ridge, play down into a valley, and play back up to a ridge.

Exactly. That's a good point.

With Maxwell in playing all and seeing all these courses where there you know, I don't want to use the word template hole, because this is in no way the way Rainer McDonald used the template holes. But were there common hole designs like you see with other architects.

I think I think you just kind of put the mail on the head as far as the fall to a climb, which my favorite golfles do that. Anyways, you just kind of see it all and it just kind of falls, and then you know, and then it kind of rises back and you almost you almost end up where you started elevation wise. He did that a lot and a lot of times. He would bring up bring a whole back home early on, like the fourth hole or the third hole, for almost like playoff reasons. He

If you were going to put together a list of like must see Maxwell courses, what would be on that.

Well, the obvious ones right, Southern Hills, Prairie Dunes, Old Town Club for sure. You know, I'm partial to Peak a country club. I think that's a special place. And then there's just there's other cool places like McPherson country Club just.

North of Id's really cool spot.

Yeah, it is, it really is. And you know, oh, what's the place out there by Chicago.

Rochelle Rochelle Fa. Yeah, yeah, exactly, You've been there, right, I've been there.

Yeah. And those greens are original.

Yeah, it seemed like to me that there was like three or four that were really stand out greens. The part five, the seventh green was really one that I kind of stared at for a while.

Things all jacked up now, but the greens are still there. So some of them you're playing from like a different angle and it's a different hole, But that's a place that I think could be. I don't know, we need to get all over that or something.

I saw that when I was there, I saw that they had like a renovation plan hung up, And that may.

Be the case. We may have been too late to the game.

Oh well, I don't know if they got the funding though, you know, I think there was a they were trying to get it. So maybe it's I doubt it's too late. I'm close enough. I should just drive over there. But it's so so that's where you know. And then you know from a public standpoint, you know, most of these are private clubs. Is there any public Maxwell courses that are or even private ones that are easy to see?

Let me pull up, Let me pull up some let me pull up the pull up the spreadsheet. Oh yeah. The the Golf Club of Dallas, which used to be the Oak Cliff Country Club, is a public course. It was Maxwell's very last design. That's really cool in South Dallas.

What what's cool about it? What's the what's the unique stuff about about that course?

It's it needs some help, it needs some treework, it needs some bunker work. It probably needs to renovate their greens. But it's one of those places that again it just has that parkland look and it used to be where the Texas Open was held. So it's like arguably has some of the best history of any Maxwell course you ever worked on. So that's that's probably where most of your listeners can get access to a public Maxwell is the golf of a Dallas.

And then there's Reynolds Park in Winston Salem, which isn't Yeah, isn't one Maxwell still, but it's got a lot of Maxwell left and you see some of the the real like I think the routing genius out there where you just go twists and turns on a on a pretty severe piece of land.

Yeah, Renolds Park, I can't believe I've waited until just now to bring it up. That place is awfully special. Could be one of the best public courses in the country.

Yeah, yeah, without a doubt.

And it's like, you know, the thing that's nice there is that all they have to do is really look down the street at Old Town as to what it could be. You know, that's pretty like it's you know, some of the holes out at Reynolds Park could be more spectacular than some of the best holes at at Old Town Club.

You can make a really strong argument that the that the land is better.

Than old Town and the old Town's got pretty great land.

You know.

It's probably my favorite Maxwell.

As I think, like in terms of which course is most symbolic of Maxwell that I've played, I think that Reynolds part are not old Town Club checks the box, it's just got it's the most fully realized to me.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think it's most fully realized is because it's not fully Maxwell either. Probably the best golf architect ever in my opinion, Bill Krer came in there and added like fourteen more bunkers, you know, but it works.

Yeah.

And so one of the things that you'll commonly hear about Perry Maxwell and when people discuss Perry Maxwell architecture is the idea of the Maxwell role Maxwell rolls in greens Can you explain that?

