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 brid Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg Friday Fridagg Bride Egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Welcome back to another edition of the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. I am Andy Johnson and we have another episode with Tom Doak, another episode of the Yoke with Doak for you. So we released an episode that was all part of this conversation earlier this week, so it will be the last podcast in your feed. But in this episode we talk about Sedge Valley, Tom's new course at stan Valley, as well as Pineors number ten and a slew of
other topics. So this was a really really fun conversation. I hope everybody's having a great and safe Thanksgiving holiday. As a quick reminder, we have a sale in the fridaygg pro shop. It is a proshop dot Thefridagg dot com. If you use the promo code black Friday, you get twenty percent off everything. If you're if you happen to be a CLUBTFE member, use your clubtf E code and it's twenty five percent off everything. So really appreciate the support and through the year. It's been a great year
and can't wait to do it again next year. So thank you guys for the support. And without further ado, here's Tom dok. All right, let's talk a little bit about SEDG. You know one thing out there you have, you have a lot of drivable part fours, just in general and in your career you've built a lot of great drivable par fours. I think a lot of people would agree with that, and thunder McRobert asked the question, how do you keep them from feeling too similar to each other?
Well, first let's talk about Sedge a little. I mean, the disappointing part of doing the Renaissance Cup was that Sedge Valley was reduced to a and I hated that because for one, it's really my design instead of me building somebody else's design. And two I think it's really good and I think it turned out really well, and I hope it can get past that and people appreciate it in its own right here next year and the year after, Yeah, I've built a lot of cool short
par fours. Although drivable part fours. Most of them are overseas. If you think about the ones that come to your mind right away are at Barnboogle and St Andrew's Beach and Terry Yeedy and not so much. I guess there's a couple of Pacific dunes.
But other than that, you.
Know, my short part four is over here or a little longer, because most American clients didn't want a two hundred and eighty five yard part four. They just were afraid of that number. And you know, I said to Mike Clayton a long time ago when we were working in Australia that that I thought part of the thing was that three hundred yard number was so important in America, just like you're trying to get to seven thousand yards
on the total scorecard. It's like if he had a par four that was under three hundred yards, everybody would just.
Go, what's that?
And and in Australia they they measure everything in meters, and that that magic number would be two hundred and seventy two meters or whatever, and nobody cares about that. You know, you don't think two hundred and sixty four meters.
So it shouldn't, you know, it's it's too short, But I was glad to you know, have a chance to do that at sam Valley and build two or three holes at Sedge that really were like two eighty and three to zero two and where you can think about driving the green if the wind's not in your face. And it is hard to do a bunch of driveable par fours and make them different than each other.
I think that some.
People will say that six and A and twelve at Sedge have some similarities.
They're both a little.
Left to right, they're both kind of skinny greens, and it gets a lot harder the further the pin is in the back of the green. So I think they'll think they'll for sure or at least hopefully try to think through, you know, the whole location so they don't wind up mirroring the same whole location. You know, if they just did the front middle back, front middle back thing like some courses do, six and twelve would be on the same.
Rotation and that would suck. Yeah.
So and then there's the eighteenth, which is a drivable par four, and that one's really a close copy of the fourth at barn Google, just with a lot more room you don't. You can hit it up to the right and not have fear of losing the ball in the native vegetation. So there's kind of an extra way
to play the hole. And I was really surprised how many of my friends who have been to Barn Google commented on that hole, said it was one of their favorite holes, and did not really clock that it was a really close copy of the hole at Barnboogle.
It's a really cool hole.
Obviously, it's a I think I assume you had to do a lot of creating to make it, but that you know you have this drivable part four, you have a couple options. You can play very safe down to the left. You can push it up to the right over bunkers you have to carry some bunkers, or you can go directly at the green, which is the longest carry and it's this cool punch bowl green with kind of three distinct areas in it, a front area, a
back right area, and a back left area. That's the hardest to get to from in terms of driving the green. It obviously opens up significantly if you play it to the right, and it's very much a bowl.
If you played to the left. It's a very cool hole.
Was there a lot that went into creating that hole or was it pretty naturally there?
It was generally you know, high on the right and low on the left, but more tilted. So we exaggerated that, but we really we used the same technology there we've been using.
Alito.
Brian Zaeger got the light our data for Barnboogle. Amazingly, it's all there for anybody to grab if they want to. I shouldn't tell that to anybody. Fortunately, they're not developing golf courses in China right now, or somebody be starting on that tomorrow. But we grabbed the light our data. We related on the ground that we had. The one thing that we changed was or a barnboo goes very short, but it's usually into a strong wind, so it's pretty
hard to drive the green. And if we'd have just used it exactly the same way without that wind in your face, it would have been much easier to drive. So we just stretched it out about twenty yards and the stretches between the big bunker the big low bunker that comes up and going down into the green, so there are more shots that carry the bunker, but don't quite make it to the slope to stay up on the right side of the green, and you know, wind
up down to the left as a result. It's funny how just you know, making one little change and pulling something apart and having to fill that space changes the playability of the hole. But other than that, it's a very close copy, and you know, closer than I would like to admit. And you know, I was frankly amazed that people did not pick up on that. You know, we obviously we the mounds behind the green at Barnbougle, those are big sand dunes, and we did tone down
the shit. You know that we didn't make them as pointy as they are in the real golf hole because that would not fit in at all at Sedge Valley. You know, Sedge Valley is sandy and it has some dunes, but it doesn't have like big pointy dunes with Sedge.
You know, you mentioned kind of the setup with the short part fours, like making sure having different whole locations. Is there anything else that you're you're worried about from the general public seeing it, Like, is there a concern? And then is there one thing that you're really excited to have the the the general public see and play well.
