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 fried egg, Frida egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday, Frida Egg Egg, fridagg bride egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. All right, welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Today's guest is a fresh edition. He's a regular guest, a fresh edition of The Yolk with Doak, So Tom Doak joins. It's the first episode of The Yoke with Doak in twenty twenty two. We talk, Uh, this is a really
fun episode. We talk about projects that Tom wants to do, new ideas that he hasn't done yet that he'd like to build, and uh, some really cool ideas in here. I'm not going to spoil it, but I had my mind racing. And yeah, we'll have another episode of this later in the month, maybe in February or later in January, another episode of The Yoke with Doke. But thank you guys for listening. And here is Tom Doak. Well, do you have any New Year's resolutions? It is the New year.
This is just a layup question for US podcast hosts to ask guests right off the vat Well.
I think it's just an extension of my resolution for a last year, which was to spend more time focusing on the parts of my job that I like the best and that I do really well, and then to try to delegate the rest of it.
What is that? What is the parts of your job that you like the I think everybody looks at a golf course architect and think what's there to not like about that job? But what do you like the best about being a golf architect?
Number One? The puzzle of doing a routing. When I get a new map, it's just like you could just lock me in a room by myself for a couple of days after I get a new map. If it's interesting, I'm just gonna start looking at how, you know, where do I see a piece there? Where do I see a golf hole? And how is that going to fit with the next one? And I was doing that for this project in South Carolina yesterday and it's just, you know,
that's just that's the most fun thing to me. And then you know, the other part of it is just being out there in the dirt and working with the guys to get things built, because that's a whole that's a different creative process, and it's more collaborative and it's more you know, in the first part, you might see some you might see this whole reminds you of something else,
and that's why you're attracted to it. But when you get out there in the dirt, you tend not to think about that anymore and you're just trying to work with what you've got.
Yeah, that makes sense. Once you get into the dirt, you see what's out there, and then it just becomes about what's out there and making it work.
You know. Now, I'm not trying to make it exactly like the radan. I'm just taking this verse, this piece of land right here, and making it into taking a work for golf.
Hearing you talk, it's a lot like my professional New Year's resolutions, which are to do more creative work and less of the business work that you know sometimes box me down, you know, doing more of this, doing more
like going to see places and filming stuff. And it's funny because like I think golf architects have you know, you're you're a small business and you have to do a lot of different things, and I imagine some of the proposals, the business stuff of the job can kind of take away from the creative.
Definitely. I mean, you know, most you know, most of these kids writing me letters wanting to work for me. Imagine that we sit around the office all day dreaming, you know, talking about golf holes, and you really don't you hardly ever do that. Yeah, a lot of it, you know. And you know, I mean I just said my New Year's resolution, and yet I have no employees to delegate anything else too, So so I have to, like, you know, I have to handle all the nitty gritty
for all the stuff that I do. But you know, I've just cut out, you know, I've pretty much cut out consulting. And cutting out consulting also cuts out like a ton of politics and a ton of proposals and reports and back and forth emails and you know, holding people's hands. You know, my new clients don't require that of me nearly as much. You know, they just you know,
they want they want to. I'm working with their consult I'm working with their consultants to try to figure out the the you know, red lines on the map and what I can't do, and then you know, we get a plan together and then we get out in the dirt and we just go at it. But there's not you know, I communicate with clients on site. It's not like the consulting world where you just you know.
Well, there's constantly new people involved with it because there's a new green chair, new person on the board, and you're kind of probably going over the same things that you've talked about for the last ten years and in a way and you know, five.
Years for a couple of my consulting clients. Man, I mean, it's it's been crazy. So yeah, I mean, you know, I lost patience with that a long time ago because it's just I'm telling a different person the exact same thing I said fifteen years ago. Yeah.
Yeah, it's and you don't get a new map to mess around with, which goes back to your year's resolution. There's never, rarely, almost never a new map when it comes to consulting.
No, And it's you know, and at the end of the at the end of the day, consulting is not really a creative thing if you're doing restoration stuff like I do. You know, if you're like taking a golf course it's not so good and trying to change it around and make it good. That might be creative.
So we're gonna do some some guided questions, but also a lot of listener questions. And I thought this was a great question to kick off from from the New Year's resolution. And we already heard the second half of it. But Doug Greenberg asked, what else do you want to still want to accomplish? And what do you get still get excited about at this point in your career. So we already got the excited thing, So what else do you want to accomplish in your career?
You know, a few years ago, I kind of you know, well, thirty years ago, I used to like think that older architects were just you know, or other architects in general were just too pessimistic about what kind of you know, I mean the US to say what you can't know, there's no good land left anymore. You know, I heard that a lot twenty five years ago. Nobody says that to me anymore.
It seems like Google Earth like completely changed the search for land because everybody is coming up with spectacular sites.
