Speaker 1: In the United States, many of the greatest old golf
Speaker 1: courses have already undergone what they've called restorations. That is,
Speaker 1: they've worked with architects to bring back elements of their
Speaker 1: original designs. In fact, many of these courses have gone
Speaker 1: through this process multiple times over the past thirty years,
Speaker 1: which begs the question, when can you actually consider a
Speaker 1: golf course restored? Can you?
Speaker 2: Ever?
Speaker 1: In any case, the restoration movement, which dates back to
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, has seemingly reached a point of maturity,
Speaker 1: and now I think we have to ask where does
Speaker 1: it go next. In this episode, I'll explore a few
Speaker 1: projects that I think represent interesting frontiers of the golf
Speaker 1: course restoration and renovation industry. First, I'll sit down with
Speaker 1: Jeff Stein to talk about his and Brian Ross's creative,
Speaker 1: historically inspired redesign the Great Dunes course at Jekyl Island.
Speaker 1: Then I'll speak with Clyde Johnson about his efforts to
Speaker 1: bring back vintage elements of British links courses. I'm Garrett Morrison,
Speaker 1: and this is Designing Golf. Jeff Stein, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3: Thanks a lot, gar I'm really glad to be talking
Speaker 3: with you.
Speaker 1: So today we're talking about the future of golf course restoration,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to talk to you specifically, Jeff, about
Speaker 1: a project that you recently completed with your partner Brian
Speaker 1: Ross at Jekyl Island Golf Club off the coast of Georgia.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure i'd call this project a restoration in
Speaker 1: the strict sense of the word, but it certainly had
Speaker 1: a historical motive and there are a number of intriguing
Speaker 1: things about the project that might indicate where golf course
Speaker 1: restoration quote unquote might go in the coming years. So
Speaker 1: just to set the scene, where is Jeckyll Island and
Speaker 1: what's the history of golf there?
Speaker 3: Okay, So Jacky Island is on the southeastern coast of Georgia.
Speaker 3: It's kind of midway between Jacksonville, Florida and Savannah, Georgia.
Speaker 3: So from the airport in Jacksonville, it's an hour drive
Speaker 3: right up ninety five, you make a right turn at
Speaker 3: Brunswick and you head, you know, right through the marsh
Speaker 3: and onto jeckl Island.
Speaker 1: So we're talking about the sea islands here, basically the
Speaker 1: Georgia Sea islands.
Speaker 3: Well they call them the Golden Isles.
Speaker 1: The Golden Isles, that's right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And then from Savannah. You know, it's an hour and
Speaker 3: a half south from Savannah. You know, Atlanta is probably
Speaker 3: four hours away from if you want to come from
Speaker 3: that direction. And the history of golf there is a
Speaker 3: long history. They you know, really done laid a golf
Speaker 3: course out there. Originally through I think it was the
Speaker 3: Riverside course. Donald Ross lay out a pretty would be
Speaker 3: a failed routing of a golf course through there. It
Speaker 3: just was too wet. He wasn't able to drain it
Speaker 3: very well. You know, the members went through several iterations
Speaker 3: kind of playing golf from the river through the Savannah. Later,
Speaker 3: Carl Keffer, the Canadian Open and their winter time pro
Speaker 3: laid out the original holes in the sand dunes, so
Speaker 3: where you would travel from the Savannah out to the
Speaker 3: sand dunes and back again. And then of course Walter
Speaker 3: Travis came in and fully laid out a spectacular ocean
Speaker 3: side links called the Great Dunes.
Speaker 1: So the Great Dunes Course a Walter Travis design. We'll
Speaker 1: talk more about Walter Travis in a moment. Originally eighteen holes,
Speaker 1: as I understand it, How did this course evolve over time?
Speaker 1: What happened to it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, Travis came and laid out the course in
Speaker 3: twenty six. Of course opened end of twenty seven, but
Speaker 3: Travis never lived to see the course actually finished. But
Speaker 3: the holes he laid out were you know, hard against
Speaker 3: the ocean, I mean, nothing in between you the beach
Speaker 3: and the golf and it was just one of these
Speaker 3: spectacular link settings that's pretty rare to find in the
Speaker 3: United States. And you know, Travis adapted the routing of
Speaker 3: Keffer on the front nine and he re routed stuff,
Speaker 3: but definitely used some of his green sites and the
Speaker 3: back nine which we lost due to basically time erosion storms.
Speaker 3: And then of course when the original owners, you know,
Speaker 3: this group of very wealthy individuals who used to own
Speaker 3: Jacko Island, they kind of gave up the club in
Speaker 3: the island in the you know, post depression, and the
Speaker 3: state took it over. And that's that is when we
Speaker 3: really lost the back nine of the Great Dunes golf course,
Speaker 3: and they decided to do a lot more economic development.
Speaker 3: They put a beach road in later on at convention Center,
Speaker 3: several hotels and and so on.
Speaker 1: So basically you can't get the original back nine back
Speaker 1: that has now been developed.
Speaker 3: That ship has sailed.
Speaker 1: Okay, you alluded to the ownership situation on the island.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty unique situation, so tell me about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, oh, you mean currently or before?
Speaker 1: Yeah, currently, Well, as I understand it, this the was
Speaker 1: the Jekyl Island Authority. It's a state body, right, It's
Speaker 1: a government body that owns it, but it's relatively independent
Speaker 1: from the government. So yeah, the current situation, which I
Speaker 1: think dates back a couple of decades, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I don't know when the authority was,
Speaker 3: you know, given their license from the State of Georgia
Speaker 3: to operate, but the state park was created sometime in
Speaker 3: the in the forties or fifties around that time, and
Speaker 3: the Jeklan Authority has, you know, complete control over all
Speaker 3: the you know, the lease agreements on the island for
Speaker 3: whether that be if you're a restaurant, a hotel. You
Speaker 3: know that they actually operate the golf course, a conservation department, landscaping,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And they just they oversee everything that goes
Speaker 3: on in the state park. But there are actually a
Speaker 3: for profit entity but given the right by the State
Speaker 3: of Georgia. So this project really came to be from
Speaker 3: a really massive commitment. I think I read the other
Speaker 3: day it was like two hundred and eighty million dollar
Speaker 3: renovation plan over several decades, and the and the golf
Speaker 3: piece was really the last part of that puzzle in
Speaker 3: this whole economic redevelopment of the island.
Speaker 1: So I guess the reason they can do a project
Speaker 1: this ambitious is that they are an entrepreneurial body. Essentially,
Speaker 1: They're they're not they they need to make a They
Speaker 1: need to make a profit, absolutely.
Speaker 3: Need to make a profit. And and I think that
Speaker 3: they they kind of they all pool the resources and
Speaker 3: pull all the dollart tourist dollars from you know, there's
Speaker 3: a ten dollars toll when you come on the island.
Speaker 3: So you know, they unlike you know, a standalone golf course.
Speaker 3: They do have maybe some other profit centers from tourism.
Speaker 3: But of course we're hoping that the golf is going
Speaker 3: to start to drive a lot of those tourists, uh,
Speaker 3: that tourist activity and and we start filling the t
Speaker 3: sheets at the Great Dunes.
Speaker 1: It's really cool. It's a it's a fun model of
Speaker 1: ownership that kind of combines the UH the entrepreneurial spirit
Speaker 1: of an ambitious golf course with the support of of
Speaker 1: government and and the and the and the you know,
Speaker 1: I guess the mission to bring people out and give
Speaker 1: them access to a great golf experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and I think that, you know, oftentimes municipal
Speaker 3: golf isn't really that profitable or it's hard to be profitable.
Speaker 3: So we're and I also want to mention there's a
Speaker 3: you know, we have two other golf courses at the
Speaker 3: Jackal Island Golf Club. There's Pine Lakes which is just
Speaker 3: recently renovated, an Indian Mound which is more your budget
Speaker 3: friendly option right now, shorter golf course built by Joe Lee.
Speaker 3: And we're going to see what happens with that third
Speaker 3: golf course, whether that gets redeveloped, maybe into a short
Speaker 3: course or something along those lines. We're just going to
Speaker 3: see how this whole plan comes together.
Speaker 1: So just some history of the island itself. My understanding
Speaker 1: is that pre Depression, Jackal Island was sort of a
Speaker 1: happening place, right This was a place that that wealthy
Speaker 1: people vacationed, and then it it just fell on hard
Speaker 1: times during the depression and the war and that's when
Speaker 1: the state stepped in and took it over. Is that
Speaker 1: is that basically an accurate characterization?
Speaker 3: That's that's fairly fairly accurate. I think there's a funny
Speaker 3: anecdote that they, you know, these owners kind of walked
Speaker 3: away with a pretty large tax bill and just said, okay,
Speaker 3: you guys deal with it.
Speaker 1: You take care of our debts here. Yeah, exactly, so.
Speaker 3: They say, here's the land, we don't want to deal
Speaker 3: with this anymore. And you know, there's a there's another
Speaker 3: island just down the coast. I think it's Cumberland Island
Speaker 3: maybe is owned by the Carnegie family, and that they
Speaker 3: have a home like in a national wilderness or something.
Speaker 3: So like this, this whole area, you know, in the
Speaker 3: teens and twenties, was was very happening. You know, you
Speaker 3: had a lot of commerce and and just yeah, vacationing
Speaker 3: for like, yeah, the wealthy and influential folks. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think they made the first transatlantic phone call from
Speaker 3: Jackyal Island. They they formed the idea of the Federal
Speaker 3: Reserve on Jecko Island.
Speaker 4: This wasn't you know, your average getaway wow, okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: I mean the stories of these different islands off the
Speaker 4: southeastern coast are all different.
Speaker 1: That's that's the interesting thing about them. There's there's not
Speaker 1: really a standard narrative of the history of all these islands.
Speaker 1: People are maybe familiar with hilton Head Island, right, hilton
Speaker 1: Head Island is currently a much more developed and you know,
Speaker 1: I would say financially stable and thriving place than Jekyl
Speaker 1: Island has been until recently. And so you have a
Speaker 1: different situation at Jekyl, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and even more even more close to
Speaker 3: home at Jeckel. You have Saint Simon's Island where you
Speaker 3: have this the you know this the Sea Island Resort,
Speaker 3: Open Forest Frederica. You know, there's there's dozens of golf
Speaker 3: courses right there, and that's just very much more developed,
Speaker 3: uh you know land Jecko Island is a state park.
Speaker 3: You know, we have we're playing golf in a state park.
Speaker 3: And and that's really evident and part of the part
Speaker 3: of what we like about visiting there having worked there,
Speaker 3: is just the tranquility of it. The wildlife. There's deer
Speaker 3: all over the place, osprey's flying over the golf course,
Speaker 3: all types of fish, and you know, gators and whatnot.
