I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a.
Bright egg, Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Friday fridagg Bride Egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump course. Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg Golf Podcast. I am Andy Johnson and this is another edition of the Yolk with Doak. So Tom was gracious enough to catch up with me. We have we haven't talked in a while on the podcast. I think we've both been very busy, Tom more so than me.
He has a ton of new projects to chat about, and we into it just as a little programming note. We talked for about two hours. So this will be part one of the conversation and we will be releasing part two this week. With it being Thanksgiving week, I figure everybody's got a lot of travel on their hands. This will get you through that and it should be should be pretty fun conversation. A quick reminder, we have
our Black Friday sale going. It starts on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week and runs till the Tuesday after Thanksgiving week. If you use the code black Friday, you'll get twenty percent off everything in the pro Shop outside of events, so that that promo code is Black Friday. Meg has done a tremendous job getting the pro Shop really stocked with a wide range of different styles, different things. It obviously is a big part of what we do here is you know, in helping us continue to put out
all the content that we want to do. So thank you to everybody that has supported us through the years. And if you're in the market for some gifts for a loved one or a gift for yourself, check out our Black Friday sale at Proshop dot Dofriday dot com. Without further ado, let's get to Tom Dook and Part two of this conversation will be posted later this week. All right, Tom, we're back. It's been been a number of months. I feel like we've both been very busy,
but you're definitely been more busy than me. I got to ask you, have you had any travel problems this year?
Not too bad really. I've gotten stranded in the airport once or twice, but you know, that's about par for the course for me. Got a thirty twenty thirty trips and no, I mean it's been you know, it's been a little easier because mostly I'm traveling in America. You know, I don't have any thirty hour flights to deal with. That's that's a welcome changement.
Pace. Yeah, I always I don't. I never complain about travel, like, you know, if I get a bad you know, something bad happens, because I really believe in like the travel gods. And this year I had like the worst thing I had happened was like I had a few flights where my my my computer didn't plug in. And I was like, Okay, these aren't big problems. I'm not I'm not upset about this, and I'm going to you know, and it was a
great year of travel for me. So it was like, you know, there's tons of people had trouble and I did not. Let's start. We got a ton of listener questions, which is obviously the basis of this pod going back six years or so. I want to get to them, and we'll weave in kind of all your new projects through a lot of these questions. But this is a fun one that we got from get get a Hold one. When was the last time that you played one of your golf courses with random people that didn't realize you
designed the course. Has that happened?
Oh yeah, so yeah a bunch of times, because I don't you know, if if I do meet up with some random person, I'm not the kind of person who's going to be like looking for recognition, and I know that I'm much more likely to get some real, like honest feedback if I don't tell them right away who I am. So I played with an Asian couple at Barnboogle one of the times I was there, which was
great fun. They'd never been on a links course before in their lives, and like after two or three holes, I had him using the backboards, but I still didn't I didn't tell them until like we made the turn. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I know a lot about the golf course. Well. The funniest one the last time I was at common Ground was it was kind of right right after the pandemic.
I was out looking at something out that way, and I just stopped in a common Ground late in the afternoon, like just in time to maybe get in eighteen holes before dark. And you know, I, you know, went in the pro shop and said hi, and just just went off by myself. But there was there was like a three ball in front of me. So after a couple you know, I hit a good shot on the second hall, right up close while they were still standing on the
third tee. So they waved me up, and we're going down the third fairway and I saw that one of the guys had a bag with a bally Neal tag on it or something like that, and I mentioned that and he said, oh yeah, I'm a big Tom Doak fan, but he did not recognize me. So I let that go for at least two or three holes before I told him who I was.
That's amazing. You mentioned like real feedback. Do you have anything that you remember where somebody said something that's stuck with you that didn't know who you were.
No, not like any great architectural insights, just more their takeaway from the golf course. You know, is it you know, what's the first word out of their mouths? Is it fun? Is it difficult? Is it interesting? You know, just that kind of feedback is nice to get, and you don't really get that very much normally, you know, every you know, I talked to a bunch of writers who want to analyze things more in depth than that, and that's not really how the average golfer is going to experience it.