In the beginning, I was pretty concerned that Michael Kai wouldn't want to set it up the way we wanted to set it up. I mean, a big part of the appeal to me is that there's basically going to be there would basically be two tea markers, and we would all pick which one to play, and we would all play from the same tea markers, and you know, some of the long part fours, you'd be going four and two and I'd be playing like a three shot
hole with a stroke in hand. And that's the way golf used to be instead of everybody has their own tea and they're all set up so we can all hit driver six iron on this whole. I don't like
that about modern golf at all. And by making the thing really short, I thought that would, you know, reduce the need for all those different teas positions, and we'd wind up wanting to play from the same place, and it would be more social, and it would be easier to get the greens and teas really close together, because you can't do that when there's five t over one hundred and fifty yards it's maybe in the back it's either the back tee or the regular members tee that's
close to the other green, and then the rest of them are just a terrible one.
It's like a short course.
Like short courses are amazing at this because everybody plays from generally the same spot where you keep everybody together. So I do think, like I didn't never thought about it that way, shortening the course, making a course really
short should achieve that. I think the thing that you did too is with it being the way it's set up, is you really have to think a lot of times about going for a green because like what would happen without some thoughtful design is that the long hitter would just be able to overpower a golf course from the same tease, but with some thoughtful design, Like there are holes out there, Like one that jumps to mind is the ninth hole that goes down is like I'm I
looked at that and I'm like, I don't I don't think I want anything.
To do with the driver here, you know.
So Alston, I'm laying back to where you know, the people that are hitting it to forty off the tee that we're hitting to the same spot right.
Yeah, and there's you know, there's other holes where you know, the fairway bunker on four is set up for only a long hitter who it's a good drive and just turns it over a little more left than he wants to. Yes, he's going to find the bunker and that's a really bad place to be.
I was at that bunker.
And ninety percent of us, the rest of us don't have to worry about that one.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that that makes sense, like the community aspect of it. So are they they're playing to set it up that way?
Yeah.
We went back and forth on it for quite a while, you know, so everything that the Kaiser's own right now, there's five tea markers and they do surveys of their customers like religiously, and sixty five percent of the people play from the same team marker, the Green tea marker, which is kind of the middle of the five, and literally five to seven percent of their customers play every
other one of the tee options. But they're in the resort business, and there's that thought that the customer is always right, and if the customer really likes playing the Orange teas, do we want to take that away from them, or shouldn't we just set this up the same way we do for everything else. And it took a while to get for him to.
Think that through.
He really had to see all the golf holes before he got comfortable with the idea that, yeah, we can just kind of put most people on any one of these two or three back tees you've got, and then you know, my dad will play from up there with you know, the older guys that just want to play it shorter and have some chance of getting to some of the part are fours in two and I think it's gonna work really well that way, fingers crossed.
But you know, they'll.
Be taking a lot of surveys of people as to how they like that, so I'm sure I'm gonna hear a lot about it after a full year of use.
This is uh, this topic. I'm like, I just thought of something in my head. And you know, about a year ago, I went to one of Thomas Keller, who's like the you know, one of the most famous chefs in the.
World restaurants and the French laundry.
Yeah, so I went to his restaurant Ad Hoc, which is just down the street. It's a little bit more casual, and the restaurant has no menu. You you get what they what they're making. They ask you if you have any allergies, and if you don't have any allergies or food aversions, this is what's coming out, right, if you
have allergies, they make tweaks and stuff like that. But the the thing I loved about it is like, you know this this guy, whether you could agree or disagree that he's one of the best chefs of the world, whatever it is, I'm going to his restaurant.
I thought.
I was thinking about it like the whole way home, is like, like why why should I pick what I want to eat at somebody? And if I'm going to one of the greatest chef's restaurant, why should I pick what I eat?
Right?
Like Yeah, it's like you're going to dinner at his house. Yeah, I'm getting five choices.
So like the same thing kind of I'm just thinking about this through is like with golf architecture. Architects designed these golf courses and then the setup is kind of like the menu right right, and we put all this this menu and then everybody decides where they wanted to play.
But like have you ever thought like and have you ever done this?
Have you ever had a client that said, like, can you say, could you set this golf course up for us twenty five different ways? And we will just rotate how we use the golf course setup. Like That's what I'm thinking, is like, why why aren't architects setting up a golf course and creating setup plans for a golf course.
Oh, we would drive ourselves crazy doing that. I mean we we kind of do. We think through the different tea options and yeah, it'd be cooler to play this way than that way. I've certainly thought of like alternate set up ideas for a bunch of my courses, everything from like Lost Students a lot. There's a lot, there's several holes that you there's a pretty good walk back to the tee. Most of the time I play Lost Dunes with a bag over my shoulder. I just play
the nearest tea to the last green. Sometimes it's the forward tea on like five holes, it's the all the way back tea on like eight holes. You know, it's just wherever's close and it's just the shortest walk and it's a good mix. You know, it's not the blue teas, it's not the white, it's not the red teas. It's some of all of them, but it's it's kind of a it's a decent combination that really works out well.
You know, bally Neal was the first golf course that I was involved with that decided not to put out team markers. I'll let the members just pick, and I think, I think that's cool. It's a great tradition there. But the one thing that I noticed from that is when you remember, you know the golf course really well, and you pick where you're going to tee off from, you pick far enough forward that you don't have to worry about carrying the bunker. You make it easy for yourself,
and it's like that kind of defeats the purpose. The bunker is out there, so at least some people will have to make a choice instead of just getting them all past it. So yeah, I would probably set up golf courses differently than how they're set up from day to day. But you know, the first couple of years of the Renaissance Cup, I went out and set pin positions and stuff, and then I was like, no, I just want people to I just want every experience it
the way everybody else would normally. You know, that's that's really the golf course. We don't need to set this up super special for our event and it you know, it drives me crazy to watch major championships and watch the enormous setup stuff that they do and how different they're trying to make it for the pros that week, when if you just played wing foot from all the way back and added up the scores, the best player would probably win without all that effort.
Yeah, we had an event a couple weeks ago at Old Barnwell and in the day before and we change pins after we do thirty six holes, we change pins and tease and we have like a drastically different golf course.
