Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak. In today's episode, Tom and I discussed Michigan golf with longtime Renaissance golf design associate Don Placik. As a reminder, if you're interested in learning more about golf course architecture, check out Tom's books, The Little Red Book on Golf Course Architecture and The Confidential Guides. Now here's the latest episode of The Yoke with Doake.
Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back. But don't toss the Yolk and the famously candid Oak doesn't pull any punches. How do I make natural looking contour? Hire the biggest pool in the village and told them to get flat first?
Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years. If you were going to split ten rounds of golf in Michigan and you can't play any course more than twice, how would.
It go in all of Michigan including private clubs.
Yeah, we'll do this for private and public because I'll take the Michigan course Michigan golf trip.
Question also okay, and I should I should preface my answer to this question with the I've been playing all over the world the last few years for my book, and I barely played any golf in Michigan. You know, a lot of the courses in Detroit I played with Fred Muller like twenty years ago, and I really haven't played very many of them since then. It's just I
stopped through Detroit Airport a whole lot. But I don't play golf in Detroit hardly ever, So I might not be the best or most up to date guy to answer this question, but I do have my favorites. So if I just have to distribute ten rounds and it's like any course public or private, I'm definitely playing Crystal Downs twice, which fortunately I get to do anyway as a member. I'm definitely playing Oakland Hills twice. I think that's one of the best golf courses in the world
because it's got a great set of greens. They're hard, but I love that set of greens. So I'm gonna give that twice. Who I'll give the Loop twice because it's not the same golf course one each way. So that's now I'm up to six, and now I've got to think about, what are the four other places that I really want to get in there. One is Belvidere and Charlevoi, where we've consulted a little bit. Used to play the Michigan Amateur on it every year. It's a
summer club. They've got a membership, but the membership's only around for like a couple months in the middle of summer. The rest of the time you can get on it pretty easily. You know. It's just a nice rolling piece of farmland that they turned into a low key golf course, but again, really good set of greens and just a really low key place. That's what more courses in northern Michigan should be like, and unfortunately they aren't very much like that at all. After that, the Dunes Club in
New Buffalo just barely in Michigan only nine holes. Maybe that's only a half half, but I don't know if there's another nine home. Of course I can stick in here.
Somebody else is a nine of somewhere around the front nine out Lost Dunes.
We'll make that number eighth. You know, I hate to I don't. I have a lot of fun at Lost Dunes, you know, it's it was one of the first private clubs I've built, and I've gotten to go back there a lot because it's close to home, and it's you know, some people don't like it because the greens are really wild. But but once you know the golf course, it's a really interesting golf course. You always have to think about which side can I miss on and still make par?
And it's not that simple. You know, you have to know the golf course to know that. But the Dunes Club, which my Kaiser built before. You know, I saw the Dunes Club when it was brand new, and I was like, who built this? And it wasn't just who was the architecture, It's like who who wanted to do this little nine hole golf course there? And a couple of people I knew, said Mike Kaiser. And then you know when I heard
he was looking at something in Oregon. That's that's how I knew I wanted to work for Mike Kaiser because that golf course was pretty outside the box for what was getting built in in America and in miss Get in particular, fifteen twenty years ago. That's twenty five years ago, because my son was like a newborn when we were when we stopped in to look so cool place. So I'm up to eight.
Yet two rounds left. I'm trying to down your next.
I'm trying to think what else, you know. I've played a lot of the other courses near Detroit once or twice. I would say my next favorite was Franklin Hills, and I've not played Franklin Hills since they restored it ten years ago or fifteen years ago, whenever that was. It was a great you know, it's not far from Oakland Hills. It's very under the radar course because there's a Jewish club and they never hosted any big tournaments or anything like that. But a really good piece of land for golf.
So I would say there, and as much as anything because I'm curious to see how well the restoration turned out.
I heard they have a cool volcano green there.
Yeah, there's a there's a little short part four like uh, it's like under three hundred yards and it's it's not like a volcano hole where they took a bunch of fill and put a green. It's like it plays up a hill, you know, so you're you're going uphill fairway and then a little even more abruptly uphill to the green. But it's it's a natural peak on the on the land, so it's you know, maybe twenty five feet uphill, but it just feels like you're playing up to the sky.
And because it's such a short part, for it's a tiny green surrounded by trouble, and it's you know, you could take driver and try to smash it into the bunkers or something, get up and down that way. You got to hit a good second shot to stay on
it no matter what you do. And then for the tenth I'd probably go with something that I haven't played yet, whether it's meadow Brook, the restoration a meadow or I don't know, it's not a restoration the redesign of Meadowbrook in Detroit, which I haven't but i've heard great things about, or the one that I always wanted to play in is just too far away from here. There's there's there's a course called the Gales right straight across the state from here, in like Oscota and Alpina, that area, like
on Lake Huron. It's a it's a resort. They've actually got they've got two courses. They got one that they tried to make pine valley style. I can't remember what that one's called even, And then they've got this open thing that they tried to shape up like a Lynks course that they call the Gals after Western Gales, and some of the golf pros around here that I know really liked it when it when it opened, they were like,
that's really cool. They said, it's not. It doesn't really play like a Lynx as much as you wanted to, but it was really cool that they just did something out of nothing. So I've always been to get over and see that, but it's three hours away on a bad road. You know. Forest Dunes is like less than half the distance and it's right all the way, So I never get passed there to go see it. But if you could get if you could arrange for a helicopter or a private plane, we go over and check it out.
