Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends over at b dratty. It took a little while, but the entire country is open for golf. It's exciting development. I'm in Illinois, so we were one of the last states to open, and it's been nice to have it back. With everywhere open for golf, no better time to look at your closet and maybe get some new polos have a new look this year when you're at the club
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is a new one of the Yoke with Doak. So this is part of the Batchelor recordings that I did in January with Tom where we were just recorded for copious amount of hours. This episode we hit a lot of listener questions, so we hit on topics such as the links land and you know one of the some of the downsides to building on links Land, Mike Strand who he would like to listen to from from the past on a podcast and much more so, without further ado, here's Tom Doak.
I miss a green for example, I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my ball in a bright egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, fridagg.
Bright egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the.
Course from a dusty gray.
You only hear people wowed linx land, But what are the main details and obstacles faced while constructing links land courses as opposed to inland courses.
If any one of the things is unreal lynx luan ground. The soil is really fragile, like there's there's only a little bit of you know, it's sandy all the way down, but that little bit at the top is has got more nutrients in it, and you really really don't want to disturb that unless you have to. And it's really hard because it's such a thin layer. It's really hard to peel it off and save it and put it
back on. You know, a lot of golf courses an inland ground, you'll strip six inches or a foot of topsaw off and reconjure everything, and then you've got a huge pile of topsaw to put back down. But on a links course, it's a really fine layer and you can destroy it pretty easily, and you don't want to.
I mean, that's you know. I remember seeing Kingsbarns under construction of Walter Woods, who was the greenkeeper at Saint Andrew's when I lived there, was a consultant to Kingsbarns, and that was his main thing was you know, that was that little bit of topsaw was like gold to him and it had to be preserved at all costs and it had to go back down over everything when it was done or wasn't going to play like a links course.
I imagine.
The other thing is the wind probably blows. It's probably is it harder to get stuff to sit just the way.
You want to.
Yeah, in general it can be. That can be pretty fine material too. It was the same in Australia when we were building St Andrew's Beach. I mean, the the great layer of soil at the top was really fine and really dark compared to it. You know, it was sand, but it was a very dark brown sand. So yeah, if you put it in a pile over to the side for very long, it just half of it blows away.
Here's a question from waiting on willow Old Tom Morris met Donald Ross, who met Pete Die met Tom Doak? Who did Tom Doak meet? That will be an innovative force of their generation.
Wow, we skipped over a few people in there, so I'm only.
He was limited to a certain amount of characters.
I'm only two people removed from old Tom Morris according to that equation. That's cool, hmm. You know, I mean I've had a ton of talented people work for me, and you know, some of them have made names for themselves already, Gil Hands and Mike DeVries. But you know
that questions more like generation skipping. Those those people are forty years apart, and you know that's you know, it's hard for Gil or Mike or those guys to do something really different than what I'm doing because this style is so in vogue right now that everybody talks about it kind of the same way. And if you're really trying to think about, well, who's going to change things,
it's impossible to predict. I mean, who knows who's going to be the guy who or girl who sticks their neck out and really does something different that leads everybody else to go in a different direction. You know, I hope it's one of the people that I've that I've spent some time with and helped train. You know that that's I tried to tell them all exactly what Pete Dye told me, which is essentially, don't copy what I'm doing,
find your own thing. You know. And when I worked for Pete, the one thing that we never talked a lot about at all was style. And you know, he didn't try to teach me his style of doing things. He taught me his method of doing things and being out there in construction and you know, really working at it. But what the golf course was going to look like, I'm not going to say it didn't matter, but you know,
that was kind of up to him. And you know, he left that impression on me that if I ever got in position to do that, it should be up to me, and I should try to do something different. You know that I drew most of that just from the conversation we had about Harbortown, you know, because we were working a long cove and Harbortown's like five miles down the road, and one morning I got him talking about that, and he said, you know, up to Harbortown,
he still really admired Robert Trent Jones's work. But when he was working on Harbortown, he was living by Palmetto Dunes, and he drove past the Jones course at Palmetto Dunes like every day to go to work, and he kept looking at that golf course over there, and he finally said to himself, not very long into the thing, I got to do something different than that. We can't just
keep doing that. And so he tried to do something as different as possible from what mister Jones was doing, and that was harbortown tight small, really small greens, you know, really abrupt features, but not necessarily a ton of them. And I just took that as don't do the same thing I'm doing. So somebody's going to do that sooner or later and change the world again. And I, you know,
I have a few ideas who it might be. But you know, I got a letter from a young guy in Canada last week wanting an intern job, and he's like, you know, he just sounds like a really intelligent kid, and he's you know, he's talking about data driven stuff and how you know how to apply that to golf course architecture. And I I would say, I'm a skeptic about that right now, but you know, that might be where this thing goes in twenty years. Who knows.
