Welcome back to part two of the latest episode of The Yoke with Doak. Longtime associate Don Placik joins Tom to discuss routing. As a reminder, be sure to check out Tom's Confidential Guys to Golf Courses. These are the best books if you enjoy reading about golf courses. You can find them on Renaissancegolf dot com and they make for great gifts. And now part two of our discussion on routing. 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 them to make it flat first?
Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years. 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. Whereas 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.
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 be.
I was just I was just at the Valley Club the other day. You know, they had a flood event there 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 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 playing 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 t is on it. So three of the four part threes the tee is on that hill.
So it brings back. So this is something I went on a Northern California golf trip recently and you know, played a ton of Mackenzie and the thing the layering. How much does that come into mind? Like we're using bunkers on other holes to make it look like it's on it on the specific hole and visually deceiving, do you guys? I mean, how does that?
How do you Usually? Usually that comes in once once the routing is in place, you're not thinking about that level of detail. You might you might notice if you've done it enough times that oh yes, but but you're not really I'm not trying for that at the routing level.
It's going to come up, you know. Once I've got a routing, it's like, oh, you know, all I have to do is move the tea over a little bit, and then I'm looking at the other hole out there, and I can do some visual things because of that, or or you know what doesn't show up on a topo map. Two things that don't show up on a topo map, or trees and views. Sometimes you can tell what the view is going to be the general of you, like at Sabanic, you know where the bay is and
you're going to be looking at water. You don't know that there's some particular house or feature across the bay that might draw your eye, but you know, oh, I'm looking toward the water here. Uh. You know, you don't know where where the really big beautiful oak is until you get out there and start figuring out how to clear it. And then maybe you know once you walk it in the woods. A couple of times you'll say, okay,
this tree, I'm playing for this tree. But still when you are, you know, usually when you're building the course, you'll find that I want to move the tee to the left some or to the right some so that I'm looking right at this thing instead of it's just kind of off to the left there somewhere.
So now that we I just talked about Mackenzie, we had some questions. We had a couple of them actually about Golden Age architects. Which Golden Age architects stands out as the most adept at routing courses? And that's from Pete.
Oh Mm, I don't think. I can't. I can't evaluate them all on an equal basis. I mean, I'm much I've worked much more on some of their work than others. You know, I think Mackenzie was the best that I know, or at He's the one I stole the most from as far as you know, little sequences of holes that get you back to the same place, like I was describing at the Valley Club, or like you see a
roll Melbourne or Cyprus point. Most of his courses, you know, he would take a few features and say, Okay, I'm gonna get as many holes working off that as I can. You know, I haven't. I haven't spent as much time on Tilling Hass courses or Perry Maxwell courses to rule them out as being great at this too. But I've seen a ton of Donald Ross courses. If you just
had one hundred and fifty acre rectangle. Donald Ross was as good as amba ever lived at that because he you know, because he came up with one hundred different versions of it somewhere in America in that in that time period. You know, he he was very good at You know, when you get a rectangular piece of property and you're trying to fit holes in, it's very easy to fall into just playing parallel with the property lines.
You know, like in the Midwest, nearly everything, nearly every piece of land you get is is like rectangles or you know, the land was all sectioned off in like forty acre sections originally, so you'll either get a square or a rectangle of forty acre blocks. And interestingly, a forty acre block is a quarter mile four hundred and forty yards from one end to the other, so it
fits pretty well at the dimensions of golf. You know, if you played down to the end of the rectangle and across the back, that would be a four hundred yard hole. You have to you know, you need a little room behind the green. So you see you see people playing around the edges of the property a lot, and once you play along this property line and that property line, and you've got limited space in between, you know,
the holes just get parallel really fast. Ross was great at not doing that, either putting the clubhouse in the corner where everything had to fan out, but just just getting something in there that was on a diagonal and then figuring out a way to get that back to square at the corner, or better still, not getting the square at the corner because a lot of the things, a lot of the things we wind up dealing with on older courses is they've got boundary issues because they
had a hole playing right along the property line. And you know McKenzie more Town one of his early courses in England. When he built it, there was a golf course on either side of it, and so he played holes right along the right along the boundary fence, you know where if you drove closer to the boundary fence you got a better angle to the green and if
you drove away from it, it was a tougher shot. So eventually those two other golf courses next to him, the clubs moved further out of town and now there's housing developments on both sides. So now that hole where you want to drive right next to the fence, you can't do that. You know that homeowner is making them move
the hole in. You know, they needed to get a little more land at the end of the golf course to fix it, because they couldn't they they couldn't pack as many holes across the middle of the site as Mackenzie did. So Ross was a genius at that. I'm sure there's other architects that were too, but I know that's a hard thing to do, and he seemed like he did it really well. I think.
Thinking a little bit about that too, it's interesting that at the time those Golden Age courses were being built, they were designed and built by the guys they were drawing their inspiration from, not from the US, because it hadn't evolved yet, it didn't exist. So they brought those ideas over and they were allowed to incorporate those ideas because they were the expert on the task at the time.
