Welcome back to part two of the latest episode of The Yoke with Doak. In this three part episode, we talk with Tom Doak and his associate to Eric Iverson, Brian Schneider, as well as shapers Kai Golby and Blake Conan. If you haven't listened to part one of the podcasts where we detail how Renaissance golf design works, check it out. In this episode, we talk about George Thomas and the work that Renaissance has done at Iconic bel Air Country Club.
I've put together some before and after comparisons on the website on the podcast page that should help the listening experience, So check that out at the fried egg dot com backslash podcasts and you should see a variety of old aerols and then before and after photos. Enjoy this podcast and look for part three to come out on Wednesday of this week. Thanks.
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 here of the biggest pool in the village.
I told him to make it flat first?
Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to part two of the Latest Yoke with Doak. On this episode, we've still got the Renaissance Golf team with us. We've got Tom as always, Eric Iverson, Blake Conant, Kai Golby, and Brian Schneider and for this edition, we are talking about their current project at bell Air Country Club, George Thomas, the architect and Southern California Golf. Tom Welcome back.
Thanks Andy. Nice to be at bell Air.
Yeah, still nice to be.
Here, even with the rain.
This is the first day, I'm told, you know this is It's January. I'm told this is the first day it's rained at LA since last March.
I escaped Chicago winter, and it the day before I came out here was like the first day above ten degrees and ten days or something like that.
I escaped Charleston winter. There was about five inches of snow on the ground when I left yesterday.
I don't feel bad for you. It's sixty today, I'm told.
But then I looked at the forecast, I'm like, wait, rain. So to kick this podcast off, I think it'd be great for everybody to learn a little bit about George Thomas, the architect, you know, a revered architect that didn't do a lot of work. So Tom tell us a little bit about who George Thomas was.
Well, he's an architect that's really well known, even though he only did a few courses, which has a lot to do with the fact that he wrote one of the great books on golf course architecture back in nineteen
twenty seven. He grew up in Philadelphia. Family was from back East, and he was a good golfer, good amateur player, and was buddies and played golf all the time with a bunch of guys who are now famous as golf course architects Aw Tilling Hast, George Crump who built Pine Valley, Hugh Wilson who built Marion, William Flynn who followed up Wilson and Mary and then built a lot of the
best courses around Philadelphia. They were just all golfers, like this group sitting with me today that you know, like to play golf together and talk about architecture back when it wasn't really a thing, and just why this golf course isn't good enough. We should we should do something better than this. And then they wound up going out and doing it. You know, each of them on his own.
All of them had a little input into Pine Valley and what Crump did at Pine Valley, and then Thomas Thomas his first I guess he was like a green chairman at one of the clubs in Philadelphia that Donald Ross built. So that's how he learned something about how you build a golf course. And his first project on his own, or maybe a second, was to go out and build a course on his family's farm, which is
Brian You know what course that is now? Like oh, White merch Valley, White Mersh Valley where they used to have the tour event in the sixties and seventies, little thing now I can't when you go there now, it's hard to imagine they had a tour event because it's on like one hundred and ten acres. It's really tight and there's there's one hole that the green is right next to the road. I don't know how they played that for a tour event. I don't know if they
closed the road or what. So he did that, but then I don't know exactly what circumstances. But right after the end of World War One, after he got back from serving in World War One, he came to California instead of staying back in Philadelphia, and so he came to Los Angeles just as California was starting to boom, and when most of this area and now that's so
incredibly developed, was incredibly undeveloped. I mean, you look at pictures of the land that they built La Country Club on in nineteen twenty and it was like a ranch in Colorado, just no buildings of any kind for four miles in any direction, and you know, it's it's so hard to imagine now. And then bell Air, the first version of you know bell Air. Originally he was going to have holes where the Front nine is and then holes south of where the Front nine is, which is
the UCLA campus. And just as they were starting to get the project finally planned out and go ahead and do it, the landowners said, no, no, well I gave some of that land to them to build a university, so we don't have that anymore. So, you know, for a while, they didn't know if they had enough land to bild eighteen holes. And then he found another canyon
and said, oh, we'll use that canyon there. So it was the wild West of golf course design, and he was, you know, in on the ground floor, and you know, had his chance to pick from some of the best topography in the West and build three great golf courses that still exist and a handful of others that have been badly abused or wiped out completely for other development. But La Country Club and bel Air and Riviera are still revered as some of the best golf course in the United States.