Almost like everybody nudges and what if you're you know, there's like a big nudge or a big push into one direction right, and then it's like a steady nudge until there's the next big push. Really, it's kind of the way I think about it's in a way, it's a lot like if you look at a different industry, how they advance, there's you know, gradual and then somebody makes a drastic change and.
Everybody sure it's you know, it's it's not quite the fashion business. But you know, once his style is kind of in vogue, it tends to stay there for a while, and other people kind of don't push too far outside that for fear they won't get any work at all until you know, people have kind of gotten tired of it, and then it's time for somebody to come along and
do something that's way different, you know. You know, I see a couple of things now that are kind of way different, you know, just like just like back fifteen years ago, Jim Ming's stuff was way different, and Mike Strands's stuff was way different, you know, and there's there's some stuff going on like that now, but whether whether it's the right time for it, you know, it's really hard for that to work when the business is so small, because you know, most architects are just trying to find
one job for next year, and they don't want to take the risk of doing something radical and having people not like it, because then then they got nothing next year. You have to be willing to take chances if you're going to do something like that.
You brought up Mike Strants and something I've thought a lot about. You know, you guys were peers, but with drastically different styles. Yes, And I'm curious where with him passing away young, do you think architecture would be different today he had he not because he was kind of almost like a counter.
That's true, and you know, in a way, I don't think philosophically our work was that much different. I mean, artistically it was very different, and he was he was more interested in creating something that looked wild than with you know, keeping it closer to what the land was. But but then again, some of the pieces of ground he had were pretty wild to start with, so that worked. But you know, I think for sure, if if he'd kept working, you know, he would have had a lot
more influence on what other people were doing. But by the same token, you was kind of a unique talent. I mean, he really was an artist, and there aren't that many real artists in our business to try to take that direction and do it themselves. And he you know, he had a really small crew of guys that worked with him on all those projects, and since he passed away, they haven't really picked it up and run with it at all, too bad.
Something I always kind of think about because it was it was almost like he was the evolution from from the Fasio school, but that evolution kind of halted and.
Now, like you said, nobody picked it up.
Yeah, so this is from chill Gannon. Are there any average courses that could be great with a green renovation.
It's a hard question because you know, great is like a pretty vague term. Now, I don't know whether that means sixth the Doakes Gale or an eight. You know, taking a course that's a four or five and renovating the greens and turning it into an eight is pretty unlikely. Although you know, one of the great examples from history is Woking in England that John Lowe and Tom Simpson,
who are members, kind of did. They took. They took a Tom Dunn Heathland course, which everybody thought was pretty dull, and every summer while the members were away up north in Scotland or wherever, they would renovate one or two holes. And it wasn't exclusively agree's renovation. They also did some fairway bunkering connected to it, so that the all the wild stuff they were doing on the greens. You know, there was strategy to that, and there was a bunker
back in the fairway that enhanced it. But you know, over the course of five or six years, they just transformed that golf course from fairly dull into the talk of the town in London in the early nineteen hundreds when there was a lot of other cool stuff going on.
That's the golf course that it inspired Simpson to actually become a golf course architect, you know, and it inspired Cole and everybody else watching around of wow, you know you can if you take risks, you could do some pretty wild stuff that's really cool and got a lot of other people interested in art what architecture could do. So I think there is the potential for that, but you know, it helps if you've got the skeleton of
a good routing in place. You know, if the greens are in the wrong place, you're not going to fix that just by renovating the greens.
