Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset.
Speaker 2: When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
Speaker 1: And when I find my ball in a fried egg.
Speaker 2: Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg Friday Frida egg egg,
Speaker 2: fridagg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off
Speaker 2: of the hump.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Golf Podcast.
Speaker 3: I am here today. I've got a great episode today.
Speaker 3: I've got a interview with Kevin Cook about his book
Speaker 3: Tiger Slam, which goes into detail about the two thousand,
Speaker 3: two thousand and one seasons of Tiger Woods and his
Speaker 3: remarkable I think sometimes, honestly, I think sometimes we forget
Speaker 3: about all the remarkable Tiger feeds. But winning four majors
Speaker 3: in a row is when you just start to think
Speaker 3: about like the feasibility of doing this completely ridiculous, like
Speaker 3: this would not happen today. I don't think it will.
Speaker 3: And there are so many Tiger records that are seemingly
Speaker 3: untouchable and unfathomable in today's modern era of golf. So
Speaker 3: we talk with Kevin Cook about that. Also, this is
Speaker 3: a big episode. Garrett Morrison, former co host of this podcast.
Speaker 3: His new podcast, Designing Golf launches this week.
Speaker 1: So Garrett put.
Speaker 3: Together three episodes, so if you go over check out
Speaker 3: his feed Designing Golf, there are three episodes to make
Speaker 3: it easy to give you guys a little bit of
Speaker 3: a flavor of what Garrett's podcast is going to be. Like,
Speaker 3: we have his episode with Jeff Ogilvie in this podcast today,
Speaker 3: so that'll be the lead segment of this podcast is
Speaker 3: Garrett's interview with Jeff Ogilvey. It happened while he was
Speaker 3: in Australia this winter and they talk about the four
Speaker 3: courses that most influenced Jeff Ogilvy. So really fun conversation
Speaker 3: and gives you a little flavor of his podcast. So
Speaker 3: there are three episodes in there. I'm on one of them.
Speaker 3: Pj our producer is on the other, and that podcast
Speaker 3: will roll out once every two weeks. So that's Garrett's feed.
Speaker 3: Go subscribe on Apple or Spotify wherever you get your podcasts,
Speaker 3: so you never missed one of those episodes and you'll
Speaker 3: get a flavor of that in a few minutes. First,
Speaker 3: I was going to talk a little bit about my
Speaker 3: on the ground TGL thoughts, just some general TGL thoughts. Brendan,
Speaker 3: myself and PJ were there. We're going to have a
Speaker 3: full breakdown on the shot on start of going just
Speaker 3: a couple thoughts on TGL. We're four weeks in and
Speaker 3: I think we've got we've seen. I think it's been
Speaker 3: a mixed bag. I think it's really hard to just
Speaker 3: launch a product, a brand new version of a sport
Speaker 3: to an audience of a million plus people on ESPN.
Speaker 3: You know, usually the way things get on ESPN is
Speaker 3: that there they build a fan base over time and
Speaker 3: then ESPN looks at it and it's like, wow, that's
Speaker 3: really interesting.
Speaker 1: Let's let's try that.
Speaker 3: Obviously, you have the basis of golf, and the reason
Speaker 3: that this is on ESPN really is you have Rory
Speaker 3: McElroy and Tiger Woods behind this, the two biggest names
Speaker 3: in sport. So you have this kind of new concept
Speaker 3: and there have been kinks. It's not been perfect, but
Speaker 3: this is like any new product, like you have to
Speaker 3: work out the kinks, and they have the toughs of
Speaker 3: working this out in front of a million people. So
Speaker 3: I was in attendance last night, which was Monday. That
Speaker 3: was the Jupiter Links versus Boston common match. I kind
Speaker 3: of went in as a fan. I did not go
Speaker 3: and do the media the typical media thing. I wanted
Speaker 3: to see what it was like to be a fan. Honestly,
Speaker 3: I had a good time. I had a good time.
Speaker 3: I know the ticket prices are really expensive. I don't
Speaker 3: necessarily think it's like a great ticket value, but I
Speaker 3: thought it was actually easier to follow. It made more
Speaker 3: sense on in person than on television, and I thought
Speaker 3: I kind of thought it was going to be the
Speaker 3: opposite because in the arena, you don't get the banter,
Speaker 3: you don't get the miked up players. You can't hear them,
Speaker 3: like it's not like they're on a speaker in there.
Speaker 3: But I could see everything and it just, you know,
Speaker 3: I think, like overarching my big thought, my big takeaway
Speaker 3: from going to see it person, the broadcast is really
Speaker 3: doing this product no help, Like I don't know what's
Speaker 3: going on.
Speaker 1: Like, there were a lot of cool features.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of data that you can see when
Speaker 3: you're in person. One of the things I liked the
Speaker 3: most about it is they have like the hole laid
Speaker 3: out on a big screen next to the simulator and
Speaker 3: you can see exactly the line of players taking and
Speaker 3: it's like little things like this the broadcast isn't showing,
Speaker 3: and it just helps you understand what's going on. It's
Speaker 3: something that you don't really get in regular golf, right, Like,
Speaker 3: there's no other version of golf where I can actually
Speaker 3: see exactly where Tiger Woods is aiming and where the
Speaker 3: ball goes. Like, I think that's a really interesting thing
Speaker 3: even for a common fan. And it's really cool when
Speaker 3: they hit it a little offline or you can see
Speaker 3: exactly where they're aiming on a shot into the green.
Speaker 3: So anyways, I think, like just in general, my big
Speaker 3: overarching thought is the broadcast really needs to improve. And
Speaker 3: again this has never been done before. This is a hard,
Speaker 3: a tall task. You have to figure it out. To me,
Speaker 3: it just seems like there's way too much stuff in
Speaker 3: the broadcast and too little emphasis and attention on making
Speaker 3: sure that we cover the sport. In this case, I
Speaker 3: do it's maybe a little bit of a leap to
Speaker 3: call this a sport, but there's too little emphasis on
Speaker 3: explaining what's happening in the game, which is why somebody's
Speaker 3: going to tune in to watch this thing.
Speaker 4: Is the game?
Speaker 3: I don't think anybody's going to tune in to hear
Speaker 3: some corny banter between Tom Kim and Cam Young. You know,
Speaker 3: when when NYGC squares off against Juweplanes, I don't think
Speaker 3: anybody's tuning.
Speaker 4: In for that.
Speaker 3: At the end of the day, people are tuning in
Speaker 3: to watch these superstars play golf, to hit golf shots.
Speaker 3: So that's got to be the focus of the broadcast.
Speaker 3: And I rewatched the broadcast when I got home. It's
Speaker 3: just a night and day difference, and I thought, like,
Speaker 3: you know, watching it there really and obviously it was
Speaker 3: a competitive match. I think that's one of the other
Speaker 3: things that's another big takeaway that we can get to
Speaker 3: right now, is like when the matches are competitive, it's
Speaker 3: obviously a lot better. And this is with any sport.
Speaker 3: Nobody likes watching the clock run out on a thirty
Speaker 3: point deficit. In college basketball, that's a painful last ten
Speaker 3: minutes of a college basketball game. And the TJL, frankly,
Speaker 3: for the first three weeks was uncompetitive. They were just blowouts.
Speaker 3: Now are we going to see more blowouts and more
Speaker 3: close matches? I think, you know, Jupe Blinks clearly played
Speaker 3: much better than they did when they got like completely
Speaker 3: blown out to water in the second week, and that
Speaker 3: close match made it really exciting. I think there is
Speaker 3: like a genuine excitement of watching Tiger and Rory play
Speaker 3: one hole against each other. That's we don't get to
Speaker 3: see super scar stars square off. And that's one of
Speaker 3: the things I'm wondering about with this is you know,
Speaker 3: what are like when we look at this at the
Speaker 3: end of this year, what are the best things about
Speaker 3: the league? To me, one of the best things about
Speaker 3: the league is you can see these superstars match up. Now,
Speaker 3: my question would be would be better as like, you know,
Speaker 3: if the back half of it is like a three
Speaker 3: hole match with two players and then you know, two
Speaker 3: man alternate shot for three holes or something, you know,
Speaker 3: thinking about a little outside the box of just singles,
Speaker 3: because I think the single section has been a little
Speaker 3: dragging And the biggest appeal of this I think would
Speaker 3: be seeing a three hole match between Rory McElroy and
Speaker 3: Tiger Woods after they play their triples format that alternate
Speaker 3: hut format. I think people would be super into that.
Speaker 3: And could you imagine like a three hole match with
Speaker 3: Rory and Tiger the last three holes are between the
Speaker 3: top players and that's what's settling last night's match not
Speaker 3: you know, the way the formatting worked out. It was
Speaker 3: Kegan Bradley versus Tom Kim on the last hole. So
Speaker 3: I think there's just some small things in terms of
Speaker 3: like the gameplay that the golf holes. I've been pleasantly
Speaker 3: surprised with some of the ways the golf holes have
Speaker 3: played out. I'm not like a huge fan of many
Speaker 3: of them. I think we had Augie pisa on here
Speaker 3: a couple of weeks ago. I think he really understood
Speaker 3: what the idea of virtual golf holes can be. But
Speaker 3: I mean Adam Scott talked about it. There are some
Speaker 3: hard approaches that this is one of the things that
Speaker 3: this league can do that frankly real golf courses can't
Speaker 3: do anymore because of equipment. Is these golf courses can
Speaker 3: put long irons into players hands. I think the biggest
Speaker 3: thing that they from the golf course and gameplay standpoint,
Speaker 3: outside of like formatting, that they really need to hone
Speaker 3: in on is that the green is whack. I mean,
Speaker 3: it is not good. I think it's the undulations need
Speaker 3: to be reworked for the next year. It's very, very severe.
Speaker 3: If you were playing this this green in real life,
Speaker 3: you'd be like, holy shit, this is completely overcooked, and
Speaker 3: so that just you know, the fixed nature of it
Speaker 3: with the bunkers, like it can't move right or left.
Speaker 3: For those that haven't watched this, they have like a
Speaker 3: fixed green and you play into the green from inside.
Speaker 1: Like forty yards.
Speaker 3: You're basically just chipping around this green. But like the
Speaker 3: green is so severe it doesn't allow for differentiation. I
Speaker 3: think if the green and they have like movable jacks
Speaker 3: that can change slopes, but the sections are so severe
Speaker 3: they Watching it in person, I was like, wait, is
Speaker 3: this green even moving? On the telecast you can't see it,
Speaker 3: but like, apparently it is so like from my perspective,
Speaker 3: I actually think that if you went way flatter on
Speaker 3: the green, it would very much improve the gameplay because
Speaker 3: you could use those jacks to make really varied contours.
Speaker 3: Right now, there are like three really distinct sections because
Speaker 3: the slope is so big. But if you flattened it
Speaker 3: a little, then you could get that kind of ripley
Speaker 3: potato chippy contours where you could make waves and contours
Speaker 3: in all different spots. So that's another takeaway. I think
Speaker 3: that Week four was a big Like after week three,
Speaker 3: it kind of was like, where's this going? I think
Speaker 3: the biggest question in the room is how long vleish
Speaker 3: does this have? I think if we have more nights
Speaker 3: like last night where it was really exciting came down
Speaker 3: to the wire, I think there is a real potential here.
Speaker 3: I think the last thing to hit on is that
Speaker 3: it is appealing to a younger generation, which is something
Speaker 3: that golf has tried to do for years, you know,
Speaker 3: But the leash question, you know, how long does ESPN
Speaker 3: have patients? How long will they continue to put it
Speaker 3: on primetime television? Because that that's the big win here
Speaker 3: for golf is that it's it's primetime television during the
Speaker 3: week in the winter, a time when people are home
Speaker 3: and sitting inside and are looking for something to watch.
Speaker 1: So I think this is overall, like I there are
Speaker 1: a lot it's a divisive topic TGL. I think there's
Speaker 1: a lot.
Speaker 3: Of things that you can criticize about what they're doing,
Speaker 3: but there are also a lot of things that we
Speaker 3: should be hoping for workout because it is a great
Speaker 3: platform opportunity for golf to appeal to new demographic and
Speaker 3: reach new fans. So yeah, I think you know. The
Speaker 3: big thing for me is the broadcast has to get better.
Speaker 3: But where it's being broadcasted and the time is being
Speaker 3: broadcasted is the probably the best placement golf's ever had.
Speaker 3: That's enough on TGL. Let's get over to Garrett's interview
Speaker 3: with Jeff Ogilvie. As a reminder, this is the new
Speaker 3: Designing Golf podcast. We decided we wanted to launch it
Speaker 3: over here, give you guys a little flavor of what's
Speaker 3: going on. If you want to listen to the other ones,
Speaker 3: just look up Designing Golf on wherever you get your
Speaker 3: podcasts and you'll be able to find this.
Speaker 1: Subscribe.
Speaker 3: Big thanks to Jeff for coming on the podcast, and
Speaker 3: congrats to Garrett Morrison on launching his new podcast. On
Speaker 3: the back half of this will be Kevin Cook with
Speaker 3: just some astonishing Tiger anecdotes from his book Tiger Slam.
