Yolk with Doak 10: The Loop

about architecture different courses around the world. Really great resource to help you travel smarter. So, without further ado, here is the latest episode of The Yoke with Dok.

He built several like private estate courses for the Rothschilds and like the richest families in Europe and Britain. And most of them were not eighteen hole golf courses. Some of them were nine holes, some of them were six holes, some of them were just three holes. And you know, having three holes in your backyard would be kind of cool, and it'd be very you know, it's a lot better than trying to keep maintaining eighteen holes in your backyard.

But by the same token, would get pretty boring after a while to just play the same three holes over and over again. So instead of just you know, putting in different tees and having multiple teas, or even putting in alternate greens, he tried to design one that you could play forwards and backwards, in the holes would be

really different. And he put this little illustration in the back of his book of how that worked, like a triangle of holes and how how the you know, the fairways would like stop and start again, and so you were hop into completely different places when you came back the other direction, and it was really neat. It just

looked fascinating. And you know, I don't know that if that was the actual plan for one of the estate courses that he built, or it was just a doodle that he did of you know, here's how you could do it. But I you know, I saw that when I was like twenty years old and thought I'd be cool to do someday something like that. So it kind of always been in the back of my mind of that would be cool to do someday. But you know, where would that even where where would that make any

sense at all? You know, who would want that? And what kind of land would that work on? Clearly there's some kinds of you know, the more dramatic the land is, the harder it is to do that, and the less you'd want to do it, you know, when you're you know, part of golf course architecture is like trying to lay out holes. So you're you're walking through the property a

certain way and you're looking at the best views. So to say, okay, now I'm going to flip that all on its head and do it exactly backwards from the way I set it up for everybody. That doesn't make a lot of sense on its face. So it would only really, it only really makes sense on a property that's kind of dull. You know, you don't have a lot of great views. You don't have like big up

and down features. You know. The more the more if you had sand dunes in the way, or you're playing up and over hills, you would inevitably have some blind shots. You know, like you could play up and over go in one direction and have have you just getting to the landing area when you got to the top of

the hill. But unless the whole was exactly twice that long, when you're coming back the other way, the hill would be one hundred yards in front of the tee and you could and see anything over the top of it, and nobody would think that was very good. So I kind of decided, well, the only piece of land that would make sense on would have to be pretty flat, you know.

like a electrical engineer. He was a chip maker in Silicon Valley. That's where he got the money to give the Texas Tech to build a golf course. And I thought, I don't know him that well, but this might appeal to him. He's got that kind of brain. I think that's why it appealed to me. But he was not

interested in it. Mostly, you know, I warned him that if we did it that way, it was going to be hard to make it pretty because you know, it was hard to make the backgrounds work two different directions, so it would be hard to landscape it and make it really look pretty. And it, you know, that site was not very pretty. To start with, so he was concerned that it just wouldn't look good enough, so we tabled it and built the golf course that we did.

I didn't think much about it again for a while, other than everybody around me had seen that concept and they were like, well, that'd be really cool to do that someday. And then you know, I kind of stumble into going to interview for this job to do a new course at Forrest Dudentes. It was actually I was They put me in the Michigan Golf Hall of Fame, and I went down for the like induction ceremony and

it had give a little speech. I was talking about how, you know, at the beginning of my career, I didn't want to be labeled a Michigan architect, and I wanted to get out and do things in other places so I wouldn't get type cast as just working around here. But you know, now that I'd been traveling all over the world the last twenty years, I'd really love to

do a couple more projects close to home. And a bunch of friends that I've known for twenty five years were in the audience, and two of them went from there up to some event at Forest Dunes, and the managers started talking about how, oh they're looking at do another golf course. And these guys are like, you've got to talk to Tom. You know, they talked to a couple other architects already. For whatever reason, they weren't thinking a call in me. I think they thought I'd be

too high priced or something. And these guys were like, no, no, no, we just you know, we just came from We just saw him. He was just talking about how he'd like to do another course in Michigan. So you've got to talk to him. So I went over there to look at the ground and it was almost exactly the kind of ground I thought would work good for this concept. You know, it was relatively flat. There were some little like valleys through it in places, but nothing's sticking up

