Speaker 1: Welcome back to part two of the latest episode of
Speaker 1: The Yoke with Doak. In this three part episode, we
Speaker 1: talk with Tom Doak and his associate to Eric Iverson,
Speaker 1: Brian Schneider, as well as shapers Kai Golby and Blake Conan.
Speaker 1: If you haven't listened to part one of the podcasts
Speaker 1: where we detail how Renaissance golf design works, check it out.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we talk about George Thomas and the
Speaker 1: work that Renaissance has done at Iconic bel Air Country Club.
Speaker 1: I've put together some before and after comparisons on the
Speaker 1: website on the podcast page that should help the listening experience,
Speaker 1: So check that out at the fried egg dot com
Speaker 1: backslash podcasts and you should see a variety of old
Speaker 1: aerols and then before and after photos. Enjoy this podcast
Speaker 1: and look for part three to come out on Wednesday
Speaker 1: of this week. Thanks.
Speaker 2: Tom Doak is back and as usual he's not holding back.
Speaker 2: But don't toss the yolk and.
Speaker 3: The famously candied Doak doesn't pull any punches.
Speaker 4: How do I make natural looking contour here of the
Speaker 4: biggest pool in the village.
Speaker 2: I told him to make it flat first?
Speaker 4: Overrated, underrated, rough, terribly overrated over the years.
Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to part two of the
Speaker 1: Latest Yoke with Doak. On this episode, we've still got
Speaker 1: the Renaissance Golf team with us. We've got Tom as always,
Speaker 1: Eric Iverson, Blake Conant, Kai Golby, and Brian Schneider and
Speaker 1: for this edition, we are talking about their current project
Speaker 1: at bell Air Country Club, George Thomas, the architect and
Speaker 1: Southern California Golf. Tom Welcome back.
Speaker 2: Thanks Andy. Nice to be at bell Air.
Speaker 1: Yeah, still nice to be.
Speaker 2: Here, even with the rain.
Speaker 4: This is the first day, I'm told, you know this
Speaker 4: is It's January. I'm told this is the first day
Speaker 4: it's rained at LA since last March.
Speaker 1: I escaped Chicago winter, and it the day before I
Speaker 1: came out here was like the first day above ten
Speaker 1: degrees and ten days or something like that.
Speaker 5: I escaped Charleston winter. There was about five inches of
Speaker 5: snow on the ground when I left yesterday.
Speaker 2: I don't feel bad for you. It's sixty today, I'm told.
Speaker 1: But then I looked at the forecast, I'm like, wait, rain.
Speaker 1: So to kick this podcast off, I think it'd be
Speaker 1: great for everybody to learn a little bit about George Thomas,
Speaker 1: the architect, you know, a revered architect that didn't do
Speaker 1: a lot of work. So Tom tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about who George Thomas was.
Speaker 4: Well, he's an architect that's really well known, even though
Speaker 4: he only did a few courses, which has a lot
Speaker 4: to do with the fact that he wrote one of
Speaker 4: the great books on golf course architecture back in nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty seven. He grew up in Philadelphia. Family was from
Speaker 4: back East, and he was a good golfer, good amateur player,
Speaker 4: and was buddies and played golf all the time with
Speaker 4: a bunch of guys who are now famous as golf
Speaker 4: course architects Aw Tilling Hast, George Crump who built Pine Valley,
Speaker 4: Hugh Wilson who built Marion, William Flynn who followed up
Speaker 4: Wilson and Mary and then built a lot of the
Speaker 4: best courses around Philadelphia. They were just all golfers, like
Speaker 4: this group sitting with me today that you know, like
Speaker 4: to play golf together and talk about architecture back when
Speaker 4: it wasn't really a thing, and just why this golf
Speaker 4: course isn't good enough. We should we should do something
Speaker 4: better than this. And then they wound up going out
Speaker 4: and doing it. You know, each of them on his own.
Speaker 4: All of them had a little input into Pine Valley
Speaker 4: and what Crump did at Pine Valley, and then Thomas
Speaker 4: Thomas his first I guess he was like a green
Speaker 4: chairman at one of the clubs in Philadelphia that Donald
Speaker 4: Ross built. So that's how he learned something about how
Speaker 4: you build a golf course. And his first project on
Speaker 4: his own, or maybe a second, was to go out
Speaker 4: and build a course on his family's farm, which is
Speaker 4: Brian You know what course that is now? Like oh,
Speaker 4: White merch Valley, White Mersh Valley where they used to
Speaker 4: have the tour event in the sixties and seventies, little
Speaker 4: thing now I can't when you go there now, it's
Speaker 4: hard to imagine they had a tour event because it's
Speaker 4: on like one hundred and ten acres. It's really tight
Speaker 4: and there's there's one hole that the green is right
Speaker 4: next to the road. I don't know how they played
Speaker 4: that for a tour event. I don't know if they
Speaker 4: closed the road or what. So he did that, but
Speaker 4: then I don't know exactly what circumstances. But right after
Speaker 4: the end of World War One, after he got back
Speaker 4: from serving in World War One, he came to California
Speaker 4: instead of staying back in Philadelphia, and so he came
Speaker 4: to Los Angeles just as California was starting to boom,
Speaker 4: and when most of this area and now that's so
Speaker 4: incredibly developed, was incredibly undeveloped. I mean, you look at
Speaker 4: pictures of the land that they built La Country Club
Speaker 4: on in nineteen twenty and it was like a ranch
Speaker 4: in Colorado, just no buildings of any kind for four
Speaker 4: miles in any direction, and you know, it's it's so
Speaker 4: hard to imagine now. And then bell Air, the first
Speaker 4: version of you know bell Air. Originally he was going
Speaker 4: to have holes where the Front nine is and then
Speaker 4: holes south of where the Front nine is, which is
Speaker 4: the UCLA campus. And just as they were starting to
Speaker 4: get the project finally planned out and go ahead and
Speaker 4: do it, the landowners said, no, no, well I gave
Speaker 4: some of that land to them to build a university,
Speaker 4: so we don't have that anymore. So, you know, for
Speaker 4: a while, they didn't know if they had enough land
Speaker 4: to bild eighteen holes. And then he found another canyon
Speaker 4: and said, oh, we'll use that canyon there. So it
Speaker 4: was the wild West of golf course design, and he was,
Speaker 4: you know, in on the ground floor, and you know,
Speaker 4: had his chance to pick from some of the best
Speaker 4: topography in the West and build three great golf courses
Speaker 4: that still exist and a handful of others that have
Speaker 4: been badly abused or wiped out completely for other development.