Speaker 5: Jeff, I gave you an assignment for this podcast. I
Speaker 5: asked you to think about four courses that have shaped
Speaker 5: you or influenced you in some significant way. They don't
Speaker 5: have to be architecturally great courses or anything like that,
Speaker 5: but I had do you think about that subject before
Speaker 5: we talked. Was that kind of a fun assignment or
Speaker 5: was it a pain that I asked you to do this?
Speaker 6: No, it was It was interesting actually because I mean
Speaker 6: you would instantly go to childhood and growing up and
Speaker 6: obviously grew up in this area, and then other stuff.
Speaker 6: I've played overseas, But does it really influence you if
Speaker 6: you haven't played at a lot of times, you know? So,
Speaker 6: I've got one from over season three from rod here.
Speaker 5: Actually, oh interesting, Okay. I was wondering what percentage might
Speaker 5: be in the Melbourne area, which is where we are
Speaker 5: right now. We're actually filming this at Victoria Golf Club.
Speaker 5: We've just played around out there. Absolutely delightful course and
Speaker 5: one of many really really good courses in the Australian
Speaker 5: sand belt. So you have kind of a rich array
Speaker 5: to choose from among childhood courses. I would imagine a
Speaker 5: lot of people their childhood courses might not be good courses,
Speaker 5: but for you like it, there might be some some
Speaker 5: of the world's greatest courses among those that you played
Speaker 5: when you were pretty young.
Speaker 6: I mean, I was so lucky I grew up I
Speaker 6: don't know, two miles from this spot, probably just over
Speaker 6: the other side.
Speaker 4: Of Royal Melbourne.
Speaker 6: I was about probably a drive of five on from
Speaker 6: the fence at Royal Melbourne. So and I was playing
Speaker 6: golf at a very young age. And when I got
Speaker 6: my first little golf clubs, I was chipping around in
Speaker 6: the back garden with Dad following around, and then I
Speaker 6: think he saw that I was really interested, so I
Speaker 6: got the little half cut down set out of the
Speaker 6: mixed barrel, you know, like back in the old days
Speaker 6: when the pro shops had the loose clubs and the
Speaker 6: mixed barrels of clubs. Dad made me up a little
Speaker 6: half set of those, and he used to take me
Speaker 6: to Sandy which is now Sandy Lynx, but it was
Speaker 6: Centeringham Golf Gold Golf Club, I guess public golf course
Speaker 6: most Sundays, I seem to remember. He'd go and play
Speaker 6: his club golf on Saturday. He was a member at
Speaker 6: Yariara at first, and he ended up being a member
Speaker 6: at Victoria, so he would go play on Saturdays, and
Speaker 6: then Sunday was dad n Iday. And this was from
Speaker 6: probably seven or eight. We were doing this what felt
Speaker 6: like to me every weekend. I'm sure it wasn't. When
Speaker 6: you're a kid, your memories are a bit I think
Speaker 6: so Sandy, I would have said, I think I told
Speaker 6: you today.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 6: Eighty of my first one hundred rounds of golf were
Speaker 6: probably at Sandy at that age. Because that age, public
Speaker 6: golf is the only access you could.
Speaker 4: Back then.
Speaker 6: It's a little different now, but accessing these sand belts
Speaker 6: and the private golf clubs in Melbourne was pretty much
Speaker 6: impossible until you were sort of fourteen fifteen sixteen. So
Speaker 6: the first course that I ever really sort of played
Speaker 6: a lot and fell in love with it was my
Speaker 6: home course with Sandy, which is right next door to
Speaker 6: Roal Melbourne. And at the same time while that was happening,
Speaker 6: there was tournaments. This is in the eighties. Sort of
Speaker 6: from early eighties through to sort of early nineties, there
Speaker 6: was a tournament at Royal Melbourne. It felt like every year.
Speaker 6: There was Austrain Open. In eighty four, there was I
Speaker 6: think the Train Open in eighty five, this Train Open
Speaker 6: in eighty seven. There was a tournament called the bar
Speaker 6: Centennial Classic in nineteen eighty eight, which was half a
Speaker 6: million dollars to win in nineteen eighty eight, so it
Speaker 6: was a mega tournament. It was the biggest tournament in
Speaker 6: the world. I think that year Nicholas came Norman game.
Speaker 6: Fred Kupeles ended up losing in a playoff to a
Speaker 6: guy called Roger Davis.
Speaker 4: In Australian.
Speaker 6: Crenshaw was there, Payne Stewart was there, Tom Watson like everybody.
Speaker 6: Watson won the Australian Open in eighty four. Like the
Speaker 6: who's who of golf were here in the eighties, at
Speaker 6: right next door to where I grew up. So I
Speaker 6: used to sneak up the side of the fence at
Speaker 6: Royal Melbourne and jump over the fence to get into
Speaker 6: these golf tournaments to watch these guys play. So I
Speaker 6: would play golf at Sandy, but I would watch the
Speaker 6: best players in the world player Royal Melbourne. So those
Speaker 6: two sort of go hand in hand. One and I
Speaker 6: was playing a lot and the other one I was
Speaker 6: watching the best from the world all play. And then
Speaker 6: eventually I became a caddy at Royal Melbourne where they
Speaker 6: still had They don't really have caddy programs here anymore.
Speaker 4: There's caddies that you can get if you.
Speaker 6: Sort of order them in then they will caddy at
Speaker 6: all the courses around. But back then they were the
Speaker 6: last Melbourne Course to have a caddy program, and I was,
Speaker 6: I think thirteen. You could start becoming a caddy and
Speaker 6: you would caddy on the weekends. You would turn up
Speaker 6: and you would sit out the back of the pro
Speaker 6: shop and be beckoned when you were required and.
Speaker 4: Go caddy for one of the members.
Speaker 6: And we've got ten dollars I remember, which I thought
Speaker 6: was all the money in the world, but maybe not
Speaker 6: as much money as I felt like five hours out
Speaker 6: dragging someone's clubs around.
Speaker 7: And.
Speaker 4: So I cardyed a little bit.
Speaker 6: But the best deal about being a caddy was they
Speaker 6: let us play the East Course at Royal Melbourne after
Speaker 6: four thirty full access. You could do whatever you want
Speaker 6: because the course was empty. None of the members went
Speaker 6: out there after four thirty. So at four twenty nine
Speaker 6: Mon would drop me off at Roll Melbourne and I
Speaker 6: would go play the East Course every day in summer.
Speaker 4: For years.
Speaker 6: Were anywhere we went anywhere it allowed, anywhere near the
Speaker 6: West Course, because that was sort of the deal with caddies,
Speaker 6: which which at the time everybody kind of has always
Speaker 6: given it. Well, the West Course is better than the East,
Speaker 6: but it's really not that different. They're really great. The
Speaker 6: best part about the East Course for me was six
Speaker 6: of the composite holes, and the composite course is the
Speaker 6: one that they played the tournaments on were on the
Speaker 6: East Course, so I got to play these holes that
Speaker 6: I'd seen Nicholas and Norman and Tom Watson and all.
Speaker 4: These guys play.
Speaker 6: So those two courses especially were the beginning of my
Speaker 6: golf I had the local municipal public course and I
Speaker 6: had one of the best golf courses of the world.
Speaker 4: It's right next door to each other. For the experience,
Speaker 4: it was pretty amazing.
Speaker 5: So your first two of four would be Sandy Golf
Speaker 5: Links or Sandringham.
Speaker 4: It was Sandringham Golf Club golf course at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and then it evolved in the Sandy Lynx Yeah, and.
Speaker 5: The East Course at Royal Melbourne. Well, let's talk about
Speaker 5: Sandy a little bit more for people who aren't familiar
Speaker 5: with this area or that course. What is kind of
Speaker 5: the role of that course in this area. What's the
Speaker 5: course like, what are some of the basics about Sandy Golfling.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I guess it's a city course owned by
Speaker 6: the council or it's it's government land, so it's it's
Speaker 6: a public access golf course always been pretty cheap. It
Speaker 6: had the best pro shop in Melbourne at the time,
Speaker 6: back when pro shops were really, really exciting. Now we've
Speaker 6: got Taylor Made, Titlist, Galloway stricks On and a few
Speaker 6: little bits and hangers on, But back then you'd have
Speaker 6: all the it had sort of there was fifty different
Speaker 6: companies that made golf clubs.
Speaker 4: Back you'd have Links and like Honmar was in.
Speaker 6: There, and the Mazino stuff, and we'd have exotic Japanese
Speaker 6: stuff and all the different Ballada balls, like the rec
Speaker 6: Stars and all the different stuff, and all the gloves,
Speaker 6: and they'd have foot Joy Classics in there, and all
Speaker 6: the pink putters which we used to bore over and
Speaker 6: the pink wedges were really cool in the day. And
Speaker 6: they'd have Walter Hagen Crenshaw grinds, you know, remember those,
Speaker 6: the blades and Persimmon woods, and it had everything.
Speaker 4: So we'd hang out in the pro shop after the round.
Speaker 6: Dad loved to pro shop well as well, so it
Speaker 6: had a great shop that was sort of the we're
Speaker 6: here at the Ray Drummonds, which is the big golf
Speaker 6: superstore America's like Nevada Bab's or something like that. That
Speaker 6: was one of those, that was one of the original,
Speaker 6: one of those where you would go to buy golf clubs.
Speaker 4: So it was a great club from that respect.
Speaker 6: So it was sort of a public golf shop, but
Speaker 6: it was also a public access golf course.
Speaker 4: That was very busy.
Speaker 6: You'd get on the phone seven o'clock in the morning
Speaker 6: on Monday to try to get a tea time, a
Speaker 6: good tea time on Saturday morning, like all the great
Speaker 6: busy public courses around the world.
Speaker 4: And it was.
Speaker 6: Not sand belt level golf at that point. It's sort
Speaker 6: of become that way now and I'll get to that point,
Speaker 6: get there. But it was sort of where everybody could
Speaker 6: go play golf because surrounded with all these great sand
Speaker 6: belt courses, they were all super.
Speaker 4: Private and if you didn't know a member, you couldn't
Speaker 4: get on.
Speaker 6: That was a way to play golf on the sand
Speaker 6: Belt for everybody, you know, and pretty cheap. I think
Speaker 6: I used to I used to be able to play
Speaker 6: nine holes. I remember when I was really young, we
Speaker 6: could nine holes during the week was two dollars, which
Speaker 6: is pretty accessible for anybody. I mean, it's it is
Speaker 6: two dollars isn't what two dollars used to be, but
Speaker 6: it was probably the equivalent of four or five dollars now.
Speaker 6: Thirty or so years ago, we could go out and
Speaker 6: play nine holes with our friends after school and it
Speaker 6: would cost us two dollars.
Speaker 4: It was amazing.
Speaker 5: And when you say that it's next door to Royal Melbourne,
Speaker 5: it's not like down the street or you know, a
Speaker 5: little ways away. It's right in there. There's a part
Speaker 5: of the West Course that's kind of kind of pokes
Speaker 5: into the property at Sandy a little bit, so it's
Speaker 5: really yeah. Yeah, it's part of the same kind of
Speaker 5: land that all these great courses are part of, which
Speaker 5: is kind of amazing for it.
Speaker 4: It's kind of the same.
Speaker 6: Like I like I said, if you could if you
Speaker 6: look at the Google Maps, especially when you do it
Speaker 6: on the satellite version, and you just see all the
Speaker 6: green and all the golf course around here with Victoria
Speaker 6: Sandy and Royal Melbourne, and Royal Melbourne has thirty six holls.
Speaker 6: There's seventy two holes of golf right in the middle
Speaker 6: of suburbia, all touching each other. It's pretty incredible. Yeah,
Speaker 6: So the gates of Sandy are directly opposite the gates
Speaker 6: of Royal Melbourne and I used to have a great
Speaker 6: cafe too, and it was used to be we'd watch
Speaker 6: all the pros like normand and these guys hit balls
Speaker 6: on the range and they would go and have lunch.
Speaker 6: This is pre when this is pre pros didn't get
Speaker 6: looked after at that point. They would all walk across
Speaker 6: to Sandy to the cafe to have lunch while they
Speaker 6: were playing the Australian Open and then come back and
Speaker 6: play there round at the Australian Open. So Norman would
Speaker 6: be walking down the drive at Roll Melbourne, across the
Speaker 6: road up the driveway at Sandy to go have his
Speaker 6: lunch before his round. So this is sort of how
Speaker 6: I grew up. With Sandy being the public access version
Speaker 6: of the sand Belt. It was just sort of your
Speaker 6: introduction to the game. Really, if you want to get
Speaker 6: interested in golf, come play Sandy for a while, and
Speaker 6: if you really get into it, you'll meet a bunch
Speaker 6: of people and you'll end up knowing a few people
Speaker 6: who are members at one of these places, and then
Speaker 6: you can come play you can join one of these clubs.
Speaker 6: So it's been a really important part of the landscape
Speaker 6: because golf can be quite exclusive and in Melbourne aspects
Speaker 6: of golf is very exclusive and sort of closed door
Speaker 6: and hard to get in. But right next door is
Speaker 6: an open arms policy. Everybody can come in, from little
Speaker 6: kids to old people to in time you've ever played golf,
Speaker 6: to beginners. Everybody can go there and play pretty reasonably
Speaker 6: high quality golf course for the price, right in the
Speaker 6: heart of some.
Speaker 4: Of the best golf court golf in the world. It's incredible.