real big. It was all sandy, which helps because you don't have to worry about you know, you don't have to create the area outside the fair way. You can let it go and it's still playable, so you don't have to build it super wide in both directions. Necessarily. There were some trees, but they weren't like you know, there weren't like a bunch of huge, beautiful oak trees that were going to get in the way come in

one way or the other. So I'm just and I'm just looking at and there weren't views off the property very much. I'm just walking around thinking, this kind of looks like that kind of property. So then I sat down with the owner, Lou Thompson, who had bought Forest Students out of bankruptcy, basically bought it for bought the whole place for not much money, and you know, so, but he hadn't developed it. This was the first time

he was going to develop a golf course. He just stumbled into owning this golf course that had a bunch of extra acreage and it looked like it made sense to build another course. So he hadn't He didn't know anything about the process really, So he's interviewing architects and he's like, you know, so he's not from the golf business, and he's not you know, he's not your typical client.

He's not answering questions the same way most do. You know, most clients, when I ask him what they want, they tell me all the things that are on Golf Digest list of what makes a great golf course. Lou didn't know to do that. You know, I asked him what he wanted and he said two things. He said, the reason I'm doing this is to get people to stay here and play again the next day. You know, I have the one golf course, but it's kind of on the way from Detroit to Gaylord where all the other

golf courses are. So people just stop through here and play and then they leave. They don't even stay and have a drink, they don't stay for dinner. So this place just loses crazy money in the clubhouse because nobody sticks around. So I want, you know, I want people to stay here. We'll build some more lodging and that's the goal, is to get people to just stay here instead of going up to Gailor. And he said, and

I want something that's going to wow people. And I'm looking at like, well, it's not gonna wow people with this site. You know, the site's not that spectacular. But this concept that I've had for years in the back of my head, if I could pull that off, that would that would wow people. And this guy is just far enough removed from the golf business you might actually get that and go with it. So I didn't tell

him right away, came back to the office. We started trying to rout a golf course kind of in the normal way. But you know, while I'm while we're doing it, I'm thinking, well, you know this is going to work backwards too, how can we make it work backwards? So you can't, really, you don't. You can't route it both ways at the same time. You got to kind of work on a routing for one way, but then think through, Okay, that's not going to work backwards. I'll have to change

this or that in order to make it work. So Don and I played around with that, and then I went back over there to you know, formally interview and show him my idea, and I just we had the maps rolled up and I unrolled him and I and I was showing him the one way around, just talking about it. I got all done, and he goes, well, that looks good, but you know, you said you're going to do something really different, and I don't see what's

really different about that. And I pulled the one map off and had the other map underneath showing how you played it backwards, and said, well, it's also designed to be played backwards. The next day, and everybody in the room sat there kind of half stunned for about two minutes. Well, they were trying to understand what that meant. And as soon as they understood what it meant, they were like, this is what we wanted to do.

but also haul in the feed. So he hauls the feed to the turkeys, he hauls the turkeys to the processing plant, he hauls the turkeys from the processing plant to stores, and he just keeps making loops back and forth, so the truck's always full.

Could you know? Couldn't you have figured it out that you know, there's there's always a bet, you know, which is better the first hole on the black course or the eighteenth hole on the Red course that comes back the other way. Why wouldn't you choose the best out of every one of those and put them together a because those don't fit together. You know, it's not that simple. You have to have a routing that connects a bunch

of things. So so it's not like if you know, if you made me, if you made me, what are the what are the five best holes there now? Or ten best holes there now? For sure some of them would be the same fairway playing in both directions, or the same green played from two different angles. So you can't really get that's way if you work on routings enough.

There are always concessions in routing a golf course. I don't think we really made a lot more concessions to get it to be reversible, not as many as everybody thinks. I mean, there's just there's better parts of the land and there's parts that aren't quite as cool, but you have to use them both. So I don't think that we gave up that much to do it. And I was and I was perfectly willing to make those trade offs in order to do whatever trade offs I was making.

