Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doak.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we discussed Tom's design of stream Song
Speaker 1: Blue and the unique nature of the project. I was
Speaker 1: able to record this podcast at stream Song and capture
Speaker 1: some great footage while at the resort. I would recommend
Speaker 1: checking out the podcast on the website for an enhanced
Speaker 1: listening and viewing experience. Thanks for all the support and
Speaker 1: listening to the podcast. Here's episode four of The Yoke
Speaker 1: with Doak.
Speaker 2: Tom Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back.
Speaker 2: But don't toss the Yolk and.
Speaker 3: The famously candid Oak doesn't pull any punches. How do
Speaker 3: I make natural looking contour hire the biggest fool in
Speaker 3: the village? I told them to get flat first. Overrated, underrated, rough,
Speaker 3: terribly overrated over the years.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another edition of The
Speaker 1: Yoke with Doak. Today we are gonna discuss one of
Speaker 1: Tom's solo designs, stream Song Blue. Tom, welcome back.
Speaker 3: Thanks and nice to actually be here at stream Song
Speaker 3: to talk about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we got a good listener question to kick things off.
Speaker 1: It's from Will Bardwell, he'd like to know when someone
Speaker 1: is playing the course for the first time. What do
Speaker 1: they need to know slash understand in order to enjoy
Speaker 1: the round the most?
Speaker 3: Well, probably the first thing for a lot of my
Speaker 3: courses stream Song is certainly not the only one, is
Speaker 3: that there's a lot of short grass around the greens
Speaker 3: and you can get away with missing greens and they
Speaker 3: have a chance to get up and down. But usually,
Speaker 3: you know, a lot of the conturs are built with
Speaker 3: the idea that you're playing low shots back up under
Speaker 3: the green. You're not taking a wedge and flopping.
Speaker 2: It up there.
Speaker 3: It's the turf here is a little different than banded
Speaker 3: dunes are Barnboogle that you almost can't hit the flop
Speaker 3: wedge up in the air. The turf there on those
Speaker 3: courses is so tight and the ground is so hard
Speaker 3: that that only a player with great hands can do it.
Speaker 3: Here the turf is a little more forgiving. It's all
Speaker 3: Bermuda grass, but but it's still you know, those contracts
Speaker 3: were planned with in anticipation that it would be pretty
Speaker 3: tight and fast and that was the way to play
Speaker 3: the shots, and you know, so you have to get
Speaker 3: you have to get comfortable with that and bandon the
Speaker 3: caddies will just you know, if you keep trying to
Speaker 3: hit a wedge, the caddies will eventually take your wedge
Speaker 3: and jam it and the deepest recess of the bag
Speaker 3: where you can't get at it anymore. And the caddies
Speaker 3: here are pretty good at trying to steer you around
Speaker 3: shots that are a mistake here. But I think that's
Speaker 3: the biggest thing that And you know, there's a lot
Speaker 3: of contra and the approaches and the greens, and there's
Speaker 3: a lot of places for a ball they hit a
Speaker 3: conter and kind of veer off line from where you
Speaker 3: think it was going, and you know you have to
Speaker 3: be prepared for that and not get too flustered by it.
Speaker 3: I've seen some really good players get very upset here
Speaker 3: or a bad bounce or two, and you know, not
Speaker 3: not give credit for the fact the previous all they
Speaker 3: got a good bounce. Yeah they you know, they never
Speaker 3: complain when they get the good bounce or I've known
Speaker 3: people to complain about a good bounce, But you really
Speaker 3: wonder about those people.
Speaker 1: I think my dad's one of those people. Actually, it's
Speaker 1: I find that too. Everybody always tells you about like, well,
Speaker 1: my round could have been this had this happened, but
Speaker 1: nobody ever says, well, my round would have been this
Speaker 1: had I not like got this great break.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely true.
Speaker 1: It's gotta be frustrating as an architect sometimes because like
Speaker 1: they only remember the times that they get the bad breaks.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, a lot of architects avoid having little
Speaker 3: crown contras in the golf course and especially around the
Speaker 3: greens because they know that and they know that they're
Speaker 3: gonna get criticism for it. And I mean it's almost
Speaker 3: literally true that for every bad bounce, another guy will
Speaker 3: get a good bounce off the same thing. And yet
Speaker 3: you know, because nobody talks about him, you only hear
Speaker 3: the criticism. So if you're trying to avoid criticism as
Speaker 3: a designer, you stop putting those features in. And to me,
Speaker 3: I mean, this is a beautiful sight for golf, and
Speaker 3: there were some really dramatic features to it, but you know,
Speaker 3: like those contracts are a big part of the defense
Speaker 3: of this golf course. I mean, it's not it's a
Speaker 3: very wide open golf course and that's the balance against that.
Speaker 3: You know, you can get around it and not lose
Speaker 3: a ball, but it's hard to score because there's a
Speaker 3: lot of those little you know, they seem fairly random
Speaker 3: at times, like there's just a little landmine there waiting
Speaker 3: to go off if you hit the ball on the
Speaker 3: wrong spot of the green and if you you know,
Speaker 3: if you've never played here before, it's hard to accept
Speaker 3: that the first time, but you know, those are the
Speaker 3: kind of features. The more you come back here and
Speaker 3: get to know the place, that's what really makes it
Speaker 3: interesting to come back and keep trying to figure out
Speaker 3: a little more.
Speaker 1: That's why I found I appreciated I played the Loop
Speaker 1: one of your courses last summer.
Speaker 2: I played it again this summer.
Speaker 1: In the second time around, you learned, You learned so
Speaker 1: much and you appreciate things so much more when you
Speaker 1: get around it again. And it's got to be a
Speaker 1: tough thing with the golf profession. Brendan Wurinsky won to
Speaker 1: take us back to your first impressions of the site
Speaker 1: when you visited the first time.
Speaker 2: I think it's a good place to jump into how
Speaker 2: this all came about.
Speaker 3: Okay, so I can't remember the years exactly. It was
Speaker 3: either two thousand, I think it was two thousand and
Speaker 3: nine that I came down here for the first time
Speaker 3: and I met one of the clients in Tampa, and
Speaker 3: then we took a helicopter over here to have a look.
Speaker 3: And there were like three or four different pieces of
Speaker 3: ground that they wanted me to look at as potential
Speaker 3: sites for a golf course. And the original idea was
Speaker 3: that they were going to build too golf courses right away,
Speaker 3: but on two different sites, that the character of them
Speaker 3: would be really different, so you know, and we kind
Speaker 3: of hot from place to place by helicopter. They were
Speaker 3: they were two and three miles apart, say, and you know,
Speaker 3: this was a mining operation, and you know, one of
Speaker 3: them was a site that had been very recently mined,
Speaker 3: and you know, sometimes the access to places wasn't so
Speaker 3: easy here. So the helicopter helped from that standpoint and
Speaker 3: from for seeing a bunch of things in a hurry.
Speaker 3: So they took me to an area that was very
Speaker 3: gentle and almost flat. That was an area that had
Speaker 3: all been already been reclaimed from the mining, you know,
Speaker 3: and it looked like you could build like a traditional
Speaker 3: parkland course, but a fairly flat one. They took me
Speaker 3: to this raw open site that they had just torn up,
Speaker 3: and it was really really I mean, you would have
Speaker 3: to put it all back together and fill some things
Speaker 3: back in, because they'd mind stuff down pretty close to
Speaker 3: water table. The last site that we looked at after
Speaker 3: the one where the golf course is now, was kind
Speaker 3: of more of a nature preserve out It was a
Speaker 3: little south of here, I think, and you know, more
Speaker 3: wetlands and stuff. But they were skeptical about that. They
Speaker 3: thought it would take the permitting would be hard for that.
