No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - 1165: Pete Dye Deep Dive Part 2

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

DJ, Neil and Charlie Van Kirk are back for part two of our look at the life and career of Pete Dye as we finish our trip through ten of his most famous designs.  Support our Sponsors: Titleist Lagoon Club Glove 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's better than most ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the no langa podcast my name is DJ this is it's our Sunday episode technically but it's going to be a lot different than our normal Sunday episode that's because we're off filming a season of our travel series touris sauce And so what you're going to get tonight is actually part two of our deep, our deep, deep, deep dive on architect extraordinaire Pete Dye. If you've not listened to Part 1, that should be the previous one in the feed. Go check that out.

Me, Neil and Charlie Van Kirk having a lengthy chat about Pete's bio. The first couple courses that we wanted to cover, we're doing this as kind of a history of Pete die in 10 golf courses. So we covered the first three in episode one. We're going to cover the rest of them here in episode. too. Lots of fun. Excited to get into the remainder of our research today on this episode. Before we get started, I want to give a shout out, as always, to our friends at Titleist

presenting sponsor of this year podcast. Like I mentioned, we are off shooting our travel series of tourist sauce right now. I'm probably standing somewhere in Scotland right now with a GTS2 driver in my hand, maybe even feeling whiffs of confidence off the tea for the first time in quite a while. I got fit for the GTS driver. It's been a couple weeks now. I feel like I finally have worked out any kinks. I'm used to it.

I'm ready to rock. And it's been truly delightful. I just checked my Arcos right before this. I'm actually gaining shots with my driver for the first time. And quite a while, I ended up getting fit, like I said, into the GTS2. It was a good fitting process because a lot, there's a lot of combinations. There's a lot of stuff to look into, a lot of levers. you've got weights in the front, you've got weights in the back, you've got a lot of different

combos, which just leads to a lot of different improvements. I have what I would call a little bit easy power. Don't feel like I have to swing out of my shoes to still get the ball out there, which has made, you know, the dispersions become tighter with the weights in the back, feeling more stability. It's a great combo of speed and stability, and it's been really, really fun to hit off the T. And I hope I'm standing in the middle of a fairway right now after just striping one. But if you have not been fit recently, there's a good chance you're leaving performance on the table. So head to tidalist.com to find a GTS fitting near you. Let's get on with the program.

Part two, guys, our Pete Dye, Deep Dive rounds for Home. We're doing part two tonight. Sun's going to be going down behind me. It's a little Pete die after dark, which is fitting. We've got some characters in this half. Neil, how are you ready to go, man? Oh, man. I just want to shout out to anybody that's going back to back on these.

It's listening to it, you know, a week after we put them out because we're going back to back, baby. Had a little dinner, had a little witching hour. And now, now we're going to get into it. All right. I'm doing fantastic,

Dege, let's go. The kids are asleep. The high noons are cracked. It looks like you've got a little summer shandy, a little taste of Chippewa fall is going on over there. I just like, yeah,

it's just like a cold summer beer sounded like something that, that Paul Dye would be into. I love it. Maybe Paul Jr. as well. You know what? he was into it. Yeah.

Up to a point. Up to a point. Okay. Charlie, Charlie Van Kirk is here as well. Charlie, what's up? Good evening.

Character's welcome. Ready for this round two. Excited to throw Neil as many curveballs as we can. Yeah, let's do it. Let's get right into it. If you miss the last episode, go back and listen to it.

But if you refuse to do so, we talked a lot of biography of the great man, Pete Dye. We talked about the first of, the first three of 10 golf courses that we're going to get into in detail. We talked about Cricket Stick. We talked about the golf club up in Ohio, not to be confused with the country club, Neil.

And we talked about Harbor Town and the heritage and the Jack Nicholas of it all. A spice push. A spice push. A lot of good stuff in part one. In part two here, like I said, we're going to focus on the last seven golf courses. We're going to get in some heavy hitters that people know,

that people have watched on TV. it's a really fun it's a really fun lineup we've got a lot more firsthand audio a lot of good photos it's gonna be great so can I just before we go any farther can I tell you what I couldn't stop thinking about in the dark while I was feeding my son Wes about like 45 minutes ago

did that Pete die gambled away his GI Bill money like did he pay that like we just kind of just was that a tall tale did he literally just leave college throw the clubs in the freaking leave. My impression was that it was not the entire GI Bill, but maybe like that month's allotment or that week's allotment or something. He wasn't, he wasn't very specific about it in the book, that part of it.

But the story itself was so specific, him leaving his bride to be in the lurch on a playoff hole that I figure it like it has to be at least somewhat true. Yeah. I mean, just that one, I was just thinking. I was like, man, that's a big miss there. Like I know it all worked out for him, but that was really stupid. A lot of, a lot of these stories don't really hold up to, uh, to kind of the, that first order of, of, of poking holes, you know, so it's better to just kind of take of

face value and, uh, and, and, I mean, we talked about a lot, but I was like, man, let me just double click right on that one in like the first 30 minutes. Did that was that what I heard? Okay. Uh, again, if you, if you miss part one, go back and listen to it. If you're not going to do that, uh, we're doing the, the 10 golf, Pete die and 10 golf courses. We've been trying to give Neil some song comps. I realize we, I think we missed on Harbor Town. I didn't really tell me.

I didn't really have a good one. Charlie, do you have a good one for Harbor Town? My prompt was, let me read my prompt. It was the single that really launched the career a little more refined and less bombastic than his later works, possibly a prominent feature,

prominent co-lab with Mr. Nicholas. I don't have a good answer for it, but I'm someone, I'm sure someone's done. I mean, I'm going to first go to the Beatles. You know that. I think something like something like something, you know, a little softer. Like, oh, this George guy, he can really do it is, you know,

but he's kind of in partnership with the rest of the squad that comes to mind. I was thinking, nah, this isn't going to hold up in court, but Sting and the police. Sure. Maybe it's the police and then like he goes off and becomes sting on his own. Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with the police to know where it's going to fall in the in the discography. Or who did like, yeah, who else was in Genesis? Maybe Phil Collins. Phil Collins.

Yeah, I forget who played guitar. I'm trying to think of a star that had like a really good like, you know, group or collaboration and then just probably a more successful career on their own leaving behind Nicholas. But then you have to have like a power play. It almost has to be a duo that broke up. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Eric Clapton in the last episode, you know, and some of the yard. Who was in Wham? It wasn't that like two heavywigs? Yeah.

Who was the other guy? Oh, no, maybe the Doobie brothers. Sure. Michael, Mick? Yeah. I would kind of say that Nicholas is Michael McDonald and die as Kenny Loggins or might go the other way with that. Michael McDonald might be more like one of these these shapers that we're going to get into.

He was kind of just a hired gun in a lot of. Yeah. We're going to get this thing back on there. This is going to be four hours. We're not doing this, Neil. Send in some comps for Hilton Head Heritage, that whole deal. I need DJ singing the Steely Dan Michael McDonald background vocals right now from Asia. Thank you very much.

You got to think that all the dads in Hilton had loved Doobie brothers too. Oh, for sure. I think that one. We're on to something. And the many iterations of Michael McDonald. I think that's the best karaoke performance I've ever seen. It was like 2 o'clock in the morning at Cole Haynes in Atlantic Beach. And these two guys sang, what a fool believes?

I was like moved to tears. It was unbelievable. So good. Sick. What were we talking about? Okay. So one thing we didn't really touch on, kind of on the recurring Pete Dye themes and isms. One of the things I really like, Charlie, you surfaced this.

He had this penchant for hiring guys that weren't necessarily golf course guys. There was a lot of guys that became golf course guys. And he did hire a lot of golf course guys as well. But he was not shy to hire construction workers, people who didn't really have any preconceived notions about golf courses, which I really, really dug. And I think we're going to see pop up in this episode. Sounds like somebody else we know, Dej. Exactly.

Exactly right. Sounds like CB. That's right. Neil, he liked him young and impressionable. Well, not Stamper White. More CB and Rainer is what I was getting at there. He also liked, I don't think, I think we skipped past this in the first part agenda. And I had this in big bold letters because I know Neil's going to love it too.

He loved men of action, you know? He loved like, don't make me. make it bigger. You make it miss on the high side. Do I can I will pull you back. Yeah. I have a firm grip over the reins and I will yank the chain. But yes, I don't want to have to go to the whip. Yes. And I think Charlie, you fill in the gaps. It sounds like you heard a bunch of people talk about that. Oh, absolutely. Miss on the high side. Uh, for sure. I mean, to the to the young crew thing, there was also a little bit of double digit handicaps need not apply. Like he let he liked guys who didn't know anything about golf course building, but who.

love the game and we're good players, which we're going to get into in some of these. And that's a small diagram, I got to think. It is. It is. But it's a, you know, if you find them,

that's, yeah, you know, I think that speaks to like, he wasn't out there trying to micromanage. I think, sorry, I'm getting ahead of ourselves,

but there's a lot of, like, interpretation and him kind of wave in his hands and, like, making people figure it out. And I think they had to, you had to have some requisite knowledge of the game in order to kind of figure out what he was talking about.

He just didn't necessarily want it to be, like, oh, do it exactly like this golf course. Does that make sense? Yes, it does. He had his own vernacular. He called it Urbana ease that required sophisticated translations from some of his more trusted lieutenants. So there's, yeah, there's some funny stories about him grumbling about something. And then his lieutenant would go to the crew and said, okay, Mr. Dye has no idea what he wants. He doesn't like what we've done. But we're going to go out and try some more things until he does like what ends up happening. It's a great spot.

