Yolk with Doak 27: Tom’s 2020 American Road Trip

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across America all over the place. He went basically from Michigan due west, so I guess he wasn't up in the northeast. But a couple things we talk about. Of note, we talk about his new project upcoming at Dornic Hills, Perry Maxwell's home course, and then as well as the news of his potential renovation of Sandpiper, a well known seaside public golf course in Santa Barbara. So those are two big projects that we talk about, and then we go to a slew of listener questions. So this this

was a really good conversation. We're gonna have more. Tom has his audio equipment, we got it working this hour, So enjoy this podcast. I hope everybody has a happy holidays, and thanks as always for listening in the support. In twenty twenty, I missed the green for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.

was Cricket Stick. You know, it's just Pete Dies for a real big project. And you know, I spent a couple of days with Peter cricket stick over at the course of working for him over the years, and they, you know, once he had passed, they you know, I I knew several members and they reached out, you know, they were interviewing architects and would I want to interview for it. While you know normally I'm say a no to that kind of stuff, it was like, yeah, that

one's special. I should go talk to them. And you know that is like, I'm not sure there's a lot to do there. You know, I've sort of given them a preliminary report, but I'm not sure. You know, eventually, I think they're going to have to rebuild their greens because of what's underneath them. But short of that, you know, we're not looking to do a lot of work there. But you know, it's a special place because it was one of mister Dye's first projects and he was so

personally involved. And the same goes for Dorna Hills. I mean, you know, I had said in an interview somewhere years ago, you know, I'd do that for free, help them restore the golf course. And you know I said that partly because I knew the club didn't have a lot of money. And you know, I figured that would at least make them think about it. And you know, it didn't go

anywhere for a while. But but this past year they were getting ready to they're going to put in a new irrigation system, and one of the members said, hey, you know, we should talk to this guy who said he might consider doing other stuff for free. Why don't we Why don't we give him a call? So they called me the spring and and said said, we, you know, we'd like to talk to you about that and the club.

The club doesn't really have the money to do it, but but there might be a couple other ways to get some funding for it, So we'd like to at least talk to you about how much it would cost, and you know what we would have to raise in order to do it.

Dornic Hills isn't just Perry Maxwell's first golf course. He and his wife bought that farm to build a golf course, you know, before he started thinking he was going to be a golf course architect as a career. They he just built that for his town that he lived in Oklahoma, to have a good golf course, and because his wife thought it would help him. You know, he had he

had respiratory problems. That's one of the reasons they moved to Oklahoma, and she thought that golf would be better for his health long term than tennis, which he had played. And when she, you know, when she recommended that they like get involved building a golf course, he handed him an article about the National Golf Links of America and some some national magazine and you know, so Maxwell went and spend time with C. B. McDonald on Long Island

to like learn about it. You know, he was Maxwell came into this as you know, he was the local banker in Ardmore, Oklahoma, so you know he wasn't you know, he had the kind of background that McDonald would pay him some attention. And you know, they spent a little time together and in uh Long Island. And then a year or two later, Maxwell went overseas at McDonald's suggestion, and that's how he met Alistair McKenzie for the first

time when he was visiting Saint Andrews. McKenzie was there working on his map of the old course for the RNA, and you know, and then when and then when mackenzie came to the States three years after that to head to California and meet Robert Hunter, he stopped in Oklahoma on the way, and you know, made an agreement with Perry Maxwell to be one of his partners in America and and you know, consult on a couple of jobs that Maxwell already had going. Oklahoma City Country Club was

one of those. But Dornet Kills pre dates his involvement with mackenzie. You know, he the first version of it only had four holes, and then he expanded it gradually to nine and then to eighteen holes in the early nineteen twenties, and you know, it was a very personal thing for him and a very complicated piece of ground, you know, very interesting piece of ground, not like your normal you know, it's got a creek going through it

that that floods occasionally. It's got a couple of major rockout croppings, including a a sharp little cliff that runs along the back nine is in play on one of the most famous holes, certainly the most famous hole on the golf course and one of the one of the most unusual holes that I've ever seen, the sixteenth which

they call the cliff hole. But you know, in the in the late nineteen eighties or early nineteen nineties, I keep getting the date wrong, but somewhere in there, thirty some years ago, the club had fallen on hard times. You know, they were having trouble attracting members. They decided that one reason for that was people didn't like putting off greens, that some of Maxwell's greens were just too severe. Sounds like crystal downs, yeah, but crystal downs.

