Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Dok. This episode is a three part podcast. In Part one, we discuss the background of some of Renaissance Golf's associates and how the golf course design business works.
In Parse two and three, we.
Dive into George Thomas, bel Air Country Club and much more.
These podcasts will.
Be available later this week. As a reminder, if you enjoy these talks on architecture with Tom, be sure to check out his books. I highly recommend The Confidential Guides and The Little Red Book of Golf Course Architecture. Both are available on Renaissance website www dot Renaissance goolf dot com. One final announcement, fried Egg hats are available on our pro shop. Check them out on the website fried egg dot com. Without further ado, here's the latest edition of The Yoke with Doke.
Tom Doak is back and as usual, he's not holding back. But don't toss the yolk and the famously candied Doak doesn't pull any punches. How do I make natural looking contour? Hire the biggest pool in the village and told him to make it flat?
First?
Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated, over the years.
Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another edition of the Yoke with Doak Tom.
How's it going, Hi, Andy, we're bel Air Hills of Los Angeles today. I'm glad to be back. Yeah.
Today we have a couple special guests here up in the hills of bel Air overlooking the city of Los Angeles.
Who's with us? I've got my construction crew for the renovation we're doing at bel Air right now. Eric Iverson, one of my senior associates who's the lead associate on this job. Brian Schneider one of my other senior associates who's done some shaping here and is headed to Australia with me in a couple of days for the project we're doing down there. Kai Golby, who's doesn't work for my company but has built ten or twelve golf courses
with us over the last twenty years. And Blake Conant, who's been doing the same thing for us, but for only about five or six years now.
Yeah, So you know today you're going to get a behind the scenes look at how Renaissance works and some of the names behind some of the work and the shaping and the building of the greens, the construction aspect of golf course design. So, Eric, why don't you start us off and give us a little bit about yourself, how you got into golf course construction and where you grew up golfing.
I grew up in just north of Denver, the suburbs of Denver, and started playing golf at a really early age at arguably the worst course in the metro area, Lake Arbor Golf Course. But it was a great environment, great place to kind of grow up and hang out as a kid and learn a lot about just being around golf. And I knew I loved it. And you know, at some point you kind of make the realization that you know, maybe playing golf is not for me, but
how else might I get into it? And the timing was really good, and it just kind of found me, really and it was a great thing, and I thought, this is really first project I was working on was where I first saw Tom doing his thing, Riverdale Dunes, and the oldest guy on that project was twenty six years old. So my first impression of a golf course architect was that it was unattainable. Some sort of image of Desmond muirhead in a plaid jacket smoking a pipe
was what I thought it was all about. And it's like, this is just a bunch of knuckleheads. You were a little older than me, you know, so maybe this is something that could turn into something someday.
So just kind of ended up.
Joining the traveling circus and now I'm hanging out in this house above bel Air.
All right, Brian.
I grew up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and we were really lucky in that town. Not because we had a bunch of great golf, but we had immuni course that when I was a kid, my buddies and I could go there and show up before nine o'clock and we could play all day for three bucks.
And that's how we spend our summers. You know. We'd throw our clubs.
On our bag on our back and jump on our bikes and head out early and we'd be on the golf course all day. And it was just a great place to learn, and you know, got to meet a bunch of local characters there. And the golf wasn't great, but we had a lot of fun doing it.
And yeah, I've played since I was little.
My grandfather was a good player and he would take me out when I was three or four years old. His brother owned a par three course in a driving range, so I got to spend much of time with my grandpa there when I was just a little kid. Then as I got to play more, you know, I lived about a forty five minute trive from Lasnia, so my you know, my family would make that a special trip. Occasionally we go over there and see that. And to me, that was a place that felt really different than anywhere
else i'd played around town. And that's probably where I first noticed that architecture could be a thing that, you know, there could be more deliberate efforts to build something unique and fun, and it was just unlike anything I'd seen up to that point. So it had an influence on me, just the realization that architecture was a thing.
You know, I heard the course. Did you grow up playing Lakeside? It's been in the news Late Lake.
Shore, Yeah, it's it's it's a shame. A good friend of mine has been the golf pro there for years and he's looking for a job now because the city's made the decision to sell that land off to a pretty prominent local corporation.
But the golf course will be no more.
Yeah, if if anybody wants to hear more, I think golf dot com did a whole podcast about it. It's a it's an interesting situation, but probably pretty sad to see local local And it was an old course too, like over what over one hundred years old?
Right, Yeah, there was a lot of conversation in the newspaper and a lot of locals against it, but you know, economically it makes sense for the town, I.
Think, so yeah, so Kai, how about you.
I grew up in Belleville, Illinois, which is just across the river from Saint Louis, Missouri, And when I grew up, I probably lived about two blocks from a private golf club. Everybody else is growing up on public and it was a private club, but it was a very blue collar, small town, blue collar private club, and so I was playing at that course probably from the time I was
six years old. It would ride our bikes over and just hang out at the golf club basically all summer long, and a lot of times during the school year as well. My cousin who lived up the street from me, was also a good player, so we basically played golf together all the time, and that was kind of how I got started. Now, I did get started because my dad was kind of okay at golf. He played the tour for many years and won the Masters in nineteen sixty eight.
