Welcome back to another edition of the Yoke with Doak. This time Tom and I are joined by longtime Renaissance golf associate Don Plasik. Don is a man of many talents, and beyond golf course architecture, he is also behind much of the Renaissance artwork, such as the routing maps and the yardage books. Here's the first part of a two part episode with Tom and Don about the soul of a golf course, the routing and joy.
Tom Dolk is back and as usual he's not holding back. But don't toss the yolk, and the famously candid Oak 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 earth. You know, I fell in love with Cyprus Point when I was a teenager, partly because that routing is so good. You know, you go through, You go from the clubhouse by the ocean, through some lynxy stuff, back into the trees, up into the dunes, back out of the dunes, into the trees, back through the lynxy stuff, and you wind up on the coast. I mean you see the whole property. You know, it's not just divided up into trees, lynks coast. You kind
of move back and forth between them. So it's a spectacular way to see the property. It's like if you were going to walk the property, that's the way you'd walk it. Another one that I used as an example of that in my book years ago was Cruden Bay in Scotland. You know, you sort of start high up the clubhouse is up by the town overlooking the lynx. You play down into the lower land for two or
three holes, not so spectacular. Then all of a sudden you're up right by the fourth tee is like right up by a little inlet across from the fishing village, So you play right along there for a hole, and then you get up and you're playing along the big dunes from like five to seven and eight. Then you have to wind your way up a hill and play across a field up at the top of it, and then plunge back down into the lynx and go around.
So it's a big figure eight on a simple level, but again it's moving through different styles of land and it's probably exactly the way you'd walk the site if I wanted to show you what that site was like, and we were starting where the clubhouse was. We'd go down to the one end, we'd go look at the little village on the end, we'd walk back through the big dunes, we'd go up the big valley where eight is, and then we'd go over the field to get to the other side.
Would would you prefer to have a course that's gotform a uniform look and feel to it, or a lot of different types of topography, whether it be an open section or then into the woods and then you know, maybe out into water, or have one landscape that's consistent throughout. Well.
I think I probably gave that away with the answer to my last question. I'd prefer variety. I mean, ultimately, what you're trying to get by routing a golf course is variety. If you've got different looks to the terrain and different parts of it that you go to, that's a huge head start. Whereas if you've got you know, if you got a typical parkland site it's something like Inverness, then you've got to work a lot harder to make
the holes either hit the topography in different ways. Creates the variety or change directions a lot, but that's hard to do. When you get to a smaller and smaller site, you wind up with more parallel holes. But in the end, you're going for variety. So if the property has variety to start with, that's a big head start.
So Mitchell Driver asks a good question here, how do you know the routing you choose is the best for the property? And how do you choose what directions holes go? With over one thousand options.
The truth is you never know. That's one of the most interesting things about it, you know. I compare it to like doing routings is like doing a puzzle, you know, like the first time you look at the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, you go, well, this is impossible. I could never finish this. And if you're persistent with it, you get better at it over time and you understand how things fit together better and it gets easier, and eventually you can do it if you're reasonably smart. Doing
routings is the same. The only difference is they don't print the answers in the paper the next weekend, so you don't know whether the solution you've got that you really like is really the best one. First of all, it's all a matter of opinion. You know, different architects would pick different you know, if we if I laid out five different routings for a golf course, people would
have different opinions on what was the best. And then besides that, it's like, okay, how much more how much more time do I need to give this to really be comfortable that's the best, And I and I don't figure out a better way to put it together, and I'll just you know, I could name a bunch of examples of where you know, pisif Dunes. I thought I
had a pretty good routing, you know, first I went there. First, I had the maps, and I played around with the maps a little bit before I ever went there, and I had a routing before I went there. I didn't expect it to be the final routing. I hoped that maybe I found a few holes that would wind up
in the final routing. So I took it out there with me, and I'm there for like an hour, and it's trash because, among other things, Bandon Dunes used three or put three or four holes up into the map that I was working off of, So that like completely messed up some of you know, not only not only did it take some holes out of what I wanted to do, but it took out how I was connecting holes together and where I was connecting holes together. So okay,
so that's trash, and it's like, oh damn. Now you got to regroup and and try to look at this fresh and you know, what can I say from this first one, and how can I put that back together? And you know, which of these holes do I like? Off that first map that I did. There's three holes that are on the on the golf course today, the sixth, the short part four, the eleventh, the par three along the coast, and I think the other one is the sixteenth. I'm trying to remember for sure, but I'm pretty sure
it's the sixteenth. So so I did another routing that had those holes in it and a few, you know, quite a bit more of what's what's in the final routing now. But we couldn't walk all the sight because it was some of it was covered in gorse. Some of it you could walk, and some of it was just solid gorse and you couldn't really get through there.