they went in and changed. You know, they rebuilt all the greens nine holes one year and then nine holes a few years after, which is really strange because one nine doesn't even look like the other in terms of the greens construction, and neither of them looked like Perry Maxwell's greens at all. And you know, so that's what they need to fix. And you know that's that's more complicated than redoing a bunch of bunkers. They you know,

for two reasons. One, you have to close the golf course and rebuild the greens, and that costs a chunk of money. And two, they didn't really do a good job of recording what Maxwell's greens were before they dug

them up. So you know, we can talk about how we want to restore them exactly the way they were, but I don't have a map of exactly the way they were other than Jeff Brower, who did the work on the back Nine as one of his early projects, sent me his plans for the golf course in the in the the you know, the the base map underneath is probably pretty close to the old greens in terms

of how much fall there was on him. It may not be perfectly accurate, but it's the closest thing we've got, and it gives us it, you know, at least gives us a good idea of you know, the elevation of the green and how it tied in with everything around it, which would be really hard to do. You know, we've got good aerial photos of it, but looking at a black and white aerial photo doesn't tell you much about the contour of the greens.

I mean, you know, because fifty years from now, some guy will say that about my golf courses. Oh yeah, I know how Tom built greens. I could go build a set of greens just like he would. And I try to do something different from one product to the next. And sometimes the idea for the green is Brian Schneider's or Eric's or somebody else's, and you know, we do everything kind of in the moment, on the inspiration that we've got for that particular day. It's not on the planet.

And I think that a lot of the old time architects worked exactly the same way, you know, and they you know, they may have been there a lot, or they may have relied on other people to build that for them. I mean, Mackenzie certainly relied on Perry Maxwell to do that for him. At a place like Crystal Dad's where Mackenzie was only there three days during construction and Maxwell was there for two six month stints. You know, there's no question that Maxwell had more to do with

building those greens than Mackenzie did. But so I don't have a plan for Dornic Kills. And you know, if the greens were somewhere close to what they were originally, I would say they will leave well enough alone. You know, since they're totally changed and they don't look like Maxwell's at all. I'll use the best information I can find and I'll use you know, one of the people that donating money to this thing. When Maxwell built all his golf courses, he hired his two brothers in law to

be his construction team. One of them, Dean Woods, was an engineer before he got into golf construction. So the Woods brothers were the ones who went around and you know, they were at Crystal Downs all summer too, and they they're the ones who went to Pine Valley and rebuilt greens at Pine Valley and Marion in some of these other places. And one of the main donors to this project is Dean Woods's grandson, you know who grew up playing there, remembers the golf course from the fifties and

sixties before it was changed. Now, anytime we're dealing with older guys and their memories, it's a little faulty, you know. I mean I've used I've done that on a lot of projects, where you'll talk to the old members and they'll be telling you dead on what you think one of the greens would look like, and then they'll start telling you about another hole and I'm sitting there looking at a picture of it. It's like, it wasn't that way at all. So so you have to take all

of that with a grain of salt. But in this case, that's some of the best information I have to go on. And you know, sometimes you jog those guys' memories by just asking them questions about how it played, Like, you know, where could you not miss the green? You know? At raw Melbourne. The old club champion and his story and told me on the East course there was a green he used to try to make sure to miss it

over the back instead of in front. And I was like, okay, so that part of the green must have must have sloped off the back. That's why he was doing that even though he couldn't you know, he hadn't ever had a transit on the green to measure it.

typical American country club from the setting. The clubhouse sits up on a ridge, you know, face in the valley where the stream goes through, and then the clip's actually on the far side looking back at the golf course, so you know you're playing a pretty steeply back up hill on both the ninth and eighteenth holes to get back to the clubhouse, and he just built greens into that steep slope so that you could see the see the surface of the green, and I'm sure they were like five or six percent.

to be Maxwell. I'm just gonna try to do the best that we possibly can with the best shapers going and the experience that we have and some good people advising, and you know, I'm confident that will work out pretty well.

hills on either side, kind of feeding creek. And you know, he started on one side, he used the creek in play on as many holes as he could figure out how to do it, and then everything else kind of bouncing off the hills on either side to get to eighteen holes. So, you know, a similar routing process probably.

