Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of The Yoke with Doke.
Speaker 1: Tom and I are again joined by Don Plasik, Renaissance
Speaker 1: Golf design associate. In this episode, we discussed Tom's revolutionary
Speaker 1: reversible golf course, The Loop, which is located at the
Speaker 1: Forest Dunes Resort in Roscommon, Michigan. As always, reminder to
Speaker 1: check out Renaissancegolf dot com and Tom's books, The Confidential
Speaker 1: Guides to Golf Courses and The Little Red Book on
Speaker 1: Golf Course Architecture. They're both fantastic resources to learn more
Speaker 1: about architecture different courses around the world. Really great resource
Speaker 1: to help you travel smarter. So, without further ado, here
Speaker 1: is the latest episode of The Yoke with Dok.
Speaker 2: Tom.
Speaker 3: Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back.
Speaker 3: But don't toss the Yulk and the famously candid Oak
Speaker 3: doesn't pull any punches.
Speaker 2: How do I make natural looking contour hire the biggest
Speaker 2: pool in the village?
Speaker 4: I told him to make it flat, burst, overrated, underrated, rough,
Speaker 4: terribly overrated. Over the years, how long had you wanted
Speaker 4: to build a reversible golf course?
Speaker 2: More than twenty years? I mean, I didn't really honestly
Speaker 2: think that we'd ever do it on a full eighteen
Speaker 2: whole project. I thought maybe a nine hole project or something,
Speaker 2: or even smaller. I mean, the idea comes from the
Speaker 2: first place I saw it was Tom Simpson's book about
Speaker 2: golf course architecture, which is written in the late twenties.
Speaker 2: He had a little appendix in back. Now Simpson built,
Speaker 2: you know, he didn't build a lot of courses. He built.
Speaker 2: He built several like private estate courses for the Rothschilds
Speaker 2: and like the richest families in Europe and Britain. And
Speaker 2: most of them were not eighteen hole golf courses. Some
Speaker 2: of them were nine holes, some of them were six holes,
Speaker 2: some of them were just three holes. And you know,
Speaker 2: having three holes in your backyard would be kind of cool,
Speaker 2: and it'd be very you know, it's a lot better
Speaker 2: than trying to keep maintaining eighteen holes in your backyard.
Speaker 2: But by the same token, would get pretty boring after
Speaker 2: a while to just play the same three holes over
Speaker 2: and over again. So instead of just you know, putting
Speaker 2: in different tees and having multiple teas, or even putting
Speaker 2: in alternate greens, he tried to design one that you
Speaker 2: could play forwards and backwards, in the holes would be
Speaker 2: really different. And he put this little illustration in the
Speaker 2: back of his book of how that worked, like a
Speaker 2: triangle of holes and how how the you know, the
Speaker 2: fairways would like stop and start again, and so you
Speaker 2: were hop into completely different places when you came back
Speaker 2: the other direction, and it was really neat. It just
Speaker 2: looked fascinating. And you know, I don't know that if
Speaker 2: that was the actual plan for one of the estate
Speaker 2: courses that he built, or it was just a doodle
Speaker 2: that he did of you know, here's how you could
Speaker 2: do it. But I you know, I saw that when
Speaker 2: I was like twenty years old and thought I'd be
Speaker 2: cool to do someday something like that. So it kind
Speaker 2: of always been in the back of my mind of
Speaker 2: that would be cool to do someday. But you know,
Speaker 2: where would that even where where would that make any
Speaker 2: sense at all? You know, who would want that? And
Speaker 2: what kind of land would that work on? Clearly there's
Speaker 2: some kinds of you know, the more dramatic the land is,
Speaker 2: the harder it is to do that, and the less
Speaker 2: you'd want to do it, you know, when you're you know,
Speaker 2: part of golf course architecture is like trying to lay
Speaker 2: out holes. So you're you're walking through the property a
Speaker 2: certain way and you're looking at the best views. So
Speaker 2: to say, okay, now I'm going to flip that all
Speaker 2: on its head and do it exactly backwards from the
Speaker 2: way I set it up for everybody. That doesn't make
Speaker 2: a lot of sense on its face. So it would
Speaker 2: only really, it only really makes sense on a property
Speaker 2: that's kind of dull. You know, you don't have a
Speaker 2: lot of great views. You don't have like big up
Speaker 2: and down features. You know. The more the more if
Speaker 2: you had sand dunes in the way, or you're playing
Speaker 2: up and over hills, you would inevitably have some blind shots.
Speaker 2: You know, like you could play up and over go
Speaker 2: in one direction and have have you just getting to
Speaker 2: the landing area when you got to the top of
Speaker 2: the hill. But unless the whole was exactly twice that long,
Speaker 2: when you're coming back the other way, the hill would
Speaker 2: be one hundred yards in front of the tee and
Speaker 2: you could and see anything over the top of it,
Speaker 2: and nobody would think that was very good. So I
Speaker 2: kind of decided, well, the only piece of land that
Speaker 2: would make sense on would have to be pretty flat,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: And.
Speaker 2: One other time we actually had a client we thought
Speaker 2: he might go for this. That's the only reason all
Speaker 2: the guys in my office knew about it was when
Speaker 2: we when we were brainstorming the Rawles course at Texas Tech,
Speaker 2: which was a dead flat piece of land. One of
Speaker 2: the concepts we came up. One of the concepts we
Speaker 2: tried out was doing a reversible golf course. You know,
Speaker 2: the client was an engineer. That Jerry Rawls, the guy
Speaker 2: who funded the golf course, was an engineer. He was
Speaker 2: like a electrical engineer. He was a chip maker in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley. That's where he got the money to give
Speaker 2: the Texas Tech to build a golf course. And I thought,
Speaker 2: I don't know him that well, but this might appeal
Speaker 2: to him. He's got that kind of brain. I think
Speaker 2: that's why it appealed to me. But he was not
Speaker 2: interested in it. Mostly, you know, I warned him that
Speaker 2: if we did it that way, it was going to
Speaker 2: be hard to make it pretty because you know, it
Speaker 2: was hard to make the backgrounds work two different directions,
Speaker 2: so it would be hard to landscape it and make
Speaker 2: it really look pretty. And it, you know, that site
Speaker 2: was not very pretty. To start with, so he was
Speaker 2: concerned that it just wouldn't look good enough, so we
Speaker 2: tabled it and built the golf course that we did.