A lot of the holes that are kind of on that plane, the plane in the middle of the course, number four along the coast, and all the holes in and from that twelve and three that was just solid. Couldn't couldn't walk through there. You know, we knew it was pretty flat, but we couldn't see any features. And then we did get around to the far side and find where thirteen and fourteen were because you could walk in there from from the north end, kind of from
where old McDonald is now. So you know, we had that piece and then but then, you know, it was still uncomfortable to mister Kaiser because we couldn't walk the whole thing in order at all. So I had a routing and over the you know, over the months while we were waiting for the next step, you know, I was I was convinced the routing was pretty good. There were all kinds of questions about it. Oh, you've got back to back part threes. I don't like the idea
back to back part threes. Honestly, I didn't really like the idea of back to back part threes either. I'd when I'd come up up with ten and eleven on my very first plane before I saw the site. Ten was a short part four, but ten t was in the middle of one of david Kids fairways, so that wouldn't work. So like five minutes after I was there, I was like, well, either this is going to have back to back par threes, or I'm just gonna not use one of these great green sites because this is
the only way they fit together at all. So anyway, you know, I had a routing that I liked, but there were questions about it like that, and like the other one was after number eleven on that previous routing, the next hole went north, not inland where twelve is, but along the coast where number four is, so it connected up, you know. I basically I had ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
number differently, all along the coast, all headed north. And one of mister Kaiser's pieces of feedback was, you know, can't we get a whole play to the south along the coast, not only because it's better for variety and having the water on the right once, but more importantly, you know, when people are there in the summer, the wind's blown out of the north, and so having three or four hole, say having all the most spectacular holes
playing dead into that wind would have been tough, you know, so, And the only problem with trying to accommodate that request was ten and eleven were clearly better playing to the north, and thirteen was clearly better playing to the north. As it turned out, four was better playing to the south.
But to make that work you have to get in there in the middle, cross over in the routing, play a hole south, then get back to the inland side, and then do it again when you come around, play eleven, cross away from the coast, have twelve cross again, and play thirteen. So making those connections without having really long walks from green to Tea was the toughest part of
it to figure out in the end, you know. But we really didn't know that until they had a fire and the gorse burned, and then we could walk the whole thing in the order that we wanted to play it, and I could see that four would be better playing to the south. But then I had to figure out you know, that wound up changing about six or seven holes of the golf course to make the connections work
right to have that one hole play south. So you know, I'd thought six months before that I had a really good routing and it would be a great golf course. And then six months later it turned out, no, this routing is a lot better. You know, I just needed out much more time to come up with it. Part of it was not being able to walk it. But you know what that taught me was you have to
take a step back. You know, no matter how good you think the routing is, you probably need to like go away for at least a couple of months and just let it all soak in and then come back and try to look at it with fresh eyes and don't be so defensive that you've got it right the first time you were there. It's a hard thing to do, and at the end of the day you still never know, Okay, this is the right thing to do. I'm positive of it.
You know somebody else could, you know, don could look at it and go like you did for something we're just working on now, why don't you switch the nines? You know? And normally that's you get that conversation a lot when you when you come back to the clubhouse at nine, it's like, Okay, why why is this the
front nine? And why is this the back? I guarantee you if you ask ten people, there's at least one of them is going to think it's better the other way around, and you also leave your self open to the client deciding that it should be the other way around, or changing it after the fact. I mean we both know courses that they've changed at some point in their lives. Augusta changed, you know, most of the time, changing ten or ten years into the game or twenty years into
the game. That's like the kiss of death because now nobody can even remember what hole is what anymore. So that's something you really want to get right at the beginning and not change your mind on. You know, at the stage we're at with this project, we still haven't really shown anything to the client yet, so we're grinding hard on which way is better because because we want that to be the way we show it to the client, because we don't want them to change it.
As the course I grew up of UNI playing change their routing. They flipped it, and I like still describe the holes in the old order because that's what I've played the course the most with. So it's like I'm talking to something. I'm like, oh ten, and they're like no, what what? It's all different order. It's confusing don being
the artist that draws up plans. B Niblic had a question about the property and a course's character and is that determined by just sheerly the property, the routing or is it the building process that you see it or is it your drawings.
I would say it's not the drawings. I just have the enviable job of being able to work on them. That's one of my favorite things to do. But you know that to try and answer that question is is difficult. But I think that, you know, that's the craft of the process, and that's what I've learned from Tom. You know, every property is different. You can have a property that is flat and constrained and really on first glance, doesn't
lend itself to golf. You know, the two I've had the luxury of listening to Tom answer the questions and sort of formulate some basic ideas. And you know, the first thing that popped into my head was Garden City and Marion. You know, those by definition don't lend themselves to be great golf courses. They're odd, oddly shaped, there's roads crossing everywhere, There's there's some sort of structure and
and things going on on all sides. There doesn't appear to be much great golf in there, but that's when you know, figuring out where the holes go to really get the most out of the property, whatever the property has to offer, that's where the real value and the real architecture is. And then if you're able to take the way the holes are configured and really make them interesting tea to green in the in the third dimension, greens and bunkers and contours and all of that kind
of stuff, then you really have something. But because every property is different, we have the very good fortune of working with Tom. He has people that really have a lovely piece of ground, like the property in Bandon at Pacific Dunes. And Tom has a reputation of really being the guy to talk to open a dialogue with him if the land is great, because he knows how to
find the most potential in the property. But you know, some of the things I've had the luxury and enjoyment of working on with Tom or properties that when you first look at him, don't offer much. Texas Tech University in Lubbock was on a rectangular piece of ground that had three feet of fall. I mean there was nothing there. I mean, you know, a blank canvas can be exciting,
but it can be daunting too. So you know, from that all the way to Pacific Dunes, ta Eedy Cape, Kidnappers, where you have these just epic pieces of property that offer oceans of options. You know, to get that right, there's a lot of pressure, but there's also a lot of work involved in getting something really good out of
something that doesn't have any of those advantages. And and like Tom was talking about earlier, you know, just the idea of returning nines, that's a constraint in the equation that limits you in what you can do, how far you can get away from the clubhouse before you have to turn around and come back. And listening to Tom talk about Pacific Dunes, you know, bally Neil and Eastern Colorado some of the best stuff that we've had a
chance to work on. Tom went off the map to go get those extra holes, and that happened at Pacific Dunes, it happened at bally Neil, and you know, he has the ability to help a client understand that it's worth going and getting those holes so that they can be a part of the solution. I think one of the really cool things Tom mentioned about the crossword puzzle that popped into my head is Tom's right. The answers aren't posted in the paper the next day. And I kind
of think of it as a Rubik's cube. You know, when you get a jumbled Rubik's cube, there is a solution, and there's an agreed upon solution, and you know, the question is how fast can you get there? But when you're out in golf holes, the solution is, like Tom said, a complete matter of opinion. You know, you don't have the red and the green and the white and the blue all figured out. Yay, you did it.