You know, Chris Klauser, who wrote the biography of Maxwell, tried to identify certain like template kinds of holes that he used, and certainly at Dornic Hills because he'd just been to the National Golflings of America and spent a lot of time with McDonald. There are at least a few things that Dorna kills, you could say are kind of template holes or at least inspired by something that

he saw at the National. But there's not like a Radan hole and an alpshole, you know, not not the templates to that degree, but there's certain pieces that are kind of like, yeah, you know, I can see a resemblance there.

really well. By now he owns all the luxury properties in Santa Barbara as a result.

I mean, you know, you look at it and there's like, you know, there's there's about the same amount of coastal frontage on that course as there is a Pacific Dunes, you know, enough for two really long holes along the course and a par three and a little more there might be a little more coastal frontage. And one place it drops right down the beach level on the eleventh and that comes right back up on the twelfth, and most of it's up on a cliff one hundred feet high,

just like Pacific Dunes. But the contra up on top is entirely different, and you don't, you know, you don't. You're not kind of leaning over the edge of the cliff looking out all the time. You know, one of the holes you're playing along the cliff, but everything tilts back inland from the cliff, so you don't really see you're not really seeing the ocean at all where you're

playing the hole. And you know, so for for your typical amateur golfer like the guy who wrote you the note, or even for an architect, you look at that and you think, wow, somebody should have done a lot better with that routing. But when you try to, you know, just because you think there ought to be a better solution doesn't mean you can make that fit on the map. And this is one of those ones that I just was like, you know, I'm not sure there is a

much better solution for this. There are two or three things out there that they're kind of locked into for environmental reasons, Like you know, down by where the eleventh green and twelfth t are now, they wouldn't be allowed if if you ask for permits today, they wouldn't be allowed to build a green and tea down there, So those got to stay the way they are. That pond on the eighteenth hall, you know, I'm going to eliminate the par three eighteenth hall back to the clubhouse, playing

over a little man made pond. But the pond has to stay because of some endangered frog that might or might not live around it. But I think we can leave it and just you know, not have it and play on the golf course and kind of take it out visually when you're looking at the thing, you know we can we can reduce the dam that makes it

look so bad from the clubhouse. And then there's there's some holes on the other side, the ones in the trees on the front nine that the trees are like a monarch butterfly habitat, So they don't want us to change very much in there at all. So you know, once you're left with three pieces that you have to keep that aren't all right together, that really limits how

many things you can change. And you know, if it's you know, if you got to connect back into the existing routing here and here and here and here, there's only so many things you can do. And you know, I put together a plan in like two thousand and nine and gave it to him and didn't hear from them again from for years, and I just thought, well, I don't know what's happening. That's okay, you know it was that was a tough thing to figure out anyway.

And then maybe four or five years ago they asked that they asked us to look at it again for a day or two while we were while we were working at the Valley Club, but yeah, nothing more from that. And then in the spring, I got a message on my phone like, hey, you know, we've been looking at all these plans and yours is really the most sensible in terms of we could We think we could get the permits to build this, and you know, it changes the golf course, but it still uses all the parts

we have to use. So we'd like to sign you up. And I was like, this this a lost message on my phone. When is this from? You know, because the guys called me in twenty twenty and I said, can you send me the map of the plan that you're talking about? And I drew it in two thousand and nine.

wall for years trying to figure out. But then also talk about all the logistics of what's going to have to happen. I mean, it'll be at least a couple of years of dealing with the California Coastal Commission to get permits for whatever we do, and you know, trying to figure out what their hot buttons are, and you know, so we can work around those and do something sooner instead of later.

after all. So I've already had like one call out one of those, but not the one that I really really want to do. You know, you never know, as long as there's a piece of ground sitting there and an idea, somebody might make it happen someday. And certainly some of the projects that I've done are things that you know, well, you know Aaron Hills, which is in

the back of the book too. Obviously they had somebody else do the thing after, you know, somebody I knew kind of found that ground and thought it would be a good place to build a golf course. And you know, I had two different clients that were going to pay me to build that golf course years before Herdson and Fry got their client who actually did it.

and I don't get paid anymore, you know. And you're lucky now if you can even get the fifty thousand dollars out front out of them up front. You know, these days everything's so iffy. Even my best clients don't want to pay a deposit. They just want me to like take the risk with them until they're ready to build something.