Yeah.
I like think about Champion Hill where you've got just that tremendous land up here, but you know, the owner who built it, he didn't do any shaping around it, on and around the greens it's just like a basically like almost a homemade golf course. And I think, like, you know, that land's so good, it could be pretty pretty dark good, and it is pretty good as is like, and that's one of the things.
It's it's thirty bucks like for what it is.
It's great. And you know the thing about that is if it had a great set of greens, it should have still cost thirty bucks. You know, I mean building a good set of greens, assuming you're building some you know, USGA greens or native saw greens or whatever you're building. You know, putting better shape in him to start with shouldn't really cost anything more. You know, it's just having a good shaper and having some imagination about what you're doing.
But there's not a lot of people that build great greens. There never has been.
That's something that Mike mccarton said once on the podcast that stuck with me. He's like, great architecture doesn't cost any more than average architecture.
No, it really doesn't.
Thinking about this, and you know, you talked about Tom Simpson and John Lowe and we've recorded a lot of podcasts and I'm curious if there was one historical figure It could be an architect, it could be a writer, it could be anybody. If you could listen to like a podcast from one figure in golf of yesteryear, who would it be?
Oh, Bernard Darwin, no question, both to see if all of that beautiful writing just came out of his voice straight away, or you know, how hard did he have to work to be that good a writer? You know, was it just like everything he said was genius or do you really have to grind away at it to get it to that level. I'd be curious to know. But you know, I still think if the way he described some of the old golf courses that he saw,
and think about how much we've lost. You know this he just makes the spira of golf back then sound way different and and kind of cool. And you know he would he would critique golf courses pretty strongly without comparing them to Hamburger Helper or some of the things
that I've done over the years. You know, it's one of the one of the descriptions I'm thinking about is Blackheath, the old the old course in London that was you know, played a lot played across common Land that's now like in the city of you know, it's it's down near Greenwich actually, but very much. You know, they were playing across you'd be hitting across busy public roads now into the park kind of. And yet you know that was that was the best golf club in London in the
early days before the Heathlin courses started coming. And it was only seven holes, but it was really hard. There was like one part three and most of the holes were long and longer to the point that you know, he described one of them as I wish I had the exact quote. I should go grab grab one of my bucks and get the exact quote. But it was like, you know, he remembered hitting several long shots before getting
within the range of the green. You know, it's like driver three wood, three wood five iron type hole, and then the next hole after that was the same, but not quite as much. And you think, well, there's nothing even close to that now, I mean, nothing like that. So you know, there are a lot of great architects who I would have loved to meet and pick the brains up a little bit. But but to listen to them talk, Bernard Darwin had to be uclassed by himself.
I mean, he could do a couple hours just on the Walker Cup that the first Walker Cup they had to play in as a sub beat fountains in the singles matches.
And tell us what National and Leedo are really like in the early days.
Yeah, he had away with words.
I read an article that he wrote about when they outlawed the stymy the first go around. You know, he was very upset about removing this you know, skill of the game, the way he described it, and it is really interesting because then they brought it back and then sure enough a couple of years later it was removed. But his his case for the stymy was just the way he wrote it, the language and the the clarity.
And I think that there's something about my era, like especially with photos the digital where you could put as many photos as you want, an article online and video you know you can show people, But especially then where you only had the words. You to be a great writer, you had to really be a great writer.