But over time, as we do in the United States, we've americanized everything, and to a degree, americanized architecture, and we've come up with these industry standards on length and balance and all of those kinds of things, and the modern architects have taken those and tried to imprint them on whatever property they have and let which is almost a complete departure of letting the property dictate what things
ought to be. And and you know, when you can move things around and cut and fill and strip and regrass and reveg and change everything that you you know that would normally drive a design, you can just wipe it out and recreate it and move everything around. The idea that you're an architect seems to have demonstrated at some point that if you're not doing some or a lot of that, you're not really an architect. You must
not be that good at what you do. And to watch that evolution go from one end of the spectrum all the way to the other is pretty fascinating. And I think that's just what we do in the United States. We've sort of that was the American way to sort of do that, and I think it's exciting to see that now that we've been there a while, there is a new focus on going back to how it started, thankfully, and as a result, things are probably going to be a little bit better by default. Obviously the more we
pay attention to that way. But you know, and it's it's you know, having clients that will allow you to to do those things. And that's that's that's as much good fortune as being talented at what you do is having a client that really allows you to let you max out your talents.
Right, And you know, eighty percent of what you're saying goes back to what is the primary purpose of this golf course? And you know, unfortunately, at least half the golf courses built in America in the last fifty years were built the primary purpose was housing development. It wasn't golf at all. And the architects, who you know, we don't get those kind of jobs. We never have. When I started out, my name wasn't worth anything to, you know,
to a housing developer. So I you know, I started with daily fee golf courses and then resorts, but you know, I still didn't get my name up there as being a big enough name architect to be attractive to a housing developer until just when that market crashed. We were signed up to do two or three of them in
two thousand and eight and they all went away. But you know, when you know, when Jack Nicholas or Greg Norman stands up at the opening would stand up at the opening day of a of a housing development, golf course and say, you know what a great client. He let me route the golf course first anywhere I wanted to go, and then they designed the housing around it.
Now it does not it can't happen in that way, you know, you because you can't build a hole that ends two hundred and fifty feet from the property line over there and leave the developer not enough room to do anything with that, you know, not enough room for a house and a road and another house. You know, then it's just wasted space to them. So it can't work like that. At a minimum, you're going back and forth with a land planner doing the development kind of,
you know, wrestling with him over what. You know, I want to put the hole there. I know you can't. You got to move it over here so I have some space there. And sometimes you're you know, the same feature that you want to include in a golf hole, that's a great place to put a house or the clubhouse or the hotel. So you're you're constantly in a tug of war over who gets to use this feature, the housing development or the golf. So now if the golf is not really important to the client, like YaST
equally important to the development. The golf course architect's gonna lose those arguments every time, and the odds that you're going to build a really good golf course go way way down because you're not routing. You're not getting to do the routing anymore.
So off of that, we have a just a seemingly limitless supply of golf courses that you just described. If somebody was going to renovate those instead of you know, a lot of them should probably close. But say somebody was going to renovate one, like, how would you attack something like that? Would you you know where you're kind of very constricted.
Well, it depends how they're done. I mean, first of all, not that many of them are going to close, because the people that own the real estate around them have a vested interest in them not closing. And unfortunately, even if they go through bankruptcy and the value goes to zero, then then it's worth it to somebody to buy them for you know, if you could buy the golf course for a dollar because nobody really wants to run it,
then you could probably make a go of it. The guy that you know, the people that invested ten million dollars building it, no, they're out of luck. But you know, so it depends on a development course, like how much you know, how small did they divide up the parcels. If you've just got a bunch of single golf holes with houses on both sides, you have no flexibility with the routing at all, or almost none. Maybe you could make what's a par four and a par three into
a par three and a par four. That probably doesn't make any difference in overall because they you know, if if the whole development was laid out like that, then those green sites weren't located on a natural piece of ground anyway. You know, they graded the lot to either side, so you can't if even if it was now natural, it would be hard to tell that it was. So now it's just a shaping exercise. You know, what can we do to make this cooler? Can we make the
bunkers prettier? You know, if the quarters are pretty narrow, if they only let you, you know, nobody wants to say what the standard is for how how wide a golf hole has to be between houses on both sides. If I said it in this podcast, somebody would sue me in ten years because because Riley and use that dimension and a golf course that he built, and not only would they sue him, they'd sue me because I
told him. So, you know, nobody says, but obviously, you know, developers are interested in making that as narrow as it can be so they can sell more homes. And once you do that, you can't even build a hole where
you want to hit it right or left. You know, that's all predicated on hitting it down the middle of the quarter, and you know you need one hundred and fifty feet or whatever to the right of it to be safe, So you can't if you design a hole where you want to hit it down the right side or the left side, then you're playing too close to the houses on one side and you can't go there. So it's really hard with that setup to design anything
that's really interesting. If it's more than that, if you've got at least two holes in the middle between the houses, then you've got a chance. If it's more than that, where it's kind of a more or less a core golf course with housing around the outside and maybe it sticks in somewhere, then you've got some options and maybe you can really do something. But there's a ton of golf courses that are one hole wide with houses on both sides, and I can't imagine that. I would, you know,
we get calls all the time. Do you want to redesign this if that's the land plan? I don't. I don't think there's anything much I can do with that. You can make it prettier, you could make the greens more interesting, you know. To me, that's not enough.
I was just thinking about one that I grew up by, and like every single hole is siloed by itself, and like there's really nothing you can do. There's decent width between them, but you can't really do that much. There's not enough with the to get two holes on it.
I think the hardest part of it is really when you destroy the frame on both sides.
YEA.
You know, there's no natural land to the right or the left that it ties into anything, you know, it just gets divorced from being a natural landscape at all. If you've got two holes wide, then then maybe there's natural land in between and trees and some things that looks like you know, and then you just try to focus inward on that as much as you can.
I feel like it naturally evolves if it's that into a tunnel because the houses need to have the water run off onto the golf course.
Yeah.
