Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak. In this episode, we discussed Tom's design of stream Song Blue and the unique nature of the project. I was able to record this podcast at stream Song and capture some great footage while at the resort. I would recommend checking out the podcast on the website for an enhanced listening and viewing experience. Thanks for all the support and listening to the podcast. Here's episode four of The Yoke with Doak.
Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back. But don't toss the Yolk and.
The famously candid Oak doesn't pull any punches. How do I make natural looking contour hire the biggest fool in the village? I told them to get flat first. Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years.
Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak. Today we are gonna discuss one of Tom's solo designs, stream Song Blue. Tom, welcome back.
Thanks and nice to actually be here at stream Song to talk about it.
Yeah, we got a good listener question to kick things off. It's from Will Bardwell, he'd like to know when someone is playing the course for the first time. What do they need to know slash understand in order to enjoy the round the most?
Well, probably the first thing for a lot of my courses stream Song is certainly not the only one, is that there's a lot of short grass around the greens and you can get away with missing greens and they have a chance to get up and down. But usually, you know, a lot of the conturs are built with the idea that you're playing low shots back up under the green. You're not taking a wedge and flopping.
It up there.
It's the turf here is a little different than banded dunes are Barnboogle that you almost can't hit the flop wedge up in the air. The turf there on those courses is so tight and the ground is so hard that that only a player with great hands can do it.
Here the turf is a little more forgiving. It's all Bermuda grass, but but it's still you know, those contracts were planned with in anticipation that it would be pretty tight and fast and that was the way to play the shots, and you know, so you have to get you have to get comfortable with that and bandon the caddies will just you know, if you keep trying to hit a wedge, the caddies will eventually take your wedge and jam it and the deepest recess of the bag
where you can't get at it anymore. And the caddies here are pretty good at trying to steer you around shots that are a mistake here. But I think that's the biggest thing that And you know, there's a lot of contra and the approaches and the greens, and there's a lot of places for a ball they hit a conter and kind of veer off line from where you think it was going, and you know you have to be prepared for that and not get too flustered by it.
I've seen some really good players get very upset here or a bad bounce or two, and you know, not not give credit for the fact the previous all they got a good bounce. Yeah they you know, they never complain when they get the good bounce or I've known people to complain about a good bounce, But you really wonder about those people.
I think my dad's one of those people. Actually, it's I find that too. Everybody always tells you about like, well, my round could have been this had this happened, but nobody ever says, well, my round would have been this had I not like got this great break.
That's absolutely true.
It's gotta be frustrating as an architect sometimes because like they only remember the times that they get the bad breaks.
Well, you know, a lot of architects avoid having little crown contras in the golf course and especially around the greens because they know that and they know that they're gonna get criticism for it. And I mean it's almost literally true that for every bad bounce, another guy will get a good bounce off the same thing. And yet you know, because nobody talks about him, you only hear the criticism. So if you're trying to avoid criticism as
a designer, you stop putting those features in. And to me, I mean, this is a beautiful sight for golf, and there were some really dramatic features to it, but you know, like those contracts are a big part of the defense of this golf course. I mean, it's not it's a very wide open golf course and that's the balance against that.
You know, you can get around it and not lose a ball, but it's hard to score because there's a lot of those little you know, they seem fairly random at times, like there's just a little landmine there waiting to go off if you hit the ball on the wrong spot of the green and if you you know, if you've never played here before, it's hard to accept that the first time, but you know, those are the
kind of features. The more you come back here and get to know the place, that's what really makes it interesting to come back and keep trying to figure out a little more.
That's why I found I appreciated I played the Loop one of your courses last summer.
I played it again this summer.
In the second time around, you learned, You learned so much and you appreciate things so much more when you get around it again. And it's got to be a tough thing with the golf profession. Brendan Wurinsky won to take us back to your first impressions of the site when you visited the first time.
I think it's a good place to jump into how this all came about.
Okay, so I can't remember the years exactly. It was either two thousand, I think it was two thousand and nine that I came down here for the first time and I met one of the clients in Tampa, and then we took a helicopter over here to have a look. And there were like three or four different pieces of ground that they wanted me to look at as potential
sites for a golf course. And the original idea was that they were going to build too golf courses right away, but on two different sites, that the character of them would be really different, so you know, and we kind of hot from place to place by helicopter. They were they were two and three miles apart, say, and you know, this was a mining operation, and you know, one of them was a site that had been very recently mined, and you know, sometimes the access to places wasn't so
easy here. So the helicopter helped from that standpoint and from for seeing a bunch of things in a hurry. So they took me to an area that was very gentle and almost flat. That was an area that had all been already been reclaimed from the mining, you know, and it looked like you could build like a traditional
parkland course, but a fairly flat one. They took me to this raw open site that they had just torn up, and it was really really I mean, you would have to put it all back together and fill some things back in, because they'd mind stuff down pretty close to water table. The last site that we looked at after the one where the golf course is now, was kind of more of a nature preserve out It was a little south of here, I think, and you know, more
wetlands and stuff. But they were skeptical about that. They thought it would take the permitting would be hard for that. And then this big, this really big site that looked like my first impression was to look like the sand Hills of Nebraska. In the center of the site, we landed about where the somewhere between like the first fairway and sixth fairway of the Blue Course, and so that big dune that was behind the scene green is immediately right in your face. Like that's what reminded me of
sand Hills. It was like, God, that's a that's a fifty forty fifty foot high sand dune sitting out here with native grasses on it, like it had been there for a long time, or like it had always been there. You know, it was a remnant of the mining operation that had been sitting there for so long that it had been revegetated, you know, first, the wind blew it around and shaped it. I mean it was it was just a big pile of sand stacked up by a
big piece of equipment to start with. But the wind was on it long enough that it formed into like a you know, it had the shape of a real sand dune, and then grass sort of took it over and held that shape. So we kind of drove up onto that. And then you know, right when we got up there to where my seventh tea is now, all of a sudden there's a reveal that on the backside of this sand dune, the ground drops off eighty feet into a thirty acre lake with one hundred foot sand
dune on the far side of it. I was like, holy crap, I've never seen anything like that in my life. And you know, I said to rich Mac the client, you know, if you'd a blindfolded me and kidnapped me and brought me down here and taking the blindfold off, you know, Florida would be like the forty seventh guess of what state are we in?