Yeah maybe, and you know, you know, a handful of developers just willing to build stuff in spectacular places, even if it was way off the beaten track. Changed, you know, the success of those places changed a lot of things for a lot of people. But you know, but you know, so I've I've worked on ten or twelve or fifteen great great pieces of land that I never thought, you know that everybody said, oh, those don't exist anymore. But you know, I did start thinking a few years ago, Guy,
can these keep coming up? I mean, one of the odds that you know, I keep getting more of these and more of these. It doesn't seem like that. It doesn't seem like I should count on that, and so and and you know, and there weren't many new projects being built in general. You know, I think I counted last year. I've only built eight new courses in the last twelve years. And I'm a hot architect, but you know,
that's how little new stuff has been being built. But you know, partly from sitting around in the pandemic for two years, and you know, I've kind of got some energy back. You know, It's like, you know, nothing could make you more restless than that. So so all of a sudden, I'm getting all these calls about new things and they sound pretty good, especially after being on the sidelines for a while, and it's like, yeah, let's go
do this. So, you know, I didn't intend to build two or three or four new courses a year ago. Going forward, I was going to start slowing down, and instead the opportunities are speeding up, which was completely kind of unexpected for me.
Yeah. Yeah, it seems like the last time we talked you you mentioned right at the top that you know, you this is about as busy as you've ever seen it, you know, since the economic collapse in two thousand and eight. So you know, with that, I mean, what are you
kind of looking to do? I think something from from my standpoint that I really admire about your career when you look at the different projects is how different everything is and there are different concepts and you like to you know, it's not hey, we're just gonna build this this golf course and we've we did this before and it worked really well, so let's keep doing that. It's hey, we have new concepts, the reversible course, the idea with Sedge Valley, which is back on at at at Sand Valley,
where you're doing a par sixty eight. A lot of different types of golf courses. Do you have different concepts that you really want to try and build, you know, in the next you know, twenty years, I do.
I mean, you know, part of what you were talking about I just kind of stumbled into, you know, I mean, I'm interested by different things. So when somebody throws out an idea about you know, just I mean as simple as different as like, Okay, let's you know, let's build a forty dollars golf course in Colorado. Yeah, we haven't done something like that. That'll be fun. Or you know, let's take a course, Let's take a muni in Houston and turn it into a PGA tour site. Yeah, that's
that's like, never done that before. That'd be cool, even though they're not spectacular pieces of land. And yes, I have a few concepts that, you know, like the reversible course. I've sort of been sitting on them for a few years. I've thought about these things a lot, but you know, just haven't had the right client to go this is the place for that. And you know, I didn't want to just put the idea out there and watch go
Hants or somebody else build it instead of me. But at this point in my career, it's like, well I might as well put the concept out there. You know, maybe I'll get to do it. If I don't get to do it, maybe somebody else will do it. But at least somebody will do it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and that's the thing is that, you know, in putting the idea out there, bye, you know, it might land somewhere with somebody that has the means to be able to do that idea.
Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is some of them are you know, the more conceptual something is generally the plane or the piece of ground you want for it. I mean, you know, if you've got a site that has beautiful specimen trees and really good topography or a coastline or a bunch of views, you've got it designed to that you can't you know, you shouldn't be thinking about, you know, doing a reversible golf course or something like that. You know, that just doesn't make sense the same way.
So, like an example of that would be your new project at trt ti uh terry Edes Public Resort, where you've got you know, some ocean front holes and then you go up into dramatic pines, sand pines right right right.
Although you know, one of the concepts I've had floating around for years, and I've talked a little about it with Rick Kane is, you know, depite despite everybody loving Pine Valley, nobody really has ever has tried to replicate Pine Valley. That Pine by the Pine Baran's course at World is probably the closest thing to it. But even
that is like, you know, it's Pine Valley light. You know, it's not really hard off the fairways, it's not you know, so the strategic things don't matter as much because you've got plenty room to avoid the trouble on a lot of the holes. And you know, there's no reason you can't build an I mean, Pine Valley's a great piece of land, but there's no reason you can't build something like Pine Valley if you had a good piece of
land to do it on it. And you know, the reason it doesn't happen is because most developers are afraid to write off a certain percentage of golfers. Is just they wouldn't be able to get around this, So we can't do that. But Rick, especially at this point in his life, is like you know, just out there on the edge wanting to do something great. So we've talked about those inland holes. That inland terrain kind of reminds me of Pine Valley. It's got the scale of undulation,
it's all sandy. You know, it's pretty dramatic. And you know, the only way that that course is going to compete with Bill COR's fifteen holes along the water is if when we go inland, we go all out and it's really dramatic. I've you know, I've got to sit down with Rick and say are you are you really ready for us to do that?
Yeah. And one of the things I think with with golf architecture, especially public and resort golf, is one of the reactions over the last twenty years, and I think you were a big part of this, is is with and playability. You know, has the pendulum gone too far one way with every everything being super wide and they're not being a lot of penalty off the tea which a Pine Valley like golf course would invoke.
Yes, I think that pendulum went way too far. And you know Pine Valley is wide too, I mean Pine Valley.
You know, I'm just saying like there is potential for some sort of trouble off the tea.
True, yes, there is. Yes, nobody's gotten through more than about four hold Pine Valley before recognizing there is potential for trouble there. But yeah, but you know, yeah, pine Valley is sixty yards wide. It's not.
If you were going to do you know, so with this modern representation, you know, how is modern Pine Valley different from you know, original Pine Valley? Is there anything that would be different with with today's game from from the original.
