Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in.
Speaker 3: A bride egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg,
Speaker 3: bride egg, Lie.
Speaker 2: I'm about ready to run off the golf course. Welcome
Speaker 2: back to another edition of the Friday Egg Podcast. Today
Speaker 2: I am joined by a couple of guests. I have
Speaker 2: Sean Smith, the superintendent at Sullivan County Golf Course, which
Speaker 2: is up in the cast skills and a golf course
Speaker 2: that he has breathed a lot of new life in
Speaker 2: h with also the help of Tom Coin, who's uh
Speaker 2: come on board to help out this year and possibly
Speaker 2: into the future. A golf course really on the rise.
Speaker 2: And Sean has just really an amazing life story with
Speaker 2: golf and life in general. So it was great to
Speaker 2: talk to him about his life and his life in turf.
Speaker 2: And then in the second part of this interview, we
Speaker 2: talk with Tyler Ray. So Tyler, it's been a number
Speaker 2: of years since I last talked to Tyler, and since
Speaker 2: Tyler's career has really exploded. He's gone from being a
Speaker 2: shaper and occasional solo architect to really a solo architect
Speaker 2: that has a number of high profile jobs. So it
Speaker 2: was really great to chop it up with Tyler about
Speaker 2: growing his business as well as some of the projects
Speaker 2: that they are working on have in the hopper and
Speaker 2: you know, new build versus restoration, all sorts of stuff.
Speaker 2: So this is a jam pack podcast with a couple
Speaker 2: interviews and yeah, let's get right into it. Here is
Speaker 2: Sean Smith. But first let's take a quick break to
Speaker 2: hear about our sponsor, Toro. For more than a century
Speaker 2: with cutting edge turf equipment and irrigation solutions, Toro has
Speaker 2: had your front nine covered and your back nine two.
Speaker 2: In fact, Toro's always had your back period. Toro is
Speaker 2: as committed to your long term success as tour pros
Speaker 2: are committed to their shot. That's down to top notch
Speaker 2: customer support from Toro and its dedicated local distributors, both
Speaker 2: of whom are passionate about delivering turf equipment and irrigation
Speaker 2: solutions that solve real world problems. Follow at Toro Golf
Speaker 2: on Twitter and reach out to your local Toro distributor today.
Speaker 2: Now on to Sean Smith. All right, Sean, i'd love
Speaker 2: to know from your perspective where modern agronomy has gone wrong.
Speaker 1: Oh, let's start out with a light one. I don't
Speaker 1: know that modern agronomy has gone wrong. I think modern
Speaker 1: agronomy has gone so right in so many different ways
Speaker 1: and given people the ability and the opportunity to provide
Speaker 1: conditions like anywhere and everywhere that pretty much anyone and
Speaker 1: everyone who can will kind of rise to that bar,
Speaker 1: and the bar has been set like really high. I mean,
Speaker 1: I was looking at old I grew up. I didn't
Speaker 1: start playing golf until like the late nineties, and I
Speaker 1: grew up watching like senior golf on the couch, like
Speaker 1: after high school, and it was I was watching some
Speaker 1: of those YouTube videos and the courses look so different.
Speaker 1: I mean, they don't look bad from my eye at all,
Speaker 1: But just the conditions everywhere have been raised so much
Speaker 1: that I think it costs so much money to get
Speaker 1: the equipment, maintain the equipment, maintain the workforce that if
Speaker 1: there's anything that's gone wrong, it's just the scale of
Speaker 1: it all, and it's become very hard to provide golf
Speaker 1: for current people's tastes. That's maybe a little bit toned down.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a way, it creates a gap, right, it
Speaker 2: just creates a wider gulf between the haves and the
Speaker 2: have nots. Really and from a maintenance standpoint, right.
Speaker 1: Very much so. Uh, when I moved from Queens to
Speaker 1: Liberty here, I didn't know anything about my golf course
Speaker 1: here then. But like the situation they were in, and
Speaker 1: it's really common for you know, you want to call
Speaker 1: mom and pop golf courses or just you know, very small.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of them in the Northeast that you know,
Speaker 1: they're just small courses that are attached to small towns.
Speaker 1: And they were operating you know, the fleet of equipment
Speaker 1: that I inherited was from the late nineties. You know,
Speaker 1: it was already all of it was pushing fifteen twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five years old. It was only being maintained by
Speaker 1: the skill of like one person who also was responsible
Speaker 1: for you know, more than half the mowing out there.
Speaker 1: Parts very hard to get. And they were operating on
Speaker 1: a negative budget. Like there's no board meetings, there's no
Speaker 1: green committee to approve budgets. It's just ask for what
Speaker 1: you need and don't ask for much. And that's that's
Speaker 1: still the reality at a lot of places.
Speaker 2: We're going to get to your career, but just something
Speaker 2: that popped up with what you're talking about. I'd love
Speaker 2: for you to kind of contrast as how your job
Speaker 2: was different when you were on a crew at a
Speaker 2: you know, high end private club versus where you're working
Speaker 2: now Sullivan County, where you and one other person are
Speaker 2: taking care of the course, the equipment, everything, Like, can
Speaker 2: you just talk about how your day to day is
Speaker 2: different in those two situations.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 1: I mean there's the basics that you have to cover,
Speaker 1: the things that people are just gonna expect no matter
Speaker 1: what if they're playing golf, and that's like the greens
Speaker 1: and you know, some form of a tea box to
Speaker 1: get off on and after that, and it's not a
Speaker 1: frustrating experience and it is just me and one other
Speaker 1: person full time. This year, we have two members who
Speaker 1: are like younger retired guys who each help us two
Speaker 1: days a week, so like four days a week, there's
Speaker 1: three guys on the course instead of two, but it's
Speaker 1: still a lot. So it's just like priorities triage. You know,
Speaker 1: you get the greens done, you take care of the
Speaker 1: greens first and foremost. We only have nine irrigation heads.
Speaker 1: Each greens it is serviced by like a roller based sprinkler,
Speaker 1: but it's you see a lot of things you want
Speaker 1: to do, but it's greens. And then it's getting the
Speaker 1: fairways cut and brings are very hard because it's growing
Speaker 1: faster than you can mow it, and the course looks
Speaker 1: bad until you can finally turn the corner and on
Speaker 1: on a larger crew at a you know, on a
Speaker 1: course with a bigger budget, all of those things. Just
Speaker 1: because of the number of people involved, you're able to
Speaker 1: keep mother Nature under your thumb a little bit easier
Speaker 1: throughout the twelve months. You know, we don't work for
Speaker 1: four or five months out of the year, and hopefully
Speaker 1: that changes, but you know, that's just been a budgetary
Speaker 1: reality up until now. So it's just you have to
Speaker 1: learn to relish your victories. You know, take care of
Speaker 1: what you can take care of, do your best with
Speaker 1: everything else. You know, with hard work and repeated mowings,
Speaker 1: it does all come around. I mean, the course looks
Speaker 1: great right now. It's middle of July. You know, we
Speaker 1: came around a few weeks ago, but things don't happen
Speaker 1: as quick at the snap of a finger. You know,
Speaker 1: bunkers don't get don't bunkers don't get raked at the
Speaker 1: same time, greens get mode at the same time, teas
Speaker 1: get mode, at the same time, fairways get mode. We
Speaker 1: have the gracious, gracious help of Toro this year. They
Speaker 1: set us up with a greens mow or a fairway
Speaker 1: mower or a blower, a work card and just it's
Speaker 1: been a it's night and day of the difference it's caused,
Speaker 1: but it's still we have one fairway mower and there's
Speaker 1: only three people to put in those five or six seats,
Speaker 1: so things don't get done all at once, you know,
Speaker 1: at the snap of a finger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's got to feel a
Speaker 2: little bit different in terms of accomplishment though when you
Speaker 2: when you get to the point of where it's, like
Speaker 2: you said, it's looking really good right now, there's got
Speaker 2: to be a little bit different feeling associated with that,
Speaker 2: right it does.
Speaker 1: It's a large a good portion of like personal pride
Speaker 1: and even though it's just like me and my guy
Speaker 1: Chris day and day out, like there's still that camaraderie
Speaker 1: that you get on a larger crew. And maybe it's
Speaker 1: even intensified because I'm a superintendent, you know, and I'm
Speaker 1: I got one or two other guys. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: not out there planning our days. There's no morning meeting.
Speaker 1: You know, we're just looking over our shoulder all day,
Speaker 1: filling the gaps and you know what I mean, like
Speaker 1: it would be silly, you know. So my job's not
Speaker 1: normal from that standpoint. But there's a huge, huge, like
Speaker 1: intense pride that me and Chris share, especially this year,
Speaker 1: seeing the change and seeing like all the new golfers
Speaker 1: who are happy, but even more so like the old
Speaker 1: Liberty golfers who have been around the whole time and
Speaker 1: have are seeing the change and they you know, they
Speaker 1: know it's just us still, but it's like with a
Speaker 1: little bit of extra help, and it's so it's it's
Speaker 1: a lot of pride. I love being out there, like
Speaker 1: being on a fair way mower or mowen greens are
Speaker 1: doing whatever it is out there is exactly the same
Speaker 1: as golfing to me, like being on the golf course.
Speaker 1: It's you could put me on the tee some golf
Speaker 1: I say, National Golf League's never played there and first
Speaker 1: t and hand me a fairway mower. And my golf bag.
Speaker 1: And it's a coin flip on what I might choose
Speaker 1: that day, like what I want to do. Like it's
Speaker 1: very much, very similar feeling I get out there anything
Speaker 1: I'm doing on the golf course.
Speaker 2: So, what what's the one job that you do that
Speaker 2: would like auto? You would go for golf. You've used
Speaker 2: the fairway and the greens mower. What's the one that
Speaker 2: if you is like you can do this for a
Speaker 2: bait to side or golf. It would just be a
Speaker 2: no brainer. I'm going I'm going to play golf.
Speaker 1: Oh something I hate basically, I hate anything to do
Speaker 1: with irrigation. And that's not really coming from like a
Speaker 1: firm and fast standpoint, although I'm there too, Like, I
Speaker 1: just hate that part of the job. I hate pipes,
Speaker 1: I hate stuff I can't see. It's very boring. We
Speaker 1: don't have to irrigate too much here. We didn't irrigate
Speaker 1: the whole month of July because the weather just cooperated.
Speaker 1: I just hate days when we have to water because
Speaker 1: we can't water every day here. When we water, we
Speaker 1: have to water a little heavy, and if it's hot
Speaker 1: and dry, we got to do it two or three
Speaker 1: times a week. And it just sucks, Like I'd rather
Speaker 1: be golfing, But that's the time when like you can't
Speaker 1: do anything else because it's life or death.
Speaker 2: You know, this is my uneducated, the uneducated host here.
Speaker 2: But how do you know when you need to water?
Speaker 2: Like I think most people that most people that are
Speaker 2: listening that aren't turf professionals, that are homeowners that might
Speaker 2: have sprinkler systems that go on all the time, Like
Speaker 2: when do you know? How do you know you need
Speaker 2: to water versus letting it ride for a month?
Speaker 1: Well, this month was easy. I mean we were never
Speaker 1: overly wet, and we never got more than a couple
Speaker 1: inches at a time, but we got two or three
Speaker 1: of those and enough to fill in the gaps. But
Speaker 1: we went the entire It was the month of May,
Speaker 1: like which is normally our spring, our wettest month, no rain.
Speaker 1: We had eighteen hundreds of an inch of measurable rain
Speaker 1: for the month of May. So by the end of
Speaker 1: May it looked like it did last year in September
Speaker 1: at the end of a little drought we had and
Speaker 1: it was crazy and we were having to water. A
Speaker 1: lot of the grass was slow to come in because
Speaker 1: that's normally when it fills in and tries to grow.
Speaker 1: So it was very obvious. Then a lot of it's
Speaker 1: just experience, and a lot of it is your course.
Speaker 1: I have nine greens, They're pretty tiny. I don't have
Speaker 1: like a ton of traffic. We don't cut at exceptionally
Speaker 1: low heights, so I have some leeway and they never
Speaker 1: get out of control in the sense that I can
Speaker 1: turn around really quick. I don't have acres of greens
Speaker 1: out there, you know what I mean. I have less
Speaker 1: than an acre of green space. But you just, you know,
Speaker 1: you know what you're shooting for. Generally, you're trying to
Speaker 1: maintain a dry product. Dry greens mo better, they perform better,
Speaker 1: they're less disease prone. But when they start to turn
Speaker 1: colors in the high spots and the spots that you
Speaker 1: know from experience are dry, you know when you start
Speaker 1: to see the grass go from a nice vibrant green
Speaker 1: to maybe a shade of blue or gray like that.
Speaker 1: A lot of guys are looking at footprints. You make
Speaker 1: a footprint on a hot, sunny day and it stays
Speaker 1: there and the grass just kind of stays put. That's
Speaker 1: when it's time to hit them. I don't use water meters.
Speaker 2: So it sounds a lot. This sounds a lot like
Speaker 2: somebody that's just got a good feel of the grill
Speaker 2: like where Yeah, like you know when you when you've
Speaker 2: pushed the meat, it's that you can feel it in
Speaker 2: your finger in your hand when it's done right.
Speaker 1: You got this, Yeah, you got the little cooler spot
Speaker 1: over here, and this little piece of chickens about there,
Speaker 1: so you move it over there. The greens are just
Speaker 1: like that. It's exactly like that. We could do the
Speaker 1: rest of the podcast on food restaurant analogies when it
Speaker 1: comes to golf course maintenance, in my opinion, give us
Speaker 1: one I don't know, oh, like a daily one. Let's
Speaker 1: just talk from like a uh what do you what
Speaker 1: would you call it? And well, they're called condiments at
Speaker 1: a restaurant ketchup on the table. Like if you go
Speaker 1: into a nice restaurant and you ask for ketchup on
Speaker 1: the table or something, that's like coming to me and
Speaker 1: asking for a ball washer on a tee. Like there's like,
Speaker 1: I know you like ketchup, I know you like your
Speaker 1: balls clean like whatever, but that that's a bad one.
Speaker 2: But no, I just think the towels for and you say,
Speaker 2: you know, on a golf course, that's what you gotta
Speaker 2: get yourself a towel.
Speaker 1: Explainet to people and it does shut them up. But
Speaker 1: the ball washer is absurd. I they don't even know
Speaker 1: where those come from.
Speaker 2: Like I mean, the crazier thing is when you see
Speaker 2: the price of what one of those ball washers costs.
Speaker 1: Crazy. Everything in golf is expensive because golf is a
Speaker 1: relatively rich sport, and they're no different. Oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: you put a handful of ball washes out there, you're
Speaker 1: in for a few grand, like several grand, and over
Speaker 1: the lifespan, forget it, like oh Moraine Country Club, February,
Speaker 1: Like just sand in parade. Ball washers getting you got
Speaker 1: to get in the little nooks where it says par
Speaker 1: a and then you gotta paint them all over again.
Speaker 1: It's awful. Don't make your golf course do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sign like signs, all those things like the the
Speaker 2: like the standard. I was shocked and like alarmed when
Speaker 2: I found out what those like, you know, the signed
Speaker 2: the benches, the ball washers, the trash cans, the things
Speaker 2: that like those quintessential items that you see at golf courses.
Speaker 2: When I found out how much they cost. I was like,
Speaker 2: I was appalled, honestly. Yeah, it was like, you know,
Speaker 2: like you could almost shop at Creighton Barrel for less
Speaker 2: money than through one of the golf course successory.
Speaker 1: No, it's like that. It's like going from the Target
Speaker 1: website to the Creighton Barrel website as far as like
Speaker 1: the price is going up if you go from like
Speaker 1: normal landscape stuff to golf landscape stuff, it's just like
Speaker 1: ten x.
Speaker 2: It's and it's the same stuff. It's crazy. Let's talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about your life and how how you
Speaker 2: got into the golf course maintenance world.
Speaker 1: Wanted to wanted somewhere to play golf for free. I
Speaker 1: mean that was it. I grew up in Kansas City,
Speaker 1: like in a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side, Lenexa, Kansas.
Speaker 1: A lot of kids want to get the hell out
Speaker 1: of Kansas as soon as they can. I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to college right away, so me and my cousin had
Speaker 1: a chance to move to Dayton, Ohio. My aunt had
Speaker 1: an apartment in her attic that she was willing to
Speaker 1: let us use free of charge for a little bit.
Speaker 1: So we packed up his civic and went there. I
Speaker 1: had just been getting into the game of golf. I
Speaker 1: was working at a skateboard shop. My dad always took
Speaker 1: me to the putt putt and he always took me
Speaker 1: to the driving range. So I was doing that stuff
Speaker 1: growing up. And he was a guy who played a
Speaker 1: couple times a year with the company and stuff, and
Speaker 1: we were heavily into sports, but golf wasn't our thing
Speaker 1: so much. But I was getting into it right out
Speaker 1: of high school, teaching myself to play. Got to Dayton, Ohio.
Speaker 1: My aunt lived within.
Speaker 2: It.
Speaker 1: I figured it. I was like a two mile radius.
Speaker 1: There was a hundred and nate holes of golf right there.
Speaker 1: Where she lived was Dayton country Club, Community Golf Course,
Speaker 1: Moraine country Club NCR. And that's just like a nice
Speaker 1: strand there in Dayton, great golf town. But I so
Speaker 1: I started putting in applications. I'd done a little landscaping
Speaker 1: here and there. My dad one of his jobs when
Speaker 1: I was little, he managed, was a general manager at
Speaker 1: a big softball complex in Kansas City, and he did
Speaker 1: a lot of the work on the fields there. So
Speaker 1: we always did a bit of that and traveling around
Speaker 1: as a kid when we'd go to like different cities.
Speaker 1: He would take me to like Yankee Stadium, or like
Speaker 1: La we'd go to the Rose Bowl, or like Notre
Speaker 1: Dame Stadium. Wherever we're at, we'd go, even if it
Speaker 1: was like the middle of the day, nothing like we'd
Speaker 1: be at like the chain link fans trying to look
Speaker 1: in at the field and stuff. So we were into that.
Speaker 1: But I I was just getting the golf as a player.
