Welcome back to the final part of the latest episode of The Yoke with Doak. If you've missed Part one or Part two of our discussion, be sure to check them out on our feed or on our website. In Part three, we continue our discussion on George Thomas bel Air and golf architecture as a whole. If you've missed any of the previous editions of The Yoke with Doak, we have a dedicated page on the website under the podcast tab where you can go perus, ask questions, and
check out the previous episodes. So, without further ado, here is part three of our podcast with Tom Eric Iverson, Blake Conant, Kai Golby and Brian Schneider and enjoy. Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back.
But you don't hats the yult.
And the famously candid dope doesn't pull any punchet.
How do I make natural looking contour? Hire the biggest pool in the village and tell him to make it flat?
First?
Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years.
Rob Collins, fellow architect. He wants to know what have you found most useful? And this is a kind of a team answer here from what the club had, what you've discovered on your own to getting this place back.
And I'll start with one thing. In restoration work, there's it's not really public disagreement, but there there is a big dichotomy between people that think that you should try to build the course toward the original plans versus toward whatever photographic evidence you have of the golf course that got built. Because nothing's ever built exactly to the plants.
And depending on who the architect is, you can, you know, like with Donald Ross, sometimes you can make the case Weill Ross was barely ever there, so you should work to the plans instead of whatever the stupid guys that built the golf course actually did. But when there's an architect, when there's when there is an architect who did spend
time on it, which George Thomas clearly was. First of all, there's no plans, I mean other than other than like a plan for the development and where the golf holes were and where the lots are around it. There's no detailed plans of these holes that I've ever seen drawn. Jeff Sackelford's book has some really cool drawings of some of the holes that had been lost here, like the second and the ninth that we've restored, But those are
Jeff's drawings, they're not George time Is drawings. Thomas didn't do drawings of these holes anywhere that we found or that the club had in their archives. So we're you know, we're going with the photographic evidence that we have because we couldn't go from the plans even if we wanted to.
But I would make even if I had George Thomas his own drawing of the second all if it was the before he built it, I would go with what he built because in my work, the difference between whatever drawing I do at the beginning and what we wind up with. We're trying to make it better than the drawing. That's what That's why we spend all our time out here. Otherwise we just hand the drawing to somebody and say do that.
As what we talked about in the first podcast we had is that so much of your job is in the third dimension, and that's what can't be captured in drawings or photos.
It's hard to capture in the photos too, and that's what these guys will speak to.
Yeah, had both Kai and Blake can can expand on this even farther. But most places you find old bunker sand, And you know that that's kind of that's a fun just kind of a fun part of the process. You asked Kai in the in the first part of this steal, you know, what's the most interesting thing you ever dug out by accident? In Some of the most interesting things you find on purpose are just the edges of these
enormous bunkers. And Kai also kind of noticed early on that that ended up being a pretty consistent trend, is finding steel pipe around some of these features, which would have been kind of the original routing of the irrigation around the edges of the greens or the edges of the bunkers.
And yeah, you know, when you're digging a bunker and you run into a steel pipe, you've probably gone too far, because that was the pipe was around the bunker.
Yeah, through the middle of the Yeah.
Occasionally that's that's when I'm ripping a pg A tow our of course, and I'm rating it after and I'm like delete this is when you hit a pipe here, just bringing that dirt right back down right.
Yeah, But it's a good indicator and and and it also it's just another piece of evidence that there's never one. There's there's never one. Go to. This is all the information you need to do this. It's always an assembly of stuff that you find some holes. We have great straight down aerial photos of three or four different years, and everything's clear as a bell, and other things are There's there's no good straight down aerial photo of number
five because it's off in the corner. You know, the best. There's a We have a ton of shots that are taken from a bit of an angle, but the one straight that we have that little corner is pretty fuzzy, but that happens to be the one that we have good ground level shots of with golfers in it also
to give it scale. So you find the bunker sand at a certain depth, and then you kind of chase that bunker sand up a little slope to where the face was, and then all of a sudden that kind of drives the face to be at this height, and then you know, twenty five feet to the right is this little kind of ridgeline coming off the hillside that you just put the dirt there, and the whole thing just kind of folds into place.
I have a question, because I just got back here today and I haven't seen the work that they've done at number five yet. Did you find the old bunker sand on that.
Hole, the bunker that's on the right, tucked up against the slope, because the rest of it had just been a smear to move the dirt.
To a lot of what we're talking about, I mean, some of this is archaeology. And the reason it works is because when they did work on these golf course at a later date, a lot of times they were just lazy and they whatever new version they built, they just brought in trucked in fill and buried everything and built over the top of the old thing. They didn't take all this. If they'd taken all the sand out of the bunkers, we wouldn't know how deep the bunkers are.