That's what I was going to say.
The original call, like they said, hey, we think we have this great site for golf.
What was it like? Did you have like a predisposition heading into.
Well, they said it was a mining site, so I assumed that it was going to be there was going to be some elevation. I mean, you know, I sort of assumed more like a rock corps. I didn't understand anything about phosphate mining and the scale of what they did out here, but you know, I assumed it wasn't going to be flat from the little bit that they told me. But I didn't imagine that it was going
to be anything as dramatic as it was. Of course, that call came like right after the financial crisis, when nobody was thinking about starting any projects. So so for for us and for Bill cor this project was a godsend. I mean, right when nothing else was going on, this big company with a lot of dollars in its pocket that wasn't too concern it. You know, their balance sheet is so big, this is just a rounding her. It's like,
oh God, they're you know, they've got the money. They don't have to worry about spending the money for it, and they think that now is the right time to build when prices are low, and so you know, it was obviously a tremendous opportunity. They talked right away about building two golf courses at once, and they interviewed three or four architects, including Bill Core and me, and you know, I think we all really wanted the job. And you know, it was funny, you know, they kept going back to
that idea of using two different sites. And this site that we built the two golf courses on was so much more dramatic than the other ones. And you know, even though they moved dirt all around in the mining process to create the site, kind of by accident, you know, we treated it like a finish, like like it was a piece of land in the sand hills and here's the contras you've got. And you know, we we approached it like we don't have to move a lot of
dirt around. Somebody already did a lot way back when. But we can you know, there's good shapes for golf out here, so we don't have to change too much. Whereas all the other sites we looked at, no, you'd you know, you'd have had to move quite a bit of dirt and it still wouldn't have wound up anywhere
as dramatic as this. There just wasn't the same amount of elevation change, and you know, it seemed pretty intuitive to both of us that that, you know, the contrast between that kind of site and how everybody feels about what Florida golf is like in general, was going to be the big hook for this place that you know, yeah, it's in the middle of Florida, and yeah, it's nothing at all like anything else in Florida. So even though it seems crazy, you know, think Florida. You know, Florida
needs another golf course. Now, Florida has way too many average golf courses, but this was not an average site for a golf course, and it was pretty obvious that you could do something special with it.
How much different was it working for a corporation than your traditional resort developer?
Very different. You know, I don't A lot of my clients have been entrepreneurial guys, I guess that's the best way to say it. And you know, not necessarily all super wealthy, you know, everything from hotel owners to farmers to hedge fund tycoons, but mostly guys that started their
businesses from scratch. And I think I maybe I appealed to them a little bit because you know, I'm not an ex player, and they respect that more than some other people would because they built their businesses from they didn't have a they didn't have an easy way into
what they did either. But you know, a corporate client, you know, usually I'm I've gotten used to only answering to one person, and as long as I maintained that relationship pretty good and make sure that nobody gets in the middle of it, you know, and the communication is clear that we always wind up with a good product and everybody's happy, you know. With the corporate client, the fear was, you know, what's the chain of command going to be? And you know how many people are passing
on everything. But the main guy at Mosaic who was pushing for this golf project, the CEO who's retired now, was definitely behind it. He was a golfer. But their chief legal counsel and one of the vice presidents is a guy named rich Mack, who showed me around here the first time, good golfer, and he was clearly going to be very involved with the project. And ultimately he's who Bill and I and Gill now have all answered to.
And even though there is that corporate structure at Mosaic behind the scenes, you know, on the face of it, he's been our client, just like Mike Kaiser or Rick Kane or anybody else. And we spent a lot of time with him during the process.
So working with Corn creunscha On and this is from Pete. Oh, how much collaboration or joint planning was involved with Core and Crenshaw, with them doing the red course and you doing the Blue course at the same time.
A lot. This was really a unique project. And so going back to my story about these four different sites, you know, Bill and I both wanted to work on the site that we built on, and Mosaic's original assumption was that there wasn't enough land there for thirty six holes, and one of us had to want to work on one of the other sites instead. And I've known Bill for a long long time, and we both have similar tastes, and we both had our eye on the one particular site.
And as much as we like each other, neither one of us really wanted to, you know, take the bullet for somebody out for the other guy and say, okay, I'll do the other site, you know, and rich Mack would ask us questions like so if he asked, I remember Rich asking me specifically, So, if I gave you one of the other sites, do you think you could build as good a course as on this site? You know? And it was like it's like one of those interview
questions from hell. They you know, they just they're trying to force you into saying what they want to hear, and you know, and I just I said, well, I'm pretty good. But if if I took any of those other sites and made it as good as this site here, then you must have hired the wrong guy for this site here, because this should turn out way better than
the other ones. And finally, you know, Bill and I were Bill and I were both here at the same time, and we kind of knew each other well enough to say to each other, you know, let's try to figure out if we can get all thirty six holes on this site so we don't have to like compete for it or arm wrestle or whatever the hell we're going to have to do. So I went back and tried to lay out thirty six holes on the site Bill had.