I'm working on the plane. I think I'm further away than I've ever been.
Me too.
Well, listening to Tom's roster, you know, i'd be to be honest, I'd be hard pressed to really come up with anything much different. And part of it is because, you know, in the time I've worked for Tom in the last twenty or twenty plus years, you know, anytime
we're in Michigan and get to Plague golf. We you know, we gravitate to try and get to the downs for the same reason that reasons that Tom does, so don't I don't know that I that my list would would be much different, But I would say, in listening to Tom's answers, I think I wish there was more. You know, the places Tom described are special and cool, and you know, spots you want to get to if you have the opportunity,
no question about it. But I also think in the time that I've lived in Michigan, I've watched, especially up north up here where there used to be just a whole slew of man Pa nine and even some eighteen hole golf courses that were able to sustain themselves. You know, there was the golf season short, but there was enough of an interest that you could go to these places,
and there were lots of them. And then, of course, you know, with what the economy has experienced in the last decade or so, a lot of those are gone now. And it's it's unfortunate because I think, you know, some of the most fun I've ever had playing golf isn't on a great golf course. It's just playing golf with people whose company you really enjoy and laughing and hitting
shots and and just having that experience. I'm I'm really lucky because a lot of the fun golf that I have played has been in a lot of the places, not just some of the best stuff in Michigan, but all over the world. And but it's, uh, you know, the thing that the thing that makes that really special isn't just the architecture, it's the people you're playing golf with.
And it you know that we talk a lot about, gosh, what can we do to make golf more affordable and accessible and sustainable, And that's a that's a popular topic, but it's it's not easy to figure out. It's a it's a it's a hard question to try and solve. So you know, the I would like to play more golf on the really cheap, accessible golf courses, not just
in Michigan but everywhere. And and you know, it's a good reminder that golf can be really fun if if the company is is fun too, and you know, there's a place in golf for that. And it's a it's a good compliment to all the great places that Tom
described that you should play in Michigan as well. And if you you know, anyone's listening and gets to play some of these places, keep your eyes peeled for those one offs that are three miles down the road that is not on any map, and maybe give those a whirl too, And they're a nice compliment to all the stuff that Tom listed for sure.
Yeah, I mean I think you know, I've never been to Muskegon Country Club, which is supposedly a really good Donald Ross course. It's about an hour further from here than Crystal Downs. Is you know, it's a frog question for me. I mean, I pay four thousand dollars a year to belong to Crystal Downs, and I play out like six times, So it's really hard to justify skipping one of those six times to go an hour further
to play something else. But there's a lot of good golf here, and it's not necessarily all the places that they promote as the golf Mecca or whatever. You know, There's just there's a lot of interesting land up here. It's a beautiful place to build a golf course. That's one of the reasons I got here.
Dustin McCann has a question that's based off of Crystal Downs and most people listening probably haven't played Crystal Downs, but it's a gorgeous site. Is there anything that can be done in the game to bring back the concept of building artistically strategic public golf courses for a modest amount of money that would be similar to Crystal Downs? And he's assuming that it didn't take a big cost to build Crystal Downs.
No, it wouldn't have taken a big cost to build Crystal Downs because it's on a really interesting, undulating piece of ground. Funny enough, it's you know, like all the houses of Crystal Downs overlook like Michigan, they're on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. The golf course never actually touches the bluff. They wouldn't they wouldn't let him go there. They had already, you know, they had already sold most
of that land. When Mackenzie showed up, they had a little nine hole course and they laid out the lots and then they said, oh, well, let's get bringing him into like make the golf course better. But it's like, no, you can't go there. We've already you know, that's where we're making our money. We've already done that, So yes, you can't. You know, That's what high point was supposed to be. Take a good piece of land, build a golf course for a modest budget, open it for forty
five dollars green fees. That's what we talked about when we started building it. You Know, the one thing I didn't understand about the golf business was, you know, obviously I was trying to make the golf course as good as I could make it. I didn't want it to just be thought of as, oh, it's a good forty five dollars golf course. So I'm you know, I thought it was a really good piece of land, and I'm talking to the client like, you know, this is going to be very good. I think it's going to be
very good. And other people around the project were like, oh yeah, this is good. Oh yeah, you could charge more than forty five dollars for this. You could charge
seventy or eighty four. So by the time we got the golf course done and they were ready to open, it had morphed away from being affordable and it was an eighty dollars golf course, you know, while still being you know, being predicated on the idea that they could maintain it for a forty five or fifty dollars kind of green fee, but they weren't really you know, we talked about what the maintenance budget would be, and just because they went to eighty didn't mean they were going
to jack up the maint and it's budget a lot more to keep up with it. So they, you know, they instantly got off track of what they'd been talking about at the beginning. And that's that's what happens. When people say, why don't you build more affordable golf courses? I'm like, well, there's this, there's this, there's this middle man the owner, and the owners incentive really isn't to keep the thing as cheap as you positively can. It's like,
how can I make more money off this? You know, and and it's easy for them to just I even the simplest thing is, well, if we could make the same amount of money by charging more and having less people on it, that would be more attractive to me because then I could go out and play golf whenever I wanted to. So, you know, unfortunately, you know, the idea of building a new course and making it an affordable golf course, if it works, that's you know, if
it's successful, it's not going to stay affordable. The affordable golf courses are the mom and pop places like Don's talking about that. They because they have no capital in it. You know, the capital costs were thirty years ago and they've forgotten about that by now. They can just afford to operate on whatever cost to maintain the golf course, plus a little bit for themselves. That's a completely for an equation than trying to pay off how much you
just spent building the golf course. Plus you're you know, you're just you know, any new course, you're just hyping the crap out of it opening it. You get all this publicity trying to make it sound good. You want to charge more if you can possibly charge more. And only client we've ever had that was different than that was common ground for the Colorado Golf Association.
