Tom Doak is back and as usual, he's not holding back.
But don't toss the yolk and the famously candid Doak doesn't pull any punches. How do I make natural looking? Contour? Hire the biggest fool in the village and told him to.
Make it flat burst, overrated, underrated, rough.
Terribly overrated over the years.
Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to the first episode of The Yoke with Doak.
Tom exciting to get this going.
Thanks Andy, it's nice to be here. And a very clever title on your part. There's not many things that rhyme with Doke.
There were, you know, my.
Wife kept saying it's got to be talking with Tom and I was like, that's about the most boring title you could come up with.
But it worked out.
So today we're going to talk about golf course architecture one on one. So we've got a ton of questions from listeners and they range from you know, the very beginning, you know, what what is golf course architecture? To you know, questions about specific features that you know different golf courses. So the first question I think where we can start off with is from Tommy j and it was it's how would you describe golf course architecture to fifth grader?
Oh, to a fifth grader, that's about the age where I took up golf. I think that the idea of golf course architecture is to playing out a golf course over the ground that'll be interesting for people to play, you know. And part of that's finding the right path across the ground so you don't have to keep climbing up hills and going downhills too much. And then part of it's figuring out what sorts of things you have to build to add to the fun and the interest of the golf course.
Yeah, I think that's a good way to do it. I remember my early golf memories. I played tree golf and I would play with whiffle balls in our front yards or in our neighborhood with a buddy, and we'd played at different trees, but we had the street was like a water hazard, so you know, you'd have to play over it. It wouldn't have been a good golf course design because there were a lot of four scarries.
Yeah. I started thinking about design more on paper. I mean one of the very first courses I saw was Harbortown when it was brand new, and the thing that got me hooked on golf course architecture was this little booklet that Charles I, the golf writer, had done. It was like hole by hole diagrams. It's kind of like you for a yardage book today, except without yardages because it was nineteen seventy and people didn't play by yardage
so much. But it had like a diagram of the whole and three really simple sentences about how to play it, like, you know, this is a short par five, and if you're going for the green in two, you need to drive it left near that bunker, otherwise there's going to be a tree in your way for the second shot, you know. And it was something a ten year old could read and understand, and golf course architecture really isn't much more complicated than that.
I wonder if learning golf course architecture, you see it with like languages, Now, kids get taught foreign languages at age like four because they've found that it's easier to oh wait wait, So I wonder if that would be like similar for golf course architecture, Like if learning the principles at a really young age would be easier.
I think it would help, you know, just in terms terms of you know, coming to acceptance on a lot of it, but also you know, really thinking through the things that you challenge that challenge you about it.
Yeah, it's uh maybe it's it's the beginning of your golf life. You should learn it, like right, that should be the first thing you learned before you even learn how to play. Let's uh so Mark Ell wants to know, how do I know I'm standing on a good golf hole in terms of the t shot, approach and green How do you know it's good?
I think if it excites you, it's good. I mean, you know, most architects would give you a lot of different reasons about strategy, and you know, in some ways, you know, good golf design is like watching some of whose expert play billiards. It's like you have to make one shot, but really good player is the about setting up the next shot at the same time. And you know a good golf hole does that too. You know,
it's not just about hitting along straight drive. It's about you know, what's that going to leave you once you do it? And you know, depending on your game, there might be places you don't want to leave yourself because you're you know, you're just not a good bunker player, and there's a bunker fifty yards short of the green and that's the last place you want to be, so you know, do something different with your t shot instead
of risking that. But you know, it is simple enough that the average person, you know, like my wife doesn't play golf, but usually she can pick out a good golf hole. It's there's just something about it that fits the eye and it looks really engaging. And you don't even have to be a golfer to know that the proportions are right.
As I was recently at a golf course and and somebody that didn't know a ton about golf was like, oh, I love the thirty hole there, and like sure enough that hole was like it was like one of the coolest holes out of the golf course for sure, Like you know, probably it was probably the hole that sticks with you the most. But it's like, you know, this is a novice that doesn't know anything, but he picked out that hole. I remember that hole, So ma, that's
that's uh, there's a lot of truth to that. So Kyle Nathan asks, what are the different styles of golf course architecture.