Speaker 2: I didn't think much about it again for a while,
Speaker 2: other than everybody around me had seen that concept and
Speaker 2: they were like, well, that'd be really cool to do
Speaker 2: that someday. And then you know, I kind of stumble
Speaker 2: into going to interview for this job to do a
Speaker 2: new course at Forrest Dudentes. It was actually I was
Speaker 2: They put me in the Michigan Golf Hall of Fame,
Speaker 2: and I went down for the like induction ceremony and
Speaker 2: it had give a little speech. I was talking about how,
Speaker 2: you know, at the beginning of my career, I didn't
Speaker 2: want to be labeled a Michigan architect, and I wanted
Speaker 2: to get out and do things in other places so
Speaker 2: I wouldn't get type cast as just working around here.
Speaker 2: But you know, now that I'd been traveling all over
Speaker 2: the world the last twenty years, I'd really love to
Speaker 2: do a couple more projects close to home. And a
Speaker 2: bunch of friends that I've known for twenty five years
Speaker 2: were in the audience, and two of them went from
Speaker 2: there up to some event at Forest Dunes, and the
Speaker 2: managers started talking about how, oh they're looking at do
Speaker 2: another golf course. And these guys are like, you've got
Speaker 2: to talk to Tom. You know, they talked to a
Speaker 2: couple other architects already. For whatever reason, they weren't thinking
Speaker 2: a call in me. I think they thought I'd be
Speaker 2: too high priced or something. And these guys were like, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: we just you know, we just came from We just
Speaker 2: saw him. He was just talking about how he'd like
Speaker 2: to do another course in Michigan. So you've got to
Speaker 2: talk to him. So I went over there to look
Speaker 2: at the ground and it was almost exactly the kind
Speaker 2: of ground I thought would work good for this concept.
Speaker 2: You know, it was relatively flat. There were some little
Speaker 2: like valleys through it in places, but nothing's sticking up
Speaker 2: real big. It was all sandy, which helps because you
Speaker 2: don't have to worry about you know, you don't have
Speaker 2: to create the area outside the fair way. You can
Speaker 2: let it go and it's still playable, so you don't
Speaker 2: have to build it super wide in both directions. Necessarily.
Speaker 2: There were some trees, but they weren't like you know,
Speaker 2: there weren't like a bunch of huge, beautiful oak trees
Speaker 2: that were going to get in the way come in
Speaker 2: one way or the other. So I'm just and I'm
Speaker 2: just looking at and there weren't views off the property
Speaker 2: very much. I'm just walking around thinking, this kind of
Speaker 2: looks like that kind of property. So then I sat
Speaker 2: down with the owner, Lou Thompson, who had bought Forest
Speaker 2: Students out of bankruptcy, basically bought it for bought the
Speaker 2: whole place for not much money, and you know, so,
Speaker 2: but he hadn't developed it. This was the first time
Speaker 2: he was going to develop a golf course. He just
Speaker 2: stumbled into owning this golf course that had a bunch
Speaker 2: of extra acreage and it looked like it made sense
Speaker 2: to build another course. So he hadn't He didn't know
Speaker 2: anything about the process really, So he's interviewing architects and
Speaker 2: he's like, you know, so he's not from the golf business,
Speaker 2: and he's not you know, he's not your typical client.
Speaker 2: He's not answering questions the same way most do. You know,
Speaker 2: most clients, when I ask him what they want, they
Speaker 2: tell me all the things that are on Golf Digest
Speaker 2: list of what makes a great golf course. Lou didn't
Speaker 2: know to do that. You know, I asked him what
Speaker 2: he wanted and he said two things. He said, the
Speaker 2: reason I'm doing this is to get people to stay
Speaker 2: here and play again the next day. You know, I
Speaker 2: have the one golf course, but it's kind of on
Speaker 2: the way from Detroit to Gaylord where all the other
Speaker 2: golf courses are. So people just stop through here and
Speaker 2: play and then they leave. They don't even stay and
Speaker 2: have a drink, they don't stay for dinner. So this
Speaker 2: place just loses crazy money in the clubhouse because nobody
Speaker 2: sticks around. So I want, you know, I want people
Speaker 2: to stay here. We'll build some more lodging and that's
Speaker 2: the goal, is to get people to just stay here
Speaker 2: instead of going up to Gailor. And he said, and
Speaker 2: I want something that's going to wow people. And I'm
Speaker 2: looking at like, well, it's not gonna wow people with
Speaker 2: this site. You know, the site's not that spectacular. But
Speaker 2: this concept that I've had for years in the back
Speaker 2: of my head, if I could pull that off, that
Speaker 2: would that would wow people. And this guy is just
Speaker 2: far enough removed from the golf business you might actually
Speaker 2: get that and go with it. So I didn't tell
Speaker 2: him right away, came back to the office. We started
Speaker 2: trying to rout a golf course kind of in the
Speaker 2: normal way. But you know, while I'm while we're doing it,
Speaker 2: I'm thinking, well, you know this is going to work
Speaker 2: backwards too, how can we make it work backwards? So
Speaker 2: you can't, really, you don't. You can't route it both
Speaker 2: ways at the same time. You got to kind of
Speaker 2: work on a routing for one way, but then think through, Okay,
Speaker 2: that's not going to work backwards. I'll have to change
Speaker 2: this or that in order to make it work. So
Speaker 2: Don and I played around with that, and then I
Speaker 2: went back over there to you know, formally interview and
Speaker 2: show him my idea, and I just we had the
Speaker 2: maps rolled up and I unrolled him and I and
Speaker 2: I was showing him the one way around, just talking
Speaker 2: about it. I got all done, and he goes, well,
Speaker 2: that looks good, but you know, you said you're going
Speaker 2: to do something really different, and I don't see what's
Speaker 2: really different about that. And I pulled the one map
Speaker 2: off and had the other map underneath showing how you
Speaker 2: played it backwards, and said, well, it's also designed to
Speaker 2: be played backwards. The next day, and everybody in the
Speaker 2: room sat there kind of half stunned for about two minutes. Well,
Speaker 2: they were trying to understand what that meant. And as
Speaker 2: soon as they understood what it meant, they were like,
Speaker 2: this is what we wanted to do.
