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 Frida Egg, fridagg bride egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off of the hump. Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. I am your host, Andy Johnson, and I am excited for the second part of our latest talk with Tom Doak. So this will be another episode in the Yoke with Doak series. Uh, this one is really heavy on listener Q and A. So we took a bunch of questions in Club TFE and fired through them. So Tom Big thanks to Tom for chatting with us here at high point.
This is the second part of our conversation. It was a day later and for him to make a little bit time for this episode. Let's take a quick second to talk about the USGA. This week, we can't get enough of watching the one hundred and twenty fourth US Amateur and it's a good reminder of the USGA's impact on golf extends far beyond just the US Open. Every year, the organization supports fifteen championships, providing a stage for thousands of golfers to compete at the highest level. But it's
not just competitive golfers that benefit. The USGA supports programs and initiatives that affect every aspect of the game, including junior golf, environmental sustainability, and preserving the history of the game. When you become a USGA member, you play an important role in supporting the game that you love. You also receive great benefits like the US Open or the US Women's Open, members hat, a personalized member bag tag, a
subscription to the USGA's Golf Journal, and much more. Give back to golf and get back great benefits by visiting USGA dot org slash Frida Egg and becoming a USGA member today. That's USGA dot org slash Frida Egg. All right, let's get to the yoke with dope. All right, let's start this, uh listener, Q and A. Here this is from William J. What GCA book do you find yourself returning to again and again over your career?
Oh heck, you know, honestly, I don't that much. But you know, I mean, I used to joke with people that I had the world Alice of golf, like memorized by the time I was fourteen or fifteen, and that
was almost literally true. I mean, you know, if I go back and look at the books now, probably the one I look at the most is mcken's his book and and what I'm you know, but I remember a passage and I'm trying to find it, and it's not very well organized, and sometimes I have a lot it takes me a long time to find the little snippet that I'm actually looking for. But so that was his original golf architecture book. But The Spirit of Saint Andrews, the later book, has the entire text of the original
book in it. It was basically just written in the note in the margins of the original book. So so that's probably the one I look at the most. I do like to go back and read Simpson's book every once in a while. Partly the diagrams are cool. Partly, you know, he's probably the father of minimalism.
If anybody was. But he was such a good writer.
It's just there's there's some things in there that are just funny, and then there are some things that are just very simple. But he's like you know, he basically tells you you're an idiot if you are doing it differently.
I played my first Simpson golf course a couple months ago. I played Baltray, County low yep. I was so good. I love that golf course. I feel like nobody talks about it, talks about that course enough in terms of Irish golf.
It's true, it's you know, it's not. I mean, the Irish courses are. It's such tough competition. Those those top five golf courses are all so dramatic and so much movement that Baltray that's pretty flat can't compete with that. If it was in Scotland, people would be.
Like, Wow, that's a really good golf course.
We're at high Point. Here's a question about high points, So this is this is a good one just because we're here and you just you're fresh off playing eighteen holes of the preview play and it's from Andrew c Are you building the new holes at high Point as if you were late twenties Tom or rather with your current style and principles at the forefront. Is this complicated by the fact that you or restoring your own holes and building new holes at the same time, I.
Might lose my place in a multi part question, so you may have to remind me about this later on. I thought about that some. You know, it helped that the routing for the nine new holes that haven't opened yet was a routing I did for a third nine in nineteen eighty eight, so that was the old time
doing that routing. And when when we started talking about doing this, and we weren't going to tear up the hops farm, so we were going to have to go over there for the rest of the golf course, you know, I thought, oh, maybe that routing wasn't that great, and I'll try to do another version of it. And I tried a couple different things, but I didn't like them as much, and I said, Okay, I'm going to keep the routing that I did when I was young, and that'll kind of keep me on the right track, you
know that. Really the one thing, the only thing that's different is I've got a lot more talent. It helped to help me build it this time than I had the last time. I say it a lot, I really mean it. My ideas are not that much different than they were when I was twenty five thirty years old. The execution is a lot better, and I have a lot more talented people helping. I have Brian Slonik to
build bunkers here the first time. I had never even tried to build a bunker that had sand going up the face, So we tried a bunch of different things in it. The original golf course, it was kind of cool because it was eclectic and different, but the bunkers weren't really sophisticated. They weren't really good. They're better now.
