Speaker 1: I don't know what the best course in the world is,
Speaker 1: but if you were to narrow it down to two
Speaker 1: or three candidates, Cypress Point would be one of them.
Speaker 1: Let's dive deep. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf,
Speaker 1: all right. This is a big one. We're talking about.
Speaker 1: Cypress Point Club in Pebble Beach, California, the venue of
Speaker 1: the upcoming twenty twenty five Walker Cup. This golf course
Speaker 1: was designed by Alistair McKenzie, with some key contributions from
Speaker 1: his associate Robert Hunter. There was also input from members
Speaker 1: of the development team, which included Samuel Morse and Marion Hollins.
Speaker 1: Construction began in late nineteen twenty seven and the first
Speaker 1: round was played in August nineteen twenty eight. Since the
Speaker 1: day it opened, Cypress Point has been one of the
Speaker 1: small handful of the world world's most remarkable golf courses.
Speaker 1: The properties mixture of Duneland forest and seaside cliffs is
Speaker 1: unique and extraordinarily beautiful, and the routing of the course
Speaker 1: alternates between those environments seamlessly. Every golfer knows about the
Speaker 1: ocean holes, the miniature fifteenth, the huge sixteenth, and the
Speaker 1: strategic par four seventeenth. But what makes Cypress Point Cypress
Speaker 1: Point is that the holes in the dunes and the
Speaker 1: trees are just as good as the ones on the
Speaker 1: Seaside coast. And if you ask a member what their
Speaker 1: favorite hole is, they're just as likely to name an
Speaker 1: inland hole like the ninth or the thirteenth as a
Speaker 1: seaside one. Alistair Mackenzie himself was thrilled with the course.
Speaker 1: He wrote, not only is it the best golfing terrain
Speaker 1: I have ever had to deal with, but it is
Speaker 1: the only course I have ever been associated with which
Speaker 1: has given me complete satisfaction in regard to the details
Speaker 1: of the construction work. Mackenzie went on to compare Cypress
Speaker 1: Point to his ideal golf course, the Old Course at
Speaker 1: Saint Andrews. He wrote, Cypress Point has similar strategic problems
Speaker 1: to Saint Andrews and is infinitely more spectacular and beautiful.
Speaker 1: For years, I have been contending that in our generation,
Speaker 1: no other golf course could possibly compete with the strategic problems,
Speaker 1: the thrills, excitement, variety, and lasting and increasing interest of
Speaker 1: the Old Course. But the completion of Cypress Point has
Speaker 1: made me change my mind. So today we're doing a
Speaker 1: deep dive into the golf course at Cypress Point. We'll
Speaker 1: be joined for part of the episode by the author
Speaker 1: of the club's upcoming centennial book, David Normoyl. David and
Speaker 1: I will talk about the history of Cypress Points founding
Speaker 1: and construction. Later, we'll bring on Joshua Pettitt, a golf
Speaker 1: architect and the founder of the Alistair Mackenzie Institute. Josh
Speaker 1: and I will discuss a few fun stories about specific
Speaker 1: aspects of Cypress Points architecture, and for the other parts
Speaker 1: of the episode, I'll just be talking with you directly,
Speaker 1: with my producer Will Balsam kind of as a sounding board.
Speaker 1: With me, I'll just be monologuing essentially about the courses,
Speaker 1: land routing, strategic design, greens and restoration work and so on. Now,
Speaker 1: before we get to all of that, I want to
Speaker 1: talk for a minute about some of my personal history
Speaker 1: with Cyprus Point, if you'll indulge me just for a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes here. I've been fascinated with this course
Speaker 1: since I was a kid. I've told this story before,
Speaker 1: but my interest in golf course design really started when
Speaker 1: my dad brought home a copy of the World Atlas
Speaker 1: of Golf and the map. This book has these great
Speaker 1: beautiful maps in it. The map that I looked at
Speaker 1: the most was the map of Pipe Point. It was
Speaker 1: just the most outrageously cool looking course I could imagine.
Speaker 1: I could barely believe that it was real. But it
Speaker 1: was also in a setting that I was very familiar with.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Santa Barbara, California, which is about
Speaker 1: a four hour drive from Monterey, and I obviously started
Speaker 1: to wonder, will I ever get to play this golf course?
Speaker 1: Is that even possible? Fast forward about twenty years later,
Speaker 1: and I moved to Pebble Beach to teach at a
Speaker 1: boarding school called Stevenson School. Stevenson is right next to
Speaker 1: Spyglass Hill golf Course, which in turn is right next
Speaker 1: to Cypress Point. So it was about a fifteen minute
Speaker 1: walk to the forest holes at Cypress Point from where
Speaker 1: I lived on campus in a house on campus. It
Speaker 1: was faculty housing at Stephenson's School, and I lived and
Speaker 1: worked there for five years, and I walked by Cypress
Speaker 1: Point many times. The funny thing about Cypress is that
Speaker 1: it's not really hidden from public view. The first thirteenth
Speaker 1: and fourteenth holes are right next to seventeen mile Drive.
Speaker 1: You can even pull to the side of the road
Speaker 1: and hang out on Fanshell Beach and you're literally one
Speaker 1: hundred yards from the thirteenth Green, And if you wanted
Speaker 1: to take it a step further, there's a public hiking
Speaker 1: trail that runs along the top of the dune ridge
Speaker 1: above the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth holes. It's called
Speaker 1: the Green Trail. You can park in the Pebble Beach
Speaker 1: Equestrian Center and within a few minutes you're looking at
Speaker 1: Cypress Point. So it's not one of those courses that's
Speaker 1: concealed behind gates and completely inaccessible. But of course it
Speaker 1: is not easy to get a tea time at Cypress.
Speaker 1: It's a small membership club that likes to keep things
Speaker 1: very low key and low profile. So during the five
Speaker 1: years that I lived in Pebble Beach, within literally eight
Speaker 1: hundred yards as the crowflies of the fifth Green at
Speaker 1: Cypress Point, I actually never played it. And this was
Speaker 1: around the time that I was getting back into golf,
Speaker 1: getting interested in golf course design again, starting to write
Speaker 1: about it, and that eventually led to the career that
Speaker 1: I have now. But at the time, I often thought
Speaker 1: to myself, how funny it was that I had this
Speaker 1: passion for golf courses, these things that I could look
Speaker 1: at and maybe get close to, but not actually experience.
Speaker 1: In a few key cases. It's sort of like if
Speaker 1: you were a movie lover and there was a film
Speaker 1: that you knew to be one of the greatest ever made.
Speaker 1: Everybody thought that it was the greatest, but you couldn't
Speaker 1: watch it. You could just sort of hang out outside
Speaker 1: the theater and maybe catch a few lines of dialogue
Speaker 1: or a few hits.
Speaker 2: Of the score.
Speaker 1: That's what it felt like for me with Cyprus Point,
Speaker 1: and I didn't feel that with any bitterness. I wasn't
Speaker 1: angry about it. It just amused me a little bit.
Speaker 1: How have I put myself in this position that this
Speaker 1: is what I really love and it has kind of
Speaker 1: this weird dynamic. And I think the reason that I
Speaker 1: wasn't that I wasn't bitter about it or angry about it,
Speaker 1: is partly because I figured I probably would eventually get
Speaker 1: a chance to play the course, and that did turn
Speaker 1: out to be the case. I've been very lucky to
Speaker 1: play Cyprus Point a few times now. But the reason
Speaker 1: I'm telling you about all of this is that I
Speaker 1: know that some of you listening are probably in the
Speaker 1: same position that I was a number of years ago
Speaker 1: when I loved this golf course that I didn't have
Speaker 1: any way of playing. I know what that's like, and
Speaker 1: I don't take it for granted at all that I've
Speaker 1: now gotten to study this course in person, and I'm
Speaker 1: thrilled that I'm in a position to relay what I've
Speaker 1: learned to you. I'm very grateful for all of that.
Speaker 1: And I just add that if you have, if you
Speaker 1: have a real and enduring passion for golf architecture, if
Speaker 1: you become involved in the community of fellow enthusiasts, you
Speaker 1: will end up getting opportunities that you never thought you'd get.
Speaker 1: And that's that's what's happened for me, and I think
Speaker 1: that that's a true thing about about this community that
Speaker 1: we're part of. So that's it for the For the
Speaker 1: personal section of the podcast, well, we'll now properly get
Speaker 1: into the deep dive on Cyprus Point and we'll start
Speaker 1: with some history. My guest for that segment is David Normoyle.
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Speaker 1: get to David Normoyle. All right, David, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being here.
Speaker 3: Pleasure Garrett.
Speaker 1: So, in talking about the history of Cyprus, point I'd
Speaker 1: like to start pretty broad, bring some characters onto the stage,
Speaker 1: and then finally get to the building of the golf course. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, who was Samuel Morse?
Speaker 3: Well, Samuel Morse was a man from the East who
Speaker 3: found himself in the West. And that's the theme that
Speaker 3: I think runs through all of the main characters of
Speaker 3: this story, whether it's Samuel Morse, Marion Hollins, Roger Lapham
Speaker 3: and even Alistair Mackenzie. They all came from somewhere else,
Speaker 3: and because of their experiences at Cypress, at Cypress Point,
Speaker 3: and in particularly the Monterey Peninsula, but at Cypress Point,
Speaker 3: they made the rest of their lives on that portion
Speaker 3: of the world. So Samuel Morse was raised in Boston,
Speaker 3: educated at Yale. He was the captain of the undefeated
Speaker 3: Yale football team in nineteen oh six. And his hero
Speaker 3: was Teddy Roosevelt. And because of some connections that he
Speaker 3: made with classmates at Yale from the Hammond family and
Speaker 3: then more importantly the Crocker family, which is one of
Speaker 3: the Big four California families from the eighteen hundreds, the
Speaker 3: railroad barons and industrialists, he got a job working on
Speaker 3: ranches in California, and following in the model of his hero,
Speaker 3: Teddy Roosevelt, he loved being on horseback and working the land.
Speaker 3: And the Crockers happened on this huge piece of land
Speaker 3: as part of the Pacific Improvement Company, which was an
Speaker 3: outgrowth of one of these great industrialist conglomerate corporations that
Speaker 3: owned thousands and thousands of acres on the Monterey Peninsula,
Speaker 3: including Pebble Beach, Cyprus Point, and the Hotel Del Monte
Speaker 3: in Monterey. Unfortunately, because of a variety of different land complications,
Speaker 3: this del Monte unit was hugely unprofitable, and so the
Speaker 3: Crockers were trying to get rid of it, to liquidate it.
Speaker 3: So they hired sam Mors to come and be the
Speaker 3: manager of this land and to gussie it up so
Speaker 3: that it could be ready for sale to benefit the
Speaker 3: inheritors of this property. Except the problem was Sam Mors
Speaker 3: didn't want to sell it. He wanted to buy it
Speaker 3: because he had a vision for creating a new port
Speaker 3: of the West, a sort of grand resort on the
Speaker 3: most beautiful piece of land. But unlike what had been
Speaker 3: and done previously through the Pacific Improvement Company in Pacific
Speaker 3: Grove as an example, chopping up the land into small
Speaker 3: pieces of real estate, what Morse wanted to do was
Speaker 3: preserve the best pieces of land for golf, which would
Speaker 3: then drive value of the real estate further inland. And
Speaker 3: he oversaw all of this as the Duke of Delmonte
Speaker 3: from nineteen fifteen until his death in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: The Duke of Delmonte. I like that. That's how he
Speaker 1: was actually known. That's not your term for.
Speaker 3: Him, No, No, He was kind of known as that
Speaker 3: around town, and some people say that he didn't like it.
Speaker 3: Some people say that he secretly embraced it. But he
Speaker 3: wore a lot of different hats as the developer of
Speaker 3: del Monte. He from his father, who fought in the
Speaker 3: Civil War, had a kind of pugilistic instinct, and from
Speaker 3: his mother, who was a sculptor. He was an artist,
Speaker 3: so a number of his original paintings Charcoal and Oils
Speaker 3: are hanging on the walls of the clubhouse at Cyprus Point.
Speaker 3: So he balanced both. He approved every single planning or
Speaker 3: architectural plan in the Delmonte Forest from nineteen fifteen to
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty nine, and he had his fingerprints on everything,
Speaker 3: including Cyprus Point.
Speaker 1: Could you give me a sense for the scope of
Speaker 1: his vision for del Monte properties, for this kind of big,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of resort attraction that he wanted to
Speaker 1: build in the Monterey area, just the size of it,
Speaker 1: the extent of it.
Speaker 3: Well, he started with the Hotel del Monte, which was
Speaker 3: this grand Victorian structure built by Charles Crocker in the
Speaker 3: eighteen eighties and in the mid nineteen twenties it burned down, actually,
Speaker 3: and he was able to rebuild it in his preferred
Speaker 3: sort of neo Spanish Californian style, and that's what really
Speaker 3: set the tone for a lot of what he was doing.