Speaker 4: But La Country Club and bel Air and Riviera are
Speaker 4: still revered as some of the best golf course in
Speaker 4: the United States.
Speaker 1: So with the guys they started with in Philadelphia, Tilling
Speaker 1: asked William Flynn, Hugh Wilson, and you look at the
Speaker 1: resume of courses, and these are some of the courses
Speaker 1: that have best stood the test of time. What would
Speaker 1: you attribute that to.
Speaker 4: I think they had really good foresight in planning them
Speaker 4: and to some degree and given them enough space that
Speaker 4: they didn't become obsolete as the game grew. They weren't
Speaker 4: so tight together that they were a safety issue or
Speaker 4: a liability issue, and you weren't hitting it out onto
Speaker 4: the street, and they had to change the whole thing.
Speaker 4: And then they didn't have enough land to change the
Speaker 4: whole thing. So you know, that's the golf course that
Speaker 4: becomes a mall instead of stay in a golf course.
Speaker 4: You know, some of the Golden Age thing is I
Speaker 4: think the reason we review all those courses from that
Speaker 4: certain time is there's no question when they built the courses,
Speaker 4: they were building them for the really good amateur player.
Speaker 4: They didn't think so much about pro golf in nineteen twenty.
Speaker 4: They thought about the really good amateur player, which was
Speaker 4: Bobby Jones, but it was also themselves. I mean, all
Speaker 4: these guys were talking about were really good players and
Speaker 4: playing a US amateurs and whatever else. And the funny
Speaker 4: thing is, at that time, to build a really good
Speaker 4: golf course for a top flight amateur, you would build
Speaker 4: a sixty five hunder yard golf course. And today those
Speaker 4: sixty five hundred yard tees are the teas that appeal
Speaker 4: to guys that are interested in golf but aren't scratch players.
Speaker 4: They're the five or ten handicappers that love golf and
Speaker 4: support golf financially, and there's a lot more of them
Speaker 4: than there are scratch players. So now all these older
Speaker 4: courses that were built for scratch players are really popular
Speaker 4: golf courses for a much bigger mass of people then
Speaker 4: would have appreciated them, and you know, they'd have been
Speaker 4: way too hard for the ten handicappers in nineteen twenty,
Speaker 4: but they work just great for them now.
Speaker 1: So a Thomas question that we got from Steven Britton,
Speaker 1: he asks. In George Thomas's book Golf Course Golf Architecture
Speaker 1: in America, he mentions a typical course should set up
Speaker 1: as follows two part five, one reachable in two and
Speaker 1: the other not reachable into five par threes ranging from
Speaker 1: longwood to wedge, eleven par fours, four long holes, four
Speaker 1: medium holes, three short holes, which would be driver chip.
Speaker 1: He says, this seems like a really fun setup to me.
Speaker 1: Have you taken any of that idea into your own design?
Speaker 4: I don't have. I don't have that much of a
Speaker 4: formula in mind. I mean I have a broader range
Speaker 4: of I don't care what par works out to seventy
Speaker 4: or seventy two. You know, it's kind of like, what's
Speaker 4: what's happening when I fit this together? I know, if
Speaker 4: I build up, you know, if I if I do
Speaker 4: a routing and it's par sixty eight and now the
Speaker 4: client's not gonna like that, I'm I have to go
Speaker 4: work on that some more. But but other than that,
Speaker 4: I'm not as you know, like I built out of
Speaker 4: thirty five golf courses, I've built maybe seven or eight
Speaker 4: that had more than four part three's. Like Thomas said
Speaker 4: he would build five par threes, So I'm not opposed
Speaker 4: to that, but.
Speaker 2: I'm not looking to do it either.
Speaker 4: And the funny thing is, I don't think like George
Speaker 4: Thomas didn't necessarily feel entirely responsible to follow his own guidelines.
Speaker 4: Bel Air does have five par threes, it has three
Speaker 4: par fives to make up for it, so it's still
Speaker 4: a par seventy golf course.
Speaker 6: Would do those numbers, sorry, Briant. Those only add up
Speaker 6: to sixteen holes though, eleven par four's, three par three's
Speaker 6: and two.
Speaker 5: Part five fives up to par sixty nine though, yeah,
Speaker 5: up to.
Speaker 2: Par sixty nine.
Speaker 4: If you read closely, and he didn't actually build any
Speaker 4: par sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Golf courses, maybe that's a you know, a flaw like
Speaker 1: it's supposed to be par sixty nine.
Speaker 4: More well, one of the things that he did believe
Speaker 4: pretty strongly. And you only have to go look at
Speaker 4: these three golf RSUs bel Air and La country Club
Speaker 4: and Riviera to see it is the first two holes
Speaker 4: are they're either both par fives, or one's a par
Speaker 4: five and one's a really long part four. That was
Speaker 4: probably a par five in the day, and you know
Speaker 4: it's just it's four seventy, so now they call it
Speaker 4: a part four.
Speaker 2: So he started out with two long.
Speaker 4: Holes on all of his best courses, and you know,
Speaker 4: he talked about the first hole especially. You know, he
Speaker 4: thought in terms of match play, so he thought of
Speaker 4: the first hall as a first hal and potentially the
Speaker 4: nineteenth hall. So he described the first hole as being
Speaker 4: like it's a par five for the first time around,
Speaker 4: and you want to make birdie on it, but it's
Speaker 4: a comfortable part five. But if you get back around
Speaker 4: and you're all square in the match at the end,
Speaker 4: now somebody's got to make four on this hole. You know,
Speaker 4: if you don't make four, you're probably going to lose.