Speaker 3: And then this big, this really big site that looked
Speaker 3: like my first impression was to look like the sand
Speaker 3: Hills of Nebraska. In the center of the site, we
Speaker 3: landed about where the somewhere between like the first fairway
Speaker 3: and sixth fairway of the Blue Course, and so that
Speaker 3: big dune that was behind the scene green is immediately
Speaker 3: right in your face. Like that's what reminded me of
Speaker 3: sand Hills. It was like, God, that's a that's a
Speaker 3: fifty forty fifty foot high sand dune sitting out here
Speaker 3: with native grasses on it, like it had been there
Speaker 3: for a long time, or like it had always been there.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a remnant of the mining operation
Speaker 3: that had been sitting there for so long that it
Speaker 3: had been revegetated, you know, first, the wind blew it
Speaker 3: around and shaped it. I mean it was it was
Speaker 3: just a big pile of sand stacked up by a
Speaker 3: big piece of equipment to start with. But the wind
Speaker 3: was on it long enough that it formed into like
Speaker 3: a you know, it had the shape of a real
Speaker 3: sand dune, and then grass sort of took it over
Speaker 3: and held that shape. So we kind of drove up
Speaker 3: onto that. And then you know, right when we got
Speaker 3: up there to where my seventh tea is now, all
Speaker 3: of a sudden there's a reveal that on the backside
Speaker 3: of this sand dune, the ground drops off eighty feet
Speaker 3: into a thirty acre lake with one hundred foot sand
Speaker 3: dune on the far side of it. I was like,
Speaker 3: holy crap, I've never seen anything like that in my life.
Speaker 3: And you know, I said to rich Mac the client,
Speaker 3: you know, if you'd a blindfolded me and kidnapped me
Speaker 3: and brought me down here and taking the blindfold off,
Speaker 3: you know, Florida would be like the forty seventh guess
Speaker 3: of what state are we in?
Speaker 2: That's what I was going to say.
Speaker 1: The original call, like they said, hey, we think we
Speaker 1: have this great site for golf.
Speaker 2: What was it like? Did you have like a predisposition
Speaker 2: heading into.
Speaker 3: Well, they said it was a mining site, so I
Speaker 3: assumed that it was going to be there was going
Speaker 3: to be some elevation. I mean, you know, I sort
Speaker 3: of assumed more like a rock corps. I didn't understand
Speaker 3: anything about phosphate mining and the scale of what they
Speaker 3: did out here, but you know, I assumed it wasn't
Speaker 3: going to be flat from the little bit that they
Speaker 3: told me. But I didn't imagine that it was going
Speaker 3: to be anything as dramatic as it was. Of course,
Speaker 3: that call came like right after the financial crisis, when
Speaker 3: nobody was thinking about starting any projects. So so for
Speaker 3: for us and for Bill cor this project was a godsend.
Speaker 3: I mean, right when nothing else was going on, this
Speaker 3: big company with a lot of dollars in its pocket
Speaker 3: that wasn't too concern it. You know, their balance sheet
Speaker 3: is so big, this is just a rounding her. It's like,
Speaker 3: oh God, they're you know, they've got the money. They
Speaker 3: don't have to worry about spending the money for it,
Speaker 3: and they think that now is the right time to
Speaker 3: build when prices are low, and so you know, it
Speaker 3: was obviously a tremendous opportunity. They talked right away about
Speaker 3: building two golf courses at once, and they interviewed three
Speaker 3: or four architects, including Bill Core and me, and you know,
Speaker 3: I think we all really wanted the job. And you know,
Speaker 3: it was funny, you know, they kept going back to
Speaker 3: that idea of using two different sites. And this site
Speaker 3: that we built the two golf courses on was so
Speaker 3: much more dramatic than the other ones. And you know,
Speaker 3: even though they moved dirt all around in the mining
Speaker 3: process to create the site, kind of by accident, you know,
Speaker 3: we treated it like a finish, like like it was
Speaker 3: a piece of land in the sand hills and here's
Speaker 3: the contras you've got. And you know, we we approached
Speaker 3: it like we don't have to move a lot of
Speaker 3: dirt around. Somebody already did a lot way back when.
Speaker 3: But we can you know, there's good shapes for golf
Speaker 3: out here, so we don't have to change too much.
Speaker 3: Whereas all the other sites we looked at, no, you'd
Speaker 3: you know, you'd have had to move quite a bit
Speaker 3: of dirt and it still wouldn't have wound up anywhere
Speaker 3: as dramatic as this. There just wasn't the same amount
Speaker 3: of elevation change, and you know, it seemed pretty intuitive
Speaker 3: to both of us that that, you know, the contrast
Speaker 3: between that kind of site and how everybody feels about
Speaker 3: what Florida golf is like in general, was going to
Speaker 3: be the big hook for this place that you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's in the middle of Florida, and yeah, it's nothing
Speaker 3: at all like anything else in Florida. So even though
Speaker 3: it seems crazy, you know, think Florida. You know, Florida
Speaker 3: needs another golf course. Now, Florida has way too many
Speaker 3: average golf courses, but this was not an average site
Speaker 3: for a golf course, and it was pretty obvious that
Speaker 3: you could do something special with it.
Speaker 1: How much different was it working for a corporation than
Speaker 1: your traditional resort developer?
Speaker 3: Very different. You know, I don't A lot of my
Speaker 3: clients have been entrepreneurial guys, I guess that's the best
Speaker 3: way to say it. And you know, not necessarily all
Speaker 3: super wealthy, you know, everything from hotel owners to farmers
Speaker 3: to hedge fund tycoons, but mostly guys that started their
Speaker 3: businesses from scratch. And I think I maybe I appealed
Speaker 3: to them a little bit because you know, I'm not
Speaker 3: an ex player, and they respect that more than some
Speaker 3: other people would because they built their businesses from they
Speaker 3: didn't have a they didn't have an easy way into
Speaker 3: what they did either. But you know, a corporate client,
Speaker 3: you know, usually I'm I've gotten used to only answering
Speaker 3: to one person, and as long as I maintained that
Speaker 3: relationship pretty good and make sure that nobody gets in
Speaker 3: the middle of it, you know, and the communication is
Speaker 3: clear that we always wind up with a good product
Speaker 3: and everybody's happy, you know. With the corporate client, the
Speaker 3: fear was, you know, what's the chain of command going
Speaker 3: to be? And you know how many people are passing
Speaker 3: on everything. But the main guy at Mosaic who was
Speaker 3: pushing for this golf project, the CEO who's retired now,
Speaker 3: was definitely behind it. He was a golfer. But their
Speaker 3: chief legal counsel and one of the vice presidents is
Speaker 3: a guy named rich Mack, who showed me around here
Speaker 3: the first time, good golfer, and he was clearly going
Speaker 3: to be very involved with the project. And ultimately he's
Speaker 3: who Bill and I and Gill now have all answered to.
Speaker 3: And even though there is that corporate structure at Mosaic
Speaker 3: behind the scenes, you know, on the face of it,
Speaker 3: he's been our client, just like Mike Kaiser or Rick
Speaker 3: Kane or anybody else. And we spent a lot of
Speaker 3: time with him during the process.
Speaker 1: So working with Corn creunscha On and this is from Pete. Oh,
Speaker 1: how much collaboration or joint planning was involved with Core
Speaker 1: and Crenshaw, with them doing the red course and you
Speaker 1: doing the Blue course at the same time.
Speaker 3: A lot. This was really a unique project. And so
Speaker 3: going back to my story about these four different sites,
Speaker 3: you know, Bill and I both wanted to work on
Speaker 3: the site that we built on, and Mosaic's original assumption
Speaker 3: was that there wasn't enough land there for thirty six holes,
Speaker 3: and one of us had to want to work on
Speaker 3: one of the other sites instead. And I've known Bill
Speaker 3: for a long long time, and we both have similar tastes,
Speaker 3: and we both had our eye on the one particular site.
Speaker 3: And as much as we like each other, neither one
Speaker 3: of us really wanted to, you know, take the bullet
Speaker 3: for somebody out for the other guy and say, okay,
Speaker 3: I'll do the other site, you know, and rich Mack
Speaker 3: would ask us questions like so if he asked, I
Speaker 3: remember Rich asking me specifically, So, if I gave you
Speaker 3: one of the other sites, do you think you could
Speaker 3: build as good a course as on this site? You know?
Speaker 3: And it was like it's like one of those interview
Speaker 3: questions from hell. They you know, they just they're trying
Speaker 3: to force you into saying what they want to hear,
Speaker 3: and you know, and I just I said, well, I'm
Speaker 3: pretty good. But if if I took any of those
Speaker 3: other sites and made it as good as this site here,
Speaker 3: then you must have hired the wrong guy for this
Speaker 3: site here, because this should turn out way better than
Speaker 3: the other ones. And finally, you know, Bill and I
Speaker 3: were Bill and I were both here at the same time,
Speaker 3: and we kind of knew each other well enough to
Speaker 3: say to each other, you know, let's try to figure
Speaker 3: out if we can get all thirty six holes on
Speaker 3: this site so we don't have to like compete for
Speaker 3: it or arm wrestle or whatever the hell we're going
Speaker 3: to have to do. So I went back and tried
Speaker 3: to lay out thirty six holes on the site Bill had.
