Speaker 1: Welcome back to the final part of the latest episode
Speaker 1: of The Yoke with Doak. If you've missed Part one
Speaker 1: or Part two of our discussion, be sure to check
Speaker 1: them out on our feed or on our website. In
Speaker 1: Part three, we continue our discussion on George Thomas bel
Speaker 1: Air and golf architecture as a whole. If you've missed
Speaker 1: any of the previous editions of The Yoke with Doak,
Speaker 1: we have a dedicated page on the website under the
Speaker 1: podcast tab where you can go perus, ask questions, and
Speaker 1: check out the previous episodes. So, without further ado, here
Speaker 1: is part three of our podcast with Tom Eric Iverson,
Speaker 1: Blake Conant, Kai Golby and Brian Schneider and enjoy. Tom
Speaker 1: Dolk is back and as usual, he's not holding back.
Speaker 2: But you don't hats the yult.
Speaker 3: And the famously candid dope doesn't pull any punchet.
Speaker 2: How do I make natural looking contour? Hire the biggest
Speaker 2: pool in the village and tell him to make it flat?
Speaker 1: First?
Speaker 2: Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years.
Speaker 1: Rob Collins, fellow architect. He wants to know what have
Speaker 1: you found most useful? And this is a kind of
Speaker 1: a team answer here from what the club had, what
Speaker 1: you've discovered on your own to getting this place back.
Speaker 2: And I'll start with one thing. In restoration work, there's
Speaker 2: it's not really public disagreement, but there there is a
Speaker 2: big dichotomy between people that think that you should try
Speaker 2: to build the course toward the original plans versus toward
Speaker 2: whatever photographic evidence you have of the golf course that
Speaker 2: got built. Because nothing's ever built exactly to the plants.
Speaker 2: And depending on who the architect is, you can, you know,
Speaker 2: like with Donald Ross, sometimes you can make the case
Speaker 2: Weill Ross was barely ever there, so you should work
Speaker 2: to the plans instead of whatever the stupid guys that
Speaker 2: built the golf course actually did. But when there's an architect,
Speaker 2: when there's when there is an architect who did spend
Speaker 2: time on it, which George Thomas clearly was. First of all,
Speaker 2: there's no plans, I mean other than other than like
Speaker 2: a plan for the development and where the golf holes
Speaker 2: were and where the lots are around it. There's no
Speaker 2: detailed plans of these holes that I've ever seen drawn.
Speaker 2: Jeff Sackelford's book has some really cool drawings of some
Speaker 2: of the holes that had been lost here, like the
Speaker 2: second and the ninth that we've restored, But those are
Speaker 2: Jeff's drawings, they're not George time Is drawings. Thomas didn't
Speaker 2: do drawings of these holes anywhere that we found or
Speaker 2: that the club had in their archives. So we're you know,
Speaker 2: we're going with the photographic evidence that we have because
Speaker 2: we couldn't go from the plans even if we wanted to.
Speaker 2: But I would make even if I had George Thomas
Speaker 2: his own drawing of the second all if it was
Speaker 2: the before he built it, I would go with what
Speaker 2: he built because in my work, the difference between whatever
Speaker 2: drawing I do at the beginning and what we wind
Speaker 2: up with. We're trying to make it better than the drawing.
Speaker 2: That's what That's why we spend all our time out here.
Speaker 2: Otherwise we just hand the drawing to somebody and say
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 1: As what we talked about in the first podcast we
Speaker 1: had is that so much of your job is in
Speaker 1: the third dimension, and that's what can't be captured in
Speaker 1: drawings or photos.
Speaker 2: It's hard to capture in the photos too, and that's
Speaker 2: what these guys will speak to.
Speaker 4: Yeah, had both Kai and Blake can can expand on
Speaker 4: this even farther. But most places you find old bunker sand,
Speaker 4: And you know that that's kind of that's a fun
Speaker 4: just kind of a fun part of the process. You
Speaker 4: asked Kai in the in the first part of this steal,
Speaker 4: you know, what's the most interesting thing you ever dug
Speaker 4: out by accident? In Some of the most interesting things
Speaker 4: you find on purpose are just the edges of these
Speaker 4: enormous bunkers. And Kai also kind of noticed early on
Speaker 4: that that ended up being a pretty consistent trend, is
Speaker 4: finding steel pipe around some of these features, which would
Speaker 4: have been kind of the original routing of the irrigation
Speaker 4: around the edges of the greens or the edges of
Speaker 4: the bunkers.
Speaker 2: And yeah, you know, when you're digging a bunker and
Speaker 2: you run into a steel pipe, you've probably gone too far,
Speaker 2: because that was the pipe was around the bunker.
Speaker 4: Yeah, through the middle of the Yeah.
Speaker 1: Occasionally that's that's when I'm ripping a pg A tow
Speaker 1: our of course, and I'm rating it after and I'm
Speaker 1: like delete this is when you hit a pipe here,
Speaker 1: just bringing that dirt right back down right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, But it's a good indicator and and and it
Speaker 4: also it's just another piece of evidence that there's never one.
Speaker 4: There's there's never one. Go to. This is all the
Speaker 4: information you need to do this. It's always an assembly
Speaker 4: of stuff that you find some holes. We have great
Speaker 4: straight down aerial photos of three or four different years,
Speaker 4: and everything's clear as a bell, and other things are
Speaker 4: There's there's no good straight down aerial photo of number
Speaker 4: five because it's off in the corner. You know, the best.
Speaker 4: There's a We have a ton of shots that are
Speaker 4: taken from a bit of an angle, but the one
Speaker 4: straight that we have that little corner is pretty fuzzy,
Speaker 4: but that happens to be the one that we have
Speaker 4: good ground level shots of with golfers in it also
Speaker 4: to give it scale. So you find the bunker sand
Speaker 4: at a certain depth, and then you kind of chase
Speaker 4: that bunker sand up a little slope to where the
Speaker 4: face was, and then all of a sudden that kind
Speaker 4: of drives the face to be at this height, and
Speaker 4: then you know, twenty five feet to the right is
Speaker 4: this little kind of ridgeline coming off the hillside that
Speaker 4: you just put the dirt there, and the whole thing
Speaker 4: just kind of folds into place.
Speaker 2: I have a question, because I just got back here
Speaker 2: today and I haven't seen the work that they've done
Speaker 2: at number five yet. Did you find the old bunker
Speaker 2: sand on that.
Speaker 4: Hole, the bunker that's on the right, tucked up against
Speaker 4: the slope, because the rest of it had just been
Speaker 4: a smear to move the dirt.
Speaker 2: To a lot of what we're talking about, I mean,
Speaker 2: some of this is archaeology. And the reason it works
Speaker 2: is because when they did work on these golf course
Speaker 2: at a later date, a lot of times they were
Speaker 2: just lazy and they whatever new version they built, they
Speaker 2: just brought in trucked in fill and buried everything and
Speaker 2: built over the top of the old thing. They didn't
Speaker 2: take all this. If they'd taken all the sand out
Speaker 2: of the bunkers, we wouldn't know how deep the bunkers are.