Speaker 3: But if you think about it, he realized that the
Speaker 3: best way to sell real estate was to people who
Speaker 3: had money, and he knew from the nineteen sixteen Western Amateur,
Speaker 3: which was played at the old Delmonte Golf Course historicalf
Speaker 3: course from the eighteen nineties right next to the Hotel
Speaker 3: del Monte Marey. He knew that wealthy people tended to
Speaker 3: travel to golf tournaments, and so he created this tiered
Speaker 3: structure where beginning with the public access historic old Delmonte
Speaker 3: Golf Course, he then added a public access Pebble Beach
Speaker 3: Golf Links in nineteen nineteen, which would drive visitors' bedstays
Speaker 3: all of that to the newly rebuilt lodge. And then
Speaker 3: if you keep going up the pyramid, the idea was
Speaker 3: to build a thirty six hole country club, the Monterey
Speaker 3: Peninsula country Club, which came about starting in nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 3: and that would be for local landowners, retired military people,
Speaker 3: people who wanted to buy smaller pieces of land. And
Speaker 3: then at the very pinnacle of his golf pyramid would
Speaker 3: be the exclusive Cypress Point Club on the most beautiful
Speaker 3: piece of land, limited to a smaller number, again driving
Speaker 3: people to buy the most expensive and valuable lots. The
Speaker 3: only problem was he, as the president of the del
Speaker 3: Monte Properties Company, couldn't be seen to promote both this
Speaker 3: private Cypress Point Club and del Monte Properties. There needed
Speaker 3: to be an intermediate, and in Marion Hollands, sam Morse
Speaker 3: found his ideal.
Speaker 1: We'll get to Marion Hollands in a second. That was
Speaker 1: an excellent segue, but I'm gonna jam that for a
Speaker 1: second and ask about the kind of general role of
Speaker 1: golf in Morse's vision, because I think that maybe some
Speaker 1: listeners right now would be surprised to hear that these
Speaker 1: great golf courses, including Cyprus Point, were sort of part
Speaker 1: of a real estate scheme, and real estate driven golf
Speaker 1: has a bit of a bad name now among golf
Speaker 1: architecture enthusiasts and golf purists. How was what Morse was
Speaker 1: doing with the combination of real estate and golf maybe
Speaker 1: different from what modern people would expect from that mixture.
Speaker 3: Sure, when Sam Morse inherited the Delmonte unit project and
Speaker 3: turned it into the Delmonte Properties Company. There were plans
Speaker 3: to have hundreds of row houses on the headland where
Speaker 3: the sixth hole and seventh green at Pebble Beach are
Speaker 3: right now. So if you want to know what that
Speaker 3: would have looked like, go to Google Earth. Look at
Speaker 3: what Pacific Grove looks like just slightly to the north
Speaker 3: on the Monary peninsula, and imagine Pacific Grove on top
Speaker 3: of Pebble Beach golf links, because that's what the del
Speaker 3: Moni Properties Company inherited plans for that. But what Morse
Speaker 3: realized is if you preserve the most beautiful pieces of
Speaker 3: land for golf, open views, etc. And move the real
Speaker 3: estate further inland with a view of the golf and
Speaker 3: the sea beyond, that real estate will only continue to
Speaker 3: increase in value again and again, whereas the small properties
Speaker 3: you can only sell once. And one person who he
Speaker 3: convinced to do this was Robert Hunter, who bought and
Speaker 3: built a house designed by Wallace Neff on the thirteenth
Speaker 3: hole at Pebble Beach, overlooking the golf course with Point
Speaker 3: Lobos in the distance, and he became central to the
Speaker 3: Cyprus Point story.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's get back to Marion Hollins. Now who was
Speaker 1: Marion Hollins.
Speaker 3: Marion Hollins was another child of the East who found
Speaker 3: herself in the West. She was born in New York
Speaker 3: City to great privilege in the eighteen nineties. Her father,
Speaker 3: if you can imagine, was the founding president of the
Speaker 3: Metropolitan Golf Association, Harry B. Hollins HB. And one of
Speaker 3: his great friends was the son of the Vanderbilts, who
Speaker 3: at the time were the wealthiest family in America, and
Speaker 3: he really saved their bacon on a finance deal in
Speaker 3: the eighteen eighties, so as a consequence, he was able
Speaker 3: to build a six hundred acre family homestead out on
Speaker 3: Long Island where Marian grew up, including having a small
Speaker 3: golf course on this amazing piece of land. And she
Speaker 3: did everything. She had only brothers, and she did everything.
Speaker 3: She was the classic tomboy who rode horses, learned to
Speaker 3: play polo, eventually became the only woman in America with
Speaker 3: a man's rated handicap at polo. But her strength was
Speaker 3: as a golfer, and she emerged around the same time
Speaker 3: as Bobby Jones on the national scene, finally breaking through
Speaker 3: in nineteen twenty one and winning the US Women's Amateur.
Speaker 3: And during this time as one of these great polo
Speaker 3: players and golfers, she would make occasional visits, including before
Speaker 3: World War One and after out to Pebble Beach for
Speaker 3: the purpose of playing polo at del Monte. And by
Speaker 3: the way, Sam Morris was captain of the del Monte
Speaker 3: polo team, so he dabbled in this as well, so
Speaker 3: he knew Marion and he engaged Marion slightly after she
Speaker 3: won the nineteen twenty one Women's Amateur to sell real estate,
Speaker 3: and essentially she was I don't want to use the
Speaker 3: word shill, but she was the front person who would
Speaker 3: get her wealthy New York society friends to come out
Speaker 3: to Monterey and buy expensive real estate, which she did herself.
Speaker 3: And having developed the Women's National Golf and Tennis Club
Speaker 3: on Long Island with Dero Emmett and ultimately Seth Rayner
Speaker 3: and Charles Blair MacDonald in the nineteen twenties, she was
Speaker 3: perfectly poised to develop this exclusive private club at Cyprus
Speaker 3: Point for Sam Moore.
Speaker 1: Women's National was an incredible looking course. There are some
Speaker 1: vintage photos of this course that make it clear that
Speaker 1: it was a high quality golf course. Clearly Hollins had
Speaker 1: very good taste in golf course design, knew how to
Speaker 1: choose a piece of land, and so she would seem
Speaker 1: to be very well suited to this new role in
Speaker 1: Morse's overall scheme. So, how then, was Cypress Point conceived?
Speaker 1: How did all the parties kind of come together choose
Speaker 1: a property and come up with the idea for this club.
Speaker 3: Well, if you go back and do some research. In
Speaker 3: late nineteen twenty three and Pacific Golf and Motor, there
Speaker 3: was an article by a guy named Francis Macomas who
Speaker 3: became a Cypress Point member. He was an artist and
Speaker 3: he was best friends with Sam Morse and in December
Speaker 3: of nineteen twenty three, this is before all the things
Speaker 3: that we think we know happen. He said that the
Speaker 3: history of the Pebble Beach courses dates back to nineteen
Speaker 3: fourteen when Crocker, one of these men and more started
Speaker 3: talking about the possibilities. So they investigated a few holes,
Speaker 3: and they also said that favorable mention of the site
Speaker 3: of the present course Pebble Beach and also the land
Speaker 3: around Cypress Point, where eventually a third course will be
Speaker 3: built was explored. Seth Rayner, one of the world's most
Speaker 3: distinguished golf architects, with Miss Marion Hollins, recently spent time
Speaker 3: studying Cypress Point locality and reached the conclusion that as
Speaker 3: a material for a great golf course, it cannot be
Speaker 3: surpassed in America. So the idea of developing a golf
Speaker 3: course at Cypress Point began with the whole development of
Speaker 3: Pebble Beach and del Monte in nineteen fourteen, nineteen fifteen ish,
Speaker 3: but finally the time arrived in twenty three, twenty four
Speaker 3: and twenty five to develop this golf course. Marion Hollins
Speaker 3: was engaged by Sam Morse to do the selling, and
Speaker 3: Seth Rayner was engaged as well because he was doing
Speaker 3: the work at Modera at Peninsula Country Club for the
Speaker 3: del Monte Properties Company. And I would add also that
Speaker 3: Hollins would have known Rayner and McDonald because not only
Speaker 3: was her father the founding president of the Metropolitan Golf Association,
Speaker 3: but he joined every club in the New York area
Speaker 3: and was a founding member of the National Golf Links.
Speaker 3: So Marian had loads of access to the National Golf Links.
Speaker 3: Understood the whole theory behind it. And when she went
Speaker 3: to develop her women's National golf course, she too traveled overseas,
Speaker 3: playing in amateur tournaments and studied the great holes of
Speaker 3: the UK, just like Charles Blair McDonald did with National
Speaker 3: Golf links. So at the beginning she was very much
Speaker 3: in the National school of thought, and you can read
Speaker 3: this in some of her writings about the Women's National
Speaker 3: not so much the Mackenzie naturalism, which we'll get to
Speaker 3: in a bit.
Speaker 1: What can you tell me about how far SETH. Rayner
Speaker 1: got into the design process and which aspects of the
Speaker 1: current Cypress Point course might be linked to his initial efforts?
Speaker 1: What can you tell me about all that?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: Well, in nineteen twenty three, twenty four and again in
Speaker 3: twenty five, Rayner made visits from Monterey Peninsula and also
Speaker 3: visited the land at Cypress Point. And one of the
Speaker 3: pieces of interesting pieces of evidence that we found during
Speaker 3: the research is a newspaper article from the Lassie Los
Speaker 3: Angeles Evening Express in September of nineteen twenty five. So
Speaker 3: Rayner still very much alive, and the headline reads wonder
Speaker 3: golf course. Miss Holland's creation will be delightful one hole
Speaker 3: carries calls for a long carry over a lake. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 3: that lake was the sixteenth hole and.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a lake.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it wasn't a lake. But the way to think
Speaker 3: about it is this, from the beginning, the founders, Hollands,
Speaker 3: Morse and everybody else knew that the clubhouse was going
Speaker 3: to be where the clubhouse was going to be, which
Speaker 3: was on a rise on a relatively flat piece of
Speaker 3: land overlooking Cypress Point on one side, overlooking Fanshell Beach,
Speaker 3: which is the cove where the first green is. It's
Speaker 3: Fanshell Beach on the other side, and then the Cypress Grove.
Speaker 3: So there was always going to be the clubhouse there
Speaker 3: on that beautiful spot. And then when you think of
Speaker 3: the name of the course, the name of the club,
Speaker 3: the Cypress Point club holes were always going to be
Speaker 3: played along Cypress Point. So the big question is if
Speaker 3: you know where the clubhouse is, and you know that
Speaker 3: you're going to play the holes along Cypress Point, are
Speaker 3: you going to play them clockwise to begin, down the
Speaker 3: hill around them and then go play the inland holes
Speaker 3: or are you going to play them counterclockwise to finish?
Speaker 3: You only have two choices, and from beginnings of recorded history,
Speaker 3: photographs before there was ever a golf course were always
Speaker 3: taken from the land looking out to Cypress Point for
Speaker 3: the sixteenth green. There were never photographs taken from the
Speaker 3: point looking back to the land because it's inherently less dramatic.
Speaker 3: So from this beginning point Seth Rayner was in, Marion
Speaker 3: was involved. They always knew that the sixteenth hole was
Speaker 3: going to be played in the direction that it is
Speaker 3: counterclockwise to finish. So the big question becomes what do
Speaker 3: you do with the other fourteen holes on the other
Speaker 3: side of the road. Because if you're going to have
Speaker 3: those four holes along Cyprus Point, which with all due
Speaker 3: respect my mother in law would have designed exactly the
Speaker 3: same way that Seth Rayner and Marion Hollins and Alistair
Speaker 3: McKenzie did, because there's really only one way to play them,
Speaker 3: the question is what do you do on the other side.
Speaker 3: And Seth Rayner did a routing of the other holes,
Speaker 3: and it was described in this article, and I'll tell
Speaker 3: you some of the things that were said. So this
Speaker 3: Los Angeles Evening Express from September of nineteen twenty five
Speaker 3: reads the former champion Marion Allins is convinced, with the
Speaker 3: assistance of Seth Rainer in Golf Architect of National note
Speaker 3: that she hopes to construct a creation which will even
Speaker 3: surpass such notable links as Leedo and the National. National
Speaker 3: was always held up as the standard which new development
Speaker 3: we're trying to match. It reads, the first nine holes
Speaker 3: will lead into the virgin forest, which contains innumerable kinds
Speaker 3: of trees of great age, and is interesting to learn
Speaker 3: that those which are doomed to be cut down have
Speaker 3: been sold to private parties by Miss Hollins. The article continues,
Speaker 3: from the forest lane, the lynx will lead down to
Speaker 3: the water's edge along mountains of that glorious white sand,
Speaker 3: which particularly belongs to that district, as do the cypress trees.
Speaker 3: The greatest hole in the lynx will probably be the sixteenth,
Speaker 3: which calls for a carry of one hundred and eighty
Speaker 3: yards clean over the bay. So the article describes the
Speaker 3: routing as going nine holes into the forest and then
Speaker 3: back along the mountains of sand. If you want to
Speaker 3: know exactly what Seth Rayner's routing was, in the upcoming
Speaker 3: centennial history book that the club is producing, there will
Speaker 3: be a routing map so that you can see exactly
Speaker 3: what he did. However, the more interesting thing is not
Speaker 3: what Seth Rayner may or may not have done, but
Speaker 3: what Alistair mackenzie actually did. And when you think about
Speaker 3: the four holes that go around Cyprus Point, we've already
Speaker 3: determined there's really only one way to do counterclockwise to finish.
Speaker 3: Then the question becomes what do you do inland. You've
Speaker 3: got one hole leading away from the clubhouse the first,
Speaker 3: You've got another hole leading back to Cyprus Point the fourteenth,
Speaker 3: So you have twelve holes that you have to do
Speaker 3: something interesting with And according to that article, Rayner took
Speaker 3: nine of them and went into the forest. Well, if
Speaker 3: you think about how Mackenzie ended up designing it, and
Speaker 3: this is where the story becomes remarkable. When Alistair Mackenzie
Speaker 3: got on a ship in January of nineteen twenty six
Speaker 3: to sail to New York City to visit America to
Speaker 3: see his design partners Perry Maxwell and Robert Hunter in
Speaker 3: San Francisco. Ultimately, when he did this, Seth Rayner was
Speaker 3: still alive on the way across the country on the
Speaker 3: t Seth Rayner dies six days after Seth Rayner dies
Speaker 3: and Marion Hollins no longer has an architect for Cypress Point.
