No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1164: Pete Dye Deep Dive Part 1

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

DJ and Neil are joined by Charlie Van Kirk for a two-part deep dive into the life and design career of Pete Dye.  We focus on Pete’s upbringing and his marriage to his wife Alice before a look at ten of his most notable courses.  Support our Sponsors: Titleist USGA Arccos If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Nest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠: No Laying Up’s community of avid golfers. Nest members help us maintain our light commercial interruptions (3 minutes of ads per 90 minutes of content) and receive access to exclusive content, discounts in the pro shop, and an annual member gift. It’s a $90 annual membership, and you can sign up or learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠nolayingup.com/join⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Newsletter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://newsletter.nolayingup.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe to the No Laying Up Podcast channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@NoLayingUpPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

be the right club today that's better than most that is better than most ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the no longer podcast my name is DJ we've got a big one today we've got a couple big ones coming for you back to back today is going to be the first episode of our Pete die deep dive me Neil and our guy Charlie Van Kirk are going to go deep into the catalog of Pete Die. We're going to get part two of this episode out on Sunday. We are traveling around the world right now. Can't really do a normal Sunday recap this week. So we're going to do this back to back, Monster Pete Die Deep dive. Instead, really hope you guys enjoy it. Before we get there, of course, want to shout out. We are presented today as every day by our friends at Titleist.

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a little bit of a follow-up to our CB McDonald episodes that we did earlier in the year. And to help me break it down with my good friend, Neil, Neil, greetings from New Jersey, my man. Greetings, Dege. I don't know if break it down. I'm in the student chair. You know, I came to the seminar.

I'm looking to learn about Mr. Peter Dye. Love his name. Obviously named my son, Peter. So I'm fired up. No enough to be dangerous, but not enough to tell anybody else about him. That's the guy who's going to be telling everybody else about him is our good friend Charlie Van Kirk. Charlie, how are you? Doing well, thanks. Excited that Neil is in the hot seat, the only student in the class this time. So nowhere to hide, man. Yeah, professor, I got a question. Great student. I like a drum set back there. I'd like to play some drums with you. Let's see some paradigital adalas out of you. Yeah, and come on. Great student to teacher ratio in this class.

It's a Montessori school. This is office hours. This is. This is. Charlie, you probably recognize or remember from, I always got to introduce him as the guy who made the Big Cairns remix first and foremost. Of course. You know, to a lesser extent, also did all the reporting on our Coppelua episode as well. And just a generally talented, curious, interested guy. And so, Neil, I think to to set the table, you and I, along with the rest of our compadres, went down. to Casa de Campo earlier in the year. It was kind of right after we recorded the CB McDonald episodes. We're like, well, what should we do next? And I think just walking around that place, we're like, man, I don't know anything about Pete Die. We need to spend some time diving into Pete Die. And so we tasked Charlie. We said, go find out everything you can find out. Charlie, what have the last couple months looked like for you? Yeah, well, I've had my boots on the ground a little bit. I took the opportunity to do some due diligence and visit a couple of his courses.

I wasn't with you in the DR, so I didn't go there. But I went a couple other places, interviewed 16 or 17 people who either worked with Pete and were friends with Pete in different capacities. I read a couple books, scoured the internet for some other wonderful things that other people in golf media have made and put it into a giant dock for us to go through here. A dossier. A dossier, the Pete DiDossier. Sounds like it's a dossier to me.

The files. We're going to go through the Pete Dye files today along with, along with Charlie. I think I think everybody listening to this just to kind of set the introduction. I think everybody listened to this probably Pete Dye's prolific. I think everybody probably has an idea in their mind, a picture in their mind when they hear the words Pete Dye. Pop bunkers, railroad ties, bulkheads, island greens, visual deception. Neil, we're going to talk a lot about visual deception. 80s, just any number in the 80s. that's just seen with p.

I, uh, whole length hazards that just, it might as well be white stakes because they're just all the all down the left side. Don't hit it there. Well, I think the other thing, uh, that's interesting about Pete die, again, kind of in stark contrast to our, our CB McDonald episodes is, I mean, Charlie, there's a guy that died in, in 2020, you know, he's, he's around all of his protégés are around for the most part.

It's kind of a, it's pretty recent history, which is very different. and I think makes this one a little more, just a little more alive, you know? I know you were upset that you couldn't get Stanford White on the horn for that. I wasn't that upset. I wasn't that upset about that. I don't know if we have any Stanford White equivalence in this episode. But yes, indeed, given that he passed only roughly six years ago, there are lots of folks on the dye tree, the design tree, if you will, who are still around.

one of the guys who I spoke with George Fry down on Kiowa. He said, you guys better make this podcast soon because everybody who knew Pete and Alice, we're going to the same place that they went. Well, before we get too deep into it, Neil, like open for him. What set the table? Where are you at with Pete Dye? What's your experience? As he stuffed you in a locker, are you guys cool?

What's, how are you feeling? Great deal of respect has my number. I don't play well on his golf courses. But I never walk. office golf course as being like that was unfair or he just twist me up and knots uh he's got a little bit you know oh's the mentalist in him you know kind of like how'd you do that man i didn't like why did you why did i do that you know so he kind of lets you hang yourself a lot of times and but i i think where what i know or how i've perceived pete die is you had the the golden age guys uh you know we talked about

c b mcdonald donald ross you kind of had the guys from the early 1900s and then it felt like, you know, Tammany Hall took over, the Jones family, you know, kind of boss tweed style. And Pete Dye is almost the connector to me kind of bringing back or creating this tree, as you said, Charlie, of modern golf architecture of like, oh, man, maybe we should go back to what they were doing in the 1900s. I feel like I don't know how much of that he was doing, but I think a lot of guys that worked for him have then become students of history. and he also just, again, this is all just me, just how I, you're kind of batting a thousand so far. All right, good, because it does, it also feels like Pete Dye,

and I give the Fahs credit here, like just an expert at building, like the nuts and bolts, the engineering of golf, like the proper way to build golf courses on, on difficult sites. Like, hey, if you need a guy that's going to figure out how to, similar to what you were saying about Seth Rainer in the, CB McDonald episode, Dij. I've looked at places like Kiowa and Teeth of the dog, like even the stories we were hearing down there, like, they didn't have like, there were no telephones when they built that

court. You know, like the place was just really remote and wild. And same with Kiowa from the Ryder Cup episode, Sally did a long time ago. Just felt like, you know, Pete was like, yeah, I'll get it done, you know. And you have to have some engineering and some construction shops to do that. But he seems to have a foot in both camps of like, no, I also understand like the, the, the hoity-toity architecture, like nerdy stuff, you know, more the abstract concepts, but also like, yeah,

this is how you grow grass and this is how you like keep water from, this is how you drain water basically. So that's my novice take on it. I think that pretty much nailed it, Charlie. Yeah, we can call cut, I think. I don't know that I would use the word novice to describe that. That hit a lot of the juicy stuff right out of the gate. So we might need to call in some new students.

Well, let's start before we get into. to kind of like the nuts and bolts biography stuff. Charlie, what's the stuff that's going to keep popping up? What's the what's the headlines? What are the what's the what's the, you know, you click on, you get the AI synopsis of the local news article. Give me, give me kind of some some upfront stuff that is going to permeate all of what we're going to talk about. To Neil's point, Pete was a provocateur. You know, someone asked me when I was hanging with Bobby Weed and his family down in Florida for this episode. Bobby's son-in-law to be asked me, What's your lead, man?

And I said, Pete knew how to push your buttons. He knew how to freak you out, Neil. He knew how to lure your eyes to all the wrong places, mess with yourself. So you mean this from a golf standpoint or just like individually, like with humans? From a golf standpoint. There's a lot of fun stuff about him as a human. He had, he knew how to threw a barb. He had what was described to me as like a proper Midwestern wit.

We'll get into some to some stories there. He was like a true chops buster and a storyteller, but provocateur in the design sense. He loved to get you thinking about the wrong things and pull your eyes into the wrong places. That reminds me, Dege, a little bit of Mike DeVries. Sure. You know, as I described Mike, a true hockey guy, you know, like, come on, just you're busting your chops, be with the boys. I like where we're heading here. Yes.

Well, I think that leads into kind of the next point, right? He's like a guy who was not only, he was not designing this in an office building. You know what I mean? It was very designed build. His whole ethos was, let's figure it out in the dirt. This is not the guy you called if you wanted a set of plans in advance. Full stop. Really.

He was famous for throwing out any plans that he did draw. He self-proclaimed didn't know how to draw. Its preferred method of drawing was literally sculpting mounds of dirt and sand little scale models when he was out on site. You know, you go down here and build me a bath. bathtub there or there'll be a waste bunker that's about this size and let's, you know, physically drag my muddy boots in the dirt to illustrate what I'm talking about. And a lot of the guys who worked for him have adopted that sort of ethos, even if some of them draw more plans than

Pete did their like true designer builders. He didn't even like to call himself an architect because he wasn't formally trained in that way. How about that? He's like calling backyard football plays. Exactly. Like, all right. Yeah, broken, a lot of broken plays. Hey, Fry, you go deep, okay? And I want to, I want to hook her out here from you, Gil.

All right. Yeah, a lot of, a lot of broken plays out there. I think Charlie, we got to just, you know, we got to hit this before the 10 minute mark here. If we're going to talk about Pete, we got to talk about Alice. I think that's a, that's a permeating truth through this whole story. When I sat down with Roger Warren, who is the president of Kiowa, before I even press record on the tape, he said, I hope that whatever conversations you're having about Pete are also about Allison. I assured him that that was in fact the case. They had a really interesting partnership and by all accounts, a very strong marriage. And she was a killer in her own right as a golfer and as a design partner. I'm not sure how much that was publicized in the moment. It kind of depends on the outlet. But she's super interesting character. We're going to dive into her as well. And as I understand it, she was the better golfer.

Like she was the golfer and almost got him into it. Is that right? She was more accomplished in her own right. She didn't get him into it per se. But they started their design business together. Yes. Don't sleep on how good of a player, Pete, was as I did. And I did not realize that coming.

Yes, absolute stud. A couple other things, Charlie. I mean, bundle of energy, we're going to hear a lot about a lot about the work ethic. Yeah, back to Bobby Weed in Florida. He was finishing up TPC at Sawgrass, and he'd drive from Pontevira to Hilton Head. And sometimes I'd hear him come in at like at 12, 1 o'clock. And the next thing you know, he'd be knocking on our doors. We shared a condo, his son, Peeby and I.

And we shared a condo with Pete and Alice. And shit, he'd be knocking on our doors at 5.30. And he'd be like, get out of that bed. You can't build a golf course lying in bed. And I'm like, holy shit. He ain't been here five or six hours. I talked to one of his shapers who started working with Pete when Pete was in his 70s. And Abe Wilson, the shaper was in his 20s.

And he said that Pete ran him ragged. So, yeah, just boundless. Hustle, baby. I love it. You kind of mentioned the self-deprecation, the awshucks, kind of this Midwestern. So, I mean, it wasn't a grandfather the whole time he was, you know, doing this. He was obviously a young guy when he started. But this kind of very grandfatherly, like your wacky old grandpa sort of vibe, which is awesome. And it makes for a great book.

We're going to shout out his book, Barry Meena Popunker, a number of times throughout this episode. But that, that wit and that vibe kind of permeates that. I think he also, you said this really well, Charlie, and are kind of like pre-work. This, a lot of dichotomies, right? A lot of like, like almost contradictions in Pete Dye. Yeah, the more people that I talk to about him, and the more that I even read his book that Barry Meena Pat Bonkers, you mentioned that was written with Mark Shaw, the more he contained multitudes in the sense that he had this self-deprecation,

was not afraid to admit when he got something wrong, which is a very endearing quality. But he was confident as fuck about the stuff that he made. Like, there were some news clippings. that like this is this might be this not only might be this is probably certainly the greatest golf course ever like there are some quotes like i just made something great and and i know it so but he he held these two things at once and i think that's kind of a fun quality about him it's got a little fig jam in him i like hearing that but it's all kind of wrapped up in this like oh shucks i don't know

what i'm doing i'm just kind of moving dirt around just like but i am the best of the world of doing it just so you just so you know which is like charlie said it makes for like a really good good dynamic uh so listen a lot of directions we could go with this we could we could we could take this in a bunch of different directions neal you're the students so we're catering this class we're catering this class to you we're calling this the history of pete die and 10 golf courses okay this is uh kind of loosely or maybe not so loosely maybe pretty directly based on a book i read a number of years ago the history of rock and roll and 10 songs book by grill marcus that's that's uh really good uh so we might even throw out some some song comparisons to to each of these guys

golf courses, try to, uh, to, you know, meet the analogy king where, where he is at. Uh, please meet the student. So how he learns. I like that. Why, why are we focusing on only 10 courses that, you know, Pete and Alice had their hands on more than 100 golf courses? It would have taken forever to, to get two, too, too deep into this. So we had to pick 10 to be clear, this is not a ranking.

This is not the definitive list. This is, this is not meant to be read into as like, these are the only 10 courses that matter. I think, Charlie, these kind of illustrate like an evolution. There's a specific technique. There's a reason that we kind of pick these two because I think they kind of add up to the portrait of a man is what we're going for. Yeah, a lot of choosing the 10 for me was which courses or the which courses had the most interesting stories behind them. A number of these courses on this list,

you could make multiple documentaries about just the generational, multi-generational sagas that that took place. It's hard to build a golf course. It's expensive. There are a lot of characters. There are changes of ownership. There's complex histories. So I looked for some of the juicy bits there and also for some consensus opinions from folks who know more about golf course architecture than I do as to what were the most important and influential of his analysis, massive output. So just confirming no old head? No old head in this. No, good question. Oh, and the courses will go in chronological order, not any sort of order of importance. We're just going straight down the calendar.

Okay. Charlie, we mentioned Barry Me to Popunker, the book he did with Mark Shaw. Anything else you want to shout out on the top as kind of overarching sources? Yeah, in addition to the first-hand interviews that I did, Solly's 91 Rider Cup deep dive was fantastic. There are a couple of other pieces of media by other folks in the golf world, one of whom's Eric Anders Lang did an interview with the man himself with Pete in I think it was 2012 or 2013 before his health started to deteriorate. And that was great. It's awesome. Yeah. It's so good.

And Eric has graciously agreed to let us clip some of that stuff out into this episode. And there were a couple of wonderful pieces by the fried egg. They've of course focused on a lot of architecture content over the years. They made a video about Crooked Stick that we will reference and a deep dive pod on the Kiowa construction that will come up later. So some some good stuff from them that will be, I'll be pulling some quotes from as well. Well, let's get into it. Let's get into the man himself. You ready, Neil? Ready. I'm going to throw you a curveball right on the first pitch. I know you're looking fastball. I'm not giving you one. Paul die Jr. No middle initial, apparently, already at a good early wrinkle, was born on December 29th, 1925 in the great city of

Springfield, Ohio. Trivia question. I thought his name was Pete, not Paul. Well, his dad's name was Pete. Or I'm sorry, his dad's name was Paul. I'm already twisted up. No wonder they did this. His dad's name was Paul Francis Die. And so people would call his son PD, which then became PD, which then just became Pete. Oh, which is, which is great. So no one says Peter. That's why I'm like, yeah, Peter die. It's like, now you're wrong already. Exactly. How about that? And Springfield, Ohio, I know a city that's close to your, close to your heart. He was born in Springfield? He was.

Yeah, that's where my mom's from. Exactly. Grandfather was the mayor of Springfield. I feel pretty good that your grandfather and Paul Sr. had to have known each other for reasons that we're going to chase that down. Yeah. Paul Sr. Pete's dad, multiple acts in his career, did a lot of different stuff, kind of foreshadowing for his son. Different points.