Like no way would be a golf course.
That you could enter a score into because it's not going to match up with any slope and rating right because the teas are all over the place. But Brian Schneider, one of your longtime associates who designed the golf course with Blake Conant, he came out the day before and set it up and it was it was so fun to talk through it and like you could see every hole. There's so many ways you could set set these holes up.
But like it was so fun because you know, one of the one of the long par fours that he built was playing really short because of the wind, and we knew the wind was gonna be the same way, so it's like.
Playing super short. So we moved the tee way up.
And then it's like, so we know everybody's gonna be forty yards away, fifty yards away. That hit a good drive, right, They're gonna hit this up. There's like a little hidden bunker that somebody might find. Brian and I are playing together. Sure enough, he hits a great drive and I'm right in the hidden bunker. But the key, the one thing we did was we put it right over a bump.
So everybody's seeing this great drive up and it's like funny because like, you know, a lot of people might be like, why is there this little bump in front of the green right? And then we put in Then Brian puts the pin right there and everybody hitting it.
Like I heard these comments, like from so many people, They're like, I hit it up to forty yards and then I was like, I have to hit this to twenty five feet left because I'm terrified, I know, if I, if I, And it's just like I think, like, that's what's missing a little bit, is like you had these long you had longer hitters playing a way up tee that they would never usually play, and then it showcases like this little architectural feature that that you know, this
is the type of stuff that gets mixed up. And it makes me think of this, this this restaurant, because like you end up eating stuff that you would never order and you're like, wow, that was incredible, right, And I just wonder if that's another way that architecture from a setup perspective could be pushed forward.
Well, we could. You know, one of the things that Alistair McKenzie did, that famous drawing of Saint Andrews. Alistair McKenzie helped them codify the championship poll locations one hundred years ago and they still pretty much go back to that guide and use them for the fall meeting of the RNA and for any big tournaments that are there.
So yeah, there is space for architects to be more involved in that, but you can't set it up that way on an everyday basis, or at least you'd have to have you know, somebody like Brian Palmer at Tera E D. He would he'd do that every day if you let him. He'd set it up completely different every day and keep it interesting. But now he's got three courses maintained instead of one, so he'd never ard doing that.
So it was back to SEJ. We had a little diversion here.
I remember you talking about and it was your first project with the Kaiser family. It was Pacific Dunes where you had a little bit of at that point point non traditional routing and you know where the scorecard you had these back to, you know, a lot of par threes. You had par thirty four on the front nine right, and and then you know, it was a moment of like, you know, you're showing the routing to Mike Kaiser and you're and then you put the put the pars.
On the card. I remember this story.
Is this a little bit of a look where architecture has gotten to that you're able to create this golf course at Sedge Valley that like makes Pacific Dunes in terms of golf course theory feel very traditional.
I mean, the landscape has certainly changed over the last twenty five years. There's so much more interest in golf course architecture. You know, when I wrote for Golf Magazine in the eighties, there are like readers don't want to read about architecture. That George Pepper used to kid me about it, and I'm like, well, you have a magazine that doesn't write any articles about art architecture, And then
you ask the people what they are reading. If they wanted to read about architecture, they wouldn't be reading your magazine. So it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy. But there were no podcasts about golf course architecture in the eighties, so you didn't have that many people who were just total geeks about it like we do today. And that does change. That winds up changing the client's perspective on what they ought to do too, or at least they're
more open to it. And again, you know, there's a little changing of the guard there too, between Mike Kaiser and his sons. You know, his sons want to do they want to do great stuff, but they want to be seen as doing something a little different than their dad did, and they know the place to do that is to have a few less rules about certain things. At the same time, they're very meticulous about other aspects
of it that they think should be a certain way. So, you know, when I wrote Getting to eighteen, several of my friends comment about the book were, oh my god, I can't believe how involved the client was in some of those things. And I didn't go through that in much detail, just enough to give people a sense of how much the client's perspective changes what I might even try to do. You know, I don't want to argue
about the fifth pole with the client. You try to get to know the client and what they like and what they don't like about golf and steer it that way a little bit. That's one of the things that keeps my work different from one course to the next, instead of just trying to do the same thing every time. But yes, there's much more scope now for it to be really complicated and really edgy. And at the same time,
you know, I'm kind of a minimalist. I think we're getting to the point that people are really overdoing that. I think some of these new courses you're about to see from some of the young guys are going to be wild, and maybe that's going to be a good thing, and maybe it's going to be too much. Depends on your taste with UH.
With Sedge, I played UH Piner's number ten recently and I'm I'm curious, Sedge. I feel like, I feel like you have holes at Sedge that are part Four's that at Piner's number ten are par threes? Is there a difference in clients, like in holes that are par fives that would be part that are a part four? Is that at Piner's at number ten, having now worked for two of the biggest resorts in America too, that you know, to the biggest golf developers in America, was there a difference?
And I think I like kind of enjoyed. I enjoyed finding out that a hole that I thought was a short part four was a long part three. I was I kind of I like cackled on the inside of Piners numbered I like, I was like, oh, I like that, And I said I Angela was out that. I was like that par five. She goes, that's par four. I was like, oh, is it is that? Did you find
with Piner's number ten that working for a client? And this was kind of something that I kind of was thinking through in my head, was was working for a client that hosts major championship golf like they do, allowed for to build a more difficult golf course from a sense of par then then working for a golf resort company that really curtails to a retail golfer wants. You know, I think there it's in their ethos of people to come out and have fun, right.
Yeah.
So at the beginning of the job, and it's difficult to compare, Pineers didn't abandon because you know, over the years, I've had a really close personal relationship with Mike Kaiser and with his sons, and I know him really well. And with Pineers on the other hand, I was really concerned at the beginning, like who is the client at Pineers? Who do I go to to ask for feedback because
it's a big company and they're not really clear. You know, Tom Ashley, the president who called me about the deal in the first place, that invited me to come look at it, you know, was pretty hesitant to be the guy to give me input. He you know, he wanted to go to other people too, and you don't. You don't want to have a committee telling you what to do.