Speaker 3: Alistair Mackenzie arrives in San Francisco to meet Robert Hunter,
Speaker 3: and a couple of days after that, February second, he
Speaker 3: comes and visits Cypress Point for the first time. He's
Speaker 3: there briefly but long enough to create a new routing
Speaker 3: map and a new design with details of bunkers and greens,
Speaker 3: and a routing that incorporates some of the features we're
Speaker 3: about to talk about in a way that makes it
Speaker 3: possible for Albert Barrows to draw that famous aerial map
Speaker 3: that you see in nineteen twenty six. And mackenzie didn't
Speaker 3: return to Cyprus Point again for another year nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 3: so he was there only briefly, but long enough to
Speaker 3: design all of the features and change the routing to
Speaker 3: a degree where it looks kind of like it does today. However,
Speaker 3: there were a few changes during construction. So the key
Speaker 3: thing to think about when you're trying to understand how
Speaker 3: Cypress Point works as a golf course is there are
Speaker 3: three main environments. You've got the see, the sand, and
Speaker 3: the forest, and you're constantly moving from one environment to
Speaker 3: the next. See sand forest, and only when you play
Speaker 3: the holes at Cypress Point do you visit those once,
Speaker 3: and all the other elements from two through fourteen you
Speaker 3: visit those features multiple times. You come to them and
Speaker 3: from them and away from them. And the way that
Speaker 3: Mackenzie and Hunter made this possible is that every single
Speaker 3: hole on the other side of seventeen mile drive from
Speaker 3: Cypress Point, so holes one through fourteen, every single hole
Speaker 3: plays to a dune or from a doone, every single
Speaker 3: one except for the fifth. And the reason the most
Speaker 3: dramatic bunkering on the entire golf courses on the fifth
Speaker 3: is because it's the only hole where you have no
Speaker 3: contact with a natural dune. So one plays to a dune,
Speaker 3: two plays from a dune, Three plays to a dune,
Speaker 3: four plays from a dune, five you're truly in the forest,
Speaker 3: six to the dune, seven from it, eight over and
Speaker 3: in it. Nine plays to the core of Mackenzie in
Speaker 3: Hunter's central dune, ten plays from it, eleven plays to it,
Speaker 3: and twelve plays away from it. Thirteen you rejoin the
Speaker 3: fanshell dune, that first central dune, the first bit of
Speaker 3: the dune, and then fourteen plays away from it. So
Speaker 3: all of those holes are really dune holes. And Mackenzie
Speaker 3: talked about it in March of nineteen twenty seven, writing
Speaker 3: in Game of Gossip, Game and Gossip, which is Sam
Speaker 3: Morris's local magazine. Mackenzie said, and this is before construction
Speaker 3: ever began. We shall play over inlets of the sea,
Speaker 3: turn into the pine woods, and then into high dunes,
Speaker 3: and back again to a club looking into the endless
Speaker 3: expanse of a great ocean. Five holes skirting the sea
Speaker 3: or flirting with its waves, five holes in the pine woods,
Speaker 3: and eight greens in the dunes. Where else shall we
Speaker 3: find all of this? And So if you want to
Speaker 3: try and understand the difference between what Mackenzie did and
Speaker 3: what Rayner may and may not have done, just think
Speaker 3: of the description for Rainer nine holes led into the forest.
Speaker 3: For Mackenzie five he also planted eight greens in the dunes.
Speaker 3: Do you have any of your grandmother's old recipes? So
Speaker 3: if you know the ingredients, you know the recipe, when
Speaker 3: you make it, does it taste the same? No, because
Speaker 3: just knowing the recipe or just knowing the routing is
Speaker 3: not the same as creating the whole thing. I mean
Speaker 3: architecture is a combination of routing, yes, but also design,
Speaker 3: so the shapes of the bunkers, the people who shape
Speaker 3: the bunkers, and then ultimately construction. And I think one
Speaker 3: of the remarkable things about how Cyprus Point was created
Speaker 3: is that mackenzie acknowledged that almost all of the greens
Speaker 3: and fairways and teas were artificially constructed. It's just that
Speaker 3: you don't know it. He was the magician trying to
Speaker 3: hide his work, complain sight, and that was the intent
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 1: It was that kind of contribution of naturalness and seamlessness,
Speaker 1: which was, you know, Mackenzie's trademark. Obviously, many of our
Speaker 1: listeners will know who Alistair McKenzie was, but you know,
Speaker 1: if we can backtrack a little bit, who was he
Speaker 1: by the mid nineteen twenties, How would you characterize the
Speaker 1: stage of the career of his career that he was
Speaker 1: in at that point that he got the Cypress Point commission.
Speaker 3: So he arrived in San Francisco in February, late January
Speaker 3: February of nineteen twenty six. So this is ground zero
Speaker 3: from an American golf perspective. He had never built a
Speaker 3: golf course prior to that moment, And so when Marion
Speaker 3: Hollins and Sam Morris want to build Cyprus Point, they
Speaker 3: of course would not have gone to Mackenzie. They would
Speaker 3: have gone to Seth Rayner and Charles Blair McDonald because
Speaker 3: they were the leading architects in America at the time.
Speaker 3: But with Rayner's passing, a pivot was required. And it's
Speaker 3: not just that Mackenzie was an interesting character. It's also
Speaker 3: that Robert Hunter, his design partner, who lived in Pebble
Speaker 3: Beach and at the very same time was coming out
Speaker 3: with his own book on architecture, The Lynx, which in
Speaker 3: April of that year, just a couple of months after
Speaker 3: Mackenzie and Hunter visited Cyprus Point for the first time.
Speaker 3: Hunter hand inscribed a copy of the Links to Samuel Morse.
Speaker 3: So as much of an expert as Mackenzie was, Hunter
Speaker 3: in California was equally so an expert in golf architecture.
Speaker 3: But at the time Mackenzie had designed or he designed
Speaker 3: a number of golf courses in the UK, but really
Speaker 3: had not expanded beyond that. He hadn't gone on his
Speaker 3: trip to Australia yet, he hadn't built anything in America.
Speaker 3: He had just done the UK based work and wrote
Speaker 3: his book Golf Architecture, along with a number of other articles,
Speaker 3: and so it was really this opportunity to make his
Speaker 3: debut in California in nineteen twenty six that set things running.
Speaker 3: But at the time he had nothing special to claim
Speaker 3: on his own, so it was really an almost providential
Speaker 3: visit that he happened to be en route to California
Speaker 3: at the time of rainers passing.
Speaker 1: So a lot of luck factored into his earning of
Speaker 1: this opportunity, in other words.
Speaker 3: Huge amounts. But then he went and reconstructed or constructed
Speaker 3: a number of golf courses in California, starting with the
Speaker 3: Metal Club. He did bunker work at the California Golf
Speaker 3: Club cal Club, reconstructed a number of greens after the
Speaker 3: initial construction was done by Vernon McCann, did Cyprus Point,
Speaker 3: did some work at Pebble Beach, did some work at
Speaker 3: Moderate Peninsula Valley Club, on and on and on, and
Speaker 3: ultimately Pasa Tempo, where he resided towards the end of
Speaker 3: his life. Number of other courses in California two.
Speaker 1: So this mackenzie Hunter partnership was very dynamic. How would
Speaker 1: you characterize the work that they did generally in California
Speaker 1: from a stylistic perspective, In other words, what was distinctive
Speaker 1: about the work that they did together as opposed to
Speaker 1: the work that Mackenzie did with say, Perry Maxwell in
Speaker 1: the Midwest, or with Alex Russell and others in Australia.
Speaker 1: What did this kind of partnership produce well.
Speaker 3: The key unifying feature in all of this was the
Speaker 3: company that Hunter and Mackenzie formed, the American Golf Course
Speaker 3: Construction Company, and Neil Crafter and Shawn Tully have done
Speaker 3: far more research and written about it far better than
Speaker 3: I ever will. In fact, there's a great article in
Speaker 3: the Australian Golf Course Architects Journal that from twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: or twenty eighteen that Sean and Neil did that covers
Speaker 3: all of this. But I think the key thing is
Speaker 3: as Mackenzie was building golf courses in the UK, he
Speaker 3: was dissatisfied with the quality of construction, so he and
Speaker 3: his brother founded the British Golf Course Construction Company and
Speaker 3: then this created the model for Hunter to do the
Speaker 3: American Golf Course Construction Company, and Mackenzie brought over a
Speaker 3: number of his associates who all happened to be Irish
Speaker 3: for whatever reason, to be the lead shapers and builders.
Speaker 3: So it was Hunter Hunter's son, Robert Hunter Junior. And
Speaker 3: then the key names at least on the Cypress Point
Speaker 3: project were Jack Fleming who stayed and they all stayed
Speaker 3: in California, by the way, Jack Fleming, Dan Gormley. The
Speaker 3: key bunker shaper in all the Cypress Point work was
Speaker 3: a fellow called Patty Cole, and then Michael McDonough, all irishmen,
Speaker 3: and I think extreme naturalism is the word that I would.
Speaker 2: Use to describe this.
Speaker 3: These were high flying times where real estate was going
Speaker 3: for immense amounts of money and even though they were
Speaker 3: trying to be very responsible with their costs, and actually
Speaker 3: Mackenzie felt it was outrageous how much money was being
Speaker 3: wasted on golf courses. They took risks, and they had
Speaker 3: pieces of lamb on which to take remarkable risks. But
Speaker 3: it was everything having to do with the American Golf
Speaker 3: Course Construction Company and these core people who built these
Speaker 3: golf courses. While you see a different style than you
Speaker 3: might see elsewhere.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Mackenzie had this great crew with him capable
Speaker 1: of producing incredibly naturalistic shapes in the landscape. Now they
Speaker 1: get a hold of a property like Cypress Point. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about construction a little bit. What were the major
Speaker 1: changes that mackenzie and his crew made to the landscape
Speaker 1: at Cyprus Point. I think, you know, to contextualize this
Speaker 1: question a little bit, I think people regard the Cypress
Speaker 1: Point property as one of the great natural golf properties,
Speaker 1: and it is probably that. But unless I'm mistaken, they did,
Speaker 1: you know, move some dirt around.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, they moved a lot of dirt and they
Speaker 3: had to. So Hunter worked. So he was a professor
Speaker 3: at the University of California before he retired as a sociologist,
Speaker 3: and he had relationships with the University of California professors.
Speaker 3: Is not that far from the Monterey Peninsula, and he
Speaker 3: worked with a number of scientists at Berkeley to develop
Speaker 3: test plots for what types of turf grasses they would
Speaker 3: want to use. So some of the sand dunes are
Speaker 3: beautiful for native grasses, but they're not great for building
Speaker 3: brand new turf. Charles blay MacDonald found this to be
Speaker 3: the case at National Golf Links. George Crump at Pine
Speaker 3: Valley establishing great grass on sand was one of the
Speaker 3: key breakthroughs in American golf course construction. So from starting
Speaker 3: point you had see sand and forest. You had the
Speaker 3: rocky cliffs, you had the sand dunes, and you had
Speaker 3: the forest in this ancient drainage ravine. And so you
Speaker 3: had to find a way to move essentially arable land
Speaker 3: to grow grass to all these different places to make
Speaker 3: that happen. So that was thing number one. Thing number
Speaker 3: two is the property lines for this development were in
Speaker 3: some ways shifting. You had seventeen mile drive, you had
Speaker 3: some lack of clarity about exactly where the dunes on six,
Speaker 3: seven and eight are, and so originally the sixth hole
Speaker 3: was not meant to be a back to back par
Speaker 3: five like it is today. It was meant to be
Speaker 3: a par three. But during construction they realized that actually
Speaker 3: the property line behind the seventh green and the eighth
Speaker 3: T made it possible for the seventh green to become
Speaker 3: the par three that went up into the dunes, the
Speaker 3: eighth T extending up above it, allowing for an even
Speaker 3: more heroic carry over that shoulder of the sand dune.
Speaker 3: And so that's why you have those back to back
Speaker 3: par fives in five and six, so changing changing six
Speaker 3: and seven and eight to be what they are would
Speaker 3: be one of the major changes. And then the other
Speaker 3: one was the consequence of the rerouting of the road,
Speaker 3: about which I think there's more confusion than there needs
Speaker 3: to be near the fourteenth Green. So if you look
Speaker 3: at the earliest plans, the green for number fourteen was
Speaker 3: going to be about where the middle of the curve
Speaker 3: of the road is. It was like a four hundred
Speaker 3: and twenty yard hole instead of a three hundred and
Speaker 3: eighty five yard hole. Of the sharpness of the curve
Speaker 3: that was going around the green, almost encircling it like
Speaker 3: an island. This was part of the source of frustration
Speaker 3: from Morse and his highway foreman, thinking that people were
Speaker 3: going to be killed with traffic coming so close to
Speaker 3: the edge of the green. So what they decided to
Speaker 3: do was soften the curve slightly, which required Hunter. Mackenzie
Speaker 3: wasn't there by the way to move the fourteenth Green
Speaker 3: down to its current location build it up. There's a
Speaker 3: letter on Mackenzie and Hunter letterhead which is in the book,
Speaker 3: which describes all of his thinking about this. Moved the
Speaker 3: fourteenth Green down, which slightly shortened it. Took the thirteenth hole,
Speaker 3: which was meant to be a par three initially made
Speaker 3: it into a par four, took the twelfth meant to
Speaker 3: be a par five, shortened it to a par four,
Speaker 3: going all the way back to that tee. So there
Speaker 3: was a sequence of changes as a result of that.