The you know, the old books that I've read about golf course architecture separated into three schools. There was penal design, which is, if you hit a bad shot, you wind up in a bunker or a hazard or something just right off the bat. Strategic design, which is, maybe there aren't a lot of hazards, but the hazards are really close to where you really want to go, so you can decide to flirt with them or play give them a lot of room and kind of play half away
from them. And then Robert tren Jones started talking about that he was doing something different called the heroic school, where you know, you you give somebody a water hazard to hit over it in order to gain an advantage for the next shot. So that's kind of strategic, but more in your face, you know. And I've always used the example that great golf courses really have a usually
have a mix of all three. I mean, you very rarely see I don't think you ever see a course with eighteen just purely strategic holes that don't have any you know, left and right bunkering on a hole, you know. I once used the example of Augusta National. You look at eleven, twelve, thirteen in augusta National, they are pretty famous holes. Eleven is really strategic. There's only one thing you don't want to do. Hit it in the lake
to the left. You've got all the room in the world on the right to avoid the lake to the left. You get to number twelve, and that's a penal hole. Yeah, I mean there is. You know, you can aim away from the right hand pin over to the left hand pin, but if you do that, you're hitting over a bunker with another nasty bunker behind, so you're avoiding the water. You know. It's like you do have choices, but you
still have to hit a really good shot. There's no getting around having to hit a good shot on that hole. And then thirteen is more of a heroic hole. You know, if you're a great player, you're thinking about going for it in two and shaping your shot around the corner of the dog legs, so you've got a way to get in there, and you shorten the approach where it's possible, you know, and the average player can't think that way, but it's a good three shot hole for them, so
you know, there's a really good example. August is considered like one of the great strategic courses, but not every hole on it is a purely strategic hole.
Yeah, there's still like some peenus aspects of it. I was writing an article on a short part three the other day and I was thinking about it. I was like, well, like, all short par threes are kind of penal holes for the most.
Part, nearly all. Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes I take flak from people that, you know, I've heard several people say they don't like my par threes as much as some of my other holes, and it's I think it's because I don't really like building penal holes, so I don't, you know, I don't like surrounding greens with bunkers.
I'll usually give you a place to miss. And for most people, a good par three is a penal hole that it's just guarded everywhere because they figure you've got a short iron in your hands and it's on a tee, so you ought to be this is the time. I ought to be able to make you hit a good shot.
I feel like those par threes are great, but something that gets messed up there is with the like the ladies and senior teas because they have to have this forced care, and a lot of times they don't. They don't move the teas up far enough to give them a chance because they're hitting like a I watched my mom.
She'll hit like have to hit like a five wood.
Right into like this little green with a with bunkers everywhere exactly.
I mean, you know, you don't building a green that requires a carry into it is really hard for people who hit the ball in a load trajectory, And a lot of architects don't even think about people that hit it on a load trajectory until they get in their senior years and suddenly wish they had thought about that morey.
It seems like it's that's the playing the game as a as a lady. When I watch like my mother or like the rare time that my wife goes out, is it's just such a different game. It's so much harder for them. But here's here's a good question. Ben Vanna wants to know how important are drawing skills and becoming a golf course architect.
If drawing skills were really important, I would have never been able to get a job. I mean, you know, I can draw like a play in view of a golf hall. Okay, but you know, if you wanted me to do a rendering of what it was going to look like, I'd be hopeless at that I took. I had to take one drawing course in college for my landscape architecture degree, and that I'm sure that was the lowest grade I gotten in three years of landscape architecture.
And I used to be very defensive about it. But but I've you know, I've learned over the years a different you know, everybody has a different way of communicating. And but the thing that I've learned the most is, you know, to me, golf course, architecture is it's more sculpture than drawing. I mean, you're working in three dimensions,
and the third dimension really matters. You know, whether the whether the the green is pitching away from the line of play a little bit, or whether there's a crown there has a huge effect on things, and you have to be able to visualize that. So I don't think, you know, I've never thought that the guys that just strictly draw plans and then hand that to somebody to
try to build. You know, Michelangelo wouldn't do a sculpture by starting in two D and drawing a plan of it and then going to three D. He just went straight to three D when it was time to do sculpture. And you know, that's kind of how we build golf courses. Plus, I can't.
Draw whenever I see one of those contests, for like, hey, raw, draw a golf hole and be to enter the contest. I'm a horrendous drawer, Like I can't write. My handwriting's horrible. My drawing skills are terrible, and I always I'm always like, well, that's just I'm not gonna even take the time because I don't want my thoughts to even be what's on paper, because it's not representative of what I'm thinking about at all.
Like I'm not that's how bad I am at drawing, but it I imagine a lot of stuff happens in the ground too, Like that you have to make some minor tweaks, Like you can't just go off of a drawing and get the result.
You know, there's very rare.
I don't think. Yeah, at the end of the day, I don't think anybody is that good at drawing to get exactly what they want just from a drawing. I mean, every great golf course I've ever seen was built by people out in the out in the ground who understood golf. And you know, we're really paying attention to all those details when they were building it. So I'm not saying it can't be done. I just don't know if a place where it has been done.
Yeah, with technology, who knows. Eventually it might get to somewhere with that.
Well, the day, you know, the day that the day that everybody is able to like do a golf course entirely in three D virtual reality so they can just translate it out to the ground, will also be the day you don't need to go out on the ground anywhere because you could just stay in your house and do it on the virtual reality. So I'm hoping that's still a long way off.
Have you have you ever seen those like that? I get it.
