Speaker 1: I miss the green, for example, I'm already upset. When
Speaker 1: I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in a brid egg.
Speaker 2: Friday egg, the dreaded Friday Friday fridagg brid egg Lie,
Speaker 2: I'm about ready to run.
Speaker 3: Off of the.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Andy Johnson. Today. I'm excited.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: This marks the beginning of our our really kind of
Speaker 1: big tournament, big tournament season, championship season, you could say
Speaker 1: March's Major. The players is starting off now. Albeit you
Speaker 1: know their their claims that they're a major.
Speaker 5: I do not.
Speaker 1: I do not consider it a major. And thus instead
Speaker 1: of five things, we do four things for the players.
Speaker 1: I am joined as always, not as always, but hopefully
Speaker 1: as always for the players by Sean Martin from PGA
Speaker 1: tour dot com. He is a long time regular guest
Speaker 1: of this podcast, has been way back since since the
Speaker 1: beginning days, so always nice to chop it up with Sean,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite golf minds, favorite golf people, and
Speaker 1: talk about the players his hometown event. So we will
Speaker 1: talk about the players, we'll dive into kind of the preview.
Speaker 1: It's obviously this week. Uh, we''ll be wrapping up with Bayhill.
Speaker 1: This is a Sunday release and we will be off
Speaker 1: and running.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: It kind of just signals that the Masters is really,
Speaker 1: really quickly approaching. On top of Sean, we have added
Speaker 1: in audio from a project that we did in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: I thought it'd be fun to throw this in here
Speaker 1: for those that listen. Then thank you for all of
Speaker 1: our new listeners. You may not have seen this or
Speaker 1: heard this. Garrett Morrison, one of my great colleagues here
Speaker 1: at Friday Golf, put together an incredible documentary style podcast
Speaker 1: about the building of TPC Sawgrass. It includes interviews with
Speaker 1: an interview with Dean Beeman. This is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite projects that we've ever done here, and I figured
Speaker 1: it was a time to re release it and add
Speaker 1: it to the end of this episode. Before we get
Speaker 1: to Sean, here is a word from Optim. Optim is
Speaker 1: making the healthcare system simpler, smarter, and more connected. Optims
Speaker 1: capabilities include patient care, pharmacy services, health intelligence, and AI.
Speaker 1: Optim is a proud partner of the Players Championship, and
Speaker 1: Rory McElroy is an optim Health Ambassador. Thanks to optim
Speaker 1: for their support of our players coverage. All right, let's
Speaker 1: get to Sean Martin. Proud to welcome in, not proud,
Speaker 1: happy to welcome in. Sean Martin. It's been a while,
Speaker 1: a long time regular of this podcast. Uh, Smartin, how
Speaker 1: are we doing?
Speaker 5: I'm good. This is like my annual appearance. I think
Speaker 5: it was this event last year that I was on
Speaker 5: last time. So I'm happy to be back, Happy to
Speaker 5: talk to players.
Speaker 1: You know, cutting down to one one one episode a
Speaker 1: week has you know, limited guests appearances.
Speaker 5: You know, it's a higher bar to clearer to get
Speaker 5: on the guest list.
Speaker 1: It's a scarcity schedule, right, But excited to talk about
Speaker 1: your hometown event the players. Uh, you know, there's listen,
Speaker 1: there's there's not many people with the with the sheer
Speaker 1: amount of players expertise as you, and that's why this
Speaker 1: is the podcast that you out.
Speaker 5: I like that, you know, I'm technically a TVC Sawgraphs member,
Speaker 5: so I feel like I know the course intimately. Maybe
Speaker 5: I can add some insight as well. But uh, big,
Speaker 5: big fan of the players, love the tournament, love having
Speaker 5: my backyard, love hosting all of my you know, frends
Speaker 5: from the golf media get to come like and show
Speaker 5: them Jacksonville's finals for the week. It's always it's a
Speaker 5: great week for all of those reasons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where are we going to beget in dinner this week?
Speaker 5: That's a great question. Mann put me on the spot.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have We're gonna have PJ and and Joseph
Speaker 1: Young the young iNTS with us.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: We'll have to go, you know, talk nineties sports. Uh
Speaker 1: and educate them.
Speaker 5: Well, you might have to join us. PJ and Joseph
Speaker 5: and myself have to go back to bricks bar. I
Speaker 5: think on Wednesday for sports Trivia, I think we have
Speaker 5: to defend our second place finish it cost us they
Speaker 5: The final question was who was the first person say
Speaker 5: I'm going to Disneyland after winning a Super Bowl? And
Speaker 5: I think I into Phil Simms. But Phil Simms was
Speaker 5: the second one. I think he actually was correct. I
Speaker 5: think it was Doug Williams of the Washington Red Now Commanders.
Speaker 5: I think I talked PJ out of it. I swore
Speaker 5: as Phil Simms. I think because I was older and
Speaker 5: closer to the time, he allowed it. But unfortunately I
Speaker 5: was wrong. We really need Brandon would have nailed it.
Speaker 5: Big commander's guy hometown team. He would have killed it.
Speaker 5: He would have gotten that answer for us.
Speaker 1: Excited for my annual week in Jacksonville Beach Area. It's
Speaker 1: a delightful place this time of year. We've got the
Speaker 1: players in March. How are we feeling about the players
Speaker 1: at Marsh in general?
Speaker 5: I mean, that's my first thing. I don't know if
Speaker 5: I want to spoil it yet.
Speaker 1: We're doing four things I heard, so just four.
Speaker 5: Sure, let's start. So my first one is just the
Speaker 5: winners in March. Right, there's been six players in March.
Speaker 5: The winners are Rory twice, Scotty twice, Justin Thomas, Cameron Smith,
Speaker 5: So twelve combined majors among the group, and everyone except
Speaker 5: camra Smith was a major winner before they became a
Speaker 5: Players Champion. Cameron obviously won his major later that year.
Speaker 1: I had this as like a sub title to one
Speaker 1: of mine. My my mad story was the race for
Speaker 1: three players between Rory and Scottie. It's not maybe it's
Speaker 1: you know, that's I think like a fantastic story for
Speaker 1: the players. But also the sub was this incredible run
Speaker 1: of majors winner made or of players winners. God, I
Speaker 1: just tripped up a Freudian slipped there. Incredible run of players, winners,
Speaker 1: and you know, I for years it's been the storyline
Speaker 1: with with sawgrasses like it's fluky, we don't know who's
Speaker 1: gonna win. Look at the look at the winner winner's list.
Speaker 1: You get a lot of flukes. And now you look
Speaker 1: at it and I don't know where the flukes are.
Speaker 5: No has gone back to March. You know. I think
Speaker 5: obviously some people may criticize the overseed, some people may
Speaker 5: be on this podcast, but I do think that you know,
Speaker 5: Rory uh has said that in March it's more of
Speaker 5: a driver's golf course. It's a little softer, you have
Speaker 5: to driver more often, obviously plays longer. March it was
Speaker 5: very much I would say March was almost more like
Speaker 5: Harbor Town in a sense of like you're really plodding
Speaker 5: your way around there. It's really firm and fast, a
Speaker 5: lot of irons off of teas and May now yeah May, sorry, yeah,
Speaker 5: May was firm and fast. March it's really I mean,
Speaker 5: it's a you've got to hit driver, and obviously you've
Speaker 5: got to hit it well. And so I think that's
Speaker 5: one reason for the strong winners we've had so far.
Speaker 1: The other aspect of of I think the advantage that
Speaker 1: March has beyond just history. You know, it's just kind
Speaker 1: of like when you expect to watch the players is
Speaker 1: right now, and it's a great ramp up for the
Speaker 1: first major of the year. You know, is is the
Speaker 1: the wind. March is just a windier times. I think
Speaker 1: it's the windiest month. I might be wrong in Florida.
Speaker 5: I don't know what that one, but I remember Paul
Speaker 5: Tasori told me the wind actually is different in March
Speaker 5: versus May. So in May seventeen and eighteen played downwind
Speaker 5: and in March usually seventeen and eighteen played into the wind.
Speaker 5: So like even when Ricky won, Ricky hit like three
Speaker 5: wood gap ledge to eighteen and now it's back to
Speaker 5: being that brute of a finishing hole.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the so I just think the wind is more
Speaker 1: of a factor. I wish the golf course could play firmer,
Speaker 1: even just the greens. I think like we've seen numerous
Speaker 1: ball in hand situations over the last couple of years,
Speaker 1: which I just, you know, you wish that wasn't the case.
Speaker 1: But I do think May or March is a much
Speaker 1: better date and you know, I've talked to some superintendents
Speaker 1: in the area and it is like, really, it would
Speaker 1: be really dicey to be Bermuda at that point. From
Speaker 1: what they've told me, is like it's not super ideal
Speaker 1: at that time of year.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's the weather this time of year too,
Speaker 5: and I think maybe one why the champions have been
Speaker 5: so good. March you get such a wider variety of weather.
Speaker 5: Like May, it's either hot or thunderstorms, so it's either
Speaker 5: blazing hot or you're in a rain delay. March you
Speaker 5: get some rain here without lightnings, you're playing through that,
Speaker 5: you can get some higher wins. We've seen it in
Speaker 5: a few of the March playing since it went back
Speaker 5: to March, Like, you just get a wider variety of
Speaker 5: weather that guys have to play through.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about the race for three.
Speaker 1: It gives us an opportunity to talk about Rory and Scotty.
Speaker 1: You know, if you were handicapping this, who would you
Speaker 1: say has the better chance at earning their third Players
Speaker 1: Champion Chip this year?
Speaker 5: I feel like Scotty, he's already got a win obviously,
Speaker 5: and then really two weeks where he won the last
Speaker 5: fifty four holes just had some sort of you know,
Speaker 5: fluky bad start, So I think I'd probably give an
Speaker 5: edge to Scotty for that one. I do think Rory is,
Speaker 5: you know, he showed some great form at the end
Speaker 5: of the year. He's had a good start to the year,
Speaker 5: and I think the good vibes of heading towards Augusta
Speaker 5: and his title defense are I'm in a good spot,
Speaker 5: but I'm probably leaning Scotty here. Plus, i mean, Scotty's
Speaker 5: done well. We always said, you know, what would happen
Speaker 5: if he became one of the world's best putters, and
Speaker 5: now he's one of the world's best putters.
Speaker 1: That's the crazy thing. I mean, you know, if you
Speaker 1: look at the stats, and I think it's it's too
Speaker 1: early to really dive into the stats on the year,
Speaker 1: but we're still going to do that. His iron play
Speaker 1: has been pedestrian this year, which is, you know, very
Speaker 1: Unscotty like and and you know, if I was another
Speaker 1: player on tour, I'd be absolutely terrified for it. I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that the other things, you know,
Speaker 1: Rory talked about this in his sit down interview with
Speaker 1: Kevin Van Walkenberg that's on our YouTube channel. But he
Speaker 1: talked about how Scotty has like no ego, how he's
Speaker 1: he kind of like fits, you know, and this is
Speaker 1: me interpreting this, like he doesn't care, he said he
Speaker 1: didn't doesn't care about being the longest in our group.
Speaker 1: But the way Scotty's able to tailor his his driver
Speaker 1: to the golf course where he kind of you know,
Speaker 1: looks at the golf course and what it's giving him
Speaker 1: and isn't afraid to hit you know, two hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety yard cuts or you know, if it's a place
Speaker 1: where it's bombs away, you know, tee it high and
Speaker 1: you start to see him hit. You know, he can
Speaker 1: get into those low one eighties to one eighty four
Speaker 1: ball speed. It's he's a fascinating player because I feel
Speaker 1: like just so many guys on tour are are kind
Speaker 1: of a one speed player where this is my driver
Speaker 1: swing and I go, I go at it and you know,
Speaker 1: if I want to hit a fairway finder, I tee
Speaker 1: it down a little, and that's the way it works
Speaker 1: like Scotty. Scotty's like I don't even know what the
Speaker 1: right comp is, but it's like almost like a Pitcher
Speaker 1: that that doesn't throw the gas all the time that
Speaker 1: they have it's.
Speaker 5: Like with the driver, what he's like a Greg Maddox
Speaker 5: with the driver.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's it's incredible. Obviously. I
Speaker 1: think this is like for both of them, a landmark achievement.
Speaker 1: You're talking about you get a third players, You're doing
Speaker 1: something in the modern era that nobody's done. Jack Nicholas
Speaker 1: won three players, but that was before it moved to
Speaker 1: TPC Sawgrass Tiger Woods only having two players, Like, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is really, in a way, like the most detainable Tiger,
Speaker 1: Like okay, like Tiger's teed it up here his whole
Speaker 1: career and I'm going to pass him in and wins
Speaker 1: at a significant championship. That's a huge deal.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was also thinking too, like we have grave if
Speaker 5: they were in a showdown for this, like this title,
Speaker 5: Like I don't remember a Rory Scotty showdown. They've impaired
Speaker 5: a bunch on Thursdays and Fridays. They've obviously been one
Speaker 5: and two for a long time, but I can't point
Speaker 5: back to like a Rory Scotty showdown where it's like
Speaker 5: Mono amano for a title. I think it'd be cool
Speaker 5: if this was when we got it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the they haven't had like an epic do a
Speaker 1: lotside of you know, the Tour Championship, right, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know one that comes to mind where they were
Speaker 1: playing together late on Sunday they they were paired together
Speaker 1: in the final group at LACC and that was a
Speaker 1: four player race. You know, you had Wyndham, Rickey in
Speaker 1: the final group, Scotty and Rory in the second to
Speaker 1: last group. You think about I mean Scotty. Scotty's had
Speaker 1: some close calls at the US Open. I don't mean
Speaker 1: to change the subject here, but he had uh he
Speaker 1: had the country club obviously and uh la cec. Both
Speaker 1: of those. He was really in a position going into
Speaker 1: Sunday to win.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 5: I think you or Brendan when he was dogging his
Speaker 5: US Open record for a bit, I feel like.
Speaker 1: It wasn't me. I was dogging his Open championship record
Speaker 1: and he shoved in my face. He did, really really
Speaker 1: steamrolled steamrolled me.
Speaker 5: This this year Scotty with the driver is crazy because
Speaker 5: I feel like he has distant control with it to
Speaker 5: go out. You said, I don't remember last year, but
Speaker 5: like he wins as the CJ cop and there's a
Speaker 5: driver at part four there that's seventeen and it's like
Speaker 5: not a full send driver, and he was like hitting
Speaker 5: it pin high and almost I think he hit it
Speaker 5: stiff one day and the next week is quail Hollow
Speaker 5: and he almost holds out on fourteen when he's making
Speaker 5: that charge on Saturday to kind of separate, and it's
Speaker 5: just like, I mean, it's obviously a little bit of
Speaker 5: luck involved, especially on fourteen you're kind of rolling it
Speaker 5: down the hill, but like there's like distance control of
Speaker 5: the driver, which is insane.