Speaker 5: Now your firm OCM has had an opportunity to do
Speaker 5: a bit of work at Sandy. Can you tell me
Speaker 5: a little bit about what you did there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So it was a very it was a big
Speaker 6: project on sort of master planning sort of sense in
Speaker 6: the Golf Australia. Who's our version of the USGA and
Speaker 6: the PGA of Australia sort of got together with the
Speaker 6: state government of Victoria and wanted to create sort of
Speaker 6: a head office for those guys, a center point for
Speaker 6: the high performance golfers in the state, so great training
Speaker 6: facilities and they wanted to build it all in the
Speaker 6: heart of the sand Belt, which is right across there
Speaker 6: from Royal Melbourne.
Speaker 4: Role Melbourne was.
Speaker 6: Involved because they now sort of have they operate Sandy Lynx,
Speaker 6: so they help maintain the course, look after the greens,
Speaker 6: look after the fairways, so there's an efficiency there with
Speaker 6: all the machines and stuff, and it's right there across
Speaker 6: the road, so it's kind of Ron Melbourne's kind of
Speaker 6: looking after fifty four holes. So we got a chance.
Speaker 6: And part of the development is they wanted to build
Speaker 6: a driving range, one end for public driving range and
Speaker 6: the other end for the elite golfers.
Speaker 4: Like I said, so we lost the first and.
Speaker 6: The ninth holes at the traditional golf course and that
Speaker 6: became the new driving range aslong with a big old
Speaker 6: clubhouse they built with all the gyms and then all
Speaker 6: the admin officers for basically golf is run in Australia
Speaker 6: from that building at Sandy Lynx. So we had to
Speaker 6: now fit eighteen holes. We thought, maybe could we bid
Speaker 6: twelve holes, do we do nine holes and a little
Speaker 6: path three course or there was lots of sort of
Speaker 6: options on the table and it seemed like the appetite
Speaker 6: was really for let's have an eighteen hole golf course.
Speaker 6: So we then had to fit eighteen holes into the
Speaker 6: spot where sixteen holes were just in, so we had
Speaker 6: to make it a bit shorter.
Speaker 4: There's lots of path threes. It's quite a short course.
Speaker 6: But we built sand belt greens, especially sand belt greens,
Speaker 6: Raw Melbourne like greens, with Rawal Melbourne bunkers and the
Speaker 6: same turf, the same construction and turf as Royal Melbourne
Speaker 6: because they were going to be looking after it, and
Speaker 6: so there was an efficiency and having the same eighteen
Speaker 6: greens over the road. So now it's even better than
Speaker 6: what I grew up with. I grew up with typical
Speaker 6: municipal conditions as you imagined in the eighties, as anyone
Speaker 6: who did that can probably remember to Now you've got
Speaker 6: eighteen Royal Melbourne level greens that are firm, that bunkers
Speaker 6: cut right up to the edge like you'll get on
Speaker 6: the sand belt. So you have a true sand belt
Speaker 6: experience for forty dollars on a weekend probably for a
Speaker 6: round of golf and quite short, lots of path threes
Speaker 6: and a really really fun golf course to play it.
Speaker 6: It's the most it's an even better entry to the game,
Speaker 6: entry and exit from golf beginning place to learn how
Speaker 6: to play. There's enough there for all the elite players
Speaker 6: who like playing there. There there's sand belt type green
Speaker 6: so you can have some really tough pins and a
Speaker 6: lot of slopes and if you want to get good
Speaker 6: at playing sand belt golf, that is a really good
Speaker 6: place to sort of learn your craft. It's like a
Speaker 6: small version of the Biggert sand Belt courses. So it's
Speaker 6: it was a great place when I was a kid,
Speaker 6: but it's evolved and there's a great driving range, and
Speaker 6: I said, all the great players will hang out there
Speaker 6: every morning and stuff and get better. And as I said,
Speaker 6: it's sort of the heartbeat of Australian golf all in
Speaker 6: the one spot, which is very appropriate. That's right across
Speaker 6: from Roal Melbourne and right in the heart of the
Speaker 6: sand belt. So it's evolved into a really special place.
Speaker 6: And it was a really fun project for us because
Speaker 6: all three of us spent a lot of time there
Speaker 6: when we were kids and sort of we knew how
Speaker 6: important a place and sort of the Melbourne golf landscape.
Speaker 4: Sandy took and it.
Speaker 6: It came out and it's the finished product is better
Speaker 6: than we could have imagined to have. All the potties
Speaker 6: that were involved would usually turn into a bit of
Speaker 6: a mess, but it actually worked out amazingly well and
Speaker 6: with Roll Melbourne sort of the custodians of Sandy, it's
Speaker 6: sort of preserved, you want to think for a really
Speaker 6: long time because they're going to look after it like
Speaker 6: it's their own, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think everybody fantasized is about going back to their
Speaker 5: childhood course and being able to improve it. So it's
Speaker 5: pretty cool that you got an opportunity to do that basically,
Speaker 5: you know.
Speaker 4: The amazing it was a dream job. Really. Yeah. Cool.
Speaker 5: So the second course you mentioned is the East Course
Speaker 5: at Royal Melbourne. This is the first course I actually
Speaker 5: played when I came to the sand Belt. I mean
Speaker 5: this kind of second day of my trip right now.
Speaker 5: The East Course was my first exposure to to sand
Speaker 5: Belt golf. Remarkable golf course. Obviously you got to play
Speaker 5: it a good bit as a as a caddy. This
Speaker 5: was sort of the accessible, more accessible course of the
Speaker 5: two at Royal Melbourne. What are some things about the
Speaker 5: I mean we're getting in now getting into extremely advanced
Speaker 5: golf course architecture and talking about real Melbourne East. What
Speaker 5: were some of the things that you noticed about that
Speaker 5: course when you were playing it in your early days
Speaker 5: that helped you learn about what a good golf course is.
Speaker 6: It wasn't really, and I think we chatted about this
Speaker 6: out in the golf course when we were talking about
Speaker 6: something else, but I think it wasn't really I played it.
Speaker 6: I thought that was normal because I'd grown up next
Speaker 6: door to this. Everyone would tell us, Oh, Jeff, you're
Speaker 6: very lucky you live next door to one of the
Speaker 6: best courses in the world. But Australians don't really ever
Speaker 6: believe that sort of thing. We're just like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 6: it's good. But like you look at the courses in America,
Speaker 6: they're all green, and the sand is white, the big
Speaker 6: pine trees and you sort of the grass is always greener,
Speaker 6: so you aspire to go out of places.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Literally, in this sense, It wasn't really until so I
Speaker 6: grew up playing that course, and then obviously later on
Speaker 6: I got to play the West Course a lot, but
Speaker 6: it wasn't until I went away that the longer I've played,
Speaker 6: and the more different courses I've playing the longer.
Speaker 4: The further I get from the beginning experience.
Speaker 6: The more I see the genius and the amazing thing
Speaker 6: that Roll Melbourne actually is to me. It was just
Speaker 6: amazing fair ways and incredibly fast greens and really tough
Speaker 6: bunker shots. And as a kid you're a little bit
Speaker 6: sort of sadistic about it. You're always going to try
Speaker 6: to find the hardest shot you can, and I'd always
Speaker 6: take my dad's blade one iron out there, and I
Speaker 6: always wanted it to be hard. It was less about
Speaker 6: the golf course, and it's just stuff. I knew I
Speaker 6: was getting spoilt having access out there and playing it
Speaker 6: because it was better than all the other public courses
Speaker 6: that I'd got to see. But I didn't have any
Speaker 6: sense of how can you know that it's so special
Speaker 6: until you go everywhere else, and everywhere else isn't quite
Speaker 6: as special. You don't know until you've seen the other,
Speaker 6: you know. So I just thought, well, this is the
Speaker 6: great course that I livix door too. I didn't appreciate
Speaker 6: how well it would stack up against the old courses
Speaker 6: or the Shinnecock's or Augusta National or Cyprus Point or
Speaker 6: whatever it's like. Genuinely, after I twenty years into my
Speaker 6: traveling golf career and I'd got to all those sorts
Speaker 6: of places that I sort of realized, Wow, all the
Speaker 6: things I'm seeing at these top ten, top fifty golf
Speaker 6: courses in the world. That's what I saw at the beginning,
Speaker 6: but I haven't seen it in the middle, you know.
Speaker 6: So it was really seeing the other stuff which made
Speaker 6: me appreciate what I grew up on, if that makes sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. I mean when you're a kid, you kind of
Speaker 5: take things for granted. Whatever you're exposed to early on
Speaker 5: becomes the norm, and it's hard to convince anybody that
Speaker 5: what they grew up with is particularly great or even
Speaker 5: particularly bad, because that's just the standard by which you
Speaker 5: judge everything else.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but I guess underneath all that I was learning
Speaker 6: the lessons, you know, and the sand Belt and especially
Speaker 6: Roal Melbourne, I think teaches you so much sort of
Speaker 6: deep newance to golf, like you're sort of getting right
Speaker 6: down to sort of.
Speaker 4: Very high IQ golf.
Speaker 6: Is the wrong way to say it, but that's sort
Speaker 6: of deeply nuanced sort of strategy and all those shades
Speaker 6: of gray that golf. The better golf is the more
Speaker 6: it exposes all those little shades of gray that was
Speaker 6: there at the beginning. For me, I didn't know that
Speaker 6: was all the shades of gray. But the first hole
Speaker 6: at the east was the third hole on the composite
Speaker 6: now and they've changed the order so many times, but
Speaker 6: I'd seen it played a lot. It's a big, wide fairway,
Speaker 6: typical of a sand belt course, but you just had
Speaker 6: to be left. If you weren't left, you only had
Speaker 6: fifty yards of the green, but you couldn't hit the
Speaker 6: green from the right hand side.
Speaker 4: You had to be left.
Speaker 6: So growing up, I didn't know I was learning that,
Speaker 6: but I learned that some holes you have to be
Speaker 6: on the left hand side of the fairway, some holes
Speaker 6: you have to be on the right hand side of the.
Speaker 4: Fairway, and when.
Speaker 6: The pin's over there that day, you really want to
Speaker 6: be on this part of the fairway. And that just
Speaker 6: became the way I looked at golf. Without me knowing,
Speaker 6: I was looking at go like that, and so many
Speaker 6: golf courses I ended up playing on tour were if
Speaker 6: you're on short grass, you're good, and if you're in
Speaker 6: rough you're bad, or if you're in a bunki you're bad,
Speaker 6: whereas Royal Melbourne. Sometimes the rough, if you're on the
Speaker 6: correct side of the fairway, is better than the fairway
Speaker 6: on the other side, and.
Speaker 4: I just grew up. That was just the way it was.
Speaker 6: So I didn't know that that was right or wrong.
Speaker 6: It was just my most efficient path around this course
Speaker 6: isn't straight at the hole. Sometimes it's over there and
Speaker 6: sometimes it's over there. And I think that that I
Speaker 6: didn't learn that lesson until later on. But the DNA
Speaker 6: was put in there, like the at the beginning of
Speaker 6: my golf, that was a part of the course that
Speaker 6: was presented in front of me, that there was questions
Speaker 6: being asked of these holes, and I have to learn
Speaker 6: how to answer these questions. Whether I knew I was
Speaker 6: answering questions or not, I just I was, you know.
Speaker 6: And I think you could play your whole life and
Speaker 6: not get to courses like Royal Melbourne or the Old
Speaker 6: Course or Augusta or any of these sort of those
Speaker 6: amazing courses and not even know that those questions exist
Speaker 6: in the sport.
Speaker 4: They were the first questions ever presented to me. When
Speaker 4: I played golf.
Speaker 6: It became more about playing the hole than it did
Speaker 6: swinging the club in a way, which there's probably advantages
Speaker 6: to both, but for me working out golf courses, I
Speaker 6: think was right there at the beginning.
Speaker 5: How would you compare the East Course to the West Course,
Speaker 5: and I'll give you actually a take that I heard
Speaker 5: from Lucas Michelle about this. I played with Lucas at
Speaker 5: Royal Melbourney's and I told him I was going to
Speaker 5: steal this take, but I'm crediting it to him now.
Speaker 5: What he said, basically is that the East Course has
Speaker 5: very good land and amazing greens. The West Course has
Speaker 5: amazing land and very good greens. Do you think there's
Speaker 5: something in that the greens at the the East Course
Speaker 5: might be even better in some ways, or even more
Speaker 5: interesting than the ones at the West Course.
Speaker 4: Yes, and no, I don't think it's a fair I
Speaker 4: don't think it's fair to split the two courses.
Speaker 6: They're a little bit like wing Foot, where the East
Speaker 6: and the West you could kind of play thirty six
Speaker 6: of any of them and it would all be great,
Speaker 6: right the East Course, I feel the East Course is
Speaker 6: a bit of a journey. It feels a little bit
Speaker 6: more like a sort of Scottish Links where you disappear
Speaker 6: off and you cross the road, then you cross another
Speaker 6: road and you end up so far away from the
Speaker 6: clubhouse you're in the whole nother neighborhood, and then you
Speaker 6: play all the way back and you see the clubhouse
Speaker 6: at the start and at the end. I feel more
Speaker 6: about the East Course without I don't really think of
Speaker 6: it as like a in aer which greens are the
Speaker 6: good grains and which are the less so good greens
Speaker 6: and the holes. I feel like the East Course is
Speaker 6: a journey, whereas the West Course is just pure golf
Speaker 6: hole challenges. You know, you stay around more around the clubhouse.