Yeah, so you you got like a essentially playing through like a half pipe on every single hole. Right, So, which from Brett, a former intern, which routing that you have done is your favorite? Which was the most puzzling and the most rewarding? So three part pot a three part question, and we'll have we'll have Don uh answer the first and then Tom you answer the last two.
Okay, which which which a part of the question.
Is Don, Don's got favorite? And then you've got puzzling and rewarding.
Wow, that's a great question. Favorite. We'll have to think about that for a little bit. If you've got answers to the next two, I'd be happy to let you start.
Tom, all right, well, the most puzzling. There's two that I would put in. The most puzzling rock Creek. We started with an eighty thousand acre ranch. The first two times I was there, I never even got to the part of the ground where the golf course is. Now, you know, it's like, Holy hell, this is so much ground. How do I even how do I look at this?
I should probably start with a helicopter or something. But you know, so there were a lot of iterations of that, and the first couple were just okay, which part of all this land are we going to? And then some back and forth with a client as well. You know. Ironically, one of the things that made that one hard the valley where the last three holes are. It's just beautiful
for golf. I mean, you're playing down this narrow little valley and the creek runs right down it, and there's at the bottom end of it there are these two big rock pinnacles, and the valley gets really narrow, like you can't really just the creek goes through pass where the seventeenth greenis. You couldn't really put a more golf holes down that way. It got too narrow to do anything. So it's a beautiful little secluded spot. But at the bottom end below there there's a big power line going
across the valley and you can see it. And when I first saw it, I was like, damn, that's a beautiful spot. But if I had eighty thousand acres to work with and I put these last couple of holes right where you're looking at the power lines, everybody's gonna go why did you have to do that? You know, he had all this ground where you didn't have to look at the power lines. Why would you look at them? So the first couple of versions of the routing that I did for the client, we didn't go there. We
just didn't use that part of the ground. We obviously had a lot more ground we could use. And then one of Bill's good friends is a guy named Tom Devlin who developed Flint Hills National Witch Top very good golf and Tom Tom was one of the guys that Bill had come and look at my routing, and Tom Devilon was like, why don't you go down there? It's beautiful for golf holes down there, And I said, well, yeah it is, but you're gonna look at the power lines.
And we got to talking about it, and we finally all agreed, yes, those power lines are there. But if you're gonna let that distract you from it's a beautiful you know, it's not like there, it's not like there's a tower right next to the green, they're behind there always. You know, if you're gonna let that distract you from the fact that these are three great holes in a
beautiful setting, you're just an asshole. You know, it might get you the first time, that might be your overall impression, but for the members, the people that live there, that's no big deal. It's just there, it's in the background. So what it was hard to get over that. But
they were absolutely right. I mean, that was the best place for those It was the best place for the golf course to finish, just partly because the you know, the the golf course starts from the clubhouse and works way up the hill and way down and instead of just coming down to the clubhouse and ending, it goes past it and it comes back into the mountain view at the end. So from that perspective it was really good. But you know, letting go of that took a long time.
And then bally Neil was the other one because you know, we found the one, nine, ten and eighteen kind of how to get in and out of the clubhouse pretty fast. We found a lot of good holes out there, some of them kind of a little too far away if you had to go out one and get back nine. But the really hard part was number. Once you once you got to one green, you were way above where most of the golf course was, and there was no
obvious good way down there. You know, every time every hole we looked at was like, well, you're just gonna hit down, he'll in to the wind where it could go anywhere, and then you're going to wind up in a place. If it's a longer hold, you're probably gonna wind up in a place where you can't see the green very well because you're gonna wind up in this bowl, and then there's there's no good angle to go from there. So I was stumped for a long time. It didn't
help that, you know, they weren't very well funded. I couldn't tell if they were serious or not. So so it was like I was only there for a day or two at a time, on the way to somewhere else. And it didn't spend like four or five days in a row to really get it figured out and get you just get lost out there. You had a thousand acres of dunes to work with, and every time I'd leave, I was like, damn it, I just didn't get far
enough to figure this out. And finally the last time was the last time in that process, I said, well, what's over the fence? You know, we were looking at the second hole and the second green is about one hundred yards or one hundred and fifty yards past where their property line ended. And the third hole is all on property that they didn't own and that I hadn't seen. You know, you could see the second green, but you couldn't see what was going on over there at number three.
And you couldn't see once you walked up over that hill what the view was off of fourty, And I said, well, what's over there, you know, cause it's all just barren dunsland? Nobody's really it's ranch land, but nobody's using it for anything in particular. They just graze animals. So it's like, you know, we we went over and as soon as we got to where three t was, I was like, this is a lot better way down off the hill. You know. Can we trade some of this, a little
of this land for something else down there? You know, just swap, make an even swap with your your neighbor. So that's how that worked out. But it took like that was after I'd been on the property four or five times already. And the funny thing is that land that we couldn't figure out how to get down from behind Number one Green two years ago when they when they called me back and said, you know, we'd like
to consider doing another little facility of some kind. We've got we've got a little more water than we need for the golf course. So we got like enough to water seven or eight acres more turf. You know, what would you do with that? You know, we could build a part, we could build a range. Well that's not exciting, you know, could we build like a short course or a couple a couple extra holes or you know what.
We wound up doing a par three course. You know, almost as soon as you said it, I realized that the land that was too severe for the for the second hole that was probably going to be good for the par three course. So all that land that we dodged around to get the first routing right, we wound up using for the Mulligan course just last year.