Speaker 1: I think about. You know, billcore came on the pod
Speaker 1: and he talked about, you know, Trinity Forest Rip Trainy
Speaker 1: Forest is a tour set up, but he talked about
Speaker 1: the idea of like challenge great golf courses challenge players
Speaker 1: to hit a line off the tee he's and a
Speaker 1: distance they make you choose, you know, and he was like,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm trying to do with off the t
Speaker 1: shots and how this relates to the players. I think
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that the players does so
Speaker 1: well well and hazards is you have to pick a
Speaker 1: line and a distance off the tee to to drive
Speaker 1: it really well. Uh as as we illuminated as we
Speaker 1: kind of talked about the players in March, it being
Speaker 1: more driver heavy, I think has restored it, you know,
Speaker 1: some of that that challenge the May May date. You
Speaker 1: just saw so many irons off the tea.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely the diagonal hazards, Like that's the beauty of
Speaker 5: them is you got to do line and distance. We're
Speaker 5: talking about well rounded off the t though. I think
Speaker 5: that's what Rory showed last year when he won, and
Speaker 5: we talked about I think that stinger driver that he
Speaker 5: displayed at Pinehurst to use that's some like he hit
Speaker 5: less than half his fairways last year to win. I
Speaker 5: mean it was a great scrambling comp and it was
Speaker 5: the beginning of the year when you want to Pebbly
Speaker 5: talk about emulating Scotty by improving his short game, maybe
Speaker 5: being more conservative off the tee, and like he really
Speaker 5: put it into practice at the players, like wasn't hitting
Speaker 5: it well, definitely wasn't driving it well, but really kind
Speaker 5: of scrambled his way to winning.
Speaker 1: I you know, both of these guys kind of highlight
Speaker 1: you know, in the modern era and if you kind
Speaker 1: of look through. I guess like, I don't think you
Speaker 1: can be a great player without like a great short game.
Speaker 5: Yeah, short game is cool again now. I think because
Speaker 5: of that.
Speaker 1: It's you know, these these guys are such magicians, both
Speaker 1: of them around the Green and I think it gets
Speaker 1: your Scotty gets talked about some, but Rory, Rory kind
Speaker 1: of falls in that bucket of like Hideki Matsuyama, Sergio
Speaker 1: Garcia over the years, just like criminally under talked about.
Speaker 1: And you see it with you know, part five performance,
Speaker 1: how you eat up par fives is really like short game.
Speaker 1: You know, if you you know, you're not gonna hit
Speaker 1: every part five and two, but you're gonna be you know,
Speaker 1: if you drive it moderately, well, you're gonna be around
Speaker 1: every green and two for the for the in the
Speaker 1: modern game. And that's where short game just takes over
Speaker 1: and creates, you know, incredible scoring opportunities. Yeah, what's your
Speaker 1: what's your second thing?
Speaker 5: So since we only did four, I really jammed a
Speaker 5: lot of subtopics into these my value.
Speaker 1: You're taking my second taking by my approach, it drives
Speaker 1: Trevor Mullman always nuts.
Speaker 5: So my second thing is a combination of Chris Goddroup
Speaker 5: and Jacob Bridgeman both.
Speaker 1: We're on the same page here, there we go, let's go.
Speaker 5: But both have had amazing starts to the year, and
Speaker 5: I think, you know, they've both proven to be bona
Speaker 5: fide really good pg Tour players. They both made Eastlake
Speaker 5: last year, they've both won already this year, Chris has
Speaker 5: won twice, and they've won big events, and then that
Speaker 5: sort of so that the next step now is performing
Speaker 5: in big events, performing in the players, forming the majors,
Speaker 5: you know. I mean, both these guys are bona fide
Speaker 5: PGA Tour winners. They've closed tournaments out and so now
Speaker 5: it's going to be how do they perform big events
Speaker 5: this year? Like how big is the step that they're
Speaker 5: going to take into twenty six and it's gonna be
Speaker 5: defined by some of these events.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Chris got her up misscut last year. Uh in
Speaker 1: his first appearance. I think Bridgeman finished T fifty last
Speaker 1: year in his first appearance or T sixty the uh,
Speaker 1: I think it was T fifty. I might I wrote
Speaker 1: down in my notes T sixty though, like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: remembering what I saw and.
Speaker 5: You can't remember if you closed the loop on five
Speaker 5: if it's a five or six.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've misrecorded it on my notes here.
Speaker 5: Uh whatever was middle of the pack?
Speaker 1: Middle of the pack? I you know what about other
Speaker 1: other things here? With those two is we've seen the
Speaker 1: player of the players at TPC Sawgrass kind of be
Speaker 1: a thorn in young player sides learning how to play
Speaker 1: the golf course and figuring out how to play it
Speaker 1: in particular, the one that would I think Bridgeman's kind
Speaker 1: of more of this, like well rounded, you know, does
Speaker 1: everything pretty well. I don't think he wouldn't alarm me,
Speaker 1: but like Chris got her up, maybe there's a period
Speaker 1: of time where he needs the to learn how to
Speaker 1: attack TPC Sawgrass the restraint he has to show in
Speaker 1: places and you know, certain spots that he has to
Speaker 1: get to in order to attack. But I think that's
Speaker 1: that's an interesting subcard on this is like do we
Speaker 1: see both one of them they've been the stories of
Speaker 1: the spring. Do we see one or both of them
Speaker 1: play play well here? Or do we see uh TPC
Speaker 1: Sawgrass claim like another young victim of oh this is
Speaker 1: this is a tricky place to figure out how to
Speaker 1: play around.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think Chris The one thing I like about
Speaker 5: him is he has that variety off the tea, kind
Speaker 5: of like we talked about with Rory. He has that
Speaker 5: stinger driver when he needs it. He uses a one
Speaker 5: iron off the tea at times. He did in Scotland
Speaker 5: at least, so I think that works to his favor
Speaker 5: and I kind of like that about him. But I
Speaker 5: just I just like both guys I love. Got her up,
Speaker 5: Like after he won in Phoenix, he said, like he
Speaker 5: started Rutgers, obviously, I think he had like a seventy
Speaker 5: four scoring hourage his first year, like was not on
Speaker 5: the road to like one time becoming a top ten
Speaker 5: player in the world. And he said, I viewed myself
Speaker 5: as a work in progress, and I still do. So
Speaker 5: I got her up this offseason. He improved his wedge play,
Speaker 5: improved his putting. Like He's a guy who obviously had
Speaker 5: a great foundation. He was a college player of the
Speaker 5: Year by the time he left Oklahoma after five years.
Speaker 5: But he's just testament to kind of continually refining and
Speaker 5: Bridgeman sort of the same way he talked about working
Speaker 5: with Scott Hamilton to improve his iron play and really
Speaker 5: improve his distance control because of the way he was
Speaker 5: releasing the club like he wasn't delivering consistent loft and
Speaker 5: so I think both guys are just kind of a
Speaker 5: testament to young guys, Like they had great college careers,
Speaker 5: they come out, they're helped by PG two or you,
Speaker 5: but there's still room for improvement. And there's guys that
Speaker 5: they were smart about how they improved, and they did
Speaker 5: it kind of gradually.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: Neither of them was like twenty three, and so I
Speaker 5: think there's testament to like we have this obsession with
Speaker 5: really really young guys, but that kind of gradual improvement,
Speaker 5: finding your weaknesses, improving them getting better, and so I
Speaker 5: like that side of both of their stories as well.
Speaker 1: I was, you know, I when I was putting together,
Speaker 1: I was trying to think about some other names that
Speaker 1: I could throw into this bucket, and I think, you
Speaker 1: know one name that would be intriguing to watch this year.
Speaker 1: There is Michael thorpe Jornson has played very well over
Speaker 1: the last i'd say eight eight to nine months and
Speaker 1: super promising young player. You know another guy that won
Speaker 1: last year that's super young and definitely don't think his
Speaker 1: game's built first. TPC Sagress is aldriche Potkeater, but he
Speaker 1: missed the cut last year at his first players and
Speaker 1: and that would be another young name that I would
Speaker 1: look at. And one that I just feel like hasn't
Speaker 1: popped the way that a lot of people thought he
Speaker 1: would so far this year is is Johnny Keefer.
Speaker 5: M Yeah, I think Thor especially like that one. He's
Speaker 5: a guy who obviously kills it, murders off the team,
Speaker 5: was kind of hurt by the occasional wild ball, and
Speaker 5: he's really rained that in. I mean, he's got the length,
Speaker 5: but he's really jumped in stroscane off the tee. He
Speaker 5: was a guy who was one of the longest players
Speaker 5: on tour, but was really far down in stroskin off
Speaker 5: the t which means you're not driving accurately and you're
Speaker 5: probably racking up penalty strokes because it's really hard to
Speaker 5: not be high in that sat you're hitting as far
Speaker 5: as he was. But his accuracy is improved and you've
Speaker 5: seen him a lot on like Friday leaderboards. He's had
Speaker 5: some weekend troubles, which I think some players need to
Speaker 5: learn and go through that, but like it's been on
Speaker 5: a lot of leaderboards through two rounds.
Speaker 1: I think that there needs to be a stat that's
Speaker 1: like a number of holes spent on on the first
Speaker 1: page of the leader board. Yeah, I feel like that's
Speaker 1: actually like one of the most telling ways to figure
Speaker 1: out who's going to break out is you know, Jacob
Speaker 1: Bridgeman is a great example. Last year just spent a
Speaker 1: ton of time on leaderboards where you know, he he
Speaker 1: didn't always have the finishes that you would like, oh,
Speaker 1: like he finished T twenty two, But it's like, but
Speaker 1: he was on the first page of the leaderboard for
Speaker 1: significant portions of Saturday and Sunday before he fell down,
Speaker 1: And I think there should be a stat Like to me,
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like the easiest way to predict breakouts
Speaker 1: to the next year is look for the guy that
Speaker 1: spent you know, had a lot of disappointing finishes given
Speaker 1: how much time he was on the leaderboard on Saturday
Speaker 1: and Sunday, And that's the person that's going to take
Speaker 1: away like, Okay, I got in here, and what happened,
Speaker 1: Like did I lose my staying in the present, and
Speaker 1: how do we clean that up? And in the offseason
Speaker 1: have that time to reflect but also have like just
Speaker 1: the comfort of being there I think that's the thing
Speaker 1: when you when you see these young players kind of struggle.
Speaker 1: I mean Thor you saw him it looked like Scottsdale
Speaker 1: was his tournament, and as soon as that moment hit,
Speaker 1: it was like he realized it was his turnament and
Speaker 1: sure enough, like the wheels kind of came off and
Speaker 1: Chris Gottrup wins. But the you know the idea of
Speaker 1: getting just the reps in in the moment, and when
Speaker 1: you look at it year to year, I feel like
Speaker 1: there's there's some correlation as someone who's just followed the
Speaker 1: game for ten years now and they're no, there's no
Speaker 1: stat that really represents that that I'm aware of.
Speaker 5: When in the week would you start that like midday
Speaker 5: Friday or.
Speaker 1: I would start it on on Saturday? Okay, I think
Speaker 1: it's like I feel like the first two days of
Speaker 1: a golf tournament, they're just like playing and there's no
Speaker 1: consciousness of of where I'm at. Something I'd be fascinated
Speaker 1: about is like, what's the percentage of of sub sixty
Speaker 1: six scoring on Thursday and Friday versus the percentage of
Speaker 1: sub sixty six scoring from anybody who who started, you know,
Speaker 1: within the top twenty five on Saturday and Sunday, and
Speaker 1: I think that that number would be a really I
Speaker 1: think it'd probably be you know, it'd probably be a
Speaker 1: lot lower on Saturday and Sunday, the percentage. But you say, well,
Speaker 1: there's the number of players that could do it is last,
Speaker 1: but you'd also have the qualifier of like, but those
Speaker 1: are the guys that are playing their best golf.
Speaker 5: Well that's what made it's so crazy that Scotty led
Speaker 5: the tour in first round, second round, third round, and
Speaker 5: fourth round scoring average last year because the third and
Speaker 5: fourth rounds he's teeing off last, and usually later in
Speaker 5: the day, it's always like a half stroke, harder, greens
Speaker 5: are chewed up, it's windier. But then also on Saturday
Speaker 5: and Sunday, now you've got like the pressure of contending
Speaker 5: and leading and even despite all that, he's still led
Speaker 5: in score hours on those days. Like that's insane.
Speaker 1: That might be the best Scotty Scheffler stat. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: cut the tour Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday last year.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what do you have next? All right? Next is
Speaker 5: my who is this year's JJ spawn? You know, I
Speaker 5: think TBC Salgass kind of prides itself on that David
Speaker 5: vers Goliath sort of storyline. We get a lot of cinderellas.
Speaker 5: You get your Paulaguidos's your JJ last year. So who
Speaker 5: is that guy this year? And I think part of
Speaker 5: it's the golf course. The golf course is so variable,
Speaker 5: and then also you know the tournament in the course
Speaker 5: pride itself on the It doesn't favor a single style
Speaker 5: of play. You have to work it both ways, and
Speaker 5: I think there's part of that. So I think guys
Speaker 5: get into contention there because you know, a short hitter
Speaker 5: is not automatically disqualified just by the golf course itself.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of ways to kind of skin a
Speaker 5: cat if you will. With the players. So again, trying
Speaker 5: to jam pack my things. I've got four names here.
Speaker 5: I can go one at a time or just list
Speaker 5: them off.
Speaker 1: All four, let's let's go go just unload here, all right?
Speaker 5: First one, Jake Knapp, Then we got Pearson Cootie, Ryan Gerard,
Speaker 5: and Min MOULEI are my four guys.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 5: Jake Napp incredible play this year, worst finishing five starts
Speaker 5: as T eleven. He has one tour win. Kind of
Speaker 5: like spawded and his last year's T twelve with the players.
Speaker 5: So again I think going back that you know, driving
Speaker 5: is really emphasized in a March players. That suits Jake
Speaker 5: NAP's game.
Speaker 1: I you know, he w d'd late w d at
Speaker 1: at API this week. We're recording this on Friday of API,
Speaker 1: so you know, some of this might be you know,
Speaker 1: moot points. But the Jake Napp I've been I didn't
Speaker 1: really see this leap from him.
Speaker 5: Coming.
Speaker 1: I think, like, you look at him, he's a great putter,
Speaker 1: and the and the off the t talent was like
Speaker 1: really you look at it and it's like, wow, this
Speaker 1: is this makes you drool. But then some of the
Speaker 1: stuff approaching around the greens, you're like, oh man, that's right.
Speaker 1: It's a work in progress. But the way he's tightened
Speaker 1: that up in the last year and kind of has
Speaker 1: become much more of an all round player is fascinating.
Speaker 1: It Like you know, you think about it is like
Speaker 1: TPC Sawgrass does not feel like a Jake Knap fit.
Speaker 5: No, but he played well last year.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Pierson Cuties I almost put through into that bucket
Speaker 1: with the other guys. He's often a great start and
Speaker 1: One of the things I like about Cootie is like
Speaker 1: he's someone who has kind of had to had to
Speaker 1: earn his spot out there where he's He's bounced back
Speaker 1: and forth. It has not been like a a perfectly
Speaker 1: clean ascension to where now he's a top fifty player
Speaker 1: in the world. He'll be, I mean, without anything kind
Speaker 1: of crazy happening, the first grandchild of a Master champion
Speaker 1: to play the Masters, which is a cool little thing.
Speaker 1: But Cooty, you know, he obviously promising player, like incredible
Speaker 1: college career, but he had to bounce back and forth
Speaker 1: between the Core Ferry Tour, and I think that I
Speaker 1: think that does players well when they aren't when things
Speaker 1: aren't perfect yet early in their career.
Speaker 5: It feels like early in his career he was highly volatile,
Speaker 5: Like he won quickly on the corn Ferry Tour, even
Speaker 5: his first tour season, like he was runner up at
Speaker 5: the ISCO, lost in the playoff, but like there was
Speaker 5: a lot of miscuts and then occasionally some high finishes
Speaker 5: and like last year he was the highest ranked player
Speaker 5: on the corn Ferry Tour without a win, like just
Speaker 5: consistently T three, T five, playing really well, popped a
Speaker 5: couple times on the PGA Tour as well, kind of
Speaker 5: split time between the two. And I think kind of
Speaker 5: like Thor, like I said, I think the Bay thing
Speaker 5: was the driving, So he led the tour and tros
Speaker 5: gained off the tee last year after being eighty ninth
Speaker 5: the year before, and sort of like Thor, big long
Speaker 5: haitter who was just still losing strokes or not getting
Speaker 5: a lot off the tee because of penalty, lack of accuracy, etc.