So growing up I did see some pretty good golfers. And my cousin that lived up the street was Jay Haas, so we had, you know, some pretty quality golfers. And so the golf course that we grew up on everyone that grew up on that same course. My dad actually caddied there as a kid, and I didn't know it at the time, and I don't think anyone did. But as I grew older and became more interested in architecture, I started kind of looking into the golf course because really,
God some cool stuff. And then I played a William Langford course Donald Seitherdone was like, wow, that's really similar to what I grew up on, and I kind of started researching it. Found out it was a William Langford golf course that we had been playing on, and no one had any idea who William Langford was. So that was a little bit how the architecture bug got in
my head. I think it was almost through osmosis. You just were playing this course every day, and there was a lot of cool shots to play and interesting greens, and so I think it wasn't some of these guys I think had a little more interest in architecture early age, knowing they wanted to be golf architects. I wasn't really thinking though. I just liked to play and wanted to kind of compete, and the architecture thing just kind of got into me at a later stage. And how that
actually occurred. I played golf in college, and by the senior year of college I was just sick of golf. I wasn't as good as guys in our team and just got tired of playing. Went to Boston after college to work in the financial business. Did that for a few years and was not really enjoying myself in the offices. Kept looking outside. I was like, man, I'd rather be
outside and had an opportunity. Actually, my dad got an opportunity in our hometown to do a golf course, and so I quit the financial business and went back to Belle Illinois to help him build a golf course. Got into that and it was like, hey, this is kind of fun, and just kept at it and eventually he got in touch with Tom a few years later, and just like Eric, here we.
Are all right, that's a pretty cool story with the family lineage is quite strong.
I'm the black sheep, so blake, what about you.
I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska picking golf balls from a driving range called Schmidley's for three twenty five an hour, but I would get all the free golf balls that I could hit, so I would do that after or before baseball games where the Keystone ball fields were just across the street. So that's sort of how I started
playing and honing my swing. And then my stepdad was a member at a club in Omaha called Ironwood, which was formerly Highland Country Club, which was an old Langford that I think had been butchered in the fifties or sixties, but the routing was still intact for the most part. So a lot of just like Twilight nine whole rounds there. And got into golf. And then I went to school
for a painting degree up in Montana. So I graduated in two thousand and nine with an art degree, which led to zero jobs, in which case I started asking myself what do I really want to do? And I liked golf. I was pretty good at math and still wanted to be in some type of creative field. And I really blamed my mom because she's an enabler who would just say, yeah, man, go for it, you know, go to art school in Montana, or yeah, go try to get into golf architecture.
You can do it.
And so that's what I did. I went to a master's landscape program down in Georgia and got in contact with Tom, who then immediately pawned me off on Don Placic, who I can communicated with for a year and a half before getting an internship in Dismal River. Then hooked up with these guys and nobody's fired me yet, so I'm still hanging around.
It's always interesting with the people that come on the podcast. So many people, with the exception of Kai, you know, grew up playing public golf. But for this conversation, Tom, I think it would be great if you could walk us through kind of what happens from renaissance side. After you guys went a bit and you get awarded a project, you know, what are kind of the first steps and how do you determine who's going out to that project.
Well, the first thing I should say is our process is pretty different from the status quo of the golf business, or at least the status quo of golf business ten or twenty years ago. I mean I learned from Pete Dye, who is very hands on construction based person, so I am too. But a lot of architects doing a renovation rely on golf course contractors to do all the work. And they don't have guys like this that they bring
into a job. They just they do plans, they go and inspect it as it's happening from time to time like I do. But they rely on a contractor to come up with shapers and people to run the equipment and build stuff. And that's the whole key of doing renovation worker, especially restoration work. I mean, if you think about it, you know, clubs get all interested in master plans and you know this whole big process of how do we you know, how do we do a master
plan and sell it to the membership. You know, if you're restoring bell Air to George Thomas's design, every single architects master plan should be the same. It's all about execution and being able to build that and make it look right. And unfortunately, when you do that with a contractor they're not as engaged as these guys are, so you know they're there to do a pretty good job
and make money. And that means that, you know, you'll get guys that don't really know anything about George Thomas or what he was about, and it's very hit or miss. And you know, as an architect, I don't know how I would get a bunch of guys that don't care about George Thomas to build something that looks like George Thomas's work. So I bring golf rats in, guys that are really interested in golf and think this is a
cool project to work on. And they see an old picture of the twelfth hole at bel Air with this big mound in front of the green and go, okay, we got to get that to look just like this picture. How are we going to do that? And keep working on it. I mean, Kai was did the most work work on that whole, and we what like three or
four times. We you know, we we we thought we had a close and then we get there and we're looking at the picture it's like, Nope, need a lot more full still, Just back to the drawing board, get some more fill. In there until this thing really looks right. And that's kind of what it takes to do a restoration and get it right. So I don't you know, there is another approach, but I just I don't have any idea how that would work for me anyway.
It's most people that listen to this podcast are in the business world, and I think everybody would agree that when you get a third party involved it, it kind of muddies things up and makes things more difficult. That's from my experience. Obviously, there are some third parties that do good, good work and stuff, but from the for the most part, having a club, a contractor, and a designer, I think would make communication more difficult and more difficult to align everybody on the same mission.
Yes, and let me not misrepresent either. There is a golf course contractor involved in this. This is like an eight or nine million dollar project. It's a huge project, and these four guys can't do all that work. So there's a big golf course contractor involved, and there's an irrigation contractor putting in irrigation, and there's there's all kinds of laborers and guys cutting down trees and all kinds
of subcontractors working out here. But for us, the key thing is you know, shaping bunkers, shaping greens, getting those details to look just like they're supposed to look. And that's the part that I don't want to sub out to somebody else.