Speaker 3: So you really it's really a getaway and I think
Speaker 3: that's that should be the attraction and the focus of
Speaker 3: Jeckyll is the fact that it's not developed. You know,
Speaker 3: we do have a convention center and that's you know,
Speaker 3: like I said, that ship has sailed, but I think
Speaker 3: that we've done a lot to conserve the space that
Speaker 3: we have. And that was part of the thrust of
Speaker 3: the Great Dunes project is we got the nine holes
Speaker 3: from the Dick Wilson course, the only ender golf course
Speaker 3: because we gave away the other nine holes for wetland conservation.
Speaker 3: So the whole thing is wrapped up in you know,
Speaker 3: a nice little package.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's good context. Now you enter the picture
Speaker 1: with Brian Ross. How did you become involved in the
Speaker 1: in this Jackyll Island golf course project.
Speaker 3: It was a public RFP. Brian brought the RFP to
Speaker 3: me one day.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: I we were working together in Pennsylvania. I was doing
Speaker 3: a design and build a type project where I really
Speaker 3: was working as like architect and contractor. We had built
Speaker 3: We'd built a very small crew and had shapers working
Speaker 3: for us, and Brian was one of those shapers and
Speaker 3: he said, Hey, what about this project. And I said, listen,
Speaker 3: if you if you can put this RFP together, because
Speaker 3: they're they're pretty onerous, you know, it's.
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, yeah, a government RFP. It's not you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just.
Speaker 3: A presentation patch together. I don't know if it was
Speaker 3: thirty forty pages or something. And I said, I'll co
Speaker 3: sign it. You mail it, I'll co sign it. And uh,
Speaker 3: that's how we got involved. You know, Brian had been
Speaker 3: there before and knew the potential of it. I really
Speaker 3: had no conception of it. He didn't even show me
Speaker 3: any pictures. He just I trust Brian's you know, I
Speaker 3: his his knowledge of the business. And the first day
Speaker 3: that we got there, I have to say I was
Speaker 3: a little bit like overwhelmed with the amount of work
Speaker 3: that I saw was necessary. And I was like, oh man,
Speaker 3: what did you get us into? How are we going
Speaker 3: to do this?
Speaker 1: What exactly did you see on that on that first
Speaker 1: day on site?
Speaker 3: So much overgrowth, an overwhelming amount of vegetation, vines. Not
Speaker 3: only that, like it's a sensitive you know, conservation district,
Speaker 3: like you're there are restrictions on removing trees.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: We we had luckily since we were literally working for
Speaker 3: the j I A. The you know, the the methods,
Speaker 3: and like the mitigation was easy to work with if
Speaker 3: we had to take you know, a large tree branch
Speaker 3: out that was hanging over a green site. But that
Speaker 3: happened couple of times where we moved a green back
Speaker 3: by about forty yards, but we had this huge, you know,
Speaker 3: oak branch hanging over the green and you know, I
Speaker 3: kind of wanted to keep it because I thought it
Speaker 3: kind of reminded me a little bit of like the
Speaker 3: Harbor Town stuff. But in the in the end, you know,
Speaker 3: we had to lop lop off a few limbs here
Speaker 3: and there.
Speaker 1: And you were working for the authority that that would
Speaker 1: decide whether you could do this, so that it was
Speaker 1: fairlylined the process.
Speaker 3: But we we mitigated, we mitigated whatever we cleared, and
Speaker 3: we honestly we didn't We didn't take out any very
Speaker 3: large trees. It was just all the underbrush and palmettos
Speaker 3: and all the thick stuff underneath the understory needed to
Speaker 3: be just mulched up, chewed out, and and taken away.
Speaker 3: We buried a bunch of it to bring up clean
Speaker 3: sand so to kind of like again minimize our you know,
Speaker 3: our our footprint in terms of hauling stuff off off island,
Speaker 3: we did as much of that as possible to just
Speaker 3: keep everything like in the envelope.
Speaker 1: So how much of the Walter Travis design remained in
Speaker 1: the ground to restore through light touch methods? Like, to
Speaker 1: what extent could you get back the Walter Travis design
Speaker 1: by clearing out some vegetation, widening fairways, pushing out mowing
Speaker 1: lines on greens In other words, was there much in
Speaker 1: the ground that that you could work with?
Speaker 3: I would say there were three green sites that required
Speaker 3: a relatively light touch, and the rest of it what
Speaker 3: really had to be adapted for modern play, just kind
Speaker 3: of making stuff a little bit bigger, like amplifying the
Speaker 3: green site. Just you know, we're expecting you know, twenty
Speaker 3: thirty thousand rounds maybe a year, where there were probably
Speaker 3: playing a few hundred or a few thousand when the
Speaker 3: course was created. So yeah, we're just trying. Definitely some
Speaker 3: green sites were were worth preserving and working off of.
Speaker 3: And then the veget clearing vegetation on the dunes. I
Speaker 3: mean that that really elevates the architecture as well, because
Speaker 3: again more overhanging trees you couldn't see certain sight lines,
Speaker 3: lines of charm, stuff like that. And and of course
Speaker 3: the routing was intact. I mean, we accept our our
Speaker 3: ninth t was the first hole of the Great Dunes.
Speaker 3: So the way that we you know, looped in the
Speaker 3: Great Duns nine, it happens really in the middle of
Speaker 3: our round of golf. We play holes one, two, and
Speaker 3: three on the old Oleander, and then four through twelve
Speaker 3: is the Great Dunes. And and it's a really happy
Speaker 3: accident that it works out that way because it allowed
Speaker 3: it created this seamless transition and an out and in
Speaker 3: routing as well, that really doesn't require more than you know,
Speaker 3: fifty to seventy five yards walk between where the golf
Speaker 3: courses were linked.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you had two different courses. You had the
Speaker 1: Oleander eighteen designed by Dick Wilson, and you basically borrowed
Speaker 1: a portion of that course and connected it to the
Speaker 1: Great Dunes nine to create a new eighteen whole course.
Speaker 1: So presumably you had very different approaches for these two
Speaker 1: different sections of the course. You probably had to be
Speaker 1: way more aggressive on the Oleander portion of the course
Speaker 1: than you were on the Great Dunes portion of the course.
Speaker 1: Where maybe you were doing some more classic restoration work.
Speaker 1: So how were your methods different on these different parts
Speaker 1: of the site.
Speaker 3: Sure, well, the approach was the same because we're trying
Speaker 3: to create you know, a classic, a classic you know,
Speaker 3: appearing Golden age golf course. The method was on the
Speaker 3: odlander was okay, drop the blade and just smash all
Speaker 3: this dirt. There's a lot of dirt around those green sites,
Speaker 3: so you know, either we're just pushing it out as
Speaker 3: far as we can, trying to tie it out, you know,
Speaker 3: and just blend it into the kind of restore the landscape.
Speaker 3: That's like job number one, and then find a green
Speaker 3: site that that makes sense for the routing and the
Speaker 3: you know, the timing of you know, where you're gonna
Speaker 3: you're gonna see these particular greens. And that's what that
Speaker 3: was like the biggest the biggest challenges maybe just taking
Speaker 3: away and just trucking off a bunch of dirt and
Speaker 3: putting it somewhere where you needed it, you know, on
Speaker 3: the first green, for example, a ton of dirt around
Speaker 3: the green site pushed it out, but also we also
Speaker 3: created a kind of push up green there on number
Speaker 3: one to kind of kind of you know, punch you
Speaker 3: in the face a little bit. Let you know you're
Speaker 3: on a Walter Travis golf course. And and it also
Speaker 3: broke up some of the site line so that you
Speaker 3: could have a really focused target. And just the way
Speaker 3: we cleared cleared the trees behind number one, you know,
Speaker 3: it was just this long gun sight, you know, probably
Speaker 3: twelve hundred yards long from the first tee or the
Speaker 3: first fairway all the way to too Green, and we
Speaker 3: decided to just break that up a little bit so
Speaker 3: that you could you could just get a really nice
Speaker 3: target to hit at.
Speaker 1: So this might be a somewhat naive question, but was
Speaker 1: there ever any thought of restoring Dick Wilson's work on
Speaker 1: the non Great Dunes nine And if not, why not?
Speaker 3: I think it was a very fleeting thought if anyone
Speaker 3: had it. I think the work of Travis was just
Speaker 3: valued more highly above that of Wilson's. Not to say
Speaker 3: people really adored the only under golf course.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Wilson was a good architect, There's no
Speaker 1: doubt about that. Maybe this wasn't the best example of
Speaker 1: his work. Well, but where he did good work, he
Speaker 1: did really good work.
Speaker 3: Yeah, except half his golf course was like perpetually underwater,
Speaker 3: so like it just was it just never was created
Speaker 3: in a way that was would be sustainable. Whether that's
Speaker 3: because the water table has risen, we're getting more rainfall,
Speaker 3: I don't know exactly, but decision was really made for us.
Speaker 3: We're gonna, you know, chop off half of the only
Speaker 3: inter course because we can't even get golf carts out there.
Speaker 3: And hey, we really like and this came from you
Speaker 3: know that we had a sense of it during the
Speaker 3: RFP process that restoration was a priority for Jecko Island,
Speaker 3: like going back as far as we could go to
Speaker 3: something that was usable and really like the best iteration
Speaker 3: of the golf on Jecko Island is from the savannah
Speaker 3: to the dunes. And we didn't have the choice to
Speaker 3: go dunes dunes, but you know, if we had a choice,
Speaker 3: hey let's let's marry these two pieces of land which
Speaker 3: were really actually very similar, Like the the thirteenth and
Speaker 3: fourteenth holes on the Oleander pretty much are joined up
Speaker 3: with this you know sandy plane that that rides in
Speaker 3: the in the the back of the sand dunes of
Speaker 3: the primary sand dune. So it was always I think
Speaker 3: it was always meant to be this way when when
Speaker 3: they built the Oleander golf course, the front nine was
Speaker 3: actually a part of the great They combined the two
Speaker 3: back in the sixties when they were building the Oleander.
Speaker 3: When they completed both nines, Oleander went to it's you know,
Speaker 3: its routing. So I find it I find it really
Speaker 3: interesting that again, like it seems like it was meant
Speaker 3: to be to join these two nines together.
Speaker 1: How do you go about restoring a golf course that
Speaker 1: never existed? Maybe that's maybe that's an issue for philosophers,
Speaker 1: but I like, yeah, how do you what's your what's
Speaker 1: your approach there?
Speaker 3: Right, that's the that's the semantical argument, and say hey,
Speaker 3: is this a restoration or not? And and so you
Speaker 3: go about that by really diving deep into the historical photography.
Speaker 3: You look at the aerials and you see, hey, what
Speaker 3: can we do what was actually built and how can
Speaker 3: we maybe place that on what we're doing here on
Speaker 3: those Oleander holes. And Brian came up with a great idea.