Speaker 5: And so I think that was a big part of
Speaker 5: his inconsistency. When it was off, it was off, and
Speaker 5: he's really improved that driving, and then you've seen it
Speaker 5: inconsistency this year with five top twenty fives and six starts.
Speaker 1: You know, the young player who seemingly has everything you
Speaker 1: want off the tee that struggles off the tea. I
Speaker 1: I don't know if this could be it, but could
Speaker 1: it be simply that they're not comfortable playing PGA Tour
Speaker 1: events and there's just a slight, you know, body not
Speaker 1: firing all at the same time because you're a little nervous,
Speaker 1: and maybe your tempo gets a little bit quicker, your
Speaker 1: transitions not as smooth. And because I think that's like
Speaker 1: one of the biggest things is that you hit bad
Speaker 1: t shots usually when you're uncomfortable, when you're nervous and
Speaker 1: part of me. When you eliminate thor you eliminate Coodie.
Speaker 1: Like these guys when you watch them hit a ball
Speaker 1: in college, you're like, oh my god, this guy is
Speaker 1: going to be a load on tour. Look at the
Speaker 1: way he drives it. But they have this initial struggles
Speaker 1: off the tee. Could it just be the ropes, the
Speaker 1: scoreboards and the people.
Speaker 5: Yeah, definitely, could be. Definitely. I think that's actually I
Speaker 5: haven't thought about that. I always think about technique first there,
Speaker 5: but honestly, I could. I could definitely see that being
Speaker 5: a thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just like comfort and also like you
Speaker 1: don't I think like you go to these new courses
Speaker 1: and you're looking at new windows, windows you've never seen.
Speaker 1: There's doubt about is this the right play for me?
Speaker 1: Off this tee, even if you know, if you see
Speaker 1: everybody else hitting driver, you might be like, well, this
Speaker 1: doesn't fit my eye well, And then the second go
Speaker 1: around everything's more comfortable. You're Golf is such a game
Speaker 1: of comfort.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 1: It's probably the most under talked about but being comfortable
Speaker 1: with where you're staying, being comfortable with where you're eating
Speaker 1: before rounds, what you your routine, what gym you're going to.
Speaker 1: For these guys, most of them go to the fitness
Speaker 1: t tent. But like the whole habit, the more times
Speaker 1: you visit a place, the more inevitably more comfortable you get.
Speaker 1: And anybody can relate to this. If you play as
Speaker 1: a guest at somebody's club, you go visit somebody, your
Speaker 1: buddy's public golf course. The first time you play, you're
Speaker 1: a little bit blind, and that can be fine, But
Speaker 1: then the second you know, the more often you're there,
Speaker 1: the more often you see the shots, the more comfortable
Speaker 1: you get. You get more comfortable just getting there and
Speaker 1: being there. You know where things are. And I wonder
Speaker 1: if that could be why we've seen some young players
Speaker 1: that seemingly have all the tools to thrive off the
Speaker 1: tea struggle off the tea.
Speaker 5: I think too, when you're that long and you become
Speaker 5: a PGA tour player, there's that maybe doubt about when
Speaker 5: to deploy the weapon. Like party is probably like, well,
Speaker 5: I'm on the tour, now we're going to play smart.
Speaker 5: I'm going to be a mature player. We're going to
Speaker 5: hit less than driver. Then you're also like, well the
Speaker 5: analytics say hit driver everywhere and uses your advantage, and
Speaker 5: you're probably stuck a little bit in between when to
Speaker 5: press it and when to not because you probably feel
Speaker 5: like you need to change from college, need to be
Speaker 5: that smarter, more mature course manager. So that could be
Speaker 5: part of it as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there's so many things you could pull
Speaker 1: on so many threads here. Also, like the idea of
Speaker 1: the first time you're playing, you know, in thorpe Jornson's case,
Speaker 1: like the first time you're playing with like if I
Speaker 1: don't play well, I might lose my card.
Speaker 5: And too's big on the caddy, Like I don't know
Speaker 5: Pearson's caddy situation to be honest, or who's on his
Speaker 5: bag and when they came. But thorpe Jornson started playing
Speaker 5: well right around when JJ Jacobac got on the bag.
Speaker 5: So there's a veteran experienced caddy. Even Chris godr Up
Speaker 5: we saw it last year. You know, he played really
Speaker 5: poorly the first half of the year and then he
Speaker 5: wins in Scotland, contends in the Open Makes Tour Championship,
Speaker 5: he's a potential Ryder cup pick and he had changed
Speaker 5: caddies mid year. Also, I think to like a longer,
Speaker 5: more tenured caddy, So I mean the caddy is a
Speaker 5: big part of it as well. I think especially when
Speaker 5: guys get on tour. You know a lot of those
Speaker 5: seen friends that seeing their peers have friends on the bag,
Speaker 5: and that seems appealing. You don't want to travel the
Speaker 5: country alone. You're going to these new places, you'd like
Speaker 5: to have a friend with you. Some times when they
Speaker 5: switch from that friend to a professional caddy, you see
Speaker 5: a leap in performance.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I you know all these things. I mean, frankly,
Speaker 1: having a regular caddy is something you have to get comfortable.
Speaker 5: With, you know, and I with JJ like you gotta
Speaker 5: wait for the right time for a guy to go
Speaker 5: off of a bag so he's available for you.
Speaker 1: You know. The other thing that you know, everybody who's
Speaker 1: always like talks about caddies with like how their financial
Speaker 1: performance is tied to the player. Nobody ever talks about
Speaker 1: the psychological aspect of a player and knowing the guy
Speaker 1: that you spend we'll call it probably forty hours a
Speaker 1: week with their their financial wellbeing being tied to you
Speaker 1: and that adjustment. Yeah, for sure, especially if it's the
Speaker 1: first time you've played for money.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: All right. My next thing is the Brian roll app
Speaker 1: press conference. Obviously that's gonna be a big topic this week,
Speaker 1: but we've we've heard breadcrumbs about about the schedule, what
Speaker 1: it's going to look like. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of thoughts around that. I am I'm very interested to
Speaker 1: see what comes out of that press conference about because
Speaker 1: it seems like they really want to get a new
Speaker 1: schedule on board in twenty twenty seven and where they're
Speaker 1: at with that, how close they are, because you know,
Speaker 1: with with the way tour sponsors and all this stuff
Speaker 1: works like that, they've got to they've got to get
Speaker 1: that thing out into the world pretty soon. And you know,
Speaker 1: and you know, a couple couple of big things from
Speaker 1: that is like how many how many exempt players are there?
Speaker 1: What what are the status of exemptions? I know they
Speaker 1: want to get rid of most of them, if not
Speaker 1: all of them, What does that look like? But but
Speaker 1: the schedule and you know, really just the first time
Speaker 1: we see the new Sea take over and do this
Speaker 1: big press conference that will be an annual thing going forward.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think obviously the big word that I think
Speaker 5: has kind of come out of its scarcity, and I
Speaker 5: think I don't know a lot, but I think sometimes
Speaker 5: people take that as like, oh, we're just gonna see
Speaker 5: less golf, and I don't necessarily know that's the case,
Speaker 5: but I think we've seen it with less cards, right,
Speaker 5: and I think sometimes we've even seen the start of
Speaker 5: the year with less cards means more urgency, less spots.
Speaker 5: And actually my fourth thing was a little bit related
Speaker 5: to that of the players field just going from one
Speaker 5: forty four to one, it's a it's a big reduction
Speaker 5: in the field. And so for guys who or people
Speaker 5: have opinions on field reduction and what it should look
Speaker 5: like like, this is a good litmus test, like do
Speaker 5: you feel like something was lost this week because there's
Speaker 5: only one hundred and twenty guys? I feel like something
Speaker 5: was gained because of the pace of play or darkness
Speaker 5: or flexibility with you know, when there's delays that kind
Speaker 5: of stuff.
Speaker 1: So you know, what I'm worried about was that reduction
Speaker 1: the number of balls in the water graphics are it
Speaker 1: can be you know, you've lost you've lost forty eight
Speaker 1: chances for a ball in the water on seventeen.
Speaker 5: That record might be just set in stone.
Speaker 1: Now they need to statistically adjust for it.
Speaker 5: I've always argued that you need to do those at
Speaker 5: a per player basis because also can do like total
Speaker 5: balls in the water since two thousand and three. It's like, well, automatically,
Speaker 5: you are narrowed down to the golf courses have been
Speaker 5: used every year since two thousand and three. You know,
Speaker 5: if you were ever like a playoff event where they
Speaker 5: only had fifty players in the field versus a full
Speaker 5: field event where they had one hundred and fifty six,
Speaker 5: like that affects it. Like there's so many variables and
Speaker 5: we just need to what's the average per player? We
Speaker 5: need a rate basis, not a total sum number.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, while we're here the I think
Speaker 1: the seventeenth hole is one of the best, you know,
Speaker 1: tournament holes in the world. And I don't think that's
Speaker 1: like an outlandish take. But when I say that, why
Speaker 1: I say that is I think the best moments and
Speaker 1: tournament golf on TV are are when when holes create
Speaker 1: an urgency for you sitting up in your in your chair,
Speaker 1: you know, like.
Speaker 5: You're watching it and you feel nervous, like, man, imagine
Speaker 5: how the guy trying to wain the tournament feels.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, and it's it's amazing. The other aspect of
Speaker 1: like how you view sawgrass right and why I mean
Speaker 1: everybody talks about the finish. The finish should be studied.
Speaker 1: It is like a to me perfect finishing stretch. Even
Speaker 1: if you go back to fifteen challenging part four, gettable,
Speaker 1: par part five, super risky but gettable par three short
Speaker 1: part three and then hard part four to finish like that.
Speaker 5: Honestly, the entire back nine has those kinds of that
Speaker 5: give and take of sort of like eleven and twelve
Speaker 5: or super birdy holes even thirteen if the pins in
Speaker 5: the right spot, and then fourteen is the most difficult
Speaker 5: hole on the golf course. Fifteen's another tough part five.
Speaker 1: Attack, seeky, hard.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But anyways, the thing about seventeen is like it it
Speaker 1: actually create it. It is like part of your lens
Speaker 1: of how you view the tournament throughout every round and
Speaker 1: throughout the finish where somebody could be four up and
Speaker 1: it seems like in a lot of tournaments it's just like, Okay,
Speaker 1: he's just skating his way to the finish in this tournament.
Speaker 1: In the back of your head's always like, well, he
Speaker 1: has to get past seventeen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think too. And one reason why I love
Speaker 5: the tournament and like having been to it so many
Speaker 5: times now is like you really don't until you're in
Speaker 5: person kind of see the proximity of like sixteen Faaraway
Speaker 5: and seventeen Green, and like y'all talked about it with
Speaker 5: Pinehurst with the proximity of teas and greens, and Rory
Speaker 5: admitting he was watching Bryson like sixteen Fairaway you look
Speaker 5: over seventeen Green feels like it's right there. The tea
Speaker 5: as well. And if you're playing sixteen and a guy
Speaker 5: ahead of you hits in the water or hits it close,
Speaker 5: like you're hearing that. So if guys dump it in
Speaker 5: front of you, you're very aware that someone just dumped
Speaker 5: in the water. The walk from sixteen to seventeen is cool.
Speaker 5: It's like that little I mean it's an amphitheater. I
Speaker 5: guess that little amphitheater is a pretty cool spot and
Speaker 5: a pretty cool scene in tournament golf.
Speaker 1: I would say, you know, I say this pretty confidently.
Speaker 1: I you know, a couple of years ago, I think
Speaker 1: it was the blog Cabin year. It was like twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: On Saturday, I brought my brother. My brother in law
Speaker 1: was in the in the Navy at this point, and
Speaker 1: I brought him and his friend and they were stationed
Speaker 1: in Jacksonville. I brought him and his friend to the
Speaker 1: Players on Saturday and we basically just hung out on
Speaker 1: seventeen the whole time, and they loved it. I was
Speaker 1: with him a couple of weeks ago and he was
Speaker 1: he was like, man, that that time we went to
Speaker 1: the Players was so fun. Like I say this pretty confidently,
Speaker 1: I think it's probably the best golf golf tournament experience
Speaker 1: in terms of viewer The stadium course is like legit
Speaker 1: it It's easy to watch golf. The the purpose built
Speaker 1: stadium really works. Garrett's done a bunch of podcasts on this.
Speaker 1: He did a podcast on his Designing Golf recently about this.
Speaker 1: But like stadium golf does quantitatively work for the spectator.
Speaker 1: The only thing that's that's challenging about Stodgrass is like
Speaker 1: getting to and from it.
Speaker 5: It's a disaster, But I mean you can't you can't
Speaker 5: widen that road unless you bulldozed the pond inning club,
Speaker 5: which you know has a historic golf course on its own, right, So.
Speaker 1: It's that's the only issue is like it's a disaster
Speaker 1: getting in and out. But like for this is the
Speaker 1: one to me as just a regular spectator to go to.
Speaker 5: It's a good It's also it's not if you get
Speaker 5: there early. Like, look, the Starbucks by the golf course
Speaker 5: opens at five. You're just south, you know, get there,
Speaker 5: read a paper, read a magazine, hang out for an hour,
Speaker 5: and then go watch guys worm for the first tea time.
Speaker 5: It's great.
Speaker 1: I mean, are are you going to give that advice
Speaker 1: to someone with with a with a with kids?
Speaker 5: Look, I have three kidsunderstand no that I want.
Speaker 1: To be like kids were getting up at four thirty.
Speaker 1: We're going to hang out at the Starbucks for a while,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna make it at the golf tournament till
Speaker 1: ten am. That's when we're gonna preach our expiration point.
Speaker 5: The thing actually that I wish we'd bring back on
Speaker 5: the mounds because the spectator mounds are awesome, Like you
Speaker 5: can just lay down and you can just watch golf.
Speaker 5: They used to have built in like stairs in there,
Speaker 5: so they had like the staircase. You could sit on
Speaker 5: the steps and it was a great look. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 5: around the first t was this big grass mound with
Speaker 5: rows of seats carved into it. It was kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: It's uh, I love the old pictures of Soccrass. I
Speaker 1: they did they did some changes for this year.
Speaker 5: Nothing this year that's major, But I do think there
Speaker 5: is some work coming to like bring some of that
Speaker 5: character back into the greens. And I mean you talk
Speaker 5: about these little plateaus and little portions of the greens
Speaker 5: that guys freaked out about back in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 5: Those have been softened, but I think some we're coming back.
Speaker 1: It's it's amazing to me when you look at the
Speaker 1: die legacy of like sagra the the what the ways
Speaker 1: Sagrass was portrayed by players and uh and also than
Speaker 1: Pja West his two big stadium courses, and then years
Speaker 1: later how it's just accepted and it's like a great
Speaker 1: reminder of initial reactions or often times the worst reactions.
Speaker 1: But now there's this this desire to go back to.
Speaker 3: What it was.
Speaker 5: Oh you know what that actually reminds me I left off.
Speaker 5: And this is for Joseph. I left off one of
Speaker 5: my cinderellas, my JJ spawns. I had two p die specialists.
Speaker 5: It was Ryan Gerrard. He finished runner by am actually
Speaker 5: tied with Matt McCarty, who Matt's kind of fit into
Speaker 5: that like more control player, not the longest, but a
Speaker 5: good ball striker, solid, you know, straight driver and has
Speaker 5: I mean played so well as Master's debut last year.