He was a politician. He was a postmaster. He was a bar owner. He was an insurance agent. Pete described his dad. as a trim effervescent man and his mom as a strikingly beautiful petite lady. He said, quote, no two finer people have ever graced this earth. Just a, that's bottom line in it right there.

Pete's dad got him hooked on golf early, had him swinging a little Spalding golf club in the backyard when he was five years old. Neil, I know you love Springfield Country Club. Did you know Pete's dad, Paul Sr., was part of the committee that actually convinced Donald Ross to come to Springfield, to design Springfield Country Club? Club, which was completed in 1921 right before Pete was born. A little bit of foreshadowing there, considering that we will get in some extensive Ross influence on Pete.

But Charlie, talk a little bit about how this idea of Ross coming to Springfield and Springfield Country Club in general kind of affected Pete's dad. Sure. It's kind of a one thing leads to another, leads to another situation in that Springfield, even after he got Ross to build it or helped convince Ross to build it, wasn't really close enough for him to get to, for him to drive to. It was 12 miles away, a whopping 12 miles, which maybe the roads were a little slower in the 1920s, I suppose. So Pete's dad, Paul Sr., persuaded his mom, Pete's grandmother, to release some of her acreage so that he could go ahead and design a nine-hole

course for himself. This was Urbana Golf Club in 1922, three years before Pete was born. This is where Pete grew up, and this is where he learned the game. some more foreshadowing for you. Paul Sr. had no formal training in golf course designer construction. He just went out there, started moving dirt. Got some old Ford tractors with wide steel spikes. It took almost a full year, apparently, for Paul and his crew to rough out six of the holes on 60 acres. And they might have been moving slow, might have been busy selling drinks at the bar or doing, you know, post work or selling insurance. I'm not sure what's happening exactly at that time. But I see this, and Pete kind of frames it this way as like, follow by example, Apple not falling far. Dad's going out in the dirt and building this course. And 70 years later, kind of a heartwarming story, Pete's on Peebee, came back and designed a second nine at that course,

which looks very charming today. It's still around Urbana. Pete compares it in the book to Olympic Club in Oakmont for its blind uphill shots, like severely sloping side hill stances which i thought was interesting okay so just so i i'm clear couldn't get donald ross to come because he was too far away so he builds his own nine holes they they did build the ross course which is springfield but it was after they built it uh paul senior said ah that's kind of far away like i want something next door yeah got so he helps get springfield built he's a member at springfield i presume so he might have been on the on the

on the board the founding board founding member something of that nature yeah yeah okay wow and then he's like yeah too much too uh i'm not gonna get as much golf which i can relate to i mean course proximity of the course is probably a bigger factor in club selection than at least for your boy right now than anything else hard to pass up one in the backyard that's good stuff 100% totally so by the time pete was eight or nine he was in charge of turning the sprinklers on and off at urbana started to get a little responsibility creeping in. His dad, for better or worse, left him in charge of a beautiful bright red Fordson tractor just before World War II broke out. And Pete let his brother drive the tractor who turned it over sideways in a ravine. They managed to rescue it

before their dad got home. I'm not sure that he ever found out about that one, but they, you know, lives tell the tale. Which based on some of the stories we're going to hear, I don't think I wouldn't want to flip paul senior's tractor uh that would have been a scary proposition seemed like a serious cat uh so world war two breaks out and uh pete's given a little bit more responsibility at this homemade golf course urbana because all the other guys are shipped off to war essentially so when he's 15 he he takes over the duties of of greenskeeper at this uh kind of homemade golf course and so early on he's you know he's trying to put on these uh lessons that he's learned from the the former greenskeeper and and put them into practice.

And he saw that the greens were getting a little brown, one of the summers. And so he tries this mix of sulfate of ammonia and water to, as he says, quote, inject a hot dose of nitrogen onto the putting surfaces. And he was so stoked when this worked. And, you know, he added it a little bit. And he saw that the green started to become a little bit darker green and it was working. And so he just kept going and just kept going and kept at it. He's like, if this, you know, made him a little more green, what would a little bit more do?

And he says, unfortunately, I went a bit too far. The putting surfaces went from light green to medium green to dark green to black and then a yellow straw that spelled disaster for me in the course. Charlie, I love the experimentation vibe. I think he's filing these lessons away for as he goes down the road. Let's go find out. Let's go fuck around and find out. This reminded me of a quote from an interview on, I believe it was the Turf Today podcast with a superintendent. at a Pete die golf course, which we'll get to. But the superintendent, Keith Christina said

essentially the reason that a bunch of younger people, younger superintendents call me and ask for advice is that I've killed more grass than they have. Like, you know, I've figured out almost as many ways as possible to mess things up and then I've not made that mistake again. And yeah, Pete kind of lived lived by that as well. I mean, kind of a relatable thing. I feel like every young man has learned that more is not always better. Sure, I think we've all there's Maybe with alcohol, maybe with subwoofers in the back of your car, you know, more base is not always better. I learned that in high school, you know, so this is just another example of that. You got to know where the edge is.

Otherwise, you know, yeah, you got to know when you're going to cross. But the key there is Charlie said, don't make the same mistake twice. Exactly. So I struggle with that as well. Pretty common during this time for, you know, famous golfers, big name golfers to travel around the country do these exhibition matches. Pro golf was not nearly what it is. now so they kind of had to supplement their incomes by doing like essentially what would be almost charity outing type things today and so between tournaments they'd visit these small towns almost do these like barnstorming tours and visit a club and get paid to do it and so one of the guys who actually came to urbana was uh walter hagan i was gonna say it's got to be your boy yeah noted bum as wolfe as wolfe called him uh this speaks to his bum tendencies uh i i like this uh pete said his dad paul senior He tried. He tried hard to reach Hagan, teach him a lesson in manners.

Basically, like, the gist was, it was customary to pay these guys like $500 for their, to compete in these exhibitions at the courses, and then it was customary to give them a tip afterwards. And Pete said it would, you know, my dad would not give a tip to Walter Hagan because the great golfer did not stand up when my mother entered the room. Love that. I love, I love the example that we're setting. I don't know if it got through to the to the great bum Walter Hagen, but, you know, he's not for lack of trying. Paul Sr.

There's another one. Taught Pete a good lesson. This is another one. I think I will keep in my back pocket here. When Pete was 14, like I said, good player that we're going to get to in a second. Pete was playing in this pro am and he was putting horribly. And so he had this wooden shafted putter and he got really pissed off and he hucked it up into a poplar tree. And he looks, he turns to his caddy and he says, go get that.

And before the cat, he can even take a step. He hears these stern words from behind him and says, you go get it from his dad who's on the, you know, on the sidelines watching this, this round of golf. And so Pete's kind of sheepish and he shimmies up the tree and gets the putter. And when he comes back down,

he sees that both his dad and the golf clubs are, are gone. Like they've, they've taken off. And so Pete goes to find his dad. Obviously, he can't play in this tournament anymore. He goes to find his dad later that day.

And he sees him in his office and clubs are sitting there. And Pete asks, you know, let me get the clubs back. so I can go play. And his dad's like, I paid for the clubs. You don't throw my clubs. And so he made Pete buy the clubs from him. And Pete learned the lesson.

Did not throw any clubs after that, which is good stuff. I got to say, at least he made the club throw count. That's true. Yeah, that's a good boy. You'll hear a lot of guys in clubs stuck in trees. Is that you're going to do it? Is that the lesson you're taken away from this one? I mean, one of the lessons, yeah.

Like, I think, you know, if you're going to throw one, you shouldn't throw them. but if you're gonna you gotta like bro it you gotta make it send it yeah because you shouldn't do it much so you better make it count uh there's all kinds again this is like Pete's book is just full of these little like parables uh these little like Midwestern kind of folksy uh types of types of stories it's it's great so there's all kinds of little Peteisms and diisms that uh that he lists out uh I love the one you know Charlie made sure like it's I think it's like the first one listed. It's just like if you're ever designing a hole, make sure the cart path goes on the right because most women are right-handed golfers and they don't want you sitting in their

cart looking at their butts while they're trying to hit. And it's just like, it's just very practical kind of common sense stuff like that. I just love. Which after a while of wondering about where that came from, like speculating that maybe that was an Aliceism, an Alice Diasm rather than a Pete Diasm, it got confirmed when I interviewed Abe Wilson who, I mentioned a little bit earlier who worked on a number of Pete's crews over the US shaping for him, that he was playing golf with them one day and he was standing behind Alice when she was hitting a T shot. And I've got the quote written down somewhere. But Alice turned around and said to him, don't stand behind me when I hit.

I don't want you looking at my butt while I'm hitting a golf ball. It was like, oh, yes, of course. There's just all these little lines in there like, you know, when I traveled to Scotland, every course had railroad ties. I figured if it was good enough for Queen Anne, it was good enough for me. I like this. I'm guilty of over tipping. He just, this is just a list of like bullet pointed just quotes and like thoughts. I'm guilty of over tipping. I like to tip people who never get tips like a girl in an ice cream counter. She's happy and the ice cream tastes better. You know, I don't I got a list like this. They'll trust someone that wears a bow tie exclusively. You know, be careful with people with two first names. I love this stuff. Exactly. I don't I don't know whether spineless golf shoes help protect the greens or not. I've always worn sneakers. It's just. Just little stuff like that. It's really great.

He's kind of a walking dad joke in a lot of respects. Like he had a number of dogs over the years, Neil, and every dog was named 60. Someone told me that one of his dogs was named 57, but everyone else that I talked to said all of his dogs that they ever met were named 60. And the reason was the first dog he ever got, dog cost $20. And Pete was about to leave and said, actually, I need a collar as well. How much is the collar? $20. Ah, you know, I need a leash too.

How much is the leash? $20. This dog costs 60. Dog cost 60. Every dog thereafter just remained 60. Just kept the bit going throughout his life. Love that. Folks, quick break in the action here to tell you that the U.S.

Women's Open presented by Ally. Heads to Southern California next week at the Riviera Country Club where they're going to welcome the best players. Nelly Corta, Lydia Co., Charlie Hull, battle it out for our national championship on NBC USA Network and Peacock, June 4th through the 7th. If you want to be there in person, maybe you're in Southern California, maybe you want to take a trip to Southern California. Tickets are still available at USwomenesopen.com slash tickets. Plus kids getting free with a ticket at adults. What a deal that is. Get out there. I can't think of a better place to go walk around.

Enjoy the weather. Watch some golf. Watch some great women's golf. Watch a major championship on a great golf course. It's going to be an awesome week at the U.S. Women's Open. Cannot wait to watch next week. Let's get back to the program. Pete had really bad allergies when he was a kid. And so him and his family started spending the winters down in Florida, Delray Beach. While he was there, Neil, another kind of connection to your life. Took lessons from the great man Tommy Armour, the OG.

Silver Scott. Yeah, played some of the best golf of his life while he was in high school. I mentioned this earlier. I think this is one of the things that blew me away was as I was reading this book, you know, I think I've always, I've always pictured Pete Dye, and this is my fault. Like, I've always pictured him as like this kind of wily old grandfather and he's got the old time cap and he's standing there reading a set of plans on Whistling Straits or Keough or whatever. And I just had zero appreciation for what a good player he was. It's it was really impressive. So did he play competitively?

Did he play in college? Yes. He didn't graduate college, but he did. I believe he was the captain. which we'll get to. He was the captain of his college team. He won the individual title at the 1942 Ohio High School Golf Championship, which is a title that Jack held later. He considered turning pro, but in those days, you had to be finishing in the top five roughly to make a living at it, and he decided that his game wasn't at that level. He said that his long iron game didn't

match up, but you'll like this, Neil. He was a hooker. He's patented hooks in the center of the fairway. Okay. Moving it right to left. That's right. Also a bit of a rascal. Not a lot of clarity on why this happened, but he got sent to a prep school in Asheville when he to complete his final year of high school, which didn't go well. He said much to my father's displeasure. All I did was play golf and have fun.

Change of scenery had not triggered my concern for graduating, which is a good, a good line. So he ends up leaving school then and goes to enlist in the military. again world war two kind of in full full force here desperately wants to be like many people in this generation wants to be sent to the fighting front uh so he joined the parachute infantry uh because that was the the most likely to get sent out to the front lines uh what what years this this is 45 right so right at the end of world war two exactly so before uh his unit gets sent out essentially that Truman drops the atomic bombs war kind of war ends and uh and pete is not sent out to the front. There is a good, Charlie, if you remember the story from his parachute

training, I thought was pretty good. Yeah, he just tosses this in like many other anecdotes, just real quick offhand. By the way, one time I was training, jumped out of a plane. My parachute got caught in a tree on the way down, and it was, we're doing a night jump. And so he's just dangling from this tree, terrified, not sure how high he is off the ground. So he's just, He dangles all night, stressing out. Finally, the sun comes up and he realized that he was about 10 feet above the ground. And he just managed to get himself down to the mushy terrain. So some good military connections here.

He was training at Fort Benning in Georgia. And he ended up winning the base tournament. You know, a lot of these like military base golf courses and stuff that are that are around. And he ends up meeting a couple like these golf crazy officers who learned about background like oh this guy can grow grass he knows what he's doing and so he gets asked to be the superintendent uh at the base course at uh at fort benning and another great story he gets he gets put in charge by his words he gets put in charge of all these italian p o ws uh who had been tasked with uh with kind of being like golf course maintenance you know we've got all these guys we don't know what to

do with them so give them to pete to take care of the golf course and he said they're all super anxious to make a good impression so that they could stick in the u.s after after the war they don't have to go back to kind of war-torn Italy. And so he's like, they just, they kept the golf course in immaculate condition. I mean, they're best workers I ever had. Which is a great story. There's another one that was a little, a little. These guys are cut in the grass by a hand.

It's another one that was a little wilder when his, his brother, Andy, was graduating from prep school also in Asheville, presumably the same, the same school. Their dad insisted that Pete attend the graduation. See, like, you got to be there to celebrate your brother. And Pete didn't have any remaining leave time left with the military. So he ended up falsifying a pass to get off base and go to this celebration. And he ended up, I don't know if he was proud of, you know, hey, look at me. I'm sticking to my commitments, but he tells his dad about the scheme, which also doesn't go great.

Big mistake. Paul Senior decides being apparently also a practical joker. Paul Sr. decides to tell a military policeman that his son had falsified his leave pass military policeman did not like that and you got put in the brig for the last 60 days of his military career with a big pee on the back of his uniform so then he was out there with the italians it might have maybe on the crew so charlie kind of alluded to this earlier but just a good bit of trivia he he went to high school he went to college and he ultimately went to law school and he never finished any of them which is pretty which is pretty like aspirational i think that's kind of how my my brain works as well as i i want to do all of all of you all of you all of you

of these things, but I don't really want to finish them. It's kind of like you and I learning like songs, Steve. Yeah, exactly. I'll learn like 80% of the song and then I'm good. As soon as you get to the bridge. Where did he go to college? He went down to Rollins. I think is where he ended up going.

At least he was down in Rollins when Alice was there. We're going to get to that very shortly. Okay. Sorry, I'm jumping ahead. No, you're good. Another good military base that's worth flagging some symbiosis with our guy, Cody here a little bit. He was transferred to Fort Bragg.

before he got out of the military. And while he's there, he starts making these frequent trips to Pinehurst right nearby with some of the other kind of golf-crazed Army captains. And Pinehurst obviously makes a massive, massive impression on him, Charlie. Yeah, the quote from the book, directly from Pete, is, I was so enthralled with Mr. Ross's design that I convinced my fun-loving friend, Jack Lear to let me ride with him in an old Ford, 13 hours from Indianapolis to Pinehurst to play in the north and south amateur. Jack, who, up above nothing, later had a habit of sleeping in a pen with his beloved pack of 17 gray eastern timber wolves, thought I was crazy when I made him stand and hold a measuring rod so I could look through a transit and record the contours on Mr. Ross's greens.