Speaker 4: So you know, that was very strong in his thinking.
Speaker 4: And all three of these courses start out the same
Speaker 4: way that the holes aren't exactly the same, but you do.
Speaker 4: You have the par five right out of the blocks,
Speaker 4: and it's a fairly short par five, and the next
Speaker 4: hole is.
Speaker 1: A bear of a par four unless the USGA comes
Speaker 1: in and changes it to four, like they did at
Speaker 1: the USAM this year, but that's another subject for another day.
Speaker 1: Ben Vennon wants to know why did George Thomas build
Speaker 1: so few golf courses.
Speaker 2: He built a little more than people think, and they're gone,
Speaker 2: you know. I think he probably built.
Speaker 4: Twelve or fifteen golf courses in southern California, and there's
Speaker 4: only like six or eight of them left now, you know.
Speaker 4: And some of them are the munis that are You
Speaker 4: can barely tell who designed them or that there was
Speaker 4: any design quality in them at all, because so little
Speaker 4: of it's left.
Speaker 2: But I think I think he did so few because
Speaker 2: he didn't.
Speaker 4: I mean, I I don't know his biography well enough
Speaker 4: to know. I've read Jeff Sackel for his biography, but
Speaker 4: it's been a while since I really read all the
Speaker 4: personal stuff. He didn't travel very far, so he didn't,
Speaker 4: you know. He wasn't like McKenzie working all over the
Speaker 4: globe and spending three days on somewhere and then going
Speaker 4: away and never.
Speaker 2: Seeing it again. I mean, what he did do.
Speaker 4: Was close to home, and he stuck around and spent
Speaker 4: time on which is part of the reason they all
Speaker 4: turned out so good. But so but he worked in
Speaker 4: a fairly limited area and really only from nineteen twenty
Speaker 4: to he died in nineteen thirty two, so he didn't
Speaker 4: have that long of an active career.
Speaker 1: He I think I remember reading that he was really
Speaker 1: like his family was really wealthy too, so it wasn't
Speaker 1: like a business kind of like McDonald, he didn't need
Speaker 1: to do design for a business.
Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah?
Speaker 1: So, uh, Jordan Benson wants to know how did the
Speaker 1: bel Air job come about?
Speaker 2: That's an interesting story. I was doing an interview for.
Speaker 4: The second volume of the Confidential Guide that covers, you know,
Speaker 4: all the California courses as part of the Americas, but
Speaker 4: you know the places that you can play in the Winner,
Speaker 4: so California is part of that. And I think it
Speaker 4: was with Rand Morrisset from Golf Clubattles. I can't remember
Speaker 4: for sure, but somebody asked me, so, if you could
Speaker 4: renovate any one of the golf courses in this book,
Speaker 4: what one would you do? And you know, I've learned
Speaker 4: over the years, don't answer those questions because because somebody
Speaker 4: is the consultant there now and they're not going to
Speaker 4: appreciate it very much.
Speaker 2: And and I'm not really I don't campaign for work.
Speaker 4: I mean, we consult a lot of places. We get
Speaker 4: a lot of calls about consulting. So I don't think
Speaker 4: I want to consult there. I want to poach that
Speaker 4: job away from whoever's there. I never try to do that.
Speaker 4: But because it was a friend asking me the question,
Speaker 4: I just blurted out, bel air, you know, I just
Speaker 4: it's one of the coolest routings that I've ever seen,
Speaker 4: and it just seems like it's a mess.
Speaker 2: Now and I don't understand the direction that they're going.
Speaker 4: And I said that absolutely, not thinking that I was
Speaker 4: they were going to call me about it, because I
Speaker 4: didn't think I knew anybody here. I had only played
Speaker 4: the golf course twice and not for fifteen or twenty years,
Speaker 4: and I, as far as I knew, I didn't know
Speaker 4: any members. In fact, I knew two members on the
Speaker 4: Green Committee, and the next Green Committee meeting, they both
Speaker 4: took that interview and plopped it down on the desk
Speaker 4: and said, why aren't we.
Speaker 2: Talking to this guy?
Speaker 4: You know, we're getting ready to do a bunch of
Speaker 4: work on the golf course, and we've been doing work
Speaker 4: on it for years and it doesn't seem to be.
Speaker 2: Getting any better. Well, let's get a second opinion.
Speaker 4: So they asked me to come out and play golf
Speaker 4: with him, just give them perspective on what they were
Speaker 4: doing and what I thought. And you know, Eric came
Speaker 4: out with me and I played. That's one of the
Speaker 4: worst rounds of call.
Speaker 2: But I played a long time.
Speaker 4: I sure didn't get the job because I impressed him
Speaker 4: with my playing ability.
Speaker 2: I don't think I made any pars all day.
Speaker 4: And you know, and we went back in after we
Speaker 4: were done playing and sat down and they asked me, well,
Speaker 4: what do you think of the golf course? And I said,
Speaker 4: I just don't understand. You talk so much about George
Speaker 4: Thomas and everybody thinks of it as one of his
Speaker 4: best golf courses, and yet the most famous holes had
Speaker 4: been gone for fifty years. Everybody talks about the May
Speaker 4: West Hole, and you blew that up in nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 4: you know. And and there's you know, there's an aerial
Speaker 4: photo on the wall right behind you of what this
Speaker 4: golf course looked like when George Thomas built it, and
Speaker 4: it doesn't look anything like that now. And I don't
Speaker 4: understand why you're what direction you're trying to go besides
Speaker 4: that one. And I had to tell that story to
Speaker 4: a few more people a few more times. But that's
Speaker 4: basically how we wound up working.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned the routing and being one of the
Speaker 1: most spectacular routings. We talked about, you know, routing in
Speaker 1: the last episode, and you're writing a book about routing.