Speaker 2: But it's still down there three or four feet and
Speaker 2: all you got to do is dig and find it.
Speaker 2: But when there's a green like five, which when they
Speaker 2: take something away to make that new green for the back,
Speaker 2: now we got nothing, you know, we don't have We
Speaker 2: can't find where the old bunkers where, we can't find
Speaker 2: the elevation of the old green. We have to go
Speaker 2: back and look at pictures taken from ground level. It's
Speaker 2: all we've got because there's nothing physical left of it.
Speaker 5: There was there was old bunker saying in the big
Speaker 5: front bunker two and yeah, that right bunker gives you
Speaker 5: an indication of where the green level would have been.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: So a lot of it's piecing that stuff together. And
Speaker 5: then honestly, like thirty minutes that you spend when you
Speaker 5: first get to a hole is trying to relocate the
Speaker 5: exact spot of ground level photo may have been taken from.
Speaker 5: So you're walking around like trying to get yourself oriented.
Speaker 5: The other thing, and I don't know if it was
Speaker 5: Ryan Yoans or Brian Sullivan who found all the old obliques,
Speaker 5: but those have been very helpful to get the third
Speaker 5: dimension as far as man, this sand was really flashed
Speaker 5: in the area. You sometimes can't tell that, so it
Speaker 5: gives you a sense of how big something was, how
Speaker 5: big a contour was. The other thing, though, is like
Speaker 5: I feel like Catherine Hepburn or Bob Newhart has just
Speaker 5: a stash of ground level photos somewhere in their attic
Speaker 5: of here is Bob Newhart playing around a golf you know,
Speaker 5: like nineteen sixty and it's you know, oh, that's nobody
Speaker 5: came forward with those with that treasure trove, that little
Speaker 5: white buffalo of photos.
Speaker 2: Right, And that's that's the the big danger. The biggest
Speaker 2: danger in restoration projects is as soon as you get done,
Speaker 2: somebody digs up a bunch of old photos and shows
Speaker 2: you did it wrong. Which that's what happened at Crystal
Speaker 2: Downs and Crystal Downs in the eighties before I joined
Speaker 2: they they brought Jeff Cornish in to look at it
Speaker 2: and suggest renovations at restoration. And you know, it was
Speaker 2: a Mackenzie course, so Jeff assumed that you know, the
Speaker 2: bunkers had capes and bays and these these shaped to
Speaker 2: them like Cyprus Point does. And like somebody said earlier,
Speaker 2: you know, you tend to find what you want to find.
Speaker 2: So you know, they dug around a little bit in
Speaker 2: the sand, and it's harder and Crystal Downs because it's
Speaker 2: basically all sand, so it's not it's not so easy
Speaker 2: to find where the old bunker sand is because the
Speaker 2: whole place is sand, so you can't belle erits clay,
Speaker 2: and when you're digging through clay and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: they're saying, you know what, you've just found it crystal downs.
Speaker 2: You can't really do that. But they probed around, and
Speaker 2: so they made a bunch of bunkers with capes and bays.
Speaker 2: And about ten years after they did that, some member
Speaker 2: found a home movie of playing the golf course in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty two, not every hole, but most of them,
Speaker 2: and they, you know, they took the movie apart and
Speaker 2: did freeze frame. There's what number one green looked like.
Speaker 2: And those bunkers, those bunkers were all wrong, you know,
Speaker 2: because Perry Maxwell had built the golf course for Mackenzie,
Speaker 2: and it looked like Perry Maxwell. You know, it looked
Speaker 2: like Perry Maxwell bunkers with kind of blobby shapes and
Speaker 2: rough edges, but not the not the capes and bays.
Speaker 2: So much so they you know, they went back and
Speaker 2: redid it all over again and got it dead to
Speaker 2: nuts right now. But you know, yeah, we we spent
Speaker 2: a lot of time asking we got bel Air to
Speaker 2: pay a friend of ours to do some research and
Speaker 2: dig through every place that we could find. Out here,
Speaker 2: they're asking me to shout out Tommy Nacarato, who does
Speaker 2: who does that kind of research? Especially for courses in
Speaker 2: the LA area and as a huge George Thomas Nutt
Speaker 2: and and you know he's been to like the UCLA
Speaker 2: libraries to know what aerial photos exist of all these
Speaker 2: golf courses. And you know, without people like that, I mean,
Speaker 2: we can't do that, you know that that would be
Speaker 2: crazy for you know, you know Jack Nicholas and Tom
Speaker 2: Fazio they're not doing that, and neither of I I mean,
Speaker 2: we've got to rely on you know, we rely on
Speaker 2: the clubs to some level, and more and more of
Speaker 2: them because they've done a club history book in the
Speaker 2: last ten or twenty years. They've got some good stuff,
Speaker 2: but nearly always. You know, if we ask around and
Speaker 2: we dig around, you know, we we can find something
Speaker 2: else that the club hasn't seen yet. And in this
Speaker 2: at this club, by far, the coolest thing that we
Speaker 2: talked about the May West Hole at the beginning of
Speaker 2: this that it was a part four with a green
Speaker 2: kind of tucked up in the corner to a big
Speaker 2: mound in front of the green that made it blind,
Speaker 2: and then a hillside coming down from the right that's
Speaker 2: kind of another mound. So it was the May West
Speaker 2: Boosoms And there's a picture of it in George Thomas's book,
Speaker 2: but there's only one picture, and from the angle the
Speaker 2: picture is taken, you can't really see the green because
Speaker 2: it's behind the mounds. So we had no idea what
Speaker 2: the green looked like.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: We had an aerial photo that showed a rough shape
Speaker 2: of the green, but we didn't know how high, we
Speaker 2: didn't know what contra was in it or anything else.
Speaker 2: And Tommy Macarato found a picture from somewhere taken from
Speaker 2: the thirteenth t looking back, so you could see the
Speaker 2: mound come down in back into the green and how
Speaker 2: the little notch that between where the man came back
Speaker 2: and where the left side of the green was that
Speaker 2: fell off. So we knew how to restore it. And
Speaker 2: I'm glad. I'm glad we found that photo before instead
Speaker 2: of two years from now after we're done and got
Speaker 2: it wrong.
Speaker 1: Probably a good piece of advice for any GREENS committing
Speaker 1: members how can you help, is just just go drove
Speaker 1: around the college libraries and try and find any kind
Speaker 1: of old photo. I got messaged by somebody and I said,
Speaker 1: you should just try and find as many old photos
Speaker 1: as you can.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you know, I've been trying to find. I can't believe,
Speaker 2: since we started this job, I've been trying to find
Speaker 2: like a really old scorecard of the golf course because
Speaker 2: the teams don't show up quite as well in the
Speaker 2: aerial photo is as everything else. You know, they weren't
Speaker 2: as well defined as they are now, and they so
Speaker 2: you can't depending on what time of year the pictures taken,
Speaker 2: you can't see the actual outline of the tea and
Speaker 2: exactly where they were. So to know exactly where all
Speaker 2: the original teas were, you'd really like to have a
Speaker 2: scorecard that measures it off, and I can't. You know,
Speaker 2: I've assed around and the oldest scorecard I've got so
Speaker 2: far as from the sixties or seventies. It's before you know,
Speaker 2: it's not even it's after Dick Wilson with all the stars.