He was studying up. Yeah, so just this guy Jack that hangs with the, with the timber wolves. Is this, Charlie, is this where he ends up meeting Ross in person? because he spent a little time talking to Donald Ross and picking his brain, which is, again, just a little bit like when we did the CB McDonald stuff, and you had, oh, this is the guy that actually worked with old Tom Morris talking to the guy who, you know, is still alive today. Like this is another one of those big bridge moments.

Yeah, it's not that long ago. It feels both like way, way back and also like, oh, that's like one generational bridge. Yeah. So Charlie mentioned this earlier, but ultimately his game wasn't quite good enough to want to turn pro, but he was a stud playing golf. He captained the college golf team. Like Charlie said, he was the 1958 Indiana State Am champion. He ended up reaching the third round of the British Am.

We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Qualified for five U.S. AMs. 1957, he qualified for the U.S. Open. He missed the cut, but he missed a cut by two. But he liked to tell people that he tied Arnie and he beat a 17-year-old Jack Nicholas that day. So it was, you know, not a slouch on the golf course, which again, I think actually makes sense when you look at some of his golf courses.

Or it's just like, no, just hit the shot. You know, there's a little bit of Jack Nicholas, like just hit a high fade. It's not that hard. But I think he's- Inverness. So kind of a local, local U.S. Open for him, too. Oh, yeah. I didn't think about it. Town-wise.

Yeah. But I think it's important to think about him not turning pro. Charlie, you kind of raised this question. I've been thinking about a lot as well. It's like if he's born into a different time, he might be, maybe he catches the wide. enough funnel that it's like, maybe I will try to go pro and then, I mean, think about how different the golf world looks. Yeah, would he have been like a JT. Poston level tour player or something like that is what I wrote in the dock, like, which is maybe a strange, depressing thought to

think about him not designing all these courses and impacting the world of design in the way that he did if he had been born into a different era. Yeah. So after Fort Bragg, he leaves, he goes down to Rollins College, like I said, in Winter Park, Florida, a former home of yours truly. Okay, so he went, he went high school, prep school, then he goes straight to the military. It wasn't college. So he does, he does, gets the GI Bill goes to college, got it. Correct, which is about to be relevant here. So relevant.

And so, while he's there, he meets a young woman from Indianapolis named Alice Holiday O'Neill. Good player in her own right, I think would be understatement of the century here. Pete, not shy with his words here, the book, attracted to Alice right away. He wrote, quote, her perky smile and a great pair of legs certainly caught my attention. Almost blew up on the launch pad, though. This is like almost, almost dead before it started. Okay, Neil, so speaking of the aforementioned GI Bill, Pete was caddying for Alice at an intercollegiate, enter sorority match, excuse me, at Rollins in 1946.

Bring those back, by the way. Sure. When did those go away? A collection of golfing nieces. So Alice was favored in this match, which I imagine was not uncommon for her at that time. And later, Pete decided to bet his GI Bill on the outcome of the match in Alice's favor. This was kind of in the courtship phase, the perky smile, great legs phase of their relationship, if you will. So he's cadding for Alice at the end of 18.

match was all square. On the first extra hole, Alice and her competitor both hit good drives. Alice's opponent hit her second shot into a green side bunker. Doors open. Alice proceeds to top her second shot into a ditch about 70 yards ahead. Pete started panicking over his investment. So he raised up the fairway with the clubs to see if the ball was playable and found it nestled in some slimy green muck.

This is where we start to question. the great man's choices. He was pissed. He tossed her bag full of clubs into the muck and stomped off the course, leaving Alice to fend for herself. So needless to say, she was a little bit cold to our guy for the next few weeks. God, he could have lost it all right there. For sure. Lost the GI Bill and the woman of his dreams. Yeah, but he wins her back. I mean, think about how charming you got to win somebody back after after doing that, which which he ends up doing. So Alice graduates from Rollins in 1949 and she goes back to Indianapolis and Pete was a great line. Pete called her from he was still living in Florida at the time and he called her and said I'm

coming up to Indy to talk about marriage. And so Alice Alice tells her parents that they all get like prepared for this big proposal because again it's like it's a big family in Indianapolis you know well-known family and a big deal for for their daughter to get married. And so everybody kind of starts setting the table they're all ready for this for this big event to happen. when Pete gets to Indianapolis, he just started playing all this great golf. Like, he loved playing golf. Alice love playing golf. Probably very well-connected family in in town.

So they've got access to all these great courses and know all these great amateur players. And Pete just like starts having the time of his life playing all this golf. And he says, my scores in the high 60s quickly sidetracked any thoughts of marriage. Not playing professionally. I'm just on a heater. I'm an absolute heat. It sounds like TC. Sorry, guys.

I just like I it was an emergency I had to play. And so the tension kind of starts to build and Alice, you know, and her parents are kind of waiting for for him to pop the question. And so she finally front streets him and asks him what's going on. And he just straight face. He's like, we can't talk about this during golf season. I'm sorry. And so it's not until the following winter that Pete as by his words,

he finally comes to his senses. He proposes and they end up getting married in a snowstorm on Groundhog Day. 1950, a great little detail there. And they would end up being married for 68 years, built more than 100 golf courses together. I mean, the real number might be closer to like 200. It's a ton of a ton of golf courses. But I think this is the place to go a little deeper on Alice, Charlie.

What like, fill in the gaps a little bit. Yeah, I've split up Alice's influence into a few four buckets, if you will, that we alluded to in the intro. And just now, she was an amazing thing. player. She let's let's go straight in there with the golfing prowess. So she won the Indiana State Am nine times. She won the north-south. She competed on a winning Curtis Cup team. And in several U.S. Women's Open, I think, in opens. I think if she had been born later, she would have been like in the upper echelon of LPGA tour players. Just slaughtering amateur fields in Indianapolis

throughout her life. Pete said that. Sorry, I wasn't on that first. I was on that for a second. I alluded to this a second ago, but it's going to be funny how much you hear that despite their golfing prowess, how much I feel like both of them were just like, how is the regular player going to play this? How is the, we got to leave more room here. We got to add another tea here. Like it is commendable that, you know, as good as both of them were. It's still, they still kind of had that in the back of their head as a designing principle. Yeah, she was like a pioneer activist in that regard, especially in the domain of creating women's teas that were both at equitable yardages, but equitable angles being a key point

that I don't think was, she moved the Overton window, certainly, in her time with pushing Pete and pushing their courses to set up tea boxes that didn't require such outrageous forced carry shots, maybe off the tea, and allowed people to run the balls up to greens in as many cases as possible. was, you know, had a huge influence on Pete in a design capacity there. And to the, to the earlier point as well about her being a great golfer, I think Pete said, I knew that as soon as I married her, I'd be the second best golfer in the family. There was, there was no, no doubt about it. This, you know, brings to mind as an anecdote from Mark Shaw, who wrote the Barry Me with, with Pete, the first time that Mark ever played with the two of them, Mark was, I think, fresh

off a college championship winning team, a Purdue team, young stud, feeling as oh, it's ready to take a little money off Pete and Alice, maybe, who were in their late 40s, I think, at this time. He, like, thought about pitying them when he accepted a 25 cent wager from them, you know, this nice, nice lady just who looked closer to his mother's age than anything. But he was like, oh, whatever, that's okay. They'll be fine. They can handle it. I've read about their accolades. They know how to play. So Mark gets up to the first tee, stripes a drive. He said 265 down the middle, which was deep in those days. And Pete laces one of his hooks out over a pond into the center of the fairway. Sloppy hooks. Well back from Mark. And as they're walking

to the forward tee after that laser of a drive, Pete says to a mutual friend, just loud enough, boy shaw must not be able to chip or put otherwise i would have heard of him great line it's a good line and then alice proceeds to stripe her drive down the middle and hole out for a two from the fairway and proceeds to win every hole off of shaw for the entire round how'd that happen oh whammy oops yeah well that's incredible you mentioned uh the contributions to the to uh the design i i think a lot of people know this 17 Tina Sawgrass, the best, the best example. The Kiowa stuff that we'll talk about later, probably in episode two, is very interesting.

It's her idea to raise up those fairways so that you can actually see the ocean at Kiowa. Otherwise, you know, you'd be sunk down too deep below the dunes and not really realize it. As she said, that you're playing right next to the ocean, which also made the golf course really hard for people who like to throw it up in the air. And you mentioned kind of the kind of the tea boxes and the angles and stuff like that for for women, too, as well. What's kind of your third, your third pillar? Alice was well known for not pulling any punches. I think this was described most effectively in a Friday egg video about Crooked Stick by Alan McCurek, who worked on a lot of construction projects, a lot of courses with Pete. He said, say you're out on the site, you're working on the course.

Pete's pretty laid back guy, easy enough to be around him. You're with him all day, in the dirt with him. When Alice walked on the site, Neil, everybody straight. up sure she's an alpha yeah she said i think that the quote was she could damn sure drop the hammer on you if things didn't look well or if they didn't fit her eye the hell's going on with this bunker on seven who's working who's talking identify yourself exactly i love i love the uh there's a tom doke note in the book too about uh basically tom conceded a point to to alice when they were building pGA west and then alice conceded a point to to tom and and peter

Pete basically made the point to Tom Doak at the time. He said, you're now one for two in arguments with my wife. I think that's an all-time record. You'd be wise to retire right now, which is good stuff. So just a lot of people speaking very, very highly and very reverentially of Alice and her work on site. But I think the last thing, too, Charlie, is like they seemed, I'm saying this as somebody who obviously never met them, but they seem to just balance each other out really, really, really well in a pretty important way. It was yin yang. It was good cop, bad cop. They, you know, Pete was on the wackier, fantastical idea side and Alice was fix it down to earth. And I don't mean to give the impression that people that told me that she was an asshole or anything. People really enjoyed her company. And I don't think she was hard to be around at all from what the 16 or 17 people I talked to said. She would just give it to you straight. You knew where you stood with her. Yeah, there are some good stories of,

wealthy developers, folks who hire them to design courses, who would bring Alice out onto the site, we'll get into some of these later and ask her for her thoughts. And she would just, yeah, this is the last sucks. She'd be like, well, well, this is the worst, this is the worst opening hole I've ever seen in my life. She would just, you want to do that? No, that's, that's budget. We're not, that's, no, that's, that's, it's not going to be good enough. There's a good, uh, there's a good clip from, uh, from Ron Witten. We'll, we'll, will play here, just talking about the dynamic a little bit. Often when you would have a conversation with both Pete and Alice simultaneously, they would have tendencies to cut one another off. Can you

fill out some of that for me? What was that like? Yeah, everybody's probably experienced this, but I did quite a bit where Pete and Alice would talk to me at the same time, which reminded me of my parents. They would talk to me at the same time on two different conversations oftentimes. How do you decide who to reply to first if they're both talking to you at the same time? I don't know that I ever got a word in edgewise. I can tell you, they would always send me notes. Sometimes when I'd write something in golf, I just, Alice wouldn't agree, and she'd write right in Sharpie,

right on the page, you know, what was wrong with it or that sort of thing. And Pete would, in Christmas cards, Alice would write her note on the Christmas card, and then Pete would add something on the back. It was all very touching because they, you know, They took the time to think of me personally when they didn't need to. I was going to cover for Golf Digest one way or the other, but we just developed a friendship. What's an example of something that Alice wrote in Sharpie on a page and sent back to you?

Oh, man. There was one time when Jerry Tarty commissioned, I can't even remember the writer now, but he was a writer that did stuff for, you know, like, Rolling Stone and Vogue magazine and stuff. He was a pretty controversial writer, I should say. And he did a piece on the Die family, and the arc of it had Alice in pearls with a

ballerro of bullets, you know, like she was some sort of defender of her family. And Alice said, tell Jerry, I don't like this one bit. you know, Jerry, which Hardy will being our boss, my boss, uh, the editor of golf digest. There you go. I mean, there's a million stories.

A couple of there, though, like the, the first anecdote around, you always know you're at like a, the right table when you have multiple conversations that break out. Like when you're at a dinner with, with, you know, with friends. And it's like, because everybody's so comfortable. So it's just like, oh, my God. All right, we get, we need to unite the conversations. But it's like, it's a, I see that as a good thing that, like,

that's a, that's a lively table to be sitting at. That's good stuff. percent. Moving into kind of adulthood here. So Pete and Alice are married. Pete's not going to become a pro golfer. So he needs to come up with a career and he decides to get into life insurance. Becomes a salesman with Connecticut Mutual. Plenty of people in golf getting into insurance. We know that. He's going to work the cocktail tour. He's going to work the cocktail tour. He's going to work the hospitals. He talks about how he gets deep in it with young doctors and how many nights he would spend at the Indiana University Medical Center just talking insurance with resident physicians. But, you know, times a flat circle. Same as it ever was.

His ability to play golf, like pretty directly correlated with his ability to sell insurance on the golf course, right? And so. Well, I was saying he's going to get on the cocktail circuit of like these high end midam, the gasperillas of the world. Sure. You know, he's going to go to go to, yeah, I'm going to keep beating up the north-south. Why not? He does continue to play a lot of amateur golf in this in this stage. But I think it's a lot of like client golf, you know, just like, you know, watch me hit this big hook. You don't think. I know what I'm talking about when it comes to insurance. Yeah.

And he does really well. He says during his second year of employment, he became part of the million dollar roundtable, which you would presume means he sold a million dollars worth of insurance that year. A lot of money in, you know, 1950. Alice also working for Connecticut Mutual, selling insurance at the time here. Also quite successful. In a short 10 year, she sold more than a quarter of a million dollars worth of insurance, which was big achievement for a woman in the workplace.

certainly during those days. But this is not really scratching the itch, Charlie. This is not what our two golfing heroes are looking to be doing with their time. Yeah, Neil, he got home when he was 30, 195, after about five years on the job and said, that's it. Let's get out of insurance, start building golf courses. Pete's boss at the time apparently wasn't too happy about this, sent him a note suggesting that he seeks psychiatric help.

Which is pretty understandable. You're just killing it in, you know, killing it in this business. And there was talk in the book about how he was asked to take over the company. And it's like, no, no, I'm actually just going to go build golf courses instead. It's like, it is a jarring. It's a jarring visual. Would you actually stop to, to think about it? Love a big career pivot.

Right. That's inspiring stuff. I just can't sell these term life policies anymore. Charlie, did you get a sense of like what the, what the breaking point was? Like, what was the enough is enough sort of moment? I think a lot of it comes back to. his early days turning sprinklers on and off when he was eight or nine years old at Urbana. There was something planted in there in those formative years.

So like in the early 50s, he was on the country club of Indianapolis Greens Committee. The course had been through some rough times apparently, and he asked to be on the committee. And so they allowed him on and they may have come to regret that decision later. They didn't know how much, he says, the quote, is it took a while for them to realize how much of a disaster it would be. that they let him into the boys club. So the club at the time had what he called some of the finest players of the day as part of their membership who, quote, remember me as the man who single-handedly annihilated their golf course.

Pete had studied, we know that he didn't graduate from any university, but he studied turf management, took some classes with a few professors and academic doctors at Purdue, went to superintendent's meetings in the area to learn. learned some techniques, got a little dangerous, emboldened with... I like Cody. Yeah. Just, just diving in. He's a lifelong learning.