That's good. So in a recent Golf Club Atlas post, you mentioned Pacific Dunes was a response to Bandon Dunes. What specifically were you responding to on Bandon and how did this play out in the design of Pacific Dunes, And that's from jaredam So.
I mean, I just thought at the beginning, well, you know, you don't want the two golf courses to be the same. Let's just see how many ways we can make it different and still be good. And the first and the first two most obvious ones were they've made banded dudes like seventy two hundred yards from the back teeth, and I was like, it's a really windy place. I don't
think it needs to be that long. And the routings that I was doing were coming up kind of short, sixty six sixty seven hundred yards, and I just said to Mike, look, you don't need you know, nobody really wants to play seventy two hundred yards in the wind. And on top of that, you've already got a golf course that is that. I don't think we need to do that again. You know, unless you're gonna have the
US Open here, there's absolutely no reason. Even if you have the US Amateur, you're gonna play it on banded dunes, which they wound up doing. You don't need that twice. This is a resort course. It's for people like you and me.
It was.
Not the easiest sell because you had Mike Davis whispering in his other ear at the same time, but I really stuck to that, and I was like, if you find out in fifteen years you need back, tease, I'll come back. But I really don't think you need them. And the perspective has changed so much. When when that golf course opened, people speculated about whether it was too easy, and now they all think it's the hardest golf course at the resort. It's funny how times change and how
people's perception changes on what heart is really about. So on top of that, the other thing, you know, Mike David wanted to build real sod wall pot bunkers and Mike Kaiser would not let him, so he did, but he did small bunkers with half steep faces.
And those have changed completely. I saw some old photos abandoned. I was shocked at how different the bunkers.
Are, and I haven't I have not been out on Banded Dunes in probably fifteen years. I've only played Pacific a couple of times in the last ten years, so I don't even know exactly what they look like now. But the original bunkers were kind of like Ballybunion. Ballybunion doesn't have many bunkers. They're small. We're kind of like being inside a little cone. It's not easy to get out,
but it's not you know, they're not really severe. Mike just was abbed adamant that people hated leaving it in a bunker, and he didn't want guests to have that experience, so he wanted it where you could get out anyway instead of hitting the sidewall. You know, Pacific Dunes had some land that had just natural blowouts.
In the dunes, like the eighteenth hole. There were just big.
Sand craters and several places around the golf course. So when we started building it, we actually, when we started building the golf course, Mike wasn't sure he wanted to go ahead with all eighteen holes. We talked about building four or five holes as like a test case and building bunkers like that to see how they would hold up. And then the first three holes we built were ten, eleven, and five, the three part threes that are right together there. We had those done in like two weeks, and Mike
was like, how many more holes could you build? And the superintendent at the time, Troy Russell, said, we could tap into the irrigation from Bandon Dunes and like grow in like probably eight or nine holes while we're building the irrigation pond for this, and we were just off and running. But I got it. I digressed a little bit, you know. The bunker style. We tried to make as different as possible, these blowout bunkers, hoping that they would
hold up in the wind that was out there. We even like put irrigation heads just to water the sand in the bunker to try to keep it straight. It's still a big problem. The biggest maintenance item there is at Bandon next at Pacific, next to Mo in the golf course, he is putting sand back in the bunkers. It's a tremendous amount of work, but everybody loves them and it's not like, you know, the net profit on that has been positive. And the other one was kind
of keeping the greens half small. The greens on Bandon Dunes were really big. You know, Mike really, I think wanted people to be able to land the ball on the green and keep it on the green. And the way to do that was build a green forty forty five pieces deep. And they got a lot of that on that golf course. And I thought, I knew Mike wouldn't want me to have a lot of contre in the green, So I thought, if I keep the greens half small, then I can have contour around the edge.
And you know, you're putting from off the edge of the green a lot anyway. But you know, putting up and over a contra on the edge did not bother Mike the same way it did if you were putting up over a contre inside the green.
What you you mentioned that the perception of what's hard changed. You know, everybody thought it was too might be too easy. Now people think it's too hard. What's changed do you think in the perception of what's hard?
Partly people have stopped stopped playing from too far back. I mean those seventy two you know, the problem was so band in Dunes when it opened had six sets of tees. They pretty quickly went to four sets of tea markers, and none of them were ever on those back teas anymore. So nobody's playing the golf course. It's seventy two hundred yards, you know the most if you were playing the back team markers, you're probably playing sixty eight sixty nine hundred yards. But even that people shy away.