Speaker 6: The routing's a bit more sort of around the one spot.
Speaker 6: I think that the land on the West Coas is
Speaker 6: definitely better for drama. There's a bit more that's greens
Speaker 6: up tops of hills, and you hit through valleys and
Speaker 6: you've got some hero carries that you don't have on
Speaker 6: the East Course. I would say the West course everyone,
Speaker 6: if you played them both. If you play them, you
Speaker 6: play the East Course yesterday, you may say you played
Speaker 6: the West Coast tomorrow. You would initially say, all the
Speaker 6: West Course is way better. But I think the longer
Speaker 6: you played there, the more the East would start to
Speaker 6: level itself out with the West. I just and it
Speaker 6: might be a hallmark of I just used to lovingly
Speaker 6: look over at the West because I wasn't allowed to
Speaker 6: go out there, you know.
Speaker 4: But there's a few.
Speaker 6: Runs of holes on the West. I mean four, five, six, seven, ten, eleven, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
Speaker 6: There's just no run like that in golf anywhere, and
Speaker 6: the East doesn't have a run like that. The best
Speaker 6: hole they they stick the best hole you've ever seen,
Speaker 6: like four or five, six of the three best holes
Speaker 6: you've ever seen, and they're all next to each other.
Speaker 6: And then seven, I think is better than those, you know,
Speaker 6: and then ten. You look at ten from the back
Speaker 6: of the seventh and it's like it's just an unbelievable hole.
Speaker 4: It's like it's just a hole that you just cannot
Speaker 4: imagine anywhere else.
Speaker 6: But it's so perfect. So I lean towards the West
Speaker 6: because of the drama of the land, and I think
Speaker 6: it's thirty six amazing greens and it's thirty six amazing holes.
Speaker 6: I think the routings tell the stories, and the journey
Speaker 6: you take on the East course is such a different
Speaker 6: style of journey.
Speaker 4: The West.
Speaker 6: You sort of leave the clubhouse, come back past the clubhouse,
Speaker 6: You leave the clubhouse, you come back past the clubhouse,
Speaker 6: you leave, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5: So it's a it's intertwined, interlocking, It's yeah, the West
Speaker 5: course is that style of routing, whereas the East course
Speaker 5: is almost out and back.
Speaker 6: It's kind of an out and back feeling and it
Speaker 6: definitely has a different When you get way out the
Speaker 6: back there on nine and ten on the East course,
Speaker 6: you feel like you're a long way away from where
Speaker 6: you stay, which is nice. You're on your own, you're
Speaker 6: out there and there are a cool holes that you've
Speaker 6: taken a journey. There's some incredible holes out there, so
Speaker 6: I don't like to compare them against each other. And
Speaker 6: when we are at the start and you said we
Speaker 6: picked three courses, I'm going to put all of Royal
Speaker 6: Melbourne into one. I see one course because I grew
Speaker 6: up watching the composite course, which has six of the
Speaker 6: East and twelve on the West.
Speaker 4: And that isn't a preference thing.
Speaker 6: That's more of a we don't want to cross roads
Speaker 6: when we play a golf tournament thing for all the
Speaker 6: logistical reasons. So there's two different sixteenth holes I've used
Speaker 6: over the years, so it's almost nineteen holes in the
Speaker 6: commers of course, I would put Royal Melbourne into just
Speaker 6: one big basket because I think it's thirty six incredible
Speaker 6: holes and I grew up watching a combo of both.
Speaker 6: So when you ask me, what do you think of
Speaker 6: when you think of Royal Melbourne, I think of Royal Melbourne.
Speaker 6: I don't think of I don't separate the Eastern, I.
Speaker 5: Don't think of East West. Yeah, it's just all It's
Speaker 5: almost like there are all those holes out there and there,
Speaker 5: and the East and West courses are ways to play
Speaker 5: those holes. You could do it in a bunch of
Speaker 5: different ways, including the composite course obviously, but I'd imagine
Speaker 5: you could come up with any number of eighteen hole
Speaker 5: routings that would be highly interesting.
Speaker 6: Yes, you could come up with all sorts of different
Speaker 6: all sorts of different ways around it, which I'm sure
Speaker 6: now golf is getting more popular and there's more people
Speaker 6: out there, it's probably harder to do. But I'm sure
Speaker 6: there's a bunch of members over the years who have
Speaker 6: started on the East, jumped onto the West, jump back
Speaker 6: onto the East.
Speaker 4: Like gone around.
Speaker 6: Because it's really is thirty six incredible holes, and I
Speaker 6: would put any of them on either of the courses,
Speaker 6: you know, what I mean, like, they're all great. I
Speaker 6: feel Wingfoot's very similar in that you lovingly look over
Speaker 6: at the east holes when you're playing the West, but
Speaker 6: you lovingly look across at the west holes when you
Speaker 6: play the East. You know they're clearly so closely related
Speaker 6: that it's really the same entity in a way. Everybody
Speaker 6: always plays them the same way. But I just think
Speaker 6: Raw Melbourne is a whole property and a club and
Speaker 6: everything that sort of represents and sort of shows you
Speaker 6: when you play golf. There isn't a bad hole to
Speaker 6: play there, and I.
Speaker 4: Enjoy playing them all.
Speaker 6: But if you said where do you want to play tomorrow,
Speaker 6: I'd choose the West Coase just because I think that
Speaker 6: hallmark of that was the one I wasn't allowed to
Speaker 6: play when I was a kid.
Speaker 5: So we have Sandy Golf Links, we have Royal Melbourne
Speaker 5: the Fall thirty six. As opposed to one course or
Speaker 5: the other, what would be your third course.
Speaker 6: Well here has to be arguably as influential. So Victoria
Speaker 6: Golf Club as influential as those two, because I was
Speaker 6: a member here from just before sixteen until current day.
Speaker 6: Still remember so I've probably played the most rounds I've
Speaker 6: played in Melbourne around here, and Victoria is it's an
Speaker 6: incredibly great golf course.
Speaker 4: I'm deeply sort of.
Speaker 6: Moved by Royal Melbourne in such a way that that
Speaker 6: to me is an outlier and that just sits on
Speaker 6: its own.
Speaker 4: And this will been so spoilt around here.
Speaker 6: But Victoria as far as the course that I know
Speaker 6: every blade of grass on it, intimately, I've seen it
Speaker 6: sort of evolve, stay the same but totally evolve with
Speaker 6: sort of trees coming out and bunkers getting reinstated from
Speaker 6: what I grew up with, and the turf changing, the
Speaker 6: turf conditions just getting better and better better over the years.
Speaker 6: And we sort of redid the first hole ten fifteen
Speaker 6: years ago now and now it just feels like the
Speaker 6: first hole. I can't even remember the old first hole
Speaker 6: and little bits and bobs. I just that development period
Speaker 6: between sort of sixteen and twenty one. I was here
Speaker 6: every single day, So this has to be a big
Speaker 6: part of the whole thing.
Speaker 5: How do you think this course has has shaped your
Speaker 5: views on golf architecture?
Speaker 2: Has it?
Speaker 5: I mean, you've been a member here for a tremendously
Speaker 5: long time. Any course that you play as much as
Speaker 5: you've played, you know, over as many years as you
Speaker 5: have has to have, you know, shaped your thoughts on
Speaker 5: golf courses and golf course architecture in some ways. Is
Speaker 5: there a way that it influences you that's different from
Speaker 5: what Roll Melbourne does.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 6: I think the sand belt just in general, the use
Speaker 6: of short the firm ground, I think is the number
Speaker 6: one thing which all golf, at least in my experience,
Speaker 6: golf is just a more interesting game when the ground
Speaker 6: is firm, when the ball does something when it lands
Speaker 6: and it keeps going or it stops as the player
Speaker 6: might have struck the shot. Because it matters now how
Speaker 6: you strike the shot. It matters the flight, it matters
Speaker 6: the spin, it matters the shape it's coming in. There's
Speaker 6: it doesn't just end when the ball lands. I think
Speaker 6: if the ball stops when it lands, it doesn't really
Speaker 6: matter how you hit it, as long as you land
Speaker 6: it in the right spot. But when it's firm, and
Speaker 6: we grow up with ultra firm conditions here pretty much
Speaker 6: even in winter when it's soft, it's firm here relatively
Speaker 6: speaking to everywhere else, it matters how you strike the ball.
Speaker 6: Like the strike if you get at one groove low, Well,
Speaker 6: it's going to be a bit flat. It's going to
Speaker 6: take a bigger bounce. If you just you just flub
Speaker 6: it a little bit and there's no spin on it, Well,
Speaker 6: now you're going to be in the back bunker. If
Speaker 6: you cannot fade it to a right pin, you just
Speaker 6: cannot hit the green. If you cannot draw it to
Speaker 6: the left side, you just cannot hit the green. I
Speaker 6: think that aspect of sand belt golf is the most important.
Speaker 6: It's a great development tool because you have to strike
Speaker 6: and quality of shot, shot shape and flight and strikes
Speaker 6: so important here.
Speaker 4: You cannot conquer these.
Speaker 6: You cannot improve your score and get your handicapped down
Speaker 6: and improve as a golfer unless that's a big part
Speaker 6: of it. It's not just hitting it straight and high
Speaker 6: or long or low, or whatever the case may be.
Speaker 6: It's you've got to it all if you want to
Speaker 6: actually start shooting lower and lower scores. So there's that aspect,
Speaker 6: and that's it's sand belt in general. I think Victoria
Speaker 6: the bunkers. I think it's a bit of a hallmark
Speaker 6: of Victoria that people seem to be in bunkers all
Speaker 6: the time, and sam belt bunkers. People talk about them
Speaker 6: on tour. We have very uniform bunkers. It feels like
Speaker 6: we play out of the same sand, of the same depth,
Speaker 6: of the same rake everywhere. And it's generally speaking, you've
Speaker 6: got a pretty good lie and if you get good
Speaker 6: at that sand, you get good at bunkers. But here
Speaker 6: that's a very sort of narrow band of skill, and
Speaker 6: it's not necessarily an easy skill, but once you learn it,
Speaker 6: you've kind of learned it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a variety.
Speaker 6: But here there's the bunkers here have firm bits, soft bits.
Speaker 6: There's sometimes it can be firm under your feet but
Speaker 6: soft under your ball. Your ball is always sort of
Speaker 6: on a downslope or upslope.
Speaker 4: Or above your feet.
Speaker 6: You get the we call them gum trees, but eucalyptus
Speaker 6: trees in the US would they dropping they're dropping sticks,
Speaker 6: and they're dropping leaves, and there's like little nuts that.
Speaker 4: Fall out of them.
Speaker 6: And there's always sort of a bit of junk in
Speaker 6: the bunkers and learning how to read lies and play variety.
Speaker 6: You'll get up slopes with the sand wet in the
Speaker 6: morning and you'll get all the spin in the world.
Speaker 6: But then it'll get dusty in the afternoon off a
Speaker 6: downslope and the ball sits down and all you can
Speaker 6: do is the ball's going to roll out twenty feet.
Speaker 6: There's nothing you can do. And learning how to navigate
Speaker 6: that and read lies and understand it teaches you how
Speaker 6: wedge works. It teaches you really how to understand the
Speaker 6: bottom of a wedge and the bounce and sometimes you
Speaker 6: got to have a square stance and square the face up.
Speaker 6: Otherwise you're just going to bounce the club and it's
Speaker 6: going to go across the other side of the green.
Speaker 6: And sometimes, wow, I really have to open this one up,
Speaker 6: otherwise there's too much sand for my normal act. It
Speaker 6: teaches you variety out of bunkers, and as I said,
Speaker 6: the real golden thing is learning how to read lies.
Speaker 6: I remember as I first started drifting away from Melbourne
Speaker 6: and playing high level am of a goal from pro golf.
Speaker 6: You'd get the pro every now and then would blade
Speaker 6: a bunker shot and start complaining of it. I couldn't
Speaker 6: see that there was no sand under there, and to
Speaker 6: me it never made any sense because it's easy to
Speaker 6: see there wasn't any sand under there. I could have
Speaker 6: seen it from the other side of the green, but
Speaker 6: only because we had to learn that here. You know,
Speaker 6: I'm not saying that that guy did anything wrong, it's
Speaker 6: just that he never had the experience of learning it
Speaker 6: with all that variety. So I think those two things
Speaker 6: from a playing point of view, I think are great,
Speaker 6: and just architecturally, the holes just make sense, which I
Speaker 6: didn't know again until I.
Speaker 4: Went to other places. When you play holes, it don't
Speaker 4: make sense.
Speaker 6: But uh, the bunker, usually the fairway has it is
Speaker 6: exactly where you want to be coming in from. It's
Speaker 6: usually on the inside corner of a dog leg, which
Speaker 6: you have on the second and the third and the
Speaker 6: fifth um And usually the best line into the green
Speaker 6: was from somewhere near that bunker, so you had to
Speaker 6: go just short of it, just next to it, or
Speaker 6: try to go over it. And if you went the
Speaker 6: wide side of the fairway, you'd hit the fairway all day.
Speaker 6: But it took you a while to work out, well,
Speaker 6: if I'm on the wide side of the fairway with
Speaker 6: the easy t shot, now I can't really get the.