But it's still down there three or four feet and all you got to do is dig and find it. But when there's a green like five, which when they take something away to make that new green for the back, now we got nothing, you know, we don't have We can't find where the old bunkers where, we can't find the elevation of the old green. We have to go back and look at pictures taken from ground level. It's all we've got because there's nothing physical left of it.
There was there was old bunker saying in the big front bunker two and yeah, that right bunker gives you an indication of where the green level would have been.
Right.
So a lot of it's piecing that stuff together. And then honestly, like thirty minutes that you spend when you first get to a hole is trying to relocate the exact spot of ground level photo may have been taken from. So you're walking around like trying to get yourself oriented. The other thing, and I don't know if it was Ryan Yoans or Brian Sullivan who found all the old obliques, but those have been very helpful to get the third dimension as far as man, this sand was really flashed
in the area. You sometimes can't tell that, so it gives you a sense of how big something was, how big a contour was. The other thing, though, is like I feel like Catherine Hepburn or Bob Newhart has just a stash of ground level photos somewhere in their attic of here is Bob Newhart playing around a golf you know, like nineteen sixty and it's you know, oh, that's nobody came forward with those with that treasure trove, that little white buffalo of photos.
Right, And that's that's the the big danger. The biggest danger in restoration projects is as soon as you get done, somebody digs up a bunch of old photos and shows you did it wrong. Which that's what happened at Crystal Downs and Crystal Downs in the eighties before I joined they they brought Jeff Cornish in to look at it and suggest renovations at restoration. And you know, it was a Mackenzie course, so Jeff assumed that you know, the bunkers had capes and bays and these these shaped to
them like Cyprus Point does. And like somebody said earlier, you know, you tend to find what you want to find. So you know, they dug around a little bit in the sand, and it's harder and Crystal Downs because it's basically all sand, so it's not it's not so easy to find where the old bunker sand is because the whole place is sand, so you can't belle erits clay, and when you're digging through clay and all of a sudden, they're saying, you know what, you've just found it crystal downs.
You can't really do that. But they probed around, and so they made a bunch of bunkers with capes and bays. And about ten years after they did that, some member found a home movie of playing the golf course in nineteen thirty two, not every hole, but most of them, and they, you know, they took the movie apart and did freeze frame. There's what number one green looked like. And those bunkers, those bunkers were all wrong, you know, because Perry Maxwell had built the golf course for Mackenzie,
and it looked like Perry Maxwell. You know, it looked like Perry Maxwell bunkers with kind of blobby shapes and rough edges, but not the not the capes and bays. So much so they you know, they went back and redid it all over again and got it dead to nuts right now. But you know, yeah, we we spent a lot of time asking we got bel Air to pay a friend of ours to do some research and dig through every place that we could find. Out here, they're asking me to shout out Tommy Nacarato, who does
who does that kind of research? Especially for courses in the LA area and as a huge George Thomas Nutt and and you know he's been to like the UCLA libraries to know what aerial photos exist of all these
golf courses. And you know, without people like that, I mean, we can't do that, you know that that would be crazy for you know, you know Jack Nicholas and Tom Fazio they're not doing that, and neither of I I mean, we've got to rely on you know, we rely on the clubs to some level, and more and more of them because they've done a club history book in the last ten or twenty years. They've got some good stuff,
but nearly always. You know, if we ask around and we dig around, you know, we we can find something else that the club hasn't seen yet. And in this at this club, by far, the coolest thing that we talked about the May West Hole at the beginning of this that it was a part four with a green kind of tucked up in the corner to a big mound in front of the green that made it blind, and then a hillside coming down from the right that's
kind of another mound. So it was the May West Boosoms And there's a picture of it in George Thomas's book, but there's only one picture, and from the angle the picture is taken, you can't really see the green because it's behind the mounds. So we had no idea what the green looked like.
You know.
We had an aerial photo that showed a rough shape of the green, but we didn't know how high, we didn't know what contra was in it or anything else. And Tommy Macarato found a picture from somewhere taken from the thirteenth t looking back, so you could see the mound come down in back into the green and how the little notch that between where the man came back and where the left side of the green was that fell off. So we knew how to restore it. And
I'm glad. I'm glad we found that photo before instead of two years from now after we're done and got it wrong.
Probably a good piece of advice for any GREENS committing members how can you help, is just just go drove around the college libraries and try and find any kind of old photo. I got messaged by somebody and I said, you should just try and find as many old photos as you can.