If there's four sets of teas and not three, people shy away from that and they come to the second markers and those were more like sixty four hundred yards, So you know, people have stopped letting their buddy drag them. Too far back is a big difference. And you know, it's more fun to play golf when you've got a seven iron in your hands instead of a Forewood to hit approach shots on par fours.
Yeah, I selfishly would love to see a USM match play held at Pacific Dunes. I know they probably won't ever do it because they love that finishing scene with the lodge and everything behind it. But to me, there's so many great match play holes out there in terms of like I mean, I would I would love to just you know, six, you just go down the list six, sixteen with the way these kids hit the ball, like sixteen to me would be fascinating to.
S exactly who. I absolutely believe, I don't care what the score is. Pacific Dunes at match play is a great golf course for good players. And they did talk Michael Kaiser called me two years before the US Amateur.
They were talking about using a composite course that I can't even remember all of it, but I do remember like they were going to wind up with the thirteenth hole at Pacific Dunes is the eighteenth hole, wow, and finish away from the clubhouse to have that background because they'd had the Curtis Cup there and all the TV guys were like, this is freaking awesome, you know, this is so beautiful out here, and it's not even the end of the golf course. It barely made TV.
Well, they had the road that goes right back there behind that green, right, so they seriously considered that, and I kind of torpedoed it. I was like, that's like saying, neither one of the golf courses is good enough to host the US Amateur, And they're both good enough to host the US Amateur. But I said at the beginning, you know, banded Dudes is seventy two hundred yards long, that's where you'll host the US Amateur. I don't have any problem with that. Yeah, yeah, it'd be cool to
change it up. Like one of the things about you know, the great thing about Bandon is that they like the debate. Everybody loves the debate of what's what's your favorite course? What would be neat with all the Usam's, all the USGA events that they're hosting rotated around, you know, have have it at all the courses since that, and they kind of do.
You know, it's a it's a bit of a negotiation with the USGA over which course is best for which event. But there they are reasonably open minded and and and everybody abandoned is kind of like, well out of the box. Yeah, we don't have to do that. We could use old McDonald for this for this event instead. You know, there's a lot you can do with set up there. Yeah, Pacific Dunes is a little short for toure pros.
I don't I don't know. I want to be so I called the college event there right before COVID hit. It was like the last thing I did before COVID was I was calling this COVID uh college event and it was like all big, big schools from the West coast. And I think the winner was after three days, no win. Do you know what the winning score? Hey, have any clue what the winning score was? I want to say it was like between six to ten under and it was it was.
I think that's I mean, if the wind blows, it's a hard golf course, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how good the players are. They will have to hit golf shots.
That's it. Yeah, I don't know. I think I always have thought of all the courses there, that's the one where I have to hit the most high quality golf shots, especially like you get on like the eleventh te box and it's like you don't get a break till maybe the fifteenth t or fourteenth fifteenth t really is like when you feel like you can take your foot off the gas. All right, on to the next question here,
all right, I thought this was interesting. Mark d asked if Tom could redo one routing he designed, which one would it be and why?
I don't have any answer for that at all. I really don't.
Oh I do, And it's people don't know the golf course, so the quail. No, it's Riverfront Virginia. I did this course in in Suffolk, Virginia. Like it's my sixth or seventh golf course that I did, and it's it's part of a housing development. It's a really affordable public golf course. You could play it for about thirty bucks. There's still maintaining it. There's about three or four holes where the houses are way too close, but the rest of it's pretty good. You know when we did it, it's it's
stretched out over. I mean it's a it's a huge development, a huge piece of property with with a bunch of inlet tidle marshes come in in off the off the big river there, and there's some really dramatic holes along the edge of the marshes. And the developer was a guy that i'd met when when I was in college traveling around seeing things, and you know, he was a really good golfer. So he let me put a lot more holes on the land than a lot of developers
would have. But the land was kind of three peninsulas, and I tried to stretch the course out over all three peninsulas, and that meant you wound up with houses like right next to some of the holes. You know, in hindsight, I wish I just hadn't stretched it out so far and kept like nine of the halls where it was just a core golf course, and then gone out and gone off along the marshes. More so then instead of exposing it to the real estate question.