It's like, if I can make this work in both directions and people think it's cool in both directions, that's great, then the other the other more our practical question is, you know, how much do you have to manipulate it so one way around isn't a lot better than the other way around, because at the end of the day, if one way around is much better than the other way around, the demand will be way higher for that

and they'll abandon playing at reversible. You know the old course of Saint Andrew's is that Originally at the old course you were playing out to one flag on a green and back to the same flag on the same green. And then it got a little too busy for that, so they widened out the greens and they made the double greens. But when they did that, they didn't have a clear which was the way to go. Do you start up number one or do you start back down

number eighteen? And they did both for several years. I don't know how they decided when to alternate them, but they did both for several years. And supposedly at least one of the opens played in Saint Andrew's in the eighteen hundreds was played backwards from the present golf course. So I knew that history. That wasn't where I got the idea, but I knew the history, and I understood, now,

why isn't the old course that way? Anymore because everybody wants to play the road hole, and everybody wants to play eleven that way. All the famous the three or four famous holes that everybody's got like in their mind, I'm going there to see this. They're all based on going down the right side off at number one and coming back up the right side, going coming back up

seventeen and eighteen. So there's you know, they do, or they did for a little while, introduced playing the golf course backwards for a couple of days a year in the spring. They pretty much gave that up. Well, they gave it up a long time ago because nobody wanted to play it that way anymore. You know, once everybody got familiar with the road hole and the other famous holes, that was the kiss of death for the other way around.

around a day or two later. And and it happened to be while we were working on the Renaissance Club. So Don and I and Eric did that because after we talked about it it for Texas Tech, and I was always curious about it. I didn't think it would work that well. And you know, I know the old course really well. So I think Donald vouched that there were a couple holes. It was really almost impossible figure out what to do if I didn't know what was in the fairway coming the other way, because you do.

There are really holes that you know, they'd abandon playing that way for so long that they'd stop mowing some patches that were important, like they stopped mowing the off the back of the green that you needed to bounce it on, or you know, they don't. You know, you're hitting over bushes off the tee now, but they're in the approach if you're playing it backwards. So it was kind of awkward.

that you get really attached to. The one hole that your listeners could visualize really easily that's a really good hole is if you're playing at backwards, the very first hole is playing from from you're really playing from one te across, you know, down the left side into eighteen fairway more and then into the back of the road green. So now the roads on the left, the bunkers on the right, you know what's normally the front part of the green is still sticking out behind the green to

the right. You know, it'd be a great hole, except it's the first hole and it's a brutal.

it's not a short part four. Go in both directions. One hole might be a long part four, but the hole coming in the other way might be a part three or a short part four or something different. Yeah, that's actually one of the things that makes it more interesting than people give it credit for it because you're you're playing the same lengths of holes overall, but you're not playing the same length the hole end of the same green.

what I don't like about this way. So if I did it again, I do I could do something better. But you know, like I said at the beginning, it's like not nearly every site lends itself to this. I mean, it's just funny. You know Lou Thompson who got into this by buying up a distressed golf course. You know, like almost after we were done with the golf course, he he called me and said, I'm looking at this other distress course. Could you see if it works for

a reversible course? And it was something in Las Vegas, So I like got it up on Google Earth and I'm looking at it. I'm like, Lou, like the eighteenth you'd be playing backwards down the eighteenth hole into a narrow spot and then have to hit it across a road to the seventeenth gree you know, because it was a development golf course. Was like, there's absolutely no way in the world you could reverse that. He was like, oh, okay, but there's a ton of pieces of land that would won't work for it.

have regular repeat play all the time. Would that environment be one that you would consider doing a reversible course for sure?

it's over hyped. I'm out of luck. And you know, if you have two or three or four courses, the odds of you not liking any of them get a lot less. You're not taking as big a risk. So you know, for los deal, you know it's not just that course and backwards, but he's also got the other one next door that you could play if you don't really like mine, So it's kind of a good deal.