Speaker 5: But Matt McCarty also was on my list. I know
Speaker 5: Joseph's high on him.
Speaker 1: I you know, I I have an affinity for Matt McCarty.
Speaker 1: Do you know why?
Speaker 5: Because he's the Utah player, so he can handle golf courses,
Speaker 5: their penal off the tee.
Speaker 1: He he calls Chicago's home, that's right, he's Amber right,
Speaker 1: lives in Chicago. Yeah so he I mean he's there
Speaker 1: in the winter.
Speaker 5: That's so, he's full time Chicago.
Speaker 1: He lives in the city of Chicago.
Speaker 5: Do you know why? Just wants to experience.
Speaker 1: I think it's his girlfriend or wife. I need to
Speaker 1: talk to him more. I got to have him on
Speaker 1: the podcast.
Speaker 5: Maybe she's doing like a medical is she doing a
Speaker 5: medical residency or something?
Speaker 1: I you know, all the way I found that out
Speaker 1: was when he was doing the Get a Grip with
Speaker 1: Bacon and I asked where to send a mic to
Speaker 1: and he sent me this address. It's like what you
Speaker 1: live in Chicago.
Speaker 5: And he's a MEDNA member, right right, I believe.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe a MEDNA member. Maybe I'm not sure.
Speaker 5: So he's he's looking hard at you know, President's Cup spot.
Speaker 1: I'm exed I did about the President's Cup this year.
Speaker 5: It's gonna be great.
Speaker 1: This is gonna be a good time. The uh but yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean Matt McCarty, Girard Girard is uh, I loved
Speaker 1: I loved the tour. The tour did of his of
Speaker 1: his house.
Speaker 5: In credit to him for letting letting the cameras in
Speaker 5: his place, and a lot of players would do that.
Speaker 5: Girard though, is I mean, he's like if you're a
Speaker 5: golf guy, like he is awesome. Like I've seen him
Speaker 5: out there with like titleists. He's just hitting one hundred
Speaker 5: hybrids trying to find the right hybrid. Like he just
Speaker 5: loved Like we always want our tour players to like
Speaker 5: love golf like he as a golf and you want
Speaker 5: the guy to feel the same way you do about golf.
Speaker 5: And I guess Gerard like Girard is a golf like
Speaker 5: sicko golf nut, and it's awesome.
Speaker 1: I think the vast majority of people that listened to
Speaker 1: this podcast followed the bucket of like golf nut. I
Speaker 1: do think, and I don't want to get you in
Speaker 1: any trouble. I do think one of the more depressing
Speaker 1: aspects of the PGA tours how many of the players
Speaker 1: would fall into like they just do this because they
Speaker 1: get paid a lot out of money. They don't really
Speaker 1: love the game.
Speaker 8: But it's hard.
Speaker 5: It happens like it happens when it becomes work. I
Speaker 5: think when you started the Friday you probably loved like
Speaker 5: writing and opening and getting to produce content. And then
Speaker 5: after like ten years and a family and all this,
Speaker 5: you're like, gosh, I got to bang out this, you
Speaker 5: know thing for the newsletter. Kvv's all over me like
Speaker 5: it it things become work. I remember I talked to
Speaker 5: it was a multiple major champion. We asked I think
Speaker 5: we're doing like one of those survey things like what's
Speaker 5: your favorite you know, recreational golf round you played in
Speaker 5: the last five years or favorite golf course you played
Speaker 5: not on tour, And the guy was like, I don't
Speaker 5: play recreational golf, Like it's just it's become work, like
Speaker 5: things become work. So I understand it, but it is
Speaker 5: nice when you find a guy who just like loves golf.
Speaker 1: I'll leave the name out of this, but I'll never forget.
Speaker 1: I was talking to a tour player who's an absolute
Speaker 1: golf nut. I'll leave all the names out of this,
Speaker 1: and was riding in a car and looked out the
Speaker 1: window and was like, oh my god, this that golf
Speaker 1: course looks sick. We should we should stop and play it.
Speaker 1: And the other player in his car in the car
Speaker 1: was like like exhaled and was like you you want
Speaker 1: to just stop there and play? And he was like yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it looks great and along the you know,
Speaker 1: this was years ago, and he was like, dude, you
Speaker 1: actually like playing recreational golf. And it's like it's kind
Speaker 1: of crazy how there is like an overriding belief of that,
Speaker 1: but that you're right. It is when things turn into
Speaker 1: your job, you know. I tell people this all the time.
Speaker 1: I love what I do. I love what I do.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't trade it for anything. I don't feel like
Speaker 1: I work on a daily basis, no matter what part
Speaker 1: of the job that I'm doing, unless it's my taxes,
Speaker 1: I don't feel like I'm I'm working.
Speaker 4: But the.
Speaker 1: You know, the thing that I have lost is a
Speaker 1: little bit of my hobby, Like I don't I play
Speaker 1: so little golf for myself anymore. And that's the one
Speaker 1: thing I missed. But that's just I think it's more
Speaker 1: like the life situation I'm in. If I wasn't doing this,
Speaker 1: I would have lost a lot of my hobby of
Speaker 1: golf also because of where I am in life. But
Speaker 1: you know that that it's hard. It's hard, you know.
Speaker 1: That's why I love hearing about like guys that go
Speaker 1: on golf trips, that play on the PJ Tour, or
Speaker 1: you get the tour of Ryan Gerard's whatever was house
Speaker 1: or apartment, and it's just literally golf clubs everywhere.
Speaker 5: Yeah, orn't even the fact we went to Mauritius to
Speaker 5: you know, try to qualify for the Masters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean Xellaturus on this pod was saying he's
Speaker 1: he might go to like South Africa to try and
Speaker 1: qualify for the Masters.
Speaker 5: Yeah. That Ogilby fits in that vein as well, so
Speaker 5: dj By House and I went to Chambers before or sorry,
Speaker 5: I went to Bandon before the US Open at Chambers
Speaker 5: and we get there and I think we were his
Speaker 5: breakfast one morning. Everyone's like, oh, Jeff Ogolviy's here, and
Speaker 5: he was in the US Open, still exempt off his
Speaker 5: wing foot win and he was just like at breakfast
Speaker 5: with everyone else eating and he was gonna go play
Speaker 5: thirty six abandon and then he's gonna go play the
Speaker 5: US Open a couple of days later, and like it's
Speaker 5: just awesome to see because you're just you're so shocked
Speaker 5: to see someone doing that as well, because they're about
Speaker 5: to have a really long and stressful week of US
Speaker 5: Open and they should most guys just be a home
Speaker 5: relaxing and he's playing Bandon with a bunch of randos.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing that's been lost with this, like
Speaker 1: almost like load management of tour players where we only
Speaker 1: played nine hole practice rounds is like even the idea
Speaker 1: of going and playing somewhere the week of Alla. You
Speaker 1: think about Ben Crenshaw putting crystal downs on the map
Speaker 1: when he when he built or when he went went
Speaker 1: there the week of it was a Buick Open and
Speaker 1: played crystal downs the week he won the Buick Open
Speaker 1: and you know it's four hours away. You know, he
Speaker 1: just couldn't not go see that golf course.
Speaker 5: But you know it's probably it's a key to longevity
Speaker 5: in some way. It definitely helps. I think Keith burnout
Speaker 5: at Bay like you look at I mean, Scotty loves playing.
Speaker 5: I mean he mostly plays at Royal Oaks, but he
Speaker 5: loves playing with members there and you know, having handicapped
Speaker 5: games with like ten and fifteen handicaps, and like from
Speaker 5: all accounts, he's a maniac. Brodo E Miller wrote a
Speaker 5: great story on it that like he goes full board
Speaker 5: trying to beat these guys he's given twenty strokes to.
Speaker 5: And you know Rory obviously, I think it feels like
Speaker 5: Rory's fallen back in love with the game. That there
Speaker 5: are maybe some years that he didn't love it, but
Speaker 5: then as he's gotten older, like he's fallen more in
Speaker 5: love with like going places and seeing courses and playing recreationally,
Speaker 5: and that might be one reason for his longevity and
Speaker 5: kind of this like second half success he's had in
Speaker 5: the last you know, five six years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels like you have to be just a
Speaker 1: complete competitive psycho mhm. Or you have to just love
Speaker 1: the game so much. Yeah, for a long career. My
Speaker 1: last thing is, uh, this is our our show me
Speaker 1: something checkpoint on the I've got some names to throw
Speaker 1: at you that you know. I would say that we
Speaker 1: expected some big things from and and just have not
Speaker 1: seen much of anything from uh this year. Relative basis
Speaker 1: h Victor Hovland.
Speaker 5: Yeah, coaching change for Victor, so.
Speaker 1: Teach the world turns and as Victor changes coaches.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean we did a sit down interview with him.
Speaker 5: We do a kind of a car wash where guys
Speaker 5: coming from fifteen minutes of the time, and we were
Speaker 5: just asking general questions about the season. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 5: you're still working with Grant. He goes no, he goes
Speaker 5: TJ y Eaton. I go oh when that start. He's like,
Speaker 5: oh last week and he was there's a social post
Speaker 5: he was wins TJ at Dubai in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 5: Then he went back to Grant Waite, who had been
Speaker 5: working with previously around I think bay Hill of last
Speaker 5: year and was with him until I guess last week,
Speaker 5: and then now he's back with with TJ, who also
Speaker 5: is the coach of ben Crane, who's you know, you've
Speaker 5: talked about about to go on a run on the
Speaker 5: Champions Tour. So he could. If he turns Victor around,
Speaker 5: he gets ben Crane into a world beater. I mean,
Speaker 5: could be a stock rising for TJ eaton.
Speaker 1: Today's Today's the start of the ben Crane era on
Speaker 1: on the Champions Tour. We're recording this on Friday. Is
Speaker 1: everybody's looking at Zach Zach Johnson and what he's gonna do.
Speaker 1: I've been told by source of ben Crane is a problem.
Speaker 1: So we got Victor. I mean Victor. You know you
Speaker 1: talk about like having characters on tour, right, having someone
Speaker 1: who's perpetually unhappy with where their golf swing at is
Speaker 1: that is great for the tour, very relatable too well.
Speaker 5: And Victor the funny thing is like he doesn't tire
Speaker 5: about talking about it like you would think that, I mean,
Speaker 5: because all people ask him about and it's almost it's
Speaker 5: got to the point now where really, I think for
Speaker 5: a while we thought he was on this journey to
Speaker 5: remake his swing, and you know, maybe he was unhappy
Speaker 5: with one thing and he went down a road. But
Speaker 5: like now it's just it's the new normal, Like it's
Speaker 5: the normal for Victor. Like if he's ever been a
Speaker 5: point where he's not changing like coaches or trying new drills, like,
Speaker 5: then we're like, oh, something new has happened. But I
Speaker 5: think that I think honestly, it's just Victor's it's just Victor,
Speaker 5: like I at this point, I think it's the it's
Speaker 5: normal for him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh, I mean, it's amazing, it's it's a
Speaker 1: great aspect to have. I just would like him to
Speaker 1: play better golf.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating to have somebody that gets to basically where
Speaker 1: everybody's like, maybe he's the number one player in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, it's like, oh, he just
Speaker 1: blew everything up.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: Well. The thing with him too, he's so smart that
Speaker 5: I think he like started pulling it one string, but
Speaker 5: then and then the you just start, the whole ball
Speaker 5: starts unraveling and you you know, you're dealing with matchups
Speaker 5: and things like that, And so I think that and
Speaker 5: he's not a guy who's gonna be intent with like hey,
Speaker 5: feel like you bow your risk little bit. More like
Speaker 5: he's not that's not going to do it for him.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 1: I was telling somebody the other day, I haven't gotten
Speaker 1: a lesson in eight years, and you know, I feel
Speaker 1: like I play about as well as I played when
Speaker 1: I played. I mean, I'm not quite as good, but
Speaker 1: you know, but one of the things is, like I
Speaker 1: know my golf swing yep, and like one of my
Speaker 1: fears of if I went and got a lesson or
Speaker 1: did work on it is what you just said is
Speaker 1: that if you pull one string, something else on strings
Speaker 1: and there is like you look at what Scotty does.
Speaker 1: Scotty's Scotty's got the most self awareness of his golf
Speaker 1: swing because they just work on the same stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, they've never they've never pulled a string. That's
Speaker 1: undid three other things.
Speaker 5: I think. So the coaches for like Scotty and even
Speaker 5: like got Her Up. Got Ups had the same coach,
Speaker 5: Jason Bernbaum, since he was a kid. Like those coaches
Speaker 5: to not change that stuff, but to make it better
Speaker 5: without like wholesale changing it deserves a lot of credit,
Speaker 5: first of all. But it's just I mean, that's that's
Speaker 5: the essence of great teaching, where you're working within someone's framework,
Speaker 5: you're not completely changing them, but you are making them better.
Speaker 5: Like Scotty's swing has a lot of really unique things
Speaker 5: in it that you wouldn't teach. I'm not even really
Speaker 5: talking about the feet either, Like it's there's just a
Speaker 5: lot of it's very unique and his owns it and
Speaker 5: it's crazy. This week, though, he talked about when he
Speaker 5: came out of college. He's like, yeah, I wasn't a
Speaker 5: very good ballstriker coming out of college, Like that wasn't
Speaker 5: seven years ago. Like He's like, I think I could
Speaker 5: have been, but there was still too much wrong in
Speaker 5: my swing. He's like, twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, I
Speaker 5: became a better ball striker. And so you're talking about
Speaker 5: a guy who went from like twenty nineteen to really
Speaker 5: twenty twenty three, he really of established themselves as the
Speaker 5: best ball striker on tour and it was very obvious.
Speaker 5: Like so in four years he went from what he
Speaker 5: would call like not a good ball striker, obviously different
Speaker 5: standards than what we would have to the best one,
Speaker 5: unrivaled in the year. It's kind of crazy.
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
Speaker 5: But also if he looked at his swing, I don't
Speaker 5: think you would see like an insane difference. It's not
Speaker 5: like he you know, totally overhauled it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I that's the thing. I think it just a lot
Speaker 1: of it was like I think so much of it
Speaker 1: is just understanding your swing. Yeah, but if you're in
Speaker 1: a perpetual state of change, you can never get to
Speaker 1: a point where you actually understand the swing.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think in Victor's case, he might just understand
Speaker 1: too much of it and and be like I hate
Speaker 1: this right as opposed to like I think Scotty accepted
Speaker 1: this is.
Speaker 5: What it is well, and like Mari Kawa talked about
Speaker 5: at Pebble, is like, you know, I was being too
Speaker 5: much of a perfectionist and trying to just like be
Speaker 5: this like Robot and I went back to just kind
Speaker 5: of playing golf. And I think Scotty is like the
Speaker 5: epitiom of just playing golf. But I think Victor is
Speaker 5: in that stage that Colin was talking about, like perfection,
Speaker 5: like he always talks about, you know, if it's not
Speaker 5: coming out of the right window, I don't like it.
Speaker 5: I don't care where it shows up. And Colin did
Speaker 5: that last year.
Speaker 2: Colin.
Speaker 5: People will be like, oh, you led the field and
Speaker 5: strops gain approach and he's like, I don't care. I
Speaker 5: hate it. I missed left too many times, like I
Speaker 5: wasn't fading the way I wanted, Like I don't care
Speaker 5: what the stats say. And it's like, well, I get that,
Speaker 5: and you want to be You want it to look
Speaker 5: a certain way and to feel a certain way. But
Speaker 5: like if the stats say you're the best on tour
Speaker 5: at it, like you probably just maybe accept it so
Speaker 5: you don't drive yourself crazy.