So they were a nonprofit, the nonprofit, that's what I was going to say.
Ground, Well, even common ground even as a nonprofit because they have all the Caddy Foundation things that they've got going on, they still would like to make money for all their charitable endeavors now, so there is a little upward pressure on the green feet. But there their mission statement in the beginning. What they told us was, Okay, this is a forty five dollars golf course and we've saved up four million dollars to redo it, and we want to make at the best forty five dollars golf
course in town. We don't, you know, we're not trying to compete with the seventy five dollar courses and you know, and take business away from the seventy five dollar courses. We want this to be truly affordable for everybody that belongs to the Colorado Golf Association. And and we're not in it for we have no profit motive here. But you know that that's one client in my lifetime that that had that attitude.
Yeah, in my head when you were talking about it, I'd never thought about that. It's like, it's impossible for a golf course to be affordable and great almost because the owner, in almost all cases, unless it's a as soon.
As you gets the top hundred list, they'll add one hundred dollars to the green fee the day after. Yeah, So why wouldn't.
You The only possible way would be if it was like somebody that if it was like a nonprofit and that was like their whole mission was building a golf courses that are you know, have good architecture.
I think that was one of the most refreshing things about that project. You know, those that's a one off for sure, that their mandate is that it not just be affordable, that it stay affordable, right, But it is interesting to see the pressures that are coming now because it's been a success. They have many programs, grassroots programs that they're trying to really move forward and advance and
include a lot more people. But those don't operate for nothing, and it's hard to keep the governor turned down for them. I'm sure when they could turn it up based on the demand that they have, but it's it's interesting. I think that's something that's been interesting about golf in the US for a long time is that it's it's our perception that if it's expensive, it's good. Yeah, you know, if it's not expensive, if it didn't cost a lot
to build, they must have cut corners. They probably didn't do as many things as they should have in the experience is going to be commensurate with the green fee, and it's you know, it's a shame that it's like that, but it's very real.
Oh and I you know, I have a great story about that, you know, I mean I grew up on the East Coast and Myrtle Beach golf back in the day. The whole golf holiday thing that they put together was, you know, you call up and get a package and get a tea time on five different golf courses whatever, and stay at ex hotel and the package was the
same price. All the golf courses were the same price, and so you could pick whatever ones you wanted, but they were they cost the same and so the package price was the cost of the package depended entirely on what hotel you wanted to stay at, you know, somewhere a little more and somewhere a little less. My client down there for the legends, Larry Young when he built Oyster Bay and marsh Harbor, those were the first two golf courses that charged a premium. You know, the golf courses.
All they got out of the package was you had to pick cart feet of them directly. They were basically almost given the golf away, where they just got half of what they were charging. Larry was like, I'm trying to build something better, so I'm not gonna go for that. I'm gonna you know, you have to pay an extra ten or twenty dollars to play my courses, which you know, was throwing a monkey engine into the whole system that wasn't really popular down there.
Probably had a lot of enemies in the Myrtle Beach air.
Yah, and especially when he was like, you know, they would try to charge They tried to charge all the all the all the participants in that thing based on how much revenue they did. And he's like, well, my courses successful, so that means I got to pay more to be in the same ad with the guy across the street who gets to pay less to be in the same ad. That doesn't work. So he pulled out of the thing entirely for a while, and you know, he he had kind of an off on again, off
again relationship. But anyway, it got to the point that nobody knew what course to play in Myrtle Beach. And once he broke the barrier of like, oh, I'll charge more, some of the other courses said, well, you know, I mean those COFs courses were so busy that they were in bad shape because they were so busy. Fifty sixty thousand rounds a year, and some of them said, well, why don't we raise the price and do less rounds?
And they raised the price and they got more rounds because once they put their green fee up higher, everybody thought, well, that must be the best one I want to play that. There's there's some economic term for that. There's there's some like economic perceive value. Now it's named after somebody. I just don't remember what the name of it is right now,
but it's absolutely true. You know, if you don't know, if there's thirty golf courses and you don't know the difference between any of them, you will automatically assume that the highest priced one is the best one. So people jack their prices way up to be the highest priced one, because that's how you you know, if you especially most of those courses back then, they didn't really have they
had no signature architect's name. You think about it, Hiring a signature architect is doing the exact same thing, Jack Nicholas, Oh, Jack Nicholas, that must be the best one, you know, regardless of what you know, if you've never seen what he designed, or if you have, Oh Jack Nicholas, So you know it is crazy, but that's yet another reason why keeping a golf course affordable is not what business people will do. It's it's against their interest to do it that way. It's funny.