Yeah, exactly. So he, yeah, he started tinkering, started experimenting with some of these, some of this new knowledge, tried out some chemical mixes on the fairways at the country club. Didn't get the ratios quite right. Cause the, the course to lose a little grass. The quote is that he caused the course to lose the little grass. grass it once possessed. Yeah, so he gets on the board with Indian, uh, Indianapolis. And I think it like, it just has a lot of fun tinkering around with with this stuff and working on the land and thinking about the holes. And I think that like gets into him and, uh, you know, kind of makes them want to

jump ship. There's another, another story there where, uh, they needed to replace this like shaky old wooden bridge that they had on the, on the second hole out there. And, and so he, he's like, I got this idea. I was like, leave it to me. I got it. And so his idea, yeah, his idea was to construct this concrete bridge that was going to be there for eternity. He even, he called it, quote, a lifetime bridge. And so he did all this research. He was like, I got it. I know exactly what we need to do.

He built the bridge. He was so proud of it that he carved his initials in it at the date. And the next spring, the first time it rained, Pete got a frantic call from the core superintendent that is, say that his lifetime bridge had not made it through the first spring rainstorm. As it turned out, as well constructed as it may have been, he built it on top of quicksand. And as soon as the rain came, it just the entire foundation. Entire bridge washed away. Everything, everything disappeared. It's just there's some really good stuff about all these like disasters that are going

on at this country called Indianapolis, which like really lingered with him. You could tell. He wasn't in the million dollar club of designing courses at that point. But still, it clearly got the juices going enough enough for him to jump ship from insurance land. I love that he said at one point during the 60s or he's afraid to come to the door because he was afraid it was going to be somebody from the country club of Indianapolis membership. He was going to tell him about something that he messed up, which was great. But so by the time they kind of, we touched on this earlier, Neil, you said this in your eloquent open. But by the time that Pete and Alice are like, we're going to become golf course architects.

We're kind of in this in-between period. Like a lot of the Golden Age guys have passed away. And in the 1950s, it's pretty much like Robert Trent Jones, Dick Wilson, and Ellis Maples are the big names with Robert Trent Jones far and away the superstar of that group. Yeah. Maybe throw like a Willard bird in there. Sure. You know, down in the south. Exactly.

I don't know if my guy, Halperdy's bouncing around yet, but it could be. He might be. But RTJ becomes like this, the benchmark of that time period and the guy who Pete's later going to compare himself against and also violently contrast himself against, which we'll hear about. Yeah. And so Pete and Alice, like we've mentioned, they receive all this publicity for their playing exploits. You know, there's great stuff about how often Alice is on the cover of the newspaper and all this stuff. Everybody knows her as this really good player, but that's not really helping them convince anybody. like, oh, no, we can build golf courses too.

You know, that's still a little bit of a bridge too far. And so they go to the man himself, Robert Trent Jones, and they ask to be employed as designers. And so he offers them these management positions, but he's like, yeah, you're not doing actual work, like out in the field doing actual stuff. And this is not interesting to them. So they visited another architect, this guy, Bill Didell,

kind of gives him a bunch of horror stories. And it was less than encouraging. Real pessimist. Yeah, so the way they describe it, they're kind of all dressed up with nowhere to go. But after a couple of false starts, there's two contractors that are finally willing to, it's like that scene in Tommy Boy, you know, let me say maybe. There's these two contractors, Bill and Henry Nordseek, who finally, they call Pete and Alice in the summer in 1959. And they say, we need a golf course on this plot of land just south of Indianapolis. To this day, Pete, you know, he writes to this day, I can't remember whether or not we even got a fee.

I would have paid the Norseeks for the opportunity to do it. And this is, I mean, it's a while after they started, Charlie. It's like not like this is like when you really, time can kind of like compress when you start looking at it in a book or something. But it's like four years, five years after they kind of make this switch. Yeah. Yeah, this struck me in that they're all dressed up with nowhere to go phase was about four years long. They're just looking for jobs.

It's not clear to me exactly when they stopped taking salaries. is worth mentioning, you alluded to it earlier, DJ, that Alice's family came from money. She had a maid and a butler growing up. So there could have been some support there. I think Pete said that her parents helped them out a bit. He still had some, he was coasting on some royalties, had some insurance premiums, little passive income going. But they were grinding and putting ads in the newspaper looking for work for a little while into their mid-30s. Well, also interesting that, you know, nowadays it feels like one, one spouse.

Alice takes the big risk and the other one keeps the steady job. It's very unique to see it. It's like, no, we're going to run this business together and we're both going to jump ship together. Shout out to the to the dies because that takes some guts. Yeah. So the first course that Pete and Alice did was a place called Eldorado on the south side of Indianapolis now called Dyes Walk.

This doesn't count as one of our 10. This is just, this is biographical information. And so same as Ross, McKenzie, McDonald, Rayner. all these guys, they didn't have any training in this. They weren't building it with any plans. They were just using kind of the memories of their, their favorite courses in the U.S. They're,

the stuff that they liked is what they were going to use, their inspiration to lay this out. And so it's a great story. Pete sent these samples like dirt and Pete, like P-E-A-T, off to this lab in Texas A&M to basically tell me, you know, tell me what I got and tell me how much stuff I need to build a golf course that's like this.

and the lab looks at it and they say oh you need this much and he orders it up and he he orders all this without knowing how much space 3,000 cubic yards of material is going to take up and so he just sees this line of of dump trucks just come barreling down at him coming down the highway has no idea where he's going to put all this stuff he said it all creates a pile that was 100 feet logs 60 feet wide 30 feet high that was going to be his his his shirt shaping mix is greens mix, all of that stuff. And then the Texas A&M folks also admitted, like, we're sending you a bunch of different stuff, but we've only had small amounts of like the examples that you sent.

So we don't know what the ratio is to mix all this stuff together. Like you're going to have to figure that out yourself, which is another adventure in its own right. I'm picturing Pete calling them up and then being like, you ordered how much of those materials we told you about? Like, we just, you know, we just experimented with six ounces here. You got thousands of pounds. Neil, there was no large machinery to handle the mixing and distribution of this giant pile. They got out over their skis a little bit.

So they did what one does. They strung up some lights in the barn and they pretty much did it by hand. They used the ratios. They were like, we're just going to eyeball this. We're going to get it as close as we can. And they're made to avoid. Is this ratios of sand and soil or chemicals? Like what are we talking about sand and soil and peat and stuff like that that's gonna kind of make up like the the soil to shape

Basically like the divot mix essentially. Yeah. Yeah, essentially but just like like the just a whole boatload of that yeah Yeah, but I think that they had some bumps along the way but the biggest problem with Eldorado might have might have been the routing This is he tells a great story with in the podcast with with with Eric Anders lying here. We thought we built Oakmont but not quite But after we finished the Dallas made a nice map showing the golf course, and she sent it to all our friends and sent one to Richard Tufts. Mr. Tufts owned Pinehurst, or was a big owner of Pinehurst, and he was past president of the United States Golf Association.

So he wrote back and said it was wonderful for us kids to build this nine-hole course. But he said, don't you think crossing the creek 13 times in a nine-hole course, it's just a little too much? I love that. It's a little excessive, isn't it? Also love that you kids, it's like, don't tell like 34? It's true. Yeah.

I just love like everything I was saying about the, oh, they're thinking about the, you know, the higher handicap player. I think they did have to learn. Not yet. Not yet. Yeah. They did have to learn.

But at first it's like, no, they were thinking about anything. Thinking about finishing the job. So they're going along. They're doing a good job until 1963. when Pete was 38 and him and Alice took a very formative trip to Scotland. This is going to end up sounding like everybody who's ever taking a trip to Scotland, right? Everything I thought I knew about golf, it all changed once I, once I arrived there. But it's his first time over there.

He mentioned Richard Tufts, who was the former USGA president, grandson of James Walker Tufts, who was the guy who founded Pinehurst. He was the guy that convinced him to go over to Great Britain. And Pete received an odd welcome when he got to Scotland. is when he got to the Prestwick airport, he was detained in an interrogation room, questioned vigorously by the authorities. Would you like to venture a guess? Why?

Wow, God, if it was Australia, it would be because he had soil with him. It would have been a good guess. They don't like that down under. I don't know. No, this was because his suitcase was full of women's underwear. And the reason for that was Pete and Alice had traveled separately because of something to do with, you know, scheduling and taking care of their two young, you know, kids at home. And so Pete ended up grabbing Alice's suitcase.

And Alice had Pete's suitcase. And Pete had this suitcase that was all full of women's clothes and underwear and all kinds of stuff. And I don't have to dig into what the charge would be. But they did not like that. It's your deal, man. Yeah. Fucking weirdo. What do you do it?

Yeah. And so they, they would not, they weren't satisfied with Pete's explanation until. Alice arrived later and corroborated the story. But I like to imagine that there's a file somewhere in Scottish passport control from 1963 saying like Pete die possible underwear smaller. No, it would be Paul Dyer. Paul Dyer. Excuse me. Thank you. Yeah. So this is like I said, I mean, this is kind of the, this is the whirlwind tour of the British Isles that just makes the, makes the light bulb go off for these guys and you know. God, I can just see the tough guy being like, hey kid, you got to go to

You get your ass across the pond. You're trying to design golf courses. Come on, man. That's good. That's good stuff. Neil, this turned into what I'm thinking of as his Steve Jobs goes to Xerox moment, where he gets a look in the R&D lab, sees, oh, clickable mouse. That's an interesting idea.

I might want to. Dewey. I want to take a look at that. Maybe pull that back across the pond and utilize some of those techniques. Shane Ryan made a wonderful. a podcast about Pete and compared it to an American painter visiting Europe for the first time, which is possibly more app. But I like this, I like this cunning poacher analogy. So there's like of the 30 plus golf courses they saw, he shouts out five of them,

specifically Turnberry. This is the most imposing golf course I've ever seen. I love this is going to come up a million times. But he's struck by all the different grasses on the golf course, you know, multiple shades of green dotting the fairway, the roughs of different different grass, the approaches to the green or different grass, it causes the golf course to appear even more undulating than it really was. This is going to become something that you just constantly hear in his golf courses is like different grasses, different colors, different textures, get, make this thing look three dimensional. Like that all goes into some of the visual, you know, both aesthetic beauty and and the the trickeration, uh, that, that Pete's trying to employ.

And we're probably in what, like 19, late 1950s at this? point this is 63 okay so even early 60s so you i got to think at this point not a ton of imagery other than maybe photography of these courses over there right so like even the way like dj you and i were just in liverpool and we went to three open rhoda courses that i know the names of i could tell you a little bit about each of them but there's just no replacement for being like the getting on site and be like wow lhythm is so different than burkdale 100% and for years it's been like, ah, yeah, they're all links golf. It's like, no, they're not.

And I can only imagine that, you know, that's exponentially more true for Pete and Alice die at this point. 100%. And like the little tiny details too, right? It's like, Prestwick's the next place he shouts out. And what does he like there? The railroad ties. You know, he sees railroad ties there,

which Prestwick famously running right next to the rail line. So that was like very utilitarian for them. When they needed to replace the railroad ties, they kind of threw them up from the tracks. And they said, we got all these railroad ties what can we do oh if we use these you know it's going to stop the bunkers from washing away you know that's like car and reusing yeah you know kids soccer pitch astro turf for their uh you know walkways yeah so there's like a a great thing about you know he loves that

at presswick is not only is it going to be this crazy good striking visual thing but it's also like oh wow we can save some dough this can help keep things in in place so railroad ties obviously will become a big a big theme for him. Carnusti. I love Charlie, the story about Carnusty that he shares about Nicholas. This is really telling that Pete includes this anecdote specifically. The story is that Mr. Nicholas played Carnusty and was upset that his drives to the right side of the 9th Fairway always ended up with a downhill lie.

There's OB left on that hole. It's a 470 yard par full, par four. So Jack complains to Carnusty as maybe a pretty American thing to do. complaints of the governing body and they quote listened very carefully to to his complaints. Jack, according to Pete, was certain that the next time he came back, the situation would have been dealt with. So when he returned on that downhill lie, they placed a steep pot bunker and called it Jack Nicholas.

Yeah. Can you believe this? Also, Jack, I got to think that they want you challenging the O.B. I think that's the idea. Yeah. Like better lie. If you care about it, you got to take on the trouble, brother. Exactly.

which I think is going to become a pretty good through line because he's we're going to see a couple instances where he goes oh interesting suggestion and that completely steers in the opposite direction which is 100% which is great also to piggyback on the utilitarianism just briefly DJ to Pete was a proper utilitarian like he this was not a materialistic fellow Neil we'll get into some of this later but unpretentious dresser dirty boots khakis same starched white shirt collar. Same thing every day. You know, keep the uniform simple. No flashy cars, never owned a car. We'll get into more of that later. I went to Derry Queen for his anniversary with Alice, like not a materialist guy. It's another T-Cism. Dege, I mean, we've discussed this. If you and I ever cash out, I mean, what am I buying? I'm buying maybe a drum set like you got in the background there, Charlie, and some nice underwear and some nice socks, man. Call it a day. I'm probably living. You guys go in public or something?

No, I'm not. But if I did, you know, you try to think about it. I'm like, I don't know if I want a bunch of stuff. Pete sounds like my kind of guy. He shouted out Royal Dornick, which we actually might be playing right now as you're listening to this episode. Which is interesting. We're going there next. It might be on this Scottish walkabout as you're listening to this.

I love this story. He says when he got to Dornick, there were two women in long pleaded skirts that were about to tee off. And so Pete, you know, he's all. aggrieved. He's like, I don't want to get stuck behind these two ladies. Come on. We got to go. We got to go. Alice is off taking photos of the clubhouse and the golf course. She's not anywhere to be found. So these ladies tee off right in front of them. And Pete's just like he's hurrying on every shot. He's like, we got to play through these ladies. Come on, come on, come on, come on. We got to go. And when they were walking off the second green, Alice essentially paraphrasing, told them chill to

fuck out and to look over and they can see that the two ladies were now on number seven as they were walking off of of the second green and he said that was my was my introduction my introduction to just how quickly is scots play the game alice is still making fun of him later that night for his his chauvinistic behavior which is which was great but another good good like very practical point of influence i think at royal dornick which i can't wait to look for uh when i'm there charlie basically like the the the way he treats kind of the eye level of of greens is something that kept pop kept popping up Neil, I think about this as kind of a, if you trim your bushes, it'll make your deck look bigger situation.

Like, we're on the level with the green from the fairway. Let's just, let's dig a little earth out in front of the green. Make it look elevated. It's not elevated, but it appears that way. You know, I got a little bit from Tom Doak when we were at Pinehurst number 10, when Ben and I were out there, I don't know, two or three years ago. And he was talking just about what he learned from Pete Dye on how to use very specific trees to create visual deception same kind of idea of like using distance and be like how far you know really messes

with people on how far away something is or making something look bigger or smaller uh based on like the whether it's digging elevating or um like using landmarks um for that stuff i just love it we're gonna we're gonna hear some of this when we talk about the golf club as well but the this idea that like what would it take to push these like obviously we want to push up these greens and we want to make it more difficult and more demanding and add more dimension. And it's like, oh, man, that's going to take a lot of dirt. That's going to take a lot of work. That's going to take a lot of this, that.

The other thing, like, what if we just dug a big trench and, you know, just dig out in front of the green. So it looks like it's up. And then they might hit it over the back. Who knows? Yeah. Like, what if we just like make it look like we did that? And it, we didn't really do it.