Speaker 3: Picked he picked a great green site. It's kind of
Speaker 3: a a T shaped green with a saddle, you know,
Speaker 3: two high dunes and you know saddle in between. And
Speaker 3: so the green sits down low in between these in
Speaker 3: between these mounds, and Brian found a great site on
Speaker 3: our thirteenth Green to recreate the shapes and strategy of
Speaker 3: of what we believe to be the fourteenth Pole on
Speaker 3: the Great Dunes. So that's a you know, the best
Speaker 3: example of how we went about restoring something that actually
Speaker 3: used to exist. But you know, kind of it's kind
Speaker 3: of like the Lido, right, you know, in a certain way.
Speaker 3: You know, they it definitely didn't ever exist in Wisconsin, right,
Speaker 3: So I think it's it fits in a similar category
Speaker 3: with Lido, although we didn't use like the you know,
Speaker 3: the lighter like they did, and you know the GPS technology.
Speaker 3: Ours is really handbuilt and using our judgment, intuition and
Speaker 3: and you know, just trying to find fun features that
Speaker 3: we think Walter Travis would have built if he had
Speaker 3: that had those pieces of ground to work with.
Speaker 1: So you were pulling inspiration for lost from lost aspects
Speaker 1: of the course. So that's that's one possible source that
Speaker 1: you can use. I assume you also looked at other
Speaker 1: Walter Travis courses to get ideas from there.
Speaker 3: Oh, without a doubt. Yeah, we uh, we took our
Speaker 3: executive our deputy executive director, Noel Jensen. We took him
Speaker 3: on a field trip to New Jersey. So we brought good, good,
Speaker 3: good old uh uh you know, buy you boys from Louisiana.
Speaker 3: We brought him up to New Jersey and we took Yeah,
Speaker 3: he had a blast, and we took him to Hollywood.
Speaker 3: We went to North Jersey and we went to Troy.
Speaker 3: Uh I. I have been you know, an intimate knowledge
Speaker 3: with Garden City Golf Club, Cape Arundle, and those were
Speaker 3: like a really good uh subset for us to like
Speaker 3: pull ideas from and and really look at the greens
Speaker 3: and see like what did Travis do here? And so
Speaker 3: going back to an earlier question like what was worth restoring?
Speaker 3: Was there anything that we could just do like a
Speaker 3: light touch on And the the ninth green of the
Speaker 3: Great Dunes, which is our eighth green, it had this
Speaker 3: this deep swale that ran through the middle of the
Speaker 3: green on a little bit of a diagonal. And that's
Speaker 3: something that we all picked up on in our in
Speaker 3: our field trip, was the way that Travis used these
Speaker 3: these swales through the middle of his green. He would
Speaker 3: rotate them different angles and create different playing strategies. And
Speaker 3: and that was far and away the most like intact
Speaker 3: feature that we found that was recognizably Travis uh out
Speaker 3: there in the Great Dunes. So you know, that's a
Speaker 3: great way to uh you know again like build something
Speaker 3: that was never there, but you know, to kind of
Speaker 3: transport yourself and say what would you know, what would
Speaker 3: Walter do?
Speaker 1: North Jersey is incredible.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know, Brian Schneider has done a ton
Speaker 3: of great work there and and it's hard to tell
Speaker 3: now like what Brian's done and what Walter Travis has done.
Speaker 1: So exactly right. Yeah, that's why it's such a relevant
Speaker 1: comparison because Brian Schneider has gone out there and created
Speaker 1: greens using his own imagination that seemed like Walter Travis
Speaker 1: greens but are not actually restored Walter Travis green.
Speaker 3: I couldn't agree more. We have a we have a
Speaker 3: ton of respect for Brian's work, his talent, and like
Speaker 3: clearly like the clubs that he's been working with in
Speaker 3: the Travis space, there's a huge inspiration for us. His
Speaker 3: eighteenth Green at North Jersey was was definitely something that
Speaker 3: we tried to We took a look at that and said, well,
Speaker 3: that's that's kind of a cool idea. That's you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's kind of like a mini beer. It's greed
Speaker 3: we built. We built one on the fourteenth green of
Speaker 3: our course that has like it's a little bit of
Speaker 3: a beer its style. It's a little bit of the
Speaker 3: sixteenth at North Barrick, you know the two plateaus with
Speaker 3: the swale through the middle, and we incorporated a dune
Speaker 3: that like kind of feeds into the green to to
Speaker 3: create this like you know, this two headed you know
Speaker 3: terminus for the dune and which makes for just an
Speaker 3: awesome put surface. It's one of my favorites.
Speaker 1: This is a little bit like dancing about architecture. But
Speaker 1: what for you are the characteristics of a Walter Travis green.
Speaker 1: How would you describe his style of green construction? Because it,
Speaker 1: I mean it is super distinctive.
Speaker 3: Yes, he often has steep transitions between plateaus. Often there's
Speaker 3: knuckles or mounds surrounding the edges of the greens, and
Speaker 3: irregular patterns you could have like these swales that we
Speaker 3: talked about, and I believe you know it's like you
Speaker 3: talk I've heard say before, like if you want to
Speaker 3: build a cool green, like throw some pebbles around and
Speaker 3: you know, like those where your mounds will be, and
Speaker 3: then you know figure out where the water is going
Speaker 3: to go. And it's almost as if he's constantly you know,
Speaker 3: moving mounds in asymmetrical ways around the green and then
Speaker 3: throwing a swale in, you know, doing a maiden style
Speaker 3: green two shoulders and at Troy has an awesome I
Speaker 3: think it's the sixteenth green at Troy there's like two
Speaker 3: shoulders left and right and the green falls away from
Speaker 3: you with the swale right down the center. Troy blew
Speaker 3: me away because I felt like that was the place
Speaker 3: where we saw his work the most untouched. To my knowledge,
Speaker 3: I don't know if the greens were really messed with
Speaker 3: at all. And again, like I see in Brian's work
Speaker 3: some of the ways that Troy has influenced him, like
Speaker 3: the eighteenth at Old Barnwell being like that dead flat
Speaker 3: you know, top of the plateau, like nothing fancy, just
Speaker 3: like this is what it is the eighteenth that Troy
Speaker 3: is like that, you know, So it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: good to study. It's good to study. The Masters.
Speaker 1: Yes, Country Club of Troy is so special because it
Speaker 1: really has been preserved as opposed to renovated or restored.
Speaker 1: And that's partly because they've been working with Bruce Hepner,
Speaker 1: who is not somebody who likes to go in and
Speaker 1: reconstruct he is he is somebody who likes to use
Speaker 1: a very light touch. And as a result, you have
Speaker 1: some very special feeling greens at at Country Club of
Speaker 1: Troy that then do you can tell their original because
Speaker 1: because you just wouldn't probably build greens like that anymore
Speaker 1: in a modern context. And so yeah, that Country Club
Speaker 1: of Troy just an incredible place to study what Walter
Speaker 1: Travis might have actually done in Cape Arrundle as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think the ten and Bruce worked at
Speaker 3: Cape Rundle for a long time. He's worked at Skylar
Speaker 3: Meadows as a course in the Capital region in New York.
Speaker 3: And I think the tendency for restoring architects, you know,
Speaker 3: myself included would be again is to like expand things,
Speaker 3: get pinning locations bigger. And I think that's a function
Speaker 3: of green speed. And you know this, you know usability
Speaker 3: of the golf course, you know, getting more cup locations,
Speaker 3: spreading out where like all necessary things for the modern game.
Speaker 3: But you know kind of problems born by green speed.
Speaker 3: And so I think when you go see the greens
Speaker 3: at Great Dunes, we're not anticipating the greens that are
Speaker 3: going to be all that fast. So we were able
Speaker 3: to build some smaller greens, nothing crazy small, like we didn't.
Speaker 3: Our smallest green is like forty eight hundred square feet
Speaker 3: to Part three or fifth hole. But what we had
Speaker 3: to work with there before, I mean, Garrett, I mean
Speaker 3: the Moon's surface couldn't have been more than nine hundred
Speaker 3: square feet. And even if we like went out to
Speaker 3: like the fhillpad, it was going to be you know,
Speaker 3: twenty eight hundred square feet of actual green like our
Speaker 3: client would never We just couldn't build a green that
Speaker 3: small for a public resort. So it's it's very site specific,
Speaker 3: like what you do. And but I don't think we
Speaker 3: we have a variety of green sizes out there, and
Speaker 3: the stuff that we amplified, like I said, the few
Speaker 3: greens that we thought were worth preserving, we we were
Speaker 3: very cognitiant of that of just like, hey, let's let's
Speaker 3: keep this under control here. No need to make everything
Speaker 3: ninety five hundred square feet.
Speaker 1: So now that you've kind of done this deep dive
Speaker 1: into Walter Travis, like tried to become inhabit Walter Travis,
Speaker 1: you know, like get get his get as close to
Speaker 1: him as possible methodical. What excites you about about his
Speaker 1: architectural style as compared to his his contemporaries.
Speaker 3: I mean, he's just so well known for the intricacies
Speaker 3: of his greens.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know, I get really excited thinking about East Potomac Links.
Speaker 3: You know, the reversible course, and I've seen the green
Speaker 3: plans for that. Mike mccarton from National Links Trust showed
Speaker 3: me the greens plans for that, and so yes, his
Speaker 3: the way that the golf course works, especially so from
Speaker 3: the green back. Uh. In terms of Travis's style. And
Speaker 3: then yeah, thinking golf is you know Travis that was
Speaker 3: his the term that he coined and and about you know,
Speaker 3: uh strategy and you know the shot values and penalty
Speaker 3: and and you know, I think he wasn't afraid to
Speaker 3: make you take some take your medicine. If you hit
Speaker 3: it in a bunker, you know, hit it behind a
Speaker 3: chocolate drop. You know, the game was not meant to be.
Speaker 3: I don't think he was a very I think he
Speaker 3: was a little of a gruff guy, and I think
Speaker 3: that is reflected maybe in his architectural style certainly, like
Speaker 3: if you look what if you go to Garden City
Speaker 3: golf Club, like what he did to Emmett's golf course.
Speaker 3: You know, he really really tough in that that he's
Speaker 3: stiff in that golf course up from you know, Fairway
Speaker 3: bunkering to the to the greens themselves.
Speaker 1: Just the fact that his nickname was the old Man,
Speaker 1: and I think he got that nickname when he wasn't
Speaker 1: really that old, That's right. I think that tells you.
Speaker 1: That tells you a little bit about what his persona
Speaker 1: might have been.
Speaker 3: A cranky, scratch golfer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, when I look at Travis's
Speaker 1: architecture and think about how it can be applied to
Speaker 1: a modern context, it's exciting to me because he didn't
Speaker 1: do wall to wall reshaping, and not many architects of
Speaker 1: his time did. Obviously, you know, Donald Ross maybe did
Speaker 1: that a little bit. SETH. Rayner got close on some projects.