Speaker 1: So what about bel Air's routing is so impressive.
Speaker 4: Well, there's there's a lot of nuance to it that
Speaker 4: I don't really have time to get into in that
Speaker 4: much detail, but just just the general description of how
Speaker 4: this golf course works. I mean, there is nothing else
Speaker 4: like it in the world anywhere, you know, and I
Speaker 4: don't really understand exactly why, because it's been here for
Speaker 4: ninety years and a lot of people have seen it.
Speaker 4: They could have tried to do some of these things,
Speaker 4: and nobody really as So it starts out, you know,
Speaker 4: the clubhouse is on a ridge, and the first tee
Speaker 4: is right out the clubhouse porch basically, and you're looking
Speaker 4: down into Los Angeles and you play down the hill
Speaker 4: part five, going straight toward USIL and a big broad area,
Speaker 4: and then you go back. The second hole kind of
Speaker 4: winds back into a narrow area, and you know by
Speaker 4: the time you get to the third is like a
Speaker 4: narrow little Part three.
Speaker 2: Hole in a canyon.
Speaker 4: And when you get to the fifth green, another part three,
Speaker 4: you're in the end of a canyon and you're like,
Speaker 4: where am I going? I don't see another hole, And
Speaker 4: you know behind the green on the right there's a
Speaker 4: tunnel and you either walk or take your golf cart
Speaker 4: through the tightest tunnel that you can possibly imagine, because
Speaker 4: they designed a golf cart around fitting through the tunnels.
Speaker 4: And you tunnel under this ridge for like one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty yards or something like that. It's a long tunnel,
Speaker 4: and you come out in a valley on the other side,
Speaker 4: and oh, there's another golf ho there's actually two, six
Speaker 4: and seven.
Speaker 2: And then you work back up.
Speaker 4: To the to the ninth green, and now you're in
Speaker 4: another canyon and the clubhouse is right there and there's
Speaker 4: no place to go again. And this one's really tight.
Speaker 4: I mean there's like barely room for a green in
Speaker 4: the canyon and there's nowhere else to go. You're like, okay, oh,
Speaker 4: there's another tunnel, and you go into the tunnel and
Speaker 4: you go halfway through the tunnel and you take an
Speaker 4: elevator up into the clubhouse and you can walk out
Speaker 4: the door and you're on the tenth tee hitting over
Speaker 4: another canyon on the other side of the clubhouse with
Speaker 4: a suspension bridge from high to high to get you
Speaker 4: over to the other side. There is nothing else I
Speaker 4: can tell you. You know, Eric and I have seen
Speaker 4: a lot of crazy things built in Japan and Korea
Speaker 4: where they spent hundreds of million of dollars putting a
Speaker 4: golf course in canyons.
Speaker 2: In the mountains. They never did anything like that, never
Speaker 2: even thought of.
Speaker 1: Let's say it goes back to the story he said
Speaker 1: earlier about Thomas's background, is how they just found another
Speaker 1: canyon and they said, oh, we can build.
Speaker 2: A golf course.
Speaker 4: Well, yeah, I mean the story of the routing is
Speaker 4: that he thought he was stuck and didn't have a way,
Speaker 4: you know, he didn't have enough land, and they had
Speaker 4: never looked where the back nine was. And then when
Speaker 4: he thought he was stuck, he was up there with
Speaker 4: Billy bell and actually there was you know, there was
Speaker 4: a third co designer at bell Air for a little bit.
Speaker 4: I can't tell how much he actually had to do
Speaker 4: with it, who was another great amateur player in California.
Speaker 4: Jack Neville, the guy who designed Pebble Beach, or it
Speaker 4: gets the credit for designing Pebble Beach, was involved at
Speaker 4: bell Air too, And they were all standing on the
Speaker 4: ridge where the clubhouse is, and Thomas said, do you
Speaker 4: think he could play like over it? You know, kid
Speaker 4: across this canyon and played with a green up there.
Speaker 4: And they tried with whatever they had around to hit
Speaker 4: a ball, and they were like, yeah, I think that'll work.
Speaker 4: And so they went over there and then they look
Speaker 4: from you know, now you have to go across a
Speaker 4: road to the eleventh tee, but you didn't back then.
Speaker 4: And you know, once you get just over that ridge
Speaker 4: where ten green is, there is that great valley where
Speaker 4: eleven through sixteen are, and they'd never really looked up
Speaker 4: in there at all. And that valley is really tight,
Speaker 4: like it's by by the standards we used to lay
Speaker 4: out golf courses. Now, it's not wide enough to have
Speaker 4: a hole going up in a hole coming back in
Speaker 4: that valley.
Speaker 2: But they got him in there and it works just fun.
Speaker 1: We're going to kick this to the crew, the guys
Speaker 1: living on site, and we talked about in the previous
Speaker 1: part about how you guys really become student of the
Speaker 1: architect when you're doing restorations and your job becomes knowing
Speaker 1: all this stuff. So, what are some of the interesting
Speaker 1: facts or concepts or principles that you've kind of learned
Speaker 1: since being here uncovered during the restoration with Thomas and
Speaker 1: bel Air, Eric, you want to go first?
Speaker 3: Sure, The one thing I think we've all kind of
Speaker 3: marveled at as we've worked on some of the holes
Speaker 3: that had been more undone over the years than others.
Speaker 3: You know, some of them are just you maybe a
Speaker 3: different bunker configuration around the green and modified the green
Speaker 3: a little bit, where others the green had been moved,
Speaker 3: you know, thirty forty five yards like the fifth, you know,
Speaker 3: and we just got done kind of putting the landforms
Speaker 3: back together as we kind of piece that together through
Speaker 3: the photographs and kind of the evidence that's in the ground,
Speaker 3: and just how well everything instantly ties in, falls into
Speaker 3: place and just fits without really us trying that hard
Speaker 3: or thinking, wow, we got to just like dream up
Speaker 3: this old fifth hole based on a couple of photographs.