Speaker 3: Bill had already laid out a couple of eighteen hole
Speaker 3: routings that he really liked and I went back and
Speaker 3: just said, okay, I have to put that aside and
Speaker 3: see if I can make thirty six holes fit. And
Speaker 3: I did, and we came down and looked at it
Speaker 3: and compared it to his eighteen hole routing, and there
Speaker 3: were clearly some things that he could do, you know,
Speaker 3: go in different directions that we really liked, that you
Speaker 3: couldn't do if you tried to get all thirty six
Speaker 3: holes and you just had to have more parallel holes
Speaker 3: to make them all fit. You know. The clearest example
Speaker 3: was what's now the fourth Hall on the Blue Course
Speaker 3: was on one of Bill's routings, and you know, taking
Speaker 3: that dramatic step up, you know, it plays uphill and
Speaker 3: you have to hit up over up onto a bluff
Speaker 3: for the second shot, which is you know, really unique
Speaker 3: for Florida. And you know, we couldn't. You couldn't build
Speaker 3: that hole and fit in as many holes working around
Speaker 3: the edge of that crater. You know, I had a hole,
Speaker 3: I had like two parallel holes underneath that big slope.
Speaker 3: So so what we started doing was working on a
Speaker 3: thirty six hole plan together without you know, we both
Speaker 3: agreed that there were some pretty dramatic features and if
Speaker 3: you just drew a line through the middle of the
Speaker 3: site and said you stay on that side, Now stay
Speaker 3: on this side. That neither course would get the variety
Speaker 3: that you really wanted. One would get that that bowl
Speaker 3: with a really sharp bluff, and then it wouldn't get
Speaker 3: the big lakes over on the far side. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: And so we tried to figure out what was the
Speaker 3: best thirty six hole plan without deciding who was doing
Speaker 3: which course. So there was a lot of back and forth.
Speaker 3: We were here together a couple of times. You know,
Speaker 3: Bill would come down for a couple of days and
Speaker 3: send me a sketch with a few new holes. You know.
Speaker 3: When we agreed that the thirty six holes wouldn't quite
Speaker 3: fit the way we did, Bill went out and walked
Speaker 3: a part of the ground that what's now the first
Speaker 3: six holes of the Red course. Except for the first
Speaker 3: hole of the Red the rest of that was a
Speaker 3: pretty flat piece of ground that hadn't been mined yet,
Speaker 3: and so we never really you know, that wasn't the
Speaker 3: first the obvious place to look. And they told us that, well,
Speaker 3: we're going to mine our way out of there when
Speaker 3: we do this project. So Bill looked over there and
Speaker 3: found a couple holes that he liked, and that got us.
Speaker 3: You know, we wound up with about thirty holes on
Speaker 3: the on the piece that we thought was the best
Speaker 3: part of the golf course, and those few holes gave
Speaker 3: it thirty gave us a way to fit thirty six
Speaker 3: holes in so that it all fit. We even looked
Speaker 3: at going a little farther into where the black course
Speaker 3: is now, but we didn't really like that ground as much.
Speaker 3: It was just, you know, it didn't feel like that
Speaker 3: ground would fit as well with all the other stuff
Speaker 3: that we were working with. So so after a couple
Speaker 3: more back and forth, we had at one point we
Speaker 3: had the routings where the thirteenth hole the thirteenth green
Speaker 3: on each course were right together, so you could actually
Speaker 3: like take the thirteen holes off one course and then
Speaker 3: you had a choice so the last five holes could
Speaker 3: fit with the other thirteen either way they are right. Really,
Speaker 3: they're pretty close together. They're not you know, Bill tweaked
Speaker 3: the routing that routing, so so where they come together
Speaker 3: is twelve on one course and thirteen on the other course. Now,
Speaker 3: so we didn't have that choice of how, you know,
Speaker 3: we had to fit them together a certain way. So
Speaker 3: one the red and blue thing comes from Bill was
Speaker 3: like drawing his holes with a with a red marker
Speaker 3: over the map that it was like a map with
Speaker 3: an aerial photo on it, so you had to do
Speaker 3: it in color to see very well. And Bill had
Speaker 3: always been doing his things in red. So when I
Speaker 3: drew a map, you know, with these overlapping holes so
Speaker 3: you could tell which way it went, you know, I
Speaker 3: drew blue for the other one, and you know that
Speaker 3: wound up being the names for the two courses. But
Speaker 3: we really worked on it together without deciding which was which,
Speaker 3: and then neither one of us wanted to decide be
Speaker 3: the one who decided, Okay, I'm going to take these halls.
Speaker 3: And you know, rich Mack eventually forced Bill to choose
Speaker 3: which course he would take because we kept we all
Speaker 3: kept Duck in the question. So that's so it's you know,
Speaker 3: as far as I know, that's a unique collaboration.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know. Bill even said to rich Mack pretty early on,
Speaker 3: he's like, and all the credit in the world to Bill,
Speaker 3: you know, he said, if I was if it was
Speaker 3: another designer that you were, you wanted me to do
Speaker 3: this with. He said, I'd be more possessive and you know,
Speaker 3: want to keep all the good stuff to myself. But
Speaker 3: Ben and I have known Tom for a long time,
Speaker 3: and you know, we'd like to see the best solution
Speaker 3: for the whole project, so you know, we don't really
Speaker 3: feel like we're compete with each other. And you know,
Speaker 3: and we can approach this project this way, where whereas
Speaker 3: if it was somebody else, you know, our views would
Speaker 3: be different enough that we don't know if it would
Speaker 3: work as well, and you know, we would be more
Speaker 3: inclined to want to have the best of the land.
Speaker 1: I can't think off the top of my head of
Speaker 1: any situation that even closely resembles that with.
Speaker 3: No I can't either. And I you know, I know
Speaker 3: a fair bit about the history of golf courses and
Speaker 3: how they came to be, you know, you don't you know,
Speaker 3: most architects are pretty competitive, and you know, it's just
Speaker 3: I'm lucky I've known I've actually known Bill and Ben
Speaker 3: longer than they've known each other, so you know, kind
Speaker 3: of have a little bit different relationship than most architects
Speaker 3: in the business, do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I you know, just the only thing that it
Speaker 1: would be like Pine Valley and Marian with a collaborative approach.
Speaker 1: But you know, obviously at the end of the day
Speaker 1: much different, right because.
Speaker 3: Now you know, once we decided who was building what,
Speaker 3: we didn't really collaborate. I mean, our crews were here
Speaker 3: at the same time, and it was really really fun
Speaker 3: to go walk over the hill and see what the
Speaker 3: other guys were doing. Yeah, but you know, I had
Speaker 3: thought about in the beginning about you know, loan in
Speaker 3: one of my guys to build's crew for a little
Speaker 3: while and taking one of their guys to work with
Speaker 3: us for a little while. But you know, when it
Speaker 3: came time to do it, everybody, everybody's you know, used
Speaker 3: to doing their own thing. So we you know, we
Speaker 3: would we would go have lunch with those guys a
Speaker 3: bunch of days. But but we still didn't didn't you know,
Speaker 3: didn't want to interfere in the other's process too much,
Speaker 3: just other than to walk around and see one of
Speaker 3: my favorite stories, the ninth green of the Blue Course
Speaker 3: and the seventeenth green of the Red Course are really
Speaker 3: close together. There's just like one little dune between them.
Speaker 3: And Bruce Happened, who ran the project for me, and
Speaker 3: I were standing on that dune one day and Eric
Speaker 3: Iverson was shaping our ninth green and Jimbo Wright, one
Speaker 3: of Bill's longest tenured guys, was shaping seventeen green on
Speaker 3: the red and they were working at two entirely different speeds.
Speaker 3: Jimbo is much more methodical and likes to track in stuff,
Speaker 3: and he goes really slow, but he does great work.
