Speaker 1: Welcome to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast. Before
Speaker 1: we get to the Sean Tullian Zach Player episode, just
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Speaker 1: to Austin. Now, without further ado, here's Sean Tully and
Speaker 1: Zach Blair.
Speaker 2: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
Speaker 3: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 2: And when I find my ball in.
Speaker 1: A Frida Egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida Egg, Fridagg
Speaker 1: Frida Egg Bride Egg Lie, I'm about ready to.
Speaker 2: Run off of the.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome back to another edition of the
Speaker 1: Frida Egg Podcast. Today we are joined by Zach Blair,
Speaker 1: podcast regular and then the superintendent at the Meadow Club,
Speaker 1: noted golf historian and the godfather of with Sean Tully. Sean,
Speaker 1: welcome on.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: I feel like I owe you royalties.
Speaker 1: You know, with an angles, it's kind of a ripoff
Speaker 1: from the man that's you know, been preaching with for years.
Speaker 1: How does it feel to have an era wherewith is
Speaker 1: becoming almost embraced.
Speaker 3: It's been great to see.
Speaker 4: It's it's taken a long time watching all the tournament
Speaker 4: golf that we see on TV where all the bunkers
Speaker 4: are lost in the rough, and I feel like it
Speaker 4: feels really good to see that we need that in
Speaker 4: the game today for sure, for the for golf to
Speaker 4: be enjoyable for all all levels of play.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we just Zach and I just finished playing up
Speaker 1: here at Metal Club Alistair McKenzie's first design.
Speaker 2: Lots of wid Zach, what do you think?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've been lucky enough to play up here a
Speaker 5: couple of times, played here in college about every year
Speaker 5: I was at b YU, So it's always fun to
Speaker 5: come back, so I knew we had to definitely hit
Speaker 5: this spot up on the on the Blair Wish Project
Speaker 5: San Francisco Voyage.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's it's been a good one. We we've hit
Speaker 1: up a bunch of different golf courses, but a few
Speaker 1: Alisair Mackenzie's Sean, how do you was it when you
Speaker 1: got this job in two thousand that you really became
Speaker 1: enamored with Mackenzie or did it start before then?
Speaker 3: I definitely started before then.
Speaker 4: I've always he just knowing what he was able to
Speaker 4: do and seeing pictures at that time living in Wisconsin
Speaker 4: and not being out here just seeing the golf courses
Speaker 4: and knowing what I was what I was seeing and
Speaker 4: wanted to embrace that a little bit more. Had to
Speaker 4: come out to California to see it.
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 2: When how did you get into golf? Like being from
Speaker 2: Wisconsin and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this was my first job in high school. My brother,
Speaker 4: who's a superintendent in Chicago, was supposed to go interview
Speaker 4: for a job and he wasn't. He was woke up
Speaker 4: that morning it was like, I'm not going in, and
Speaker 4: for some reason I said I'm going in.
Speaker 3: So I went into interview.
Speaker 4: For the job and The superintendent was quite confused when
Speaker 4: I said my name was Sean Tully and not Ryan Tully.
Speaker 4: But I'm very thankful that he didn't want to go
Speaker 4: to work that day or go to his interview.
Speaker 3: And you know, the.
Speaker 4: Same golf course that my dad worked at, and the
Speaker 4: superintendent knew my dad, so it was I think he
Speaker 4: was going to hire us either way.
Speaker 1: But it's a you just got a different Tully. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what course was that at Dellbrook in Delvan, Wisconsin. It's
Speaker 1: an old Foulis brother, one of the foulest brothers.
Speaker 4: I haven't had chance to figure that one out, but
Speaker 4: one one degree of separation from Oldton Morris which kind
Speaker 4: of got me started.
Speaker 1: So that you have this, you know, directory of historical
Speaker 1: findings and all this stuff. As a kid, were you
Speaker 1: really into history and is that they just naturally lend
Speaker 1: itself into golf.
Speaker 4: Yes, I've always you know, I don't read fiction. I'm
Speaker 4: a nonfiction guy, so I like the facts and my dad.
Speaker 3: Just being in the game.
Speaker 4: He was a really good golfer, qualified for the Greater
Speaker 4: Milwaukee Open as an amateur, and just his love of
Speaker 4: the game, my grandfather's love of the game. It keeps
Speaker 4: me close to both of those of my family in
Speaker 4: the game. Just being good on the.
Speaker 2: Golf course parents in the game. That's like you ze.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's always nice to have you know, you get
Speaker 5: to spend time with him and then it just kind
Speaker 5: of like like totally said, it kind of keeps you
Speaker 5: close to him. So it's cool. It's definitely a neat
Speaker 5: sport that way.
Speaker 1: So, Sean, You've got a lot of different things from
Speaker 1: a historical and you found a bunch of things.
Speaker 2: What's like the coolest piece of golf.
Speaker 1: History or artifact or information that you've uncovered in your time.
Speaker 4: That's a good question. Probably just learning more about the
Speaker 4: evolution of golf and how good or how not so good.
Speaker 4: Some of the early stuff was Pebble Beach when it
Speaker 4: first opened, it kind of got lambasted.
Speaker 3: To some degree.
Speaker 4: And Herbert Fowler was brought in almost within within a
Speaker 4: year of the course opening, and he drew up plans
Speaker 4: and finding finding his plans and his his description of
Speaker 4: the golf course and his changes was pretty pretty amazing
Speaker 4: to find that when I came across the the information
Speaker 4: about Billy Bell doing some of the bunker work at
Speaker 4: San Francisco Golf Club was pretty amazing. And you know, again,
Speaker 4: you know, getting back to with I am a fan
Speaker 4: of with in fairways and I found an article from
Speaker 4: I think nineteen thirty four where it finally spelled out
Speaker 4: what the width was in golf at that time frame,
Speaker 4: with the low end being forty yards in the high
Speaker 4: end being sixty. I think we have a lot to
Speaker 4: learn still in golf on what constitutes good golf.
Speaker 3: And it doesn't have to be off the tee to
Speaker 3: be challenging.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's about angles and having the opportunity
Speaker 4: to find that, and we don't need twenty two yard fairways.
Speaker 1: So with the modern game, the ball goes further, sometimes
Speaker 1: more offline is do you think with is about the
Speaker 1: same or should it be wider to accommodate for the
Speaker 1: longer distances people are hitting it.
Speaker 4: I'm not always going to say more width is better.
Speaker 4: It can be challenging. I mean I don't I can
Speaker 4: already say I don't hit the ball very far. But
Speaker 4: if you hit the ball online and where you need
Speaker 4: to hit it, then you're in a good place. And
Speaker 4: if you mishit your shot or or have some factors
Speaker 4: that you haven't factored into your shot, and you're going
Speaker 4: to be more offline, further offline than you need to be,
Speaker 4: and find new, new and different challenges.
Speaker 3: Hopefully.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we we played, Zach and I played a golf
Speaker 1: course today that isn't known by many and doesn't have
Speaker 1: a lot of with Northwood, a nine hole Mackenzie golf
Speaker 1: course in Del Monte or is it del del Rio
Speaker 1: Monte Rio. It's a cool little town. Is that one
Speaker 1: of the you know, golf's biggest kind of tragedies and
Speaker 1: where it is right now compared to what it could be.
Speaker 3: Well, Sharp Park is always the easy go to for that.
Speaker 4: You know, the course is suffered with a lot of
Speaker 4: the river, the Russian River, going over its banks quite
Speaker 4: a few times, I think the twenty feet over the
Speaker 4: eighth green, so it gets when the water, when the
Speaker 4: ever goes over there, it's over. And they've you know,
Speaker 4: ed Bail, the superintendent there, he's been there for for
Speaker 4: a number of years. He could tell you how many
Speaker 4: times he's had to rebuild that green there in a.
Speaker 3: Couple of the other holes. So it's they're lucky, we're
Speaker 3: lucky to even have the course with that much water.
Speaker 2: It's such a cool place.
Speaker 1: It's in this little town and you just drive up
Speaker 1: and you never would expected what got Mackenzie up there
Speaker 1: to do that proadject.
Speaker 4: The story that that I understand it is is John
Speaker 4: or Jack Neville, a noted amateur player played you know,
Speaker 4: had his hand in design, was the one that introduced
Speaker 4: Hunter and Mackenzie to the property. There's been quite a
Speaker 4: few people have done research and we still have not
Speaker 4: found There's some people that feel there's a connection to
Speaker 4: the Bohemian.
Speaker 3: Club, which is right there as well. So far.
Speaker 4: That's the story that that we're sticking with at the moment.
Speaker 4: But there we haven't found any thing that really is
Speaker 4: cut and dry.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: I think that place has like a sneaky more width
Speaker 5: than we're giving it credit for though, because like we
Speaker 5: didn't hit one tree out there the entire day, realistically one.
Speaker 5: But I think the trees are so massive that it
Speaker 5: just looks extremely tight.
Speaker 4: There's that visual especially watching the drone footage you guys
Speaker 4: did today, it just makes it look even tighter. But
Speaker 4: I also saw you guys hit the ball to egg
Speaker 4: and the trees were weren't going to be an issue
Speaker 4: no matter what you guys were playing really good?
Speaker 1: Is yeah that I guess that it is almost a
Speaker 1: thing with scale. It goes to scale, how I mean
Speaker 1: with with how important is it to have matching scale?
Speaker 4: It's really important. I mean, you know, we have fairly
Speaker 4: good scale here with our bunkers.
Speaker 3: You know, they aren't.
Speaker 4: Super big out here, but they fit and they feel
Speaker 4: good with the contours that we have. You know, another
Speaker 4: good example would be San Francisco Golf Club. You know
Speaker 4: the scale that property is so huge, and you have
Speaker 4: some of the bunkers on three that big, The one
Speaker 4: that runs short right off your T shot is a
Speaker 4: great bunker and it ties in with the bunkers behind it.
Speaker 4: A lot of it is scale and you don't need
Speaker 4: big bunkers if you layer your bunkers. And I and
Speaker 4: we talked about that quite a few times with our
Speaker 4: bunkers out here. How mackenzie used strategic bunkering to move
Speaker 4: you around the golf course. And you know we have
Speaker 4: some of them lost in trees. You know, the T
Speaker 4: shot on number two's one that it would be a
Speaker 4: good example. And then your second shot into number four
Speaker 4: here at Metal Club where you're looking and you have
Speaker 4: the bunkers stacked up behind the green from you know,
Speaker 4: four green, five green, two green, and even fourteen if
Speaker 4: you stand in the right spot.