You're right that. I mean, it's certainly an acquired taste, and it's certainly I mean the first time people play it, and the first time they play it backwards, they're confused. They don't really the coolest reaction I've had to it, I've had it from a lot of people. I didn't really expect it is. It's so different. I didn't even realize it is the same piece of ground, you know, he said, I knew, But once you get out there, you're like, how did how did this hole work the

other way around? I can't really piece it together. You know. It's because it's it's the next day, and it's hard to remember what you played the day before. Exactly when we were building it, before it opened, I would take people out and play two or three holes and then turn right around and play the same holes backwards, so they had just played it and then they could kind

of get it. But the way it's presented now, it's not as easy to piece together in your brain, how this hole is flipped over for tomorrow or how it was yesterday. You know, to me, that's That's the cool thing about it is you know the people who you know, some people will just go right over there. Some people don't care it's two different golf courses. They don't. You know, they're not that interested in architecture, so they don't. So they're just judging the Red Course for the Red Course,

the Black Horse for the Black Corse. They either like it or they don't. They love it or they you know, it's more polarizing. They either love it or they move on. But the people that like it get really interested in it, and they're going to come back a bunch. And you know, that's what everybody in the golf business really needs is repeat business. So having a golf course, it's like, this is cool, and I still can't quite figure it out yet.

You know, that's the enduring power of Saint Andrew's and and there's no reason that can't work at the resort course level. You just have to understand that a certain amount of people aren't going to care for it and move on. But that's true for every new course. You know, I could build whatever, a certain percentage of people are gonna be like, that's not my thing. I'm never going back there. You know, you just hope you catch on with enough people that it works. And the one thing

I hadn't thought about. You know, one of the people that came to the Renaissance Cup is my friend Michael Yamaki, who's the manager of Riviera, very sharp business guy. We were sitting at dinner after he played it the second way around and he was like, you realize what you've done. I said, I don't know what you're talking about. He said, you only have to find half as many people that

are interested in this course because they'll all play. You know, if they're interested, they're all going to play it the second way around. So ten thousand interested people equals twenty thousand rounds of golf. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I've never really thought about it that way.

were good starting points. But then it also those things bred all kinds of things that you didn't really have answers to or questions you didn't really even think about. And I think for Tom and the rest of us that got to be a part of it. It was cool because there were so many things that were not conventional in this routing puzzle that we've had this discussion about because they're just so exclusive to this situation. They're just so different. They're not just parallel there by a

track or two. They're going literally and figuratively one hundred and eighty degrees the other way. And I remember little little dialogues with Tom and with Brian Slanik, who ran the job, and Brian and Eric as they were getting this stuff built, and one of the things myself, you know, you have these preconceived notions, well, the Greens are going to have to be big. You got to have big putting surfaces right in order to be able to play it from both directions and for it to be different.

And that you know, Tom should certainly chime in, but I remember that Tom's saying, no, they don't have to

be big, they can actually be smaller. And that was by virtue of you know, the approaches and the short grass and the soil structure and how the ball behaved around the greens as long as you had a playing surface that behaved like a putting surface in plenty of area in around, you know, on the green quote unquote green proper and also the approaches and the you know, when you short side yourself all of that kind of thing. You don't really have to have a big green, You

just need a lot of green like area. And so you know, you end up not really decorating a green in sight with bunkers. You know, what you end up doing is really focusing on contour and contour and short grass, which we talked about all the time. That's one of the coolest hazards in golf. It isn't a ravine or a bunker or a pond or a quarry. It's the greatest hazard in golf is really interesting contour and really tight firm turf. And that was I think that was fun.

I know it had to be fun for Tom because that is such a departure from what you normally would would do. And and you know that's just one example, but I you know, how you wayfind around this. This golf course too was a real challenge, you know, and how the golf course is set up is really important, and you know, there was a vertical learning curve almost for you know, Lou and his staff to make sure that the team markers where they were supposed to be.

You know, so there were a lot of there are a lot of residual challenges that you really had to spend some brain cells on in order to figure out to make sure that it worked, so that it wasn't perceived as this you know, experimental, you know, kooky idea, but that it was really legitimate and it really presented really interesting golf and fun golf and playable golf, and it wasn't just odd. It was actually really really really

very interesting. And you know, that's just one. But other notions were the idea that you know, like Tom had alluded to, when you're in a conventional golf course, all that leftover ground where the ball, the lion's share of the time is in the air, off the tee and then coming to you know, one hundred yards pick your distance, one hundred yards, one hundred and twenty five fifty yards. You don't really need to do a whole lot to

that stuff. You don't need to irrigate it. You know, you can leave it natural because it's sort of out of play. But when you flip a golf hole around come in the other direction, that stuff that got relatively no attention was now getting a tremendous amount of attention because it was in the approach coming the other way.