Yes, And have you ever tried to play a match with Steimy's in play It's unbelievable. I've done it two or three times with guys that work for me, just to just so they understand it a little bit. But but it was it wouldn't come It usually wouldn't come into play more than like a couple of times in eighteen holes. But when it did, you know, it was rarely ever a matter of luck. It was like, you know, we're both playing a part four or part five, and we've we've kind of hit the same you know, we've
kind of played it the same way. But but I've been just a little sloppier than you have. So I've left myself too far from the hole, and then I don't hit a good approach pot, and you have the chance then not to just you don't have to make your putt to beat me. You have to either make it or just leave your ball in a place that I can't make mine, which you've got a lot more chance of doing. And that's my punishment for being sloppy
on the hole. You know, I can't just make us six or eight foot or and save myself from being sloppy all the way through. So it was, you know, it would anytime a steiny happened, it would almost always be to the advantage of the guy who played the hole better. Yeah, you know, and you know it just if you try to explain it to somebody now it just seems like, oh, that's completely unfair. I mean, you can't you can't block it. And obviously everybody going to
stroke play as the main form of golf. It doesn't make any sense in stroke play, so you had to get you know, once stroke play became more common, it was hard to leave it in because people were so used to putting everything out and that's the game that having this element of match play just didn't make any sense to them anymore. But but I think it was clearly. It clearly rewarded the better player in match play, and that's why all the old guys thought, we don't want.
To see this go the I think that stymy one of the things that it just allowed somebody. It kind of captured the essence of golf where it gave somebody one last opportunity to make a truly great shot, you know, to get a ball to stop right in somebody's line.
It is not very easy to do, no, it's not. That's the other part of it.
And it gave that last opportunity to hit a true, really great shot that could swing the match. That's the the interesting thing about that. Darwin in the Walker Cup against founds. I mean it was like the most like heavily favored match maybe of all time for founds. So you know, they really and I remember reading he was down three or four through four and the match turned.
He stymied founds and found Founds lost like four or five for the next seven holes, and it totally had to be the I think he stymied him on the radan and and that swung the match because there's a mental aspect of it too.
Oh definitely, definitely. I mean you just you think you're playing better than the guy and you just got screwed there.
It's uh, stimy's are everybody should go out and play a.
Match with stymies. That's it's fun.
So with forward thinking ideas, is there a space to combine combine golf and environmentalism?
There's space to combine golf and environmentalism. Yes, I mean there's the Golf Environment Organization based in Scotland in North Barrack. Great place for them. It has been around for about ten years now. I kind of volunteered to help them a little bit at the beginning, and I still am
like an informal advisor to them. But they're like the only you know, there's there's lots of organizations in golf that, you know, preach how they're saving the environment, but most of that sounds very self serving to environmentalists and doesn't have much credibility. These guys do have credibility in the
environmental community. And and I said to him right from the beginning, you know, the only way you have credibility outside of golf is if you're willing to point the finger at golf every once in a while and say, you know, pointed an example of a golf course that's really doing this wrong, instead of you know, just whitewashing everything or green washing they call it. Now, where you know, you make no matter what, no matter how bad the project is, we're going to put a good face on it.
And they've done that, you know, they've they've given case studies of courses that they think really did a good job, but they've also picked on someone's that didn't do a good job. And they have the RNA's total support and backing.
And they also got involved in the Ryder Cup a few years ago, and they actually did and I won't name the golf course, but they actually did pretty much rule out one country's bid for the Wrder Cup last time because they said they could not supp were at the golf course that they were going to go to as being environmentally sustainable at all, which was a big deal and will make a big impact in the country
that they picked on. Like, you know, now, that is not the model for your future right there, We can't support that.
Yeah, I think it makes it makes a lot of sense that that would be one of the trends that continues to emerge in the future, because obviously it's you know, a environmentalism is growing, you know growing, you know, concern
of more and more people. I studied environmental science in college and even from ten years ago till now, it's you know, on the forefront of so many people's minds, and golf is an open space activity with you know, inputs into the turf that aren't environmentally friendly, but also provides like an excellent place to have a lot of environment environ meline is combined with it.
