Yolk with Doak 16: St. Patrick’s and Building from Scratch vs. Renovating

slash Frida Egg member SIPC. In this episode with Tom Dok, we talked with Tom about how difficult it is renovating a course compared to restoring one and his new project in Ireland at the Rossapana Resort, Saint Patrick's. As a reminder, check out our pro shop. We have some new towels up in the shop as well as hats, t shirts, polos, great gear for summertime. Visit the pro shop at thefridagg dot com. And without further ado, here's Tom dough is back and as usual he's not holding back.

something really cool, like the TPC at Sawgrass. So you don't need to spend money on finding a good piece of land. And you know that's why nobody was doing that thirty years ago. Is it's like, oh, this would be easier. We wouldn't we wouldn't have to try so hard to we wouldn't have to spend so much on the land. We wouldn't have to wait so long on

the permits to make it happen. And so to Ethan's question, I think for sure, you know, if you're a golf developer that's getting in the business to try to really make money at it, buying an old course and tearing it down and starting over is a way better business model because you don't, because it's already permitted as a golf course, you don't really need anything. You can start. You can buy it one day and start construction almost

the next day. In a lot of places, you know, that speeds up the you know, that speeds up the timeframe by a couple of years. Whereas when you're a when you're Mike Kaiser and you're you know, you're trying to get permission to build on a new piece of

land down the road from Dornick. He's what two or three years into that now, and he still doesn't know if He's spent a lot of money on environmental consultants and everybody else, and he's paid Bill Corp. To do routings and he's still not sure he's going to be able to do anything. You know, from a business standpoint, that's really hard to swallow as a business model. It's like,

not many people want to do that. The only kind of people that want to do that, or somebody like Mike or Rick Kine or you know, a lot of my clients they want to do something really special. And if they want to do something really special, they want to start from scratch. They don't want to start from some failed golf course.

and west. But they planted trees around all the holes running east and west, it's like impossible to convert that because there's just too many things built in your way for that to really make any sense. So, like it's not a failed golf course. This we just this last project we built before Houston was rebuilding a course at the National in Australia. And it's actually a project that I looked at like twenty years before and tried to

do a routing for. But they hired Greg Norman to do one of the courses, in Peter Thompson to do the other one. And you know, the club's been very successful, but the Thompson course, the Ocean course, was always like the third best course. They have an older course that Trent Jones Junior did. Norman's course is really well regarded. Thompson's course was never you know, it was nobody's favorite.

It didn't do nearly as much visitor play. So after, you know, two or three years ago, they they asked me if I would take a look at it and see if I could suggest them things to make it better. And I think they were they were really only thinking,

you know, I would change a few holes. But I went out and you know, I was already familiar with the land from twenty years ago, but I couldn't go back to I looked at the routing we did twenty years ago, and the routing I did would have been too tangled up with the course that Norman built, so I couldn't do what I'd planned, so I had to, but you know, I just it's an The key to it was it was an open site and nobody planted

any trees or done anything to change it. So on the second hole, you know, they they built a par four, and they were because the third tier was going to be up and up the hill in the corner. They tried to build themselves a green two thirds of the way up this pretty steep slope and shape the hell out of it to try to get it so it

wasn't so severe. And you know, if you were short, the ball would roll back down the fairway, but it still did, so they had to reshape it again, you know, just smacking straight into the contours kind of the wrong way in order to make the next hole work out. And right away I looked at that hole, I go, this is you know, the first hole's fine, but this

hole I gotta you can't have the green there. There's this little pocket down to the left where just past the landing here, and I thought, you know, that'd be a really cool short part four with just the green right in there, and then okay, but if I did that, then I can't make everybody walk way up the hill to that old third tee. And honestly didn't like the

old third hole very much anyway. So I started looking around and I'm like, well, you could just put the TB behind the green on two and play back toward what's now seventeen green. That's a pretty good look in a hole. And before I knew it, I'd rerouted like half the golf course, you know, like found new green sites for I think nine of the eighteen something like

nine of the eighteen holes. You know, the green is forty yards away or more from where it was last time, and change, you know, just the way I just described two and three. So you know, I cut into the back nine on the third hole, so I changed the sequence completely, just trying to get myself out of that corner where the new second hole was. So it's a very different golf course. I'm looking forward to going back and playing it. They've you know, it's winter there now.