So I was nervous about that at the start until the first couple of visits I made is we were finishing the routing and getting getting ready to start the golf course. You know, by Deadman was there. And I never really met Bob Deadmon or spent any time with him before working on this project, but he's been around
golf forever. Somewhere between taught interviewing me in the first place and getting started on the golf course, he did his homework and he went to Pacific Dunes, and he went to Terry Edie, and he went to Barnbogle and saw them so we could talk about them. And you know, the funny thing is, I mean what you're referring to that the fact that Pineer's Number ten is kind of
a longer, harder golf course. Part of that is just it's a big piece of property and getting up to those par fives on the high ground stretched it out.
So it was going to be a pretty long golf course, certainly compared to such valley, but even compared to like Pacific Dunes, and it's you know, I've always built courses a little shorter in places where it's really windy, which is a lot of my best work because you know, you do not want to play a seventy three hundred yards course in a wind you know, Sabonic is the only course I've done that you know, has got that full scale championship length and it's in a windy setting,
and it'll just kill most people if they don't play it from sixty two hundred yards. But Pinehurst is it is a little windy up there, but not like being on the coast of Oregon or or in Tasmania. So so we felt like we could make it a little longer. But the funny thing is like, now that we're done, I mean, even the client is like, shouldn't we call this a short part four? Aren't people going to think
this is too hard? Even though anytime, and it was only like three or four times, but anytime I asked Bob Dedman a question, what do you think about this? Versus that his answer always leaned towards the harder option, put in the bunker. Mike Kaiser erequently would tell you take out the bunker. So that's the at least part of the reason why, you know, part of the reason
is a different piece of ground. Part of the reason is the client's initial feedback and perspective is just different because yes, because they host championships, because that Bob Dedmond was a really good player.
It's funny because I, you know, I centered around this. We played piners ten and then we were the next couple of days, we're doing prep for the US Open next year, doing our filming and stuff, and I was I was buzzing around number two, you know, and people are playing and I'm out there filming stuff and I you know, and I'm in a cart, so naturally, like you end up talking to these people when they go by.
And this one guy he's playing and he's on like.
The sixteenth hole at number two, and I'll like, I'll never forget this.
He's I'm like, how's it going?
Because he said something to me and he's like, you know, I'm I'm getting my ass kicked.
I'm playing as bad.
As I've ever played, but I don't know if I've ever had a better day, like you know, And it's like this idea, like people go there and it's like they know they're gonna get, you know, killed, and they just love doing it. And it's funny because like it's amazing how polar opposite the experiences from like say Mammoth Dunes where people go and they play. I hear from so many people and this goes to like my college friends of like I've shot the best score of my
life and I had so much fun. And how it's like either extreme and Piner's number two offers probably the golf course, the most popular American golf course that people just get eviscerated at, right, And it's like both of them provide that unbelievable joy and they're at such extreme other opposite ends of this spectrum right.
Right, And you know, I work for peace die growing up And Pete dye'es theory was the Pinehurst theory that like, you could get beat up all day, but sooner or later you're going to hit a really good shot somewhere and it's going to be like ten times as memorable because you're doing it on a really hard, really dramatic looking golf hole, and you're just gonna be so happy about the two good shots you hit that even though you got beat up, it's a win.
What what were some of the challenges at number ten in terms of just you made reference of having to stretch things out to get to high points. Were there any other challenges with the property in general that you had to overcome.
It's not quite as sandy as everything in Pinehurst is supposed to be, but not just Number ten. That's true of a lot of the golf courses. You know, we had our construction superintendent was Kevin Robinson, who spent like ten years being the superintenent of number two during the last open, and he's you know, he's been around there his whole life, and very unsurprisingly, Pinehurst Number two is
the sandiest bit of ground there. You think of that as a flat golf course, but if you think but driving every day from like the resort and the village to number ten, you realize you're driving off the top of a hill down to everything else. And all of the other courses at Pinehurst are a little lower than number two, and they're not quite as high and dry
and sandy. And you know those little all those little pockets around the greens at number two that the water just goes sucks down and you never see it again. It doesn't work that easily on the other side. And then you know there is a certain esthetic to Pinehurst that you kind of had to incorporate into a new golf course there you're going to have like the sandy
and wire grass waste. But that's much harder to do on a hilly site because the water is going to run off the fairway into that stuff and just gouge it out and make washouts everywhere. So you know, we had to do a lot more drainage work and put a lot more like centipede sod in to keep it from.
Being a mass around.
You know, Pineer's number two does have a couple holes like four and five. The fairways are and hilly sits in on the side and they have problems like that, but they just go out and fix it after every ring. You don't want you try not to build a course where you got to do that on every hole. But we'd have been doing it a lot if we hadn't really worked on it during construction.
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I think a hole that a lot of people will talk about with Piner's number ten is the eighth hole.
Oh yeah, you think so.
It's just a general hunch, a general yeah.
So from the day we started that what to do with that little section was always like one of the more difficult decisions I had to make. So a lot of people know that Pineer's number ten. Part of it's on the site of the old the pit, the old Dan Maples course that closed ten years ago, and the pit was kind of like Tobacco Road in an earlier time,
but a much smaller, narrower version of that. It was very tight golf course, but it had just some wild contras and old you know, ailes left over from mine days that were in play on the very much in play on the golf holes. Most of that is on the east side of that property where they will eventually build Pineer's Number eleven. We only had a little corner
of it on our site. We had the first seven holes of the pit, and only the you know that was a loop back to the clubhouse, and only the They had their Part three fourth hole in this little section that was that had been quarried out the same way as the as all of the back nine, and you know, in my routing, we turned that into a part four playing backwards up over into the quarry and then the green is kind of right at the base of where the tea was for the part three.
But it was complicated by two things.