Speaker 1: That somebody has to have a scorecard.
Speaker 2: Somebody has to have it. And just the other day,
Speaker 2: the very first time I came to Beller in nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: I played golf with Eddie Marins, who's the pro emeritus now.
Speaker 2: But while we were waiting until of course got quiet
Speaker 2: so we could play, we went and had lunch and
Speaker 2: the Men's grill and his former boss, Joe Novak, had
Speaker 2: lunch with us, and Joe Novac spent like an hour
Speaker 2: over lunch telling me how various architects had ruined Bellair,
Speaker 2: you know, took the Maywest pull out and all this
Speaker 2: other stuff. He was, you know, and I didn't realize
Speaker 2: until this year when there's a there's a like a
Speaker 2: case in the in one of the hallways of the
Speaker 2: clubhouse that has a little display about Joe Novak. And
Speaker 2: Joe Novak was the first pro at bell Air. He
Speaker 2: was the pro from when it opened in nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: seven until six in the sixties when he retired and
Speaker 2: became the pro emeritus and Eddie Merin's take took over.
Speaker 2: So they've only ever had three pros. But I didn't
Speaker 2: realize that that guy who was telling me all those stories,
Speaker 2: he'd been there right from the beginning.
Speaker 1: That's that's like, was it oak Mount's on their third
Speaker 1: pro now that Bob Ford retired. It's most a lot
Speaker 1: of the iconic places have so few pros in terms
Speaker 1: of being out here. What would you rate as Thomas's
Speaker 1: best trait as an architect? This is an answer for
Speaker 1: the whole group after Tom.
Speaker 2: For me, it's not one to do the same thing
Speaker 2: over again, you know, there's not like bell Air has
Speaker 2: or Riviera has a version of the dan hole the
Speaker 2: fourth or it's a longer hole than the famous one
Speaker 2: at North Beric. It's to twenty five. There's a huge
Speaker 2: bunker short of it, and depending on I mean, he
Speaker 2: actually had an option to lay up short of the
Speaker 2: bunker and hits straight in over that instead of playing
Speaker 2: the board off the right as an option if you couldn't,
Speaker 2: you know, if you couldn't hit it to thirty and
Speaker 2: hit it on the green on the fly. But he
Speaker 2: didn't do that. He didn't try to build one at
Speaker 2: bell Air too, He didn't try to build one at
Speaker 2: La Country Club too. He sort of like, okay, that's
Speaker 2: my version of that. Now I'm going to go do
Speaker 2: something different on the next golf course. And just like
Speaker 2: Brian was saying, I mean, he spent a lot more
Speaker 2: time dreaming up these conceptual things and then trying to
Speaker 2: find a place for something like that on the new
Speaker 2: courses that he was doing than most other architects.
Speaker 6: I know.
Speaker 2: Part of that is because he did so few golf courses,
Speaker 2: you know, I mean you get to a point where
Speaker 2: you're too busy to do that. I mean, I don't
Speaker 2: really draw a bunch of theory. You know, when I
Speaker 2: was twenty I drew all kinds of theoretical golf holes.
Speaker 2: Now I just go out on a site and look
Speaker 2: at the visa land and try to think, well, what
Speaker 2: will fit with this? But you know, he really did.
Speaker 2: He thought way outside of the box, and he was
Speaker 2: not afraid to go do it. But he wasn't you know,
Speaker 2: he didn't have this formula down because he only you know,
Speaker 2: he only built, however, many golf courses in his life,
Speaker 2: and he didn't want to do the same thing over it.
Speaker 3: Brian, I'm thinking about his bunkers, and we've talked a
Speaker 3: bit about.
Speaker 1: This is great because it answer is a question from
Speaker 1: another listener.
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 3: The style of the bunkers stands out obviously in the scale.
Speaker 3: I mean there's some massive bunkers at bel Air in
Speaker 3: the other work he's done everywhere else, but there aren't
Speaker 3: that many of them.
Speaker 2: And to that point, when I came to start work,
Speaker 2: what was the number seventy seven bunkers that were here?
Speaker 2: Seventy seven or seventy nine or something like that that
Speaker 2: were on the golf course a year ago today. George
Speaker 2: Thomas built forty two bunkers on the golf course and
Speaker 2: you know they just kept adding more and some of
Speaker 2: the holes, like number ten has four bunkers around and
Speaker 2: now I had none. He built these bunkers at this
Speaker 2: huge scale, like somebody was saying earlier. But he didn't
Speaker 2: build four of them around the green. He just built
Speaker 2: one there.
Speaker 4: It is.
Speaker 2: Get over that and you're good. Eighteen as a humongous
Speaker 2: bunker in front of it. They'd added bunkers on both
Speaker 2: sides of it after the fact, you know so. And
Speaker 2: it has to do with the style too, you know,
Speaker 2: his style now is famous that you could say it's
Speaker 2: the thing that you know, depending on who you're talking to,
Speaker 2: Gill Hants or Bill cor or me or somebody else.
Speaker 2: You know, we all build these cool bunker shapes and
Speaker 2: you could say it come from Mackenzie and the sand
Speaker 2: belt of Australia. You could say it comes from George Thomas.
Speaker 2: They're all slightly different versions of a similar style. And
Speaker 2: you know, I remember when Gilhants worked for me and
Speaker 2: we were trying we were going to build black Forest
Speaker 2: and wanted to build bunkers like that. He and I
Speaker 2: brought him out here for a week and we went
Speaker 2: to Cyprus Point in San Francisco Golf Club and Riviera
Speaker 2: and La Country Club and paste off how big those
Speaker 2: bunkers were and how far the keep stuck into them
Speaker 2: and stuff, so we could do similar stuff. But that
Speaker 2: style that Tom has had and that really wild look,
Speaker 2: it was like it was meant to be looked at
Speaker 2: one or two bunkers at a time, not four overlapping ones.
Speaker 2: You know. So the visuals on this golf course changed
Speaker 2: tremendously when they started adding bunkers. I mean it just
Speaker 2: got way too busy. And so the one bunker with
Speaker 2: all the things going on, that looked good, but when
Speaker 2: you had three or four of them, it just looked crazy.
Speaker 1: I imagine that one bunker loses its impact because sometimes
Speaker 1: you hear it with almost everything, less is more, But
Speaker 1: having that only one bunker is pose a three. Like
Speaker 1: you look at three bunkers and if there's one short,
Speaker 1: there's one left and there's one right. And what I
Speaker 1: say to myself is, well, just hit a fucking good shot. Literally,
Speaker 1: what I say to myself whenever I have trouble on
Speaker 1: both sides, and like when there's when there's just one
Speaker 1: the strategy change where you're like, just don't hit it there,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you miss.