Speaker 3: And you know, Eric is much more quick and about it,
Speaker 3: and you know, he gets it really polished, but but
Speaker 3: he does it quicker than almost anybody alive and get
Speaker 3: that level of detail. And Bruce and I were laughing
Speaker 3: about that. He was trying to take a video to
Speaker 3: show how different it was. I should get that from
Speaker 3: him if he still got it. But when Jim Jimbo
Speaker 3: at some point like parked the machine and left and
Speaker 3: you know, went to find Bill somewhere else on the site.
Speaker 3: And so Bruce and I went over to see the
Speaker 3: green that he just roughed in, and we both thought
Speaker 3: it was one of the cooler things we've ever we'd
Speaker 3: ever seen. And so Bruce calls him on the cell
Speaker 3: phone and says, yeah, we just wanted to know we're
Speaker 3: over here looking at your seventeenth green. And we think
Speaker 3: it's really cool, one of the coolest greens we've ever seen.
Speaker 3: And Jimbo didn't know what to say about that, and
Speaker 3: you know it, said thanks and hung up. And Bill
Speaker 3: told me later that Jimbo was standing with him when
Speaker 3: he got that call and he puts down the phone
Speaker 3: and he goes, He's told me that green, that seventeenth
Speaker 3: green they thought was one of the coolest greens they've
Speaker 3: ever seen. Are they trying to fuck with me?
Speaker 1: I imagine that like once that project kicked off, there
Speaker 1: was there was a good competitive streak you probably, you know,
Speaker 1: each of you wanting to.
Speaker 3: Out do the other one. No, I really did not
Speaker 3: feel that way at all. And I I know Bill
Speaker 3: and Ben pretty well. I can't really imagine that they
Speaker 3: did either. You know that that may not be true
Speaker 3: for everybody that works for us. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: we're trying to do something special and we're spending a
Speaker 3: lot of days at it, so you know, it was
Speaker 3: really you know, it was really motivating to see somebody
Speaker 3: else doing really good creative work right next to you.
Speaker 3: And and I think that, you know, I'm not taking
Speaker 3: any credit for it, but I think that the the
Speaker 3: Red Course is one of my favorite course of Bill's.
Speaker 3: Bill and Ben's, I think it gets. I think it's
Speaker 3: more different to their other courses than you know, some
Speaker 3: of their other courses have the same a similar feel
Speaker 3: to them, and this really is different. A lot of
Speaker 3: that's the site of course, but they did build like
Speaker 3: two or three really wild greens that you rarely see
Speaker 3: them do, and I would guess that has a little
Speaker 3: that had a little to do with some of the
Speaker 3: stuff that we were building. At the same time, they
Speaker 3: were just like, okay, we're you know, we can do that.
Speaker 3: You know, we can do some of that stuff too,
Speaker 3: But you know, we weren't just trying to compete with
Speaker 3: each other and outdo the other one. And you know,
Speaker 3: it actually sort of bummed me out at the end.
Speaker 3: You know, Mike Kaisers weighed in on who won the competition.
Speaker 3: I didn't like that, not just because he thought he
Speaker 3: liked the Red course better, but you know, I felt
Speaker 3: that painted how we collaborated in a false light, and
Speaker 3: Mike wasn't around for that. He didn't really know. But
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't feel feel good with the way
Speaker 3: that was characterized because I really felt like it was
Speaker 3: all one big project. By far the most interesting part
Speaker 3: for me was because we really hadn't picked who was
Speaker 3: going to do which holes. I mean, some of the
Speaker 3: holes on my course or holes that built had routed
Speaker 3: in his first eighteen hole routings before I got involved,
Speaker 3: some of the holes on his course or holes that
Speaker 3: I routed to try to extend the thing and make
Speaker 3: it thirty six holes. Every hole on their course I
Speaker 3: had at least looked at and thought to myself, Okay,
Speaker 3: if I was going to build that hole, what would
Speaker 3: I do? And then to see some of the really
Speaker 3: different things that they did with the same hole in
Speaker 3: the same place was really fascinating to me. And of course,
Speaker 3: you know that's lost on everybody else because they wouldn't.
Speaker 3: They can't visualize how that looked as a raw piece
Speaker 3: of ground and what was changed about it. But they
Speaker 3: did some really different things. And I know their favorite
Speaker 3: hole on our course, or the one they said to
Speaker 3: me at opening day, was the little short part four
Speaker 3: the thirteenth. Yeah, and I know that a lot of
Speaker 3: the reason they picked that is because that was the
Speaker 3: one place that we had to move some dirt and
Speaker 3: really change what was there, because you couldn't the water.
Speaker 3: It was. It was it was just like a big
Speaker 3: flat bluff where the fairway is, and then it fell
Speaker 3: very sharply down into the lake that's over to the left,
Speaker 3: and it was dangerous. If you had a golf cart
Speaker 3: out here, you could drive right off into the alligator
Speaker 3: land and you couldn't and you couldn't see, you know,
Speaker 3: you couldn't see the edge of it. It was just
Speaker 3: like you hit it left and then it just goes
Speaker 3: off the bluff blind and you don't know what happened. So,
Speaker 3: you know, we cut that side down a lot to
Speaker 3: make that hole and it really worked out well. But
Speaker 3: I know they you know, I know they thought that
Speaker 3: was an awkward little corner and they weren't sure what
Speaker 3: they were going to do with it. And then they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: that turned into a good hole.
Speaker 2: That's uh. I mean, I've always wondered why there.
Speaker 1: I get there is so, you know, this unique relationship
Speaker 1: allowed for the collaboration to really work, yes, and versus
Speaker 1: you know, I've always went because like you look at
Speaker 1: what happened with like the Golden Age of architecture, with
Speaker 1: like the Philadelphia School, where those guys regularly collaborated with
Speaker 1: like ideas and they would look at each other's courses
Speaker 1: and provide feedback like and like you look at the results,
Speaker 1: it's like, holy cow, these are courses that are still
Speaker 1: great today. And I mean these are two very fantastic
Speaker 1: golf courses. Collaboration is the cool thing that usually doesn't
Speaker 1: get worse with collaboration.
Speaker 3: No, collaboration is a hard thing. I mean, everybody's kind
Speaker 3: of setting their ways a little bit. And yet I
Speaker 3: mean Bill and I both learned from Pete Die, and
Speaker 3: you know, the Pete Die attitude toward construction was anybody
Speaker 3: out here could have a good idea, So don't you know,
Speaker 3: and somebody you know, feel strongly about something, hear him
Speaker 3: out and or let him try to do something and
Speaker 3: see how it turns out, instead of just dismissing him
Speaker 3: or having your mind already made up that you're going
Speaker 3: to do something else. And you know, Bill's team works
Speaker 3: that way just as much as we do. So you know,
Speaker 3: from that perspective, it wasn't really hard to get along
Speaker 3: and have fun with it, but it was. You know, obviously,
Speaker 3: Bill and Ben and I have worked on a couple
Speaker 3: other projects quote unquote together, you know, in Bandon at
Speaker 3: Barn Google, but this is the only one where we
Speaker 3: were doing it at the same time, so we got
Speaker 3: to spend you know, I got to spend way more
Speaker 3: time with Bill Corr during the course of this project
Speaker 3: then I had up till then. As you know, I've
Speaker 3: known him since nineteen eighty one, but I spending time
Speaker 3: with him, having dinner with him, talking to him. You know,
Speaker 3: I don't ask him so much like exactly what are
Speaker 3: you thinking there? You know, I you know, but you know,
Speaker 3: see and seeing how he interacts with Ben because they're
Speaker 3: they're normally very guarded about that around press, even around
Speaker 3: their clients, but you know, seeing it every day here,
Speaker 3: we got a better sense of how they do work
Speaker 3: instead of just guessing it how they do it.
Speaker 1: So we've talked a little bit about the scale, and
Speaker 1: Jim Turk has a question about like, you know, the
Speaker 1: site obviously possesses tremendous scale.
Speaker 2: How important is scale?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 3: At your underrated overrated thing. I'm starting to think that
Speaker 3: scale is getting overrated because it seems like, you know,
Speaker 3: the Best New Award winner is just bigger and bigger
Speaker 3: and bigger, and every year the biggest course wins, like
Speaker 3: the tallest presidential candidate always wins. The biggest course always wins,
Speaker 3: and I've gotten to build a lot of big courses,
Speaker 3: so that hasn't been bad for me. But you know,
Speaker 3: there's got to be some upper limit to it. I'm
Speaker 3: starting to think that we're reaching that upper limit, and
Speaker 3: maybe maybe some some courses that I've seen lately have
Speaker 3: crossed the line. And I you know, I feel somewhat responsible.