Not only are you playing into this little section that's completely different from the rest of the golf course. But there's also there's a gas line that runs through there that you have to hit over three or four times when you're playing golf and you're trying to hide it.
But that blind T shot up and over is also over the gas line, so you couldn't just like knock it down and make it really visible into that And so I had to find like, Okay, where can I make this shot feel like it works because it's going to be really awkward to go up and over into that bowl, and it you know, it wound up making sense for the T shot on a short part four.
You know, from the beginning, the clients talked about, you know, wanting this golf course to be a little different and not as hard necessarily, and have a different aesthetic and be more fun to play. You know, I think they you know, I think they envisioned if I could build Pacific dunes in the sand hills, that would be perfect, And of course they knew that you can't really do that. But you know, this one little second of the site was so different. It's like we got to go in there.
It's it's a cool feature, but it is going to stand out and some people are going to think it sticks out like a sore thumb because it's just out of character. And also the client was a little worried about the possible perception that they're doing anything that's ripping off Tobacco Road. You know, their respect Tobacco Road from what it for what it is, that's not really the vibe of the resort. And they're not going to build
a golf course just like that. But they didn't want people to think, oh, yeah, we're taking a little bit of that and putting it in here too to keep you guys happy, get all you young people happy.
They don't want to be They didn't want it to be known as like the Instagram hole, because I could already see it's going to be the whole everybody takes pictures of.
One hundred percent. So no, they were concerned about that. At the same time, they have a massive publicity department. They don't mind having an Instagram hole. They just don't want to be seen as trying to create an Instagram hole. So, you know, I could tell Tom Pashley was a little nervous about that. As we started building that hole and the main feature of it off the tee. You know, you're kind of hitting up into a big bowl. But
there's also like a pretty big dune there. I think it's about say twenty feet high or twenty five feet high relative to the fairway. That's kind of right center, almost right. You know, the perfect drive is honestly right over the top of it, which a lot of people are going to shy away from. There's more space out to the left.
I'd say it's even over more to the right.
Yeah, ideally even a little further right or just over it with a little bit of a fade. But most people are going to start at left with a fade and wind up left, and it's a lot harder hole from the left.
It's not good from the left.
But you know that we burned all the native vegetation in there to get it cleared, and you know, that thing was like a it It looked like Mount Doom for a little while. But you know, I always caught it the Matterhorn because of the shape of it, and I always thought we were going to have to knock it down, that it was just too big and too
weird compared to everything else on the golf course. And sooner or later we just take that dirt and use it to like fill in some of the pockets in the fairway, because the fairway is like the North Sea, it's really severely undulating, and we did have to fill in some things so you could mow it. But like all through the first two or three months of construction, after that thing was cleared, nobody, nobody wanted to tear it down. All the crew was like, I kind of
like it. I kind of like it. I don't think you should tear it down. But I still thought, even if I sided with the crew, that the client was going to want to tear it down until the day I came out to work one morning and Bob Demon was just walking around. He was just he'd gotten into town the day before and he was just having a little walk around to see what progress had been made. And I just happened to encounter him on the eighth te I was walking one way, and he just walked
back through the golf hole. It wasn't finished yet, we hadn't done the shaping of the green or anything, but you know, he had the sense of where the tea was and what you were going to be hitting into, and he had a big smile on his face and he was like, I think that's going to be really neat, And I was like, I never thought he was going to say that, So I guess the mountain is stained.
With that.
So it's you know, you kind of are teeing off and it's like I think it was mining, right, It's just a lot of spoils, Like it's like lots of mounds and different things.
Yeah, and how do you then take that?
And as you said, it's completely it feels completely different than the rest of the golf course. How do you I imagine this is probably like one of the rare instances where you have like a completely a tiny little section that's completely out of the character. How did you go about trying to tie that in to the rest of the course and make it feel at least somewhat related.
Well, out on the fringes of that, on the fringes of that little quarry you have the seventh tee and the sixth green are kind of close to it, So we left some features there that, you know, some sharp ridges that so you kind of feel like you're working your way into it a little bit, even though you're not like playing through it the same way at all.
And then.
On the backside where the halfway house and the ninth tea is going to be, and also where the fourteenth green comes back in. There's a little of that feature, and we actually went out there and built a couple of mounds to add to it to make it feel like it didn't just stop right there, and there was a little more of.
This stuff.
Which I probably shouldn't have given away. Hopefully most people think those those piles or this or old things just like the new piles. Except it's hard to do that because when you when you build the pilot doesn't have the same kind of groundcover on it. That's that inside the quarry has where it's been, you know, untouched for the last thirty or forty years, and just native stuff
growing on it and a bunch of pine straw. So it's it's hard to mimic that look, and that will be hard when whenever they do that other golf course, that will be hard. It will be harder there to integrate some things and blow up others and make it look like you didn't do anything. We only had to worry about it for the one hole, but other than that, I didn't really worry too much about the fact that the the fairway was just wildly undulating compared to anything
else on the golf course. It's just like, you know, most links courses have a section that's just different. You know, there's a couple holes that are just wilder, or or flatter or something else. You very rarely see a links that that is just similar from the conters are similar from one end to the other. Think about a place like rol Saint George's, you know, near the club asse, it's all a little rumpy stuff and then at the far end you've got a forty foot done of a
bunker in the face of it. So, you know, I think we'll get away with that being different. The one thing that I did do, I designed a short part four, so it's wild, but it's not too hard. You know, if that was a four hundred and fifty yard part four going through that thing, nobody would like it. But at three hundred and fifty yards, it's kind of a break and you just get to giggle at how.