I have a bunch of readers that play this like video game that's like a golf course design. You can design the golf course. It's called like the golf club or something. Have you ever tried doing that thing?
I tried a little with the really early ones, like fifteen twenty years ago. No, I haven't. I haven't touched any of the latest stuff. Like I said, I'm scared of it. I mean, at some point, it's not just gonna put golf course architects out of business. If they're really good at it, it'll put golf out of business. And that would be a sad day for me. Yeah.
And like with the screen golf popularity in Southeast Asia, it I don't know. Screen golf's gonna come to America eventually, and it might take some of the popular It might grow.
The game though, too.
That's true, it might.
There's there's a give and take.
Here's a good question, so, mister asks, golf is full of counterintuitions. So you know, hit down to make the ball go up, for one, if your ball's going right, swing right to make it go left. Is there anything in architecture that you found is counterintuitive?
Oh, that's not a one oh one question. You should say that for the three to oh one class.
I know it. It was such a good question.
I think there are a bunch of things that are counterintuitive about good golf course architecture. And I'm trying to think where to start with that. Well, I guess the first counterintuitive thing to me is that what people you know, one of the words I don't like to use in golf course architecture is fair. And the reason is fair changes for every single player. You know, you and I don't play the same game. You hit it forty yards
farther than me on a bad day. So you know, you might think that a hole is fair because you're hitting a seven iron into a green that takes you a good shot to get a seven iron and hold it, and so you would call that hole fair. And then I would be looking at that green with a four or five iron in my hands and not quite the same ability as you, and I would pronounce it unfair because even if I carry the bunker in front, I'm going to have a hard time hold in the green.
So you know, and that that that just keeps sliding down the scale for every different golfer. Every different golfer has different abilities, so you can't really say that something's
fair for everyone. And and the but the tricky part is, you know a lot of architects, especially the ones who are good players, you know, they think of everything in terms of fair and trying to make it work out well for them, and they don't realize that they're making that makes everything work out just wrong for somebody who's twenty five yards shorter than them or twenty five yards longer than them.
So I I think one of the toughest things is thinking For me thinking backwards. I always try and think about like my dad or my mom and how they play.
And then you know different.
You have to think about every type of player when you're designing a course.
You should think about every type of player when you're designing a course. It's hard to do. I mean it's you know, when you when you've got a real wrinkly piece of land. You know, if you're hitting over a valley, trying to find tease for every level of player that that you know they can get to the top on the other side is tough to do. You kind of
like you know when you're laying out of course. You know, if you want, if you want to require a two hundred and twenty yard T shot, a pretty good T shot to get over that valley, you know, you'll play around with the angle of the hole. You know, the valley might be one hundred yards across on a straight line, but if you turn the hole on a diagonal, you can make it so it's two hundred or two twenty
or whatever you want. The problem is, then when you try to make it work for a one hundred and fifty yard carry, you know, you can, you can move the tee up the one side so you're hitting more straight across, but then you wind up getting to the point where you're just hitting straight across the fairway and
out the other side. You know. So the the angle that you take for whether you're planning the golf course from the back T first or the middle T first, you know, kind of makes it harder to to put the other t's in the right place. And ninety five percent of golf courses they're designed from the back tees first, so the forward t's are the ones where the problems show up.
I imagine that T box placement is like, that's something I never think about with when it comes to architecture. Is that something that like a lot of like a lot of thought goes into from your.
On Actually I think probably not enough thought goes into T box placement for the middle and forward tees. You know, a lot of people just put it a certain percentage of distance, operate a certain number of yards up from the from the back tees, and call it good. But you know, when you're dealing with a piece of land that has undulation to it, there's a lot more to
it than that. And you know, I think everybody thinks, you know, most architects when they get out on site, they're thinking more about their own game than about everyone else. You know, you try to think about everyone else, but but you visualize the shots that you can hit. So it's pretty hard to make yourself back off and think.
You know, I used to think. I used to think about my mom a lot and knowing that she could you know, I mean, I only saw her play later in life, and she barely got the ball airborne a lot of the time. But that's sort of easy to visualize, you know. I can go back to that pretty easily and think, now, there's no way my mom could get
around this. You know, it's much harder to think about the the senior player who is still good but hits the ball low and only carries it one hundred and thirty or forty yards, and what works for them.
Car for the course wants to know what is the most difficult obstacle when designing a course A poor soil b bland topography See overbearing owner or d.
Other Oh, repeat the question again.
Because the most difficult obstacle when designing a course.