Bill had already laid out a couple of eighteen hole routings that he really liked and I went back and just said, okay, I have to put that aside and see if I can make thirty six holes fit. And I did, and we came down and looked at it and compared it to his eighteen hole routing, and there were clearly some things that he could do, you know, go in different directions that we really liked, that you couldn't do if you tried to get all thirty six holes and you just had to have more parallel holes
to make them all fit. You know. The clearest example was what's now the fourth Hall on the Blue Course was on one of Bill's routings, and you know, taking that dramatic step up, you know, it plays uphill and you have to hit up over up onto a bluff for the second shot, which is you know, really unique for Florida. And you know, we couldn't. You couldn't build that hole and fit in as many holes working around
the edge of that crater. You know, I had a hole, I had like two parallel holes underneath that big slope. So so what we started doing was working on a thirty six hole plan together without you know, we both agreed that there were some pretty dramatic features and if you just drew a line through the middle of the site and said you stay on that side, Now stay on this side. That neither course would get the variety
that you really wanted. One would get that that bowl with a really sharp bluff, and then it wouldn't get the big lakes over on the far side. Yeah, you know, And so we tried to figure out what was the best thirty six hole plan without deciding who was doing which course. So there was a lot of back and forth. We were here together a couple of times. You know, Bill would come down for a couple of days and send me a sketch with a few new holes. You know.
When we agreed that the thirty six holes wouldn't quite fit the way we did, Bill went out and walked a part of the ground that what's now the first six holes of the Red course. Except for the first hole of the Red the rest of that was a pretty flat piece of ground that hadn't been mined yet, and so we never really you know, that wasn't the first the obvious place to look. And they told us that, well, we're going to mine our way out of there when
we do this project. So Bill looked over there and found a couple holes that he liked, and that got us. You know, we wound up with about thirty holes on the on the piece that we thought was the best part of the golf course, and those few holes gave it thirty gave us a way to fit thirty six holes in so that it all fit. We even looked at going a little farther into where the black course is now, but we didn't really like that ground as much.
It was just, you know, it didn't feel like that ground would fit as well with all the other stuff that we were working with. So so after a couple more back and forth, we had at one point we had the routings where the thirteenth hole the thirteenth green on each course were right together, so you could actually like take the thirteen holes off one course and then you had a choice so the last five holes could fit with the other thirteen either way they are right. Really,
they're pretty close together. They're not you know, Bill tweaked the routing that routing, so so where they come together is twelve on one course and thirteen on the other course. Now, so we didn't have that choice of how, you know, we had to fit them together a certain way. So one the red and blue thing comes from Bill was like drawing his holes with a with a red marker over the map that it was like a map with an aerial photo on it, so you had to do it in color to see very well. And Bill had
always been doing his things in red. So when I drew a map, you know, with these overlapping holes so you could tell which way it went, you know, I drew blue for the other one, and you know that wound up being the names for the two courses. But we really worked on it together without deciding which was which, and then neither one of us wanted to decide be the one who decided, Okay, I'm going to take these halls.
And you know, rich Mack eventually forced Bill to choose which course he would take because we kept we all kept Duck in the question. So that's so it's you know, as far as I know, that's a unique collaboration.
Yeah.
Uh.
You know. Bill even said to rich Mack pretty early on, he's like, and all the credit in the world to Bill, you know, he said, if I was if it was another designer that you were, you wanted me to do this with. He said, I'd be more possessive and you know, want to keep all the good stuff to myself. But Ben and I have known Tom for a long time, and you know, we'd like to see the best solution for the whole project, so you know, we don't really
feel like we're compete with each other. And you know, and we can approach this project this way, where whereas if it was somebody else, you know, our views would be different enough that we don't know if it would work as well, and you know, we would be more inclined to want to have the best of the land.
I can't think off the top of my head of any situation that even closely resembles that with.
No I can't either. And I you know, I know a fair bit about the history of golf courses and how they came to be, you know, you don't you know, most architects are pretty competitive, and you know, it's just I'm lucky I've known I've actually known Bill and Ben longer than they've known each other, so you know, kind of have a little bit different relationship than most architects in the business, do.
Yeah, I you know, just the only thing that it would be like Pine Valley and Marian with a collaborative approach. But you know, obviously at the end of the day much different, right because.
Now you know, once we decided who was building what, we didn't really collaborate. I mean, our crews were here at the same time, and it was really really fun to go walk over the hill and see what the other guys were doing. Yeah, but you know, I had thought about in the beginning about you know, loan in one of my guys to build's crew for a little while and taking one of their guys to work with us for a little while. But you know, when it came time to do it, everybody, everybody's you know, used
to doing their own thing. So we you know, we would we would go have lunch with those guys a bunch of days. But but we still didn't didn't you know, didn't want to interfere in the other's process too much, just other than to walk around and see one of my favorite stories, the ninth green of the Blue Course and the seventeenth green of the Red Course are really close together. There's just like one little dune between them.
And Bruce Happened, who ran the project for me, and I were standing on that dune one day and Eric Iverson was shaping our ninth green and Jimbo Wright, one of Bill's longest tenured guys, was shaping seventeen green on the red and they were working at two entirely different speeds. Jimbo is much more methodical and likes to track in stuff, and he goes really slow, but he does great work.