Wild is Yeah, my colleague Garrett always likes to talk about how some of his favorite architecture is like humorous, right, it is a little bit of a hole that you you get to I remember getting there and I was like, okay, I you know, who kind of dropped us off at ten? You know, we're playing a golf course that you know nobody's at, and you know, it's like, there's the first t and he's like, and when you get to eight, hit it over the middle of the mound. And we
get there and I'm looking at it. I'm like okay, and I like kind of chuckle. And then you get past this big mountain that you're it's like a mountain that you're hitting over, and then you see the fairway
and I think I just burst out laughing. I was like, all right, this is insane, you know, And and I think, like I think sometimes, you know, it makes sense why golf course projects are very serious, Like they're they cost millions of dollars and you build something and it's kind of like done, and if you have to change something, it costs a lot of money, right, but there is.
Costs a lot more. Not only costs a lot more to fix something later on. But you know, I spend twenty five or thirty days of my time building a new course. And when when we had the one hole at the National in Australia that we had a safety problem.
I had just been like a.
Week flying to Australia to fix one, you know, one hole. Basically, you don't want to make those mistakes. They cost too much.
Time, so the stakes are high.
But like, there is an aspect of like playfulness or huber in golf design. Funny like stuff that makes you laugh is actually quite I think it's a great and underrated element of golf design. But it almost the cost and the seriousness of it works against humor, and I think that's one of the things that I like about I really like about that whole is it kind of makes you just chuckle.
Yeah.
And you know, I've always appreciated that because the first time I saw places like Cruden Bay and North Barrack, you know, I remember that feeling really well, like ever expected this to look like this, And yet they're fun to play And most of the holes that are really
wild are not that hard. And that's the balance is when you've got something like that, you know, just take your foot off the accelerator some and let it be fun because it's you know, if you're trying to make that fair and challenging, that's going to be pretty hard. It's not an easy hole, but it's not nearly the hardest hole out there, but it will certainly be the most talked about because it's really different.
Yeah, this goes a little bit back to Sedge Valley. I got a question from Clinton Edgar and I guess it relates to our conversation with Pinehurst too, because it's championship course. But do you think a championship caliber course can be designed? I'll last Sedge Valley to show that shorter horses, with half par holes and better uses of angles can host top level players.
I just don't think that any of the governing bodies are very interested in doing that. I think you could build a golf course. I don't think they would be interested in playing the big event there. They'd play something on it, they would appreciate that it's a good golf course, but it's not going to be a PGA Tour event. It's not going to be the US Open. They're not that,
you know. They they they got out of their comfort zone for Chambers Bay and Aaron Hills, and they had a bunch of people complained to them about it, and I don't you know, and those were not short, easy golf courses.
At all.
They just weren't twenty yards wide with nasty rough, and the players caught them on relatively good scoring conditions and whors we're too low for the US Open, which I personally don't think there is such a thing as you know, who won those two events, Jordan, Spieth and Brooks, Yeah, they play and they played great. And in hindsight, like you know, if if if that was one hundred years ago and you were looking at, oh man, they played that weird course. Who won there? Oh one of the
best players, that must be a good golf course. But that is not the reaction they got in the present day.
I've thought about this a little bit, and I think if you were truly attempting to build the greatest championship test, the golf course would look so so, so so different
than what's become. What is a status quo golf test, Like you'd want to have such a wide variety of holes, and you like yardages, like I think like what you would want is you try and go and get somebody to hit all their clubs in their bag, right, like a how do you get Brooks, Kopka or Rory or Speith to hit every club in their bag in a round, and in order to do that you'd have to have such an odd configuration of holes.
You know, a lot of my courses have imitated Alistair McKenzie's work, but also finally enough Pete Die's work in that we didn't build a lot of medium part fours and medium length par five either build them short or you know, they're kind of skewed to certain clusters of distances, you know, the three hundred and thirty yard holes or the four hundred and fifty yard holes, but not so
many in the four hundred and four tan range. That's more interesting for the average player playing a match with his buddy because one of them will make four and one of them will make five instead of both guys making four or both guys making five all day. But those clusters of distances don't work out for tour pros and the distance they hit it. Now generally speaking, you know, to really get him to hit every club in the bag,
if that's your goal. I don't necessarily think that that should be the great goal, but the only.
Way to do it.
The thing I proposed for the Olympic golf course in Rio was to just regiment it. You know every hole is twenty five or thirty yards longer than the last hole, and have no no feelings about that. Wholes too eighty and the next one's three ten and the next one.
Three, So every hole went up yardage.
Yeah, and you know, and I was gonna I was also going to set up well it was the first song ten yards twenty yards forward every day and not be hitting the same club from one day that the next.
Interesting. I kind of like this idea.
I even want to if they don't let me set up the golf in the Olympics, I'd have made the ladies play the men's yardage one day and the men play the lady's yardage one day.
See, this is what I thought.
The governing bodies would never do that.
Yes, this is the like I always think about this, and part of this tournament infrastructure, right is like I think about the US Open at Olympic Club. What they on the sixteenth hole? So Jim Furix just cruising along and on the sixteenth hole they surprised them by moving the tea box up fifty yars and he stood on the tee and he had no clue what to do. It was very clear he was not ready to hit the shot. And you think about, like one of the issues that's going on in pro golf is like nobody's
playing practice rounds anymore. And it's like, well, if you tell them exactly where the tea box is every day, and it's in one spot every single day and it's not really going to move around much, they aren't going to prepare to see the golf course. But if you say, like any t box is game, you might play this at fifty six hundred or it might play this sixty two hundred yards one day, seventy four hundred yards one day.
You know what guys are gonna do. They're just spend a lot more time on the golf course.