So with the guys they started with in Philadelphia, Tilling asked William Flynn, Hugh Wilson, and you look at the resume of courses, and these are some of the courses that have best stood the test of time. What would you attribute that to.
I think they had really good foresight in planning them and to some degree and given them enough space that they didn't become obsolete as the game grew. They weren't so tight together that they were a safety issue or a liability issue, and you weren't hitting it out onto the street, and they had to change the whole thing. And then they didn't have enough land to change the whole thing. So you know, that's the golf course that becomes a mall instead of stay in a golf course.
You know, some of the Golden Age thing is I think the reason we review all those courses from that certain time is there's no question when they built the courses, they were building them for the really good amateur player. They didn't think so much about pro golf in nineteen twenty. They thought about the really good amateur player, which was Bobby Jones, but it was also themselves. I mean, all these guys were talking about were really good players and
playing a US amateurs and whatever else. And the funny thing is, at that time, to build a really good golf course for a top flight amateur, you would build a sixty five hunder yard golf course. And today those sixty five hundred yard tees are the teas that appeal to guys that are interested in golf but aren't scratch players. They're the five or ten handicappers that love golf and support golf financially, and there's a lot more of them
than there are scratch players. So now all these older courses that were built for scratch players are really popular golf courses for a much bigger mass of people then would have appreciated them, and you know, they'd have been way too hard for the ten handicappers in nineteen twenty, but they work just great for them now.
So a Thomas question that we got from Steven Britton, he asks. In George Thomas's book Golf Course Golf Architecture in America, he mentions a typical course should set up as follows two part five, one reachable in two and the other not reachable into five par threes ranging from longwood to wedge, eleven par fours, four long holes, four medium holes, three short holes, which would be driver chip. He says, this seems like a really fun setup to me.
Have you taken any of that idea into your own design?
I don't have. I don't have that much of a formula in mind. I mean I have a broader range of I don't care what par works out to seventy or seventy two. You know, it's kind of like, what's what's happening when I fit this together? I know, if I build up, you know, if I if I do a routing and it's par sixty eight and now the client's not gonna like that, I'm I have to go
work on that some more. But but other than that, I'm not as you know, like I built out of thirty five golf courses, I've built maybe seven or eight that had more than four part three's. Like Thomas said he would build five par threes, So I'm not opposed to that, but.
I'm not looking to do it either.
And the funny thing is, I don't think like George Thomas didn't necessarily feel entirely responsible to follow his own guidelines. Bel Air does have five par threes, it has three par fives to make up for it, so it's still a par seventy golf course.
Would do those numbers, sorry, Briant. Those only add up to sixteen holes though, eleven par four's, three par three's and two.
Part five fives up to par sixty nine though, yeah, up to.
Par sixty nine.
If you read closely, and he didn't actually build any par sixty nine.
Golf courses, maybe that's a you know, a flaw like it's supposed to be par sixty nine.
More well, one of the things that he did believe pretty strongly. And you only have to go look at these three golf RSUs bel Air and La country Club and Riviera to see it is the first two holes are they're either both par fives, or one's a par five and one's a really long part four. That was probably a par five in the day, and you know it's just it's four seventy, so now they call it a part four.
So he started out with two long.