It's great. So that's just one of those very crystal clear. Like you always hear, oh, it's Pete die, visual deception. It's like, what does that mean? What are you talking about? It's like, that's just a very concrete example. example and I think Donald Ross does this a good amount too maybe I'm again I'm not an architecture expert but the bunker that is 40 yards short of the green yeah oh that's great that if done properly makes it look like that's a green side bunker and you just I've been fooled by that so many times on a p. die course where I'm like oh I got to carry that bunker and it's like no that bunker's not really like even a factor especially in the days of you know before range finders and before exactly like even more important and that's and again that's like I remember doakes saying some of that of like, yeah, if I, if I lower the fairway to make it so you can't see over

that bunker, it looks like it's green side from 150 yards out, but it's not. You got like 20 yards in between there and the front of the green. Exactly. Finally, the course, you know, the course he was there to play was the old course. He was there for the, for the British Am. You can count him in the in the group, Charlie, of people not exactly enamored with the old course first time around. Really? Shout out to Bob Mack. Yeah, he just laid into it, Neil. He described it to, what did he say? An astonished Scottish reporter.

Called it a goat ranch. He said if I played it a thousand times, it would still be a goat ranch. Just the belligerent of Yankee just, you know, coming over from a shot. If Pete's one of those guys, if he's a sally, like, yeah, I just didn't think that course was great. So what'd you shoot, Sally? Well, he did pretty good. He moved on

in the British Am. And so he got to play it a bunch more times. And he would end up walking this back pretty quickly. Him and Alice got, we're just totally struck by the vastness of it, the flatness, but it's not really flat. The definitions between the gorse and the pop bunkers and the way that they win changed. The wind, all of that stuff. He ended up by the end of that trip calling a golf course design in its purest form and said that the road hole may well be the very best par for in the

world. Shout out to Bob Mack like he said, Charlie. I kind of fucking love this. He was, this is how, and Charlie I think has the details. This is how enamored he was by the 17th green when they got there. He and Alice rented a tripod in order to measure the dimensions of the green. They were surprised to learn after actually getting the gear out and taking the measurements that the roadhole green is a perfect rectangle despite appearing as an oval from the fairway. And he went as far later on as suggesting to Walt Disney that they attempt to recreate the whole state side like note for note, but Walt passed away before they could follow through on that one. And I'm guessing the maybe the old course hotel had not been built by this point.

I think what would have been right. 63. I actually don't know. It's a good question. I don't know when that actually was built. Good question. I'd love to get his thoughts on that. Well, that's kind of the end of the, the aggressive biography section there.

So we can move through some of the, the courses. And I think the first one that we're going to get to is crooked stick. Charlie, why is this the first one? Why is this on the list? Crooked stick, Carmel, Indiana, built from 1964 to 1967. Caramel, Indiana, or Carmel. They're gonna get out, they're gonna- Terry hate, Terry Hot.

They're gonna get on you for that one. Did I hear you with the Carmel? You did. Watch your- straight to jail. Yeah. I'm not even from California. Right up the road from Terry Hot. Now, see, Tehrotte, I don't have a problem with the French pronunciations,

but yeah, they'll probably kill me for that one too. Okay. Somewhere in Indiana, they built a golf course in the mid-60s. This was not the first course that they built. We established that El Dorado there crossing the creek 13 times in nine holes was the first. But they considered this course their firstborn, Pete and Alice did. It was interesting. I thought the golf club was.

Right after that. Okay. All right. That's good to know. Same period of time. The golf club, capital T. The golf club, sorry. The golf club, sorry.

Not the golf course. course is considered to be their their coming out party it's distinctive because they initiated it they found the funding they found the land pete knocked on doors he kissed babies he figured out how to get this property he brought some early members in this was their project and their course like from ground zero charlie for our song comp section he this is how he described he said something to canote a major coming out party arriving on the scene no outside developers indie label not major i don't know i don't have a lot of deep cuts on here i i put uh about a girl from the nirvana's first record you know generation kind of a new genre yeah i think

nineteen ninety one you know pj championship was doing a lot of heavy lifting right like we're set in the table so that in nineteen ninety one we've got a full a full takeover but also got like the jones family just playing the you know the 80s arena stuff and and here comes this small outfit like yeah what's this grunge thing yeah this is interesting yeah exactly uh But, you know, it's kind of based on punk and it's kind of, yeah. Spons, I like this. Spons, you know, Tom Doke is Dave Grohl. Sure.

You know, go son and doing his own thing for years and years. Like just a lot of offshoots to this. Doak wasn't on this course, but yes. Yeah. I mean you get the point. I know, I know. Yeah, I like it. Should we talk about the name?

I feel like that's, we got to start there, right, Charlie? Sure. It turns out that naming a golf course isn't always the easiest thing to come up with. There's some funny stories in the book. some of these courses that will go through. Sometimes it's a lightning bolt of inspiration. Sometimes there are some less than ideal suggestions thrown out there. Pete wanted to call this course the Mure of Ord, which means Fields of Gold,

which was inspired by the name of a James Braid course. Scotland really rolls off the tongue for those Indianans. In Carmel. And I can't even bring you. I'm afraid like you, Neil, of this pronunciation now. I started here flip stuff to the party, yeah, boy. I got all those

Hawaiian pronunciations dialed, but Carmel Indiana somehow on pronunciation so many times. It's like, you know, quadruple jeopardy. I can't put me in jail anymore, guys. Like Andrew Tate. He's trying to cancel them anymore.

Can't do it. I'm post-cancel on pronunciation. We're an hour and 21 minutes in. We got our first Andrews Tate mentioned. Yeah. Take my blood, okay? Back to Carmel. Charter member Bill Wick of Crooked Stick saw Pete walking around in 1966 with this knobby crooked stick and said, how about that? You just look like an old Scottish

Shepherd, Pete. What if we call it crooked stick? There you go. And he's walking around with that almost just like sticky picked up like pointing out we want this like just building it in the moment kind of just swatting a stone with it. Yeah, just casual. You kind of alluded to the origin story when he got back from Scotland. They started putting together this group. Let's just let's just go knock on doors. Let's try to find some land to build. We're going to build the finest club and all the land type of endeavor. Great one worth mentioning. He goes to the door this, this, what he calls a cagey lady named Mae Kearns. And he says he just goes toe to toe with her glass for glass on elderberry wine until he gets so drug that he ends up pay a double what the land is worth in order

to buy her land for $1,200 an acre, which is good stuff. A lot of just, you know, things that are Like, I think what makes like a good kind of Midwestern storytellers, like it kind of doesn't matter if it's true or not. You know, it's like it's just it's a directionally. It's true. But some of the details might be a little a little fudge. But I like that. When Pete had to step down from the board later on or the membership board of directors or whatever it was, they wrote this whole missive that was tongue and cheek and funny thanking him. And they did reference him paying no more than twice what the land was worth to build the course.

after getting drunk under the table by our cagey lady. So it may have happened. Another, another good one. He says he's got this pile of money that's reserved for a full coat for, or a fur coat for Alice. And instead he buys an old used caterpillar D2 bulldozer. Gets all this, all this fill dirt delivered to the front door. And he just, you know, front yard of his house here in Indianapolis. And he starts like, he starts just getting on the bulldozer and practicing and figuring out how to make stuff. And that's just how he's figuring out how to build this place. What do you think, huh? And so eventually he ends up getting this, this big 400-acre plot to build this place. We kind of alluded to this earlier too, Charlie, but like,

you know, surely they must be going off some plans here. Is that the, is that the premise? Well, according to Chris Worthwine, a historian on this excellent fried egg video about Crooked Stick, He said that somebody made a drawing for the course plans, but Pete claimed that he hadn't actually drawn it and neither had Alice. So it's unclear to me who made this drawing, but there was a drawing made by someone that was used to raise money. And then I was going to say you had to have it for the marketing packet, right? To get, you got to have a visual for the bank for the loan for the loan. Yeah, that was it Dean Beeman that had that same story? I think about seeing story.

I've heard this like, you know, command C, command. story on almost all of these 10 courses like, yeah, we, you had to go to the bank with something. So somebody made something. It wasn't, I don't think it was Pete. And then, you know, we got the money and he just threw away the plans and built the course. I think it was, yeah, Sawgrass specifically. I remember, like, I think it was D.V had told the story where they were walking out of the beat.

It goes, all right, well, you can throw those plans away. We're good now. It's just, it's just great. But to give you a little sense of the finances for this specific project, they started by building the back nine first, and that's because there was wheat growing on the front nine. And so it wasn't harvest time yet. So they couldn't plow all the wheat under. They had to leave that alone so that they could build the back nine because they needed the money from selling the wheat in order to keep the whole project going.

And that was that was in 1964 that they built the back nine. The first thing he did was just built a big ass lake, which is another thing that I think is going to end up being a pretty repeatable, you know, kind of first move. Even I know that it's like, oh, you need dirt. Yeah, let's why don't we just dig a big ass hole first? And we can just use that as a center of gravity as a as a mine for us. You will be seeing more of that, you know, in the ensuing nine courses. And as a result of this harvest time gap between the two nines, they ended up with some different design influences.

You know, Pete was looking at before building the back, he was spending time on some McKenzie and Perry Maxwell courses. Big McKenzie guy, by the way. had his architecture book and scribbled in the front of Pete's copy of McKenzie's book, $500 reward if found. Like he had all kinds of notes in the margins there. So green on 14 at Crooked Stick, for example, is an inverse version of the number 13 green at Crystal Downs, Perry Maxwell course with a front tier falling away at the back.

But then before building the front, he had been spending time with Ross and Tillinghast. So you see a lot more of their influences in the greens on the front nine. according to Tom Doe, he goes through some of this in detail on that Friday video, which is interesting. So you end up with a little bit of a smorgasbord of different ideas, which is not the first time that's going to happen on a Pete Ty course either. And let me ask this. It seems like a student, you know, natural, curious about the history of golf course architecture does his pilgrimage over to Scotland. Clearly, is reading all the literature he can get his hands on of these famous Golden Age architects. But he doesn't seem like

I can't think of a lot of Pete Dye templates. Like he's looking to make his own holes, right? He's not trying to, am I wrong about that? Or are there template holes from Pete Dye? He was a big Redan fan. And so he has a few instances of Redan's. I don't know how many of the other templates he might have implemented. He certainly used elements.

There's an interesting Alpsi kind of hole at Long Cove that will get into. I know that hole. I know exactly what hole you're talking about. That's an interesting. And from the old course, Pete's famous for his 17th holes in whatever shape they take, usually some sort of horrifying par three forced carry. He was just inspired by the difficulty of the road hole. I don't know that he built strict road holes to your point.

The thing, and I think this ties back to Crooked Stick, too, is, Neil, at least in my reading about it, I feel like it's less, oh, let's command C, command V. this specific hole into a bunch of places. And it's more like the philosophies, in particular, like the closing holes. I mean, he talks about this at crooked stick where it's like, we're going to go, I want you showing up the paraphrasing. I want you showing up on property. And even if you par the first, you're worried about what you're going to do on 16, 17, and 18.

And you think about sawgrass, you think about Kiowa. You think about harbor town. You think about like some of these places where it's like, yeah, that's great that you made a birdie on five. But like, I'm going to punch, I'm going to punch you in the face at three of o'clock p.m. And I need you to be thinking about three o'clock p.m. all day. And he kind of does that at cricket stick as well, right? With 16, the tough par four, 17 long part three and 18, kind of a ballbuster as well. And so it's it's kind of those philosophies that I feel like we keep seeing over and over.

I think on that same note, honestly, like one of the things we kind of skip through in the intro was like, he was obsessed with this idea of cadence and tempo and Charlie, I think you probably speak to that a little better than I came. Yeah, we're talking about music. We're talking about 10 songs. He was a big cadence guy. Davis Love the 3rd talked to me about this. A number of people expressed a similar thing. He talks about it in the book, you know, if I'm going to hit you back to back to back with a, you know, long demanding par 4, long par 3 with a difficult mid to long iron shot and a tough par 5, I'm going to follow that up with a with a comfier par 4 with a shorter par 4. Like he He's not trying to get you all at once.

He's trying to build to this crescendo that DJ eloquently described a minute ago. So there's this, there's always this give and take back and forth. And I think a give and take on shot shapes, right? Like that's the other thing is you're going to see constantly. I mean, everybody always talks about sawgrass, again, as a perfect example of this. But, you know, number one, you're hitting a draw off the T, you're hitting a cut into the green. Or vice versa, I guess. The number two, you're hitting a draw off the T and a cut into the green.

And like, it just, it's just constant like, can you do. both can you do this can you do that uh sort of mix is kind of the way to the way to score the way to play and that makes sense knowing now that he was such a good golfer right it's like he does he's definitely the feeling i get is it's less options with p. die and it's more like you know can i need you to execute this right now like he's messing with your eyes but it's it's kind of clear what you have to do when you're standing on the tee it's like okay this this hazards all down the left and this hole is bending like you've got to decide you do have make a decision, but there is like a, usually there's a specific like answer, I think, to what

he's trying to get you to do on a lot of his harder holes. Yeah, which I think is, you know, there, Charlie had kind of a criticisms section later, but I mean, that's kind of hitting on it specifically is like if you wanted to to zoom in and critique something, it's like that is kind of the way to play in a lot of ways where there is two, there's usually two shots like a, uh, the right one and a safe one if you're, if you're trying to bail. Yeah. But the right one is usually the right one. It's not like, oh, there's 15 different right shots. that I could hit here. You know, obviously there's exceptions to that. But I think, like, large scale that would be if you were looking for a criticism, probably one of them. I'm projecting

here, but I sense because of his like, you know, good golf background, it's like, playing his courses is an evaluation of like your game. It's like, hey, do you have the shots? And you may not. And, but, hey, there is a safe way to play. So if you're not very good, like, you can do this. But if you are looking for it, it's like, if you want to play my, my game, here's my game. Like, but we're going to evaluate. your game versus a lot of Corrin Crenshaw, for instance. It's like, oh, no, man, you can play it up this way and maybe get creative and go that way. And I just don't really, and some of that might be the type of land he puts his courses on,

but it doesn't feel like I have 15 different ways I can play this shot. Most of the time it's like, no, I got one or two. And like you said, D, just like, yeah, the one is what he's asking for. Yeah, which the score. If you want to score, you got to do this. Exactly. Which I think you see that. We're kind of jumping all over the place.

but you see that with tour players and kind of their growing fondness for the golf courses. I know Charlie, you talked to Mav McNeely. Actually, I think we have, I think we have that audio. Let me just play this. What do you think about Pete Die golf courses? I think every time I play a Pete Die golf course, I think I like it more. I think it's one of those unique tests where it doesn't favor any particular type of game. And it's definitely not one that you stand up on the tee and try and swing as hard as you can.

The shot value is really important. to hit every club in your bag, every shape imaginable. And I think that's what people love to see and love to see professionals do with their golf ball. And there's a lot of the game that has to be shaped in the air. And I think Pete's the master at that. Did you like it at first or did it take some time to Mike, Pete died?

The first time I played TPC Sawgrass, I didn't really understand the hype. And now I think this is my fifth or something to players. And it's probably top three courses on tour for me. So it just, it grew on me every single time I play it. I notice different features. And I think every hole is just awesome. Oh, shoot back doing a little ham and egg with me in the press conference.

Yeah, there you go. What a good, what a good quote that is. Yeah, I think that kind of bottom lines it a little bit. But yeah. Guys, one more break in the action to say that I think this deep, this Pete Dye deep dive is, is the perfect setup to talk about Arcos because nobody understood strategic golf better than our guy, as you've been hearing in this episode. honestly there may not be a better example than the island green at tpc sawgrass on paper just a short par three we're going to hear about it in episode two anybody who's stood on that tea anybody who's watched the players knows the stress starts ramping up as soon as as soon as players take the tea the number almost never plays what the yardage is that's exactly why the arcos smart laser is so different arcos analyzed nearly three and a half million smart laser readings from real golfers found out that slope only accounts for only about 20 percent

of what actually changes the shot's true playing distance. The rest of that is made up by wind, gusts, all kinds of different things. And, you know, Pete Dye exposes this better than anybody. We know that. At 17 at Sawgrass, for instance, Arcoe showed data that the same hole played anywhere from 126 yards to 149 yards on the same day, just depending on the wind, depending on the conditions. It's the same T, it's the same green, it's the same island.