Speaker 1: I imagine that with Thompson. He made his money in trucking.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 1: So he's a very utilitarian I mean, like I worked
Speaker 1: in trucking industry a little, no fact, but the you know,
Speaker 1: the big thing is always getting take a load somewhere,
Speaker 1: getting a load back.
Speaker 2: You know that's true. I didn't even think about it,
Speaker 2: you know it. He probably understood that much better because
Speaker 2: that is his business exactly. You know he does his
Speaker 2: trucking business is all almost entirely doing stuff for butterball turkey. Yeah.
Speaker 2: But he does everything from like haul in the turkeys
Speaker 2: to slaughter and then haul in the turkeys to market,
Speaker 2: but also haul in the feed. So he hauls the
Speaker 2: feed to the turkeys, he hauls the turkeys to the
Speaker 2: processing plant, he hauls the turkeys from the processing plant
Speaker 2: to stores, and he just keeps making loops back and forth,
Speaker 2: so the truck's always full.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so it's the same idea as connecting a
Speaker 1: route and being able to go back around the route.
Speaker 2: I never thought of that I've got. I'm curious to
Speaker 2: ask him if he thought about it that way, because
Speaker 2: he never said it that way directly, But it would
Speaker 2: make the internal logic would work perfect for lou and
Speaker 2: he's he's a very practical guy.
Speaker 1: So to make the course reversible. Ian McGregor wants to
Speaker 1: know what concessions it came with it.
Speaker 2: It's funny because that's every question anybody that I ever
Speaker 2: talked to about this concept. They always make the assumption
Speaker 2: that you're giving things up, that oh, it would have
Speaker 2: been better if you know. I mean we call one
Speaker 2: way the Black Horse and the other way the Red Course.
Speaker 2: So you say the first three holes in the black
Speaker 2: course were better in that direction, but then the fourth
Speaker 2: hole you would have rather played the other way around?
Speaker 2: Could you know? Couldn't you have figured it out that
Speaker 2: you know, there's there's always a bet, you know, which
Speaker 2: is better the first hole on the black course or
Speaker 2: the eighteenth hole on the Red course that comes back
Speaker 2: the other way. Why wouldn't you choose the best out
Speaker 2: of every one of those and put them together a
Speaker 2: because those don't fit together. You know, it's not that simple.
Speaker 2: You have to have a routing that connects a bunch
Speaker 2: of things. So so it's not like if you know,
Speaker 2: if you made me, if you made me, what are
Speaker 2: the what are the five best holes there now? Or
Speaker 2: ten best holes there now? For sure some of them
Speaker 2: would be the same fairway playing in both directions, or
Speaker 2: the same green played from two different angles. So you
Speaker 2: can't really get that's way if you work on routings enough.
Speaker 2: There are always concessions in routing a golf course. I
Speaker 2: don't think we really made a lot more concessions to
Speaker 2: get it to be reversible, not as many as everybody thinks.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's just there's better parts of the land
Speaker 2: and there's parts that aren't quite as cool, but you
Speaker 2: have to use them both. So I don't think that
Speaker 2: we gave up that much to do it. And I
Speaker 2: was and I was perfectly willing to make those trade
Speaker 2: offs in order to do whatever trade offs I was making.
Speaker 2: It's like, if I can make this work in both
Speaker 2: directions and people think it's cool in both directions, that's great,
Speaker 2: then the other the other more our practical question is,
Speaker 2: you know, how much do you have to manipulate it
Speaker 2: so one way around isn't a lot better than the
Speaker 2: other way around, because at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: if one way around is much better than the other
Speaker 2: way around, the demand will be way higher for that
Speaker 2: and they'll abandon playing at reversible. You know the old
Speaker 2: course of Saint Andrew's is that Originally at the old
Speaker 2: course you were playing out to one flag on a
Speaker 2: green and back to the same flag on the same green.
Speaker 2: And then it got a little too busy for that,
Speaker 2: so they widened out the greens and they made the
Speaker 2: double greens. But when they did that, they didn't have
Speaker 2: a clear which was the way to go. Do you
Speaker 2: start up number one or do you start back down
Speaker 2: number eighteen? And they did both for several years. I
Speaker 2: don't know how they decided when to alternate them, but
Speaker 2: they did both for several years. And supposedly at least
Speaker 2: one of the opens played in Saint Andrew's in the
Speaker 2: eighteen hundreds was played backwards from the present golf course.
Speaker 2: So I knew that history. That wasn't where I got
Speaker 2: the idea, but I knew the history, and I understood, now,
Speaker 2: why isn't the old course that way? Anymore because everybody
Speaker 2: wants to play the road hole, and everybody wants to
Speaker 2: play eleven that way. All the famous the three or
Speaker 2: four famous holes that everybody's got like in their mind,
Speaker 2: I'm going there to see this. They're all based on
Speaker 2: going down the right side off at number one and
Speaker 2: coming back up the right side, going coming back up
Speaker 2: seventeen and eighteen. So there's you know, they do, or
Speaker 2: they did for a little while, introduced playing the golf
Speaker 2: course backwards for a couple of days a year in
Speaker 2: the spring. They pretty much gave that up. Well, they
Speaker 2: gave it up a long time ago because nobody wanted
Speaker 2: to play it that way anymore. You know, once everybody
Speaker 2: got familiar with the road hole and the other famous holes,
Speaker 2: that was the kiss of death for the other way around.
Speaker 1: And so much of that has to What also hindered
Speaker 1: that is the television and the championship history. Sure it's
Speaker 1: nobody's going to the old course and dropping down what
Speaker 1: is it, five hundred pounds or whatever it is and
Speaker 1: and getting to play that the other way around. That's
Speaker 1: not as famous. I mean, I bet there's a lot
Speaker 1: of golf nerds that would play to go play it
Speaker 1: that way.
Speaker 2: Don and I. Don and I and Eric did it
Speaker 2: when they were doing it ten fifteen years ago. They
Speaker 2: started on an April Fool's Day one year. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not a busy time in Saint Andrew's. They said, oh,
Speaker 2: April first, everybody plays backwards. We'll see if anybody wants
Speaker 2: to come for this, And people did so, like they
Speaker 2: did two or three days a year where you would
Speaker 2: like buy, you know, you bought a package where you
Speaker 2: played that way and then you played the other way
Speaker 2: around a day or two later. And and it happened
Speaker 2: to be while we were working on the Renaissance Club.