I always recommend people to go play Ravslow in Chicago because everybody, I mean they probably get ten to fifteen emails a week from people saying where should I play in Chicago? Because I'm from there, and I'm always like, you should play Ravislow. It's like and they're like, they're like, oh, thanks, and then they email me after they're like, I can't believe that place is forty bucks, you know, like it's unbelieved.
I'm like, yeah, it's but instead of going and playing like the two hundred dollars or one hundred and fifty dollars around place, It's like it it's odd to me because in actuality, the high cost is probably they spent a lot of money to build it, and they spend a ton of money to maintain.
It and to promote it.
Yeah, and to promote it.
There's some of them are spending a lot on that too.
Rather than the actual like value of like how is this golf? Like a lot of times, but I find the best architecture in the thirty twenty dollars golf courses in the city.
Sometimes yes, And but the flip side of what you're saying is once the golf course opens, it now no matter, no longer matters what you spent building, because the only thing is it's like how many people are willing to pay X for green fee. They don't care. They don't care how much it costs to build. You know. That's the part where the owner is either like doing great. You know, if it didn't cost that much to build and everybody loves it and you can charge two hundred dollars,
you make a lot of money. The flip side is if you didn't. You know, if you spend a lot to build it and you need to charge one hundred and fifty dollars to break even or pay that off, and people are only willing to pay sixty or eighty, you are doomed. And they have no sympathy for what it costs to build it. They are only comparing it to well, this course costs seventy so and I don't think you're any better, So I don't care what you spend building. But then the really really odd part of
the golf businesses. So that guy who spent way too much to build a golf course and then it fails, he goes. He doesn't necessarily go bankrupt, but he winds up selling for pennies on the dollar to somebody else. And now that guy is in a good position. That guy has something that they spent ten million dollars to build, but he only bought it for one So now he's in a position to make a lot of money and drive the good, modest one out of business because he's
got a lower cost pieces. That's the perverse part of the golf business. Some of the some of the biggest white elephants that have ever been built, wind up still creaming the competition when the second or third owner gets a hold of him for nothing.
I've never thought about that makes total sense, and.
They don't go away. Those are the ones that don't go away because the price, the resale price, just keeps going down until you get to the point where it works.
It's interesting that the economy of golf, you know, from what it the price of eggs to build a golf course, whatever that is, and if you can build it well and cheaply, you're light years ahead of anyone that didn't do it that way. And it's it's interesting. I mean, you you, we all are enamored with the idea of golf being accessible and affordable, but you know, whoever is writing the checks to get our playing fields built and open for us are not gonna disregard what the market
will bear. And if the market bears a high green fee, you can ask them to be do us all a favor and don't charge us so much, but you know, the likelihood of that happening isn't very good. It's like a lot of places that you see in areas where the economy is starting to emerge and you need you need labor and there's no affordable housing for people, but there's a lot of development going on, and you're you, you can't require developers to please build affordable housing for
the labor force. They're going to build and get what they can out of their investment. So it's it's a very difficult pendulum to swing back the other way.
So we touched on high point and we got a question about high point from Brian Hilco. He wants to know what is high point on the Doke scale. If it existed today.
I think I rateed it a seven or eight in my book way back, and that was probably a point above where it should have been. But I really miss it. You know, I've had three or four of my courses close. That's the only one that I really truly missed, partly because it's the only golf course I did where I shaped all eighteen greens by myself. You know, others of my projects, I've done some of them, but that's the only one that I did.
All of them.
And it was a really nice piece of land for golf. I mean, I just really liked how to fit together. It was kind of hard to walk, you know. I went out they still hadn't torn up the land for the back nine as of a year ago. So I took a writer out there a year ago and just walked some of the back nine with him, Like, you know, there's no grass left. It kind of looks like the piece of land that I started with. It's really weird, but it kind of looks like the piece of land
that I started with again. And when we walked it, I was like, shit, this is a lot harder to walk than I remember. And I was like, duh, I was like twenty eight when I built this. You know, I'm fifty six, so my perception has changed a little bit. I can relate to what other people thought of how hard it was to walk, but you know, it was different and that was worth a lot. You know, it
got ranked in some of the early rankings. You know, just barely made a list of this or that back in the day, and it wouldn't now because I've done so many other good courses and it's clearly not as good as Pacific Dunes or Cape Kidnappers. You know, it wasn't that spectacular piece of land. So you know, the reason it made those lists at all was because my style was really different and there was nothing else quite
like it. And now my style is a little better, a lot better known, and so it's not as unique anymore. And it's not the best piece of ground I worked on, so it wouldn't be rated as highly. It wouldn't be it wouldn't be in the rankings, but it was a neat place to go play golf, and at some level, you know, it was a more pure vision of my minimalist you know, my style kind of evolved from that
piece of land. You know, I shaped everything. Everything we did I shaped with a very small bulldozer, a D four that couldn't push much dirt around if you tried, so it had to be something that was, you know, and I built it in a in six months, so it's like it had to fit the land really close because I didn't have any more horsepower to do anything different than that. And that was what was cool about it.
And you know, if if you know, if my kaiser wanted to build the same golf course on that land with unlimited money, the routing probably would have been the same, but the way we shaped it and everything would I'm sure it would have turned out different. But I liked the way it was. I mean it was it was
really neat. And you know, there's a couple of things, like there were a couple of greens there the third along part four fourteenth, a little short part four greens were just there was a little knob for a green site, and I just built the green on that little knob. I just flattened it just barely enough that you could have some whole locations and then it was short grass peeling off the knob in all different directions. I've really never built a Green like that. Since then, you're always
tempted to do a little more. And and there I was like, No, that's good, that's gonna be plenty hard. Don't need to do anything else.