Speaker 1: Certainly the Lido was was just created from whole cloth.
Speaker 1: But Walter Travis's courses really leave most of the natural
Speaker 1: terrain completely intact, and from tee to green, especially there's
Speaker 1: just not that much alteration of the natural landscape. There
Speaker 1: might be some chocolate drops, but you can there's a
Speaker 1: kind of transparency about where the manufacturing happened. You can see, Okay,
Speaker 1: that chocolate drop was manufactured, but the rest of it
Speaker 1: is completely lay of the land. Okay, the green is
Speaker 1: highly manufactured, obviously manufactured, but everything around it is natural.
Speaker 1: And for me, that's that's almost the best of both worlds,
Speaker 1: where you get the natural terrain, but you also get
Speaker 1: some really interesting architecture and not everything is blended in,
Speaker 1: so you can actually see where some of the work happened.
Speaker 1: And for me, that's a that's a compelling combination.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think there's another layer to that in
Speaker 3: that Travis edited a lot of people's work and added
Speaker 3: on to others golf courses. Wayne Styles did a bunch
Speaker 3: of this in New England where he took nine holes
Speaker 3: and added another nine in and you know, didn't necessarily
Speaker 3: move a lot of earth other than creating the green sites,
Speaker 3: you know, digging some bunkers and things of that nature.
Speaker 3: So I think it is very site specific, like at
Speaker 3: North Jersey that you know, they probably had to blast
Speaker 3: a lot of rock or you know, and and it's
Speaker 3: a pretty severe sight as well, so they would have
Speaker 3: had to, like, you know, do some significant fills. But
Speaker 3: the way that he blended it in h is very
Speaker 3: much in the same way that uh Travis's contemporaries did.
Speaker 3: And and the thread here for me is between McDonald, Rayner, Travis,
Speaker 3: and Emmett. I think they were all so closely related
Speaker 3: in the time that they were creating golf courses, and
Speaker 3: you can just see how they borrowed ideas and the
Speaker 3: style and methods of construction from one another. And you
Speaker 3: could almost confuse an Emmett and a Travis sometimes or
Speaker 3: like a Rainer and an Emmett. Uh very you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's it's not too far fetched.
Speaker 1: And they were all buddies, right, so it kind of
Speaker 1: makes sense they were. They were all sharing ideas with
Speaker 1: each other and and maybe even consciously emulating each other
Speaker 1: and competing with each other about Yeah. All right, so
Speaker 1: the Great Dunes Project, I want to get into some
Speaker 1: macro questions about it. Okay, would you call it a restoration?
Speaker 1: Do you have a do you have a term for
Speaker 1: what you did here?
Speaker 3: I think at first we approached it like, hey, we're
Speaker 3: going to restore this golf course. And then the more
Speaker 3: that we got into it was it was just clear,
Speaker 3: like how much new that we were building out there.
Speaker 3: You know. Certain we didn't mess with the routing, We
Speaker 3: didn't mess with Travis's routing, but there were just there
Speaker 3: wasn't anything. There wasn't too much recognizable. Like if we
Speaker 3: just like dusted it off, stripped the side, and like
Speaker 3: put it back, I think people would think that we
Speaker 3: were crazy and they would be very very much disappointed.
Speaker 3: You know, people were being promised a Walter Travis restoration, right,
Speaker 3: but most of that cool stuff had been obliterated either
Speaker 3: in the hurricanes and storms on the Back nine, or
Speaker 3: it had been obliterated by you know, saying irrigation renovation
Speaker 3: in the nineteen seventies or whatever. Right, because we did find,
Speaker 3: you know, these kind of platforms of dirt in the
Speaker 3: center of these film pads. They were like ten to
Speaker 3: twelve inches, like our famous the famous May West hole,
Speaker 3: the our fourth hole. Like the green feels like it's
Speaker 3: sitting in a hollow in a punch bowl behind these
Speaker 3: two dunes. But then there's like this little pyramid on
Speaker 3: in the middle of the green, and we're like, this
Speaker 3: doesn't make any sense, you know, you know, this is
Speaker 3: not what the green shape would be. So we really,
Speaker 3: in all honesty, we restored as much as we could.
Speaker 3: We had historical photographs of that particular green site. We
Speaker 3: have some of the stuff on the back nine, but
Speaker 3: there's there's more than half of this golf course that
Speaker 3: is you know, newly created from you know, putting ourselves
Speaker 3: in walter shoes. Between Brian and I.
Speaker 1: You know, this is an interesting to me because in
Speaker 1: previous conversations I've heard you express the view that there
Speaker 1: might not really be such a thing as pure restoration.
Speaker 2: M H.
Speaker 1: Could you explain that that position to me and how
Speaker 1: it might have led to your approach to this to
Speaker 1: this project.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, in the most doctrinal sense, like purely restoring something,
Speaker 3: you would have to have one hell of a record
Speaker 3: or it would take you an ungodly amount of time
Speaker 3: to like archaeologically peel back and figure it out. And
Speaker 3: you know, we tried to do that certainly. On that
Speaker 3: may West Green. We went down all the way to
Speaker 3: the to the native sand layer and to see how
Speaker 3: deep was the soil layer that was built up upon
Speaker 3: that and by far and away. That green was filled
Speaker 3: more than any of the other greens. It was a
Speaker 3: very unique green site. Some of the other greens we
Speaker 3: found a little bit of consistency, maybe there was you know,
Speaker 3: eight to ten inches of soil, but it was just
Speaker 3: so inconsistent what we were finding in the ground. We're
Speaker 3: just like, well, how can we possibly just restore? There
Speaker 3: was no there was no like consistent way or method
Speaker 3: that we could find to get to the actual like
Speaker 3: elevation that we thought it would be. So what is
Speaker 3: what is restoration? I'd have to think a minute of
Speaker 3: you know, how you could which golf courses have actually
Speaker 3: been restored. You know, I'm working with Hooper Golf Course
Speaker 3: right now, and this is a bit of a hot topic.
Speaker 3: Like the first green at at Hooper is you know,
Speaker 3: the members would love to have backpin positions there, but
Speaker 3: and the green, to anyone's knowledge, has never been altered.
Speaker 3: But the question is did they ever have back positions
Speaker 3: on a green that was sloping you know six to
Speaker 3: eight percent sometimes ten percent in place?
Speaker 1: Six Oh yeah, the whole that's not that's not pinnable,
Speaker 1: Just just to clarify to people.
Speaker 3: But it may have been pinnable when the greens were
Speaker 3: running out of five.
Speaker 1: That's the thing is that like, Okay, at what point
Speaker 1: can it really ever be a restoration if green speeds
Speaker 1: are what they are?
Speaker 3: Right? So you get you getting into this massively gray
Speaker 3: area of are we restoring the intention and the playability
Speaker 3: of the original hole? Are we you know, are we
Speaker 3: going to just turn back the clock and say no,
Speaker 3: we want to play Victorian style golf. You know, we
Speaker 3: think that's cool. We're going to hickorys and cop mounds,
Speaker 3: you know, And I don't believe that's where we're going,
Speaker 3: you know, in the next decade or more in the
Speaker 3: golf restoration game. I think more people we clearly have
Speaker 3: you know, been changing classic designs. Like you know, I
Speaker 3: work at the you know, the lower course at Balterstral
Speaker 3: with Gil, and and I don't Gil in all honesty,
Speaker 3: Gil did not change many of those greens at all.
Speaker 3: But there were certain instances where we we literally had
Speaker 3: to change stuff. They were like clo there were uh,
Speaker 3: you know, closed contours in greens where water was settling,
Speaker 3: and in one instance Gil actually left that contour. He said, no,
Speaker 3: we're not touching it. This thing is perfect. We're not,
Speaker 3: you know. And then another instance where we decided to
Speaker 3: you know, cut you know, cut three four inches out
Speaker 3: of the back of the green to let water flow
Speaker 3: flow out. So, you know, of all my people, I've
Speaker 3: worked with guys who are the best in the business.
Speaker 3: Like it's always there's always a judgment call to be made,
Speaker 3: you know, and maybe Bruce Heppner is a guy who's
Speaker 3: like not willing to make that call. And then on
Speaker 3: certain stages like championship golf courses, members and architects are
Speaker 3: much more willing to make those calls for the same
Speaker 3: of continuing the tradition of championship golf.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, well, Balthus roll Lower is an interesting comparison
Speaker 1: because they're a lot of historical evidence was used, as
Speaker 1: you obviously know, like Gil loves to use historical photographs
Speaker 1: and really try to precisely get back what was there.
Speaker 1: But in the end, those greens were dug up and
Speaker 1: you know, high tech infrastructure was put under them, and
Speaker 1: then they were reconstructed.
Speaker 3: Well they were scanned, you know, they were scanned to
Speaker 3: a very high degree of accuracy. The greens were certainly
Speaker 3: expanded around the edges, and like I said before. They
Speaker 3: they look amazing. They're also expanded around the edges to
Speaker 3: improve pin locations because they want championship golf and the
Speaker 3: greens running at twelve plus and the members want to
Speaker 3: play that every day. You know. It's like Wainfoot, same deal.
Speaker 3: You know. That's what's so was the experience there is
Speaker 3: playing US Open Golf PG Championship golf. So it's it's
Speaker 3: really tough. Like I'm one like going back to Hooper,
Speaker 3: you know, I sympathize with like regular members who don't
Speaker 3: get to experience like the full dynamism of that hole
Speaker 3: at Hooper. It's such a cool hole. The second it's
Speaker 3: a short par five, and the idea is, okay, if
Speaker 3: the pin's in the middle of the green or in
Speaker 3: the back of the green, how dare do you get
Speaker 3: close to that pin? Because the danger like ratchets up
Speaker 3: the more club that you take. These days, the pin
Speaker 3: can only be laid in the front third of the green.
Speaker 3: You're always sure of the bunkers, you never feel like
Speaker 3: you need to take extra club, and the strategy becomes
Speaker 3: you know, dull. So then you say, okay, what do
Speaker 3: we do? Do we just slow all the greens down,
Speaker 3: or do we, you know, take take a few inches
Speaker 3: off the back and restore the playing strategy. And that's
Speaker 3: the opinions vary wildly.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm sure. I'm sure it's a lively debate. But
Speaker 1: these are the questions that I think more and more
Speaker 1: architects are going to need to confront going forward in
Speaker 1: renovation and restoration projects. And I think part of the
Speaker 1: reason for that is that a lot of the great
Speaker 1: courses that could be restored through less interventionist methods or
Speaker 1: with more historical accuracy have been restored, maybe even multiple times.
Speaker 1: At this point, they've they've been restored supposedly right, And
Speaker 1: so what's left is courses that have either been altered
Speaker 1: beyond recognition so that very little remains to be restored,
Speaker 1: or courses that maybe weren't very good to begin with.