So you know, we really had to work hard. It's fun to listen to Tom talk about this because the things that he pointed out in this case really are are far reaching into the other parts about you know, the twenty seven hole course or the extra whole course and people, you know, how they process it in their mind and which courses which and all of that. So there were and how to manage cart traffic is a

huge one. It always is on a golf course that plays in one direction, but now when you're taking that golfer traffic, especially when they're behind the wheel, and managing where all that baggage goes in a normal around to golf with people playing golf in a cart, which we don't subscribe to, but you have to, you have to integrate it at some point. That was tough.

that came completely out of left field to me. I was not thinking we would get get away with that.

what you're gonna do so. I just in Detroit Motor City. That's the culture up here, so I figured that was going to be a pretty hard cell to try to get people to walk. And I think, you know, the place is doing well, but it's it's not as busy as the other course. And I think that's why as people, you know, everybody plays it is interested by it. But if they can't ride, there's a certain number of people that are just like, ah, I can't do that, you know, I just can't do that. And it's an easy walk.

The Green to Tea is right there, and it's relatively flat, so it's about as easy a walk as you could have. But but it's still there's some people that just aren't open to that, and and they're filling up rooms over there, so the other you know, so the course that you have to walk is not as full.

to feel like you're you're not golf fatigued. You're not you know, you're not tired, and that that's a good thing because that makes you hopefully want to play a little bit more as well. And you know when people go to play golf and band and or other places, you know, I guess that's part of the the whole idea of short courses and things, you know, to play operate golf after the big course or after the round. I still want to play, but I'm kind of tired.

whichever one you did. You know, when you got to the thirty first of the month and then the first, so there's a couple months that you wouldn't have at you know, those days you could try to set up okay, this is special, we're going to do a shotgun or something. So you could play both ways and have a few days of a year where you could try to do that. But I hope they do.

about how that played backwards. So a ton of people just assumed we were going to have these big double greens that you could play into from different directions, and they were huge double greens. They were going to be huge double greens like Saint Andrews. And I was really stubborn about that. From day one. I'm like, well, if you had to have greens that big, then nobody's going to do this concept. If you have to mow five acres of greens to make this work, that's a lot

more expense. Who wants to do that? So from day one, I told these guys, whatever else we do, these greens can't be any bigger than every other project we do. In fact, I'm gonna beyond you to keep these small as small as we can get away with. But then you know, and it's funny because the first, the first question people asked me when we were building, the question that I got all the time was how can that

work without double greens? Isn't somebody getting get hit going the other direction, and I'm like everybody, no, you're not playing both ways at the same time. You know, the holes going out to the end and the holes coming back aren't necessary. They don't have to be as close together as Saint Andrew's. The greens can be separate. You only have to worry about, you know, you only have to worry about one direction at a time. So it's

you know, there's there's no fear for that. But then the thing that makes it so different that I didn't realize, you know, where I fell into thinking wrong about it was even though you know, I thought, I thought, well, it's better if we keep going the same direction, like

Saint Andrews goes where you go. When you're going out, you just step off to the right of the green, and the next fairy keeps going that way, and it's easy to keep the flow if you turn ninety degrees all of a sudden, like the old course does at the end. Now you've either got a crossover, or you've got you know, or you've got an awkward tee that's like you're needing to hit over a green or something to make the angle work. And so we were better off the more we kept playing straight down the line,

the better it was. And that was one of the things when I first saw the piece of land, I thought, oh, well, number one, because of the way they built the first course and where the clubhouse was, they couldn't really go They couldn't have returning nines. It was kind of gonna have to be out and back. So that that made the concept work, and then you know, it was kind

of a long out and back. Basically, the course basically starts by the back of the clubhouse where the parking lot is, and with a couple of jogs, it works its way around the property line to almost where the entrance gate is, is where the ninth green is, and it comes back. And so I thought it was going to be better if it was like Saint Andrews and

you just kept going the same direction. And then I realized when we tried to do that on paper, that wasn't very long, and I said, oh, okay, So to get enough length after number six, instead of going around the property line, you know, we kind of had to go from six back into the interior of the property for seven and eight back out toward the boundary again, and then nine along the boundary, and those turned out to be some of the best holes. Versible part work better.