now seventeen. They you know, length in the really short one to like one e or something now and have and have one of the part threes be really long. But he didn't say very much else about that hole or what to do with it. And you know when I was playing around on paper trying to just draw something to have a first plan of the golf course, you know, I thought, well, the best part three hole that's two thirty is sixteen at Cyprus Point, so I'll

draw a version of that. So I just drew, like, you know, two hundred and thirty yard direct carry over the water, or some fairways shortened left that you could play to if you didn't want to go for that. Obviously, it's in Palm Springs, and you know you're not you know, you're not fifty feet above the Pacific Ocean. That takes away quite a bit of the drama and all the naturalness of it. But you know, in plan it's not a way different hahule. And yet because it looks man made,

people's attitude toward it is a lot different. I think, you know, you don't at Cypress Point, you know, if you're not strong enough or or confident enough to try to hit driver onto the green, you know, you don't blame the architect for that. You think, well, shit, you put the green on the point there, just like everybody would and I can't go for that today. But you don't, you know. But at PGA West, you think, why do they build a hole that I have to lay up on?

I don't want to lay up. I want to be able to go for the green.

get forward there. Just hit driver without saying anything negative to me at all, you know, it was And I hit driver just as good as I could, right in the middle of the green and two putted to win our match.

I've been in the ocean, right, I've been. You know, I've laid up and then shanked it into the water. Right. That's why I don't lay up anymore if I can help it, because last time I laid up, I shanked the second shot into the water. Anyway. You know, one of the very first times I played it, when I was a kid, I hit it, I pulled it left,

and I wound up on the beach down there. You know, when the tides out, there is a beach over there in front of seventeen t and there were, at least in the old days, there were steps down to it. So I played a shot, you know, I pulled it left, and he hit a shot off the beach back up on the green and made it four.

just like free thinking about it myself. You know. We had a you know, I played with Eric two and another friend of mine who's a member of San Francisco Golf Club. So you know, it was kind of a really nice social round of golf, and I wasn't trying to analyze the golf course architecture so much. But I do you know, I've seen that place for forty five years.

I know it pretty well. So a couple you know, like a couple of the things I pointed out to the green chairman or things that I'd been seeing for like twenty years, you know, wondering if they would ever do anything about it. But mostly it's cutting down a tree or two. That's you know, they're not allowed to cut down a modere cypress tree, period, you know, so like people that talk about seventeen and eighteen and oh, you know, they should cut down those trees and make

the holes better. It's like those trees aren't coming down until they fall dow.

out of the bunkers. And in a few places we took a big bunker that the sand just ravaged on it every bit every year basis and broke it up into two or three smaller bunkers to kind of try to reduce that problem some. But the golf holes, I love the golf holes. You know, there's a there's a couple of holes there where I kind of really held strong through that process of you know, let's not do too much here, and let's not just jazz this hole

up like everything else. You know, you kind of need a break somewhere in there instead of making every hole the best hole on the golf course. And I but I wouldn't change that. After twenty years, I still think that was an important part of the design, even though most people don't. You know, when you when when most people look at the design, they're just looking at it one hole at a time, and they're not thinking about

the whole thing together so much. You know, I was thinking about that a lot while we were building that golf course, and I did make some decisions because of that that if you're just looking at a particular hole, you would suggest, you might suggest something that was more dramatic. And I just think, now I didn't you know, that wasn't the time to do that.

And you know, I'm a big believer that you know, get it right the first time and then don't mess with it after that, you know, instead of always thinking, you know, the Tom Fazio approaches, you could always improve something and make it better, And yes you could, but you could always you could also always tinker with something and make it worse. And that's really easy to do on a great golf course.

of them aren't very good golfers. Some of them are really good golfers, So you know, I never You know, Angela is different too, but I never really assigned it all to her gender. You know, it's just I think of her. We all think of her as one of the guys. No slight intended, and I think she appreciates that.

But you know, I mean for Angela, who was a good junior player and is a pretty good golfer to this day and plays from the men's teas, Or for Crystal, who is a great golfer and plays from the men's teas all the time, or for Alice Dye, who is a great golfer and play from the men's teas most of the time, even until let's do is sixty five or seventy years old. You know what, they're women, but they don't play golf like the average woman at all.