Speaker 2: Right or you know, just just just the way you
Speaker 2: said it, don't hit it there. For most golfers, that's
Speaker 2: where they're going because you've made them think about there
Speaker 2: and how bad that would be. And you know you're
Speaker 2: a good enough player to get over that and just
Speaker 2: miss wide left if the bunker's right. Yeah, but but yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, you do these things get It's not just
Speaker 2: the visuals, it's like it does impact how you play
Speaker 2: the whole. The visual impacts how you play the whole.
Speaker 2: You know, you're scared away from something and you see
Speaker 2: some open you know, it's like run to daylight. You
Speaker 2: see some space over there that looks like you're not
Speaker 2: gonna get any trouble if you're over there, I'll just
Speaker 2: miss out there a little more. And then a lot
Speaker 2: of times, what I've learned about bel air is a
Speaker 2: lot of times you're out there and now you've got
Speaker 2: a downhill chip shot that you just cannot stop anywhere
Speaker 2: near the all at all. That looked like a good
Speaker 2: place to be.
Speaker 1: It's not over there is usually worse than the big bunker.
Speaker 6: Yeah, to that point.
Speaker 3: I mean he only built forty some bunkers at bel Air,
Speaker 3: but they're they're all relevant. I mean, you put them
Speaker 3: in the right places, and there's still irrelevant today that
Speaker 3: The second hole is a great example. There was a
Speaker 3: massive central fairry bunker with lots of fairway left kind
Speaker 3: of banking off of hillside and a lot of ferry
Speaker 3: out to the right. But over the years tree has
Speaker 3: been planted up the left and the bunker's gone away
Speaker 3: in the center, and the hole became, you know, a
Speaker 3: third less wide, and you've lost the options of playing
Speaker 3: around this thing that was really relevant. And you know
Speaker 3: now there's a bunker ferry bunker out in the right
Speaker 3: that was added that was more penal than you know,
Speaker 3: something that made you think about where you want to
Speaker 3: hit the ball. And you know, Riviera is a great example.
Speaker 3: I was telling the story earlier, earlier today. I worked
Speaker 3: there in nineteen ninety seven for the superintendent and in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety eight the golf course held the Senior US
Speaker 3: Senior Open. I don't know how many bunkers are a
Speaker 3: Rivierra but after the first round to play, there were
Speaker 3: only two bunkers in the golf course that didn't need
Speaker 3: to be raped, which meant that almost every bunker on
Speaker 3: that golf course for the world's best seniors was in play.
Speaker 3: And you know, that was a golf course that was
Speaker 3: built in the nineteen twenties and the bunkers haven't been
Speaker 3: moved around there. They're exactly where George Thomas put him.
Speaker 3: Some teas have been added, but every boat, you know,
Speaker 3: every bunker he put on that golf course is still
Speaker 3: relevant seventy years after he built it, and there aren't
Speaker 3: that many. And to me, that's that's pretty pressive. And
Speaker 3: the restored bel air is going to be more of
Speaker 3: the same and it's going to be really interesting because
Speaker 3: trees have been taken out, with has been restored and
Speaker 3: a lot of those options are going to come back.
Speaker 3: That one single bunker is responsible for a whole lot
Speaker 3: of thought and interest.
Speaker 6: Just to kind of expand on what Brian's saying, what
Speaker 6: you had said before, Andy, when you said, oh, it's
Speaker 6: surrounded by bunkers, I just say, just hit a good shot.
Speaker 6: I haven't played golf with you. I've heard you're a
Speaker 6: good player, But that's great for you. You can hit
Speaker 6: a five iron two hundred yards in the air and
Speaker 6: stop it on that green. But what's cool about what
Speaker 6: these guys did is there was one bunker, and it
Speaker 6: might be massive and scary, but there was a way
Speaker 6: for everybody else to play around it. And I just
Speaker 6: think that's why these golf courses are so cool. And
Speaker 6: I'm sure you've talked about in your podcast in the past,
Speaker 6: but the Golden.
Speaker 4: Age courses were cool.
Speaker 6: They weren't They gave everybody a chance.
Speaker 1: Also, it's just like what we were talking about with
Speaker 1: the backside of that bunker, where a low running shot
Speaker 1: could use that to run it into the.
Speaker 6: The ground option was actually an option in golf back then.
Speaker 6: You know, everyone still used it.
Speaker 1: The good news about California too, is that it doesn't
Speaker 1: rain much, so the ground game is actually in effect
Speaker 1: most days.
Speaker 6: You know what's cool about George Thomas, You tell me
Speaker 6: what you learned from one thing I thought was cool
Speaker 6: you come out to California, not being from here. I
Speaker 6: committed her. I think the landscape, the natural landscape out
Speaker 6: here is just fantastic and gorgeous, and every golf course
Speaker 6: out here seems to try as hard as they can
Speaker 6: not to have a California landscape, and George Thomas seemed
Speaker 6: to really embrace just the coolness of California. As Tom said,
Speaker 6: it was pretty wild and rugged back then. But I
Speaker 6: think with bel Air, we're bringing some of the California
Speaker 6: landscape back by getting rid of some of the kind
Speaker 6: of English garden effect that was covering it all up.
Speaker 4: Another aspect of just the so many fewer bunkers in
Speaker 4: combination with getting rid of a bunch of trees. You know,
Speaker 4: an element that you referred to Andy that I think
Speaker 4: really actually aids better players is just is just more
Speaker 4: kind of subliminal information, uh, you know, tree left, tree right,
Speaker 4: bunker left, bunker right, whatever it is. You know, you're
Speaker 4: just kind of splitting the difference and finding the safe
Speaker 4: spot in the middle. The narrower these golf courses get.
Speaker 4: And one thing I've learned over the years is the
Speaker 4: more you know, people think it's you're making things easier
Speaker 4: when you take trees away, When you take away all
Speaker 4: that extra information about where where you need to go,
Speaker 4: you need to think about it more, which is that's
Speaker 4: not good, you know, just in terms of having you know,
Speaker 4: hitting a successful shot, and the other thing is that
Speaker 4: it strips away some of the feeling of of you know,
Speaker 4: a little bit of safety where your ball is gonna
Speaker 4: end up. I mean, we talked about Tom and I
Speaker 4: were just kind of walking around left of seventeen green
Speaker 4: and there was kind of a bunker off the back
Speaker 4: left side and a big pine tree kind of at
Speaker 4: the left corner of the green, and it's a long,
Speaker 4: hard hole, and you know, those two things helped you
Speaker 4: feel like, well, if you if you kind of tug
Speaker 4: one left, it's going to catch the tree and fall
Speaker 4: near the tree and you're kind of under it, but
Speaker 4: you can kind of scrape one on the green and
Speaker 4: probably get up and down, or you're in the bunker.