Yeah, that's I would agree with that, you know, all right, Joel Anderson writes, since writing Anatomy of a Golf Course in nineteen ninety two, what changes would you make to the book book after thirty years of experience? Would you prioritize certain topics more now than you did then?
No? I mean, just like my own golf courses, I don't really want to go back and rewrite books and edit them. And you know, I don't think my philosophy has changed very much. You know, I'm a better architect because I've got more practice building things. That's the part where we keep getting better. But the ideas are still the ideas. They've kind of always been the ideas, and maybe there's pieces of it I could do better at editing and condensing a little bit. That is a pretty
dense book for a beginner. I'm really surprised how many times people compliment me on it, because it does get pretty technical at times in the middle of it. But overall, I'm really happy with the book. It's still sell you know, it sells better now than it used to. I guess that's because people know me more. But I'm really happy with that book. I don't feel the need to rewrite it at all.
All Right, all right, all right, with a high point. We'll go back thirty years, thirty plus years, and your back rebuilding high point. It's got eight holes from the original design, and you guys have finished shaping all of them, if I'm correct.
Right, we finished shaping everything, and we actually seeded all the holes this fall, although quite a few of the newer holes were seated so late that, you know, we were hoping for a really long, nice fall like we had last year to get some growth on those. But I suspect several of those holes will have to be reseeded next spring. You know, you always take the chance and go ahead and try to seat everything and just
see if it'll catch. Because, as Pete I said to me, the first time we were working on a high point, we were getting near the end of the year and we didn't have irrigation in all the holes. I actually called him for advice and said, you know, we're not going to have time to get all the irrigation, and should I try to see these holes or not. And Peetie and his infinite wisdom said, seed doesn't grow in the barn. What do you think we used to do before we had a lot of your big irrigation systems.
Just put it out there and see if it'll to grow.
That's good, that's a good one liner. What surprised you most about High Point? Part two? So like, what has surprised you about the whole project the most? And that's from Sea Pressed.
I don't know if I'm surprised by high Point. I mean I did feel a lot more pressure to get out there and do some of the shaping myself, and it certainly interrupted my rhythm at home. You know, normally, when Brian Slannik and I are working on project, we're away working on the project and then we're home and we're home and we have time for our families. And this summer wasn't like that at all. You know, we were are we going to be home for dinner? We're
not sure. You know, we might work late. That doesn't go over well. So it was that was a tough summer just for you know, getting out of our comfort zones while we're home, which we don't really it's taken a long time to get in a comfort zone as much as we travel. But you know, overall, I'm really happy with the golf course. At the same time, you know, I'm kind of curious to play these new nine holes
and see if I like them as much. You know, I'm happy with all the holes, but would we have had more cool features if I'd had all of my crew working on that, contributing their little idea like they do on all of my other projects, instead of having to all come from me. And personally, I think it would probably be better if I'd had all that help. You know, people always assume all the ideas are mine, and that's not really the way we work, and and I hope this course doesn't show that in a bad light.
It's uh yeah, I mean, I would hate for anybody to read my writing without Garrett from our team or Brendan from our team editing it. It would be it would be revealing. I guess people from wayback might remember that. You know, it's like the same type of thing with writing, right It's like if you don't have your editor or you know, team of editors. I like that's and it
makes sense. I think it makes sense completely, because if you think about the Great Golden Age courses, so many of them were built through collaboration, and architects weren't as competitive then. And in a way, your associates act as as the you know, you know obviously the historic story of like the Philly School acted where they all shared ideas they would come visit their site. In a way, your your associates are kind of like that, right.
Yeah, they're They're a huge part of what I do and they always have been, and you know, and we like having all these young guys around to getting their first taste of it because they they they bring such enthusiasm to the project. It's like it's never just another
project to them. And you know, they may not give me a great idea of how to shape the ninth Green, they shouldn't really expect to do that at this point in their lives, but just being out there every day and being another set of eyes on the thing to say, you know that the right that back right corner doesn't really look cry. You know, most of my jobs, I've got half a dozen people with real talent out there looking at everything we're doing every day. And that's why they turn out.
