Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's podcast is brought to you by our friends over at b dratty. If you're on the hunt for the perfect stocking stuffer, we cannot recommend the b Dratty Richard Boxer enough. Using the same peruvium PMA cotton from their Polos, they remove the seam down the back to prevent riding up nobody likes a natural wedgie, and added details like the button fly to make the most comfortable pair of boxers we've ever worn.
Not convinced.
They're running forty percent off their site right now using the code Gift forty through Wednesday, September second, So that's today. If you're listening today, I would use that code. It's forty percent off.
Now.
If you are not listening today, we have another code TFE twenty five t f E twenty five and that'll get you twenty five percent off. So if you're listening to this after Wednesday the second, that code will get you discount. So with the discount of mind, snag a pair, try them out.
I love these things. I wear them to sleep a lot. I don't want to.
Talk much more about my boxers but let's get to Tom Dok. Today's episode is the latest edition of The Yoke with Dok. Tom is back from a month long road trip. He went all over the United States. We just got set up with remote recording equipment so we can do these a little bit more seamlessly and safely. And Tom, we didn't get the the We didn't get the mic dialed in for this episode, so it'll be like a normal interview audio, but the next episode will
be that crisp like in person audio. But Tom talks on this episode primarily about his experience at the Houston opening Memorial Park, which debuted on the PGA tour, his uh redesign of Memorial Park in Houston. We talk a lot about that, and without further ado, here is Tom Dope.
I miss the 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 egg Frida egg and Frida egg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the.
Well.
Jaeger Kovich has pestered me about this one for for months now, and he even has his wife asked on on the life's call for questions.
I didn't give any invitation or anything.
Okay, she she asked. She wants to hear a travel story. She wants to know about traveling, leaving the country without a passport, forgetting your wallet on different occasions. She wants to hote these travel stories, these alleged travel stories.
Okay, well, I should be saving these for a future book, but I don't really have any inclination to write that book right now. I have never left the country without a passport. That would be a really bad idea, however, you know, and in fact, I always keep my passport in either my briefcase or now it's a backpack that I always travel with. So that's the one thing I know that I'm going to have if I forget ship when I leave the house. But sure enough, one time I was going on a trip where I was going
to China and then to Spain. This was like two thousand and eight, two thousand and seven, when we were looking at a project in Spain. So I was going to China, then to Spain and maybe somewhere else in Europe and then home. And I went out the door without my wallet or any credit cards or any money or any any form of payment at all, and you know, and I was like, you know, it was one of
those six thirty am flights. So I get to the airport at five point forty five in the morning or something and realize I don't have that stuff and it's too late for my wife to run it to me. I'm like, well, I never need any money or anything in China. You know, the client always just picks me up and like takes me everywhere, and you know, so, so I don't really need any of that stuff in China. I'll just need it when I get to Spain and
Brian Schneider is going to meet me in Spain. So instead of trying to ship it to China, which I figured it was pretty sure it would get lost, I just told my wife just send that stuff to Brian Schneider and I'll meet him when I get to Madrid. So I did travel from home to China to Madrid without any money or any form of payment at all, and it worked. But you know, you would only do that once you have the confidence of your of travel behind you. But mostly too, you know, I'm privileged now.
When I'm traveling somewhere, there's somebody on the other end to take care of me and pick me up from the airport when I'm in a strange place and doing all that kind of stuff. So I really had, you know, I've traveled a lot of pretty you know, a lot of places where I couldn't get around on my own, especially for the confidential guide going to the Philippines or
Sri Lanka and India and those places. If I was trying to make those trips on my own without any help, I'd be I'd never get out the door here because
it's so hard to make all the arrangements. But the great thing about it at this point is like even those places, you know, there's somebody in golf that will help me, you know, and it's sort of you know, they get to spend three or four days telling stories back and forth with me while we go around and see places, and I've got the security of knowing that, Okay, I can get here and this won't be a disaster and it'll work out. And you know, like India was
a great example of that. So when I when I said I wanted to travel there, a couple of different people reached out to me with somebody they knew in India. But the one, the one who I connected with was an architect there, a golf course architect there in vidget Nandra, a jog. He's a he's a great player, and you know, that's how people get in the golf architecture business and countries that don't have a thriving business. A good player,
you know, whose opinion is respected. But he's actually taken time to learn about construction and he's got a little crew of guys that help him build stuff. He doesn't get much new work at all. Most of it's consulting at older golf courses and they're doing you know, they're doing it without a hell of a lot of resources, and they certainly don't spend the kind of money that we spend in the States building stuff. But you know,
I said him a really complicated thing. You know, I wanted to see like eight or nine golf courses in all different parts of India, you know, the most. It couldn't have been more complicated. And we managed to do it. And you know, he went along for some of the stops and then you know, found a driver for me to take me to some of the other places. When he had commitments and couldn't go. And the only the only hard part was I went to Sri Lanka for four days too, and he had no contacts there at all.