Speaker 4: Ball close to the hole. So it taught us too.
Speaker 6: From an architectural strategy point of view, it was just
Speaker 6: it's a great example of hazards where they should be
Speaker 6: and hazards that relate to the green that's at the
Speaker 6: end of the hall. And it's a great set of grains,
Speaker 6: and so you learn how to put fast grains and
Speaker 6: read big breaks. And it's a detriment later on to
Speaker 6: put on slower grains because we just grew up on
Speaker 6: crazy fast grains all the time. But when we get
Speaker 6: to crazy fast grains, we get to an or a Pondhurst,
Speaker 6: it feels like we're at home. So there's advantages and disadvantages,
Speaker 6: but it's an incredibly amazing place to learn how to
Speaker 6: play golf Melbourne in general, but Victoria was a great
Speaker 6: example of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Victoria, you know, there's it's very playable for average
Speaker 5: players like me. You can get around out there. You
Speaker 5: might end up in a few bunkers with shots to
Speaker 5: greens sloping away from you that you would have a
Speaker 5: hard time with, but it's not like you're getting punished
Speaker 5: over and over and there's usually some space to play
Speaker 5: on holes. So if you know your way around then
Speaker 5: you can then you can have a fairly pleasant time
Speaker 5: of it. But if you're a good player and you're
Speaker 5: trying to score out there. It seems like one of
Speaker 5: those relentlessly intense tests of golf. You can score low
Speaker 5: out there. You can shoot in the mid sixties or
Speaker 5: low sixties if you're a great player, but you really
Speaker 5: have to focus the entire round and kind of walk
Speaker 5: the tightrope constantly because there's no kind of mental letup
Speaker 5: out there. If you're looking to make birdies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, if you're looking to shoot a low score, the
Speaker 6: better you get. The scarier these courses get, I think
Speaker 6: because if you're looking to challenge pins, hit it close
Speaker 6: to the tournament pins if you like, or the challenging pins.
Speaker 6: You really have to take on like you have to
Speaker 6: kind of take on the fairway hazards a little bit,
Speaker 6: but you also have to take on those short sided situations.
Speaker 6: You have to make decisions. It's like, well, like we
Speaker 6: talked abouten out there, which is this great little uphill
Speaker 6: par three that just disappears off over the back and
Speaker 6: it's just terrible. We all end up hitting it way
Speaker 6: short there because of the fear of hitting it over
Speaker 6: the back. So the firm conditions and all the short grass,
Speaker 6: it asks a really tough question is that you have
Speaker 6: to be really brave to shoot low scores out here.
Speaker 6: When it's set up tough, you have to be brave,
Speaker 6: and it's it's a learnt brave by getting burnt so
Speaker 6: many times, by getting it wrong.
Speaker 4: You know, it's not that obvious.
Speaker 6: Seventeenth that saw Grass hit it and you're good. Miss
Speaker 6: it and you're bad, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 6: That's a great question. Sometimes they ask them the seventy
Speaker 6: first whole of a tournament. It's like, well, you better
Speaker 6: hit a good nine one, you know. That's and the
Speaker 6: eighteenth of saw Grass, for example, it's like, left is bad,
Speaker 6: hit a good shot, whereas here is You kind of
Speaker 6: have to learn what's good and what's bad. You know,
Speaker 6: it's not always obvious, and you'll be getting not necessarily long,
Speaker 6: they're not long in the big scheme of things, but
Speaker 6: you'll get seven eyes and eight irons and even wed
Speaker 6: shots that you know, you know what, I'm happy with
Speaker 6: twenty f here because if I get this wrong, I'm
Speaker 6: going to make a five. And if I make a
Speaker 6: five with a wedge in my hand, I'm going to
Speaker 6: be annoyed for the next three holes. And so you
Speaker 6: end up playing really nervous even though it sort of
Speaker 6: presents beautiful and it doesn't really look that scary, you
Speaker 6: get burn a couple of times and you end up
Speaker 6: playing nervous, and that's one of the great so I
Speaker 6: feel like sort of signs of a great golf courses.
Speaker 6: It makes the good players a bit nervous because they
Speaker 6: don't want to get it wrong. You know, you think
Speaker 6: the Masters and the second shot in to thirteen or
Speaker 6: something is like, guys, get all twisted about that shot,
Speaker 6: and really, on a Tuesday with nothing on, it's really
Speaker 6: not that.
Speaker 4: Scary a shot.
Speaker 6: But let you getting the Masters all of a sudden,
Speaker 6: it makes you nervous and it makes you make a
Speaker 6: bad swing.
Speaker 4: These courses do that a lot.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the and there's no there's no letting your
Speaker 5: guard down after a miss. On some courses. If you
Speaker 5: miss the fair way, then the test is sort of
Speaker 5: over in a way. You've failed the test and now
Speaker 5: you're going to have a fairly predictable recovery. It's not
Speaker 5: going to be pleasant, but you know what you need
Speaker 5: to do. If you miss out here at Victoria, then
Speaker 5: there are any number of things that could happen, any
Speaker 5: number of scenarios that you could be facing and shots
Speaker 5: that you could be hitting, and so the test is
Speaker 5: just beginning after a.
Speaker 6: Minute, absolutely, so it can be exponential. So I mean,
Speaker 6: there's good misses out here and there's bad misses out here.
Speaker 6: And if you make a good miss, it's like, well,
Speaker 6: maybe I don't make bertie or par, but I can
Speaker 6: get myself a reasonable par partner if I make it.
Speaker 6: Great If I miss it, oh well I made a mistake.
Speaker 6: But sometimes if you can miss in some spots, it's
Speaker 6: like you go from wanting to make birdie on your
Speaker 6: second shot, but all of a sudden, how do I
Speaker 6: not make double? Like how do I get this third
Speaker 6: shot somewhere where I can get the ball up and
Speaker 6: down from?
Speaker 4: And you can.
Speaker 6: It's a compounding error place if you follow an error
Speaker 6: where a sensible shot generally are okay. But if you
Speaker 6: follow ERA with another era, you can rack up a
Speaker 6: big number with no water, no lost balls, no nothing,
Speaker 6: really really fast.
Speaker 4: It can expose your sort of.
Speaker 6: Bad decisions and bad execution really really quickly. So it
Speaker 6: can get scary. And because you know that you're playing
Speaker 6: like that and it ends up making you play, you
Speaker 6: have to be brave, you know, And if there's a
Speaker 6: couple of guys in the field who are running away
Speaker 6: with it and making lots of birdies as well.
Speaker 4: You've just got to do it. I've got to be brave.
Speaker 6: But like it's it's a risky thing. Now, it's a
Speaker 6: fascinating way. It's sort of a delayed penalty.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 6: You know you don't necessarily get penalized on your first
Speaker 6: on the first bad shot, but the penalty is now
Speaker 6: coming and you don't know it yet. But you've got
Speaker 6: to kind of know you've made the mistake before you
Speaker 6: carry on, because if you just keep making them, you're
Speaker 6: just going to rack up some really big numbers and
Speaker 6: be pingponging like bunker shots across greens or living yourself
Speaker 6: in spots where how do I get this into a
Speaker 6: spot that I could actually toop it from? Because it
Speaker 6: only feels like I can hit this into a spot
Speaker 6: where I'm probably going to three part Now it's fascinating
Speaker 6: and it sounds really really scary. It's not always like that.
Speaker 6: That's when it's set up really really tough, but it's
Speaker 6: kind of a hallmark of these places. It's the firmness
Speaker 6: and the way the bunkers are and the way the
Speaker 6: rough is sort of unpredictable that if you start going off,
Speaker 6: if you start going wrong, if you don't realize you've
Speaker 6: gone wrong, which is not always obvious at the start,
Speaker 6: and you don't sort of right the ship or be
Speaker 6: smart from that point, yeah, you can rack up big
Speaker 6: scores really quick.
Speaker 5: So what's course number four? We're going outside of Australia now, I.
Speaker 6: Gather, Yeah, it has to be the Old Course. And
Speaker 6: I hate to be predictable, but.
Speaker 5: I think everybody, if I do this interview with a
Speaker 5: range of people, I think everybody is going to talk
Speaker 5: about the Old Course at some point. But it's the
Speaker 5: particular ways that people relate to the Old Course that
Speaker 5: are interesting, because I think it's different for everybody.
Speaker 6: So I mean, I think it's fair to say I
Speaker 6: kind of wanted to love it before I ever got there.
Speaker 4: I mean, I was.
Speaker 6: A bit of a golf nerd, I guess, growing up,
Speaker 6: and I'd read a lot of the books so Jones
Speaker 6: who tore up his scorecard the first time he went
Speaker 6: there and thought it was ridiculous and then ended up
Speaker 6: loving it, And like that, there was always this story
Speaker 6: that people hated it at first and then ended up love.
Speaker 6: The ones who loved it the most are the ones
Speaker 6: who hated it the most at the start. So I
Speaker 6: kind of loved that whole narrative that this place could
Speaker 6: grow on you so much, you know. But I was
Speaker 6: very fortunate Dad's my father was from the UK, and
Speaker 6: his mum was getting a bit sick, and in nineteen
Speaker 6: ninety three I was sixteen. He wanted to go over
Speaker 6: and see her because he hadn't seen her for fifteen years,
Speaker 6: so and he took me. Fortunately, whatever happened, he wanted
Speaker 6: to have a travel mate. My sister had a trip
Speaker 6: with mum somewhere that year, but I got to go
Speaker 6: over with Dad and we had a batter week of
Speaker 6: him catching up with his mom. But in the meantime
Speaker 6: he's like, oh wow, we're here. I was a probably
Speaker 6: bit of golf and we ended up at the old
Speaker 6: course and we drove up into town, and I was
Speaker 6: already in love just driving up into Snatas for anyone
Speaker 6: who's ever done it, you get closer and closer, and
Speaker 6: then you see all the signs and then finally you
Speaker 6: start seeing glimpses of the town and it's just it's
Speaker 6: almost a religious experience just going to the town itself,
Speaker 6: especially when I'd read so much about it already and
Speaker 6: it was clearly sort of the it's the genesis of
Speaker 6: the sport really.
Speaker 4: In a lot of ways, so I already kind of
Speaker 4: wanted it.
Speaker 6: We got up there. We got in there late, about
Speaker 6: five pm. Obviously it's in summer and it still feels
Speaker 6: like the middle of the day at five pm and
Speaker 6: we go up to the start. It's like, well, we're
Speaker 6: going to be here for the next two days. Is
Speaker 6: there a chance that we can play the old courses? Like, oh, well,
Speaker 6: you've got to enter the ballot every night, but you're
Speaker 6: too late to enter the ballot for tomorrow. So of
Speaker 6: course I'm devastated. But he's like, well, if you like,
Speaker 6: you can come here straight away in the morning and
Speaker 6: you can stand around and if there's a two ball
Speaker 6: they and I ask, I'll ask if they don't mind
Speaker 6: if two people join, but they're like to say no.
Speaker 6: But if they say no, we'd be happy to play
Speaker 6: with two more.
Speaker 4: You can go on.
Speaker 6: And we've got there at six thirty in the morning
Speaker 6: or whenever we could get there and sat around that
Speaker 6: little putting green next to the first tea, and eventually
Speaker 6: the Swedish couple came along at ten or eleven o'clock
Speaker 6: in the morning and see, yeah, we'll play with these two.
Speaker 6: So we got on. So the first morning in s
Speaker 6: Andrew's and I loved every moment of it. Shot seventy four.
Speaker 6: I remember being disappointed because I had a double buggy
Speaker 6: late on sixteen, but shot seventy.
Speaker 4: Four, and I was just blown away.
Speaker 6: The experience of a bit like I talked about with
Speaker 6: the East Course, sort of starting in the town and
Speaker 6: disappearing out into the middle of nowhere, and then gradually
Speaker 6: you see the town get bigger and bigger and bigger
Speaker 6: you get back in. But I just loved I loved
Speaker 6: everything Sonandrew's when I first got there, so I played it.
Speaker 6: I was very lucky and then I played So I
Speaker 6: played it when I was sixteen, and I got back
Speaker 6: three years in a row. I played the Snandra's Lynx Trophy,
Speaker 6: which was the greatest amateur tournament in the world as
Speaker 6: far as I was concerned, and I think it still happens.
Speaker 6: It was seventy two holes and Andrews. You would for
Speaker 6: forty pounds you would enter and it was hard to
Speaker 6: get in. You were getting ballided out off scratch. But
Speaker 6: I got lucky at sort of eighteen nineteen twenty. I
Speaker 6: played it three times. You'd get a practice round around
Speaker 6: the old. You would have eighteen on the new and
Speaker 6: eighteen on the old the first two rounds, and then
Speaker 6: you made the cut and you got thirty six on
Speaker 6: the old, so you would get seventy hours on the
Speaker 6: old course and one on the new, which I just
Speaker 6: thought was miraculous for forty pounds. And it was competitive,
Speaker 6: and that was in the fields where Sergio, Justin Rose,
Speaker 6: Trevor Immlman like guys who all had great careers.
Speaker 4: So it was that era.