Holes on all of his best courses, and you know, he talked about the first hole especially. You know, he thought in terms of match play, so he thought of the first hall as a first hal and potentially the nineteenth hall. So he described the first hole as being like it's a par five for the first time around, and you want to make birdie on it, but it's a comfortable part five. But if you get back around and you're all square in the match at the end,
now somebody's got to make four on this hole. You know, if you don't make four, you're probably going to lose. So you know, that was very strong in his thinking. And all three of these courses start out the same way that the holes aren't exactly the same, but you do. You have the par five right out of the blocks, and it's a fairly short par five, and the next hole is.
A bear of a par four unless the USGA comes in and changes it to four, like they did at the USAM this year, but that's another subject for another day. Ben Vennon wants to know why did George Thomas build so few golf courses.
He built a little more than people think, and they're gone, you know. I think he probably built.
Twelve or fifteen golf courses in southern California, and there's only like six or eight of them left now, you know. And some of them are the munis that are You can barely tell who designed them or that there was any design quality in them at all, because so little of it's left.
But I think I think he did so few because he didn't.
I mean, I I don't know his biography well enough to know. I've read Jeff Sackel for his biography, but it's been a while since I really read all the personal stuff. He didn't travel very far, so he didn't, you know. He wasn't like McKenzie working all over the globe and spending three days on somewhere and then going away and never.
Seeing it again. I mean, what he did do.
Was close to home, and he stuck around and spent time on which is part of the reason they all turned out so good. But so but he worked in a fairly limited area and really only from nineteen twenty to he died in nineteen thirty two, so he didn't have that long of an active career.
He I think I remember reading that he was really like his family was really wealthy too, so it wasn't like a business kind of like McDonald, he didn't need to do design for a business.
Right right, Yeah?
So, uh, Jordan Benson wants to know how did the bel Air job come about?
That's an interesting story. I was doing an interview for.
The second volume of the Confidential Guide that covers, you know, all the California courses as part of the Americas, but you know the places that you can play in the Winner, so California is part of that. And I think it was with Rand Morrisset from Golf Clubattles. I can't remember for sure, but somebody asked me, so, if you could renovate any one of the golf courses in this book,
what one would you do? And you know, I've learned over the years, don't answer those questions because because somebody is the consultant there now and they're not going to appreciate it very much.
And and I'm not really I don't campaign for work.
I mean, we consult a lot of places. We get a lot of calls about consulting. So I don't think I want to consult there. I want to poach that job away from whoever's there. I never try to do that. But because it was a friend asking me the question, I just blurted out, bel air, you know, I just it's one of the coolest routings that I've ever seen, and it just seems like it's a mess.
Now and I don't understand the direction that they're going.
And I said that absolutely, not thinking that I was they were going to call me about it, because I didn't think I knew anybody here. I had only played the golf course twice and not for fifteen or twenty years, and I, as far as I knew, I didn't know any members. In fact, I knew two members on the Green Committee, and the next Green Committee meeting, they both took that interview and plopped it down on the desk and said, why aren't we.
Talking to this guy?
You know, we're getting ready to do a bunch of work on the golf course, and we've been doing work on it for years and it doesn't seem to be.
Getting any better. Well, let's get a second opinion.
So they asked me to come out and play golf with him, just give them perspective on what they were doing and what I thought. And you know, Eric came out with me and I played. That's one of the worst rounds of call.
But I played a long time.
I sure didn't get the job because I impressed him with my playing ability.
I don't think I made any pars all day.
And you know, and we went back in after we were done playing and sat down and they asked me, well, what do you think of the golf course? And I said, I just don't understand. You talk so much about George Thomas and everybody thinks of it as one of his best golf courses, and yet the most famous holes had been gone for fifty years. Everybody talks about the May West Hole, and you blew that up in nineteen sixty two,
you know. And and there's you know, there's an aerial photo on the wall right behind you of what this golf course looked like when George Thomas built it, and it doesn't look anything like that now. And I don't understand why you're what direction you're trying to go besides that one. And I had to tell that story to a few more people a few more times. But that's basically how we wound up working.
So you mentioned the routing and being one of the most spectacular routings. We talked about, you know, routing in the last episode, and you're writing a book about routing. So what about bel Air's routing is so impressive.