So that's really the only place I've gone where I just found a driver like online, and you know, so I get to the airport. I was kind of one with a friend, David Lee. We get to the airport in Colombo and there's no driver waiting for us with a sign and I'm like, uh, we don't have a backup play in here. And then like forty five you know, I'm trying to email somebody to sort it out. Like forty five minutes later, these two guys show up and
they're like, sorry, we're late. And then you know, we get in the car and start out and you know, I don't know much about Sri Lanka, but I've seen a map of where we're going, and you know, we're our first stop is east into the center of the country, and we start out north and I'm like, oh, what are we doing here? And the guys are like, oh, the traffic going east is just terrible. We have to go,
you know. So we went like fully an hour and a half, like out of the way to the north to avoid the traffic coming from the east, which I saw two days later. I'm like, okay, that made sense, but it sure was scary at the time, just getting in a car with two guys you don't know taking you to some place they've never been and hoping that you get there in one piece.
Yeah, wait, your time talking about the guy being a good player. And that's how I got a golf course architecture that sounds a lot like the way America was early on.
That's the way everything, that's the way it's always been. I mean, you know, I am I'm one of the few guys that didn't get into it that way. That's how he Died got into it. He was just the best amateur player around. And you know people. You know, a friend of his asked him to find an architect for the golf course, and he couldn't get Robert tren Jones to do it, and he couldn't get Dick Wilson
to even look at it. And he finally, you know, he went back to the guy and said, I struck out with those guys, and the clients said, why do you do it?
Yeah, So your road trip is you were all over the place. Anybody that follows you on Instagram knows that you you cover some serious ground. The latest place that you were was Baroreial Park, which was hosting the Houston Open, which you redesigned the golf course. Every got to see it, I think, you know, from general public opinion was positive
about it. It sounded like the players really liked it. But Jason Long would love to know what your thoughts were, And a number of people asked about this, but what your thoughts were on how Memorial Park played and you know, what you would like to see be done differently for years to come, or you know what they did well and if you're surprised at anything. Lots of questions, but you know, just general Memorial Park thoughts.
That was a really fun week. You know, when we're building a golf course, the one thing that we can't do is test it. You know, we spend Brian Slonik, you know, shapes greens for me and shapes other things. He always talks about you. You're imagining what the ball is going to do when out lands. Well, you know, if I went back to Memorial Park on my own and played golf for a week and watched the public
play the golf course. I might go a whole week sitting by the fifteenth green waiting for somebody to land a ball right where I don't want to see what happens to it and never see it. You know, that's we're not that accurate. The best players in the world are that accurate. So spending a week kind of inside the ropes getting to see where the ball's landing and what happens to it is perfect. I mean, I wish I could do that with all of my golf courses.
You know, I don't I don't care if they're shooting sixty four or seventy four. That doesn't really happen, you know, I just want to see does this work the way I wanted it to work. And there is no better way to do that than watch the PGAH or play there.
Even though I understand as well as anybody not everybody's like that, but you know, I can visualize how it's going to work for myself, you know, to see how it works for them, and you know, there's when we started that project, I sort of said to some friends, well, you know, we're going to take on Mission impossible, that that cliche about design and a golf course that will that can host to be a public course for sixty thousand people a year and host the PGA Tour event.