Maybe, But so here's why they don't do it. In addition to the fact that they're not very flexible thinking about these things. I mean, there are some legitimate reasons. One of them is they have to rope the golf course offers. They got grand stands by the tee and if he use the forward t there's no grand stand there,
so that complicates things. But at the end of the day, they just they don't really want to do that because they think I have this argument on golf Club Atlas A lot with a couple of guys who who say? Who keep saying that. You know, when you're restoring a golf course, you're trying to put it back to the way Donald Ross intended the hole to be played, as if Donald Ross thought that there was only one way
to play the hole. Donald Ross, I don't think thought of the hole as being a driver fore iron, and that's what he wanted it to always be. He knew people hit at different distances, He'd seen equipment change radically. He wanted it to be challenging and interesting for a
variety of players like I do so. But there's this perception when you're setting up a golf course for a major championship that you want to reward the guy who played the hole the right way, and they just can't get it through their brains that there there's not you know, the old course, there isn't a right way to play it. Nobody designed one into it. That' why it's interesting. Had that discussion with Brooks Kapka a lot. He said the
same thing you did. He said it'd be great. We couldn't do it at Memorial Park because we were in a public park. And there's a lot of trees around and they didn't really want to cutting down any trees. We didn't need to cut down. But one of his first things was, you know, it'd be nice to have tease at different angles, so guys just can't hit it at the same target four days in a row, and they have to think when they get on the tees.
Like he said, the reason he's better in major championships and more competitive on major championships is because you have to play the golf course different from one day to the next. The average turk course you don't. And there's a lot of players on tour that are so used to just playing the hitting the same t shot all four days that when they get to a major they're uncomfortable. Either they're uncomfortable or they just stick to what they do.
And it doesn't work nearly as well at Shinnecak Hills as it does at the random TPC that they play every.
Week, you know, throwing in another course into the bucket of somewhat unconventional for US Open that got complaints is this year's US Open course Los Angeles Country Club, you know, obviously got a lot of complaints and a lot of it was driven around sixty the sixty two's so is fascinating what you were talking about with short part fours and long par fours. That's a golf course that didn't have a lot of medium length part fours.
And that's of course, you know, George Thomas designed it to be. There's a couple of holes that was it's a par three one day and it's a par four another day. And they actually tried to use some of that in the setup for the event. But you know, when people are focused on the winning score that it's hard for them to get into that. The same way.
I was talking with Rory McElroy, who almost won a few weeks after, and he was telling me, and you know, he was like, I can't stop thinking about LACC and how good of a test it was. He's like, I can't think of many courses ever that I hit every bag, every club in my bag over the course of a week, and that golf course made me hit every shot and
every club in the bag. And it's and it clicked with me when you said short part four like, not a lot of medium length part fours, because that's what to me ends up at the highest level is the four hundred and you know for the highest level it's three eighty to four fifty has been reduced to just driver wedge, right well.
And yeah, but also, I mean what I used to consider a really long part four is still.
Driver wedge for those it's insane.
I mean you look at the scorecard for the Masters, every part four except for one of them, is four hundred and fifty yards are more.
Yeah, it's it's crazy.
Well like seven that used to be like three sixty and irons off the tea. Now they're playing at four fifty.
And they're still hitting wedge into the green.
If they're not behind a tree.
Yeah, yeah, well.
All right, uh let's uh, let's get a couple questions and wrap this up. We have so you have so many projects, there's so many things we should talk about. So maybe we'll get more time on the books that I'm guessing your travels going down a little bit.
No, that you're guessing wrong. I have four projects under construction right now, not the ones we've been talking about. I know, I'm still busy for another nine months to a year solid.
Maybe maybe we'll get time on one of your holiday breaks. You got to have a couple of holiday breaks, so it won't be eight months or whatever between these. Peter Fleury, what do you think has been the most innovative design that you've seen in the last ten years that you weren't associated with?
You know, I used to do a really good job of keeping up with what other guys were building, and at least if, you know, if something was new and the feedback was that it was interesting, I would get out to see it pretty fast. In the last three or four years, I haven't had any time to do that. I mean, I was adding up my own golf for the year the other day for my Christmas letter, and like, I played four of my own golf courses for the
first time this year, but I barely played. I only played like fifteen golf courses and most of them were mine. So really hard for me to answer that question right now, you know, the because I just haven't seen a lot of stuff. The stuff that I've seen. I was really impressed by Ohoopie, which was a little weird to me because I wasn't the things that I heard about it.
You know, I kind of had.
Mixed feeling about but I was really impressed that, you know, Gil apparently had a client there who's a really good player and said to him, do put at least one really hard to get to pin placement on every one of these greens. That is not the feedback that Rick Keine or Mike Kaiser gives you. So they they made a golf course with some really hard to get at pins and that's really different compared to what everybody else is doing right now.
All right, another quick one and maybe quick one, Bob Crosby wrote Wright, sin, how would you respond to critic who says that too many of the holes you design lead to punishments that are not proportional to the degree to which a shot is missed. As you know, proportionality is a goal for many architects as well as a goal for many for many course setups for tournaments.
Yeah, and I just don't believe that at all. So I don't really care about that criticism. It's just like we have to agree to disagree on that as a fundamental you know, I think I think you just look at the end of the day, you know, everybody gets a bad bounce or two along the way. When you
get a bad bounce. The part that really bothers me when good players talk about this, they do not talk about when you get a bad bounce, it's because you hit it too close to somewhere where something could go wrong. They don't treat the bad bounce the same way they treat a bunker or a water hazard.
They don't.
They don't take any personal responsibility for it. It's all the architects fault. And I heard Pee I talk about that a long time ago when when we were working on that TPC course in Connecticut, the eighteenth Hall, which is still pretty much the eighteenth Hole the way it
was designed originally. You know, they needed a cart path for member play, and the only place to put the you're either going to put the card path way up at the bowl of the stadium and make everybody walk way down in there and way back to their golf cart, or it had to come down where it was in play off the tee for the tour players. And you know, and Pete and Dean Beeman were talking about it, wrestling
with it back and forth. You know, if we put it down here, that's what the members need, but somebody's going to hit that cart path and complain. And Pete was like, Okay, I'll take the heat for that, because if I was a tour player and I was playing for a lot of money and hitting that cart path would cost me money.
I would avoid it.
Yeah, but they won't.
They'll just blame me.
That's the other thing I'll add about good players is they never remember the good bounces and the good breaks, and that they usually level out right.