Speaker 1: It was the Tiger Woods era. Wanted free golf. Because
Speaker 1: I was broke. Me and my cousin were working at
Speaker 1: the bagel shop up the street from Morain. I put
Speaker 1: in an application at Moraine, thinking it was INCR. And
Speaker 1: then I went up the road and put in an
Speaker 1: application and asked them what course it was, and they
Speaker 1: said it was INCR. And I filled one out anyway.
Speaker 1: And then by the time I had gotten home, the
Speaker 1: superintendent at Moraine, Jerry Overbay, had already called and left
Speaker 1: a message with my grandma. So one thing led to another.
Speaker 1: He hired me. I was probably twenty ish, this was
Speaker 1: ninety twenty twenty one. This was probably like ninety eight,
Speaker 1: and I started working the crew and lucky for me,
Speaker 1: Moraine had like a super open culture, at least at
Speaker 1: that point. I haven't been back in a couple of
Speaker 1: years anyway, but I could play once he knew I
Speaker 1: wasn't gonna quit after a couple of weeks, and I
Speaker 1: was into golf. Like he got me on the course
Speaker 1: like immediately, he'd get me on the course on week
Speaker 1: you know, normal weekday afternoons. And it got to the
Speaker 1: point where, you know, I was there for seven years.
Speaker 1: The better part learned everything there, really, the learned love
Speaker 1: of golf. You know, this was pre it wasn't pre Internet,
Speaker 1: but it was like early Internet.
Speaker 2: So I.
Speaker 1: Didn't become like an architecture head or anything at that point.
Speaker 1: But that's a pretty good course to cut your teeth on.
Speaker 1: Even at that point. I mean there were a lot
Speaker 1: more trees there, but you know, it was still everything
Speaker 1: was there.
Speaker 2: The land, the lants is unbelievable there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the land hasn't changed. It's it's a great
Speaker 1: strip of land there. Like all those golf courses on
Speaker 1: that little strand share that land. There's like six golf courses,
Speaker 1: great little strip, just.
Speaker 2: A little pocket of nipper gamble there.
Speaker 1: But anyway, that's that's how I got into turf, Like
Speaker 1: I got into. I had a lot of free golf
Speaker 1: and instantly loved mowing greens. Kind of worked my way
Speaker 1: out of just doing like sandtraps and trap banks, you know,
Speaker 1: all week every week. Jerry trusted me with course set
Speaker 1: up pretty early, like the second season, like I was
Speaker 1: doing course set up and stuff at Morain. Really got
Speaker 1: into it.
Speaker 2: And do you know from there, have you ever thought
Speaker 2: about back like when you started doing doing turf at Moraine,
Speaker 2: what it was that like specifically that really appealed to
Speaker 2: you about it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I had a very I think about it
Speaker 1: a lot because there was a good little vibrant community
Speaker 1: there among us among people who worked on golf courses
Speaker 1: like Mondays. It was either like we were hosting at
Speaker 1: Morain on maintenance Monday afternoons, or we were going to
Speaker 1: someone else's course. And there was a lot of competition
Speaker 1: among golf courses like who was the best and stuff,
Speaker 1: and we got to play all the best in that
Speaker 1: and I was always very adamant that Morain was the best.
Speaker 1: And yeah, back in the day, I'd tell you Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus,
Speaker 1: that whole stretch and there's some competition there. I still
Speaker 1: think it holds up pretty good, but there would always
Speaker 1: be that competition and I didn't know what it was
Speaker 1: because I couldn't talk about it then like I could now,
Speaker 1: but it was definitely there was something about Morain that
Speaker 1: was like you get in like streaks with your game
Speaker 1: or something. Have you ever have you ever been to
Speaker 1: a course in like your game you knew it wasn't
Speaker 1: on or something, or maybe you knew the course was
Speaker 1: long or something, but somehow the course conditions are just
Speaker 1: the course itself kind of like negated all that and
Speaker 1: you could either punch it around and get around or
Speaker 1: like distance didn't matter like as much as you thought
Speaker 1: it does on the card or something. Morange just has
Speaker 1: a way of kind of negating styles of play. And
Speaker 1: I think it's because it's one of the more natural
Speaker 1: courses in that area. It's a very I mean, it's
Speaker 1: an up and down course like and it goes up
Speaker 1: and down like twice. And I don't know, I could
Speaker 1: just always if you're playing really well, it could kind
Speaker 1: of hit you around a little bit. If you weren't
Speaker 1: playing well even back in the tree days, like you
Speaker 1: weren't losing balls there when you got on those small greens.
Speaker 1: You always had a chance there, but it was really
Speaker 1: hard to get there. And there's also like just kind
Speaker 1: of intangible things. There's like a rhythm to that course,
Speaker 1: the way like the kind of the sixteenth and the
Speaker 1: seventh green sit there next to each other, and they
Speaker 1: meet at kind of the same spot in each nine
Speaker 1: and they're kind of like weird cousins of each other.
Speaker 1: They sit in the same spot out of the land,
Speaker 1: their push ups with bunkers on each side. They come
Speaker 1: down a hill and then the next two holes do
Speaker 1: the same thing. It's two par fives now, and there's
Speaker 1: like this cool symmetry and almost a sense of humor
Speaker 1: to the design. Every hole is very different, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of familiarity out there. It's a very very
Speaker 1: good golf course.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So where'd you go after Moraine?
Speaker 1: Moraine? Oh, I went on the wagon or off the
Speaker 1: wagon or whatever they So my life in Dayton was
Speaker 1: like wake up at four, get to the golf course,
Speaker 1: work my ass off, go home, either take a nap
Speaker 1: or go to the driving range or something, or hit
Speaker 1: balls if I wasn't playing, and then it was music.
Speaker 1: Like I was a pretty serious guitar player at that time,
Speaker 1: and my friend will Cope him and I played like
Speaker 1: at bar joint and like beard like beer joints in Dayton, Ohio,
Speaker 1: and even traveled around like West Virginia and Kentucky and
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania and stuff, and we were kind of serious musicians,
Speaker 1: drank a lot, party a lot. So after Morain, you know,
Speaker 1: I was kind of my life kind of was getting
Speaker 1: more and more unsustainable and the alcohol kind of got
Speaker 1: out of control. Ended up going back home for a
Speaker 1: little bit, ended up coming back to Morain for a
Speaker 1: little bit. The guitar and all that kind of art
Speaker 1: life eventually led me on a trip to New York.
Speaker 1: As soon as I got there, I kind of fell
Speaker 1: in love with it. That's kind of how New York
Speaker 1: City is. But like I was only going to stay
Speaker 1: there for two weeks with some friends and ended up
Speaker 1: and that's I essentially never left, you know, I kind
Speaker 1: of picked up my things and stuff. But I between
Speaker 1: more Rain and New York City, I kind of lived
Speaker 1: a hard life and lived even a harder life my
Speaker 1: first few years in New York City before kind of
Speaker 1: getting my stuff together, and it was just alcoholism. It
Speaker 1: was just you know, selfish living and drinking too much
Speaker 1: and not listening to anybody, and one thing led to another.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I ended up doing fits and starts at rehabs, you know,
Speaker 1: but it took three or four like residential rehabs up
Speaker 1: here in New York. Thank god we have those for
Speaker 1: people here before I really got my shit together and
Speaker 1: then ended up finally you know, this puts me at
Speaker 1: two thousand and ten, twenty eleven, met the girl who
Speaker 1: would become my wife, kind of got more serious about things,
Speaker 1: started using my skill in the city in horticulture. Ended
Speaker 1: up doing at a pretty high level, like terrace gardens
Speaker 1: and green walls and all the kind of plantings that
Speaker 1: you see in like big cities. Yeah, even like like
Speaker 1: even like down to like Brownstone gardens, you know, people's
Speaker 1: backyards and stuff. But a lot of like big, big
Speaker 1: downtown Manhattan stuff, tech companies and stuff, huge green walls
Speaker 1: and terraces way up in the sky. Worked for a
Speaker 1: great company called Blondie's Treehouse in the city under an
Speaker 1: amazing horticulturalist. Her name was Boshana bud buzz Budzick. Sorry
Speaker 1: I still have trouble spitting that whole name out. We
Speaker 1: call her bo but she was a Polish horticulturalist and
Speaker 1: she had she was in charge of all the interior
Speaker 1: plants for Blondies that they did, and I think we
Speaker 1: had like eight hundred accounts in the city. We had
Speaker 1: a crew of like twenty five thirty interior horticulture techs.
Speaker 1: And it was kind of like a crew at a
Speaker 1: big golf course, you know. We'd have weekly meetings, not
Speaker 1: morning meetings, and like crews would go everywhere and it
Speaker 1: was a really cool job. When I left there, I
Speaker 1: was kind of doing My job ended up being when
Speaker 1: they would do a new install, I would kind of
Speaker 1: show up on the scene, check the plants, and kind
Speaker 1: of scope it out and take care of it for
Speaker 1: the first couple of weeks, see what it was going
Speaker 1: to need, what it was going to take from, like
Speaker 1: a personnel standpoint, a water standpoint to maintain it, and
Speaker 1: kind of set up the maintenance program with both. And
Speaker 1: it was really cool. Worked at places like Google and
Speaker 1: their campus down there. We did Facebook, we did Museum
Speaker 1: of Modern Art, Big Greenwall there, World Trade Center, all
Speaker 1: those buildings. There's really exciting job, very difficult job.
Speaker 2: What did that job teach you that you were able
Speaker 2: to take later to turf in.
Speaker 1: Golf person coming back like at that level, especially when
Speaker 1: you're kind of dealing with the installation process and doing
Speaker 1: big plantings in a downtown area, you know, as much
Speaker 1: as seventy eighty stories high, the logistics are really really frustrating,
Speaker 1: especially when these buildings are going up. Everyone's trying to
Speaker 1: do everything with these buildings at the same time, from
Speaker 1: fleshing the offices out to doing the electrical and you're
Speaker 1: trying to get up there with bags of soil and
Speaker 1: live plants and bags of malt or what have you
Speaker 1: up freight elevators, and the logistics are just really frustrating.
Speaker 1: And then once you get them in there, they're beautiful projects,
Speaker 1: but the stresses that the plants are under are very unique.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of expos The sunlight can either be
Speaker 1: non existent or almost like omnipresent. You're dealing in a
Speaker 1: huge heat island effect. So I learned a lot just
Speaker 1: about like plant physiology, what plants can take, what they can't.
Speaker 1: Because you're you know, you're doing you know, a multimillion
Speaker 1: dollar install that's you know, a half acre of new
Speaker 1: groundcover or flowers or something, and it's ninety two degrees
Speaker 1: on the ground, and you know your plants are up
Speaker 1: there on the fiftieth floor on a south facing highly
Speaker 1: windy and they're in three inches of like soil less
Speaker 1: plant mixture. Like it's just it's really under the gun
Speaker 1: like it and a lot of like at golf courses,
Speaker 1: really high end golf courses. Like the most stressful job
Speaker 1: on that whole property will be like the assistant superintendent's
Speaker 1: on a hot summer day, chasing around keeping greens alive,
Speaker 1: you know, under heavy play and never never getting them
Speaker 1: too wet. But that's very equivalent to that, and you
Speaker 1: but you're trying to do it. You might have So
Speaker 1: it's like having greens spread out all over Manhattan, and
Speaker 1: one green's on the fiftieth floor down here on fourteenth Street,
Speaker 1: and then you got to go to the other one
Speaker 1: that's on the twelfth floor on you know, East seventy ninth,
Speaker 1: and you got to check two or three of these
Speaker 1: spots in a day. You gotta be taking the subway,
Speaker 1: you got it's so it's it's it's crazy. You got
Speaker 1: to argue with the freight elevator guy, or you gotta
Speaker 1: you've lost your id or something. It's just it's always
Speaker 1: it's a whole different level of like logistics and things
Speaker 1: you don't think of that goes into it, just like
Speaker 1: little plants and offices.
Speaker 2: I I imagine that you can't have a fear of
Speaker 2: heights either. At that point, you're probably in some precare.
Speaker 2: I always look at like window washers when I'm in
Speaker 2: a tall building. I'm like, God, that's crazy. And in
Speaker 2: a way, you're doing even more with plants and stuff,
Speaker 2: right are you? Were you hanging from buildings.
Speaker 1: Never hanging from buildings, And I'm not afraid of heights,
Speaker 1: but I don't necessarily like them. And there were some
Speaker 1: properties that would give you that vertigo, but I mean
Speaker 1: it was mainly terraces. You know, you're walking out from inside.
Speaker 2: It wasn't like out there out there.
Speaker 1: Now. The craziest wall I had was in inside the
Speaker 1: Google campus. We had like two green walls that were
Speaker 1: like pillars of plants, like six feet on each side,
Speaker 1: and they went up. They started on the eighth floor
Speaker 1: and went all the way up through the eleventh floor,
Speaker 1: and it was like kind of an open cafe area
Speaker 1: and two of these giant pillars of plants, and we
Speaker 1: had like a big like cherry picker. You know. I'd
Speaker 1: park it down the hallway. It was like kind of
Speaker 1: a they'd put it on the eighth floor because that's
Speaker 1: where all the air conditioning and stuff. It's like the
Speaker 1: brains of the building that go through like the middle floor.
Speaker 1: It was a fourteen story building. So I would pull
Speaker 1: this cherry picker down through the hall and pull it
Speaker 1: up there early in the mornings, and these things were
Speaker 1: like sixty seventy feet in the air, and you'd go
Speaker 1: all the way up and you'd get vertigo because the
Speaker 1: thing starts rocking and stuff, and people are starting to
Speaker 1: filter in and look at you do the work. It's
Speaker 1: like kind of part of the fun. But that stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But nothing crazy, no, No.
Speaker 2: What made you want to get back into golf from
Speaker 2: this job?
Speaker 1: Frida Egg Baby, No in a big in a large sense,
Speaker 1: the Frida Egg at large though, the golf community that
Speaker 1: I kind of walked back into or rediscovered. I got
Speaker 1: healthy number one, Like you don't, well, actually I can.
Speaker 1: There were times. I won't get too into this, but
Speaker 1: it's suffice to say I was living out of a
Speaker 1: backpack like Lower Manhattan essentially, and there were times I
Speaker 1: would like hit balls at Chelsea Piers. They have like
Speaker 1: a public green at Bryant Park. And at times when
Speaker 1: I was either like essentially homeless or CouchSurfing, like, I
Speaker 1: would stop and play a little bit. But as I
Speaker 1: got healthy, like and I got my body back, and
Speaker 1: I got my sleep patterns back, and I had a
Speaker 1: regular job and had a bank account and all that stuff,
Speaker 1: it was like I could golf, like I was living
Speaker 1: in Queen's and everything. But we do have I mean,
Speaker 1: I was only once once we got the car in Queens.
Speaker 1: You know, I could get to Forest Park in six minutes.
Speaker 1: We were really close to Forest Park golf course. But
Speaker 1: I worked in Manhattan, so I would play, you know,
Speaker 1: I'd go practice at Chelsea Peers. The We found some
Speaker 1: real treasures that are up and down the beaches there
Speaker 1: near the city, some great par three courses like Rhese
Speaker 1: Park and Nickerson Dunes, yep, exactly. And that was another
Speaker 1: But that's what I mean. It was like kind of
Speaker 1: that whole community that I rediscovered, putting language and thought,
Speaker 1: because you guys had kind of a head start, Like
Speaker 1: I'm older than a lot of you guys. I'm forty five, now,
Speaker 1: But I was kind of checked out there for a
Speaker 1: little bit, and a lot of you guys in those
Speaker 1: later years, like right when I was kind of getting
Speaker 1: my shit back together, you guys were busy studying and
Speaker 1: busy researching and traveling and seeing all these golf courses
Speaker 1: and doing the historical connections and putting language to it.
Speaker 1: So by the time I had practiced up a little
Speaker 1: bit and was kind of like, hmm, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: getting a little tired of doing this in the city,
Speaker 1: and you know I have some relevant skills. When I
Speaker 1: started getting on the computer, you guys would be the
Speaker 1: first thing that would come up. I always knew about
Speaker 1: golf club at lists now golf Club at list I
Speaker 1: can remember coming across probably and two thousand and five
Speaker 1: or six is when I started reading that, and that
Speaker 1: might have been my first kind of entree into the
Speaker 1: real architecture stuff. But that's still a little traditional based.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's I mean, it's all of our best
Speaker 1: resource right, but like this new younger guys talking about
Speaker 1: it and kind of approaching it from a less stuffy
Speaker 1: way was just it was a It gave me a
Speaker 1: lot of optimism because I didn't want I wasn't the
Speaker 1: person who was gonna step into like a conservative, like
Speaker 1: preppy kind of new pastime. I needed some sort of
Speaker 1: plausible denial in there, so like cool guys like you
Speaker 1: and not to like sound so cheesy about it, but
Speaker 1: just like in plain language, kind of gave me cover
Speaker 1: to get back in and like at least be enthusiastic
Speaker 1: and like at least knude know that there were some
Speaker 1: people out there different.
Speaker 2: Mhere what I got to ask for advice for any
Speaker 2: city dweller. You know, you lived in Queens and we're
Speaker 2: playing a lot of golf, a lot of affordable golf.
Speaker 2: What are the five courses you must see near the
Speaker 2: city And.
Speaker 1: There's good courses too, And I'm gonna give them kind
Speaker 1: of a strategy about it too, because you don't just
Speaker 1: want to show up or whatever.
Speaker 2: These are good. This is I need this.
Speaker 1: The city courses, they're they're packed right now, They're going
Speaker 1: to be packed four hours from now. Like if it's
Speaker 1: sunny and plus forty degrees, like you're gonna run into
Speaker 1: golfers and probably quite a few. But your best bet
Speaker 1: is to either go very early. I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: living in the city, don't listen to this, you just
Speaker 1: gotta freaking gut it out. But five courses. Forest Park
Speaker 1: is awesome, really cool set of greens. All of these
Speaker 1: courses were basically we've done. This is one of the greatest,
Speaker 1: like untold stories in golf course architecture, what John van
Speaker 1: Kleek did of styles in Van Cleek. By this time
Speaker 1: he was on his own the new deal projects like
Speaker 1: the WPA projects or whatever you want to call them,
Speaker 1: that he did in New York City during those eighteen
Speaker 1: months where he did. He redid Van Cortland, he redid
Speaker 1: Split Rock, he built Cassenna, redd Forest Park, built Douglas Town,
Speaker 1: built Reese Park. All golf courses built, constructed and like
Speaker 1: up and play like in less than two years with
Speaker 1: all this labor, and any of those golf courses are
Speaker 1: a blast to visit, but go online first and do
Speaker 1: some research. The New York City government has a really
Speaker 1: great time lapse thing like the NYC ven And now
Speaker 1: if you google that, it'll give you like a slider
Speaker 1: aerial where you can look at some twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: aerials of these golf courses and see how crazy they were.