That well, speaking of that, I noticed this at the at your Renaissance Cup about a month ago, where you had, you know, you had everybody that was really involved with the with Alito project there. I couldn't help but notice the youth wave on your staff. What's it been like having so many new young people involved and have you noticed anything different about the way they think about golf architecture or talk about it.
Unfortunately I don't get to spend as much time with them as i'd like, you know, I try to make room for at least to have every one of them like shadow me for a day at some point when I'm there during the process. But there has been a youth movement. We've kind have done it in waves over
the years. You know, I've always had this internship program, but you can't really have too many interns unless you've got a design project coming up in the summer, a construction project coming up in the summer, so you'll have something for them to do. You know, it doesn't make sense to have them all sit around my office looking
at each other trying to draw routing for something. So, you know, coming out of the pandemic and getting started on Lido, we've trained up a lot of people to the point that you know, ten years ago those people helping us were Blake Konan and Cly Johnson and Angela Moser and now they're running projects and we you know, we need another generation of people who are kind of starting at the bottom and we don't have to pay them a fortune and you know, let them be out
there and contribute a little bit. So so we had five interns for the lido and two or three of them that came back for the second year, and you know, Brian Schneiders had a couple of them under here wings since then working on Old Barnwell and some of the
renovation things that he's doing. So we had to get a couple more to help with Sedge Valley and there's some real talent there, like there always is, and it's exciting to see him starting to learn how to actually build things and and be helpful instead of just having an opinion.
I love that they're helpful instead of just having an opinion.
That's the thing I mean. You know, I meet so many people that are interested in golf course design and want to work for me, and that you know, their idea of working for me is that they're going to walk around behind me all day and help me think through everything. It's like everybody would like to have that.
Job, especially right out of the gate.
Sure, and I don't know what I expected the day I went down to start working for Pete Dye at Long Cove, But it did not take me more than half a day to figure out, Okay, he doesn't really need that much help thinking through how to design this thing. He needs help building it. That's what everybody's out there for, and that is the most important part of it. You can't It doesn't matter how many great ideas you've got
if you can't build that. And that building process takes so long and takes so many people that that gives everybody else a chance to contribute and make it better, which you're not going to do sitting in the office.
Well, it's what you just said about high Point, and like what you are worried about is that you didn't have as many people helping you, and you worry about like the cool stuff that you might have missed out on by not having everybody there right and.
Right, Which is not to say I didn't have any help. I mean, Brian Slanik was there from start to finish and kind of polishing up everything I did and make it better. We aren't just going straight off my last bulldozer push to a finished green for the couple of greens that I did, just say, now, we're just going to keep these contours that are right here. Let's just
map that and put it back together. And then I had Matt Hunter, who was an intern for US at stream Song years ago and worked on several construction projects for US, but eventually got out of the business and moved back to Traverse City and you know, got married and has a little family. Now he's been working here in Traverse City for the last ten years. But he always said to me, if high Point ever comes back, I'm going to quit my job and work on high Point.
And sure enough, as soon as they started talking about putting it back, he was like, yeah, I'm serious, that's what I'm going to do. So he was on the crew all summer and you know, good enough on a bulldozer that he was the one with actually with the daughter of the engineer for the project who put the greens back together and put the mix in and got them floated out again with the GPS unit. So they were right, which saved both me and Brian a ton of time. And you know, they did a great job.
So it's not like I didn't have any help, but I didn't. You know, most of the famous courses I've worked on in the last twenty years, Bally Neil or Terry Edy or wherever. You know, you've got at least four or five greens on those golf courses that that was really Brian Schneider's idea or Eric's idea or Kai Goldy's idea, you know, with me editing them a little. And that's you know, it's different when all the ideas have to come straight out of me. That's the part that I'm worried about.
Yeah, yeah, I guess. Yeah. My point was the where people can help is in the field. That's where they get to put their ideas right, imprinted their ideas, and you know, very little comes from just walking behind you. Right. All right, let's talk about our sponsor, Club Champion. Club Champion has been with us and they have an awesome offer. So for those that aren't aware of what Club Champion is, Club Champion is really the premier club fitter in America.