Speaker 6: So the highest level British amateur tournament you could play
Speaker 6: two weeks before the British Amana, we would play at
Speaker 6: the Old Course and I played that three times, so
Speaker 6: by the time I even turned pro, I was well
Speaker 6: versed with the Old Course. And it was playing those
Speaker 6: tournaments that started showing me the genius of it, because
Speaker 6: if you play it once, you know it in those conditions,
Speaker 6: but it's different every single day. It changes multiple times
Speaker 6: during the day as all the stories. Everyone's hot, everyone's
Speaker 6: til the tide change in the wind, changes direction. You
Speaker 6: play the front nine into the wind, and then you
Speaker 6: play the back nine into the wind, or you play
Speaker 6: the front nine down wind and then you get the
Speaker 6: back nine down wind. And I've had all I had
Speaker 6: all those experiences quite early, and I just I started.
Speaker 6: It helped connect some of the dots that Royal Melwan
Speaker 6: and Victoria had taught me about. Well, bunkers are there
Speaker 6: because that's where you want to be coming in from
Speaker 6: and it doesn't really matter today, but what's that bunker
Speaker 6: doing there? But it's not until you come back on
Speaker 6: the back nine that all of a sudden, it's that
Speaker 6: bunk is exactly where you want to be.
Speaker 4: And it just.
Speaker 6: Showed me how good you needed to be a golf
Speaker 6: to answer all the questions that a golf course could ask.
Speaker 6: And I've eventually I sort of I regarded as sort
Speaker 6: of like the it's almost the Rosetta Stone of golf.
Speaker 6: I mean, you can't replicate it, and you probably wouldn't
Speaker 6: want to replicate it. But if you want to build
Speaker 6: golf courses or understand architecture, just spend a bit of
Speaker 6: time there. And I think a whole lot of stuff
Speaker 6: that might have been a bit fuzzy starts coming into
Speaker 6: focus because I just think all the examples are there.
Speaker 6: And the coolest part about it, I think was that
Speaker 6: it basically was just an evolution. It evolved how they
Speaker 6: were playing the game. So it was almost like humans
Speaker 6: and nature. Nature taught golfers how to play golf, and
Speaker 6: golfers taught the old course what it needed to be.
Speaker 4: You know, it was kind of a both.
Speaker 6: It's sort of a collaboration between nature and humanity to
Speaker 6: come up with the sport that we love. And I
Speaker 6: just think it's it plays a bit too short for
Speaker 6: the way we hit it now, but it's such as
Speaker 6: it's why the sport is such a great sport, because
Speaker 6: it started off in such a great place.
Speaker 4: You know, It's just to me, it's perfect. I think if.
Speaker 6: Everybody, I think it's the greatest teacher in the game,
Speaker 6: I think the golf course, the golf coaches and stuff
Speaker 6: along the way might disagree with me.
Speaker 4: Hopefully some of them agree.
Speaker 6: I think the golf course is the best teacher of
Speaker 6: the game because that's the questioner the golf course is
Speaker 6: asking you questions. I think the old Course is the
Speaker 6: best teacher of golf, and I think if everybody played
Speaker 6: their first hundred rounds of golf ever at the old course,
Speaker 6: the level of golf in the world will be a
Speaker 6: lot higher because it teaches you how to play golf
Speaker 6: the correct way, unlevel lies and understanding angles and shooting
Speaker 6: for pins when when you're supposed to shooting away from pins,
Speaker 6: when you're supposed to give you any choice of loft
Speaker 6: or no loft, or it's very democratic. It lets anybody
Speaker 6: play any way they want, but it begins to teach
Speaker 6: you how to play the game if you played enough times.
Speaker 4: I mean, I just I could speak about it all day.
Speaker 5: Do you think knowledge of golf architecture does make somebody
Speaker 5: a better golfer? I kind of go back and forth
Speaker 5: about this myself sometimes I wonder if that can be
Speaker 5: overstated a bit. But do you think it should be
Speaker 5: part of a golfer's education beyond just giving people the
Speaker 5: pleasure of knowing about golf courses and allowing them to
Speaker 5: appreciate them, do you think it actually helps them develops
Speaker 5: as players?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I don't think.
Speaker 6: Yeah. I go back and forward a little bit too,
Speaker 6: because I think there's disadvantages for knowing too. I think
Speaker 6: I think playing great courses is great for people's golf.
Speaker 6: As I said, I think to me these lists of
Speaker 6: course rankings, and we talked about this a bit earlier today,
Speaker 6: like we all have. Some people like them to look great,
Speaker 6: some people want them to play great. Some people are
Speaker 6: in the middle. Some people like warm weather, some people
Speaker 6: like cold weather, wind, whatever it is. Everybody has different
Speaker 6: ways of measuring how they make their lists of what
Speaker 6: the best courses are. To me, I view them like
Speaker 6: their teachers. It's eighteen sets of questions or challenges or puzzles,
Speaker 6: and I think the better the golf course for me
Speaker 6: is the one that asks the most interesting set of questions.
Speaker 6: And so I think from that respect, everyone would get
Speaker 6: better if they had the opportunity to play the great
Speaker 6: golf courses, because you see more depth in golf. It's
Speaker 6: like if you go to a to a if you're
Speaker 6: lucky enough to go to a really high level restaurant
Speaker 6: or a Missilin Star restaurant or one of those things,
Speaker 6: you think you've had a steak until you've had one
Speaker 6: of those guys make you a stake and it's like,
Speaker 6: oh my goodness.
Speaker 4: I had no idea it could taste like this.
Speaker 6: You know, I don't know if you need to know
Speaker 6: how to do that to a stake, but it's nice
Speaker 6: to have had the experience to understand how good food
Speaker 6: can actually get.
Speaker 4: I think golf is the same.
Speaker 6: I think you don't need to understand sort of basic
Speaker 6: strategy of a golf course, an understanding while bunkers are
Speaker 6: better on the inside of dog legs and the outside
Speaker 6: or whatever the golf snobbery nerdery that we can get into,
Speaker 6: which really isn't that important for people who aren't that interested.
Speaker 6: But I think you need to play the examples of
Speaker 6: them because they'll teach you a better version of golf.
Speaker 6: They'll make you a better player because you're they're presenting
Speaker 6: you with more difficult questions or more interesting questions. I
Speaker 6: guess it's better. So I think they're great teachers. So
Speaker 6: I rate golf courses on how how good a player
Speaker 6: do I think I would be if I played this
Speaker 6: every day? How good would golfers get to play this
Speaker 6: golf course?
Speaker 4: Because it would have to make you.
Speaker 6: It makes you better in the mind, It gives you
Speaker 6: more shots. It teaches you that you have to move
Speaker 6: the ball left to right, or you have to hit
Speaker 6: the ball low, or you have to learn how to
Speaker 6: land this one short of the green. If you never
Speaker 6: get asked those questions, you never learned the answers. So
Speaker 6: I think the important thing about the architecture is it
Speaker 6: deepens people's sort of golf IQ if you like, you
Speaker 6: don't necessarily have to understand why. But I think it's
Speaker 6: a really great advantage to have access to play them
Speaker 6: every now and then.
Speaker 5: So we've got Sandy Golf Links, Royal Melbourne, Victoria Golf
Speaker 5: Club and the old course at St Andrews. Yeah, pretty
Speaker 5: stout quartet there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a bit of golf snobbery there, but like
Speaker 6: Sandy's a new one that probably most people haven't heard of,
Speaker 6: which was probably arguably and a lot of ways the
Speaker 6: most influential because I probably if that wasn't there, maybe
Speaker 6: I didn't end up playing golf.
Speaker 5: Right, you know, So in a way it's the most
Speaker 5: important one, the most important border. Yeah, all right, well
Speaker 5: thank you for coming on the show, Jeff.
Speaker 3: Please all right, As a reminder, that was designing golf.
Speaker 3: Garrett Morrison's new podcast, go check it out wherever you
Speaker 3: get your podcasts real quick. Before we get to Kevin Cook.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about our friends at Club TFE. That is
Speaker 3: that is us. So anyways, we are humming. If you're
Speaker 3: into designing golf and golf architecture, this is a no
Speaker 3: brainer for you. We're producing a ton of content. We're
Speaker 3: producing international content. We just had Hinch Up as a
Speaker 3: course profile last week. I think in the next two
Speaker 3: weeks we'll have Victoria from Australia. On top of that,
Speaker 3: we're doing a ton of domestic golf courses, so we
Speaker 3: have just about one hundred profiles in there to date.
Speaker 3: On top of that, you get early access to our
Speaker 3: event discounts every day in the Friday Pro Shop. I
Speaker 3: think we're working on some members only merch I think
Speaker 3: that'll be out later this year, so you'll have your
Speaker 3: own little membershop too. But yeah, this is the best
Speaker 3: way you can support this podcast is to sign up
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Speaker 3: midst of a website redesign. It's looking like we're gonna
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Speaker 3: this new website, and we're excited about some of the
Speaker 3: new features we're building in for the membership there, So
Speaker 3: jump on the bandwagon. If you've been a member, big
Speaker 3: thank you. We really appreciate and love the community we're
Speaker 3: building over there. But yeah, if you haven't joined and
Speaker 3: you're thinking about it, jump on in the water's warm.
Speaker 3: You can find information about this at the fridegg dot
Speaker 3: com slash membership and we're we're really looking for or
Speaker 3: to the rest of twenty twenty five and club TF.
Speaker 3: All right, let's kick it over to Kevin Cook on
Speaker 3: his Tiger Woods book. All right, Kevin, thanks for joining
Speaker 3: us to talk about your newish book. It's new, it's
Speaker 3: within six months of coming out.
Speaker 1: It's very new. Six weeks, six weeks, six weeks.
Speaker 3: The Tiger Slam, the inside story of the greatest golf
Speaker 3: ever played. It focuses on the Tiger Slam, which was
Speaker 3: two thousand to two thousand and one.
Speaker 1: I as someone who was.
Speaker 3: I guess am I falling in love with golf stage
Speaker 3: of life at this period of time, I was shocked
Speaker 3: to think about, how was twenty five years ago?
Speaker 1: This summer me too.
Speaker 2: That it's been that long, And I think partly because
Speaker 2: it was so vivid at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in so many of these memories.
Speaker 3: As I read through the book, and you know, you
Speaker 3: do a great job of like hitting all the all
Speaker 3: the high points in there, so many of them are
Speaker 3: still such vivid memories. Because you know, as the title suggests,
Speaker 3: it might have been the greatest golf ever played.
Speaker 2: I really think that it was before or since. I mean,
Speaker 2: and I think you know, as you well remember, there
Speaker 2: was talk when Tiger was playing, well, well, he didn't
Speaker 2: have the competition that Jack Nicholas had. He didn't have
Speaker 2: Travino and Watts and Weis's golf and everyone else chasing him.
Speaker 2: And I never bought that. I believe that the fields
Speaker 2: were deeper when Tiger was playing than when Jack Nicholas
Speaker 2: was playing, and I think it must be true that
Speaker 2: the fields are deeper today than they were twenty five
Speaker 2: years ago. At the same time, I still don't think
Speaker 2: that we've seen the game of golf played back better
Speaker 2: than Tiger did it in two thousand and two thousand
Speaker 2: and one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's so hard to compare generations, and it's
Speaker 3: you know, every single sport has this this struggle. You know,
Speaker 3: a lot of people would say this is the deepest
Speaker 3: golf that golf has ever been right now, and you're
Speaker 3: seeing it with young kids. But I think, like the
Speaker 3: other fascinating thing, and I was really really pleased to
Speaker 3: see this be an early chapter in the book. The
Speaker 3: kind of fascinating aspect of this moment in time was
Speaker 3: that we began to see this was really the start
Speaker 3: of a massive technological shift in the game. And and
Speaker 3: you know, I think like an interesting topic and I
Speaker 3: think we could talk about that later, you know, but
Speaker 3: is the solid core golf ball and and Tiger switched
Speaker 3: to the solid corp golf ball the beginning of two
Speaker 3: thousand is a fascinating thing. And then where the solid
Speaker 3: core golf ball and the driver heads have gotten us
Speaker 3: to this point is that is that part of why
Speaker 3: golf is so deep now is that the equipment might
Speaker 3: not you know, throw out the the less skilled as much.
Speaker 2: You know, Yes, that's a that's a that's a good point.
Speaker 2: That it made even things at the very highest level
Speaker 2: of the game. And of course we could talk about
Speaker 2: per Simmon and Gotta Purchase in the in the same terms,
Speaker 2: but that's a long conversation.
Speaker 1: I would love to understand.
Speaker 3: You know, obviously, anytime someone goes into the pursuit of
Speaker 3: writing a book, uh, there needs to be a why.
Speaker 3: So obviously, one of the wise is that this was
Speaker 3: an epic, unrivaled run of golf that that the world
Speaker 3: has never seen.
Speaker 1: But what were the otherwise of writing this book? Now?
Speaker 2: I think the first why for me was the surprise
Speaker 2: that it had been twenty five years in this transformative
Speaker 2: time that really, I think brought so many millions of
Speaker 2: new golfers to the game because of the celebrity the
Speaker 2: charisma of this player who dominated the game in two
Speaker 2: thousand and two thousand and one. But the other, and
Speaker 2: to me, the biggest why, is that I think it's
Speaker 2: underappreciated even by golf people. We can get into good
Speaker 2: discussions of well, is this the greatest feat in golf history?