Speaker 1: It's you have to get to a state of comfort
Speaker 1: to play your best golf. And that that's where I
Speaker 1: have like a hard time with the constant changes. Are
Speaker 1: you ever getting comfortable enough to win a major championship
Speaker 1: is like a big question for me, And you know,
Speaker 1: hopefully for for golf's sake, I would love Victor Hovlin
Speaker 1: to win a major championship. I think he's one of
Speaker 1: the best characters in the sport. I hope that it
Speaker 1: comes back and he ends up in his best self
Speaker 1: he's ever been because of all all these changes and
Speaker 1: and you know, and win something this year.
Speaker 5: He'd probably benefit hugely from getting married and having a kid.
Speaker 5: Like some guys, they lose skill because then they used
Speaker 5: to practice all day and now they can't like that
Speaker 5: actually might be we might need to maybe need to
Speaker 5: find victorial wife.
Speaker 1: It's that I like that take actually a lot. He
Speaker 1: needs less time to think about his golf swing. Next
Speaker 1: on the list, I got Xander. I think it's inconceivable,
Speaker 1: uh to think about, you know, two years ago, him
Speaker 1: being like a fringe top ten player in the world.
Speaker 1: But we're here, Uh you know, he's he's two bad
Speaker 1: weeks effectively away from being outside the top ten in
Speaker 1: the world golf rankings. Uh, you know, and obviously he
Speaker 1: had the injury last year. I just we got to
Speaker 1: get a run of good play from him because he
Speaker 1: was on the level of you know, maybe not. I mean, god,
Speaker 1: in twenty four it was like is Xander as good
Speaker 1: as Scottie?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: And now two years later it's like, is he I'm
Speaker 1: at the point where it's like, is he one of
Speaker 1: the twenty best players in the world.
Speaker 5: Yeah. You know what's been really depressing is I texted
Speaker 5: PJ about, you know, big New York Golf Club matchup
Speaker 5: and he's like, we stink like this season's over, like
Speaker 5: lost cause. So, I mean it's had effect on NYGC
Speaker 5: as well. It's really brought PJ down.
Speaker 1: I mean he doesn't even want to stander in the lineup.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, which I mean then to the problem then too,
Speaker 5: I think, is you know, then how does Steve Cohen's
Speaker 5: other team perform? You know, we don't know. That's I
Speaker 5: think that's what Pj's really worth.
Speaker 1: Your team's ruining baseball. So I hope you enjoy the
Speaker 1: lockout in twenty twenty seven. That's that's fueled by your Dodgers, Xander.
Speaker 5: I mean, luckily I'm looking at leaderboard because it is Friday.
Speaker 5: He did shoot sixty eight yesterday at bay Hill, which
Speaker 5: was a great score. He did win the Bay Current.
Speaker 5: You know, he won over in Japan. He did speak
Speaker 5: about what we just did with Victor like he did
Speaker 5: just have a child or his wife did so injury child.
Speaker 5: There's been a lot of adjustments. I don't know. I'm bullish.
Speaker 5: I think we'll get there. He probably spent a lot
Speaker 5: of off season with the kid.
Speaker 1: And I don't know how we got to the place
Speaker 1: where people thought that like a kid, you know that
Speaker 1: I love. I don't know how. I'm not saying don't
Speaker 1: have kids. I'm not saying this, but I don't know
Speaker 1: how we got to spot where people at one point
Speaker 1: was like having a kid's good for pro golfers.
Speaker 5: Well, we just said about Victor.
Speaker 1: I think it's a very special case when it's good,
Speaker 1: Like like, you can't tell me that there are like
Speaker 1: attributes that are good for your pursuit of pro golf.
Speaker 5: Well, I do think it is. I mean, what's better.
Speaker 5: Is it better you go back to otellrom when you
Speaker 5: play with your kid, or you go back to hotel
Speaker 5: room and you start like fiddling with your grip and
Speaker 5: looking at your takeaway, And like I mean, for some guys,
Speaker 5: some guy's probably the latter, some guy's the former. But
Speaker 5: so I think I think just getting your mind off
Speaker 5: of golf, if you have a tendency to go too
Speaker 5: much down that road, I think that's the good stuff.
Speaker 1: It is is a case by case basis. You're right,
Speaker 1: you're right, You're absolutely right.
Speaker 4: You know that.
Speaker 1: Kevin KVVU interview with Rory, he talked about how it's
Speaker 1: like I just go play with my kid. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. Ben Griffin the delight the breakout of last year.
Speaker 1: He hasn't done much this year. And I think this
Speaker 1: is a guy that everybody was kind of like okay,
Speaker 1: like he's going to be a major competitor. It's obviously
Speaker 1: early in the year, and we saw Ben Griffin plays
Speaker 1: Best Golf like kind of like this point forward last year.
Speaker 1: But he's I mean, he's playing his.
Speaker 5: First Masters this year, right, so so is Chris Goto.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I it's fascinating.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: We talked I think we talked about this with Ludwig,
Speaker 1: who's also on my list but who played really well
Speaker 1: yesterday at bay Hill. But Ludwig was like, it was like,
Speaker 1: is this the highest the most you know, highest ranked
Speaker 1: player to ever make a Master's debut. When Ludwig came through,
Speaker 1: I think it was like four or five, and then
Speaker 1: he contended but got her ups right there too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, but Ben Griffin and Ludwig kind of round
Speaker 1: out the players. I just want to see something from them,
Speaker 1: and Ludwig might be you know, as I said, we're
Speaker 1: recording this Friday at bay Hill. He's in second place
Speaker 1: right now at bay Hill going into today.
Speaker 5: I think a couple of guys I was looking at
Speaker 5: JJ Spawn and I'd read something about some vertigo, which
Speaker 5: was kind of thing mentioned offhand. But that's obviously a
Speaker 5: terrifying affliction for a golfer. But I mean, JJ was
Speaker 5: like one of the great stories last year and I
Speaker 5: really enjoy like watching JJ play golf. JJ's a great personality.
Speaker 5: I would like to see him play well, hopefully. And
Speaker 5: then Justin Thomas, who I mean obviously Bay Hills his
Speaker 5: first start of the year, but as we talk Friday afternoon,
Speaker 5: he's fourteen over through twelve holes of his second round
Speaker 5: and he's in last by seven. Now, you hope it's
Speaker 5: just rust and you just got to get some reps.
Speaker 5: But like he loves tc Sawgrass. I think it's his
Speaker 5: favorite course on tour. He's had a ton of success
Speaker 5: at TPC. So you just hope that this player's week,
Speaker 5: you know, you see something definitely better than what we're
Speaker 5: seeing this week at bay Hill, and that it's just
Speaker 5: maybe he tried to shake off some rust.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was thinking about jt on here and I
Speaker 1: just you know, in good faith with a major back surgery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like we got to give them, yeah, two
Speaker 1: months to work things out, which unfortunately for him and
Speaker 1: just the way the schedule is constructed now it's just
Speaker 1: two months and the season's basically over. Yeah, that does
Speaker 1: it for me? You got an odds and ends?
Speaker 5: No, those are my things.
Speaker 4: That was it.
Speaker 1: That's good. Who's your pick?
Speaker 5: Who's my pick? Man? Honest, you know, think of that
Speaker 5: as a thing.
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: It's the problem with this, this this format. I like
Speaker 1: getting it out early, giving people a table setter for
Speaker 1: the week, but you know, making a pick, uh, this
Speaker 1: earliest heart.
Speaker 5: Let's scroll down to the O w JR. A little bit.
Speaker 8: Uh, I mean I kind of.
Speaker 5: I mean, I'm Scottie.
Speaker 1: You can't go wrong there, right, Maybe you can't. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I uh, you know, they all go Russell Henley said.
Speaker 5: Name stood out to me. That's kind of your you know,
Speaker 5: your ball control guy and amazing like great driving accuracy. Actually,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna call him not also not like a crazy,
Speaker 5: you know, insane pick, but I'm gonna go call him.
Speaker 1: I think he's he's uh, this is a redemption year
Speaker 1: for him. I was happy I was on that island.
Speaker 1: Despite the way Joseph Lamania looked at me on this
Speaker 1: podcast when I said the.
Speaker 5: Name data boys, you know, he just they're not always right.
Speaker 1: They aren't always right. You know, games games, the data
Speaker 1: the data is all data all comes after they play yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, data's all data takes are always reactive takes.
Speaker 5: Well, you know what data can't measure great heart. I
Speaker 5: mean maybe it could if they're wearing like an Apple
Speaker 5: watch or whoop, but it can't measure heart.
Speaker 1: Soon, soon it'll be able to tell us everything that's
Speaker 1: going to happen, and we'll just stop. We'll just start
Speaker 1: simulating everything.
Speaker 4: True.
Speaker 5: I hope Joseph listens, hope we get to this far
Speaker 5: in the podcast.
Speaker 1: I've already already poked him for that, you know, all right,
Speaker 1: thanks Martin. Do you have anything coming out that we
Speaker 1: should watch out for.
Speaker 5: No, we have some really exciting and like new and
Speaker 5: different stuff we're doing at the Players that I don't
Speaker 5: think people might see it right away. Someone's going to
Speaker 5: come out in Brian's press commence.
Speaker 1: I think, but.
Speaker 5: Some cool stuff. I'm definitely different than what I've been
Speaker 5: involved in my previous life as a writer and editor.
Speaker 5: But I can't quite say right now, but I think
Speaker 5: definitely exciting from a content standpoint.
Speaker 1: Awesome. I'm looking forward to getting across the Moat for
Speaker 1: that press conference, seeing where the magic happened.
Speaker 5: You might not be you know, you might be onto
Speaker 5: something to talk about them blocking you in a room.
Speaker 1: All Right, thanks Sean. All Right, see y'all, let's talk
Speaker 1: about a new sponsor, Cobalt rangefinders. I just got my
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Speaker 1: All right, let's get over to Garrett's documentary podcast about
Speaker 1: the building of Tpcsawcrass.
Speaker 2: Sailing out of Gravesend, England on the trade route, Captain
Speaker 2: William Hilton one August morning in sixteen sixty three came
Speaker 2: upon an island peaceful and serene.
Speaker 9: What you're hearing is the telecast of the nineteen sixty
Speaker 9: nine Heritage Golf Classic. It was a new event held
Speaker 9: at a new golf course, Harbortown Golf Links had been
Speaker 9: built by a forty three year old architect named Pete Dye.
Speaker 9: Back then, Pete Dye wasn't well known in a mainstream way,
Speaker 9: but his collaborator had a more recognizable name.
Speaker 7: Hello, I'm Jack Nicholas. This is Pete Dye.
Speaker 9: The two men lean against the balustrade of an outdoor stairway,
Speaker 9: both looking a little flushed in their full suits.
Speaker 7: Pete and I have worked together to design and build
Speaker 7: the Harbortown Golf Links here at Seapin's plantation. We're here
Speaker 7: on the eve of the first Heritage Golf Classic. He
Speaker 7: played over the Thanksgiving weekend. Having a golf tournament on
Speaker 7: the first year of operation, it's a dream come true
Speaker 7: for both of us.
Speaker 3: And the golf course looks great.
Speaker 7: Nispeech, that's beautiful, Jack, Really, it's been a lot of
Speaker 7: fun here and well, yes, that's a great contrast.
Speaker 2: Today there were beauty grasses with a beheas centipede.
Speaker 4: Pine Strong brings you back to Pinehurst and some of the.
Speaker 7: Old British golf links looks great.
Speaker 9: It was quite a coup for Pete Dye to be
Speaker 9: there on TV, side by side with the greatest golfer
Speaker 9: in the world. If you were a golf architect in
Speaker 9: nineteen sixty nine, he didn't get an awful lot of
Speaker 9: press unless your name was Robert Trent Jones. So the
Speaker 9: opening of Harbortown marked a turning point in Pete Dye's career.
Speaker 9: Here was a course to be discussed. It was quirky
Speaker 9: and challenging, and it proved popular among the pros. One
Speaker 9: of those pros was Dean Beeman, who played his first
Speaker 9: Heritage in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 6: My favorite golf course was Harbortown, and Harbortown was today
Speaker 6: is many players' favorite golf course.
Speaker 4: They really like it. Harbortown is a golf course.
Speaker 6: That has just as many right to left as left
Speaker 6: to right holes. It has small and green, It demands accuracy.
Speaker 6: It doesn't favor a long hitter versus a shorter hitter.
Speaker 6: So I thought it had a great balance and it
Speaker 6: was a great test of golf and a fair test
Speaker 6: to golf.
Speaker 9: By nineteen seventy eight, Beeman was commissioner of the PGA
Speaker 9: Tour and he had just negotiated the purchase of a wild,
Speaker 9: soggy property near Jacksonville, Florida. There he intended to build
Speaker 9: a new venue for the Tournament Players Championship. He wanted
Speaker 9: the course to tax the abilities of the world's best
Speaker 9: golfers while providing a better viewing experience for spectators. It
Speaker 9: would be a stadium golf course, and he knew the
Speaker 9: man to build it was Pete Dye. Today, on Frida
Speaker 9: Egg Stories, we are going back four decades to the
Speaker 9: building of this stadium course at TPC Sawgrass in the
Speaker 9: nineteen eighty two Players Championship. This story has been told
Speaker 9: and retold over and over, and since it's Player's Week
Speaker 9: right now, you'll no doubt be reminded by various journalists,
Speaker 9: TV hosts, and podcasters of the usual bits of lore.
Speaker 9: Dean Beeman purchasing the property for one dollar, Pete Dies
Speaker 9: sketching a routing on the back of a place mat,
Speaker 9: the creation of the island Green, the complaints of the pros,
Speaker 9: and Jerry Pate after his victory in eighty two hauling
Speaker 9: both Beman and Die into the pond next to the
Speaker 9: eighteenth Green. Don't get me wrong, we'll replay a few
Speaker 9: of those hits in this episode. We're not about that.
Speaker 9: But the real reason I'm curious about the TPC Sawgrass
Speaker 9: story has to do with the personalities involved in the
Speaker 9: contrasts between them. On the one hand, you had Pete Dye.
Speaker 9: Golf architecture was a passion for him, not just to
Speaker 9: business enterprise, and as we know in the way he
Speaker 9: designed courses, he was intensely hands on and independent. He
Speaker 9: was an artist. On the other hand, you had the
Speaker 9: PGA tour under the leadership of Dean Beaman, thirteen years
Speaker 9: younger than Pete. Die Beeman was energetic and assertive, a
Speaker 9: deal maker. TPC Sawgrass was his venture, and he had
Speaker 9: ideas of his own about what it should be. No
Speaker 9: less an authority than Alice Dye, Pete's wife and most
Speaker 9: trusted design consultant, had her own doubts about the partnership
Speaker 9: between Dean and Pete. Oh, Pete, you're crazy, she said,
Speaker 9: you can't build for Dean. He's particular, he's efficient, he's
Speaker 9: all the things you aren't. He'll have his hands in
Speaker 9: there trying to tell you what to do. Don't do it.
Speaker 9: But he did, and oddly enough it worked. In this
Speaker 9: episode of Frida Egg Stories, we'll try to figure out
Speaker 9: how today the Tour is the eight hundred pound gorilla
Speaker 9: of the golf world. Back in the nineteen seventies, it
Speaker 9: was more like a newborn computi. The Tournament Player's Division
Speaker 9: as it was then known, had just separated from the
Speaker 9: PGA of America, and it was a scrappy operation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was really a mom and pop shop back then.