That's uh man kind of is a smart thing if you think about like courses that force eighteen holes onto property versus routing the best holes you can and then using those little plots of land for like practice areas and short courses as opposed to putting bad golf holes on It would be a smart thing for golf.
Yeah, I mean, I don't. It's really hard for me to visualize that golf will get away from eighteen holes or nine holes, you know. I mean, I'm a big champion of great nine hole golf courses. There aren't many because everybody thinks, oh, that's not real. But you know, when you've got a really great nine hole course, going around it twice is a good thing, not a bad thing.
But but yeah, I mean to have some of the best work I've seen in the last five years is like working with little pieces of land and coming up with some par three holes or a little short course, or some alternative version of the main course, or something that is really thinking outside of the box. But there's a lot of good golf in a small space.
So don do you come up with your favorite routing?
I did, Anny. I think it was useful to be able to think about it a little bit and favorite, if you stretch that term a little bit. I think it's my favorite for different reasons, not just liking the holes I found necessarily, but it's more by the fact that I was part of the construction process and finding the holes that the routing is. The second course at Stonewall the North Course affectionately known as the Utter Course
and all kinds of other names for it. But I was involved in trying to figure out where the holes were going to go with Tom from the beginning, and it's got you know, it's an odd shaped piece of g it's got elevation. It has sort of a starting and finishing point with the existing barn and sort of farmhouse that we lived in during construction that was going to become that was going to serve in that capacity.
So you had a couple of givens in the equation, but going around clockwise or counterclockwise, and if you're going to going to cross over where, and proximity to roads and all that kind of stuff. There was a lot
to be learned. But when we settled on where the holes were going to go, to be privileged to be you know, on site and trying to get those ideas in the ground from the beginning all the way to the end really made it my favorite because some of the preconceived notions that I thought I had on what was going to be good ended up maybe not what
I thought at all. And you learn from that, you know, you really do start looking off site and past you know the church steeple that serves as a backdrop, backdrop for the fourth and seventh greens. You know the barn at the sixth, All of that kind of stuff. You really that resonates it and it stays with you the rest of the way. And I just learned so much from the learning curve on that project was so sharp because it was really the first time that I had
been in that position. And thank God, Tom surrounded me with a lot of talent. You know, Brian Schneider was was there right from the get go and brought all his shaping and green contour and green experience building experience with him, and Ky Goldby was there, and Eric Iverson did a stint or a couple of them, and Brian Slonik as well, and Kyle Franz, Will Smith, I mean the really long list. Toby Cobb and Dan Proctor from Bill and Ben's camp were there. So how could I
go wrong? I mean, I just but I didn't know that. I didn't know the value of those guys the ideas into the ground, but to be able to watch the the on paper part of the whole design really get realized and all the different decisions that go into the final version of whatever it was. We were shucking and jiving all over the place trying to get everything just right, and we were allowed to do that, which was a real privilege.
But well, there's you know, the interesting part of that. And you're right, do you It's at some point it's important to have enough experience actually building a golf course to understand like the holes that don't quite fit, the little transitions that you're trying to make to get you know, you've got a bunch of holes. You know, we're good, but there's some places where it doesn't fit together really well. And it's like, is that fixable in the field? You know?
And I have certainly seen modern golf courses where somebody rout it and just said, oh, they'll fix that in the field, and it wasn't fixable. There was no way in the world you can move dirt forever and not get a good hole there. But the guy arouting it didn't understand that because he never spent any time in the field. You know. He just figured, well, if they
throw enough at it, they'll get it, you know. And and there's other ones that, Okay, that's bland, But you know, I can see how I can see how I'm going to make that work. So you have to, you know, if the holes don't all fit together perfectly from one to eighteen. You also have to understand enough about what
you're gonna do. You don't have to necessarily have it all figured out in the beginning, but you have to understand that you're putting yourself in a situation that's not unsolvable, and you can easily put yourself in a situation that's unsolvable all you really the most unsolvable thing is just if you've got a severe side slope with no bottom that you can work off of, it's really hard to
build anything good any longer hole. You can build a par three pretty much anywhere, but once you've got to have a landing area for a par four and you think about where people could drive it, they could drive it all over the place on a hole like that, it's hard to do enough earthwork to receive all of those t shots.
I think Tom's absolutely spot on there too. I think you're as you're looking on a on a blank piece of property, finding good short holes, good par threes, or that's really easy, and it gets progressively worse from there. Finding the really good long holes is actually a lot harder because you you just need the space and you and so you know what with stonewall going up and over the pretty much the kind of ground that Tom was just describing and getting a long hole out of
some of the most difficult part of the property. That's the third hole, exactly right, That's exactly right, And that's.
The fourth all at Roll Melbourne. Yeah, I mean, it's just blatantly stolen from Mackenzie's thing because I because I'd noticed when I was at Ray Melbourne, how you know, doing the one thing that we normally don't do is go up and over a big hole a big hill, you know, made the other holes were perfect playing back into the hill.
And so that's an example of the walk, the tough walk up the hill after a t shot that you talked about earlier too.
Yes, yes, yeah, if you just walked all the way to the top of that hill to play the next hole, it would be bad. But but on that on that part of that property, the top of that hill, it's about two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards from where the green is. For number four, it's about three hundred yards from like any angle that you could go around that property. It's kind of in the middle along
a property line. But you you didn't have any long holes in that section that there's four or five holes if you played up to that and back off, they were all really short holes. So the only way to get something of any length was just suck it up and go up over it and get one long hole and then fit everything else in. You're kind of fit in. When we did that, we also managed to get eight and seven kind of on the diagonal through the middle of the property and get some long holes there.