Speaker 1: The stuff that he built and a lot of it's
Speaker 1: still there in the ground, although it's been grasped over
Speaker 1: grown over. But they're all really really cool Golden Age
Speaker 1: golf courses, and he had a real flare around the greens.
Speaker 1: You know, they're generally smallish, but like all all of
Speaker 1: kind of the template styles are represented throughout his courses.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of mutations of them. He just had
Speaker 1: a real fun style when he was doing these courses,
Speaker 1: and I think it was probably due to some of
Speaker 1: the speed he did it in It's just some of
Speaker 1: some of the architecture is almost kind of frivolous. It's
Speaker 1: kind of fun.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, I've heard Split Rocks really cool.
Speaker 1: Split Rock is great course. Yeah, both those courses there
Speaker 1: great day of golf if you want to do thirty six. Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know which one's better split Rock. There's Pelham
Speaker 1: and there's Split Rock. And I hope I'm not getting
Speaker 1: it wrong. Pelham or split Rock is the more is
Speaker 1: the more uh kind of wooded, rambunctious, and I think
Speaker 1: the other the more. They're both really good. They I
Speaker 1: think they were both golf courses like from the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds on and just kind of permutated and that
Speaker 1: was the land that they used for the Van Cleet courses.
Speaker 1: But a lot of that, I'm trying to think of
Speaker 1: stuff that's maybe a little farther out. I didn't get
Speaker 1: to play golf on Long Island too much, as far
Speaker 1: as I was fortunate enough getting back into golf. My
Speaker 1: first job back into golf from doing the hort of
Speaker 1: culture work was at the Creek and Locus Valley under
Speaker 1: Adam What ye.
Speaker 2: What year was this about?
Speaker 1: It was the September after the growing of Hans's work,
Speaker 1: so this last and exactly I think it was the
Speaker 1: fall of seventeen and it was the off season. Adam
Speaker 1: went to school with Jason Mall, who was the then
Speaker 1: superintendent at Moraine. Yeah, and Jason and I were close,
Speaker 1: so kind of on Jason's recommendation, Adam hired me as
Speaker 1: like third assistant horticulturalists because they were also looking for
Speaker 1: like a horticulturalist for that club. And it was November.
Speaker 1: I was living in Queens and he said, come on
Speaker 1: try it out for a little bit, see if it
Speaker 1: would be a fit. And I loved it. I spent
Speaker 1: five or six weeks. It was nice. I could leave
Speaker 1: Queens in the morning and be at the creek in
Speaker 1: forty five minutes. But if I didn't leave the creek
Speaker 1: by about two thirty three o'clock, like that drive home
Speaker 1: could go to two and a half three hours pretty easily.
Speaker 1: So at that point I had like a you know,
Speaker 1: fourteen month fifteen month old daughter, My wife's working from home,
Speaker 1: so I kind of respectfully declined to, you know, start
Speaker 1: the spring out with them, but it gave me a
Speaker 1: big boost. And that was kind of concurrent with you
Speaker 1: guys publishing my piece on Nickerson Dunes and getting to
Speaker 1: know Garrett and talking to Garrett quite a bit through
Speaker 1: that process, and both of those things gave me a
Speaker 1: lot of wind in my sales. So after that it
Speaker 1: was just kind of a matter of when we ended
Speaker 1: up moving out of the city to get some more
Speaker 1: space and put some projects together up here until I
Speaker 1: found this place.
Speaker 2: Were what were you doing up there before you found this,
Speaker 2: before you found Sullivan County?
Speaker 1: Uh? Right? At Like, I commuted back and forth from
Speaker 1: the from here to the city for about nine months,
Speaker 1: still doing the horticulture job. Went back to the horticulture
Speaker 1: right after the creek. We ended up buying a house here,
Speaker 1: but I commuted back and forth from Liberty to New
Speaker 1: York for about nine months, and at that point there
Speaker 1: were a couple projects brewing up here. There was a
Speaker 1: casino course up here that was built in the sixties
Speaker 1: and was getting Aerys Jones makeover. So I ended up
Speaker 1: helping a little bit out there for him, just kind
Speaker 1: of part time, did some work here in the clubhouse.
Speaker 1: And that was all before working at NS which is
Speaker 1: Rob Collins Place. So the whole time we were like
Speaker 1: shopping for houses up here, I had known about the
Speaker 1: project it was going to happen. I kind of checked
Speaker 1: out the old golf course it was going to be on.
Speaker 1: By that time, I had been introduced like to Rob
Speaker 1: a little bit online and we had texted a little bit,
Speaker 1: so just going back and forth with him. Ended up
Speaker 1: having a friend who who I also met online from Knoxville.
Speaker 1: His name is Kyle. He ended up helping Rob and
Speaker 1: that crew during the construction. But I always had a
Speaker 1: kind of a pulse on that, and when it was
Speaker 1: all completed, I ended up working with Anthony the superintendent
Speaker 1: on the growing at ANSS and did that and worked
Speaker 1: there through their first season and into all through their
Speaker 1: first off season, and that was when the job here
Speaker 1: opened up. So I did get about a year and
Speaker 1: a half in at a ness in between the city
Speaker 1: and here. So that was a really fun experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what was the what was growing like? And what
Speaker 2: what were the unique aspects of growing in a golf
Speaker 2: course that you particularly take a lot with you from.
Speaker 1: I had never done it grow in, you know, I'd
Speaker 1: done random tee projects here and there, greens expansions, some
Speaker 1: bunker renovations and stuff, but never a whole grow in.
Speaker 1: So they completed the course more or less late in
Speaker 1: the season, and they had kind of hydro seated a
Speaker 1: cover crop and by the time I got there the
Speaker 1: next growing season, you know, there was a winter involved
Speaker 1: and they had started the serious hydro seating of the
Speaker 1: grasses that were going to be the turf, and so
Speaker 1: I participated in kind of the end of the hydro
Speaker 1: seating process. That golf course was in a sense kind
Speaker 1: of built to perform in a way that was a
Speaker 1: little bit different than most like clay based, soil based courses.
Speaker 1: It was never going to be sand capped or anything.
Speaker 1: You know, the greens were sand based, but Rob and
Speaker 1: Ted wanted that course to play very firm and fast.
Speaker 1: So they had that place rock hard before we idro
Speaker 1: seated it, and they got the irrigation in the ground,
Speaker 1: and the process was just there were going to be
Speaker 1: two cuts. You have a fairway cut that's almost, you know,
Speaker 1: infinitely wide, that leeds into a native cut, and you
Speaker 1: know the the fairway cut was going to be. It
Speaker 1: was rye grass and bluegrass, real tightly moan, and all
Speaker 1: the natives were fine fescue, and we just painted those
Speaker 1: things on and really growing in a golf courses of struggles,
Speaker 1: things don't stay put, even in soil. I know, they
Speaker 1: say it's worse than sand, but you know when you
Speaker 1: go that there were tropical storms involved, thunderstorms, you know,
Speaker 1: wipes out work that you took you hours to do,
Speaker 1: you know, just on repeat. You know, there were spots
Speaker 1: of that course that we had to rebuild, not large spots,
Speaker 1: and through no one's fault. It's just a natural process,
Speaker 1: especially on a course as voluptuous as that, but you know,
Speaker 1: just sex that you have to just keep hammering on
Speaker 1: and the grass just gets a little bit closer and
Speaker 1: a little bit closer and a little bit closer till
Speaker 1: you finally have a surface, and then you finally see
Speaker 1: it start to knit, and then you're finally taking the
Speaker 1: mower down and it's really cool, and it's a real struggle.
Speaker 1: It's just seed and sand and dirt and water. And
Speaker 1: the whole time you're working out of a shed because
Speaker 1: they're building your new maintenance barn and then you're moving
Speaker 1: into that and you're learning how to set up a
Speaker 1: maintenance barn. And we didn't have a mechanic, so Anthony
Speaker 1: was learning, you know, the hard way, how to do
Speaker 1: it on his own and then teaching me how to
Speaker 1: do it just so we could keep the mowers out
Speaker 1: and stuff, you know, assembled a little crew, but eventually
Speaker 1: got up to where it needed to be really really
Speaker 1: fun process, especially on a course that's so cool and
Speaker 1: fun to look at, like every day.
Speaker 2: So the Sullivan County job comes up and you jump
Speaker 2: at that. What was it about Sullivan County that attracted
Speaker 2: you to the job and what I know, this is
Speaker 2: a very special place for you. What makes it such
Speaker 2: a special place to you?
Speaker 1: Number one, it's very close. The house we ended up
Speaker 1: buying is half a mile that way, so I'm two
Speaker 1: minutes from work. I can walk here in seven or
Speaker 1: eight minutes. I got here and it was going to
Speaker 1: be my local and I played it and it was
Speaker 1: very early and it was wet, and I was like,
Speaker 1: it's cool, you know, a lot of good land movement
Speaker 1: and stuff. But it didn't sink in until a little
Speaker 1: bit later in the spring when it dried out a
Speaker 1: little bit and they got it mowed out, and I
Speaker 1: could kind of see what the idea of the course was.
Speaker 1: I always kind of wanted to take care of my
Speaker 1: own place, but I never really had the guts, Like
Speaker 1: it was always going to have to be a perfect situation.
Speaker 1: And like you're talking to me like I'm a superintendent,
Speaker 1: and I am, and I I appreciate, you know, the
Speaker 1: skills that I have and everything, but there are thousands
Speaker 1: of superintendents right now doing the job at a higher
Speaker 1: level than me at their own place, and you know,
Speaker 1: they're managing people, they're managing members and everything. And this
Speaker 1: was the perfect situation because it was just the two owners.
Speaker 1: And they asked me, when Tony and Mary decided to
Speaker 1: stay in Florida, if I could just come and mow
Speaker 1: it to keep it from going to see, you know,
Speaker 1: because they didn't think that I would want to kind
Speaker 1: of give it a go, or they didn't want to
Speaker 1: like put that on me right off the bat. But
Speaker 1: I was kind of like instantly like, if you give
Speaker 1: me Chris, which was Tony and Mary's helper, and now
Speaker 1: my guy, let's just keep it open, if you don't
Speaker 1: mind doing one more season. You've lost this much money,
Speaker 1: you know, and maybe we can get some interested people.
Speaker 1: And they trusted me enough to do it, you know.
Speaker 1: But it was a situation where I knew I couldn't
Speaker 1: meet the expectations here. I wasn't stepping into a place
Speaker 1: with very high expectations. And I even knew that I
Speaker 1: had the skills that I could probably you know, raise
Speaker 1: it a little bit with my experience, but I knew
Speaker 1: that I wasn't gonna have to have a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff regular superintendent for lack of a better term,
Speaker 1: would have to. I don't have Greens committee meetings. You know.
Speaker 1: Tom coyn is on board now, But since he's been
Speaker 1: on board, he hasn't given me thirty seconds of grief.
Speaker 1: We're both on the same page. We just wanted to
Speaker 1: look better out there, and we spend as much time
Speaker 1: as we can do in that, but it's also a
Speaker 1: really cool golf course. It was built by two guys
Speaker 1: who knew exactly what they were doing and had seen
Speaker 1: about everything. They were kind of builders for the first
Speaker 1: wave of Golden Age builders. Lynn Rayner no relation to
Speaker 1: seth Rad He was the original head pro and superintendent
Speaker 1: at Leatherstocking Golf Course in Cooperstown, which is a Devereaux
Speaker 1: Emmett and by all accounts, essentially built that course for
Speaker 1: you know, within for Emmet. You know, he was there
Speaker 1: the man on the ground for the development of that
Speaker 1: course and the other architect of they worked together, Lynn
Speaker 1: Rayner and then Maurice McCarthy, who did like the original
Speaker 1: layouts at Hershey, is on record in some records doing
Speaker 1: like courses like Knickerbocker. He pops up a lot of
Speaker 1: places as kind of like perhaps a builder some credits
Speaker 1: on his own. But these weren't well known guys, but
Speaker 1: they were definitely around kind of that first wave. Lynn
Speaker 1: Rayner built five greens under Walter Travis at nearby Stanford
Speaker 1: Golf Club. So these these were guys who built our course,
Speaker 1: who definitely were in the loop back then and kind
Speaker 1: of that first Golden Age crop you know the Emmett Travis,
Speaker 1: you know, before the Rosses and before the Tillies kind
Speaker 1: of that. So we have a really cool golf course.
Speaker 1: It's just it's pretty wild land, a lot of elevation change.
Speaker 1: They just kind of built teas and greens and worked
Speaker 1: with the land. We have twelve thirteen bunkers, depending on
Speaker 1: how you want to count out there.
Speaker 2: It's about depending on what you count as a bunker.
Speaker 1: We're trying to scratch a few more out that. We
Speaker 1: know that that we two's the last one looks it's
Speaker 1: the coolest bunker on the course. Like it's a very
Speaker 1: dramatic green side bunker, very deep, and it's right there.
Speaker 1: It's just weed it out. It's just like the last
Speaker 1: one on the list. So yeah, but it's cool. You
Speaker 1: just just midge over three thousand yards unrrigated. It's fun,
Speaker 1: really fun golf. Good ground game, good ground game course.
Speaker 2: Obviously, the maintenance expectator she took over was like, let's
Speaker 2: just not let this go to seed and in your
Speaker 2: time you've elevated at what's what would you say has
Speaker 2: been the toughest challenge of getting this golf course kind
Speaker 2: of back to more more make it more and more playable.
Speaker 1: A few challenges that there's a term they use, a
Speaker 1: benevolent neglect, and this, if it was ever true, it's
Speaker 1: true here because they never tried to do anything too bad.
Speaker 1: When I from an agronomic standpoint, the greens had always
Speaker 1: been taken very good care of, but over the last
Speaker 1: decade they had stopped doing any top dressing or erification.
Speaker 1: So say when I cut a new cup and I
Speaker 1: pull that plug out, you know, I've got a pretty
Speaker 1: nice inch inch or two in some areas of thatch
Speaker 1: organic matter that's been built up. So that's one of
Speaker 1: the bigger issues we've been tackling, and we'll continue to
Speaker 1: tackle because that's they play better than they should for
Speaker 1: that much thatch if you keep them dry. But it's
Speaker 1: not good, you know. We want to get some of
Speaker 1: that stuff out there and even them out a little bit.
Speaker 1: The grass lines have all been had all been lost.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of fairways here that I tripled in
Speaker 1: like square footage because they had just gotten so narrow,
Speaker 1: little tiny approaches going up to the greens and flaring out.
Speaker 1: So I worked on bringing everything out. It's a neat
Speaker 1: stand of grass it's an old mix, but there's really
Speaker 1: no difference in the stand from the fairway to the
Speaker 1: rough or anything. So I had kind of and really
Speaker 1: at the start of each season you kind of have
Speaker 1: free reiin to do grass lines and it takes to
Speaker 1: a fair cut really well if you can get on
Speaker 1: it in time. But that's kind of how I expanded
Speaker 1: the fairways and they look great now. But getting those,
Speaker 1: especially the approaches out wide so the ball can come
Speaker 1: into these greens from different angles, because that had all
Speaker 1: been lost is just bottlenecks. And then just we took down,
Speaker 1: like we have a lot of tree work still to do.
Speaker 1: At the start of this year, we took down twenty
Speaker 1: five thirty trees, especially on our third hole, which had
Speaker 1: become kind of broken just because of the tree encroachment.
Speaker 1: It's on a hill that you need to be able
Speaker 1: to play it up so far, and you weren't able
Speaker 1: to do that. But our corridors are still nice and wide.
Speaker 1: We don't have any like super egregious trees, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, it's just too for it's just too
Speaker 1: forested through. We have really nice vistas that we'd like
Speaker 1: to get back. So the general stuff trees, grass lines.
Speaker 1: We have drainage that we need to work on. I
Speaker 1: don't know. If they offered to put in a brand
Speaker 1: new irrigation system for fair ways and everything, I don't
Speaker 1: think i'd do it. I think we'll stay with just
Speaker 1: greens only, even if we do get a modern system.
Speaker 2: Like if it's good, if it's good enough for Fisher's Island,
Speaker 2: it's good enough for you.
Speaker 1: It's definitely good. And we're in such a sweet little spot.
Speaker 1: I mean, we're just waiting for the most springs. We're
Speaker 1: just waiting for him to dry out, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's like June finally comes and they're good, and it's
Speaker 1: you're just you hope it stays dry. You know. It's
Speaker 1: kind of you get a thunderstorm and you know the
Speaker 1: golf's gonna suck for a day, day and a half,
Speaker 1: and then they're gonna get back to dry. So it's nice.
Speaker 1: You just never last year we went like twenty two
Speaker 1: days in some heat without any rain, and they got
Speaker 1: pretty nasty looking, you know, but cool looking, you know,
Speaker 1: but you don't get too much of that anymore. Like
Speaker 1: it's fun, Like where where can you go in that
Speaker 1: middle class say that forty to ninety dollars round in
Speaker 1: America where you're gonna get like burned out un irrigated fairways,
Speaker 1: like public access, there's just not There's a few Northeast,
Speaker 1: especially if you're gonna find them, you'll probably find them
Speaker 1: up here, but there's no there's no like resort for
Speaker 1: a day doing that.
Speaker 2: Like there's a course in Door County, Wisconsin that just
Speaker 2: got sold to the packers owner or a packers somebody
Speaker 2: that works for the packers for like one million dollars.
Speaker 2: And I'd always had my eye on that golf course
Speaker 2: because it was by the bunk the bunker style was
Speaker 2: and it was built in the late twenties. The bunker
Speaker 2: style was eerily like I have an old areal of it,
Speaker 2: so similar to lang for Moreau, and I had done
Speaker 2: some research in It was built by Joe Roseman, the
Speaker 2: guy that invented the lawnmower.