Yeah, I've never really fully agreed with that term. Where I see where I see the Maxwell roles are in a fair ways and as landing zones. He would he would put the you know, buried elephants out there, but the Maxwell I call the more Maxwell pimples where they're like these like just sucked up little you know. He didn't do many plateaus. He did mostly the pins were in the lows, right, So I guess you could call them the rules, but I think they're more like, you know,

Yeah, you know.

Dunlop White, the uh golf chair at Old Town Club call them muffins, which I like the top tops of muffins. Like, I think that's a good way to describe them. What what impact does that have on putting and greens compared to tears.

Well, again, Maxwell being the practical designer, he was a lot of the reason why he designed greens like.

That, so they drained better and what is it because the water would kind of divert in a bunch of different ways off of them.

Yeah, exactly. And the last thing you want on your greens whenever it's one hundred degrees out is sitting water because that will literally cook the green. So it's important that he didn't have any bird baths being created on his greens. So that's why they all kind of roll off in multiple directions, which I know the punch bowl is like super popular now, like Maxwell was like the opposite of the punch bowl.

I mean, he designed in some places that are the best for probably punch bowls also with the with the soils and everything, like, you know, punch bowls worked really well when you're on sand.

No doubt he didn't get very many sandy sites, although he does in East Texas at Mount Pleasant country Club, really cool golf course where it's like the prime example of nine holes from the Golden Age and nine holes from the Middle Age. But it's like white sugar sand all around. And that place could be Pinehurst number two if they not actually, but they could. They could Pinehurst it up and make it really special out there if they have the will to.

Yeah, I've seen like old Foe of Texarkana Country Club, which is from Moreau out there, and it's got that same kind of ascetic right, And that's in East Texas, West Arkansas.

Right right, special part of the country.

With uh with Perry Maxwell.

You know, I think obviously this is a big year in your book's coming out around the PGA Championship. What can you tell us about Southern Hills and the types of Maxwell things that we should look that are easily identifiable at Southern Hills for people that are gonna be watching on TV or going on the ground.

Yeah, well, it's where I grew up working maintenance and I caddied out there for a little bit. I actually caddied out there for Frank Lackwier and the Senior PGA last year or this year.

No way, that's got to be a story on his on his self the blade.

Yeah, he was awesome. I love I loved it. I loved his intensity. But one thing I guess is look for a really exciting finish. Seventeen and eighteen are the perfect finish par fours back to back. One's a short, tricky one, one's along just brute, and I think you're going to see some just a really exciting finish. So seventeen and eighteen also check out the fairway contours and thirteen Fairway. You know, ten is ten is probably my favorite hole now out there. So Gil Hands and his

Yeah, that stretch of ten to eleven, twelve, thirteen is a really neat stretch of holes with like a lot of variety. Obviously, between the way it kind of shifts along. It's playing in this river valley, and twelve twelve as a whole that I felt like most embodied like Augustin nastional of all the whole.

You said it already, ten, eleven, twelve thirteen that you know, those holes kind of have the similarities to Augusta.

Huh yeah, yeah.

I mean, like it's just that it's the dramatics of that river valley, you know. I think like it just produced such good movement and the way twelve banks, it's like a long part four that kind of is like it feels like a sister to thirteen in Augusta, no doubt.

No doubt, And then thirteen feels like the risk reward nature of it feels like thirteen in a way.

So closing thoughts on Maxwell, you've got a book coming out. What would you say are the most important things that somebody should take away from Perry Maxwell's golf architecture.

Just have fun, meet the members, meet the people who play out there all the time, and try to walk if you can. It's not the middle of the summer, and don't overthink it.

Well, so why don't we step back here and try to take an overall view of Perry Maxwell's design philosophy, some takeaways from how he built courses. What would you say are the main components of the way he approached design?