Totally different shot based on the moment. That's where the smart laser range finder comes in. gives you a lot of calculations, gives you all kinds of things, humidity, temperature, altitude, gusts, slope, basically all the things that you need to know to confidently hit a good shot. And it helps you play faster, right? You don't want to be sitting there talking and thinking about all that stuff. So if you're listening to a podcast like this, you already know smart decisions, matter and golf. That's the entire Arcos ecosystem, better data, better strategy, more confidence. Now is actually the perfect time to jump in. Arcos has their father's day promo going on.

So if you've been thinking about getting the smart laser, maybe the new Arcos Air can't even don't have time to talk about how good that thing is today. Go check it out. The inventory on the air is tight. So go get it now. So it's in time for Father's Day. Go to Arcosgolf.com, A-R-C-C-O-S-Golf.com for great Father's Day savings across the Arcos line up. Let's get back into our conversation about Pete Dye. Back to Cricket Stick a little bit.

I think the other thing that I think is a big example of, Charlie, wanted to call this section tinker taylor soldier die which we're absolutely not doing uh but i don't don't put in the newspaper that we're calling at that but i think that uh he continued and part of this is him living there and having a house there same with teeth of dog which we'll talk about but he uh he continued like he was big on this idea that golf courses are not finished which i really respect and i think is a fascinating conversation in this day and age you know Tom Doak said that Pete would change the golf course, not necessarily every year, but pretty regularly for 30 or 40 years.

They just kept coming back, kept coming back. Apparently the membership got tired at one point. And they'll have just hearing the sound of the dozer, be, beep, beep, be backing up. Like, God, what are we tearing up this time? But I think that's, I just think it's a fascinating push and pull. You know, we got, we kind of fetish eyes a little bit, these like, oh, Donald Ross's dad wanted it this way. And so we can't have a grain of sand out of place.

I mean, Pete talks about this a lot, right? I mean, he talked about this. I think we have that clip, too. He talked about it with Eric, that it's like, man, everything else in the world is evolving. Like, it's okay for the canvas to evolve as well. There's a lot of people that say that, oh, we have an old Donald Ross course. We want to restore it just the way Donald did it in 1923. Let's see, that's 23.

77 and 12 would be 85 years ago, right? A long time ago. Well, Donald Ross, I met him when I was in the service, World War II. I was at Fort Bragg, and that's very close to Piner's. I used to go over and play Piner's after the war, and I was there for six months, and I went over there, and I played, and I got to know Mr. Ross. But I got to know some of his people that worked on a golf course. Well, then the golf course, the grass, the bermuda grass at Pinehurst, and if you had a stem meter reading, it would be maybe five or six.

I mean, it was very slow compared to today. So Mr. Ross designed and built everything according to 1923. He didn't build it according to the year 2012. So knowing that he was a pretty good golf. offer in the way he set his golf courses up, he would never, never have the greens as contoured like he did back in 23 is today. Because if he did, you couldn't play him. You know, he had to go back to, uh, circuit stick and redo the greens because they were

too, you know, think about building this starting it in 1963, 64, whatever, all the way, even just to the 1991 PGA championship is like, think about how much green speeds and agronomy and technology changed in that period. And then you have the BMW championship in whatever it was, 2014 or something, the one that Rory won. And it's like, you know, there's another almost 30 years or that goes by. And it's like this is not everything else is standing still. And so I appreciate the other side of the coin that like the golf course doesn't need to necessarily stand still either while still kind of respecting the general principles and the guiding, you know, the guiding light. This was a topic that apparently would get Pete riled up.

I would have liked to see him sling and takes with Brandl on Live Film about some of these things. But if you started talking about the Greens at Pinehurst, he gets into it with Eric. He said that it was not Ross's intention for the Greens to be so pushed up. They got taller and taller over the years through top dressing and that apparently Mr. Ross told him he wanted to cut the greens down and shave him off, but he didn't get to before he passed away. and then they've they've lingered that way. So yeah, he was not a big restoration guy. Pete was like, let's keep evolving. Look at these turtlebacks, man.

He wouldn't even believe it. Yeah. Ross was like, no, I don't like those. That's impossible. That's not my thing. What hell is anybody going to hit that? Yeah. We're kind of breezing through crooked stick,

but there was a couple big tournaments, obviously before the PJ Championship. The 1983 senior amateur was played there, which Pete played in. Golf course got turned up way too high. high. This is when they decided they needed to redo the greens. Pete said even, you know, even though it was his golf course, it made me want to withdraw and throw all the greens mowers into the lake. Just a hard one. Randy would have loved it. People are four putt and five putt and

October and Indianapolis. So it's cold. It sounds like my qualifier jumping broke country. It does. It does. We're getting degreined out the ass. It's crazy. But then, yeah, the 1991 PGA famously won by John Daley, famously drafted in my award. winning PJ Championship draft. Probably don't need to do the whole John Daly sidebar, but I do think the story is interesting on how they actually got the tournament. This was a story I didn't know. I did not know this either. There was a guy called Mickey Powell who caddied for Pete and Alice when Mickey was 13 at the country club of Indianapolis. Mickey, back in my day, both directions uphill in the snow, he would walk six or seven miles to work along a railroad track,

caddy with two bags and then walk home, just really huffing it, getting those steps in. Mickey's parents couldn't afford to send him to college, so Pete and Alice helped out. They, I don't know to what extent they helped out if they floated the whole bill. Tuition might not have been as high in those days as it is now. Mickey went to Indiana Central University, which is now University of Indianapolis. He was an all-conference golfer for four years, total player, became a club pro, became the owner of the golf club of Indiana, the founding owner, I believe, and which Neil Yule, you and Randy would enjoy this, that golf club of Indiana fulfilled his dream of creating a public course that had the

challenge of a championship layout. He would go on to become the president of the PGA of America, long way from a 13-year-old cadding for our friends Pete and Alice. So after all this success, Mickey showed up on their doorstep and asked if he could pay them back for college. And Pete said, no, don't worry about it, pay it forward. And Mickey said, no, Pete, you take the money, you help somebody out. So Pete said, the only among the young people that they helped out go to college, which was apparently more than just Mickey, he was the only one to pay them back. And Mickey, through his positions of power, went ahead and, as you may have guessed, successfully lobbied for Crooked Stick to become the host of the 1991 PGA. I don't know if he should have maybe recuse himself in the situation or what,

but he got it there i love well that's interesting because it's built in 64 you said let's say 65 66 it's open so it takes another 30 almost 30 years for it to kind of reach a claim by that point i guess you guys are going to get here but like when was it deemed like uh when were they when they started getting attention of like oh they're doing these these dies are doing some nirvana stuff they're creating a new genre uh yeah i think a lot of that's going to come at at harbortown Okay. But we're going to get, yeah, before that one, we've got another one that we're going to talk about, which is the golf club number two on our list. You mentioned this earlier. This is a new, New Albany, Ohio started in 1966. I think the most, the most elusive, the most elusive, the most elusive, probably, Charlie, would you agree with that? I'm thinking of it as the most elusive on our list. Maybe the second most elusive all time to what I believe is called White Oak outside of Jacksonville. nobody has ever played or will ever play the last one yeah the last one which all you can see from the

plane right which has been talked about on the the the no laying it up podcast from time to time that one was finished by alan mccurick that was very late in pete's life but this of course neal the golf club of all the courses on our list this is this is not one that that you're going to play and you being but i will say this i have you played it no i have not played it but i hear that people rave about the experience a very uh good club cultural They have some real fun traditions and it's like I don't know anything about it. I will give you a funny story though. Kind of unrelated, but I was playing in a member guest years ago.

This is 2017 maybe. And I'm not going to say where because I don't want to out this person, but I'm playing against this, this other, you know, member guests. Crew, it's a match. It's a semi-final match. And I would, you know, this guy was pretty like, you know, ready to, ready to go to battle. And I was like, oh, where, you know, where are you from? And he was like, oh, I play out of the country club. And I was like, oh, up in Columbus.

Hell yeah, man. And he was so offended, you know, and it's like me. I'm like, oh, you made my Brooklyn. I have a boss, you know, he didn't like. But I just, I get the country club and the golf club mixed up, you know. And I always, I've always gotten a kick out of that. So anytime I hear the golf club, I'm like, okay, not the country club. I've, the separate places.

I promise. That was a good one. I promise that is never going to happen again after you understand why the golf club was founded. which we're going to talk about here shortly. Song comp. I don't have a great one here either. Actually, you know what? I do have a great one.

You do. This is a good one. This is Charlie's direction. Mysterious early work. It's more minimalist than the rest of the catalog. Almost no one has ever heard it. I don't know if I get, almost no one has ever heard it. I don't know.

But I said, there's a song called Fred Jones Part 2 by Ben Folds. First of all, the owner of the properties named Fred Jones. So that's where my head, my head went there. I think the song's about a guy getting laid off by the newspaper. but it's you know it's not it's it's stripped down it's bent folds in the piano it's not brick it's not uh you know one angry dwarf it's not rocking the suburbs it's it's a b side but i think it's yeah it's minimalist and and it's fucking called fred jones and the guy we're gonna we're about to talk about fred jones so it's the best i can do charlie i don't know if you had another one for this

one or or not i had a very esoteric one i think an early an early sonlux record that you just gave me the the buzzer at like don't know it see you i don't know maybe something like with jimmy page and eric clapped in before like led zeppelin you know they are those guys like yeah playing together before cream and lead zeppelin came around it's like maybe something like that's a good a good one especially with the collaboration angle which we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna talk about in a second i had no i had no shame about picking well-known stuff for my songs because p. die's fucking he's well-known you know he's he's a mainstream guy but anywho uh all right let me lay the history on you here neil so this is uh from the golf club's

historical book uh guy william l kate is quoted as saying Fred Jones was a member at the Columbus Country Club and became very disenchanted with all of the activities at the modern country club. He would quote, bitch about the automobile dealers having a party at the club. He couldn't get on the golf course or it was Ladies Day or it was Junior's Day and so on and so on. The hell is this? And the last straw was what it was suggested at one point by another member that Columbus should host a PGA championship. their hat in the ring to host a PJ championship. Our guy Fred Jones expressed violent objection to this idea.

And during a dinner party, one of the younger members of the club fired back with, well, Mr. Jones, if you think that way, then why don't you go out and build your own golf course? That's what he did. So the golf club's historic, like its historical book says a major attribute of the club is, quote, freedom from encroachment. Stay the hell away. And it just goes on to say the golf club was not fed. founded as a family recreation or amusement center.

It was not and is not now intended to serve all of the recreational needs of all members of a family. It is decidedly, Neil, not the country club. You want to go to the pool and build one in your fucking backyard, okay? Take that shit out of here. It is not the country club. It is the golf club, which, listen, I hope it doesn't sound like we're throwing shade here. This is, I'm a, I'm a purist. This built stuff is good.

I have no problem. As long as you are being transparent about it, that's like, no, this is purpose built. This is a very specific. Talk about design built. Exactly. Even from the idea standpoint. Yeah. Yeah.

We're talking 150 members, Neil, boys only, full boys club. According to ProPublica on the internet, I don't know if this is all accurate. It's about a 750K initiation. Okay. Yeah, which the men only. situation is interesting. That's going to come up later and I think is compelling from the Alice of it all aspect. I think early in the career, maybe Pete was able to get away with something like this. I do not think he was going to get away with this much beyond. And I would say, I'm guessing,

let me try to front run you here, out flank you. Crooked Stick picks up a little bit of buzz. Some guy comes back to Ohio. I was like, hey, there's like this guy upstart, you know, Fred's like, who do I go to? It's like, well, check out this guy. They're doing some, some grungy stuff over in uh car carmel carmel carmel you're you're pretty spot on pete i mean the other thing he had going for me is he he was from nearby right he's from urbana only an hour away from from new albany and ohio pete's parents were friends with uh our guy fred jones i just have the song in my head now randy's the only other person i know that that likes that song which makes sense because it's like the saddest song ever at the time uh yeah Pete's credentials are they're pretty

modest you know he built the the second course at university of michigan by this point the radrick farms course which i've never played but desperately want to was in the middle of building crooked stick like you said the other people he had on his side you might remember he was reaching out to the usGA folks about uh about hey can you can you get us some work you know where were these two upstart husband and wife we're trying to get some some deals going and the executive secretary at the time Joe die, D-E-Y, no relation. And Ward Fochay, former president of the USGA, where they were in Pete's corner,

recommended him for the job to our guy Fred Jones. So Pete said that Fred told me unequivocally that I was in charge and that he wouldn't bother me and that I would only answer to him. And Mr. Jones, very much true to his word. Charlie, paint the picture like, what's interesting about this one from a golf course perspective? because it's very different than let's push up dirt, let's throw a bunch of railroad ties, let's like, let's really bend the earth to our will type of spot.

Before I answer that question, can I like just jump on to emphasize what you just said about Fred Jones essentially telling him, go do it, you're in charge? Like, contextually early in Pete and Alice's careers, they got not, I don't know about a blank check, but they got this guy who they described as Alice described as a lovable dictator. He was an autocratic owner, but he was well-resourced, this insurance magnate. And he said, you guys go do it, go build something that looks like it's been here forever as soon as it's finished. That was for Crooked Stick. No, that was for the golf club.