Speaker 1: Ah, I didn't I don't even know about Joe Roseman,
Speaker 1: and here I am.
Speaker 2: But he and he had I think he had worked
Speaker 2: either for Harry Speed or Langford Moreau, one of those
Speaker 2: two guys that built some really wild crazy stuff in
Speaker 2: the Midwest. But that golf course just sold for a
Speaker 2: million bucks in Door County and it's unrrigated.
Speaker 3: Well, screw.
Speaker 2: I don't think I don't think the guy has intentions.
Speaker 2: I think he just didn't want it to become houses
Speaker 2: good golf, doesn't doesn't want it doesn't want to. It
Speaker 2: doesn't want to, you know, it doesn't have intentions I
Speaker 2: think of changing the golf course. Just didn't want houses
Speaker 2: near his vacation house.
Speaker 1: I think I can understand that. Like I feel like
Speaker 1: here I'm getting my cake and eating it too, because
Speaker 1: it's kind of gone from uh, we're gonna put it
Speaker 1: up for sale to you know, and they were going
Speaker 1: to do all these condos and their big hotel and
Speaker 1: that's off the board now. And it went from very
Speaker 1: perilous to now I've got someone who's at least very
Speaker 1: in line with a keeping the operation lean and keeping
Speaker 1: it kind of golf centric.
Speaker 2: So what's been the since you've been there? What's gone?
Speaker 2: Can you just explain, maybe you know, a cliff notes
Speaker 2: of the metamorphois of the property of the property, the
Speaker 2: ownership situation, and what's going on now.
Speaker 1: So this year when we opened, we had a least
Speaker 1: signed with Tom Coin just kind of a long process
Speaker 1: for me, reaching out to people primarily online, getting people
Speaker 1: to visit the course, some architects, some writers and stuff,
Speaker 1: just to kind of make sure I'm not crazy here,
Speaker 1: you know, is this worth pursuing or not? Or am
Speaker 1: I just going to annoy people? But one thing led
Speaker 1: to another, and.
Speaker 2: So what was the situation that led to this?
Speaker 1: So last year closes. You know, we pulled it off
Speaker 1: in a sense where we kept the doors open, but
Speaker 1: by the end of the golf season last year, the
Speaker 1: owners gave me an ultimatum like May first, if you
Speaker 1: can bring somebody in who's interested in the golf course,
Speaker 1: you have the I was almost like the broker, But
Speaker 1: on May first, we're going to put it on open market.
Speaker 1: So I kind of put things into overdrive. I had
Speaker 1: actually seen a post on Twitter where Tom Coin was
Speaker 1: now working with the architect Colton Craig and kind of
Speaker 1: forming a venture, you know, kind of starting the starts
Speaker 1: of a company, and I was I had never considered
Speaker 1: reaching out to Tom Coin, but I had heard a
Speaker 1: lot about Colton Craig through the podcast and some of
Speaker 1: his projects, so I just blindly reached out to Coin
Speaker 1: on that post. I d M him on Twitter and
Speaker 1: send him an album of pictures of the course, explaining, listen,
Speaker 1: we got like, I got like five months to try
Speaker 1: to turn this thing around or it's gonna get sold.
Speaker 1: Here's the cast of characters, here's me, here's Chris, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. And we started a dialogue. One thing leads
Speaker 1: to another. He gets to see the property, he's into it,
Speaker 1: hunky dory. He meets the owners, They're like, take it
Speaker 1: from us. You can run it for a season. So
Speaker 1: that's what we're doing. You know, it's a simple property.
Speaker 1: I'm sitting in the clubhouse here. We have a cart
Speaker 1: barn and we have a maintenance bar and those are
Speaker 1: the only structures on the whole property. We've did a
Speaker 1: little bit of tree work. We got new equipment from Toro,
Speaker 1: so instantly this year, like the quality of cut and
Speaker 1: the mowing was better. Last year, my maintenance to mowing
Speaker 1: time was like one to one, just like turning wrenches
Speaker 1: keeping the old ones like literally, and this year it's
Speaker 1: just much better. So the course looks better, greens are
Speaker 1: putting great. And then you know someone like Tom Coyne
Speaker 1: moves the needle so much with his connection, so you
Speaker 1: know this year silly stuff that every golf course has.
Speaker 1: You know, we have golf shirts with our logo on it.
Speaker 1: You know. He's friends with Lee y Branski, who does
Speaker 1: the Great US Open art, and he calls them and
Speaker 1: we get Lee y Bransky to do our logo, you know,
Speaker 1: with the Propeller and the golf club because in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty one we had a transatlantic flight take off from
Speaker 1: our eighth fairway and it's kind of a big part
Speaker 1: of a club lore. Yeah, we got Aquatrolls who like
Speaker 1: supplies fertilizers and wedding agents who he had a relationship with,
Speaker 1: and they're kind of sponsoring me from the standpoint of
Speaker 1: helping me with our soil health and the right kind
Speaker 1: of nutrition out there. And they approach it very much
Speaker 1: from an environmental point of view like I do, so
Speaker 1: I don't have to be too scared of like what
Speaker 1: I'm putting down or spending money on things I don't
Speaker 1: want to spend money on anyway, two three weeks ago,
Speaker 1: and these names will mean something to the superintendent's listening
Speaker 1: to us now. But I had Scott Ramsey, who people
Speaker 1: might know best Yale from Yale. Yeah, then I had
Speaker 1: Tom Valentine, who is of the Marian superintendent lineage. His
Speaker 1: dad and his grandfather were superintendent at Marian for sixty
Speaker 1: seventy years together. And then the guys from a patrols,
Speaker 1: you know Aggie Young, We got Chris Pogi from Toro, Grassland, Toro.
Speaker 1: All these guys are like behind me now, like if
Speaker 1: I have a problem with the mower, or if I'm
Speaker 1: running out of a fung just side and bad weather's coming,
Speaker 1: it's like that which we had none of those resources earlier.
Speaker 1: So the course, there's just obvious benefits. It's just been
Speaker 1: brought up to kind of more of a level that
Speaker 1: you would expect when you come in and pay thirty
Speaker 1: or forty dollars for a round of golf and there's
Speaker 1: just kind of a buzz. It's fun. People are coming
Speaker 1: from a lot of people are coming from the city.
Speaker 1: A lot of people are coming from Philadelphia, a lot
Speaker 1: of people are coming from Boston. We're two hours from
Speaker 1: New York, three hours from Philly, four hours from Boston, essentially,
Speaker 1: but they're making the trip. They're staying in little hotels here.
Speaker 1: The cat skills, this little part of the cat skills
Speaker 1: is it's like Heaven. Like the hottest temperature we've had
Speaker 1: all year, We've hit eighty seven twice, like I'm sitting
Speaker 1: here today, the high temperature with sixty eight degrees. We
Speaker 1: got some of the best like fly fishing and hiking
Speaker 1: and outdoor stuff literally in the world. This is to
Speaker 1: fly fishing, what like Long Island is to American golf,
Speaker 1: Like this is the hot spot, like so we we
Speaker 1: just hope to capitalize on it with courses like NS
Speaker 1: and hopefully the course, the new Reese Jones Course, and
Speaker 1: there's a couple other projects that I don't want to
Speaker 1: talk about too much, but there's some good golf to
Speaker 1: have up here, and there's a little golf trail. So
Speaker 1: I would definitely like tell people who are within a
Speaker 1: hollering distance to spend a couple of days and check
Speaker 1: out all the courses here. It's really nice part of
Speaker 1: the country.
Speaker 2: The Monster, John.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know how much you know about that.
Speaker 2: What a name for Reese's course.
Speaker 1: Joe Lee, who did the first iteration of the Monster
Speaker 1: and also did the Grossinger course which is right across
Speaker 1: town here at Liberty. He's an interesting character. Anders he
Speaker 1: worked for Dick Wilson. Yes, yeah, but he's apparently a
Speaker 1: little bit more agreeable than Dick Wilson, like from the
Speaker 1: client's point of view. But no, the Monster was like
Speaker 1: the longest course at the time. I think it was
Speaker 1: like seventy nine to fifty like when it opened in
Speaker 1: sixty eight or something like that. Like it had water everywhere,
Speaker 1: like it was like Island fairways. It was like that
Speaker 1: Ryder Cup course from.
Speaker 2: A few years back, like like.
Speaker 1: Like a sixties northeast version of that. Rhys Jones toned
Speaker 1: it down. It's actually a really cool golf course. I
Speaker 1: need to see the grass now. They built twelve of
Speaker 1: those holes like three years ago and then COVID just
Speaker 1: killed it. And then they came back and finished the
Speaker 1: last six holes last fall, and they've got those almost
Speaker 1: in condition, and they're about to open up. Like I
Speaker 1: think maybe this they might be over it right now.
Speaker 2: They might. It might be today, honestly, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: It might be August first. But it's cool. They've got
Speaker 1: like fine fescue find fescue blue grass mix fairways and
Speaker 1: actually I think they've planted that bent grass greens and
Speaker 1: then all the roughs and fairways are fine Fiescu bluegrass mix,
Speaker 1: so that could be an interesting surface out there, a
Speaker 1: little different.
Speaker 2: The gray Walls has that actually surface. And it's really
Speaker 2: cool is where where there's heavy cart traffic, the bluegrass
Speaker 2: kind of takes over, and where there isn't heavy cart
Speaker 2: traffic like on hills or anything, it's all fescue, right,
Speaker 2: So like if you think about it that way, that's
Speaker 2: how it kind of interacts. And the thing they do
Speaker 2: so well is they keep it all like they keep
Speaker 2: the carts really off the green, So in the twenty
Speaker 2: to thirty yard approach area, it's all fescue coming into
Speaker 2: the green.
Speaker 1: Very good, yeah, especially.
Speaker 2: Really great playing surface.
Speaker 1: So they cat skills, yeah, the catskills hopefully making a
Speaker 1: little resurgence and hopefully there's no news to repour. I mean,
Speaker 1: hopefully grossingers can turn in a corner too, because it's
Speaker 1: been closed now for nine or ten years. It was
Speaker 1: another Joe Finger design. Joe Finger, not Jovie. Joe Finger
Speaker 1: is no Finger. Okay, yes, yes, but he grafted eighteen
Speaker 1: holes on to a tilling hast eighteen and there's still
Speaker 1: like twelve and a half original tilling hast holes in
Speaker 1: the ground over there. And then it was a twenty
Speaker 1: seven hole facility. It's been closed for nine or ten years.
Speaker 1: They still mow the fairways and the greens, but all
Speaker 1: the resort buildings and everything have been wiped out. But
Speaker 1: it's just sitting there. They still have a crew like
Speaker 1: mowing it. You could go sell tea times there right now,
Speaker 1: but locked up. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, hey, I really appreciate the time Sean. And everybody
Speaker 2: can find you on social media. You're on Twitter, you're acts,
Speaker 2: as they call it now excellent so.
Speaker 1: Weird, Yeah, bad, complete this. It's just like it seems
Speaker 1: jarring because I still see the blue everywhere. But it's
Speaker 1: excellent my home screen.
Speaker 2: I'll think about it. We were we were working on
Speaker 2: the bottom of our newsletter and putting like Instagram, Facebook,
Speaker 2: and then we had Twitter on there and we switched
Speaker 2: to x.
Speaker 3: Did you get the.
Speaker 1: Fresh logo on there?
Speaker 2: But a little bit it looks like it looks like
Speaker 2: an error, right they get this like it doesn't look
Speaker 2: like it's a you know, like it's I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm not a branding expert, but I'm curious what one
Speaker 2: would think about that. So can you there? And Instagram
Speaker 2: to Instagram? Yeah, the best way to fight, you would
Speaker 2: be just going to Sullivan County go and play the
Speaker 2: fall up there has got to be ideal, like with
Speaker 2: that coming around the corner.
Speaker 1: Best golf is in September early October, definitely, until until
Speaker 1: it gets cold enough to where the rain doesn't dry out,
Speaker 1: which is normally sometime late October mid November, and then
Speaker 1: you just do something else.
Speaker 2: Well. Thank you for coming on and telling your story.
Speaker 2: It's a I think it's it's a it's a fascinating
Speaker 2: one and obviously one where you know, golf has come
Speaker 2: in and out of your life and uh and and
Speaker 2: it seems like the best parts of it have been
Speaker 2: with golf in it.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Andy. It's in no small part I owe
Speaker 1: it to a lot of what you and your team
Speaker 1: are doing. Tell Garrett I said, hello you guys, especially
Speaker 1: with that article and all the all the stuff you
Speaker 1: guys do. Like I said before, you put a lot
Speaker 1: of wind in my sales, got me very excited about
Speaker 1: golf again. And here I am so thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Thanks Sean, we'll talk soon.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: All right. Thank you again to Sean Smith for the time.
Speaker 2: Be sure to follow him on Twitter. It's at Gorsnod,
Speaker 2: And before we get to Tyler Ray, let's take another
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Speaker 2: and less fuel consumption when it isn't. That kind of
Speaker 2: all around performance is what champions are made of. Follow
Speaker 2: Add Toro Golf on Twitter and reach out to your
Speaker 2: local Toro distributor to schedule a demo. Now onto Tyler Ray. Tyler,
Speaker 2: it's been a little while and uh, you know since
Speaker 2: we last talked, you're you're quite quite a busy man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks Andy, thanks for having me on. It's uh,
Speaker 3: we're riding the golf wave, so it's all good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to talk about kind of your journey.
Speaker 2: The last time we talked, which was it had to
Speaker 2: be about six years ago, you were doing a little
Speaker 2: bit of solo work, but mostly as a as an
Speaker 2: associate working for Ron Pritchard. Now you are full blown
Speaker 2: on your own, and I'd love to hear a little
Speaker 2: bit about the differences of going from associate to solo architect.
Speaker 3: Yeah, gosh, that's a great, great first first start question there.
Speaker 3: You know, when you're when you're working for somebody else
Speaker 3: or when you're shaping and coming up in this industry,
Speaker 3: you don't get all the calls. You're you know, living
Speaker 3: on the road a lot job the job. You know.
Speaker 3: I was living at Cedar Rapids during that restoration, living
Speaker 3: at Beverly, you know, living and shaping full time pretty much,
Speaker 3: visiting some clubs here and there. But at the end
Speaker 3: of the night you go to the hotel or the
Speaker 3: Airbnb and you have five emails, three emails. Your phone's
Speaker 3: not really ringing during the day because Ron Pritchard was
Speaker 3: handling that and he was getting the calls and I
Speaker 3: I was just the guy kind of out in the
Speaker 3: road doing a lot of our work, making a lot
Speaker 3: of sight visits and we tag team that really well.
Speaker 3: But now it's the change is the twenty emails a day,
Speaker 3: the ten calls, the invoices, you know, paying five full
Speaker 3: time employees. You're really running a business, really a business man.
Speaker 3: It's real. It's real. And so to me, like the
Speaker 3: other night, I was at Wakanda the last couple of
Speaker 3: days building greens and all the bunkers, teas and stuff
Speaker 3: there in des Moine, and I mean going to bed
Speaker 3: at like twelve thirty, you know, and then you get
Speaker 3: up at four thirty and try to sneak a work
Speaker 3: out in in the morning just to stay healthy. And
Speaker 3: so it's real, it is real.
Speaker 2: H I can. I can sympathize and relate, you know,
Speaker 2: when you when when you travel, I think like that's
Speaker 2: one of the times where your tank gets the most empty,
Speaker 2: just because of the hours. And if you're you know,
Speaker 2: your your job is kind of in a way a
Speaker 2: little bit similar to mine. When I travel, I'm out
Speaker 2: on site at courses all day long and and at
Speaker 2: very early hours in the morning and late at night
Speaker 2: because of photography, and you know, you get home and
Speaker 2: it's like, oh, I still have to do all this
Speaker 2: other stuff, and it's just you know, you just kind
Speaker 2: of you get home from a trip and you know
Speaker 2: a lot of people say this with you've got young kids.
Speaker 2: I've got a young kid. A lot of people are like, well,
Speaker 2: at least you got some sleep while you're away. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: I got less sleep than if I be home.
Speaker 3: So exactly.
Speaker 2: With the boom and golf, as you as you alluded to,
Speaker 2: you're riding the wave in golf. One of the challenges
Speaker 2: I think out there has been you know, you went
Speaker 2: from golf architecture and golf construction, went from this industry
Speaker 2: that was relatively you know, predictable year over year. There
Speaker 2: wasn't a ton of projects that were going on, and
Speaker 2: now we have this huge boom. How's it been with
Speaker 2: finding good staff? And then also you know, contractors and
Speaker 2: different things when there's you know, just in general a
Speaker 2: little bit of a labor shortage out there, what's what's
Speaker 2: that been like?
Speaker 3: Well, everybody chases you know, the big money unfortunately when
Speaker 3: it's really hot, you know, and not architects per se,
Speaker 3: but but I mean down to labors, shapers. You know,
Speaker 3: everybody knows there's if they're good, they're gonna request a
Speaker 3: little bit more money, and so we're having to pay out,
Speaker 3: you know, higher fees for really good guys and and
Speaker 3: guys we've worked for in the past. And and I'm
Speaker 3: okay with that, you know, because these projects, if they're going,
Speaker 3: you know, the clients understand that. So it's okay. But
Speaker 3: it's hard to secure really good guys. All the best
Speaker 3: are really busy, you know, and that's like the best
Speaker 3: green finishers, the best bunker guys, the best those are operators,
Speaker 3: you know, they're just all really busy and uh and
Speaker 3: they're happy. And so when you're trying to pick and
Speaker 3: choose for certain projects, it's hard to retain really good help,
Speaker 3: you know, really good people. And so for us, every year,
Speaker 3: we we've just like, you know, our staff, I mean,
Speaker 3: we're paying them more and more and more, and I'm
Speaker 3: starting to raise my fees. The clubs, you know, and
Speaker 3: they're kind of like, oh, okay, I get it, you know,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, well, we're just paying so much for
Speaker 3: our great guys to retain you know, top notch talent,
Speaker 3: and but no, it's hard. It's really hard, Indy. And
Speaker 3: but you know, everything's cyclical, so who knows how long
Speaker 3: this wave is going to last. But it is good
Speaker 3: because you know, inflation every year three four percent. It's
Speaker 3: good to see people making a little more money in
Speaker 3: our industry too. It's such a hard industry. The road life,
Speaker 3: there's not it's not a long life. I mean, you
Speaker 3: see some guys do ten twelve years on the road
Speaker 3: and they're like, all right, I can't have a family,
Speaker 3: I can't have a life. I can't have a wife,
Speaker 3: I can't have kids. I'm never home. And so it's
Speaker 3: good guys are making a little more money because then
Speaker 3: they can spend a little more time at home. So
Speaker 3: I'm seeing a lot of guys work like eight months straight,
Speaker 3: take four off, you know, or or or work for
Speaker 3: straight then take a couple, or you know, work three months,
Speaker 3: three weeks straight, take a week, things like that. But
Speaker 3: you have to be creative.