Speaker 1: I noticed that with Golden Age architects they layered greens
Speaker 1: on top.
Speaker 2: Of each other.
Speaker 1: So well, but then those bunkers and they catch your
Speaker 1: eye and sometimes, you know, we live in this day
Speaker 1: and age of technology where visual deception is a bit lost.
Speaker 1: Because we play with rangefinders. We always know what that
Speaker 1: what the exact.
Speaker 2: Yardage is, and we can shoot bunkers.
Speaker 1: But it was Mackenzie the greatest, in your opinion, at
Speaker 1: layering and stacking bunkers on and making you know, deceiving
Speaker 1: the eye.
Speaker 4: Well, I would say yes, obviously given his background with
Speaker 4: camouflage and trying to he is challenging your eye in
Speaker 4: a lot of ways, more so than you know, other
Speaker 4: architects were privy to.
Speaker 3: The challenge.
Speaker 4: You know, we talk about yardages and if you hit
Speaker 4: a t shot, it's one hundred and seventy five yards
Speaker 4: and the bunkers at one hundred and sixty. But we
Speaker 4: don't like bunkers by nature, we don't want to be
Speaker 4: in them. So no matter how many few bunkers or
Speaker 4: how many more bunkers are in the background. Your your
Speaker 4: mind may know the yardage, but it still is looking
Speaker 4: at those bunkers, going, I don't like the bunkers. I
Speaker 4: don't like the bunkers. So it's a mind game. He's
Speaker 4: playing with your mind and just trying to make it
Speaker 4: look harder than it actually is.
Speaker 1: You guys have been working with Mike Devrees since nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine, you got here two thousand. It's been you know,
Speaker 1: you've kind of been chipping away at it a lot.
Speaker 1: And I obviously a lot of clubs in America don't
Speaker 1: necessarily have the financial resources to do full brown blown
Speaker 1: restorations right out of the gate or even member buy
Speaker 1: in to do them. What advice do you have for
Speaker 1: a club that might be trying to start the restoration
Speaker 1: and really improvement process.
Speaker 4: Like, first of all, it's been really great to work
Speaker 4: with Mike. I mean, his vision and understanding of what
Speaker 4: we have here has really helped push this program or
Speaker 4: restoration program along. To get to your question, what has
Speaker 4: really worked for us is figuring out which hole, which
Speaker 4: is our fifth hole here has the most documentation in
Speaker 4: being able to draw from the pictures in state the
Speaker 4: historical nature of that hole.
Speaker 3: It's a copy of the.
Speaker 4: Eden Hoole from Saint Andrews and the importance of it
Speaker 4: and the scale and scope of the of the design
Speaker 4: and trying to get back to that and we did
Speaker 4: it over, you know, try to gain the members trust
Speaker 4: of those that may not understand what we're trying to do.
Speaker 4: Some of that was with tree removal, which can be hard.
Speaker 4: I mean there's you know, when most of our members
Speaker 4: joined here, there was the course had become more of
Speaker 4: a parkling course, had lost that meadow definition that is
Speaker 4: in the name of the club.
Speaker 3: So for some of them it's.
Speaker 4: Been pretty hard to see our trees come down. But
Speaker 4: it's at the same time it's been pretty amazing to
Speaker 4: see and be able to see more of the golf
Speaker 4: course and understand the design and the thoughts that went
Speaker 4: into it.
Speaker 3: But you know, just trying to figure out where you.
Speaker 4: Can best make your case and have the history work
Speaker 4: in your favor to tell you to tell the story
Speaker 4: and make the work that you're doing work for you.
Speaker 4: And there's obviously there's different ways to do the work,
Speaker 4: and when we first started our restoration, the process was
Speaker 4: trying to figure out what would work an intern that
Speaker 4: was working for Mike at the time. Mark Thley, who
Speaker 4: now works with Kyle Phillips, did a dissertation at Arizona
Speaker 4: on how to best do a restoration. So he went
Speaker 4: around the country and and interviewed and and you know,
Speaker 4: came up with, let's the program that we ended up
Speaker 4: going with was doing a couple holes each year for
Speaker 4: the minimal impact. Our members love playing metal club and
Speaker 4: you know, we were not going to shut the course
Speaker 4: down for anything.
Speaker 3: They love this course as they should.
Speaker 4: And the the program went over a five year period,
Speaker 4: six year period, you know, with minimal impact, and the
Speaker 4: turnaround was pretty quick. By the time we got to
Speaker 4: the end the last year, our process was really good.
Speaker 1: Zach, you played this course a couple of times in college.
Speaker 1: How have you noticed the change over the years.
Speaker 5: When we played or when I was in school, Some
Speaker 5: of the stuff was already done, you know, some of
Speaker 5: the big changes, Like fifteen and thirteen, they'd kind of
Speaker 5: taken down the trees and they'd done a lot of
Speaker 5: the bunker work, I mean most of it, honestly. Now
Speaker 5: you know they're really working on the aprons, kind of
Speaker 5: around the green, kind of promoting that ground game and everything,
Speaker 5: and I mean it's even better than you know when
Speaker 5: I played it four or five years ago. So it's
Speaker 5: always fun to come back.
Speaker 1: It's cool to see a walking through your clubhouse. There's
Speaker 1: so many old photos, and I think you're lucky and
Speaker 1: that they have you that finds all this stuff, but
Speaker 1: also that there's so much documentation available because you see,
Speaker 1: it was a meadow. I mean there's no trees, there's nothing,
Speaker 1: and there's all of a sudden, all these angles and
Speaker 1: different options to play. Like you know, today I played
Speaker 1: with a hickory driver, which was unbelievable. I was all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, hanging long irons in, but like on
Speaker 1: some holes, I was playing way right and I played
Speaker 1: into another fairway to set up an angle because I
Speaker 1: knew I was going to have like a four iron
Speaker 1: and I needed to get an open way in. And
Speaker 1: you know, you're getting so close to being where you
Speaker 1: need to be, but there's just still a few more
Speaker 1: trees to go. I imagine working somewhere where you know
Speaker 1: the ones you want them to go, like coming in
Speaker 1: and seeing them every day.
Speaker 2: Like that's got to goot just frustrating.
Speaker 4: There is some frustration there, but at the end of
Speaker 4: the day, you know, it was frustrated. As being historian,
Speaker 4: it's it's really hard to not feel that way, and
Speaker 4: knowing how good the golf course was, it's just my
Speaker 4: job to educate the golfers as the best I can,
Speaker 4: to get them to understand what we're trying to do
Speaker 4: from an agronomic standpoint, and then you know, trying to
Speaker 4: give them the best product, the best golf course they can.
Speaker 4: In some ways, we have some responsibility to honoring Mackenzie
Speaker 4: and his work well in Hunters he always kind of
Speaker 4: gets dropped off, but you know the work they did
Speaker 4: here was exceptional. And you know they went from here.
Speaker 4: They worked at Cyprus and Pasa Tiempo and Valley Club
Speaker 4: and all those courses or must plays and must seize
Speaker 4: for anybody that wants to see it see some of
Speaker 4: their work. And it's just great that, you know, Metal
Speaker 4: clubs their first place in the connection with the old
Speaker 4: course at Saint Andrews. With his design here, it's shine
Speaker 4: a little bit more with as the course opens up.
Speaker 1: So what got Metal Club for those that don't know,
Speaker 1: is the first Mackenzie design in America? Did he come
Speaker 1: to America to specifically designed metal club or did he
Speaker 1: come here for like what got him over there?
Speaker 4: Well, it was more of his trip to Australia, so
Speaker 4: it was a stopping off you're gonna make I think
Speaker 4: it was he met with Perry Maxwell and they traveled
Speaker 4: across and stopped in Oklahoma to see his course there,
Speaker 4: and then he got out here. And at that time
Speaker 4: Robert Hunter was, by reading through some of the correspondents,
Speaker 4: he was more or less acting as an agent for Mackenzie.
Speaker 4: It was trying to get him work while he was
Speaker 4: traveling through And you know, there's other stories, but that's
Speaker 4: this is the best documented one. There was some stories
Speaker 4: about McDonald smith being involved in the process, but from
Speaker 4: what I can tell, he more of a traveling pro
Speaker 4: at that time. May not of you even have been
Speaker 4: in the area, but Hunter has it in I've got
Speaker 4: it in his writing the corresponds that I found between
Speaker 4: him and one of our founding members. So it was
Speaker 4: pretty cool to find that.
Speaker 1: So I asked this question to Jim or being a
Speaker 1: if you could have either Robert Hunter. You're building a
Speaker 1: golf course tomorrow and you can bring him back from time,
Speaker 1: you could have Robert Hunter or Perry Maxwell as your associate,
Speaker 1: which one are you taking?
Speaker 4: I know much more about Robert Hunter, and I don't
Speaker 4: know how much architecture talk we would have because I
Speaker 4: would be asking him all about all his socialist tendencies
Speaker 4: and hanging out with Mark Twain and almost being killed
Speaker 4: in New York and a bombing where he.
Speaker 3: Was supposed to give a talk.
Speaker 4: But it feels like Perry Maxwell was a little a
Speaker 4: little more closer to the I don't know what I'm
Speaker 4: trying to say, but.
Speaker 3: More refrained, more religious.
Speaker 4: I'll say that I'm always trying not to go there,
Speaker 4: but you know, just looking at some of the books
Speaker 4: that Parry Maxwell was reading, it it sounds like I
Speaker 4: don't know if I would have been it would have
Speaker 4: been as enlightening a conversation with him, But.
Speaker 3: To work it would be great to work with both.
Speaker 4: I having just seen Old Town this last year or
Speaker 4: almost two years now, that is amazing the work that
Speaker 4: he was able to do there and the work that
Speaker 4: Corn Crenshaw did.
Speaker 2: But it's kind of similar to the work you guys
Speaker 2: are doing here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I mean the width that they
Speaker 4: have there. Again, here we go the with on the
Speaker 4: last couple holes, you know, seventeen eighteen nine and.
Speaker 3: Whatever the other hole was there.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's just amazing with that double green coming
Speaker 4: in and the t shot up the hill. I mean,
Speaker 4: I just I stood out there for way too long.
Speaker 4: It was just an amazing I didn't want to leave.