Well, there's there's a lot of nuance to it that I don't really have time to get into in that much detail, but just just the general description of how this golf course works. I mean, there is nothing else like it in the world anywhere, you know, and I don't really understand exactly why, because it's been here for ninety years and a lot of people have seen it.
They could have tried to do some of these things, and nobody really as So it starts out, you know, the clubhouse is on a ridge, and the first tee is right out the clubhouse porch basically, and you're looking down into Los Angeles and you play down the hill part five, going straight toward USIL and a big broad area, and then you go back. The second hole kind of winds back into a narrow area, and you know by the time you get to the third is like a narrow little Part three.
Hole in a canyon.
And when you get to the fifth green, another part three, you're in the end of a canyon and you're like, where am I going? I don't see another hole, And you know behind the green on the right there's a tunnel and you either walk or take your golf cart through the tightest tunnel that you can possibly imagine, because they designed a golf cart around fitting through the tunnels. And you tunnel under this ridge for like one hundred
and fifty yards or something like that. It's a long tunnel, and you come out in a valley on the other side, and oh, there's another golf ho there's actually two, six and seven.
And then you work back up.
To the to the ninth green, and now you're in another canyon and the clubhouse is right there and there's no place to go again. And this one's really tight. I mean there's like barely room for a green in
the canyon and there's nowhere else to go. You're like, okay, oh, there's another tunnel, and you go into the tunnel and you go halfway through the tunnel and you take an elevator up into the clubhouse and you can walk out the door and you're on the tenth tee hitting over another canyon on the other side of the clubhouse with a suspension bridge from high to high to get you over to the other side. There is nothing else I
can tell you. You know, Eric and I have seen a lot of crazy things built in Japan and Korea where they spent hundreds of million of dollars putting a golf course in canyons.
In the mountains. They never did anything like that, never even thought of.
Let's say it goes back to the story he said earlier about Thomas's background, is how they just found another canyon and they said, oh, we can build.
A golf course.
Well, yeah, I mean the story of the routing is that he thought he was stuck and didn't have a way, you know, he didn't have enough land, and they had never looked where the back nine was. And then when he thought he was stuck, he was up there with Billy bell and actually there was you know, there was a third co designer at bell Air for a little bit. I can't tell how much he actually had to do with it, who was another great amateur player in California.
Jack Neville, the guy who designed Pebble Beach, or it gets the credit for designing Pebble Beach, was involved at bell Air too, And they were all standing on the ridge where the clubhouse is, and Thomas said, do you think he could play like over it? You know, kid across this canyon and played with a green up there. And they tried with whatever they had around to hit a ball, and they were like, yeah, I think that'll work.
And so they went over there and then they look from you know, now you have to go across a road to the eleventh tee, but you didn't back then. And you know, once you get just over that ridge where ten green is, there is that great valley where eleven through sixteen are, and they'd never really looked up in there at all. And that valley is really tight, like it's by by the standards we used to lay
out golf courses. Now, it's not wide enough to have a hole going up in a hole coming back in that valley.
But they got him in there and it works just fun.
We're going to kick this to the crew, the guys living on site, and we talked about in the previous part about how you guys really become student of the architect when you're doing restorations and your job becomes knowing all this stuff. So, what are some of the interesting facts or concepts or principles that you've kind of learned since being here uncovered during the restoration with Thomas and bel Air, Eric, you want to go first?
Sure, The one thing I think we've all kind of marveled at as we've worked on some of the holes that had been more undone over the years than others.
You know, some of them are just you maybe a different bunker configuration around the green and modified the green a little bit, where others the green had been moved, you know, thirty forty five yards like the fifth, you know, and we just got done kind of putting the landforms back together as we kind of piece that together through the photographs and kind of the evidence that's in the ground, and just how well everything instantly ties in, falls into
place and just fits without really us trying that hard or thinking, wow, we got to just like dream up this old fifth hole based on a couple of photographs. There's really not as many ground level photographs photographs as we would like to have. We have a couple of good ones of that hole. But it's like, well, you know, you kind of piece together the evidence from the map, it's like, well, the back edge has to be about here.