Speaker 2: So Don and I and Eric did that because after
Speaker 2: we talked about it it for Texas Tech, and I
Speaker 2: was always curious about it. I didn't think it would
Speaker 2: work that well. And you know, I know the old
Speaker 2: course really well. So I think Donald vouched that there
Speaker 2: were a couple holes. It was really almost impossible figure
Speaker 2: out what to do if I didn't know what was
Speaker 2: in the fairway coming the other way, because you do.
Speaker 2: There are really holes that you know, they'd abandon playing
Speaker 2: that way for so long that they'd stop mowing some
Speaker 2: patches that were important, like they stopped mowing the off
Speaker 2: the back of the green that you needed to bounce
Speaker 2: it on, or you know, they don't. You know, you're
Speaker 2: hitting over bushes off the tee now, but they're in
Speaker 2: the approach if you're playing it backwards. So it was
Speaker 2: kind of awkward.
Speaker 1: The old courses A ten in the confidential guys, what
Speaker 1: would be the reversed old course.
Speaker 2: Five, five or six. I mean, you still got the
Speaker 2: cool greens complexes, and you can kind of wind up
Speaker 2: in the same place. But you know, it might be
Speaker 2: a little better than that if they if they would
Speaker 2: mow it all back and fix some of the things
Speaker 2: that have grown grown wrong over time. But it's not
Speaker 2: it's not a great It doesn't have the great holes
Speaker 2: that you get really attached to. The one hole that
Speaker 2: your listeners could visualize really easily that's a really good
Speaker 2: hole is if you're playing at backwards, the very first
Speaker 2: hole is playing from from you're really playing from one
Speaker 2: te across, you know, down the left side into eighteen
Speaker 2: fairway more and then into the back of the road green.
Speaker 2: So now the roads on the left, the bunkers on
Speaker 2: the right, you know what's normally the front part of
Speaker 2: the green is still sticking out behind the green to
Speaker 2: the right. You know, it'd be a great hole, except
Speaker 2: it's the first hole and it's a brutal.
Speaker 1: Start four with Oh no, no, no, it's not long four.
Speaker 2: That's right. One of the odd things about the reversible
Speaker 2: golf course is the fair way that you're playing backwards
Speaker 2: and the green that you're playing two backwards are not
Speaker 2: attached to the same hole. You know, like when you
Speaker 2: play when you play the eighteenth fair way backwards, you're
Speaker 2: playing to seventeen green, and when you play the first
Speaker 2: hole backwards, you're playing to eighteen green. So the you know,
Speaker 2: so the green changes one direction. The green's not like,
Speaker 2: it's not a short part four. Go in both directions.
Speaker 2: One hole might be a long part four, but the
Speaker 2: hole coming in the other way might be a part
Speaker 2: three or a short part four or something different. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's actually one of the things that makes it more
Speaker 2: interesting than people give it credit for it because you're
Speaker 2: you're playing the same lengths of holes overall, but you're
Speaker 2: not playing the same length the hole end of the
Speaker 2: same green.
Speaker 1: And the strategy still works so well with going to
Speaker 1: the road hole green because if you play towards the
Speaker 1: outer bounds left, you can get it the Georgian pins
Speaker 1: without that nasty bunker right.
Speaker 2: A lot of times the strategy the strategy may not
Speaker 2: be exactly the opposite. It depends, you know, Like if
Speaker 2: you if you just had a straightaway hole with a
Speaker 2: hazard sticking in from one side on one hole, both holes,
Speaker 2: you'd be playing towards the boundary to get the best
Speaker 2: angle at it. But you know one of those holes
Speaker 2: you're playing down the right side and the other hole
Speaker 2: you're playing down the left side to get there.
Speaker 1: Jose wanted to ask should there be more reversible courses?
Speaker 2: Should there be more? Well, I've been asked a handful
Speaker 2: of times since would we ever do it again? And
Speaker 2: my flipping answer is yeah, but only after like a
Speaker 2: few other people try to do it and I feel
Speaker 2: like they did better than me, and I should go
Speaker 2: try to do it again. And you know, I definitely
Speaker 2: learned things from it where I thought. We're a lot
Speaker 2: the same as like when I work on a flat
Speaker 2: piece of ground, When I get all done, I think
Speaker 2: I could have done this better. I just understand better
Speaker 2: what I don't like about this way. So if I
Speaker 2: did it again, I do I could do something better.
Speaker 2: But you know, like I said at the beginning, it's
Speaker 2: like not nearly every site lends itself to this. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's just funny. You know Lou Thompson who got into
Speaker 2: this by buying up a distressed golf course. You know,
Speaker 2: like almost after we were done with the golf course,
Speaker 2: he he called me and said, I'm looking at this
Speaker 2: other distress course. Could you see if it works for
Speaker 2: a reversible course? And it was something in Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: So I like got it up on Google Earth and
Speaker 2: I'm looking at it. I'm like, Lou, like the eighteenth
Speaker 2: you'd be playing backwards down the eighteenth hole into a
Speaker 2: narrow spot and then have to hit it across a
Speaker 2: road to the seventeenth gree you know, because it was
Speaker 2: a development golf course. Was like, there's absolutely no way
Speaker 2: in the world you could reverse that. He was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 2: but there's a ton of pieces of land that would
Speaker 2: won't work for it.
Speaker 1: With for students. Being like a resort, a lot of
Speaker 1: people will play at one time. Like I've had the
Speaker 1: good fortune to play in it a couple of times.
Speaker 1: It seems like you get better. It gets better and
Speaker 1: better every time you play and the last time I
Speaker 1: played it, coming off, I was like, man, this would
Speaker 1: be really cool as a private club course where your
Speaker 1: member play, where you have essentially a different course each day,
Speaker 1: or a muni where you get to play that you
Speaker 1: have regular repeat play all the time. Would that environment
Speaker 1: be one that you would consider doing a reversible course
Speaker 1: for sure?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, it had appeal to lou Thompson
Speaker 2: as a resort because he added two courses for the
Speaker 2: price of one. He went from one course to three.