So is it is it a team effort with trying to find the old aerials, the old pictures or when when does the team kind of get picked?
Well, the hard thing when you sign up you don't know exactly when the construction is going to happen, so you can't pick the team. Yeah, you know you can't. I can't ask Kai to you know, block off some time for me at some point down the road, but I don't know when yet.
If it was for Bill Air, i'd say okay.
But so in the beginning, it's just me and Eric, you know, doing the master plan and trying to get a budget together and figure out how much work this is going to be, so we can you know, go through all the political stuff at the club and get them to say okay, once we get past that point, then we can start thinking about, Okay, here's a realistic construction schedule for when this is going to happen and how long it's going to take and how much work have we got to do and how much help do
we need to do it? And we start putting the team together, and you know, we've got probably eight to twelve people that we've worked with in the past on other projects that we can call up and see if they're interested or you know, are you busy over this winner are you are you working for somebody else? Or
what are you doing? You know, I've got three of the guys would be on my payroll, and generally one of them is going to run a job and be the lead associate, and depending on how busy we are, the other guys might be able to chip in and
help a bunch. And sometimes there are in three different places, and you know, like Brian Slanik, the third guy is in Australia right now running a big renovation project there, so he can't really help out it all here, so he's running that, Eric's running bel Air, Brian Schneider with me is jumping back and forth in between them helping out.
And then you know, we'll pull in two or three other people as we need to get the work done in a timely manner and kind of the key for me is you know a lot of people ask like but they ask more about new courses than renovations, like, well, don't you go back and want to change stuff after you get all done, because certainly you can't just be perfect and get it all right the first time. And I say, well, no, I don't get it all right. I wouldn't get it all right the first time. Except
it's not just me. You know, there's four really talented guys who spend a lot more time out here than I am. You know, they get it right. They get it mostly right before I show up. You know, we kind of walked through what what the goals are, and
we've got a bunch of pictures to work with. They get it mostly right before I show up, and then I can deal with the really fine details and the stuff that's more about the playability of the whole instead of at bunkers in the wrong place or it doesn't look like they've already got that, and they're you know,
they're really working with each other. It's very collaborative. You know, it's more fun on a new project because you're you know, it's creative and you're getting creative input from other guys. But on a renovation. It's you know, how are you going to make a mistake because three other guys are going to point right at it and say that's not right yet.
So Eric, in terms of you're the day to day lead on a project, what's that look like?
It's a good question. Excuse me.
The main thing is to just spend a little bit more time during your day looking ahead. You know, you've you've got to just work with the golf course superintendent and the contractor just kind of forecasting what's coming down the pike to make sure that you're you're kind of tackling each whole, each portion of the whole. Each there's materials coming for Green's construction at the end of the week, so you need to have this done by this day
and that done by the next day. That type of coordination of our work is it's really the primary responsibility of doing that, and it's really not that but you know, it's not that much fun relative to the project as a whole what you're doing, but it's an important part
of it. And that's kind of the day to day and nuts in Bolt's part, and then the larger aspect for me and what's what's a lot more fun is just the collaborative part that Tom mentioned, where you know, you're kind of going around and looking as a group, you know who's going to work on what next, kind
of leap frogging around. And I think we all have worked together a lot over the years, and and you know, one of the things I think everybody appreciates when we're working together is that we we try pretty hard to not pigeonhole anybody into one role and kind of stuck doing all of the teas or all of the bunkers or just greens that type of thing, and and kind of let everybody have a chance to do some of the really fun stuff, like whether it's you know, putting
back the May West Mound. That's a pretty cool thing. Tom took three or more goes to really feel like we had it right, and Kai and Tom had it absolutely right about three weeks ago, and then just random somebody trying to be helpful with the box blade was on top of it, took the top of it down
towards the bottom got to cleaning it up. So it's actually been through its fourth and fifth iteration and it has sod on it now and we feel like we got it back right, But it makes the These types of projects are always set up to be done and not quite enough time so that, you know, because people don't want to give up their golf course, and it can be a bit of a high pressure situation that all of Tom's new courses turn out best because or they turn out well because we have a good time
building them. So keeping the keeping the fun part of doing this work as a big part of it is important, and I think that stems directly from everybody having a chance to chime in on everything. It's like no piece of work goes without everybody having a chance, whether solicited or unsolicited, to say looks like crap. I don't know what you're thinking there. Are you sure that goes all
the way over there? I don't think it does. You know one thing I'll leave with this is one of the things I've noticed most about about this project, And everybody is every bit as guilty as anybody is. When you're interpreting these old photos. I've been you know my
go to phrases. Everybody sees what they want to see, so you have a sense for how something might have been and you're looking into these grainy, old black and white photos that are a little bit fuzzy, and you know there's a third dimension missing and and what you feel a lot to be there. You can kind of make a case for it in the photo. And eventually we kind of we kind of hashed that out amongst ourselves and then Tom comes back and says, no, you're
all for wrong. See it should be over here. But that's just kind of a a part of the of this particular process doing a restoration that's just been a lot of fun.