It just doesn't work that way. And the other thing is it's it's free form. I mean a crossword puzzle. Somebody's determined the answers for you, and you don't go out of the box, and you don't go off the page. And with a golf course outing you can I mean ninety nine point nine percent of people, except that it's got to be eighteen holes. That would be a pretty tough convention to fight, although there's a couple of people trying to fight that convention now. But beyond that, there's
not really any rules or limits to it. I mean, you know, one of the first one's boundaries we pushed against. Black Forest is the first one where I went off the page to find a couple holes. And that was when I worked for Pete Dye. He told me at the golf club in Columbus that he had like four hundred acre farm to work with, and he went back to the client and said, I got a really good routing, except I need the two acres over there off the property for one of the green sites. You know, you
got to buy that other two acres. Is four hundred acres isn't enough, and you know, to be able to look outside, you know, I have the freedom to do it. Some clients would give you the big middle finger if you all them. You know they're four hundred acres isn't enough. But if you're trying to find the best solutions, sometimes that's what it takes. So when we were working on Black Forest a long time ago, I actually, you know, it was the client owned seven thousand acres of woods.
So it gave me a topa map and there were no property lines or anything on it, and I did a routing and you know, you couldn't. You kind of had to do the routing mostly off the topo there. Because the woods were so thick you couldn't tell very much when you were walking through about house this hole going to look. I mean you really, you really had to kind of understand the map and just take a leap of faith. Okay, I know what this hole's doing, so when it gets cleared out, it's going to be okay.
So i'd done a routing and they were starting to cut center lines of the holes so we could walk it. And the survey air comes by and I think Gil Hanson and I were out there. The surveyor comes by and goes, I think that sixth hole is is going across into the state property, going over the property line. And I said, what property line? You know, because there was nothing on my map that showed a property line.
And I figured, well, the guy owns seven thousand acres, so he's given me something in the middle of it. But no, you know, there was there was a property line, it wasn't showing on the map. And sure enough I'd put one hole, you know, one hole going over by one hundred yards, and another hole with the tea on the state land coming back, and then another hole down at the bottom that was really close like really close
to the property line. You know, the it was it was state forest and it wasn't marked, and it wasn't fenced. It was just out there in the middle of the woods. So we had to like change a couple holes on the fly, you know. We had to take the sixth and the seventh holes and like angle them, you know, like route them on more of a diagonal so you could fit them in and be sure of the where
the property line was. And then the thirteenth hole, I had the surveyor come out and I was like, Okay, I don't want you to mark this thing and put a bunch of flags or anything. I just want you to show me this. You know, I got a tee over here somewhere. I just want you to show me where the line is so I don't go over it. And he showed me and that the back of that tea is about two feet on our property. But you know, I didn't want to, you know, I didn't want to
build a fence and give it all away. I just wanted to work as close as I could to the edge without drawing any attention to it.
So when you've got this property, you win a job or you're fighting for a job and you're you know, presenting a plan, like where how do you start the whole process of routing it?
Off? Course, First of all, I hate that. I hate those jobs where they want four different architects to present a plan because this is the most important part of the job and the most time consuming part of it, or should be one of the most time consuming parts of it, and asking everybody to do it for free as kind of not right on top of that, you know, the people that are the people that are looking at the maps, a lot of them don't know what they're
looking at. You know, if you walk them through the golf course that you've routed, okay, they might have a decent understanding of that, but just to look at the map and say, oh, I really like this one, you know, then they are responding to the artwork or they're responding to oh, that looks like a cool hole, but they can't see it in three D. They don't really know how it's fit in the ground. Years ago, I sent I sent like my first preliminary routing for Rock Creek
to our client, Bill Foley, and he called me. He's like, Oh, this is really cool. I really love this fourth hole, like playing through that valley up the hill and then then the way you get that next hole over the side hills and stuff. I'm like, hold on, you can read a topo map. He's like yeah, I said, where do you learn to do that? He said, west Point?