Okay, I remember the three options, you know, I wrote right in the front of my little red book. An old guy that used to work in the construction business named David Postalwage, who was one of my first bosses when I worked for the Dies, said that, you know, everything comes back to the land, the owner, and the money, and you really, you know, to do something really good,
you've got to get all three of them right. So the soils are the land and the topography and the topography and of the two, you know you can you can fix those if you spend enough money. But you know, I think the soils are the harder thing to fix. I mean, I'm not a big A lot of these new courses build out west and overseas. They'll like truck in a foot of sand to sand cap all the fairways fifty acres of grass. You know, it's hard to
make the numbers where. You know, it's hard to build a course that is profitable when you spend that much, you know, trying to create perfect conditions on a harsh site. So I think that would be my first choice overbearing owner. You know, I try to use my sixth sense so I don't wind up working for those guys and just declining a job like that. But you know, you do. You have to have a you have to have a
good relationship with the client for it to work. And I get so I guess the answer to that problem is you just have to know the ones to walk away from that you don't think you could work with. And I've certainly walked away from a few potential jobs because I just didn't think the client and I would be on the same page.
Yeah, it's the uh I did a bunker. I built a bunker this summer. And you quickly realize when you hit clay and it's really hard to dig in clay. It's like I was thinking about it. It's like when it was like sandy and nice loose soil, it was easy, and you hit clay, it's like, oh, this is really hard.
To work with no doubt. I mean, and you know, honestly, one of the keys to my success in the golf business is that I've done so many projects on sand because it is so much easier. You know, I've the best analogy that I could ever come up with for somebody is you know, if you were like in the printing business, when desktop publishing came along, it was a whole different world because you could actually like see on a computer screen exactly what was going to be on
a page. Before that, you had to make all these allowances for you know, how the spacing was going to work out, and how much room to leave at the top and bottom, and you never really saw the finished page until somebody put it in a typeset or put it together. You know. In golf course architecture, when you're building in clay, you know, once you've kind of shaped the green the way you want, there's all these other
steps that still have to happen. You know, you have to put trench in, drainage underneath, and then put a gravel layer in, and then put a sand layer in, and presumably all those layers are exactly right and flowing together, so what you built on the bottom winds up on the top. But it's really hard to do. There's a lot more steps in places where things can go wrong.
It's harder to visualize the first step and get it right, you know, And if you do something on the ground floor of that and then you get up to the top and you're like, oh, that doesn't look too good. You're kind of stuck. You're not supposed to like change the profile of the green in order to make something work better. You know, in sand, it's only one layer. You shape and you're done. You dig a bunker and you stand it in and try to visualize the shot
that you're going to play. And if you think, now I want it a little deeper, you go back and dig out a few more scoops and lower it another
six inches. Whereas in clay, you know, you've got to stand in that bunker and visualize, Okay, there's going to be a liner in this thing, and then there's gonna be sand on top of that, and there's gonna be topsail on the face of the bunker, and you really don't have as clear a feel for the shot that you're going to have to hit out of it when it all gets put back together.
Besides, like the layers, do you think it settles any differently, like over time with all like the gravel and everything, or is it is you.
Know, I've I've heard people talk about green settling when we when we do consulting work they say, oh, that green's settled, and usually I just think, well, no, the green's faster, and it's just you know, the ball's getting away from you more because the green is faster, and
you think something else must have happened here. But it's possible if you're building out it, if you build out of like you know, if you put five or six feet of phil to build a green and you don't compact it and run over with the equipment a lot at the start and it's clay and not sand, Sand gets pretty compacted pretty fast as much as it's going to It's possible some kinds of soil will settle a
little bit. You know. I've never seen it much on my courses, but we don't build a lot of things out of phil, you know, I try not to put phil at a green site, so I personally I have almost never seen it on my own courses. I can think of exactly one hole where I think something's settled a little bit. But maybe it's more common than I think.
Yeah, I might be just an old lives tale can hidecki Winn wants to know if you pay attention to par when you're designing a golf course.
I'd like to say no that I don't pay attention to par. The it'd be more fair to say I try not to let par drive all my decisions. Like I know some architects that if they've built more that if they've built two par fours in a row, they are uncomfortable with doing a third. They think they think it must be time for a par three or a
par five. And I have to, you know, I just you know, when I traveled around when I was in college and saw these great courses, you know, I've seen so many of those kind of rules be broken, and you know, still thought the golf course was great that I kind of threw a lot of that out, you know.