That It's another example of kind of uh we talked about earlier with like the distinct sections of property where you know, one and two are kind of their own little area, and then the third t shots its own area. But then you get up and it's a vast open space. And then you go back after the eighth hole, the par five you have the par three and ten and eighteen are its own pocket. But then you get across the road and this vast open space.
Exactly, and that's you know, we you know, we've talked away. We spend all this time talking about routings and all those all those young guys that want to be architects are probably really frustrated because we haven't told him anything about how to do it. And the first thing that you do is you break it. You break it down into a few parts, just like you talked about. You know that first little bit where one and two and three T are, that's a separate section from everything else.
And you you know, whether you were going to wind up at three T or kind of more up the hill on number three, you couldn't come You couldn't go any farther because property line's there. You couldn't come back past the clubhouse with a hole. So that's a little section to work out on its own. And then that big three through eight that's a section to work out on its own, and nine and ten and eighteen that's a section to work out on its own. And then
the other part is too. So you know, almost any property is like that, even if you know Stonewall has broad crossings and stone walls and things that really break
it up. The Lost Dudes has an Interstate highway going through the middle of it, so obviously there's at least two pieces there, but nearly every property breaks up into three or four or five or six different parts, And the main reason they break up is because you're going over a hill and you don't want to play a blind hole, so you're going to try to get the last hole in one section, like up close to the top of the hill, and then the next tee up
on the top going over into the next section. And when you change a routing, you know, when I played golf with somebody on of course I built, and they go, oh, it's really cool, but I think you should have put that green over there. Okay, but then where was it? Where was the next tea going? Because that's you never change one hole at a time. Yeah, I guess it's possible. You know, if the tee is to the right and your green site was further right, maybe you could do that.
But nearly anything you change, you're going to change two or three holes to make it work, or you know, cutting out a hole saying no, I can't do that, or I'm going to combine these two holes into one. Now you don't have any teen anymore. You have to find someplace else to get that hole back. So it's
you know, that's the Rubik's cube part. When you do one thing, it changes other things, so you always have to be conscious of how you're going to come back to be in the right number of holes at the end.
One of the things I really learned Stonewall again is the process you talk about compartmentalizing sections of the property. If you can get two holes in one particular section that you like that are good, that work, that's great. But if you can get three in there or four that you like that work that function, that just gives you way more leeway to wiggle around and get bigger and more creative in the other pieces that are left over. So each piece that you can really max out gives
you more freedom in all of the others. And it's exactly like Tom says, it's a ripple effect. You're not changing one hole or one thing and it stops there. Often it resonates into two and three and four and five holes, going all over the place, and then getting them all to fit together as eighteen.
No doubt, that's that's the next lesson routing. Once you break it down, it's like, how can you get the most out of this one? And you know when high point the one little piece I wrote on routing and the Anatomy of a golf course was about the start of the back nine. At high points, there was like a forty acre block a land that was in back of everything else, and it was by far the prettiest land, you know it was. It was covered with ferns and
these It was very sandy hilly. It was covered with ferns and these little tiny pine trees that they planted for erosion control. But but when we when we were starting the golf course, they were only like hip high and you could you could almost rip them out of the ground by hand to clear you just we just wrapped a chain around them and pull them out with
a bucket of a tractor basically. And you know, when I first looked at that piece of the ground, I was like, oh, there'd be a cool hole playing diagonally across here to this green site right here, and then there'd be a cool hole up there coming out. And I had like two or three holes in forty acres. And it took me maybe a couple of days to get to forget about that. It's like, that's the best
piece of the property. I should get five holes in there if I can't, And ultimately that was you know, it's like ten eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and part of the fifteenth tea coming out of it. We're all in that section in your land, and anybody who ever played the golf course, that was the best part of the golf course and that's why you wanted to go back there. So so yeah, once you've got it broken up, it's like, Okay, what's the best part of this? How do I get
the most out of that? And that's you know, it's not just one hole. It's like the best combination of three or four or five holes. But but you know that's kind of where a routing starts.
It's, uh, yeah, you got to maximize rather than having one great hole that hogs the best feature is using that feature as much as exam so that you get the most. It makes a lot of sense. It's so don you You bring a lot of these routings and ideas to life drawing, and a lot of the world,
like myself, are absolute awful artists me too. What are some just tips for drawing that you have for because there I feel like there's more and more armshair, architects, guys that like to doodle, you know, routings and sketches. What kind of advice do you have.
Well, the advice I think is me be to, now that we have more resources to do it, pay attention to what the old guys did not. You know, we're talking about building golf and realizing actual golfers, but I just did the same thing withdrawing too. You know, the more plans that you can get your hands on from the guys that did it a long time ago, there's always something there, whether you know it's as simple or
as irrelevant as a north arrow. You know, those are the kinds of things that kind of catch my eye. And how do they depict grassing lines and you know, center lines and te's and greens and flags and that kind of stuff. And there's really good stuff out there. And you know, I'm not quite sure what my style is,
but it's it's really not uniquely my own. Certainly. It's just a you know, a conglomerate of a bunch of other things that someone else has already done that I saw, and I'm just putting them together, maybe in a slightly different way, but I you know, for me personally, I'm fascinated by the really old maps all the way down to tease greens and bunkers and different fonts, different styles. You know, I think it's it's like most things. If you enjoy it, that's going to drive you to investigate it.