He went to school at West Point. And you know, everybody in military officers they have to learn how to read a topo map so they know where they're going. He's the only client I've ever had that can really read a topo map and see what the hell is going on. So so start, you know, trying to sell something, sell your ideas based on a drawing and a topo map is really hard because the clients don't understand that well. As for where you start, it's different for different projects.
I mean, honestly, for me at this point, it's just like my eye is drawn to something on a topo map. It's like, you know, if if you got really flat ground, then you're looking for, okay, where is there a feature that looks interesting because you're just desperate for something to go go work off of. If you've got a really steep site like rock Creek, it's like, okay, where is
where is. You know, we want variety, but we want something that's that's got enough land that's flat enough that we can build a golf course here, because a lot of that site would have been way too steep. So you know, we you know, we looked along the creek and then we looked, like, that looks too steep. You know, if we come down here, Okay, now there's some flat land here, and then well there's a little canyon here, and I don't know how we get through that and
come out the other side. So you know, that's kind of you know, okay, let's get a bigger map of this section and start working with it. But but then, you know, and sometimes it starts with a clubhouse site because they tell you where it is. I don't really like starting that way because it limits your options. Like Don was saying, you know, okay, if you're starting here, then you've kind of got to start with the holes around the clubhouse and make sure you've got you can
get out and get back. You know, you don't. We've only done a couple that there was a building that was going to be the clubhouse Stonewall. Both courses actually had an existing building that they were going to use for the clubhouse, so everything revolved around that in terms
of the design. And then there's ones like you know, if you're working on a modest project public course or something, you know the clubhouse is going to be like as close to the where your access point is off the road as possible, because you don't want to build a half a million dollars worth of driveway to get back
in there. So you know, something like bally Neo, which is built for not a lot of money, you know that the clubhouse and the lodge and everything is like the first good place coming in from the road that you know you've got kind of a decent vantage point, and the property spreads out enough that you could you know that you could have four holes in and out of there reasonably well, you know, you're you kind of come over a couple of hills and then you park
in the lot in a little valley just before it. But all those buildings sit up on a little ridge that overlooks a bunch of stuff, and you know it could have been anywhere on there. You know, sometimes when you've got one thousand acres of sand dunes, it actually helps you to say, okay, this reasonably this has to start here, otherwise you could be looking around forever, you know, find finding the one hundred and eighteen holes they found at sand Hills. You know, that was kind of the
tough thing for Bill and Bennett. Sand Hills was the lodge and everything was going to be down by the creek, so they didn't have a place to start or finish.
So don in your opinion, what was what's been the most difficult whole or aspect of a project to route that you guys have had to find, you know, or figure out, you know, the most difficult puzzle that you've had to work around.
Wow, that's a that's a really great question. I think the knee jerk reaction is to kind of think about what have been some of the most challenging sites. I think Stone Eagle definitely comes to mind. You know, that was a that was a lunar property. I mean you could you could spend three hours with the right equipment trying to walk where a tee on a par four was going to be and get yourself to the green
before anything started out there. And I remember the routing that I think it was Tom Fazzio had for that problem before we started looking at it, and what we came up with could not have been more different for many reasons. But you know, I think Tom's right. I think one of the things he mentions about, you know, a competitive routing process is there's so much value and so much architecture in figuring out where the holes ought
to go. It seems it's difficult to sort of relinquish that so early in the process on a project that you might even not even get to do. And if you put your best foot forward and really work at it, to say that's not an integral part of making a golf course great would be you know, that's a crazy understatement.
So I think it's like, you know, when you have a contest route to design a golf course, that ignores the fact that there's going to be all those iterations between this one and the one that you wind up up with.
It's like what we talked about in this stream Song podcast was how much of your job is done in the third dimension, and it's sculpture. So it's when you're out constructing and there's so many changes that happened.
But even the routing process, you know, the routing process is usually between ten and twenty days on site before you're really you know, and you could, it could, it can get broken up a whole bunch of different ways. But you know, I'll go for four or five days and play around with things, and then go away for a while and then come back and do it again. Maybe I've got it right by the second time, and maybe I get to come back the third time, and you know, maybe you know, you've got thing like the
thing that we're working on in California. Now you have a routing that you like, but there are some wetlands conflicts, so that you go back and talk to the engineers and it's like, oh, we better not do that, or it'll take two more years to get permits to build this thing. So let's see if we can work around these little things and change a couple more holes for that. So it's just a lot of time input, you know, before you get to the sculptural part. It's it's a
big part of what I do. And I would say that you know roughly how important it is to the outcome. You know, you start with a piece of land and that's kind of you know, that limits what you're gonna do. You're not gonna build a ten on the Doke scale on a lot of pieces of ground. It takes a special piece of ground. But then you know, you're not gonna build a ten if you don't get the routing
really right. And then you're still not going to build a ten even if you've got the routing right, unless you do a great job shaping what you need to shape. And you know the point of the routing is to try to make it so you don't have to shape so much, you know, so you don't have to rely on that part so much. But but still it gets something that's a nine or ten. All three of those things have to come together. And you know, the last two are the parts that we spend our time on,
and I'd say they're about equal and importance. You know, I spend about as much time figuring out where the holes go in the beginning as I do working on shaping greens and stuff when we're out there. Obviously it takes more time for the guys that work for me to shape the greens, but my time working on it with them is about the same.