Those are the two, like furthest the part things that you can do. And everybody always says that's what they're trying to do, is is will fill both ends of the spectrum. But it's it's you know, I kind of went into it thinking, well, it's almost impossible to do that. You know, We're just we're gonna do it by not worrying about what the winning score is for the tournament. But as it turned out, most of the players thought it was a pretty hard golf course, and that has
everything to do with Bermuda grass rough. You know, it doesn't have to be really long. I think they had the rough mode at like somewhere between an inch and a half and two inches. They let it grow all summer, and I'd heard, you know, in the build up to the event, like six weeks before the event, the feedback was, oh, the rough is brutal and they're having a hard time finding balls, And I was like, cut it, you know,
you don't need guys losing balls the tour event. That'll just be a freaking disaster, just.
Quick way to get on their side.
It's no kidding, but you know an inch and a half or two inches, you're not going to lose the ball, but it sits down and you can't spin it, and that's all you have. That's the only penalty those guys need.
It's super unpredictable too. You don't know when it's gonna nose dive, you don't know when it's gonna fly.
It comes out.
Berma rough is the just the most difficult rough to play out of it and it is short. It doesn't look like a lot, but you never have any clue how the ball. You're almost guessing how it's going to come out right.
I actually, I mean those guys make it look pretty easy. And I went I went out one night during the tournament. You know, they were playing early in the day on the weekend to like avoid compete with football and TV time, so late in the afternoon on Saturday, I went out and hit some shots and I just threw three or four balls in the rough and tried to hit the shots, and I was just hitting them all over the place, like you know, it wouldn't come out straight at all.
They have shanked a couple of them, and you know, I had no appreciation for just how squirrely the ball does come out of that kind of rough from watching those guys. I had to hit a couple of shots to realize how hard it is. But you know, I didn't grow up in Bermuda grass, so I don't really
have that experience. That's one of the first things when, you know, when I got together with Brooks Kopka to talk about the golf course, that was one of the first things that he said, actually that you know, the hardest shots on a Bermuda grass golf course or shots out of the rough from not a perfect flat stance. He's like, you just don't know where it's going to go. You know, you know you going to have trouble stop in it. So you start you start thinking about, you know,
where do I want to miss around the green? And you know, where is there a backstop that I can aim at so this won't get away from you completely? And sure enough, you know, I had dinner one night during the tournament with a couple of young players, including Victor Oland, who's a great young golfer, and he said the same thing. He said, you know, when I walk up to the ball and it's two yards in the rough instead of in the fairway, I just totally think differently.
And you know, now I've got to think about where can I get around the green. I'm not thinking about any close to the hole at all.
Yeah, that makes sense. So what anything else stand out to you? I think everybody loved, you know, that closing stretch, the short part four. That was a fun hole to watch where we saw some players playing ping pong.
I needed. I didn't actually witness anybody play ping pong on that hole. You know. Thursday morning, I woke up and there was like a hole in one on the second hole at the front pin blazement, like the first hour of the tournament, and you know, they were afraid there were going to be a half a dozen of them,
but that didn't happen. And then like while they were worried about that, twenty minutes later, somebody made ten at thirteen going back and forth across the green and I was like, ooh, you don't see you don't see either one or ten on tour that often. Yeah, I mean the finishing stretch held up really well. You know, we thought of it as well. I mean, one of the reasons the scoring wasn't lower is they took two holes that are normally part five for the tournament and turn
them into part fours. Yeah, the first hole, which we thought they would do it that way, but also the fourteenth hole, which we thought they would still call a part five, you know, And if they called fourteen a part five, then I guarantee you that, you know, with thirteen being a short four and fifteen being a short part three and sixteen being a reachable par five, that you know, the guy in the club house wouldn't stand a chance against the guys still out of the golf course.
But just change in par on fourteen from five to four kind of balances that out more and also takes four shots off the winning score, you know, when you're thinking of it in terms of under par. I mean, you know, Dustin Johnson was twenty under part of the Masters, Carlos Artiz was thirteen under winning at Memorial Park. But they shot almost exactly the same score. It's just to
call par different. You could easily do the same thing for Augusta and call two of those parts five is part fours, because they're you know, most of them are going for the green most of the time.
Yeah, you could easily say that two and thirteen are part fours with the way these guys hit it. I mean, if they hit good drives on either of those holes, most guys have irons in their hands.