Speaker 1: And so the architect is put in the position of
Speaker 1: trying to introduce some of their own idea is and say,
Speaker 1: this is what I think good golf is. If we
Speaker 1: want to make this a good golf course as opposed
Speaker 1: to just a restored or historically authentic golf course, then
Speaker 1: here are some of the things that we need to do.
Speaker 1: And so how do you how do you get to
Speaker 1: that point where you have enough guts basically to say
Speaker 1: this is what I think would best serve the golf course.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean it just you got to build
Speaker 3: up a lot of trust with your client. And you
Speaker 3: know here right behind me where you know, I'm sitting
Speaker 3: in the office at essex Fell's country Club right now,
Speaker 3: it's a it's a job that I'm working on with
Speaker 3: Jim Orbina's who's done a lot of this restoration work.
Speaker 3: And you know, we could open up that conversation about
Speaker 3: you know, Posit Tiempo is too as well, like where
Speaker 3: they did a lot of archaeological type construction method. But
Speaker 3: here at essex Fell's this is kind of a mishmash
Speaker 3: of architects coming through here throughout the years. You know,
Speaker 3: we have record of SETH. Rayner coming through and he
Speaker 3: did did a survey as built drainage plan, and then
Speaker 3: we have another plan of Tilling Hast drawing green sketches
Speaker 3: in the margins of that drainage plan. Rhees Jones has
Speaker 3: been through the golf course and and now Jim and
Speaker 3: I are here doing just exactly what you are alluding to,
Speaker 3: is like creating good golf, you know, usable space.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: You know one thing that we you know, we didn't
Speaker 3: really thought, we didn't really feel like fit the style
Speaker 3: of the golf course here at Essex Fells is you know,
Speaker 3: the Jones group brought a lot of dirt in around
Speaker 3: the greens to I guess kind of create the sense
Speaker 3: of difficulty when you really didn't we didn't think you
Speaker 3: really have to do that. So we're kind of undoing
Speaker 3: some of that, removing the extraneous soil and creating some
Speaker 3: of those sharper features and and fall off that. You know,
Speaker 3: tilling Hast has shown us a lot of his original work,
Speaker 3: and we believe tilling Hass did some original work here. Uh,
Speaker 3: you know, it's just some of it is beyond recognition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you're using your own judgment to put it
Speaker 1: back together, your own knowledge of what telling Hast might
Speaker 1: have done or what he could have done, and not
Speaker 1: necessarily needing to fall back on historical evidence to justify
Speaker 1: your moves. And that sometimes a little bit scary, I
Speaker 1: would imagine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sometimes the evidence just isn't there anymore. It's just
Speaker 3: it's just been you know, warmed over. Uh and and
Speaker 3: a lot of the bunkers get crowded into the side
Speaker 3: of the greens, and that's what create you know, they
Speaker 3: create these like these false roles that clearly were never
Speaker 3: on the side of the greens. And you can see
Speaker 3: that in the when you take it apart, you can see,
Speaker 3: you know, what materials were used, so you can see, Okay,
Speaker 3: somebody did something here, So let's the first step is
Speaker 3: just take it away and tie into what they didn't touch, right,
Speaker 3: and so that you know, so your powers of intuition
Speaker 3: are just by being very careful about how you go about,
Speaker 3: you know, deconstructing things sometimes that and then you have
Speaker 3: to know when to stop and maybe that's you know,
Speaker 3: that's where our expertise comes into play.
Speaker 1: M hmm.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Personally, I think these projects are really exciting because you
Speaker 1: need to make some of these judgment calls. And so
Speaker 1: I'm actually very really anticipating that that the restoration and
Speaker 1: renovation game is only going to get more interesting as
Speaker 1: we go on because the projects, a lot of the
Speaker 1: projects do exist in this gray area.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think, like everything is that
Speaker 3: we're always approaching like our work and thinking how can
Speaker 3: we improve this area? You know, how can we make
Speaker 3: this shot value a little bit better? How can we
Speaker 3: make this uh, you know if if there's too many
Speaker 3: bunkers that's often happens like too many bunkers pinched the
Speaker 3: front of a green right, how can we create an
Speaker 3: angle by removing a bunker and maybe shifting one in
Speaker 3: the other direction, opening up locations and things. So it's
Speaker 3: a very fun exercise. And again you're putting on your
Speaker 3: architectural hat and you know whether it be Tilling, Hass,
Speaker 3: Travis or Emmett, and you're doing your best to incorporate
Speaker 3: their design principles into the way into the lens of improvement,
Speaker 3: design restoration.
Speaker 1: Jeff, it's been very fun talking to you. Thanks for
Speaker 1: spending the time.
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it. Garry a lot of fun as well.
Speaker 3: Hope we can do it again soon.
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Speaker 1: let's get to my interview with Clyde Johnson. Clyde Johnson,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2: A right good to be honest.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to make sure to speak with you, Clyde,
Speaker 1: because you've recently been doing a kind of restoration work
Speaker 1: that is pretty rare right now, but I think might
Speaker 1: become more common in the coming years, and that is
Speaker 1: the restoration of links courses. So, first of all, why
Speaker 1: do you think links courses in Great Britain and Ireland
Speaker 1: have generally not done restoration projects.
Speaker 2: I think generally is that there's an attitude towards golf
Speaker 2: and Great Britain mind as you know, we certainly not
Speaker 2: precious about the history of our golf courses. I don't think,
Speaker 2: you know, golf courses have evolved a lot, especially over
Speaker 2: you know, from the mid eighteen hundreds to the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 2: You know, golf courses, even the great golf courses like Mirfield's,
Speaker 2: evolved a bunch over over that fifty thirty seventy year period,
Speaker 2: depending on the age of when the golf course was
Speaker 2: initially laid out and developed. Yeah, so I don't think,
Speaker 2: you know, there's this there's not that same preciousness towards
Speaker 2: the work. And you know, if we're talking about restoration,
Speaker 2: it's really difficult to take a fixed point and time
Speaker 2: to restore a golf course too. So yeah, I think
Speaker 2: that's a lot of it. Really.
Speaker 1: In Hoursty you mentioned that a lot of British links
Speaker 1: clubs don't really seem to think of themselves as having
Speaker 1: like significant architecture that needs to be preserved right there.
Speaker 1: They instead kind of view their courses as grounds for
Speaker 1: the game, and those grounds evolve as time goes on.
Speaker 1: And that's okay, I've heard you make that point before.
Speaker 1: It's a really interesting point of difference between between say,
Speaker 1: UK golf and American golf, where a lot of people
Speaker 1: in the American golf community are now kind of obsessed
Speaker 1: with the history of architecture and bringing back things from
Speaker 1: the Golden Age exactly as they were. There's there's not
Speaker 1: as much of that ideology I guess that you find
Speaker 1: at especially older UK links clubs. Do you think that
Speaker 1: perception is changing now and and do you want to
Speaker 1: change it?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think I think, I think yeah, I think
Speaker 2: I think it definitely. It definitely is more recognition of
Speaker 2: you know, a golf course is history and past and
Speaker 2: how it's evolved, you know, partly, you know, I think
Speaker 2: most of that really comes from American influence in terms
Speaker 2: of coverage of golf course architecture, you guys, and you know,
Speaker 2: almost talking about this type of stuff more readily. And
Speaker 2: I think, you know, I think British architects as well
Speaker 2: have seen what's been done in America as well, you know,
Speaker 2: in the reference for the history, and you know, wanted
Speaker 2: to incorporate, incorporate that certainly into certainly into thought processes
Speaker 2: an execution of of work over here, you know. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's it tends. It tends to be you
Speaker 2: know when when we I think when clubs look at
Speaker 2: the past, but you know, when it comes to doing work,
Speaker 2: they use it. They're looking at the past for you know, ideas,
Speaker 2: you know, ideas to grab onto as opposed to wholesale
Speaker 2: and exact restoration to that to that certain day. So yeah,
Speaker 2: certain there's there's certainly more value. There's certainly more value
Speaker 2: and knowledge near today history about history our clubs, and
Speaker 2: I think I think that's generally a good thing. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not it's not restoration for the sake of restoration.
Speaker 2: But if there was a good idea that you know,
Speaker 2: if it looked to be a good idea it was
Speaker 2: one hundred years ago and it helped solve a prone
Speaker 2: or it makes some more interest in golf today, why
Speaker 2: why not look at the past and use that for
Speaker 2: inspiration and bring that back into into you know, some
Speaker 2: of some of our golf courses today. And you know,
Speaker 2: often you know no thing, you know golf courses, all
Speaker 2: these you know linkxy features links, you know, links in
Speaker 2: the general lynx environment. You know, it's continually evolving more
Speaker 2: than any type of any of the type of golf
Speaker 2: course really, you know, so there's there's generally a reason
Speaker 2: why golf courses have evolved, and there's not massive big
Speaker 2: blowout e sand scraping bunkers anymore. So you know, when
Speaker 2: you are thinking about, you know, recapturing and reusing these
Speaker 2: historic features, you know, you kind of got to have
Speaker 2: a fairly pragmatic and practical approach and think how you
Speaker 2: can lean on those, but also think how it might
Speaker 2: work and exist today, because you don't want to put
Speaker 2: them back and then watch them being done again or
Speaker 2: filled in in five or ten years time.
Speaker 1: Some of these factors that you're talking about are part
Speaker 1: of why the idea of British links restoration is so interesting,
Speaker 1: because because it's kind of a more towards the beginning
Speaker 1: stages of that movement than a lot of American Golden
Speaker 1: Age clubs are, where restoration has been kind of a
Speaker 1: fixed reality of those clubs and what they're doing for
Speaker 1: you know, thirty years now. And so it's I'm excited
Speaker 1: to get into some specific examples with you of projects
Speaker 1: that you've done at links courses. So, first off, over
Speaker 1: the past four years you've helped with some projects at
Speaker 1: North Barrack Golf Club, the famous and very wonderful Links
Speaker 1: course in East Lothian, Scotland, famous as the home of
Speaker 1: the Radan Hole and the pit hole and Perfection and
Speaker 1: many other holes that have kind of served as an
Speaker 1: inspiration for later golf golf architects. And you know, I
Speaker 1: think there's been kind of a rediscovery of North Barrack's
Speaker 1: brilliance over the past decade or so. It's really risen
Speaker 1: in prominence, I think, or in at least in frequency
Speaker 1: of discussion as far as I've been able to see,
Speaker 1: So have what have just broad strokes what have your
Speaker 1: projects at North Barrick Ben over over the past three
Speaker 1: years or four years.
Speaker 2: So it's it's kind of funny really, you know, on
Speaker 2: some of the stuff we talked about earlier, as as
Speaker 2: Northbury Bay has become more recognized and fought more fondly
Speaker 2: of over the last decade fifteen years, say, the architectural
Speaker 2: presentation of the golf course until four or five years
Speaker 2: ago was actually going in the opposite direction. Fair Ways
Speaker 2: were shrinking greens were shrinking. Bunkers. Bunkers were massively shrinking.