Well, I think, you know, one of the things that I like about that concept is, you know, Pine Valley has changed in the last ten or twelve years. They've lengthened it substantially. You know, before that it was a sixty seven hundred yard part seventy golf course and tour
protypes didn't hit driver there a lot. You know, they were hitting three woods and one irons to the fairways on a lot of the holes, and they were okay with that, and it worked fine for it, and it worked well for you know, five to ten handicappers who are the members. So so I think I'd want that version of Pine Valley and not the you know, when you stretch it out to max length, so that the best players in the world can hit driver all the time. A it loses the intimacy, you know, the green to
tea walks get all messed up. B you know, you just you start thinking about the scale for those guys, and it kind of blows the scale for everybody else, especially if you've got some carries involved, you know, because what's a what's a totally irrelevant carry to a tour pro is, you know, is a really hard shot for the average guy. I've got a good story about that. I was, you know, the the Renaissance Club for the Scottish Open is has signed up Pidrig Harrington to consult
a little bit on the golf course. So I spent I spent a little time with him last summer and you know, talking through the holes and it was great to talk to him, super nice guy. But you know, we got to talking about the seventeenth hole there, which
is a fairly long part three. It's like a one ninety two hundred yard hole, and there's a bunker short left of the green deep bunker, but it kind of sits down so you don't see it very well, and he didn't remember it was there, you know, And it's a nasty bunker, and I was kind of shocked that he didn't remember it was there. And then after talking about it for a minute, he was like, well, you know, they put the pin pretty deep in the green there because it runs away from the bunker a little bit.
So I'm trying to fly at eight yards over the bunker, and if I'm trying to carry the bunker by eight yards, I'm never going to ever hit it in the bunker, you know. So he's talking about like one hundred and ninety yard carry with a five iron or six iron or whatever he's hitting, but he is never going to miss eight yards short.
Yeah, I mean, and that's what's rendered that water short of green so irrelevant almost right. It's like you know where it's just the greatest extrapolator of skill is I don't know if that word is correct there, but it's the It just pushes a skill gap in a far direction.
I think one of the interesting things about you know, I find myself in a lot of modern courses just hitting driver everywhere, like you alluded to, And I think one of the things that happens when you don't hit driver everywhere is golf courses play significantly longer than their yardage, where a sixty seven hundred yard course can play like a seven thousand yard course. The other thing it does is it kind of tests good players restraint because you know,
they want to hit driver. People want to hit driver, They want to push it as close as they can get. And sometimes what you can do is you can kind of egg people into doing something they don't necessarily they shouldn't necessarily do percentage wise, because they're being asked to lay back a little bit more than they would like to, right.
And there's a flip side of that too. I mean, sometimes they'll get themselves in trouble being impatient and going for it. But other times they'll lay back and hit a foe iron and then hit a bad four iron and you know, make the whole pretty hard for themselves. And then they're really frustrated because they think I actually hit driver. But you're right. I mean, Crystal Downs is
a great extent. You know, it's only sixty five hundred yards, but those four short part fours, you know, until recently, nobody ever hit driver on them. You're always hitting the you know, maybe four wood, maybe three iron or four iron, so you know, so you had longer shots into the greens. It wasn't just a push it.
You know, crystal downs is a great topic because you know a player of that is now on the PGA Tour, Nick Hardy, just set the course record a couple of years ago out there. I'd read sure if I ever
talked about this on the pod. But Nick and I have known each other for a number of years, and he's we've always talked about crystal downs and how hard it is given the short nature of it, and he's he's told me so many times he's just so frustrated by the place because he feels like he should shoot these low numbers, but he always gets him He gets himself in positions where he's got these side hill lies with like fifty yard wedge shots, and he's just like,
these are shots I don't hit. And I realize, like, you know, it just requires so much patience out there. And you know, he he sent me a back like I finally slayed the beast when he set the course record. And this is a course that a PGA Tour player had played hundreds of times before he finally got there, you know, And I think he did it like two years ago when he was on the corn Ferry tour.
So that's a perfect example. I always walk away from there is God that course is so fricking hard, and it's just it doesn't appear to be hard.
You know, Well, I don't know what you're looking at besides the scorecard. If you don't think it appears to be.
Hard, well you feel like you should be able to bully it. But what happens when you try and bully it is it It punches you right back in the face.
That's true of a lot of McKenzie's courses. It's the same for Posita Tiampo, It's kind of the same for a Cyprus Points. It's the same for that little Cavendish thing that's like fifty nine hundred yards. It's still like there's a lot of there's a lot of places where you can make a big number just by making one mistake.
Yeah, that's a course that I've looked at a million times, like just photos I scour because that's one of the places I bost want to see when I go over to the UK this year. It's finally going to happen this year. But you know, the uh, one of the things that I've heard you talk a lot about before on this pod, is the idea of designing a course for the women's game. I assume that's probably still in your you know, desires of new concepts.
Very much so. And it's a hard one to do because it's it's politically incorrect to talk that way. I mean, you know, I mean even my you know, I've said to Angela Moser, I've said to my wife, you know, I'd like to build a course that's it's more geared toward women golfers. And they're like, oh, no, no, no, don't say it that way. And I'm like, why not, you know, And what I'm talking about is nearly all women golfers.
You know, well, the average women golfer doesn't doesn't have a very high swing speed, doesn't hit it too far, but a lot of them could hit it through a doorway from a hundred or one hundred and forty or one hundred and fifty yards away. They're just they're so straight because partly because they don't they're not overswinging, you know, trying to overpower it so they could drive it one seventy instead of one to fifty. But they just they have way more control. And you know, and that scales
up to the women pros too. I mean, some of them hit it really far now, but they still hit it really straight compared to the guys in the bit of spectating that I see. You do not see them hitting a foul ball eighty yards right hardly? Ever. Yeah, so, I mean you said it before that. You know. I was kind of taught as a young golfer and architect.