That's uh's gotta suck having the first fun go.
That's well. You know, I've talked to a lot of other architects about that, and and it's it's much more common than you think that you're their first golf courses are either bastardized or gone, which in hindsight, if you think about it, We've talked about a lot. It's like, you know, what kind of owner would hire somebody they'd
never done a golf course before to do something good. Well, probably somebody that doesn't really know what they're doing very well, So the odds of it feeling are better than really smart or someone that's really smart and trying to get a good deal built. Even if they're trying to get a good deal, you know, they don't know how to
operate a golf course. Yeah, you know, that's not like you know, Mike Kaiser got a lot of credibility at the beginning for hiring David Kidd when nobody knew who he was, and hiring me even though I'd already done twelve courses when people didn't know that much about me. But he doesn't do that now. It's like he can't
take that chance. Now there's too much money at stake and too many you know, whoever he hires for the next person in Valley, whether it's me or Gil Hants or Mike Derez, it's going to be somebody who's already proven. He's he's not as willing to take the chance anymore because because the profile of that thing is so high Whereas when he started banded dudes, nobody knew who the hell, what the hell? Even though it was a great sight,
nobody knew anything about it. So he could he could pick whoever he wanted and not worry about what people thought.
There's uh. In Malcolm Gladwell's book David Versus Goliath, he talks about how like David was actually the the favorite in the fight against David at Goliath because he was this lumbering giant that was blind, and David with a slingshot was like a sniper, so like, of course he's
gonna win. But the same thing goes for like these young companies that take on giant mega corporations is they can try stuff and if it fails it Do you ever feel like that as an architect, like from when you were younger to when you're now because you're building, When you build a course, it's more high profile that there's more scrutiny that comes with it, and it.
Oh, I look at that as a good thing. No, I. I think I've seen a ton of other architects, and I don't have to name names. It's most of them. After they're successful, they get more and more conservative. It's really easy to do because you know, when if somebody calls me on the phone right now and wants to talk to me about doing a new project, the reason they called me is because they've seen something else I've
done and they liked it. So the Rees Jones approaches, Okay, we'll do of course, just like Pacific Dunes for you on your inland play site wherever. You know, let's let's skip over all the obvious ways where you can't really do that. You know, I'm going to tell you just what you want to hear. Yes, you like that I could do that. I've already done that obviously. It's way, way, way, way way harder to say now. I mean, you know, when we start keep kidnappers, Julian Robertson is like, I
love the bunkering of Pacific Dunes. I would like you to do the same thing here. And I looked at him. I'm like, well, I was in sand dunes. This is not sandy at all. And you know here, once you're off these little fingers aground, everything's like hanging down out of you, off the end of the world. You know, those that style of bunkers is just not going to work here. You know. I I could try, but it would look very out of place. And I'm telling you
that is not what you ought to do. Really hard conversation to have with somebody who you know they want you because they love that golf course. But you know he listened and said, okay, you know, he still was like on me, why aren't there more bunkers on the back nine. I'm like, because they'd be eighty feet d you know, the next step off this green is off the world. So you know, putting a bunker there it's
not really going to stop anything from happening. But now, I mean, I feel like it's just it's just my personality in general, I've always been kind of a contrarian. I don't want to keep doing the same thing over and over again. So I see, so I'm crazy enough to ask somebody if I can do a reversible golf course. You know, there's all kinds of things that I'd like to do that I still haven't find the client that
will let me do them. And I'm hopeful in the next ten or twenty years, or however long I keep building golf courses, I will find people to do some of those ideas, because I've still got a lot of ideas that we just haven't found the right place for yet. But you're right, most guys they're not going to be that way. You know. It's easier for somebody young to take the chance. Well, it's easier in a different environment,
you know. When you know, when I did High Point, there were a lot of golf courses being built, and the reason they took a chance on me was that a lot of the local guys were busy or they'd already done too many other golf courses around there, so they didn't want the same guy that built a course across the street. So now they're more willing to look at somebody who's young and nobody knows who he is.
You know, in this environment where there's only a few courses being built every year and they're you know, it doesn't make any sense to build one unless it's going to be something really great and you could charge premium for. It's really hard for somebody to get the chance that I had when I was twenty seven. I mean, I've had a ton of guys work at guys and girls work for me that are really talented, that are probably pretty close to as far along as I was when
I was twenty seven. You know, two things make it harder for them. One there's way more of them all want that chance. And two there's not as many chances. Oh and three there's me and Gil Hans and Mike Derees and all these you know, all these guys that have done it a bunch, you know, so it's harder for the you know, it's harder for them to get
a chance. But the art grows when those people get chances, and you know, and the art grows when we let those kids work on our and they're not kids, they're thirty, but when we when we get them onto our projects, and let them contribut something. I mean, not as much as if we just turn them loose and let them do something entirely on their own. But at least they get a chance to try out some new things and see if they work or not, or see if they get past.
My headit.