So the golf club. Okay, so Mr. Jones is the insurance magnet. Yes. And so they get carte blanche to go make something cool. there's not going to be any housing on property free from encroachment. Pete made a mistake of asking Fred Jones where the housing is going to go and Fred almost fired him on the spot for asking the question. I think Pete said as soon as I asked the question, I saw his look and I knew I'd made a mistake. Almost lost the job, but was left to go run with it. Like, I am not a golf course designer. I've

never been one, but it doesn't seem like it's an easy world in which to get jobs. And when you do get jobs, I think it's probably pretty common that golf courses have housing nearby or the course is built as an amenity. Especially in this time frame. I mean, this is like the probably the, I mean, I'm just thinking about growing up in Atlanta and every course is just an excuse. They're just subdivisions. Like that's, that's the only way you're making money. Yeah. On the golf course. So I think it's, it was huge that that they said, all right, let's go, let's go make something great and turn it into a calling card, which is what they did. And Pete kind of goes all in on this. He sees Fred Jones as bona fides. Never doubts for a second that like Fred is down for this. He's he's good to finance the club. He's good for the money, which is put to the test early because Fred Jones ends up getting hospitalized early on in construction. So he's kind of incapacitated. And Pete ends up borrowing $40,000 just against his own name to keep the construction going himself. Just like, never a thought to ask you know if it doesn't work out then i'm on the hook for this money he just

he just goes and does it and jones was apparently astounded when he ended up you know coming back to and learned about this and he asked pete what he would have done you know if if he had died and pete had a good quote he said well i've told him that i would have bought a lily and climbed right in that pine box with him uh which what they shot in the face a little bit yeah but i think it just kind of like underscores what charley would say it like it's a pretty dream dream job man like yeah out in the woods doing whatever you want to do on land that is pretty great for golf you're not trying to you know you're just trying to make an art project out there and he had a great owner and you know he was the guy i think he said mr jones doled out the

money and i spent it no questions uh that's a pretty dream dream scenario so as far as the uh property is pretty uh pretty rolling terrain i've never been out there but big oak trees beautiful country farmland Lake Creek meandering through the property. We don't know how many times they crossed it in the first nine. But recurring theme, we talked about this, but he goes big on this idea of appearance, the appearance of elevating greens without actually elevating them, which I think makes sense, particularly like amongst the trees, right? I think this kind of speaks to probably what Doak was telling you too, Neil. But Charlie, I know he had like some quotes about this. Yeah, Doug said that this is effectively a minimal.

golf course aside from a few features. And I think that that has changed a little bit over time as as it got renovated. But on the whole, 10,000 foot view, this is one of Pete's most minimalist style courses. It's a lot of lay the land. Let's find the green sites naturally in these, in these woods. Let's, you know, not move thousands and thousands of tons of dirt if we don't have to, those kinds of things. And I think guys, can I be honest? Like, this is one of those courses. I'll be totally on i don't really i don't know what it looks like i know the logo totally is aligned like a it's a buck yeah or a buck thank you uh but i could not tell you like what the calling card is here same page i've i've only probably intentional by the golf i think that's exactly right

which honestly i think speaks to some of the influences that that pete talks about as well he he just like he was listing his kind of british isles influences he was listing his american influences as well And one of them was Camargo, which is, you know, another very exclusive place in Margo rules. Ohio that he had played a bunch of times in USGA qualifiers and U.S. amateurs and things like that. And, you know, he talks about how the membership at Camargo is so limited, right, that like very few people have actually seen it, which is the same same situation at the golf club,

right? And I mean, Charlie, I know we were talking about this too, but it ends up kind of changing a little bit. Like I think that has a little bit of an impact on him going forward. I mean, especially if you think about some of the later stuff on our list, it's, it's less and less, like, don't fucking tell anybody that this golf course exists type of places. And it's more like, hey, the arts meant to be seen sort of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he weighed in on a course later on that we'll get to asking the developers specifically, like saying, I don't want this to be too restrictive. I want people to see this. It was on his mind for sure. On the Camargo front, there's a couple

things on this like references section that I love. But, uh, he, he loved, loved Comargo. Uh, he even got asked, this was like, I forget the year. This was way back, uh, or kind of like later in his, his career. He got asked to come in and, you know, spruce it up and renovate it and, you know, do all these great things to, to Camargo. And so he goes to Cincinnati and he spends a bunch of hours walking the course looking at it. And, uh, he describes this in his book. He says, uh, quote, I was finally escorted into Camargo's boardroom where a group of distinguished business executives requested my views regarding what was wrong with their course.

Sitting in khakis among these elite gentlemen, I extolled the virtues of Seth Rainer's design, but the committee kept insisting I tell them what problems I saw. Finally, I bluntly told them that as far as I could tell, the only thing wrong with Camargo was its membership and that they would be wise to leave Mr. Rainer's course alone, which is a massive hell, yeah, right? But it's also like, I think it's very interesting

on that push and pull between our golf course is finished are they not finished what yeah you know you got a if you got a if you got a good beautiful hardwood floor you got to leave that thing alone but don't mess with if not then it's okay to change it up and and blow it up so i like that i mean and i would like echo like car marco's got some outrageous stuff but it just you know this i would say the same thing like do they they don't build them like these anymore don't mess with this yeah the other especially the par three's out there incredible the other one he he shouted out as a um i mean wildly different different place because it's it's obviously in south florida on the ocean but he shouted out as

another inspiration with seminal uh donald ross golf course and there are a couple of interesting things he liked about he liked about seminal yeah he cites the thing that we talked about earlier this idea of alternating directional sequences a hole that you know confronts golfers with a drive that should be played left to right off the tee and then right to left toward the green the opposite true on the next hole alternating intermittently throughout 18 the quote from Barry Me is while Donald Ross contributed many design innovations to the profession, this one took me a while to discover, but then influenced me the most. This couldn't be more off topic, but as he's writing about Seminole, I had to include this

story. He got to play Seminole with Ben Hogan one time, and Ben Hogan is like his guy. He speaks very reverentially about the grit and the determination, digging it out of the dirt and the whole, you know, the whole thing with Ben Hogan. And he writes about it. He says in the mid-70s, I was asked to play Seminole with Ben Hogan, and I was more nervous than I've ever been before around a golf. I was sitting in Seminole's locker room with my three guests when the club pro interrupted asking whether I'd want to play with Mr. Hogan. Very quickly, I made arrangements for my guests to play with someone else. The Ben Hogan company had just come out with a new set of clubs that year, and I remember being afraid that Mr. Hogan might be offended

when he saw that I was playing a set of Tommy Armour Irons. So quickly I really, quickly I ran to the pro shop and purchased a new set of Hogan medalliads. Then I thought Mr. Hogan might wonder why they had no scuff marks on them. So I sneak back behind the pro shop and pounded the irons on a cement walk until they looked used. I think it's just a everybody living in fear of Ben Hogan is, I think what a golf's great. You know, also so so die was a member at seminal. Yeah. I think he I think he learned that too. I think he likes sunshine and I think he got around to places where it was sunny. Seems like yeah. So another the other big notable thing about the golf club is that you know, again, kind of an inflate.

point on where we're headed in the future. The guy who there's a person who keeps hanging around the construction site, Neil, do you know who this might be? This is what, 1960s? Something like that. Somebody loitering on say Bill Corp. No, good guess, though. Bill Corr's going to come up later. 27-year-old Jack Nicholas. Okay. Very interested in golf course design, Ohio guy. He just, you know, he keep. I mean, already like the dude. Yes. Already the dude, but kind of peak. you know, kind of on his way to become in the peak dude, right? And so, uh, there's some good backstory between between him and Jack, like before this as well. Yeah, they'd played against each other in the, the trans Mississippi amateur at Prairie Dunes and Hutchinson, Kansas in, uh, it was in

1957. Uh, sorry, they, they played in the U.S. Open together at, at Inverness, uh, in 1957, but a year later, they met in the semifinals of the transmiss amateur. 18 year old Jack was just out driving Pete. You know, the hooks couldn't hang with the young buck. Jack was blown at 30 yards by him and he won three and two. Jack won a day later his first amateur victory of any national repute apparently. And Pete was fond of saying that if I had beaten him, it would have changed the history of golf.

Just a very Pete quote. Sliding doors. That's right. For sure. But maybe my favorite Jack anecdote, he was walking the property and he was, We was walking the property and he was weighing in on some design ideas. They were talking back and forth because they had built up a bit of rapport. So Pete, for example, asked Jack what he thought of the 188 yard par three third hole,

which played across a pond to a circular green surrounded by some symmetrically arrayed rocks and wood planking. You'll be shocked to learn. Jack, in a very goodwill hunting moment, said, Pete, that's the ugliest hole I've ever seen in my life. It's like, let's see how this fucking car I've ever seen in my life. So Pete changed the hole. And he built a gigantic three-level bunker on the left-hand side and used a bunch of railroad ties for bulk heading after Jack's suggestion. Oh.

This makes me, I'm surprised that Pete wasn't why Jack went with Desmond Muirhead for Muirfield Village. The reason, well, Pete joked that the reason they didn't get into business together, we'll go into this a little more in our next chapter, too, is that Jack wanted to make money. building golf courses and Pete didn't. Oh, that's good stuff. So the course ended up taking about two years to actually complete Black Lake Creek came into play on four holes. Not a great deal of earth movement.

You know, again, it's supposed to be a very naturalistic sort of golf course. Pete said it was much more of an old English kind of Heathland, you know, Sunningdale Wentworth sort of golf course. Anything else? which surprises me when you've got a blank check totally for him to show that kind of restraint in an early project with an owner that's like do whatever you want and he goes he goes minimalist

that's that's interesting to me there was a good moment uh on the 12th hole neal to that to that effect uh where he he writes he says i think the 12th hole is my my favorite hole that's the one i remember most partly because it's also the hole where i needed help i needed more land and i was scared to death to go to mr jones but i finally did i told them it'd be nice if we could buy five or six acres behind the existing 12th T. And just to reiterate, Jones had already bought like 400 acres. This was supposed to be a golf course in the middle of this big, you know, kind of undisturbed boundary.

And of course, Pete's like, oh, no, well, this is not enough. We need to, we need to use more. But this is the first time he does it. This would not be the last time he does it. In fact, it becomes quite good at just, oh, what's the line? Yeah, that doesn't matter. We're going to keep going over here. But when he, you know, to his credit, Jones asked him what's it, what's it for?

And Pete told him, you know, if you want to make the whole look like it's always been here, we're going to need this land to build a shoot for this, this tea back onto that land. And he went out and bought it, no more questions. So to your point about the experience notorious club for, it's very strict protocol, when Senator Robert Taft visited there, he was wearing a sport shirt. And jackets, of course, were required in the club. Mr. Jones apparently flipped, scolded him. He said, where do you think you are, the Senate dining room?

Pretty good burn there. This is the site of what Charlie alluded to earlier. Alice not immediately impressed what she saw the first hole. So Mr. Jones invited Alice out to offer her opinion of the course. And she told Fred that she believed that Pete had done a better job. than she ever would have thought possible, which is a nice backhanded compliment to start things off.

But to use her exact words, the first hole was undoubtedly the worst starting hole in golf. And Pete says, much to my chagrin, Alice was right. She describes her reasoning in the golf club's historical book that I got a copy of, which is, by the way, just like a sick black leather bound book with the buck on the inside cover. It's a pretty cool book.

The quote from that is Fred didn't want to take out all those wonderful old beach trees from the right side of the fairway, but you had no shot with them there. The hole has an elevated tee, and Black Lake Creek cuts diagonally across it. That's one crossing DJ. Before the dog leg right up to the green, there are huge traps on the right side after the dog leg. But because of the trees, you couldn't even see them if you wanted to cut the creek. You couldn't see the traps because of the trees. They're kind of obscured, apparently. So there was, according to Alice, no way to play the hole fairly.

they cut down the trees and fix the hole. There you have it. How about that? I have heard, and I don't know, again, I don't know much about the golf club, but I feel like someone told me that there's like a, like required breakfast ball. Oh, I don't know. Off the first tea. It's like a club policy.

Like, you know, you have to hit a breakfast ball. So somebody tell me if I'm wrong on that. You got to ask Sally. I think Sally's played out there. Oh, gosh. Don't invite the C suite to these recordings. There's, there's famously a, uh, a hang. man's noose out on the 16th hole because I think Fred Jones had kind of a sick sense of humor.

Out there, long, long, par three failed to reach the green like many, many, many times in a row on this part three. And so he put this noose out on the branch of this like 270-year-old white oak tree, which is kind of a, you can read into that, you know, if the hole goes the way it did for me, here's your option. I think it's no longer there, but it was up for a while. I'm not 100% sure on that, but yeah. The news got canceled. Yeah, noose is kind of a tough, that's a tough visual. But yeah, I think Pete, I think by and large just spoke extremely glowingly about the place.

You know, he talks about how magical it was that, you know, the holes are far apart, at least like feel far apart. You know, he talks about feeling like he's out there. He's the only person on the face of the earth out at dusk. Like it's one of those types of places. He said, I doubt I ever had more fun building a golf course than I did at the golf club. Fred was a time. To be fair, he says about a few courses. And that's a life well lived.

That's right. You know, I mean, that's something for all of us to strive for. Like, the next project is the best project. I literally can't remember which one was the most fun. They were also, they were all fun. Oh, it was sick. It was all, it was just really a sick run. I love the way he categorizes Fred.

Fred was a tough old bird, but he treated me with great respect. he brought me on her by selecting me to design his dream course there you have it yeah you know alice didn't like him but he's cool with me a couple cool i will say ahead of his time you know and you could take this for like a good or bad but i mean what's what's getting built now guys it's it's either resorts you know from kind of consolidating mega golf resort companies or it's rich guy play rich guy dream course totally and i would say during this time period it was it was not that. It was subdivisions. It was development courses, basically all the stuff that we grew up on. So Mr. Jones was, God, 50 years ahead of his time, it sounds like, because I can't, this is wrong,

because this is just showing that I don't know what I'm talking about. But like, we'd love some other examples in the 60s or 70s of this type of build. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, it seems like they're either like 1914 or 2019. Yes. Yeah. I did get one more interesting story about Mr. Jones in the early membership that despite the exclusivity of it, apparently he had his guys, his friends who he wanted to join. And in one case, there was a member who Fred called up and said, hey, I'm doing this thing. I'm starting this project. Do you want to join? And the man, I think who had a younger family at the time said, you know what, Fred, it's just not a great time for me. Don't know if I

have the bread at this moment. Fred said, okay, no problem. And this guy was also in insurance. And after that phone call, the guy's business started to take off. A bunch of calls came in, a bunch of new business. Fred called him back a little while later, said, how about now? Doing any better? And the guy was like, yeah, actually, I am. Let's do it. What you know, Dege.

Yeah, sometimes. I'm sorry, Mr. Jones. I just, I really need that pool. Yeah, exactly. John, I need to, we get some tennis courts, you know? This is kind of on the club, the club side of it. I did like this note. there's exactly 150 lockers and exactly 150 members.

So the idea is when, you know, members accepted into the club, they're assigned the locker like most in the rear of the locker room. And then as lockers kind of, or as members sort of phase out and you increase in seniority, you get moved closer and closer to the front of the room. And when the member passes away, they take their member badge and they put it up above the fireplace on the, on the mantle. And so the members like to say, basically, you, you start. start out at the rear, you move towards the front, but your final move is always to the fireplace,

which is just kind of a nice. A one in, one out policy. Yeah. And, and 150 is a, I mean, you know, there's like research on this. Like what when organizations get over a hundred, you know, probably, probably 200. It's like it, you can't, you don't know everybody. Right. You know, you can't, humans like, I guess biologically, like can't keep, it's too big of a tribe at that point. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's right. I think most notably, there's never been an outside event held at the golf course. That was kind of the goal. And it seems like they've...

Don't do that. Stuck to that. Mr. Jones's intention for the club was for it to be used by the members. Apparently at one point, I don't know if this was verified. There was a... The USGA was considering moving their headquarters to the golf club, which is fascinating. And then they... Uh, conversation came to an immediate halt when they're like, yeah, obviously, we could have the US open there.

They're like, nope, no chance. So that's the golf club. All right, guys, that brings us to course number three on our list, which I think is going to be the last course we'll cover in this episode. We'll pick it back up in episode two. That is, of course, going to be Harbor Town, the vaunted Harbor Town Golf Links. I think, Neil, let's kick it off with a little video asset, should we? Sailing out of Gravesend, England on the trade route,

Captain William Hilton, one August morning in 1663, came upon an island peaceful and serene. A lush green headland off the southeastern corner of what is today the state of South Carolina. And he wrote in his ship's log, facing on the sea, the air is clean and sweet. It is the most pines, tall and good, the land the goodliest, best, and fruitfullest

aisle that ever was seen. Today it is called Hilton Head Island, with its ancient trees and shells and shoreline and this quiet resting place for the old families that worked the land, marked now only by the hand-cut gravestones hidden under the great walk. I think that's probably good. I think the goodliest best and truthfulest aisle that was ever seen is a pretty good.