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bucks with a club purchase. They have been an awesome partner and they got me an awesome set of golf clubs. I'm playing really good golf, and I think part of it is that I have a really well fit golf bag. I've been using them since all the way back to my high school days when they were starting in Chicago when they had one location. That's where I was going. So really great brand, somebody that I've worked with my
entire really my entire golf life. So go to Club Champion dot com use the promo code frieda Egg to redeem this offer. And now back to Tom dok So. One of the unique things about your some of your new holes, and you posted this on Instagram at high point is the choose your own adventure routing between three and four and Ryan Book asked, how far do you think this concept could go? I think explaining how it works would be great. How far do you think this
concept could go? Do you think a course could have a few similar situations like could you do this multiple times of course? Or could an entire course be where you that your next tee is determined by the green you choose.
Well for starters, you know, I came up with that idea very late in the process of building the golf course. We were down to building the shape in the last three or four holes, and we had all the all the other part of three is were kind of medium length, and I was trying to decide whether to make number three really short or really long, and I asked Rod Trump his opinion, and he said, I kind of like short, and I said, well, so do I. But the hard thing about doing a really short part three is you
want to build a really small green. And the superintendent doesn't want us to build a thirty five hundred square foot green. You know, he's going to say that's going to be hard to keep in perfect shape every day if we're doing fifteen thousand rounds down the road. So you know, Tom Fazio used to do it quite a bit on his golf courses back in like around two thousand.
Shadow Creek had one and Pelican Hill had one where they built two greens on a hole so they could build a small green for one of those two greens.
That was the whole idea, and you know, so that was the start of this, was like, okay, well we'll build the small green for the really short hole, but then we'll build a know, we'll build another green on the par three that's a much longer haul and have a decent sized green for it too, and then there'll be plenty of green space, even though both the greens are barely smalle if they were the only one and that longer green pushed against the t's for the next hole,
so you don't have to play the short t the short green for the par three and then the long tee for the par five. You could obviously walk forward and you could stand. You could stand on the back tee for the par five while people were playing the long part three and not get hit. But it does make more sense for flow to just combine them. When you play the short part three, play the long par five. When you play the long part three, play the short
part five. And because one of the things that somebody's going to ask me at some point is, well, how do they get a good course rating and a slope If you've got these two different options, we're gonna have to rate it separately from all the t's. But I think you know this kind of balances that out. If they use it the way I'm describing, you're playing two holes that add up to seven hundred and fifty yards
or whatever. That's gonna come out pretty much the same in the slope system no matter which way you rate it. I think so I'm hoping that discussion goes away because the last thing we need is like multiple sets of combo tes plus different greens.
So it'll be fascinating to see after like a year of play, what like the averages if they track it, what the average is of going short long so short part three, long part five versus long part three short part five, Like, it's gonna be fascinating. Does it change year by year? And then you know, is there are there certain types of players, like you know, if this level of I think this is it's a really interesting concept.
The idea of allowing people to choose, Like effectively, what you're doing is allowing like human decision into something which always makes things more interesting, you.
Know, right at the same time, you know, I'm a golf designer. Usually my job is to choose the best combination. That's that is the job. That's what we do. Try to figure out which of those holes is better, which of those two combinations is better. In this case, because of wanting to do the really small green, I opted
to do it this way. But you know, I've done something like this a couple times before, you know, like Pacific Dunes has the alternate greens for nine and the alternate teas for number ten, and they kind of work together. You don't really have to keep the combination the same, but I like that way of you those The loop obviously has all kinds of different combinations and permutations to it. I've seen it in other places, like Tom Watson's design for that of course it kesiki or whatever it is
it I don't know how I pronounced that. In South Carolina has a couple of versions of this were two or three holes played different from one version to the next. Do I see myself doing it a lot? No, because again, and at the end of the day, it's my job to figure out I like this way better than that way. But do I like playing around with new things, and especially when I can't decide which one I like better? Sure? Why not?
So if you did this for an entire course, you would need to have effectively two greens or two whole locations you could I guess you could do it with bigger greens and have all that side.