He's just going to know it when he sees it. Exactly. Don't worry. Exactly. It's really threading that needle between, I'm making it all up as I go, but I do kind to know what I want. So if you could just meet me halfway, it's, uh, yeah, it's really, really fun stuff, but it's not the most affordable way to build a golf course, as it turns out.

That's true. Not efficient. Uh, all right. The first golf course we're going to talk about today of, of the seven that we have left to get to is a course that Neil and I have been to. We went there earlier this year. down in the Dominican Republic we are of course talking about teeth of the dog uh song comp here you know uh history rock and roll and 10 songs uh this was charlie's prompt some of the strongest raw

songwriting in the catalog showy and wild recorded with simple tools analog record no heavy machinery lots of hand tools crazy manual labor i mean what what struck out to me is just again we're talking mainstream stuff here it's it's led zeppelin it's whole lot of A lot of Frog rock, you know, but maybe too much synth and effects in Prague, right? It feels like Bonham. Yeah. It's just thunderous, you know? Charlie, is that, can you get down with that?

Fully down with Bonham. Yes. Give me. The only thing I could argue for me is a power trio. You could, you could talk me into rush. Of course. Of course. Working man.

You know, I know how you feel about that one. Well, let's let's get down to it. Charlie, how did we, how did Pete actually get linked up with the folks? in the Dominican Republic to begin with, because he ends up doing a ton of work down there. Pete was friends with the CEO of Gulf and Western, which was the sugar conglomerate, who will hear more about them momentarily, who developed this site and ran a sugar mill still run. I believe, well, it's new ownership now, but they ran the sugar mill there at the time. Pete was friends with Charles Bloodhorn, the CEO.

He doesn't, Pete doesn't talk about, I know. B-L-U-D horn, but yeah, it's just epic, epic stuff. I think they own Columbia Pictures, too. I think they were, I think golf and Western was like, maybe I'm getting that wrong. But I feel like Gulf and Western, like when you say conglomerate was doing a little bit of everything. Yeah, I think they had their fingers and a lot of stuff. Well, in 1969, Pete is driving around the Dominican Republic. He's got some people who look like they want to build a golf course.

They're trying to find a site. He's driving all over the place. He's a little worried. He's on a wild goose chick. described this southeastern coastline as desolate, said he's bumping along a narrow dirt road. I passed through the town of La Romana and almost by accident I saw before me the most beautiful seaside location for a golf course I had ever seen. We talked a little bit about kind of the ownership group, but development of the resort here at Casa de Campo radically changed the tourism landscape for the area around La Romano, which is the big city right next to Costa Campo. cities founded in 1897 as an oil town, but sugar quickly took over as the dominant industry in 1917.

In 1960, fast forward a little bit, Gulf and Western purchased the sugar mill and invested in the livestock industry as well. And soon 330,000 tons of raw sugar were being produced per year at the mill in La Romana. I don't have a ton of scale on that one, but 330,000 tons seems like a lot of sugar. I'm going to say that's a lot. Uh, Cuban born Alvaro Karta was running the mill, uh, in the Dominican Republic, but sought some alternative, uh, revenue sources for his newly adopted country. Uh, according to Pete, it sounded like, uh, Carter had learned from Cuba, maybe don't put all your eggs in the sugar export. Sure. Uh, that can, that can go sideways on you quick. And so enter now tourism. Let's let's get some tourists here, spending some dough. And so his first proposed site that he was showing Pete was, uh, near. the Santa Domingo airport. Pete was not excited about this land at all, lacked an adequate water source, wasn't going to work. So he asked him for some other ideas. And it's, I don't know, I'm trying to

think of like what movie I'm thinking of where there's a similar, you know what it is. It's, it's almost heroes. Do you perhaps take gold? It's, it's that thing where Mr. Carter's like, well, you know, I do have this other 400,000 acres. Do you think that might work, like close to the mill? and they went and looked at it. It was 60 miles from the airport. And so as we talked about in our videos, I mean, it's wilderness, man. There's nothing going on.

You know, the roads are unpaved. I mean, to give you a sense of this, though, Cody pointed this out to me when we were on the way to the airport. He was like, look at the fence post. It's so, like, lush down here that, like, they chop down trees and then plant, like, the tree starts, like, zombie, like, leaves are coming out of the fence posts. It's like, yeah, just, like,

re-germinate. It's crazy. It is, it's, it's nuts. So that just carry that undertone, overtone throughout this entire conversation is just you got to tame this wilderness and somehow figure out how to put a golf course there. It's a whole lot of love. Charlie, let me ask you this. Is 400,000 acres, is that going to be enough for our guy? It was not, in fact. Four hundred thousand acres was not enough. We talked about this in New Albany, Ohio. Our man just had a knack for just finding the edges. He's painting the quarters.

He's like, no, I got to put this up in the top of the strike zone, man. I'm sorry. He was just like, can we fill in the ocean? I just, I got to get a little more out there. He started trying to do that as well with some rocks later on, filling in ocean and building tea boxes out on precipices as you experienced. But he was approached by the apoplectic vice president of the sugar cane. company mid construction, who apparently was stammering. He was so stressed that Pete had wandered

too far east and was violating Dominican law by digging on someone else's land. No problem. Mr. Alvaro Karta purchased the additional acres the next day. Recurring theme. On the subject of resources, Pete caught wind of a rumor early on. He became stressed because he thought that someone had said that only $50,000 had been allocated to build the entire course. which is about 450k adjusted for inflation. So Pete confronted Mr. Carter like, what's going on here? If I can't, I can't build this on 50K, that's enough for maybe one hole. And Mr. Carter informed Pete that that was the amount allocated per day of construction.

Sugar, good business. Very good business. Yes. So Pete's supervisor on this job at Costa de Campo was a guy named Bruce Mashburn, aka Senior Bruce. So he's like the foreman. supervisor yeah yeah Bruce again in kind of one of those bridge bridge moments right he was a guy that had worked with Donald Ross he'd worked with George Cobb he was not one of the the construction worker

type guys that we're talking about he was he was a real a pros pro uh he was not kind of one of those 20 something green lieutenants that we're gonna we're gonna hear about in a little bit 62 years old he had frosted hair a ruddy complexion uh the look of a prosperous Philadelphia banker love that uh that turn phrase by by Pete uh he also says that bruce was you know to what we were talking about on the jump he was able to read pete's thoughts uh he he knew what he meant when he kind of waved his hand and did one of those uh which is invaluable on a project like this and he was also revered by the dominicans uh who worked with him because there were a lot of dominican laborers working on this project right to work country that's right if you want a job we're to get you a job yeah i guess this would be after

uh what was like dictator's name robert Trujillo. I think he died in the 60s. Is that right? Robert Trujillo is the bass player from Metallica. I think that's the name. The Raphael Trujillo. There we go. That's a good mix of though. Yeah, this one could be battery, but that could be another good song comp. We referenced manual labor in the song comp and this is why. Pete says in the book that

because the cost to import golf course construction machinery was prohibitive, allegedly, We had to rely entirely upon the machinery used for growing sugar cane. So manpower over horsepower. They had 300 Dominican workers molding the course. They dug a bunch of dirt a mile from the site and hauled it in on sugar cane carts pulled by oxen. What I don't understand is that, you know, if we're talking $450,000 suggested for inflation per day of construction, Gulf and Western provided Pete with a helicopter. and 300 attractor couldn't get a dozer in there what we talk about yeah there's a there is some questions to be to be asked i do agree with that i mean but just think about the with no

infrastructure around like you got to build the whole like the roads the i don't know it's it's it's not just you're not just building the golf course here totally you're kind of building like the way that you see neighborhoods get built you got to build those cul-de-sacs first to get I guess if you're not using heavy machinery, maybe not as much. So that's probably some of it too. No, but I mean, if you're building for, you know, infrastructure, people getting in and out and all that stuff is, yeah, I agree. All that stuff. I mean, on that, on that note, there's, you were there, Neil, it's, it's very rocky.

There's, there's boulders everywhere. So there were boulders lying in all over these, like, proposed fairways. So to Charlie's point, like this team of 300 people would just have to get all these rocks out of the fairway, like huge rocks, get them loaded on the canes on Sugar King. carts and get them pulled away. And then they would stack them into these like really high walls that you can see, those big stone walls that you see in Casa de Campo. And when they were finished, that wall ended up being like nearly two miles long, contained more than 20,000 tons of rock, which is all, again, like, moved by hand.

I mean, it's so much work to get that done. So flashing back to our, you know, our peak contains multitudes, pizza man of contradictions, discussion from from part one. Pete and the team came up with this idea of using, I think it's Kakaza. Is that how you, is that how he's maybe Khashaza? Kshaza, not a 100% sure, which is a byproduct of sugar cane as kind of the chief ingredient of the topsoil. You got to imagine there's a lot of this hanging around with our 330,000 tons of sugar being processed per year. But the, this, it's like this organic material. It's kind of like peat moss. And so they would mix it with the sand and the.

the red dirt to create the topsoil that they needed. And then Pete, again, we talked about it. Tons of different grasses, variety of grasses. You can see that when you're down there, even though they just kind of redid the fairways and the T's and stuff. But you can still see like all the different texture and stuff that's going down at a place like this. So originally it was Bermuda in the fairways. I think it's Baja and guinea grass in the rough, tiff dwarf on the T's and greens. And on many holes, the fairways were painstakingly planted sprig by sprig, blade by blade by workers, a little point stick. I would love to know more on that.