Speaker 2: You know, you know when you rebuild, when you rebuild
Speaker 2: a revetted or sod wall bunker, you know, normally you'd
Speaker 2: chased back in you know by you know, mostly by hand,
Speaker 2: uh you know, shovel out of the old revet wallers
Speaker 2: that decayed, say between three and seven years have been
Speaker 2: the the average lifespan of a revetted wall, depending on orientation,
Speaker 2: exposure to win, amount of traffic, et cetera. You know,
Speaker 2: you know, rather than rather than the older ready wall
Speaker 2: being chased out and the new wall being built in
Speaker 2: the same position, as they're really careful to do at
Speaker 2: the old course in Beuerfield was being built on the
Speaker 2: inside of the old wall. And you know that happens
Speaker 2: over a twenty to thirty year period soddenly something the
Speaker 2: bunker becomes half the size. So you know, a lot
Speaker 2: of you know, a lot of the work has been
Speaker 2: to remedy, remedy therese remedying. The fairway lines were really
Speaker 2: shrunk in. For fairway, for example, was maybe about fifteen
Speaker 2: yards wide. Four or five years ago. As Kyle's Grugshanks,
Speaker 2: the superintendent was taking over and we've slowly been able
Speaker 2: to push that out to thirty thirty five yards kind
Speaker 2: of back to where it used to be. Picking up
Speaker 2: so some of the cool old features that are on
Speaker 2: the right, on the seaside side of the whole. The
Speaker 2: same same with green expansions too, just just getting those
Speaker 2: back as far as irrigation will allow, and then assisting
Speaker 2: Kyle with a lot of the you know, you know,
Speaker 2: he's he's had a four or five year program for
Speaker 2: vetting the bunkers that you tend to tend to do
Speaker 2: North berks, not particularly bunker heavy golf course in Link's terms,
Speaker 2: probably seventy twenty bunkers so I remember correctly, but you know,
Speaker 2: rotating those on a five year program, so twenty is
Speaker 2: twenty ye ish bunkers a year, and then just really
Speaker 2: helping him to recapture the original size of those while
Speaker 2: also dealing with you know a lot of them. You know,
Speaker 2: so there were Dwanhill, for example, the famous or not
Speaker 2: the famous book with the lamb the lamb bunker on
Speaker 2: the left, on the inside of that one that tilts
Speaker 2: away that that become it was maybe three yards three
Speaker 2: yards deep in terms of you know, from the green
Speaker 2: side back to the direction to play floor was floor
Speaker 2: was tilting really hard towards the base of the revect wall,
Speaker 2: which meant, you know, the ball would generally have become
Speaker 2: trapped right at the face and you know, the floor
Speaker 2: to bunker and also deepened with times versus where it
Speaker 2: used to be. So not only did not only did
Speaker 2: it look inconsequential or not be fitting of hold the
Speaker 2: scale or statue of the redown, it was also become
Speaker 2: really playable and difficult for the average golfer. So it
Speaker 2: was remedying stuff like that while thinking about, you know,
Speaker 2: improving the maintainability of those features as well.
Speaker 1: There have obviously been many versions of North Barrick over
Speaker 1: the years, and so yeah, one of my questions is
Speaker 1: always like what how do you settle on a version
Speaker 1: of the course to go back to When you're doing
Speaker 1: things like working on bunkers on the Radan hole, you know,
Speaker 1: what kind of historical evidence do you look at and
Speaker 1: then how do you make a decision about what's the
Speaker 1: best version of that bunker that we want to bring back.
Speaker 2: Well, listen, there's some great obviously his pretty famous holes,
Speaker 2: some great old photographs. There was a nineteen twenty nine
Speaker 2: areals that really helped, like an aerial photograss. There was
Speaker 2: a nineteen twelve plan sketch that actually talked about how
Speaker 2: deep the faces of the bunkers were. So the lamb
Speaker 2: bunker was six foot deep. We worked on the Raddan
Speaker 2: got the color ra Dan bunker, which is the pair
Speaker 2: of bunkers at the front forty to fifty yards short
Speaker 2: of the green. This went that was seven foot deep,
Speaker 2: for example. But then the bunkers on the right of
Speaker 2: the green, which are now free today and have been
Speaker 2: free in number since nineteen nineteen thirties, I think around
Speaker 2: that time, but a long time anyway, that you know,
Speaker 2: in that sketch were only actually two bunkers, so had
Speaker 2: a bunch of great ground photographs. So one you know
Speaker 2: some of the really some of the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: early nineteen hundreds pictures. You know, the rare Dan was
Speaker 2: stabilized by a sleeper wall, for example, but you know
Speaker 2: with time that became a sod walls. So you you're basically,
Speaker 2: you know my approaches, you're kind of thinking about the
Speaker 2: problems that you're trying to solve that exists with the
Speaker 2: existing bunker off feature, and then you're kind of interpolating
Speaker 2: all of the different imagery that you've gotten, coming up
Speaker 2: a solution that kind of fits the problems that you're
Speaker 2: trying to address with, you know, a nod to how
Speaker 2: the bunker used to look and how the bunker used
Speaker 2: to play. So, you know, on the lamp on the
Speaker 2: lamb bunker left of the green, we kind of restored
Speaker 2: that sold wall to the you know, to six foot high,
Speaker 2: really really cut it tight or as tight as possible
Speaker 2: to the green, squaring off the corners. You know, that
Speaker 2: kind of you kind of give that old you know,
Speaker 2: you look at you know, modern revetted softwall bunkers of
Speaker 2: you know tend to people a little bit rounder, and
Speaker 2: that's I think that's really driven by maintenance and wanting
Speaker 2: to get you know, the triplex mo as close as
Speaker 2: close as possible and riding over and tight to the
Speaker 2: top of those lips. And then you know, also also
Speaker 2: raising the floor, also tilting the floor back up towards
Speaker 2: the green, you know, in the old in some of
Speaker 2: the old folk or actually you can clearly see in
Speaker 2: both versions where it was either timber, timber faced or
Speaker 2: so on faced. You know, the floor was climbing up
Speaker 2: into the far car, up the bunk and the wind
Speaker 2: which just doing its thinging like blow around, and it
Speaker 2: kind of looked cool, easy to access, easy to access,
Speaker 2: an easier to play out, while also of looking visually
Speaker 2: pretty intimidating.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let me let me know if this is
Speaker 1: like a good distillation of what you're saying about your approach.
Speaker 1: You're you're kind of you're you're coming in there to
Speaker 1: solve current some current problems with whatever version of the
Speaker 1: course currently exists, problems that numbers are having, or or
Speaker 1: just you know, maybe esthetic problems or problems with the
Speaker 1: architecture in general, and you are looking at some historical
Speaker 1: evidence to find, you know, possible solutions to that problem.
Speaker 1: You're not necessarily saying like nineteen nineteen was the best
Speaker 1: version of North Barrick and that's what we're going to
Speaker 1: bring back, which is a very common approach in the
Speaker 1: US where where where where you know, fed the line
Speaker 1: by by many clubs that you know, this particular year
Speaker 1: is the course that we think was ideal, and we're
Speaker 1: going to do everything we can to get the course
Speaker 1: back from from that year. It seems like this is
Speaker 1: a more complex process where where you have to go
Speaker 1: through a number of different options, see different iterations of
Speaker 1: the feature and kind of decide all right, this this
Speaker 1: is the one that best serves our current needs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I tend to have a fairly tragmatic approach to
Speaker 2: certainly consulting golf cost design. But really it's kind of
Speaker 2: kind of thinking of you really just create, you know,
Speaker 2: problem solving in a creative way, you know, with with
Speaker 2: the nod to history. So you know, you kind of
Speaker 2: especially at place as historically significant as North Barrick, you know,
Speaker 2: you've got to view your role as a custodian. You know,
Speaker 2: you're only you're only there for you already working there
Speaker 2: for a short moment in the golf course's history of
Speaker 2: the golf course has evolved. What you kind of want
Speaker 2: to make sure the pieces or your impact on the
Speaker 2: golf course is sensitive to what's gone before, but also
Speaker 2: can hopefully stand the test of time. So you know,
Speaker 2: you know, I was going to say, you know, going
Speaker 2: back in and recreated a cool feature that was one
Speaker 2: hundred years old that obviously didn't last beyond a certain
Speaker 2: period without thinking about the consequences of that. It's a
Speaker 2: it's a surefire way to have to have to redo
Speaker 2: your work pretty soon, pretty soon after. And there is
Speaker 2: only you know, there is only a lifespan. There is
Speaker 2: only a certain lifespan to a revetted bunker, you know,
Speaker 2: So you've kind of got you know, you kind of
Speaker 2: you're accepting that the next person to build that's probably
Speaker 2: going to be the you know, the greenkeeping team without
Speaker 2: any put from an architect or a designer. That's the
Speaker 2: assumption that you're going to make. So you kind of
Speaker 2: got to set them in the right place. And you know,
Speaker 2: if you do get if some thing doesn't quite turn
Speaker 2: out right, you know, then it's you can you can
Speaker 2: force be a little bit more risky, I think when
Speaker 2: in the links environment, and and you know, building reverted
Speaker 2: bunkers partly because they've only got a short lifespan, and
Speaker 2: you know, constructions relatively easy in the sound, and you know,
Speaker 2: often the materials you're using coming from the sites that
Speaker 2: they've got their own turf now sort of they're using
Speaker 2: for reverted walls, et cetera. So you know, if you
Speaker 2: don't quite get the walk, you know, you lead the
Speaker 2: walk in a little steep because that's what it used
Speaker 2: to look like in the old photographs, but it doesn't
Speaker 2: quite work as you think, or the wind blows and
Speaker 2: the roads more in a certain direction. You can theind
Speaker 2: of just that wall, just to just hold the sandal
Speaker 2: a little bit more. Next time around you do it.
Speaker 2: You know, you look at the mut Field's got a
Speaker 2: mate got putting the best reveeted bunkcause anywhere in the world,
Speaker 2: and they, you know, they've evolved really over seventy eight years,
Speaker 2: whereas North Berwick because of the north the reflect the
Speaker 2: neglects it kind of had, which is perhaps a bit
Speaker 2: of an fair word, but you know the bunkers really
Speaker 2: were because of that neglect over the last thirty years. Say,
Speaker 2: you know, you kind of starting against well a lot
Speaker 2: on a lot of those books, rather than you know,
Speaker 2: having had that dialed in or refined final bunker, if
Speaker 2: that makes sense.