It's this many feet long, this many feet wide. It looks like it, you know, the back of the right bunker tighten off of this ridge. And you just kind of start filling in all the blanks with the things that you know, and and it's like, man, yep, that's a hole that looks pretty good. That's going to be that's got to be pretty close to what it was because it fits so well, you know.
And one more thing about that hole, in addition to fitting so well on every other level.
They moved that green.
In the sixties, I guess when they did all the other work. So they lengthened the part three. They moved the green like back thirty five yards and put it, you know, up against the wall of the canyon further back. So they took the old green at you know, they cut the old green away because you couldn't see the new greens so well without cutting out in front of it. That's why we had to put it back but one of the things that it prevented. When I got here.
You know this, the superintendent, Brian Sullivan, had been here for like twenty five years, and he tried to convince him to redo the green, rebuild the greens, and you know they're they're all they were all poetic greens, and he wanted, you know, the club was like, we should put new bankrast greens out there, at least do that, and Brian said, but I got one problem. I can't grow bent grass on the fifth green where it is now because it's up it's back up against the canyon,
and it doesn't get enough sunlight in the winter. And I just you know, I could plant bent grass on it, but it'll fade, It'll just be poetic. And it would have been hard to convince the club to go to restore this much shorter Part three if I didn't know that it was also out in the sun where they could grow bent grass.
So not only did.
It fit in every other level, you could actually grow grass on it, which apparently the guy that redid it in the sixties didn't think about or care about as much.
Blake, well, have you picked up.
Well, I had obviously heard of George Thomas had read his book Golf Architecture in America, and I'd seen a few holes at Riviera on one of my previous stints in southern California, but honestly didn't know his golf courses or his style intimately before coming here. So I was working at a job in Mexico, and Eric asked if
I would want to help out here. So I ordered the Captain Jeff Shackelford's book about George Thomas and had my girlfriend bring it and Golf Architecture to America down to Mexico so I could just brush up on any information Eric shared with me on dropbox, all the info
that they had. So it was just a matter of learning about the place and what Bellair is and the things that didn't really stick with me then, but now that we're doing the work is a lot of these bunkers are removed from the greens more than we would probably do on a new course. The right bunker on eleven Green is probably twenty feet from twenty feet from
the green, which you just wouldn't think to do. And there's a handful of other examples like that, and the other thing he did in his drawings in his book. He had a lot of fair way behind the greens. That was a place where he encouraged people to miss was through the green or belong And you may have a chip that's four percent running away from you, but you're not in a bunker and you're on short grass. So seeing those two things sort of come to light once we got into the ground was cool.
And following up on that kind of the observation about the bunkers and a lot of cases being far from the green, not all of them, some of them ate in pretty close, but that and that's a big pitfall of like really judging anything based on photographs. And that's more that rings more true today than at any other time that anybody's gave a crap about golf course architecture. Is when you start putting all the piece together and how what seemed like a fairly benign contour all of
a sudden makes all the difference in the world. Like all the photo evidence was pretty clear that the bunker that Blake referred to that's well off the green on the eleventh, well, there's a pretty good contour between the bunker and the green, and it's not a deep green. At all, and if you you know, if you place safely right off the tee, the green is shallower yet and you kind of need to land it near the
front edge, and that's where that little contour is. So even though the sand is twenty yards away from the green, it's just it's four or five feet away from the green where if you don't carry that pretty good likelihood of rolling down into the bunker.
I think that's something that the average golfer doesn't understand, is it's not just the hazard or the bunker in this case, but it's the kind tours on the other side of the hazard that really also have a huge effect on the strategy of the hole. Is on that whole playing left you all of a sudden't have a really nice, like almost kicker slove to just run it in there to that shallow green.