Absolutely, you know, I've been trying to find. I can't believe, since we started this job, I've been trying to find like a really old scorecard of the golf course because the teams don't show up quite as well in the aerial photo is as everything else. You know, they weren't as well defined as they are now, and they so you can't depending on what time of year the pictures taken, you can't see the actual outline of the tea and
exactly where they were. So to know exactly where all the original teas were, you'd really like to have a scorecard that measures it off, and I can't. You know, I've assed around and the oldest scorecard I've got so far as from the sixties or seventies. It's before you know, it's not even it's after Dick Wilson with all the stars.
That somebody has to have a scorecard.
Somebody has to have it. And just the other day, the very first time I came to Beller in nineteen eighty, I played golf with Eddie Marins, who's the pro emeritus now. But while we were waiting until of course got quiet so we could play, we went and had lunch and the Men's grill and his former boss, Joe Novak, had lunch with us, and Joe Novac spent like an hour over lunch telling me how various architects had ruined Bellair, you know, took the Maywest pull out and all this
other stuff. He was, you know, and I didn't realize until this year when there's a there's a like a case in the in one of the hallways of the clubhouse that has a little display about Joe Novak. And Joe Novak was the first pro at bell Air. He was the pro from when it opened in nineteen twenty seven until six in the sixties when he retired and became the pro emeritus and Eddie Merin's take took over.
So they've only ever had three pros. But I didn't realize that that guy who was telling me all those stories, he'd been there right from the beginning.
That's that's like, was it oak Mount's on their third pro now that Bob Ford retired. It's most a lot of the iconic places have so few pros in terms of being out here. What would you rate as Thomas's best trait as an architect? This is an answer for the whole group after Tom.
For me, it's not one to do the same thing over again, you know, there's not like bell Air has or Riviera has a version of the dan hole the fourth or it's a longer hole than the famous one at North Beric. It's to twenty five. There's a huge bunker short of it, and depending on I mean, he actually had an option to lay up short of the bunker and hits straight in over that instead of playing the board off the right as an option if you couldn't, you know, if you couldn't hit it to thirty and
hit it on the green on the fly. But he didn't do that. He didn't try to build one at bell Air too, He didn't try to build one at La Country Club too. He sort of like, okay, that's my version of that. Now I'm going to go do something different on the next golf course. And just like Brian was saying, I mean, he spent a lot more time dreaming up these conceptual things and then trying to find a place for something like that on the new courses that he was doing than most other architects.
I know.
Part of that is because he did so few golf courses, you know, I mean you get to a point where you're too busy to do that. I mean, I don't really draw a bunch of theory. You know, when I was twenty I drew all kinds of theoretical golf holes. Now I just go out on a site and look at the visa land and try to think, well, what will fit with this? But you know, he really did. He thought way outside of the box, and he was
not afraid to go do it. But he wasn't you know, he didn't have this formula down because he only you know, he only built, however, many golf courses in his life, and he didn't want to do the same thing over it.
Brian, I'm thinking about his bunkers, and we've talked a bit about.
This is great because it answer is a question from another listener.
Is that right?
The style of the bunkers stands out obviously in the scale. I mean there's some massive bunkers at bel Air in the other work he's done everywhere else, but there aren't that many of them.
And to that point, when I came to start work, what was the number seventy seven bunkers that were here? Seventy seven or seventy nine or something like that that were on the golf course a year ago today. George Thomas built forty two bunkers on the golf course and you know they just kept adding more and some of the holes, like number ten has four bunkers around and now I had none. He built these bunkers at this huge scale, like somebody was saying earlier. But he didn't
build four of them around the green. He just built one there.
It is.
Get over that and you're good. Eighteen as a humongous bunker in front of it. They'd added bunkers on both sides of it after the fact, you know so. And it has to do with the style too, you know, his style now is famous that you could say it's the thing that you know, depending on who you're talking to, Gill Hants or Bill cor or me or somebody else. You know, we all build these cool bunker shapes and you could say it come from Mackenzie and the sand
belt of Australia. You could say it comes from George Thomas. They're all slightly different versions of a similar style. And you know, I remember when Gilhants worked for me and we were trying we were going to build black Forest and wanted to build bunkers like that. He and I brought him out here for a week and we went to Cyprus Point in San Francisco Golf Club and Riviera and La Country Club and paste off how big those bunkers were and how far the keep stuck into them
and stuff, so we could do similar stuff. But that style that Tom has had and that really wild look, it was like it was meant to be looked at one or two bunkers at a time, not four overlapping ones. You know. So the visuals on this golf course changed tremendously when they started adding bunkers. I mean it just got way too busy. And so the one bunker with all the things going on, that looked good, but when you had three or four of them, it just looked crazy.
I imagine that one bunker loses its impact because sometimes you hear it with almost everything, less is more, But having that only one bunker is pose a three. Like you look at three bunkers and if there's one short, there's one left and there's one right. And what I
say to myself is, well, just hit a fucking good shot. Literally, what I say to myself whenever I have trouble on both sides, and like when there's when there's just one the strategy change where you're like, just don't hit it there, and all of a sudden you miss.