All the good players told me, don't take driver out of my hands, you know, just you know, it may not be the right club to hit, but don't like narrow it down to nothing or put a cad you know, make me lay up because a belt of rough goes across or anything. Just let me hit driver however far I can. So we've all been taught to do that. And you know what we've been doing is just pandering to guys who hit it long and wrong. You know, we've we've we've come to think, well, we have to
give them all that. You know, they're gonna swing at it really hard, so we have to give them all this room. And it's like, why do not make it hard for him to do that? You know, why not make it so hard for them that they have to think about gearing down. The hard part is to you know, now you're talking about areas that are not the fairway, that are kind of out of play, you know, out of play. You know, how are you going to set them up and maintain them? So you don't want to
be there, but you can still find the ball. But if you could do that, women golfers would be fine with twenty and thirty yard wide targets. You'd water a lot less, you know, environment, there's a lot of reasons it would be better. There's one old golf course is Stanley Thompson Course in Toronto. The Ladies Golf Club of Toronto used to, i think still only ladies can be members. Men can play the golf course as a guest, but it's a lady membership. So Thompson really designed it for women.
And so that meant there's dog leg holes that dog leg at two hundred yards off the team, you know, and you know, and now you know on this course there's a lot of so you look at that the first time as a man and you're like, god, well, you know, I'm gonna have to hit five iron off the tee all day or whatever to to keep it in play. But you know, if you take away some of the trees, now you're saying, okay, you know you're not going for the normal fairway. You're gonna have to
be carrying things. You're going to have to be carrying hazards to that other part of the fairway if you want to hit drive. You know, that's more challenging than just sixty yards of fairway going straight down. Yeah.
You know, I had Christine to Kim on the podcast a couple of years ago, who plays on the LPGA tour, and she talked and she's, you know, she's into golf architecture and traveling and seeing courses, and she talked about how you know, when you've got a you know, sixty yard wide fairway with a center line bunker, you know she's going to pick a side and it's going to be very easy for her to thread the needle of that side, you know, and she like laughs about how
wide it is. And in a way I've always wondered about, like, you know, the way the USGA sometimes sets up for men's us opens is like those like where Wingfoot we saw a couple of years ago with twenty five yard wide fairways twenty two yard wide fairways. That's a better test of the women's game than the men's game because of just the you know, a woman who's driving it really well could conceivably hit eighty percent of those fairways.
A man that's driving a well, like they're gonna have a great driving day and they're gonna be like, oh, I hit sixty percent of the fairways. And it all of a sudden, like, you know, if somebody's driving the ball well, you want them to be able to hit fairways. So for a women's you know tournament, you know, narrow fairways and rough isn't necessarily the worst thing, right.
No, And you know, all the feedback that I've gotten from the players for the Houston Open is all around and yeah, it actually matters if we hit in the fairway here because you know, the rough is not super deep, but you can't spin the ball out of the rough. And then at the at the green end, if if you can't spin the ball, that the ball tends to go off the side of the green and down into trouble on one side or the other.
Yeah, I mean, it's a It's one of the things I've seen like, you know, there's been commentary about you know, potentially like women. You know, I know Brandal Chamblie has been talking about how he wants to build TPC sawgrass for women in Mexico, and then there's been commentary Beth and nichols Is, you know, she writes for Golf Week
covers the women game. She's talked about how women's golf needs to be kind of pushed more where it's shorter courses and they should be hitting more wedges and scoring should be more similar to the men's game. It seems like this would push it the other the opposite way of that and more towards you know, we're going to really test their skills.
Yes, you know, they're I mean, there's a dichotomy there, and I don't think that the women players all agree on what the best way to do it is because because you know, they've just announced all these new US Women's Open sites, they're going to some of the courses that the men have historically played, and they're all excited about that. You know, they're really excited about it from the standpoint of, you know, we want to show what
we can do on the best courses. And I remember you know, years ago the first time they played the Women's Open at Oakmont, you know, Patty she and Beth Daniel and those players, they all love that challenge of going there and seeing what they could do on the golf course, you know, not with it. You know, they didn't play it all the way back where the men did, but they you know, they played it where the members do basically, and it was still a real challenge for them.
But but you know, they felt like that was a great you know, a great challenge. So I don't think I don't think very many of them agree with the idea that it should be like the PGA Tour week to week where we want to shoot thirty under par.
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I think. Like one of the things that, you know, I got a text from somebody, you know, Michael Wolfe, big book collector, historian. He messaged me after that announcement. He said, how many courses are out there today are more interesting to watch the men than women play, you know, at professional level? And in the list was really short. And I think it's because like the way these courses were originally designed the game that it's much more close to the women's
professional game. Now there are women that are out there hitting at three hundred yards, but there aren't. You know, it's not a prerequisite to being playing out there, which you know, I think that mirrors what it was like in nineteen twenty five, where you read about Jones hitting drives occasionally three hundred yards, right.
Yes, I think that's right. And you know, I mean when I talked to when I spent time with Harrington this summer, he said, you know, I asked him if he if he had changed how he attacks golf holes, you know, as a result of all the you know, new books and stuff about strategy, and he said, yes, absolutely he does. And you know, he kind of he kind of felt stupid about playing more conservatively years ago.