Speaker 2: Are you a goals person?
Speaker 3: Goals as in g oa ls, Yeah, yeah, I have.
Speaker 3: I have five year goals. So I had twenty twenty five, thirty,
Speaker 3: thirty five, forty forty five, fifty and I've hit I've
Speaker 3: hit them, you know, I've hit them. There's there's two
Speaker 3: major goals I have before forty and it's getting tight here.
Speaker 3: I'll be forty pretty soon, and there's two more that
Speaker 3: I need to hit and we're really close, so we're hopeful.
Speaker 2: But if you if you don't mind sharing them, what
Speaker 2: have what have been one or two that you've achieved
Speaker 2: and what are what are one or two that you're
Speaker 2: looking to get to that you haven't yet?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think. I mean when I'm on an
Speaker 3: airplane at night or in the morning, when I'm coming
Speaker 3: going to clients, going to clubs, coming home, I'm on
Speaker 3: my phone and I'm always looking at my prioritization list
Speaker 3: of what I have to do. But there's always there's
Speaker 3: goals in there, and I'm always looking at them and
Speaker 3: changing them and not changing them but modifying them. And
Speaker 3: you know, one was, probably when I was twenty five,
Speaker 3: was I wanted to work for two top five architects
Speaker 3: at some point and I felt like, you know, with
Speaker 3: Corn Crenshaw working a little bit with Dog, Keith Foster,
Speaker 3: Ron Pritchard, you know, I tried to work with Gil
Speaker 3: We almost had a deal for Durrau back in the day,
Speaker 3: so I almost had something going with him. But I
Speaker 3: feel like I achieved that goal, you know, working with
Speaker 3: two top five guys or teams. And then another one
Speaker 3: was have like five top one hundred clubs by forty.
Speaker 3: That's the one I'm working on a little bit. We're
Speaker 3: lucky to sign Brookside Canton recently in Ohio.
Speaker 2: Where you're going to have your great spot.
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, you're shootout here on the twenty eighth
Speaker 3: of August, and so you know that one's in the
Speaker 3: Golf magazine top one hundred, and you know Beverly's pretty
Speaker 3: darn high up there Mountain Lake. So I think we're
Speaker 3: on the cusp. I think I have like four in
Speaker 3: the top one hundred, and we're hopeful maybe Wakanda sneaks
Speaker 3: in there here soon or.
Speaker 2: Or something else. I mean, you got ones that are
Speaker 2: in process that could go up, you know, like I
Speaker 2: guess that goal that all depends on when you judged
Speaker 2: it right.
Speaker 3: Right, right exactly lookout Mountain I mean, shoot, yeah, I'm
Speaker 3: more proud of that than almost anything in my whole career.
Speaker 3: I Mean, it's just shockingly bold, and so we're hopeful
Speaker 3: that gets really great reviews. It's getting great reviews now,
Speaker 3: but we're hopeful when Golf digests and magazine and everybody
Speaker 3: comes out that really see it this fall. We're hopeful
Speaker 3: next year it gets the love. I can't wait for
Speaker 3: you to see it. And John Cavalier, I was talking
Speaker 3: to him the other day with links gems and he
Speaker 3: was heading down to see it soon. But yeah, so
Speaker 3: that that's another one. And then I think, you know
Speaker 3: what else. Gosh, you know, some are personal stuff, some
Speaker 3: are you know, relationship stuff, stuff like that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess business, you know, we're trying to hit different
Speaker 3: numbers and stuff like that, you know, with those top
Speaker 3: one hundred things, and I guess you know, I always
Speaker 3: categorize every year by the amount of work we do
Speaker 3: by dollars, So like last year we did thirty three
Speaker 3: million worth of projects, and the year before we did
Speaker 3: like twenty four million. In the year before we did
Speaker 3: like eighteen million. So we're trending. And so you know,
Speaker 3: a goal was for me was to do fifty million
Speaker 3: in a year, and in twenty twenty five we have
Speaker 3: that lined up. We have like fifty five million lined up.
Speaker 3: So that's a goal. It sounds like an odd goal,
Speaker 3: but but.
Speaker 2: I just know that, like that's a that's a relevant
Speaker 2: business skull. You know, everybody's trying to get revenue.
Speaker 3: You know, gross revenue. You know, everybody's always looking at
Speaker 3: P and R and gross revenue. And so for us,
Speaker 3: it's like, you know, when I think about what Gill's
Speaker 3: doing or Andrew Green or Tom Doak, I'm like, now,
Speaker 3: these guys might be doing eighty, you know, or seventy
Speaker 3: or one hundred million in projects a year. And with
Speaker 3: our new building Charleston coming up, I mean that's going
Speaker 3: to put us up up in the echelon up there.
Speaker 3: But I just think of like people always say, oh,
Speaker 3: how busy, Oh, you know, how busy architects are, How busy?
Speaker 3: So I think of the top five of how busy
Speaker 3: they are, And it's a direct correlation to how much
Speaker 3: project totals are.
Speaker 2: So when you think about your business, what what is
Speaker 2: the right amount of business? Is there a cap to
Speaker 2: it or are you are your goals to get it
Speaker 2: to where you can take on more than you know,
Speaker 2: say a Tom dok or a Bill Core and Crenshaw
Speaker 2: are taking on. Now, Like what what do you see
Speaker 2: as the right balance of projects versus you know, time
Speaker 2: on site?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, that is the fine line of life there
Speaker 3: you know. So for me, I'm not really money driven
Speaker 3: in this. I mean I love it so much that
Speaker 3: I don't think about money like ever. You know. I love.
Speaker 3: I love getting up. I get out of bed every
Speaker 3: morning almost before the alarm because I love. I love
Speaker 3: seeing different golf courses every day and being on different
Speaker 3: golf courses. I mean, it's like my favorite thing, you know,
Speaker 3: other than my wife and kids and family, you know,
Speaker 3: I love. I love it so much. I can't wait
Speaker 3: to go, like you go photo, I bring my drone
Speaker 3: on the road. I have it sitting in front of
Speaker 3: me charging because I was at Mount Lake this week
Speaker 3: in Wakanda and Ansley Club in Atlanta, and it's like
Speaker 3: I can't wait to get up there and beat everybody
Speaker 3: out there and take the shots when the sun's coming
Speaker 3: up like you do. And then I'm the last one
Speaker 3: out there, you know. But I love spending time. I'm
Speaker 3: playing my own golf course, you know, Bitterman Golf Club
Speaker 3: in Wilmington, Delaware. And I love seeing my friends. And
Speaker 3: there's just more to life than work. And I worked
Speaker 3: from like eighteen to probably thirty three. I lived on
Speaker 3: the road in different localities. So I lived in Oregon.
Speaker 3: I lived in Charleston, I lived in Dallas, I lived
Speaker 3: in Chicago, Boston, London. I mean, I've lived in so
Speaker 3: many places that I almost became just this gypsy my friends.
Speaker 3: So my buddies would call me just like this gypsy.
Speaker 3: And so I value friendships a lot now in this
Speaker 3: part of my life, because I just didn't. For so
Speaker 3: many years. Everything was just work and I neglected everything.
Speaker 3: I didn't have girlfriends and I have athing. I was
Speaker 3: just sobly focused on building golf and trying to build
Speaker 3: my career and making relationships and visiting and seeing everything
Speaker 3: I could. And now I'm like taking a step back.
Speaker 3: I want to enjoy watching my kids grow. So I
Speaker 3: turned down twenty seven. I was adding it up in
Speaker 3: the last couple of weeks. It was like between twenty
Speaker 3: seven and thirty one clubs last year that we turned down,
Speaker 3: Which is cool. Okay, that's great, And I'm not I'm
Speaker 3: not saying that because I'm you'll being I'm bragging about it.
Speaker 3: It's it's answering your question of how much how much
Speaker 3: work is enough. I just looked in the mirror and said, well,
Speaker 3: if I keep taking all this work, or if I
Speaker 3: keep going after because they were just calls that said, hey,
Speaker 3: we'd like you to interview. It's not like, you know,
Speaker 3: I had the job or something like that, but these
Speaker 3: are just interviews and you know, X, Y and Z
Speaker 3: club and you know, somewhere in Kentucky or somewhere in
Speaker 3: Boston or Florida. And but I had to say no
Speaker 3: and politely decline because it's like, you know, we want
Speaker 3: to work with, you know, a smaller nest egg. We
Speaker 3: want to have a small boutique firm. We want to
Speaker 3: be hands on, but we also want to go home
Speaker 3: on Fridays. Like I'm in my office. It's a Friday,
Speaker 3: and it's delightful and there's dust gathering because I haven't
Speaker 3: been here enough. But I flew home yesterday from Wakanda,
Speaker 3: and it's like I'm going to be home Friday, Saturday
Speaker 3: and Sunday. This is great. I can play golf tomorrow morning.
Speaker 3: I can hang out with my family, go to the pool.
Speaker 3: And so that's to me what life is like and
Speaker 3: what life's about. It's more than golf, and it's more
Speaker 3: than trying to get all these clubs. I don't want
Speaker 3: to be dope and have all that work and I
Speaker 3: mean he travels so much. I talked to him last week.
Speaker 3: I was in Traverse City last week and you know,
Speaker 3: we couldn't wake up for lunch because he was I
Speaker 3: think gone for like six straight days. And you know,
Speaker 3: so those guys are awesome, and Gil's killing it. These
Speaker 3: guys are off the charts busy. But I just want
Speaker 3: to take the right amount and the select ones that
Speaker 3: I really want to work with, the special properties like Brookside,
Speaker 3: like Wakanda, like Beverly, like Mountain Lake, Brayburn, Detroit Golf,
Speaker 3: you know, and then some of these new builds that
Speaker 3: we're doing finally, like in Charleston. You know, just special
Speaker 3: places that we're really going to enjoy going to because
Speaker 3: I care a lot about where we like where we work,
Speaker 3: and because we immerse ourselves in the scenery, you know.
Speaker 3: Like Jim Ryan Junior, our design associate. You know, we
Speaker 3: were out in Des Moines the other night and we're
Speaker 3: trying different restaurants and walking around and exploring the city.
Speaker 3: It's like, Wow, the Moins really cool. You know, I
Speaker 3: never would have experienced the Moines.
Speaker 2: Makes it different.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we never would have experienced it, you know.
Speaker 3: And uh so we're happy we're there and we're immersing
Speaker 3: ourselves with the membership and the locality. And I know
Speaker 3: so much more about den Moine than I ever knew,
Speaker 3: and it's cool.
Speaker 2: So I think you hit on a lot of things there.
Speaker 2: And I think one of the hard things, the hardest
Speaker 2: things to balance when you get into a job, as
Speaker 2: you alluded to, that you love that, like there's really
Speaker 2: the only thing that you love more than going and
Speaker 2: seeing new golf courses. Being on a golf course is family, right,
Speaker 2: And the hard thing about it is that, like you can,
Speaker 2: it can engross your life. It can take over your
Speaker 2: life because you don't feel like you're working. You know
Speaker 2: you're doing something that you love and you don't feel
Speaker 2: like you're working. But like sometimes you just have to
Speaker 2: take a step back and be like, wait a second,
Speaker 2: I still need a little bit of balance because you know,
Speaker 2: all the other life things help you relate in all
Speaker 2: the other situations, right, And if you if you get
Speaker 2: too down into the rabbit hole, you don't have any
Speaker 2: relation with society, right, That's the way I feel sometimes.
Speaker 3: One and relationships, friends, family, you know, your parents, and
Speaker 3: I love hanging out with my parents and going to
Speaker 3: play golf with my dad and seeing my sister and
Speaker 3: her husband and kids, and I I really look forward
Speaker 3: to that.
Speaker 2: So to talk a little bit about golf architecture here
Speaker 2: A question I had for you is, you've obviously grown
Speaker 2: over your career. You've been you've built greens for you know,
Speaker 2: I don't know exactly how many years, but I'm curious
Speaker 2: about experience in green building. And when you look at
Speaker 2: your early greens compared to the greens you're building now,
Speaker 2: do you notice any differences?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: I think like we look at the Golden Age architects
Speaker 2: and everybody always likes to talk about how they evolved.
Speaker 2: How are you evolving?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: You know, I think about this. We talk about this
Speaker 3: a lot too, because we've just built. I was just
Speaker 3: building the green yesterday, the seventeenth at Wakanda, and then
Speaker 3: I built the second at Wakanda on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Speaker 3: So I mean we're building. We built forty nine greens
Speaker 3: last year and and so, and we're going to do
Speaker 3: a lot this year. I don't know the number, but
Speaker 3: I think when I was young, I you know, walking
Speaker 3: all these courses, you'd always think about the pine valleys
Speaker 3: and like what are the greatest sets of greens in
Speaker 3: the world. You know, you're thinking about Saint Andrew's and
Speaker 3: Augusta and they were always you know, like Chicago golf
Speaker 3: has a phenomenal set of greens putting surfaces, you know,
Speaker 3: and and so traveling around you know, World, Melbourne, stuff
Speaker 3: like that, you're always thinking about the best putting surfaces.
Speaker 3: But the problem is then when you get your chance
Speaker 3: to build greens, you're usually building them too crazy, a
Speaker 3: little too wild, because you're thinking of the best ones
Speaker 3: you've ever seen. And I sketch, So I have like
Speaker 3: a ton of sketches of greens, and I'll sketch the
Speaker 3: high points and the lows and where water is going,
Speaker 3: and then the shape. So it's really easy when I
Speaker 3: can pull up my phone or iPad and I can
Speaker 3: pull up, you know, a green at Royal Melbourne or
Speaker 3: you know from like say more Fontaine or something like that,
Speaker 3: or door Knock, and I'll pull it up and I'll
Speaker 3: kind of look at the highs and lows and kind
Speaker 3: of the composition of the green. But to me, what
Speaker 3: I've gotten better at I think when I was younger,
Speaker 3: you're trying to stuff too many things in one green
Speaker 3: and you're trying to shoot for the stars. And when
Speaker 3: I was younger we built, I think people were like, oh,
Speaker 3: these greens are just a little much. They're cool. When
Speaker 3: I go back and see stuff from twenty twelve, twenty ten,
Speaker 3: you know, fifteen years ago, I'm okay with them because
Speaker 3: the concepts were I've tried really hard. They're tied in
Speaker 3: really well, they make sense. There's a bunch of flags,
Speaker 3: but it's like some of the little details are just off,
Speaker 3: and maybe there's too much going on in them. So
Speaker 3: I have gotten a lot more fine and softer and
Speaker 3: like elegant and maybe maybe easier, you know, because I
Speaker 3: worry about all the different handicappers, you know, all the
Speaker 3: different levels skilled levels playing, and I realized that golfers
Speaker 3: are not that good, and so like Northmore. We redid
Speaker 3: Northmore last year and it just opened a couple weeks ago,
Speaker 3: and I was really proud of the most subtle greens there.
Speaker 3: Like there's one that's falling away, that's really a head
Speaker 3: scratcher that you really can't tell, but it's falling away.
Speaker 3: And then there's another one that has like the most
Speaker 3: gentle spine in it, but you'll have a putt and
Speaker 3: on the left side of the green it just wanders
Speaker 3: at the left, and on the right side of the green,
Speaker 3: it just wanders a little right. So I've almost found
Speaker 3: like the most confounding fun greens are the ones you
Speaker 3: just don't immediately walk up to and go, oh, look
Speaker 3: at the spine there, look at that, look at that.
Speaker 3: So I've been really into subtle stuff, but trying to
Speaker 3: mike match. So like north Moore, I tried to have,
Speaker 3: you know, we try to. I always say six sixty six,
Speaker 3: so like six pretty darn interesting fun greens. But they
Speaker 3: have to relate to the length of the hole. So
Speaker 3: shorter holes par three this or that reachable part five.
Speaker 3: If it's a long part four, I want it to
Speaker 3: be very subtle, you know, because guys are hitting in
Speaker 3: guys and gals are hitting in long irons or woods,
Speaker 3: so it's all length driven from the hole kind of
Speaker 3: determines the funnest funness meter that we put in there.
Speaker 3: But I'm really cognizant now, you know, fifteen years later
Speaker 3: of shape and greens of like less is more, let's
Speaker 3: be a little more subtle. Everybody's maintaining them so quick
Speaker 3: these days. You know at eleven, twelve, thirteen on the
Speaker 3: stamp that you put a little bump in there and
Speaker 3: it's it's enough. And then you know, working with some
Speaker 3: really good guys and watching great green builders, I was
Speaker 3: always a fan of like one movement in a green,
Speaker 3: how it affects every pot on the green. Like there
Speaker 3: was a green at Mountain Lake that rainer, you know,
Speaker 3: obviously I think it's like number fourteen, and it had
Speaker 3: this gentle spine in it. And they always said to
Speaker 3: me like, hey, whatever you do, just don't screw up
Speaker 3: fourteen green, you know. And it was their favorite greens
Speaker 3: the whole, all the members favorite green, and it has
Speaker 3: that gentle spine. But it affects every single pot on
Speaker 3: the green. And so I'm a big fan. Sometimes in
Speaker 3: one movement affecting everything, I think that's really cool. But yeah,
Speaker 3: and then the last thing off, I don't want to
Speaker 3: talk too long some of these answers. I know, I
Speaker 3: can get long winded because we love talking about this.