Speaker 3: I mean I think, well, Bill and Ben were doing
Speaker 3: it at the same time I was, you know, and
Speaker 3: it's really it's really down to Ben. I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: I've known Ben since I wrote him a letter when
Speaker 3: I was in college asking for advice, you know, what
Speaker 3: should I do to be a golf course architect? What
Speaker 3: courses should I go see? He's been like a cousin
Speaker 3: ever since. Not that I see him a lot, but
Speaker 3: you know, when I was in college or just out
Speaker 3: of college, and i'd go to a tournament, it's like, oh,
Speaker 3: just you know, come on a practice round and walk
Speaker 3: inside the ropes with me and we'll talk about the
Speaker 3: golf course. So I did, and you know, at the
Speaker 3: same time that I was talking with Ben about the
Speaker 3: golf course, I'm watching him play practice rounds with David
Speaker 3: Graham and Sevy and all the best players of that generation.
Speaker 3: You know, watching them from ten feet away was pretty
Speaker 3: good education. So, and Ben is always talked about with
Speaker 3: I mean, I would say, if there's anybody I learned
Speaker 3: that from, it's him. And I'm sure Bill would say
Speaker 3: the same thing. You know, Ben grew up in Texas.
Speaker 3: It's a windy place. Ben was maybe a little bit
Speaker 3: of an erratic driver, so he appreciated wider golf courses,
Speaker 3: which I would have too.
Speaker 2: You know, I'm not interesting.
Speaker 3: He's a better driver of the ball than me.
Speaker 2: He wanted Augusta too before when I was still wide.
Speaker 3: Sure, so you know, those guys and I have probably
Speaker 3: been right at the front of changing golf and making
Speaker 3: it wider. But both of us, you know them, you
Speaker 3: know them even more than me. There is a limit
Speaker 3: to that that we don't. You know, we've never thought
Speaker 3: that thirty five yard fairways were wide enough. Yeah, but
Speaker 3: you know, Charles blur MacDonald in his book said something like,
Speaker 3: you know, average with the fair green forty five to
Speaker 3: sixty yards was his his idea of ideal. And of course,
Speaker 3: when you talked about sixty yard fairways in nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: people like that, You're like you had a screw loose.
Speaker 3: I mean they were thirty five and getting narrow. But
Speaker 3: you know, we've built sixty yard wide fairways and even
Speaker 3: wider than that at times, and you know, it gives
Speaker 3: our courses a different look. It gives people more room
Speaker 3: to play and find the ball. That means you can
Speaker 3: emphasize the contries around the greens a little more to
Speaker 3: make up for it. And you know, that's a big
Speaker 3: part of my style, and it's a big part of
Speaker 3: Bill and Ben's style too, And a lot of that
Speaker 3: just goes down to Ben having a lot of influence,
Speaker 3: not just on Bill but on me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's a pendulum and it.
Speaker 1: You know, I think it. It was way over on
Speaker 1: one side in the eighties and right now. I I
Speaker 1: played a course that I'm like myster with I always
Speaker 1: talk about with but it might have gone too far.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I've seen a couple that went too.
Speaker 1: Far and is but that's the whole balancing act of
Speaker 1: anything you have to write.
Speaker 3: And you know, one of the big differences, one of
Speaker 3: the big differences is stream song between the between red
Speaker 3: and Blue is Bill's course is much tougher test off
Speaker 3: the tee than Hours, and I think ours is more
Speaker 3: a second shot course. But a big part of the
Speaker 3: reason for that is that the Red course is basically
Speaker 3: around the perimeter of the property and the blue courses
Speaker 3: all in the inside. So the Red course on a
Speaker 3: lot of holes has like native vegetation on.
Speaker 2: The one side, they have like boundary lines, right yeah.
Speaker 3: When you're going, especially when you get to that the
Speaker 3: part that goes around the far I was thinking, like
Speaker 3: the far end of the golf course, like, yeah, nine,
Speaker 3: everything from after like seven's got the water along the left,
Speaker 3: and then nine's a little more open. But then ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen,
Speaker 3: all you know, if you hook it lost ball, well,
Speaker 3: if you slice it into the into the bushes on
Speaker 3: the hill, lost ball.
Speaker 2: Two, three, four are like that. Also, yes, on the
Speaker 2: front nine.
Speaker 3: So that's you know, that's that's part of just the
Speaker 3: way the two courses divided themselves up. You know, they
Speaker 3: have a lot more potential lost ball country and play
Speaker 3: than I do. And then you know, we because we're
Speaker 3: in the middle of the property and we could you know,
Speaker 3: I brought a few people out when we were uh,
Speaker 3: we finished the We finished our course fully a year
Speaker 3: before the before the golf courses open, even even more
Speaker 3: than that. And you know those those second through fifth
Speaker 3: calls on Bill's course, the mining operation that went through
Speaker 3: there and putting it back together took a lot more
Speaker 3: to everything else was done before those holes were done,
Speaker 3: so that like, you know, we might have been able
Speaker 3: to open our course sooner, but there was no sense.
Speaker 3: And you know, the the clubhouse wasn't ready, the pro
Speaker 3: shop wasn't ready. So what I did, you know, the
Speaker 3: golf show. Every year, I would take people out and
Speaker 3: hit balls around the golf course even though it wasn't
Speaker 3: you know, it was kind of in shape to play.
Speaker 3: And you know, I took one of the assistant superintendents
Speaker 3: with me, and every time we look for a ball
Speaker 3: or lost the ball, it's like cut that down, you know,
Speaker 3: chop that back, let's take out those bushes, Let's make
Speaker 3: this play as you know, any plays that you're likely
Speaker 3: to lose a ball, let's make it more forgiving. Because
Speaker 3: I wanted people to get around the golf course. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's a busy resort. You don't want to wait on
Speaker 3: people looking for their ball. As Bobby Jones famously once wrote,
Speaker 3: you know, somebody asked him if he if he minded
Speaker 3: playing with average golfers, and he said, no, as long
Speaker 3: as they don't ask me to look for their damn ball.
Speaker 2: That's ah.
Speaker 1: I've got a buddy who's like a ton handicap. Anybody's
Speaker 1: really wild off the green, off the tee. He's like
Speaker 1: a twenty five off the tee and like he's like
Speaker 1: a plus three around the greens. It's it's it's maddening
Speaker 1: to watch him play golf. But he we call it
Speaker 1: gorse hunting. And like, you know, we go play places
Speaker 1: that have on eye grass around in places, we spend
Speaker 1: all day looking for balls and it's out my ball.
Speaker 1: It's always just and it's it's uh, that's that's important.
Speaker 1: It's it's very nice to not look for your golf ball.
Speaker 1: Uh so Canahadki Winn wants to know about the eleventh
Speaker 1: hole and how much restraint you used and not putting
Speaker 1: a bunker by the green there.
Speaker 3: That little stretch of the blue corse ten and eleven
Speaker 3: was kind of the flattest. It wasn't really flat, it
Speaker 3: was tilted, but but it was like there was less
Speaker 3: feature to it than pretty much any other part of
Speaker 3: the property. Nearly every other hole we had something in
Speaker 3: the fair way and something in the green to work with.
Speaker 3: On ten all we tens of par three. All we
Speaker 3: had was you know, you're hitting over where we cut
Speaker 3: through a belt of trees, so there was some like
Speaker 3: rough ground out in front of the tee. But the
Speaker 3: green site was just flat as well, tilted left to right,
Speaker 3: but nothing shaped there, no shapes there to build a
Speaker 3: natural green. And then eleven was again tilted left to
Speaker 3: right the whole way, and the only thing that was
Speaker 3: there was you know, the fall off at the back
Speaker 3: of the green and a couple a little like I mean,
Speaker 3: little small two foot high ridges that were leftovers from
Speaker 3: the mining operation. Just these random, a little features, the
Speaker 3: one that's to the right of the green and long
Speaker 3: grass that's been there since the first day I saw it,
Speaker 3: and that's why the green is there that in the
Speaker 3: fallof now, eleven was going to be a really long hole,
Speaker 3: you know, from ten Green to eleven Green was like
Speaker 3: five hundred and fifty or six hundred yards or something
Speaker 3: like that, and you were going over a crown on
Speaker 3: the way. So if we made it a part five.