But then he said, but then he paused for a second, and he said, but honestly, you know, the difference now is you have to because everybody else is so long. You know, you can't, you know, he said, you know, twenty years ago when he played, there were maybe only twenty guys who were really long, significantly longer that it gave them an advantage, and in any given week, half of them weren't there. And half of the guys that
were there, weren't playing that well. So now you're down into like two or three guys who are significantly longer than you and really playing and you might beat him, but you know, now there's sixty guys and you have that, you have that again, and you're still like planned for fifteenth place. If you're short and you're playing conservatively, you just can't afford to do it.
Hark is such an interesting guy because he's really thinks about the game like he's a maniacal tinkerer with his golf swing. But he delivered I think probably the quote of last year in the lead up of the PGA, and I'm curious just what your thoughts are from a golf architecture standpoint. He said, you know, experience isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'm paraphrasing slightly here because I don't have the quote from me. Experience isn't it all it's cracked up to be? Uh, the more experiencing
you gain, the less innocence you have. And I'm curious, from a golf architecture standpoint, a really good golf, well designed golf course, you almost think about more and more you play, right, Yes.
You know, like I mean, you know, the famous example is the Old Course, you know. I mean, on one hand, it's pretty simple and there's a lot of room, and if you just stay left most of the time and avoid the trouble, you can get around it, okay. But but you're always tempted. You always see, you always see. But the really cool shot would be to hit it close to that bunker and steer it off that mound
and it would roll right to the hall. So the better you are, the more things you see out there that will get you in trouble if you try to do it and fail instead of just playing it really conservatively.
But you know, I mean part of your the thing that your quote reminded me of, you know, I mean, I was a big Jack Nicholas fan growing up, and Nicholas always at the start of a tournament he had a number in his head about what it would take to win the tournament, and a lot of times he lost because somebody else else shot a lot lower than that. You know. They they weren't thinking the golf course was that hard, and they just attacked it more and they
played pretty well. And he had played conservatively for the first two or three days and he got to where he couldn't catch them. You know, he played well enough to do what he thought it would take to win, and he was just wrong because somebody else thought the golf course isn't really that hard. I can attack this.
Yeah, yeah, I think that's that's the true of Edie. Eddie Turbine golfer, would would think as a golf architect. You know, there's I was thinking the two ways you could frame this as a golf architect. Is that true what Harrington said about being a player, where you know, sometimes experience isn't all it's cracked up to be, and you see problems, you know, and you're wary of things, and you lose some of the innocence and maybe the some naive you know, naivety. I never pronounced that right,
but you're you're naive nature. You you miss out on something really cool because of all your experience. Obviously, experience saves you a lot in different situations. But where inexperience actually helps with golf design, I don't know.
That inexperience helps, But inexperience gives you more potential outcomes, some really good ones and some really bad ones. So when you have more experience, you're eliminating the bad potential outcome same way players, do you know, you're just like, Okay, I have tomit. I'm not going to build a hole there because that might be too severe, so I better not do that. And you know, if you hadn't a thought that you might build something that some people think
it's the greatest hole I've ever seen. Oh, it's it's just so wild and crazy and different. And you're more likely to build that when you're thirty five years old than when you're fifty five years old.
Yeah, that makes sense.
You know.
I think that way too, with like a lot of things. What do you you know, the older you get, the more you have to lose, So you're you're you know, you can make bad decisions, but some of those decisions that could have that you live at those you know.
Well, yeah, And it's funny about that too, because you're known, you know, everybody people do act they get more conservative as they get older. It's nearly universally true of people. And you wonder why. I mean, I'm at the point in my career where I got money in the bank, and I don't you know, I'm not gonna like never get hired again if I build a course and it doesn't turn out well, so I can take a chance.
You know, if I was thirty five now, it'd be hard to take a chance because like one wrong move and you'll never work again. There's so many other talented people.
Well, people always ask me about my life, like what made me do what I did, which was like leave a very good job and start something in a completely different field. And I always say, like, I was at the very very perfect life situation. I was like twenty eight, I was single, I was dating my wife, but I wasn't married, and she was like we were just like
in the right situation to take a risk. And like, if it had happened four years later, three years later, I wouldn't have I wouldn't have taken the risk because I would have had too much going on. And it's just an it's experience is an interesting, a very fickle thing that applies to everybody's lives, you know. And I think that Harrington quotes just it It resonated with so many people because everybody could listen to that and think, h he's kind of right about that.
Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the things we do, we try to do on all every golf course we build, is you know, hire some young kids for the crew. You know, have somebody out there who will say the crazy thing. So either we can explain to him why no, no, no, that'll get you killed, or yeah, why don't you try that? And well we'll see if it works.
Who who's the person that tells? Are you're kind of the editor in your role where your associates build or shape out stuff? And then are you the line or do you have somebody that that cubs in and says this has passed the line?
No, usually it's me, but I mean, you know, we talk about it more amongst ourselves. You know, it's not it's not always me making the call. And I you know I told those guys years ago, Look, I don't I don't want to always be the guy who's toning you down. You know, it's don't don't always push it to the edge. Give give me some places I can make it harder instead of easier.
Do you have any good stories of the edge and a discussion with the group that you that jump to mind?