Speaker 3: There's really not as many ground level photographs photographs as
Speaker 3: we would like to have. We have a couple of
Speaker 3: good ones of that hole. But it's like, well, you know,
Speaker 3: you kind of piece together the evidence from the map,
Speaker 3: it's like, well, the back edge has to be about here.
Speaker 3: It's this many feet long, this many feet wide. It
Speaker 3: looks like it, you know, the back of the right
Speaker 3: bunker tighten off of this ridge. And you just kind
Speaker 3: of start filling in all the blanks with the things
Speaker 3: that you know, and and it's like, man, yep, that's
Speaker 3: a hole that looks pretty good. That's going to be
Speaker 3: that's got to be pretty close to what it was
Speaker 3: because it fits so well, you know.
Speaker 4: And one more thing about that hole, in addition to
Speaker 4: fitting so well on every other level.
Speaker 2: They moved that green.
Speaker 4: In the sixties, I guess when they did all the
Speaker 4: other work. So they lengthened the part three. They moved
Speaker 4: the green like back thirty five yards and put it,
Speaker 4: you know, up against the wall of the canyon further back.
Speaker 4: So they took the old green at you know, they
Speaker 4: cut the old green away because you couldn't see the
Speaker 4: new greens so well without cutting out in front of it.
Speaker 4: That's why we had to put it back but one
Speaker 4: of the things that it prevented. When I got here.
Speaker 4: You know this, the superintendent, Brian Sullivan, had been here
Speaker 4: for like twenty five years, and he tried to convince
Speaker 4: him to redo the green, rebuild the greens, and you
Speaker 4: know they're they're all they were all poetic greens, and
Speaker 4: he wanted, you know, the club was like, we should
Speaker 4: put new bankrast greens out there, at least do that,
Speaker 4: and Brian said, but I got one problem. I can't
Speaker 4: grow bent grass on the fifth green where it is
Speaker 4: now because it's up it's back up against the canyon,
Speaker 4: and it doesn't get enough sunlight in the winter. And
Speaker 4: I just you know, I could plant bent grass on it,
Speaker 4: but it'll fade, It'll just be poetic. And it would
Speaker 4: have been hard to convince the club to go to
Speaker 4: restore this much shorter Part three if I didn't know
Speaker 4: that it was also out in the sun where they
Speaker 4: could grow bent grass.
Speaker 2: So not only did.
Speaker 4: It fit in every other level, you could actually grow
Speaker 4: grass on it, which apparently the guy that redid it
Speaker 4: in the sixties didn't think about or care about as much.
Speaker 1: Blake, well, have you picked up.
Speaker 6: Well, I had obviously heard of George Thomas had read
Speaker 6: his book Golf Architecture in America, and I'd seen a
Speaker 6: few holes at Riviera on one of my previous stints
Speaker 6: in southern California, but honestly didn't know his golf courses
Speaker 6: or his style intimately before coming here. So I was
Speaker 6: working at a job in Mexico, and Eric asked if
Speaker 6: I would want to help out here. So I ordered
Speaker 6: the Captain Jeff Shackelford's book about George Thomas and had
Speaker 6: my girlfriend bring it and Golf Architecture to America down
Speaker 6: to Mexico so I could just brush up on any
Speaker 6: information Eric shared with me on dropbox, all the info
Speaker 6: that they had. So it was just a matter of
Speaker 6: learning about the place and what Bellair is and the
Speaker 6: things that didn't really stick with me then, but now
Speaker 6: that we're doing the work is a lot of these
Speaker 6: bunkers are removed from the greens more than we would
Speaker 6: probably do on a new course. The right bunker on
Speaker 6: eleven Green is probably twenty feet from twenty feet from
Speaker 6: the green, which you just wouldn't think to do. And
Speaker 6: there's a handful of other examples like that, and the
Speaker 6: other thing he did in his drawings in his book.
Speaker 6: He had a lot of fair way behind the greens.
Speaker 6: That was a place where he encouraged people to miss
Speaker 6: was through the green or belong And you may have
Speaker 6: a chip that's four percent running away from you, but
Speaker 6: you're not in a bunker and you're on short grass.
Speaker 6: So seeing those two things sort of come to light
Speaker 6: once we got into the ground was cool.
Speaker 3: And following up on that kind of the observation about
Speaker 3: the bunkers and a lot of cases being far from
Speaker 3: the green, not all of them, some of them ate
Speaker 3: in pretty close, but that and that's a big pitfall
Speaker 3: of like really judging anything based on photographs. And that's
Speaker 3: more that rings more true today than at any other
Speaker 3: time that anybody's gave a crap about golf course architecture.
Speaker 3: Is when you start putting all the piece together and
Speaker 3: how what seemed like a fairly benign contour all of
Speaker 3: a sudden makes all the difference in the world. Like
Speaker 3: all the photo evidence was pretty clear that the bunker
Speaker 3: that Blake referred to that's well off the green on
Speaker 3: the eleventh, well, there's a pretty good contour between the
Speaker 3: bunker and the green, and it's not a deep green.
Speaker 3: At all, and if you you know, if you place
Speaker 3: safely right off the tee, the green is shallower yet
Speaker 3: and you kind of need to land it near the
Speaker 3: front edge, and that's where that little contour is. So
Speaker 3: even though the sand is twenty yards away from the green,
Speaker 3: it's just it's four or five feet away from the
Speaker 3: green where if you don't carry that pretty good likelihood
Speaker 3: of rolling down into the bunker.