Yeah, I should say too. I mean when I was when I was in college and going around and seeing all the best golf courses in the world. One of the ideas for the way we work came from the guy who was superintendent at Pine Valley back in the day. Said I said, well, how do you break up who does what? And he says, well, I got like six key guys and they're each responsible for three holes and
are totally responsible for him. It's like you've got your little crew to help you, but those are your three holes, so take good care of them. And you've got to do that. You've got to give them some ownership of it. And at the same time you've got to let the other guys have some input too, because it's it's not like you don't get the final say on this, but you know, you get the first crack at it and do a good job.
Brian, you've been with Renaissance for a long time. What project was the most obscure kind of accommodations because you guys are moving places for months at a time.
That's a great question.
Yeah, we haven't stayed in many places like this, or you know, six hundred feet above the golf course looking down to Los Angeles and just saw beautiful rainbow in the canyon below us as it's raining in Los Angeles today.
That's a great question.
You know, we've stayed in some fantastic places around the world, and we've stayed in some places that are Yeah, traveling as much as we do, and we all have families, significant others that that would enjoy the opportunity to travel with us to some of the places we're going, And yeah, Bella would be a great place to take your family. New Zealand is a fantastic place to take your family. Mull in Colorado is a little more challenging. I'm sorry, Holyoak,
Holyoak or Mulla Nebraska or Deer Lodge, Montana. You know, they offer less too for non work activities, So I mentioned Deer Lodge. One of my favorite things about staying there. We stayed in kind of a ranch house that we shared with some of the working ranch staff, and out the back window in the mornings and the evenings there were horses penned up right outside and you see the horses running around and doing their thing. It was fantastic in the mountains in the background with the snow on top.
We've been lucky to work in some really wonderful places and I appreciate all those experiences. Sometimes it's a relief when they're over. But looking back in retrospect, yeah, we've We've had a lot of great, great times wherever we worked.
So Kai, Yeah, you're out there doing the construction, and what's your favorite thing to get out there? And you wake up that morning you know you're doing X job. What's the job that really guess you're going?
Honestly, there's not one like on this job.
Just this week, we've I've been involved in starting a green, building a green with the bulldozer. I've been digging a bunker from scratch. I've worked on a bunker that we've already done, kind of edit it. I also was on a rake. Eric and I were raking out greens that we have we're getting ready to first see and saw it around him when we were raking so and running a trap break. So it's there's all kinds of different
jobs you're doing, and honestly, they're all great. That's probably why I'm still out here doing this because I still think it's great doing all these jobs. And that's one of the cool things about working as Tom said, that you get the opportunity to do a lot of different things to bring the golf course from, you know, the early stages to the final stages. And an interesting element too when Tom was talking earlier about how the six six guys in three holes. I've done some work with
a lot of other people through the years. Working with Tom is the best part of that, but the other guys I've worked with, it's interesting that Tom and his company give you more input, you know. And Tom's if you had people rank, who's where the architecture rank of guys working today, I think he'd be up near the top.
But yet he seems to give us a little more freedom and involvement and not being worried about, oh, that's not my idea, and allows us to almost participate more than the guys some of the other guys do, and I find that very interesting, and it's also makes it more interesting for me to work on the projects, and I think probably for Blake as well and everyone just having that you're very engaged and you have ownership of what's happening. So I might have gotten off the.
Track there, but but dude, that's why I'm near the top is because I get to borrow all your good ideas and all the rest of you. You know, I get the credit.
They always say, hire great people and let them do what they do. Is you know the most successful companies micromanagers are, you know, they they constrain ideas and for something that you guys do allowing free flow of ideas, it's got to be so important.
Absolutely. And one of the things, I mean, the part of this that I didn't talk about my role is I'll be here for a few days at a time and we'll work on however many holes, trying to get them finished, and then before I leave, Eric and I'll walk through what the holes are that he's going to be working on while I'm away, and you know, and then Eric or Kai or somebody else is going to take a shot at roughening those greens before I get back.
And the one thing that I really had to learn didn't take too long because I you know, I tried to do it for Pete Dye, was not to give them too many instructions out any particular green you could you could tell them it was you wanted to tell them two or three key things. But if I but if I gave them like seven, inevitably I would tell them two things that kind of conflicted with each other.
You know, I'd tell them to keep the green at this elevation right here, keep the back of the green at this elevation right here, and then don't have too much tilt in it, and then something but I don't, and then I don't want to see that sprinkler box way back there on another hole. And you couldn't do all those things at the same time. It wouldn't work. So you know, I had to learn to keep it down to like the two or three things that I
thought were really important. Let them take a crack at sorting out how everything else would work together and then come back and deal with the sprinkler box if that was a problem, but it was better, you know. But they'll see the sprinkler box too and try to work around it. But you know, if I just gave them two any points to fit in, he couldn't make everything work in between, you know, So you have to give him enough space to operate it.
Tom.
One thing I just thrown in what you're saying is and Andy's listeners and what he was talking about before. But everybody here being a golfer, from my experience with you also, you will sometimes just explain how the golf shot coming in. You don't even have to say anything about the dirt, and just say this is I want this shot to receive from here, but I don't want
you to be able to recover from over there. And if you don't understand golf, like you were talking about the contractors, like guys don't even play golf, No, you can't have that conversation with them.