Pointalist artwork. Yeah, truly. Pete's very proud of this when it's done. He's very proud of the setting and the golf holes. He's got some strong words for this. Yeah, he, you know, speaking of his confidence, he just went ahead and compared it to Pebble Beach in the book. He kind of went with many people are saying treatment a little bit in the way that he sourced these quotes.

I don't think he had any specific quotes from particular players. but he said, you know, amateurs and professionals compare it favorably with another great seaside course such as Pebble, et cetera, et cetera. I'm curious, you guys have strong man, just been there what your thoughts are on that comp. It's not laughable, man. No, it's not. It's really cool. It's really, really cool. I love that he writes in the book.

He says, Pebble may have several holes along the sea, but only teeth of the dog has seven holes in the sea, which I think is pretty, pretty spot on. You know, it's like you're, you're playing. The ocean is right there. It is, it's intense. Yeah, you're almost playing on decks out into the ocean. It feels like you're, um, it is really. And with how rough the surf is, that's what's incredible. I was shocked by, I didn't realize how old it was when we, when we went down there.

This is really connected some, some joining some dots for me, Dej on, I, with the resort, it reminded me a ton of Hilton head. Yeah. And I was, and now it's like, oh, so it was like the same year as heritage. I'm like, that makes. so much sense now. Which is, yeah, I mean, I know it can get a little punchable when you start getting too deep into the golf courses, our works of art conversation.

But truly, man, when you start thinking about it like that and you start thinking about influences and that's why I love like what you said about crooked stick, Charlie, in the first episode is when you, when you have a golf course that even, even on one course when you're building it over a long enough stretch of time, it's like you're going to see multiple influences even inside of the same course. Like, I love that stuff. All right, moving on. Pete, uh, we talked.

we talked about some of the holes on the ocean. Pete definitely incurred the wrath of our guy, Mr. Karta, at one point, causing the sugar magnet to attack him with a two by four, Pete's words, maybe an exaggeration there. And the reason was that essentially Pete had decided to move the location of the eighth green to be flush with the ocean, which ordinarily would be great. But he decided to do this just prior to the 1974 World Amateur Team Championship coming down at little whiffs of Harbor Town

like oh shit the players are coming we got it we got to be done yeah we got to get out of this bunker the players are coming right now so I think Mr. Carter was understandably pretty pissed that Pete took it upon himself to move green right before this this big tournament that was going to kind of showcase the golf course to the golf world but he promised that the green would be done and playable before the tournament he got it done as he always did

the 1974 world amateur team Championship brought some big names down to Teeth for the first time. George Burns, Curtis Strange, Gary Coke, Jerry Pate, who's going to end up being, you know, his life's going to be intertwined with Pete's shortly. Talked about the PTI Index. Pete might be the father of the PTI Index. Thank you. Was bucking during this tournament.

Three of the 590 rounds were under par. Hell yeah. Windy conditions. Closing stretch earns the moniker reload alley. I mean, guys are just pumping balls into the ocean. Gary Koch, very visceral quote here, said, this course will come out of nowhere, it will throw you down and stomp on your head.

Oh, yeah. Which is what happened to me. I can't relate. Can't confirm. Yeah. Can't confirm. And again, like we heard last time, I think you could kind of just imagine Pete's kind of buzzing.

When he reads these comments. Yeah, look at these guys. They stick out. And especially like, you know, it's right around the same time as Harbor Town. spoiler alert over the next hour and a half here we're going to hear some pros that were not so found of of Pete's work you got to almost wonder if you know we talked about kind of fine you don't know where the edge is until you find it right i kind of wonder how much of this is uh you can almost kind of feel Pete sneaking up to the edge especially with with big name players right because he he's he's got harbor town but that's it's kind of got some jack protection it's it's there's nothing crazy about Harbor town right like it's it's pretty it's small greens and it's it's corridors but it's not goofy this is intense right this is much more kind of a maximal feeling uh and you know obviously we would we will take that to sawgrass and pj

west and kioa there'll be all kinds of other things that end up happening on much bigger scales and you can kind of feel him start to hit the wall and and say as much but uh here i think he's probably like a little bit oh hell yeah man this is what i'm going for well you also i i mean i've i said this in in our Casa de Campo video, but tested out here, this feels like the first destination golf resort to me. Like true, I know you could argue Pebble Beach is that, but there's, there was already development there, like to go and build something like Bandin in the middle of nowhere. And now you now this is a tried and true strategy that's worked.

But the fact that this was done in 1969 and then it almost, I don't want to say it went away because you could give me some other examples in the, in the 80s and 90s, but it came back with a vengeance like 50 years later or 40 years later. And so I think there's something to, he has to make it, he has to wow people if they're going to travel that far. And I'm sure it's not an easy journey back then to get there, right? It's not like it is, you know, it's pretty easy to get there now. It's a little bit more developed.

But I'm sure it was a hassle to get down there in 1970. At least you could land on the 18th fairway, you know, on that runway. Yeah, but even that, I mean, like, you know how much like Randy hates small planes. Think about that. No, I'm kidding. Yes. It would be incredible. Charlie, how did the recreational golfers handle this?

They felt similarly to Mr. Gary Koch in the sense of getting thrown down and having their head stomped on. There was one bald-headed gentleman from New York, as Pete describes him, who was a necessary detail. Just, you know, this guy who slept with his timber wolves and this balding guy and this. This guy was so bald. He's just, this cagey lady. You just throw in these little pokes. just to make you so curious about how much he knew about these characters or what was going on outside of what made it into the book.

So the balding New Yorker was scheduled to stay at teeth for three days and he ended up staying longer. The reason that he stayed longer is because he could not hit any of the greens on the par threes in regulation. Just couldn't do it. He was just absolutely pissed. The golf director, Danny Prasant, present, asked, Mr. New Yorker how long he might stay.

And the guy said, I'm not going to leave this bleeping course until I hit one of those bleeping damn par threes with my first shot. Six days later, finally he got a six iron, 141 yards into the air onto the back edge of the 13th. He was sunburned, blistered, too weary to celebrate. He went straight for the hotel without even getting his ball off the green on 13. Hell yeah. He's played 36 a day as well for six straight days.

He's probably the hardest one out there. Right? Exactly. That's the inland one. Yeah. That's something. Neil, I think you're going to like this based on our experience. Well, actually, I felt this way more than you did.

You played pretty good on the Lynx course. But due to the success, you know, teeth of the dog turned into a pretty big success. And so Pete was asked to build another course on adjacent land right next to teeth. And so he put his protege, Lee Schmidt, in charge. This would end up becoming the links course, which we also played. Lee designed the routing. He staked out the golf course. He cleared all the corridors.

He got through all this thick grass, the jungle conditions. And after completing all of these tasks, he flew to Miami in route to Indiana because he was getting married. And he put Pete in charge while he was away. He said, you know, I did everything he asked. Just go ahead and keep pushing. Grass him up, baby. That's right. And so 10 days later, you know, Lee Schmitt gets married.

he comes back to the DR where he's going to do his honeymoon and then get back to work. And he asked Pete, you know, how things are going on the links. And Pete's answer, quote, drained every bit of color from his face. Pete said, I only changed one thing. I kind of reversed everything. Where you had the greens, I put the teas and vice versa. And with that, Pete said, I ambled to my plane leaving poor bewilderedly to begin his honeymoon. mood.

So not only are we... What a sick of. Yeah. So not only are we enjoying torturing the world's best avidors. I think he's starting to really embrace his... He's hot right now. He's embraced his... It took a while to get going, but now it's like he can't...

The work can't won't stop coming. Yes, exactly right. I don't think he cooled off until he was in his early 90s. Yeah. And that just seems like that's kind of how it seemed to go for all these architects, even the modern ones, man. I mean, once you become a brand name, it's like, I don't know how they all do it. I don't know how they keep up with it with all the travel and stuff.

We should have mentioned this in case it's not in there later, but the naming of the golf course Teeth of the Dog comes from that famous rock that you see all over the golf course, kind of like this porous type of gray rock that, you know, Pete was asking, what is that called? And the locals said it in Spanish and it translates to Teeth of the Dog. And they said, oh, well, that's a great. It's a great name for the golf course. We're going to have a harder time name in some of these other golf courses.

But the internet panel. Yeah, that one they were down with. As I've said on the record, coolest name in the top 100. Totally great. It's not even close. Ever since I was a kid, I was like, what is that course? I got to see that at some point. Totally.

Hard to talk about Casa de Campo without mentioning our guy Gilles. Jils Gagnon, who, you know, is truly, man. The word legend, I think, gets thrown around a lot. lot jills is a legend uh he is a 78 year old little guy from montreal uh who we got we were so lucky to meet uh citizen of the world he truly citizen of the world we got to meet him when we were down there great great friend to cody you can again you can hear all about this in the video that we did on costa compo but uh jills has worked at costa compo for 45 years uh he was the sales and marketing director of golf he's not director of golf emeritus he's not a hitter emeritus that's right

He was a good, good friend to Pete. Came to the Dominican Republic, pretty unorthodox credentials. He played college hockey at Michigan State, primarily spoke French until he got to Michigan. He had spent a little bit of time organizing some NCAA golf tournaments in Michigan. So he wasn't like totally without qualifications in golf. But very notable here. Neil, you kind of accidentally almost sunk our battleship in that first episode. But Jills was not Pete's first choice for the director of golf.