Yeah, yeah, you know they're I mean, those greens of Augusta are a little tougher, you know, calling those part those would be really hard Part four horse, but but they are, you know they you know, the pros have an expectation on pretty much every part five. I mean the one long hold of Memorial Park number eight. You know, we one of the things I changed in the routing
was the the ninth hole. The original ninth holeup Memorial Park was like kind of a layoup par four to the end of the fairway and then a shot across that little canal to the green. And I just hated the key shot. And you know, it was possible that somebody would try to go for the green, but we couldn't clear the trees in the creek, so they'd be going for a kind of blind and dangerous to agree with a lot of people around it. So that was out.
So you know, I turned that hole into a part three, and then lengthened the previous hall from a really short par five to a really long one. It's six ten from the back or something like that. And even so, you know, if guys hit it in the fairway, they're ripping driver off the deck or three wood to get it up there close to the green, and a lot of them are getting close to the green or on the green. It's kind of insane to watch.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's you build it longer, they're just going to hit it further. That's there farther.
You know.
That's like the kind of addage of the tour at this point. With with regards to Kopka, Allen Mazroll wanted to ask if there were any interesting differences between his thoughts in twenty nine team and Nicholas Is at Sabonic when you guys were designing that golf course together. He's essentially looking for comparing players perspectives from different errors.
You know, Well, the relationship with Jack was entirely different. I mean, you know, he had done so many golf courses and you know, you know, we're sort of trying to be equals, even though it's hard to be at the same cable with Jack Nicholas would be considered an equal. But but you know, Jack didn't spend a lot of time telling me how he thought about design. He assumed. I knew most of that from having seen a lot
of his golf courses. You know, the one the one thing that I remember the most that Jack talked about from a playing perspective. You know, it was funny because it didn't happen until like the opening of the tournament.
When we were playing on opening day, he hit a shot on well, he looked at hitting a shot going for the green on the thirteenth hold with his second shot, and then he laid up instead to the left and hit a little pitch in and he said, as we were walking up, he said, you know, that was about an eighty percent shot. And I said, what do you mean And he said, he said, well, you know, I figured if I tried, I could maybe get to the
green about eighty percent of the time. And I said, when you were playing on tour, what percentage did you did it have to be for you to go for it? And he looked at me like I had rocks in my head and said one hundred percent. You know, he he was like, you know, I'm not going to hit the shot one hundred percent of the time. But if I'm not one hundred percent sure I can hit it, if I hit a good shot, I'm not. I was never trying. And that's certainly a different approach to what
these guys do today. It's just like we were talking about on the longer part five. You know, they're just if they can't make it, they're happy getting up there as close as they can. They're not thinking about, you know, what's the most strategic place to lay up to. They don't really lay up hardly at all, you know the I mean on the aphole at Memorial Park. The only time you'd see guys laying up is if they hit it in the rough. And even then they were trying
to get it down there pretty far. But they were trying to make sure they got it out of the rough and got it back in the fairway. You know, whatever was the most club they could hit and be pretty sure they were going to do that. That's what they did.
That's that's interesting.
So that obviously Kepka was was he was always saying, just he gets it as close to the green as it can.
Yeah, and he didn't say that directly, but I, you know, I've seen these guys play enough. I understood that's the perspective now. And he certainly would say that, you know he's he's you know he, you know he. So the first two rounds, you know, the tour likes like all these driveable par fours, and each of ale part five, the tour likes to have a tee further back. That takes that out of play for most of the field.
So on Thursday and Friday, when they've got a full field and they're trying to get the round finished in daylight, the players aren't waiting for the previous group to drive the green or something. And so on sixteen Brooks suggest, you know, we had the whole bill, and Brooks suggested a tee another twenty yards back and slightly left in a different angle a to give him a different angle
to hit the t shot. He wished we could do that on more holes, and I would have liked to, but with all the trees that were there, there wasn't too much scope for that. But that extra twenty yards, you know, it took the hale from like five fifty to five seventy and that stopped a lot of players from going for that green and two over water Brooks still did it on Friday, but you know, most guys were were just playing conservatively on that hole at least till the weekend. And if you drove it out of
the fairway, you kind of had to lay up. You know, nobody was going for that green out of rough from to.