No. You know, one of the best instructed one of the first projects I worked down with Eric I just when we were doing Riverfront. I remember saying on the fifth pole, you know, just the only thing I want you to do on this green is you know, go over it. You know, there's when you stake out a new golf course, you put a post where the landing area is, you know, presumably where everybody's going to drive
it off the tee. But I've not everybody drives it right in the middle of the fairway two hundred and eighty yards or wherever the post is. So they're all over the place. And but there's always the post there, and a lot of architects go stand at the post and look at the hole like everybody's going to be there. And I know from you know, because I I'm a golfer. You don't drive it to where the post is. You're
all over the hole. So you know, I told Eric on at Riverfront, So you know, okay, walk twenty yards right of the post and look at the green from there, and then walk twenty yards left of the post and look at the green from there, and try to make the look as different as you possibly can. And and after I after I said, I was like, that's a pretty good general rule, you know, because if you can make the shot from the right look really different than the shot from the left, now you've got strategy.
Yeah, angles and options, that's my my thing. A lot of people think actually, but so Blake, tell me the first time that you got on a dozer and like built a green or attempted to like, was that like learning how to do that.
Stuff rattling because you inevitably create these waves when you're first getting on a dozer. The blade will dig down and then you try to overcompensate by lifting up. And so I think actually the first time I was on a dozer was Dismal River doing this huge push on two Fairway, and Brian Schneider would have to spend the first twenty minutes of his morning every morning cleaning up
our mess that we had made the night before. But as you sort of get out of that, which is for some people it's twenty hours on a doser seat, it could be two hundred hours on a doser seat, and you're lucky to get that time if you get it.
To Blake's credit, we had I think eight interns on the Dismal project, and that that project on the second hole was probably a six or seven day project all told, and I'd work on it during the day among other things I was doing, and in the evening when it was time to shut the dozers off and was getting dark and we all wanted to eat, there was the opportunity for somebody to jump in the bulldozer, and those eight guys all had a chance, and Blake made himself
a built every night to jump in that machine and get that experience because it's hard to do. It's hard to do, but he took advantage of that, and he was a really quick study. You know, he took to it quickly, and he was eager to take advantage of that opportunity. And that's a big reason why he's sitting here right now.
Has there ever been somebody that made like a horrible mistake that actually ended up being like a brilliant mistake.
Have you seen that the second fair way? It does more. We'll have to put a picture.
Yeah, it used to be dead flat. It happens every day.
You know, I.
Wouldn't call the mistakes, but you know, part of being on site every day is number one, capitalizing on opportunities when they present themselves, but also just being in a machine and messing around until you stumble on something that works and looks cool. So they're they're kind of intentional mistakes. But you know, you don't always have in your head the perfect picture of what you're intending to build.
In the get go change. You change your mind as you're going. The best. The best example I know of of a mistake I when I I was at Costa Compo once. Then mister Dye has given me a tour of Teeth of the Dog and there's a green there. I'm trying to remember what a hole it is. It's the only part of three that's not on the sea. I think it's the teem, and it's a really odd it's an odd looking green. It's like sits down, sits down a little bit unnaturally, and then there's like a
big I think what they built it. It was like a donut, like there was sand all around it, and then just a little green sitting up in the middle of the donut. And Pete told me that he had like given these guys some instructions to build something completely different than that, and gone away for like three months and they had like almost no heavy equipment to build anything there in
nineteen seventy, so it was all hand labor. And he got back and it was just totally not what he decided what he was wanting at all, and he was like, this is like three months in the end labor. I'm just gonna have to work with it. So he worked with it, and you know, it's a lot of people think it's a pretty cool hole, but it was like nothing at all like what he had in mind.
I make mistakes sometimes and they turn out like working a well like Eric. So you've got a somewhat obscure job. Some people would say it's an obscure job. And when you talk to somebody, when you talk to like Joe, regular member at a country club, what do you wish they understood better about what you do?
Hmm.
That's a tough one, really, I've got I tend to be pretty obscure about trying to describe it in the first place. So I think if you know people, you can tell right away if someone has a sense of what it is, just based on the follow up question, if they're at all even concerned about architecture or how
things get built. You know, like a lot of the people that listen to your podcast at least are interested and kind of have an idea, And usually you can tell by either the question or the reaction to the answer whether or not they have any idea, and I don't really you know.
If if there's nothing there, I don't.
I don't really try to elaborate any I think the biggest thing is is that the assumption is is that everything is drawn and that if you're in any part, like I usually describe it as designed and build golf courses, and they get the design part, but they will what do you mean by the build part?
And it's like, well, we we go.
Out and shape.
They don't. They don't get that it's all one process. They think of it as two separate things. You know, there's the there's the guy that's designing it and they think that's me, and there's the guys that are building it, and they think that's these guys. They don't see how much input the you're still designing it while you're building it.
I mean, you're you're sculpting, you don't you know. They think you've got it all figured out exactly in three D in your mind, in advance, and there's no way that anybody does that that well, that way you know you've got and you know, when you're asking me for an answer right now of how exactly how that's going
to be. You know, I can, I can try to describe what I want it to be like, but but in the end, somebody's going to have to make it, and they're going to spend hours and hours and hours making it and sort it through all this detail and usually it gets better from that process. But you know, the members just think it's well, it's all figured out, or in this case, George Thomas figured it all out, and yeah he did, but he still had to go
through that process. And sometimes we we have to go through that process again to get back to there.
So Kai, yesterday, I, you know, showed up and I you were digging a bunker and shaping a bunker and you came across some like electrical wire. What's the most obscure thing that you have come across while digging up?
I can't answer that question.