Do you know who was? Bill Corr. Bill Corr. Yeah. Bill Corr was offered the position first. Had some mutual friends and connections. What was Bill Corp doing at the time? Was he already in like the design business?

He was working under a superintendent, right? Charlie. I know it's later in the script here. He comes back up again. I don't have. That's all right. Hard answer for that as to what he was doing then. Yeah.

We're going to get to it. I know he was working in Texas somewhere, but I can't remember for who we're doing it. Might have been Waterwood National. Yeah, I just don't want to say it without being sure. Yeah. Come on, this NLU podcast. Yeah, let it rip. But fortunately for Jill's, and I would say fortunately for golf, you know, because we got a lot of great golf courses out of the deal.

Bill did not want to be stationed in one place overseeing one golf program. He wanted to design and build golf courses, which he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, did a hell of a lot of and he did a hell of a good job so you know worked out for everybody but charlie what what other jill's stories did you come across as far as jills tells it he just gave a ted talk he's given another another a couple of interviews so i pulled some of these stories from from those places there was a real meeting of the minds the first time that that he and pete got together pete was feeling him out a little bit asking him what he knew about golf course maintenance and jill started Started talking, started trying to answer the question, and Pete just got up and walked away and said, obviously, you don't know shit, Jules.

So early on, you know, in that relationship, Pete gave Jules a list of things that he wanted him to do while Pete was headed out of town for a few weeks. Gave him the note, left town. Jills unfortunately couldn't read anything that Pete had written on this note. If you've seen Pete's handwriting, you know, I can't blame Jill's. was the language barrier too. No, no. Yeah, it's like bad handwriting in a different language. Like, fuck, man.

Pete said he couldn't draw. And I mean, he could write, but like we have some sketches from his designs. And I have to squint pretty hard to figure out what's going on there. So Pete comes back three weeks later and was like, what the hell? You didn't get anything done. And Jill's explained that he couldn't read the note. And Pete was like, all right, you better start walking with me and taking notes, man. Otherwise, nothing's going to happen.

Pete talks about Jills in his book a little bit, which is great. He says at one point, him and Alice quote, spent a rather boring evening watching Jill's daughter's ballet recital. And during the recital, Pete told Jills, if you ever doubted my friendship, I proved it to you tonight, I showed up for this. It was just pretty great. And then the retort in 1998 when Pete was, you know, receiving an honorary doctorate at Purdue in Indiana.

Jill's made the trip all the way to Indiana. Long ceremony, very drawn out. And some years later, Jill's goes up to him and says the same thing. If I ever, if you ever doubted my friendship, Pete, I approved it to you today by attending this ceremony. So two guys, I mean, truly only got to meet Jill's, you know, for a couple days and obviously never got to meet Pete. But, like, sign me up to be at that dinner table, like forever. Sure. That's about as good as it probably.

I mean, just in like it, such an awesome exotic setting. Just a couple of guys being dudes down there. the Dominican Republic in the 70s? You kidding me? Not to mention Jill's game. It's just the whole, the whole deal is like that, that's people,

I think people talk about like, what's the high watermark of golf? You could make a pretty good case, man, for like mid-70s hanging out of Casa Campo with Pete and Jill's and the crew and had to probably be pretty good. I would imagine. But detour, we're going to skip here.

I would, if anybody wants to do their own research on the current ownership of of casa de compo i would i would say please knock yourself out uh the the the fanjul brothers uh interesting interesting provocative stuff uh pete called them some spirited florida businessmen sanctioned by u.s customs and border protection for forced labor practices in 2022 all kinds of uh all kinds of stuff going on there you've been cuban by birth and yes exactly you know cuban exiles yeah but hustlers for sure sure that's right

polluters of the everglades are like they bootstrappers yeah possible destroyers of worlds yeah sure yeah sure we'll let you let you dig into that on your own on your own time but as far as kind of big picture cost of compo there's five golf courses at the resort now we talked about it in the video and in the podcast just how big the place is there's over 1700 private villas

inside of the resort which i think again speaks to to just how big it is. It's been called the Hamptons of the Dominican Republic. I think that's a pretty accurate, accurate description. The Dominican designer, Oscar de Laurenta, famously lived there, had a house right behind the 15th T. He was a guy that used to supply Pete with huge quantities of khaki pants, which is a great detail.

Pete said in his book that play was often held up on the 15th as players paused to watch Oscar's voluptuous model sunbathing by his pool. Shout out to Wolfie in Argentina. I know they had a situation kind of like that. Sure. Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue was photographed there in 1971. We talked about this in the video, but a lot of celebrities hanging out at Costa Campo. Michael Jordan.

Ray Allen gets a mention by Jills. He gets name checked by Jills. Connor McGregor. Hey, we ran into Ray Allen too. We saw him at Shelter Harbor. Remember that? That was one of my best golf men. Hell.

Miguel and Hell Jimenez. We saw him when we were down. there at Casa Campo. He's down at the short game area. Oh my God. I forgot about that. We were right next from one of the range. Yeah. His whole one was crazy. Sean Connery, Sean Connery, James Bond used to hang out down there. Jill said, just like tons of presidents too.

The place is like dialed for for you know, heads of state. Lots of layers of security there. I was talking to Cody about that. I was like, this place security is like, oh, they got it down down here. Like it's a fortress if they want it to be. It is a secure location. That is for sure. Clinton used to go down there George W. Bush, Georgia, H.W. Bush. Jill's not impressed by his golf game. It's not a good ball striker.

Might have got his head stepped on. He may have walked by a guy sitting on his back porch. And Jill's like, it was like Bill Clinton's college roommate. You know, he's just like a hanging out down. I was like, oh, he's like, yeah, yeah, he's been, you know, he's, he's, that guy's, you know, he's tenured. Yeah. Michael Bloomberg had a house down there. Yeah.

Herb Kohler had a house down there, which we're going to hear about. Famously, Drake started from the bottom video featuring Cody, the place down there. So, I mean, it's just, it's, it's the center of the maze in a very specific type of maze, I would say. But, I mean, this was this was up there, man. This was Pete's, kind of Pete's baby. He was asked in a Q&A in 2009. I think this was in Forbes. If he had a favorite among the courses he designed, said, I've always liked Heath of the Dog in the Dominican Republic.

When he started down there, there wasn't a paved road within. 35 miles of the property. There was nothing there, no trees. Now there are 50,000 people who have jobs because of the course and the resort in 3,000 homes and an airport and former presidents play there. And I like the course too. That's just a guy. It's a guy having a pretty big impact on a region down there.

And he's pretty beloved down there as well, you know, as we're going to hear shortly. But I think the other thing that's notable, much like Cricket Stick that we talked about in the first episode. Pete and Alice had a house down there as well, Charlie. They did indeed. And to call it a house might be a little bit of a misnomer. As it turns out, Bobby Weed, who we mentioned in the last episode, who I spent a day with in Jacksonville, Pontevira area, spent some time working with, well, spent sometimes 17 years, I think, working with Pete on a number of different courses. And he told a story. I've got some tape from us talking in the car about this this little compound that Pete put together at Casa de Campo.

Well, there's some really great Dominican Pete stories about his place down there and going down there at Casa de Campo. Yeah, a lot of great stories there. Would you indulge me with one? Sure. Well, they built this. He had a lot on the right of home number seven, part three. I always told the maintenance guys to throw all the trash, throw all the trash from the golf course storms on his lot. They throw cobble and rock and trees and palm fronds and everything.

But one day he decided to build a house. And he said, we're going to build a house and we're just going to use all the rubble that we've, all the stuff that we've collected and everything. Okay. So they built this, they built this house. out of all native materials from off the golf course and stuff. Trees. There's no nails, thatched roof, rock walls, coral rock walls, tree limbs for beams.

Very, very Dominican, very cool. Had five little huts all connected by little walkways. It was really very, very, very Dominican. There was a guy that had a lot beside Pete. He was from Italy, some Italian guy that only came once or twice a year. But he always walked around and said, yeah, one of the world's great architects, Pete died, you know, he's got the lot. We're neighbors.

You know, he's going to build and we're neighbors. We're going to be neighbors. I've got the lot right beside him. He had this big, big Italian. and mausoleum looking home. And he came in town after Pete had built his house. He got in at night, late at night. So he got up the next morning and he was going to go out back

and jump in his pool. And the story was he got up and walked out back to jump in his pool and looked out and saw Pete's house. And his comment was, oh, my God, the son of a bitch built five. orange juice stands and Pete hooked up the irrigation system into his house from the golf course he hooked up the golf course irrigation system into his house for its plumbing and I had a little too much pressure and they flushed a toilet and

the toilet just blew off it just completely just blew up into the air 120 pounds of pressure. Wow. And Alice said they turned the shower on, and he said, it would not only take the hair off your skin, it would take the skin off your bones, off your arms. But he would just, that's just how eccentric he was. You know, he was just, he was very practical,

but at the same time, he was just incredibly eccentric. And the guys would be going around spraying the golf course. she'd whistle for him to come over and a guy on a sprayer come over and he'd get the hand boom and he'd take the hand boom you know they were spraying for bugs or something for insecticide it was insecticide and he would um he would um get the handgun off the spray tank and go spray the that's roof and everything for bugs and everything in the house he just go spray this thing all over the house I mean he was just it was crazy oh my god I did not know any that.