Speaker 2: I mean, Mike Kaiser says one plus one equals three
Speaker 2: in terms of the amount of revenue that you do
Speaker 2: and how many people want to come. There's just more
Speaker 2: critical mass to having two courses, and people don't think, oh,
Speaker 2: I might fly all the way across the country and
Speaker 2: there's only one course and if I don't like it,
Speaker 2: it's over hyped. I'm out of luck. And you know,
Speaker 2: if you have two or three or four courses, the
Speaker 2: odds of you not liking any of them get a
Speaker 2: lot less. You're not taking as big a risk. So
Speaker 2: you know, for los deal, you know it's not just
Speaker 2: that course and backwards, but he's also got the other
Speaker 2: one next door that you could play if you don't
Speaker 2: really like mine, So it's kind of a good deal.
Speaker 2: You're right that. I mean, it's certainly an acquired taste,
Speaker 2: and it's certainly I mean the first time people play it,
Speaker 2: and the first time they play it backwards, they're confused.
Speaker 2: They don't really the coolest reaction I've had to it,
Speaker 2: I've had it from a lot of people. I didn't
Speaker 2: really expect it is. It's so different. I didn't even
Speaker 2: realize it is the same piece of ground, you know,
Speaker 2: he said, I knew, But once you get out there,
Speaker 2: you're like, how did how did this hole work the
Speaker 2: other way around? I can't really piece it together. You know.
Speaker 2: It's because it's it's the next day, and it's hard
Speaker 2: to remember what you played the day before. Exactly when
Speaker 2: we were building it, before it opened, I would take
Speaker 2: people out and play two or three holes and then
Speaker 2: turn right around and play the same holes backwards, so
Speaker 2: they had just played it and then they could kind
Speaker 2: of get it. But the way it's presented now, it's
Speaker 2: not as easy to piece together in your brain, how
Speaker 2: this hole is flipped over for tomorrow or how it
Speaker 2: was yesterday. You know, to me, that's That's the cool
Speaker 2: thing about it is you know the people who you know,
Speaker 2: some people will just go right over there. Some people
Speaker 2: don't care it's two different golf courses. They don't. You know,
Speaker 2: they're not that interested in architecture, so they don't. So
Speaker 2: they're just judging the Red Course for the Red Course,
Speaker 2: the Black Horse for the Black Corse. They either like
Speaker 2: it or they don't. They love it or they you know,
Speaker 2: it's more polarizing. They either love it or they move on.
Speaker 2: But the people that like it get really interested in it,
Speaker 2: and they're going to come back a bunch. And you know,
Speaker 2: that's what everybody in the golf business really needs is
Speaker 2: repeat business. So having a golf course, it's like, this
Speaker 2: is cool, and I still can't quite figure it out yet.
Speaker 2: You know, that's the enduring power of Saint Andrew's and
Speaker 2: and there's no reason that can't work at the resort
Speaker 2: course level. You just have to understand that a certain
Speaker 2: amount of people aren't going to care for it and
Speaker 2: move on. But that's true for every new course. You know,
Speaker 2: I could build whatever, a certain percentage of people are
Speaker 2: gonna be like, that's not my thing. I'm never going
Speaker 2: back there. You know, you just hope you catch on
Speaker 2: with enough people that it works. And the one thing
Speaker 2: I hadn't thought about. You know, one of the people
Speaker 2: that came to the Renaissance Cup is my friend Michael Yamaki,
Speaker 2: who's the manager of Riviera, very sharp business guy. We
Speaker 2: were sitting at dinner after he played it the second
Speaker 2: way around and he was like, you realize what you've done.
Speaker 2: I said, I don't know what you're talking about. He said,
Speaker 2: you only have to find half as many people that
Speaker 2: are interested in this course because they'll all play. You know,
Speaker 2: if they're interested, they're all going to play it the
Speaker 2: second way around. So ten thousand interested people equals twenty
Speaker 2: thousand rounds of golf. Yeah. I'm like, oh, I've never
Speaker 2: really thought about it that way.
Speaker 5: I think that's one of the cool things about being
Speaker 5: part of this conversation is that there are things when
Speaker 5: you have an idea that you've had in your hip
Speaker 5: pocket or the back of your mind for a really
Speaker 5: long time, and you think about it and refine it
Speaker 5: and push it a little and redefine what you think
Speaker 5: will work and won't work, and you have a lot
Speaker 5: of preconceived notions that you know Tom's ironed out that
Speaker 5: were good starting points. But then it also those things
Speaker 5: bred all kinds of things that you didn't really have
Speaker 5: answers to or questions you didn't really even think about.
Speaker 5: And I think for Tom and the rest of us
Speaker 5: that got to be a part of it. It was
Speaker 5: cool because there were so many things that were not
Speaker 5: conventional in this routing puzzle that we've had this discussion
Speaker 5: about because they're just so exclusive to this situation. They're
Speaker 5: just so different. They're not just parallel there by a
Speaker 5: track or two. They're going literally and figuratively one hundred
Speaker 5: and eighty degrees the other way. And I remember little
Speaker 5: little dialogues with Tom and with Brian Slanik, who ran
Speaker 5: the job, and Brian and Eric as they were getting
Speaker 5: this stuff built, and one of the things myself, you know,
Speaker 5: you have these preconceived notions, well, the Greens are going
Speaker 5: to have to be big. You got to have big
Speaker 5: putting surfaces right in order to be able to play
Speaker 5: it from both directions and for it to be different.
Speaker 5: And that you know, Tom should certainly chime in, but
Speaker 5: I remember that Tom's saying, no, they don't have to
Speaker 5: be big, they can actually be smaller. And that was
Speaker 5: by virtue of you know, the approaches and the short
Speaker 5: grass and the soil structure and how the ball behaved
Speaker 5: around the greens as long as you had a playing
Speaker 5: surface that behaved like a putting surface in plenty of
Speaker 5: area in around, you know, on the green quote unquote
Speaker 5: green proper and also the approaches and the you know,
Speaker 5: when you short side yourself all of that kind of thing.