Yes, and you know, we actually I think the golf community in general has done a pretty good job in the last fifteen years of like getting out in front of it with more research and and pushing back on the you know, you used to go to a permit meeting for a golf course twenty years ago and have five people in the back stand up and start shouting about pesticide use on golf courses, like, we can't have
any of this in our neighborhood. And I remember Pete Ie going to a going to a meeting twenty years ago or more than that for Bully Rock in Maryland, and you know, same kind of group standing up in the back, and you know, Pete Pete looked at them and said, you know, a golf course to put out any pesticides at all, you know, you have to you have to have a superintendent who's licensed and put it out, and there's very strict laws on exactly what he can
put out. Meanwhile, you go in your backyard and use five times as much per acre and nobody says boo. You know, the golf business has tried to do that responsibly, and they've done a better job of showing the rest of the world that that's what they do. And so there's not that many questions like that anymore. When I you know, I don't go to permit meetings often, but
when I do, that's not the topic. You know, you might have topics about specific habitat for insects, birds, whatever, but it's less likely to be about pollution and pollution coming from golf courses because we really have addressed a lot of those things in the last twenty years, Which is not to say that there are no golf courses that do it wrong. Yeah, there still are, but it's pretty hard to get a permit if you want to do it wrong.
Now, yeah.
Yeah.
And then there's there's stuff like the Posita Tiempo is a good example with the recycled water they're doing now with that treatment plant, where they're essentially taking water that's otherwise unusable and making it where they can at least irrigate the golf course.
With it, right, And that was really cool because they wound up getting an agreement to take the water from the neighboring town. I mean, you know, usually the politics of those things are all you know, inside our little borders.
And you know, they had no source of water from Santa Cruz because they're way up the hill from Santa Cruz and it made zero sense to pump the water all the way up there, so they had no supply, and they you know, they basically looked across the highway at the at the little community next door that like hadn't you know, it was a small place and they had no they had no outlet for their treated water. They were just letting it go downhill to the ocean.
And it's like, hey, could we use some of your water.
That's that's a very cool and especially given the spot, you know, with a with the water restriction to California, a perfect example of environmentalism working with golf there. Yes, Adam Grove, this is a good question.
I think that I struggle with this sometimes.
There are always a lot of discussions about strategy and golf, but how does strategy and golf course architecture apply to players who have very little control over where their golf ball goes off the tee and on their approach shots.
Well, yeah, I've heard that critique before that eighty or ninety percent of golfers, including me, aren't good enough to play the course strategically, and and I don't really, I don't think that's true. You know, it may be true that I don't hit my drive to the side of the fair way that I want to be on as consistently as a really good player does or consistently as you do. But that doesn't mean that I can't help
myself as I go around the golf course. I mean I play with people all the time that you know. Partly it comes from my brief stint as a caddie and partly because I know my way around a golf course pretty well. But you know, I'll play with people a lot and they'll play five shots better than they normally do just because I'll tell them a couple of times.
You know, just just aim right at the green. Make sure you make sure you stay right at this flag, because there's there's certain holes where that makes a ton of difference. And it's not always you know a lot of golfers. If you look in a book about strategy on golf course architecture, it's all about what he's talking about, hitting the t shot to the right side or taking on a bunker in order to get a better angle
to the green. But to me, where it shows up much more in the scoring is on the second shot and where you miss the green. If you miss it. You know, most good golf courses, there's a best place around the green to miss, and there's a worst, and it's a shot difference every time. You know, if you finish below the hall at Augusta and not in a water hazard, you've got a birdie pot and you should make par. And if you hit it on the high side of the green, you're just desperately trying to two
putt for par. And you know, if you're not a tour pro, you're gonna make bogie like nine times out of ten. So you know, that's worth like six shots around to the average guy if he just figures out which side to miss on and play is for there.
Yeah, And I grew up catting my whole life, and you know, getting people into the right places where they where it takes the big number out of play is half the battle, you know, it's it and takes the real risk, like you know, a shot that they have, you know, three times as much opportunity to get up and down that The strategy is still like kind of the same, right, It's just it's just a different, you know, a different How can how can I give myself a
really good chance of making par if you don't have that good of control and if you hit a really great one, you got a birdie putt and.
One of the main things I learned from p Die, and then it was really reinforced from the little bit of time I spent with Jack Nicholas at Sabonic was how conservatively the pros play exactly.
That's what people don't understand.