I think that's one of the most interesting things that in this dialogue is is what Tom was talking about. To have the opportunity to have iterations, you know, because if you do, if you have that autonomy and you have a client that's willing to allow you to make
changes and adjustments as you go. Even if you are rock solid on what you think the configuration of the holes ought to be and you've done your best work, there's still so many opportunities that happen during construction that could be missed or not even pursued if you're you know, white knuckled to what's drawn on a piece of paper. And that's something we get a lot of fun out of.
Is you know what's behind a green site. You know, if that green site moves fifteen yards any direction, what you see beyond the putting surface is incredibly special and before you didn't even know, you know, whatever. You know, it could be a building, it could be a landscape feature, a view, you know, a long range view, a piece of vegetation that's just absolutely exquisite that didn't even show up on the map, and you didn't even know it
was there until you spent some time walking around. And it just not take advantage of that because you know, the agreed upon routing is on the paper and we're not going to deviate that. You know, I've seen watched Tom work really hard to help clients understand that we're only improving what we have. But you don't always have someone that allows you to be for it to be a fluid process during construction, and that's critical.
Yeah, if you look at you know, if you looked at the final map that we drew of our final routing plan before we start a project and then an ass built, there will be a probably a couple holes where the green is moved or something. You know, we just we just find something that you know, even as much time as we spend on the routing process, we're out there and we get everything cleared and we're trying to shape things. You know, sometimes it's not me. Sometimes
it's one of the guys that worked for me. It was like, what if we moved it over there? And it helps to be open to that, and it helps when clients are comfortable with that, you know, that's what we try to feel them out at the beginning. You can be comfortable with us tinkering around and this. You know, it's not going to work out to exactly seven and eleven yards like it says right here, you know, we're not going to change everything, but it's a process, so it won't be exactly like this.
I think if you think about the way Pine Valley was built, that routing had to have gone through hundreds of iterations with all of the feedback that Crump got from different architects, and then Colt came in and tweaked some stuff like and that's a perfect example of you know, a golf course. Then it wasn't as time sensitive as now where you got to kind of you get a project, you want to get it done on a timeline.
That one was.
Built over a long period of time, but that the routing had to have changed.
Right and the you know, the interesting thing about the timeline that you talked about is the usually in the routing phase, clients are not in a hurry. They own the land or they've got an option on the land or whatever, but you know, they're not really spending much money on it until the next phase. You know, once construction starts, they wanted to be done and they wanted
to be open because they've spent all this money. But but in the routing phase, you still kind of you got time to tink around and try to figure something out. And you know, I can't remember very many projects we've done where they were in such a hurry to build a golf course that you know, that were like rushing through the routing and not sure that we've got the best thing. There might be one or two that just you know, well Stonewall, you know, Tom Fazio had already
done a routing and they had permits for that. So they asked me. They told me I could change it a little bit, but without changing you know, it had to be changes I could make without changing all the like erosion control work that they had permits for that was that sort of tied back to where the routing is. So there wasn't there weren't you know. We didn't start over on that routing. We started with what they had and figured out how we could tweak it to make it better.
So we got a lot of questions from young architects and architects and general about your routing.
So well, I mean, it's you know, it's such a hard thing to learn. I mean, I only in the time I spent with Pete die He gave me like three hours one day on a plan for the Honors course that he was working on when I was working at Long Cove, just showed me kind of what he'd done, and he, you know, he made it look like he'd done it all that morning, but I'm sure he hadn't. I'm sure he had taken a while, but that that was really the only time he ever spent with me
talking about routings. I mean, it's not a well documented process. So everybody in the business is like, Jesus, how do you do this? How can I figure out how to do this better? And really being better as a matter of practice, And the hard thing for a young person is getting practice. You don't get in on the ground floor very often to see what happens. You know, you get there when you're starting to build a golf course.
Riley John's wants to know about your philosophy regards or regarding routing and the ebbs and flows of a golf round, and is there a type of balance or rhythm that you try and achieve, and if so, how.
I think that's I think getting a having a rhythm to the golf chorus that has some character to it is important. I don't think you can start with one in mind, you know, like I don't think people write songs thinking about the whole flow of them. They get a couple of little pieces that they like, and then they try to figure out how to put those pieces together in a beautiful way. It's very similar to that.
You have to start with a few holes and once you've got that part, then you're like, Okay, now do I want to start there or do I want to start over here? And you know, and then you know, what do I need in between these things to make it all fit together? You know, both fit together physically
and that experience fit together. But you know, I mean, great golf course is very different from one or another one to another, like I guess, but Saint Andrews and Marian are both they're very different pieces of the property, but they're both kind of the same. It's kind of hard at the beginning, easy in the middle, and then
it gets hard at the end. Again. Yeah, but that's not that's not it's it's very atypical for a championship golf course to have a stretch like the loop at Saint Andrews or those middle holes at Marion where you've got all the short part fours in a row that that it goes that short for that long most architects thing. No, I don't want to do that, you know, I want it to keep mixing back and forth on a more
regular kind of wave. You know. I've heard people say, well, the cool thing about Augusta is that you you don't play part fours in a row until you get to like nine and ten. You know, it goes four or five four three four, three four or five. Personally, I don't think that's important at all, And I almost believe the opposite, Like some of my favorite stretches of my own courses are three or four good par fours in
a row. You know, that's almost maybe you're going out on a limb a little more, But you know, I think it's important from the rhythm of like, you know, getting people hitting driver on a bunch of holes in a row and getting in a rhythm for doing it. You know, Like I don't like a routing. I've built courses with five par threes, but I don't like it when they come like every other hole, because you really
get out of a rhythm for a hitting driver. It's just like, oh, another par three, and so you know, going back to basics, I don't think you can I don't think you pre plan what that flow is, but I do think it's important.