Right or you know, just just just the way you said it, don't hit it there. For most golfers, that's where they're going because you've made them think about there and how bad that would be. And you know you're a good enough player to get over that and just miss wide left if the bunker's right. Yeah, but but yeah, I mean, you do these things get It's not just the visuals, it's like it does impact how you play the whole. The visual impacts how you play the whole.
You know, you're scared away from something and you see some open you know, it's like run to daylight. You see some space over there that looks like you're not gonna get any trouble if you're over there, I'll just miss out there a little more. And then a lot of times, what I've learned about bel air is a lot of times you're out there and now you've got a downhill chip shot that you just cannot stop anywhere near the all at all. That looked like a good place to be.
It's not over there is usually worse than the big bunker.
Yeah, to that point.
I mean he only built forty some bunkers at bel Air, but they're they're all relevant. I mean, you put them in the right places, and there's still irrelevant today that The second hole is a great example. There was a massive central fairry bunker with lots of fairway left kind of banking off of hillside and a lot of ferry
out to the right. But over the years tree has been planted up the left and the bunker's gone away in the center, and the hole became, you know, a third less wide, and you've lost the options of playing around this thing that was really relevant. And you know now there's a bunker ferry bunker out in the right that was added that was more penal than you know, something that made you think about where you want to hit the ball. And you know, Riviera is a great example.
I was telling the story earlier, earlier today. I worked there in nineteen ninety seven for the superintendent and in nineteen ninety eight the golf course held the Senior US Senior Open. I don't know how many bunkers are a Rivierra but after the first round to play, there were only two bunkers in the golf course that didn't need to be raped, which meant that almost every bunker on that golf course for the world's best seniors was in play.
And you know, that was a golf course that was built in the nineteen twenties and the bunkers haven't been moved around there. They're exactly where George Thomas put him. Some teas have been added, but every boat, you know, every bunker he put on that golf course is still relevant seventy years after he built it, and there aren't
that many. And to me, that's that's pretty pressive. And the restored bel air is going to be more of the same and it's going to be really interesting because trees have been taken out, with has been restored and a lot of those options are going to come back. That one single bunker is responsible for a whole lot of thought and interest.
Just to kind of expand on what Brian's saying, what you had said before, Andy, when you said, oh, it's surrounded by bunkers, I just say, just hit a good shot. I haven't played golf with you. I've heard you're a good player, But that's great for you. You can hit a five iron two hundred yards in the air and stop it on that green. But what's cool about what these guys did is there was one bunker, and it might be massive and scary, but there was a way
for everybody else to play around it. And I just think that's why these golf courses are so cool. And I'm sure you've talked about in your podcast in the past, but the Golden.
Age courses were cool.
They weren't They gave everybody a chance.
Also, it's just like what we were talking about with the backside of that bunker, where a low running shot could use that to run it into the.
The ground option was actually an option in golf back then. You know, everyone still used it.
The good news about California too, is that it doesn't rain much, so the ground game is actually in effect most days.
You know what's cool about George Thomas, You tell me what you learned from one thing I thought was cool you come out to California, not being from here. I committed her. I think the landscape, the natural landscape out here is just fantastic and gorgeous, and every golf course out here seems to try as hard as they can not to have a California landscape, and George Thomas seemed to really embrace just the coolness of California. As Tom said,
it was pretty wild and rugged back then. But I think with bel Air, we're bringing some of the California landscape back by getting rid of some of the kind of English garden effect that was covering it all up.
Another aspect of just the so many fewer bunkers in combination with getting rid of a bunch of trees. You know, an element that you referred to Andy that I think really actually aids better players is just is just more kind of subliminal information, uh, you know, tree left, tree right, bunker left, bunker right, whatever it is. You know, you're just kind of splitting the difference and finding the safe spot in the middle. The narrower these golf courses get.
And one thing I've learned over the years is the more you know, people think it's you're making things easier when you take trees away, When you take away all that extra information about where where you need to go, you need to think about it more, which is that's not good, you know, just in terms of having you know, hitting a successful shot, and the other thing is that it strips away some of the feeling of of you know, a little bit of safety where your ball is gonna
end up. I mean, we talked about Tom and I were just kind of walking around left of seventeen green and there was kind of a bunker off the back left side and a big pine tree kind of at the left corner of the green, and it's a long, hard hole, and you know, those two things helped you feel like, well, if you if you kind of tug one left, it's going to catch the tree and fall near the tree and you're kind of under it, but you can kind of scrape one on the green and
probably get up and down, or you're in the bunker. And you know, we're talking for good players. Thinking here those guys that come up from UCLA and you know, six feet below the level of the green and a bunker twenty feet from the hole, they're thinking of making that one. And whereas a mid handicapped member doesn't like being in a bunker, take all that crap away. You know, Tom made the comment, the one thing to make this golf course as hard as you'd want is just momore
and now it's just a grass slope. If you miss left, you're all the way down on the other side of eighteen t in or near this baranka, and who knows what you're gonna make from down there.