It's I mean, the longer I've gotten into golf is the greatest golf courses, Like there's great variety within the golf course. You know, the great golf areas have great variety among the golf courses. The greatest era of golf architecture had great variety amongst all of US architects. You know, there were so many of them, different ones so that did different things well. And then you look at like the PGA Tour, it's like the best golf is when
there's a variety of different players on. Like golf is all about variety, yep. And it should be even within designs, like like every design shouldn't be the same. There should be a lot of like different styles. And you know, I think that's something.
That no, I mean, I don't you know, people ask me about minimalism and I'm like, well, it's kind of the thing I do. But you know, I don't. You know, I've done some projects that I wouldn't call minimalist, and you know that doesn't mean I don't want to do it unless you can build a golf course without moving any dirt. But do I think all golf courses should be that way? Absolutely not? You know, should should every young architect want to do the same thing I'm doing.
I mean, you know you can explain minimalism and make it sound really good. I figured that out a long time ago, so it's hard to say no, I don't want to do that. I want to make a bigger splash and move more dirt around and be creative and do some things that that those guys don't have the guts to do. But you know, if somebody would let you do it, go for it. Don't just feel like you have to be the next minimalist guy in line,
because A there's a long line. Now, it's hard, it's hard to get to the front of it and be Variety is important. As soon as somebody does something that's really different, really good, minimalism isn't going to go away, but it won't be the hot thing anymore. That's it.
I always say that the only way you can disrupt a industry is if you do something different and continue to do something different, right, you know.
It's and I you know when I when I started, I mean, what what I tried to do at the Eygepoint was radically different. I mean, you know Tommy who built the golf course with me, you know, we talked to you know, the closest golf course to high Point was the Bear at Grand Travers Resort, the Nicolas course, where they had a flat piece of ground and they shaped up all kinds of mounds and tiny greens with deep bunkers around them and lakes on every other hole, and and you know, we talked, we want to do
the dead opposite of that. I mean, not one mound on the golf course anywhere, and no lakes and know this and that, you know, just picking out all the things we could try to do different, and it wasn't. That's terrible. I hate all that. It's like, God, there have been so many of those. Yeah, let's just try to do something that doesn't look anything like that at all.
Sounds like a few other Jack Nico discourses.
Well, yeah, he did a lot in the same style too, Although to Jack credit, I mean He's done so many things. He's tried everything over the years. But you know, you get to the point where you've done so many courses, it's like, oh, I got to do something different. I'm just I'm just tired of this. I could do the same thing, but I want to do something else.
You market it differently, too, right, is different than any project.
Well, yeah he's doing he might be doing one ten miles away from where he did one ten years ago. So it's you know, you got to change it a little bit. But you know, when you know, in the late nineteen eighties, everybody was building bunker everybody's bunkers looked like Pte Dieseah long sixty yard long fairway bunkers with sand fly on the bottom and a two or three foot bank up to a flat fairway. That's what the
barrel looked like too, you know. And I'd just come working for Pete Dye and and I thought, well, if I do that, you know, I don't want to do that. First of all, that would not that would not honor mister Die at all, you know, that would just be copying. And second of all, from a business standpoint, if you wanted that, you'd hire a son, you're not gonna hire me. You know, you don't need me to do that. You could go to the source. So I need to do
something different than that. Whatever else I do got to be different than that. And you know, I'd spent time talking with Ben Crenshaw about design, and I spent time and I kind of looked at all these golf courses in the UK and all the classic courses in the US, and they didn't look like that at all. And I'm like, well, I could make I could build a course that looked like Riviera. I could build a course that looked like
would all Spa. I could build a course that looked like eighty other great old courses that nobody is trying to do now. Mostly nobody's trying to do them because nobody had a piece of land. It was very good, but you know, the piece of land doesn't mean that you have to do bunkering style a certain way. You know. So Black Forest, you know, my crew was Gill Hansome, Mike Davies, three of us built that golf course, and you know we were it's it's through the black Forest.
Then there's a reason for that name. It was dark in there, those trees are so thick and so close together. It was just dark. I mean even when you cleared out the golf course, you know in the evening, in the late afternoon when the shadows are going out, it's just black where the shadows are coming across. So I thought, well, all these holes are going to look the same, you know, they just look like they're surrounded by dense trees. So we need to do big, flashy bunkering to make these
look different from one another. And you know, I tried to do that a little bit at a high point, but I wasn't very good at it. I had a small bulldozer, so the bunkering was eclectic, you could say that much for a high point, but it wasn't. There were a few flashy sand bunkers that look kind of cool, but there it wasn't consistent at all because I never tried to build a bunker like that, you know, I was just trying to figure out how you do it.
And so when we started Black Forest the fall, the fall before, just before we started construction in the winter, I took gill Hands to California. We started San Francisco Golf Club and we went from there to pass Tiempo, to Cypress Point, to the Valley Club, and to Riviera an La Country Club, and we looked at all those bunkers at Mackenzie and Billy Bell had built, and we
kind of paste out how big they were. We paced out like how far the capes hung down into the bunkers, and then we tried to build bunkers like that for Black Forest, and nobody had tried to build bunkers like that for like at least twenty or thirty years. You know. I guess you could say that like George Fazio built bunkers that kind of looked a little like that, or Dick Wilson, but really, you know, nobody built them in the eighties, so it was at least ten years everything
looked like Pete Did's. So you know, Black Forest didn't get a lot of publicity at the time it was, I was still unknown, but you know, those those were the bunkers that really those were the first time any of the modern architects had tried to build bunkers like that. And now that's all that anybody ever does. So you know it's time to go a different direction from that. Somebody, please go a different direction. From that.