Yeah. So need to find some photos of this house, this compound, the lemonade the orange juice stands. But yeah, that and I think Bobby Weeds accent and Bobby Weeds general kind of disposition is maybe like, why would you do that?

His answer probably, because it's sick, man. Trash to treasure. Yeah, I've been sitting on the on the toilet story for a couple months just laughing about that one. How good that is, just blowing the toilet off the nuts. That's good stuff, man.

It's truly something I would do. I'm like, oh, yeah, let's just hook it up to the irrigation. That makes sense. But you can't deny it did work. I mean, it worked. It's like it technically makes sense. You just didn't think it through. Yeah, it just worked too well.

That was kind of the problem. Yeah. It's right back to the country club of Indianapolis, just like a little more, you know, a little more chemicals. Let's just keep the good times rolling. Let's let's go until we break it. Charlie, wasn't there a story of one of the, other guys going down and staying in the in the in the d r with pete yeah so i talked to bob patten who's

the director of golf at long cove bit of foreshadowing there and pete was known to invite his friends down to to stay at his five orange juice stands and hang out for a few days and a number of folks took him up on it and said wonderful things they had had a great time there pete was revered by the locals as soon as they found out that you know bob was traveling with mr die like the He said that the tone of his caddies completely changed. Like, oh, my gosh, you are your friends with Signior Dai or Mr. Die. Like, that's a pretty big deal. We've heard about Pete being an early riser.

He's going to beat you to the job site. But he may not be, he may not be staying up all night or he may not have been, according to Bob Patton. We were staying with him at his compound in Casa de Campo. We were having dinner at a little area outside where we ate all your meals. Breakfast last dinner you ate in this little. cabana that was sitting kind of in the backyard. And we had

dinner and it wasn't that late. I mean, I don't know what time it was, but it wasn't late. And he gets up from the table and he comes back and he's got this cuckoo clock. It's like a literally like a chicken and a clock and he held it and he winds it up and it starts clucking and clucking and he goes, you know what that means?

It means it's time for everybody to go to bed and get out of here. He did like to go to bed early. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Wow, what a move for the house guest. Not subtle. Oh, yeah, no, no, it's just, that's it. That was it. Oh, God, I love that. You know what this little bird means?

Go to the fuck to sleep. Everybody get out of here. He's even more of my kind of guy, Irish exeter, it sounds like. Yeah. You know, Irish host kind of, like, don't say goodbye. Get out of here. Yeah, you mentioned, you mentioned how revered he was down there. You know, Bob would go on and say he was basically like a god down there to a lot of the locals for,

for transforming the place. But I think the other thing, too, is like the, the title of the book, Neil, you'll know this from being down there. The bury me in a pot bunker is, it's a pretty, that's a literal request. He's, you know, when he, when he passed away in 2020, I believe it was, his ashes were scattered down there at Teeth of the Dog in an undisclosed pot bunker. And Jill's, uh, Herb Kohler and, and his wife, P.B. Dye and his wife and a few others were were in attendance.

So, Neil, that is, that's teeth of the dog. Hopefully filling in some, uh, filling in some, some blanks from when we were, we were down there. Yes. The next golf course that we're going to talk about, I'm going to lead with some quotes here, uh, about our, our next golf course. Uh, Tom Watson called the course quote, a joke, a real joke, uh, need some major changes before it can ever be called fair. Ben Crenshaw said this is Star Wars golf designed by Darth Vader.

Uh, another unidentified player said, the 17th hole was a ridiculous piece of shit reminiscent of some sort of put-put carnival course. J.C. Sneed famously said that Pete had, quote, ruined a perfectly good swamp. Said the course was 90% horse manure and 10% luck. Jack Nicholas

came, you know, he stopped short of any personal attacks on his guy. Pete said, I've never been very good at stopping a five iron on the hood of a car. And Pete said the pros came very close to killing me. We are, of course, talking about the stadium course. At TPC sawgrass. Oh, God, I thought you were going to say Kiowa.

We are not there yet. We were talking about the sawgrass, which opened in 1982. Song comp here. Here's what Charlie's asking for. The arrival of a new direction among the body of work, arena rock, music made for a huge audience, controversial at first, ultimately revered for what it is. I read the Stephen Hayden book about Bruce Springsteen last year or two years ago. Born in the USA comes to mind, very misunderstanding. understood mischaracterized song coming right off in Nebraska, kind of a stripped down,

you know, hands in the dirt type of record into just let's see if we can fill up some stadiums. I would, you know what, I hit you with Coldplay. Okay. Some good early stuff that critics raved about. And then just kind of like a victim of their own success, kind of like, oh, man, these guys are high on their own supply, you know, it's just too much. Sure.

And then the arena stuff. That's what I'd hit you with. Charlie, got anything? No, I, I, I'm fine. I'm fine with those takes. I, I, I, I spent so much time with, with Mr. Die here. I just delighted in the idea, despite my, my career and background in music,

I enjoyed writing these prompts and just, I'm just going to leave it to the people to select. And listen, kind of similar to TPC, you know, whole play comes on now. For sure. Fix you, comes on. I'm like, oh, that's kind of a bagger. Forget it. Tell anybody I get it. But also maybe got a little too polished in the recent iterations.

Maybe it could be used a little return to its roots. You know, I could listen to that. That's good. Well, of course, the story of TPC Sawgrass begins with Dean Beeman. Dean is now 88 years old. Still doing great. Charlie got to spend good time with him when he was down in Jacksonville. But quick walk through.

Hell yeah, Charlie. God, he's a met. He's like one of the unsung hitters of golf. Totally agree. Shout out to Adam Shupak's book. I believe golf's driving force about Beeman. Quick, quick run through his CV. Yet another successful insurance executive, which is great.

Good player in his own right, certainly. Won the US AM twice. One the British AM once. Always a good feather in the cap. American going over and winning the British AM. One on the PGA tour four times after turning pro. in 1967.

He was on a winning Walker Cup team, and he was the second commissioner of the PJ tour serving for 20 years, 20 formative years, 20 big years, 1974 to 1994. Overall, just kind of a killer, man. A guy who I think had the respect to the players, you know, was it was a player himself, but also like a really built a tour. Great business mind who kind of, yeah,

Yeah, exactly. Charlie, anything else that you kind of took away from spending some time with him? This was early in my reporting on the project, and I spoke with Dean and Davis-Lev III back-to-back, and I just kept pressing Dean like, you know, hey, tell me about Pete and Alice off the course, like, what do you guys chat about when you had dinner when you weren't working? And Dean, who's 88 now, as you mentioned, was like, basically, man, I was busy running shit. Like, there was no socializing. I was like, all right. Fair enough. He does seem like an intense guy.

Fair enough, Mr. Berman. Okay. But he had a lot of great things to say about. Pete and their working relationship, some of which we'll hear. Which is also funny, just a quick sidebar, but in comparison to some of the other, you know, quote unquote owners, right? Like Dean's kind of the quote unquote owner that Pete's working for here. The group is the PGA tour.

But it's just very different compared to some of the others who are just like, hey, man, can I walk next to you as you lay out the holes? Can I, what can I do? Can I get on a dozer? You know, it's just very different that Pete came into this. Or I'm sorry, Dean came into this and was very, he knew exactly what he was. wanted right like that was almost that was that was one of the the differentiating points was to to the degree that he was like i want as many holes that go left to right as to go right to left stadium golf was

the other big thing right i mean everybody kind of knows about this like building a golf course to host a tournament building a golf course to host uh patrons uh making sure that people could see building mounding all of that stuff was kind of this this vision that dean had uh he he went to new york and Joe Dye has come up like a million times. But he was the director of the USDA at the time. And Dean basically tried to convince him, which is kind of funny to, you know, as we start talking about like the major championships

and maybe these people just need to own their own golf courses type of situation. He tried to go to the USDA and said, you know, the USDA should build a series of stadium courses to hold their championships. You can do whatever you want. He said Joe was interested for about a minute and a half.

And that was it. the concept of stadium golf got buried until I had the challenge of developing the players championship. And so a lot of people know this story, I think, but Dean ended up acquiring the 415 acres that Sawgrass now sits on. He paid a dollar for it from the Fletcher brothers famously, who were developers in the Jacksonville area, who owned a bunch of the surrounding land. And they ended up selling that acre, that acreage for nothing to Dean because Dean essentially convinced them, trust me, if we put a world-class golf course on it and we host a big tournament. All your other land is about to get infinitely more valuable,

which is exactly what happened. So we mentioned this in the last episode, but Pete kind of became Pete. He became famous to Dean. He got on Dean's radar after designing Harbortown and the great reception that that golf course got. It became very clear. And Charlie, you mentioned this in the last episode,

but he almost to his not detriment necessarily, but almost got a little micro pigeonhold is like, oh, that guy can, he can make something out of nothing. You got shit land. Like, you need to get Pete die. He can,

he can come in there and, uh, and just totally revamp it, which is, it's what they had here. I mean, it was, it was,

it was a swamp. As our guy, J.C. Sneed, uh, said. But like, like I said,

I think what was novel about the relationship was, uh, Dean was, uh, Dean's a ball knower, right? I mean, Pete's a player. Dean's a player.