That was on one of my projects, and no, he can't.
Can you give us a hint? No, there was a building of some sort.
We did when I worked in when I worked for the dies, the irrigation guys trenched through human bones and they had to you know, they they had to like bring the police out to the site to investigate it. As a murder investigation until they figured it was at least one hundred years old, and so they it wasn't an active murder investigation and they could let it go, but it was going to shut the whole job down at the time, so it was a pretty big deal.
It's crazy, and it's not as interesting as skeletons in the golf course. But when you came out yesterday, the wires that actually hit were irrigation wires, old irrigation wires. That's why that tape was there. But just the guys that are listening might find it interesting because you were standing there.
I was digging where we kind of knew the.
Bunker was from the old aerial, and so as I get down three four feet, I can actually find the old bunker sand from the George Thomas golf courses there, and I'm actually able to just start the dirt kind of just pulls right off of it. It's kind of in a layer, so that sand is all under there. So I'm actually just chasing the sand from the old bunker, knowing the shape of it basically by the aerial, and can find the floor of that old bunker sitting right
buried under four feet of dirt. So it's kind of an interesting process in that.
Regard, very interesting. We'll get more into the bel Air things and in part two this podcast, but Blake, let's I guess some random questions that I think would be good to ask. In this segment from listeners, Kip Johnson wants to know what was the best way to evangelize to other golfers or clients about golf course architecture.
That I think that's a huge question for everybody, for every golf course, particularly that's going through a restoration. You know, to use bel Air as an example, it's like the less cart traffic, you can have the better just because of the nature of the property. But to do that you need to have a paradigm shift in the way that this and that a culture has thought for you know,
twenty years or fifty years or whatever it is. So educating people on let's use that as an example is a huge component, and I don't know, I imagine Tom still is figuring that out to this day, of how to educate people what the best way is because different you know, people in California may react differently to being educated than somebody in a different part of the Country, So.
I would have said that the you know, these projects are kind of contagious, a little bit like I mean, one of the reasons we're redoing bel Air is because they did a great renovation of La Country Club a couple of years ago, and all the members at bell Air and out look at that and go, why can't.
We do that?
And you know, we worked in a lot of cities that that's that's the case. And once once certain clubs start going in the right direction fixing things and everybody else sees it, everybody, oh, let's do that too. Let's let's bring somebody in to look at our course, and then I won't mention it. But there's one club I'm consulting with right now that's in a small town and they're isolated from that entirely. They're like two hours away
from anything else. And it's been the hardest client that I've dealt with in years, because they're so scared of shutting down the golf course for any length of time. All the members will quit and they can't see the you know, they can't visualize what the transformation will be because they haven't seen another club do it, and how much better it is and how much more excited the membership is to get done. So that's the main thing is go see something else that somebody else is done.
That's what's going to get people excited about it more than just talking about the history of it.
So you talk about, you know, a city undergoing one club and then you know, it becomes a keeping up with the Joneses type thing. And this question is for anybody here, what city would you like to see undergo like a golf course transformation where it's a big restoration trend or a big renovation trend.
Selfishly Denver because I live there, but yeah, I think there's a there's some places there with a lot of potential that you know, not not world beater golf courses necessarily, but just just kind of getting the fundamentals right would help a lot of places immensely. And I think that goes for you know, most golf courses that even have a modest amount of topographical interest and a good routing and some a decent set of greens. You know, it's
it's really it can be pretty minimal. You know, just getting rid of some trees and getting some mowing right is a big part of it. Really, I mean bel air was interesting just how much better it looked regardless of how it had been remodeled over the years. Just getting all the trees that had been added off of it made a world of difference.
Something I liked that I saw today was the tree behind the fourth t that got turned into a bench.
Good use of the tree. So we got this.
Question from Christopher McCann and it's for Tom. But Brian, I think you've worked with Tom for a long time, how do you think he's evolved as an architect over the years.
I'm gonna think about that.
I don't I'm not sure i'd use the word evolved. One of the things I admire about Tom and the way he works is that in regards to our new projects, he's always trying to do something different on the next one than did in the last one. And it's not necessarily an active stylistic goal. Necessarily, it's just a constant willingness to ensure that the finished product reflects the unique nature of that particular site. And I think a lot of architects have a signature look or a signature style.
You know, the bunkering they do on this course will look a lot like what they've done the past sort of thing. And I think we as a company try really hard to to do something different than we've done before on each of our projects and finding something about every site that that we can work from as a starting point stylistically. And I think Tom's great at that, and to me, he's the best in the business at that. You know, something that struck me as we're talking about
the way we've worked. You know Tom's got do. When you read about Tom, the word ego comes up a lot. Tom's definitely confident, Tom's very knowledgeable.
Tom's great at what he does. But I hope you know this discussion about how we.
Work reflects his willingness to let others participate in the entire process. And I don't think there's anyone in the business who's more respectful and shows greater public appreciation and the people that help him do what he does. And there are a lot of people that would do that for him willingly, but he goes out of his way to give credit to the people that help him do his job.
And you know, it drives me nuts to see.
That word ego attached to him so often by people that don't you know that haven't worked for him for fifteen or twenty.
Years like we have.
We've got another one here from actually one of your guys's colleagues, Clyde Johnson.
We might have to cut this question.
We'll give this one to you, Tom, because so, how do you think your career opportunities style approach would have differed if you'd started out under a different architect than Pete Die.