And if you investigate it, you're going to discover a
lot of stuff. And it's plus, it's just a hell of a lot of fun, honestly, And it's interesting too, because I think it can be it can be somewhat of a distraction in the architectural process because if you put that kind of stuff in front of a client early on and for whatever reason, they really like it, and you know, they're already having trouble picturing in their mind's eye what's this going to look like, and they're getting ready to write checks, or people are getting ready
to write checks, and they want to be comfortable that what they unknown is going to turn out a certain way. So you have to be careful not to put something out there in a way that you know you're not going to be able to make all the really necessary changes that we've been talking about for a while now in the field, because that's what really matters, that's what really really matters. So you know, there's a level of
responsibility that you have. I think in sort of projecting an idea and it's good to get people excited, but it's all I've also learned it's really important to make sure they understand, don't love it too much because it could change. Yeah, but there needs to be Yeah, there really needs to be that disclaimer, and invariably it does.
And I think that's what makes Tom and you know Renaissance somewhat unique is we kind of go in not entirely sure, we just are confident that at the end it's gonna be good because we're pouring ourselves into it and we've had good luck doing it that way. So you know, the drawings can be helpful, but you know they're they're also uh, they're just a tool. They're just they're just a launch pad. They're not the end all be all.
And a lot of times when you see you know, somebody's gone to great lengths at the beginning of the project to do all these renderings of what's going to look like and stuff. A lot of times they're just stealing.
You know, it's for the third hole at Stonewall. They would just put a picture in there of the fourth all raw Melbourne it say it's going to be like that you know, in China they would actually take a picture of raw melvern and maybe flip it over or photoshop something out and just use it like that was
the whole It was already built. You know, there's extreme versions of it, but but yeah, I mean it's you know, the more you try to do stuff like that at the beginning, it's it winds up being really derivative of like other things that are already existing. If you're really trying to do something original, you're not going to do that on paper before you start. You're going to do that when you're out there.
You know how you know That's the fact too, I think is you know, with technology that we have now, if we go back to the first plan that Tom had on a golf course, that was what we thought was going to be the routing, and then subsequently, you know, the project is done, it's built, and there are irrigation gps as builts of exactly where the tea's ended up and how the greens are shaped and the what the
grassing lines look like. It's fascinating to look at what we started with and what we actually ended up building, and often they don't resemble in a lot of ways what we started with and the configuration of grassing lines at the end is just it. It looks pretty crazy, you know it. It is really a full on evolution, and I think part of that is because that's what the ground dictated, so we that's what we paid attention to, and you can't get that level at the detail at
the beginning. But we also spend a lot of time trying to get grassing lines right when we're shaping things.
I mean, I just remember from from a high point, from one or two other things when I built them, that what you built that looks so cool on the ground looks very plain on paper. It's like there's you know, you get a i mean the the Ahole Crystal Apps, one of my favorite golf holes in the world. On paper, there's no fairway, bunkers. You know that. It's all about the topography and the landing area. And unless you can read a topa map really well, you can't tell what
the hell is going on there. So it just looks like any standard Muni hot dog dog leg right. Yeah, I mean there's nothing there in two D on a plan view that you go, oh wow, that's a really cool because it's all in the third dimensions, and if you're trying to make it look cool in the beginning, you're going to embellish it and add fairway bunkers and do all these things to make it look cool that it doesn't need out there on the ground.
So with with golf courses closing, and you know, there's like a perfect example is that Engineers is closing this year, I think, but.
Were actually closing. I mean I know that, I know the deal has been done to sell it, but I also know that well, if it's like you know, we worked on north Shore, which is not far from there, and north Shore, if they had sold the club to a developer, it would have taken them five years before they could build any homes minimums. So the golf course was going to last for a while anyway.
One place where you were a big part of the recovery was Ashkronish Up and I was.
We were a very small part of the recovery there. Somebody else, Martin Eber and those guys really recovered the golf course. We just tinkered around with it a little sense then, and by a little, I mean a little.
Trevor Dormer wanted to know about how close. Do you think today's routing is to the original.
I have no honest way of judging that. I don't.
I honestly don't think that. You know, when Martin Ebert and Gordon Irvin walked it originally and put the routing together, they didn't they had nobody had a map of it from before, so they just they just went by their eye and supposedly their vision of what they thought old Tom Morris would have done by his eye, which you know, things are so different today that you know, I would say one of the best holes at Askernish is the make sure I get the numbers right, pretty sure, it's
the eighth, the little short part four that you know, you play that great seventh hole down into the valley and then you walk up out of it and the tea is kind of benched into a little dune and the eighth hole is going. It's a short part four and there's a bunker by the green, and then you're looking out over the water and there's another island in the background. I think it's Bara or one of the other islands, and that could be exactly the hole that old Tom
Morris did. I don't know, but to me at just the presentation of it was much more modern. Tom Morris wasn't interested, or at least I haven't noticed on very many of his other courses where he tried to get the tea just up in the right spot so you could see a certain amount of water and so that island would be straight in the background. So they might be in the right place. But I suspect that there's other things that creep into it they are not even
conscious of. So once you get into the like especially once you get into the far end of the golf course from the club ass like eleven, twelve, thirteen, those are the holes that I that I don't really know if they're in the same places at all or not. You know, when you're first when you go from the kind of flatter ground to where seven and eight and
those are those seem pretty obvious, you know. But again, the further you get away from something that you know, the less likely that they're in exactly the same place.