Speaker 4: And you know, we're talking for good players. Thinking here
Speaker 4: those guys that come up from UCLA and you know,
Speaker 4: six feet below the level of the green and a
Speaker 4: bunker twenty feet from the hole, they're thinking of making
Speaker 4: that one. And whereas a mid handicapped member doesn't like
Speaker 4: being in a bunker, take all that crap away. You know,
Speaker 4: Tom made the comment, the one thing to make this
Speaker 4: golf course as hard as you'd want is just momore
Speaker 4: and now it's just a grass slope. If you miss left,
Speaker 4: you're all the way down on the other side of
Speaker 4: eighteen t in or near this baranka, and who knows
Speaker 4: what you're gonna make from down there.
Speaker 2: And we didn't go to that level on that, You know,
Speaker 2: we could, we could mow a lot more ground down. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's like, but let the ball get way away from
Speaker 2: the green. Kind of crazy. We didn't go there. But
Speaker 2: you know what you're talking about is what what I
Speaker 2: used to hear a lot in terms of definition was, Yeah,
Speaker 2: was the name of the game back then. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like the tree to the more in the bunker,
Speaker 2: the tree to the left of the green is like,
Speaker 2: you don't ever be left of there. This is kind
Speaker 2: of holding you in. You started inside that and you're okay,
Speaker 2: but you're not getting on. You don't have that anymore.
Speaker 2: You're like, look at now you're looking at the edge
Speaker 2: of the green and how precarious it is and how
Speaker 2: bad it is if you miss it left. It's a
Speaker 2: totally different feel.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it just feel there's just a lot more negative
Speaker 4: thoughts that can creep in when all that stuff is
Speaker 4: stripped away. So it's amazing how much more intimidating that
Speaker 4: hole is with just one feature, just that bunker well
Speaker 4: away from the green. But it's freaky back there, and
Speaker 4: you gotta be careful.
Speaker 1: I firmly believe that when an architect stimulates thought, that's
Speaker 1: when he wins, because as soon as I think, that's
Speaker 1: when doubt am I making it? Is this the right choice?
Speaker 2: And once.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're thinking about that exactly, it gets you
Speaker 1: out of your commit Like you watch these tour players
Speaker 1: and they take forever over shots, but it's all about
Speaker 1: them getting fully committed and just making a swing. And
Speaker 1: as soon as you enter something that stimulates thought, that's
Speaker 1: where doubt comes in. And that's where having all these
Speaker 1: options and taking trees out make it more playable for
Speaker 1: the regular player and much much more difficult for the
Speaker 1: good player.
Speaker 2: And that's when I worked for Pete Dye. We were
Speaker 2: working on the plans for the stadium of course at
Speaker 2: PJA West, and I've printed this quote in one or
Speaker 2: two of my books, and Perry Dye was not happy
Speaker 2: with me the first time he used it because it was,
Speaker 2: you know, it was something his dad just said to
Speaker 2: me casually while we were working on something, but I
Speaker 2: thought it deserved its place in history. We were trying
Speaker 2: to we're trying to work on things for the stadium
Speaker 2: course that the players were really uncomfortable with. Like at
Speaker 2: the time, they didn't carry four wedges. They just carried
Speaker 2: pitching wedges and sand wedge. So they did not like
Speaker 2: leaving themselves sixty eighty yards because they didn't have a
Speaker 2: club for that. In fact, because Pete started building so
Speaker 2: many holes where that was bad. You know where that
Speaker 2: was a bad place, but you wound up wanting to
Speaker 2: go there because he wouldn't let you lay back to
Speaker 2: the hundred yard mark and hit your full wedge. We
Speaker 2: put something in the way there, so you had to
Speaker 2: like either lay way back or get it up where
Speaker 2: you were uncomfortable. And he did it so often that
Speaker 2: they started carrying more wedges to deal with it because
Speaker 2: he wouldn't let them play the way they played everywhere else.
Speaker 2: But anyway, just casually talking about what we were doing,
Speaker 2: just he just kind of blurted out, if you get
Speaker 2: those dudes thinking they're in.
Speaker 1: Trouble, exactly, that's the way every golf every golf course
Speaker 1: for pro should be, Like longer and narrower, is just
Speaker 1: you know, you're telling them where to go.
Speaker 5: Well, and what these guys were talking about with bunkers
Speaker 5: and taking trees away that you asked what we appreciate
Speaker 5: about George Thomas, and it's that his landing areas are
Speaker 5: staggered on the parallel holes. So some people may say,
Speaker 5: if you take away these bunkers or these trees, you're
Speaker 5: creating a safety issue. But like on six and seven,
Speaker 5: how they paralleled the t shot on six would not
Speaker 5: interfere with people playing on seven, and vice versa. The
Speaker 5: landing areas aren't next to each other, like the landing
Speaker 5: area for twelve is not interfering with the landing area
Speaker 5: on fourteen. So to Tom's point of the canyons are
Speaker 5: too narrow for what we would today think could fit
Speaker 5: two holes the way he yeah, that's how he staggered
Speaker 5: those landing areas was and now it's being revealed was
Speaker 5: part of the genius of this genius routing.
Speaker 3: To go back to your point about the lack of definition.
Speaker 3: I remember after the US Open at Aaron Hills, an
Speaker 3: interview with Jason Day after his last round, he was
Speaker 3: asked about the width of the golf course and he
Speaker 3: flat out said the width made it harder for him
Speaker 3: to focus on a target off the tea. He really
Speaker 3: struggled off the tea because the landing areas weren't well
Speaker 3: defined that week and he wasn't used to that, and
Speaker 3: he had a hard time focusing on where he should
Speaker 3: hit the ball off the tea, which I thought was fascinating.
Speaker 3: And these fairways were the widest they've seen in years,
Speaker 3: and that made it harder for him too to play
Speaker 3: well off the tee. And it was refreshing to hear
Speaker 3: him say that that happened to you. In the first
Speaker 3: tea at Saint Andrews, I stayed in play by three inches.
Speaker 1: Another interesting quote from the US Open that is relevant
Speaker 1: to this conversation was, you know, they had that whole
Speaker 1: overspray debate and they had this really thick, thick fescue
Speaker 1: and they cut it down last minute, and they Jordan
Speaker 1: Spieth had his press conference and they asked him about
Speaker 1: it and he goes, well, actually, in some ways it's
Speaker 1: worse because your ball gets in there and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you think you have a chance instead of
Speaker 1: just chipping out. And you know, this goes back to
Speaker 1: our conversation about taking trees out and that idea you
Speaker 1: have you're in a grove of trees, it's just a
Speaker 1: punch out. But like when you're in rough and you
Speaker 1: got a clear shot to the green, you're going for
Speaker 1: it no matter what, and like and not just that,
Speaker 1: it's also the flip side of that is you take
Speaker 1: the chance to hit a great shot away.