Oh I can't even imagine. I mean, you know when I when I got when I started in college seriously trying to pursue this, and I didn't know anything in the golf business, So I just wrote letters to people in the golf business, give me advice. What should I do? Who should I work for? This is so this is nineteen eighty. Every single person in a golf business set work for Pete Dye. I mean there wasn't any Oh you should work for Trent Jones. Oh you should work
for Mike Hurtzon, Oh you should work for whoever. Every single person you gotta go work for this guy, partly because he was so hands on and partly because he was so passionate about what he did. But so I can't even you know, like, after I got back from my scholarship to spend a year in the UK. I mister Jones, Trent Jones Senior, who'd gone to Cornell at
thirty sixty fifty years before I did, gotten too. He had been up at Cornell and they told him they had this student overseas, and he was like, I'll have him get in touch with me when he gets back. And he would have offered me a job to go work in his office in Europe. And fortunately I had already worked for mister Dye for one summer of construction, and I was hooked on the idea that it was about construction and it wasn't about drawing plans, so you know,
so I so that didn't appeal to me. And if I hadn't had that one summer of construction experience, it might have been different. Even though you know, just like these guys have talked about, one of the most appealing things to me about this business and about golf in general, is spending your time outdoors. You know, sitting in an office drawing plans of this stuff does not interest me at all. I want to be out there doing it. I think it the work benefits from that. So you know,
if i'd work for anybody else. At the time. I mean at the time, Pete die was the only guy who was out there building stuff himself and hiring young guys that were interested in golf to help him build stuff. Now there's a lot because we all learned from Pete or you know, Bill Kore and I learned from Pete, and then a lot of other guys have learned from us. So there's a lot of people taking this approach now. But it was really rare then. I can't imagine doing it any other way.
So as a follow up to you guys, what would be your advice for somebody that might be looking to get started in the industry who's crazy enough to live as a nomad.
I would say, you better be really passionate about it because it's not going to be about the money for a long time, and you just better really enjoy being out out in the field building a golf course, because you know it's not going to be as you're a young guy, it's not going to be real glamorous. But you can also hang out with some fun people maybe on a site, but it's not going to be oh, I'm going to be out you know, putting stakes in the.
Ground and laying out golf holes. You're going to be have to do.
Hard work, having a good attitude and a willingness to appreciate that you may not conform to a nine to five schedule Monday through Friday. If you realize that about yourself and that you're just you can work for twenty days straight and then you can take two months off and you're happy with that. But you come to work with a good attitude every day and are happy to be there. That's a hell of a start.
I think another thing that I learned really quickly just about myself was that and anybody else who you know has had any staying power once they joined the circus, is you have to love golf courses. I always knew I loved golf, but you have to really love golf courses because you don't play a lot of golf. You know, we play some dirt golf from time to time, and daylight today it was a little wet.
Otherwise we might.
Have snuck over someplace great in the city and played some. And we're all getting a little long in the tooth now, so we're playing a little bit more and more as we make more time to get away. But you really just have to love golf courses and whether they have grass on them or not, because by the time they have grass on them, you're off to the next pile
of dirt. So you know, you've just got to appreciate being out on golf holes and being a part of making golf holes come to life, and not hung up too much on getting to play a lot.
To that point, we didn't spend our day off today playing golf one of the great courses in town. We spent the day walking around in the rain at LACC to see how the water moves through the arroyos.
So since you guys all love golf courses and we're in La a golf course I love. I live next to it for about a year was Rancho Park, and it's like a course I always talk about, like, man, if I could just go play, I wanted this to be a scruffy course that a lot of people wouldn't appreciate,
but like, I love that place. I go there and you hit a good drive and you get this little hanging line and you got to hit a wedge into you know, in the topography and everything there is really a neat place, but it might have it's a little worse for the wear. Where is your guys's Rancho Park?
We don't get to hang out at one place for that long. I mean, it's it's sad, you know. Somebody asked me a question a couple of years ago, well, how many courses have you played more than ten times? You know, because it was about rankings and like like, how can you rank a golf course when you've only played it once? And I'm like, well could how could I have seen fifteen hundred golf courses if I had to go back to them all ten times, you'd be stuck on a much lower number, and you wouldn't you
wouldn't see nearly as much variety. And then they were like, well, how many courses do you get to play ten times? I'm like, well, okay, the Sterling Farms, the municipal course at Stanford where I grew up, and Cornell University course and Crystal Downs where I'm a member now, and probably half of my own courses I've played more than ten times, and probably close to half of them I still have
not played ten times yet. And then after that it was like all the best you know, Saint Andrews in Pine Valley and Marion because I keep National Golfings, because I you know, I've gone back to those places over and over again until I wear out my welcome and they won't let me come back anymore. But you know, no, you know, not too many places like Rancho Park. I mean, because I'm always moving and you know, we never get to hang out in the same place for too long.
That's going back to your earlier question. That's the toughest part of the business, and that you know, some of them my best work, of some of these guys best work is in Australia and New Zealand. We're getting on a plane Friday to go fourteen hours to Australia. And I've had nothing but good, great times in Australia and New Zealand, building four spectacular projects. But it sucks that they're so far away. And even when I do, we'll be in Sydney for a week. I'm not going to
get back to Barnboogle and play. I'm not gonna you know, I am going to stop through Terry Edy for a day because I know it's the only time this year I'm going to get to you know, That's why I don't mind at all being kind of a homebody and trying to grab any little project close to home, even if it's not going to be spectacular, because hey, I might at least get to hang out there a little bit and enjoy it after.