Speaker 3: But the other thing by routing the road where it
Speaker 3: was is it didn't allow them to build the tea
Speaker 3: out on the water on fifteen like they had perhaps
Speaker 3: originally intended, I mean early, early, before they got to
Speaker 3: where they are with Mackenzie. Plus there was the cost
Speaker 3: of doing so. So that lower T that you play
Speaker 3: today that was installed installed in the nineteen fifties. So
Speaker 3: that's one of the we'll call it major changes. The
Speaker 3: other major T change will be the creation of the
Speaker 3: ninth T. So when you look at the eighth green,
Speaker 3: that upper tier to the left that used to be
Speaker 3: the ninth T. There's a great photo that we did
Speaker 3: in the book of Mackenzie playing it sort of smashed
Speaker 3: together with the guys coming up number eight, which really
Speaker 3: shows how the connection was made. But other than that,
Speaker 3: for the most part, few things here and there, but
Speaker 3: the golf course is essentially as designed by Mackenzie and Hunter.
Speaker 3: When it opened in nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 1: What was the basic time frame of construction.
Speaker 3: So one of the ways to think about the gestation
Speaker 3: period of Cyprus Point essentially is it was a five
Speaker 3: year period from nineteen twenty five to nineteen thirty. So
Speaker 3: key things happen in each of those.
Speaker 2: Years which are worth noting.
Speaker 3: Nineteen twenty five is the kickoff, because that's when Marion
Speaker 3: Hollins takes out the option on the land from the
Speaker 3: Delmonti Properties Company and starts signing up members. In fact,
Speaker 3: the routing from seth Rayner was February of nineteen twenty five,
Speaker 3: so very early. However, a number of things happen in
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty five and twenty six which slowed things down,
Speaker 3: including Marion hurting her back purportedly playing polo, and so
Speaker 3: the membership drives stalled and the whole thing was in
Speaker 3: danger of collapsing until a young salesman named Harrison Godwin,
Speaker 3: who ended up being a local fixture in the Carmel
Speaker 3: area owner of the Pine Inn. He was the one,
Speaker 3: as a twenty something who took the project over the
Speaker 3: line and signed up the one hundred members required in
Speaker 3: order to fund construction. So McKenzie comes in nineteen twenty
Speaker 3: six does the design, but again it's not until the
Speaker 3: next year, in nineteen twenty seven, when they finally have
Speaker 3: enough people signed up to pay for the thing. So
Speaker 3: construction begins after the club is formally incorporated in July
Speaker 3: of nineteen twenty seven. Construction begins that fall in October November,
Speaker 3: and is largely completed by April of the following year.
Speaker 3: Mackenzie came just for the third time to check it
Speaker 3: all out and to take photos when that was occurring,
Speaker 3: and the golf course opened for play in August of
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty eight. So once they got going from late
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty seven to opening in August of nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 3: it all happened remarkably quickly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is there any sense of how that happened? That
Speaker 1: is such a compressed timeframe for the construction of a
Speaker 1: golf course.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the reasons why it happened is because
Speaker 3: Robert Hunter lived in Pebble Beach. He was there, he
Speaker 3: was overseeing, along with his son, Robert Hunter Junior, all
Speaker 3: of the construction, and so he had a deeply vested interest.
Speaker 3: And not only it's sort of like hair club for men.
Speaker 3: Not only was he a client, he was also a
Speaker 3: member of Cypress Point, so he wanted it to go
Speaker 3: particularly well. And at the same time, there's another character
Speaker 3: in the story who I think does not get the
Speaker 3: credit he deserves, and that's Roger Lapham. So Roger Lapham
Speaker 3: was so called the Brahmin of San Francisco golf. He
Speaker 3: was the USGA Executive committee member on the West Coast
Speaker 3: from around nineteen twenty two to nineteen twenty nine. He
Speaker 3: was the one responsible for getting the US Amateur to
Speaker 3: come to Pebble Beach in nineteen twenty nine. He was
Speaker 3: part of the three man committee that redid Pebble Beach
Speaker 3: in nineteen twenty eight in preparation for the Amateur. The
Speaker 3: other people were Robert Hunter and Chandler Egan, who ended
Speaker 3: up being McKenzie's design partner after Hunter retired. So Lapham
Speaker 3: was the director of Cyprus Point who was responsible for
Speaker 3: golf course construction. There's a great letter in the book
Speaker 3: from Lapham to Hunter Junior thanking them for the work
Speaker 3: that they did. And so I think it was really
Speaker 3: it was Lapham being there it was Huunter being there,
Speaker 3: was Hunter Junior being there, and it was also the
Speaker 3: incredibly favorable growing climate of the Monterey Peninsula for year
Speaker 3: round golf.
Speaker 1: In addition to the quickness of the construction period, Mackenzie
Speaker 1: also ended up being very proud of the economy of
Speaker 1: the construction process, how efficient it was financially. So how
Speaker 1: did the crew achieve this? Was it part of the
Speaker 1: same reason that you know Robert Hunter was there overseeing things.
Speaker 1: Are there some other factors we should be aware of
Speaker 1: of how exactly Cyprus Point was built so cheaply and
Speaker 1: as I understand it, under budget.
Speaker 3: It was under budget, and it came in yeah, under
Speaker 3: budget and ahead of schedule. And they used modern construction techniques,
Speaker 3: They used equipment that they could be more efficient instead
Speaker 3: of having to use manual labor, though reported they still
Speaker 3: used up to hundred laborers at a time to dynamite
Speaker 3: trees and clear forest and all that that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3: But I think it was just the efficiency of the
Speaker 3: team that had trained and worked together, and also Hunter's
Speaker 3: advanced research on what grasses would work, and so when
Speaker 3: they actually went to plant the golf course, it took
Speaker 3: unlike Pine Valley which failed, unlike National Golf Links which failed,
Speaker 3: all of which adds cost.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, growing is probably the single most underrated
Speaker 1: factor in golf course construction. In this golden age of
Speaker 1: golf architecture. It was always growing that was the problem.
Speaker 3: They and they nailed it. And if you look at
Speaker 3: the descriptions of the golf course from nineteen twenty and
Speaker 3: twenty nine, they say it was the most perfectly conditioned
Speaker 3: golf course in America. Now, I mean, you didn't have
Speaker 3: the mutations and one hundred years of introducing all sorts
Speaker 3: of other elements and the coastal challenges, but it was
Speaker 3: when it opened, it was perfect. It's a miracle that
Speaker 3: Cyperu's point even exists. I mean, if you think about it,
Speaker 3: and this is something that we talk about in the book,
Speaker 3: is there was a small moment in time when it
Speaker 3: became possible to hit a golf shot from one precipice
Speaker 3: of a great ocean to the other. Because if it
Speaker 3: happened any other time during that gestation period from nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty five to nineteen thirty, So you've got Marion Hollins
Speaker 3: the option in nineteen twenty five, Mackenzie enters the picture
Speaker 3: in twenty six, the club incorporates in twenty seven, the
Speaker 3: course opens in twenty eight, the US Amateur twenty nine,
Speaker 3: and then the clubhouse finally opens in nineteen thirty. If
Speaker 3: it happens at any other moment between that narrow window
Speaker 3: of time, it's not possible because anytime before that, Pebble
Speaker 3: Beach was immature and would not have been ready from
Speaker 3: a real estate standpoint to have the number of people
Speaker 3: required to support it, So it would have been dead
Speaker 3: on arrival anytime after nineteen thirty, and because of the depression,
Speaker 3: I mean, the club barely survived in the first place. Now,
Speaker 3: imagine coming out of World War Two and just assume
Speaker 3: it was claimed by the military. There was a naval
Speaker 3: sea observation tower which was placed on the property for
Speaker 3: viewing the submarines during the war, So think of its
Speaker 3: strategic location. Imagine that clubhouse, understated George Washington Smith is
Speaker 3: owed to old Moterey stucco with white stucco and green shutters.
Speaker 3: Imagine that in the modernist fifties and sixties, Imagine the
Speaker 3: Coastal Commission making it possible to build a golf course
Speaker 3: in the seventies eighties and nineties or today. The point is,
Speaker 3: if it didn't happen in that narrow window of five years,
Speaker 3: you would never have had a chance to hit a
Speaker 3: golf shot on the sixteenth hole.
Speaker 1: So how was the course received when it opened? Was
Speaker 1: it immediately recognized as as one of the world's great courses?
Speaker 3: Immediately and astoundingly somewhat to the disappointment of Alistair McKenzie,
Speaker 3: who was looking for more criticism, and the fact that
Speaker 3: it withstood no criticism whatsoever kind of made him feel
Speaker 3: like maybe he missed something. But when you take that setting,
Speaker 3: and when you take those elements, the sea, the sand,
Speaker 3: the forest, the routing, the setting of the clubhouse, and
Speaker 3: then what evolved over the next hundred years, it was remarkable. However,
Speaker 3: if you go back fifty years to win, say the
Speaker 3: late nineteen seventies in the Walker Cup. In nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: one mackenzie had fallen out of favor. There was a
Speaker 3: letter that Lewis Lapham, who was the son of Roger
Speaker 3: Lapham and who went around with mackenzie as a teenager
Speaker 3: with a carpet and hit tea shots to determine what
Speaker 3: the carry angles should be on various holes for where
Speaker 3: the tea should be possised. In the nineteen seventies he
Speaker 3: wrote a letter suggesting that half of the members of
Speaker 3: Cypress Point wouldn't know who designed the golf course. They
Speaker 3: wouldn't know who McKenzie was. And so it was really
Speaker 3: because of a lot of things independent of Cypress Point
Speaker 3: and Alistair McKenzie. The discovery of his manuscript and the
Speaker 3: publication of the Spirit of Saint Andrews in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 3: the formation of the Alistair McKenzie society, various books, whether
Speaker 3: it was by Tom Doak and Raymond Haddock about Alistair McKenzie,
Speaker 3: or the work and the research from George Botto that's
Speaker 3: gone into MacDonald and Rayner. That this revival and interest
Speaker 3: of these people has in turn created a kind of
Speaker 3: revival and interest in places like Cyprus Point, which when
Speaker 3: you look at the rankings from the seventies and early eighties,
Speaker 3: it was outside the top ten and barely in the
Speaker 3: top fifty in various rankings, But since the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 3: post Walker Cup and beyond, it's consistently remained in about
Speaker 3: the top five in America.
Speaker 1: Well, David, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Pleasure talking to you, and good luck with finishing the book.
Speaker 1: I'm very much looking forward to your centennial book on
Speaker 1: Cyprus Point. It'll contain I think a lot of answers
Speaker 1: to many questions I've had over the years.
Speaker 3: Well, the good news is the book is finished, but
Speaker 3: we're just waiting for the Walker Cup to be played
Speaker 3: because we can't quite write that chapter yet. As soon
Speaker 3: as it is, then we'll go to print.
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Speaker 1: All right, let's get back to the episode. All right,
Speaker 1: So it's just me and my producer, Will Balsam. Now, Will,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Excited to make the first appearance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, I'm not doing you very much
Speaker 1: justice here because basically I have a lot of notes
Speaker 1: that I want to get through. I'll be talking a
Speaker 1: lot here, but it's also nice to have a sounding board,
Speaker 1: so I'm not just in my head doing doing a monologue.
Speaker 1: It's nice to have somebody to bounce things off of.
Speaker 1: And so you know, jump in whenever you want ask questions.
Speaker 1: You're kind of the audience surrogate here. Is that a'll
Speaker 1: sound good?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'll do my best for the rest of the listeners.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, So you know, as usual in these
Speaker 1: deep dives, I like to break things down into categories.
Speaker 1: So we'll touch on the land, the routing, the philosophy
Speaker 1: of the design at Cypress Point, the esthetics, the greens,
Speaker 1: the agronomy a little bit, and the restoration work that
Speaker 1: has recently been done. So let's dig in here. Start
Speaker 1: with the land. So there are, as David Normoyl mentioned
Speaker 1: in my chat with him, three distinct landscapes at Cypress Point.
Speaker 1: You have the ocean cliffs, the dunes, and the woods,
Speaker 1: or as David put it, see sand and forest. The
Speaker 1: dunes are part of one large formation that cuts like
Speaker 1: a wedge into the course. The dunes hole is actually
Speaker 1: at Spyglass Hill on through five and two through four
Speaker 1: sit on the same dune formation just a little bit
Speaker 1: to the north within Cyprus Points. Section of this dune formation,
Speaker 1: there are a couple of specific sub sections. So there's
Speaker 1: a high, very prominent ridge. The eighth and ninth holes
Speaker 1: sit on top of this, The third, sixth, and eleventh
Speaker 1: greens are either benched into it or near it. The
Speaker 1: twelfth hole plays around it. So this is really the
Speaker 1: focal point of the property, this very obvious abrupt dune ridge.