And we didn't go to that level on that, You know, we could, we could mow a lot more ground down. Yeah, that's like, but let the ball get way away from the green. Kind of crazy. We didn't go there. But you know what you're talking about is what what I used to hear a lot in terms of definition was, Yeah, was the name of the game back then. You know, it's like the tree to the more in the bunker, the tree to the left of the green is like, you don't ever be left of there. This is kind
of holding you in. You started inside that and you're okay, but you're not getting on. You don't have that anymore. You're like, look at now you're looking at the edge of the green and how precarious it is and how bad it is if you miss it left. It's a totally different feel.
Yeah, it just feel there's just a lot more negative thoughts that can creep in when all that stuff is stripped away. So it's amazing how much more intimidating that hole is with just one feature, just that bunker well away from the green. But it's freaky back there, and you gotta be careful.
I firmly believe that when an architect stimulates thought, that's when he wins, because as soon as I think, that's when doubt am I making it? Is this the right choice?
And once.
Yeah, and you're thinking about that exactly, it gets you out of your commit Like you watch these tour players and they take forever over shots, but it's all about them getting fully committed and just making a swing. And as soon as you enter something that stimulates thought, that's where doubt comes in. And that's where having all these options and taking trees out make it more playable for the regular player and much much more difficult for the good player.
And that's when I worked for Pete Dye. We were working on the plans for the stadium of course at PJA West, and I've printed this quote in one or two of my books, and Perry Dye was not happy with me the first time he used it because it was, you know, it was something his dad just said to me casually while we were working on something, but I thought it deserved its place in history. We were trying to we're trying to work on things for the stadium
course that the players were really uncomfortable with. Like at the time, they didn't carry four wedges. They just carried pitching wedges and sand wedge. So they did not like leaving themselves sixty eighty yards because they didn't have a club for that. In fact, because Pete started building so many holes where that was bad. You know where that was a bad place, but you wound up wanting to go there because he wouldn't let you lay back to
the hundred yard mark and hit your full wedge. We put something in the way there, so you had to like either lay way back or get it up where you were uncomfortable. And he did it so often that they started carrying more wedges to deal with it because he wouldn't let them play the way they played everywhere else. But anyway, just casually talking about what we were doing, just he just kind of blurted out, if you get those dudes thinking they're in.
Trouble, exactly, that's the way every golf every golf course for pro should be, Like longer and narrower, is just you know, you're telling them where to go.
Well, and what these guys were talking about with bunkers and taking trees away that you asked what we appreciate about George Thomas, and it's that his landing areas are staggered on the parallel holes. So some people may say, if you take away these bunkers or these trees, you're creating a safety issue. But like on six and seven, how they paralleled the t shot on six would not
interfere with people playing on seven, and vice versa. The landing areas aren't next to each other, like the landing area for twelve is not interfering with the landing area on fourteen. So to Tom's point of the canyons are too narrow for what we would today think could fit two holes the way he yeah, that's how he staggered those landing areas was and now it's being revealed was part of the genius of this genius routing.
To go back to your point about the lack of definition. I remember after the US Open at Aaron Hills, an interview with Jason Day after his last round, he was asked about the width of the golf course and he flat out said the width made it harder for him
to focus on a target off the tea. He really struggled off the tea because the landing areas weren't well defined that week and he wasn't used to that, and he had a hard time focusing on where he should hit the ball off the tea, which I thought was fascinating. And these fairways were the widest they've seen in years, and that made it harder for him too to play well off the tee. And it was refreshing to hear
him say that that happened to you. In the first tea at Saint Andrews, I stayed in play by three inches.
Another interesting quote from the US Open that is relevant to this conversation was, you know, they had that whole overspray debate and they had this really thick, thick fescue and they cut it down last minute, and they Jordan Spieth had his press conference and they asked him about it and he goes, well, actually, in some ways it's worse because your ball gets in there and all of a sudden you think you have a chance instead of
just chipping out. And you know, this goes back to our conversation about taking trees out and that idea you have you're in a grove of trees, it's just a punch out. But like when you're in rough and you got a clear shot to the green, you're going for it no matter what, and like and not just that, it's also the flip side of that is you take the chance to hit a great shot away.