Speaker 2: This is good, this is the good stuff here. I
Speaker 2: have so much detail. I appreciate this.
Speaker 3: So like at Wakanda yesterday, okay, I'm you know, there's
Speaker 3: there's like five really good Langford greens out there that
Speaker 3: I'm not going to touch. Like we've pulled them out
Speaker 3: of the job a little bit. We're going to expand them.
Speaker 3: We're expanding every green. Rebuilt a bunch, but there are
Speaker 3: some complete duds, like straight up dead flat one percent.
Speaker 3: You know, something happened. A bunch were rebuilt in the
Speaker 3: seventies and eighties. But there are about five or six
Speaker 3: world class Lawsonia Culver level greens. So I'm looking at those,
Speaker 3: and I'm looking at like kind of what we're building.
Speaker 3: The whole time I'm thinking while I'm building greens is Tyler,
Speaker 3: don't get too crazy. We want to blend want. I
Speaker 3: want you to play one to eighteen in Wakanda and
Speaker 3: not be able to pick a Tyler a greenow. I
Speaker 3: want them to blend in. So here's the only problem. Though,
Speaker 3: this is a nineteen twenty one early Langford before Monroe Moreau,
Speaker 3: kind of before they were really cooking. He met Moreau
Speaker 3: in like nineteen nineteen, nineteen twenty when he was when
Speaker 3: Theodore Moreau was working for the American Park Builders, and
Speaker 3: so this was an early Langford. He really didn't start
Speaker 3: really knocking it out of the ballpark till like twenty five.
Speaker 3: So Conda has like the best land in America for
Speaker 3: a golf course. I mean, it's absolutely, I'm so in
Speaker 3: love with it. It's so crazy and bowl and the
Speaker 3: holder off the charts. But the Langford architecture wasn't like
Speaker 3: his peak yet, you know, his like high point. So
Speaker 3: it wasn't the Lawsonia you know, like nineteen twenty nine, thirty,
Speaker 3: the Culver, really great stuff that we see, Kanka Kilks,
Speaker 3: those three I think are the top three in his repertoire.
Speaker 3: So I'm I don't want to pull greens from those
Speaker 3: clubs and then have like eighteen off the charts, like
Speaker 3: mind blowing Langford greens because I don't think it would
Speaker 3: fit with what he built in twenty one and what's there.
Speaker 3: So see how like it gets, So it gets so
Speaker 3: hard to like make judgment calls on some of this stuff.
Speaker 3: So I'm sitting on like the second green yesterday, I'm like, ah,
Speaker 3: this is a little over the top. I got to
Speaker 3: tone this down a little. It's got to blend in
Speaker 3: with the landscape. It's got to make sense for this course.
Speaker 3: So I was being a little more muted.
Speaker 2: Would you say that the more difficult restoration projects, you know,
Speaker 2: this is a restoration, historical renovation, whatever you want to
Speaker 2: call it, are the ones where you kind of have
Speaker 2: a mixture of stuff that's left, stuff that has been changed,
Speaker 2: little documentation, versus the ones where you have everything and
Speaker 2: it's is that the most challenging restorer? What's the most
Speaker 2: challenging restoration historical renovation scenario?
Speaker 3: Yeah, one hundred percent. Like there's ABC kind of that
Speaker 3: I call it. So A is like going into White
Speaker 3: Bear and it's like we just want to touch the bunkers.
Speaker 3: That is easy, peasy. I don't have to do any greens.
Speaker 3: I'll do light green expansions, maybe fair way stuff, rebunker
Speaker 3: it look at old aerials. But when you get into
Speaker 3: greens work, I mean you just don't want outliers. You
Speaker 3: don't want Tyler ray greens to so many courses where
Speaker 3: you see three or four greens that were blown up
Speaker 3: in the eighties or nineties and they don't fit at all.
Speaker 3: It's like what were the architects looking at? You know,
Speaker 3: it's like you got three moonscape or four green scape.
Speaker 2: Speaking of White Bear, the eighteenth green at White Bears, right, there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sorry, the one.
Speaker 2: Perfect examples, right, You're like, oh, what happened?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the parking lot bulldozer guy. I got a hold
Speaker 3: of that one. Yeah, but no, but you know, for
Speaker 3: or other examples of like you know Rono Mink, you
Speaker 3: know all eighteen greens, or you know when you have
Speaker 3: all eighteen greens existing that are amazing, you know, say
Speaker 3: like maybe even you know Summrset Hills or something like that.
Speaker 3: But that's a that's easy. You don't have a lot
Speaker 3: of decisions. It doesn't scare you. But then B is
Speaker 3: kind of there's been four or five blown up or six,
Speaker 3: and you have to somehow blend them and then do
Speaker 3: the green expansions thoughtfully. And that's the wakanda that I'm
Speaker 3: in B. And then C is like, oh they've all
Speaker 3: been blown up. You can do whatever you want. So
Speaker 3: like Northmore, they were all blown up, Tyler Rae could
Speaker 3: rebuild them all and I kind of could go with
Speaker 3: my own theme and I wasn't held to some standard
Speaker 3: same thing like at Detroit Golf. I just go off
Speaker 3: a zoom with them. And we finished the master plan
Speaker 3: and everything we've met with the PGA tour and we're
Speaker 3: working with them on that, and the rocket mortgage was
Speaker 3: so great. With Ricky winning this year, I was so
Speaker 3: happy about that. But their greens were all rebuilt by
Speaker 3: Art Hills in nineteen eighty eight, and they're failing, you know,
Speaker 3: drainage all that. They're thirty some years old now and
Speaker 3: they were early kind of takes on USGA greens, so
Speaker 3: they're getting ready to fail. And so we're going to
Speaker 3: rebuild them. And guess what I get to redo all
Speaker 3: eighteen or twenty because I'm doing the putting green and chipping,
Speaker 3: so twenty greens and I get to do my take
Speaker 3: on Ross. So it's liberating. It's very liberating.
Speaker 2: That's It's an interesting note. I always feel like Detroit
Speaker 2: Golf like it was exciting when it got added. I
Speaker 2: haven't been there, and you it was excited when they
Speaker 2: got added. It's like, oh, a Ross course in an
Speaker 2: area of the country where I think you could make
Speaker 2: an argument is some Maybe his best work is Ohio
Speaker 2: and Michigan. The best concentration of Donald Ross courses might
Speaker 2: be there. And then I watched it on TV and
Speaker 2: every year I'm just like this, just this course doesn't
Speaker 2: have much juice and the greens. You know, it doesn't
Speaker 2: have the topographical interest of its neighbors like Oakland Hills
Speaker 2: or Franklin Hills, you know, you know, even Barton Hills,
Speaker 2: which I know you've worked at, really stunning piece of
Speaker 2: ground there, but you know, the greens just like they
Speaker 2: you know, It's like I've always watched it and was
Speaker 2: like these just I would expect a little bit more
Speaker 2: going on here given how flat everything else is. And
Speaker 2: that makes a ton of sense, especially when you go
Speaker 2: to like Canton Brookside, which has wild ground and wild greens.
Speaker 2: I mean that might be his his most extreme golf
Speaker 2: course out there right.
Speaker 3: Right it is. There are greens out there twelve percent,
Speaker 3: you know that that's sixth green and sixteen and can
Speaker 3: Brookside is just off the charts. You know, it's like
Speaker 3: fun Land.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what what would you say in terms of you know,
Speaker 2: you're now entering a different part of your career. You're
Speaker 2: you're starting to get some new builds. You have a
Speaker 2: new build on Long Island, uh, I think it's called
Speaker 2: spy Ring Golf Club that's opening this fall. You have
Speaker 2: a new project in Charleston area, and you're doing a
Speaker 2: ton of rest of the ration work, Which one you know,
Speaker 2: which one do you prefer if you if you had
Speaker 2: to pick one, And and how do you see your
Speaker 2: career evolving with this new work coming in?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a that's a good one. That's kind of
Speaker 3: a two part question there. That was good.
Speaker 2: You know, I think we're just giving. We're setting you
Speaker 2: up for long answers. Yeah, I know.
Speaker 3: Sorry, you know your listeners will probably be like, gosh,
Speaker 3: this guy can't get this guy off of here. He
Speaker 3: talks the whole time. But no, I think, you know, Andy,
Speaker 3: I never thought I would be in the position, to
Speaker 3: be honest. My father asked me a couple of years ago,
Speaker 3: and I said, you know, if I never built a
Speaker 3: course from scratch, I'll still die happy, you know, because
Speaker 3: I love restoration renovation work so much. And I meant
Speaker 3: that truthfully. I didn't know of the job. I didn't
Speaker 3: know if it would ever come to fruition.
Speaker 2: And especially that, I mean, there was just so few
Speaker 2: courses being built, you know, five years ago, right, and
Speaker 2: now is like completely different market for new courses, right, We're.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just gangbusters. We looked at twenty some
Speaker 3: properties last year, all up and down the East coast,
Speaker 3: all over New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, everywhere. We
Speaker 3: looked at properties, and we still have some potential owners
Speaker 3: right now looking at properties. We're still maybe looking at
Speaker 3: one in New Jersey out in the sand across from Philly,
Speaker 3: which is pretty pretty cool.
Speaker 2: To be a home game for you.
Speaker 3: You can see the Philadelphia skyline. It's amazing. So but
Speaker 3: we'll see if they can get it. So it's so
Speaker 3: hard new builds. That's the other thing too. It's like
Speaker 3: you have to secure the land, then you have to
Speaker 3: get the funding, then you have to get the permitting,
Speaker 3: then you have to have potable water, then you have
Speaker 3: to have three phase sewer. I mean you have to
Speaker 3: have like nine things come to fruition all in the
Speaker 3: same spot. And then it's.
Speaker 2: Just we talked about that on the POD is just
Speaker 2: like how how the timelines can all get screwed up
Speaker 2: in that where like, oh, I've budgeted and it's the
Speaker 2: hardest thing is I've budgeted this many people we are
Speaker 2: allocated to do this, and then it's like, well we
Speaker 2: couldn't get the permits. It's got to go next year,
Speaker 2: and that becomes a new challenge of timing and planning
Speaker 2: that you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the permitting is brutal, it really is. You have
Speaker 3: to start so early and hope that everything you know,
Speaker 3: work with a really talented engineer, and there's so many
Speaker 3: things like the Charleston job right now. I spoke to
Speaker 3: them earlier this morning, and we did all our soil samples,
Speaker 3: all our water samples, We've graded the whole site. We routed,
Speaker 3: you know, we came up with nineteen different routings, and
Speaker 3: Jim Ryan, actually, this is the funny thing, is I
Speaker 3: don't have an ego. Sometimes I've worked with a lot
Speaker 3: of people who have big egos and it's like you
Speaker 3: tell them you'd like show them something, and they just
Speaker 3: ignore you. And I never wanted to be that person.
Speaker 3: So Jim Ryan actually came up with like an alternative
Speaker 3: routing on our Charleston Charleston job, and I was like, Tyler,
Speaker 3: don't have a big ego. Let's just go look this out.
Speaker 3: Let's see if it works. And it ended up being
Speaker 3: absolutely off the charts routing. So most of the routing
Speaker 3: on like my third new build is going to be
Speaker 3: from one of my associates. But it was so good
Speaker 3: I couldn't say no, you know, but so he's got
Speaker 3: like probably eleven or twelve hole corridors there and then
Speaker 3: eight of seven or eight of mine. But it works
Speaker 3: so well. But you know, I guess where we were
Speaker 3: going with this was, you know, new builds and all that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, so it's just so hard to get them,
Speaker 3: I mean, all secured and they're so expensive. Land is
Speaker 3: so hard to find these days, and good land. I
Speaker 3: mean you can find flat land kind of anywhere in Florida,
Speaker 3: like they're doing everybody's flying. They're just going inland a
Speaker 3: little bit from Hope Sound and everything, but into.
Speaker 2: The swamp its having been down there are a lot
Speaker 2: of a lot of times in my life it is
Speaker 2: not desirable land in there. There's a there's a dune
Speaker 2: ridge that that has some really great land. But that's
Speaker 2: I think probably when we started. When you start talking
Speaker 2: about permitting and the availability of it is very difficult to.
Speaker 3: Get right exactly exactly well.
Speaker 2: But now now the Lake Wales area is popping that,
Speaker 2: like central you know, sand Belt seems to have a
Speaker 2: lot of project X that are gonna be coming up
Speaker 2: in there. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know Steve Smyers has some stuff cooking I've
Speaker 3: talked to him, and uh, you know that's kind of
Speaker 3: the high the high land, you know, kind of the
Speaker 3: hill country of Florida. And yeah, it's pretty cool, very
Speaker 3: cool there. I know I talked to some folks there
Speaker 3: when Tony Nice was at Mountain Lake, the superintendent. Now
Speaker 3: he went to Apogee, and I know he's he mentioned
Speaker 3: a bunch of stuff and yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: stuff cooking in there. And Florida is just so hot.
Speaker 3: It's unbelievable. And I don't mean hot temperature.
Speaker 2: I mean it's like so multiple ways so hot, real
Speaker 2: real estate temperature, golf, golf construction.
Speaker 3: It's got the trifecta. It is. It is. Uh, they
Speaker 3: are killing it down there. But but I guess what
Speaker 3: was I what were we getting back to? I guess
Speaker 3: your question was too bad?
Speaker 2: New built, new build versus h versus restoration. You know,
Speaker 2: if you if you had to, if you had to
Speaker 2: choose one, which would you do? You know, the hard
Speaker 2: the hard question. Yeah, you know, we live in a
Speaker 2: world where you don't have to choose one. Which is nice?
Speaker 2: So right, I hope any perspective clients that are listening
Speaker 2: to this don't take it as Oh, he doesn't want
Speaker 2: to do one of the right right.
Speaker 3: No, it Look, I'm just here to be candid and
Speaker 3: if people can take it the way they want to
Speaker 3: take it, and so I'm going to tell the truth
Speaker 3: is new builds are really tough. And I've said it before,
Speaker 3: maybe even on that the prior podcast we did way
Speaker 3: back when you know, they suck the life out of
Speaker 3: you because they take eighteen months to two years, and
Speaker 3: I mean it's there's so much open dirt and and
Speaker 3: so we first started talking to Charleston clients back gosh
Speaker 3: August last year or September, so it's almost been a
Speaker 3: year already, and then we're planning the break ground in
Speaker 3: October and then it'll be another year of construction, so
Speaker 3: it won't open to probably November twenty four. So there's
Speaker 3: that two year timeline. Even longer than that, you know,
Speaker 3: from kind of first talk to fruition, you know, playing
Speaker 3: hit and hitting the first t shot. But there's so
Speaker 3: much work involved. There's somebody layers of it. I love them,
Speaker 3: I really do, because it's liberating. I can't wait. I
Speaker 3: just cannot wait to showcase like what a Tyler Ray
Speaker 3: I don't know golf courses, but kind of like my
Speaker 3: style and like all the things that have influenced me,
Speaker 3: the more Fontaines, the trips that I've taken, you know,
Speaker 3: the Valderrama stuff, the all the stuff from New Zealand
Speaker 3: and Australia, and all the all the stuff out west,
Speaker 3: you know, the L A. C. C. And the bel
Speaker 3: Airs and the you know, the cool stuff you see
Speaker 3: in California where you are. And so I just can't
Speaker 3: wait to show, you know, like super fun bold par threes.
Speaker 3: And then like I have, I've had ideas forever on
Speaker 3: part five because everybody talks about part fives how they're
Speaker 3: so hard to make meaningful, and I've had ideas cooked
Speaker 3: up on part fives my whole life, and I can't weight.
Speaker 3: Like I know, there's going to be some absolute stunners.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's impossible to make eighteen incredible golf holes,
Speaker 3: you know, even Pine Valley. I mean, it's just so hard.
Speaker 3: I just don't want to have a duzz out there,
Speaker 3: but I want eighteen really good golf holes where it's
Speaker 3: hard to discern what's the best hole. But anyway, but
Speaker 3: I want to you know, new builds are super liberating,
Speaker 3: They're very fun, a lot of freedom. I mean I'm
Speaker 3: picking the bunker style, I'm picking the green style, and
Speaker 3: picking grasses, soil, I mean everything. You know, this ownership
Speaker 3: has given me really a lot of carte blanche. And
Speaker 3: then on spir Ring that was another new build. And
Speaker 3: then I call Northmore a new build because we rerouted
Speaker 3: the property. I mean there's nothing that looks anything similar.
Speaker 3: We raised parts of the golf course eight feet. We
Speaker 3: cut two five acre ponds, so it's like a Tyler
Speaker 3: Ray golf course now. I mean there was no ross left.
Speaker 3: When people say, oh, you took a ross course and
Speaker 3: you know, yaday, and it's like there was nothing left.
Speaker 3: And so North Moore was probably our first new build.
Speaker 3: Inspiring now Charleston, so you know inspiring it's different than Charleston.
Speaker 3: Charleston is going to be super private. You know, they're
Speaker 3: going to overseed and be like a winter club. It's
Speaker 3: gonna be the first private club built in Charleston, I
Speaker 3: think since Bull's Bay. You know, there's like a six
Speaker 3: year waitlist everywhere in Charleston for golf. Where's spir Ring
Speaker 3: on Long Island Port Jefferson North North part of the
Speaker 3: island fifty miles out from the city.
Speaker 2: It's right by Saint George's.
Speaker 3: Huh Yeah, Saint George's is less than a mile away.
Speaker 2: And it's amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, really hilly, really cool property. One hundred foot
Speaker 3: deep sand, all sand like sure sand, so really cool,
Speaker 3: drains so fast, so it's going to be rock hard.
Speaker 3: I mean you'll be able to freaking bounce it in
Speaker 3: from thirty yards out, which is the goal. So we
Speaker 3: have big open approaches.
Speaker 2: What's the client like there is it? Is it a
Speaker 2: private owner or is it a private developer?
Speaker 3: Yeah, private developer, so not a municipal but it is
Speaker 3: going to be public access. There was an existing golf
Speaker 3: course there called Heatherwood and it was like a par sixty,
Speaker 3: you know, it had like eight par fours and then
Speaker 3: the rest par three's. But it had amazing land and
Speaker 3: it didn't really use the land properly. But so it's
Speaker 3: pretty vast for you know, the golf course. But there
Speaker 3: is a housing element unfortunately, so there's some interior housing.