Well, I mean, in getting to eighteen, I talked about that that part of three where you're gonna build a kid kidnappers. It was just hanging off the side of the cliff. I mean, that was That's the only hale I've ever considered building. That was a scary hole from the prospect of just just standing on it would have been scary. And you know, we seriously thought about doing that and we're going in you know, we were pretty far along in the process of committed to like you know,
when we decided not to do it. The thirteenth hole that we wound up building, we hadn't really even looked at what the alternative was to squeeze in another little hole in there, so that whole wound up being like it. You know, we only had room to build about one hundred and twenty five yard Part three, which turned out
to be a cool hole. But but you know, the reason it's so short is because we crammed it in there at the last minute thinking we were thinking the green was off the side of the hill and eighty feet further down instead. But you know, part of that conversation was was Brian Slanik, who was going to take
a piece of equipment down there and build it. There were the there was there were a couple of mounds down and there there was just barely room for a green and there were a couple of mounds that we're going to have to knock down. And you know, when you're working by the coast in Australia, in New Zealand, every mound is a potential like bury pit of some kind and the lasting in the world that you want to actually actually dig into. So you know, that was
the straw that broke the camel's back. It's like, I can't go down there and dig through those mounts. That was our warning sign of okay, let's not do this.
So what are do you have any other uh, you know, new concepts that you like to talk about?
Yeah, I should. I should have my little list handy and I don't you know one of you know, the the the par sixty eight shorter golf courses won and I'm glad to be doing that of course for women, which is kind of related. You know. It's like, you know, it's not so much about length, it's about accuracy and
scaling everything down. That's that's a big one. And I'd still like to do that some and I don't know, you know, to me, it's like the best place for that is a resort with four or five golf courses, like you know, like you know, maybe in Bandon they don't they don't, they don't talk as much about trying to advertise and market to women, but stream Song does. Stream Song like every conversation is like, how can we
get more women to come here? It's like, what if you build a golf course it was more geared to women.
Yeah, we got a question about that, about gearing courses to women from Abby Libenthal, and it was, you know, I think one thing that every almost every course could improve on is tea placement. And she asked what makes for a good forward tea placement? And and then she goes on to say, I've played so many bad ones plopped in the fairway nearly behind a tree, But there are playable ones out there too, So like, what's what what makes for a good forward tea placement?
Well, you can't say. I mean, the temptation is to say so it plays the same for the ladies that it does for the men, But that doesn't really work the same way because if you don't get the women farther up there, you know, further up in the landing area, or to a new landing area where they can hit a shorter club into the green. You know there it's going to be way harder for them. So you can't just set it up with the with the landing area for the men in mind. But you know, it's it's
easier to talk about what not to do. I mean, the one that I've heard the most complaints from women about is, you know, you push the tea. You push the tea pretty far up into one side or the other so it's not in the way visually from the from the men's teas, and then they just don't have they don't have a good angle. They hit it far
down the fairway. It's like they have to aim kind of through the middle of the landing area and they're going to go out the other side into the rough if they hit a halfway long drop, you know, because you're setting them up. You know, you've got a straight fairway going down in some trees, and then you're making them hit diagonally across that space and it just doesn't
work very well. So you've got to you know, you've got to give them, you know, the I mean, the fallacy is thinking that all women hit the ball the same distance. Oh yeah, I only have to worry about them hitting it one hundred and fifty yards from here. Now there's women that are going to easily hit it two hundred yards from that tee and you've got to give them a line to do that.
Mm yeah, yeah, because if you get it up to the if if everybody's taking from one fifty, you know, whether it's a junior, whether it's a twelve year old playing a senior, or a lady like you know, one fifty for me is a wedge or a nine iron and for them, you know, for my mom, she's hidden a wood. Yes, so it can't play that. So you need you almost need new landing area. I never thought about the landing area conundrum.
Yeah, And that's you know the hardest part is when you're on when you are an undulating land. You know, you're you're trying to set the landing area kind of into a little bit of an upslope where you can see it, okay, and now you want the shorter hitters to play up and hit it past there and down the hill on the other side, which would be okay, but they you know, now they're landing area is invisible for them the same way.
Yeah, with the way so many places have it oriented. Where I grew up, Caddie, the forward t is six thousand yards and it's par seventy seven. It was nuts. But like when you think about it, you know, the people that play the forward t are gonna be the last people to hit and then so often they're the first people to hit the next shot. So if you have good forward tes, it actually will help your pace of play too.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean a friend of mine, her mom was a really good player in La and they had joined a new club out in Seemi Valley and she really liked the golf course and you know, and she she, you know, she'd played bel Air and Riviera in places like that historically. And I was like, what do you like about this new course so much? And she said it only has four par fives. I was like wow.
And then I was like, oh, you know, because like Riviera and La Country Club had seven or eight par fives for women back in the day they had, you know that they were just the same as you were talking about, no forward tis. You know, the four hundred yard olds were parf fis.
Yeah. The first hole at this place is like four fifty par four and it's just got a twenty yard box and it's at the very front of this twenty yard box. It's just it's just boxers.
It's uh.
Every time I go back, I just I'm like, it's just you remember it was just a slog and so hard. You know, while we're talking about new designs, Will Bardwell had a question for you that I thought was I hadn't really ever thought about from a design standpoint, and I was curious if you had, have you begun factoring climate change into your designs, and if so, what does that look like? If not?