No, people look at the pros and think they can just fire at the pins all day and that's and that's true, but that's true once they've gotten themselves in position and not made a mistake. I mean, you know now it's since Mark Brody and some of those other guys wrote about it. It's just the ironclad law. You know, if there's a hazard with a penalty stroke involved, you're aiming thirty five forty yards away from that, no matter what.
I mean. You know, even if you're at the edge of the trees on the other side, even you could be aiming to miss the fairway entirely, just to take that out of play, because half the time you'll you'll wind up missing between where you aimed and the water in the fairway. The other half you're playing out of the rough and it might be a little harder, but you took double out of the hole. And you know
it used to drive Pete crazy. How conservative the pros were, but you know, he knew that he understood it well enough that he tried to use it to their disadvantage. Like, the more conservatively you play on this t shot, the
harder this second shot is going to be. So you know, if you know, either if the player just has more guts that he can keep pulling off the drive closer to the water, or if he's that much better of a driver of the ball that you know he can aim twenty five yards left of the water instead of thirty five. Either one of those gives them a big advantage.
But you know, the players now are also convinced by the data that this is the right way to play the golf course that very few of them, even on their best week, and even when they're here and it's pure, they're still aiming at the same spot and it's kind of costing them little shaves of a stroke here and
there throughout. You know, if they were confident enough to aim five yards closer to the water than the other guy and really know that they're not going to hit in the water that week, it'd make a big difference.
Yeah, It's almost like if they understand when they're having their outlier performances. Yeah, and when they're having when they're having their outlier performances on the other end.
Or if they're just better. I mean, you know, Tiger Woods clearly was better with his irons for years. And that's you know, if you think of how how the players plot their second shots on a golf course, a severe golf course like Augusta, where it really matters if you're above the pin or below, you know, they're kind
of we'll take an extreme example. You know, say there's a haul where you know, if if Tiger and player B were both hitting eight iron into a green, Tiger at his best was probably hitting that shot within ten feet of where he aimed nearly all the time, and the other guy maybe fifteen or twenty feet because he's just not that good. You know. That means Tiger could aim five or ten feet below the holl without ever worrying about getting above the hole, and the other guy
had to aim twenty feet below the hole. And there's you know, there's lots of greens in Augusta that there's not that much space. You know, you're playing twelve or thirteen and the pins toward the front, you can't aim twenty feet short of the pin, that's the water. So you you know, you pretty much just have to take your medicine, aim for the hole, wind up above the hole too much of the time, and it costs you
big time, you know. So you know, having that tighter circle to aim with is a huge advantage if you understand exactly how big your circle really is, and it's you know, it's not just like what the tour average is. It's what your average is, and you're better than other guys at that. That's the advantage that you should be trying to press. And Tiger understood that completely with or
without any book telling him how to do it. He just he just knew what where his advantages were and he macs that out in his strategy of playing golf.
And it also kind of.
Puts forth the idea of having more contour and greens that because that the circles that the great shots get more separated from the average ones.
Yes, well, just the fact, you know, we always talk about players aiming at the hole. You know, if you let if Tiger is that good to aim, you know, if his circle is ten feet around and the green is flat and he's just aiming right at the hul because it doesn't matter what side he misses on, he's going to have a five foot pot a lot of
the time. If the green has contour and it's significantly different to be above the flag than below, then you know he's you know, the top end of his circle is at the flag, the middle of it's five feet away, the bottom of its ten feet away, and now he's leaving himself five to ten feet a lot of the time, and he's not making nearly as many birdies. I mean, that's the key to like keeping scoring on the tour a little higher is you know, not letting guys aim
right at the flag. But like we talked about earlier, the tour is just the opposite of that. They want the pin placements flat and they don't want there to be a difference between missing above the hole and below the hole. That's what that whole two percent slope rule is about.
It's interesting.
I've thought about this a ton, and you know, you see a lot of times when when it's wet, you get these really bunched leaderboards and there's seven guys on the back, nine within one shot in the lead. And in a way, the tour is an entertainment product, and that is more entertaining than the runaway winds.
But the runaway wins are more more.