Speaker 3: But it's really well done. It's gorgeous. They spent a
Speaker 3: lot of money to do everything right. You know. It's
Speaker 3: like a little gated community, beautiful pool like almost like
Speaker 3: Cape Cod style housing with the beautiful like cedar shake,
Speaker 3: you know, siding and all that, and so at least
Speaker 3: it looks really good. And then the golf is just
Speaker 3: big fairways, big gnarly like corn crenchall style rugged punkers,
Speaker 3: and then big fun greens, not like Augusta so much,
Speaker 3: but I wanted them. I wanted you to have like
Speaker 3: twenty different flagsticks on each green, so it was it
Speaker 3: was different every time he played it, so that one's
Speaker 3: just not going to look anything like Charleston ironically, you know,
Speaker 3: so that one's more like public. I wanted to get
Speaker 3: people through it. Not many hazards, there's one or two
Speaker 3: bunkers a hole, but super fun. Like everybody that I've
Speaker 3: talked to, it's just like the fun factor, you know,
Speaker 3: really fun greens, fun shots. The land is really cool.
Speaker 3: But we just wanted people to come back, like repeatedly,
Speaker 3: and Long Island there's so much hard golf, like you
Speaker 3: just mentioned, you know, Saint George's and you know all
Speaker 3: those clubs out there. It's hard, you know, it's really
Speaker 3: hard golf.
Speaker 2: It's yeah, it's.
Speaker 3: That.
Speaker 2: And there isn't a lot of public golf. There's not
Speaker 2: a lot of it's firing public golf, which is which
Speaker 2: is the other thing I think when you New York
Speaker 2: is such a great, great place for golf, but like
Speaker 2: you have to have access for it to be you know,
Speaker 2: like there are good public golf courses in New York,
Speaker 2: but they're busy and and there aren't a lot of
Speaker 2: good public golf courses. So that's a that's an important thing.
Speaker 2: I wanted to talk a little bit more about Lookout
Speaker 2: Mountain in that project. Obviously a crazy place. I mean,
Speaker 2: as the name would suggest, Lookout Mountain, it's in it's
Speaker 2: on the Georgia Tennessee border, and uh it is. It
Speaker 2: was Seth Rainer. I I mean, there are a million
Speaker 2: courses that claim this. I feel like the Seth Rainer's
Speaker 2: last course. I believe he died during construction, and it is,
Speaker 2: you know, at the time of its build, I believe
Speaker 2: it was the second or the most expensive course being built.
Speaker 2: It was it in Yale, so too, you know rainer
Speaker 2: golf courses there. So this golf course, as the name
Speaker 2: would sugges, is a Rainer on a mountain, on a
Speaker 2: freaking mountain. It is is a wild place, you know,
Speaker 2: despite I think it was you know, I always when
Speaker 2: I had gone there, I was like, God, this place
Speaker 2: could be so good with a with a brush up,
Speaker 2: because you could you could see what it could be.
Speaker 2: But you know it had gotten some good work that
Speaker 2: had gotten it from one era to you know where
Speaker 2: it was where it was a really good golf course.
Speaker 2: And then you know, you guys just finished that project.
Speaker 2: I believe you paired with Kyle Frantz there to to
Speaker 2: to create that that project. And if you were going
Speaker 2: to just you know, give a short description of what
Speaker 2: Lookout Mountain is, now, what is it?
Speaker 3: It's the best of rainer. So before we broke around,
Speaker 3: I went everywhere I could for months, multiple times, multiple
Speaker 3: visits Short Acres, Chicago Golf, Blue Mound, which has maybe
Speaker 3: the best rainer green and still existing Fishers. Chicago Golf
Speaker 3: has some of the best greens too for rainer. And
Speaker 3: we just tried to see every single rainer we could
Speaker 3: and then make it the best eighteen rainer holes there
Speaker 3: were because the plan. So we were very fortunate to
Speaker 3: have a plan, a rainer plan. A seth rainer plant
Speaker 3: is like the rarest of the rare you find them.
Speaker 3: With Donald Ross at the time, telling asked Okay, great,
Speaker 3: Perry Maxwell Rainer. It's like we have a little bit
Speaker 3: of a plane at Mountain Lake, and I think there's
Speaker 3: two or three four others. I mean, there's not much
Speaker 3: that survived. So we had the full plan with every
Speaker 3: single bunker green shape, even the green templates, like eighteen
Speaker 3: was the maiden you know, we knew sixteen was a short.
Speaker 3: We knew seventeen was the double plateau. I mean, we
Speaker 3: knew the punch bowls knew, we knew what every template
Speaker 3: pretty much worked. Funny funny thing is, though the club
Speaker 3: on the scorecard had six of them wrong, just because
Speaker 3: you know, it's hard. People don't have no people aren't
Speaker 3: as crazy about this stuff as we are. But so
Speaker 3: we worked with Doug Stein, the Green past Green chairman
Speaker 3: and everything, and he's like one of my favorite guys
Speaker 3: in the world.
Speaker 2: But did you start the society?
Speaker 3: He did? He started the Seth Rainer Society. And he
Speaker 3: knows more about Rainer than anybody. He's amazing, you know,
Speaker 3: him and Anthony Piapi probably know the most. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so we worked with him. We got all the templates correct,
Speaker 3: and he then agreed and we figured that all out
Speaker 3: and then we went from there and we took like
Speaker 3: the best pieces, like the best. We kind of used
Speaker 3: like the best templates from these other clubs as like
Speaker 3: the guiding tool, and then riffed off of them a
Speaker 3: little bit. But Andy, it is so bold, it's I
Speaker 3: can't wait. It's fully grown in now. The greens are
Speaker 3: off the charts. I just can't wait. I hope people
Speaker 3: don't think it's too crazy, you know, but it's because
Speaker 3: it's the land is so insane. But I truly believe
Speaker 3: it's gonna be right there with the Yale Chicago Golf Fishers.
Speaker 3: Is the best, the best that Rainer has to offer.
Speaker 3: And I think it's only going to get better with age.
Speaker 3: You know, it's slowly going to get better every year,
Speaker 3: like four or five years from now. I think people
Speaker 3: are going to go visit and go, okay, you know,
Speaker 3: like this is, you know, a masterpiece. And we spent
Speaker 3: so much time down there. I personally shaped eighteen out
Speaker 3: of nineteen greens down there. There was one I didn't
Speaker 3: get on because my son was being born last August seventeenth,
Speaker 3: and so that week I didn't get on the fifth green,
Speaker 3: but I got on all the others and with the
Speaker 3: dozer shaping and finishing, and so we put our heart
Speaker 3: and soul in there. And we had Ben Warren and
Speaker 3: I can't say enough about Ben Warren Artists in Golf,
Speaker 3: that's his company, but he works a lot in Japan
Speaker 3: and he's worked for Gil and Doak. I think he
Speaker 3: did for corn Crunchhall. He built the one out there
Speaker 3: north of Meadow Clubs Brambles. He built brambles with them.
Speaker 3: And he's my age and we got along like De's
Speaker 3: and carrots. I love the guy. So he's from North Barrack, Scotland,
Speaker 3: and one of the most talented shapers I've ever seen
Speaker 3: in my life. We'd go out to dinner every night,
Speaker 3: we'd hang out, we'd talk about everything, and I couldn't
Speaker 3: have done it. And you know the same with Kyle.
Speaker 3: You know, Kyle obviously super talented. You know, has worked
Speaker 3: for everybody and does a lot of great work on
Speaker 3: his own. And so we teamed up because we felt
Speaker 3: like we were just so busy in both of our
Speaker 3: careers that if we could team up for a couple
Speaker 3: of jobs, maybe we can they could be masterpieces, you know.
Speaker 3: And I said this probably a couple of months ago.
Speaker 3: I think looking back on my career, I think in
Speaker 3: twenty years I might look back and lookout mountain and
Speaker 3: same with Kyle, We're probably going to be like, I
Speaker 3: don't think we could do any better. You know, it
Speaker 3: might be the best work even then. So but Kyle, yeah,
Speaker 3: he was. He's great, such a knowledgeable guy. I mean
Speaker 3: he put his heart and soul into it. And Ben Warren,
Speaker 3: and then we had a really great shaper, Eduardo Rojas
Speaker 3: who shaped with Kyle a lot, and rich lebar Like
Speaker 3: he did all the bunker work for Andrew Green at
Speaker 3: Oak Hill stuff like that. So he was no joke.
Speaker 3: So we had a fricking crew US four pretty much,
Speaker 3: and it was like every day you'd build a green,
Speaker 3: you do this and we'd all come look at it
Speaker 3: and and just meeting of the mines. But Ben Warren,
Speaker 3: I'm telling you, like he built the Redan because he
Speaker 3: grew up in North Berk so he built the Dan.
Speaker 3: He worked on the Barritz you know some of those
Speaker 3: the ones that are so good. I think it's the
Speaker 3: best radan in the world now, you know, right there
Speaker 3: with National Golf Links and then a real one at
Speaker 3: North Bari.
Speaker 2: It's a stunning setting. I mean you're up on the
Speaker 2: on the high hill just below the clubhouse, looking down
Speaker 2: and off a mountain. I mean, it's an it's an
Speaker 2: incredible That's I think the thing about the place that
Speaker 2: is just so you could see too, you could see
Speaker 2: how bold it once was and that had been kind
Speaker 2: of covered up in just grass like so many places,
Speaker 2: and you just you put that with the with the
Speaker 2: just the sublime setting of playing golf on a mountain,
Speaker 2: and uh, you know it's I can't wait to get
Speaker 2: back there.
Speaker 3: All the trees now are gone. So you see for
Speaker 3: hundreds of miles, you can see seven states Andy seven. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's amazing. And there's a plaque that talks about that.
Speaker 3: So I'm not lying, like it's actual facts up there
Speaker 3: when your home lookout mountain to see seven states. But people, oh,
Speaker 3: never believe me. They're like, get out of here. And
Speaker 3: I'm like I show people. I'm like, you see that plane,
Speaker 3: you know, like it looks like it's a thousand miles away,
Speaker 3: but you can see a plane taking off. I'm like,
Speaker 3: that's Louisville Air Kentucky. Like that's how far you can
Speaker 3: see from there. So anyway, but to round off on
Speaker 3: that too to finish up. You know, Doug Stein, I
Speaker 3: think the really cool part about this is he calls
Speaker 3: it a completion, So it's not a restoration or a renovation.
Speaker 3: It's a completion because SETH. Rayner died during construction, and
Speaker 3: then they ran out of money, and then they had
Speaker 3: a hurricane that came up from Florida and everything the
Speaker 3: Panhandle and then just sat on Lookout Mountain and washed
Speaker 3: everything off of the golf course they had just top
Speaker 3: soiled and spragged it in twenty I want to say,
Speaker 3: I want to say twenty six was when that happened,
Speaker 3: or early twenty seven, because Rayner died in January twenty sixth.
Speaker 3: He did the plans in twenty five, and you know,
Speaker 3: so they had like a horrific ten inch rainstorm washed
Speaker 3: everything away, and they ran into so much rock, Like
Speaker 3: we had two rock cammers going the entire time, and
Speaker 3: I'm talking Andy like the biggest excavator you've ever seen. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we had two of them going the entire time, just
Speaker 3: rock hammering. And so I think they never built the
Speaker 3: fairy bunkers because of the rock and the granite, and
Speaker 3: they just built the fill pads and then some of
Speaker 3: the bunkers around the greens. So he calls it a
Speaker 3: completion because the plan was never completed because of the
Speaker 3: money and the rain event and all that, and so
Speaker 3: Doug Stein's got a great take on it. It's really
Speaker 3: cool and anyway, but that's Lookout. I try to be
Speaker 3: as humble as possible, but it's hard to be humble
Speaker 3: about Lookout because we're so proud of that one. We
Speaker 3: really are.
Speaker 2: Just as a personal actote from looking at the few
Speaker 2: pictures of it on your website, I just I'm so
Speaker 2: happy that the Rainer bunkers are do not look like
Speaker 2: Tetris pieces as they are interpreted at some places. There
Speaker 2: is some roundness to them. Sure they have some geometric characteristics,
Speaker 2: but they are rounded bunkers. They are not square edges
Speaker 2: that look like Tetris pieces. And I'll let everybody else
Speaker 2: put together the dots y.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly when people go and see I don't want
Speaker 3: to name the places, but there was an interpretation. This
Speaker 3: is my true believing, true belief on this is. You know,
Speaker 3: Brian Silva, a great architect. I have so much respect
Speaker 3: for him. He came into all these courses in the
Speaker 3: late nineties and early two thousands when people were finding
Speaker 3: out about Rainer and got a little carried ray away
Speaker 3: maybe with the edges and the corners like he did
Speaker 3: in Mount Lake, and he did, you know, at country
Speaker 3: called Charleston and a couple others. And when you see
Speaker 3: untouched Rainer, like at Fisher's Saint Louis, Chicago short acres,
Speaker 3: there are there's not one square or rectangular corner and
Speaker 3: any bunker on any aerial that you'll ever find. And
Speaker 3: then when you look at the Lookout Mountain masterplan from
Speaker 3: Rainer in twenty five, there's not one square bunker. They
Speaker 3: have beautiful shapes and round it they look like submarines.
Speaker 3: And so if you look at any historical data Fishers, Yale,
Speaker 3: any of this stuff, there's been this weird misconception by guys.
Speaker 3: They get to Rainer courses and they don't travel enough,
Speaker 3: they don't go see everything, and they just look on
Speaker 3: the interweb and they go, oh, that's Rainer, and it's
Speaker 3: very depressing. It bugs me more than you would ever
Speaker 3: imagine any because it's so it's like lazy, so lazy,
Speaker 3: it's so lazy.
Speaker 2: I think it's important to note too, with the Brian
Speaker 2: Silva stuff is that he when he started doing the
Speaker 2: rainer work, there was so little information available. We like,
Speaker 2: there needs to be a preface of like where golf
Speaker 2: architecture and restoration has gone over the last thirty years
Speaker 2: from when he was he was starting this rainer revival.
Speaker 2: And he deserves so much credit for restoration.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent. And I like him a lot, great personality.
Speaker 2: He's amazing personality.
Speaker 3: But you know what he has learned. I mean, he
Speaker 3: got it so close except for maybe the cornering of
Speaker 3: the bunkering, like the green pads and all that. The scale,
Speaker 3: he got really close and it's amazing how well he did.
Speaker 3: But if you look at Metai what he just did,
Speaker 3: so like he restored Metari, which is a rainer down
Speaker 3: in New Orleans last year. And then if you look
Speaker 3: at like the first rainer he restored, maybe in two thousand,
Speaker 3: maybe a Mount Lake I think was maybe his first.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure you can see his growth, and now
Speaker 3: like a Metori, there aren't square bunkers and weird corners
Speaker 3: like that. I think he nailed it. And so all
Speaker 3: the kudos in the world because that dude he really
Speaker 3: shed the light on it and if you go to
Speaker 3: a Black Creek there, which where Doug Stein, you know,
Speaker 3: is the man down at Black Creek just two or
Speaker 3: three miles from Lookout Mountain Club. I mean, there are
Speaker 3: some unbelievable holes by Brian Silva. It was a Brian
Speaker 3: Silva original and it's phenomenal. There are some great holes.
Speaker 3: The punch bowl there outs punch bowls like maybe the
Speaker 3: best there is and some of his takes on that
Speaker 3: on those on those holes are phenomenal. So yeah, all
Speaker 3: the kudos in the world of Brian you know, Gil
Speaker 3: is gil gets it. He gets Seth Rayner. You know,
Speaker 3: you see his work. I can't wait to see Yale,
Speaker 3: but you see his work at Fishers and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: And Kyle understood that too. Kyle friends and I we
Speaker 3: both agreed and we totally understood where we had to
Speaker 3: go with that.
Speaker 2: All right, real quick, last question. I know you're a
Speaker 2: big golf traveler. You love seeing new courses. What are
Speaker 2: you know it's spent six years or five years whatever
Speaker 2: since our last conversation. Curious, what give me three courses
Speaker 2: that are new to you in that time? That kind
Speaker 2: of knocked your socks off that that, uh, you know
Speaker 2: they could be big names or or give me one
Speaker 2: sleeper in there too.
Speaker 3: French Lick Boom, French Lick Indiana Ross Course maybe the
Speaker 3: best set of Ross greens. I mean they're wild, They're
Speaker 3: like a little over the top. I've been there now
Speaker 3: three times. I went back in May because I just like,
Speaker 3: I can't get enough of it, and it's so hard
Speaker 3: to get to. You have to like, yeah, I flew
Speaker 3: in the Louisville or I flew out of Louisville. I
Speaker 3: flew into Emmonsville, Indiana. Each way it's a couple of hours,
Speaker 3: but I want to see Victoria National two and I
Speaker 3: stopped in to see them, and that one maybe the
Speaker 3: best Fasio. But French Lick, I mean, it's just like
Speaker 3: it's early Ross too. It's nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 3: Like for how bold he built the greens and the bunkering.
Speaker 3: It looks like a rainer course because it's so bold.
Speaker 3: But Pete Die, I always like, before Pete passed, I
Speaker 3: wanted to ask him he knew who built that for
Speaker 3: Ross the constructor, and I never heard the name, and
Speaker 3: I wish I that was If I had one question
Speaker 3: for Pete Die before he died. You're like Pete who
Speaker 3: built French like for Ross because it it it influenced
Speaker 3: Pete Dye. That's how awesome it is. So that when
Speaker 3: Andy's number one, probably number two would be what has
Speaker 3: shocked me, like kind of like you know, definitely on
Speaker 3: the Langford. When I've been on this Langford kick, I'm
Speaker 3: always I'm always shocked. Where you'll find a Langford or
Speaker 3: Moreau and there will be like two greens remaining that
Speaker 3: are just like mind boggling, you know, like like if
Speaker 3: sixteen holes of duds and then like two of the
Speaker 3: most incredible greens you've ever seen. There's a course called
Speaker 3: ozaki Yea in Wisconsin is just south of I think
Speaker 3: it's right around Milwaukee Country Club and all that, that
Speaker 3: whole district just north of Milwaukee.