Because then the houses would have all gone on that peninsula, right and they and you wouldn't.
Have had well, there still would have been some houses around the others, but not as much as there is now.
Interesting. That's that's a good one. That's a really good one. It's like because everybody always tried it. It was you know, the most dramatic probably property, and you wanted to get there. But when you look back on it. It's like that's a good an her all right. I think you heard probably just the answer that Tom had about the architecture book that he keeps coming back to. That's the McKenzie Golf Architecture Book. We've got great news for you. Our friend,
friend of the program. He's been on a couple of times, Josh Pettitt. He's the founder of the McKenzie Institute. He has been putting together some great books on Alistair McKenzie. A couple of years ago he produced The McKenzie Reader, which was a compilation of a bunch of writing that Alison McKenzie had you hadn't seen, you know a lot of people hadn't seen that he had found. It's a great, beautiful book. Now he's reproduced Alister McKenzie Golf Architecture Book.
Super unique book. The you know, most reprints are are you can get cheap reprint, but they you know, they don't have like the level of detail that you'd want from like kind of a collector book. I sense this is a collector's book. He retyped, He basically reset the typeface, retyped the entire book. It's on really high quality paper, really well bound together book. It is a book that when you are reading it, you're like, this is a
nice book. The illustrations are are awesome. So you can get one of the thousand copies that Josh is producing of this book, this reprint. You go to Mackenzie dot Golf. That's Mackenzie dot Golf, and if you use the promo code fried Egg you'll get ten percent off. So these these are going to be really beautiful books. And as Tom said in this episode, this is the one he keeps coming back to over the years. This is a
iconic golf architecture book. So Mackenzie dot Golf use the promo code Frida Egg for ten percent off this beautiful book that Josh is putting together. All right, let's get back to Tom. Here's one from Gray. He asked, what are the major differences between working with an experienced golf developer versus the first time developer.
I've just gone through this in the last couple of years. You know, on the one hand that I've been working with Michael Kaiser and with Pinehurst and people that have been around the golf business their whole lives basically, and no concern about budgets at all. They don't even ask me any questions at all for two reasons. One they've got a pretty good idea, you know, it's going to
be in this range. And two they know me, and it's like he's not going to like go go off on a tangent and decide to spend another five million dollars. He's not that kind of guy. So we're not worried about the budget for the golf course. But then with a new with a new client, they worry about it. And it was very difficult to deal with because, you know, I'd had so many experienced clients the last few years, and the price has changed so much. It's like I
didn't even know what the price of eggs was. So Rod Trump here another of my clients. You know, they were really concerned about the bottom line number, and I gave them a bit too low of an estimate right off the bat, because because the you know, the price of building a golf course is almost doubled in the last five years, just trying to do the same thing, not even putting in more bells and whistles.
That's it's crazy, like irrigation costs everything is, it's mostly irrigation.
You know, irrigation was almost half the budget of high Point the first time around, and it was again this time around. But those numbers are like three and a half times what it was or four times what it was originally. And you know, over thirty five years.
This is from Matt. I under he's a frequenter of this golf course. I understand that Riverdale Dunes was one of your first projects that you got to implement your own design ideas in the field. What exactly did you implement and it might be cool to hear about that experience a little bit.
So you know, when I the first job I worked on for the Dies was Long Cove, Club Hill and Head. And you know, I was like a junior in college. I'd read a lot of books, thought I knew a lot about architecture. It only took me maybe two days of working on a construction site to figure out, Okay,
mister Dye does not need any help designing anything. He needs help getting this built and like making sure that all the little details are right, but like where to put stuff or what about putting a back to you over there? It's like he's got that. So you know, so most of the time I worked for the dice. That was really what we did. You know, we didn't come up with new design ideas for him to do.