Speaker 2: And as long as what it's requiring is a great shot.
Speaker 2: You know, if what you're doing is making it so
Speaker 2: everybody can hit the green, no, you don't want to
Speaker 2: do that. But if you're giving a guy a chance,
Speaker 2: a chance, but a difficult shot to play out of rough, over, bunkers, whatever,
Speaker 2: and he pulls it off, that's a big part of
Speaker 2: what you're trying to do in golf course architecture. And
Speaker 2: putting a bunch of stuff in the way so nobody
Speaker 2: can do that is ridiculous.
Speaker 1: With our crew here tonight, we would be very shortsighted
Speaker 1: and not talk at least a little bit about Billy Bell,
Speaker 1: William Bell, George Thomas's construction guy, Kyle Mackie, what have
Speaker 1: you learned from William Bell's golf courses in his style
Speaker 1: and is he is he underrated.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't say I've seen enough of mister Bell's work
Speaker 4: to really pass judgment on it. I can only speak
Speaker 4: to you know what I've learned from working on bell Air.
Speaker 4: But we have we have distinct different years of aerial photographs.
Speaker 4: And you know, the original bunkers that Thomas built were
Speaker 4: really nothing. They were the scale was the same, they
Speaker 4: were enormous, and they had some larger landforms involved. But
Speaker 4: the really you know, the really wacky crazy stuff came
Speaker 4: about when when Billy Bell got involved in in kind
Speaker 4: of work, you know, exerted his influence on on what
Speaker 4: was going on. So that's the one thing that I
Speaker 4: noticed on this project in particular right away was just
Speaker 4: that from the original, you know, the earliest photographs of
Speaker 4: the place that they were really simple, large landforms, and
Speaker 4: the the you know, the detail came a little bit
Speaker 4: later and came in spades when when Billy Bell was here.
Speaker 2: And you have worked on one other of course, where
Speaker 2: Billy Bell did bunkers in the San Francisco Golf Club
Speaker 2: where he never gets any credit, but same thing tilling
Speaker 2: Hatfs version early nineteen twenties. Scales, right, shapes are different,
Speaker 2: simpler time in the late twenties, Billy Bell went up
Speaker 2: there for a little while, and those are the bunkers
Speaker 2: that you see all the pictures of, and they've the
Speaker 2: famous little Tilly hole has got famous when Billy All
Speaker 2: built the bunker.
Speaker 4: In front of it. We'll start calling it little Billy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a little Billy mumfree so deep, it seems
Speaker 1: like you know, George Thomas Bunkering and Mackenzie with Robert
Speaker 1: Hunter Bunkering are revered as the greatest bunkering of all
Speaker 1: time and they all happen to be in California. What
Speaker 1: is it about California that inspired this bunker?
Speaker 2: It doesn't rain much? In answer? Yeah, I mean that's
Speaker 2: that is huge, and you know it works in the
Speaker 2: sand Belt to Melbourne too, they're raising all those bunkers.
Speaker 2: There's two things going on in the sand Belt to Melbourne.
Speaker 2: It doesn't rain much and the it's here too. Bermuda
Speaker 2: grass holds the edges much better. You know, the roots
Speaker 2: go really deep. The reason they can have a bunker
Speaker 2: at raw Melbourne with just a practically vertical edge is
Speaker 2: because there's so much root structure going down that you
Speaker 2: can just take a spade shovel and chop it down
Speaker 2: and not worry about all the eroding and contaminating the
Speaker 2: bunker with a bunch of bad material. It holds its
Speaker 2: shape and then the rain doesn't erod it and mess
Speaker 2: it all up either, So you know, so you don't
Speaker 2: see bunkers, you know, if you have the same bunk
Speaker 2: If they try to build the same bunkers in Scotland,
Speaker 2: they're all blown away in a year. I mean, you know,
Speaker 2: the biggest problem abandoned dunes by far is how much
Speaker 2: wind erosion there is in the bunkers. It's Pacific dunes
Speaker 2: is just crazy. How much time and effort they spend.
Speaker 2: Of course they don't have to spend time and effort
Speaker 2: on a lot of other things, so they can put
Speaker 2: the labor to that instead of some other places if
Speaker 2: they'd done things differently. But there is no question that
Speaker 2: it worked. The reason you see it here and in
Speaker 2: Melbourne to a lesser extent, is because it doesn't rain
Speaker 2: very much and you can build those shapes and not
Speaker 2: have to send the crew out to fix all the
Speaker 2: bunkers every time it rains, because it doesn't matter. It
Speaker 2: doesn't rain enough to make a difference. But when you
Speaker 2: try to take these shapes and build them everywhere else
Speaker 2: around the world. In Asia, that doesn't work.
Speaker 4: You have a.
Speaker 2: Tropical storm every afternoon in the summer. It's just it's
Speaker 2: impossible to get those shapes.
Speaker 6: Andy wonder that you mentioned your question about Billy Bell.
Speaker 6: I've worked a couple of courses out here that Billy
Speaker 6: Bell was involved in, and they're all very cool. But
Speaker 6: I think what it really boils down to with Billy
Speaker 6: Bell is that it takes more than one person to
Speaker 6: build a good golf course. And Billy Bell was helping
Speaker 6: George Thomas, he was helping Killing Hast and Tom's name
Speaker 6: might be on the golf course, but there's a lot
Speaker 6: of people involved in any golf course that happens it's
Speaker 6: a good golf course, there's more than one person that
Speaker 6: had a hand in it.
Speaker 2: And it takes time to I mean, one of the
Speaker 2: things we were looking at today was all the barancas
Speaker 2: over at La Country Club and how they were naturalized
Speaker 2: when they did stuff, and and I mean they had
Speaker 2: just go works the same way I do. He is
Speaker 2: a ton of guys out there who are talented and
Speaker 2: trying to do cool stuff, and they're working really hard
Speaker 2: on all this artistic stuff around the edges. The issue
Speaker 2: is you can go too far. One of the things
Speaker 2: that makes all these golf courses really good is time
Speaker 2: and somebody involved over the longer term to work out
Speaker 2: all those details. No matter no matter how good everybody
Speaker 2: is here, the really good golf courses are going to
Speaker 2: get better over time and the other ones are going
Speaker 2: to get worse over time because of who the superintendent
Speaker 2: is and who his crew is, and to some extent,
Speaker 2: who the green chairman is. But they're either good at
Speaker 2: that stuff or they're not good at it. And I
Speaker 2: guarant every single golf course I've done has either gotten
Speaker 2: better or got worse. They don't stay the same because
Speaker 2: they're living, growing things and there's other people involved. So
Speaker 2: we didn't just go over there by ourselves. We went
Speaker 2: over there with the new superintendent here who used to
Speaker 2: be the assistant superintendent over there, so he understands it
Speaker 2: really well. And you know, we're kind of thinking, let's
Speaker 2: not overkill this and think overthink it too hard. We
Speaker 2: could try to get everything perfect by the fourth of
Speaker 2: July next year when it opens, but really, you know,
Speaker 2: when we want it perfect is the next fifty years
Speaker 2: and he'll get there. Let's just not make it too
Speaker 2: complicated for him to get there, you know. Let's let's
Speaker 2: get everything grasped and where he doesn't have to worry
Speaker 2: about it washing away first and then start to work
Speaker 2: on some of that stuff instead of instead of doing
Speaker 2: all these edges now and then having them all go
Speaker 2: crazy the first time it rings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's hard to believe. George Thomas and Billy Bell
Speaker 3: spend a bunch of time working out how they wanted
Speaker 3: the bunkers. You know, how the Arroyals were going to
Speaker 3: look really cool on opening day.