I think what Tom mentioned about music too. Invariably, when we have any of these kinds of dialogues, music kind of creeps in and it's Music's a part of the artistic process, and it's a big part of on site work too for all of us. And I think there's a you know that you talk about if you're trying for flow and what kind of flow and what's good and what's not. There's a cadence. There are opening holes that just really perform well as opening holes because they
make you interested and comfortable at the beginning. And you know, there's all kinds of philosophies about how you know how to ease into around and save the best for last, and you spend some of that in the middle and all of that, and that's where the expertise and the experience comes from on deciding how much weight those things carry. And I think if you take that music analogy and
just take it to the next step. You know, you start with a a rhythm and a melody that you like, and you have some lyric that you're trying to work in there. But I think One of the cool things that I've learned working for Tom is the bridge in the song, and the bridge is that hole, or maybe a couple of holes that allow you to build the really natural stuff on a site. But you have to
connect them somehow. And when there's not a natural connection with another hole that's just laying there, sometimes you got to take a big leap of faith and move the big furniture in the room to get it all to work, and then try as to your best to cover your tracks at the end. I mean, I'm looking at just the pictures on the wall here. The sixth that Stone Eagles, a short par four that's uphill and was not a
golf hole in its native state by any stretch. The fourth at a par five at Suncadia at Tumble Creek in Washington was a hugely of faith, but it allowed a connection between holes that were really very very natural. And then you spend a lot of your time and effort and your resources getting that hole to look and play and feel commensurate with all the other natural stuff.
And you know, often that's how you get the best out of a property is build a hole that's not really there so that you can max out on the stuff that's really good naturally.
Instead of having to do a little work to a bunch of holes, having a bunch of holes that are there and just having to do a lot of work to one hole. Sometimes that's a better alternative. It's funny to me that we're talking about music, because I'm like, you know, I would finish in last place on the music Apptitude test in any group, not just among my guys,
you know. And yet you know Brian Solanik, who works for me, plays in a band a little bit on this, Jeff Bradley, who builds bunkers for Bill and Benn as a drummer. Eric Iverson who works for me, his dad was a jazz musician. So and and my favorite one,
Kay Golby, whose dad was not a musician. Kai Kai did an interview with some many years ago and they asked him what is the best technical innovation that you have seen since you started in the business thirty years ago, and he said the iPod, because instead of sitting in a bulldozer all day, stuck with your thoughts or the bad local radio station, you can listen to whatever you want while you're out there, and it's the work turns out a lot better.
Is a state of mind. They're and there, you know, it's it's an artistics And I was.
Never you know, the little bit of time that I that I did shaping for the dies and at like a high point where I shaped the greens myself. I never thought about music when I was out there. I was always thinking about Fortunately, I was thinking about all these places that i'd been in the UK relatively recently, And you know, I'd be working along thinking about one place, and then after a while I get half done with him, I'm like, oh, this is starting to remind me of
something else. But I had so many of those experiences so fresh in my mind from like the last two or three years before that, it was really easy to have the free flow and change your mind on the flot.
I think that's one of the great things of being around Tom and the other fellas. From the very start. Tom has always encouraged us when we were working somewhere to go see what else there is to see, And boy, when you do that in the UK, there's just there's countless, countless, infinite number of precedent studies for how do you handle this tight corner of the property. How do you get in and out of there in a safe way that's good for golf, that's interesting and memorable and not too awkward.
And there are precedents for nearly every solution if you look hard enough for them, and then you know, the challenge is to decide is that an appropriate solution here too? Can you take the spirit of how it works in the British Isles and bring it to wherever you are and get it to work as effectively because the little nuances about why it works are not realized in plan view.
There's a lot of in the third dimension that's going on there, the timing of the hole, the distance of the shot into a tight corner, and you know, people waiting as a group to play back out of that space for example. All of that's really got to be working well in order for you to take that idea and make an iteration of that somewhere else. But you have to have a pretty solid understanding of why it works well before you can pull it off somewhere else.
And it's an example of that. I mean, if you look at the Irish courses, nearly all the famous Irish courses, there's one hole where you step off a green back onto a tee and then hit the t shot across that the green that you just played, perfect example, and you're like, how the hell does that work? You know
it's bally Bunyon. You played down to the third green and then I think originally the fourth hole was shorter there, but they, you know, they they figured out, hey, we could put a tee the other side of this green and just hit over the green after people play number three and it works just fine. And with Hinch has one, I think dude, Beeg has two or three. Nearly all those courses have something like that, and and you're like, well, how the hell does that work? And people not sneak up.
And you know why it works is because it's because the hole you've put, the first hole that you played, is nearly always a par three. So when you get off, when you walk off the green of the next tee, the other guys are still two hundred yards away and they're not going to be right up on you. If it was the other way around, if you played a part five and then you wanted to go back and play to a part three where you might have to wait, that wouldn't work at all.