Speaker 9: Adam Schupak is a golf journalist and the author of
Speaker 9: Golf's Driving Force, a biography of Dean Beaman.
Speaker 3: When the Tour moved its headquarters to Panaviter Beach, it
Speaker 3: was working out of a four bedroom home with Dean's
Speaker 3: office was the master bedroom. The garage had the copier
Speaker 3: and postage meter, and you know for an intercom, they
Speaker 3: just yelled at each other.
Speaker 4: It was.
Speaker 3: It was a really small staff and Beaman took over
Speaker 3: in nineteen seventy four and used to say that, you know,
Speaker 3: the largest capital ast that they had was an IBM
Speaker 3: Selectric typewriter. They had about twenty walkie talkies and.
Speaker 10: They did it on.
Speaker 3: They had three Budweisers and the Canna beans. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was a time period where bowling was still attracting
Speaker 3: higher ratings, golf and tennis was the sports surging of popularity.
Speaker 3: So you know, he had a lot of work cut
Speaker 3: out for him when he took over his commission.
Speaker 9: It didn't take long for Beamon to start making aggressive moves.
Speaker 9: He was in his mid thirties and he had a
Speaker 9: background not only as an elite golfer who had won
Speaker 9: two US Amateurs, but also as an insurance broker. He
Speaker 9: knew his way around tax documents as well as boardroom negotiations.
Speaker 3: You know, he was an intense man. He's got these
Speaker 3: piercing blue eyes, and you know, his friends used to
Speaker 3: say that, you know, he could deliver a look that
Speaker 3: could exterminate headlice. And it was a job that required toughness,
Speaker 3: because you know, he had this quest to kind of
Speaker 3: roll over the status quo in this traditional game, make
Speaker 3: golf a bigger sport. And you know, he wanted to
Speaker 3: create a fan base that was much broader than just
Speaker 3: its own participants, and that meant doing things a little
Speaker 3: differently than they'd been done in the past.
Speaker 9: In his first year, Beaman converted the tour into a nonprofit,
Speaker 9: exempting it from paying income taxes and changing its financial fortunes.
Speaker 9: Beamon's others nature project was the new tournament Players Championship,
Speaker 9: later known as the Players Championship and now apparently as
Speaker 9: just the Players Anyway. From the beginning, Beeman had big
Speaker 9: plans for the event. The USGA had the US Open,
Speaker 9: the PGA of America had the PGA Championship, and the
Speaker 9: RNA had the Open. Why shouldn't the PGA Tour have
Speaker 9: its own major. Well, for one, it's not easy to
Speaker 9: manufacture prestige, but Beeman tried his best. After staging the
Speaker 9: first three tournament players Championships at three different courses, he
Speaker 9: decided to stick with one that it worked for the
Speaker 9: masters after all, So starting in nineteen seventy seven, the
Speaker 9: players absorbed the Greater Jacksonville Open and set up shop
Speaker 9: at Sawgrass Country Club, which was.
Speaker 6: A very dynamic golf course that was played in March
Speaker 6: where the wind blew. It was as close to an
Speaker 6: ocean side course as you could get, and so it
Speaker 6: had all.
Speaker 4: Those elements in it.
Speaker 9: But while Beeman liked Sawgrass as a course, he thought
Speaker 9: it could be proved as a venue, there.
Speaker 6: Was going to have to be a substantial investment made
Speaker 6: in the golf course and the facilities to accommodate both
Speaker 6: the players and the gallery.
Speaker 4: And what we wanted to do.
Speaker 9: So Beeman attempted to buy Sawgrass Country Club, but for
Speaker 9: a variety of reasons, the deal never happened. Instead, he
Speaker 9: set out to build a new course, a home course
Speaker 9: for the tour. Just across the road from Sawgrass Country
Speaker 9: Club was a huge tract of wilderness. The owners knew
Speaker 9: that being in business with the ascendant golf tour would
Speaker 9: raise the value of their land, so they sold four
Speaker 9: hundred and fifteen acres to Beaman for one dollar. From there,
Speaker 9: the commissioner pieced together financing from a non recourse loan,
Speaker 9: a few dozen expensive founding memberships, and a few thousand
Speaker 9: cheap annual memberships. It was a tidy sum acquired at
Speaker 9: minimal risk.
Speaker 3: As PG Tour commissiony, he's working for a board, he's
Speaker 3: working for the players, and they had a lot of
Speaker 3: and they pretty much said, you can't risk any of
Speaker 3: our assets. They didn't have a lot to day, but
Speaker 3: they didn't want to put put anything on the line,
Speaker 3: and if he failed, it was his neck. And so
Speaker 3: he went out and figured a way to do it
Speaker 3: where they just couldn't say no. And it was you know,
Speaker 3: that is one of the most brilliant deals ever in
Speaker 3: the game of golf.
Speaker 9: After all that, though, Beeman found himself in possession of
Speaker 9: a piece of land that, to put it mildly, seemed
Speaker 9: ill suited to golf. Here's how Pete Dye described it
Speaker 9: in his autobiography Bury Me in a pop Bunker. When
Speaker 9: I first inspected the proposed site for the player's course,
Speaker 9: my only compatriots in the impenetrable swampy jungle were deer, alligators,
Speaker 9: wild boar, and deadly snakes. In order to cut a path,
Speaker 9: I followed deer tracks that led me to dry areas
Speaker 9: in the swamp before I nearly drowned in the depths
Speaker 9: of the marshland well.
Speaker 4: The property was. It was dead flat. It had a
Speaker 4: lot of standing water on it.
Speaker 6: There's substantial rainfall here in Jacksonville following rainfall. Until to
Speaker 6: dried out. It was a pretty wet piece of property.
Speaker 9: It hadn't always been that way. The array of oak, pine, sweetgum,
Speaker 9: and magnolia trees on the site indicated that it had
Speaker 9: once been an upland, But when the Intracoastal Waterway was
Speaker 9: built nearby in the early nineteen hundreds, water began to
Speaker 9: collect on the site. By the nineteen seventies it was
Speaker 9: a Florida forest mashed up with a Florida swamp. But
Speaker 9: Beeman didn't mind that the property was flat and would
Speaker 9: need to be almost wholly re engineered. To him, it
Speaker 9: was a blank slate where he could realize his vision
Speaker 9: for a stadium golf course.
Speaker 6: No golf course up to that point had been bought,
Speaker 6: had been built. That more interest was concentrated on the
Speaker 6: gallery than the players. Most golf courses are built for players.
Speaker 6: We needed to build one for the players, but we
Speaker 6: also had to we want eyewant to build a golf
Speaker 6: course that would be the first what I called a
Speaker 6: stadium golf course.
Speaker 4: Well, I wanted. I wanted two things.
Speaker 6: There were two elements that I thought were extremely important
Speaker 6: in making a stadium course as successful as it could be.
Speaker 6: One is that you did all you could to build
Speaker 6: the spectator areas in the highest places on the course
Speaker 6: and the golf courses in the playing services on the
Speaker 6: lowest point of the golf court, so that the spectators
Speaker 6: were actually walking with you, and they would be above
Speaker 6: the players, and so more people could see. And that's
Speaker 6: the concept of a stadium. The second part of the
Speaker 6: concept that I thought was very important was the routing
Speaker 6: of the golf course should be in a way that
Speaker 6: produced the most what I call areas of activity. Instead
Speaker 6: of spreading the golf course out, bringing the holes out,
Speaker 6: they should wind back and forth in a way that
Speaker 6: created us hubs of activities where a spectator could maybe
Speaker 6: walk two or three hundred yards and see four or
Speaker 6: five different shots close to a couple of tees, a
Speaker 6: couple of greens and maybe a fairway and not have
Speaker 6: to walk five miles to watch a lot of golf,
Speaker 6: Because there are some spectators that want to follow their
Speaker 6: favorite player and others that just want to watch golf.
Speaker 9: It's striking how these ideas, although novel at the time,
Speaker 9: call to mind the features of certain time tested tournament
Speaker 9: golf courses. As Pete Didye pointed out in his autobiography,
Speaker 9: the Links courses of Great Britain and Ireland have dunes
Speaker 9: that form natural spectator mounds along the fairways and around
Speaker 9: the greens, and Beeman's notion of hubs of activity reminded
Speaker 9: me of how Augusta National returns to certain landforms, creating
Speaker 9: gathering spots where spectators can see multiple greens and teas
Speaker 9: at once. Perhaps in part because he appreciated these historical references,
Speaker 9: Pete Dye took beeman stadium concept and ran with it.
Speaker 9: Over dinner at the Homestead Restaurant in Jacksonville, Die sketched
Speaker 9: a back nine routing on that now famous place Mat
Speaker 9: and Beeman knew he had the right architect. Granted, a
Speaker 9: place Matt is a lot easier to work with than
Speaker 9: a four hundred and fifteen acre alligator pick.
Speaker 8: We killed rattlesnakes and moccasins all the time, almost every day,
Speaker 8: also alligators and spatters and all kinds of stuff on
Speaker 8: at on the side, and you wore snake boots or
Speaker 8: you didn't really go out there.
Speaker 9: Vernon Kelly was the project manager at TPC Sawgrass.
Speaker 8: There was something out there we called blue gumbo clay.
Speaker 8: What it was was almost a plastic kind of play
Speaker 8: It was like quicksand and when you were digging sand
Speaker 8: out of the pits, because wherever you found sand, we
Speaker 8: excavated it for the golf holds, and that's how we
Speaker 8: created seventeen. Of course, almost anyway you see a lake
Speaker 8: out there, it's because there was sand in that area
Speaker 8: and we didn't have the money to buy sand. And
Speaker 8: once you excavated the sand, sometimes you would hit this
Speaker 8: gushy kind of play material and it didn't seem to
Speaker 8: be any bottom to it, and out I think it
Speaker 8: was number seven. One night we went a back over
Speaker 8: and we were digging building the green and he got
Speaker 8: into that stuff, and I mean literally, without a couple
Speaker 8: of hours, it completely covered the tracks of the back though,
Speaker 8: and was up to the cab, which is about five feet.
Speaker 8: We were able to pull it out with a dozer,
Speaker 8: but it just showed how treacherous the sight was.
Speaker 9: Early on, it could seem like the land itself was
Speaker 9: rejecting the golf course.
Speaker 8: The first thing we had to do was to find
Speaker 8: the property, so we had the boundary surveyed, and the
Speaker 8: surveyors actually went out there and cut the survey line
Speaker 8: with machetes, and then you know, went from point to
Speaker 8: point and marked the points with the survey steaks and
Speaker 8: survey tape. Well, the vegetation grew so fast out there,
Speaker 8: literally within a couple of days, you could barely find
Speaker 8: the cut lines, which were the pass from stake straight
Speaker 8: and you couldn't find the steaks at all.
Speaker 9: And then there was the wildlife.
Speaker 8: So one day we were walking along it was hot
Speaker 8: as could be, and the bugs were about to carry
Speaker 8: off with skews and the rest. And I was talking
Speaker 8: to David, that.
Speaker 9: Would be David post Away, Pete Dye's construction superintendent.
Speaker 8: He said, do you think there are any alligators out here?
Speaker 8: I said, oh, yeah, they're all over the place because
Speaker 8: they can travel in this water. It's about knee high,
Speaker 8: and they can move from place to place, and he said,
Speaker 8: those step on one.
Speaker 5: It's all.
Speaker 8: We won't do that, but you can find them because
Speaker 8: there'll be a n alligator pit. And what they do
Speaker 8: is they'll be in an area of saw grass and
Speaker 8: they'll root around and make an alligator pit that's probably
Speaker 8: twenty feet square around where if they ripped up the
Speaker 8: vegetation and kind of dug them but a little bit deeper,
Speaker 8: and that's where they live, and that's where they sleep
Speaker 8: in the water. And all they're scavengers. They don't eat
Speaker 8: live meat. They kill things and they put it in
Speaker 8: that pit to rot, and when it's real gamey, then
Speaker 8: they'll eat it. So when you come to one of
Speaker 8: those pits, you can tell what it is because it
Speaker 8: stinks to high heaven. And he said, boy, I hate
Speaker 8: to be in something like that, and I said, yeah,
Speaker 8: me too. So in the meantime, we're pushing through. We're
Speaker 8: pushing through the saw grass and it's about five that
Speaker 8: and so thick. I mean, you can't. It just wears
Speaker 8: you out to push against it, sort of leaning leaning
Speaker 8: into it. I was in front and Dave was following me,
Speaker 8: and all of a sudden I was leaning All of
Speaker 8: a sudden it just parted and I fell in this
Speaker 8: hole and I knew immediately what it was because it's
Speaker 8: stunk to high have and I'd fallen into an alligator.
Speaker 5: Kid.
Speaker 8: Fortunately the alligator went home, but you know, said, I'm
Speaker 8: laying of this thing, and my full concentration is on
Speaker 8: keeping my balf of water. All of a sudden, David
Speaker 8: comes and pops right through the grass and falls right
Speaker 8: on top of me. He looks around. He says, oh
Speaker 8: my god, He says, the stinks that I have, And
Speaker 8: what is this? I said, it's what we were talking about.
Speaker 8: It's an alligator. Bit He's gone. He just disappeared. He
Speaker 8: was he took off so fast.
Speaker 9: How did you get out?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 8: I got out.
Speaker 6: I was.
Speaker 5: I was right behy.
Speaker 4: But nothing happened to us.
Speaker 9: Kelly, who hadn't worked on a pet dye project before,
Speaker 9: quickly got a taste of Die's creative process.
Speaker 8: When we first started working with him, we had to
Speaker 8: get upset of plans for the bank in order to
Speaker 8: just stit the loan. It was the hardest thing to
Speaker 8: get a set of plants. Pete resisted and just didn't
Speaker 8: want to give us a set of plants, and finally
Speaker 8: we were able to secure a set of plans from him.
Speaker 4: We gave them to the bank and everything's ready to go.
Speaker 8: So we're on the site. The first day we were
Speaker 8: walking out to the first t I said, oh, wait, man,
Speaker 8: I forgot something. And I went running back to the
Speaker 8: truck and got the plans, and son come running, come
Speaker 8: running back, and Pete says to me, what's that And
Speaker 8: I said, oh, these are the plants. And he said,
Speaker 8: put up back of the truck, and I don't want
Speaker 8: to see them again. That was the last time we
Speaker 8: had the plants on the job, and.
Speaker 9: That, it seems to me, is exactly where Pete die
Speaker 9: and the tour could have found themselves at loggerheads, the
Speaker 9: craftsmen versus the corporation, the improviser versus the plan followers.
Speaker 9: But as it turned out, Dean Beeman himself had a
Speaker 9: healthy regard for Dye's methods.
Speaker 4: That's Pete. Pete wants to be hands on, boots on
Speaker 4: the ground. I want to see it. I don't want
Speaker 4: to see it on a piece of paper. I want
Speaker 4: to see it with my own eye and my boots
Speaker 4: on the ground.
Speaker 9: Get wet and from Vernon Kelly's point of view. While
Speaker 9: there was a contrast in styles between Die and Beman,
Speaker 9: there was also a crucial element that kept the peace.
Speaker 8: There was a tremendous amount of respect between Dean and
Speaker 8: deep In both ways and Alice both ways.
Speaker 9: Years later, Alice I admitted that her initial fears about
Speaker 9: the partnership had been unfounded. Dean was wonderful, she said.
Speaker 9: He let Pete do his thing, and both of them
Speaker 9: let Alice do her thing. She too was on site,
Speaker 9: and she too had a knack for boots on the improvisation.