Speaker 6: Yeah, don't Friday.
Speaker 2: We have just we have definitive photographic evidence. They didn't
Speaker 2: look cool on opening day. They look cool two or
Speaker 2: three years after opening day, after Billy Bell was back
Speaker 2: tinkering around with him.
Speaker 5: So when was that Because the course opened in twenty seven,
Speaker 5: But when was Billy Bell here redoing the bunkers.
Speaker 2: Well it's the course. I think technically it opened in
Speaker 2: twenty seven, but it was built in twenty five and
Speaker 2: they were playing it before twenty seven, and so our
Speaker 2: earliest pictures are in nineteen twenty five, and then we
Speaker 2: have another set from twenty seven, and it's it's it's
Speaker 2: in that, you know, it's different than what we're doing now.
Speaker 2: What we're doing now, we're doing eight months work and
Speaker 2: then bang, they're going to open it to five hundred members.
Speaker 2: Back then, it was a year and a half or
Speaker 2: two years of growing and you played a little golf
Speaker 2: on it, but it wasn't really ready for the onslaught
Speaker 2: because they didn't have irrigation systems like we do now,
Speaker 2: and they you know, it took a lot longer to
Speaker 2: grow in a golf course and get it all right,
Speaker 2: and so they had a lot more time to tinker
Speaker 2: around with it. I mean, all we would really need
Speaker 2: is one summer when the bermuda grass was growing so
Speaker 2: we could see how everything reacted and we could go
Speaker 2: fix some of that. But they want to be open.
Speaker 1: Then, so that's the job of the super right.
Speaker 2: Well, it's not just his day. You know, we'll be
Speaker 2: involved in the next couple of years. But importantly he's
Speaker 2: around here now we're when we're still working on it,
Speaker 2: so you know by the time by the time we're
Speaker 2: out of here, he's been working with us for a
Speaker 2: while and you understand the same things that we all
Speaker 2: talk about every night, and he's the one who's going
Speaker 2: to be watching out for that in the long term.
Speaker 1: Eric, that's gotta be a really important facet of any restoration.
Speaker 1: Is it super and the relationship there right?
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it goes It can go beyond the
Speaker 4: super to the membership. You know, the I like to say,
Speaker 4: you know, when we're talking about golf course architecture, you know,
Speaker 4: we're not curing cancer out there. It's we're making a
Speaker 4: field to play for a fun game. But a lot
Speaker 4: of the nuance can be lost if people just try
Speaker 4: to think about it in terms of what's there and
Speaker 4: what do you want it to look like? You know,
Speaker 4: you get that all the time. What do you want
Speaker 4: this to look like? You know, what should this be like?
Speaker 4: What should that look like? And it's less about what
Speaker 4: it looks like and more about how it works and
Speaker 4: how it looks will follow. If it's well built, holes
Speaker 4: on good ground, how it looks will kind of take
Speaker 4: care of itself. So more importantly than having a superintendent
Speaker 4: that quote unquote knows what you want it to look like,
Speaker 4: it's more important that they understand how it's supposed to
Speaker 4: work and understand how maybe more important what you don't
Speaker 4: want it to look like. But anything past that qualification
Speaker 4: is okay. And I think the best clubs in the
Speaker 4: world have a membership that get that too. They don't
Speaker 4: need the superintendent to kind of tell them what what
Speaker 4: it ought to look like. They're their own best police.
Speaker 4: I think Tom could probably speak to.
Speaker 2: But a lot of them they've grown up with it
Speaker 2: because it's always been well managed. I mean Raal Melbourne.
Speaker 2: You know, Mackenzie was famously in Melbourne for six weeks
Speaker 2: and he built one hall at Roll Melbourne and then
Speaker 2: he left in the but the superintendent there mc Morecambe
Speaker 2: and Alex Russell, the club champion, they're the ones who
Speaker 2: actually built the golf course and then we were talking
Speaker 2: about golf pros here and now there's been three in
Speaker 2: however many years. Raw Melbourne's had four superintendents since the
Speaker 2: day they built it. Morecambe he was there for twenty years.
Speaker 2: His assistant was Claude Crockford. Crockford was there for thirty years.
Speaker 2: They're the ones who worked out what it looks like.
Speaker 2: And everybody and every member at Roy Melbourne that we
Speaker 2: deal with now they get it because they've seen those
Speaker 2: guys work exactly.
Speaker 4: I mean, all the best, the very best places in
Speaker 4: the world have the membership really is fifty percent along
Speaker 4: on the education of what their golf course is all about,
Speaker 4: and you know who built it and what's important and
Speaker 4: what's not important. And that's a big part of it.
Speaker 4: So you know, that'll be a big part of bel
Speaker 4: Air as well, is getting people to kind of re
Speaker 4: embrace not just that George Thomas his name was on it,
Speaker 4: but that this is what is so great about it,
Speaker 4: and getting them to understand that.
Speaker 1: Like them being able to say, look at how few
Speaker 1: bunkers there are out here, but how well placed they are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And and not everybody, really, frankly, not everybody. People
Speaker 4: are busy, not everybody has time to delve into golf
Speaker 4: course architecture. But I think most golfers just kind of
Speaker 4: play regularly and you've liked golf, you just kind of
Speaker 4: know it when you see it's like, damn, that just
Speaker 4: feels right. This just feels so much better. Can't really
Speaker 4: put my finger on it, but yeah, this is better.
Speaker 4: And then the ones that are a little more keen
Speaker 4: to like dig into it, they'll they'll ask questions and
Speaker 4: learn and there's that whole faction too, that are sometimes
Speaker 4: they can sometimes they can be a hassle too. They
Speaker 4: get a little too involved. But you know you want
Speaker 4: you want an educated membership.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's uh, let's get out of here with some
Speaker 1: overrated underrateds. Who's who's ready for overrated?
Speaker 2: Underrated? I'll go this too often? Let them do this
Speaker 2: all right?
Speaker 4: First? Can I just go underrated or do I have
Speaker 4: to do both? You gotta pick.
Speaker 2: He's gonna he's gonna give you a particular thing.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna give you one one topic. You
Speaker 1: say overrated, there's no okay, no properly rated Stanley Thompson.