So I'm trying to think of a good example. There's there's a course in England called Saunton that's a very good course out in the west of England, a links course, and I think they changed what I think they changed the second hole to a par five. But Sauntan, the first fourteen holes were like it had four par fours and then a par three, and it's seven more par fours and then a par three, and it had like two par fives at the end to be to wind
up at par seventy one or something. But it was like it was kind of an interesting experience playing it for the first time. It's like, wow, is there ever going to be a par five or is there It seems like we've gone a long way without a par three. But I don't have a problem with that if that's you know, if that's what you feel like makes for
the best golf courses. You know, at the end of the day, though, you know, when I get a routing plan kind of three quarters done, yes, I look and if it's par seventy four or it's par sixty nine, you know, realistically, I've got to think is the client going to be okay with this? Or you know, what are my options to make it not that way? But I try to follow my eye first and then think, okay, this is too weird. And absolutely the best example of
that when we were outing Pacific Dunes. I'd been struggling around trying to put the pieces together, and I had most of the holes figured out, but there were a couple places. My last version changed a couple of holes, but it also changed the sequence pretty completely. You know, one version you would have been going you would have played not all the coastal holes in order, but pretty close to that instead of getting to them and away
from them. So when we we walked through the routing, the final routing one morning, and we were going to walk through the previous routing afterwards, everybody loved the routing that we had so much that it's like, we're done. That's the routing. And we went in and had lunch, and it's kind of everybody in a good mood. And I was sitting across from Mike Kaiser and I started thinking about the scorecard for it, because i'd only, you know, figured out this new sequence like the night before, and
I hadn't done a scorecard or anything. So I just started jotting it down on a napkin because I realized it was going to be pretty weird. And you know, there are seven par fours on the front nine, the third holes a part five, fifth holes a par three, all the other holes are part fours, and then the back nine you start with two part threes in a row, then a part five, and then fourteens a part three, fifteens apart five, seventeen's apart three, and eighteen's apart five.
So there's four Part three's in the back nine and three part five and only two par fours, and I thought, damn, I've never seen a great course that got away with that. So I slid that napkin over to mister Kaiser and said, are you comfortable with this? And he said, if you'd just showed me that before we went out for that walk, I just said no. But we all walked it and we all thought it was great, So I'm comfortable with it. And that's you know, a lot of people make up
their minds. You've heard the saying don't judge a book by the cover. A lot of people make a lot of decisions about golf courses by looking at the scorecard, and I just think that's the dumbest thing you can do. You know, you just got to go out and look at what's out there on the ground and how the golf course takes you around the ground, and that's the most important thing. If it doesn't fit precisely into the box of Part thirty six on each side, who cares? As long as it's good.
I feel like if you once there is a great course that has a setup like that, it's more likely to have more obscure you know, formations of scorecards. Also, you know, it usually takes one thought leader to you know, one you know example, to lead the way to more.
No doubt, no doubt. I mean, golf is a game of follow the leader, like in you know, in Asia. I did a course in China. Sadly it never opened because they changed their minds on allowing golf in China. But you know, in Japan, in China, in Korea, par
seventy two is almost like a religion. It's like they are so uncomfortable with the idea that you could do anything else that you know, it's maybe one of the reasons they don't call me more about going over there, because I you know, that's so far from my mind when I'm trying to design something. But you can just see the level of discomfort with a client like, oh, I don't know, you know, that's going to be really
hard to sell. And you know, it's strange to me because they don't you know, I guess they feel that way because they don't know that much else about golf, so they do know this one thing that it's supposed to be par seventy two. That's what quality is. You know, the more you know, the less important that gets to be.
It also seems like there's like, if you know just enough, you're almost the most dangerous person.
Like sure, sure, there's some superintendents that think that about me, that I know just enough about turf to be a be a real problem.
So it kind of leads right into we got a lot of questions about routing and talking about this, and it is a natural transition. Blair Bromley asked, when you first visit a site for a potential project, what's the first thing that comes into your mind.
I just did that twice in the last five days. I was in Spain looking at a couple potential projects, and I hadn't Usually I try to have a map beforehand, because when you go out on a site for the first time, if I take somebody with me that's not used to doing it, you know, without golf holes on the land, it seems so much more vast, and it
really is. You know, a golf course takes up at a minimum one hundred and fifty acres and sometimes we're looking at hundreds of acres of ground trying to figure out where the holes go, and you know, the sense of scale, you know, even a simple part four hole is a quarter mile long, and when you get out there and there's no fair way and no scale, it looks a quarter mile long. It looks like a long
way out there, and your eye tricks you. It's you know, I've the number one question I'm asked when I'm walking a golf course with somebody in the dirt, is is this a par five? Because they all look like par five's. You know, a three hundred and fifty yard old looks like a par five to the average person until you get a flag out there or something for scale that they can see how the scale of a golf hole fits it. You know, I'm different when I go out
on a piece of land for the first time. I'm like looking for the problems, like where's the corner that if I get into that corner, I can't get out, you know, because ultimately the client, you know, the client wants to know if this is potentially a great course, and I want to know is this a job I want to take? And so it's kind of like, Okay, is there something here that's going to prevent this from
getting to where everybody wants it to be. The other thing that you look for because you know, I rely on topo maps quite a bit to work with the routing. But there are things that don't show up while on the map, you know, like trees and vegetation, Like if there's this, you know, trees will be marked on the map. But they you know, they all look alike on the map. And obviously some are huge, beautiful oak trees and some
are little scrubby things. So you know, picking out the ones that are great looking things that you wouldn't want to cut down, and trying to make those features instead of getting right in the way of something is really important, So you start trying to note where those things are. And then the other thing that doesn't show up on a map is the views. Like you know, if you've if you've got a course that's next to the water, that's not hard to visualize on the map. You know,
you're you're just looking out to the water. But if you've got like both pluses and minuses, if you've got a beautiful church steeple, and you'd like to have a whole play toward that that maybe not beyond the map, and you have to have a sense of where it is. By the same token, if you've got a power line going past. You know, you don't want to be playing
right at one of those towers. I mean it's you know a lot of properties have power lines somewhere around them and it doesn't really bother the golfers experience very much. As long as you're not playing right at one of those towers, then they can't help but notice it, or playing from under one, or playing from under one.