What I forgot to mention was that weird renegade Courus, a desert mountain they built thirty years ago, which had every hole either had two small greens, or one giant green with two flags on it that you could choose your own adventure, and that was interesting. But again, you know, my takeaway from that was like, clearly some holes were more interesting if you played the shorter tea and the harder pin, and some of those holes were too hard.
The harder pin was just too hard for ninety percent of people, and you had to play the easier pin. And you know, why didn't they just decide to do that instead of having the two options on every single hole.
I think the other thing that it would do is it reduces over like if you did it over and over again, it would reduce the importance of like the T shot in positioning, because you could hit your T shot and then kind of decide, right, yes you could, It's like, well I hit it over here, so I'm going over here, right.
Or the approach shot if there's two flags on the green.
Or yeah, exactly, you can hit a really bad you could hit such a bad approach shot that it was good, right. So I think that's where it kind of falls apart for like a lot, But I do like the idea of one time. It's like everything like in small doses, right, I think it would be hard to do for eighteen holes, is my thoughts though on just in general, it.
Would be pretty hard to do. Oh. Another example of it in Japan to you know all those old courses they built two greens on every hole for agronomy reasons. Yeah, and sometimes the combinations don't work there very well. You know, you have a lot of holes that just they look the same because it's like a two headed monster. It's really hard to come up with eighteen optional greens that look different from each other. It's easy to do it once or twice on a golf course, it's really hard
to do on multiple times. It's also much easier on par three's than it is on par fours. You know, when you get to a par four or part five with alternate greens, you know it does it looks like a two headed monster because you've got you got to have fairway going into both with a par three, you really don't.
Yeah, your your turf budget too, would go through the roof, right right, All right, let's talk a little bit about the Sand Valley golf courses. Obviously you were part of recreating the Lido, and then you have now eighteen holes of sedge valley completed grass, it's been playable. What were your big takeaways you had your Renaissance Cup out there from just watching people play Lido.
Well, I should ask what were yours? Because you played for me. The biggest takeaway was, you know, I didn't really think much about the strategy of some of those holes while we were building the golf course because that wasn't my job. You know, we were trying to recreate it exactly as it was, so we were following a model, and you know, I wasn't thinking about the playability or you know. Plus, most of the halls are template holes, which you think you know pretty well. You know, you've
seen lots of versions of them. But going out there and watching the matches in the Renaissance Cup or playing with some of the better players on the second day, you know, just informally, after I lost early in the competition, I was really amazed how many contracs there were in the fairways to like steer balls into certain spots or
or make it tougher. You know, if you drove it over here, you're in a rumpy little area, or the ball just steered away from the good line of attack to the green and you know, it finally dawned on me. McDonald spent a lot a lot of time thinking about all those little ridges in the fairways. They're not random. They look kind of random, but they're all thought out for like getting a golf shot into position. And the
one that impressed me the most. You know, Mike mccarton worked for us for years, good player and his brother played college golf at Duke, so they were they were I thought they'd be a really formidable team. But they lost in like the second round of the match.
So I went, there are a lot of good There are a lot of good players out there.
I got a lot of good players, and so I lost.
To the second round and we played well, we just got beat.
So Eric and I played nine holes with the two of them and a couple other people in the afternoon after we were eliminated. And you know, Mike's brother hits it really far, like all college players do, and he was trying to hit it over the bunkers on fifteen, but also way left to get the angle into the green.
With that right with that right pen right, yeah, those are the yeah right.
So he didn't do it. He hit it in the bunker, but as I was watching. After hitting my second shot, I went over to watch him and I noticed on the far side of all those bunkers, there's a contour in the fairway that if you can keep it close to that left bunker, you can kind of steer it way to the left instead of having to carry all
of that last bunker. And I thought, holy hell, I mean he put that in deliberately in nineteen eighteen for a guy who is going to carry it three hundred yards, or maybe it was for somebody's second shot, but whatever it was, it's like, that's that's not just the accident. That's there for a reason. And I could tell you I've built a lot of golf courses. I've never thought that much about putting little extra contures into the fairways.