They started member play late in the fall, like two months ago, but they really haven't had a ton of visitor to play at all. They just had they just let the members out on it a little bit before it got nasty. So this, you know, coming up here October and November, they'll really be back on the golf course full time. And I'll probably I'll probably go in November and play it for some member event thing. But I think it turned out to be a pretty dramatic

golf course. You know. It's kind of like it's it's more dramatic than I thought it was going to be when we started. It's certainly way bigger change than they ever visualized in the first place. And you know, to their credit, when I came back to them with that plan, they were like, oh, well that's that's a lot more than we were thinking. But how much would this cost? And and you know, can you can you help write this up so we can so the members will get

excited about it. You know. The other thing that made it happen was they've got fifty four holes. They actually have seventy two holes. They merged with another club that's up closer to Melbourne, so they have a course up closer to the city too, So it's it's no big yang for them to close a golf course for six months and take it out of play. They've still got plenty of other places to play. You know, that's the

thing that holds you back on most existing courses. To really make changes, you got to close and most, you know, most existing clubs do not want to close the golf course. So that means if you won't close the golf course when you're remodeling, that means you're not going to do the two most important things. You're not going to change the routing and you're not going to change the greens, and then all you're doing is playing around with the bunkers.

You're kind of you know, it's kind of like rearranging the furniture. You're not really changing things that much.

it was. And you know, I mean realistically, if I was a contractor, I would or more quite a bit more for that than just building a new course, because you got to you got to do everything you're gonna do to shape a new course, but then you've also got to go fix a bunch of things from the old course that are just you know, that old green is kind of in the middle of a fairway now, so you can't ignore it. You've gotta you gotta knock down the edges and make it look like it wasn't there.

a links course in Ireland. And I thought I was going to do it twice before and they didn't happen. And this one. You know, I've known the Casey family that owns ross Apana Resort in the Northwest for like, oh, probably eleven or twelve years now. Larry Lambrick, the photographer, introduced me to them. Originally they were they were redoing. They originally had thirty six holes at ross Apana, and one of the nine, one of the older nines, used

to like cross roads. It used to cross two roads going out and to the same two roads coming back in the course of nine holes to loop in with the what they call the old Tom Morris nine that runs along the beach. And you know, the place is getting busier and people were building the holiday homes and those roads were getting really busy, and that those that

nine was just too dangerous. I mean, you're just hitting across traffic in awkward you know, one hundred and fifty yards off the de in really awkward places where you're likely to hit a car. So it just it was dangerous and it didn't work. And they they had just enough land on the sea side of the road to squeeze in nine holes there so they didn't have to

cross the road anymore. And Pat Reddy actually built the nine holes, but they were still growing it in and they didn't you know, he had kind of like not built any bunkers. He was going to leave that till later.

You know. They'd done it on a shoe string, really, and you know they were They asked us if we'd look at it and see if we had some suggestions to make it a little more dramatic, and you know, I gave him a couple of ideas, and Eric Iverson basically spent a couple of months over there at one point just redoing green complexes on three or four of those holes, adding some bunkers and making it a little better.

But from the well at the beginning, I think Larry thought, you know, maybe I would help them do some work to their second course. There are Sandy Hills, which is a really dramatic, really pretty, really hard modern golf course. You see it when you see pictures of Rossa Penna, it's usually of Sandy Hills. It's up in some really big dunes and the fairways are mostly elevated well above the old Tom Morris nine, so you've got great views

of the bay and the mountains around the bay. I mean it's a spectacular looking place, but it is a heck of a hard golf course to play in the wind, and of course in Northwest Ireland is windy all the time, so you know, so the feedback on the Sandy Hills course is always you know, some people love it because it's spectacular and pretty, but a lot of people lose a lot of balls and get really frustrated with it too, And there's sort of handcuffed done how much they could

do about that because they're right in the edge of land with a bunch of environmental restrictions, so it was like, you know, you're not allowed to go out and cut the rough all down way out in there and soften the shapes. Just can't do it. So it was limited on whether they could really do much to change the golf course. They've started mowing it more, they've taken out a couple of the bunkers in front of the greens. Over the years, it was still a hard golf course.

But anyway, you know, right when I first met them, there was this the property next door to them is this place called Saint Patrick's and back in the nineties when the EU was forming and Ireland was going to

be part of the EU. A couple of the architects in Ireland, Eddie Hackett and Pat Ruddy and a couple other guys, went around to all the little clubs and said, you know, any of you that own any more of this duneesland, you should go build something on it right now, because once we're part of Europe they're going to draw a circle around it say you can't touch that anymore.