That's That's what I was like thinking in my head is like, well you'd have you couldn't have something that you regularly wait on. I bet doing it. Like if you have a short par five that a lot of people are waiting to get home into that you that would be another good one to have play over a green.
Yes and no, Yes and no, because you also get groups where they're like fifty yards away ready to chip onto the green when you're when you're done. So so you know, the only really, the only way where the dance worked really well is when it's a part three. Then you can then you can put the tea anywhere you want around.
The green or somebody's backyard course.
Or somebody that yeah, or a place like Terry Edy that gets twenty rounds a day. You can do whatever. Stone Eagle, we've got one of those that they don't use the tea much. It's only a back tee. But you know, after eight you can go up to the right and number nine or for number ninety and hit diagonally back over eat green. That's a better angle for that hole. But you can't have everybody on it because you can't make the traffic flow work.
J Blosi wants to know if you could describe a instance where you gave up on like a great hole in order to make a better course.
I try to forget about those things after and on top of that, you know, you don't when I give one away, it's like then then there's a whole bunch of people that are like, oh, you made the wrong decision. You should have kept that hole. So it's like when you you know, when you talk about it, it's like, you know, it's like the kiss of death for the golf course. So there's one that I'll talk about that. It only it changed one hole, but it changed the
character of the golf course a lot. Originally at Cape Kidnappers, after the twelfth green, you know, now there's a little one hundred and thirty yard part three with the tee right behind twelve green, and you play this little short part three which just feels like the cliff edge off the world. Just to the left of the green, there's like a bunker that's about five feet wide, and then it's gone. And then fourteenth hole is a short part four.
And our original green site for that part three was one hundred feet below where the green is now on this little piece of land that was like hanging off the cliffs, but there was enough room down there for a green, and it would have been the most spectacular hole on the golf course. It would have been one
of the most spectacular holes in the world. It would have been one of the most scary holes in the world to play because we had to push the tee even closer to the cliff edge and you could barely see, you know, where the where the little shoulder is going
up to the present green. You could barely see around the corner of that to see down to where this green was, so you know, to you know, scary, to scary to just stand literally stand on the tee would have been scary, scary to build, uh, And then the kicker was really tough to get down there and back. I mean, most of the rest of Cape Kidnappers is pretty easily walkable. There's a couple of ravines, but there's bridges across them, so you never have a really downhill
or uphill walk on the whole golf course. And that would have been a huge break. You know, just hiking one hundred feedback up the hill would have been tough. And then you'd been kind of out of breath, and it would have taken five minutes, you know, so it would have it would have been a big break in the routing as opposed to the way it is now. We play thirteen, you're done, you walk right onto fourteen, t you keep going seamless. So we debated that hole
for a long time. We didn't really have the thirteenth all the way it is now. We hadn't really figured that out as an option. We were going to go down below, and the more we looked at it, the more, you know, we were like, could you build a little like tram to get down there and back up so people don't have to walk uphill on our feet because there's no way to get a car path down there. It was just you know, a steep and then it
was too small down there. And then the final nail in the coffin of going down there was there were a couple where the little Green site was. There were a couple of moundy rolls down there, and we looked at those and we were like, that could be an archaeology site. That's the kind of place that the Maoris might have had a little you know, very defensible, you know,
that could be an archaeoligical site. And if that's an archaeological site and we get into it, this whole project is gonna get delayed for quite a while, plus bad karma. So so that was the final straw that Okay, we're not going down there. Let's figure out some other way to get it to have another hole in here so we can make this work. But it was a spectacular hole, and it's hard to even show people because you have
to even to show. So I tried to show somebody the last time I was there where that hole was, and just even walking close enough to the cliff that you could see it was uncomfortable for me. So I'm like, good thing I didn't build that. It would have you know, it would have sucked all the air out of all the other holes.
When is a long walk from like a green to tea, okay, like.
When it's beautiful number one and you know, like you know, if you're a long walk from green to tea is like across a development street, that's bad. You know. I'd rather set it up so you can hit across the streets so you don't think about the walk so much. You know, every time you've got a break between green and tea. That's lengthy. You know, I'm trying to avoid those as much as possible in normal circumstances, because you get distracted, you look at your damn cell phone, you
get out of the flow of playing golf. So if you can avoid that, that's the ideal. If you can't avoid it, but you're on the path from the fourth green to the fifty at Barn Google, where you're right on top of the dunes looking at the ocean for the first time you get a pass. Nobody looks at their cell phone there, except maybe to grab it and take a picture of a wallaby. Keep kidnappers. Going from fifteen green along the edge out to that sixteenth tee
to play back. That's spectacular. We didn't plan that originally, you know. We were going to have the fifteenth green a little shorter and the sixteenth was going to be a short part four. And then client was worried about making the golf course longer, and I looked for I was looking for a place where I could get one hundred yards just like that, and I found that tea and said, oh okay, we could put a back tea there.