Twenty outside of the rough?
Was there anything, any hole or any shot that you saw that you know might have given them more trouble than you expected?
You know, the fourth, the long part four is one of my favorite holes there and I and I did expect. You know, that green kind of sits down and it's one of the only greens we moved to a different locate. You know, we moved it like fifty yards right and further back than it was before. It's almost on the what was the te for number five and and it's you know, so it sits on the ground. They didn't put any fill there, and it kind of falls away, you know, it falls into the green and then it
falls away to the right and left and back. So you know, that's a scary hole for them to approach. They kind of have to land the ball short and make sure they don't go through because they'll get into trouble through the green. And that it was tough for that was really tough for especially if they got in the rough at all. They just they had to you know, they had to land the ball like thirty yards short of the green to make sure it didn't run through. And they're not that comfortable.
Yeah, they're so scared of of hazard. That's that's the thing, is the how cautious tour players are. I feel like gets people don't realize that they're like among the most cautious players in the game.
You know. I knew that from from listening to Pete Die forty years ago. I mean, he just drilled that into me. How they you know, how conservative the players were. And you know one of the reasons he set up all his water hazards on that that really shallow angle.
You know, if you set up something on a forty five degree angle, he said, you know, they know how they know where that point is that they can carry the water comfortably, and they'll always play a certain degree safe of that like further left if the if they things left to right, and you know, if the angle is if there's too much angle there. The carry is so much less when they play safe that they just they're never ever going to go in the water at all.
You know. It's only when you're playing almost parallel with the hazard but not quite that they're likely to ever miss in the water. And of course now they don't even think about that because they're they're thinking where I'm carrying it to an aim and so far, you know, they don't care where the left side of the fairway is on that whole. They're just getting aim to the safe spot, even if it's in the rough, to make sure they never hit in the walk.
Yeah, that was what Tiger did so well as he just you know, he took out the big myths.
He would just hit it as far if if there's Obie left too, he's always gonna miss, right, you know, he did that.
But the you know, the other thing that Tiger really had an advantage on, I think is, you know, so these guys are kind of not that many of them are like math majors, but but they are kind of plotting their way around golf course like like somebody that knows trigonometry a little bit. They've got you know, they know what their circle is they can drive a ball into and they're making sure that circle stays away from penalty shot. And the same on the approach to the green.
It's like, okay, I can you know, I can hit it on a dime, or I can hit it in a circle that's fifteen feet around. So I'm going to make sure I take that bunker out apply or at Augusta. You know, I'm going to aim that much below the hole so I don't hit the ball above the hole. But then I can't because there's a creek on the other side. So I've got to, like, you know, I've got to split the difference, and sometimes I'm going to be above the hole, but that's better than being in the creek.
That's the advantage of having sloping greens, yes, is that it's and that's I think I think that's one of the issues with the speeds of greens get keeping increasing. You know, the pursuit of speedy greens is, you know, sloping greens is one of the best ways to protect par against really great players because they don't want to be pin high or pass pin high. Nobody wants a ten foot or the breaks eight feet.
You know, right. Yeah, you know, Ben Crenshaw said said, you know, you know, before Brooks, I spent way more time talking to BEG. Crenshaw than any other pro about design and stuff. And he said once that on a you know, when you had greens with slope, it was
it wasn't just important to stay above the hull. It was important to hit a straight approach shot because being p and high twenty feet right with six feet a break was a brutal shot and if you could get it below the whole put straight up hill, it was a huge advantage. And I had never thought about that part of it.
Yeah, yeah, because then especially then you get those twenty footers with all that break, and especially when they're hooking putts, like then you're so worried about it running six feet by on that putt, you know, where you get that putt running.
Away from you.
It's just it's so sloping greens is so important to especially for the for this modern you know, the modern player where you know, a lot of challenges have been removed from the game with equipment.