Speaker 2: I believe it is. I believe it's ahead of Bobby
Speaker 2: Jones in nineteen thirty the Byron Nelson's streak. Hogan in
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty three was an astounding performance Jack Nicholas's whole career.
Speaker 2: But I think the Tiger Slam is the best feed
Speaker 2: in golf history. And the more that I thought about it,
Speaker 2: the more I think that it's the best feed in
Speaker 2: sports history. And I've talked to some Joe DiMaggio fans
Speaker 2: and we butted heads about that. But I can go
Speaker 2: into that as well. I think there are a couple
Speaker 2: of asterisks to Joe DiMaggio, to Wilt Chamberlain's hundred point game.
Speaker 2: I think Tiger Tiger Slam surpasses them all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think, like, when you boil it
Speaker 3: down golf, Golf such a unique sport, right, and to
Speaker 3: win those four tournaments in a row, now, like the
Speaker 3: technicality of it not being in the same year, the
Speaker 3: fact they finished fifth in the Masters in two thousand,
Speaker 3: But when you boil it down to beating you know,
Speaker 3: a field of ninety ish at the at the Masters,
Speaker 3: a field of one hundred and fifty six at the
Speaker 3: US Open, one hundred and fifty six at the Open,
Speaker 3: and one hundred and fifty or one hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: six or whatever at the PGA. When you boil it
Speaker 3: down of like, what is that statistical number is insane
Speaker 3: when you contemplate like four events of beating you know,
Speaker 3: ninety to one hundred and fifty six of the other
Speaker 3: the best players in the world and doing it so
Speaker 3: often in such dominant fashion.
Speaker 2: That's totally right. And Justin Ray, whom I see is
Speaker 2: that as the best stats guru in the game, calls
Speaker 2: it incomprehensible, and I really think it's true, and I
Speaker 2: think we can we can flip coins. Wonder about will
Speaker 2: there ever be another player to win four Majors in
Speaker 2: a row. I be surprised, but I could bet you
Speaker 2: that there's never going to be anybody who wins another
Speaker 2: US Open by fifteen shots. That that is just beyond
Speaker 2: what's capable even before that point or since that point
Speaker 2: in the game, and then to follow up with three more.
Speaker 2: I think it was really interesting that Earl Woods himself
Speaker 2: Tiger's dad, when this was going on, said well, I'm
Speaker 2: a purist to me, you got to win them all
Speaker 2: in a calendar year. Reporters ran to Tiger, of course,
Speaker 2: and Tiger said, you know, I think if you can
Speaker 2: put them all on your coffee table at the same time,
Speaker 2: that's a slam. I'm with him, and I think that too.
Speaker 2: At the Masters in two thousand and one, when he
Speaker 2: makes a long put, because he always ended properly, he
Speaker 2: always ended tremendously with some supreme effort that jim Nance
Speaker 2: addressed that by saying as grand as it gets. He
Speaker 2: called it as grand as it gets, and I think
Speaker 2: he was right about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, what you hit on is like his
Speaker 3: sense of the moment. And I think like when you
Speaker 3: talk about the greatest athletes ever, I can't think of
Speaker 3: one that didn't seem to have that sense of the
Speaker 3: moment when when the chips are down any sport, you know,
Speaker 3: you think about you think about what's happening right now.
Speaker 3: With Patrick Mahomes, you know, if you are it feels
Speaker 3: like if you are a team that's going against Patrick Mahomes,
Speaker 3: the if you hold a lead in a you know,
Speaker 3: one score lead with six minutes ago, the only way
Speaker 3: you are winning that game is if you can hold
Speaker 3: onto the ball for six minutes, because if you give
Speaker 3: the ball back, it's over. And with Tiger, I think,
Speaker 3: like you hear this from from players that played in
Speaker 3: the in the in the his generation is that if
Speaker 3: he was around on the weekend, there was an era
Speaker 3: of inevitability and you watched some of the greatest players
Speaker 3: of generations just crumble around him. And but then the
Speaker 3: part of how that happened was the ability to rise
Speaker 3: to the occasion, and really the book starts. You start
Speaker 3: at the beginning of two thousand with Kappaalua, one of
Speaker 3: the all time great duels between two great players. You
Speaker 3: know of this, we'll call it a modern generation. Everybody
Speaker 3: that was a golf fan in that time remembers Ernie
Speaker 3: Els and Tiger going back and forth at Kapeloua. And
Speaker 3: sure enough, it was one of the many times that
Speaker 3: Tiger just seemingly crushed Ernie El's spirits.
Speaker 2: And everybody else's. Yes, And I think I mean, suppose
Speaker 2: Tiger had not taken up the game, Suppose Arrow Woods
Speaker 2: had not been stationed in Brooklyn, right across the street
Speaker 2: from Dyker Beach golf Course, and then we'd be talking
Speaker 2: about the era of Michelson and El's. But I think
Speaker 2: it's absolutely true that like Mahons, who has a potential
Speaker 2: three pet coming up, like Brady was the same way,
Speaker 2: you better not let him touch the ball with a
Speaker 2: minute left or you're going to lose the game. Like Jordan,
Speaker 2: and what motivates them is very significant to me. And
Speaker 2: at Pebble on the last day the tournament is over
Speaker 2: in two thousand, Tiger is is lapping the field, and
Speaker 2: he motiv invaded himself on Sunday by saying, I'm not
Speaker 2: making a bogie today, and he comes all the way around.
Speaker 2: He's almost three puts at eighteen, and he's so annoyed
Speaker 2: at himself because, as he put it later, I'm going
Speaker 2: to ruin the day. Oh. He might only win the
Speaker 2: US Opened by fourteen shots, but what drives him is
Speaker 2: to do something that is as near perfection as he
Speaker 2: can do. And that's one thing. I do believe that
Speaker 2: the Tiger Slam is underappreciated. I also think that in
Speaker 2: some ways even Tiger Woods is underappreciated because we remember
Speaker 2: his talent, we remember the fitness that he brought to
Speaker 2: the game. But I think he's the best grinder who
Speaker 2: ever lived.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you think about just the mad cut streak.
Speaker 3: Yes, I mean there's so many, so many things that
Speaker 3: you can talk about with Tiger. I think like one
Speaker 3: of the stats that illuminated and I wish I had
Speaker 3: a handy now that we have this Strokes gained data,
Speaker 3: was there's you know, Justin Ray I think is the
Speaker 3: one that found this originally. There's some absurd amount of
Speaker 3: rounds in a row that he had positive strokes gained,
Speaker 3: which means like and I know, like strokes gain can
Speaker 3: make them make some people's eyes glaze over, But strokes
Speaker 3: gained means that he is performing at an above average
Speaker 3: you know where when you're positive, you are better than
Speaker 3: half the field on a day, and just the sheer
Speaker 3: number of days. Like, golf is such a fickle game.
Speaker 3: And I think this is like the thing about the
Speaker 3: Tiger Slam and just Tiger in general, what you illuminated
Speaker 3: underappreciated for being a grinder, the maid cut streak, the
Speaker 3: strokes gained streak, the Tiger Slam, all of these things,
Speaker 3: and anybody that plays golf can understand this can be
Speaker 3: undone so easily with just sheerly a bad bounce. Yes,
Speaker 3: we see this on Sunday of tournaments all the time.
Speaker 3: I'm always amazed by, like, if you're watching the golf closely,
Speaker 3: how one leader, one person around the lead might get
Speaker 3: a bad break, another person around the lead might get
Speaker 3: like bounce off a fan as opposed to going in
Speaker 3: a hazard, and and you like just write it down.
Speaker 3: It's like, oh, and the guy won by one, and
Speaker 3: the guy that went into the water or got a
Speaker 3: bad bounce loss. And I think, like, when you talk
Speaker 3: about this successive nature of winning all four of those
Speaker 3: majors in a row, the sheer fact that he played
Speaker 3: a level of golf where you know, there had to
Speaker 3: be untimely breaks in that there were untimely breaks, but
Speaker 3: he still won. And one of the reasons is just
Speaker 3: he had this capability. I mean, five of I believe
Speaker 3: five of the of his wins in majors, or maybe
Speaker 3: six of his wins in majors, he entered Sunday with
Speaker 3: a three shot lead or more. And in this streak,
Speaker 3: like how you do this streak? And I think, like,
Speaker 3: you couldn't do the four majors in a row with
Speaker 3: four close majors, one of the things that he had
Speaker 3: the supreme skill of, and you hit on it like
Speaker 3: I'm not gonna make a bogie on the last day,
Speaker 3: like this will to continue. He never took his foot
Speaker 3: off the gas, you know, And by blowing two fields out,
Speaker 3: it makes this so much more feasible because it limits
Speaker 3: your risk of a bad break here or bad break
Speaker 3: there costing you one tournament.
Speaker 1: You know, you look back on like Jordan.
Speaker 3: Spieth probably was the closest person to do this since
Speaker 3: Tiger and he had the open and the whistling straight,
Speaker 3: you know, like he's probably the closest person since and
Speaker 3: but you know he had one blowout, one close one
Speaker 3: they and they lost two other close ones. You know,
Speaker 3: I think it's just I guess you've done all this research.
Speaker 1: You've looked into it.
Speaker 3: What's a couple one or a couple things that like
Speaker 3: your favorite things that you uncovered about Tiger during this
Speaker 3: period of writing this book.
Speaker 2: There are so many the fact, I mean, we talk
Speaker 2: about his dominance at Pebble, he made a triple at Pebble,
Speaker 2: and what did he do immediately afterward? Okay, now I
Speaker 2: have a new mission today. I'm going to get back
Speaker 2: to even and that's the first step to what becomes
Speaker 2: a fifteen shot win.
Speaker 7: But while I was working on the book, I mean,
Speaker 7: I mean not only the utter dominance and dominance to
Speaker 7: a degree that, as you alluded to, it almost insulates
Speaker 7: you from getting beat.
Speaker 2: You are so much better than everybody else. Accept at Valhalla,
Speaker 2: where Bob May is going to take him right into
Speaker 2: a playoff, is going to give Tiger all he wants,
Speaker 2: more than anybody else in this period, this guy comes
Speaker 2: out of nowhere, but not nowhere to Tiger because he
Speaker 2: was a junior star before Tiger and Phil. But there
Speaker 2: were also personal things I was I was very surprised
Speaker 2: to find out that three days after Tiger wraps up
Speaker 2: the US Open at Pebble, his third major, that Wednesday,
Speaker 2: he shows up in Henderson, Nevada at a qualifier for
Speaker 2: the PUBLNX, for the US Amateur PUBLNX. Why to caddy
Speaker 2: for his buddy Jerry Chang. And now he doesn't want to.
Speaker 2: He doesn't want to make everybody's all autograph seekers racing
Speaker 2: after him, So he doesn't meet Jerry Chang on the
Speaker 2: first tee. He goes to the second hole, waits around
Speaker 2: where he can just kind of slip out its blazing heat,
Speaker 2: and Jerry Chang has the best golfer in the world
Speaker 2: of all time as he caddy for the rest of
Speaker 2: the day. He didn't even make the the public links
Speaker 2: that year, but for that day he had Tiger Woods
Speaker 2: as his caddy. And that's that's a heck of a distinction.
Speaker 3: It's like, it does make you lament social media because
Speaker 3: that type of thing would never be able to happen.
Speaker 2: We would all know about it, Yes.
Speaker 3: It's like Charlie Woods can't even go play a qualifier.
Speaker 3: He's entering tournaments as as under pseudonyms because of because
Speaker 3: of this, you know, Tony Tony Romo enters tournaments under
Speaker 3: fair names sometimes because of this. And it's you know,
Speaker 3: one of the proliferations of the Internet and social media
Speaker 3: is like, this couldn't happen anymore.
Speaker 2: You know, that's right, It's too bad. We need we
Speaker 2: need a social media jammer that you could carry around
Speaker 2: so that so that nobody could see you from hundreds
Speaker 2: of miles around.
Speaker 3: I would have loved I would have loved to hear
Speaker 3: about the the other players in the group that day,
Speaker 3: and like.
Speaker 1: I imagine that this get done, you get done with the
Speaker 1: first all. I'd be so nervous if I was one
Speaker 1: of the other players. It's like, also the Tiger was
Speaker 1: shut out.
Speaker 2: Yes, and yeah, yeah, Tiger's raking the bunker. Not bad,
Speaker 2: not bad.
Speaker 3: What you know in the research was there was there
Speaker 3: a particular outside of the PGA. Was there a particular
Speaker 3: tournament that really stood out to you as an impressive win?
Speaker 1: It maybe not even a major.
Speaker 2: Uh. Actually, I was so focused on the majors because
Speaker 2: to me, that is his goal. And and while he
Speaker 2: never really admitted it publicly, he admitted it privately from
Speaker 2: from before the Tiger Slam that his the number in
Speaker 2: his head was eighteen and he was going for more
Speaker 2: than that. That he's looking for more majors than Jack one.
Speaker 2: Uh but yeah, I mean the the Valhalla PGA was
Speaker 2: was an astounding remarkable drama. But of the of the
Speaker 2: tournaments that I really focused on on the last the
Speaker 2: two thousand and one Masters was a fabulous drama too.