You know, they may be more tuned into the average woman is not like them, and that you have to think about how to accommodate them. But when they see a golf hall, they the first thing they're visualizing is the same shots that I do, because they all hit the driver as far as I do.

golf is a business of big egos. Architects have big egos too, so I'm not saying it's just a one way street. But at the end of the day, it's my job to decide what's out there. And if somebody builds something that's cool, but I just don't think it fits the golf course that we're trying to build. Or the or the client, or it doesn't fit into the

ground that's there. You know, quite often I'll say, now we've got to do something different, and sometimes it's only a little tweak, and sometimes it's like knock it down and start over. But you know, that's the three guys that work for me full time. We've been doing that for twenty years, so that you know, they they can more anticipate something. You know, they're not going to build something if they know I'm going to hate it, and they've got at least some sense of what that is.

You know. That doesn't mean they're building the same thing all the time, but you know they've they've learned from previous conversations, you know, of various things that I don't like or that probably we're not going to do, you know. So it's easier to have that relationship with them than it is with somebody new or somebody who's just who's you know, really getting their first chance to shape and wants to show you how great they are, you know,

And that's fine. We like having new people on projects too, because they do add new things, but they just have to accept it at the end of the day. You know, I'm the one who has to be the most happy with it. They don't necessarily have to.

You know, I encourage those guys to make it wild and do all the things that we couldn't do on a normal eighteen whole golf course. But you know, on most golf courses you don't want to, you know, turn the dial up to eleven. You have to you have to understand that it all fits together and how to modulate that some and and that's what young people tend to lose sight of because they haven't done it much before.

It's just like you get caught up. And these two things happen when you get caught up and excited in

what you're doing, which is a good thing. But you also, you know, a construction project is like six months is shaping and if you're if you know, if it's one of your first jobs, you're probably out there nearly every day and you are not going around to other golf courses and reminding yourself that they are not like that, that the it's Cyprus Point doesn't have eighteen greens each wilder than the last one, and you don't really need

to do that. And that's what you know, most young people just need to be reminded, Hey, you don't need to do that. You know, we don't have to go that far. That's really cool, but don't make the next one even wilder.

And it's just like that's the perfect place for something like that, just before you get to all the really wild Hey, and.

that was before the Prairie Club existed too. And then since then, you know, I've been back to sand Hills three or four times, and I've been you know, I built the course at Dismal River, but between bally Neil and sand Hills and Dismal River, I never like had time or energy to get in the car and go an hour hour and a half further north to see what happened with the Prairie Club, which you know, two of the guys that used to work with me shape the Dune's course at the Prairie Club for Tom Lehman,

and I'd never so I'd never seen either of those courses, and I'd never see and I knew Gil was building the course on the land that I'd looked at, so I was curious to see that. And then I also knew I remember I played golf in the opening for Pacific Dunes. I played golf with a young Australian guy named Josh Taylor who worked for a Leman for a while.

He's out of the business now, but I remember that Leman's guys when they were working on the Prairie Club got excited about doing a course for the town, you know, replacing the town uni with a new golf course, and they built nine holes of it, or actually ten holes of it, and they've got a plan to do the others someday, but I don't know when they'll get around to it. But so I made a point of stopping in and seeing that instead of just calling it a day with the Prairie Club. And and what a cool

little place. You know, it's like a it's like I think it was twenty one dollars for nine holes and twenty three for eighteen and you want to go back around, which I thought was the perfect pricing scheme, and little, tiny, modest clubhouse, and the first couple holes are on really flat ground, and you know, you might if I'd just driven in and not known anything about it, I might not have gone out because the first things that you could see were not that inspiring, and I had no idea,

you know, after the I think it's the fourth hole that's kind of up with a great view of the valley, and then you drop down into the valley for the next two or three holes, and it's really up and down from there back in, but some really dramatic stuff, you know, mixed in with a couple of pretty flat holes. So it's on balance, it's not really hard, but there's a couple of spectacular that's cool.

But it was built in like nineteen twenty four or five, and I was driving by it and I just saw it out of the you know, while I'm driving by, and I was like, WHOA, that looks really good, and I but it's as it was a nine whole course. I can't remember the name. I can't remember. I got to find it in the text. I was on the phone. I was literally on the phone with somebody and I had them looking up information about it. But it's it's.

my first Langford course, Harrison Hills. Tommy and I were driving to Evansville when we were talking about the job at Quail Crossing with the client, and for some reason we drove through via Purdue and So we drove through Attica, Indiana, and we drove you know, the highway goes right past a fence that the like the ninth holes on the other side of the fence, and you know, we're driving by and I looked to the side and I saw these mounds and you know where the bunkering with huge mounds,

and I was like, stop the car, We're going to have a walk around that.