The most that you could really contribute to the design was to take a bunker face or a feature and make it look really good and maybe better than he was thinking. Then, you know, I wound up in Denver working for his son, Perry, and you know, Perry was new to design, and he obviously didn't have anywhere near as much experience as his dad, and I was the only one out there who had really spent time with
his dad on a couple of construction sites. You know, between working at Long Cove and helping do the planning for PGA West, I'd gotten to really pick Pete's brain a little bit, so you know, Perry really valued me from that perspective. And he was doing two golf courses at the same time, Riverdale Dunes and a private club down near Cherry Hills called Glenmore. And Glenmore was a big deal. It was a housing development, there was a
big budget. Riverdale Dunes was just this public golf course for the county up northeast of the city, even further northeast than where the airport is, and Perry was just like, you know, he's spending all his time on the other one and just turning us loose to do whatever up the road. So you know, he put me out there, and it's like the irrigation guys are starting on the first hole. You know, this is it's what we've got roughed in is too basic of a golf course. Just
go to town, jazz it up. You just got to stay ahead of the irrigation crew. So the first two or three holes I didn't.
Do very much.
You know, I'm kind of I'm learning to run a bulldozer, and I'm working with one other guy, Jim Orbino, was the only one who had any experience at all. He had shaped one other golf course before that, so I'm telling him what to do. And then at some point Jim had to go back to his real job and I had to get on the bulldozer and do the last few greens. But it started like just just shape a green, reshape a green, and make it more interesting.
And then it was like, okay, well, let's move the tea on this hole over to play diagonally over this feature instead of just parallel with it. And then it went from that to like, I'm moving greens and putting a green in the hollow where the bunker was supposed to be, and turning the what was supposed to be the green into a big mound and showing Jim a picture of the dell hole of the hinch and saying
something like that there. And you know, it's a wildly interesting golf course because we were staying ahead of the irrigation crew and we could kind of do what we wanted.
He asked specifically about the fifth and seventh greens. He said they really stand out to him, but he's and he was curious.
Yeah, so those like I said, you know, I started on two, three, four, and and I wasn't you know, I wasn't doing very exaggerated stuff at all. They were interesting greens, but they were they were gentle. And the fifth green I did a version of it, and Perry came out and said, oh, that's boring. Why didn't you do something more dramatic. And I was like, all right, I'll show you what dramatic is. Been a lot of times since I played that golf course, but that's a
pretty wild green for my standards. And so those number seven is like seven is like along the water, and then there's like it comes up onto a plateau and then there's a back hole location back down behind that with the water behind those two greens would be pretty wild.
That's great, all right, here's a sedge question. Rich h said, do you think other architects should follow the path he took with Sedge Valley?
It's really a.
Question of whether other clients will let them follow the athlete took at such valley. I mean, I think for sure there is I think that a sixty two hundred yard golf course that's well done and the details are well done could be hugely popular. And the need to build something longer to say that it's longer has mostly gone away. Now people don't think about that the same
way that they used to. But you know, that's still not the conventional wisdom of the golf business, and most developers are afraid to let somebody go there.
Yeah, I think that's a good answer to that question, because I think there are a lot of times people that want you know, I think like it's so rare that architects get to build exactly what they want, right, It's so often like you know, there there's parameters around it, and there's certain non negotiables, and you know, I think think like the other hard thing is like I gave you three hundred acres or four hundred acres, and.
Well, yeah, if you got, yeah, if you got if if they're giving you four hundred acres, they probably don't want a sixty two hundred yard golf course. But you know, I think a lot of a lot of guys on the art on the architect's side, I think a lot of guys they don't get to know the client well enough to see what makes them tick, and they don't try, you know, they don't kind of push the envelope to
try to get them thinking the same way. You know, they just lay out the sixty eight hundred yard golf course, and once you've done that, you're not backing away from that.
And building the sixty two hundred yard golf course.
You know, to if that's what you wanted to do, you would have to start slow and not have a plan and you know, and work on trying to figure out if this is a client that would do something like that, and you know, try to talk to him about it before you did a routing for it.
You know, it's like.
The I mean, the best example I could think of in my own career is the loot, you know, trying to sell any client on the idea of doing a reversible golf course. I figured, you know, I'd wanted to do it for twenty years. The only client that I ever even broached the idea to was Jerry Rawls, to who's the who donated all the money to do the golf course at Texas Tech because he was he was an engineer. He was like, it was like a Silicon Valley guy, and I thought maybe his brain, he'd be
the kind of guy to go for it. But you know, that was a dead, flat piece of ground and we had to do a lot of He wanted it to be pretty, and it's hard to make it pretty if you're worried about making it work in both directions. It's kind of like the prettier you make it one direction, the un pretty it is in the other direction. So so didn't try it again, you know. And when I went over Lou Thompson, Lou didn't know much about the
golf business, and that was an advantage. But when I asked him what he wanted, he said, I want something that's going to make people stay here and play again the next day, because that's why this place loses money. Right now, Nobody stays, you know, nobody even has a beer before they go to Gaylord. And I thought, okay, and then he said, and I want it to wow people, and and I thought it was a general piece of land.