And you know, Eric is much more quick and about it, and you know, he gets it really polished, but but he does it quicker than almost anybody alive and get that level of detail. And Bruce and I were laughing about that. He was trying to take a video to show how different it was. I should get that from him if he still got it. But when Jim Jimbo at some point like parked the machine and left and you know, went to find Bill somewhere else on the site.
And so Bruce and I went over to see the green that he just roughed in, and we both thought it was one of the cooler things we've ever we'd ever seen. And so Bruce calls him on the cell phone and says, yeah, we just wanted to know we're over here looking at your seventeenth green. And we think it's really cool, one of the coolest greens we've ever seen. And Jimbo didn't know what to say about that, and
you know it, said thanks and hung up. And Bill told me later that Jimbo was standing with him when he got that call and he puts down the phone and he goes, He's told me that green, that seventeenth green they thought was one of the coolest greens they've ever seen. Are they trying to fuck with me?
I imagine that like once that project kicked off, there was there was a good competitive streak you probably, you know, each of you wanting to.
Out do the other one. No, I really did not feel that way at all. And I I know Bill and Ben pretty well. I can't really imagine that they did either. You know that that may not be true for everybody that works for us. I mean, you know, we're trying to do something special and we're spending a lot of days at it, so you know, it was really you know, it was really motivating to see somebody else doing really good creative work right next to you.
And and I think that, you know, I'm not taking any credit for it, but I think that the the Red Course is one of my favorite course of Bill's. Bill and Ben's, I think it gets. I think it's more different to their other courses than you know, some of their other courses have the same a similar feel
to them, and this really is different. A lot of that's the site of course, but they did build like two or three really wild greens that you rarely see them do, and I would guess that has a little that had a little to do with some of the stuff that we were building. At the same time, they were just like, okay, we're you know, we can do that. You know, we can do some of that stuff too, But you know, we weren't just trying to compete with
each other and outdo the other one. And you know, it actually sort of bummed me out at the end. You know, Mike Kaisers weighed in on who won the competition. I didn't like that, not just because he thought he liked the Red course better, but you know, I felt that painted how we collaborated in a false light, and Mike wasn't around for that. He didn't really know. But you know, I didn't feel feel good with the way that was characterized because I really felt like it was
all one big project. By far the most interesting part for me was because we really hadn't picked who was going to do which holes. I mean, some of the holes on my course or holes that built had routed in his first eighteen hole routings before I got involved, some of the holes on his course or holes that I routed to try to extend the thing and make it thirty six holes. Every hole on their course I had at least looked at and thought to myself, Okay, if I was going to build that hole, what would
I do? And then to see some of the really different things that they did with the same hole in the same place was really fascinating to me. And of course, you know that's lost on everybody else because they wouldn't. They can't visualize how that looked as a raw piece of ground and what was changed about it. But they did some really different things. And I know their favorite hole on our course, or the one they said to me at opening day, was the little short part four
the thirteenth. Yeah, and I know that a lot of the reason they picked that is because that was the one place that we had to move some dirt and really change what was there, because you couldn't the water. It was. It was it was just like a big flat bluff where the fairway is, and then it fell very sharply down into the lake that's over to the left,
and it was dangerous. If you had a golf cart out here, you could drive right off into the alligator land and you couldn't and you couldn't see, you know, you couldn't see the edge of it. It was just like you hit it left and then it just goes off the bluff blind and you don't know what happened. So, you know, we cut that side down a lot to make that hole and it really worked out well. But I know they you know, I know they thought that was an awkward little corner and they weren't sure what
they were going to do with it. And then they're like, oh, that turned into a good hole.
That's uh. I mean, I've always wondered why there.
I get there is so, you know, this unique relationship allowed for the collaboration to really work, yes, and versus you know, I've always went because like you look at what happened with like the Golden Age of architecture, with like the Philadelphia School, where those guys regularly collaborated with like ideas and they would look at each other's courses and provide feedback like and like you look at the results, it's like, holy cow, these are courses that are still
great today. And I mean these are two very fantastic golf courses. Collaboration is the cool thing that usually doesn't get worse with collaboration.
No, collaboration is a hard thing. I mean, everybody's kind of setting their ways a little bit. And yet I mean Bill and I both learned from Pete Die, and you know, the Pete Die attitude toward construction was anybody out here could have a good idea, So don't you know, and somebody you know, feel strongly about something, hear him out and or let him try to do something and see how it turns out, instead of just dismissing him or having your mind already made up that you're going
to do something else. And you know, Bill's team works that way just as much as we do. So you know, from that perspective, it wasn't really hard to get along
and have fun with it, but it was. You know, obviously, Bill and Ben and I have worked on a couple other projects quote unquote together, you know, in Bandon at Barn Google, but this is the only one where we were doing it at the same time, so we got to spend you know, I got to spend way more time with Bill Corr during the course of this project then I had up till then. As you know, I've known him since nineteen eighty one, but I spending time
with him, having dinner with him, talking to him. You know, I don't ask him so much like exactly what are you thinking there? You know, I you know, but you know, see and seeing how he interacts with Ben because they're they're normally very guarded about that around press, even around their clients, but you know, seeing it every day here, we got a better sense of how they do work instead of just guessing it how they do it.
So we've talked a little bit about the scale, and Jim Turk has a question about like, you know, the site obviously possesses tremendous scale.
How important is scale?
Uh?