I don't think Pete necessarily had worked with a ton of other people who were like, I know exactly what I want. I know what golf fans need. I know what players are expecting to see. And he just had like a very clear vision of what he wanted. Absolutely. Yeah. And one other little detail, Neil, that I didn't know before this about the story of where Dean's epiphany revelation for the stadium idea came from was that the biggest money making March item at a previous tournament, he hosted was a periscope. And I'm not talking like binoculars. I mean, these like tall periscopes.

Yeah, the boxes. Yeah. That's like an iconic thing from old. Exactly. I don't know, just golf stuff. It's, yeah. What a time capsule item that is. Right.

Totally. These old photos are, are terrific. And so that was his simple way. What if we build some big ass mounds so that people don't need to buy as many periscopes? What if we create some, some areas of activity so that folks don't have to,

walk miles and miles to see golf on different holes. Sounds obvious in hindsight, but yeah, that was his like, okay, let's go do it. And I also love the linearity of Pete Dye and Jack become friends playing together. Jack walks with Pete at the golf club in Ohio. They have some banter. They trade some suggestions. Jack then brings Pete in with Charles Frazier at Sea Pines for Harbor Town. One leads to the next. Dean Beeman, sees harbor town falls in love with it Pete becomes famous to him he calls him for sawgrass it's just this very clear chain of jobs leading to the next jobs yeah Pete's all in on this this stadium idea totally grasps it he throws out turnberry is a good example of like that's the types of dunes that

we're we're building I understand what it would be like to have spectators up on top of those dunes and great we'll just do that here but we're just going to turn it up to 11 which if you've been out to sawgrass I mean that's that's what it is. It doesn't feel natural, but it feels functional. And so Pete sketched out the routing on the back of a placemat that he liked. But as we mentioned in the last episode, Dean made him submit a full set of plans to appease the bankers. Charlie, this was famously the story when they walked out of the meeting and Pete said, you can go ahead and put those plans away. We're good. We're just going to build this thing in the dirt. So there wasn't a lot of dirt to start with.

Like we said, it was a pretty, quote, impenetrable swampy jungle, which God sounds unfun to just wade through all day. Yeah, with some gnarly alligators and snakes and all kinds of stuff. And like, you know, it's Florida on the coast. Like, not like you get, the water table is pretty shallow. It's not like you could dig down that far. 100%. Pete said on that note, we must have killed 60 or 70 rattlesnakes,

all of them five or six inches around. And he said, since rattlesnakes live in pairs, the crew knew that if they killed one, there was another one that was that was hanging out. So it's just, just miss me with, with all of that. It was,

I love this, this quote that you found, Charlie from, this is Peter Dobbin Reiner, I believe, from golf. Doberriner. Doberriner from golf digest.

Summed up Dean Beeman's request for Pete Dye said, quote, behold this tract of jungle swamp, pray turn it into the world's first golf stadium. We used to, you know, we used to write things in this country. We used to build things. But, you know, follow this again under, under something that might not happen exactly the same way in 2026 because of, you know, environmental regulations. But turning this just complete swamp into golf, I think carries some, you know, some complexity and some challenge with it.

Yeah, this bit kind of reminded me of a Dutch person who told me once that the canals in Amsterdam are like 1.30. water, one third bicycles, and one third muck. And they had some proper muck to deal with at sawgrass, 12 to 18 inches of organic material, if you will, that had to remove to build the holes. And so they pulled that out. They built the lakes and ended up with all of this stuff to build the mounds. And part of that whole process, they used an old school method to clear vegetation that was detailed by Pete himself in this excellent interview that he did with Eric Anders Lang in 2012 that we referenced in episode one. Eric has graciously agreed to let us play some of that. So we've got a clip here of Pete talking about this vegetation clearing. During the

billing the golf course, there was a lot of rough area out there. And we didn't raise the fairways. The fairways are natural. There's pretty natural. And the greens are very low. Just the mounds were up. But I brought in all these goats to clean out the roof, and they did a wonderful job. They did it fine. And finally we got the golf course open, and still had the goats there, and one was called Prunes. And old Prunes were doing all right, but they finally went around and nosed a few of the ladies in the rear in the back end a little bit, didn't do too good, and didn't like that. And actually, the roof of the original clubhouse came down, and somehow Prunes could get on the edge of that roof

and climb clear up the top. So after we had them out there for a while, and even though they were doing a good job of maintaining the rough area and keeping it cut down, but there are interference with some of the players and climbing that roof that was just too much for Dean,

and we had to get rid of the goats. It sounds like the, first of all, if you ever go to the Sawgast Clubhouse, there's some good photos of the god-awful old clubhouse, not that the new clubhouse is... The ground level. Yeah, the new clubhouse is kind of an eyesore in its own way. But the old one was this kind of like, yeah, just very weird retro.

I don't even know what the architecture would be. I know. It's a very specific kind of architecture where like the roof, like they start at ground level or like three feet above it. And then the windows come out of the shingles. It's, what would that mind me of? I don't know. I don't know what that would be called. But there's some good photos of old prunes up on the, up on the roof. And it sounded like maybe the gators also got a taste for the goats.

I was going to say that's. I think that's a pretty well-worn story too. But if you're ever running around the players championship or you see someone with the goat logo, that that's, hence why, that's the players club merchandise. That's why they have, they have goats, which side note, we might have gone too far with the alternate logos. But we can maybe have that conversation at a different time. Alan McCurrick is the founder of a golf construction company that bears his name down in Jacksonville and worked with Pete for 17 projects, a ton of projects during his time when Pete was alive. He was actually the one that was entrusted after they signed on to do White Oak, the very kind of secretive private golf course near Jacksonville. Pete was in failing health.

And so Alan was the one that ended up doing a lot of that work. When he was really, really young, he started working with Pete in 1980 on the stadium course at Sawgrass. I kept referring to Pete as the crazy gardener because Alan didn't know what a golf course architect was. Yeah, these quotes come from, I'm pretty sure it was the Friday egg video about Crooked Stick, where they end up talking about some other courses as well. And Alan tells the story when he was super young, he was raking out the third green at Sawgrass. They all had it. they're nice and tied up really really tied in tight clean peak came over didn't like the way it

looked so we just backed a bulldozer right over the top of it push it out and said all right let's start over you know not the first time not the not the last time you're hearing hearing stories like this but ain't right let's just let's get it sorted yeah just not not subtle with some of his his feedback it's just not quite by tempo yeah exactly rushing and dragging sorry Alan Charlie, let's talk about 17. Let's do it. We mentioned this in the Alice introduction in episode one. Famously, it was her idea to make this island green.

They started digging and digging and digging and digging. And she's the one who deserves the credit for that idea. And it's better. Let's hear it from Pete rather than from me. I think that'll be a better source. It all comes back to my bride of some 62 years. Alice has played great golf all her life. She's won the North-South amateur,

and she won the Eastern Amateur, and she's won the state. She won the Florida State Amateur in Indiana State, I remember 11, 12 times. But anyhow, in a par three, you always know where the T's are going to be. The T is there for a par three. So if you're on the back T, if you're a good player,

you're playing here, and you're a modest player in the middle of T. and if you have a ladies are playing it, you've got to have a ladies tea so you know where they're coming from. So Alice, every time I work on a golf course, we talk about it, and she comes out and says, well, where is Mary Smith going to play this hole?

Where is she going to, how is she going to play this hole? It's always Mary Smith, some lady 90 years old or 80 years, over 70 or 60 or 5, or whatever it is, whatever age, but then she always feels that the par of threes ought to be the strongest because she knows she can get the ladies tea in a certain position that they have a fighting chance to play that hole.

So we were down in Jacksonville, and it was a low area. Well, you're going to see Dean. I don't want to call it a swamp. But anyhow, it was a swamp. And it didn't have much sand. And I was looking for sand every place I was. out there. And finally, we're over there where the 17th hole, Power 3 was going. We started digging

and then we hit sand. So I kept digging and digging and digging and digging and digging. And finally, instead of having a golf hole, I just had a hole in the ground about 30, 40 feet deep where I'd taken out all the sand. So I've got to build a golf hole. I don't have one. And Alice came out there and she looked at it and she said, what are you going to do here? I said, I don't know. I got to go get some junk dirt, put back in here and fill this thing up. She said, well, why don't you just build an island green and made a real short par three? I said, well, what do you mean?

Just a nylon green? Well, I said you can just go out there and bulk it and bring the bad dirt up to ground level and build the green on top of it. And I said, well, that's crazy. So more I got to thinking about it. And then I came back, and financially it was the least expensive thing to do

to start with. So from the back T, from the pros T, it's only 135 yards. So they're hitting a wedge or nine iron, eight irons, the most. And then off the sign, the green was just obloing. I put the ladies' teeth. They only had about, oh, maybe 200 feet, 60, 70 yards to carry to get the green. So that's where she wanted to tea, so it is. And the amazing thing about it, the club professional was there, he could go out there and put 100 golf balls down and hit 100 golf balls onto that green.

Now, when they had the tournament, and here the tournament is, and those guys got out there, and they would take a nine iron, and the green is five thousand square feet in diameter. It's playing big. It's not just a poachy stand. and they would stand out there with a nine iron or a wedge and miss that green. I couldn't understand it. I really had no wild. I thought everybody would hit that green. And they put swings on it like you've never seen those people swing on that particular hole.

I mean, that's, that's it, right? There's so much packed in there. The, you know, utilitarian is about how deep the lake is. Right. Exactly. You know, maybe it's. Maybe some creatures. Who knows?