Speaker 2: It's in near Mechwon, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Mechwon, just south of West Bend and all that. But
Speaker 3: my buddy Brett, the superintendent, I went to UK with
Speaker 3: Kentucky and I've stopped be in I've probably been there
Speaker 3: four times. But this last visit I really had like
Speaker 3: an epiphany because it was built the same year as Wakanda,
Speaker 3: So nineteen twenty one Early Langford. We call it early
Speaker 3: because it's before he really got cooking, So it's the
Speaker 3: same year as Wakanda. So I just wanted to see
Speaker 3: the similarities. And it was like I was like a
Speaker 3: kid out there. I was laughing, I was giggling. I
Speaker 3: was out there all by myself, like four pm to dark,
Speaker 3: maybe a month and a half ago. It was like
Speaker 3: the best day of the year because I couldn't believe
Speaker 3: it was identical to Wakanda in the sense that like
Speaker 3: there's six world class greens out there. Great it's like
Speaker 3: great Land, but then there's like six that almost don't
Speaker 3: look like Langford holes, like somebody totally blew up, you know,
Speaker 3: somebody came into the eighties and like re routed. But
Speaker 3: the stuff that's sitting there, there's a fourth I think
Speaker 3: it's the fourteenth hole. It's a par three up the hill.
Speaker 3: It's the best part three that I've seen. It has
Speaker 3: so much complexity in the green and these big rolls
Speaker 3: and these big valleys. It's like Number two at Culver
Speaker 3: but better you know, Number two cover kind of the
Speaker 3: radan that blew my socks away. Because somebody asked me recently,
Speaker 3: like Oh, where would you want to work if somebody
Speaker 3: calls you, you know, in the next couple of years.
Speaker 3: And I was thinking, like, man, I could really I
Speaker 3: could really have some fun in Ozaki, Like we could
Speaker 3: crush it there and like it would be like the
Speaker 3: number one course other than maybe Lasonia or Sand Valley
Speaker 3: and stuff in or Milwaukee in Wisconsin. We could bring
Speaker 3: it up to the stratosphere. And the funniest thing is
Speaker 3: the other one. The third one is right up the
Speaker 3: road at Sheboygan Country clubine Hills.
Speaker 2: Pine Hills is insane.
Speaker 3: You know it because you've been there a bunch. But
Speaker 3: they called me, you know, when I was at Beverly
Speaker 3: on a bulldozer when they called, and I'm like, pine Hills.
Speaker 2: It sounded like a name, Like the name the name
Speaker 2: is like so misleading because it's like what it sounds
Speaker 2: like a generic like you know, pine Hills is like
Speaker 2: a clip art version of a golf course name.
Speaker 3: Right, So I remember they called. And the funniest story
Speaker 3: I'm on like the twelve twelfth green at Beverly and
Speaker 3: I'm sitting there in the dozer because I remember it
Speaker 3: like yesterday, and I'm like, yeah, I didn't answer the
Speaker 3: phone because I had the music going and we were motoring,
Speaker 3: but I listened to the voicemail when I got off
Speaker 3: the dozer at dark and I look up pine Hills.
Speaker 3: So I type in pine Hills on my phone. Thirty
Speaker 3: courses come up. I couldn't figure out which one, so
Speaker 3: I was like, where is this? Where's this guy called
Speaker 3: me from? Is it like pine Hills in Texas? Is
Speaker 3: it pine Hills in California? So anyway, so the funny thing,
Speaker 3: so long story short, I go up there and I'm
Speaker 3: walking around with the committee and I'm like, oh, one's good,
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, two's good, Wow, three is cool? Man four
Speaker 3: is great. I mean we got through like ten holes
Speaker 3: and I'm like, why am I here? This place is
Speaker 3: so good. You don't even mean me. Agen need to
Speaker 3: cut down some trees.
Speaker 2: And honestly, honestly, I think like it could be the
Speaker 2: best course in Wisconsin.
Speaker 3: It could be. It could be, it could be top forty,
Speaker 3: could be top forty in America.
Speaker 2: I mean, it is so insanely good, and nobody ever
Speaker 2: talks about it because of the cooler courses, right, And
Speaker 2: it's like, that's that's the most fun course in town.
Speaker 2: That's the one that's the most fun to play. Like
Speaker 2: Whistleing Straits is gorgeous, is on the on the lake.
Speaker 2: There's some really cool stuff at Whistleing Straits. It's amazing
Speaker 2: what they did with earthwork there and it's in. But
Speaker 2: like from just a knock your socks off golf architecture experience,
Speaker 2: there are very few. Like you walk out to Pine
Speaker 2: Pine Hills is just insane.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you leave there and you're like, all right, what's
Speaker 3: the worst hole? And you can't. I mean, like I
Speaker 3: came up with the sixteenth, the part three, I kind
Speaker 3: of told them in my interview process, like we could
Speaker 3: cut down the trees, move the cart path, you know,
Speaker 3: shift this a little bit, but I want to touch
Speaker 3: the other seventeen. I just cut trees now, like the
Speaker 3: whole interior of eighteen, the big Boomerang hole with the
Speaker 3: big play.
Speaker 2: They did that too. It's unbelievable the different the difference
Speaker 2: it made. I actually had before and after footage. I've
Speaker 2: been meaning to post something on it.
Speaker 3: Yeah you should, but I didn't win that one. I
Speaker 3: was runner up and I should have done it for free,
Speaker 3: Like I don't even know what I was. I wasn't
Speaker 3: focused at the time because I was like sew into
Speaker 3: Beverly and like I kind of went up there and
Speaker 3: I don't think I don't think I had a good interview,
Speaker 3: and I really that's the number one of course, I
Speaker 3: wish I I had garnered because it is like playland.
Speaker 3: But the funny thing is it wouldn't have helped me
Speaker 3: get any other work because.
Speaker 2: Of nobody knows it.
Speaker 3: Nobody knows it, so you could do world class work
Speaker 3: and make it even better. But it's just the weirdest thing.
Speaker 3: Like I don't even understand why Golf Digest and like
Speaker 3: Rand war set and and like I typed in, so
Speaker 3: I'm on the you know whatever, the panel for Golf
Speaker 3: magazine and I he there's a write in at the bottom, like, hey,
Speaker 3: tell us if we've missed anything. I've written in pine
Speaker 3: Hills every fricking year on Rand's thing, like hey, Ran, I.
Speaker 2: Think he finally went there. I saw something about it.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I feel like we've been banging the Pine
Speaker 2: Hills drum for years. It's I mean, they have you know,
Speaker 2: listeners there. They have one of the best national memberships
Speaker 2: in the in the country too.
Speaker 3: Like I'd be a member there, I mean a really.
Speaker 2: Incredible, incredible national membership, especially for people from Chicago. But
Speaker 2: they a no brainer.
Speaker 3: If they hired Drew Rogers, who's a UK alum too,
Speaker 3: and I like him a lot, great guy. I really
Speaker 3: get along with Drew. I have a ton of respect
Speaker 3: for him. So they're in great hands. And all you
Speaker 3: gotta do is remove trees and open it up and
Speaker 3: get the native greens, span greens.
Speaker 2: I mean it's fair ways too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think he'll get all that right. And
Speaker 3: I'm telling you, it's got to be in the top
Speaker 3: one hundred, like Brookside made a leap in the number
Speaker 3: ninety six this year. I mean Pine, if Brookside did it,
Speaker 3: Pine Hills has to be in the top one hundred,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 2: And then Harry Speed there's a there's a course in
Speaker 2: Chicago that I played a ton in my twenties called
Speaker 2: Big Run that Harry Smede did. It's been monkeyed with,
Speaker 2: but you still you see some of the crazy stuff,
Speaker 2: like there's not a ton of it left, but it's
Speaker 2: it's embroiled in some housing development thing. I mean, if
Speaker 2: you were talking about a public golf course in in
Speaker 2: Chicago that you could take and you know, with five
Speaker 2: million dollars make off the charts. There there's three that
Speaker 2: come to mind. It's can't Kicky Elk's big run, and
Speaker 2: then you Spring Valley, which is technically in Wisconsin, but
Speaker 2: forty five minutes from the.
Speaker 3: It's still Yeah. I think some people are trying to
Speaker 3: get on that. I think they're trying.
Speaker 2: To a lot of people are a lot of people
Speaker 2: are sniffing around.
Speaker 3: You know though, to be honest, we took a Jim
Speaker 3: and Ryan and I know we got to wrap up here.
Speaker 3: But Jim Ryan and I took a deep, deep dive
Speaker 3: recently and spent like real meaningful days really looking at
Speaker 3: the architecture. And unfortunately, I think Kanka Kee blows Spring
Speaker 3: Valley all of the water Spring Valley. Spring Valley is
Speaker 3: just a little boring.
Speaker 2: Spring Valley is in a better spot, though it's a
Speaker 2: better It's like you're you got Lake Geneva, you got
Speaker 2: the northern suburbs, You've got like it's it's just like
Speaker 2: Kanka Key Elks. Is that difference between forty five minutes
Speaker 2: from city center versus Kanka Key Elks like our twenty
Speaker 2: that's a that's a huge difference. But Kanka Key Elks.
Speaker 2: I think Kanka Key Elks could be one of the
Speaker 2: four best courses in Illinois, full stop.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep. It has everything. The greens have so much character,
Speaker 3: the lambst incredible, the bunkerings all there. They could cut
Speaker 3: down the trees they're trying to. I think if they
Speaker 3: got back the old volcano part three fourteen sitting there,
Speaker 3: there's a flag in it. Somebody put a flag in
Speaker 3: it last time we were there, which was great.
Speaker 2: I got so excited because the last time I was there,
Speaker 2: they had a mower on it and I was like,
Speaker 2: they're mowing it out, but they stripped the green of
Speaker 2: all the green grass, so they'd have to rest it.
Speaker 2: And you know, it's it's just so funny that one
Speaker 2: par three that they bypassed it for. It makes a
Speaker 2: pro built allegedly a pro built it in like nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty and he was and he just pushed it up.
Speaker 2: It's covered in shade all year. Then you have this
Speaker 2: terrible walk back to the next tea. It's just uh
Speaker 2: but yeah, that place, that place is amazing. There's you know,
Speaker 2: the the opportunity for great public golf in Chicago exists,
Speaker 2: but Unfortunately it is so far away from having great
Speaker 2: public golf. So sorry to end it on a diary.
Speaker 2: But a real quick, quick.
Speaker 3: I real quick. I. Since you always are asking all
Speaker 3: the questions I got to ask a question for the
Speaker 3: audience here. You asked me the three courses that I
Speaker 3: thought were really cool that you know we haven't discussed ver.
Speaker 3: What are your three in all your travels? Because I
Speaker 3: know you're on the road a lot, so give us
Speaker 3: three real.
Speaker 2: Quick, all right? Recent this is recency bias. I Saint
Speaker 2: George's is out of this world like that that got
Speaker 2: the land, the the there's it's got like a little
Speaker 2: bit of everything, right. I hadn't seen like Devereaux emmet
Speaker 2: at like at you know, I'd seen Garden City, which
Speaker 2: is you know a lot of Devaux Emmett, which was great,
Speaker 2: but like it's got some quirk, It's got some some funk.
Speaker 2: It's got some of those like holes that you could
Speaker 2: take and just put on National Golf links or Shinnakok
Speaker 2: and be like, oh, this is just one of the holes,
Speaker 2: like the twelfth hole out there, you know that finishing
Speaker 2: stretches amazing. But then it's got like that cool. I
Speaker 2: was at ten, the like kind of like sidewinding short
Speaker 2: part four that with the like punch bowl green at
Speaker 2: that right on the on the road like it is. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like so funky and cool, so I would put
Speaker 2: that in there. Let's see, let me think about what
Speaker 2: else I've seen recently. I well, this is just going
Speaker 2: to be a New Jersey thing, because I mean New
Speaker 2: Jersey golf in general is amazing. But I couldn't believe
Speaker 2: how good Essex County was in New Jersey right like
Speaker 2: they're gonna do this Gillhands renovation. I kind of was like, Oh,
Speaker 2: we're going to see it before it gets renovated, and
Speaker 2: I was like, God, this isn't like very far off
Speaker 2: from being like really really good, you.
Speaker 3: Know, the same thing I walked it. I thought they
Speaker 3: had already done the renovation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was like, oh, this is amazing. Gil crushed it here.
Speaker 3: And They're like, oh no, we haven't done it yet,
Speaker 3: and I'm like what, Yeah, I walked like three years
Speaker 3: ago and thought it was mind boggling good yep.
Speaker 2: And then a third let's see this is the this
Speaker 2: is where it gets tough. A third new course from
Speaker 2: this year, uh recently, I mean I went to Scotland,
Speaker 2: which is hard because like all all the stuff over there,
Speaker 2: really you know, if I was going to pick one
Speaker 2: in Scotland. I've talked about this on this pod a
Speaker 2: lot as Elie was one that uh, I think there
Speaker 2: was like a lot of things going on in my life.
Speaker 2: I was I've gotten off the mat with food poisoning,
Speaker 2: like from two days earlier. That was like debilitating to me.
Speaker 2: And it was just this like you know, Wednesday of
Speaker 2: the Open Championship, I had been at Saint Andrews all
Speaker 2: day and got on it and we're racing against the dark.
Speaker 2: But the the routing out there is just it's just
Speaker 2: a magical journey, you know, the way you stay that
Speaker 2: the whole I think just in general, the whole in
Speaker 2: the any course that starts in town and you venture
Speaker 2: away from town and you have like this this journey
Speaker 2: out just like it. You know, North Barrick has it.
Speaker 2: St Andrews, the Old Course has it. Eely has it.
Speaker 2: There's just something so special about leaving town and then
Speaker 2: coming back like that. It just sets such a it
Speaker 2: makes the round a a trip right and and that's
Speaker 2: just such a beautiful thing. But with like eee the
Speaker 2: way you bounce back and forth. I thought from the
Speaker 2: ocean versus like, you know, staying, like getting out there
Speaker 2: right away and like blasting it early, or you know,
Speaker 2: like the way it jogs between it, you know, gives
Speaker 2: you looks, takes you away, brings you back and then
Speaker 2: you think it's over like that. That one, to me,
Speaker 2: that's the one, you know, it's funny. I saw North Barrack,
Speaker 2: I saw Mirfield, I saw the I played the Old
Speaker 2: Course the Tuesday after the Open. I think about all
Speaker 2: those courses a lot, but the one that I want
Speaker 2: to get back to the most is probably Ely in
Speaker 2: North Barrack. Those are the two that I really want
Speaker 2: to And it's not fair to the Old Course because
Speaker 2: I spent an entire week walking around the Old Course
Speaker 2: and then I played it right like so, I you know,
Speaker 2: I've walked around that one probably ten times at this
Speaker 2: point in my life versus Ely. It was just this one.
Speaker 2: We finished in the dark. It was pitch black and
Speaker 2: it was just like, God, I just want to get
Speaker 2: back there.
Speaker 3: So they still have that periscope on the first team.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Amaz, i'n't.
Speaker 3: Been there a couple of years. And oh like twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: I think was my last visit there.
Speaker 2: Oh did Spring Valleys? Did Spring Valley still have the
Speaker 2: periscope on a whole twelve? Oh gosh, the plastic plassic
Speaker 2: PVC five?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, because I actually drove Jim over to see
Speaker 3: it because we actually borrowed a cart there and he
Speaker 3: was like, what is this And I'm like, you won't
Speaker 3: even believe it. I'm like, it's it's pretty bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's all right. Hey, thanks so much for
Speaker 2: the time. Everybody can follow along. You occasionally post on
Speaker 2: Instagram and Twitter, but you know, your your handles are there,
Speaker 2: and I can't wait to see your new work as
Speaker 2: well as some of your recent restoration work. And congrats
Speaker 2: on all the growth, and you know it's it's it's
Speaker 2: fun to see some of the the next generation of
Speaker 2: architects getting great opportunities.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Andy. Yeah, for sure. And I know my
Speaker 3: wife and my family have kind of gotten after me
Speaker 3: about social media. So I'm I have like a one
Speaker 3: one post a week, and I'm doing more stories and
Speaker 3: I posted like three times last year and everybody's like, dude,
Speaker 3: all my friends everybody's telling me I have to be
Speaker 3: more social media oriented. So I am making a big
Speaker 3: push and I'm going to put a lot more stuff
Speaker 3: out there. I'm taking the drone with me everywhere, so
Speaker 3: I people are going to see a lot more Beverly
Speaker 3: and Northmoor, Wakanda, not Lake, you know, look out, Charleston,
Speaker 3: spy Ring, Detroit so Brave Barn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, awesome, all right, thanks Tyler, we'll talk soon.
Speaker 3: All right, Andy, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to another edition of the Frida Egg Podcast.
Speaker 2: Today's episode was edited by Matt Rushes. Thank you Matt.
Speaker 2: As a quick reminder, Club tf's humming, We've got lots
Speaker 2: of stuff up there. We put up a bally Neil
Speaker 2: video routing bally Neil video with Tom Doak last week,
Speaker 2: which has gotten rave reviews. It's it's a phenomenal watch.
Speaker 2: I you know, I didn't have any part in it,
Speaker 2: so I can I can say that. I guess I
Speaker 2: shot it a little bit of footage, but Cameron threw
Speaker 2: together and it's a video interview with Tom talking about
Speaker 2: routing bally Neil. It's really good. Right on top of that,
Speaker 2: one big announcement, we have a member guest coming to
Speaker 2: CLUBTFE we're going to be doing more events for members
Speaker 2: and clubtf and the coming probably next year, we'll we'll
Speaker 2: have more but you know, more opportunities for CLUBTFE members
Speaker 2: to play some cool places. We're doing a member guest.
Speaker 2: It'll be in northern California. It's in October, end of October,
Speaker 2: so if you want to be a part of that.
Speaker 2: The best way to get involved with those events are
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Speaker 2: dot com slash membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars
Speaker 2: a year and it's really the best way to support
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Speaker 2: will be back next week with some new episodes of
Speaker 2: the Frida Egg Podcast.