Speaker 4: It was just amazing there. But Robert Hunter gets it
Speaker 4: just because of I've done way more research on Robert Hunter,
Speaker 4: and it's he's he's fascinating.
Speaker 2: So most of your research has been centered around California. GoF.
Speaker 3: I try. I try to keep it the California.
Speaker 4: But if anybody knows, the guys that are that know
Speaker 4: me are laughing because I've helped out.
Speaker 3: What I try to do is I do all.
Speaker 4: My research and then I just keep finding things and
Speaker 4: finding things, and you know, if I know somebody at
Speaker 4: the course, I'll send it to him if it's really good.
Speaker 4: Chris Turtaba when he was at Northland, I sent him
Speaker 4: a picture of the eighteenth green there and he was like,
Speaker 4: I've never seen this picture before. This is before so
Speaker 4: and so did this and that, and you know, I
Speaker 4: just love to be my my I just love to
Speaker 4: share the information because my goal is to if I
Speaker 4: do go to Northland, It's going to be better because
Speaker 4: the superintendent there knows a little bit more about the
Speaker 4: course and through the club, they can make their golf
Speaker 4: course better. I want to as a historian, I want
Speaker 4: to see more of the history, more of the architecture,
Speaker 4: and not see all the changes that have been made
Speaker 4: to the negative.
Speaker 3: I want to see the changes to the positive.
Speaker 4: And I feel like the superintendent should be knowledgeable. I
Speaker 4: agree with Kyle Heglund in his wonderful podcast superintendent should
Speaker 4: know about golf course architecture and understand it and the
Speaker 4: relevance of whoever designed their golf course.
Speaker 3: I think it's important.
Speaker 5: I got a question, what are a couple restoration projects
Speaker 5: or a couple courses that have restored, you know, their
Speaker 5: courses back to the original, the originality of the course
Speaker 5: that you think have done really well, and then what
Speaker 5: are a couple that you would really like to see
Speaker 5: do a complete restoration.
Speaker 3: Old Town was amazing.
Speaker 4: I mean I again, that was really good Valley Club
Speaker 4: with their restoration.
Speaker 3: Work and their turf changes with the Bermuda grass. I
Speaker 3: went out there and played. I didn't even play it,
Speaker 3: I walked it.
Speaker 4: In February of twenty fifteen, and it was amazing the
Speaker 4: work that they have done out there.
Speaker 3: La Country Club.
Speaker 4: I'm a little more California centric, obviously, I don't get
Speaker 4: out there too far, but cal Club is wonderful. But
Speaker 4: you know, to speak to the courses, I would love
Speaker 4: to see restored. Riviera would be amazing. Crystal Downs, you know,
Speaker 4: just squeezing out a little bit more Mackenzie there would
Speaker 4: be incredible. But you know, Sharp Park would be amazing.
Speaker 4: That the front nine out there, the original front nine,
Speaker 4: if anybody's ever looked at it, If they haven't, you
Speaker 4: should look at it. It's an amazing routing around that,
Speaker 4: the lagoon, the laguna, it's a lot of really amazing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: Just it almost doesn't matter what course though. I mean
Speaker 4: to me, it's widening the fairways, reducing the rough, slowing
Speaker 4: the greens down, and just getting back to enjoying the game.
Speaker 4: Anybody just restoring the golf course to those features because
Speaker 4: the green speeds are too fast, the rough is too long,
Speaker 4: there's too much rough, and it just goes. We've gotten
Speaker 4: so far away from how simple the game can be,
Speaker 4: with trying to make it harder and trying to make
Speaker 4: a tournament golf. I mean, I understand it from the
Speaker 4: tournament side, seeing how far they hit the ball and
Speaker 4: this and that, But we don't need to make.
Speaker 3: It harder for the day to day golfers.
Speaker 4: And we've done a really good job of doing that,
Speaker 4: and we need people to enjoy the game.
Speaker 1: Isn't it way more economical though, to rebuild a green
Speaker 1: just to slow them down? It does. We had a
Speaker 1: funny conversation about stint meters earlier today and how the
Speaker 1: USGA started manufacturing them and giving them to people, but
Speaker 1: then they don't You were saying, they don't tell the.
Speaker 2: Stip meter reading of the US Open.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 4: The stip meter is I'm a little too infatuated with
Speaker 4: the stip meter for a lot of different reasons. But
Speaker 4: it's just become what it shouldn't have been as a
Speaker 4: speed meter. You know when the USA almost when they
Speaker 4: first rolled it out, they were going to call it
Speaker 4: the speed meter, and they pulled back on that, and uh,
Speaker 4: it's it's a dangerous tool, and you know there's people
Speaker 4: are going to gravitate it to it for different reasons,
Speaker 4: and you know, I'm just nervous having people out out
Speaker 4: of my golf course or anybody else's golf course trying
Speaker 4: to understand how to use it without any formal training.
Speaker 4: I mean, you can read the pamphlet, but when you
Speaker 4: get on that green and you're rolling the ball out there,
Speaker 4: it's there's a little bit of a there's more science
Speaker 4: to it than it sounds, and we just we need
Speaker 4: to understand. Golfers need to understand that the faster the
Speaker 4: greens get, more whole locations are lost, more time they're
Speaker 4: going to spend on the course. If they like to
Speaker 4: four putt, you know, all the power to them, but
Speaker 4: I'd rather have more whole locations in more enjoyable rounds
Speaker 4: and getting around and playing more golf.
Speaker 5: It's amazing how many people don't even fully under I
Speaker 5: mean like they don't even come close to actually understanding
Speaker 5: green speeds. You'll sit there and you guys, yeah, the
Speaker 5: greens are rolling eleven today and I'm sitting there going
Speaker 5: like there may be like a not like people don't
Speaker 5: understand how fast like a ten is.
Speaker 4: And you know, no matter you know, no matter who
Speaker 4: I talk to as a superintendent, there's what what I
Speaker 4: try to do when a member asked me or a golfer.
Speaker 4: If they ask me what the green speed is, I'll
Speaker 4: ask them what they think it is first, and invariably
Speaker 4: it'll be slower than what the actual number is. And
Speaker 4: we have a range that we try to hit here
Speaker 4: so that our members don't have to ask. They know
Speaker 4: that it's within a range of ten nine till eleven three,
Speaker 4: and it's been moving up. Green speed in the United
Speaker 4: States has been moving up. When they first took readings
Speaker 4: in nineteen seventy seven seventy eight with the USGA, the
Speaker 4: average green speed out of over seven hundred courses tested
Speaker 4: was six and a half feet. I'd be very interested,
Speaker 4: and I'm hoping to do some research with Michael Woods.
Speaker 4: Were just started to talk about it, to try and
Speaker 4: figure out what the average green speed in the United
Speaker 4: States is today. I think it would be very interesting
Speaker 4: to see the numbers.
Speaker 2: I think I might start selling signs.
Speaker 1: You just made me think of it, of you know,
Speaker 1: today's stimpmeter and have it just be a permanent number.
Speaker 4: Well, no matter what you do, it's always gonna be
Speaker 4: eleven to five, just every day, eleven five, no matter what.
Speaker 1: It's Zach from a professional side, like I remember watching
Speaker 1: your like a Ryder Cup in the British Open or
Speaker 1: the Open Championship, and hearing that sometimes the slower greens
Speaker 1: can really mess with the American players more so than
Speaker 1: the Europeans. Do you ever see that playing abroad versus here?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I just think, you know, out there, we're so
Speaker 5: used to putting on really fast greens, and you know,
Speaker 5: you've kind of you kind of stroke your putts to
Speaker 5: that type of speed, you know, and your whole games
Speaker 5: kind of around you know, your whole game on the
Speaker 5: green is built around that certain kind of tempo or
Speaker 5: that style, and then when you get to slower greens
Speaker 5: and kind of have to change that up to to
Speaker 5: kind of hit putts harder instead of stroke them. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I think it kind of really screws with guys.
Speaker 1: So do you think it's more would be would challenge
Speaker 1: players more to have slower greens with pins on more
Speaker 1: slope or faster greens with pins on less slope.
Speaker 5: I think guys would be able to adapt either way.
Speaker 5: You know, if if the PGA Tour played slow greens,
Speaker 5: it might mess with guys for a couple of weeks,
Speaker 5: but then they would they would be able to figure
Speaker 5: it out. So I think it's kind of the best
Speaker 5: players in the world out there, so they'd get it.
Speaker 1: So Sean with Mackenzie, what do you feel is the
Speaker 1: most underappreciated aspect of his designs.
Speaker 4: That's a good question. I don't think about it like that.
Speaker 4: Probably just his use of the routing, his routings. You know,
Speaker 4: some people kind of downplay it for certain courses. But
Speaker 4: you know, one of my favorites is just how simple
Speaker 4: he does it at Metal Club, at Valley Club, at
Speaker 4: Cypress Point where he uses hills and you know the
Speaker 4: hill on nine at Cyprus. You know how many greens
Speaker 4: come into that area, how many greens come into the
Speaker 4: area here.
Speaker 3: That Metal Club, in that Valley.
Speaker 4: Club, you have all these teas built up on the hills,
Speaker 4: playing from one hill the next. And what that really
Speaker 4: is is, you know, there's intimacy there, so that his
Speaker 4: courses are very intimate until you start adding length. But
Speaker 4: but there's something else there that it's the economic there's
Speaker 4: a word, a couple of words I'm missing here, but
Speaker 4: where he's designing golf courses.
Speaker 2: With like the idea of like ease of maintenance.
Speaker 4: The ease of maintenance, there's but he designed you know
Speaker 4: when he designed Bayside, that course was built within so
Speaker 4: many months and open. But then also when you have
Speaker 4: five greens in one area, you can go in and
Speaker 4: mow all those greens and have five greens mode by
Speaker 4: two guys instead of two guys walking all over and
Speaker 4: getting three three greens mode.
Speaker 3: So there was a.
Speaker 4: Degree where he was paying attention. And later in his career,
Speaker 4: you know, Lake Merced just turned up some really cool
Speaker 4: information where he was offering the surfaces services to help
Speaker 4: improve their greenkeeping work at the course. So and if
Speaker 4: you read any later on, he's talking and writing about
Speaker 4: how green key being has changed over the years. And
Speaker 4: I mean the other part is, you know his connection
Speaker 4: with Hunter. Everybody is like, it doesn't seem like there
Speaker 4: should be a connection between those two guys. But you know, mackenzie,
Speaker 4: when he traveled to Australia, he wrote an article for
Speaker 4: an Australian magazine about the the the United States as
Speaker 4: a whole from an economy standpoint, you know what's driving it.