Speaker 1: But then there's a lower set of dunes and sandy
Speaker 1: material kind of off to the side, and that's where
Speaker 1: the first, second, thirteenth, and fourteenth holes are. And finally
Speaker 1: of separate but related very large dune ridge running east
Speaker 1: to west. So the dune ridge that I talked about before,
Speaker 1: that's kind of in the middle of the course runs
Speaker 1: north south. This one runs east west, bordering the north
Speaker 1: side of the golf course, kind of near the sixth hole.
Speaker 1: This is where that trail is that I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: that I used to load my son into like a
Speaker 1: hiking backpack and we would go hike on this dune
Speaker 1: above Cyprus Point and this very big dune ridge. It's
Speaker 1: less abrupt, less dramatic to look at, but it's very large.
Speaker 1: The seventh Green and the eighth t sit on this ridge.
Speaker 1: So that's the Duneland section of the course. Does that
Speaker 1: kind of make sense these different areas of the dune.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can see it, okay.
Speaker 1: Then you have the inland forest section to the west,
Speaker 1: pretty large scale, undulating topography. And then finally you have
Speaker 1: the seaside portion of the property to the west, a
Speaker 1: spectacular series of capes and bays, very well sized for
Speaker 1: golf of dunes in the middle, forest to the east,
Speaker 1: ocean cliffs to the west. It's just an extraordinarily varied
Speaker 1: and beautiful property. And that's basically what was there before
Speaker 1: the golf course was.
Speaker 5: Built, seems like the perfect piece of land for a
Speaker 5: world class golf course.
Speaker 1: It was a great piece of land for a golf course,
Speaker 1: and Mackenzie recognized that right away. He saw that this
Speaker 1: had huge potential to be his best golf course potentially.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, I think it was also
Speaker 1: kind of tricky because it was I mean, it's the
Speaker 1: variety of the property is both a strength and a
Speaker 1: weakness in a way, because yes, it is exciting that
Speaker 1: it's so varied, and you have these great ocean cliffs,
Speaker 1: and you have the dunes, and you have the it's
Speaker 1: all there. You know, you can use all of it,
Speaker 1: but it's also a little bit disjointed, and so there's
Speaker 1: the potential that the golf course could kind of be awkward. Right.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not a a piece of Link's
Speaker 1: land like Royal Port Rush sits on, or that the
Speaker 1: old course sits on at a lower profile where there's
Speaker 1: kind of this consistent rumple and you can almost put
Speaker 1: golf holes. You can't put them anywhere, And there are
Speaker 1: some combinations that are better than others, but there are
Speaker 1: a lot of options to make a golf course work.
Speaker 1: There at the Cypress Point property. I'm not sure there
Speaker 1: were many great solutions to the equation of the property
Speaker 1: because it was it had these different characters to it.
Speaker 1: You had to do something to make it all work together.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to the routing of Cypress Point. Now,
Speaker 1: David already discussed this beautifully in the history section of
Speaker 1: the episode. I don't think I could really improve on
Speaker 1: that description. But basically, what's brilliant about the routing of
Speaker 1: this course is how it alternates between different landscapes without
Speaker 1: ever feeling disjointed. As David pointed out, all of the
Speaker 1: inland holes except number five have some relationship with that
Speaker 1: central dune formation. The course is continually playing into, off,
Speaker 1: of around, and onto this big slice of dune land.
Speaker 1: And what makes the course a unified and coherent experience
Speaker 1: is that there's not a clean separation between the duneland
Speaker 1: holes and the forest holes. Holes like two, three, four, six, ten, eleven,
Speaker 1: and fourteen are part of two environments at once, or
Speaker 1: transition between them. They're both part of the forest and
Speaker 1: the dunes. They have elements of both landscapes in them,
Speaker 1: so they sort of function like segues and writing right
Speaker 1: They provide these links between different ideas so that the
Speaker 1: whole piece hangs together and doesn't seem choppy. But that
Speaker 1: sort of changes after the fourteenth hole. There is a
Speaker 1: clear separation between the first fourteen holes and the last four.
Speaker 1: On the ocean, you literally walk across seventeen mile drive
Speaker 1: and down a little path before arriving at the fifteenth tee,
Speaker 1: and then you walk through another path to get to
Speaker 1: the sixteenth tee. And for me, this works from a
Speaker 1: dramatic perspective. There's this pause while you're being set up
Speaker 1: for the big finale, and of course the ensuing reveals
Speaker 1: on the fifteenth hole in the sixteenth hole are incredibly exciting.
Speaker 1: To get to both teas you walk along these really
Speaker 1: compressed paths lined by cypress trees, and then boom, everything
Speaker 1: falls away and you get these panoramic views of the
Speaker 1: cliffs and the ocean. So there's a sense of compression
Speaker 1: and release. And this is an example of how the
Speaker 1: routing at Cypress Point, I think, creates anticipation and drama
Speaker 1: and just has a beautiful sense of rising and falling action.
Speaker 1: Right you start off with some excitement on the first
Speaker 1: hole with a downhill tea shot, a view of the
Speaker 1: ocean and a green benched into dune. The next two
Speaker 1: holes show you the big dune ridge and a lot
Speaker 1: of the rest of the course, giving you a preview
Speaker 1: of coming attractions. Then you wander away from that environment
Speaker 1: and into the forest for a couple of slightly quieter holes.
Speaker 1: Those still plenty dramatic because the bunkering is so outrageous
Speaker 1: on the fourth and fifth holes. The sixth hole brings
Speaker 1: you back to the dunes, and the seventh, eighth, and
Speaker 1: ninth play right on top of them. This is the
Speaker 1: most exciting stretch on the course aside from fifteen through seventeen.
Speaker 1: Then it quiets down a little bit. Two side by
Speaker 1: side longer holes in ten and eleven, playing out to
Speaker 1: the forest again and then and then back, and then
Speaker 1: twelve starts the journey out to the ocean. Once you
Speaker 1: round the corner of the dune ridge on the twelfth hole,
Speaker 1: you see the amazing thirteenth green and the uphill fourteenth
Speaker 1: hole behind it, and you know what's beyond those holes,
Speaker 1: but you can't see it, so the anticipation is building
Speaker 1: and building. You hit the ocean on fifteen, sixteen and seventeen,
Speaker 1: and then the course decides not to end with a
Speaker 1: huge flourish. Instead you get the eighteenth hole climbing back
Speaker 1: up through the trees to the clubhouse. And I think
Speaker 1: that this is sort of an unexpected choice for a
Speaker 1: golf course. A lot of great golf courses end with
Speaker 1: a bang, right, the eighteenth a Pebble Beach one of
Speaker 1: the best examples. But it's not an unusual choice for
Speaker 1: narrative art in general, like movies and novels. Often movies
Speaker 1: and novels end with falling action with a de numont, right,
Speaker 1: which is the word that may maybe an English teacher
Speaker 1: made you learn it at some point. The routing of
Speaker 1: a golf course is a narrative right. It can be
Speaker 1: compared to storytelling. So ending with a dan numont like
Speaker 1: eighteen at Cypress Point can work well, and I think
Speaker 1: it does work well. I think the line that Cypress
Speaker 1: Point is the best seventeenth hole course in the world
Speaker 1: is a little wrongheaded because Cyprus is a complete eighteenenth
Speaker 1: whole experience, and every hole plays its part, including the eighteenth.
Speaker 1: Not every hole is trying to be the most spectacular.
Speaker 1: They're just all working together to create this beautiful cadence
Speaker 1: and a wonderful story. So that's the kind of dramatic
Speaker 1: element of Cyprus's routing. How do you, I mean, what
Speaker 1: do you think of ending with an eighteenth hole that
Speaker 1: maybe seems a little bit out of character and is
Speaker 1: clearly not as spectacular as the holes that come just
Speaker 1: before it. Do you do you find that to be
Speaker 1: something that you would like or know?
Speaker 5: I have recently found that I'm not as hard pressed
Speaker 5: by the eighteenth hole as long as you have a
Speaker 5: stretch leading up to it that gives you some dramatic
Speaker 5: climax and ending. I think there are a lot of
Speaker 5: great golf courses that fifteen, sixteen, seventeen are like these
Speaker 5: great finishing holes I really test you. But sometimes it's
Speaker 5: all right for eighteen to maybe not reach those those standards.
Speaker 4: All routing is such a tough thing.
Speaker 5: You have to most of the time end up back
Speaker 5: where you started, so you can understand why that may be.
Speaker 5: But my preference, though, is not to end on a
Speaker 5: par three, So as long as it's not that I
Speaker 5: think you're okay.
Speaker 1: There are some good courses that end on par three's though,
Speaker 1: Possa Tiempo being one.
Speaker 4: Of them, but yes, Boston Golf Club as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Boston Golf Club exactly, very good. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: rarity I suppose in general, though, Yeah, I think the
Speaker 1: eighteenth of Cyprus is interesting because it has to get
Speaker 1: you back up to the clubhouse, and that's what a
Speaker 1: lot of eighteenth holes do. That's kind of what you're
Speaker 1: referring to, right where. The eighteenth hole, unlike the holes before,
Speaker 1: it has a job, and its job is to get
Speaker 1: you back to the clubhouse, get you back to the
Speaker 1: starting point. And at Cyprus it does that job. And
Speaker 1: clearly nothing that could be built on that piece of
Speaker 1: land could possibly live up to fifteen, sixteen and seventeen.
Speaker 1: There was no possibility that that whole was going to
Speaker 1: feel anything but slightly disappointing in comparison to those holes.
Speaker 1: And so Mackenzie made an interesting choice not to force it,
Speaker 1: just to kind of route this hole through the trees.
Speaker 1: It's a very tight hole. It requires a really precisely
Speaker 1: shaped shot. A lot of people just don't like the
Speaker 1: hole at all, but I think it's kind of kind
Speaker 1: of different. It really makes you shape your tee shot
Speaker 1: right to left or choose maybe to go over the trees,
Speaker 1: find that left side of the fairway so that you
Speaker 1: have a clear approach up the hill through the trees.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's it's a different challenge and I think
Speaker 1: an interesting choice to end the golf course. He didn't
Speaker 1: try to over exert himself design wise with that hole.
Speaker 1: All right, So now that we've talked about land and routing,
Speaker 1: let's get into some of the philosophy of design, so
Speaker 1: individual holes and how they're designed. And I want to
Speaker 1: touch on three aspects of Alistair McKenzie's design. First, his
Speaker 1: use of strategic art chitecture, Second, his commitment to playability,
Speaker 1: and third his approach to the visual and esthetic composition
Speaker 1: of his holes. So, first of all, Cyprus Point is
Speaker 1: very much an example of the strategic school of golf
Speaker 1: course design. You always have an option to play safe,
Speaker 1: but if you take a risk, you're rewarded with an
Speaker 1: easier next shot. Big diagonal natural hazards appear on holes two, eight, twelve,
Speaker 1: and seventeen. This is a classic strategic dilemma where because
Speaker 1: you're hitting diagonally across a natural hazard a dune or
Speaker 1: a rock ridge like on two, or the ocean cliffs
Speaker 1: like on seventeen. Because that hazard is oriented diagonally to
Speaker 1: the te you have to choose what line to take,
Speaker 1: and you're free to take the easy route, the short carry,
Speaker 1: or you can take on the long carry, and reliably
Speaker 1: on each of those holes, you gain an advantage if
Speaker 1: you bite off more of the hazard, So strategic architecture
Speaker 1: one on one basically on those holes. There are also
Speaker 1: holes where bunkers are positioned right where you want to play.
Speaker 1: The sixth hole is a very interesting example. I think
Speaker 1: it has a big bunker off the tee on the
Speaker 1: right side, but the hole bends to the left. Jeff
Speaker 1: Shackelford actually talks about this in the video that we
Speaker 1: released a couple of days ago on our YouTube channel.
Speaker 1: There's you know, the whole bends to is a dog
Speaker 1: leg left, and so you'd think that the advantage would
Speaker 1: be cutting the dog leg, but you actually get an
Speaker 1: advantage from carrying this bunker on the right because beyond
Speaker 1: that bunker, and concealed by the bunker is a kicker
Speaker 1: slope that can feed your ball down to an ideal
Speaker 1: position to attack the hole from there. So that's an
Speaker 1: example where a bunker just sits very near the landing
Speaker 1: zone that is most advantageous again strategic architecture one oh one.
Speaker 1: The ninth hole is a classic strategic part four. The Sir,
Speaker 1: you push toward the green, the more trouble you can
Speaker 1: get into. But the green is so severe that you
Speaker 1: really don't want to be approaching it from a long
Speaker 1: way back. So nine definitely a hole to keep an
Speaker 1: eye on in the walker cut, because I think it'll
Speaker 1: be pretty exciting, and I think that the telecast will
Speaker 1: probably be aware that this is a hole to focus
Speaker 1: on that they don't need to keep the cameras always
Speaker 1: on fifteen and sixteen seventeen. So Cypres's point really does.
Speaker 1: It represents Mackenzie's commitment to strategic design, and Mackenzie himself
Speaker 1: thought very highly of the tactical questions that the course
Speaker 1: puts to the player. As I mentioned toward the beginning
Speaker 1: of the episode, he compared Cypress Point favorably to the
Speaker 1: Old Course at Saint Andrew's, which Mackenzie saw as the
Speaker 1: exemplar of strategic risk reward architecture. Another and I think
Speaker 1: related similarity that Mackenzie saw between Cypress Point and the
Speaker 1: Old Course was playability. He wrote, Cypress Point share with
Speaker 1: the old course at Saint Andrew's the distinction of being
Speaker 1: just as pleasurable to the dub as the scratch man.