Speaker 1: So, just a couple of days before I'm talking to
Speaker 1: you right now, Clyde north Barrick actually announced that it
Speaker 1: had hired Gil Hants as its new consulting architect. So
Speaker 1: you and north Barrick are parting ways. I just wonder
Speaker 1: when when you kind of reflect on your work there
Speaker 1: now that it's now that it's kind of a complete
Speaker 1: four years of of interventions at North Barrick and tweaks
Speaker 1: and adjustments and things like that. What overall effect you
Speaker 1: do you hope that your work there had had on the.
Speaker 2: Course and really well so it's been a privileged to
Speaker 2: how a golf course like North Beric ando into have
Speaker 2: the opportunity to really recapture and you know, bring back
Speaker 2: the gory some of the most famous holes in the
Speaker 2: in the world of golf course architecture. But I really
Speaker 2: just hope that we've been able to show the members
Speaker 2: what they have and the potential for North Berrick still.
Speaker 2: You know, there's still there's still plenty of bunkers out there.
Speaker 2: We've worked particularly focus was helping Kyle and the Greek
Speaker 2: keeping team on the bigger bunkers that they weren't able
Speaker 2: to really work on themselves. But you know, just to
Speaker 2: recapture the scale of some of those features and just
Speaker 2: you know, just to be able to, you know, just
Speaker 2: show what North Berrick should. You know, there's some, there's
Speaker 2: some and there's still some. There's still plenty some more
Speaker 2: of a low hanging fruit to recapture. Once the ons
Speaker 2: in the club installing new irrigation system, the next couple
Speaker 2: of years. The third Greek, for example, used to be
Speaker 2: used to be massive, used to go tied to the
Speaker 2: wall on the right of that green and back towards
Speaker 2: a bunker short of the green that we've kind of
Speaker 2: just reinstated or restored somewhat that used to connect all
Speaker 2: the way throughout prove to the beach. Believe it or not,
Speaker 2: but we we kind of did a a sensible version
Speaker 2: of that one that kind of went half of the
Speaker 2: way back to the beach and is revetted. But yeah,
Speaker 2: I really really just hope, yeah, that we're well, I'm
Speaker 2: just glad to have you know, shown shown the potential
Speaker 2: of what North Barak should be once again. You know,
Speaker 2: so have got some coastal erosion issues that they're looking
Speaker 2: to deal living and looking for a robust plan, you know,
Speaker 2: conveniency plan really to hopefully address something that no one
Speaker 2: wants to really contemplate, which is, you know, we've been
Speaker 2: a loss of some of the most famous holes in
Speaker 2: Scotland and the world.
Speaker 1: That would be a very difficult architectural project trying to
Speaker 1: you know, if holes get lost or altered, how how
Speaker 1: in the world do you do you design something that
Speaker 1: that can replace it. I would imagine that would be
Speaker 1: a very tricky problem for the club.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, No one who wants to think about losing
Speaker 2: the pit, green, harp, per section, greens or you know,
Speaker 2: you know some of those some of those great those
Speaker 2: great features and holes. But I'm sure, I'm sure it
Speaker 2: will be a sensible, sexible solution from coastal erosion from
Speaker 2: the from the council before them.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's talk about another course that you've
Speaker 1: been working on recently. As I understand it, uh, the event,
Speaker 1: correct me if this is not not the arrangement, but
Speaker 1: I think you're helping Tom Doak or helping Renaissance Golf
Speaker 1: Design implement a master plan at Saint Anadoc Golf Club
Speaker 1: in southwestern England. Of course that people should more people
Speaker 1: should should know about because it just looks it looks amazing.
Speaker 1: Is that the arrangement right now? First of all? And
Speaker 1: then second of all, can you tell me about the
Speaker 1: big project that you completed there recently?
Speaker 2: So say ana doc Golf Club hired Tom to do
Speaker 2: a consulting report in twenty sixteenth I think it was
Speaker 2: the twenty sixteenth, Okay, So I went I went down
Speaker 2: with Tom when we're doing some or we're just planning
Speaker 2: for the work, and his restoration worked at Woodhollspark in Lincolnshire.
Speaker 2: So I headed down with Tom for that consoling visit
Speaker 2: with the idea that i'd help the plumb emplum implement
Speaker 2: that over the next however many years. Yeah, it's one
Speaker 2: of Tom's favorite golf course, is one of my favorite
Speaker 2: golf courses, a golf course that really relies on some
Speaker 2: amazingly diverse and amazingly interesting topography and artificial features within
Speaker 2: the golf course, historically artificial features within the golf course.
Speaker 2: So yeah, really, you know, Tom completed that report twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen, club sat on it for a for a while,
Speaker 2: did a little bit of work twenty nineteen and head
Speaker 2: greenkeeper at a time after that, wanted to try and
Speaker 2: implement some of the work himself over the next few years,
Speaker 2: and then that wasn't successful as the club would have liked.
Speaker 2: So since then been you know, back into continue to
Speaker 2: implement more for Tom's ideas really plus some plus some
Speaker 2: of my own where where needed, but trying to say
Speaker 2: as faithful to Tom's report as possible, you know, the
Speaker 2: big the big feature. You know, it's it's that'sn't that's
Speaker 2: that's another. It's such a great golf course. A lot
Speaker 2: of the issues there that they have, like I said earlier,
Speaker 2: are about getting traffic around the golf course. Very popular
Speaker 2: holiday resort, second home village and area for people from
Speaker 2: generally from stereotyping, generally from the southeast, from London. So yeah,
Speaker 2: so you know, the big the big project this year
Speaker 2: was to restore the famous Himalayas Bunker to something of
Speaker 2: its form of law, because it really was a shadow
Speaker 2: of what it used to be in the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Himalayas Bunker's bunker. Which hole is it on?
Speaker 1: And could you kind of describe the feature, like the
Speaker 1: landform that it's cut into and the scale of it.
Speaker 1: Just give people a picture of this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's the it's the current it's the current
Speaker 2: day six hole. So you kind of you kind of
Speaker 2: tear off from a high high june platform. You can
Speaker 2: kind of you know, there's about tour and fifty yards
Speaker 2: down the hole as a massive let's call it twenty
Speaker 2: thirty meters high sand dune. I'm useless, I'm useless of
Speaker 2: getting the scale of elevated features like that, but.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's big. Basically, Yeah, if you, if.
Speaker 2: You, if you like, if you, if you're thirty yards
Speaker 2: short of that, you've still got one hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: yards probably ish at least one hundred and fifty into
Speaker 2: the green and you and you're laying back on as
Speaker 2: much club as you think you can get on it
Speaker 2: to get over over this enormous dune that's an exposed
Speaker 2: sand feature. From the tee, you kind of you kind
Speaker 2: of you kind of kind of see the green just
Speaker 2: poking out behind, so you know, you kind of know
Speaker 2: what the task ahead is. But you know there's a
Speaker 2: road that runs down there and some rough and the
Speaker 2: last of that there's a low marshy area. So you
Speaker 2: basically got to you kind of got to hug the
Speaker 2: left side of the fairway as much as possible and
Speaker 2: took the natural topography of the fairway can't take it
Speaker 2: into that position. But you know, it's still he going
Speaker 2: over the toe of that june. It's still plenty to
Speaker 2: think about. It's amazing how many people actually end up
Speaker 2: pretty much if it's the intimidation fact or it's the
Speaker 2: need to get the elevation over the June but end
Speaker 2: up in the in the face of that amazing sound feature.
Speaker 1: So how had the Himalayas Bunker evolved over time? What
Speaker 1: did its earliest version look like? And then what did
Speaker 1: it look like when you and Tom came in and
Speaker 1: started working at the club.
Speaker 2: There's there's actually some there's some great there's some great
Speaker 2: photos in the locker room actually that give the paint
Speaker 2: a pretty good picture of the history and you know,
Speaker 2: a bit like they're's not quite as prevalent as Dane,
Speaker 2: but there's lots of there's lots of historic phogra historical
Speaker 2: photographs out there over time. Because of the nature of
Speaker 2: the feature, it might be maybe great Britain Island's greatest
Speaker 2: links bunker feature. It's certainly the greatest in terms of
Speaker 2: scale of any surviving feature that I can think of.
Speaker 2: But you know, in the in the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: it was essentially a dune ridge which on the near side,
Speaker 2: on the Tea side of the of the whole was
Speaker 2: evolving sand dune, you know, some of marin clumps. Nature
Speaker 2: was you know, it was it was barely stabilized, kind
Speaker 2: of exposed somewhat to the prevailing wind from the west there,
Speaker 2: but not completely depending you know, if it was flipping
Speaker 2: around to the south or to the north, you know,
Speaker 2: but bye. By nineteen thirty seven, it really evolved to
Speaker 2: the point where the right side of it was kind
Speaker 2: of you know, it was stretching out quite a long way,
Speaker 2: so you know, it's maybe a forty fifty yard plus
Speaker 2: expanse of sand, you know, and went beyond the height
Speaker 2: of the of the buk itself. But that was kind
Speaker 2: of stretching out to the right, and it's kind of
Speaker 2: been started to stabilize on the right and on the
Speaker 2: left side. It certainly appears like there was some kind
Speaker 2: of effort to at least stabilize, you know, the feature,
Speaker 2: because the feature is kind of like a big at
Speaker 2: that point. By the nineteen thirty senn was like a
Speaker 2: big high ball, and then like a flare, you know,
Speaker 2: like a tail that kind of wrapped all the way
Speaker 2: down to ground level and stretched to the toe of
Speaker 2: the dune on the left side. And then you know,
Speaker 2: by the nineteen eighties it really become you know, it
Speaker 2: was really just high ball that was left a sound
Speaker 2: which was still still a pretty still a pretty impressive feature.
Speaker 2: And you know, if you've got Tom Dobe's Confidential Guide,
Speaker 2: the latest or the reading we did were the Great
Speaker 2: Britain Island to kind of kind of looked like that
Speaker 2: was the you know, you know, the painting in the
Speaker 2: front of that book. And then at some point, you know,
Speaker 2: it's no no photographs from the from that period, and
Speaker 2: you know, the committee within the club haven't given me
Speaker 2: a definite avant on this, but at some point there
Speaker 2: was also a pot bunker that was established to where
Speaker 2: the tail on the left used to go. You know,
Speaker 2: so there's a really puny little poplunker on the left,
Speaker 2: this enormous expanse of sand on the high side, which
Speaker 2: was kind of a really weird juxtaposition, and then you know,
Speaker 2: in the late twenty in the late twenty tens, that
Speaker 2: was filled in, so we're kind of back just to
Speaker 2: or you know, left with this high, high expanse of sand,
Speaker 2: but you know, nothing, you know, a really poor reflection
Speaker 2: on what feature used to be. The greenkeeping team over
Speaker 2: the last ten to fifteen years had tried tried really
Speaker 2: hard to contain the sand at the top, so they'd
Speaker 2: use chicken wire to hold that in which was you know,
Speaker 2: was saidible the sand didn't quite climb as high as
Speaker 2: it used to be, maybe a couple of meters down
Speaker 2: from from the very top. But yeah, it was a
Speaker 2: it was a that was a sensible solution to at
Speaker 2: least the top edge. But you know, the tail in
Speaker 2: the lower half of the bunker were completely lost.