Speaker 4: So there's so many layers to McKenzie as there are
Speaker 4: with with Hunter that we you know, we just don't
Speaker 4: we don't know how deep they went on.
Speaker 3: So many things.
Speaker 4: But they were very cosmopolitan. I mean, they were a
Speaker 4: part of so many different things back then, and it
Speaker 4: would have been just really amazing to sit in on
Speaker 4: some conversations with those guys.
Speaker 1: So you get to sit in. Let's just say you
Speaker 1: got to ask McKenzie one question.
Speaker 2: What would it be?
Speaker 4: That's yeah, there's a couple of things.
Speaker 1: It could be a really complex question too, you know,
Speaker 1: if you want to if you need to have multiple parts.
Speaker 3: It would be. Yeah, I just got a bunch of
Speaker 3: stuff going in my head.
Speaker 5: Give the guy a couple of questions.
Speaker 3: Let him ask a couple of questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll say, like, you know, what are the what
Speaker 1: are the things that you you always wonder about?
Speaker 4: Okay, it comes. This one's really simple. It's you know,
Speaker 4: you got certain architects. They left all the stuff behind
Speaker 4: and with him the golden Lamb, or so to speak of.
Speaker 4: What I want is the routing map for Metal Club.
Speaker 4: And there's stories that Jack Fleming had it, and then
Speaker 4: John Fleming, his son had it, and then they're gone and.
Speaker 3: They just disappeared.
Speaker 4: Somebody was giving the story was they were given to
Speaker 4: a golf writer and myself and Bob Beck we've been
Speaker 4: trying to work on this. Bob Bex is, a noted historian,
Speaker 4: plays out at Pasa Tampo. If we could find those plans,
Speaker 4: how cool would that be to find the actual routing
Speaker 4: map for Metal Club in his hand or in Patty
Speaker 4: Cole's hand or Flemings or whoever.
Speaker 3: I don't care, I want to see it.
Speaker 4: You look at Billy Bell and George Thomas, the work
Speaker 4: they did. You know, Stanford Riviera, you know some of
Speaker 4: those early courses that they did.
Speaker 3: They have aerial views of the course right after it opened.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it was on their on their
Speaker 4: call or what, but I wish we had earlier aerials here.
Speaker 4: And Mackenzie was proponent of ariels uh aerial photography in
Speaker 4: the twenties. He was telling municipalities or whatever they call
Speaker 4: him in England. You know, if you guys really want
Speaker 4: to plan for growth, you need to take aerial for
Speaker 4: talkraphy photography of your villages and hamlets and whatever to
Speaker 4: understand how and where you can grow. I wish people
Speaker 4: would have taken that advice. We'd all be richer for
Speaker 4: it with some really early aerial photography.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the aerials are cool. I find myself down a
Speaker 1: rabbit hole all the time, and then you start looking
Speaker 1: at it just and then you go out to places
Speaker 1: and you get, you know, just frustrating to see how
Speaker 1: narrow some of the places are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Brian Palmer from Short Acres called me already, texted
Speaker 4: me right before we left on our trip over there
Speaker 4: to betme and the British trif Crass Management Exposition, and
Speaker 4: he's like, Tully, NASA County's got aerials up from nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty six. And I started driving back to the shop
Speaker 4: and my cart wasn't going fast enough, so I just
Speaker 4: parked my cart and started running and were on the
Speaker 4: phone texting back and forth. Have you seen Piping Rock?
Speaker 4: Have you seen Lido? And you know, we're going back
Speaker 4: and forth, and it was it was awesome. Garden City
Speaker 4: was it looked like it was under the knife.
Speaker 3: I mean it was. To be able to see these
Speaker 3: courses in nineteen twenty six was amazing.
Speaker 4: And uh, I still need to get back and look
Speaker 4: at those, but the last thing I needed was to
Speaker 4: see those right before.
Speaker 3: Right wells planning my trip and getting ready to go.
Speaker 1: One of my buddies came across an aerial of the
Speaker 1: National and Shinnacock and Shinnacock's Mid under the Knife.
Speaker 2: Transitioning from what year? Can I ask thirty? I have
Speaker 2: it on my computer.
Speaker 3: I will need to see that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll show it to you.
Speaker 1: So it's uh, it's you know, it's Mid under the Knife.
Speaker 1: So it like half the holes are Rainer McDonald, half
Speaker 1: the holes are flam It's insane.
Speaker 2: I mean, these old.
Speaker 1: Aeroals are just treasures for and that makes a good point.
Speaker 1: You know, if you only have a forty one of
Speaker 1: Meadow as the youngest.
Speaker 2: Very earliest one, you went through the.
Speaker 1: Great Depression, your midst World War two, so that's when
Speaker 1: really a lot of the loss.
Speaker 3: Was Yeah, I mean for us, the Depression didn't really
Speaker 3: hurt the club as much.
Speaker 4: We still had labor. But when World War two came,
Speaker 4: it was the labor was gone. And then had in
Speaker 4: forty one there was a drought. So in the areial
Speaker 4: it looks like the farm circles when you're flying over
Speaker 4: Oklahoma or something where it's just green. They just ran
Speaker 4: sprinkler heads at tease landing areas and fairways and so
Speaker 4: it's we're probably missing some fairway bunkers here and there.
Speaker 4: In the aerial because it's just brown. You can't really
Speaker 4: define things. But it's an areaal we got nineteen forty one,
Speaker 4: so still trying to track down some other ones, but
Speaker 4: we'll see.
Speaker 2: So I asked this of architects all the time. I
Speaker 2: asked this question, is what.
Speaker 1: Do you wish you know the average member understood more
Speaker 1: about architecture?
Speaker 4: Like one thing, it doesn't have to be as hard
Speaker 4: as most people try to make it for some spy glass.
Speaker 3: What do we know about spyglass?
Speaker 4: It's one of the more challenging, hardest tests to golf
Speaker 4: you'll find in our area.
Speaker 3: And that's great.
Speaker 4: I mean, can we just leave it there and not
Speaker 4: have to bring it home to our course and have
Speaker 4: fairways be tightened and trees planet or what have you.
Speaker 4: Not every course has to be play one way. I mean,
Speaker 4: obviously I'm going to say we need to widen a
Speaker 4: lot of fairways on a lot of courses, but we do.
Speaker 3: That's a fact.
Speaker 1: Well, it's like you watch Zach play. If the fairways
Speaker 1: twenty five yards wide doesn't really matter for you that much,
Speaker 1: it's not like you're gonna miss You're you don't miss
Speaker 1: many fairways regardless of how wide it is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it just depends on the day, I guess.
Speaker 1: I mean, if it's fifty yards wide, like you're probably
Speaker 1: not gonna miss many.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But like when it's twenty like Northwoods, you didn't miss
Speaker 1: any fairways and it's those are twenty five thirty yard
Speaker 1: wide fairways.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, it was a good It's a good couple
Speaker 5: of days. I guess.
Speaker 2: Those hickories don't go offline.
Speaker 5: Yeah, dude, you were striping that thing. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: It's I mean, I might just play hickories from now
Speaker 1: and I'm over over the real golf ball. So if say, uh,
Speaker 1: you found everything there was to find on Mackenzie, like
Speaker 1: tomorrow you had everything, what what would be the next project.
Speaker 4: I'm kind of already started it in my mind, but
Speaker 4: it would be a way to connect golf historians together
Speaker 4: to share information. You know, you start talking with somebody
Speaker 4: and they're looking into one thing or another, and and
Speaker 4: you know, even though I try to stay to the
Speaker 4: Bay area, I've got a lot of stuff from all
Speaker 4: over the East Coast and even in England and Scotland.
Speaker 4: I don't I have never been able to draw a
Speaker 4: line and say I want to stop. But to be
Speaker 4: able to share that information and help other guys that
Speaker 4: are are other people that are looking into it. There's
Speaker 4: there's a wealth of information, and you know, you don't
Speaker 4: know the connections are so small with early you know,
Speaker 4: early golf stuff, who was working with whom and what
Speaker 4: courses they were working at. We're only privy to a
Speaker 4: very small amount of that information based off of where
Speaker 4: we're gathering it from, from newspapers or correspondence in the clubs.
Speaker 4: I mean, up until a couple of years ago, we
Speaker 4: didn't even know, you know, Herbert Fowler was mentioned as
Speaker 4: being out here in the early twenties, and then Vernon
Speaker 4: mccannon was brought in a year before mackenzie almost to
Speaker 4: the day to look at the course. And that was
Speaker 4: very interesting because I've done all my research through newspapers
Speaker 4: and magazines in the Bay area here and there was
Speaker 4: never a mention of that. I've never seen one mention
Speaker 4: of that, So it just it really opened up my
Speaker 4: eyes to you know, seeing something like, you know, I
Speaker 4: could speak to Lake marcaid, you know, Lakemer said, I
Speaker 4: know of three architects that were being interviewed or looked at,
Speaker 4: and it was Willie Watson, Herbert Fowler.
Speaker 3: And Willie Locke.
Speaker 4: And Willy Locke ended up getting the job, which when
Speaker 4: you think about the other two gentlemen that had been
Speaker 4: in the business, and I mean Willie Locke caddied for
Speaker 4: Herbert Fowler when he was a kid, so for him
Speaker 4: to get that job, it was it was a pretty
Speaker 4: big thing for him.
Speaker 3: But there we have the story. But yet there's who knows,
Speaker 3: they may have had somebody else in there.
Speaker 5: I guess you would be you'd be the perfect person
Speaker 5: to ask about this. What what do you think about
Speaker 5: the whole Cyprus routing about you know, some people talk
Speaker 5: about maybe Seth Rayner routed at some like you know,
Speaker 5: other people say, no way, what are your thoughts?
Speaker 3: Well, it's a it's an open ended question still.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's been a lot of talk with the
Speaker 4: Rainer folks and the Mackenzie people, and I mean just
Speaker 4: about anybody that wants to.
Speaker 3: Throw their name in the hat.
Speaker 4: You know, we definitely can see there's a ad Mills
Speaker 4: took a photograph of the sixteenth Green in nineteen twenty
Speaker 4: five with a flag on it, and then so that's
Speaker 4: er Rayner doing the routing, and he we can definitely say.
Speaker 3: That that was the green location that he decided on.