It was just going to be a back tea. And then I went away and mister Robertson came back and he brought his wife and they both walked out to see where that tea was. And she walked out there and took one look at it and said, everybody should come back here, this most beautiful place on the golf course, and this walk is spectacular, so everybody, you know, let's try to make that. So it went from a short part four with a silly long back tea to a
short part five where everybody was on that tee. But to do it, you know, we had to do a lot more work in the fairway to make the whole work because now you know, now we had to worry about somebody who could only get one hundred years from that tee, and it was really the land that you would have hit into was really steep. So we had to do a lot of work on sixteen to make
it work. But clearly, when you know when you've got something that's going to keep the golfer's attention because it's beautiful, a long walk is no big deal. Where you don't have that, I would I would rather now have a blind te shot that you play right away and then walk up and get get the view on your way to your ball, instead of walking one hundred yards to have the view from the tee. The sixth hole of bally Neal is like that. We were originally going to put the tea up on the dune and then I
just we had too many. We had too many elevated tea shots. You know, it's a windy place. There was only the back. It was only going to be the back tee that was up there. So eventually I just went, you know, it's not even let's just let's just make the t shot blind. Everybody's going to see the hole soon enough. Anyway, it's not the prettiest of you on the golf course. We're not giving up anything by not having that tea.
I think that the concept of walking and walkability is an integral part of all of it. I think everyone in Tom's camp is, you know, there's little there's little voices that you're listening to while you're trying to figure out where the holes go, and one of them invariably is is how how can we get this to be as walkable as possible? And you know that the connection that Tom mentioned of getting to highs and lows and
and stuff like that. It seems like if you can sell it, if it's worth it when you get there, you know, if you have to work at it a little bit. Most of most sites that are flat are walkable by virtue of the fact that they're flat. But the more interesting sites often have a couple of climbs and things like that. So you have to figure out you climbing while you're playing golf, are you climbing in
between playing golf? And when you can get those climbs like Tom's talking about while you're playing golf, it's better because you don't notice it as much. You're still doing as much physical effort as you need to to get from point A to point B, but your ball's in play and that presents differently to a golfer than it does when it's in your pocket and you're on your way to the next tee. And I think that's one of the high level things that we have learned from
Tom and work really hard on. Is it isn't routing. Isn't just the tee, the landing area and the green. It's how the holes relate to each other, the proximity of the green to the next tee, to the back t to the forwardeen, you know, trying to get them to fit together so they're intimate and close but in a way that's safe and interesting at the same time.
And that it's a lot of work too, you know, there's there's and you figure that out during construction where Tom spends so much time in walking and looking around and getting all those things as intimate as possible, but doing it in a safe and thoughtful way. And that's there's a lot of artwork there too.
Don't you think, Hey, well, there's there's two things in modern golf that have that have made that a lot harder for most architects on most courses. One is if you're trying to get to seventy two hundred yards of the back or seventy five hundred or whatever. And you know, I mean we're still building most courses for you know, the white teas are sixty five hundred yards plus or
minds sixty two hundred, sixty five hundred. You know, the further from the from that tee to the back tee, the harder it is to get both of them close to the last screen. It just doesn't work. So you know, if you're thinking about the back tea first, which a lot of good players who are designers do, then every hole is an eighty or one hundred yard walk from the green to the middle tee where most people are playing.
And if you're thinking about the middle tea and getting that close, then the further you have to go back, the harder it is to find an angle where it's safe. You know, you can't, you can't do what Saint Andrews does and just go back right alongside the previous fairway.
You know that if people were playing there on a busy every busy day from the Open Championship tease, people would get killed every day because the back teas are like fifty sixty eighty yards short of the green on the right, the whole way around, right where every average player loses their second shot to the green. So you know, the longer you try to make the golf course from the back tees, the harder it is to get the intimacy right. And then and then the other one is
cart passed. You know, once you assume that people are going to be in cart then you really don't care whether they're close together or not. It doesn't make you put them far apart, but when you stop paying attention to whether they're close together or not, you lose the thread entirely.
I imagine. Maintenance is another thing that goes into it a little bit, in the sense of if the greens are close by, it's it's less gas, easier, faster to maintain, easier to mow greens, or you know, does it does that play a role in routing at all?
A little Maybe not as much as you're thinking there, but yeah, I mean, you know, for maintenance, the old style courses were you know, you've got a bunch of parallel holes and you can mow green you don't necessarily mow all the greens in order, because it's because it's it's much faster to hop from this green across the next tee to the green that's coming back the other way two holes later, and you just there's a you know,
you can get around much quicker. Where As you know, the modern courses that are all stretched out and every hole is a beautiful view. You pretty much have to maintain the golf course in the order that you play it, and so the mainest guys are going all the way around the golf course every day to get it done.
Yeah, I was thinking about Mackenzie and how he'd have like five greens all within like sure if he drew a four hundred yard circle, there'd be.
I was just I was just at the Valley Club the other day. You know, they had a flood event. They're a month ago, and they were trying to put the pieces back together. That five feet of mud come across one of the greens. But that course, there's a couple of little hills that he just maxed out as many holes as you could possibly get around him. So this there's this one hill in the middle of the property that the third green sits right into the foot
of it. The fourth t is elevated, play on off it, fifth hole plays past it, seventh hole comes back to the foot of it, the eighth tea is on it, the tenth green comes up to the foot of it, and the eleventh tea is on it. So three of the four Part three is the tea is on that hill.
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