A big trend in golf spend abstract routings, like we've talked a lot about. A little bit car for the course has an idea for a twenty four hole course with four six hole loose and you could play eighteen holes, and then you'd have six holes open for open play at all times and you could rotate them around. What are your thoughts on that? He's written a long post about it. Also, he's got a website so everybody can go read it. I think it called it the clover Course.
And if what are your thoughts on that, and what abstract routing or idea would you want a design that you haven't done yet if you want to give it away?
So his clover course is just a little bit short. You remember, he might not be old enough. Donal'll be old enough. You remember when they had that Superstars competition on TV in the seventies. I took all the athletes and have them do like a decathlon type thing where they're doing a whole bunch of different sports against each other. They held it in a place called Rotunda, Florida, which is like over on the west side, you're it's not
far from Gasparilla. And their idea for the land plan for this town was it was a city in the round, and everything was going to be in the round. So they they put a clubhouse kind of in the middle, and they were going to have six golf courses. Eventually they only have one. But to start they built like every three holes looped back to the clubhouse. So eventually they could spoke off and keep going and build a bunch more holes. So they do. They every third hole
comes back to the clubhouse. It's crazy. It's very limiting if you think about it, It's like, what can you do. It's like a part five and then three and a four coming back is it's hard to get away from that as programmed as they were. So you know what his idea sounds like. You know, I'm not big on this twelve hole thing that everybody, you know, people are trying.
You know, I think of golf in terms of nine or eighteen, And I understand Prestrick was twelve holes originally, and I would love to play that twelve hole golf course, but but I think you're going to have a hard time getting away from nine or eighteen. So there are all So there's a lot of twenty seven whole golf courses in the world based on the exact same theory
that he's talking about. You know, we could start people on three different nines in the morning and then have them flip over to a different nine and keep going and get more people out there. We can close one of the nines and do work on it and still have an eighteen hole golf course operationally. There are a
lot of advantages to doing it that way. The one big downside of doing it that way is that if you're trying to do something really good and noteworthy, the first question from everybody is, well, what's the main course? What's the really good one? And then you're stuck. As soon as somebody identifies that this is the best way, the A and C nines are the best combination, then that's all anybody wants to play. The other one's like
a stepchild. And on the rare occasion that you get a course like Ridgewood and New Jersey where there's twenty seven holes and they're all good, the people that great golf courses still don't know how to compare that to eighteen whole golf courses. They're like, well, which one are we rating? Do we count the cool short part four on the C nine or do we not because it's not part of the eighteen whole course. So you know, for your average public golf course trying to make money,
trying to get a lot of people around. You know that idea of having more than eighteen holes and being able to take a piece out is not a bad idea at all. In Australia a lot like every place we consult, the first thing they want to do is build a par three nineteenth hole so that it's somewhere out in the golf course, not right by the clubhouse, so that they have an extra hole to play with, so they can work on a couple holes without taking things out of play, without having to have a temporary
green and all that. But you know, if you want to build a great golf course, it's going to get ranked as a great golf course. That's not the way you want to go. It's just two against human nature and the nature of raiders. They don't like it.
I'm for a four or five hole course in like an urban area, as somebody that lives in the city of Chicago. Like the idea of being able to play golf in an hour, which is the same time as somebody's workout, is like to me, like the thing that's like low hanging fruits, like you can go to the gym, or you can go play four holes of golf, like people will choose four holes or five holes of.
Golf, right, yeah, if you lift. I mean, the big advantage of belonging to a club back in the day, you know, if you actually live close to the club and you were on the club and you were right there is you could just go out and play four or five holes in the evening and jump around to where there weren't other people in the way, and it'll play a few holes.
So should we wrap this up with some overrated underrated.
Okay, that means it's time to wrap up.
Yeah, overrated underrated flat type properties.
M hm, flat type property.
Tight like flat and small properties for golf courses.
Well, they're not overrated because nobody thinks much of them to start with, so you almost have to be underrated, but you have to be really creative to get much out of them.
Agreed. I think that's right.
You.
The precedent from my mind for my money is is Garden City in New York. You know, there's, first look, there's not much there, but there are lots of creative things you can do to make it very interesting. But uh, you gotta you gotta execute them. So yeah, that's a good question.
Sometimes I think that you should judge architects based off of like what they did with some of their worst property versus what they did with some of their best property.
Well, you know, I get that, I get that questions, and and you know, there's a lot of people that are envious of some of the pieces of property that I've got to work on. You know, I'm sure, you know, just like I used to think about Alistair Mackenzie. God, I wish I could have worked on some of those properties. You know, I've gotten to work on some of those properties, and and and you know, I mean I think about
it sometimes. Donald Ross never had a chance to work on a piece of landlike kid kidnappers or Pacific dudes ever four hundred golf courses, nothing like that. But you know, I don't believe that you can judge what an architect did with a given piece of ground when you go on it and it's done. It's too hard to it's too hard to really dig down and try to get a sense of what was there to start with. And you know, how many other ways could he have done this?
So it just seems like inevitable I would have come up with that routing. You know, I might have moved it. You know, it's like, well, I would have flipped over number eleven and number twelve, and it's like you never would have found any of the other holes, so so cut it out. There was a point at which at Crystal Downs the club president at the time was a member of Inverness and he was buddies with Arthur Hills,
who had a locker right there. So Arthur Hills came up to Crystal Downs and went around the golf course with the club president and Fred Muller, the pro, and they were on the front nine, and you know the front nine a Crystal Downs pretty wild piece of ground.