Speaker 5: You don't really have to have a big green, You
Speaker 5: just need a lot of green like area. And so
Speaker 5: you know, you end up not really decorating a green
Speaker 5: in sight with bunkers. You know, what you end up
Speaker 5: doing is really focusing on contour and contour and short grass,
Speaker 5: which we talked about all the time. That's one of
Speaker 5: the coolest hazards in golf. It isn't a ravine or
Speaker 5: a bunker or a pond or a quarry. It's the
Speaker 5: greatest hazard in golf is really interesting contour and really
Speaker 5: tight firm turf. And that was I think that was fun.
Speaker 5: I know it had to be fun for Tom because
Speaker 5: that is such a departure from what you normally would
Speaker 5: would do. And and you know that's just one example,
Speaker 5: but I you know, how you wayfind around this. This
Speaker 5: golf course too was a real challenge, you know, and
Speaker 5: how the golf course is set up is really important,
Speaker 5: and you know, there was a vertical learning curve almost
Speaker 5: for you know, Lou and his staff to make sure
Speaker 5: that the team markers where they were supposed to be.
Speaker 5: You know, so there were a lot of there are
Speaker 5: a lot of residual challenges that you really had to
Speaker 5: spend some brain cells on in order to figure out
Speaker 5: to make sure that it worked, so that it wasn't
Speaker 5: perceived as this you know, experimental, you know, kooky idea,
Speaker 5: but that it was really legitimate and it really presented
Speaker 5: really interesting golf and fun golf and playable golf, and
Speaker 5: it wasn't just odd. It was actually really really really
Speaker 5: very interesting. And you know, that's just one. But other
Speaker 5: notions were the idea that you know, like Tom had
Speaker 5: alluded to, when you're in a conventional golf course, all
Speaker 5: that leftover ground where the ball, the lion's share of
Speaker 5: the time is in the air, off the tee and
Speaker 5: then coming to you know, one hundred yards pick your distance,
Speaker 5: one hundred yards, one hundred and twenty five fifty yards.
Speaker 5: You don't really need to do a whole lot to
Speaker 5: that stuff. You don't need to irrigate it. You know,
Speaker 5: you can leave it natural because it's sort of out
Speaker 5: of play. But when you flip a golf hole around
Speaker 5: come in the other direction, that stuff that got relatively
Speaker 5: no attention was now getting a tremendous amount of attention
Speaker 5: because it was in the approach coming the other way.
Speaker 5: So you know, we really had to work hard. It's
Speaker 5: fun to listen to Tom talk about this because the
Speaker 5: things that he pointed out in this case really are
Speaker 5: are far reaching into the other parts about you know,
Speaker 5: the twenty seven hole course or the extra whole course
Speaker 5: and people, you know, how they process it in their
Speaker 5: mind and which courses which and all of that. So
Speaker 5: there were and how to manage cart traffic is a
Speaker 5: huge one. It always is on a golf course that
Speaker 5: plays in one direction, but now when you're taking that
Speaker 5: golfer traffic, especially when they're behind the wheel, and managing
Speaker 5: where all that baggage goes in a normal around to
Speaker 5: golf with people playing golf in a cart, which we
Speaker 5: don't subscribe to, but you have to, you have to
Speaker 5: integrate it at some point. That was tough.
Speaker 2: Too, and we thought through all that, and then the
Speaker 2: client said, oh, he went to Bandon Dunes for the
Speaker 2: first time, and he said, what if we made it
Speaker 2: walking only first. He said, I had never walked eighteen
Speaker 2: holes in my life until Pacific. Dudes. He's from Arkansas
Speaker 2: and it's hot and humid, and he just he'd never
Speaker 2: walked eighteen holes in his life before he played in Bandon.
Speaker 2: And then he comes back and he's like, I think
Speaker 2: we should go with this walking only. And I was like,
Speaker 2: that came completely out of left field to me. I
Speaker 2: was not thinking we would get get away with that.
Speaker 1: Is that one of the best surprises you've ever had
Speaker 1: in your career.
Speaker 2: It was a very good surprise, you know. But at
Speaker 2: the same time, I was a little skeptical of it,
Speaker 2: like I, I'll be shocked if they don't have some
Speaker 2: carts out there next year or the year after, because
Speaker 2: people there's a lot of people that don't do that,
Speaker 2: you know. The first time I went to Forest Dunes,
Speaker 2: as soon as I get there, the first thing, you know,
Speaker 2: somebody's slamming your clubs on a on a cart. Whether
Speaker 2: you ask for it or not, they just assume that's
Speaker 2: what you're gonna do so. I just in Detroit Motor City.
Speaker 2: That's the culture up here, so I figured that was
Speaker 2: going to be a pretty hard cell to try to
Speaker 2: get people to walk. And I think, you know, the
Speaker 2: place is doing well, but it's it's not as busy
Speaker 2: as the other course. And I think that's why as people,
Speaker 2: you know, everybody plays it is interested by it. But
Speaker 2: if they can't ride, there's a certain number of people
Speaker 2: that are just like, ah, I can't do that, you know,
Speaker 2: I just can't do that. And it's an easy walk.
Speaker 2: The Green to Tea is right there, and it's relatively flat,
Speaker 2: so it's about as easy a walk as you could have.
Speaker 2: But but it's still there's some people that just aren't
Speaker 2: open to that, and and they're filling up rooms over there,
Speaker 2: so the other you know, so the course that you
Speaker 2: have to walk is not as full.
Speaker 5: I think an interesting part about that line of thinking
Speaker 5: too is I've noticed it, and I think a lot
Speaker 5: of people do that. When you play the loop, it
Speaker 5: is very walkable, and you know they've they've done they've
Speaker 5: made an effort with caddies to make that part of
Speaker 5: the experience and things, and it's pretty refreshing when you
Speaker 5: finish around to golf if you don't play a lot
Speaker 5: to feel like you're you're not golf fatigued. You're not
Speaker 5: you know, you're not tired, and that that's a good
Speaker 5: thing because that makes you hopefully want to play a
Speaker 5: little bit more as well. And you know when people
Speaker 5: go to play golf and band and or other places,
Speaker 5: you know, I guess that's part of the the whole
Speaker 5: idea of short courses and things, you know, to play
Speaker 5: operate golf after the big course or after the round.
Speaker 5: I still want to play, but I'm kind of tired.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not a lot of people that can play
Speaker 2: thirty six holes a day walking.