Speaker 9: According to plans, the par three seventeenth would have water
Speaker 9: just on the right but around the seventeenth green, as
Speaker 9: it happened, was some of the best sand on a
Speaker 9: generally mucky property. So the crew kept digging that sand
Speaker 9: out and using it as foundation for turf elsewhere on
Speaker 9: the course. Eventually there was an enormous pit where the
Speaker 9: seventeenth hole was supposed to be. Here's how Pete Dye
Speaker 9: recounted what happened.
Speaker 5: Next.
Speaker 9: I called Alice over to discuss with her where we
Speaker 9: could find a new place for the green. She said,
Speaker 9: put the green back where it was and fill the
Speaker 9: hole with water. Simple enough. This sort of husband wife
Speaker 9: collaboration was common on dye projects. One summer when he
Speaker 9: was in college, Tom Doak worked on the crew at
Speaker 9: Die's Long Cove Club on Hilton Head Island.
Speaker 10: They were renting a house three miles away and Sea
Speaker 10: Pine's plantation, and p would be there six or seven
Speaker 10: days a week at six thirty in the morning with
Speaker 10: the crew, and Alice would come out two or three
Speaker 10: times a week, you know, at lunch time or in
Speaker 10: the afternoon, and she'd just come check on progress and see,
Speaker 10: you know, see what what had been done since the
Speaker 10: last time she was out there, which you know, even
Speaker 10: that would be more visits than most architects would make
Speaker 10: to their own construction sites. And it was actually a
Speaker 10: guy on our crew that would have been a college
Speaker 10: roommate of PD's, you know, Pete was shaping on the
Speaker 10: golf course and Steve, his roommate, was out there working
Speaker 10: on the labor crew. And I get to know Steve
Speaker 10: a little bit, and at one point Steve just sort
Speaker 10: of said, really casually, well, you know, nothing's really done
Speaker 10: out here until miss Sally says it's okay. And I
Speaker 10: thought that was funny at the time, but but I
Speaker 10: really did get the impression by the time I was
Speaker 10: done working for Pete and Alice that Alice had a
Speaker 10: lot to say about you know, maybe not the final say,
Speaker 10: but she was certainly going to tell Pe if she
Speaker 10: didn't think, you know, he thought golf course is too
Speaker 10: hard or too easy, or if that feature didn't look right,
Speaker 10: and you know, hers was the most important opinion to Pete.
Speaker 9: So while Pte Die was firm in his own convictions,
Speaker 9: he was also eager to gather input from others.
Speaker 10: I can stay as an architect. The hardest one of
Speaker 10: the hardest things to do when you're in the middle
Speaker 10: of a construction project is half perspective on you've sort
Speaker 10: of you've gotten away from playing golf on graft and
Speaker 10: you get to lose perspective of this is too hard,
Speaker 10: this is too easy, And it really helps to have
Speaker 10: somebody out there you trust just this. You know, it's okay,
Speaker 10: it's fine, or it's a wait, are you sure you
Speaker 10: want to be doing that? You know, And most architects
Speaker 10: don't have that.
Speaker 9: The Stadium course opened in nineteen eighty, but as the
Speaker 9: eighty two Players Championship approached, the first players to be
Speaker 9: held at TPC Sawgrass the pressure on both Pete Dye
Speaker 9: and Dean Beaman ratcheted up.
Speaker 5: It was definitely a move forward for the PGA Tour
Speaker 5: because they were opening their own golf course.
Speaker 9: Sean Martin is a senior editor for PGA Tour dot com,
Speaker 9: and in twenty seventeen he wrote a feature called Leap
Speaker 9: of Faith behind the Stadium Course's wild debut at the
Speaker 9: nineteen eighty two Players Championship. It's really great and a
Speaker 9: major inspiration for this episode.
Speaker 5: So now they were getting into the golf course business,
Speaker 5: and there was debate among the players whether or not
Speaker 5: the PGA Tour should be getting into the golf course business,
Speaker 5: whether or not that was a wise business decision. You know,
Speaker 5: you look at Adam Schupack's book about Dean Beaman, and
Speaker 5: the early tour was run out of basically, I believe
Speaker 5: it was a town homer, a condo at the Sawgrass
Speaker 5: Country Club. So it was a very modest organization. So
Speaker 5: to now all of a sudden get into the golf
Speaker 5: course business was a risky venture.
Speaker 9: And the heat on Beeman and Die got turned up
Speaker 9: when the pros started to visit the new course.
Speaker 5: So Sagress Club, which hosted the players. Was literally across
Speaker 5: the street, so when guys were in town for the players,
Speaker 5: they could go over and see TPC. It was carved
Speaker 5: out of a swamp. It was much more severe than
Speaker 5: what you see today. I think some of that is
Speaker 5: just when you build slopes and you shape them, they
Speaker 5: never look quite as severe as when they get grass
Speaker 5: on them, and so just I think, of course, is
Speaker 5: always going to be severe when it's new. And then
Speaker 5: also you know, combine some of that with just the
Speaker 5: wild surrounds off the fairway. If you strayed from the
Speaker 5: corridors and hit it into that stuff, I mean you're
Speaker 5: looking at lost balls. You're having trouble hacking out. It
Speaker 5: was very raw and very very penal.
Speaker 9: The players began to make their opinions known, and not
Speaker 9: long after the grand opening, Dean Beaman oversaw some significant changes.
Speaker 6: It was difficult for me to envision what the final
Speaker 6: product would be based on looking at dirt when the grass.
Speaker 4: Was on it. It was far different than I had imagined.
Speaker 6: And clearly as soon as it opened, even before tour
Speaker 6: players came in and wanted to play it, I determined
Speaker 6: it was much too severe. The greens themselves were much
Speaker 6: too severe. So during the course of that year, before
Speaker 6: the first tournament, a lot of work was done to
Speaker 6: take some of the severity out of the greens.
Speaker 9: But when the eighty two Players Championship arrived, the course
Speaker 9: was still very rugged and very difficult. Tom Doak headed
Speaker 9: down from Cornell during his spring break to watch the tournament.
Speaker 9: When Doak remembers that era of TPC sagrass, the image
Speaker 9: of a relatively bare bones golf course comes to his mind.
Speaker 10: But you know, one of the things about the TPC
Speaker 10: that most people don't realize is, you know, in nineteen
Speaker 10: seventy ninety eighty was terrible recession time in America, and
Speaker 10: the TPC was really built to be a low meetance
Speaker 10: golf course in a fairly low budge golf course to build.
Speaker 10: And of course once it was opened for three or
Speaker 10: four years, they all of a sudden it was like, well,
Speaker 10: this is the headquarters of the tour. We've got to
Speaker 10: spruce it up and we've got to make it look
Speaker 10: pretty imperfect. But that was not Pete's idea going into it.
Speaker 10: One of the quotes I remember him saying it that
Speaker 10: the original tournament in nineteen eighty two was everything here
Speaker 10: is the dead opposite of Augusta on purpose.
Speaker 9: When Dope got to the tournament, he went out and
Speaker 9: found Pete Dye on the course.
Speaker 10: I think it was on like the eleventh or twelfth hole. Basically,
Speaker 10: he was just going around to one hole at a
Speaker 10: time and watching players come through and you know, watching
Speaker 10: shots and seeing how they reacted. He wanted to see
Speaker 10: how they played him. He didn't want to hear how
Speaker 10: what they said. He didn't care so much what they
Speaker 10: said about it. You know, he just wanted to see
Speaker 10: if the shots work the way he intended them to.
Speaker 10: And you know, so we just go to one hole
Speaker 10: at a time and watched three or four groups play through,
Speaker 10: and Pete did see somebody hid a good shot and go, oh,
Speaker 10: that whole works. We can go to the next call now.
Speaker 9: But the pros were coming to their own conclusions, you know.
Speaker 5: Going in, people knew, I think that it was going
Speaker 5: to be a high tension week. This was a players
Speaker 5: were facing something that was new, something that was very penal.
Speaker 5: Players had an opportunity to voice their opinions and voice
Speaker 5: them strongly and loudly, and the press obviously was very
Speaker 5: willing to write them and so you had some great
Speaker 5: quotes that you know, I think players had probably spent
Speaker 5: some time thinking about. And so you had Ben Crenshaw,
Speaker 5: of all people, referring to it as Star Wars golf
Speaker 5: designed by Darth Vader. Jack Nicholas after missing the cuts
Speaker 5: that I've never been very good at stopping a five
Speaker 5: iron on the hood of a car.
Speaker 9: At least one player, however, was in his element.
Speaker 5: As far as a.
Speaker 2: Pete Die golf course, I was fortunate enough to play
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy four, I played the Teeth of the
Speaker 2: Dog at Casa de Campo.
Speaker 9: Jerry Pate was a twenty eight year old US amateur
Speaker 9: and US Open champion. He had a silky, powerful swing
Speaker 9: and a fearless attitude, and he felt that he had
Speaker 9: a bead on Pete Die designs.
Speaker 2: So I kind of understood Pete strategies. I had to
Speaker 2: feel for how he liked to strategize holes. And there
Speaker 2: were just certain places you couldn't hit the ball.
Speaker 4: You just if you'd hit it there, you were in trouble.
Speaker 2: And when I saw the Stadium course for the first time,
Speaker 2: a lot of people complained about it because the greens
Speaker 2: were sort of perched up off of the grade, so
Speaker 2: you had a lot of areas that had I would
Speaker 2: call them false fronts in the front, and the green
Speaker 2: ran off on the left side and the right side,
Speaker 2: and there were very very small pinnable areas that were
Speaker 2: little target areas, and if you didn't hit it there,
Speaker 2: the ball would gather some fifteen to thirty forty feet
Speaker 2: away from there into a low depression either on the
Speaker 2: green or off the green.
Speaker 4: So you had to be extremely.
Speaker 2: Accurate with your iron. You had to be a good
Speaker 2: driver of the ball, which I was, and you had
Speaker 2: to be a really good iron player, which I was.
Speaker 2: So his designs sort of played right into my hand.
Speaker 9: Still, like everyone else, Jerry Pate was struck by the
Speaker 9: rawness and difficulty of the new TPC.
Speaker 2: And you know, the golf course was wild and willy then.
Speaker 2: It wasn't naturally managed and manacured light. I mean, it
Speaker 2: wasn't as manicure today. It was natural with pal meadows
Speaker 2: and just you know, basically bobcats and rattlesnakes twenty foot
Speaker 2: off the fairway and Armadilla's and you name it. So
Speaker 2: that day there was nothing on earth, and I mean
Speaker 2: that not with it, not with exaggeration. There was no
Speaker 2: other course on the earth more difficult and diabolical than
Speaker 2: that golf course.
Speaker 9: But unlike almost everyone else, Pete wasn't much bothered by
Speaker 9: the stadium course's severity. This was at least in part
Speaker 9: because he just wasn't the worrying type.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so he was this gregarious bass riker, just fun
Speaker 5: loving flagging shots and I guess maybe kind of cavalier
Speaker 5: in that way, aiming at flags and playing I think
Speaker 5: kind of care free, because when you're that good of
Speaker 5: a bass riker, you can kind of do that because
Speaker 5: the ball's going to go where you aim.
Speaker 9: Peate also had the advantage of having played at the
Speaker 9: grand opening of TPC Sawgrass nineteen eighty and being paired
Speaker 9: with Dean Beaman himself. Beaman had shown him where he
Speaker 9: could be aggressive off the tee and taught him not
Speaker 9: to be intimidated by Die's visuals.
Speaker 5: Look, the fairways are much wider than they appear. They're
Speaker 5: classic Pete Die deception. You know, who build up bunkers
Speaker 5: or slopes that will make the fairway look smaller than
Speaker 5: they are. But the problem is, is really the fairways
Speaker 5: or wider than you think? And if you lay back
Speaker 5: off the tee, the second shot you're going to face
Speaker 5: into the greens is harder than the shot that you
Speaker 5: just avoided off the tee. So by playing safe off
Speaker 5: the tee, you're not really avoiding as much trouble as
Speaker 5: you think you are, and you're just bringing that much
Speaker 5: more into play around the greens. And so it is
Speaker 5: very visually intimidating, but you're also going to be best
Speaker 5: suited if you take the challenge on.
Speaker 9: So Pete was even more confident than usual going into
Speaker 9: the eighty two players. Not only did he like Pete
Speaker 9: die courses and do well at them, not only did
Speaker 9: he have the right skill set and disposition. Not only
Speaker 9: did he have intel on tpc's sawgrass, but he also
Speaker 9: had deep family connections to Jacksonville. His father had been
Speaker 9: born and raised there, and his mother had moved there
Speaker 9: in high school. Added all up, and Jerry Pate felt
Speaker 9: that he had destiny on his side.
Speaker 2: I just knew I was going to win it. It
Speaker 2: wasn't even a thought in my head, you know, I
Speaker 2: knew it all along.
Speaker 9: Well, he didn't exactly jump out to the lead. He
Speaker 9: hung around shooting seventy seventy three seventy. After fifty four holes,
Speaker 9: he was tied for sixth, three shots behind his brother
Speaker 9: in law Bruce Letsky and co leader Brad Bryant. Meanwhile,
Speaker 9: Pate was very aware of the rumblings among veteran players
Speaker 9: about the course and the tour's new direction.
Speaker 2: And there was talk in the locker room by the
Speaker 2: senior Hall of famers just before they were into Hall
Speaker 2: of Fame. And I won't mention names.
Speaker 4: Some of them are dead now.
Speaker 2: Somerseille lives in their eighties, and the talk was they
Speaker 2: were going to get, you know, have a coup and
Speaker 2: fired Dean because we had no business owning a golf course.
Speaker 2: And it was crazy, and it was competing against some
Speaker 2: of these famous golfers design careers. They had their own
Speaker 2: design careers going. So they're thinking, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 2: PGA Tours hiring some outside guy named Pete Died to
Speaker 2: design their golf course. Why didn't they hire a player.
Speaker 2: It was victrial, It was anger. The players were mad, angry,
Speaker 2: I mean, you could use.
Speaker 4: All those words.
Speaker 2: It was a big deal politically for Dean and Pete Die,
Speaker 2: I can tell you. And there were some really top
Speaker 2: players in that As I said, Hall of Fame golfers
Speaker 2: that didn't like the golf course at all, in fact,
Speaker 2: missed the cut. And then once you get something that's
Speaker 2: negative in your mind you don't like the golf course,
Speaker 2: you're done. There's no way you're going to play well.
Speaker 1: And I loved it.
Speaker 9: On Sunday, after Burdiying twelve, Pate had closed the gap
Speaker 9: between himself and the leaders. The year prior, he had
Speaker 9: won in Memphis, and in celebration he had leapt into
Speaker 9: the lake by the eighteenth green. So rumors were already
Speaker 9: going around TPC Sagrass that if he pulled off the victory,
Speaker 9: he would do the same today.
Speaker 2: Anyway, as I walked back to thirteen t Can, I
Speaker 2: heard somebody kind of running up behind me and they
Speaker 2: grabbed my arm. I turned around. It was Alice Die
Speaker 2: and she looked at me and she said, you've got
Speaker 2: to win this thing, and you got to throw Pete
Speaker 2: in the lake.
Speaker 9: Alice's idea, it seems, was that a little playful public
Speaker 9: come up and might do some good. It might provide
Speaker 9: an outlet for the rising hostility toward her husband and
Speaker 9: their design business.
Speaker 2: Of course, Pete had been catching ungodly amount of heat
Speaker 2: for this golf course, and Alice, I think was a
Speaker 2: little bit worried. Can I turn around? Looked at her
Speaker 2: just calm as can be. And everybody used to think,
Speaker 2: you know, when I played, I was cocky. I really
Speaker 2: wasn't cocky. I just you know, I knew in my
Speaker 2: heart I could pull it off, and I said, I'm
Speaker 2: gonna win.