Speaker 1: I think that's something that the average golfer doesn't understand,
Speaker 1: is it's not just the hazard or the bunker in
Speaker 1: this case, but it's the kind tours on the other
Speaker 1: side of the hazard that really also have a huge
Speaker 1: effect on the strategy of the hole. Is on that
Speaker 1: whole playing left you all of a sudden't have a
Speaker 1: really nice, like almost kicker slove to just run it
Speaker 1: in there to that shallow green.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good point, And I think a lot
Speaker 3: of times the strategy gets kind of analyzed and really
Speaker 3: black and white terms as opposed to you know, I
Speaker 3: think one of the things we all appreciate working for
Speaker 3: Tom is I think, not to put words in his mouth,
Speaker 3: but I think we work more in shades of gray,
Speaker 3: like maybe you know it shouldn't be just a flashing
Speaker 3: neon light, which where you should go every day. You know,
Speaker 3: it's like that green sits lengthwise if you do go left,
Speaker 3: but that's also a deep nasty bunker in front of it,
Speaker 3: and that one does cut into the green. So even
Speaker 3: though you know it depends on the person, it depends
Speaker 3: on the day. You know, do you like that depth
Speaker 3: of the green on that angle and carrying the bunker
Speaker 3: comfortably or would you rather kind of have a little
Speaker 3: bit more of a of an approach that's you know,
Speaker 3: you don't have to flirt with any bunkers, but it's
Speaker 3: a little shallower so you know, it's not a cut
Speaker 3: and dry gain a huge advantage by going here. It
Speaker 3: varies day to day, whole locations and who's playing, So
Speaker 3: that's that's a really cool part of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not the best strategy is not the same
Speaker 4: for everybody. And you got there's so many modern holes
Speaker 4: that they'll give you two options from the tee, but
Speaker 4: there's the one option that requires a carry that most
Speaker 4: people can't make, and that's the one that gives you
Speaker 4: the easier approach shot. You know, the guy who could
Speaker 4: bomb it over everything and hit wedge to the green,
Speaker 4: he gets the good angle, and then the the ninety
Speaker 4: seven that can't do that and have to play out
Speaker 4: to the one side. They have a really tough angle
Speaker 4: to the green. And if they can't hit a high
Speaker 4: furn with a fade, they can't hold the green.
Speaker 1: Is it something I've noticed with your course is if
Speaker 1: you take the aggressive line, you don't always have the
Speaker 1: the You have to choose whether you want the better
Speaker 1: angle or the shorter shot.
Speaker 2: It. Yes, that's a Pete die thing I learned from him.
Speaker 5: Brian, you guys are touching on one of my favorite
Speaker 5: things about Thomas and that it goes back to his
Speaker 5: book again that one of the things I love about
Speaker 5: that book are his sketches. And you know, there are
Speaker 5: a lot of sketches of the work he'd done himself,
Speaker 5: but he's also got these theoretical hypothetical sketches of these
Speaker 5: wild you know, multiple route alternate fairway holes that are
Speaker 5: oftentimes really tough to put into practice. But he had
Speaker 5: landscapes here that we're suited to that with the barankas
Speaker 5: a riviera in La and there's some of that at
Speaker 5: Lair and that's you know, the work that's being done
Speaker 5: now at bell Air on holes like the eleventh, which
Speaker 5: you just talked about, where you know Eric mentioned and
Speaker 5: you play out to the right side and you've got
Speaker 5: a shallow target, but when you stand on the tee,
Speaker 5: that right side is what you see. So it's really
Speaker 5: comfortable just to play straight away from the tee, but
Speaker 5: you're gonna leave yourself a tougher angle, you know, to
Speaker 5: get to left side, which you mentioned Andy is blind
Speaker 5: over some trees over a hill and you're you know,
Speaker 5: there's a little bit of trouble down the left if
Speaker 5: you pull it, but taking that risk, you're opening up
Speaker 5: a better angle into the length of the green if
Speaker 5: you're more comfortable with that. And the sixth hole is
Speaker 5: another one six and seven where some trees have been
Speaker 5: removed and coming down the hill. In the seventh the
Speaker 5: green has been restored and it's almost a guitar pick
Speaker 5: shaped green, kind of triangular on the top of the
Speaker 5: hill where the hole can be tucked back left or
Speaker 5: back right, and you know, and arroyo is going to
Speaker 5: be restored down the center of the hole where you
Speaker 5: can play left or right of that and use these
Speaker 5: big hillsides on either side to find your angle to
Speaker 5: get at either of those back corners off the tee,
Speaker 5: and you know those alternate route alternate fairway holes or
Speaker 5: something that I always think about with his work, and
Speaker 5: there aren't many of them. Riviera's got a few, LA's
Speaker 5: got a few, and bel Air's got a few, but
Speaker 5: I think they're fascinating. And then he took these theoretical,
Speaker 5: really complex multiple option holes and he found ways to
Speaker 5: adapt that into the landscape he was.
Speaker 2: Working with here.
Speaker 1: It would be like ad at Riviera for people that
Speaker 1: might know the Riviera Marcus, it's on TV every year.
Speaker 2: Yep.
Speaker 7: Kaya, it's more of a defined choice on that one.
Speaker 2: You're like one side or the other.
Speaker 7: Yeah. As we've been talking through this, I'm getting a
Speaker 7: little nostalgic because this is reminding me of kind of
Speaker 7: how I ended up here in the first place. Nineteen
Speaker 7: ninety seven, I was doing some of my own work.
Speaker 7: I had done a few golf courses on my own.
Speaker 7: Was very fortunate at the time. I was young, but
Speaker 7: there was a lot of work going on, maybe building
Speaker 7: four or five hundred courses a year, and they'd hire
Speaker 7: some young punk like me to do it. I was
Speaker 7: sitting in my house. I ordered The Captain from Jeff Shackelford.
Speaker 7: I got in the mail. It was snowing in Saint
Speaker 7: Louis in February.
Speaker 2: Look.
Speaker 7: I read the book in one night, and I was like,
Speaker 7: this is really interesting. I just wasn't hadn't been exposed
Speaker 7: to any of that kind of stuff. And I literally
Speaker 7: got in my car the next morning and drove to California.
Speaker 7: I was like, yeah, I'm going out there, but now
Speaker 7: I did.
Speaker 2: Look.