At your underrated overrated thing. I'm starting to think that scale is getting overrated because it seems like, you know, the Best New Award winner is just bigger and bigger and bigger, and every year the biggest course wins, like the tallest presidential candidate always wins. The biggest course always wins, and I've gotten to build a lot of big courses, so that hasn't been bad for me. But you know,
there's got to be some upper limit to it. I'm starting to think that we're reaching that upper limit, and maybe maybe some some courses that I've seen lately have crossed the line. And I you know, I feel somewhat responsible. I mean I think, well, Bill and Ben were doing it at the same time I was, you know, and it's really it's really down to Ben. I mean, you know, I've known Ben since I wrote him a letter when I was in college asking for advice, you know, what
should I do to be a golf course architect? What courses should I go see? He's been like a cousin ever since. Not that I see him a lot, but you know, when I was in college or just out of college, and i'd go to a tournament, it's like, oh, just you know, come on a practice round and walk inside the ropes with me and we'll talk about the
golf course. So I did, and you know, at the same time that I was talking with Ben about the golf course, I'm watching him play practice rounds with David Graham and Sevy and all the best players of that generation. You know, watching them from ten feet away was pretty good education. So, and Ben is always talked about with I mean, I would say, if there's anybody I learned that from, it's him. And I'm sure Bill would say the same thing. You know, Ben grew up in Texas.
It's a windy place. Ben was maybe a little bit of an erratic driver, so he appreciated wider golf courses, which I would have too.
You know, I'm not interesting.
He's a better driver of the ball than me.
He wanted Augusta too before when I was still wide.
Sure, so you know, those guys and I have probably been right at the front of changing golf and making it wider. But both of us, you know them, you know them even more than me. There is a limit to that that we don't. You know, we've never thought that thirty five yard fairways were wide enough. Yeah, but you know, Charles blur MacDonald in his book said something like, you know, average with the fair green forty five to
sixty yards was his his idea of ideal. And of course, when you talked about sixty yard fairways in nineteen eighty people like that, You're like you had a screw loose. I mean they were thirty five and getting narrow. But you know, we've built sixty yard wide fairways and even wider than that at times, and you know, it gives our courses a different look. It gives people more room to play and find the ball. That means you can emphasize the contries around the greens a little more to
make up for it. And you know, that's a big part of my style, and it's a big part of Bill and Ben's style too, And a lot of that just goes down to Ben having a lot of influence, not just on Bill but on me.
Yeah, there's there's a pendulum and it.
You know, I think it. It was way over on one side in the eighties and right now. I I played a course that I'm like myster with I always talk about with but it might have gone too far.
Yeah, I think I've seen a couple that went too.
Far and is but that's the whole balancing act of anything you have to write.
And you know, one of the big differences, one of the big differences is stream song between the between red and Blue is Bill's course is much tougher test off the tee than Hours, and I think ours is more a second shot course. But a big part of the reason for that is that the Red course is basically around the perimeter of the property and the blue courses all in the inside. So the Red course on a lot of holes has like native vegetation on.
The one side, they have like boundary lines, right yeah.
When you're going, especially when you get to that the part that goes around the far I was thinking, like the far end of the golf course, like, yeah, nine, everything from after like seven's got the water along the left, and then nine's a little more open. But then ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, all you know, if you hook it lost ball, well, if you slice it into the into the bushes on the hill, lost ball.
Two, three, four are like that. Also, yes, on the front nine.
So that's you know, that's that's part of just the way the two courses divided themselves up. You know, they have a lot more potential lost ball country and play than I do. And then you know, we because we're in the middle of the property and we could you know, I brought a few people out when we were uh, we finished the We finished our course fully a year before the before the golf courses open, even even more
than that. And you know those those second through fifth calls on Bill's course, the mining operation that went through there and putting it back together took a lot more to everything else was done before those holes were done, so that like, you know, we might have been able to open our course sooner, but there was no sense. And you know, the the clubhouse wasn't ready, the pro shop wasn't ready. So what I did, you know, the
golf show. Every year, I would take people out and hit balls around the golf course even though it wasn't you know, it was kind of in shape to play. And you know, I took one of the assistant superintendents with me, and every time we look for a ball or lost the ball, it's like cut that down, you know, chop that back, let's take out those bushes, Let's make this play as you know, any plays that you're likely to lose a ball, let's make it more forgiving. Because
I wanted people to get around the golf course. I mean, it's a busy resort. You don't want to wait on people looking for their ball. As Bobby Jones famously once wrote, you know, somebody asked him if he if he minded playing with average golfers, and he said, no, as long as they don't ask me to look for their damn ball.
That's ah.
I've got a buddy who's like a ton handicap. Anybody's really wild off the green, off the tee. He's like a twenty five off the tee and like he's like a plus three around the greens. It's it's it's maddening to watch him play golf. But he we call it gorse hunting. And like, you know, we go play places that have on eye grass around in places, we spend all day looking for balls and it's out my ball. It's always just and it's it's uh, that's that's important.
It's it's very nice to not look for your golf ball. Uh so Canahadki Winn wants to know about the eleventh hole and how much restraint you used and not putting a bunker by the green there.
That little stretch of the blue corse ten and eleven was kind of the flattest. It wasn't really flat, it was tilted, but but it was like there was less feature to it than pretty much any other part of the property. Nearly every other hole we had something in the fair way and something in the green to work with. On ten all we tens of par three. All we had was you know, you're hitting over where we cut through a belt of trees, so there was some like
rough ground out in front of the tee. But the green site was just flat as well, tilted left to right, but nothing shaped there, no shapes there to build a natural green. And then eleven was again tilted left to right the whole way, and the only thing that was there was you know, the fall off at the back of the green and a couple a little like I mean, little small two foot high ridges that were leftovers from
the mining operation. Just these random, a little features, the one that's to the right of the green and long grass that's been there since the first day I saw it, and that's why the green is there that in the fallof now, eleven was going to be a really long hole, you know, from ten Green to eleven Green was like five hundred and fifty or six hundred yards or something like that, and you were going over a crown on the way. So if we made it a part five.