Perry Maxwell. I didn't have enough time to stop and play it, but it was really lay of the land.

near as good or like that. You know that you were going to go there for five days and play five different cool courses. That was not remotely true. It might be true now, you know the place, you know, mid Pines and Pine Needles in those places have really up their game. And Tobacco Road came in, came in

the mix. And now Pinehurst is like, you know, taking the competition seriously and starting working on all their golf courses too, so they won't, you know, so they won't just be the hotel for people and have them go be playing everybody else.

see the change in that. In that case. On the other side of the coin, I mean, there's there's still a bunch of golf courses in West County, New York, and on Long Island and in Philadelphia that people don't know about because Marion and you know, Wingfoot take up all get all the attention, and that's where they host the tournaments. And you know, and you know for years, places like Fenway or Rolling Green or those kind of places were just ignored. And they were ignored because because

they were there. You know. You know when when Gil Hanson and I were working on Stonewall, the original golf course, we used to go, we used to work weekends and then like Tuesdays or when I think it was Tuesdays, we'd take the afternoon off and go play a different course in Philadelphia. And we were you know, we couldn't. We didn't run out of good golf courses to go. See every time we go, it'd be like manufacturers never heard anything about it. Wow, what a great golf course.

Just you know, we must have done like ten like that. And you know, and Gil, you know, most of them are Flynn golf courses because he built so many around Philadelphia. And Gil at the time he lives in Philly now, but he you know, he was living in Colorado back then, and he thought Cherry Hills was a great golf course.

And whatever Flint course we walk off in Philadelphia, I'd look at him and go so that's Burton, Cherry Hills is and you know, just week after week, which is I shouldn't say because we do some consulting at Cherry Hills now, But you know, just a ton of golf courses, you know. And if you took any one of them and helicoptered him to.

the very first superintendent I got to know. Well, I didn't like, I didn't work on the maintenance crew of the muni that I grew up playing, So I didn't really know that much about being a golf course superintendent or what it entailed until I started working in the business, you know, at Long Cove when when I was working on the construction there for mister Dye, Bobby Weed, architect now was the superin was the growing superintendent for a

Long Cove. So I got to know him a little bit and see that from his perspective, and you know, and listen to mister Dye talk about how important the superintendent was to the project and how it drove him crazy. That good superintendents didn't want to stay being a superintendent. You know, he hoped they'd stay and take care of the golf course forever, and they wanted to go to another construction site and you know, have all the fun

of building something from scratch. And then when I went overseas the next summer, you know, I had an introduction to the greenkeeper for the old course of Saint Andrews, Walter Woods, who is like the godfather of golf course superintendents in the UK. I mean, just totally respected by everyone over there, and of course, you know, knowing him fairly well because I got to you know, originally a friend of mine had introduced me and we'd agreed that I would work on the maintenance crew when I when

I moved over there for a couple months. And when I got there, Walter said, you know, I can't do it because we're in a recession, and you know, it's a town golf course and if I hire anybody outside of town, they'll hang me. So so I've talked to the caddy master and you can caddy you know, just just let the guys that are going to make a living and that need to make a living and have two loops a day, get out before you And he said, besides that, you're welcome to hang around with me as

much as you want and ask questions. And that was like, it couldn't have been a better summer of doing that. And you know, because you know Walter used to do he used to do his work in the morning and the evening. The old course was so busy then people would go out before the first tea time of the day and pay when the when the ranger showed up.

And I mean they were they were playing seventy thousand rounds a year on the old course because it was only like twenty bucks or twenty five bucks back then. And so he was, you know, he didn't have enough time to work on it very hard. You know, It's like they had to they had to do two shifts. They had to kind of do a clean up pass behind the last golfers at the end of the day so that they could get ahead start on the next morning.