So maybe we shift this question and say, you know, which of the projects that you've worked on would you like to just kind of sit and play over and over again for a month?
Good question.
One of the courses we did.
This is Eric by the way.
Yeah, one of.
The courses we did in Australia just completely fit my psyche and just everything about it felt great to me. And that's Saint Andrew's Beach and you know it it it It's had a tough road, I understand. It's you know,
pretty pretty pretty reasonable Nick. Right now, it's you know, doing okay, and they you know, people seem to be enjoying the golf course, but you know, it's not quite on the sea, but it's it's close in the Cups region and the ground is just something about the scale of the movement there and the heat and the flies.
I love it all.
And yeah, I mean I just I just really felt just so like every day I was there working on it, I was just kind of there and support. Brian Salonic was the was the guy that really spent the time there and did a lot or you know, ran the job and Brian and I helped with it. But every
day I was there, I loved it. And then we went back after we had a Renaissance Cup and played a couple of rounds there, and then I even went on a impromptu family vacation and drugged my in laws down there for a game in the heat and the flies, and I was the only one who appreciated the flies, But but they really liked the golf course too. It's just that's just one play. And yeah, it's true I
hate bugs, So how ironic is that? But but yeah, that's that's one that of his courses that don't get back to enough, that's the first one that pops into my mind.
I may be stealing this one from Brian Schneider, but Hollywood Golf Club where Brian ran the job, which is an old Walter Travis course that Brian and Tom restored and I was lucky enough to work on, and it's just it's on a flat piece of ground and it's one of the quirkiest places you'll ever see with I think it originally had two hundred and forty bunkers ranging from ten square feet to twelve thousand square feet and
some of the coolest greens in the met area. And it's just yeah, walk it every day, play thirty six sols a day. It'd be fantastic.
Really, almost every course we've worked on. I'd love to have a chance to go back and hang out for a month. But where Tom's going to Tara Edie would be a marvelous place to go hang out for probably the rest of your life. But if I honestly could pick one, I'd probably go to the Renaissance Club over in Scotland. And nothing against Tom, but probably not so I could play his court. So I could hang out and play North Barrick every day.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good.
For me.
It's probably the places I haven't been back to in a long time. And Rock Creek and Montana Stone Eagle out in Palm Desert, there are places I loved when I saw them. It's been too long since I've been able to get back, and there are a lot of those. Like Tom said, you know, we've done work all over the world now, and it's just it's tough to cover
all those bases regularly. And it's great to have an excuse to head back to Melbourne for new work and get to swing by Saint Andrew's Beach or run down to bar and Google, but it often takes a work excuse to get back to some of those more remote places.
Down.
Yeah, I think my answer is kind of like Brian, It's like, well, where haven't you got to be very much? You know, it's been been twenty years since I went back to Riverfront, and almost that long since I went back to Quell Crossing. I sent Tom Mead down there recently to see the greens shrunk in by twenty feet in places, and some of them dirt. It's the city just bought that from an operator to turn it into
a municipal golf course. But I don't think they realized how much work they're going to have to do to get it back in shape.
You know, an interesting little factoid about that. The operator, you know, one of my readers told me, was the owner of Warrior Golf, famed infomercials on the Golf Channel.
Okay, they didn't do a good job taking care of my golf course from all reports. Yeah, I mean, you know, for me, it's the ones that I haven't had much chance to hang around yet. Sant Emilian and France. We'll go back to the Renaissance Cup this summer, but I played in the grand opening. That's the last time I've seen it. Saint Andrew's Beach, as Eric mentioned, is that's always been on my list. You know, it took quite
a while to get that project together. I looked at the land for a different client, like probably five years before we actually wound up getting to build it. And then and then the guys that we built it for went bankrupt almost right right out of the box as soon as it was done, and it was just shut down for a while, and you know, they were just
barely maintaining it so the value wouldn't go away. And eventually the guys that were maintaining the golf course said, you know, we could operate this and make money on it, and so they got it back in and it's not quite so uncelebrated now. I just got my Golf Digest like day before yesterday, and it made their list of the top hundred courses outside outside of the United States.
Really.
Yeah.
The funny thing about that course my first time in Tom's office, that's the topographic map that he uses as a routing exercise, or at least he used with me, see how many holes you can fit in this section of land? And I think I fit three? And then Tom's no wrong, you can fit seven holes in there, and he.
Puts the St. Andrew's Beach. Well, let me let me let me tell you why why I use that. You know, it's this. It's basically most of the front nine of the golf course. Now is this is in this one little tight stretch of ground, and I guess there are three, four, five is not part of it, but all the rest of the front nine is is this one little stretch of ground. And I only use that as an exercise because you know, it depends on what you're looking for.
I mean, if you you know, are you just going to look for one great hole, you know, the best possible hale, regardless of how anything else, whether that destroys your chance of doing anything else, or are you gonna look for how things fit together? Because you know, I was told that one of the Australian architects had had done a routing for that same piece of ground and where those so we're seven eight nine, all the zigzag
back and forth through that topography. He just had one par five hole going down the valley, and I thought, Okay, you know, this is a good example of how different people would just look at this entirely differently.
You've been listening to the fried Egg podcast.
We do the digging for you.