Speaker 1: At no place is there a compulsory carry of more
Speaker 1: than eighty yards, but at many holes there are voluntary
Speaker 1: carries of two hundred to two hundred and fifty yards,
Speaker 1: tempting the long drivers to great rewards. So Mackenzie believed
Speaker 1: very strongly in golf courses delivering the greatest pleasure to
Speaker 1: the greatest number, And in Cyprus Point you have a
Speaker 1: course that can be navigated successfully by the average player,
Speaker 1: but also provides optional but tempting challenges for more skilled
Speaker 1: players to keep their interest and deliver them the pleasure
Speaker 1: of overcoming challenges. The most obvious example of this is
Speaker 1: the famous long par three sixteenth hole. So yes, very
Speaker 1: difficult to reach this green with one shot, even today
Speaker 1: with our juiced up equipment, but you always have the
Speaker 1: option to hit one hundred and fifty to one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty yard shot out to a generous fairway on
Speaker 1: the left and play a pitch into the green. Almost
Speaker 1: anybody could play the whole pretty successfully that way. So
Speaker 1: Cyprus Point is appealing to many levels of player, though,
Speaker 1: I think, as you'll see in the Walker Cup, it's
Speaker 1: not a long golf course, and some of those wonderful
Speaker 1: strategic elements that are relevant to me and to and
Speaker 1: to most of our listeners might not be super relevant
Speaker 1: to twenty year olds who hit it three point fifty.
Speaker 1: But that's a technological problem. I think that's a USGA
Speaker 1: problem in RNA problem, not a Cypress Point problem. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're going to be carrying bunkers that Mackenzie may have
Speaker 1: never imagined that they would carry, but look, it's not
Speaker 1: really his fault. He did his best to create a
Speaker 1: golf course that would stand the test of time and
Speaker 1: for most of us, I think it has the last
Speaker 1: part of Mackenzie's philosophy of design at Cypress Point that
Speaker 1: I want to touch on is the visual element. So
Speaker 1: first you have some classic Mackenzie visual deception on many holes.
Speaker 1: Mackenzie believed in creating golf courses that looked more difficult
Speaker 1: than they actually were, so that mentally strong players could
Speaker 1: gain an advantage over the merely physical, physically strong player,
Speaker 1: and so that players could have the pleasure of overcoming
Speaker 1: a difficult looking hazard, even if the task wasn't as
Speaker 1: hard as it appeared, right. We all like to do
Speaker 1: something that looks difficult, even if we're just kind of
Speaker 1: fooling ourselves that it actually is difficult. And that's mackenzie's
Speaker 1: use of a visual deception or why he does it.
Speaker 1: And the best examples of this at Cyprus Point are
Speaker 1: the fourth and fifth holes. I think both appear from
Speaker 1: the tee to be just these fields of bunkers. It
Speaker 1: looks like there's a very little room to play between
Speaker 1: the bunkers, but when you get up to the fairway,
Speaker 1: you realize that the bunkers are shaped and arranged in
Speaker 1: a way that conceals how roomy the landing zones actually are.
Speaker 1: But I think even more than visual deception, which is
Speaker 1: something that people talk a lot about when it comes
Speaker 1: to Mackenzie, his greatest visual accomplishment at Cypress Point was
Speaker 1: the blending of the artificial and the natural. Obviously McKenzie's
Speaker 1: associate Robert Hunter and their construction team deserve a lot
Speaker 1: of credit for this too, But I would say Cypress
Speaker 1: Point is the most beautifully shaped golf course that I
Speaker 1: know of from the golden age of golf architecture. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it was ever done better than this.
Speaker 1: Maybe more recently Corn Crenshaw and Tom Doaks's teams have
Speaker 1: kind of reached this level, But in the nineteen teens
Speaker 1: and twenties, I'm not sure anybody got to quite this level.
Speaker 1: It's just pitch perfect tie ins between the bunkers and
Speaker 1: the greens and the surrounding landforms.
Speaker 4: The seventh hole, I feel like is on that one.
Speaker 5: You just can't believe where that green is for such
Speaker 5: a it seems reasonably short part three for nowadays, and
Speaker 5: it just it looks like it was, you know, meant
Speaker 5: to be there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's so beautifully blended into that big dune ridge, right.
Speaker 1: And that was actually a hole that came about later
Speaker 1: in the design process. Initially there was a par three
Speaker 1: sixth hole that was kind of in the forest, but
Speaker 1: I think they probably just got up on that on
Speaker 1: that dune and saw this shot across to the bigger
Speaker 1: dune ridge and we're like, well, look at that. That
Speaker 1: looks amazing.
Speaker 4: It looks so daunting but beautiful at the same time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a good way to put how
Speaker 1: Cypress Point looks. In general. It does look like a
Speaker 1: very daunting golf course. But it's just it's gorgeous. It
Speaker 1: is esthetically fine tuned to a degree that that I'm
Speaker 1: not sure golf architecture is ever equaled. Okay, I want
Speaker 1: to say a few things now about the greed green
Speaker 1: designs at Cypress Point. By Mackenzie's standards, and especially by
Speaker 1: the standards of his late career work, the greens at
Speaker 1: Cypress Point are fairly subtle. They're not huge, and a
Speaker 1: lot of them just tilt in a certain direction or
Speaker 1: have a single big tier. Some of them are quite severe,
Speaker 1: to the point that it's hard in some cases to
Speaker 1: keep the ball on the green if you're putting down
Speaker 1: a slope. But they're not nearly as intricate as the
Speaker 1: greens Mackenzie and Hunter are built at Pasa Tiempo or
Speaker 1: Augusta National. There are a couple of exceptions to this
Speaker 1: at Cyprus. The eighth green is pretty ambitious. It's a
Speaker 1: lot like a CB MacDonald and SETH Rayner Maiden template,
Speaker 1: which means there's a low front section and two raised
Speaker 1: platforms in the back with a channel between them, so
Speaker 1: three basic pin positions front, center, back, left, back right.
Speaker 1: So that's a fairly crazy green, and then you have
Speaker 1: the fifteenth green, which has this odd amoeba shape with
Speaker 1: the tongues jutting out between bunkers. It was a style
Speaker 1: that Mackenzie and Hunter later used at Pasa Tiempo, and
Speaker 1: that Mackenzie employed at Augusta National as well in the
Speaker 1: original version of that golf course. And you see it
Speaker 1: there on the fifteenth green at Cypress Point, but not
Speaker 1: really at many other greens. In general, Cypress's greens are
Speaker 1: simple and elegant, and I think that that suits the
Speaker 1: property and the course. Well. There's so much interest in
Speaker 1: the land and the bunkers, so much interest in what's
Speaker 1: going on with the routing, the undulations and the fairways.
Speaker 1: You just don't need wild greens, and in fact, wild
Speaker 1: greens might distract from what you want the golfer to
Speaker 1: be focusing on, which is those big strengths of Cypress,
Speaker 1: the land and the routing. That said, I do think
Speaker 1: the greens were slightly more complex in Mackenzie's day, and
Speaker 1: that leads me to the issue of restoration work at Cypress. Now,
Speaker 1: Cypress is a very well preserved golf course and this
Speaker 1: is something that the club emphasizes We never rebuilt our
Speaker 1: golf course, is what they say, and that is true.
Speaker 1: Cypress Point still has its original push up greens and
Speaker 1: the turf, which was initially astoria bent grass has evolved
Speaker 1: over the past century just basically stayed in place. There's
Speaker 1: more poa now than there used to be. That's mostly
Speaker 1: just an inevitability on the California coast. You know that
Speaker 1: bent grass is going to evolve into this kind of
Speaker 1: poa mixture. But there's never been a big returfing project
Speaker 1: where some modern strain was installed. Clearly though the course
Speaker 1: did gradually drift away from its original design. Some trees
Speaker 1: are planted, some bunkers got smaller or were just lost.
Speaker 1: A lot of greens shrank to basically circles. So just
Speaker 1: you know, attrition over time maintenance practices is they didn't
Speaker 1: rebuild anything but the course, but the course just sort
Speaker 1: of grew in at the edges. So if you look
Speaker 1: at photos of Cyprus in the in the seventies and eighties,
Speaker 1: it's still recognizable, but it had changed a lot since
Speaker 1: the twenties and thirties, and so Cypress has definitely done
Speaker 1: restoration work over the past few decades, and they had
Speaker 1: to do restoration work. This was initially in house and
Speaker 1: for the past decade or so with Bill, Bill Kohrr
Speaker 1: and Ben Crenshaw consulting, and their approach has been very
Speaker 1: careful and very slow. They've gradually restored bunkers, put bunkers
Speaker 1: back that had been lost, or reshaped bunkers to their
Speaker 1: original style, or enlarged bunkers that had gotten smaller. They
Speaker 1: pushed out mowing lines, They took out a tree here
Speaker 1: and there. One of the biggest projects the club did
Speaker 1: recently restoring the Dunescape. Actually they cleared out a lot
Speaker 1: of the vegetation that had started to cover up the sand,
Speaker 1: and so the dunes now look amazing because they've been
Speaker 1: revealed again. At one point they were pretty grown over.
Speaker 1: I love this approach because the course still feels old,
Speaker 1: it still feels like its original self. It's never been
Speaker 1: rebuilt or redone still has the actual Mackenzie and Hunter
Speaker 1: architecture in the ground. They've never torn it up and
Speaker 1: replaced it, and I think that's amazing. But if you
Speaker 1: look at the earliest photos of Cyprus Point, especially the
Speaker 1: ones taken by Julian Graham in the early nineteen thirties.
Speaker 1: You can see that a lot of the greens used
Speaker 1: to be a bit bigger even than they are now,
Speaker 1: that maybe some of their contouring was a little more detailed,
Speaker 1: some fairways used to be wider, Just little things like that, Right, So,
Speaker 1: I do think there's more restoration work to do, and
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that I think everything should be put
Speaker 1: back to exactly what it was in nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 1: You have to let courses evolve, and you have to
Speaker 1: trust some of your own current preferences. But those Julian
Speaker 1: Graham photos are pretty tantalizing, and I think they show
Speaker 1: a few details that would be good to bring back.
Speaker 5: You mentioned that some of the greens used to be larger,
Speaker 5: and obviously you've also mentioned quite a few times the
Speaker 5: technology differences that we have now than they had in
Speaker 5: nineteen twenty eight. Is that one that you would like
Speaker 5: to see restored or you like the added challenge of
Speaker 5: a little bit smaller greens?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. Is are smaller greens
Speaker 1: actually more challenging. I guess it depends on what's immediately
Speaker 1: on the border of the greens. If it's just rough
Speaker 1: for short grass, I don't know that they are necessarily
Speaker 1: more challenging if they're smaller. But I think what you
Speaker 1: do when you expand greens back to their original size,
Speaker 1: and for the most part, Cyper's Point has done a
Speaker 1: lot of this over the past couple of decades. The
Speaker 1: greens had really gotten to be small by the eighties
Speaker 1: and they've definitely enlarged them since then and recaptured some
Speaker 1: of their contouring on the edges and the size. But
Speaker 1: what you do when you recapture more green surface is
Speaker 1: that you allow for pin positions out on the edges
Speaker 1: of the greens, and those pin positions can be very challenging.
Speaker 1: It means that you give your golf course more flexibility
Speaker 1: to challenge skilled players like the ones who are going
Speaker 1: to arrive at the course for the Walker Cup. If
Speaker 1: you I mean in a match play event, maybe there's
Speaker 1: no reason to try to manufacture a score to par
Speaker 1: that you want because that doesn't matter. But if you
Speaker 1: really want to make these guys bleed a little bit,
Speaker 1: then expanding your greens can be a good idea because
Speaker 1: it allows you to put some of those pins in
Speaker 1: scary places. And I think that in a few cases
Speaker 1: at Cyprus Point that's what they could do specifically on
Speaker 1: the seventh. It's funny that you mentioned the seventh hole earlier.
Speaker 1: It is such a beautiful hole. If you look at
Speaker 1: an early photo of that hole, you can see that
Speaker 1: there's more green in front that could be recaptured there.
Speaker 1: There was a section of the green in the front
Speaker 1: a little bit lower than the rest of the green
Speaker 1: that was there in the late nineteen twenties.
Speaker 5: Yes, now like fringe, right, it said run up for
Speaker 5: almost false front, run up fringe.
Speaker 1: That's right exactly. So that's a key question for the
Speaker 1: club looking at those details and considering, hey, do we
Speaker 1: want to bring that back? All right, So we've covered
Speaker 1: land routing, design philosophy, greens, restoration work. That's my overview
Speaker 1: of Cypress Points architecture. I think it's time now to
Speaker 1: bring in Josh Pettitt to tell a few fun stories
Speaker 1: about specific holes and design ideas. Here's Josh Joshua Pettitt.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing.
Speaker 2: I'm doing great. Always good to chat with you. Garrett.
Speaker 2: How are you.
Speaker 1: I'm doing well. Just putting the finishing touches on the
Speaker 1: Cyprus Point deep dive. Here we've gotten to the point
Speaker 1: in this episode where we want to get a little
Speaker 1: more fine grained about a couple of issues related to
Speaker 1: this golf course. We've kind of gone through a bunch
Speaker 1: of material, but here's, you know, where we can kind
Speaker 1: of get more specific about a few things that happened
Speaker 1: during the construction process or particular holes that have interesting backstories.
Speaker 1: And so you and I talked about this beforehand, but
Speaker 1: we have kind of three topics to cover quickly here.