Otherwise they'd never be able to maintain it. But just to see him, you know, he didn't like well, they were still on a pretty tight maintenance budget back then, but he didn't like buying chemical fertilizers very much at all. He would send the crew to gather kelp off the rocks and the harbor behind a clubhouse at low tide. Bring it, you know, take a wagon and bring it back to the main its yard and mix it with sand. It's like compost it, and make his own organic fertilizer

for nothing. You know, I never heard about anybody, you know, nobody used the word sustainable to describe any of that. But that's what that was, just way before the time. It was like practical, this is what we got to do to make it work on a budget.

you know, we we wound up with CJ. Kreuscher to help build Terry Edy on ken Nice's recommendation, and then when CJ moved to moved over to the construction side to go build the two new courses. Uh. Brian Palmer from short Acers who had been consulting, consulting with us. He had played in the Renaissance Cup at Tarry Edy and you know, stayed in touch with CJ and and the client behind our not that we didn't know about.

So when CJ, you know, said he was going to give up the job, Brian was standing there first in line to move to New Zealand and run the place. So we worked with a ton of really good guys. But you know, special shout out to the guys in Australia. I mean literally every superintendent I've work within Australia and I've worked with a bunch they are just all right at the top of their game, you know, a lot

of it. Some of them were like Bruce Grant, who worked with Mike Clayton for years, was an assistant for Claude Crockford. That's where it started. You know. Claude Crockford ran Roll Melbourne for like forty or fifty years and trained up dozens of assistants who are running other golf courses and it's just been all passed down from him. So like Richard Forsyth who's at Royal Melbourne now, and really all the guys who are superintendents around Melbourne all

a branch off that family tree somewhere or another. And you know, they do so much without you know, it's a pretty harsh climate. They don't they don't have much water to work with. It's a you know, they're they should be running all the golf courses in California because they deal with all the problems that California has and they've got the golf courses perfect all the time.

I was actually gonna meet my brother in Lubbock and go play the Raws course, which I haven't seen in more than ten years, and then drive to Oklahoma from there. And then the day I flew back to Denver, there were like winter storms in the mountains of New Mexico, and my brother couldn't make it, and I wound up like delaying and not going that way, which I was bummed about. You know, hopefully when we're building Dorna Kills, I'll get back and go go see how the raw

score is holding up. Eric went there, you know, last summer on kind of a courtesy consulting visit to just check in on it and tell them tell him to mow a little more grass and take down the trees because we none of us had seen it for ten years. And things do grow up and things, you know, mowing lines change, and you know, so is the raws Churus worth leaving Austin for I don't know. I mean, you know, for me, it was just a really different project. It's a chance to see what I can do with a

totally barren piece of ground. If that interests you, and it's you know, if you I will say, if you want to if you want to go play golf in the wind, Lubbock is a great destination for that. That's one of the ways. You know, we've worked in windy places and Lubbock is the windiest of them all. So you know, if you if you want to learn how to play in the wind and what the wind can do to make a golf harder.

I was gonna go through Kansas City. I'm driving through Lincoln and I'm driving through there, and I'm like, you know what, I'm as close to wild Horse as I could get. So, you know, I went down to Hutchinson, but then on my way back, I picked up two hours, but it was a five hour drive. I was two hours close from Chicago. So many people were like, you should go. Some people recommended Doric Hills, and I'm like, listen, I'm not driving five more hours to add five hours

more to my trip back, you know. But it's so funny how you get out on those road trips and then all of a sudden five hours is like, oh, it's not a big deal, it's five hours whatever.

and see along the way. And you know, and Bruce Heepner and Jim Orbina both saw a ton of golf courses for the first time, just riding along with me. All let's stop out and look at these holes at Marion. You've never been to Marian. Okay, let's go. You know, I you know, and I just haven't had much time to do that the last fifteen or twenty years. And you know, I missed doing that. I'd like to be able to make time to do that with interns when I had him. Is just like the O'Reilly Johns was

an intern for me. I had some consulting work on the East Coast. They're like Oyster Harbors in Massachusetts. But I can't remember what. We were somewhere around New York and I said, you know, let's just go do this and like go stop in and see a few other courses while we're while we're here, and you know, we stopped in on two or three of the little ross courses in Rhode Island that I hadn't seen before. And we stopped by Yale on the way back and just said, yeah,

we go out and they're like, yeah, go play. So that was a great little trip and I, you know, I miss having time to do that, but I don't. You know, those opportunities are pretty rare now, or at least I did. It's hard to make time for them when you're working one hundred and fifty days a year on there.