Speaker 4: And then there's another flag on the rock outcropping just
Speaker 4: behind the current eighteen t that they were going to
Speaker 4: build a bridge to. Some people want to call that
Speaker 4: the McKenzie bridge, but it really, you know, it was
Speaker 4: more of a rainer bridge. Because he was out there,
Speaker 4: he had the flag. Somebody put the flag out.
Speaker 3: There for him. I'm sure he didn't put it out there.
Speaker 1: But.
Speaker 3: You know, and there was changes, you know, Robert Hunter Junior,
Speaker 3: that was one of his.
Speaker 4: He kind of cut his teeth here with Jack Fleming.
Speaker 4: The club here didn't want Hunter Junior to get the
Speaker 4: work by himself because he hadn't really he was pretty
Speaker 4: young to say the least. But he went in there
Speaker 4: and you know, he got in trouble for a little
Speaker 4: bit of the work that they did, but they re
Speaker 4: routed a couple of the holes to make room for
Speaker 4: the seventeen mile drive. It'd be very interesting, I mean,
Speaker 4: you know, you don't get that chance very often to
Speaker 4: see how two different architects, you know, especially a natural
Speaker 4: relying on the beauty golf course that or the beauty
Speaker 4: of the land with Mackenzie and then Rainer kind of
Speaker 4: you know, the whole engineer aspect, but engineering with some
Speaker 4: reliance on the beauty. You know, Fisher's Island is a
Speaker 4: good example.
Speaker 5: Yeah, those would be two really cool like architect maps
Speaker 5: to kind of look at and compare and say, like,
Speaker 5: you know, you never know, maybe you know, maybe they
Speaker 5: were both very similar.
Speaker 1: So we got a Rainer nut and a Mackenzie nut
Speaker 1: sitting next to each other. I want to know from
Speaker 1: each of you what your favorite thing about the other
Speaker 1: architect is, So Sean, your favorite thing about Rayner and Zach,
Speaker 1: your favorite thing about Mackenzie.
Speaker 4: Lido the lido course, you know, just the engineering feet
Speaker 4: that they when it went out after and uh, I
Speaker 4: just wish he had said more and written more or
Speaker 4: had you know.
Speaker 1: That's that's another treasure, another thing somebody needs to find.
Speaker 5: Huh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's not much out there.
Speaker 4: I mean, I know Tony Piapi's he's out there looking
Speaker 4: and finding some things. But uh, you know, that would
Speaker 4: be amazing if his diary would turn up or something.
Speaker 4: But that's just me dreaming. I'm always dreaming, trying to
Speaker 4: think of the possibilities.
Speaker 5: But yeah, for me, I'm kind of turning into a
Speaker 5: Mackenzie net. You know, we're on a nice little road
Speaker 5: trip here, but I mean it's it's easy to go with.
Speaker 5: You know, the bunkering is just like out of control,
Speaker 5: not only the way it looks, but you know, just
Speaker 5: bunker placement and just how it all ties together. Kind
Speaker 5: of the whole layering aspect of everything is just out
Speaker 5: of control.
Speaker 2: There there are so many good ones.
Speaker 1: I mean, the I think I've come to realize the
Speaker 1: most beautiful bunkers in the US are in California. Between
Speaker 1: Thomas Bell, Mackenzie, and Hunter. It's pretty outstanding work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's that there's definitely a California feel
Speaker 4: to it by definition of it being in California, but literally,
Speaker 4: but to get to a point, Mackenzie was already starting
Speaker 4: it and doing some of that work, and if you
Speaker 4: look at some of his later work prior to coming
Speaker 4: to California, you can see him kind of putting it together.
Speaker 4: But one aspect in you know, the research I've done
Speaker 4: is how.
Speaker 3: Far did it get east?
Speaker 4: And there was a couple of different architects that were
Speaker 4: actually in Michigan. I can't I'm drawing a blank on
Speaker 4: their name, but one golf course in particular, that's seminal
Speaker 4: in how the bunkering, the original bunkering. If you look,
Speaker 4: there's a great picture in Golf tam magazine on the
Speaker 4: cover in nineteen thirty or thirty one, and it looks
Speaker 4: just incredible. But you're looking at it and you're like,
Speaker 4: is that seminal? And you're like, of course it is.
Speaker 3: It's got all the.
Speaker 4: Palm trees in the background and whatnot. But what was
Speaker 4: going on to have that happen? Why were those bunkers
Speaker 4: designed there?
Speaker 3: That's the question I have.
Speaker 4: And obviously Dick Wilson did all his stuff and they've
Speaker 4: been changed and I haven't been I haven't been there
Speaker 4: to see the work that Corn Crenshaw has done yet.
Speaker 4: But it's interesting in that, you know, in the research
Speaker 4: I've done, I've got Bobby Jones out for the nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty nine US Amateur and just in a short little
Speaker 4: column they asked him one word comments about the golf
Speaker 4: courses he was playing or had played, and it was
Speaker 4: posit Tiempo, Riviera, La Country Club, San Francisco, Pebble and
Speaker 4: Cypress Point. And I'm gonna mix him up a little
Speaker 4: bit for sure, But you know, sporty.
Speaker 3: Was Riviera Pebble Beach was.
Speaker 4: He went a little wordy and he said not as
Speaker 4: good as I thought it was going to be, or
Speaker 4: I was told or something. And La country Club was
Speaker 4: was sporty again. I think he used that twice. But
Speaker 4: the kicker was when he got to Cypress Point. The
Speaker 4: way he described it kind of set the.
Speaker 3: Tone for his thinking.
Speaker 4: You know, very early on that he was probably gonna
Speaker 4: have McKenzie there for his course, and Cypress Point was
Speaker 4: very simply of course I wouldn't mind having in my backyard.
Speaker 4: So I'm wondering if the work that rosted at Seminole
Speaker 4: had some correlation of him trying to feed off of
Speaker 4: mackenzie's work in style. But that's just me asking a question,
Speaker 4: trying to figure out why that style went that direction,
Speaker 4: because the bunkering is nothing like Ross's bunkering, So why
Speaker 4: did that happen there? I know that Hunter was out there,
Speaker 4: and Hunter and Ross work very close with their Pinehurst days,
Speaker 4: so that's a mystery that I would like to figure out.
Speaker 4: Or you know, maybe somebody out there's looking for something
Speaker 4: to research.
Speaker 1: And can and I might know, So if if you could,
Speaker 1: if there's one, you know, say, we're going to say
Speaker 1: non living architect that you could have just all their
Speaker 1: work they did erased.
Speaker 2: Never you could remove all of it from the world.
Speaker 1: Which one would it be non living non living? We're
Speaker 1: going to keep it friendly here.
Speaker 4: I mean I would answer in the opposite. One architect
Speaker 4: that we don't have anything nearly enough of that we
Speaker 4: need to know more of is William Langford, Because I mean,
Speaker 4: no matter the work that those guys were doing there,
Speaker 4: there's a handful of guys that you know, weren't up
Speaker 4: to snuff with the other guys back in the day.
Speaker 4: But I'd almost rather have their course than some of
Speaker 4: the guys that are living some of their work in
Speaker 4: the sixties, seventies and eighties and nineties. That's just a
Speaker 4: whole different flavor. I like the old school flavor. I mean,
Speaker 4: golden age is golden age to me. But William Langford,
Speaker 4: he I mean, after seeing Lasonia in some pictures of
Speaker 4: his other courses, I can't get. I mean, if it's
Speaker 4: Mackenzie and then it's it's William Langford for me pretty quick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Langford is a victim of a lot of bad
Speaker 1: renovations to people that just didn't understand the bold contours
Speaker 1: and the idea of of green that's unpinnable, or you
Speaker 1: know these.
Speaker 2: Big slopes and giant scale.
Speaker 1: It's I'm lucky, I get I'm in like Langford Central
Speaker 1: and Chicago, so I've seen a lot of his stuff
Speaker 1: and he is definitely underappreciated over you know, yes, it's
Speaker 1: so you want to do some overrated underrated.
Speaker 3: If we're at that point already.
Speaker 2: I got one Hickory's underrated.
Speaker 5: What about overrated? Underrated Pebble Beach?
Speaker 4: It's for me, it's overrated. And can I answer this
Speaker 4: for me and Chris Dahlheimer. I have this conversation with
Speaker 4: them all the time, just how it's not I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm not trying to pick on them. I just enjoy
Speaker 4: talking with him about it. Just the size of the greens,
Speaker 4: and it's become it's that the shifting baseline. And it's
Speaker 4: also how the golf course has become defined by how
Speaker 4: small the greens are. Another golf course is Brookline. Brookline
Speaker 4: is defined by really small greens. I've got an article
Speaker 4: from nineteen twenty three or something that their greens were
Speaker 4: huge compared to what they have now. But the landforms
Speaker 4: have changed with the work that's been done over the years.
Speaker 4: But being able to look at the old pictures and
Speaker 4: a lot of work's been done at Pebble, but Egan's
Speaker 4: work in twenty eight to get it ready for the
Speaker 4: amateur was awesome, you know, the the faux dunes and
Speaker 4: the width and bringing all the fairways over closer to
Speaker 4: the how I mean, to the ocean. I mean, they
Speaker 4: were pretty they were moved over. I've got some really
Speaker 4: cool sketches by a golf pro adict Olympic Club that
Speaker 4: shows where the old fairways were and where they moved
Speaker 4: them to. And it was they were playing it safe
Speaker 4: for a long time there. But Pebble's yeah, it's a
Speaker 4: great it's a great place. But those greens. I would
Speaker 4: love to see him bigger in the fairways too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, some of those some of those old pictures that
Speaker 5: have been popping up on Twitter the last you know,
Speaker 5: two three months of you know, six, seven, nine, eight ten,
Speaker 5: those holes kind of on the coast at Pebble just
Speaker 5: look out of control. How cool they were.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's I mean, I've got a couple
Speaker 4: different I've got like three or four different write ups
Speaker 4: on all the chain that he made.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just Egan. He gets slampooned a little
Speaker 3: bit for.
Speaker 4: Eugene, you know, with all the work that wasn't so good,
Speaker 4: but what he did there was really good.