Yeah, so that was one of my big lessons from Memorial Park because we didn't you know, we knew the we knew the tour would not be okay with us putting too much slope in the greens. They told me at the start, Look, you can do whatever you want, but if you if you have areas of the green that are more than two percent, we're not putting the hole. You know, you got to give us enough places that
are relatively flat. And unfortunately that two percent at twelve or thirteen tournament speeds means that it doesn't mean, you know, they're not afraid of being above the hole at two percent and twelve on a stemmeter, you know, like on the wrang and tier of the green. Yeah, but when you're right around the hole, being six feet past is not so much worse than being six feet short. So it's really you know, so it's you know, when the
tour sticks to that standard. It's really only the major championship courses where you have that where it really matters about keeping the ball below the hole. Yeah.
If you watch PGA Tour golf a lot, it's so rare to see a putt rip across the hole. The only times you see it is that really old school places like I think like Sedgefield in North Carolina, you see balls rip across the hole as well. Yeah, they play there and it's like they just don't. There aren't any spots on the green that are two percent, you know, or if there's if there's maybe one or two, but they can't use it for four days, you know.
Yeah, and that used to be like you know, that was wing foot back in the day. You know, now they've flatten out some of those pinplatesments so you could use them more. So it's not it's not as severe, but but that was the thing up Memorial. I mean, when we're having dinner at victor Ovland, I was sitting next to Jim Crane, who was the client who funded the renovation of Memorial Park, and I said to Victor, I'm like, you know, this is what they've done this
week for the tournament. Is like how you used to prepare for a tournament. You just let the rough grow and take the greens from nine on the stip meter to eleven or twelve, and that was enough more difficult that you didn't really have to do much else to the golf course. I said. The problem is, you know, if I built this as a private course for mister Crane instead of a public course, that they don't want
to maintain the greens very fast. You know, I would have had to build the greens for twelve every day, and then they'd have to be really flat. You know, either it'd be way too hard for him, even though Jim's a really good player, or way too easy for you guys. You know, it's that difference in speed that that used to make so much difference for a tournament golf course, and now the expectation that you're going to maintain all courses to tournament standard every day has taken that away.
Yeah, it makes sense, especially, yeah, especially when you get to the club scene, like you know, Public goth Is. It works at Public goth because you know they have to maintain them at nine to get everybody around. But when you get the clubs, it's you know, they and they're always they always end up being faster than you expect them to be.
You know, yeah, well they you know, I was I got to see that first to just how how much they test the greens for firmness and speed and everything, you know, morning afternoon and evening every day leading up to the tournament. During the tournament, They've got a really good handle on that. You know, we were really lucky this year that they didn't deal with weather at all. You know, it was just it was just really nice,
warm weather, not too much wind. They could water the golf course exactly as much as they wanted to water the golf course instead of dealing with a bunch of rain that they had no control over. So they had the you know, they had it playing just the way they wanted it to, really dialed in where you know, out of the fairway, a good shot held the green, but it was hard to spin it back and an average you know, out of the rough, it was really
hard to hold the green. Even the best shots tended to land and release twenty or thirty feet.
How much input did you have in the setup process? Did they consult you a fair about any none?
You know, was it? Uh?
You know, how how did that hold the academy work with a new golf course in the In the tour set up staff.
When we were building the golf course. Uh, there are there are two or three guys that take turns doing the setup for tour events that you know, they each have a certain number of events they do and then they take and then they're home the rest of the time and and Robbie Ware who lives in Texas, was
was in charge of Houston. So he came out a couple of times while we were building the golf course to talk about some of the holes and you know how I saw them being played, and what they might do for options on setting it up and you know which holes they might use an alternate tea one or two of the days. Uh So he was involved during the construction of the golf course and then he was the guy to set it up the week of the tournament.
And you know, once you get to the tournament itself, you know, those guys are the professionals, and you know, they were nice enough to walk around with me some and talk about things and why they were doing things certain ways. But I wasn't going to try to second guess them at that point. They had it figured out and you know, that's that's their province. You know. The only thing that they did that you know, I thought
they did a great job. You know, the tournament turned out great, and the only thing they did or didn't do. You know, we built seventeen with the idea that they could move the tea up on the weekend and have guys try to drive the green and they didn't do that. And you know, they early in the week, Robbie told me all the holes where they were gonna put a tea up for a day or two, and he just omitted that one entirely. You know, it wasn't like it wasn't like you told me they weren't gonna do it.