And they were dead right. I mean, the you know, European designation is a special area of conservation and they pretty much just drew a red line around every piece of untouched dunesland in Ireland and said, no, can't do anything there, you know, like can't even just mow it out. One of those projects I looked at in Ireland years ago is not much more than mowing out something like that. And it was still a no or it was still

so so long of a permit question. You know, in theory you could get special permission to do something, but nobody ever has.

They never would have got permission, It wouldn't have been up to a government vote. It would have been a bunch of bureaucrats just saying no and no recourse. So this so somebody built, actually Eddie Hackett and oh young woman that worked for him built thirty six holes on this Saint Patrick's site twenty twenty five years ago now for a hotel owner in the next town over from ross Apenna put up the money to do it. And

it was a beautiful piece of land. It was kind of trying to get thirty six holes on the land. It was really crammed in. There were a bunch of there's a big hill in the middle of it that a bunch of the holes were just fairways running up and down the hill. It looks crazy from it when you look at it from a distance, it's like really just up down, up, down, and are pretty good. You know, Cole's going up and down sixty feet from tee to green.

But you know, when Ireland became part of Europe and they drew the red lines, there was a golf course there, so they just drew the red bubble to away from it, and it's the land is still fair game, so you can change Saint Patrick's. So for years this golf course is done like almost no play. And ten years ago when I met the cases and things in Ireland were really booming. Some Irish developer had hired Jack Nicholas to he was going to do thirty six holes there and

he actually started. They spent about two weeks in construction in the fall of two thousand and seven or an eight, I can't remember which, and then the financial crisis in the financial crisis hit Ireland and basically the contractor, did you know, the developer pulled out, the contractor didn't get paid, construction stopped completely and the thing is just sat there ever since, and kind of they had torn up three

or four holes. They're just kind of been blown around in the wind for several years, but nobody, nobody doing anything about it. And of course the only the only potential buyer for it was the cases because they're because they're because they're they're right next to it, so they but they they weren't in any hurry because they knew nobody was nobody else was going to bid against them.

So I don't know how long they you know, they waited three or four years until the price came down to something that was reasonable for them and probably not a whole lot of money, and bought the property. And then you know, they they've still been you know, they've been looking at it for years, and I've been looking at it for years with him, of you know, what

could we do on this site? But you know, the golf economy in Ireland has bounced back slowly but surely since the recession, but for a while there it wasn't very good. So it's taken a long time to get to the point where they're like, okay, you know, now seems to be the time where this will work. And and partly it's that the Frank Senior, his sons John and Frank Junior are both in their early mid thirties, and of course they're just gung ho to build this thing.

They're like, they're so excited, but you know that they're there's there be They've been being groomed for a long time to take over the place for the next generation. And they're they're still not quite running the whole show yet, although they kind of do. John runs the hotel, Bank runs the golf operation. They've been doing that for a few years, you know, and so it's all been convincing their dad, you know, let's really do this now, and

we're finally ready to go. And the one thing I said to mister Casey in the beginning, you know, I mean, we had way more than enough land for eighteen holes easily, you know, it was it was always tight for the thirty six one of the one of the one of the two golf courses was fifty five hundred yards or something. And of course there are a lot of parallel fairways up and down that hill that weren't really that attractive.

And you know, they looked at well, maybe just do twenty seven holes, you know, and like like tack nine holes onto the old Tom Morris nine and then do eighteen holes. Inland of that, and I thought about it and thought about it. You know, I've been working on routings for a long time. But you know, finally I said to mister Casey, you know, you've got forty five holes now because they still use that. They shortened up that, that old nine that went across the roads, but they

still use it, you know. And yeah, you could have a you could have two more eighteen holes, but you know, just two more good eighteen hole golf courses really do much for you other than increase the overall overall volume. And Rossa Penn is not the easiest place to get to, so you know, thinking they're going to double the number of people that go there now is that's going to

take a while. The best case, you know, I just said, you know, one of the things I've learned from Mike Kaiser is you never worry about what the next golf course is going to be. You just focus on making this one as good as you can because that's the only way. The only way you're going to do another

one is if this one is really successful. So you know, it's weird in Bandon, Well, they're building their not counting the preserve, They're building their fifth eighteen whole course now, and they'll have five different clubhouses for those five, which is pretty insane. Anybody in planning school will tell you, well that that doesn't make any sense at all. You know, they should, they should all operate out of two clubhouses. But the golf courses are better because they don't because.