Speaker 3: You know, you'd drive it to before the crown and
Speaker 3: then you wouldn't be able to see the green at all,
Speaker 3: and that wasn't very appealing, so we made you walk
Speaker 3: aways to get to the tee and then so you
Speaker 3: could drive it to where the crown was if you
Speaker 3: hit a decent drive, and then you see the rest
Speaker 3: of the hole, even though it's fairly flat. So that's
Speaker 3: that kind of central bunker in the fairway, and you
Speaker 3: know where the fairway pinches into a little narrow area
Speaker 3: on the left, and then it's wider on the right
Speaker 3: is right at that crown. That's the landing area. And
Speaker 3: then from there to the green there wasn't much going
Speaker 3: on at all. And then there were these little contours
Speaker 3: around the two little contras on the right of the
Speaker 3: green and the drop off behind it. And you know,
Speaker 3: my thinking on the hole was, it's a really long
Speaker 3: part for and you know, we don't want to make
Speaker 3: everybody walk even further to get to the tee, so
Speaker 3: we're gonna make so you know, it's like four to
Speaker 3: eighty from the back tee, but it's like four thirty
Speaker 3: or four forty from the men's tea because we just
Speaker 3: didn't want to make people walk another fifty yards to
Speaker 3: get up there farther where they could hit a shorter
Speaker 3: shot to the green. So so you know, my thought
Speaker 3: process was kind of it's the only hole I remember
Speaker 3: building that I thought this way, that, Okay, this is
Speaker 3: such a long hole that we're trying to reward the
Speaker 3: guy who it's two solid shots and at least gets
Speaker 3: close to the green. It's better to be up there
Speaker 3: twenty yards in on the green and be able to
Speaker 3: chip at it, then be in back sixty yards and
Speaker 3: hitting a pitch. So what can we do with this
Speaker 3: green shape to make that happen? And you know, I
Speaker 3: didn't want to put a bunker at the green. I
Speaker 3: thought there were some cool contras already. And you know,
Speaker 3: if we just made wrinkly ground that the closer you
Speaker 3: got and the more you could like hit a chip
Speaker 3: shot and control it, that's that's all that it would take.
Speaker 3: You know, it was going to be a really hard
Speaker 3: hole anyway, because it's so long, so it didn't really
Speaker 3: need bunkers, and it sure didn't need bunkers fifty yards
Speaker 3: short that somebody was going to make an aid out of.
Speaker 3: So we just went with no bunkers around the greens,
Speaker 3: that particular green, and you know, for variety's sake, I
Speaker 3: think it's a really neat hole, you know. I guess
Speaker 3: I thought about it as being restrained, but not exactly
Speaker 3: in that way. It's just something different out here.
Speaker 2: I think that's one of my favorite hole and golf.
Speaker 1: It's that I just love those You get such if
Speaker 1: you miss that green, you get such unique and interesting
Speaker 1: shots that you don't see really anywhere else because of
Speaker 1: those wrinkles and those rumples. It's like you'll get on
Speaker 1: you know, you'll hit a really good shot, but you
Speaker 1: miss a little bit offline and you get this really
Speaker 1: awkward recovery shot.
Speaker 2: That you don't see. And that's to me just it's
Speaker 2: that's it's cool when it happens in golf. It's a variety. So, uh,
Speaker 2: Pete C wants to know if you have.
Speaker 1: A favorite stretch of holes on the golf course at
Speaker 1: Blue two.
Speaker 3: I mean when when you mentioned stream Song to me,
Speaker 3: the first holes that I always think of or four
Speaker 3: and five and then and you know kind of into
Speaker 3: six and seven as well, but especially four and five,
Speaker 3: that that big abrupt slope going up to four green,
Speaker 3: and then you know, you can pull the thing off
Speaker 3: number five and hit it off the world. Yeah, pretty scary,
Speaker 3: you know, of everything on the site, that was my
Speaker 3: favorite feature. And you know, while I will well, I
Speaker 3: was never going to be the one to pick which
Speaker 3: course I did, I was really happy when it wound
Speaker 3: up that I got to work on those two holes.
Speaker 3: Even though number four is almost exactly the way Bill
Speaker 3: had laid out a hole, and number five is similar
Speaker 3: to the way he had laid out a hole on
Speaker 3: one of his original plans. We we kind of twisted
Speaker 3: number five and play it from a bit of a
Speaker 3: different angle than than the plan I saw from Bill.
Speaker 3: But number four is, you know, was his idea. And
Speaker 3: then the other holes are that you know, that finishing
Speaker 3: stretch fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen really long finishing bowls for
Speaker 3: you know, compared to anything else that I've done except
Speaker 3: for sixteen. There their downwind quite a bit of the time,
Speaker 3: so they don't play quite as long as they sound
Speaker 3: on the scorecard. But a lot of variety, you know,
Speaker 3: seventeen great hands. They're putting the cross bunkers all the
Speaker 3: way across the fairway with something I really thought hard
Speaker 3: about do I want to do that or do I
Speaker 3: want to leave a gap in there? And at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, I was like, shit, we never
Speaker 3: put the we never put the full cross bunkers in.
Speaker 3: Let's do it this time. You know, something that had
Speaker 3: to do that had a bit to do with rich
Speaker 3: Mack being a really good player. If rich Mack was
Speaker 3: a different guy, he would have said no to that
Speaker 3: and I would have never asked, wouldn't have done it.
Speaker 3: But with you know, Rich's take on the golf courses
Speaker 3: was it's okay for it to be hard in places,
Speaker 3: and that had a big influence on that particular hole.
Speaker 3: And then and then eighteen is really a second shot hole.
Speaker 3: I mean, it helps it a good drive. But you know,
Speaker 3: if you're on the top of the fairway there looking
Speaker 3: down at that green, that's one of my favorite shots
Speaker 3: on the whole property. Just you know, the green kind
Speaker 3: of tilts left to right and it sits under a
Speaker 3: little contra at the left of it, so there's there's
Speaker 3: bunkers on their right and there's all this room out
Speaker 3: to the left. That's one of my favorite things I
Speaker 3: can do is just like leave you like fifty yards
Speaker 3: of fairway to the left of the green. Hey, hit
Speaker 3: it out here, it's wide open. And if you hit
Speaker 3: it out there with the pin on the left side
Speaker 3: of the green, there's no way to get it close.
Speaker 3: You're just playing along a lot, a lot flat fairway
Speaker 3: and then it drops down into the green and the
Speaker 3: you know, whatever kind of shot you hit, it'll get
Speaker 3: away from you and accelerate off that slope and you'll
Speaker 3: wind up on the other side of the green. So
Speaker 3: the play is, you know, keep straight on the green,
Speaker 3: even though you see all this room to the left.
Speaker 3: You know, even if you play short of the little
Speaker 3: mound and bunker that's in front of the green, that's
Speaker 3: a way better place to be hitting your third shot
Speaker 3: than long left. Yeah, but nobody looks at it from
Speaker 3: the fairway and thinks about that until they've till they've
Speaker 3: gotten themselves over on the left one time, and then
Speaker 3: they realize, oh, there's no good play from here.
Speaker 1: It's rare too for you to have such a great,
Speaker 1: dramatic like vista of the clubhouse from on like an
Speaker 1: eighteenth hole, like where you're looking down at a clubhouse.
Speaker 2: It's like that famous well.