Well, I think that the number one was just his idea of economy on the construction, just lower costs trying to do He did almost everything through manpower or animal power. I don't think he used hardly any powered equipment, which was probably normal for the time frame. I mean, and maybe up until World War Two that was pretty normal. Anyway, I think after World War Two maybe they used a little bit.

More of a bit.

He had his own construction crew that he used, had an in house engineer, his brother in law, a Dean Woods, that knew.

How to do build things.

So Perry would go out and figure out the easiest routing to build, and with his brother in law toon and no, I can do that or I can't do that, and then then they would build it with their own people. And then I think the other thing is just some of the practices as far.

As how he would rally course.

I mean, like we talked, I mean he would keep greens and teas at higher elevations if he could, just to help keep them from having water issues and drainage concerns and stuff like that. Drainage was a big deal for him. I mean, we look at a place like Twin Hills. The whole place was routed based on how it was going to drain. And I think that's what every golf course des iron did back then, right, that was the number one problem. How do you drain a place, especially in the clay of Oklahoma.

Well, if you think about it, golf architects today always say, we spent so much more on drainage at this place than we did on anything else. And so if you're like Perry Maxwell and you're looking for ways to be efficient, then of course one of the main concerns in routing is going to be how is this place going to drain? Because I don't want to spend more on drainage than I do on building the golf course.

Right, And they didn't even have irrigation systems back then when you started, So I mean he had to figure out a way for the water to get to the course and then how it's going to flow through the course. So those things. The idea of some timplate driven holes that he used throughout his career. Whenever he saw a similar situation, he would go back to that mindset of, oh, yeah, I've seen this landform before, I can use this type of hole on it.

Could you tell me about a couple of those What were a couple of Perry Maxwell templates that somebody might be able to identify if they're watching the PGA Championship or if they go play Old Town or something like that.

Yeah.

So, one that I think is almost it's on most of the golf courses I've seen for param Maxwell is this. It's like a shortish to midlengths par four where you drive out to a plateau and it's got this drop off and then the greens on the other side of this little valley. The fifth at Dorning Hills is a great example. There's a I mean, the seventh at Crystal Downs is kind of like that too, although the boomerang

It's probably a dried creek.

Bed that's at the bottom of this of this hill, and he's got a green sitting on the other side, so he's got he's got a template right there.

I would say in the second half of his career he.

Was looking for these dog legs that would bend around the hillside, like the tenth at Southern Hills is a good example that he built a lot of those, I think in the second half of his career once he started using that concept of how to rout a course using the sides of hills and lies and stuff like that. So I think those are probably two of the more

So if a golf architect today is trying to learn something from Perry Maxwell to apply to twenty first century golf course architecture. What do you think they should focus on.

I would say focus on his greens.

They have they're unique. I mean, some people think he patterned his greens after Mackenzie. I don't think that's necessarily the case. But I think also the other thing is is you've got to learn to change over your career. I mean, you can't do the same thing over and

I think you can.

I think you just got to learn to adapt and keep pushing yourself to be different in some way and better.

Yeah, he really did roll with the times. You know, if you think about what he lived through and what his career went through, he really did find ways to build golf courses in kind of three distinct challenging eras between the twenties, the thirties, and the post World War Two era for a few years at least.

Yeah, and his work.

You can you can divide his work into those three eras and say, Okay, this is definitely a early Maxwell course, this is a mid career course, and this is an end of career course. And I think that end of the career look was probably a little bit kind of a little bit more plain because he didn't have a lot of standout designs from that era. But it wasn't anything as dramatic as an old town or southern hills or Prairie Damns obviously, so it kind of harkened a little bit back.

To what he did in the early part of his career.

And I think the other thing is he also had a different style design depending on the type of course he was doing, too. I mean, if he was doing a small town course, he had a totally different mindset about how he's going to build a small town course as opposed to this massive national country club type of course.

Thank you so much, Chris, appreciate it. It's fun talking to you about Perry Maxwell.

Yeah, anytime.

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