They are more representative of great performances and courses that have allowed great performances to separate themselves.
Sure, but you know I mean, and yes, the tour does think of itself as an entertainment product. But also the sponsors think about they want people to stay tuned and watch the commercials, so they don't want it to
become a runaway win. And they especially don't want it to become a runaway win for a player that you've never heard of, that you're not going to stick around to the end and watch that, you know, they want they want multiple guys within still having a shot at it, because maybe at least there's one or two guys in that pack of guys that you'll want to watch.
It's kind of one of the brilliant things with a gust of the way it finishes when the Nines got flipped is that there's all those scoring holes. You know, you got thirteen, fifteen, sixteen, You have all these scoring holes. So a lot of times the somebody goes through that stretch and it looks like they're in a great spot, but all the leaders haven't got through it. So it makes the tournament feel closer than it actually is.
Absolutely. Yeah. When the leaders are bogeying ten, eleven, twelve, at the same time the guys who are two shots behind or making birdie and eagle on fifteen and sixteen, it looks like, oh my god, the whole leader board
is going to turn over. But then the leader then the guys who are leading get to thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and they get those shots back, you know, unless they you know, occasionally they do just collapse after, you know, they feel like they're choking it away and they see how the leader board is changing, and they just think they've thrown the tournament away and they're not patient enough to go, yeah, I still got birdie holes coming up.
It's like the complete opposite of what we'll see at Wingfoot, where like the last four everybody's just holding on for dear life.
Oh yeah. Yeah.
And it's like if you post a number, it's an interesting you know, and something that you could think about when you're laying actually routing a golf course, you know, is how that clothes would if it was you know, if it promoted something. It's almost like a deception deception way you could just sive a player up with a hole. You could deceive a tournament with the way the finishes.
And we that's one of the things Brooks Kepka and I talked a lot about for Memorial Park. I mean, he was very interested in the idea of having a really exciting finish and having you know, not just thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,
but nearly all the way to the end. The eighteenth is a really tough part four, but fourteen's a very short par five, and fifteen is a short part three that you could make a big number on, but you could also make two and sixteen's ap par five that's a real gambling hole, and seventeen's is short part four that's a real gambling hole, And you could have big changes on the leader board really fast, you know, both in front of you that you have to react to,
but also when you get there. You could make up a lot of shots near the end. And you know, Brooks thought that was important that that most tour courses don't really have that. They're just kind of you know, every hole is about the same difficulty in relation to par so you don't get it's not that exciting to watch.
Yeah, that's yeah.
Stawgrass would be another example, coming down that stretch.
I was absolutely focused on that. And you know when we were talking about when I was working on the plans for the for the stadium course at PGA West, you know, Pete was talking about that concept and I didn't really understand. I was trying to understand what he meant, and I finally said, so, do you mean like a hole where you could have a three shot swing on a hole where you know, one guy can make birdie, but if if the other guy messes up, you can
make a double. And Pete was like, exactly, He's like, you know, it could also be eagle and bogie or birdie and double. But if you've got holes where they're that much potential for the thing to turn over, that's way more exciting and the players are way more nervous than if it's just everybody's gonna make either par or boge here.
Is there any kind of core outside of just water that you can think of that promotes that feel.
Where well, when I would get asked to make an eclectic of eighteen holes best holes from around the world, One of the ones I used to put in a lot was the eighteenth that roll Lithum, you know, and that's a hole where it's not a really long par four, but it's a difficult drive between deadly pot bunkers, and if you drive it in the if you drive it in one of the pot bunkers, you're going to struggle to make par and you can make bogie or double
pretty easily. And yet if you hit a good drive in between all those bunkers, then you're looking at wedge to the green and you've got a decent chance of making birdie. And that hole has certainly cost several guys the Open, most recently Adam Scott. I think driving it in one of those bunkers on the eighteenth hall, you know, there's not a course in the States that has bunkers
anywhere near that severe. So you don't you just don't see you You only see it on US tournaments when there's water in play, and that's why Pete put a lot of water in play on some of his golf courses.