Speaker 1: The first is the story behind the sixteenth hole. So
Speaker 1: what do you want to tell me about the famous
Speaker 1: long part three sixteenth hole over the ocean. Everybody knows
Speaker 1: this whole? What's the kind of interesting backstory here?
Speaker 2: Possibly the most photographed hole in golf? I think the
Speaker 2: interesting backstory is the question of was it intended to
Speaker 2: be a short part four, a two shotthle or was
Speaker 2: it always intended to be a part three? And there's
Speaker 2: been a lot of conversation and debate about this, But
Speaker 2: if you look back through the correspondence, if you look
Speaker 2: back at some of doctor Mackenzie's writings where he wrote
Speaker 2: about this in the spirit of Saint Andrew's and also
Speaker 2: in a few other articles that he published, and if
Speaker 2: you analyze all the various routing maps drawn by McKenzie,
Speaker 2: Rayner before that, other surveyors that surveyed the routings after
Speaker 2: McKenzie had put us together. If you look at all
Speaker 2: those various routing maps, there's all these clues. And then
Speaker 2: you combine that also with scorecards at different times in
Speaker 2: those early years, and there's sort of this mystery. But
Speaker 2: when I put it all together, I think it was
Speaker 2: clearly it was always at the end of the day
Speaker 2: when the course opened. It was a part three. But
Speaker 2: certainly mackenzie initially thought it would work better as a
Speaker 2: short part for the story that he recounts is via
Speaker 2: maryon Hollins from Seth Rayner before Seth Rayner passed away.
Speaker 2: So as you may have already talked about or people
Speaker 2: may know, is Beth Rayner laid out the original routing
Speaker 2: on the property. But then he passed away in January
Speaker 2: of nineteen twenty six, right as mackenzie happened to be
Speaker 2: making its way out to California. So when Seth Rayner
Speaker 2: was on the what they identified as like the tea pad,
Speaker 2: there was this perfect little spot for a tea box
Speaker 2: with Marion Hollins. Seth Rayner said to Mary, it's a
Speaker 2: pity that the carryover the ocean is just too long.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't make for a part three. And Marion said,
Speaker 2: I don't think it's impossible to carry and then she
Speaker 2: teed it up and hit it and cleared it and
Speaker 2: hit it right to the center of what they had
Speaker 2: identified as the ideal green site. So that was recounted
Speaker 2: to mackenzie later when he was on site with Marion Hollins,
Speaker 2: and he was a bit suspect of how it would play,
Speaker 2: but ultimately because the main thing that he was concerned
Speaker 2: about was ensuring that there were enough routes to the whole,
Speaker 2: safe routes to the whole that golfers of any skill
Speaker 2: level could get there if they wanted to take an alternate,
Speaker 2: longer route. And so when they ultimately played with some
Speaker 2: different tea positions and they looked at that fairways zone
Speaker 2: where that lone cypress tree is, McKenzie finally acquiesced and said,
Speaker 2: I you know, I think it'll work quite well. So
Speaker 2: there's a quote you know that Mackenzie has in his
Speaker 2: books saying, and he says, to give honor to where
Speaker 2: it's due I must say that except for minor details
Speaker 2: and his instruction, I was no way responsible for this hole.
Speaker 2: It was largely due to the vision of Miss Marion Hollins.
Speaker 2: So he's kind of like saying, you know, I get
Speaker 2: no credit for this, This was all her. And then
Speaker 2: he said, you know, I doubt that this hole could
Speaker 2: be considered ideal because of what we said. How you know,
Speaker 2: there may not be the opportunities for the shorter hitters
Speaker 2: to clear it, because I feared that with other Cyprus
Speaker 2: Port holes there was not sufficiently easy route for the
Speaker 2: weaker player. My mind was set at rest a few
Speaker 2: months ago. So this is when he was on site
Speaker 2: in nineteen twenty seven, his second second site visit. So
Speaker 2: but the interesting thing to me, going back to the
Speaker 2: routing plans, is that he still depicted a route for
Speaker 2: a two shot hole with a te much further back
Speaker 2: that would have played it like three point fifty. That
Speaker 2: was the yardage that was listed on some of the
Speaker 2: routing plans, and on the scorecard was that three fifty yardage.
Speaker 2: And what's peculiar to me it could have just been
Speaker 2: a misprint, is that in an article that was published
Speaker 2: after the course had already opened. It was lifted as
Speaker 2: three hundred fifty yards from the back tee. So the
Speaker 2: question in my mind has always been, was there ever
Speaker 2: a back tee pad to begin with, like maybe an
Speaker 2: optional thing or or not. It's kind of unclear. I've
Speaker 2: never seen any photographic evidence to show that that tea
Speaker 2: was ever built back there. But oh, and the other
Speaker 2: interesting thing I think Mackenzie lays out is that he
Speaker 2: realized if you look at that fairway, there's that one
Speaker 2: the lone cypress tree that's hanging.
Speaker 1: Over and the lap lay up fairway on sixteen.
Speaker 2: Exactly, and the landform is such that if you kind
Speaker 2: of aim at that tree, if you're if you're trying
Speaker 2: to take the safe route, if you aim at that tree,
Speaker 2: and if you're a writing handed player, you hit a
Speaker 2: bit of a fade, then that landform will like kick
Speaker 2: you right down to the green and you'll probably end
Speaker 2: up like just short of the green, and you'll have
Speaker 2: a fairly easy up and down or reasonable chance of
Speaker 2: getting up and down for a par.
Speaker 1: All right, So the eighteenth hole. I understand that the
Speaker 1: par four eighteenth hole cypress point much maligned. In fact,
Speaker 1: you know, cypress I often called, as I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: in this episode, the greatest seventeenth hole course in the world.
Speaker 1: I don't like that line. I think it's unfair to
Speaker 1: the eighteenth hole. That the eighteenth hole is actually quite interesting,
Speaker 1: and so I'll defend it. But on a separate subject
Speaker 1: from whether the eighteenth hole is good or not. There
Speaker 1: was an idea for a tea box on the eighteenth
Speaker 1: hole that was pretty provocative, right.
Speaker 2: That's right. If you're ever fortunate to be out there
Speaker 2: standing on the eighteenth tee and you look behind you
Speaker 2: out in the ocean, there's this island rock that's isolated
Speaker 2: from the rest of the coast, and the idea was
Speaker 2: again looking at all these routing maps, to have a
Speaker 2: tea box back there, and the whole would have played significant.
Speaker 2: It would have played I measured it out. I think
Speaker 2: it would have been about an extra eighty yards and
Speaker 2: that hole already plays uphill, so you know currently from
Speaker 2: the back tee it plays like three forty five, and
Speaker 2: had that tea been built out on the rock, it
Speaker 2: would have played four twenty five or four thirty. The
Speaker 2: tea didn't get built, and there's always been this cartion
Speaker 2: as to why, and my sense is there's a couple
Speaker 2: of factors there. One we do know that you know,
Speaker 2: after the course opened in twenty eight and the course
Speaker 2: was in play, then you know, obviously the depression hit
Speaker 2: end of nineteen twenty nine and nineteen thirty. But by
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty one they had engaged an engineer to do
Speaker 2: a plan for a suspension bridge. So in the back
Speaker 2: of Jeff Shackelbert's book, which is a beautiful book I
Speaker 2: highly recommend it, there's a detailed plan by an engineer
Speaker 2: for a suspension bridge to be built, and that's from
Speaker 2: October nineteen thirty one. So they were still looking at
Speaker 2: it as an option at least at that point, and
Speaker 2: it never got built. And my sense is Mackenzie probably
Speaker 2: this is sort of my speculation, he probably liked the
Speaker 2: idea that it would be a cool alternate tea but
Speaker 2: probably was always a little suspect of how practical it
Speaker 2: would be to build and to maintain. But nevertheless they
Speaker 2: did a plan for the bridge. It didn't get built.
Speaker 2: I do recount a story also that there was a
Speaker 2: a land swap at one point with the adjacent land
Speaker 2: that sits right next to the tea box, which is
Speaker 2: now used as like a parking lot for tourists to
Speaker 2: stop there and look out at the ocean. And so
Speaker 2: I don't know if it was just a factor of
Speaker 2: like that. If you look at the property line now,
Speaker 2: it kind of cuts in in a way where the
Speaker 2: angle from that rock. Even if they still own the
Speaker 2: land where the rock was, technically it would have been
Speaker 2: just a crammed angle. So that could have been ultimately
Speaker 2: the reason, or it could have just come down to
Speaker 2: the fact that they decided they didn't want to spend
Speaker 2: the capital, you know, in the early thirties, in the
Speaker 2: midst of the depression.
Speaker 1: Here, by the way, is the plan in Jeff Shackelford's book.
Speaker 1: I'm holding it up to the camera. This is a
Speaker 1: very good audio. But if you see the YouTube version
Speaker 1: of this episode, then you'll see that page in the book.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's one of those kind of fantasy
Speaker 1: ideas that we all have when we look at a
Speaker 1: piece of coastline and we think, well, wouldn't it be
Speaker 1: cool if you could put a tea box out on
Speaker 1: that little rock.
Speaker 2: It's always easy to be an armchair architect, yeah, when
Speaker 2: you actually are tasked with building and maintaining something. There's
Speaker 2: all these other practical considerations not to mention, you know,
Speaker 2: like budgetary stuff that you have to deal with, you know,
Speaker 2: like you guys touched on it with regarding the fourteenth hole.
Speaker 1: So the last subject, Josh, that that you wanted to
Speaker 1: get into here for you know, a little more detail
Speaker 1: on a on a specific topic regarding Cyprus Point has
Speaker 1: to do with the construction process. Now, David Normoyl and
Speaker 1: I in the history section of this episode covered some
Speaker 1: of the the issues how how economical construction was coming
Speaker 1: in under budget and in a time frame that was
Speaker 1: astonishingly quick really. But there's there's more detail here. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting stuff about what happened during construction
Speaker 1: and the various methods that were used to build this
Speaker 1: course so efficiently. So what do you have for me there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, you know, if you read Mackenzie's writings, his
Speaker 2: books or his two books, and many of his articles,
Speaker 2: there's this reoccurring theme of economization, conomization of construction, economisation
Speaker 2: of design, economization of greenkeeping. And you and I have
Speaker 2: talked about this before, Garrett on another podcast, but specifically
Speaker 2: when it comes to Cyprus Point. You know, he wasn't
Speaker 2: just talking to talk. He really walked the walk. And
Speaker 2: I think this is a very underappreciated skill set that
Speaker 2: Mackenzie had as an engineer and an economist. Was his
Speaker 2: way to economize or value engineer a project, to get
Speaker 2: better results for less money, and to do things more
Speaker 2: efficiently and got it. Keep in mind also that at
Speaker 2: this point in time nineteen twenty six twenty seven, when
Speaker 2: he first started laying out this property and building it,
Speaker 2: he had twenty years of experience building golf courses under
Speaker 2: his belt, you know, starting with all of the nineteen
Speaker 2: oh six nineteen oh seven, so it'd been twenty years
Speaker 2: where he had really honed his craft. I mean, there
Speaker 2: was the interruption with the Great War, but he had
Speaker 2: a lot of experience under his belt trying different construction methodologies,
Speaker 2: figuring out what worked what didn't, and that that became
Speaker 2: that earned that earned insight was extremely valuable when it
Speaker 2: came to the construction of Psychrus Point, because this was
Speaker 2: a club that started from humble means. You know, they
Speaker 2: didn't have an unlimited budget to build this golf course with.
Speaker 2: And uh, you know, he pitched when when he met
Speaker 2: with them, he pitched him on this idea of let
Speaker 2: me bring in my own construction team. This is sort
Speaker 2: of what we would refer to today as like the
Speaker 2: design build methodology. And he'd said, like to the club,
Speaker 2: to the founders, let me bring my own team in
Speaker 2: and we could build this for a lot cheaper. And
Speaker 2: at the time they had they had bids from a
Speaker 2: couple of different contractors, and they said that the cheapest
Speaker 2: bid from all the experts would have been one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty thousand dollars to build the course. And mackenzie
Speaker 2: and Hunter said, now we could build it for one
Speaker 2: hundred thousand dollars. And they thought that that was like
Speaker 2: unduly optimistic. And but as you know, as it turned out,
Speaker 2: they they built it themselves with the American Golf Course
Speaker 2: Construction Company, which were his guys, managed by Robert Hunter's son,
Speaker 2: Robert Hunter Junior, and they're guys that they brought over
Speaker 2: from Ireland and from Britain, and they built it for
Speaker 2: ninety thousand dollars, which was, you know, forty percent less
Speaker 2: than contract value, which is very significant, you know. And
Speaker 2: I did I did some I did some math on
Speaker 2: you know, converting into inflation adjusted dollars and it's pretty
Speaker 2: astounding that one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in nineteen
Speaker 2: twenty seven would be about two point eight million dollars today.
Speaker 2: That was what the bid was. They said they do
Speaker 2: it for one hundred thous they did. They ended up
Speaker 2: doing it for ninety thousand dollars, which is like one
Speaker 2: point sixty five million in real dollars. I mean, if
Speaker 2: you understand what things cost today in the world of
Speaker 2: golf course construction. I mean, that's just astounding that they
Speaker 2: were able to do that.
Speaker 1: And as as David indicated earlier in that episode, it
Speaker 1: wasn't like this was a pure minimalist project by the
Speaker 1: standards of the nineteen twenties. They moved some earth around.