Speaker 5: Right, But you could. You could? You could there? You
Speaker 5: could there? I mean you you wouldn't you know it
Speaker 5: would be possible. So you know, hopefully that's a byproduct
Speaker 5: of it is that people kind of notice they feel
Speaker 5: a little less golf fatigued afterwards.
Speaker 1: I know they're doing a couple of days next year
Speaker 1: there that you can play thirty six in the same day,
Speaker 1: So they're doing I think like three or four days
Speaker 1: where you can play it each way.
Speaker 2: Oh good, So I hadn't seen that you know. I
Speaker 2: mean I suggested that to him and the you know,
Speaker 2: the beginning, I said to him, well, you pretty much
Speaker 2: have to alternate every other day, so so the person
Speaker 2: that's only staying one night can get the chance to
Speaker 2: play both. But I said, you could have, like, you know,
Speaker 2: if if you try to keep it on the numbers
Speaker 2: where the odd days you were playing the black course
Speaker 2: and even days you were playing the Red course or
Speaker 2: whichever one you did. You know, when you got to
Speaker 2: the thirty first of the month and then the first,
Speaker 2: so there's a couple months that you wouldn't have at
Speaker 2: you know, those days you could try to set up okay,
Speaker 2: this is special, we're going to do a shotgun or something.
Speaker 2: So you could play both ways and have a few
Speaker 2: days of a year where you could try to do that.
Speaker 2: But I hope they do.
Speaker 1: That's I think that's exactly what they're doing.
Speaker 2: It maybe one of your next questions, but you know,
Speaker 2: don touched on something. Even after twenty years of thinking
Speaker 2: about the whole concept in my head, there were certain
Speaker 2: parts of it, like the fact that the greens didn't
Speaker 2: have to be big, that I really kind of understood
Speaker 2: going in. I thought about that a lot because I
Speaker 2: figured if I figured, if you know a lot of
Speaker 2: people they then seen Tom Simpson's book, They visualized the
Speaker 2: old course at Saint Andrews, and they knew the story
Speaker 2: about how that played backwards. So a ton of people
Speaker 2: just assumed we were going to have these big double
Speaker 2: greens that you could play into from different directions, and
Speaker 2: they were huge double greens. They were going to be
Speaker 2: huge double greens like Saint Andrews. And I was really
Speaker 2: stubborn about that. From day one. I'm like, well, if
Speaker 2: you had to have greens that big, then nobody's going
Speaker 2: to do this concept. If you have to mow five
Speaker 2: acres of greens to make this work, that's a lot
Speaker 2: more expense. Who wants to do that? So from day one,
Speaker 2: I told these guys, whatever else we do, these greens
Speaker 2: can't be any bigger than every other project we do.
Speaker 2: In fact, I'm gonna beyond you to keep these small
Speaker 2: as small as we can get away with. But then
Speaker 2: you know, and it's funny because the first, the first
Speaker 2: question people asked me when we were building, the question
Speaker 2: that I got all the time was how can that
Speaker 2: work without double greens? Isn't somebody getting get hit going
Speaker 2: the other direction, and I'm like everybody, no, you're not
Speaker 2: playing both ways at the same time. You know, the
Speaker 2: holes going out to the end and the holes coming
Speaker 2: back aren't necessary. They don't have to be as close
Speaker 2: together as Saint Andrew's. The greens can be separate. You
Speaker 2: only have to worry about, you know, you only have
Speaker 2: to worry about one direction at a time. So it's
Speaker 2: you know, there's there's no fear for that. But then
Speaker 2: the thing that makes it so different that I didn't realize,
Speaker 2: you know, where I fell into thinking wrong about it
Speaker 2: was even though you know, I thought, I thought, well,
Speaker 2: it's better if we keep going the same direction, like
Speaker 2: Saint Andrews goes where you go. When you're going out,
Speaker 2: you just step off to the right of the green,
Speaker 2: and the next fairy keeps going that way, and it's
Speaker 2: easy to keep the flow if you turn ninety degrees
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, like the old course does at
Speaker 2: the end. Now you've either got a crossover, or you've
Speaker 2: got you know, or you've got an awkward tee that's
Speaker 2: like you're needing to hit over a green or something
Speaker 2: to make the angle work. And so we were better
Speaker 2: off the more we kept playing straight down the line,
Speaker 2: the better it was. And that was one of the
Speaker 2: things when I first saw the piece of land, I thought, oh, well,
Speaker 2: number one, because of the way they built the first
Speaker 2: course and where the clubhouse was, they couldn't really go
Speaker 2: They couldn't have returning nines. It was kind of gonna
Speaker 2: have to be out and back. So that that made
Speaker 2: the concept work, and then you know, it was kind
Speaker 2: of a long out and back. Basically, the course basically
Speaker 2: starts by the back of the clubhouse where the parking
Speaker 2: lot is, and with a couple of jogs, it works
Speaker 2: its way around the property line to almost where the
Speaker 2: entrance gate is, is where the ninth green is, and
Speaker 2: it comes back. And so I thought it was going
Speaker 2: to be better if it was like Saint Andrews and
Speaker 2: you just kept going the same direction. And then I
Speaker 2: realized when we tried to do that on paper, that
Speaker 2: wasn't very long, and I said, oh, okay, So to
Speaker 2: get enough length after number six, instead of going around
Speaker 2: the property line, you know, we kind of had to
Speaker 2: go from six back into the interior of the property
Speaker 2: for seven and eight back out toward the boundary again,
Speaker 2: and then nine along the boundary, and those turned out
Speaker 2: to be some of the best holes. Versible part work better.
Speaker 2: You know, when you when you had all the holes
Speaker 2: that are like approaching from one hundred and eighty degrees opposite,
Speaker 2: you keep having the same problem of how do you
Speaker 2: make a green that's receptive from both directions because they're
Speaker 2: dead opt to see each other. Like like if the greens,
Speaker 2: if the green's tilted side to side, that works fine.
Speaker 2: But if the greens like front to back or back
Speaker 2: to front one way, it's front to back the other way.
Speaker 2: And you know, people with where the hole where green
Speaker 2: goes away from you, people have a hard time with that,
Speaker 2: you know. But the other because you don't see it
Speaker 2: very well, you know. So we wound up with several
Speaker 2: greens that are kind of crowned in the middle, so
Speaker 2: you see some of it coming into the front. But
Speaker 2: then if you fly it to the middle of the
Speaker 2: green are past it's like on the downsloping out the back.