He just left it out like, yeah, we're not gonna do that. But I don't really want to talk about it, so I do. That's the one thing that I'm gonna you know, I was like, okay, I'm not going to say anything about that because their mind's made up. But after watching that, you know, pretty much everybody laid up with five iron and then hit nine iron or wedge to the green and that was pretty dull. And so I'm going to go back to him now and say,
why didn't you want to do that? So I understand, and so I can maybe try to figure out some way to make that hole more interesting, because it's you know, you don't have too many holes on tour where everybody's laying up with a five iron off the tee and that's not the exciting finish. That's you know, in the midst of a really exciting finish, that hole is kind of a letdown. So I'd like to explore what else
we can do, you know. The one The one thing is, you know, I think they really would have liked it a lot better if it was just your standard Pete diye hole with the lake line. You know, if you couldn't drive the green, you could be twenty yards short of the green and just left and that would be okay. And we could really do that with with the shape of the lake and what we were working with. And I didn't really want to do something exactly like that. I wanted that green to sit out on the point
and be scary. But you know, I'd like to figure out something that works for them so they can set it up a little differently next year or the year after, and we'll see how that goes.
Yeah, you just gave me.
You gave me shades of my experience watching the twenty twelve Ryder Cup at Madina when I sat on the what was it the fifteenth hole, that short part four, I watched them hit six iron wedge for eight straight hours.
Yeah, that either nobody went for that.
Me and my buddy sat there for a whole day and watched sixth iri wedge for a full day.
It was it was busy.
I guess you don't. I guess you don't have Sevy playing anymore to like set the stand. You know, when when they started playing the Ryder Cup of the Belfry, everybody was like, you know, the Americans were like, Okay, We're all going to lay up on this whole one it hits seven iron wed and then you know, Seve yanks out the driver on day one, it fires it on the green and it's like, are we really going to hit seven iron wedge all week and lose to that?
Yeah?
It's see the Darren the sev was not short on any daring, you know in his game. One last question on Memorial Park. This is from a mole Yannick.
He wanted to know.
He said, we know what the pro said about Memorial Park, but what has the feedback been about from the daily feed players?
You know, I haven't got that much direct feedback. I know a couple of people that live in Houston that have played it a little bit and really liked it, but they were biased in favor of you to start, you know, and the pro shop in general has said, like ninety percent of people really like it. Some of the old timers just loved what was there before, and they were, you know, they were never going to really like that we changed it, which is sort of inevitable.
But you know, I mean, the easiest thing to say is the t sheet is full all the time, but it was full all the time before, so that's kind of a cop out, you know. But I've not heard I've not heard a lot of like complaints that we made it too hard or that people are bored. You know. I thought when we you know, when we decided to to you know, we went from like eighty bunkers to nineteen, and I wondered if people would think we were cheating
them in some way by doing that. But I've not really heard any negative feedback about that either, which is a good thing because I you know, I mean, I really am thinking thinking about doing less and less bunkers on future golf courses. So I'm glad that you know that that was a thing that attracted almost zero attention. During the tournament, players talked a lot about how the ball got away from the greens and the tricky shots
around the greens. But now one of them stopped to think, well, that's because there's no bunker there.
Yeah, that's true. Something that jogged my memory. I was just thinking about what somebody once said to me about trees on a golf course, and like, you know, if you could go around a golf course and just say to somebody that had maybe too many trees on a golf course, what are the eighteen to twenty five that you absolutely have to keep? And bunkers in a way, may have gotten to that point where it's you know, which one if you only could keep eighteen of these bunkers,
which would they be? And you'd probably end up with you know, you no course would be over bunkered that way, right.
And you know, I mean different projects we've done in the past that I said to my associates. You know, the quota for bunkers is down to like forty here instead of however many we built on the last place. You know, just just you know, usually on clay sites and smaller budgets where bunkers are expensive and it's hard to maintain them very well, they get contaminated, and you know,
so let's just keep it down. But but I almost need to give them a number not to exceed, to keep it down because you know, there's always every little place there's like a feature in the ground. You think, oh, i'd be cool if I put a bunker there, but the feature of the ground does the same work. You don't really need the bunker there.