Why? Uh, well, I guess the only place I've ever really thought about it. We were looking at a project in the Caribbean years ago, and supposedly they're still going to build this golf course someday. But the original site was had, you know, had a lot of coastline, but they were only going to, let me use, like, you know, a couple of par threes and maybe a short part four along the water because they were going to sell
residential stuff for the rest of it. But you know, all of it was like eight feet above sea level, and you know, and at some point along the way I was like, well, if the seeds keep rising, this thing is not very high above sea level, This isn't going to work out so good long term. Why don't
we build it up on the hill instead? Yeah, you know, instead of just two instead of two holes on the coast and fifteen holes on really flat, dull ground close, you know, two houses removed from the ocean, why not just go build a you know, more or less core a golf course on higher ground. So that's what we're gonna do.
Yeah, that makes sense.
You know.
Of course, a concept that you've you kind of put as one that you were interested in in an email to be was one where the golf course is kind of the the centerpiece of a new town and it being a different type of real estate play and you know, your traditional real estate course but more along the lines of something you'd see in Scotland like Saint Andrews or
North Barrack or you know. One course that reminds me of this in the US is ach and Golf Club, where it's just steps from downtown and part of the town effectively.
Yes, yeah, and you know, you know, before the housing crash in two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. We were we were starting to do planning on a couple three residential courses that never came to pass. But I remember talking with all the land plant you know, the land planner guys that do the master plans for these big communities, were starting to say that that that model that they'd used forever of like fairway with houses on either side, or even two fairways with houses so
just one side of them. You know, that just wasn't appealing to people anymore, and it wasn't selling like it always had. You know that people wanted to live near the golf course, but they didn't actually want the mowers starting up at six thirty in the morning in their backyard. So they were starting to come around to the idea, you know, let's just do these over here and there will be a few homes along the outside of it, like there are on like most of the famous courses
you could name. But it's not going to be like efficiently planned to get two hundred and forty golf frontage lots for any team hole golf course. That's a terrible experience, you know, when you when you try to build something like that, you're basically planning the housing development to be as efficient as possible. And you know, so if you're if you're six hundred feet from the property line, now it's time for a golf hole, no matter what the
topography is there, you know. And no, you can't move that hall over one hundred feet to where the topography is interesting, because then we won't have room for the road and the lot on either side of the road, which is efficient. So you know, I've always stayed away from that model. It's like, I don't I don't really ever want to build a golf course like that. I've only built really one where the where the development really pushes into the golf too much. That was Riverfront in Virginia,
one of my early courses. And you know, I like the golf course, it's just the development crowded it a lot.
And that's the thing. Is like with a golf course like that, if if money ever gets tight, they might try and add a couple lots and encroach and you
can effectively ruin holes. So what you're saying with this type of development, the way I've kind of got an envisioned in my head is that kind of the magic of these town courses if we want to just use them like a that as a as a as a topic is like the retail slash congregating area is intertwined with the golf course where you know, if you could think about like a modern retail area, maybe the golf course is at like the end of the block.
Yes, and and you know, and the you know, just like North Berrah or Saint Andrew's, the well Saint Andrews. The real estate part only comes down the eighteenth hole basically, but North Barrick it goes out to the fifth hole basically, and you know, it sort of scales down as it gets away from town. You've got bigger things and then you know, you've got big buildings in town and hotels, and then you've got more apartment building type size and then some single family things as you get further out.
But it's but it's also not surrounding the golf course. It's only on the one side, and you're you know, the whole golf courses or the whole all of those things that are looking across golf holes to the water m so you're not you know, you're not looking straight across at another building all the time. That's a big
part of it. But I just you know, just the scale of it too, the fact that you can you know, in St. Andrews, you just go out your apartment with your golf bag over the shoulder and walk down to the golf course and that's what you know. There have been a lot of new towns designed that way, designed around walking. They just don't integrate golf into it at all. It's always it's always way over there, and so you got to drive to it, and then usually it's you know,
it's because it's way over there. They put housing all around it too. In the more introduced in the more modern American model of how.
To do things well, when you think about like the community aspect and everybody, I don't want to use this we're going to say about getting people into the gay where areca use the term grow the game, But like when you think about introducing people to the game of golf, like having golf be within sight is going to make it so much more likely that somebody's going to decide one day that they want to go try it, yes.
Or having the way to go to the way to walk to school or town is footpath that crass crosses over the golf course. You'll see that a lot in Scotland. You'll see a lot in places like Argentina that you wouldn't expect that to be the case, but you see almost everywhere, but in America. Because in America there's some lawyer going, oh no, no, no, we can't have somebody walking through there. They might get hit and everybody gets sued.
It could to be a little bit with the founding of golf and how it found it, how it was started in America is such an exclusionary pursuit in a way, because you know, Cevia McDonald wasn't really a man of the people.
Yeah, So, I mean the closest I've ever got to doing something like this when I was when I was working on that course in China that we finished and never opened. The client was also looking at another site on the basically the north tip of Hainan Island to do like a real like a town, a full new
town over time. It was a huge piece of ground to develop, and so we talked through a lot of these concepts for that place, you know, ten ten years ago, and that's that's one of the reasons I've always had in the back of my mind, I'm going to try to do this somewhere. But he made the interesting point. He said to him the difference between the UK and America was in America, the edge of the golf course
is somebody's backyard, and in Scotland it's the street. You know, there may be development across the street looking at the golf course, but there's no building between the street and the golf course.