And as long as what it's requiring is a great shot. You know, if what you're doing is making it so everybody can hit the green, no, you don't want to do that. But if you're giving a guy a chance, a chance, but a difficult shot to play out of rough, over, bunkers, whatever, and he pulls it off, that's a big part of what you're trying to do in golf course architecture. And putting a bunch of stuff in the way so nobody can do that is ridiculous.
With our crew here tonight, we would be very shortsighted and not talk at least a little bit about Billy Bell, William Bell, George Thomas's construction guy, Kyle Mackie, what have you learned from William Bell's golf courses in his style and is he is he underrated.
I wouldn't say I've seen enough of mister Bell's work to really pass judgment on it. I can only speak to you know what I've learned from working on bell Air. But we have we have distinct different years of aerial photographs. And you know, the original bunkers that Thomas built were really nothing. They were the scale was the same, they
were enormous, and they had some larger landforms involved. But the really you know, the really wacky crazy stuff came about when when Billy Bell got involved in in kind of work, you know, exerted his influence on on what
was going on. So that's the one thing that I noticed on this project in particular right away was just that from the original, you know, the earliest photographs of the place that they were really simple, large landforms, and the the you know, the detail came a little bit later and came in spades when when Billy Bell was here.
And you have worked on one other of course, where Billy Bell did bunkers in the San Francisco Golf Club where he never gets any credit, but same thing tilling Hatfs version early nineteen twenties. Scales, right, shapes are different, simpler time in the late twenties, Billy Bell went up there for a little while, and those are the bunkers that you see all the pictures of, and they've the famous little Tilly hole has got famous when Billy All built the bunker.
In front of it. We'll start calling it little Billy.
Yeah, it's a little Billy mumfree so deep, it seems like you know, George Thomas Bunkering and Mackenzie with Robert Hunter Bunkering are revered as the greatest bunkering of all time and they all happen to be in California. What is it about California that inspired this bunker?
It doesn't rain much? In answer? Yeah, I mean that's that is huge, and you know it works in the sand Belt to Melbourne too, they're raising all those bunkers. There's two things going on in the sand Belt to Melbourne. It doesn't rain much and the it's here too. Bermuda grass holds the edges much better. You know, the roots
go really deep. The reason they can have a bunker at raw Melbourne with just a practically vertical edge is because there's so much root structure going down that you can just take a spade shovel and chop it down and not worry about all the eroding and contaminating the
bunker with a bunch of bad material. It holds its shape and then the rain doesn't erod it and mess it all up either, So you know, so you don't see bunkers, you know, if you have the same bunk If they try to build the same bunkers in Scotland, they're all blown away in a year. I mean, you know, the biggest problem abandoned dunes by far is how much wind erosion there is in the bunkers. It's Pacific dunes is just crazy. How much time and effort they spend.
Of course they don't have to spend time and effort on a lot of other things, so they can put the labor to that instead of some other places if they'd done things differently. But there is no question that it worked. The reason you see it here and in Melbourne to a lesser extent, is because it doesn't rain very much and you can build those shapes and not have to send the crew out to fix all the bunkers every time it rains, because it doesn't matter. It
doesn't rain enough to make a difference. But when you try to take these shapes and build them everywhere else around the world. In Asia, that doesn't work.
You have a.
Tropical storm every afternoon in the summer. It's just it's impossible to get those shapes.
Andy wonder that you mentioned your question about Billy Bell. I've worked a couple of courses out here that Billy Bell was involved in, and they're all very cool. But I think what it really boils down to with Billy Bell is that it takes more than one person to
build a good golf course. And Billy Bell was helping George Thomas, he was helping Killing Hast and Tom's name might be on the golf course, but there's a lot of people involved in any golf course that happens it's a good golf course, there's more than one person that had a hand in it.
And it takes time to I mean, one of the things we were looking at today was all the barancas over at La Country Club and how they were naturalized when they did stuff, and and I mean they had just go works the same way I do. He is a ton of guys out there who are talented and trying to do cool stuff, and they're working really hard on all this artistic stuff around the edges. The issue
is you can go too far. One of the things that makes all these golf courses really good is time and somebody involved over the longer term to work out all those details. No matter no matter how good everybody is here, the really good golf courses are going to get better over time and the other ones are going to get worse over time because of who the superintendent is and who his crew is, and to some extent, who the green chairman is. But they're either good at
that stuff or they're not good at it. And I guarant every single golf course I've done has either gotten better or got worse. They don't stay the same because they're living, growing things and there's other people involved. So we didn't just go over there by ourselves. We went over there with the new superintendent here who used to be the assistant superintendent over there, so he understands it really well. And you know, we're kind of thinking, let's
not overkill this and think overthink it too hard. We could try to get everything perfect by the fourth of July next year when it opens, but really, you know, when we want it perfect is the next fifty years and he'll get there. Let's just not make it too
complicated for him to get there, you know. Let's let's get everything grasped and where he doesn't have to worry about it washing away first and then start to work on some of that stuff instead of instead of doing all these edges now and then having them all go crazy the first time it rings.