Speaker 9: Pete went on to par thirteen, Birdie fourteen, and Birdie
Speaker 9: the Island seventeenth hole. He drove it right up the
Speaker 9: god on eighteen and had a five iron into the green.
Speaker 9: Until that point, the most famous moment in Pet's career
Speaker 9: had involved another seventy second whole five iron, this one
Speaker 9: at the nineteen seventy six US Open. He hit it
Speaker 9: so close to a dangerous whole location that some accused
Speaker 9: him of pulling it. Today, the approach to the eighteenth
Speaker 9: that TPC sawgrass is still a scary shot. Even when
Speaker 9: pros are hitting eight or nine irons. Almost no one
Speaker 9: goes directly at the pen. But Pate did with a
Speaker 9: five iron, and he knocked it to two feet.
Speaker 2: For me to hit that shot like Ben Crenshaw hitting
Speaker 2: a you know, a six foot pot, he's not nervous.
Speaker 2: Jack Nicholas isn't nervous on a six foot, but Tom
Speaker 2: Watson wasn't nervous on a six foot, but Lee Trevino
Speaker 2: was never nervous on a nine yard wed shot, and
Speaker 2: Jerry Pate was never nervous hitting a long iron shot.
Speaker 2: I mean, I nerves weren't even in my vocabulary. And
Speaker 2: when I hit the five iron, and I went to
Speaker 2: the press room, and I think Tom Place was running
Speaker 2: the interview for the PGA Tour, and he said, you
Speaker 2: have any opening statements, and I go, yeah, I guess,
Speaker 2: I guess I pulled another five iron.
Speaker 9: But let's go back for a moment into the eighteenth fairway,
Speaker 9: just after Pate had stiffed his approach.
Speaker 2: And the camera was on me, little Davy Finch, you
Speaker 2: worked for CBS and Trick Kenny and is in the truck.
Speaker 2: I knew that, and you know, all my buddies at
Speaker 2: CBS were there, and I have no idea what they've said.
Speaker 2: But as I walked up the eighteenth fairway, Davy Finch says,
Speaker 2: you're gonna jump in the lake, and I said, Pete,
Speaker 2: die will go for a swim.
Speaker 9: As he waited for the groups behind him to finish.
Speaker 9: Pate saw Dean Beeman's wife Judy, who urged him to
Speaker 9: throw Dean in the water with Pete. As that was happening, CBS,
Speaker 9: with Vin Scully calling the action, was working a bit
Speaker 9: of TV magic.
Speaker 5: There was a gator that had been seen in the
Speaker 5: pond at seventeen. So Frank Trickinny In the Great CBS
Speaker 5: producer put up a split screen and there's kind of
Speaker 5: waiting for Jerry to throw them in at the trophy
Speaker 5: ceremony on one side and the other side of this
Speaker 5: gator in the water. But what Vin said was that
Speaker 5: this gator is on the lake at seventeen. The lake
Speaker 5: on eighteen is not connected. And so the television you
Speaker 5: were thinking they're about to jump into this gator infested pond.
Speaker 2: Now I didn't even think I was going to go in.
Speaker 2: I thought I would just throw them both in the
Speaker 2: lake and that would be it. And then they were
Speaker 2: out there and you know, in the lake. So I
Speaker 2: threw them both in the lake off the bulkhead, and
Speaker 2: then I jumped in behind them. But you know, I
Speaker 2: never realized how high it was. And when I jumped in,
Speaker 2: after the fact, I go back and look at those videos. Heck,
Speaker 2: it was about an eight foot off the water. That
Speaker 2: bulkhead was about eight foot, so it's a pretty big
Speaker 2: racing dive, but to be eight foot in the air,
Speaker 2: but we didn't care. There was so much, so much adrenaline,
Speaker 2: the emotion of winning. It was an exciting time and
Speaker 2: it was, you know, a memory. I'll never forget it.
Speaker 2: It was as great as winning the US Open, I
Speaker 2: can tell you.
Speaker 9: Dean Beeman that's his own way of remembering the experience.
Speaker 9: How did the water feel?
Speaker 6: It was pretty ugly.
Speaker 9: The jump in the lake, and it's theater of just
Speaker 9: desserts may have taken the edge off the player's outrage.
Speaker 9: Dean Beeman kept his job and Pete Die kept designing
Speaker 9: courses for the PGA Tour, but the pro's opinion of
Speaker 9: the stadium course at TPC Sawgrass didn't change. Right away.
Speaker 5: After the tournament was over, Pete's in the locker room
Speaker 5: changing He's just been thrown in the lake. Ed Snead
Speaker 5: and Tom Weiscoff were waiting for him, and Pete knew
Speaker 5: both of them from Ohio, and they had a question
Speaker 5: about the thirteenth hole, which is a par three there's
Speaker 5: water left, and the green is bisected by a pretty
Speaker 5: severe swale, and so the whole locations down on the left.
Speaker 5: They're by the water, but you can use that swale
Speaker 5: to funnel the tea shot towards the hole. However, if
Speaker 5: you miss on the wrong side of it, you're now
Speaker 5: putting down a very steep slope to the hole. Two
Speaker 5: putting is almost impossible. So Ed and Tom had played together.
Speaker 5: They said their t shots landed within two feet of
Speaker 5: each other. One of them funneled down towards the hole,
Speaker 5: the other stayed up top. And they were asking, how
Speaker 5: can we have a golf course where two shots that
Speaker 5: land within two feet of each other have such vastly
Speaker 5: different results. That doesn't seem fair. Pete looks at them
Speaker 5: and he says, well, the only reason that happened is
Speaker 5: because you guys are chicken. If you were aiming at
Speaker 5: the hole, that two feet wouldn't have mattered at all.
Speaker 5: But you're afraid of the water on the left, so
Speaker 5: you're aiming for a slope in the green to try
Speaker 5: to save you, and that has too small of a
Speaker 5: margin for error, which you just told me you're not
Speaker 5: good enough to hit.
Speaker 9: In spite of appearances. Though Pete Die was not unmoved
Speaker 9: by the criticism. He wrote in his autobiography, the verbal
Speaker 9: assault against our new creation hit like a steak in
Speaker 9: my heart. Still he saw no evidence that the course
Speaker 9: was too hard. After all, Jerry Pate had won at
Speaker 9: eight under. In order to make the top ten, you
Speaker 9: had to break par. In fact, Die said at the time,
Speaker 9: when they learn how to play the stadium course, we
Speaker 9: may have to put in some more obstacles to keep
Speaker 9: them totally frustrated. But ultimately it wasn't Die's call. After
Speaker 9: the eighty three Tournament Players Championship, the pro revolted. According
Speaker 9: to Adam Shuepack's account, a group of top players sent
Speaker 9: a letter of complaint to Commissioner Beman. Among the signees
Speaker 9: were Ben Crenshaw, Taylor Win, Jack Nicholas Craig Stadler, Tom
Speaker 9: Watson and Tom Weiscough. Quickly, Beaman arranged a meeting a
Speaker 9: TPC Sawgrass between Pete Dye and a player committee. They
Speaker 9: toured the course and the players grilled Die about the
Speaker 9: green contours. The commissioner saw their side well.
Speaker 6: Some of the lowest areas on the greens that were
Speaker 6: pin positions were in places that the green surfaces at
Speaker 6: the higher.
Speaker 4: Part of those greens were so severe that the ball.
Speaker 6: Coming off the high side down to the low side
Speaker 6: wouldn't stay on the green at all. So it was
Speaker 6: literally impossible to not three part, many many times from
Speaker 6: one transition part.
Speaker 4: Of a green to another. And the players were right.
Speaker 4: It was too severe. It was still too severe to
Speaker 4: be really a fair test to golf. Yeah, our were
Speaker 4: still hurt, but they were right.
Speaker 9: Months later, Ben Crenshaw, the co chair of the Architectural Committee,
Speaker 9: presented a list of changes to be made to the
Speaker 9: stadium course. At that point, I almost certainly saw the
Speaker 9: writing on the wall. How do you think mister Dye
Speaker 9: reacted to or felt about the fact that he was
Speaker 9: modifying or had to modify the course.
Speaker 6: The answer is he was very reluctant to make the
Speaker 6: changes that we wanted made. He wanted it as difficulty
Speaker 6: could because he wanted to challenge the best players in
Speaker 6: the world, and he didn't care. He didn't think golf
Speaker 6: was fair in the first place, so he was he
Speaker 6: was not. He was not happy with the continual modifications
Speaker 6: of it.
Speaker 9: But the modifications were made, mostly carried out by Die's
Speaker 9: associate Bobby Weed between eighty three and eighty eight. Weed
Speaker 9: once said, one of my biggest regrets of being in
Speaker 9: the business is I was the one who had to
Speaker 9: make all the changes. Those changes did, however, mollify the
Speaker 9: pros and TPC sawgrass, which today boasts Augusta like conditions,
Speaker 9: complete with flower beds accenting the arena of the seventeenth hole,
Speaker 9: is now highly regarded among PGA Tour members. In a way,
Speaker 9: it's become a symbol of the tour the Dean Beaman built, sturdy,
Speaker 9: impressive and efficiently run. Here's Adam Schuepeck.
Speaker 3: Dean came along at a time where the PGA Tour
Speaker 3: was just this mom and pop shop, and he really,
Speaker 3: during his twenty years tenures assembled the building blocks that
Speaker 3: are the foundation of the modern PGA Tour. And I
Speaker 3: feel like the PGA Tour is still running the Dean
Speaker 3: Beaman playbook. It's worked all this time, and it continues
Speaker 3: to seem almost invincible and impenetrable to whatever comes along.
Speaker 3: It's just a well oiled machine.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 9: Whether the alterations Tode's original design were for the best
Speaker 9: remains a topic of debate in the Golf World one
Speaker 9: that breaks down along familiar lines. If you're a competitive
Speaker 9: or score oriented golfer, if you prize fairness and course
Speaker 9: design whatever that means, you'll likely see the changes as positive,
Speaker 9: even necessary. Others may argue that fairness is an irrelevant concern,
Speaker 9: especially when everyone is competing on the same course. These
Speaker 9: people may wish that more of the rugged quirk of
Speaker 9: Die's original design had been preserved. Tom Doak takes a
Speaker 9: fairly diplomatic view.
Speaker 10: I don't know if he can say the changes made
Speaker 10: the course better or worse. You know, it's all it's
Speaker 10: all a matter of opinion, and it's all your perspective
Speaker 10: on what the objective of the course should try to be.
Speaker 10: To me, it just made it different than the original intension,
Speaker 10: you know, in terms of how much pressure it put
Speaker 10: on the players to hit good shots consistently through the
Speaker 10: golf course. But you know, the bottom line is, you know,
Speaker 10: pros don't like shooting seventy five when they have an
Speaker 10: average to poor day. You know, they don't mind not
Speaker 10: shooting sixty seven all the time, but they don't they
Speaker 10: don't want the numbers to get up there and the TPC.
Speaker 10: When you were having a bad day. The darnwell reflected
Speaker 10: it on the scorecard.
Speaker 9: In a sense, Alice Stye's prediction had come true. But
Speaker 9: it wasn't Dean Beeman specifically who came into conflict with
Speaker 9: her husband. It was the players, and they had the
Speaker 9: last word. At some point, perhaps during that walk around
Speaker 9: TPC Sagrass with the committee in nineteen eighty three, he
Speaker 9: must have recognized that fact. After his triumph at the
Speaker 9: eighty two Players, Jerry Pate was living large and.
Speaker 2: I had a ten year exemption. It was a big deal.
Speaker 2: The most money anybody had ever won, ninety thousand dollars,
Speaker 2: a lot of endorsements, you know. Life was great. To
Speaker 2: have my own private plane, Jack and Arnold and I
Speaker 2: were the only three players had a private plane on
Speaker 2: the tour at that time. And I was twenty eight,
Speaker 2: you know, in pretty big tall cotton, I guess you
Speaker 2: could say for a Southern boy. And then in one
Speaker 2: swing in the first of June that was kind of
Speaker 2: into my golfing competitive career.
Speaker 9: He was on the driving range Secola, preparing for the
Speaker 9: Open by practicing one iron stingers into the wind off
Speaker 9: of hard ground. On one swing, he felt his left
Speaker 9: shoulder pop, and that injury turned Jerry Pate into one
Speaker 9: of golf's great what if stories. He never won again
Speaker 9: on the PGA Tour, but he stayed in the golf business,
Speaker 9: eventually starting a course design firm of his own. Over
Speaker 9: the years, he became close with Pete and Alice Dye.
Speaker 9: Their friendship had begun in nineteen seventy four when a
Speaker 9: twenty one year old Pate played the world amateur at
Speaker 9: Teeth of the Dog. Today, his firm looks after Teeth
Speaker 9: of the Dog and the other die courses at Cosa de.
Speaker 2: Compo as we've sort of taken on the role to
Speaker 2: keep the integrity of the aesthetics of the architecture and
Speaker 2: agronomics there. I go to Kasa da Kamp.
Speaker 5: I'm going next week down there.
Speaker 4: In fact, I go.
Speaker 2: You go down there a lot. And so it's a
Speaker 2: great honor to have met Pete Dye as a twenty
Speaker 2: one year old kid, and now I'm sort of stepped
Speaker 2: in his place at one of his favorite places, and
Speaker 2: that's where he died.
Speaker 9: If you listen to the Frida Egg podcast, you already
Speaker 9: know that Pete and Alice I are no longer with us.
Speaker 9: Pete passed away in January at the age of ninety
Speaker 9: five after a battle with Alzheimer's. Alice was ninety one
Speaker 9: when she died in February of last year. They're longtime friends.
Speaker 9: Like Dean Beaman, Vernon Kelly, and Jerry Pate, tend to
Speaker 9: speak about Pete and Alice in terms of both personal
Speaker 9: and historical. Their generosity, their accomplishments, their eccentric nomadic lifestyle,
Speaker 9: their influence on a generation of architects, their commitment to
Speaker 9: the game and to the craft.
Speaker 2: They didn't build golf courses for the money. They built
Speaker 2: golf coursecuse because Alice was.
Speaker 5: A great amateur player in her own right.
Speaker 2: Her husband was really a fine amateur player, and they
Speaker 2: gave so much to the game. I guess Alice was
Speaker 2: the first woman to sit on the PGA of America
Speaker 2: board that I remember, and I know she was head
Speaker 2: of the Architects Society. I mean they were for a woman.
Speaker 2: She did on incredible things in a man's world. And
Speaker 2: of course Pete was a legend. Oh my god, you
Speaker 2: know the stories Pete used to tell me about how
Speaker 2: he got fired by Augy Bush.
Speaker 5: You're fired by Herb Kohler and then they'd.
Speaker 2: Hire him back, and I'm sure Dean wanted to fire ms.
Speaker 2: He was quite a character, you know, and you couldn't
Speaker 2: help belove Pete Dye and Alice was just gosh, she
Speaker 2: was assault of the earth. She was like a mother
Speaker 2: to me, I'll tell you. And so I dearly miss
Speaker 2: him both, dearly missing both.
Speaker 9: This was the fourth episode of Frida Egg Stories. It
Speaker 9: was created and hosted by me Garrett Morrison, with mixing
Speaker 9: and engineering from Jay Eric. Our executive producer is Andy Johnson.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, all right, thanks for listening to another
Speaker 1: edition of the Friday Golf podcast asked and big thanks
Speaker 1: to Sean Martin for joining us, as well as p J.
Speaker 1: Clark for editing and producing this podcast.