It's almost like, you know, writers have writing like things they fall back onto all the time, and they use words or speaking you know, cues where you use words. I have a million of them, and listeners of this pod probably know all of them. But you have things that you fall back on when you're uncomfortable. In golf architecture, it might be like when you're uncomfortable you're not sure what to do put a bunker in.
Well. I mean when you have a lot of guys working on the project that are really great at building cool little bunkers, you know, it's like, you know, it's like the guy with a hammer and nails. It's just like, yes, that's what I should do there, that's the solution, and it's yeah, yeah, I mean we you know, we just either we have to understaff projects going ahead, or we just have to clamp down and say, okay, you personally only get to build eleven bunkers here you figure out
where they should go. But that's that's all I went.
And you build one last question from Brett Hoxtein on this subject, and it's it's kind of goes into a bigger subject.
So it's a transition question here.
Memorial Park was awesome, but is there any hope for the rest of municipal golf What would have to happen to get a significant number see even just fifteen to twenty percent of municipalities to realize the value of their golfing assets and architecturally improve them.
Oh wow, good question, big question that goes to the economics of how things are done. I mean so so not everybody. You know, I don't know if they talked
at all. You know, I didn't see the telecast at all because I was out there all week, So I don't know if they talked it all in the telecast about the fact that Jim Crane, the owner of the Astros, raised ten to fifteen million dollars to rebuild that golf course and gear it up for a tour event which included you know, it was it was expensive as that because we sand capped the whole thing. You know, we
reconjured it for drainage. We reconted it to capture runoff and put it back into the irrigation system so we wouldn't use city water. You know, we obviously reshaped every square inch of it, put in all new irrigations sand cap so I hit poored rain in the week of the tournament. They could still play. And then, you know, because even giving money to the city is a political thing. You know, they had to like spend money to move the tennis courts so they could make the driving rings
big enough. You know, a couple million dollars for something like that. It's just like that's where you tear your hair out. But you know, most cities obviously are not going to have a benefactor come in and raise that kind of money to make the unique golf course better for the people that play it. You know, it'd be nice to try. It'd be nice to go, you know, to have somebody, you know, corporate guy in a big
city that wants to do something for golf. Instead of building the next Shadow Creek, just go raise the money to make the munique again. You know, I think what holds them back is fear that the city isn't going to take care of it if they do that, you know. I mean, I've been to a decent number of municipal golf courses, and a lot of them are very poorly cared for, you know. I you know, I'm much more my politics are a little different than a lot of
my clients. I'd like to believe that government does good things. And you know, the worst example I can think of is how governments take care of municipal golf courses. They do a crap job. You know. That's that's why people don't want to pay taxes for fear they're going to get that as the standard. And I totally understand that. You know, if I was a donor, I wouldn't want
to throw money into something like that either. So that's the hard part, is like, you know, because really a lot of you know, it's not really an architectural problem. In a lot of cases, yes, you know, it's taken care of what's there. But that's harder to do because you know, you have to maintain the commitment to it. You can't just come in and write a check and solve that problem.
Do you think that's because they just don't have you know, for the most part, someone that really understands why stuff was built that way, whether it be in the parks department or whether it be on the on the turf staff or pro shop you know staff.
Well, you know, I don't know if it's fair to blame the staff at most of these places. They're dealing they you know, they're underfunded, they're you know, they're packed with golfers. It's hard to do work on the golf course when it's so busy. You know, that's what you get, you know, that's the good side and the downside of a twenty dollars golf course. It's like, the conditions are crappy, but you've got a lot of people out there enjoying it.
So why would you know, why would you shut it down to fix the crappy conditions if everybody's happy with it, and you know, you know, you could have a forty dollars golf course with better conditions, but you know that might not be the better solution for the public.
Yeah, A lot of my favorite places are those twenty dollars golf courses that aren't busy.
It seems they seem to be the best golf courses.
Well, I had somebody I had somebody say that to me about East Potomac Park when we volunteered to get involved with that project. It's like, what's to fix. There's a ton of people out here playing golf right now. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, you know, if it wasn't for if it wasn't for Travis's design being so out of the box and that just being completely lost, now I might agree with you, but you know, there was something really cool there and it's not even close to there anything, And the tire room