or the Red course that much. And you know, so you got just got two starting points and you can only get a certain number of tea times out there that they're going to have room to clear and have lunch and play eighteen holes in the afternoon. It's not you know, Band in summer is the big season. You could play fifty four holes a day in the summer, but stream Song, the busiest season is like the shortest days of the year, and getting people around twice is

hard to do. So having another golf course that has two starting points is a real help for that.

of from America. You know, there are people there are an Americans that are starting to you know, give up on the Southwest of Ireland route because it's so so busy in the summer and look for different places in Ireland or Scotland that they can go that aren't quite you know, where you just see nothing but Americans the

whole two weeks you're there. That's kind of weird, but that does happen, you know in La Hinch and Saint Andrew's and a few places around the UK and Ireland and the Northwest of Ireland, you don't really see that at all. You get Swedes, you get Germans, you get English people and Irish people from Dublin. But you know, if they can get on Americans radar, you know, there are a bunch of pretty good little golf courses up there now, not just the ones that Rossapenna, but Port Salon,

which is not that far away. Sli Goos kind of two or three hours to the south. I mean, port Rush is actually closer than Sligo is. Port Rush is

only a couple hours to the east of Rossapana. So you know, ideally they would tie into the more people that are going to county down in port Rush, but also they might be able to tie into the people that are looking to get away from the crowds and the super expensive places and go somewhere where it's a little more affordable and the golf is still really good and you feel like you're in the countryside of Ireland instead of you know, you don't see tour buses full of golfers.

with private clubs. Absolutely it does now, you know, Guys your age are like, why would I want to pay five thousand dollars a year to play this golf course over and over again when I don't have time to play over and over again when I'm home. You know, there's a lot of people instead of instead of joining a club, let's just take our money and go play, Go make two or three really cool golf trips a year and call it good. And then you know, maybe I'll play with my buddy who is a member there

once or twice in the summer when I'm home. But that's about all the time I've got when i'm home anyway. So you know, so all these destination places compete with clubs, and all of the destination clubs, the bally Nils and the Rock Creeks and the Dismal Rivers, y'all compete with each other. You know, even if they're five hundred or one thousand miles apart, they're still trying to get the guys from San Francisco to come there.

much at all. You see the water more when you're back away from it a little bit, you know, either playing toward it or just up at more elevation where even if you're pretty far away from it, you're looking right out at the bay. So some of the most dramatic looking holes of the holes back inland, there's there's it's funny where they where they didn't draw that red

circle around the golf course. Right at the fence line of the golf course on the first two or three holes, there is some beautiful pasture ground, but rolling sandy pasture ground with these giant blowouts. Like just there's there's room for another golf hole to the right of the fence. We can't build it because that they drew the red line there, so we can't touch that land. All I would have to do is mow that.

You know, you got the bay on one side and you got those dunes on the other, and you're looking at the dunes. That's how good they are. But in between, instead of going up and down the hill, I kind of go around the hill and end up the backside. And so the property has a lot of there's like you know, like like a lot of good courses. If

you just went out and wandered around the property. In your brain, it kind of divides up into three or four different field areas that have a different feel to them. And we're gonna get to all those areas in the course of eighteen holes.

The Dukes the state are partners in the in the deal, and so they had filed a planning permit to put a golf course. And when we when we started doing the planning, you know, the Duke owned right up to the stone wall along the apholl at Mierfield and and the sixth there's one of the sixth also, and Mierfield was a little nervous about an American neighbor owning right up to the wall, like there's trees on our side

of the wall. But for all Mierfield knew, we'd knock down all the trees and build a hole right there and wave at the members of Mierfield. And they really didn't want that to happen. And Obviously, my client wasn't going to do that. But Mierfield asked, can we trade you some property? Can will you just give us that strip of trees along our wall so a buffer, And actually they put the ninth tee back for the for the open back on some of the property they they

swapped with us. And for that they swapped they traded us some land in the dunes on the very point of the property. That's some of the prettiest view you've ever seen. Mierfield actually owns like another two hundred acres of dunes along the water. It's unbelievable piece of land for a golf course, but they would probably never get planning permission to do it. There's a bunch of the dunes.