Speaker 1: They had to, They had to do some things to
Speaker 1: that piece of land in order to render it golf
Speaker 1: able andterfable, and so it's very impressive that they did
Speaker 1: what they did for the cost.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah, That's something that I think a lot of
Speaker 2: people don't realize is actually how much manipulation they did
Speaker 2: have to do to the site. They had to build
Speaker 2: a lot of those green complexes out of not much
Speaker 2: and a lot of the bunkering that looks very dunesy
Speaker 2: and natural was manufactured. And so just to give you
Speaker 2: a sense of what there when they put their bid
Speaker 2: together and all the work that they did were it included.
Speaker 2: It concluded that the hundred or the night what ended
Speaker 2: up being ninety thousand dollars out the door, included a
Speaker 2: complete underground irrigation system, which was like a novelty in
Speaker 2: those This is just when people were starting to build
Speaker 2: subterranean what they called hoseless irrigation systems. So they did
Speaker 2: that entirely, a massive drainage network, all the grassing, the seating,
Speaker 2: and fertilizing, amending the soils. He mentions they amended forty
Speaker 2: acres of soils clearing of twenty Initially the scope was
Speaker 2: twenty acres of pines. You know, back there on that
Speaker 2: portion of the property when you get out past three
Speaker 2: like four, five, six, seven, ten eleven, that zone was
Speaker 2: very very densely wooded with mari pines, and so they
Speaker 2: had planned to clear twenty acres, but they ended up
Speaker 2: clearing a lot more. So I think that's one of
Speaker 2: the interesting things is not only did they complete the
Speaker 2: scope of work for forty percent less than contract value,
Speaker 2: but also they significantly increased the scope of work. So
Speaker 2: they added on an additional fifteen acres of tree clearing.
Speaker 2: Instead of clearing twenty acres of trees, they cleared thirty
Speaker 2: five acres of trees, which really opened those holes up
Speaker 2: significantly and gave you those vistas out to the dunes
Speaker 2: and to the ocean. So just imagine how different do
Speaker 2: property would look and play and feel if there was
Speaker 2: like a lot of dense forests back there in those
Speaker 2: holes blocking your vistas. So I thought that was like
Speaker 2: a pretty important component in the fact that day, that's
Speaker 2: a significant increase of the scope of work. They built
Speaker 2: twice as many tees as they originally planned to to
Speaker 2: have optionality for different skill levels of players, and then
Speaker 2: they built all of these you know, turf walk paths
Speaker 2: that were irrigated, you know, so from from green to
Speaker 2: teas and from teas out the fairways. They had these
Speaker 2: walk paths like you'd see out in the British aisles
Speaker 2: a lot, and they enlarged the fairies significantly, Like on
Speaker 2: the front the beginning of holes, they significantly enlarged the fairways.
Speaker 2: Going back to again what we talked about on sixteen
Speaker 2: is that Mackenzie wanted to have plenty of play space
Speaker 2: short off the tea, so there weren't these forced carries.
Speaker 2: So that was like more soil prep, soil amendment, more grassing.
Speaker 2: And you'll be pleased, Garrett to know that they included
Speaker 2: every conceivable luxury, including drinking fountains in all the shaded places.
Speaker 1: Just adding that on. You know, got to have those,
Speaker 1: maybe put some ball washers out there. All right, well, Josh,
Speaker 1: thank you for doing research into these different specific topics
Speaker 1: around the Cyper's Point project. Always enjoy having you on
Speaker 1: the podcast and talk to you again soon.
Speaker 2: Always nice talking to Garrett. Looking forward to see you
Speaker 2: at the Walker.
Speaker 1: Cook Absolutely all right, So I'm back with Will Balsam,
Speaker 1: producer of design. That was Josh Pettitt, and we're here
Speaker 1: now just to wrap things up for this deep dive,
Speaker 1: and I want to just talk about Cypress Point's position
Speaker 1: in the world of golf, where not necessarily where we
Speaker 1: rank it, but kind of how it compares to the
Speaker 1: other great candidates for the best golf course in the world.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the best comparisons I can
Speaker 1: come up with is to the West Course at Royal Melbourne,
Speaker 1: which I saw for the first time last December, and
Speaker 1: I think it's an interesting comparison, partly because a lot
Speaker 1: of what Royal Melbourne does really really well, Cypress Point
Speaker 1: maybe does slightly less well, but Cypress Point still has
Speaker 1: the edge in other categories. So at Royal Melbourne, I
Speaker 1: think the preservation of that golf course and especially the
Speaker 1: turf presentation is absolutely top of the line, couldn't be
Speaker 1: better than it is currently at Royal Melbourne. That course
Speaker 1: is firm and fast, and they've taken a similar approach
Speaker 1: as a Cypress Point has to the preservation of their
Speaker 1: golf course. They have not dug up their greens and
Speaker 1: put in air conditioners. They haven't, you know, put in
Speaker 1: all the modern amenities. It is a vintage golf course
Speaker 1: and they've preserved it really really well with the help
Speaker 1: in recent years of Tom Doak, and so there are
Speaker 1: some similarities with Cypress Point, but I think Royal Melbourne
Speaker 1: might be maybe a little bit farther along in that
Speaker 1: process than Cyprus, at least when it comes to green
Speaker 1: sizes and things like that, and especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to the you know, the cultivation of really good golf turf.
Speaker 1: Real Melbourne might have a little bit of tree removal
Speaker 1: remaining to be done, but it's pretty darn close to
Speaker 1: its ideal self. On the other hand, Cypress Point is
Speaker 1: obviously a more spectacular golf course. It just clearly the dunes,
Speaker 1: the ocean, that the domination of all these things, the
Speaker 1: brilliance of the routing. There is nothing like Cypress Point
Speaker 1: in the world. So I don't know really if it's
Speaker 1: a better golf course than Royal Melbourne West or the
Speaker 1: composite course at Royal Melbourne, but it is a more
Speaker 1: wonderful golf course. I think the term the adjective wonderful
Speaker 1: is the one that I always think of when I
Speaker 1: think of Cypress Point. It is the most wonderful golf
Speaker 1: course that I know of. It is the most amazing one,
Speaker 1: the most stunning one, and I think that that shouldn't
Speaker 1: be discounted, even by golf nerds who are maybe a
Speaker 1: little bit past just esthetic appeal and splendor and maybe
Speaker 1: are looking at other things to indicate the quality of
Speaker 1: a golf course. Cypress Points wonderfulness is something that I
Speaker 1: don't think has any equal in the world of golf.
Speaker 5: Does it have the lore of Augusta National, Does it
Speaker 5: does it have that for the people who maybe aren't you,
Speaker 5: me and the rest of the golfers listening to this.
Speaker 1: Clearly it doesn't have the tournament history and the familiarity
Speaker 1: of Augusta National. Augusta National for being a club that's
Speaker 1: reputed to be very exclusive, it is one of the
Speaker 1: most accessible exclusive golf courses in the world.
Speaker 4: I mean, you and I can play with our eyes closed.
Speaker 1: Right exactly. You know we maybe it's hard to actually
Speaker 1: play the course, like get golf clubs out there for
Speaker 1: most people, but to walk the course and attend the Masters,
Speaker 1: I mean a lot of people do they open their
Speaker 1: golf course up so wide and to TV as well,
Speaker 1: especially in recent years now that they've gone to every
Speaker 1: whole coverage, and so that element of sheer familiarity, the
Speaker 1: connection to people's childhoods, their memories of parents and grandparents
Speaker 1: watching the Masters with them and observing this beautiful golf course,
Speaker 1: that's something that no other course can have that doesn't
Speaker 1: have Augusta National's history. And I think you can say
Speaker 1: the same about the old course with the Open going
Speaker 1: back there every five years, and there is a lore
Speaker 1: and a mystique that grows up around it. Cypress points,
Speaker 1: mystique is something different, right it is. It is so
Speaker 1: much more low profile, and that creates a lore of
Speaker 1: its own, right.
Speaker 4: Definitely.
Speaker 5: It's funny the added mystique. You would think, I don't
Speaker 5: know to me when the conversation comes up of what's
Speaker 5: one golf course in the road that you would play
Speaker 5: if you were given the opportunity, more than nine times
Speaker 5: out of ten, the answer I'm hearing is augustin Nashvill.
Speaker 5: But I agree to you where it's like, shouldn't it
Speaker 5: be the place that most people maybe have never even
Speaker 5: seen or know much about other than the sixteenth hole?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And you know, Cypress points argument for being the
Speaker 1: last golf course that you would play is a very
Speaker 1: strong one because of the way the round ends and
Speaker 1: the build up to those incredible moments on the fifteenth
Speaker 1: and sixteenth holes. I will never forget my first shot
Speaker 1: on the sixteenth hole. It's a memory that is permanently
Speaker 1: with me and that I'm gonna have until I die.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna be able to see that ballfly.
Speaker 1: I hit a good shot, you know, in front of me,
Speaker 1: if I if I had duck hooked it, into into
Speaker 1: the you know bay on the backside of the hole.
Speaker 1: I might might, I might feel this differently, but I
Speaker 1: managed somehow to hit a good shot, and I'll never
Speaker 1: never forget it. It's gonna be one of the most
Speaker 1: special things in my brain until my brain stops working.
Speaker 1: And Cyprus can create those moments because of its splendor
Speaker 1: and the drama of the way it builds up to
Speaker 1: those holes, and and that's kind of what it what
Speaker 1: it offers as the as the course that you would
Speaker 1: want to play before you go to the electric chair, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we know it's already a good match play
Speaker 5: course of course, so that helps as well.
Speaker 1: Yes, very much. Looking forward to the Walker Cup. I
Speaker 1: think it's gonna be so much fun to see these
Speaker 1: players take on this course. As I indicated earlier, they're
Speaker 1: gonna be really long for this golf course. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're gonna be playing from some places on these holes
Speaker 1: that are I mean, they're gonna be hitting wedges into
Speaker 1: four hundred and fifty yard par fours that you and
Speaker 1: I would hit seven woods or more into. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think that might for people are familiar
Speaker 1: with the course, there might be a little bit of
Speaker 1: heartburn seeing it that, I was.
Speaker 5: Gonna say, most people will be none the wiser, So
Speaker 5: I'm not sure it'll make a huge difference exactly.
Speaker 1: Just seeing the course on TV, seeing the holes themselves,
Speaker 1: seeing players take them on will be great. And guess
Speaker 1: what if it happens to be windy. If the wind
Speaker 1: kicks up there, it's gonna be hard. It'll be hard,
Speaker 1: and it's not a big deal because it's match play anyway,
Speaker 1: but that golf course can definitely be very difficult if
Speaker 1: the elements make for that. So I think there's a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot to look forward to with the
Speaker 1: Walker Cup, any particular holes that you're the ear keeping
Speaker 1: an eye out for.
Speaker 4: I think the par fives there are super interesting.
Speaker 5: I mean, I know for them it's probably maybe it
Speaker 5: won't be as interesting because of the length that they have,
Speaker 5: but some of the risk reward on the second shots
Speaker 5: or going for these greens, especially since they are kind
Speaker 5: of smaller greens, could provide for some interesting situations. I
Speaker 5: don't know, just going over through the washing the hole
Speaker 5: by hole and seeing kind of some of these t
Speaker 5: shots and the lines that you have to take if
Speaker 5: you want to get there and too I think it
Speaker 5: could provide some really interesting match play holes.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and something to look out for is the eighth hole,
Speaker 1: which kind of plays diagonally across over the shoulder of
Speaker 1: the dune. And the question on the hole is how
Speaker 1: much of the dune are you going to take on?
Speaker 1: Mere mortals are just considering taking on maybe half of
Speaker 1: the den right instead of playing out to the left
Speaker 1: to the fairway that you can see the whole turns
Speaker 1: to the right. But I think a few players that
Speaker 1: the walker cup might be might have an eye on
Speaker 1: the green there, like might might be looking to cut
Speaker 1: the whole corner, and so that that would be something
Speaker 1: to look out for. On the seventeenth hole, the same thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's a long poke to get to
Speaker 1: the green from the tee. It's I think it's probably
Speaker 1: about three hundred and sixty yards on a direct line,
Speaker 1: but I don't know. Could the green be in play there?
Speaker 1: That would be one little bit of intrigue. But then
Speaker 1: there are plenty of holes that I think do limit
Speaker 1: distance naturally, will kind of force driver out of players' hands,
Speaker 1: have them lay up to a certain yardage a certain angle,
Speaker 1: and then play some longer more interesting approaches into the greens.
Speaker 1: So yeah, of course it is going to hold up fine, you.
Speaker 4: Know, definitely, And you mentioned eight.
Speaker 5: I feel like that could also be so pin position,
Speaker 5: depending right, if that pins talks BA left behind that bunker,
Speaker 5: that probably brings in a different drive and how much
Speaker 5: of that dune you're taking on versus if it's you know,
Speaker 5: a front center stick and you're okay with having you know,
Speaker 5: a short to mid iron in.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, it's a there. There're gonna be such
Speaker 1: such a great number of subtleties to the golf course
Speaker 1: that I hope, I hope the telecast focuses on those
Speaker 1: a little bit and and maximizes the opportunity of an
Speaker 1: event like the Walker Cup being at a course like
Speaker 1: Cyprus Point, because it is it's a relative rarity. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure when the next time is that they will
Speaker 1: see the course on this kind of stage.
Speaker 4: And depending how it goes, maybe the last time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, I hope it goes well. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you very much for hanging out during these, uh
Speaker 1: these portions of of the episode that is our deep
Speaker 1: dive on Cyprus Point. This episode of Designing Golf was
Speaker 1: produced by Will Balsam. Thank you will. If you like
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