But it's, yeah, it's utilitarian. It's, it's, it's economical. It's visually striking. I love the thing about the women's tea boxes,

right? Even if you think about how that green sits, right? Like if you're, if you're playing the forward teas, you're way up on that left side. The bunker's way on the right side of the green, never going to come into play.

It's just a, he's making it as easy as possible for a wild, insane force carry like that. It's just, I don't know. I can't hear that story enough times. I don't think. I think coincidentally, what's funny is at first he didn't think it was going to be difficult enough,

as you can kind of hear in his voice when he's talking to Eric there. And so he had the back portion of the green actually sloping towards the water as well, the same way that the front portion slopes towards the water. And Alice, I think, was also the one that gave him a reality check on that. And she said she was imagining that the TV announcers would be having to inform the audiences that the play was being held up because, you know, 25 threesomes were waiting to, waiting on the tee for the lead player to keep his ball on the green. So he ended up,

ended up softening that. But, pampered, pampered fuck. That's right. Yeah. Speaking of pampered fucks. So we had the,

the golf course opens and we have the 1982 players, right? It's the first, first golf tournament. You heard all the quotes, uh, on the, on the start of this. Neil,

can you guess what the winning score was at the 1989 two players? I'm going to say minus three. Minus eight. I don't know what all these guys are bitching about. Yeah. I know. I was thinking it'd be like pretty close to par if they're all upset. Right. Jerry Pate, of course, your, your winner at eight under played an orange ball, shot 67 in the final round, you know, hit his, hit his second shot on 18 with a five iron to just a few feet. He'd ice the tournament. He's walking up the fairway. Cameron his face. He's a Pete die will go for his swim today.

Of course, that, that famous clip. Dean Beeman just happened to be standing there at the back of the green as well. So Jerry Pate threw old Pete Dye in the lake. He threw Dean Beeman in the lake. he threw Dean Beeman in the lake and then he jumps, you know, he kind of belly flops, sort of swan dives into, into the lake himself, just the biggest commercial ever for this place. I mean, what a spectacle, right?

That story kind of writes itself, the hardest course on earth and the player just threw the architect in, in the water. I mean, it's, it's good stuff. The quote I hadn't heard before that I love. One of the media members asked Jerry afterwards if he had gotten the winters check wet when he when he jumped in the lake he said no i want to keep that dry so i can give it to

pete to help her redoing the greens uh is good stuff uh but they would famously uh soften the greens quite a bit at at sawgrass i think that becomes a theme with a lot of these golf courses green speeds speed up you know things are just a little a little too too turned up um so i don't know if i mean i'm skipping all around charlie here but i don't know if that's kind of part of the restoration plans is to add a little bit more of that into the greens so the restoration plans as far as i understand it scott sherman gave a good interview with garret morrison about this and then i talked to davis love the third about it their plans are to go back to some of the ruggedness of the features from 1989 is their is their target which i think is is really interesting so i think bunkers and

and green complexes. It has become a bit more conditioning wise and pristine wise like Augusta in Florida compared to Pete's original intention of what was, you know, like a proper, rougher, or rugged, swampy setup. Some of these old photos of the course are just beautiful and wild and weird. I think Dean kind of spoke to the green severity a little bit here too. I'll play this clip. We opened the golf course in 1981. We didn't play until 80. So it was a lot of play on it for a year before the tournament and during that period of time I was concerned that it was maybe some areas were too severe in that year's tear of time we changed a lot of things and they're really severe things we changed but it was you know everything is relative

when you're looking at how something very severe and you change it and it's not quite as severe it might be okay but for somebody else who's never even looked at it it's a different perspective so when the first tournament was here we recognize that it was still a little too severe and over time that was that has been corrected and the greens as a matter of fact today the greens are much much less severe and and and i would not i would not call of severe the greens very severe today and of course we're we're playing on the greens that are a lot faster so if they're too severe it's unfair so I think that it's a good balance today it's taken a time to do that and the players reacted

negatively some at the beginning but all that has been when you when you take severity out of the golf course you're smooth it out. I think so things were a lot smoother today. You know, this is the first time I kind of alluded to it on the teeth of the dog stuff, but this is the first time I think Pete, at least in his book, writes, you know, quote, the verbal assault against our new creation hit like a stake in my heart. I mean, I think this stuff kind of got to him a little bit. He read the comments.

You can't be the kid forever, Dee. That's right. Give him credit, he did miss on the right side. Exactly. We could always pull, we could pull on the reins a little bit. A hundred percent. But I think it's, you know, again, it's hard not to, it's hard not to look at this as, like, the point is to challenge the best players in the world, right? He's not building a, this isn't the golf club where, where you're having, you know, member play all the time.

Like, it's, it's to help this diamond, right? And so I, I don't Tom Doak had some stuff that, that he kind of had written about, about this sort of phenomenon, Charlie. Yeah, there's some nice long posts on GCA from. Mr. Doke. The dokey, though. One of those quotes is, people leave that the only way to really challenge lead players was to get under their skin,

as we've been talking about. And he tried to do that every way he could think of. When players complained about something, he'd make a mental note to do more of that. Shout out to the Jack Nicholas Bunker at Carnusty. When I was working on the plans for PGA West, Doke says Pete shared a bunch of that knowledge with me. And the quote from Pete was,

when you get those dudes thinking, the tour players are in trouble. I want to test the 15th club but John Bowdenhammer said that to Sally and I at at Chitticock during the US Open Media Day. Exactly right trying to test the 15th club in the bag

he pointed it up here to his dome piece. Pete was writing you know and kind of in retrospect about about the stadium course he said looking back I realized the radical design of the players course was too new for the tour professionals he was ahead of he was ahead of his game he said they had never seen anything like it they were displeased when a wayward

bounce or unexpected roll off a green ruined what they felt was a perfectly hit shot. The fair police were out there in force. But with all that said, I mean, the fans obviously loved it. They loved the functionality of it. They love the visuals of it. They love the do or die of 17. They love seeing somebody get thrown in the water. I mean, it's like they did have to soften it, but it was pretty clear they were they were on to something and have been really since. There's this notion that comes up a lot on his green complexes that tour players might be accustomed to hitting the center of the green and being safe. Well, it's not so much the case here. You've got what Pete would call ball splitters.

You know, all these, all these mounds, you got to, as Neil fance himself. And that's, that's, I, Bobby Weed's probably talking to you all about ball splitters. Yeah, Bobby Weed, Abe Wilson, one of Pete's shapers, you know, you got to find the the quadrants or the, the, the, the nooks and crannies where your ball's going to funnel to the right place you can't just you know hit your hit your short iron to the to the dead center and expect to have a good result you got to be precise let's uh let's keep it moving should we let's let's move on to our next golf course which is long cove uh neal you've been a long cove right i have but this is uh in high school shout out to my guy paul connor's friend of mine i i used to go down to he had a

beach house in hilton head and played out there before before you knew what you were playing you know what i mean it was like yeah you want to play golf today i was I was like, yeah, sure, let's go, you know, and, uh, so fucking hard. I mean, so hard. So it was like, you know, July, we're down there in the summer just getting just smoked out, probably both, you know, smoking out and just super humid and just like getting ejected on this golf course. And that was my first dose of like, when I talk about the full length hazards, you know, it's like, oh, man, you, you, there's water all down the left. And he just start a, you know, a quick chloroform ball off.

It's like, you're re-teeing, brother. You know, there's just, it's just OB. It's so penal. It's crazy. Your setups have just been impeccable, particularly the smokeout stuff, which is going to become very relevant. Let me, let me start with this. This is from Ron Witten, 2009 Golf Digest piece. He said Longcove on Hilton Head Island is a cherished Pete Dye design number 78 on Golf Digest,

America's top 100 greatest golf courses. If it's well-heeled membership knew what went on behind the scenes during the horses creation they'd fall out of their carts we're going to get into some of those people and who they are they are a group known as the wrecking crew let's go ahead and put up a photo of of the boy of the wrecking crew there i think DJ i might have christened them that the wrecking crew in homage to the to the to the rhythm section the los angeles rhythm section that just felt like the wrecking crew to me okay that's good to know that's good to know because i was yeah when we're doing song comps i was like well obviously it's got to be a wrecking crew song right so i had good

vibrations, beach boys. I had lawyers, guns, and money. I don't know if that was a wrecking crew song, but I think that's pretty in line with some of the vibes that were going on. But DJ regrets the air on the wrecking crew. I think this works. Must credit CVK on that one. But why don't we start there, Charlie. Why don't we talk about who's in the, as we're glossing them, the wrecking crew here. Starting with Bobby Weed, who we've mentioned a couple times. to use some some musical terminology the MD the musical director of the wrecking crew is a senior weed if you're watching this on youtube young Bobby is in the far right of this photo

with just some nice nice tight fresh curly hair short shorts probably what five inch inseam on those shorts he's he's the only one that looks like he's a shit together yeah he's put together the rest of these guys are the bad new spares man he's our MD man he's he's keeping together Bobby looks relatively clean. Everybody else in the photo is just covered in dirt. Just I don't know what this is an advertisement for, but I'm buying it, whatever it is.