The formation of the dunes themselves is considered important and distinctive, so you couldn't you couldn't like bulldoze into a sand dune. And then there's also when we tried to get permission to build on the land they traded us, there are these big patches of like mossy stuff that is important for biodiversity, and there's not too many places like it. So you know, there were big you know, there were just big like quilt patches of places that they didn't

want us to touch. It was like we were trying to figure out what we could do while avoiding all these areas. But then I think one of the reasons Mierfield was actually interested in the trade was they let us figure out if it was possible to get permits to do anything out there. But so we made the

trade right away. But we couldn't ask, you know, we couldn't ask to change the plan for the golf course that was in the zoning process, because once we changed the boundary of the land that we wanted to work on, it would be back to square one and start over. And they're like, it's taking five years to get to this point. We cannot do that, so will you? You know, so lay out an eighteen hole golf course on what

we've got now. But try to think if we got permission later on to build a couple of holes, you know how you would throw something out of this routing to tie those in and still have an eighteen hole golf course. So when I routed the Renaissance Club, the original first three holes came right back to the ouse, the fourth went out, and the fifth came back and the six goes out again. So if I came up with a two hole solution or a three hole solution, I had some I could yank out and make it work.

And of course it wound up being more complicated than that when we did everything, because they you know, we only we only we kind of built two new holes. But the original first three holes, even though we liked them, were kind of they were shorter, two shorter part fours, and they were back in the trees more than the rest of the golf course. So those are the ones

that they wanted to lose out of the routing. So we had to change around some more in order to make it make up for the three holes that we took out. They're now practice holes. So very long winded

way of how we how we did that. But so the new court, the new part of the Renaissance Club, there's a par three when you know, when you play to the g when you walk toward the green, all of a sudden you're kind of coming around the corner and the Fidra Island and the lighthouse come into view and it's like spectacular and if you've never been there for the first time, it's like holy cow, I can't

believe they build a hole there. And then you have to walk back in between all the patches of dune grass and moss that they didn't want us to touch to get to the back tee of the tenth hole, which will be the fourth hole for the tournament. But it's a cape hole. Playing along a cliff just above the beach looking over at the lighthouse is spectacular and it's like, I honestly can't believe they let me build

a golf hole. I mean, we built were right on the edge of the cliff looking down at the beach, and the only reason we got permission to build is because somebody had planted buckthorne along there to stop people from wanting to come up from the beach. Basically, don't get on our property. And the buck thorn is not a native plant, and it gets once it gets big, it sort of starts choking itself out and dying back.

And then you get like wind erosion and problems because because it starts going away on its own and nothing else comes in to replace it, and it just the land gets torn up pretty fast. So the environmental people wanted us to take all the buckthorn out and then it's like, you know, it'd be pretty hard to revegetate that with all native plants, but they let us plant grass on it to revegetate it. So we could actually play a fairway right along there, which I did not

see coming. But it was a really happy accident that it worked out that way. So, you know, we thought we'd be down in the sand dunes more and it turned out we were barely down in there at all. But we got visually, at least the most dramatic holes that we could have got by adding the two that we did, so Saint Patrick's Saint Patrick's is different. I mean, you know, the Renaissance Club. Once you get inland from those holes, it's not flat, but it's flatter. You know.

The undulations are all like the small scale fair way kind of undulations you see on links courses. You know, in general, Scottish links are generally flatter and not so flashy, and Irish links are bigger and more dramatic, at least the ones that that are the famous ones that people go to. You know, Truon is low grade rolling stuff. Bally Bunyan is big crashing undulations and playing between two big dunes. And you know that's the difference between Saint

Patrick's and the Renaissance Club too. Saint Patrick's is much more dramatic visually. You're just you're not playing right along the water as much as Barnboogle or Pacific Dunes. I mean, you know, no place does, yeh, but but most links courses don't either. I mean, you know, bally Bunion is the real exception to the rule there. La Hinch is not. You know, it's a great golf course and a beautiful site and it's you know, it's pretty, but there's only

actually the third hole. The third hole is the only one that's that's right along the sea and along the beach, and then you've got the twelfth hole along the river. I guess that new part three they added is kind of up in along the along the sea. But there's only two or three holes that are really close to the sea. And that's what Saint Patrick's will have to But there's a bunch of pretty holes, yeah that we don't have to we don't have to work hard to make them pretty.