Yeah, that's a good point, And I think a lot of times the strategy gets kind of analyzed and really black and white terms as opposed to you know, I think one of the things we all appreciate working for Tom is I think, not to put words in his mouth, but I think we work more in shades of gray, like maybe you know it shouldn't be just a flashing
neon light, which where you should go every day. You know, it's like that green sits lengthwise if you do go left, but that's also a deep nasty bunker in front of it, and that one does cut into the green. So even though you know it depends on the person, it depends
on the day. You know, do you like that depth of the green on that angle and carrying the bunker comfortably or would you rather kind of have a little bit more of a of an approach that's you know, you don't have to flirt with any bunkers, but it's a little shallower so you know, it's not a cut and dry gain a huge advantage by going here. It varies day to day, whole locations and who's playing, So that's that's a really cool part of it.
Yeah, it's not the best strategy is not the same for everybody. And you got there's so many modern holes that they'll give you two options from the tee, but there's the one option that requires a carry that most people can't make, and that's the one that gives you the easier approach shot. You know, the guy who could bomb it over everything and hit wedge to the green, he gets the good angle, and then the the ninety seven that can't do that and have to play out
to the one side. They have a really tough angle to the green. And if they can't hit a high furn with a fade, they can't hold the green.
Is it something I've noticed with your course is if you take the aggressive line, you don't always have the the You have to choose whether you want the better angle or the shorter shot.
It. Yes, that's a Pete die thing I learned from him.
Brian, you guys are touching on one of my favorite things about Thomas and that it goes back to his book again that one of the things I love about that book are his sketches. And you know, there are a lot of sketches of the work he'd done himself, but he's also got these theoretical hypothetical sketches of these wild you know, multiple route alternate fairway holes that are
oftentimes really tough to put into practice. But he had landscapes here that we're suited to that with the barankas a riviera in La and there's some of that at Lair and that's you know, the work that's being done now at bell Air on holes like the eleventh, which you just talked about, where you know Eric mentioned and you play out to the right side and you've got a shallow target, but when you stand on the tee,
that right side is what you see. So it's really comfortable just to play straight away from the tee, but you're gonna leave yourself a tougher angle, you know, to get to left side, which you mentioned Andy is blind over some trees over a hill and you're you know, there's a little bit of trouble down the left if you pull it, but taking that risk, you're opening up a better angle into the length of the green if
you're more comfortable with that. And the sixth hole is another one six and seven where some trees have been
removed and coming down the hill. In the seventh the green has been restored and it's almost a guitar pick shaped green, kind of triangular on the top of the hill where the hole can be tucked back left or back right, and you know, and arroyo is going to be restored down the center of the hole where you can play left or right of that and use these big hillsides on either side to find your angle to get at either of those back corners off the tee,
and you know those alternate route alternate fairway holes or something that I always think about with his work, and there aren't many of them. Riviera's got a few, LA's got a few, and bel Air's got a few, but I think they're fascinating. And then he took these theoretical, really complex multiple option holes and he found ways to adapt that into the landscape he was.
Working with here.
It would be like ad at Riviera for people that might know the Riviera Marcus, it's on TV every year.
Yep.
Kaya, it's more of a defined choice on that one.
You're like one side or the other.
Yeah. As we've been talking through this, I'm getting a little nostalgic because this is reminding me of kind of how I ended up here in the first place. Nineteen ninety seven, I was doing some of my own work. I had done a few golf courses on my own. Was very fortunate at the time. I was young, but there was a lot of work going on, maybe building four or five hundred courses a year, and they'd hire some young punk like me to do it. I was
sitting in my house. I ordered The Captain from Jeff Shackelford. I got in the mail. It was snowing in Saint Louis in February.
Look.
I read the book in one night, and I was like, this is really interesting. I just wasn't hadn't been exposed to any of that kind of stuff. And I literally got in my car the next morning and drove to California. I was like, yeah, I'm going out there, but now I did.
Look.