Speaker 7: The tournament was at Riviera Good coming up that week,
Speaker 7: and I was like, I can get out there. I'm
Speaker 7: gonna go check that place out. So I drove out here.
Speaker 7: I went to Riviera for four days and just looked
Speaker 7: at that golf course and I was kind of like,
Speaker 7: holy crap, this is like I'm just my mind was
Speaker 7: sort of just absorbing, like a sponge as architecture. And
Speaker 7: I tried to actually come to bel Air and they
Speaker 7: wouldn't let me in the gate, so I didn't get
Speaker 7: to see it. I saw a few holes through the fence,
Speaker 7: and after that I ended up driving up to Cyprus.
Speaker 7: I had read the Spirit of Saint Anne as well,
Speaker 7: and so I ended up driving up to Pebble Beach,
Speaker 7: and I went to Cyprus Point, went to Pebble Beach
Speaker 7: and looked at all that stuff. And at the time
Speaker 7: was at Pebble Beach, I was in a golf shop
Speaker 7: and the guy had golf archarchitecture in America. And I
Speaker 7: spent eight hundred and fifty dollars on a book, and
Speaker 7: unfortunately it came out the next year, a reprint from
Speaker 7: fifty bucks, so that wasn't a really good investment. But
Speaker 7: anyway I read. I ended up reading that book as well,
Speaker 7: and that same trip, and that was in ninety seven,
Speaker 7: and that spring I finished up a golf course I
Speaker 7: was working on, and nine months later I was working
Speaker 7: for Tom at a patche stronghold. So George Thomas and
Speaker 7: this place and his work had a huge impact on
Speaker 7: what of getting me really an architecture and getting me
Speaker 7: out of my little comfort zone and getting into a
Speaker 7: better architecture.
Speaker 2: Working with Tom.
Speaker 1: Did your work change then after that?
Speaker 7: Absolutely absolutely? I was already at the time I knew
Speaker 7: I needed. I was thinking different things, and I read
Speaker 7: Tom's Anatomy of the Golf Course, and I was thinking
Speaker 7: different things. I was working with my dad and I
Speaker 7: knew I was like, I'm not really on the same page.
Speaker 2: I got to do something different.
Speaker 1: And what was the worst thing that you were doing
Speaker 1: before that trip that you immediately ceased?
Speaker 7: You know, I didn't wasn't doing anything terrible. I was
Speaker 7: learning as I.
Speaker 4: Was the names of all these courses that you were
Speaker 4: doing on your own that we never hear about.
Speaker 7: One's called Indian Springs. It's in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 7: in Illinois. One's been changed. But there's a few others.
Speaker 7: I'm not going to mention their names, but I'm trying
Speaker 7: to think what I was doing that I learned, you know,
Speaker 7: I think it was just less scale, less willingness to
Speaker 7: be bold. You know, you kind of were doing just, oh,
Speaker 7: we don't want to do too much, and that's kind
Speaker 7: of crazy, and let's just kind of keep it simple.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 7: That's actually one of the thing. You've talked about a
Speaker 7: lot of things that you've learned from this golf course,
Speaker 7: and everybody's already kind of nailed the really key points.
Speaker 7: But one thing also is there's not a lot of
Speaker 7: bunkers here, but the scale is just humongous. The bunkers
Speaker 7: are just giant, and they were not afraid to go
Speaker 7: for it. The contractors here, these guys have been building
Speaker 7: a lot of golf courses and a couple of the
Speaker 7: bunkers we've built. Blake and I were driving by a
Speaker 7: bunch of the crew this morning who were fixing some
Speaker 7: of the erosion from the rain, and they're like, I
Speaker 7: have never seen a bunker like that one on number seven.
Speaker 7: And they've been building golf courses for a long time
Speaker 7: and this, you know, this bunker's from nineteen twenty five
Speaker 7: and they've never seen anything like it.
Speaker 1: That is a massive bunker. You got a question from
Speaker 1: Owen Calvin Smith, who actually wrote the bel Air right
Speaker 1: up on my website, and he's a golfer at USC,
Speaker 1: and he has a question about the eighth hole.
Speaker 2: So in the.
Speaker 1: Restoration, do you think replacing the pond left with original
Speaker 1: bunkering will make the whole more playable for most golfers
Speaker 1: but also make the whole less risk reward for better golfers.
Speaker 4: We should point out before we answered this question that
Speaker 4: Owen plays for USC and bel Aira's home of the
Speaker 4: UCLA golf team, so there's probably some rivalry going on here.
Speaker 2: He loves bel Air though, Okay, good. Good for him,
Speaker 2: and she shouldn't tell us. Coach Well.
Speaker 4: One of the the most controversial thing about restoring the
Speaker 4: golf course was that there were two ponds that had
Speaker 4: been added to the golf course in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 4: not even they weren't adding the Dick Wilson renovation. They
Speaker 4: were added later on the third haul of Part three
Speaker 4: and the eighth hole short part five. And you know
Speaker 4: my attitude toward them was, George Thomas didn't build ponds.
Speaker 4: George Thomas wouldn't want an artificial pond with a bunch
Speaker 4: of Japanese goldfish and fake rock landscaping right next to
Speaker 4: a green. That would just not He's probably spinning in
Speaker 4: his grave thinking about that right now. So those ponds
Speaker 4: need to go. But now the third hole I didn't
Speaker 4: think would be controversial at all because there was a
Speaker 4: huge dynamic George Thomas bunker there originally, and we could
Speaker 4: put that back just as easily. So why would they
Speaker 4: really want the pond? And I turned out I was wrong.
Speaker 4: We still had to fight pretty hard about that one.
Speaker 4: The eighth hole, I understood completely exactly this question that
Speaker 4: most good players were going to think.
Speaker 2: Of that as well. You're taking out the.