Speaker 1: One of Chicago's finest. Yeah, Olympian X for a member
Speaker 1: that Don Holt, shout out Don Hilton. He's done a
Speaker 1: lot of He's a great historian.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I think Egan is he was a precursor
Speaker 4: to Bobby Jones. You know, he he took the game
Speaker 4: by storm, and you know he was a flogger. I
Speaker 4: mean he hit the ball along ways he just didn't
Speaker 4: know where it was going, but he could recover. And uh,
Speaker 4: I think it was the four oh five Open Amateurs
Speaker 4: that he won Chicago and somebody.
Speaker 2: Else Olympics too. No, he came in second second.
Speaker 5: And yeah, you know what was interesting to hear about
Speaker 5: what he was mentioning about Pebble kind of before they
Speaker 5: changed it for the US am. You know a lot
Speaker 5: of those fairways kind of way off the cliffs and
Speaker 5: stuff kind of reminds me of Tory. Yeah, sad deal.
Speaker 5: Got to use the gotta use the natural hazards, right, they're.
Speaker 1: The most intimidating thing you could put on a golf
Speaker 1: course is an ocean cliff.
Speaker 5: Yes, that's like five hundred feet.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's probably like the best hazard and the most
Speaker 1: the best way you can intimidate someone to play away
Speaker 1: from the ideal line.
Speaker 5: Right, it seems like Tory Pines. It's like, so it's
Speaker 5: almost too easy to put a good golf course out
Speaker 5: there that it's so sad to see what it is
Speaker 5: with how easy it could be. Unbelievable. What do you
Speaker 5: think about that?
Speaker 4: Well, for me, for me, I played it a couple
Speaker 4: of years ago now, and the setup was what I
Speaker 4: was having a hard time the setup. I mean, the
Speaker 4: rough was too long. It was just it was set
Speaker 4: up for you, not for me. And uh and again
Speaker 4: you get a lot of people going out there for that,
Speaker 4: but yeah, I mean it just felt like it was there.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of potential out there.
Speaker 1: So one of the municipality's big pushbacks on wid is
Speaker 1: always maintenance costs going up.
Speaker 2: I always say, well you could.
Speaker 1: You're probably gonna have more rounds to combat that because
Speaker 1: people are going to go around faster and they're gonna
Speaker 1: play more. Like what kind of maintenance costs say you
Speaker 1: were going from twenty five to forty increase, would.
Speaker 4: You see, Well, it depends on the area of country here,
Speaker 4: and I mean if you go back east, they're gonna
Speaker 4: they're funderside.
Speaker 3: Budget's gonna go double.
Speaker 4: But for us out here, I mean, you guys say,
Speaker 4: some snow mold on our fairways, we don't really, it's
Speaker 4: very minimal. We'll have it and we won't treat it.
Speaker 4: But you know, it's just another it's a different mower
Speaker 4: mow in the grass.
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 3: The coughs.
Speaker 4: As you're saying, the costs will offset itself to some
Speaker 4: degree by having more people out there to enjoy it
Speaker 4: and to get them around the course a little quicker
Speaker 4: because they're going to be able to find their ball
Speaker 4: or you know, it's just an easier walk.
Speaker 2: You know, if they stayed wide, you wouldn't see car
Speaker 2: pass inside of bunkers.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 2: What's your biggest pet? Peeve?
Speaker 3: Just cart use? Whoops?
Speaker 2: I mean Zach had a bad cart use today.
Speaker 5: No, I don't think it was bad. I think we
Speaker 5: just needed it. Uh, we needed the you had the
Speaker 5: drone in there. It's like I didn't want to have
Speaker 5: to carry the camera around I was doing it more
Speaker 5: for you. Honestly, I didn't want to ride.
Speaker 3: I mean for me. I make.
Speaker 4: When you get out to play golf, I mean, the
Speaker 4: whole point is to get out and enjoy being outside,
Speaker 4: enjoy the camaraderie with your fellow golfers. You get behind
Speaker 4: the wheel and it's just you might as well be
Speaker 4: on the on the one oh one. You know, you
Speaker 4: you're turning the radio stations on your phone, texting somebody.
Speaker 4: You know, just drop it, you know, get out of
Speaker 4: the cart and just walk and enjoy. You know, take
Speaker 4: a caddy or take a four bagger and you know,
Speaker 4: put four backs on the cart and have have a
Speaker 4: couple of people walking and just push them a little bit.
Speaker 4: I've got a member here that I'm always giving him
Speaker 4: a hard time, but it's it's really fun when when
Speaker 4: I see him and he's walking.
Speaker 3: He's like, I'm over here walking and see me.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: It's but it's it's trying to change the culture, and
Speaker 4: you know, cal Club is you know, probably the embodiment
Speaker 4: embodiment of that culture change, and it's not an easy
Speaker 4: culture change. I think Thomas Bastus when he was still there,
Speaker 4: he tweeted out a picture of just a member event.
Speaker 4: I don't know if it was a member guest or whatnot,
Speaker 4: but it was all walking backs and you just don't
Speaker 4: see that when you have an outside event. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's let's get in the cart and go play golf
Speaker 4: and drive around. And you know, for me, it's the experience.
Speaker 4: No matter how many times I play golf, which I
Speaker 4: haven't played a lot, just a lot of things going on,
Speaker 4: raising three girls in the Bay Area, working, I just
Speaker 4: don't play as much.
Speaker 3: But when I do, it's gonna be walking and with
Speaker 3: some good company.
Speaker 5: It really is amazing how much more enjoyable golf is
Speaker 5: when you walk. Like I mean, I even noticed it today.
Speaker 5: I'm sitting there, you know, texting and looking at Twitter,
Speaker 5: and all you guys are back there talking and then
Speaker 5: I get up to the ball and sit there for
Speaker 5: like two or three minutes waiting for everybody, you know,
Speaker 5: and all you guys are just talking about how cool
Speaker 5: all the features are looking at everything, and I'm like, gosh,
Speaker 5: I should have watked, but like it's so bad. In Utah,
Speaker 5: there's not one golf course that promotes walking, like, not
Speaker 5: one private club, not one public place. It's like cartball everywhere.
Speaker 4: It sucks, and it's really easy to promote it instead
Speaker 4: of you know, somebody comes into the pro shop and
Speaker 4: y know, I'm gonna play eighteen holes.
Speaker 3: Oh are you going to walk today? I mean usually
Speaker 3: it's the opposite. Are you going to take a cart?
Speaker 3: I mean, we just just need to simply change the
Speaker 3: conversation right in walk.
Speaker 1: What kills me is the places that have the cart
Speaker 1: included in the rate. You know, like our rate sixty
Speaker 1: dollars with it, it comes with a cart cart included.
Speaker 2: It's like, what why would you do that? I think?
Speaker 5: You know, I got on this conversation with my dad
Speaker 5: the other day, who is in that side of the business,
Speaker 5: and he kind of talked about it's that that revenue.
Speaker 5: You know, it's the pro shop, the pros wanting to
Speaker 5: make a couple extra box by by getting the carts,
Speaker 5: you know, the cart money. Yeah, just sad.
Speaker 4: There's the flip side of cart paths and ropes and signs.
Speaker 4: I mean, especially out here where we're it's such a
Speaker 4: beautiful property and one of the things we're trying to
Speaker 4: do is illuminate signs in ropes. But there's still we
Speaker 4: have outside play on some mondays and it's the carts
Speaker 4: still will just end up going anywhere if you don't
Speaker 4: put the ropes up. I mean there's new technology with
Speaker 4: the GPS and all that, but it all costs money.
Speaker 3: And just walking it's good for your health. I mean,
Speaker 3: we have a we have a gentleman here that's in
Speaker 3: his I mean he's ninety eight. I thought it was.
Speaker 4: Ninety five, but not a big difference there. But he
Speaker 4: plays eighteen holes and then he'll jump on a cart
Speaker 4: and play another nine.
Speaker 5: Geeze.
Speaker 3: So for the it's good for your health.
Speaker 1: So ten rounds Northern California. So we're gonna take We're
Speaker 1: gonna say from kind of the pebble Cypress, Monterey North,
Speaker 1: how are you you get ten rounds?
Speaker 2: How are you split them up? You can do multiples
Speaker 2: at places.
Speaker 4: This is an exercise I do occasionally. I kind of
Speaker 4: keep it to the Bay Area because I don't want
Speaker 4: to throw Monterey in it. But I would only play Cypress.
Speaker 4: Are we talking ten times in one year?
Speaker 2: Or just you get ten rounds?
Speaker 3: Ten rounds?
Speaker 4: I would still I will say I will play Cypress once, okay,
Speaker 4: And just because when I go out there, I'm gonna
Speaker 4: it's gonna be that moment that I'm there, and if
Speaker 4: I play it more than once, then I'm not gonna
Speaker 4: it's not gonna be. I'm taking advantage of it. San
Speaker 4: Francisco's in there, Metal Club, Claremont, I guess there'll have
Speaker 4: to be multiple times, but uh, you know, Monterey Peninsula.
Speaker 4: I have yet to see the Dunes course, so I'll
Speaker 4: throw that in there. Even I would, I was excited
Speaker 4: that there was some possibility of it, that they might
Speaker 4: have gone rainer with it, but that kind of obviously
Speaker 4: fell through. You know, Pacific Grove, the back nine, I
Speaker 4: would play that twice and to skip the front with
Speaker 4: the houses. But you know, Presidio was fun for the
Speaker 4: for the challenge of the hills and the history of
Speaker 4: the course, with the property being golf on that property
Speaker 4: since eighteen ninety five.
Speaker 3: I would lose Country lost, I know.
Speaker 4: But uh, you know, Clairemont for me, I would always
Speaker 4: say ten ten rounds of golf just in the Bay area,
Speaker 4: and it would be, you know, about six times at Meadow,
Speaker 4: three times at Sam Francisco, and then one at Claremont.
Speaker 4: I really like Claremont, the crossing holes, the history, it
Speaker 4: doesn't have to be long, to be fun, and it's challenging.
Speaker 5: So I would say one of the cooler things like
Speaker 5: we learned this week that wasn't today, was how we
Speaker 5: learned that the Presidio was the original s you know,
Speaker 5: San Francisco Golf Club, and then they moved to a place,
Speaker 5: and then then they moved again. Yeah, then they moved
Speaker 5: again and Cal Club bought ingle Side, the second one,
Speaker 5: the second you know, the second go around, and then
Speaker 5: found another place and built it. So at one time
Speaker 5: that Ingle Side was Cal Club and s F and.
Speaker 3: It was almost and it was almost Olympic Club.
Speaker 5: Dang, that would have been so Olympic Club.