You know, when you when you had all the holes that are like approaching from one hundred and eighty degrees opposite, you keep having the same problem of how do you make a green that's receptive from both directions because they're dead opt to see each other. Like like if the greens, if the green's tilted side to side, that works fine. But if the greens like front to back or back to front one way, it's front to back the other way.

And you know, people with where the hole where green goes away from you, people have a hard time with that, you know. But the other because you don't see it very well, you know. So we wound up with several greens that are kind of crowned in the middle, so you see some of it coming into the front. But then if you fly it to the middle of the green are past it's like on the downsloping out the back.

It's amazing how many times on on the loop, especially when it was new, you'd see people like hit it thirty yards over the green because once they carry to the middle of the green, it hits on a downslope and there's nothing but fairway going out the other way for the approach for the next hole. So they just, you know, way through the green like more than I'd ever seen anywhere. It's not quite as firm as it was on opening day, so that's that's softening up a

little bit, but there's still it's repetitive. You don't want it to be repetitive. When the holes are when the two holes are coming into the green ninety degrees apart or something like that, you know, not exactly ninety degrees, but something like that. It's amazingly more interesting because you could do the simplest thing, like if you just build a rectangular green, the one direction it's long and skinny, the other direction it's wide and shallow. Yeah, and it

doesn't look like the same green at all. And not only that, but with those two directions, the background looks completely different. You're not looking just down the golf course anymore. You could be looking at you know, one direction, you'll be looking at a wall of trees behind the green, which I didn't think we could even do when we started routing the golf course. But if the other holes come in ninety degrees to that, yeah, you can do that,

you know. It's just like having a wall of trees at the very end of the ninth hole at Saint Andrew's. But you can do it anywhere in the middle too. So that's what makes the Those are the holes that really make it feel completely different when you play it when you turn around the next day. And I had not figured that out at the start. It wasn't until I had to make the routing that way. As soon as I had to make the routing that way and I put it on we put it on paper, it

was like, oh, this is going to be better. All we have to do is figure out what to do with the teas so they don't conflict with you. You know, the tea going the one way doesn't conflict with the tea going the other way. We basically had to give up on using the same tea for both directions, and that was a big leap, just giving up on using the same tea. Because there's eighty eight the short grass there.

You could stick to tea markers anywhere out there and have a golf hole, and we're used to doing that.

We're more and more in the last ten or twelve years, we've built like we most short grass like off the green, past the green and over to the next tee, so you don't leave short grass between green and tea, which is you know, I got that idea from Saint Andrews, and I got that idea from this map of the Valley Club on the wall, because that's the way they gang mode the fairway and the gang mode right over to the next tea in the old days, you know,

so that we'd already been doing stuff just like that, you know. So we're basically just building fairway on two different sides of the greens and building enough little flat places in it that you could tee off from either side from a.

turf before, just because we build it really wide. This one, even building it a little narrower, is eighty five acres of turf, So you know, you're you're irrigating maybe twenty more acres, So that's another couple hundred thousand dollars maybe in construction budget, like you don't but you don't have to build the greens any bigger, so there's no extra cost there, you know, And you're maintaining twenty more acres of fairway. So that's you know, again the green well,

but it's not, but it's not, but it's not. I mean, fairway maintenance is only a fraction of the budget, and that's it's not the most expensive part. I mean, the greens maintenance is the most expensive part. That's why making the greens bigger is a bit you know, That's why I wanted to stay away from that. I knew the fairways would be more acreage to maintain, but at the end of the day, you know, there's a there's like

zero mode rough to deal with. You know. Essentially, we're taking some areas that we probably would have had to grass and take care of as rough and turning them into fairway. So it might add ten percent to the maintenance budget or fifteen percent, but I know, I mean, we're also using fescue, which is not as high a cost per acre as bank grass. You know, forest dunes.

I haven't seen the numbers, but I almost guarantee you that they spend less maintaining the Loop than they do the wise cof course next door, which is all you know, it's not it's not as much fairway acreage, but it's bank grass fairways, tightly maintained, super high end maintenance. I'll bet they spend more money on that.