Speaker 4: One really scary hazard on this short part five that's
Speaker 4: otherwise going to be a really easy hole for us,
Speaker 4: and that will take you know, I don't like that
Speaker 4: term risk reward that he used. Everything in golf is
Speaker 4: risk reward, you know. But but you're taking out this
Speaker 4: scary hazard that makes us think twice about going for
Speaker 4: the green and if you don't have it, we're just
Speaker 4: going for it all the time. And you know, he
Speaker 4: phrases it a little wrong there. He says, there's you're
Speaker 4: gonna put back a bunker left of the green. Thomas's
Speaker 4: bunker was short of the green on the left and
Speaker 4: to the left playing downhill and although fairway is draining
Speaker 4: down the hill and then right in front of the green,
Speaker 4: it goes behind this bunker that's short left and down
Speaker 4: into the start of this little arroyo that goes alongside
Speaker 4: the left of the green and down across the first
Speaker 4: fairway and connects into the arroyo that drains down between
Speaker 4: the eighteenth hole and the first hole. So there, I mean,
Speaker 4: it was all part of this old drainage network.
Speaker 2: So the arroyo will.
Speaker 1: Be like almost like a like a native type area.
Speaker 2: Not a native type of you know, we can't. We've
Speaker 2: decided we can't.
Speaker 4: Like I mean, it started out as it's a drainage way,
Speaker 4: and it's certainly not a good place to be. If
Speaker 4: you hit it down in there, you're in the rough.
Speaker 4: You could have any old kind of lie possible. You know,
Speaker 4: it's not like hitting it into a pristine bunker that
Speaker 4: you could just get up and down from. You know,
Speaker 4: it could go It could go bad too, so you know,
Speaker 4: so we think that the whole now is you know
Speaker 4: you're taking a chance going over there, but you don't.
Speaker 2: Know how much.
Speaker 4: But but we're gonna you know, you're gonna have to
Speaker 4: take the chance, cause you can't. You're gonna look like
Speaker 4: you know, now, a golfer like your friend, he's so long,
Speaker 4: he just is hitting the mid iron or short iron
Speaker 4: in there all the time. So it wasn't the old hole.
Speaker 4: Wasn't that risk reward for him.
Speaker 1: I will say though, that that feature I talk the
Speaker 1: course I play the most in Chicago. We have a
Speaker 1: short par five and it's got two giant trees right
Speaker 1: that frame kind of the green and if I'm not
Speaker 1: right in the middle of the faraway, I like if
Speaker 1: I hit a good drive, I've got a mid iron
Speaker 1: even some days a wedge, But like if I'm not
Speaker 1: right in the middle of the fairway, I never go
Speaker 1: for it. I lay it out and I have a
Speaker 1: lob wedgeon. You know, every time it's easy. It's like
Speaker 1: I always have been, like, those trees aren't there. They
Speaker 1: deserve to get like take them out, take them out.
Speaker 1: And they're like, it'll make it easier. But it doesn't
Speaker 1: make it easier because when I'm in trouble and I
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, I'm like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 1: to go for it. And then there's all these big bunkers,
Speaker 1: like green side bunkers around and if you end up
Speaker 1: in the back left bunker, which nobody can get to
Speaker 1: except for somebody like me who can hit it over
Speaker 1: the trees, that's the worst place. Like you'll make six
Speaker 1: on a part five from the back bunker and two
Speaker 1: because you'll hit it and you can't keep it on
Speaker 1: the green. So by opening up the hole, it entices
Speaker 1: more people to go for it, and more people get in.
Speaker 2: Trouble, and more people get in trouble.
Speaker 4: And you know you said the key thing that question,
Speaker 4: the question we get the most often and renovation is isn't
Speaker 4: that going to make the hole easier? You know, you
Speaker 4: get it about everything you do. If you expand the
Speaker 4: green back to all the little corners it had, well
Speaker 4: you've made the green bigger. Is didn't that make the
Speaker 4: hole easier? And no, because the pin isn't always in
Speaker 4: the center of the green. If you take out a tree,
Speaker 4: well that's making the hole easier. Now there's not a
Speaker 4: tree in my way. Yeah, but now you're going to
Speaker 4: try to hit a hit a five urn in the
Speaker 4: green out of the rough and make ten instead of
Speaker 4: just punching it back to the fairway and hitting the
Speaker 4: green in three. You know this aphole that we're talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 4: now the good players they have to go for it.
Speaker 2: There. The other guy's going to go for it. It's
Speaker 2: short enough they.
Speaker 4: Have to go for it, but they could still get
Speaker 4: themselves in trouble. You don't want to miss that green
Speaker 4: right playing, you know, chipping off the hill to a
Speaker 4: green draining the other way toward the toward the baranka.
Speaker 4: They had to make the green. They made the green
Speaker 4: flatter when they built the pond, so if you missed right,
Speaker 4: you wouldn't chip into the water. Although I guess when
Speaker 4: they got the green really fast in the in the
Speaker 4: ameter or the walker in the amateur qualifying rounds, there
Speaker 4: were some guys that chipped into the water because it
Speaker 4: was that fast. But you know, you don't want to
Speaker 4: miss right, and you don't want to miss down in
Speaker 4: this baranka on the left, and if you think you've
Speaker 4: got to go for it, it's not going to be
Speaker 4: an easy hole. It's not going to be like, oh,
Speaker 4: I hit it in the water and ruin my day.
Speaker 4: But it's still people will make six on it and
Speaker 4: be doubly mad because they think it's an easy hole
Speaker 4: now and they should always make four or five.
Speaker 7: See.
Speaker 1: I think that's like one of the best parts about
Speaker 1: golf is like when you walk off a green and
Speaker 1: you're like, how the hell did I just fogy this hole?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: You know it's but then the other side of that
Speaker 4: is nobody's going to make nine anymore.
Speaker 2: The poor members they did to balls in the pond.
Speaker 2: That kind of goes away. I guess they can still,
Speaker 2: they can make a mess from the left to.
Speaker 4: I'm underestimating them, but but it's you know, that kind
Speaker 4: of stuff shouldn't happen as much.
Speaker 7: You've been listening to the Fried Egg podcast. We do
Speaker 7: the digging for you.