That's an amazing project in time, like the three man crew there of you, Gil and Mike and where everybody is now.
You know, and it is. Yeah. I've had cruise like that on a lot of other projects, but they weren't quite as long ago. So you don't know who those guys are yet. Yeah, and you may never know because some of them have to get out of the you know, they're not all staying in the business. But we've had a ton of talent, you know, I've had you know, I've had golf courses where we had six guys like that on site. The hell done. Don was talking about Stonewall.
The second course of Stonewall we had we had me and him and all of my current associates shaping stuff, and Bruce Heppner and Dan Proctor who worked for Bill Corr forever, and Kyle fram when he was an intern, and Philip when he was an intern, and Kai. I mean, there's like Kelly Blake Moran, the architect who lives in Pennsylvania, came to visit one day. I'd never met him before. He just he just emailed me and said, can I
come and see what you're doing? I said, sure, so he spent all day walking around with me on site while I was like editing guys and checking in and seeing how things were doing, and like every twenty minutes, I'm pulling somebody off a piece of equipment to introduce him. And like at the end of the day, he's like, I can't believe how many people are working on this that I you know, not just not just people, but like guys who are sharp, who I've heard of and
you know, have heard good things about their work. It says, how do you get all these people in one place at the same time. And it's like, well, you just have to, you know. Part of it says I had to be willing to pay them all to be there. You know, the client will pay more for talent, but only to a point. So at some point you get like, okay, this is as much as we'll pay you to shape all of it. Now, who can you afford to have do that? You know, Like unfortunately a lot of the
golf courses build overseas one shaper. You know, there'll be other guys that are kind of finishing up behind him or helping out at the start, but it's really just one guy who's who just built another course for another architect four months ago, and he comes in here to just jam out all the bunkers and greens on a golf course in three or four months, working eighty hours a week, and then boom, he never sees it again. That's the way construction companies work.
That's tough too, because you lose the collaborative aspect about it, and you also lose like when you got a bunch of young, hungry guys, there is a little bit of a competitive aspect amongst them.
Oh, when they're.
Building out, you know, there's no question everybody wants to build the you know, there's.
No question, and you know that can go too far. We have done courses where I look back and I'm like, you know, I just keep having to slap people down, like, don't you know we don't need the eighteen wildest holes anybody's ever seen here, So don't don't try to make this hole even wilder than that green that Brian just built over there. But but yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of golf courses that are built where there's only one talented guy and he doesn't even stick
around till they finish the green to plant it. So the guy that follows up and like floats out the green and plants it isn't the guy who shaped it. And then the guy who shaped it. On some of those jobs, they never come back. And see, like when we Lost Dunes, we were doing three courses at the same time. So Lost Dunes was one of the one of the few golf courses that I've had that I've done that was built by one of the big golf course contractors with their shapers. Amazingly enough, one of my
most severe sets of greens. But the the one key shaper guy they had there was a guy named Jeremy Miller who was really talented, and it was like the first time anybody let him like go wild and be creative, and he he did some really cool stuff, and then he got hired by Jack Nicholas. He worked for Jack for a bunch of years after that. But but there was this older shaper on that project, and you know, he was he was shaping up the side of this one hole, and you know, he was just making everything
too big and too exaggerated. And I was looking at and I was thinking, you know, he's trying to make it look a certain way. In the dirt when everything's monotone, and he's not really visualizing that there's going to be long grass over there and that's going to provide contrast. And you don't need to be going up and down like he's going up and down to you know, he's just trying to make contrast. And I got something else that's going to do that. So I don't really need
him to be doing what he's doing. So I went over to talk to him. I was just I didn't know him for it. I didn't know him at all. Striking up a conversation, I said, do you ever go back to the courses that you built and see what they look like? No? No, twenty years in the business and he had never seen anything he'd shaped with grass on it. We have a different approach to that.
That's uh, that's that's a I guess when you look at a lot of golf courses, it makes sense, but it's it's very frightening. It's kind of sad, actually, is that I couldn't imagine building all those golf courses never going to play.
Them, right, I mean, yeah, for the I mean like all the young people that work for me or you know, the only thing that motivated me when I was twenty years old and working on a construction crew for Pete Dye and Blistering Sun at Long Cove. You know, it's like, what's this going to look like when it finishes it? And what's it going to be like to come back
and play here? And you know, if if you don't have something like that in your head through the construction process, I don't know why anybody would stay in the business very long. I mean, other than that, it's just a lot of long days in hot and nasty weather that you get really dirty, and you know, if you're not visualizing the finished product at some level of I want to enjoy this when it's done, you know, it would suck.
That's I mean one of the things about when you know, the few times we've built, of course it's like super exclusive private, it's kind of the same problem. It's like even my crew is like, we ever going to be able to come back here? You know, they lose motivation at some point if it's like, well no, I mean, you know, you guys, maybe you can come with Tom someday.
Thanks for spending a few months here.