You know, you'd drive it to before the crown and then you wouldn't be able to see the green at all, and that wasn't very appealing, so we made you walk aways to get to the tee and then so you could drive it to where the crown was if you hit a decent drive, and then you see the rest of the hole, even though it's fairly flat. So that's that kind of central bunker in the fairway, and you know where the fairway pinches into a little narrow area on the left, and then it's wider on the right
is right at that crown. That's the landing area. And then from there to the green there wasn't much going on at all. And then there were these little contours around the two little contras on the right of the
green and the drop off behind it. And you know, my thinking on the hole was, it's a really long part for and you know, we don't want to make everybody walk even further to get to the tee, so we're gonna make so you know, it's like four to eighty from the back tee, but it's like four thirty or four forty from the men's tea because we just didn't want to make people walk another fifty yards to get up there farther where they could hit a shorter
shot to the green. So so you know, my thought process was kind of it's the only hole I remember building that I thought this way, that, Okay, this is such a long hole that we're trying to reward the guy who it's two solid shots and at least gets close to the green. It's better to be up there twenty yards in on the green and be able to chip at it, then be in back sixty yards and hitting a pitch. So what can we do with this green shape to make that happen? And you know, I
didn't want to put a bunker at the green. I thought there were some cool contras already. And you know, if we just made wrinkly ground that the closer you got and the more you could like hit a chip shot and control it, that's that's all that it would take. You know, it was going to be a really hard hole anyway, because it's so long, so it didn't really need bunkers, and it sure didn't need bunkers fifty yards short that somebody was going to make an aid out of.
So we just went with no bunkers around the greens, that particular green, and you know, for variety's sake, I think it's a really neat hole, you know. I guess I thought about it as being restrained, but not exactly in that way. It's just something different out here.
I think that's one of my favorite hole and golf.
It's that I just love those You get such if you miss that green, you get such unique and interesting shots that you don't see really anywhere else because of those wrinkles and those rumples. It's like you'll get on you know, you'll hit a really good shot, but you miss a little bit offline and you get this really awkward recovery shot.
That you don't see. And that's to me just it's that's it's cool when it happens in golf. It's a variety. So, uh, Pete C wants to know if you have.
A favorite stretch of holes on the golf course at Blue two.
I mean when when you mentioned stream Song to me, the first holes that I always think of or four and five and then and you know kind of into six and seven as well, but especially four and five, that that big abrupt slope going up to four green, and then you know, you can pull the thing off number five and hit it off the world. Yeah, pretty scary, you know, of everything on the site, that was my
favorite feature. And you know, while I will well, I was never going to be the one to pick which course I did, I was really happy when it wound up that I got to work on those two holes. Even though number four is almost exactly the way Bill had laid out a hole, and number five is similar to the way he had laid out a hole on one of his original plans. We we kind of twisted number five and play it from a bit of a different angle than than the plan I saw from Bill.
But number four is, you know, was his idea. And then the other holes are that you know, that finishing stretch fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen really long finishing bowls for you know, compared to anything else that I've done except for sixteen. There their downwind quite a bit of the time, so they don't play quite as long as they sound on the scorecard. But a lot of variety, you know,
seventeen great hands. They're putting the cross bunkers all the way across the fairway with something I really thought hard about do I want to do that or do I want to leave a gap in there? And at the end of the day, I was like, shit, we never put the we never put the full cross bunkers in. Let's do it this time. You know, something that had to do that had a bit to do with rich
Mack being a really good player. If rich Mack was a different guy, he would have said no to that and I would have never asked, wouldn't have done it. But with you know, Rich's take on the golf courses was it's okay for it to be hard in places, and that had a big influence on that particular hole. And then and then eighteen is really a second shot hole.
I mean, it helps it a good drive. But you know, if you're on the top of the fairway there looking down at that green, that's one of my favorite shots on the whole property. Just you know, the green kind of tilts left to right and it sits under a little contra at the left of it, so there's there's bunkers on their right and there's all this room out to the left. That's one of my favorite things I can do is just like leave you like fifty yards of fairway to the left of the green. Hey, hit
it out here, it's wide open. And if you hit it out there with the pin on the left side of the green, there's no way to get it close. You're just playing along a lot, a lot flat fairway and then it drops down into the green and the you know, whatever kind of shot you hit, it'll get away from you and accelerate off that slope and you'll wind up on the other side of the green. So the play is, you know, keep straight on the green, even though you see all this room to the left.
You know, even if you play short of the little mound and bunker that's in front of the green, that's a way better place to be hitting your third shot than long left. Yeah, but nobody looks at it from the fairway and thinks about that until they've till they've gotten themselves over on the left one time, and then they realize, oh, there's no good play from here.
It's rare too for you to have such a great, dramatic like vista of the clubhouse from on like an eighteenth hole, like where you're looking down at a clubhouse.
It's like that famous well.