You know, the land isn't going to wow people. The only way, the only way it can wow people is if the concept is really different. I'm like, he might actually go for this. And you know, I didn't tell him right away. I spent like two months trying to figure out if I could make it work. And then I showed him the one way and he's like, that doesn't really wow me. And then I like showed him that it all was also playable for backwards and he just sat there kind of dumbfouted for about thirty seconds
and he went, Okay, now I'm wowed. But again, that's what you know, if you want to try to get the client to do something different, you got to pick the right client for the thing that you want to do, and you've got to get them invested in that's a good idea. And here's why it's a good idea and if they just you know, if it's your typical client. You know, the unfortunate part of the golf businesses. There used to be a lot of golf courses built where the client did not care about golf. It was a
housing deal. That's all the client really cared about. Any old golf course was fine. So just build me a conventional golf course. Don't push the boundaries, don't spend money, don't spend more money trying to make it great.
That's not what we need.
You know, we're in this to sell the houses. Don't make it controversial. There's not as many projects like that anymore, but there's still a lot of clients that.
Think that way.
And you know, if you're if you're an architect and you want to do something different, you got to find the right clients to let you do that.
Have you you know, I think like one of the most interesting aspects of golf architecture is like you give somebody the same piece, Like give ten architects the same piece of land, you get ten different.
Ideas, amazingly different rout yes, yes, amazingly different.
Have you ever gone to like a meeting about a routing with a couple options. Does that ever happen? Or you always do? You always get set down, have you do? You always drill down to this is what I want to do here.
I always try to drill down to what I want to do and get feedback and iterate off what I've done. All right, let's work on these three holes over here. They're not quite as good. But no, if you you know, if you just go in like you're an open book and I could do this or I could do that, you're letting them make the decisions for you. You would want to be very careful about who you're letting make those decisions.
I just would be interested in, like, in the framework of this question, right, if somebody gave it, gives you four hundred pieces of lamb, build me a golf course, like, it's almost hard. I would imagine it's hard to go in, say, especially if you're if you're you know, working, you know, you're trying to get the job. It'd be hard to be like, I want to build fifty nine hundred yard par sixty seven.
You know, yeah, I mean that was It was certainly a much easier sell for Sand Valley, which already had two or three other golf courses that were big and wide and everything else. Then it would be as like a standalone eighteen hole private club. Although you know, now that I've done it, I've got a potential client in Florida that wants me to do kind of the same thing down there on a you know, on a different piece of land, and that would just be a standalone eighteen hole private club.
He doesn't care how long it is. He just wants it to be cool.
I I don't know if I'm just this way, but like, I don't think that golf should take four hours, like exactly. I just the whole idea. I kind of think that there should be versions of golf. Recently, I don't like, I rarely play golf when I'm home. It's like, because I play so much my travel and I've been traveling so much. I like him home, I'm home and you're married, yeah, And I'm married and I've got a young kid.
Yeah.
And you know, the other day I was like, it was like just spur of the moment, a buddy of mine asked like, Hey, do you want to go play nine holes? Or I think he said eleven holes, And it was the course is right in town, like very close to my house. And I was, like, I said
to my wife, I'll be back in two hours. And like the power of that, like in terms of just like the idea of like how much more golf you can play when when the commitment is less than let's just say five or six hours, when you add up time to the course and back.
Seven or eight for me to go over to Crystal Downs and play and and show people around and and have a have something to eat and make the drive back and here. You know, that's the whole reason I wanted to do this so badly is you know, my life, my wife likes to have dinner early. I still got time to come over here, play nine holes and go back, and you know it's not bedtime yet.
It's great.
See That's why I'm most jealous of. It's like you could you could, like I think about it in terms of dad hours. You know, I could conceivably do bedtime right if I were in your situation. Come off here, play nine holes after bedtime.