And Nita did McDonald you know, every other court. There was a lot of cool stuff there and he just used it the same way we always do. But when he had nothing to start from, he spent a lot of time thinking about those details and embarrassing. You know, I'm kind of humbled by it. I was like, well, I'm not spending enough time on this project or that project.
Yeah, you know, I I think my takeaways. I had played it once before the event, and then I think I played it four times or three three or four times during the event. And the first time you play it, you're you're very disoriented. And I think this is like just an interesting topic in general about golf design and how a lot of people will only play a golf course like at a resort one time, right, and the first time you play Lido, you're kind of like what's
going on? You don't see a lot of stuff because there's significant blindness and you're you hit into these spots and you don't know where the right places and the wrong places.
You know, with it is like the old course at Saint Andrews in that you need it caddy to tell you what to aim at. Yeah, you can't really tell from the team.
And where to aim is different based off of how far you hit it. Right, if you're hitting in two twenty.
Picks up your game after a couple holes and tells you where it usuing.
Yeah, it's not like a hit it here for everyone
type situation. What I thought was really fascinating, and I talked to Peter Florey about this is I believe that the golf course everybody thinks it's very, very hard, and I do think for a player that can hit good shots, once you understand the course, it actually becomes fairly easy because you can get yourself there's enough space out there that you can get yourself into positions where you're hitting shots into greens where like all the contours help you.
And it's just this giant chess match. And I talk to another person who's a member, who's a really good player about this, and he's like, yeah, every time I play it, it becomes like a little bit easier because of like I know, I need to get over here for this pin. It's like a perfect example what you're talking about with fifteen getting the ball, Like you get
the pins on there. This is it's like a shorter, it's like a medium like Part four, and there's the right side of the greens protected by a really deep bunker. And if you hit a driver and you have like a sixty yard wedge, you have no chance from the right. You have to get over to the left. You're not going to hit it close from the right side, so you have to get it over left, and you just know and then you see when the pin's on the
left side. You're like, okay, I can just blast us up the right and then I have a little bit of help. So I think, like, what's interesting about the golf course is is how a golf course can go from like the first time you play it, you're like, wow, that's really intense, really hard, to more and more you play it, the more and more achievable and impossible it seems. Does that make.
Sense, Yeah, I'd add that. You know, there's two things about it that really help make it like that and make it a little more complicated still than you're saying. One is, you know, the surface is really firm and fast, and the bunkers are really deep. And that's why I'm fifteen. You know, on a normal American course, it doesn't matter if you're hitting over the bunker into a big green. You just hit seven iron over the bunker and it plops down on the green, it stops, and nobody would
be afraid of that at all. But the conditions on that golf course, at least for an hour and hopefully they can keep them that way, you cannot afford to
do that. The bunkers are too deep. You really don't want to miss in them or play it too close to the edge of getting over and then even though the green's big as hard as a rock and trying to get it to stay on the green, flying it over a bunker at an angle is not any guarantee unless you're a damn good player, So you kind of have to find the angles and give yourself, you know, some approach in front of the green instead of flying
it over a green side bunker. But then the other thing is it's windy and the wind comes out of different directions there, so you can figure it out for yourself on a calm day, but then when the wind's blowing twenty miles an hour, it's like, oh, all right, today, I can't do that. I got to think about going back to this instead. So I don't think it'll get boring.
You know, you'll you'll definitely figure out more, but you'll still have decisions to make because you're not going to see it under the same conditions three days in a row.
Well, I think that's what the fascinating thing about it is is when you know where you need to go and it see you know, it's very wide, but then it becomes very narrow, right like you are trying to push it into these little spots, because you know, you get such a big advantage if you can get it there. And every one of those little spots you have to take on something you don't want to take on, and you know where you can bail, and then you hit these shots and you bail and you're like, oh no,
I can't believe I'm here. Next time I play it, I really want to play it with like, pick up a set of the Hickorys from the clubhouse and play it with that. That's like kind of my next next time around there, I'm gonna play hickoryes and just see how great I mean. That's the thing, is like the idea of that golf course existing in nineteen eighteen is absolutely like. I just don't know how people got around it.
Or you could be like me and get old and just play like you're playing with hickory is with really good modern equipment.