So they they got in that stretch of five and then six coming back over the rugged ground and then seven and Arthur Hills looked at Fred and said, I don't know if I would have come up with this, and Fred just laughed like, I don't think you would happen.
You know, some argue is one of the maybe the greatest stretch of golf holes in the world.
That would have been a really hard routing to come up with. You know, when when Mackenzie started with that, the road that goes around the edge of it now came through some of those holes. It was it went across the middle of six and seven fairways. So so he's got to be looking across the road at the other side trying to figure out how to do it. And I think, you know, the hole that makes it work is number five, the short part four that hits
over the hill. It's not as like up and over like raw Melbourne, but it's it's over and around and I, you know, I think that was just necessity is the mother of invention. You know, six will be great, seven, eight, but I got to get to sixty. Oh, I can do it this way. I don't think anybody would have come up with that hole just looking at You could look at the map all day and not think there's a hole right there. You know, that was just like, okay, I got some other holes. Now I got to make
this one work. And arguably that's the most interesting hole of all of those.
Yeah, I heard. I don't know if it's an old live sale that.
You know.
Perry Maxwell was there, and he was you know, Mackenzie had been just grinding over this routing for days and he ran out of booze and Maxwell left to go get booze, and when he came back, Mackenzie was like.
I've got it.
I've got it. And then they counted up the holes and there was only seventeen. Is that true?
I don't know if it's true. And then the ninth hole was supposedly an extra hole, and you know it was legend of Crystal Downs that that was a true story. So so years ago I was I got asked to write I actually got asked to write the chapter on architecture in the centennial book for the USGA, like the first hundred years of golf in America. Very high powered writing assignment. They had, like the editor of the New
Yorker was their editor. So I was a little in over my head and and I had that story and I wanted to use it, and they're like, can you fact check it? I'm like, I don't know if we could fact check that. So Perry Maxwell's son was still alive, Press Maxwell, so we called him to check on it and he's his confirmation was I've heard the same story. Not necessarily, yes, that's exactly the way it happened. But that was good enough the USGA and the editor for the New Yorkers, so it's good enough for me.
That's as funny story, all right. Last overrated underrated dog legs.
I don't build any dog legs. I'll say this. Dog legs with trees overrated. Dog legs without trees underrated. You know, if you can build a dog leg that makes somebody like bite, you invite somebody to bite off the angle, but to hit to a fairway that's angling away from them instead of straight on, I think that's a great hole. It's hard to do, you know, it's hard to do a lot of dog legs on a modern course because
you're not working around trees. You have to be really wary of somebody shortcutting into another hole that it's you know, it's shorter, it's a better angle to the green to hit it in the next fairway over and go from there. There's a lot of that on old courses. Sometimes when you're taking down trees on older courses, if you don't watch what you're doing, you open up something that nobody
was thinking about. But if you've got the space, I love you know, where the fairway is not straight, where the fair you know, I mean, a dog leg is just a really really a matter of interpretation. There's always a bee line from the tee to the green. It's just some holes you can't actually hit it. When you hit drive length is you can't find fairways straight on
that line. Those are cool holes. But a dog leg where you know there's trees inside the corner two hundred or two hundred and fifty yards off the tee, those are really tough because, on top of everything else, the more the distance keeps changing that people hit it. It doesn't work for everybody very well. It's a terrible hole when you hit a decent drive and you're a block behind a tree and you can only hit like a hundred yard shot get yourself around the corner.
Yeah, that's easy to sit here and agree with Tom on that. Over under and you know a dog leg hole that you're hitting diagonally across you know some really cool negative space natural feature that's whether it's the ocean or a natural wash or something. You know that that
works well. But when the hazard is up in the air and you can't see where you're going and you don't know what happens if you hit through the dog leg and all of that, that's where you really get in a spot where the hole's not very desirable.
And if you weigh that.
Against a perfectly straight hole that is thoughtfully and strategically bunkered. I'd rather play the straight hole more often than not than you know, that less desirable, less good dog leg with something you know in the crux of it that just doesn't it's just not interesting. It ends up being really one dimensional that way, and the more multi dimensional you can be, sometimes straight offers the widest variety of routes to the hole, and that's the good stuff.
So I think a lot of my prefer or a little of my preference, at least two goes back to being a photographer. It's like, I want to see where the hole's going, you know, I want to see the flag from the tea. If I can see the flag from the tee and then see different ways of getting there, that's great. But but you know, you watch tour pros, you know, beating it over trees, over the corner of the dog leg. You know, I'm not good enough to do that. But if I was, when I got done,
i'd still be standing there and the tea going. I wonder if that's imply you know, they know, we don't know. We can't even tell whether that worked or whether we have to hit another tea ball to be safe.
Yeah, it does make you match up line and distant. But with I think as if technology keeps going, it makes it harder and harder for it to stay relevant.
That's true. I think brings up in the other thought too that Tom's talking about from a photographer's standpoint, to be able to see the hole. I think the whole dialogue being more or less today about routing. When you can find a really good hole, a long hole on the golf course where you can see the flag from the tee, he might not necessarily be able to see what's going on all the way through between where you are, but if you can see the flagstick on a really
long golf hole, you've got something there. And you know, finding that on paper and finding it in the field are two different things. But if you can get a hole like that in your routing, that's always that's always a winner.
All right.
That's it for routing. Don really appreciate the time, Tom also, and we will be back in a couple of weeks with a podcast about the Loop and Michigan golf.
Thanks Sandy, you've been listening to the fried Egg podcast.
We do the digging for you,