It's a pretty good way to sum up the vibe on Hilton Head. I mean, the guy from Springfield, Ohio, you know, being best known for a course on Hilton Head, that hits, that's on the nose. As someone who spent a lot of time in Hilton Head as a kid and whose parents are from Ohio, they knocked it out of the park with that one. It's not a pipeline that I'm not aware of. Oh, yeah, Midwest. Ohio specifically. Ohio. It's just like Ohio license played on the way in and out of Hilton. Yeah, there is it. Let's sell some condos. Well, I think that's what this, this little quote unquote documentary advertisement is, uh, is all about. It's just extolling the virtues

of, uh, the great Hilton Head Island, uh, site of Harbor Town golf links. Uh, this was, I think made right after the first playing of the heritage, uh, which we're going to, we're going to talk about. But according to that documentary, uh, our guy, our guy, Captain William Hilton was the first colonizer who sailed into Hilton Head, paving the way for many generations of future, big and little Randy's to go on vacation with their families. Pete described the developer of Sea Pines, a guy named Charles Frazier, as a man who had, quote, the most imagination of any developer I have ever known. Pete cites evidence as the fact that Frazier took a small desolate island without even a bridge and convinced his skeptics that he could build a resort

that could captivate the world. Maybe a little bit of hyperbole going on there with that closing sentiment, but you know, the point's well taken and it seemed like it went pretty well for Charles Frazier. Charlie, I'll throw it over to you for this section, but the deeper you go maybe in some of the South Carolina history, it's you end up bumping on some pretty not heartwarming stuff pretty quickly, but I think it is fairly related to the conversation here. You're giving me the laughs part. Thanks, DJ. Yeah, I mean, you know, where there is a successful developer on Hilton Head, for example, there is a whole story of black land, historically black land that had been passed down through an informal airs system that existed because in

Jim Crow South, black folks didn't have access. they were barred from using legal services. So there was this informal system and a lot of developers. I don't know if Fraser and Seapines specifically, I'm not going to make a claim to that, but a lot of developers on Hilton had used these tactics to acquire that land. They would convince certain heirs who owned partitions of land to sell their share to them. And then they would force a share of the whole partition. I think they could do that by.

by suing to clear the title, forcing an auction, and then essentially easily outbidding the rest of those heirs. So what this let them do was acquire prime real estate for pennies on the dollar. Was it legal? Yes. Was it ethical? I'm going to go with a no on that one. So this is not the only golf course where sitting on land where things like this had happened, obviously. But as we're digging into like, what's the back end of this course? Who's the developer here? Who's the owner here? I start to do a little searching and found like pretty quickly like oh god you know it's a it's a messy one yeah let's get randy on the horn yeah exactly all these people behind fucking come on charlie i just want to go ride my bike on vacation stick to stick to golf would you well say what you will uh about the the history

but our guy charles fraser definitely he knew the golf boom was coming here in the mid 60s and so he wanted to build a championship golf course in the lowland by the ocean something that had an old-fashioned look and feel Well, first call he made was to Jack Nicholas for the job. Jack, of course, at this time, very busy tour player. It doesn't really have a ton of time to be running around designing golf courses full time. But like we said about, you know, the golf club, he's very interested in the project, interested in becoming a designer. And earlier, we established that him and Pete have a great relationship. And so, you know, dating back to obviously stuff in Ohio, the golf club, competitive golf. And so Jack suggested, why don't we bring Pete into into the project.

They agreed to collaborate. Seems like kind of a dream combo, right? When you break it down, you've got Jack's name associated with the project. You've got Jack's vision for the project, you know, is kind of nips and tucks and ideas. Sorry, what year is this? This is 69. Okay. So we're still in the 60s.

69. So you've got, yeah, you've got Jack's name and everything good that comes with Jack, but you've also got Pete Dye, the guy who knows how to design and build a golf course and actually, like, get it done. So kind of kind of a Tom Doak. Brooks Kepka Memorial Park sort of situation. But yeah, an interesting one. Worth noting, I think, I didn't know this,

but before Pete and Jack came along, the famous architect George Cobb actually designed the first seven courses on Hilton Head Island and was commissioned by Frazier to, you know, naturally as the guy to do the next one. So he sketched some preliminary routings and had a plan for what to do on Harbortown. And Pete credits Cobb for his, innovative work on that front. I don't know exactly what happened or how they moved on to Pete and Jack, but there's definitely a little bit of George, George Cobb in that,

that routing that carried over that's worth, worth mentioning. But on the actual land front, it's, it's worth mentioning again that this might, this is kind of the first instance of Pete designing courses in the low country. If you know anything about Pete die, you know this is definitely not the last. We're going to get a lot more of these. But same thing. Crew started by dredging out canals. We got to get this water out of here. We got to start making some land for golf.

We got to build lagoons to handle all this excess runoff. And, you know, when you end up draining all the water off, like, you're kind of hoping that, like, what's under there is interesting stuff, right? Not exactly what they found at Harbottown. The word that Pete used was unimpressive. Once they exposed the land, property was unimpressive. The change in elevations. between the highest and lowest points on the property was four feet so yeah he pete ended up getting maybe even pigeonholed in a way to over time become this let's make something out of nothing

guy and you know he he contained multitudes as we were kind of talking about before contradictions with the the the ashock self-deprecation and his confidence well he also contained multitudes in terms of his infamous for his ability to receive an unlimited budget and manage to exceed it, which will come up a couple of times throughout this. This wasn't necessarily one of those projects, but he had this utilitarianism. DJ you were talking about earlier as well. So at Harbottown, for example, he was proud of the fact that he spread sand and covered it with pine needles around many areas of the rough, which provided the course with Pinehurst look that he was fond of and also decreased the amount of maintenance that was required and decreased the

cost there. That's kind of a small example, but the book is full of those things like, ah, look what I did there. I managed to save a bunch of money on drainage by doing this or save a bunch of money on mowers by spreading pine needles over sandy areas and making them look native. Yeah, and he got, like you said, he was pretty proud of this idea, I think because he loved running in the opposite direction of these like very, very manicured golf courses. Here's, here's a little bit of him talking to Eric Lang about it. We keep the golf courses so manicured nowadays as the cost has gone up.

And I don't really like that too much, but I don't run the world. But like you go, a lot of the courses in Ireland, England, Scotland, their maintenance is nothing like what we do in our country. And we've escalated it. A lot of us that's come from

where the builders are building homes, and they built homes. So now the lady lives here and on the other side of Farrow, another lady, and they want everything manicured from one side to the other. Yeah, he wasn't about that.

But one of the favorite quotes that was known to kind of make the rounds before Harbor Town also comes from this book, which is he said, quote, in an ironic way, my designs at Harbor Town were influenced by the architecture

of Robert Trent Jones. In that I took Mr. Jones's ideas and I headed in the opposite it direction. This is pretty good stuff. And I think, Charlie, you can maybe sum this up to you, but like at this time, like we said, Robert Trent Jones was was out there, big greens, big teas, big budgets, big everything. And when you think about Harbor Town, it's so the opposite, right? It's, it's very intimate. It's small. It's tree lined. It's small greens. And, you know, I think Pete kind of took this idea of being a contrarian a little bit to heart and, and just ran with

and turned into something that was pretty great. It was super motivating for him. Yeah, let's build the most finessey shot making course possible when the guy on the scene at the moment is building these huge brawny courses. So one anecdote to this effect, well, two, that was not the only time that he said, you see whatever that guy's doing over there,

like we'll be okay if we do the exact opposite. Someone who told me a different version of that story about a different course and a different designer. But anyway, when I was talking with George and Mack Fry at Kiowa, George Frye was the original super at Kiowa, and Mack is his son who developed a friendship with Pete over the years. Mack told me that he was having lunch with Pete in Indiana one day and the subject of another golf course who Mac wouldn't tell me what the course was

or who the designer was, but the subject of this course came up and Pete just stormed out of the restaurant. No explanation. They were like, did we, what, what, what happened? Do we say something to offend? And Pete comes back with the plans for that other course and starts eviscerating it, just tearing it apart, talking about everything that they had done wrong with it. It's great. He was, he was a man of of strong opinions for sure. And another one like kind of involved in the strategy. Like we, we talked about, you know, slowly learning this. And now it's been, it's been about a decade, right? Since we've been, we've been designing golf courses. I think at Harbortown, they also

started to get much deeper into this idea of who's playing the golf course, right? Like, who are we building this golf course for? This is going to be a resort course. This is not the golf club. So I think that was one of the things that Jack needed to come to terms with as well. Here's a little bit of Jack kind of speaking to that. I say he cleared the golf course with silk gloves. He went down and individually marked every tree. He'd put a certain colored ribbon on the tree for a tree to be taken down. Another colored ribbon for the fellow to start to be very careful because there's other trees right next to that. He wants to say, and then Treesie definitely wanted to save.

He put another colored ribbon on. A great number of things happen underground on a golf course, which certainly the average golfer doesn't see that really goes into the cost of a golf course. Basically, the cost of a watering system, the pipes and the heads are all a fairly fixed cost, but it all depends on what you're putting it in. At Hilton Head, you're putting it in sand,

and it's not too expensive to put piping in. But in the northern part of the United States, a lot of times you're dealing with rock and clay clay and other things that make it more difficult and it does become more costly. I think on that front, like he wasn't very precious about certain parts of getting the job done, right? I mean, the fifth hole, I think, was that the dump hole? Yeah, I mean, it can get precious very quickly like, oh, here's this great man, this great genius, this designer, look at all the strategy, look at all the visual deception. And then Pete in his book is like, yeah, fifth hole was an

island dump. We must have buried 30 cars, 10 trucks there. It was an old asphalt. pit, you know, everything that we didn't want. We just put in that hole. That's that mound. We're over around five. Kind of feels like the spot to talk about waste bunkers as well. Where just, just for background, during construction in Harbor Town, Pete noticed that there was, the local sewer patrol was out there. According to him, fighting a losing battle with a broken pipe near Harbor Town's border. With raw sewage about to pour over the area, he suggested that the workers pump it into a large,

narrow depression that was going to be used for a bunker. This, Neil, is the origin of the term waste bunker, which I did not know. Okay, I'll think about that every time I'm in one. Like, this might be contaminated. Might be my hazmat suit. Now I understand why people at other courses bristle at the use of that term, knowing the origins of it. This is me projecting, but he strikes me as somebody that would go,

that would hear about that or see that happening and go over and be like, let me go tell these city workers what I think they should do. Tom, like here's some unsolicited advice. Why don't you pump it over here? Like, oh, yeah, good idea. The, as far as notable holes, I mean, the short par four, the 13th hole at Harbortown, one of the, one of the most talked about highly regarded holes, probably in Pete's hole, whole catalog.

Charlie, I don't think it traded you very well when you were down there. Not going to talk about that. Alice, when they were designing this one, she asked Pete, what, what do you plan to do with this green during construction? He told her he had absolutely no clue what he was going to do. So he asked her to take a crack at it with a couple of guys from the crew, which is another one of my favorite stories here. There was a bulldozer operator named TP, capital T-E, capital P-E, I don't know what the story is there.

I probably should ask Bobby Wheater or somebody about that. But Alice and T-P went over to 13 and carved out this kind of small, heart-shaped green protected by this wild horseshoe bulk-headed bunker using these old gray cypress planks. I find this green to be completely ridiculous, but I'm tainted by the whatever it was, the eight that I made on that hole after getting pot bunkered. But the story from the book that I love is that right at the beginning of this inaugural heritage classic or toward the beginning of that tournament, Pete was dressed like a day laborer. He was like, oh, doing some work early in the morning on 13.

And a couple of spectators came over and he heard them say, oh, this is such a beautiful golf hole that Jack Nick was built. And somebody told me that Pete might have had a couple drinks the night before. And he said, actually, I'll have you know, a fine young lady built this golf hole. And the gentleman turned around, walked away. And Pete overheard them say, well, that's a morning drunk for you. I also love that they were like, they were just running so down to the wire on this hole. They weren't they?

They were still spreading sand or pineal. I think it was sand in the bunker on 13 as the first players for the tournament are like coming around the corner on Thursday morning. So this this was purpose built for PGA event. I don't know about purpose built. It was like purpose built as a resort, but I think they had a, I don't know if it was a handshake or whatever to host the tournament. That's right. Yeah, interesting how quickly they fired it up as a tournament venue. Especially compared to cricket stick, right?

Like you were talking earlier. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was a deadline for sure. There's another story about a tree on the corner of a dog lake where Pete was standing and watching players during this tournament wrap their drives beautifully around this tree. And they all found the fairway. It was served as kind of a visual guide for them. I think it was on the first day, Thursday or Friday. And the players came back the next day and the tree was gone.

And they all drove it. Pete watched again. They all drove it in the waste bunker because they no longer had this sort of visual helper to avoid it with some hidden trouble. Yeah. But yeah, to your point, the first heritage took place Thanksgiving of 1969. Great time to be in South Carolina, right? Thanksgiving. Yeah. In Hilton Head, it sounds great.

Good photos from back then, golfers in just sweaters and pleats, 40-year-old Arnie just looking incredibly dapper in a teal cardigan. And like you said, Pete's out there watching everything and making adjustments to the course kind of as it goes. and they ended up putting this this uh video together which is great we'll we'll throw a couple of a couple of clips in there but jack looking suave pete looking a little awkward uh in in the video it's it's uh it's good stuff but jack had to had to like change gears right because if you if you think about i mean again 1960s like kind of approaching the peak of his powers and yeah also designing the golf course it's just a it's a weird uh it's a weird one to be able to you know to be the guy designing the golf

course, and also going out and trying to win the golf tournament, which he did not do because Arnold Palmer ended up winning the first one by three over Dick Crawford and Bert Yancey, the score of one under par. So a true, a true test out there at Harboretown. Ended a 14-month winless streak, or windless drought, I should say, for Arnold Palmer, which was massive for the course, massive for Hilton Head. So, you know, massive for kind of Arnie's popularity and extending that on the PGA. tour it's just a bunch of a bunch of things all going at the right people right place right time that i think kind of helps this just absolutely you know take off kind of goes like about as good as you

could as good as you can imagine it seems to me now also massive credibility for pete die yes on you know who he's working with and who's who's vouching for him as a as a okay he's designing a pGA tour venue now and not you know it's not uh some eclectic guys in New Albany that wants a very isolated place. I think that is the best way to tease towards the episode two, because like this is the place that basically puts Pete Dye on Dean Beeman's radar when he wants to design TPC sawgrass. That becomes a whole can of worms that we'll talk about in the next episode.

And we're kind of, I mean, we're off to the races at that point. But before we get there, Charlie, anything other big picture stuff on, on Harbortown? Just doubling down on the PTI. I've been texting Randy as we make this, as I have been reporting on this episode, like Pete kept receipts about the extents of the proper tests at these tournaments. Like he's, you know, bragging in the book about how Lee Trevino shot 11 over, but still managed to call Hybertown the greatest course I've ever played. That's a feat.

It is a feat. Well, more evidence, too, how he looks at. designing as an evaluation of someone's game and not um whether someone had fun or not not not uh like you know so i i think there's some architects i get the sense that they're like no my work is not i'm not going to comment as much on my work it's for you to decide you know some some artists are that way it feels like he's like no no this is how you should play it and there's a score to tell you if you did it well and it's bonus if you still like the course and you got your you know your ass kicked i I love that.

Yeah, I think it was two to one rounds in the 80s versus subpar scores at that inaugural heritage classic. So I made a note in here that we should do a genealogy check on Randy, given the Hilton Head Associations and the PTI adoption. Might be where it was from. Yeah, exactly. And of course, notably, you know, Harboretown reopens this past year with a restoration by Scott Sherman and Davis Love's organization, which is also going to, we're going to hear them

pop back up at. Coggrass, but that's, I think that's enough teasing to episode two. I mean, we've got a lot more that we're going to cover. We got a shitload of firsthand audio that we're going to play in episode two. Neil, we're going to talk about your long cove experience. I can't wait for that. All kinds of stuff that we're going to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to lunch. You're great questions. Great, great prep. You were you were dialed for this one. I love it. It's just osmosis, man. I mean, enough you get your ass kick by same guy enough times keeps taking your lunch money. You want to learn a little bit about it. Maybe he's got some weak spots. I don't know. Exactly. Well, we will hear more about his strengths and weaknesses in episode two. We'll catch everybody over there. Cheers.