I played golf with Jim Nants a couple of years ago on the in the UH for the open reopening of bell Air, and he was talking about you know, he had a small child then, and he's like, yeah, I'll like, we'll put the kid down for an app and I'll go play six holes and come back and you know, in an hour and a half, it's perfect.
That's that's honestly like the best part about about about this. It's like the late night golf you got in northern Michigan. All Right, here's a here's just an existential question. Say we made you the golfs. Are you are the golfs are? Okay, you're in charge of all of golf.
I'm ready for this.
You can do anything you want. What are you addressing? First? What was the first thing that you're doing?
Holy cow, what is the first thing?
I mean, it seems like you like this question, So there might be we might that might be if there's a thank you, I might build off of this after episode this first episode of tom Is the Golf Stars then introduced.
The first thing is everybody play matches. You know, don't be a card and pencil person. Just what you're playing with your friends. Just play a mat play match play, figure out how many strokes you need and just do that.
You know, the most interesting thing of the most interesting conversation I've had This year, we were working on a childress hall and the client brought a friend to his from Connecticut down for a couple of days and we were I sat off late at night having wine with the clients and talking about golf, like every night I was there that whole project. It was a lot of fun.
And this friend of the clients was like, we were talking about green speeds, and he was like, I don't even understand why why the green speed is so important that it's so fast, because like it's so fast now that it's too hard and nobody.
Actually puts out.
People don't finish the hole. They don't, they don't. You know, your typical round of golf, guys are giving themselves three four or five footers. They're not even trying to make those because it's so scary. It's like, why did it get to that point.
It's very stressful, Like you think about it, it's like when you see your you hit a good putt, you feel like, but you're in the wrong spot and it just keeps rolling. You're like, God, this is so stressful.
Oh and then you know, I've got the yips now, so I'm terrible on the greens. And I just want it to be over. I can chip, but I can't putt.
But you got to go to the room, Go to the broom.
I just can't do it. Man. That's another thing.
I would have made it.
I would have already made it illegal if I was the bizarre.
So I can't go there.
But you know, to that point about playing matches, if you're playing a match, if it's just match play, the conditioning of the golf the importance of the conditioning of the golf course goes away because it's the same for everybody.
You don't worry about.
You know, if you're leaving put short, if the fairways are a little rough, doesn't matter. So it's the next guy. You know, you're not like, it's not affecting your score and your whole day and your impression of yourself. That would fix a lot right there.
All right, this is a good, easy quick one. All right, Well, last question here before camera and I have to hop on a flight here. If you were setting up the lido for the matchplay portion of the mid Am, which is next year, it might be trying to just get back in shape so I could play in that. What would be one teeing location and one pin location that would be a must. So it's match play at the lido. What's one like combination of tea and hole that is a must?
Well, if I was setting up the Leado, as crazy as you'll think this sounds, I would set up one day where they were playing from exactly the historic teas that they always played from, and like you could do it with modern equipment. You're going to hit in entirely different places. I think that's just fine because that golf course has so much going on and it's so complicated that you're going to have to really figure out some
different things. Whereas if you go back where they're going to, you know, we made room for back tease, but if you go back there, then then you know more conventionally how to play the golf course the way the way that most people played it back in the day, and playing from sixty four hundred yards it would be different. And you really have to think about am I trying to get over you know? Am I trying to bomb it over everything on six and get to the other
fair way? What am I trying to do on some of.
These holes.
Whole locations? I don't know that. I mean there's a tremendous variety of whole locations on some of those greens.
I don't have a favorite at all.
All right, Tom, big, thanks for another session of these pods. I know that there's been a lot of people clamoring for a new batch, so big. Thanks for making some time and hopefully we'll be back with more soon. But enjoy the rest of your time at home here and come up and see me anytime. This is easy. I would like to I'm trying to actively spend more time up here, so you know, if maybe I'll try and
get up here again this year. All right, thanks Andy, thank you for listening to another edition of The Yoke with Doak and the Friday podcast. That was fun. Hopefully we'll get another out of these end before the end of the year. We're going to try and coordinate a time to to record more of these. Big thanks to p J. Clark for editing and producing this podcast. Uh, these are up on YouTube. I don't know if people know that, but you can check out our YouTube channel
and see these podcasts with Tom. They're they're up there and uh and yeah, so big thanks to you guys for listening. We'll be back next week with a couple new episodes of the podcasts