So you you mentioned you know owners and you know, whether it be an owner or developer, always wants to know if it's a truly a great course. Do you do you have a sense, like with some of your courses, have you known from like the second you got out there.
It was going to be a great golf course.
Yes, I've been lucky. I've worked with I've worked with a bunch to sites that could and should be great courses from the day I first laid eyes on him. Pacific Dunes obviously, even though some of it was covered by gorse. I mean, Pacific Dunes, you knew right away there were going to be a bunch of great holes. But there were pieces of it you couldn't really visualize because the gorse was so thick, you know, But you know, you get to the level like Terry Edy in New Zealand,
which turned out great. You know, from day one or day two, our client was asking us, do you think this could be one of the top fifty courses in the world. And we're standing in the middle of a pine forest that somebody planted over the top of these
dunes and you can't see a hundred yards. So I've got is a map and I know there's a great ocean view out there, and I'm like just biting my lip because you know, I don't think he wanted to try to do the golf course unless I thought it could be that good, and that it's a huge leap of faith, especially on a site where you're not you know, I said, vegetation is an important feature of the golf course, and we didn't have any to work with. I mean, none of those pine trees were going to stay in
the finished product. You know, they're all planted in rows. So even the places you didn't want a golf hole, they looked really artificial and awkward. So we're going to replace everything with natural vegetation. So staying at the beginning, yeah, I think that could be the top fifty in the world is kind of a crazy goal. But you know what I said to him was, you know, all I know is every time I get an ocean front site,
everybody loves it. And you got that big ocean front right there, so I think you got a shot.
Yeah, it's it's that from everything I've heard, that one is a special place. Putting together a golf course is kind of like a puzzle. And from what I gather very much.
So where do you you draw the line?
And this is from Philip Johnson, where do you draw the line between having the best hole on the property and having the better overall routing.
You know, you've got to get You've got to get a little feel for the client about what they're after. You know, there there may be some kinds of clients, not the typical ones that I go to, that you know, all they want is the one great hole that's a hook for the place. They're not really thinking they're going to build a great golf course. But you know, like there's a lot of courses in Hawaii that have the one great part of three over the ocean, and then
everything else is inland away from the ocean. They put houses along the ocean, but if your goal is to you know, if the client's goal is to build a great golf course, you have to be willing to throw out a really good hole that just doesn't fit. Or you know, I can build this great hole, but I know if I do the hole after, it's going to stink because you're not you know, you can get away with the whole after it being kind of blah because everybody's still coasting off the high of just having played
a really great hole. But if the next whole stinks, that kind of root, you know, that kind of just drives a stake through the last hole being so good. So there's a there's a balance there, and you know, I usually find a couple holes pretty quickly in the
process that are really hard to give up on. But sometimes taking that one piece outs is what you have to do, and it's hard, it's hard to make yourself do it, but you know, at the end of the day, you're trying to find the best eighteen piece puzzle, not just the one cool looking piece.
Yeah, because then you end up in a chase to try and figure out how to get in and out of that one spot. Well, if you have one that you just feel like you can't get rid of it probably is going to be, at the end of it a pain to get.
To, right. I mean, one of the you know, I mean, there's so many things about routing that you know, even if they like give you a place for the clubhouse to be at the beginning, and you you know, now you're I mean, if you do that, you're telling me, Okay, you got to build four holes around this point right here. So you know, I want to start trying to find holes first and then see where there's a bunch of holes that come together and see if we can make
the clubhouse work there. But you know, sometimes it's a building that you're going to renovate. Sometimes it's just you know, on a on a lot of projects, it's like, you know, there's one place you're going to drive into the property, and they don't want to build two extra miles a road to get over to the other side to put a clubhouse over there. So you know, the first good spot to build a clubhouse is going to be the spot,
and you accept that. But the fewer us that you start with, the better, you know, the more options you have for the routing. Same with it has to return at the ninth hole. You know, that crosses out a ton of options just you know, that means you can't ever get more than five holes away from more of the clubhouses.
That that's something that boggles my mind, is like why can't it stop after six holes?
Like why can't it if.