Stonewall has a great right that's to play in downhill to the clubhouse. And you know, in this case, the clubhouse is well removed from the property. But I've got to tell a story of the clubhouse architect here. And the guy who designed the hotel to has become a
good friend. And one of the reasons is when we were starting the project, he came out and walked with Bill and me and we were walking the routing, and it became obvious after we divided it up that you know, my eighteenth hole was really the only one that was,
you know, playing back in toward the clubhouse. The eighteenth hall for the red course is is on the back side of the clubhouse, and there's a huge dune between it and the clubhouse, so you can't see the clubhouse at all, and neither course comes back to the clubhouse at the ninth hole. So really my eighteenth hole is the only one that you're you're coming right into the clubhouse. So, you know, so I cared more about what it was
going to look like. And you know, he jokingly asked me when we were walking around the day, did you ever go back to one of your courses and look at the clubhouse and think, ah, that's disappointing. And I
laughed and said all the time, that's true. I mean a lot of times I've I have no idea what the clubhouse is really going to look like or exactly where it's going to sit on site, because they don't start building it until we're pretty much done, you know, and they build it while the course is growing in, and so there's a lot of times I've gone back and gone, oh, they'd only done moved it a little, or hadn't set it so far back away from the course or whatever.
You know.
The only one that I really liked of my designs was Stonewall, because that's a building that they rehabbed, and it was right there and I could work right up to it and understand exactly where it was and this, you know, this all the space around the green in between it and the clubhouse.
As I understand, they wanted to get rid of part of it too.
Right, Yes, that's true. They wanted they wanted to tear down a build. There was a little separate building that was part of the complex that they wanted to tear down. And every time they talk about tearing it down, I couldn't explain it took me a long time to understand what it was, but I just, you know, I just
see it as space. I mean, one of the reasons I got along so well with the clubhouse architect here Albert, is that, you know, we both talk about space, and you know, the feeling of walking into something and how much room you've got around you, and you know, a lot of I think a lot of golf course architects understand that, but they don't talk about it too much. When you talk to a building architect, that's all they think about. And you know, I do think about it
in the outdoor space. But yeah, we were really concerned with like you know, I was especially concerned with what we were going to be able to see from the t because the eighteenth hole plays up over a little fluff, and like you know, I couldn't visualize how high the clubhouse was going to stick up and how much of it I could see from the tee, and I knew
it had the potential to be really awkward. Once you get up to the top of the hill, you're going to see the whole building, and it was fine, but when you were on the TV, you knew you were going to see a little bit, and I just couldn't tell how much. And then they decided they were going to build rooms on the second floor, and I'm like, oh man, it's gonna stick. You're going to be looking at the rooms, or you're gonna be you're just going to see the roof over the top of the fairway
and it could be really weird. And you know, they even went out and like, you know, kind of put a couple of beams up and hung balloons to the elevation so I could see what it looked like. And at the end I asked them to drop the whole thing like four or five feet, just so you were going to see it, but you know, see us see less of it, and it wound up looking really good. You know. I give them all the credit in the world for working with us on that.
That's that's hey, there's another collaboration. It's a whole collaboration.
And I should say since then, I've been a little more vocal about the clubhouses my projects, and especially at Terry Edie. I think that combination of clubhouse and golf course that's as good as I've ever done. And getting the feeling right between the clubhouse and the course, and when I when I was doing the routing, it was like I had all these holes coming back to the clubhouse site and I was like, oh, this is a really small space for a clubhouse. So I went to
ricaying the client. I said, I got to understand how big a clubhouse you want, because I've either got this routing figured out where it's going to be perfect, or if you're going a little bigger than that, it's going to be a mess and it's everything's going to be too tight and I'll have I'll have to change the routing. So he said, I'm going to go interview two architects
for the clubhouse. Why didn't you come with me? So you know, we wound up we didn't pick which architect he he chose, but you know, I think because because I went with him, the architect to wound up doing the clubhouse down there, a guy, I mean Pip Chesher, who's architect in Auckland. He sent his son to Barnbogle to like get a feel for what we built there, not so much with the clubhouse they'd done, just the feel of what a rugged natural sand dune course was like.
And I think that impressed rick A lot. But you know, it was great working with them closely. And you know,
it's funny. I'm working on a couple of projects now that there's one in California that you know, the first time I walked into the room to go interview for the job, there's like four famous architects sitting at the dining room table talking about they're going to build like multiple little resorts on this site, and they're hiring different guys to build their own little, separate piece of the project.
It's really interesting to get to know those guys, and you know, they think about all the same concepts that we do as golf course architects, but they have a different language for it.
All.
Right, last question before we get to over it. Underrated car for the course wants to know if you could steal one hole from the red course, which one would it be?
I could steal one.
Your your course. We aren't going to make you get rid of one your course. Would them be nineteen holes?
Okay, it's gonna be hard to add it in. It's not gonna You're gonna have.
To walk your way and talk about routing.
Uh, there's two the seventh hole, the par five going out with the with the water on the left and the little dune at the right front of the green.
You highlight that in the Yes I did, I didn't the Confidential guess.
I did a drag of it for the Confidential Guide. That hole. Bill had already routed a hole there on one of his very first plans. It was his first hole on one plan, and all those features were there except for the bunker that's fifty yards shore to the green. There's a long kind of waist bunker looking things short of the green that you, you know, if you're going for the green directly until you have to hit over
that bunker and inside that little mound. And then just like my eighteenth hole, there's just a ton of short grass out to the right if you don't want to try to do that. But then you go over there and the little mound is right in your way. But that was all there, and you know, and build just had that hole fit perfectly into that slot, and it's like, that's a pretty good hole. I wish I'd come up with that, And I didn't get that. He gave me
some great holes, he didn't give me that one. The other one is the ninth hole, which at the beginning, I didn't think was one of the better holes on that routing. You know, there was room for the big fairway bunkers going up the right side. I mean, some of that land had already been gouged out, so the you know, the the basis of the bunkers was already there. They tinkered with the edges of them and how they come into play, but the green site just sat up.