Speaker 3: Was looking at the second course and they ended up
Speaker 3: buying the Lakeside property golf course which had.
Speaker 4: Just been built, and they made a bunch of quite
Speaker 4: a few changes to it, so there was quite a jumble.
Speaker 4: And it didn't help that ingleside the old course and
Speaker 4: the new course. I mean, they were so close to
Speaker 4: each other. It makes it a challenge to do some
Speaker 4: research on it and figure out.
Speaker 3: Which course they're actually talking about. Yeah, you know San Francisco.
Speaker 4: Is that was probably one of the courses I did
Speaker 4: my most research on because you would look at the
Speaker 4: course ratings, you know, the top one hundreds, and Golf
Speaker 4: Digest would say it was designed.
Speaker 3: I mean it opened.
Speaker 4: It was a tilling Acid open in nineteen eighteen, and
Speaker 4: then Golf Week would say it was nineteen twenty one
Speaker 4: or twenty and somebody else would say another date. And
Speaker 4: I'm like, wow, you would think somebody would have this
Speaker 4: figured out by now when it opened and who designed it.
Speaker 3: And I got interested in the history of it.
Speaker 4: And for me, you know, I try to identify the
Speaker 4: architects and the evolution of a golf course and the
Speaker 4: importance of not sticking to what becomes mythology, which is
Speaker 4: in some ways rooted in facts, but it.
Speaker 3: Gets bigger and bigger.
Speaker 4: To build up the stature of a certain club, and
Speaker 4: it happens all over the place. It doesn't matter what
Speaker 4: course it is. But you know San Francisco the first,
Speaker 4: you know, the first property eighteen ninety five. I can't
Speaker 4: say that with accuracy the original architect, but it played
Speaker 4: over just the first couple of holes right there off
Speaker 4: the clubhouse. All nine holes played over nine, ten and
Speaker 4: eighteen today and then they moved due to the use
Speaker 4: of the property as the training grounds for the military.
Speaker 3: They moved to the second Engle Side course, and I
Speaker 3: believe I have the artchitect of the course, but I
Speaker 3: need to get another verification.
Speaker 4: But it was one of John Clark, who had two
Speaker 4: sons that would go on to be golf pros. But
Speaker 4: and then they moved and opened up the current course
Speaker 4: in February of nineteen eighteen, and it was designed by
Speaker 4: three members, so and it kind of got lampooned in
Speaker 4: the same way that Pebble Beach did when.
Speaker 3: It first opened.
Speaker 4: There was quite a bit of criticism over the quality
Speaker 4: of the Lynks and some changes were made even before
Speaker 4: tilling Ass was there, to the point that you know
Speaker 4: what we see on the front nine was drastically changed
Speaker 4: before tilling Ass to even made changes to the course.
Speaker 4: And then tilling Ass was brought in and the end
Speaker 4: of nineteen nineteen and twenty and he had a plan
Speaker 4: drawn up.
Speaker 3: And this is the same time Herbert Follower was in
Speaker 3: the area.
Speaker 4: So it's really interesting the dichotomy of and Rayner was
Speaker 4: there and nineteen eighteen he actually stayed at the clubhouse
Speaker 4: at San Francisco.
Speaker 5: I knew I felt it.
Speaker 3: Have you guys seen did you did you guys play Olympic.
Speaker 5: Club already we played the cliffs course.
Speaker 3: Okay, did you see the routing map? Have you seen
Speaker 3: his routing map for rainers routing map?
Speaker 5: Someone posted it. I've seen it a little bit, but
Speaker 5: we didn't look at it the other day.
Speaker 3: It's pretty cools. It in there, Yeah, it's in there.
Speaker 5: We missed, we missed a boat there. Would you say
Speaker 5: I got one more overrated? Underrated San Francisco Golf Club? Overrated, underrated.
Speaker 3: Tracky it's.
Speaker 5: Or properly rated, properly rated.
Speaker 3: I'm the middle of the road on that one. I mean,
Speaker 3: I feel like.
Speaker 4: There's I know, I know it more from a historical standpoint,
Speaker 4: I love you know, they've they've added some bunkers that
Speaker 4: you know, tilling Us had taken out later on again,
Speaker 4: for me, the Greens feel like they need to be
Speaker 4: a little bigger. The fairway with is awesome out there.
Speaker 4: My favorite t shot is number one with Mega with
Speaker 4: it's you know, it's it's a close second to Saint
Speaker 4: Andrews on with I haven't measured it, but it can't.
Speaker 3: Be whiter than that. But it's a special place.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I mean, you know, with.
Speaker 3: You know, you're drawing a fine line on honoring all.
Speaker 4: The work that's been done out there, and but at
Speaker 4: the same time you're nervous and are we going to
Speaker 4: make it better or are we compromising something? And you
Speaker 4: don't want to compromise anything, especially at San Francisco Golf Club.
Speaker 4: It's it's that special of a place. When you walk
Speaker 4: out there, it just gives me the chills. On most
Speaker 4: days it does give you the chills, but depending on
Speaker 4: how much FOG's there. But it's I think it's right
Speaker 4: where it needs to be. And you know, they they're
Speaker 4: still making changes to it. The fourth hole, they've made
Speaker 4: some adjustments to it, the reef hole, you know they
Speaker 4: got Yeah, I mean, I'm glad they went back to
Speaker 4: the original routing where they the Harold Samson routing got
Speaker 4: changed back thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. That's just me being
Speaker 4: a historian.
Speaker 1: But Samson Samson really loved the dog like the tree
Speaker 1: lined dog like huh.
Speaker 3: He worked those pretty hard.
Speaker 5: Shout out to the Da Keto for bringing it back, right.
Speaker 2: I think Tom Duk did the work.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah, good job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that little green bunk ring there is phenomenal. I
Speaker 1: think it's in the front line of Front nine. Topography
Speaker 1: is pretty unbelievable.
Speaker 4: I definitely for me, the front nine is is great
Speaker 4: out there, just the variety of shots, and you know,
Speaker 4: the twelfth is another great hole out there. I love
Speaker 4: the T shot and the challenge of getting the second
Speaker 4: shot figured out.
Speaker 1: Would you go Front nine s F back nine, PASA
Speaker 1: if you could put two Bay Area nine together.
Speaker 5: Ye can't wait to see PASA tomorrow.
Speaker 2: It's gonna be It's gonna be good.
Speaker 1: So uh, I guess the last overrated underrated would will
Speaker 1: be yardage finder guns and finders, range finders, range finders overrated.
Speaker 4: I'm kind of from I'm just old school. I just
Speaker 4: will stand up and I'm gonna I'm gonna just look
Speaker 4: at it and gauge it, and I think it for
Speaker 4: you know, some of the stuff that we have out
Speaker 4: here and some of the other courses, Mackenzie courses where
Speaker 4: he's visually challenging you to know, the yardage kind of
Speaker 4: defeats some of that. But you know, everybody wants every
Speaker 4: advantage they can get, and that seems to be one
Speaker 4: that has struck a chord with people either on their
Speaker 4: watcher or whatever device they want to use, the sprinkler
Speaker 4: head or or what have you. And from a pace
Speaker 4: of play standpoint, I think there's some benefit to it,
Speaker 4: but we're not addressing the other benefits, which we've already
Speaker 4: talked about, having you know, more more with in the
Speaker 4: fairways and less rough and you know, green speed. I
Speaker 4: just keep harping on those because I think those are
Speaker 4: really important and we get back to those simple things
Speaker 4: we you know, the time that we gained from using
Speaker 4: a yards finder is it's not a big deal. It's
Speaker 4: the other things that we need to do to make
Speaker 4: golf more enjoyable. We don't need it to have a
Speaker 4: we don't need twelve inch holes, and we don't need
Speaker 4: to play foot golf. You know, they can if they want,
Speaker 4: but there's we just need to get back to what
Speaker 4: really you know, the biggest boom in golf was the twenties.
Speaker 4: I don't I don't fall into the idea that Tiger Woods.
Speaker 3: Was all. He did a great thing for golf, but
Speaker 3: I think he kind of ushered in a more consumer
Speaker 3: based golf and thought and you know, cart golf and
Speaker 3: you know what shoes I'm going to wear tigerproofing and tigerproofing.
Speaker 5: You know, I mean, me and Andy talk about it
Speaker 5: a little bit. I think they got the whole tigerproofing
Speaker 5: thing so wrong.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: It's like, he's such a he's such a long hitter,
Speaker 5: and he was hitting it by everybody, and he was
Speaker 5: a power player, and so they wanted to push the
Speaker 5: t's further back, and they wanted to make the bunkers
Speaker 5: more in play for you know, longer hitters. But it's
Speaker 5: like all they should have done to tigerproof courses is
Speaker 5: like make courses shorter and wider, and the exact opposite.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, we just keep seeing the yards go up.
Speaker 4: And you know, one of the things I've looked at
Speaker 4: is US Opens and how they've changed the first course
Speaker 4: over seventh. The first course at seven thousand yards was
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirty seven at Oakland Hills, and it would
Speaker 4: be sixty years before they got to seventy two hundred yards,
Speaker 4: and then all of a sudden, in the last twenty
Speaker 4: one years or.
Speaker 5: So, what did we hit seventy We're pushing eight thousand.
Speaker 4: So the golf has it's changed that dramatically in such
Speaker 4: a short period of time. And they used these numbers
Speaker 4: where they talk about the average yardage has gone up
Speaker 4: point two yards on certain tours and gone down on
Speaker 4: the others by point two. If you do the math,
Speaker 4: I mean you should add about three yards in the
Speaker 4: last fifteen or so years. I think it's fourteen years
Speaker 4: since Shinnakok hosted the last US Open. They added four
Speaker 4: hundred and fifty three if I remember the number right,
Speaker 4: four hundred and fifty yards to a golf course.
Speaker 3: They've added a par four. Yeah, it's long a lot more.
Speaker 5: I played there last year from the US Open tees
Speaker 5: and it's a it's definitely a big boy course, so
Speaker 5: it'll be interesting to see it is awesome though that
Speaker 5: place is sick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know the corn Crunshaw did the work
Speaker 4: leading up to it, and they've widened.
Speaker 3: The fairways a lot mega with and now they've kind
Speaker 3: of narrowed them down a little bit. I mean, as
Speaker 3: much as the USA wants to say.