Yeah, it's hard to believe. George Thomas and Billy Bell spend a bunch of time working out how they wanted the bunkers. You know, how the Arroyals were going to look really cool on opening day.
Yeah, don't Friday.
We have just we have definitive photographic evidence. They didn't look cool on opening day. They look cool two or three years after opening day, after Billy Bell was back tinkering around with him.
So when was that Because the course opened in twenty seven, But when was Billy Bell here redoing the bunkers.
Well it's the course. I think technically it opened in twenty seven, but it was built in twenty five and they were playing it before twenty seven, and so our earliest pictures are in nineteen twenty five, and then we have another set from twenty seven, and it's it's it's in that, you know, it's different than what we're doing now. What we're doing now, we're doing eight months work and then bang, they're going to open it to five hundred members.
Back then, it was a year and a half or two years of growing and you played a little golf on it, but it wasn't really ready for the onslaught because they didn't have irrigation systems like we do now, and they you know, it took a lot longer to grow in a golf course and get it all right, and so they had a lot more time to tinker around with it. I mean, all we would really need is one summer when the bermuda grass was growing so we could see how everything reacted and we could go
fix some of that. But they want to be open.
Then, so that's the job of the super right.
Well, it's not just his day. You know, we'll be involved in the next couple of years. But importantly he's around here now we're when we're still working on it, so you know by the time by the time we're out of here, he's been working with us for a while and you understand the same things that we all talk about every night, and he's the one who's going to be watching out for that in the long term.
Eric, that's gotta be a really important facet of any restoration. Is it super and the relationship there right?
Yeah, I think it goes It can go beyond the super to the membership. You know, the I like to say, you know, when we're talking about golf course architecture, you know, we're not curing cancer out there. It's we're making a field to play for a fun game. But a lot of the nuance can be lost if people just try to think about it in terms of what's there and what do you want it to look like? You know, you get that all the time. What do you want this to look like? You know, what should this be like?
What should that look like? And it's less about what it looks like and more about how it works and how it looks will follow. If it's well built, holes on good ground, how it looks will kind of take care of itself. So more importantly than having a superintendent that quote unquote knows what you want it to look like, it's more important that they understand how it's supposed to work and understand how maybe more important what you don't want it to look like. But anything past that qualification
is okay. And I think the best clubs in the world have a membership that get that too. They don't need the superintendent to kind of tell them what what it ought to look like. They're their own best police. I think Tom could probably speak to.
But a lot of them they've grown up with it because it's always been well managed. I mean Raal Melbourne. You know, Mackenzie was famously in Melbourne for six weeks and he built one hall at Roll Melbourne and then he left in the but the superintendent there mc Morecambe and Alex Russell, the club champion, they're the ones who actually built the golf course and then we were talking about golf pros here and now there's been three in
however many years. Raw Melbourne's had four superintendents since the day they built it. Morecambe he was there for twenty years. His assistant was Claude Crockford. Crockford was there for thirty years. They're the ones who worked out what it looks like. And everybody and every member at Roy Melbourne that we deal with now they get it because they've seen those guys work exactly.
I mean, all the best, the very best places in the world have the membership really is fifty percent along on the education of what their golf course is all about, and you know who built it and what's important and what's not important. And that's a big part of it. So you know, that'll be a big part of bel Air as well, is getting people to kind of re embrace not just that George Thomas his name was on it, but that this is what is so great about it, and getting them to understand that.
Like them being able to say, look at how few bunkers there are out here, but how well placed they are.
Yeah, And and not everybody, really, frankly, not everybody. People are busy, not everybody has time to delve into golf course architecture. But I think most golfers just kind of play regularly and you've liked golf, you just kind of know it when you see it's like, damn, that just feels right. This just feels so much better. Can't really put my finger on it, but yeah, this is better.
And then the ones that are a little more keen to like dig into it, they'll they'll ask questions and learn and there's that whole faction too, that are sometimes they can sometimes they can be a hassle too. They get a little too involved. But you know you want you want an educated membership.
Yeah, let's uh, let's get out of here with some overrated underrateds. Who's who's ready for overrated?
Underrated? I'll go this too often? Let them do this all right?
First? Can I just go underrated or do I have to do both? You gotta pick.
He's gonna he's gonna give you a particular thing.
I'm gonna I'm gonna give you one one topic. You say overrated, there's no okay, no properly rated Stanley Thompson.