Speaker 2: It's amazing how many times on on the loop, especially
Speaker 2: when it was new, you'd see people like hit it
Speaker 2: thirty yards over the green because once they carry to
Speaker 2: the middle of the green, it hits on a downslope
Speaker 2: and there's nothing but fairway going out the other way
Speaker 2: for the approach for the next hole. So they just,
Speaker 2: you know, way through the green like more than I'd
Speaker 2: ever seen anywhere. It's not quite as firm as it
Speaker 2: was on opening day, so that's that's softening up a
Speaker 2: little bit, but there's still it's repetitive. You don't want
Speaker 2: it to be repetitive. When the holes are when the
Speaker 2: two holes are coming into the green ninety degrees apart
Speaker 2: or something like that, you know, not exactly ninety degrees,
Speaker 2: but something like that. It's amazingly more interesting because you
Speaker 2: could do the simplest thing, like if you just build
Speaker 2: a rectangular green, the one direction it's long and skinny,
Speaker 2: the other direction it's wide and shallow. Yeah, and it
Speaker 2: doesn't look like the same green at all. And not
Speaker 2: only that, but with those two directions, the background looks
Speaker 2: completely different. You're not looking just down the golf course anymore.
Speaker 2: You could be looking at you know, one direction, you'll
Speaker 2: be looking at a wall of trees behind the green,
Speaker 2: which I didn't think we could even do when we
Speaker 2: started routing the golf course. But if the other holes
Speaker 2: come in ninety degrees to that, yeah, you can do that,
Speaker 2: you know. It's just like having a wall of trees
Speaker 2: at the very end of the ninth hole at Saint Andrew's.
Speaker 2: But you can do it anywhere in the middle too.
Speaker 2: So that's what makes the Those are the holes that
Speaker 2: really make it feel completely different when you play it
Speaker 2: when you turn around the next day. And I had
Speaker 2: not figured that out at the start. It wasn't until
Speaker 2: I had to make the routing that way. As soon
Speaker 2: as I had to make the routing that way and
Speaker 2: I put it on we put it on paper, it
Speaker 2: was like, oh, this is going to be better. All
Speaker 2: we have to do is figure out what to do
Speaker 2: with the teas so they don't conflict with you. You know,
Speaker 2: the tea going the one way doesn't conflict with the
Speaker 2: tea going the other way. We basically had to give
Speaker 2: up on using the same tea for both directions, and
Speaker 2: that was a big leap, just giving up on using
Speaker 2: the same tea. Because there's eighty eight the short grass there.
Speaker 2: You could stick to tea markers anywhere out there and
Speaker 2: have a golf hole, and we're used to doing that.
Speaker 2: We're more and more in the last ten or twelve years,
Speaker 2: we've built like we most short grass like off the green,
Speaker 2: past the green and over to the next tee, so
Speaker 2: you don't leave short grass between green and tea, which
Speaker 2: is you know, I got that idea from Saint Andrews,
Speaker 2: and I got that idea from this map of the
Speaker 2: Valley Club on the wall, because that's the way they
Speaker 2: gang mode the fairway and the gang mode right over
Speaker 2: to the next tea in the old days, you know,
Speaker 2: so that we'd already been doing stuff just like that,
Speaker 2: you know. So we're basically just building fairway on two
Speaker 2: different sides of the greens and building enough little flat
Speaker 2: places in it that you could tee off from either
Speaker 2: side from a.
Speaker 1: He touched on just there with the acreage of fairway.
Speaker 1: Steven Britton asked about the construction and maintenance cost difference
Speaker 1: of having a reverse course versus a regular course. Was
Speaker 1: there anything substantial?
Speaker 2: It's all irrigation. Yeah, you're you're, I mean, we've built
Speaker 2: courses where we had seventy five or eighty acres of
Speaker 2: turf before, just because we build it really wide. This one,
Speaker 2: even building it a little narrower, is eighty five acres
Speaker 2: of turf, So you know, you're you're irrigating maybe twenty
Speaker 2: more acres, So that's another couple hundred thousand dollars maybe
Speaker 2: in construction budget, like you don't but you don't have
Speaker 2: to build the greens any bigger, so there's no extra
Speaker 2: cost there, you know, And you're maintaining twenty more acres
Speaker 2: of fairway. So that's you know, again the green well,
Speaker 2: but it's not, but it's not, but it's not. I mean,
Speaker 2: fairway maintenance is only a fraction of the budget, and
Speaker 2: that's it's not the most expensive part. I mean, the
Speaker 2: greens maintenance is the most expensive part. That's why making
Speaker 2: the greens bigger is a bit you know, That's why
Speaker 2: I wanted to stay away from that. I knew the
Speaker 2: fairways would be more acreage to maintain, but at the
Speaker 2: end of the day, you know, there's a there's like
Speaker 2: zero mode rough to deal with. You know. Essentially, we're
Speaker 2: taking some areas that we probably would have had to
Speaker 2: grass and take care of as rough and turning them
Speaker 2: into fairway. So it might add ten percent to the
Speaker 2: maintenance budget or fifteen percent, but I know, I mean,
Speaker 2: we're also using fescue, which is not as high a
Speaker 2: cost per acre as bank grass. You know, forest dunes.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen the numbers, but I almost guarantee you
Speaker 2: that they spend less maintaining the Loop than they do
Speaker 2: the wise cof course next door, which is all you know,
Speaker 2: it's not it's not as much fairway acreage, but it's
Speaker 2: bank grass fairways, tightly maintained, super high end maintenance. I'll
Speaker 2: bet they spend more money on that.
Speaker 1: That's one of as being somebody that came from business
Speaker 1: and you know, gotten the golf is one of the
Speaker 1: most fascinating things I find about the Loop is like
Speaker 1: the economics of having two distinct golf courses for just
Speaker 1: about the same price. Hearing that doesn't cost much more
Speaker 1: to build or to maintain it with like urban areas,
Speaker 1: it just seems like something that should be done more often.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, probably more often on a smaller scale, and
Speaker 2: not the full eighteen holes going backwards, but who knows.
Speaker 1: Yeah, nine holes would be cool. You've been listening to
Speaker 1: the fried Egg podcast.
Speaker 2: We do the digging for you.