don't have to make create a bunch more infrastructure. You know, we have to have a little shed to store some of the equipment over there, but we're sharing equipment with the other golf courses and and it's you know, it's a pretty simple thing to ramp up to and and you know, open a few holes as soon as they're ready to open a few holes. Although we'll have a separate clubhouse, you know, the clubhouse will be in the middle of the site for Saint Patrick's with the golf

course revolving around it. We couldn't figure out a way to you know, it was at the far end of the old Tom Morris nine or Sandy Hill, so it didn't really make sense to try to shuttle people out there, and those weren't the holes we would have wanted to start on right when he got to the fence anyway.

same time. But yeah, we're going to start shaping greens in earnest this summer, and you know, we're hoping to do a lot of the creative work and the greens and bunkers and plant all that stuff this fall. But then we'll have to come back next year and do most of the fairways because you know, we don't we don't have the irrigation infrastructure right now to do all the fair to do all the fairway work at the

same time. So it's probably still two years away from opening, even though a lot of the cool stuff will get shaped this year.

St Andrew's greens are special. Obviously they're just you know, but those are pretty natural. But like Troon and Carnoustie and Birkdale and Litham, the greens are not There's not that much going on on a lot of them. Uh, Mirfield's got a great set of greens. I think we're all Saint George's has a really cool set of greens. It's older, but it was you know, Mackenzie did a few of those, and a couple of other architects. It did work. After the fact, Port Rush is hs colt

from start to finish. You know, there was an older you know, I think they've got they got thirty six or forty five holes there now with some little course for women and children. But originally it was an eighteen hole place. There was an older golf course, but Cole

turned it into thirty six holes in nineteen twenty. And you know the one thing that kind of bummed me out was that the second course there, which wasn't as long or strong, I thought was a terrific golf course, and they sort of stole some of the best property off that to build the two new holes for the Open. So, you know, to get the Open, they took the other

golf course backwards. And I thought that the other golf course was really fun too, So I was kind of sorry to see that happen, honestly, But what they what they wound up with is a you know, true championship course with a great set of greens, all built by one guy or except for the two new holes, and you know, a really consistent design feel to it, like most of the great courses in America, instead of what you normally see in the UK, where it's kind of

a mishmash of three or four evolutions from the mid eighteen hundreds to now.

of the rest of the world. You know, most of the cult courses in North America are the ones with his name on them are actually Allison's. Alison lived in the in the States in the twenties, and you know, had an office in Detroit, and you know, did Milwaukee Country Club, and redid the Country Club of Detroit, and did the courses in Toronto Golf Club, and you know, a whole bunch of golf courses, mostly in the Midwest.

They didn't compete so much in the East Coast, you know, Flynn and Ross and everybody were tilling house were so busy out there, they didn't try to compete with that. Allison came to the Midwest, where there was you know, where there weren't as many well known architects to compete with, and just soaked up, you know, doing the best course in a lot of the big cities in the Midwest. In a very short span. Cole only came, I think he only came to America once in like nineteen twelve,

nineteen fourteen, somewhere around there. He did the original course for the Country Club of Detroit, of which there was only a few holes left. They changed it used to kind of go toward the lake, and it doesn't do that anymore. And I think he did Toronto Golf Club and he he gave his input on Pine Valley to George. But then, you know, once the war came, he just he didn't want to travel back and forth. He hated traveling. He didn't even like making a long train for the

smart man. Yeah, I can relate. I can relate to not wanting to do that. And of course by then he was older. I mean he was you know, he was older than Mackenzie and Alison and the rest of him. You know, he you know, he'd spent years being a solicitor in a club secretary before he was a golf course architect. So he didn't you know, he liked the work, but he had plenty of work close to home. He didn't have to go to Japan to do that. He

didn't have the ego where he really wanted to. So, you know, Tokyo Golf Club did contact Cole Originally that's who they wanted to come over to design their golf course. Colet sent Alison instead, and Alison stayed and did the five best courses in Japan while he was there.

kept quiet. But you know, the clients and the powerful, the influential people in Japan actually had a lot of them had been educated in the UK. They that's where they learned golf. Is they went to school at Oxford or Cambridge or somewhere and started playing golf, and then they went back to Japan and there was app for golf courses in Japan. So they wanted, you know, they wanted the best UK architects to come help them.