Speaker 2: To have him if it just happens that day, Oh,
Speaker 2: he's gonna go up against his two best rivals, two
Speaker 2: guys who could beat Tiger, who can foil the Tiger slam,
Speaker 2: two guys that he thinks are capable of beating him,
Speaker 2: although he thought that more of David Duval than he
Speaker 2: did of Phil Nicholson. And it does wind up with
Speaker 2: a very dramatic moment with Phil where Tiger slams the
Speaker 2: three wood around the corner at thirteen and has a
Speaker 2: moment in which Phil Nicholson, who was pointedly not watching
Speaker 2: his swing, and this makes sense to me, you're playing
Speaker 2: with Tiger woods on Sunday, don't watch him swing? It's
Speaker 2: gonna make you think bad thoughts. So so Philis looking
Speaker 2: away the whole day, but the crowd goes nuts. Phil
Speaker 2: has bopped a driver with a nice, nice big fade
Speaker 2: around the corner, and then Tiger hits his three wood
Speaker 2: past him, and Tiger Wood practice that shot all winter,
Speaker 2: you know, again and again and again. This is this
Speaker 2: is the drive. At thirteen, Tiger knocks a three wood
Speaker 2: past Phil's drive and you know, Phil, here's the crowd
Speaker 2: go crazy, looks where the ball is and says, do
Speaker 2: you always hit your three wood that far? And then
Speaker 2: that Tiger is going to lay it on thick at
Speaker 2: that point and he says, no, sometimes farther.
Speaker 1: Amazing moment.
Speaker 2: It doesn't mean it just goes on and on, and
Speaker 2: there were so many dramatic moments in these Majors.
Speaker 3: I think that that two thousand and one Masters has
Speaker 3: to be one of the most popular of the YouTube
Speaker 3: final rounds. And I mean you want, I think like
Speaker 3: you could probably make an argument that that was the
Speaker 3: most thrilling in terms of big time story lines of
Speaker 3: any of the Tiger wins in majors, maybe outside twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: you know, just the Saar comeback right aspect of that,
Speaker 3: you know, but when you look at you know, on
Speaker 3: the back of NYE on Sunday, you've got Woods Duval, Phil,
Speaker 3: you know, Ernie never really factor, but he was only
Speaker 3: three back going into the day. But you know where
Speaker 3: you have you know, Tiger and David duvall deadlocked at
Speaker 3: fifteen under on you know, through fifteen holes, right like
Speaker 3: a neck and neck and at a time where you
Speaker 3: kind of felt like this thing could go anyway. And
Speaker 3: you know, so many, you know, so many of Tiger's
Speaker 3: great moments of agers are the Bob May, the Rich Beam,
Speaker 3: you know, the the you know, those those most against
Speaker 3: these these smaller names. This one was really the showdown
Speaker 3: of the giants with Phil Duval and Tiger going at it.
Speaker 2: It truly was. And then Duval hits the ball at
Speaker 2: sixteen that he thought was perfect. He thought that ball
Speaker 2: might be an ace. But even at that level, striking
Speaker 2: to me, even at that level, because because I'll hit
Speaker 2: a seven iron and if I get it like eighty percent, okay,
Speaker 2: oh that's a pretty good shot. And then every once
Speaker 2: in a while you hit one just right in your
Speaker 2: twenty yards over the green. Even at that level, David
Speaker 2: Duval could hit one too pure and it carries over
Speaker 2: the flag to a horrendous spot. And then David Duval
Speaker 2: heroically it's a magnificent, incredibly delicate little chip, but he
Speaker 2: doesn't make a put And what that masters came down
Speaker 2: to has often happened. Phil didn't make a puts down
Speaker 2: the stretch that day either, Tiger did.
Speaker 4: H Yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean that's the thing is that it's that kind
Speaker 3: of quality we talked to talked about like always knowing
Speaker 3: what you have to do in the moment. I thought,
Speaker 3: you know, an interesting undertone of all the season. And
Speaker 3: I think one of the stories is that that story
Speaker 3: you hit on with Marco era the strata and Tiger
Speaker 3: Woods chipping, you know, Marco mirror chipping and what it
Speaker 3: led to may maybe go a little bit into detail
Speaker 3: about the golf ball and what that kind of how
Speaker 3: that changed the way Tiger could play golf.
Speaker 2: It really changes everything. And and that's another thing that
Speaker 2: I think it's easy to forget twenty five years later,
Speaker 2: that we used to play golf balls that we've got
Speaker 2: a little cover over a whole bunch of wound up
Speaker 2: rubber bands. That sounds fairly primitive. Mark o'meira happened to
Speaker 2: be playing got top flight strata and they're knocking balls
Speaker 2: around and ome Omera's balls performing on just checking up
Speaker 2: just right, like it's on a string. And Tiger says
Speaker 2: to him, because they're always practicing together, Tiger says, how
Speaker 2: are you making a ball do that? And o'meira, who
Speaker 2: is one of the people who can needle him, says,
Speaker 2: don't worry about it, Tea. It's something that takes maturity
Speaker 2: and practice and uh. And then pretty soon Tiger hits
Speaker 2: one of those stratus and it behaves just the way
Speaker 2: that del Amira's balls were, and he says, it's not you,
Speaker 2: it's the ball. Now he is he is determined enough.
Speaker 2: One thing I've said about Tiger and truly believe that
Speaker 2: this is a guy who who took an engineer's approach
Speaker 2: to his game. He wants to put it together like
Speaker 2: a NASA mission, so that every component is correct. He
Speaker 2: is willing, and he's been practicing developing this ball that
Speaker 2: was we saw the Nike ball. It's just got the
Speaker 2: nice swoosh on it, but it's made by Bridge Stone
Speaker 2: uh and and it is similar to that strata a
Speaker 2: little bit better. He tried dozens and dozens of prototypes,
Speaker 2: and Rock Ishi, who was who was the designer for
Speaker 2: bridge Stone, said he had never met anyone with such touch,
Speaker 2: with such feel, who could evaluate contact by the sound
Speaker 2: of it. Uh that you'd slip in, You'd slip in
Speaker 2: a different kind of ball just to see, just to
Speaker 2: test him. And he's saying, what that one? It fell
Speaker 2: like a rock. He developed the ball that worked for
Speaker 2: him and was daring enough to put it in play
Speaker 2: in competition at a time when nobody, none of the
Speaker 2: other top players were using a ball like that. He then,
Speaker 2: of course starts to win with it by enormous margins.
Speaker 2: And it's only a little bit later that year when
Speaker 2: Phil Nicholson, who was a titleist player, and other players
Speaker 2: are saying, well, jeez, this is a miracle ball that
Speaker 2: this guy is using. It's not solely talent. Maybe it's
Speaker 2: maybe the ball is useful and ask titleists, Hey, titleist,
Speaker 2: have you got anything in the works that might be
Speaker 2: similar to that ball? Oh? Well, in fact, titleists had
Speaker 2: been developing a ball for months and months, even years.
Speaker 2: But if you're titleist, you don't need to hurry up
Speaker 2: to develop to bring out a new ball. Everybody's already
Speaker 2: playing your ball, but that led them to ramp up
Speaker 2: development of the ball that comes out that very same year,
Speaker 2: And this is often forgotten. The very same fall, the
Speaker 2: pro v one is introduced. Pretty soon everybody is playing
Speaker 2: that ball, and the whole game of golf has changed forever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I you know, I think that's like kind of
Speaker 3: a underpin of this whole of the whole thing, is that,
Speaker 3: like it's just the sort of Tiger is a Titleist athlete,
Speaker 3: he's a Titleist ball players.
Speaker 2: He's a Nike apparel wearer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but he's a Titleist sponsored player at the start
Speaker 3: of the two thousand season and he's playing a professional
Speaker 3: ninety and every I love to how you you know,
Speaker 3: the lead of the book really you know, he's teeing
Speaker 3: off a caapolo with a professional ninety, right, And and
Speaker 3: you know one of the things that you know, one
Speaker 3: of the reasons that Nike got Tiger on the ball
Speaker 3: contract that you alluded to is that titleists like to
Speaker 3: spread the money around.
Speaker 1: They still do.
Speaker 3: They're you know, one of their big metrics as a
Speaker 3: marketing thing is to have the highest number of players
Speaker 3: playing Titleist balls. So in order to do that, you
Speaker 3: cannot focus on like you know, backing up the Brinks
Speaker 3: truck for one athlete, right, like you need to have
Speaker 3: the capital spread around and you know the amount of dollars.
Speaker 3: But anyways, you know, for for nine months of this
Speaker 3: run of golf, Tiger is playing a far superior golf
Speaker 3: ball then the vast majority of the tour, who are
Speaker 3: all sponsored by the company he left.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that plays into the biggest The funniest thing
Speaker 2: that happened during the Tiger Slam is when he's almost
Speaker 2: runs out of balls and Pebble after the Friday round
Speaker 2: is called on account of weather, and Steve Williams neglects
Speaker 2: to check how many balls, and Tiger was putting balls
Speaker 2: in the lodge at Pebble and they didn't have very many. Well,
Speaker 2: once once he bangs won halfway to Hawaii at eighteen,
Speaker 2: Steve realizes there are only so many of these balls
Speaker 2: that were called a Nike Tour accuracy in the whole
Speaker 2: world generally im you and you can take a penalty,
Speaker 2: you can get it. If it's the same ball from
Speaker 2: another player, you could you could run off to the
Speaker 2: pro shop and buy some new titles can't do that
Speaker 2: with this ball that's not even available to the public yet.
Speaker 2: So it leads it leads to the crazy moment in
Speaker 2: which Tiger finishes his his his weather postponed round with
Speaker 2: the last ball in his bag. And uh, and that
Speaker 2: was something that he didn't even realize at the time.
Speaker 3: I think like one of the interesting things you you
Speaker 3: touched on was what Tiger gained from the the tour
Speaker 3: accuracy from the professional particularly with the with the driver.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it doesn't balloon in the in the wind
Speaker 2: as as players say. Uh, the wind affects this ball less.
Speaker 2: And this is pure technology that the ball still behaves,
Speaker 2: spins properly at at wedge velocities, but you hit it
Speaker 2: with a driver and it moves and it's just purely
Speaker 2: it has an awful lot to do with the wind.
Speaker 2: It moves only about half as much in the wind
Speaker 2: as the previous ball. Well, that's a big advantage if
Speaker 2: you're as technically proficient as this player is. And to
Speaker 2: give him that advantage when he's already better than everybody else.
Speaker 2: The next thing you're going to see is is sheer
Speaker 2: dominance by the player who has has made every facet
Speaker 2: of his game the best that had ever been seen
Speaker 2: to that point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: It was fascinating how the tournaments leading up to the
Speaker 3: ball switch were like close. They were the termits that
Speaker 3: actually went against Tiger. What what was the what was
Speaker 3: his first result with the ball? Where did he put
Speaker 3: it in play?
Speaker 2: He played at the Byron Nelson and uh no, he
Speaker 2: didn't play it. He actually played the last tournament with
Speaker 2: the other balls at the Byron Nelson thought he would
Speaker 2: have won by five. He's got he's got the new ball,
Speaker 2: and before before he wants to play it, he's going
Speaker 2: to hit shots that Butch Harmon described as inappropriate to
Speaker 2: the situation because he's playing the Western Open in your
Speaker 2: hometown and and he's hitting balls as if he were
Speaker 2: on the old course at St. Andrews. Why Well, because
Speaker 2: as he put it in, I thought this was quite revealing.
Speaker 2: He says, you could hit ten million balls on the range.
Speaker 2: It's never the same as in competition. So he's hitting
Speaker 2: stingers that have nothing to do with the hole he's
Speaker 2: playing in the Western Open because he's imagining what he's
Speaker 2: going to do once he gets to the old course,
Speaker 2: where is real preparation will be as furious as can
Speaker 2: possibly be. But now this new ball is he gains
Speaker 2: confidence in it as as he prepares to win majors.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, everybody should check out your book. What's the
Speaker 3: best way to what's the best way to buy it
Speaker 3: for you?
Speaker 2: Well, it's it's an Amazon, uh and and your neighborhood
Speaker 2: independent bookstore is always a good place to go.
Speaker 1: Okay, how can people uh find you? You're you're on Twitter.
Speaker 2: And find me on LinkedIn, or or let me a
Speaker 2: letter h or stone stone tablets work too, but uh uh,
Speaker 2: or or they can watch the frieda Egg and and
Speaker 2: uh and maybe maybe we'll get together again one of
Speaker 2: these days.
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks Kevin, congratulations on the book.
Speaker 3: Really really fun read and just amazing memories that documenting
Speaker 3: me the greatest run of golf will ever see ever.
Speaker 1: So thank you.
Speaker 2: That's right, Thanks.
Speaker 3: Andy, Thank you for listening to another edition of the
Speaker 3: Friday Golf Podcast. Big thanks to PJ. Clark for editing
Speaker 3: and producing this. Pj's working hard down here in the swamp.
Speaker 3: He's down in Jupiter, just played a round of golf.
Speaker 3: He's having to produce two podcasts tonight.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Oh, to have the spirit of a mid twenty something.
Speaker 1: You know, spirit and energy of a mid twenty something.
Speaker 3: So we will be back next week with a new
Speaker 3: edition of the Friday Golf Podcast. Thank you guys for listening,
Speaker 3: and hope you guys go check out the rest of
Speaker 3: Garrets Designing Golf Podcasts.