In some court lots of good courses, do you know there's certain places where yeah, we want a nine hole option, and we think we're going to do a lot of business that way. But you know, one of the clients that said that to me, that really wanted the ninth hole to come back to the clubhouse was Julian Robertson
and Kepe Kidnappers. And I thought, nobody's coming all this way and they're gonna stop at nine or or would be angry if they had to play an extra hole before they got back to the clubhouse to leave after ten. And yet it was a really important thing to him, partly because he's a member of Shinnecok Kills, one of the great courses of the world, which conveniently comes back
at the ninth hole. So we had to modify that routing a little bit to get Julian uncomfortable with it and get the club at you know, get the clubhouse, moved the clubhouse slightly to get it, so it worked with two loops A nine.
Trevor Dormer asks, how have you honed your approach to routing over the years. Trevor's not a beginner.
No, Trevor's not a beginner. I know his name. I'm not sure my approach is any different. It's just that you get better at it the more you practice. And you talked about routing being a puzzle, and it's just like it's just like doing the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. I mean, the first time that you try to do that, it just looks like a hopeless exercise that you're going to make that that you're going to get all those words and fit together and finish the
whole thing. This just seems impossible. If you do it every week, you start seeing some conventions and you start seeing, oh, yeah, they have to use there's a few kind of key words that sometimes they need to use in order to you know, when you've got an odd combination of letters, there's only a certain number of words that are going to fit that. So there's there's little tricks that you learn as you go, and I'm not sure I can
describe exactly what all those tricks are. But you know, when I let my associates work on a routing with me, sometimes they'll be like, they'll find a really good hole over here, and I'm just like shutting them down right away, like you're never getting back from that one. You know, It's kind of like you're going down a dead end and you're either going to have a bad hole coming back or or just you get yourself into a corner you can't you physically can't get out of. There's no
room for another fair way to come back. You know, if a property is certain width, there's room for four holes play in parallel, and those holes can get tighter and tighter together, but at some point it gets a little too tight for four holes, and the next the next option is only two because you can't play out and play back and play out and never get back to the clubhouse. So, you know, you just learn to see those kinds of things on the map more quickly.
As you've done it more, you're still looking for the same things. You're looking for the features that make the land special, And how can I use that as part of a golf hole. You know, the hardest part is when there's something besides golf going on. You know, I went to landscape architecture school because you couldn't go to golf course architecture school, and I did, you know, when we started, I didn't think I was going to plan resorts or you know, national parks or all the other
things that landscape architects do. But it's helped me a lot in dealing with landscape architects who do the land plans for the bigger project around my golf course. And the hardest part is they're looking for all those same features that I like. They like too. They want to make the entrance road go by this point so you can see that tree with the ocean in the background, and it's a little bit of a wrestling match over who gets to use which cool things. And so the
client's priorities really matter. You know, if the client is more interested in the housing or the hotel than the golf, I don't win those arguments as much. And it's harder to build a great golf course.
So as like, for a beginner, if they were on to start to really what should they pay attention to about routing, Like what are maybe say a couple things that they should pay attention to when they.
Play golf at a golf course.
That's a hard question because I don't think. I think it's very difficult when you're out playing golf to visualize the land without a golf course. I mean, you know, it's like, you know, when you see the answer to the crossword the next day, it's hard to feel stuck. You know, you can always go look at the answer, so you don't see the options that were passing up.
You know, it's really hard. I mean a lot of times people will people will make a suggestion to me of I could have changed the fifth hole and move the green over to the right, and they don't understand that anytime you make a move like that, there's a there's another move that has you know, that means the sixt has to be in a different place too, and that's the part that probably isn't going to work. So well, that's why I didn't do it the way they suggested.
But to see that stuff when you've never tried to visualize the property as a whole, it is really hard to do. So, so I guess for me, you know, if if you're if you're really interested in routing, the first things to focus on are just when you play a golf course that you love, like, see see how many of the standard rules of how you should do
things that it breaks? You know, try to notice those things because the more you look around, the more you find that, oh, these great courses break those rules pretty often. And you know, the fewer preconceptions you have about how you know going into how you should do it, the better you know. The more open minded you can be about, well, I could go any direction here, the more interesting you can leave it for yourself.
Peter Coffee wants to know what's the toughest type of hole for you to design? Is it a par three, A short, part four, long, part four, part five, et cetera.
I got the par fours down. I think those are nearly always the holes on my courses that people like the most. I mentioned earlier Part three's some people say, oh, he doesn't design great par threes. He's too He's trying to be too strategic, and we, you know, we want the part three to be just a beautiful picture post card hole surrounded by trouble. I've done that occasionally, but
but I don't like to like. I mean, one of the hardest part three's in the world in my opinion, certainly the hardest one I've ever built, is this little tiny hole at barn Google Dunes. It's like one hundred and twenty yards max. It can't play into a fierce wind does a lot of the time, so it's name. Don't visualize that you're always going to be hitting a
wedge to it. It's just got a tiny green and it's slightly crowned, and there there's death bunkers to the left of it, in front of it, just like you know, I think we built them eight feet deep, but with the wind on the sand out of the bunkers, they've gotten even deeper. And over the back of the tiny green, it just goes down a hill in the back into rough. But there is a bailout short and right of the green.