Speaker 1: So what did you end up restoring or building there
Speaker 1: on this feature?
Speaker 2: You know, so on so one of the rigs. So there's
Speaker 2: probably two reasons for two reasons for why the bunker
Speaker 2: had been allowed to get to that state. One was
Speaker 2: foot traffic. You know, all the foot traffic had to
Speaker 2: go round the tail of the bunker on the left
Speaker 2: to get to get towards the appafeat of Green and
Speaker 2: there was a bowl shot that's that made you know,
Speaker 2: that made traffic really squog. You know, there's there was
Speaker 2: a dune on there was a dune that flag the
Speaker 2: left of the fairway that tied in too, uh, tied
Speaker 2: into the near side of that feature, so really new
Speaker 2: like a five ten yard wide piece of space that
Speaker 2: near enough every golfer had to channel through. So that
Speaker 2: was a problem and it was you know, it was
Speaker 2: also you know because of the depth of that bowl
Speaker 2: short of where the tail of the bug he used
Speaker 2: to go. Also, you know maybe six seven eight feet
Speaker 2: deep made it really difficult for the lady golfers. That's
Speaker 2: really really lazily say, it's the lazy golfers that are struggling.
Speaker 2: But the weaker golfer to to play, to play around,
Speaker 2: you know, to lay up into that space, and it
Speaker 2: was it wasn't a great shot from there. So you know,
Speaker 2: my solution was to take off take off the backside
Speaker 2: of that dune on the fairway. He used that material
Speaker 2: to raise the bowl to give the give the weaker
Speaker 2: player a little bit of a flatter space to lay
Speaker 2: up to, you know, if you if you can't get
Speaker 2: around the feature into while also creating some more space
Speaker 2: for the walk for the golfers to get around. So
Speaker 2: that space and twenty thirty yards, but you know it
Speaker 2: would look exactly the same from the fairway and the
Speaker 2: teas it did before because it was all the blindside. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that gave us, that gave the opportunity in the
Speaker 2: space to then recapture the full tail of the bunker
Speaker 2: looks maybe extending twenty yards down to the left like
Speaker 2: it did in nineteen thirty seven. We had to get
Speaker 2: the practicalities right to be able to sell the cool
Speaker 2: part of the job, if that makes sense. So the
Speaker 2: cool part of the job is obviously seeing that bunk
Speaker 2: look as great as it used to. But if it didn't,
Speaker 2: if it didn't work, the question would be how to
Speaker 2: play this? Why we did this right?
Speaker 1: Function and artistry had to had to be matched, and
Speaker 1: you know, I would I would advise that people go
Speaker 1: to Clyde's Instagram account and take a look at the
Speaker 1: at the bunker that Clyde produced out of this process.
Speaker 1: It is really interesting looking and obviously much better looking
Speaker 1: than than what they what they had before, but also
Speaker 1: from the sounds of it, you know, serves the kind
Speaker 1: of functional needs of the golf course. And I think
Speaker 1: this is kind of a representative story in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways, because a lot of bunkers at British Links
Speaker 1: courses have evolved in this way over time. As the
Speaker 1: courses became more settled and more used. What were these
Speaker 1: initially very wild gouges of sand in the Lynx Land
Speaker 1: kind of turn into smaller and more formalized shapes, and
Speaker 1: now we see an awful lot of just like straight
Speaker 1: up circular pop bunkers with rivetted walls, and that's a
Speaker 1: very common look at Scottish links courses. But if you
Speaker 1: looked at these same courses in nineteen hundred, obviously you
Speaker 1: would have much much more kind of random sand shapes
Speaker 1: on these courses. And so, you know, I guess the
Speaker 1: question is when you bring back a kind of more
Speaker 1: intricate shape for a bunker like you did at sant
Speaker 1: Anadoc here, is there some kind of assurance that this
Speaker 1: is going to last, that this is going to be maintainable.
Speaker 2: We're certainly very pragmatic in terms of the upper section
Speaker 2: of the bunk, and you know, we didn't want to
Speaker 2: didn't want to really disturb the stabilize efforts that had
Speaker 2: gone before. And you know, it was kind of a
Speaker 2: shoulder on the left that could have that we could
Speaker 2: have opened up. It would have looked cool and made
Speaker 2: the bunk look exactly like it did on old photographs.
Speaker 2: But that was that was doing a that was doing
Speaker 2: a product, that was that was doing the job of
Speaker 2: you making the bunk. The upper section of the bowl
Speaker 2: really sam swirl around route that blows straight out. So
Speaker 2: I think, you know, that's part you know, that comes
Speaker 2: from experience of just being able to well leaning on
Speaker 2: the experience of the green keeping team that you're working
Speaker 2: with ball, so the experience of being able to read
Speaker 2: and understand Link's features and how things evolved in nature.
Speaker 2: But you know, the perception, you know, the tailor the
Speaker 2: tail of that book actually sits relatively low down the
Speaker 2: face of the dune, so we can be what can
Speaker 2: be more confident that the bunker is going to be
Speaker 2: more sheltered and not blow out as quickly or you know,
Speaker 2: a road. But you know, there's also there also needs
Speaker 2: to be you know, there's there's you know, there's also
Speaker 2: an awareness as well that there's no no bunker is
Speaker 2: ever maintenance free, you know, so we we we've we've
Speaker 2: left a we've left a small RAVET four three fourth
Speaker 2: vet high step on the leaning edge just to stabilize
Speaker 2: that and you know, to stop that collapsing and going
Speaker 2: away really quickly with time. And then I think, you know,
Speaker 2: I think there's an understanding that if you know, if
Speaker 2: the bunker, if it does, if the newly cut bunker
Speaker 2: does start the road in an odd place, then there's
Speaker 2: nothing wrong with having to stabilize that with a couple
Speaker 2: of rows of revet, and you know, like they did
Speaker 2: in the in the turn of the cential, the early
Speaker 2: Unite hundreds, where it's just really practical, you know, just
Speaker 2: like the bunker roading care. Let's let's short that up
Speaker 2: with sleepers or throw some turf down and look cool,
Speaker 2: it's quite cool.
Speaker 1: I want to widen out the lens a little bit
Speaker 1: here and just talk about kind of what's going on
Speaker 1: in the British golf industry and British golf course renovation
Speaker 1: and restoration in general. You know, my understanding is that
Speaker 1: a lot of links clubs, including North Beric and Saint Enodoc,
Speaker 1: have historically not had the kind of financial wherewithal to
Speaker 1: do big, ambitious restoration and renovation projects. Would you say
Speaker 1: that's that's changing right now?
Speaker 2: I think I think certainly. I think certainly the top
Speaker 2: end golf courses is definitely. I don't I don't know
Speaker 2: if it's partly there's more of an appreciation for golf
Speaker 2: course architecture in the UK these days are great Britain
Speaker 2: Island these days, you know, you know, has gonna be
Speaker 2: really easy to ero type. But outside I mean even
Speaker 2: the very best golf course. It would just be like
Speaker 2: committee would decide what was what would what what should
Speaker 2: be done. The head green keeper would be responsible for
Speaker 2: implementing it. But then job, job's done, really and I mean,
Speaker 2: and that's part that's partly why golf courses was so
Speaker 2: well preserved from the nineteen thirties until the court of
Speaker 2: let's say the two thousands on the twenty tens, was
Speaker 2: because because of that attitude, and you know, so you know,
Speaker 2: there's definitely, know, there's definitely there's definitely much more work
Speaker 2: being done now to golf courses. Whether that needs to
Speaker 2: be done, whether as much needs to be done has
Speaker 2: been done, This is is really up to personal taste
Speaker 2: and personal preference.
Speaker 1: Royal Dornick, Higher, King Collins, Dormer. We've seen North Berrick
Speaker 1: obviously higher gil Hands. We've seen englansh Inland English clubs
Speaker 1: start to start to do some more projects as well.
Speaker 1: You know, when when you think of shifting from the
Speaker 1: old approach that you're talking about the kind of more
Speaker 1: preservation focused approach or just you know almost kind of
Speaker 1: like hands off, let's deal with this in house and
Speaker 1: and just maintain the golf course. If there if there
Speaker 1: is a shift from that to maybe something else, do
Speaker 1: you think there are any dangers that come along with.
Speaker 2: That wink skulls specifically, I think it's I think it's
Speaker 2: really important to have great understanding of link skulls when
Speaker 2: you're working on golf courses because you know, really the most,
Speaker 2: really the most important part of a links golf course
Speaker 2: is that you know certainly when they play, they don't pray.
Speaker 2: Golf courses could be regage systems don't play quite as
Speaker 2: firm and as fast as perhaps used to, but still
Speaker 2: that that's thirty yards in front of the green also
Speaker 2: is just as important, you know, for the average golf
Speaker 2: for certainly maybe not the best player in the world,
Speaker 2: but the average golf that that's really where the most
Speaker 2: interest or most important lies, because that's kind of where
Speaker 2: you thinking about lagging you ball, you know, in you know,
Speaker 2: depending on wind conditions, and then also also being able
Speaker 2: to read you know, and understand how much the wind
Speaker 2: can change and how strong it can blow, and how
Speaker 2: you know you know you might see a bunker that
Speaker 2: you might drive past or not even give consideration to.
Speaker 2: Ninety nine times out one hundred times you played the
Speaker 2: golf course in one day, the wind's doing something. I
Speaker 2: didn't realize that bunker was there, but it was actually
Speaker 2: really in a great place and there's kind of a
Speaker 2: reason for that. And you know, understanding understanding that the
Speaker 2: vagaries of links golf, and yeah, the importance of the
Speaker 2: shapes around the greens and how they impact recovery shots
Speaker 2: into the greens that I think is is probably an
Speaker 2: acquiet taste, not that it can't be learned by people
Speaker 2: that haven't spent as which time around links golf, but yeah,
Speaker 2: I think I think that I think that's important and
Speaker 2: just an understanding of, yeah, the evolution that golf courses
Speaker 2: have been on in Great Britain over the last hundred
Speaker 2: years and why, you know, understanding why golf course are
Speaker 2: involved in knowing when knowing when to trust the past
Speaker 2: or when you can take you know, where you can
Speaker 2: think about bringing or you know, introducing new ideas or
Speaker 2: bringing old ideas into the new. Yeah, it's just it's
Speaker 2: that experience I think is really valuable.
Speaker 1: All Right, Well, Clyde, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 1: on the podcast. It's been fun talking to you and
Speaker 1: uh and good luck with your with your future work.
Speaker 2: Thank you it was a pleasure.
Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf was produced by Will Balsam.
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