And then like the second visit I made during construction, they had shaped the ninth green And that's one of the most interesting greens I've ever seen anybody build. And that was not there the whole right side of that. And the way you can play a shot up into the left and let it feedback down to the right. It's a little like a green eye built high point that you have that feature of it that to get to one pin place you played towards something else and
let it feed off the side. But it's a tremendous green and it's like, you know, and I don't know who. I assume build drew that and one of his guys shaped it, but I never really asked who. All I know for sure is that I saw it before Ben had seen it. Because because when Ben showed up on that trip, I said, I want to go walk this with you. I want to I want to see what you think of this green because I know you haven't seen it yet. And he liked it just as much
as I did. So that that that one goes to Bill and whoever shaped it, and not to Ben.
Yeah, that that's a very cool short part four. That green is wild.
I remember the first time I got up there, I was like, oh my god, I missed, I missed left.
I was dead so overrated, underrated Polk County and golf.
Yeah, hmmm, well Polk County didn't have a whole lot of golf going for it before stream Song. Now it does. I think this whole place is underrated. You know, when we were building it, Bill was just coming off doing
Lost Farm. Dave Excellent, who came here in the beginning to outplan the project, had just been working for a year and a half at Barnbougle and and Bill was really excited to have Dave come here the first time to see what he thought of the land, because you know, Barnboogle was obviously a great site, but that's how highly we thought of this site. Yeah, we were comparing it to places like that.
That's Keith Rebb told me too.
And you know, there's everybody's got an opinion on which of the three is the best golf course. And you know, decision pretty early on was, oh the red beat out the blue. Mike Kaiser decided that. So everybody in the press has to follow his lead. They can't be disagreeing with him. And you know, now the Black Corse versus you know, the every review I've seen, oh, it's the best of the three. Of course they have to say that, well it's the new, the new, latest and greatest.
There's a recency bias, and like.
Everybody makes these judgments after one oh yeah, Tripp, Like like people ask me like the same thing. And as I've done this longer, I feel like it's more and more unfair to actually judge something the first time after one visit around.
Sure, but that's the you know, that's the nature of our business too. It doesn't really bother me that much. I mean, it bothers me that everybody makes it out to be a bigger distinction than it is. You know, if you if you pull a hundred people, it's like fifty five to forty five or maybe sixty forty until they've been told that the red is the on that's higher ranked, and then it gets more tilted than that.
But but you know, obviously there's still a lot of people that pick the Blue over the Red, and you know, I don't care so much about that. You know, what I do know is if the Blue Course is the third best course at stream Song, I'm comfortable with that because I know it's a really good golf course. And it's like, you know, there's a lot of golf resort, there's a lot of famous golf resorts in the world
that wish their third golf course was that good. Yeah, And that's what I'll take away from it, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I learned in Myrtle Beach the like the second project ever did the Legends Heathln Course. It was one of three. It's a three course complex, and the client, you know, I always thought it was the best of the three, but the client had absolutely no incentive to promote that idea. They want at all three courses to be busy. He
didn't want one to be better than the others. He didn't want you know, he didn't want to start pricing them differently, and then you know that that just reinforces it, and then people want to pay the expense, play the expensive one even even more, and they won't go to the other ones. So it's in the best interest of your client if it's a hung jury and nobody can
decide what's the best course. That's a lot of the success Abandoned Dunes, and that's going to be a lot of the success of this place is that there's three really good courses, and you know, there's a pretty good debate about which is the best one.
I think it's it's it changes with who you ask too.
It's all different for the golf like what golfer like.
You know, some people, like a beginner, will lose a lot more golf balls on the red course than your course.
Yes, and I think, you know, I think it's probably a general truism of the difference between Bill and Ben's style and mine, And a little of it has to do with how good a player Ben is. And you know, I played golf with Bill. Bill is an underrated, very good golfer. He doesn't play much, but he's really good.
You don't play it wake for us if you're not good.
And he hasn't lost it. But I you know, low handicappers are more inclined to think their courses are superior to mine. High handicappers. I might come closer to winning the field on that and if I am, there's there's more high handicappers than low handicappers, So I'm okay with that. But you know, at the end of the day, we want people to love all the golf courses here and and I really, you know, I really like the Red Course. I have a lot of fun playing the Red Course,
so it doesn't bother me a bit too. You know, lose out in the rankings on that one, and you know, I've done a couple other projects with Bill and Ben and you know, you win, somebody lose them.
Yeah, the you know, I believe ranking stink anyway, so it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
You know, I rated both courses the same and the Confidential Guide and that was not a political call at all. That's really the way I feel about them. They're they're not interchangeable. They're different, but it's the same level equality and they're both and they're both I think they're both really good. I think they're They're probably one of the best cases for oceans are overrated in terms of rankings.
You're not gonna I'm not arguing with it, because I've benefited from that as much as anybody alive.
But you know, big bodies of water are certainly overrated. I can think of a few courses that are very highly rated are on oceans, and I don't you know, I.
Have no interest. And that's you know, this could this is a whole different podcast. It is ranking, but like you know, like the.
Red and the Blue Course are courses that I want to keep playing golf at, and like that should that should be like what matters the most? Like do you want to keep playing when you get to the seventeenth hole? Do you get like I get a feeling of sadness when I play really good golf courses and I get near that, And that is something that happens on these courses. So that's what should be, you know, that's I don't know, that's that is all I need to know about a
course and how good it is. So but uh, all right, We're we're done here. Stream Song Blue everybody should go check out. It's a a stream song. In general, it's an awesome spot, but uh, see you next time
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