You would think that now, given like we're seeing a lot of population shifts and new development, that you know, maybe this is is quite prescient given the time we're talking about this, But this would be the time for somebody to try it because we have all we have effectively like towns just being in different different areas as parts of the country that are really popular places for people to move where it would make sense to try.
This would be a really interesting and differentiated way to do residential development in a time where like a lot of people kind of do the same playbook.
Yes, and especially since you know, I think it's still true what those landplanners were telling me twelve years ago that that old model isn't that appealing to people anymore, you know, And I think it's even less appealing now because what's happened, you know, those developments that failed, those those golf courses right in your backyard that aren't golf courses anymore, and nobody maintains every day or a real problem. So I don't think people are that anxious to sign
up for that. I think they want something that's you know, the golf course is more part of the town experience. Then it's on them as a hone of homeowner to support.
Yeah, it's almost like formulaic. It became formulaic. And that's what everybody tries to do in business, is like, we can create efficiency when we have a clear formula of how we do our business. But what we see with like a lot of these new say let's just take the Kaisers for example. One of the things that they do well is sure they have some formulas, you know, but one of the things they do well is creating
an identity at each of their places. And the identity abandon and the identity at Sand Valley are drastically different, you know, And I think that's the you know, the essence of creating a sense of place is the most important part, and that's what you know, doing a golf course with with that's not a traditional residential. I just I've actually more I think about this idea, the more and more captivated I am about it.
Well, hopefully you've got a couple of listeners that are in that part of the business who agree.
So what are your other ideas that you shared with me? Was the idea of an old designing course that looks old. It looks like a course of like two hundred years ago.
Yeah, and believe it or not, we got this idea in China. We were I looked after after golf development China shut down. I had one call from over there from there's a there's a golf course in northern like northeastern China. It's on the coast called Tiger Beach Golf Links. You know, he's he's the only guy to try to build a links course in China. You know, with fair to middling results. It's not bad. It kind of gets the spirit of it right. The detailing is not that great.
But the developer, you know, he spent he'd been to Scotland several times and he started going back there on a regular basis. He formed some like like inner club thing with Carnoustie of all places. But you know, he was He was also an art an art collector kind of guy, and he loves some of those old pictures and paintings of golf in the early days. So he
wanted to add nine holes to his golf course. And he you know, one of the things he mentioned is a possibility was, you know, what if we tried to do a golf course that looked two hundred years old, you know, not one hundred years old like all the Golden Age courses, but before that, like those earliest pictures you see of golf where the hazards are really kind of broken down and kind of just there's a few boards hold them up in places, and there's a little
like footbridge to get across a sandy bunker in one place. And then you know, other than that, there's almost no definition because back then they weren't really they weren't mowing the golf. They didn't have mowers, they had sheet so you know, the the edges were not formalized at all.
It took me a long time, you know. There was a quote in Mackenzie's book about how at the great schools of golf, and he mentioned Saint Andrew's and Hoylake, that there was no defined line between the fairway and the rough, and I spent like years trying to think about, like, how is that possible? You know, you got to decide where you stop, you know, you know, it's not just natural. And it took me a long time to think, No, that was the sheep were making the call back in the.
Day, and so thinking about that. One of the way. One of the reasons a lot of these, you know, the early golf courses in the UK might have worked so well was because the holes became defined by where animals could walk. You know, people couldn't go over those extreme hills because there was no mowers that could go over that wanted to go over them. Right, It almost kept them the the sheep kept them away from doing something dumb.
Yeah, And some of it, you know, I mean you tend not to. You know, most links courses they're not in the biggest dunes right next to the coast, with a handful of exceptions, they're set back a little bit where the dunes are older and the soil is a
little more fertile, so grass grows easily. You know, on the big dunes, all you've got is like merrim grass kind of holding the sand down, but the sand is still actively blown around and those dunes are getting bigger, so they you know, they they even if they could have grasped up over those things, they're smart enough not to do that because it's still like an environment where things are moving around. You know, Let's just build the golf course over here where it kind of takes care of itself.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think having a course like this built in America, possibly, if it could win some awards, it would probably would do the country a lot of good when it comes to like, you know, what's what's considered sought after maintenance practices, because you know, after this year with trips in the last few years, you go to these some of these clubs in the Northeast and you just, I just can't believe the speeds of the greens, and they talk about softening great greens rather than like
the maintenance standards. And I think a lot of it has to do with like the tools, the modern tools that have become so good and the ability to do it. But it seems like it's jumped the shark a little bit where we're talking about softening greens as opposed to you know, just slowing down the greens.
Right, and that's always been a problem and it just continues to be a problem. Yeah. I mean, I haven't been back to some of these places that have done the fifteen million dollar renovations in the last couple of years, But I wonder if part of the reason for all all that big, huge thing they're doing is to take the focus off the fact that they're also softening the greens.
If they were only softening the greens, you'd be talking about it, But since they just spent fifteen million dollars rebuilding the whole golf course, you didn't even notice.
Today's podcast was edited by the wonderful Megax. Thank you, beg, and also a big thanks to Tom for coming on. As a reminder, if you guys are looking to support the Fried Egg and upgrade your wardrobe, go check out our pro shop proshop dot Thefrida Egg dot com. We've got a bunch of stuff.
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