Speaker 4: It has to be either over or under I think
Speaker 4: I think underappreciated, underrated in the ah, you know, in
Speaker 4: the in the grand scheme of golf and just the
Speaker 4: the average golfer in the in the world has never
Speaker 4: heard of Stanley Thompson. But I think in architecture circles
Speaker 4: he's very much appreciated, and so I would say underrated.
Speaker 3: That's a good parallel to George Thomas, probably for America,
Speaker 3: because that I mean George Thomas has his small body
Speaker 3: of work in California and two Americans. I suppose Stanley
Speaker 3: Thompson had his relatively small body of work in Canada,
Speaker 3: which he was more prolific than Thomas. But you know,
Speaker 3: I think his best work would stand up to Thomas's
Speaker 3: as well. Just isn't nearly as well known to Americans
Speaker 3: because Riviera is on TV every year and Capilano's not.
Speaker 1: I forgot to put who asked this question, but it
Speaker 1: was probably a Canadian.
Speaker 4: Yeah, half America's probably think Stanley Johnson was a right
Speaker 4: winger for the Blackhawks or something.
Speaker 1: Stanley Thompson might be overrated in Canada. Canada's gonna hate
Speaker 1: me now, all right. Overrated, underrated, false.
Speaker 2: Fronts, overrated. Oh, it's one of the things we've been
Speaker 2: dealing with a bell Air. I mean this, this, this
Speaker 2: topography is steeper than it looks. You know, you're playing
Speaker 2: up canyons. They're all draining out the bottom and like
Speaker 2: the eighteenth hole it was when I got the topa map,
Speaker 2: so it's like, man, that's a hard hoole. It's only
Speaker 2: four hundred yards. It's like, oh, it's seventy five feet
Speaker 2: up hill. I had no idea it was that much uphill,
Speaker 2: because you're just because you're looking in the canyon, and
Speaker 2: you don't you think you're looking down because you're looking
Speaker 2: at the bottom of the canyon. You don't realize how
Speaker 2: much the thing is climbing up the hill. So you
Speaker 2: get fooled. You get fooled a lot. Now I'm trying
Speaker 2: to remember what the question with the actual question was here, Well,
Speaker 2: the false front. So so when you're playing uphill that much,
Speaker 2: you can't see the surface of the green because the
Speaker 2: green is thirty feet above you. And you know, in
Speaker 2: the old days the green was pitched back toward the
Speaker 2: fairway on the same almost the same slope as the
Speaker 2: hill you're going up in it, you could see a
Speaker 2: little more of it. But now the green has to
Speaker 2: be flatter because the greens are faster and it's way
Speaker 2: up above you. So you can't see a part of
Speaker 2: the green surface. And the only thing you can do
Speaker 2: if you want the golfer in the fairway to see green,
Speaker 2: you give him a false front. The problem of that
Speaker 2: is the part that he sees he can't land you know,
Speaker 2: you can't land on that's not a good place to be.
Speaker 2: I just I don't like him because it's you know,
Speaker 2: you try to make things more visible than that, so
Speaker 2: you don't need a false front. And if you've got
Speaker 2: a lot of uphill approach shots, for God's sake, try
Speaker 2: to vary them so you just don't have to use
Speaker 2: that same thing over and over again. We dealt with
Speaker 2: that at Stone Eagle, and we've been trying to figure
Speaker 2: it out here. How do you know, how do we
Speaker 2: keep this true to Thomas? But you can't really actually
Speaker 2: see very much of that green surface from the fairway
Speaker 2: like you would have in the old days. But we
Speaker 2: can't have it be that Steed.
Speaker 5: This is maybe the only time I'll get to say
Speaker 5: this in my life. But I think Tom stole my answer.
Speaker 5: I also think false fronts are overrated in the way
Speaker 5: they're utilized. I think I talked about Hollywood Golf Club,
Speaker 5: Like the way the sixth Green and the tenth Green
Speaker 5: there uses a two or three foot sort of roll
Speaker 5: in the front as a false front is very effective,
Speaker 5: and using that is under and probably underutilized.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Tom was talking in the context of uphill holes,
Speaker 3: but you know, Blake just named two great examples. But
Speaker 3: Saint Andrews has a bunch of holes where there's a
Speaker 3: really abrupt contour right at the front of the green,
Speaker 3: and then it's relatively flat beyond that. But if the
Speaker 3: pin is cut close to that contour at the front,
Speaker 3: negotiating that up and over is a really tricky shot
Speaker 3: and a really fun shot because a lot of times
Speaker 3: it requires you to play something along the ground as
Speaker 3: opposed to flying in the air. You know, I don't
Speaker 3: know if that qualifies as a false front necessarily, but
Speaker 3: you know there is short grass mode down over the
Speaker 3: front of that contour, and you're seeing putting surface along
Speaker 3: that face.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fourteen seventeen greens that st Andrews are too. I'm
Speaker 2: not saying those are overrated.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'm just in a context where you're on
Speaker 3: flatter ground and it's not an uphill hole. Visibility is
Speaker 3: not the issue. There's just a really abrupt contour at
Speaker 3: the front or you're mowing putting surface down. To me,
Speaker 3: that's really good.
Speaker 1: So would you say unpinnable surface is underrated?
Speaker 3: I love unpinnable surface, and by Bryan, a lot of
Speaker 3: unpinnable surface. Yeah, that's intrated.
Speaker 4: I'm out of a job to play Devil's advocate to that.
Speaker 4: To that whole point, part of the reason we're all
Speaker 4: here tonight is that had there been maybe a few
Speaker 4: more false fronts at bel Air, Dick Wilson wouldn't have
Speaker 4: wiped a third of those holes out because you couldn't
Speaker 4: see the green. And part of putting this place back
Speaker 4: together is committing to the fact that you're not going
Speaker 4: to see the green from a lot of places in
Speaker 4: the fairway because they're up in the air. And that
Speaker 4: was just part and parcel of what was going on.
Speaker 4: That's that's that's the justification of taking the May West
Speaker 4: hole out. So you know, I think they're I'd say
Speaker 4: they're overused for sure, but yeah, they they they help
Speaker 4: give you a little idea of what you're what you're
Speaker 4: aiming at when you otherwise can't see anything.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, we uh we ran over by about
Speaker 1: an hour, so this is now a three part pot.
Speaker 1: But the uh, that was a great conversation. I hope
Speaker 1: everyone enjoyed learning a little bit about George Thomas. Uh,
Speaker 1: how you guys work and bel Air. So thank you
Speaker 1: guys all for the time. And uh, I think all
Speaker 1: of you guys are on Instagram right.
Speaker 7: Eric's the most of us, Eric Cudge, Well, we'll post
Speaker 7: all the handles on Instagram, and thanks for turning tuning
Speaker 7: into another episode of The Yolk with Doak.
Speaker 3: Thanks Andy, Thanks Andy, Thank you.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to the fried Egg podcast.
Speaker 6: We do the digging for you.