I don't want to do that anytime soon. Matt Schoolfield had a question that I thought was press it with Lido. What are some of your personal contrasts between the work at Old Mac and the Lido in creating a cb McDonald homage like you did at old mac. Where do you see your own influence versus trying to channel McDonald? And did you try and restrain your own influence in one areas of the lido that were up to interpretation.
We very much tried to restrain our own influence at the Lido. I was just trying to build the golf course as best I could. You know, it's like a restoration, but a restoration where we had to start from scratch, so it's way more complicated. You know, you don't there's nothing that you just leave alone. Although the computer model did produce some things that it was just like, yeah, that looks exactly right, that looks like all these pictures.
We don't need to tinker with that at all. But there were there were The main thing was there were some other greens. Some of the greens were flatter looking than my impression of most of mc donald's golf courses. And so I asked Peter Floory right away, you know, how how sure are you about the contours? You know, how strongly do you feel that you got them right? And he said, honestly, that's probably the weakest part of
the model. It's very hard to tell from a bunch of photos how you know if that contra three inches high or six inches high, because you don't see it except under extreme shadows or something like that. And so he really encouraged us just to wing it. But by the same token, you have the client who prefers greens that are kind of big and with big, flatter areas
in them. So there was there was some tension there, but we you know, we tried to be just as faithful as we could do what we thought the McDonald greens would have looked like. And you know, I did assume that Peter doing it for kind of a video game version the first time. You know, the video game is set up so the greens were all really fast, so you're gonna make the greens kind of flat to
deal with that. And obviously the Lido built in nineteen eighteen was not built for greens that run at eleven or twelve or whatever a computer game version of it would run at. So that would just mean, you know, the contents were a little more amped up, probably just to have the same kind of breaks on pots that you wanted it to be. You know, for all McDonald
completely different philosophy there. You know, what we were doing was just approaching the design the way Charles Blair McDonald would, Okay, where's the best place to put a road hole? And we want to get the essential features of the road hall right, and what other little features do we have out here to make this one give this kind of
a character of its own. The other thing that school about old McDonald, you know, other than the Lido, which I never thought would come back, McDonald never built anything that was remotely like a Lynx course. All the all, nearly all the templates were from Lynx halls overseas, nearly all of which I've seen. So instead of thinking about the Seth Rayner version of the road hole or the Red Daan or whatever, you know, we thought a lot more about the real because we were really familiar with them,
and so was Charles bro McDonald's. So it really looks different, you know, the bunkering looks more linksy, even though we didn't do any like prevetted faces. But it's not, you know, the flashy bunkering that we do a lot. It's not just the the straight banks like the Lido has and like your typical McDonald course has. But if you look at early pictures the National they had a bunch of
different looking bunkers. They even had some things that had like sleeper faces originally on a couple of the holes. So we did that at Old McDonald too. Those Jim Orbina put those and those are some of the coolest bunkers out there.
Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff. I you know, I was, I've been thinking through in my head what what alpshole is? Is I prefer whether it's Liedo or
or Old McDonald. Just one little thing. We did a dream eighteen recently on sand Valley on this podcast, and H and I was just talking through alpsholes and I was like, oh, Liedo's, you know, probably one of the best ones, along with like National Golf links and and then somebody commented about about forgetting Old McDonald and I was like, uh, that's that's a great alps hal Yep. Thank you for listening to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast, and big thanks to Matt Rushes for editing
and producing this podcast. A quick reminder, if you you know we're in that holiday time period, a great gift is Club TFE. It is one hundred and twenty dollars for the entire year and really we're putting up, you know, a bunch of content in there, a new newest feature in the last three months we you know, or so we we put out every Monday a Design Notebook. It just kind of like covers you know, stuff that we've seen recently, as well as news in the world of
golf course architecture. This week I compared Old Barnwell and the Tree Farm, two new golf courses in Aiken that that I've seen, and just talk about what each's each does really well. So Design Notebook comes out every Monday. We have course profiles every week and much much more. Thank you guys, to whoever is a member. It's been really great to build that community and interact with it throughout the year, and those that are on the fence, this is a great time to do it around the holidays.
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