The tournament was at Riviera Good coming up that week, and I was like, I can get out there. I'm gonna go check that place out. So I drove out here. I went to Riviera for four days and just looked at that golf course and I was kind of like, holy crap, this is like I'm just my mind was sort of just absorbing, like a sponge as architecture. And I tried to actually come to bel Air and they wouldn't let me in the gate, so I didn't get
to see it. I saw a few holes through the fence, and after that I ended up driving up to Cyprus. I had read the Spirit of Saint Anne as well, and so I ended up driving up to Pebble Beach, and I went to Cyprus Point, went to Pebble Beach and looked at all that stuff. And at the time was at Pebble Beach, I was in a golf shop and the guy had golf archarchitecture in America. And I spent eight hundred and fifty dollars on a book, and unfortunately it came out the next year, a reprint from
fifty bucks, so that wasn't a really good investment. But anyway I read. I ended up reading that book as well, and that same trip, and that was in ninety seven, and that spring I finished up a golf course I was working on, and nine months later I was working for Tom at a patche stronghold. So George Thomas and this place and his work had a huge impact on what of getting me really an architecture and getting me out of my little comfort zone and getting into a better architecture.
Working with Tom.
Did your work change then after that?
Absolutely absolutely? I was already at the time I knew I needed. I was thinking different things, and I read Tom's Anatomy of the Golf Course, and I was thinking different things. I was working with my dad and I knew I was like, I'm not really on the same page.
I got to do something different.
And what was the worst thing that you were doing before that trip that you immediately ceased?
You know, I didn't wasn't doing anything terrible. I was learning as I.
Was the names of all these courses that you were doing on your own that we never hear about.
One's called Indian Springs. It's in the middle of nowhere in Illinois. One's been changed. But there's a few others. I'm not going to mention their names, but I'm trying to think what I was doing that I learned, you know, I think it was just less scale, less willingness to be bold. You know, you kind of were doing just, oh, we don't want to do too much, and that's kind of crazy, and let's just kind of keep it simple.
I don't know.
That's actually one of the thing. You've talked about a lot of things that you've learned from this golf course, and everybody's already kind of nailed the really key points. But one thing also is there's not a lot of bunkers here, but the scale is just humongous. The bunkers are just giant, and they were not afraid to go for it. The contractors here, these guys have been building a lot of golf courses and a couple of the
bunkers we've built. Blake and I were driving by a bunch of the crew this morning who were fixing some of the erosion from the rain, and they're like, I have never seen a bunker like that one on number seven. And they've been building golf courses for a long time and this, you know, this bunker's from nineteen twenty five and they've never seen anything like it.
That is a massive bunker. You got a question from Owen Calvin Smith, who actually wrote the bel Air right up on my website, and he's a golfer at USC, and he has a question about the eighth hole.
So in the.
Restoration, do you think replacing the pond left with original bunkering will make the whole more playable for most golfers but also make the whole less risk reward for better golfers.
We should point out before we answered this question that Owen plays for USC and bel Aira's home of the UCLA golf team, so there's probably some rivalry going on here.
He loves bel Air though, Okay, good. Good for him, and she shouldn't tell us. Coach Well.
One of the the most controversial thing about restoring the golf course was that there were two ponds that had been added to the golf course in the nineteen seventies, not even they weren't adding the Dick Wilson renovation. They were added later on the third haul of Part three and the eighth hole short part five. And you know my attitude toward them was, George Thomas didn't build ponds.
George Thomas wouldn't want an artificial pond with a bunch of Japanese goldfish and fake rock landscaping right next to a green. That would just not He's probably spinning in his grave thinking about that right now. So those ponds need to go. But now the third hole I didn't think would be controversial at all because there was a huge dynamic George Thomas bunker there originally, and we could put that back just as easily. So why would they really want the pond? And I turned out I was wrong.
We still had to fight pretty hard about that one. The eighth hole, I understood completely exactly this question that most good players were going to think.
Of that as well. You're taking out the.