It has to be either over or under I think I think underappreciated, underrated in the ah, you know, in the in the grand scheme of golf and just the the average golfer in the in the world has never heard of Stanley Thompson. But I think in architecture circles he's very much appreciated, and so I would say underrated.
That's a good parallel to George Thomas, probably for America, because that I mean George Thomas has his small body of work in California and two Americans. I suppose Stanley Thompson had his relatively small body of work in Canada, which he was more prolific than Thomas. But you know, I think his best work would stand up to Thomas's as well. Just isn't nearly as well known to Americans because Riviera is on TV every year and Capilano's not.
I forgot to put who asked this question, but it was probably a Canadian.
Yeah, half America's probably think Stanley Johnson was a right winger for the Blackhawks or something.
Stanley Thompson might be overrated in Canada. Canada's gonna hate me now, all right. Overrated, underrated, false.
Fronts, overrated. Oh, it's one of the things we've been dealing with a bell Air. I mean this, this, this topography is steeper than it looks. You know, you're playing up canyons. They're all draining out the bottom and like the eighteenth hole it was when I got the topa map, so it's like, man, that's a hard hoole. It's only four hundred yards. It's like, oh, it's seventy five feet
up hill. I had no idea it was that much uphill, because you're just because you're looking in the canyon, and you don't you think you're looking down because you're looking at the bottom of the canyon. You don't realize how much the thing is climbing up the hill. So you get fooled. You get fooled a lot. Now I'm trying to remember what the question with the actual question was here, Well,
the false front. So so when you're playing uphill that much, you can't see the surface of the green because the green is thirty feet above you. And you know, in the old days the green was pitched back toward the fairway on the same almost the same slope as the hill you're going up in it, you could see a little more of it. But now the green has to be flatter because the greens are faster and it's way up above you. So you can't see a part of
the green surface. And the only thing you can do if you want the golfer in the fairway to see green, you give him a false front. The problem of that is the part that he sees he can't land you know, you can't land on that's not a good place to be. I just I don't like him because it's you know, you try to make things more visible than that, so you don't need a false front. And if you've got a lot of uphill approach shots, for God's sake, try to vary them so you just don't have to use
that same thing over and over again. We dealt with that at Stone Eagle, and we've been trying to figure it out here. How do you know, how do we keep this true to Thomas? But you can't really actually see very much of that green surface from the fairway like you would have in the old days. But we can't have it be that Steed.
This is maybe the only time I'll get to say this in my life. But I think Tom stole my answer. I also think false fronts are overrated in the way they're utilized. I think I talked about Hollywood Golf Club, Like the way the sixth Green and the tenth Green there uses a two or three foot sort of roll in the front as a false front is very effective, and using that is under and probably underutilized.
Yeah, Tom was talking in the context of uphill holes, but you know, Blake just named two great examples. But Saint Andrews has a bunch of holes where there's a really abrupt contour right at the front of the green, and then it's relatively flat beyond that. But if the pin is cut close to that contour at the front, negotiating that up and over is a really tricky shot and a really fun shot because a lot of times it requires you to play something along the ground as
opposed to flying in the air. You know, I don't know if that qualifies as a false front necessarily, but you know there is short grass mode down over the front of that contour, and you're seeing putting surface along that face.
Yeah, fourteen seventeen greens that st Andrews are too. I'm not saying those are overrated.
Yeah, yeah, I'm just in a context where you're on flatter ground and it's not an uphill hole. Visibility is not the issue. There's just a really abrupt contour at the front or you're mowing putting surface down. To me, that's really good.
So would you say unpinnable surface is underrated?
I love unpinnable surface, and by Bryan, a lot of unpinnable surface. Yeah, that's intrated.
I'm out of a job to play Devil's advocate to that. To that whole point, part of the reason we're all here tonight is that had there been maybe a few more false fronts at bel Air, Dick Wilson wouldn't have wiped a third of those holes out because you couldn't see the green. And part of putting this place back together is committing to the fact that you're not going to see the green from a lot of places in
the fairway because they're up in the air. And that was just part and parcel of what was going on. That's that's that's the justification of taking the May West hole out. So you know, I think they're I'd say they're overused for sure, but yeah, they they they help give you a little idea of what you're what you're aiming at when you otherwise can't see anything.
Well, you know, we uh we ran over by about an hour, so this is now a three part pot. But the uh, that was a great conversation. I hope everyone enjoyed learning a little bit about George Thomas. Uh, how you guys work and bel Air. So thank you guys all for the time. And uh, I think all of you guys are on Instagram right.
Eric's the most of us, Eric Cudge, Well, we'll post all the handles on Instagram, and thanks for turning tuning into another episode of The Yolk with Doak.
Thanks Andy, Thanks Andy, Thank you.
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