We'll see it. We'll see it right. And I hate to say it, but you know, the quality of the work goes down if those guys aren't that motivated about that part of it. So it's hard to keep the morale up from start to finish. That's one of the hardest things about building a golf course. It takes a long time, and you get excited about it for a little while, but it's hard to keep that going for six or nine months or more or two and a
half years. And and you can tell when it looks like you know, when it looks like you get to a really dull stretch of the golf course, or it looks like they ran out of money to build it. That's usually the problem. It's like too late in the game. Everybody moved on, got to get it finished.
It's like when I have a newsletter that I is due the next morning and it's like midnight on a Tuesday night and it's going out at six am on the next Wednesday. You know, there's topics I just decide that don't need very much color to them. It's uh, so we got we got a little off subject. We'll dive, we got a couple quick questions, and then we'll do a few overrated underrats. What's the most overrated and most underrated course in the state of Michigan.
Oh oh man, what's the most overrated course in the state.
Of Mission And this is from Chris McCann.
I mean, usually the most overrated course is is a tour course that you know, you know about because they've been playing it forever, but it's not really good. They've just been playing it forever, so everybody knows it. But there's not really much of that here. I mean Warwick Hills where they had to buick open. Nobody ever thought that was a great golf course. Now I remember. It's
It's fun tell you how things change. I mean, like nineteen seventy that was one of the harder courses on tour because it was fairly long and narrow, and then by like two thousand it was like who could choose twenty eight under here? So things do change. But so the most overrated course, unfortunately, in that case, will be the one that, you know, some very expensive, modern, hyped up project that doesn't really live up to it. I might have to take a pass on which one that is.
Your readers, your listeners can probably fill in the blanks. But I'm just going to take a pass on that most underrated Belvedere Never. It shouldn't make a list of the best courses in the country. It's not that good, but a very good golf course. You know that, you know, pretty much under the radar except for people in Michigan that played in the Michiganian.
Yeah, and people that listened to our first podcast. Yes, because I got I got emails all the time. I went to Belladere Man that was awesome.
Cool.
So that's uh, sooner.
Or later we'll ruin it and I'll jack the green fie up tow one hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah.
I think the Michigan, Michigan Dam's back there this year. I think somebody told me that, all right, m overrated, underrated the southeast Michigan golf scene. And this is you know, this is a question turned overrated, underrated. But it's in comparison to like Philly, New York, Columbus.
Oh so the Detroit area as compared to well, I don't know.
I think comparing it to that might be.
Yeah, I mean compared to Philadelphia. It's not even close to Philadelphia. But I don't know that anybody's I don't know that anybody's made that comparison. Yes, Detroit is definitely better. I mean there are there's a good little second tier of golf courses around Detroit that people don't talk about that much. But they're actually pretty good courses like Meadowbrook and Red Run and Birmingham. And I'd never been to Barton Hills and ann Arbor till a couple of years
ago I went there. Somebody suggested I'd go there and get it in the confidential god, way better than I expected it to be, way better. In fact, I probably should have had that. I was one of my ten rounds of golf in Michigan. But but do those courses compare to this? You know, the second tier in New York is like the Creek Club and Piping Rock and Garden City and Quicker Ridge. So now Detroit isn't Detroit.
If I had to rank ten best metropolitan areas, it might be around tenth, but it's not in the top five. So I don't think I don't think it's underrated. I don't think it's overrated because you know, people don't talk about it like it belongs in there, or at least outside Michigan, they don't.
One of the cool things I find with Detroit. I've never played in Detroit, but just from one of the reasons I think I'm going to go visit there this summer is that they have such a variety of Golden Age architects that work there, Right, Walter Travis, Donald Ross, Willie Watson, Alison Colt, you know.
Right, Allison Allison was based there for like five or six years. You know, he ran Colt's Office in America out of Detroit in the twenties. That was his base of operation in the twenties when he was building Milwaukee Country Club, and you know, and he did he did the country He redid the Country Club of Detroit. I have not been to Orchard Lake, but I hear it's really good too. He did two or three things around there that are that are very good, that kind of
fly under the radar a little bit. You know, his name just doesn't you know. There's there's mackenzie and McDonald and Ross and tilling Hast and Colet, and he's not in there, so people overlook him a lot. And yeah, from that standpoint, you're right, there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff in Detroit that that weren't designed by the big name guys that are pretty good, and they just don't get near as much publicity because they weren't designed by Ross or tilling.
Hast Lions Analysis overrated, underrated Oakland Hills South Course.
I think Oakland Hills South Course is a great golf course. You know, they have tinkered with it a ton. The present version of it is probably not as good as the one I remember from twenty five years ago when I first moved here. But they still have the same set of greens, and that's at least fifty percent. You know, it's still a good piece of land. It's still the same routing. They still have a great set of greens that goes a long long way. So I still think
it's a great golf course. You know, I wouldn't want to play it from anywhere near the back tees anywhere near them now, But that's another story.
So if you built a golf course with eighteen great greens, like how enft would you have to be with everything else for the golf course not to be like pretty good, You'd have.
To be you know, you'd have to be stumbling around and just making the visibility into them would have to be horrible. You know, a great set of greens that you can't really see what's going on from the fairway. That wouldn't be very good. But it's hard to believe that you're going to do get the greens right and get that wrong.
All right, another edition in the books and we'll be back in a couple of weeks. But thanks again for the time, Tom and Don.
Thanks for coming to visit us up here.
Our pleasure any thanks for making the trip.
Thank you you've been listening to the fried Egg podcast.
We do the digging for you.