One really scary hazard on this short part five that's otherwise going to be a really easy hole for us, and that will take you know, I don't like that term risk reward that he used. Everything in golf is risk reward, you know. But but you're taking out this scary hazard that makes us think twice about going for the green and if you don't have it, we're just going for it all the time. And you know, he phrases it a little wrong there. He says, there's you're
gonna put back a bunker left of the green. Thomas's bunker was short of the green on the left and to the left playing downhill and although fairway is draining down the hill and then right in front of the green, it goes behind this bunker that's short left and down into the start of this little arroyo that goes alongside the left of the green and down across the first fairway and connects into the arroyo that drains down between
the eighteenth hole and the first hole. So there, I mean, it was all part of this old drainage network.
So the arroyo will.
Be like almost like a like a native type area.
Not a native type of you know, we can't. We've decided we can't.
Like I mean, it started out as it's a drainage way, and it's certainly not a good place to be. If you hit it down in there, you're in the rough. You could have any old kind of lie possible. You know, it's not like hitting it into a pristine bunker that you could just get up and down from. You know, it could go It could go bad too, so you know, so we think that the whole now is you know you're taking a chance going over there, but you don't.
Know how much.
But but we're gonna you know, you're gonna have to take the chance, cause you can't. You're gonna look like you know, now, a golfer like your friend, he's so long, he just is hitting the mid iron or short iron in there all the time. So it wasn't the old hole. Wasn't that risk reward for him.
I will say though, that that feature I talk the course I play the most in Chicago. We have a short par five and it's got two giant trees right that frame kind of the green and if I'm not right in the middle of the faraway, I like if I hit a good drive, I've got a mid iron even some days a wedge, But like if I'm not right in the middle of the fairway, I never go for it. I lay it out and I have a lob wedgeon. You know, every time it's easy. It's like
I always have been, like, those trees aren't there. They deserve to get like take them out, take them out. And they're like, it'll make it easier. But it doesn't make it easier because when I'm in trouble and I then all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, I'm going to go for it. And then there's all these big bunkers, like green side bunkers around and if you end up in the back left bunker, which nobody can get to except for somebody like me who can hit it over
the trees, that's the worst place. Like you'll make six on a part five from the back bunker and two because you'll hit it and you can't keep it on the green. So by opening up the hole, it entices more people to go for it, and more people get in.
Trouble, and more people get in trouble.
And you know you said the key thing that question, the question we get the most often and renovation is isn't that going to make the hole easier? You know, you get it about everything you do. If you expand the green back to all the little corners it had, well you've made the green bigger. Is didn't that make the hole easier? And no, because the pin isn't always in the center of the green. If you take out a tree, well that's making the hole easier. Now there's not a
tree in my way. Yeah, but now you're going to try to hit a hit a five urn in the green out of the rough and make ten instead of just punching it back to the fairway and hitting the green in three. You know this aphole that we're talking about. Yeah, now the good players they have to go for it.
There. The other guy's going to go for it. It's short enough they.
Have to go for it, but they could still get themselves in trouble. You don't want to miss that green right playing, you know, chipping off the hill to a green draining the other way toward the toward the baranka. They had to make the green. They made the green flatter when they built the pond, so if you missed right,
you wouldn't chip into the water. Although I guess when they got the green really fast in the in the ameter or the walker in the amateur qualifying rounds, there were some guys that chipped into the water because it was that fast. But you know, you don't want to miss right, and you don't want to miss down in this baranka on the left, and if you think you've got to go for it, it's not going to be an easy hole. It's not going to be like, oh, I hit it in the water and ruin my day.
But it's still people will make six on it and be doubly mad because they think it's an easy hole now and they should always make four or five.
See.
I think that's like one of the best parts about golf is like when you walk off a green and you're like, how the hell did I just fogy this hole?
Right?
You know it's but then the other side of that is nobody's going to make nine anymore.
The poor members they did to balls in the pond. That kind of goes away. I guess they can still, they can make a mess from the left to.
I'm underestimating them, but but it's you know, that kind of stuff shouldn't happen as much.
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