Speaker 3: Stonewall has a great right that's to play in downhill
Speaker 3: to the clubhouse. And you know, in this case, the
Speaker 3: clubhouse is well removed from the property. But I've got
Speaker 3: to tell a story of the clubhouse architect here. And
Speaker 3: the guy who designed the hotel to has become a
Speaker 3: good friend. And one of the reasons is when we
Speaker 3: were starting the project, he came out and walked with
Speaker 3: Bill and me and we were walking the routing, and
Speaker 3: it became obvious after we divided it up that you know,
Speaker 3: my eighteenth hole was really the only one that was,
Speaker 3: you know, playing back in toward the clubhouse. The eighteenth
Speaker 3: hall for the red course is is on the back
Speaker 3: side of the clubhouse, and there's a huge dune between
Speaker 3: it and the clubhouse, so you can't see the clubhouse
Speaker 3: at all, and neither course comes back to the clubhouse
Speaker 3: at the ninth hole. So really my eighteenth hole is
Speaker 3: the only one that you're you're coming right into the clubhouse. So,
Speaker 3: you know, so I cared more about what it was
Speaker 3: going to look like. And you know, he jokingly asked
Speaker 3: me when we were walking around the day, did you
Speaker 3: ever go back to one of your courses and look
Speaker 3: at the clubhouse and think, ah, that's disappointing. And I
Speaker 3: laughed and said all the time, that's true. I mean
Speaker 3: a lot of times I've I have no idea what
Speaker 3: the clubhouse is really going to look like or exactly
Speaker 3: where it's going to sit on site, because they don't
Speaker 3: start building it until we're pretty much done, you know,
Speaker 3: and they build it while the course is growing in,
Speaker 3: and so there's a lot of times I've gone back
Speaker 3: and gone, oh, they'd only done moved it a little,
Speaker 3: or hadn't set it so far back away from the
Speaker 3: course or whatever.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: The only one that I really liked of my designs
Speaker 3: was Stonewall, because that's a building that they rehabbed, and
Speaker 3: it was right there and I could work right up
Speaker 3: to it and understand exactly where it was and this,
Speaker 3: you know, this all the space around the green in
Speaker 3: between it and the clubhouse.
Speaker 2: As I understand, they wanted to get rid of part
Speaker 2: of it too.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, that's true. They wanted they wanted to tear
Speaker 3: down a build. There was a little separate building that
Speaker 3: was part of the complex that they wanted to tear down.
Speaker 3: And every time they talk about tearing it down, I
Speaker 3: couldn't explain it took me a long time to understand
Speaker 3: what it was, but I just, you know, I just
Speaker 3: see it as space. I mean, one of the reasons
Speaker 3: I got along so well with the clubhouse architect here Albert,
Speaker 3: is that, you know, we both talk about space, and
Speaker 3: you know, the feeling of walking into something and how
Speaker 3: much room you've got around you, and you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of I think a lot of golf course architects
Speaker 3: understand that, but they don't talk about it too much.
Speaker 3: When you talk to a building architect, that's all they
Speaker 3: think about. And you know, I do think about it
Speaker 3: in the outdoor space. But yeah, we were really concerned
Speaker 3: with like you know, I was especially concerned with what
Speaker 3: we were going to be able to see from the
Speaker 3: t because the eighteenth hole plays up over a little fluff,
Speaker 3: and like you know, I couldn't visualize how high the
Speaker 3: clubhouse was going to stick up and how much of
Speaker 3: it I could see from the tee, and I knew
Speaker 3: it had the potential to be really awkward. Once you
Speaker 3: get up to the top of the hill, you're going
Speaker 3: to see the whole building, and it was fine, but
Speaker 3: when you were on the TV, you knew you were
Speaker 3: going to see a little bit, and I just couldn't
Speaker 3: tell how much. And then they decided they were going
Speaker 3: to build rooms on the second floor, and I'm like,
Speaker 3: oh man, it's gonna stick. You're going to be looking
Speaker 3: at the rooms, or you're gonna be you're just going
Speaker 3: to see the roof over the top of the fairway
Speaker 3: and it could be really weird. And you know, they
Speaker 3: even went out and like, you know, kind of put
Speaker 3: a couple of beams up and hung balloons to the
Speaker 3: elevation so I could see what it looked like. And
Speaker 3: at the end I asked them to drop the whole
Speaker 3: thing like four or five feet, just so you were
Speaker 3: going to see it, but you know, see us see
Speaker 3: less of it, and it wound up looking really good.
Speaker 3: You know. I give them all the credit in the
Speaker 3: world for working with us on that.
Speaker 2: That's that's hey, there's another collaboration. It's a whole collaboration.
Speaker 3: And I should say since then, I've been a little
Speaker 3: more vocal about the clubhouses my projects, and especially at
Speaker 3: Terry Edie. I think that combination of clubhouse and golf
Speaker 3: course that's as good as I've ever done. And getting
Speaker 3: the feeling right between the clubhouse and the course, and
Speaker 3: when I when I was doing the routing, it was
Speaker 3: like I had all these holes coming back to the
Speaker 3: clubhouse site and I was like, oh, this is a
Speaker 3: really small space for a clubhouse. So I went to
Speaker 3: ricaying the client. I said, I got to understand how
Speaker 3: big a clubhouse you want, because I've either got this
Speaker 3: routing figured out where it's going to be perfect, or
Speaker 3: if you're going a little bigger than that, it's going
Speaker 3: to be a mess and it's everything's going to be
Speaker 3: too tight and I'll have I'll have to change the routing.
Speaker 3: So he said, I'm going to go interview two architects
Speaker 3: for the clubhouse. Why didn't you come with me? So
Speaker 3: you know, we wound up we didn't pick which architect
Speaker 3: he he chose, but you know, I think because because
Speaker 3: I went with him, the architect to wound up doing
Speaker 3: the clubhouse down there, a guy, I mean Pip Chesher,
Speaker 3: who's architect in Auckland. He sent his son to Barnbogle
Speaker 3: to like get a feel for what we built there,
Speaker 3: not so much with the clubhouse they'd done, just the
Speaker 3: feel of what a rugged natural sand dune course was like.
Speaker 3: And I think that impressed rick A lot. But you know,
Speaker 3: it was great working with them closely. And you know,
Speaker 3: it's funny. I'm working on a couple of projects now
Speaker 3: that there's one in California that you know, the first
Speaker 3: time I walked into the room to go interview for
Speaker 3: the job, there's like four famous architects sitting at the
Speaker 3: dining room table talking about they're going to build like
Speaker 3: multiple little resorts on this site, and they're hiring different
Speaker 3: guys to build their own little, separate piece of the project.
Speaker 3: It's really interesting to get to know those guys, and
Speaker 3: you know, they think about all the same concepts that
Speaker 3: we do as golf course architects, but they have a
Speaker 3: different language for it.
Speaker 2: All.
Speaker 1: Right, last question before we get to over it. Underrated
Speaker 1: car for the course wants to know if you could
Speaker 1: steal one hole from the red course, which one would
Speaker 1: it be?
Speaker 3: I could steal one.
Speaker 1: Your your course. We aren't going to make you get
Speaker 1: rid of one your course. Would them be nineteen holes?
Speaker 3: Okay, it's gonna be hard to add it in. It's
Speaker 3: not gonna You're gonna have.
Speaker 2: To walk your way and talk about routing.
Speaker 3: Uh, there's two the seventh hole, the par five going
Speaker 3: out with the with the water on the left and
Speaker 3: the little dune at the right front of the green.
Speaker 1: You highlight that in the Yes I did, I didn't
Speaker 1: the Confidential guess.
Speaker 3: I did a drag of it for the Confidential Guide.
Speaker 3: That hole. Bill had already routed a hole there on
Speaker 3: one of his very first plans. It was his first
Speaker 3: hole on one plan, and all those features were there
Speaker 3: except for the bunker that's fifty yards shore to the green.
Speaker 3: There's a long kind of waist bunker looking things short
Speaker 3: of the green that you, you know, if you're going
Speaker 3: for the green directly until you have to hit over
Speaker 3: that bunker and inside that little mound. And then just
Speaker 3: like my eighteenth hole, there's just a ton of short
Speaker 3: grass out to the right if you don't want to
Speaker 3: try to do that. But then you go over there
Speaker 3: and the little mound is right in your way. But
Speaker 3: that was all there, and you know, and build just
Speaker 3: had that hole fit perfectly into that slot, and it's like,
Speaker 3: that's a pretty good hole. I wish I'd come up
Speaker 3: with that, And I didn't get that. He gave me
Speaker 3: some great holes, he didn't give me that one. The
Speaker 3: other one is the ninth hole, which at the beginning,
Speaker 3: I didn't think was one of the better holes on
Speaker 3: that routing. You know, there was room for the big
Speaker 3: fairway bunkers going up the right side. I mean, some
Speaker 3: of that land had already been gouged out, so the
Speaker 3: you know, the the basis of the bunkers was already there.