And that's why I said, you know, I just want to look I just want to look back at it after one day or after four days. You know, the did the golf course ultimately reward the guys who played the best. You know, everybody's going to get a bad break somewhere along the way. And as we used to say, that's golf is like that, because life is like that.
You have to be able to deal with that when it happens to you on the golf course and to just take all that out because somebody could get a bad break on the last hole and it'll cost them the tournament. It's like, that's part of the game.
All right.
This is a bit of a long question, but I think it's a good question, So stick with me here.
Okay.
After hearing feedback early feedback from Leedo, it sounds like there's a lot of blind elements out there. I feel like blind elements are beloved by the online golf community and are very trendy right now, you know. It goes on to say that I'm a big fan of them. I do love blindness. My question isn't whether Tom likes to incorporate blind elements, but how he can rationalize that. One of the greatest architects, Alistair Mackenzie, seems to be
the only major architect that doesn't like them. Mackenzie says things like quote approach shots should never be blind. Blind holes on an inland course where there are no surrounding sand holes to locate a green should never be permitted, and he especially hates shots when the flag is visible but the surface of the green cannot be seen from what I gather. A hazard has two purposes for Mackenzie, First to present a physical challenge if you hit a
ball into it. Second, to present a mental challenge by appearing terrifying and formidable. Maybe the most interesting and challenging feature of a hazard is their ability for the course indecision, fear, and also excitement as you play over them, which isn't
possible if they are blind. To Alistair at least. He even goes as far to say that the fourteenth at the Old Course is very nearly the ideal hole, but it is not because of the beardies, the crescent, the kitchen and the hell bunkers are not visible and not in very impressive looking. I know this is sort of rambly and not really a question, but I'm curious what Tom and others whoever else has to say about blindness, specifically in regards to Alisair.
Mackenzie Wow, I mean Charles Blair.
McDonald was not a huge fan of blind holes in his writings. In his book you Know, he talked about how all whole liked the you know, all whole liked the Alps was great to have maybe once around, but he didn't think that you should have that kind of blindness consistently on the golf course, and that that some of those links courses were inferior because there were too
many blind shots. So it wasn't just McKenzie, but and the the very ironic part of that is that McDonald's work in the States is one of the few places you see blind shots in the States like presented to be that way deliberately, and you know, it's just it racks my brain that when we built Old McDonald, I built the Sahara hole with the ghost tree to hit over on the third hole, and the and the alpshole for the sixteenth hole, and if those were my ideas,
Mike Kaiser never would have bought it. But when we were doing it and said that's what McDonald, that's the kind of thing that McDonald did, he was like, it's great. So people's perceptions changed dramatically depending on who's saying it and what they're trying to do. But I think in general, the modern you know, the modern perception of what golf course architecture is supposed to be is McKenzie's view that there shouldn't be very many blind hazards or blind shots.
That's certainly like through the sixties and seventies and eighties when I was growing up, like nobody wanted to touch a blind shot with one hundred foot pole and they would make up excuses though it's dangerous. It was just like, no, I don't want to get criticized for having done that. And now you know, there's there's so much more discussion of architecture, and you know, people just honestly recognize that some of the coolest holes in the UK are blind.
So it's like a cool trendy thing and it's back in vogue and guys are trying to incorporate it in their golf courses more whereas you know, Alistair McKenzie and the architects of his day, they were sick of it because that's all they saw all the time on the old links courses.
Yeah, I have a hard time thinking of a golf course that that is a great golf course that doesn't have a fair amount of obscured views at the bare minimum, like where it's like it might be half blind or fully blind views.
Like is there a great golf course where you could see everything.
The first The first one I was going to say was Pebble Beach. But you can't tell where the hell you're going on.
E yeah, or you don't know where you're going on really the second shot on six you're like, where am I going?
You know, so you know, generitely you only see you know, visibility is easier on flatter golf courses if you don't build big features that get in the way of it. But you know, in general, I think I'm barely aligned with McKenzie's view, but I'm also you know, I'm not always trying to build the ideal golf course. Honestly, neither was McKenzie. And sometimes times a blind feature for the sake of variety or because you know, that's what it takes to keep this tee close to the last green
and get to where you need to go. You know, I mean, think of Crystal Downs. The fifth pole of Crystal Downs, Yeah, has got real elements of blindness to it, even though that's definitely Alistair McKenzie's design.
It.
If there's one hole on that golf course that I would say that's his, it's either five or seven, and both of them have blind elements to them. It's just the nature of that terrain that you're gonna get it, and you'd better figure out a fun way to use it.
It's maybe he was just trying to dissuade other people from using blindness so he could just be the only Well.
He did say, you know, he did say in the spirit of Saint Andrew's you know, his first book, Golf Architecture, was written in nineteen twenty, and you know that was about analogous to the Anatomy of a golf course Alistair McKenzie hadn't designed a lot of golf courses on his own before nineteen twenty, so he laid down these thirteen ideal principles, and then when he was writing his book at the end of his career that he'd never found the publisher for and it was lost for a long time,
he took his thirteen points and the first thing he said was, sometimes I wish I'd never written this, because, like, you know, the first thing was ideally the course, you'd have two loops of nine holes, and like the client at Cyprus Point is going to complain to you that it doesn't come back to the clubhouse at nine, and you're like, it's pretty good. I think it's better this way.
So anytime you write down a bunch of very strong rules and people interpret them as absolutes, you just opening yourself up to needing to revise that later for a certain circumstance. And that's why I don't really write down things in terms of absolutes very much.
It's it's like what people always say, like oftentimes the best architecture is unconventional.
Yes, And being unconventional means you kind of have to keep changing things around a little bit too. Otherwise what you do just gets conventional.
All right, Tom, thank you for this time.
We will get more time on the calendar soon because I like I got to a quarter of what I have written down here. So and you got a lot of stuff to talk about because you've got a bunch of projects that we haven't talked about that are are being built right now.
So thank you.
All right, good to talk to you, Andy Takeout.
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