You know, there's bunkers on the surrounding the bailout area, but there's a place that if you if you're not sure you can hit the green, there's a there's a slightly bigger area you know you actually aim just for the right edge of the green, or just off the right of the green. And if you wind up short, it's not easy to get up and down for three, but at least you'll finish the hole. I mean, if you pull it in the left bunker, you might pick up.
You know. That's my idea of a great hole where okay, there is a little bailout and if I was playing a match with you and you hit it in the left bunker, I don't have to hit it on the green. I can bail, and then you know, I might still mess up. I bail and then you hit a good bunker shot and oops, I wasn't so smart after all.
But you can have the advantage by bailing.
That's right, because I'm in a bad spot and now all of a sudden you've got like a half shot advantage.
And that hole is I mean, that hole is so severe around the green that I see great players bailing one hundred and twenty yard Part three with with really good players laying up deliberately because they don't want to take the chance of making a six going in the bunker.
So something I've noticed playing a lot of your designs and is that I when I have a wedge in my hand, which the game of golf has divulged into a driver wedge.
For like the very good players.
When I have a wedge in my hand, I am absolutely terrified. And I don't know if if you're if it's just in my head, but like the way that you've built you know, greens and bunkers like like my head, and like I'm all of a sudden thinking about the exact numbers I have to hit shots and how they're going to land and react in it. And it's different than almost you know, any other architect. Is that on purpose? That's on purpose?
I'm smiling to hear it, because because we really do think about that a lot. You know, I talked about, you know, going back to when we were talking about
low trajectory players earlier. There's things that you can do that don't bother those guys so much, that really bother a good player because when you're you know, if there's a if there's a crown or a bump in a green like stream Song has a lot of them, and you're hitting a forewood into the hole and landed thirty yards short of the green and it running up that bump doesn't make any difference for a player like that, the ball will just roll over the bump if it
has enough momentum to roll over the bump, and it'll roll over softly and go to the other side. You know, a good player with a wedge in his hand, he's deathly afraid of hitting the backside of the bump and have the ball go skidding over the green. And honestly, you know, that's one of the few weapons you have to really frighten a really good player anymore. You know, when I worked for mister Dye, he said, all the part fours or driver eight iron driver wedge for good players. Now.
And you know, the great players, if you look at the chor stats, on average, they hit the ball within fifteen feet of the hole when they've got a short iron in their hands. And you know, back then, the guidance for put in the hole was that you wouldn't cut the cup less than five paces from the edge of the green. So that basically means you can't do anything within the circle that the good player is going
to hit the ball. The only thing you can do in that circle is have some contra and some contra that makes them think twice about where do I want where do I really want this ball to land? You know, we play with that a lot to try to make it challenging and a little frightening because the other thing, the other thing mister Dye was absolutely adamant about, is you know, with a great player, you have to try
to get inside their heads. They're too good to make normal mistakes on a golf course that other people make, so you have to do things that make them uncomfortable at some level. You know, he did a lot with water. He did it sometimes with really really deep bunkers, but you know he also did it with a lot of visual things, like having the green sit up and you know it's where there's trouble falling off the back of the green and you can't really feel where the back
of the green is. I've used that a lot in my own work, you know. And then the other thing that I've used and kind of for different reasons than mister Dye, you know, going back to talking about barnbug or that bailout that I'm leaving, leaving a player. You know, a lot of very good players will play very conservative golf when they see something difficult up ahead, and you know, you don't use that against them necessarily, but you know, if I build a golf course where you can just
hit it straight at the flag eighteen times. Somebody having a good day is going to hit it close to the flag an awful lot, and more power to them. But if I can get them a little scared to hit it right at the flag because the green has tilt in it and they don't want to be past the hole, or because there's some contra that they don't want to hit, or because there's a bailout and it
would be easier to just take the bailout. You know, those are the only things that keep people from shooting sixty four all the time, the great players, if somebody does, I don't have a problem with it, but I don't want it to.
Be easy for Yeah, i'd agree with that.
It's when you see these guys on tour get it going, it's I mean.
Oh yeah, somebody told me. You know, Gary Woodland went to Dismal River like the week before the Open at Chambers Bay because you wanted to play on fescue. And one of the three days he was there, he show fifty nine on my course, and I'm like, okay, he's a great player, all right, you know, eleven under par more power to.
Him that will do it.
For Part one of Golf Course Architecture one on one, Part two will be posted next week. If you're new to the podcast, be sure to subscribe on iTunes or your podcast provider of your choice,