Speaker 3: They tinkered with the edges of them and how they
Speaker 3: come into play, but the green site just sat up.
Speaker 3: And then like the second visit I made during construction,
Speaker 3: they had shaped the ninth green And that's one of
Speaker 3: the most interesting greens I've ever seen anybody build. And
Speaker 3: that was not there the whole right side of that.
Speaker 3: And the way you can play a shot up into
Speaker 3: the left and let it feedback down to the right.
Speaker 3: It's a little like a green eye built high point
Speaker 3: that you have that feature of it that to get
Speaker 3: to one pin place you played towards something else and
Speaker 3: let it feed off the side. But it's a tremendous
Speaker 3: green and it's like, you know, and I don't know who.
Speaker 3: I assume build drew that and one of his guys
Speaker 3: shaped it, but I never really asked who. All I
Speaker 3: know for sure is that I saw it before Ben
Speaker 3: had seen it. Because because when Ben showed up on
Speaker 3: that trip, I said, I want to go walk this
Speaker 3: with you. I want to I want to see what
Speaker 3: you think of this green because I know you haven't
Speaker 3: seen it yet. And he liked it just as much
Speaker 3: as I did. So that that that one goes to
Speaker 3: Bill and whoever shaped it, and not to Ben.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that that's a very cool short part four. That
Speaker 2: green is wild.
Speaker 1: I remember the first time I got up there, I
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, I missed, I missed left.
Speaker 2: I was dead so overrated, underrated Polk County and golf.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hmmm, well Polk County didn't have a whole lot
Speaker 3: of golf going for it before stream Song. Now it does.
Speaker 3: I think this whole place is underrated. You know, when
Speaker 3: we were building it, Bill was just coming off doing
Speaker 3: Lost Farm. Dave Excellent, who came here in the beginning
Speaker 3: to outplan the project, had just been working for a
Speaker 3: year and a half at Barnbougle and and Bill was
Speaker 3: really excited to have Dave come here the first time
Speaker 3: to see what he thought of the land, because you know,
Speaker 3: Barnboogle was obviously a great site, but that's how highly
Speaker 3: we thought of this site. Yeah, we were comparing it
Speaker 3: to places like that.
Speaker 2: That's Keith Rebb told me too.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's everybody's got an opinion on which
Speaker 3: of the three is the best golf course. And you know,
Speaker 3: decision pretty early on was, oh the red beat out
Speaker 3: the blue. Mike Kaiser decided that. So everybody in the
Speaker 3: press has to follow his lead. They can't be disagreeing
Speaker 3: with him. And you know, now the Black Corse versus
Speaker 3: you know, the every review I've seen, oh, it's the
Speaker 3: best of the three. Of course they have to say that,
Speaker 3: well it's the new, the new, latest and greatest.
Speaker 2: There's a recency bias, and like.
Speaker 1: Everybody makes these judgments after one oh yeah, Tripp, Like
Speaker 1: like people ask me like the same thing. And as
Speaker 1: I've done this longer, I feel like it's more and
Speaker 1: more unfair to actually judge something the first time after
Speaker 1: one visit around.
Speaker 3: Sure, but that's the you know, that's the nature of
Speaker 3: our business too. It doesn't really bother me that much.
Speaker 3: I mean, it bothers me that everybody makes it out
Speaker 3: to be a bigger distinction than it is. You know,
Speaker 3: if you if you pull a hundred people, it's like
Speaker 3: fifty five to forty five or maybe sixty forty until
Speaker 3: they've been told that the red is the on that's
Speaker 3: higher ranked, and then it gets more tilted than that.
Speaker 3: But but you know, obviously there's still a lot of
Speaker 3: people that pick the Blue over the Red, and you know,
Speaker 3: I don't care so much about that. You know, what
Speaker 3: I do know is if the Blue Course is the
Speaker 3: third best course at stream Song, I'm comfortable with that
Speaker 3: because I know it's a really good golf course. And
Speaker 3: it's like, you know, there's a lot of golf resort,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of famous golf resorts in the world
Speaker 3: that wish their third golf course was that good. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And that's what I'll take away from it, you know,
Speaker 3: at the end of the day, you know, I learned
Speaker 3: in Myrtle Beach the like the second project ever did
Speaker 3: the Legends Heathln Course. It was one of three. It's
Speaker 3: a three course complex, and the client, you know, I
Speaker 3: always thought it was the best of the three, but
Speaker 3: the client had absolutely no incentive to promote that idea.
Speaker 3: They want at all three courses to be busy. He
Speaker 3: didn't want one to be better than the others. He
Speaker 3: didn't want you know, he didn't want to start pricing
Speaker 3: them differently, and then you know that that just reinforces it,
Speaker 3: and then people want to pay the expense, play the
Speaker 3: expensive one even even more, and they won't go to
Speaker 3: the other ones. So it's in the best interest of
Speaker 3: your client if it's a hung jury and nobody can
Speaker 3: decide what's the best course. That's a lot of the
Speaker 3: success Abandoned Dunes, and that's going to be a lot
Speaker 3: of the success of this place is that there's three
Speaker 3: really good courses, and you know, there's a pretty good
Speaker 3: debate about which is the best one.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's it changes with who you ask too.
Speaker 2: It's all different for the golf like what golfer like.
Speaker 1: You know, some people, like a beginner, will lose a
Speaker 1: lot more golf balls on the red course than your course.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I think, you know, I think it's probably
Speaker 3: a general truism of the difference between Bill and Ben's
Speaker 3: style and mine, And a little of it has to
Speaker 3: do with how good a player Ben is. And you know,
Speaker 3: I played golf with Bill. Bill is an underrated, very
Speaker 3: good golfer. He doesn't play much, but he's really good.
Speaker 2: You don't play it wake for us if you're not good.
Speaker 3: And he hasn't lost it. But I you know, low
Speaker 3: handicappers are more inclined to think their courses are superior
Speaker 3: to mine. High handicappers. I might come closer to winning
Speaker 3: the field on that and if I am, there's there's
Speaker 3: more high handicappers than low handicappers, So I'm okay with that.
Speaker 3: But you know, at the end of the day, we
Speaker 3: want people to love all the golf courses here and
Speaker 3: and I really, you know, I really like the Red Course.
Speaker 3: I have a lot of fun playing the Red Course,
Speaker 3: so it doesn't bother me a bit too. You know,
Speaker 3: lose out in the rankings on that one, and you know,
Speaker 3: I've done a couple other projects with Bill and Ben
Speaker 3: and you know, you win, somebody lose them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the you know, I believe ranking stink anyway, so
Speaker 1: it doesn't really matter at the end of the day.
Speaker 3: You know, I rated both courses the same and the
Speaker 3: Confidential Guide and that was not a political call at all.
Speaker 3: That's really the way I feel about them. They're they're
Speaker 3: not interchangeable. They're different, but it's the same level equality
Speaker 3: and they're both and they're both I think they're both
Speaker 3: really good. I think they're They're probably one of the
Speaker 3: best cases for oceans are overrated in terms of rankings.
Speaker 3: You're not gonna I'm not arguing with it, because I've
Speaker 3: benefited from that as much as anybody alive.
Speaker 1: But you know, big bodies of water are certainly overrated.
Speaker 1: I can think of a few courses that are very
Speaker 1: highly rated are on oceans, and I don't you know, I.
Speaker 2: Have no interest. And that's you know, this could this
Speaker 2: is a whole different podcast. It is ranking, but like
Speaker 2: you know, like the.
Speaker 1: Red and the Blue Course are courses that I want
Speaker 1: to keep playing golf at, and like that should that
Speaker 1: should be like what matters the most? Like do you
Speaker 1: want to keep playing when you get to the seventeenth hole?
Speaker 1: Do you get like I get a feeling of sadness
Speaker 1: when I play really good golf courses and I get
Speaker 1: near that, And that is something that happens on these courses.
Speaker 1: So that's what should be, you know, that's I don't know,
Speaker 1: that's that is all I need to know about a
Speaker 1: course and how good it is. So but uh, all right,
Speaker 1: We're we're done here. Stream Song Blue everybody should go
Speaker 1: check out. It's a a stream song. In general, it's
Speaker 1: an awesome spot, but uh, see you next time
Speaker 2: You've been listening to the Fried Egg Podcast, we do
Speaker 2: the digging for you.