Speaker 4: This is still wider than the previous US Open, they
Speaker 4: still send a negative connotation by narrowing it. They're still
Speaker 4: saying it's there's an issue with it being wide, and
Speaker 4: it's just for me, it's a hang up that a
Speaker 4: lot of people have just this notion that golf has
Speaker 4: to be hard or a challenge, or it can't be
Speaker 4: easier because we cut down these trees. We don't want
Speaker 4: to make the golf course easier. I mean, it's show
Speaker 4: me the scores.
Speaker 1: The other thing is like everybody's like, well, this era
Speaker 1: is so much more talented, so much better players like
Speaker 1: their you know, technology is better, Like the game's not
Speaker 1: the same as it used to be, but we still
Speaker 1: have to hold on to the same score as like
Speaker 1: the sacred number, Like, oh this is the if it's
Speaker 1: not close to par a, it's not a real us opening.
Speaker 1: It's like, well, the game has changed dramatically, so like
Speaker 1: why would the par still be the same if everybody's
Speaker 1: better and technology is better.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean even you're just talking about from the
Speaker 4: players standpoint, I mean you need to talk about what
Speaker 4: we're doing as superintendents in the technology that we bring
Speaker 4: to the game with our moisture meters, our new products
Speaker 4: of wedding agents, and I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 4: stuff that we're doing that has driven some of this
Speaker 4: as well. And so technology as a whole has really
Speaker 4: taken the game and pushed it in the wrong direction.
Speaker 4: And having just come back from the UK and Ireland
Speaker 4: and seeing some amazing golf courses and learning and seeing
Speaker 4: what they do over there. I mean I met with
Speaker 4: did a course tour with Amen the links mean, as
Speaker 4: you're there at Royal County down and just listening to
Speaker 4: what they don't do over there, and they still provide
Speaker 4: wonderful course conditions.
Speaker 3: And we can be our own worst enemy, and we can.
Speaker 4: We have a lot of tools to do a lot
Speaker 4: of things, but at some point the game's going to
Speaker 4: be We're already up against it with yardage and all
Speaker 4: these other things. But at the same time, the cost
Speaker 4: of maintaining courses, the dues that are members see environmental concerns.
Speaker 4: I mean there's all these in labor.
Speaker 3: I mean labor.
Speaker 4: If you talk to anybody in our industry, labor is
Speaker 4: at our I mean we're running into robot mowers now.
Speaker 4: I mean we're out there trying to figure out how
Speaker 4: can we maintain greens and do all this work, but
Speaker 4: with a labor force that's reducing and in our association,
Speaker 4: our golf course superintendents in Northern California, we're trying to
Speaker 4: figure out how we can get interns to come out
Speaker 4: and work at some of our better courses. And it's
Speaker 4: it's a challenge. I mean, the job market out there,
Speaker 4: it's just not it's not what it used to be.
Speaker 4: And so we were trying to get our get our
Speaker 4: story out there and try to get some young people
Speaker 4: interested in our industry. And it's you know, we're working
Speaker 4: with our the National Golf Course Superintendent's Association, you know,
Speaker 4: trying to get that out there and go to job
Speaker 4: fairs at high schools and and let people know that
Speaker 4: this is a viable job with a lot of.
Speaker 3: Character building and you know, you can take care of
Speaker 3: your family stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty cool gig to just get to hang
Speaker 1: out on the golf course every day too.
Speaker 3: It's not bad the early mornings, sunrises, sunsets. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's just I don't know where i'd be if I
Speaker 3: wasn't doing this work.
Speaker 2: What's better light? Morning light or night light or like
Speaker 2: a sunset light for pictures?
Speaker 5: What do you think.
Speaker 4: For my personal schedule? The morning light is better, But
Speaker 4: I love being up here late in the afternoons. The
Speaker 4: colors are the It just looks better, looks drier. I
Speaker 4: guess it doesn't have as much luster when you have
Speaker 4: the do and stuff.
Speaker 1: Which of your peers has the best Instagram feed? Like,
Speaker 1: who's the guy the best photos of all of the supers?
Speaker 4: I just I literally just got on and started using Instagram.
Speaker 4: When you have six Twitter feeds, it's it's hard.
Speaker 3: To not be anywhere else.
Speaker 1: But uh.
Speaker 3: But I mean, I'm you know, Clyde Johnson, Is that right, Clyde?
Speaker 3: I really he's well, you.
Speaker 4: Know him, Clyde. Brian Palmer and Scott Pobacco. They just
Speaker 4: wrapped up yesterday their trip that we were on together
Speaker 4: with turf Net over in the UK and they hang
Speaker 4: out late and they were taking some amazing pictures of
Speaker 4: the golf that they're playing. They just need to keep
Speaker 4: doing that when they get home so we can see
Speaker 4: that what they're doing at their courses.
Speaker 1: Scott Vincent from on once a Club takes unbelievable photos.
Speaker 2: He's like real pro photo photographer, pros pro, pros pro.
Speaker 3: I'm working on it.
Speaker 4: I love you just see different things and we're superintendents.
Speaker 4: We know where the sun's coming up, we know where
Speaker 4: it's going down, we know which trees we don't want
Speaker 4: to have in the picture because we might be taking
Speaker 4: it out or or or you know, let's take a
Speaker 4: picture of this tree before we take it out, so
Speaker 4: we can show what it looked like before and after.
Speaker 2: You can just get that photoshop game down where you
Speaker 2: can just get them all out of there.
Speaker 3: Well that's I is it Google Earth before they changed you?
Speaker 3: Because now it's free, right.
Speaker 4: If you use one or the other, I can't remember
Speaker 4: which one, it'll flatten. If you go to street view
Speaker 4: on the golf course, it takes out all the trees,
Speaker 4: but it keeps the elevations.
Speaker 3: So I found that out.
Speaker 4: Late one night and I was up for a couple
Speaker 4: hours and I would just hit a t shot, stand
Speaker 4: in the fairway on one and just spin myself around,
Speaker 4: go to the green and spin myself around. And I
Speaker 4: did all eighteen holes, just looking for things that I
Speaker 4: don't normally see because of trees. And I went for
Speaker 4: I went to different golf courses all around the area.
Speaker 4: And I mean on my Google Earth, I've got all
Speaker 4: the maps that I put on, you know, all the
Speaker 4: different things we do for management of grubs and bermuda
Speaker 4: grass and all that. And then I have a section
Speaker 4: where it's just golf courses I want to visit and
Speaker 4: I just sit there and I'll study.
Speaker 3: I'm and you know, I'm out there. I've got with
Speaker 3: a new Google Earth now it's free.
Speaker 4: I can measure the fairway wits and to verify how
Speaker 4: things are going, and you know, to see where we're
Speaker 4: at and be able to you know, shinnecock. I've What
Speaker 4: I love is to be able to go in and
Speaker 4: uh because I was trying to figure out what the
Speaker 4: yardage was to add to my my my.
Speaker 3: Study of yardages.
Speaker 4: And I would go to the twenty sixteen seventeen find
Speaker 4: out where the t's are and then switch back to
Speaker 4: two thousand and four to see where they are in
Speaker 4: relation to what the tea's used to be. And it's
Speaker 4: really fun to study and see how they did it
Speaker 4: or you know, in some cases it's a lot of work.
Speaker 4: They cut trees down and moved I think it's on
Speaker 4: two or three. Maybe it's too you know, the tea
Speaker 4: moves over, gets closer over to to national a little bit,
Speaker 4: and you know, again the rhythm of a golf course
Speaker 4: for me is walking. You know, McKenzie had it right,
Speaker 4: you know, he he had He did talk about elasticity
Speaker 4: in his golf courses, but he didn't build in for
Speaker 4: how far the ball is going today? And you know
Speaker 4: what was it, Baltrazol. They were talking about, Oh, it's great.
Speaker 4: You know they didn't have to add any yardage to
Speaker 4: the golf course for this year's PGA. And it's I'm
Speaker 4: sitting there going, well, do they have any room to
Speaker 4: add yardage?
Speaker 3: And they really didn't.
Speaker 4: And at some point, you know, that's a long course.
Speaker 4: But we're going to start. We've already lost how many courses?
Speaker 6: And then you know, yeah, I played the PGA there. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's a it's a big course. It's hard, big ballpark,
Speaker 6: big ballpark.
Speaker 3: It's just a lot of walking.
Speaker 4: I mean in golf now with the guy sitting the
Speaker 4: ball for there, it slows play down if you hit
Speaker 4: the balls as far as you do, because you have
Speaker 4: to walk even further to get to the ball. It
Speaker 4: takes longer to walk that distance if it's another thirty
Speaker 4: forty yards.
Speaker 3: So there's there's a factor there. So that's why I
Speaker 3: mean five hour rounds.
Speaker 5: They're taking a long time right now. Yeah, not good.
Speaker 5: Four hours and ten seconds over a shot, four minutes,
Speaker 5: four minutes.
Speaker 2: Four hours felt like that geez can but uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: how can people find Sean Tully?
Speaker 4: Well, I got the one Twitter handle that I would
Speaker 4: point them to a couple of them. I just I
Speaker 4: try to stay under the radar, and I think only
Speaker 4: a couple of people I know.
Speaker 5: A couple of people know those burners.
Speaker 3: Yes, burners.
Speaker 2: It's just gonna but with one of them one day.
Speaker 4: The one is My main Twitter feed is at toll Fescue.
Speaker 4: I've had Tollescu as a it was like my first
Speaker 4: email address back in school trying to figure out something.
Speaker 4: Somebody us just leaned over and he said, Tollscue is
Speaker 4: your Twitter is your email address?
Speaker 3: And I was like that's good.
Speaker 4: And I've just kept it with everything. But it's mostly
Speaker 4: golf course architecture and just talking about golf and you know,
Speaker 4: anything that really gets me going. But uh, I posts
Speaker 4: for metal Club uh and uh and uh our association
Speaker 4: for golf course superintendents and then the other burners.
Speaker 3: I won't talk about.
Speaker 2: The next podcast, ye, just about the burner.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so thanks for coming on awesome day to day
Speaker 1: and yeah, everybody foul Sean and start walking off yardage
Speaker 1: fair away with.
Speaker 3: Please do thank you very much. It was it was great.
Speaker 4: I finally have you out here and do this podcast,
Speaker 4: and then we've tried to do it quite a few times.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hopefully you're the first of many. Yeah, thanks Zach.
Speaker 5: Absolutely you've been listening to the Fried Egg podcast. We
Speaker 5: do the digging for you.