Bobby would obviously go on very successful golf design career outside of his work with Pete. Worked on the Dyes Valley course at Sawgrass, along with Jerry Pate as well, I believe. Also designed Grove 23, Michael Jordan's course in Florida, old farm in Virginia, renovated,

I think he renovated Tim Aquana, as well he's done a bunch of stuff uh in the red shirt there and the and the off color cap you're going to see a very very young uh slender tom doke that's dope i believe that that's got to be dope right i'm pretty sure yeah uh yeah he was he was on the crew here uh great tape we got to play for for bobby weed about about hiring tom doke i hired tom doke pete said hire this kid and i interviewed him and i called pete i said i'm not hiring him i said he's skinnier than i am and i said that no ciums and the bugs will just devour him he said you hire that little some bitch i'm tired of him writing me letters he said put him out there and tell him to pick up

sticks all summer and that's exactly what he did oh it's just great that's so sick it's great stuff great stuff uh tom doke needs needs no introduction uh god just fishing dope as the new guy it's it's great right the snicks would you okay everybody everybody everybody everybody it came from somewhere you know that's awesome it's great i can't believe that's dope now i mean definitely that's got to be him uh pb die also on the crew pete's son i've got some good tape from former golf digest architecture editor ron whitn with whom i had a terrific conversation on a number of pete related topics talking about pv and talking about this long cove crew a little bit everybody told me the story of pb chasing people around on the bulldozer you know knocking over palm trees as he was

clearing out, but he just kind of, you know, it was like they were standing there and suddenly he burst out of the forest and they'd run for their lives. I think I wrote it. It was Animal House, if I'm, if I'm not mistaken. That's correct, yep. This club that very kind of discreet, under the radar, expensive venue for people my age and older, they would be aghast if they heard what went into creating that golf course. But that's part of it. of its lore. That's part of what makes it such a distinctive course in my way of thinking. Everything there was

one of those courses where it wasn't as great piece of property. There was a highway right next to it, and so Pete built this big berm to block that, and then he wanted to get out to the, you couldn't get to the ocean, but you could get it to the river

or the swamp or whatever you want to call it on the one end, and he was able to get out to that and it was a housing development course and it was so it was kind of spread out and and what he ended up doing there was you know was just remarkable I think uh Bobby weed I think sums up kind of as maybe the quote of the the episode here but sums up the the general vibe and how they built this place people say how did y'all build such a great golf course here at Longcoe and pebb and I always commented the pillars of sex drugs and rock and roll.

Is what built that. You hear Sally's laugh there. I thought to you. I think they're just tearing up Hilton Head. So what is this 775? 82 that the course opens. Right after sawgrass. Yeah, which I think is notable too, right?

Because I've never been there, but just reading everything about it. It sounds like there's some similar principles, right? Again, back to our artist kind of being in their certain eras, right? There's there's like two different almost competing things where he's got like a lot of the sawgrass stuff that's going on at the same time. It's like I don't want it to be quite exactly like that. It's not far away from Harbortown. I was like, well, it definitely has to be, you know, totally different than that, right? So I know there was kind of this like push and pull, right? Absolutely. Yeah. I was initially hesitant to put another Hilton Head course on this list, but it's so different from Harbor Town.

And I think that speaks to Pete didn't want to come back to Hilton Head and build something similar. He had evolved. This was years later after the, you know, the late 60s of, of Harboretown. So he needed to do something different. And this is, there are some things that remind me of sawgrass a little bit, maybe specifically the third hole, which is a dog leg left par five at Longcove with a meal longhazard down the left. Yes. Less of a driver.

Which hole is that? Three. Three. This is exactly the hole I'm thinking of, man. And I just remembered, I went to see Paul in, uh, 2019. So I played in 2019 as well. Or maybe 2018. It's still early days of NLU.

So it's like, I can remember course is a lot better now. But this hole stands out to me and the Alps hole. I think it's a short par four are just super striking. But what Bobby Weed said, like, you know, the, it's right off the main drag in Hiltonhead, kind of a nondescript entrance, super flat. And then there are a few holes out on the, I think it's the intercoastal waterway. So you get maybe two or three holes that are out by the water. So the most part, it's, I mean, it's, it's a pretty uninteresting piece of land, but a very, very interesting and like intricate golf course.

It's very difficult. Yeah, I found that aside from the third hole, which was terrifyingly difficult at part of the first two and then just ejected promptly on, on number three, this outrageous green complex with a tucked pin pushed way up like up next to this hazard. There are lots of holes on which you can run the ball up. 16 of the 18 greens, they're proud of this fact at Longcove. You can play a low runner in there, which is not the case at every Pita golf course, but it's something that distinguishes Longcove. There was a golf course on the property, just getting into some of the actual property itself.

There was a golf course on the property back in the day that had been designed by Arnold Palmer and Frank Dwayne when the developers bought the property. But that was shut down for like six years and it had, you know, was kind of lay. Balo in 1980. So I think they used some of those corridors and shook up some of the other stuff. But we talked briefly in the open, Charlie, about like this kind of construction vibe, right? And you have Tom Dock and you have Bobby Wheaton, these guys that are real golf sickos that are really deep into the game.

But Bobby also subcontracted out like some of the other work to some people who are maybe not as high golf IQ. B talks about this in the book that Bobby hired this. construction company that normally built roads. I don't know where this was on the course or at what stage in the process, but they gave this guy, this road builder, bulldozer operator, some instructions about carving a three foot deep waist bunker all the way down the left side of 10. I drove it in there. Editor's note. And quote from the book is, the gangly bespectacled man chewing a huge wad of tobacco listened intently. He smiled and nodded in all the right places. Two hours later, we walked over to the 10th hole but the man hadn't moved shout out to gilles not being able to read pete's note uh

pete asked him what the problem was and this guy just hitched up his pants and said look here sir is this to be a two lane or a four lane highway going through here which is fun there's like a bunch of different examples of that where he would be like if he if he wanted a green he'd be like hey build me a house pad you know over there on top of that ridge if he wanted a bunker to be like oh go dig me a foundation, you know, over there. And, uh, that was kind of just how he, you know, he'd get that and then he would kind of massage the edges and, uh, you know, it seemed to work out. Okay. But I think natural question about some of the dynamic. I'll pull this photo down in a second if anybody's, uh, getting uncomfortable.

Is, wrecking crew? I mean, Alice like had to be around for, for all of this as well, right? I mean, what was the, the vibe with that? She made a presence felt. Bobby told me that, quote, We held our collective breath in anticipation of Alice's thumbs up or thumbs down reaction, you know, stiffen up, better make sure things are tight. One instance of the latter, thumbs down reaction, came on the 15th green when Alice made a slight visit during shaping. Pete proudly showed her his masterpiece, as he put it in the book. And she told him that the inside shapes looked like a toilet bowl.

So ego bruised. He admitted she was right, didn't want to argue with his, his broad. and went back and you fixed the damn thing. I think it is probably as good a place as any to slide this in. I feel like most casual golf fans don't know this. I certainly did not know this until you filled me in on this, Charlie. But Pete and Alice were both AA members as well. Just how did this kind of come up during your research?

This came up when Bobby and I were drinking a beer together. Yeah, I think Bobby ordered a beer and I asked, hey, did Pete and Alice drink? and he said that they did until they didn't essentially right around the time he started working with them uh which was he met them at amelia island plantation but i think long cobb's his first proper job with them was around the time they were they were going through a a pete writes about this briefly mentions it in in the book he doesn't doesn't dwell on it by by any stretch but realized that might want to might want to tighten things up and he and he cut out the alcohol there I did get one story from Abe Wilson, the shaper who I mentioned at Whistling Straits,

who's done a bunch of revisions there and worked on Pete's courses for a while. Abe said that he was having lunch with Pete one day. I think it was at French Lick, which is, of course, they built together. And Pete ordered, it might have been a cranberry soda or something like that, or cranberry and tonic, and took a sip and he said, there's goddamn whiskey in here. and the waiter had served him something accidentally and he sent it back and the waiter apologized and Pete turned to Abe and said,

it tastes pretty damn good though. So Abe thought that might have been the last drink that Pete ever had. It's probably right. As far as the, I can't get, I can't get PB coming out of the trees like he's on a panzer out of my head. We're skipping over that one too. Good call out.

I bill. uh, Ron Witten described him as the balushy character of this crew. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's going to do it for our wrecking crew photo. We'll, we'll take that down. You'd let me know if you need to put it back up, you know. As far as the actual golf course at Long Cove, this is one wasn't as much about dominating

the landscape like, like sawgrass as it was about, you know, trying to integrate with the environment a little bit more, especially the greens. Pete was, was very, very big on the greens. Obviously, like every golf course architect, he said, if, if I'm known for one thing when I leave this earth, I hope people will say that Pete Dye knew how to build a set of first class greens. He was much more conscious of increased green speeds at this point. Again, constant thread that we keep kind of coming back to here. As technology is improving, as agronomy is improving, I think this becomes a much, a much bigger deal. He talks about the stint meter, you know,

if the stint meter had been used back when Hogan won the masters in like 1953, he was convinced it would have been like a six or a seven. That's how slow the greens used to be. So, The downhill reading might have been like a 10, but uphill, there's no way it would have been more than like four. He wrote, in my opinion, the decision to increase green speeds has definitely hurt the game of golf. We've talked about this. Greens are more severe, yada, yada, yada, but also, you know, you cut things low and they're more susceptible to disease and they require more chemicals. They're more, you know, the footprints become more evident. There's just a lot of things that come with these fast greens.

I think this might be the, I don't know, this might be my platform going in the next, the next 20 years. Just like, let's slow these greens down. What are we doing? Let's slow down the tempo. I stand with Pete on the... Bring back slope. Exactly right. But so it kind of scaled these down a little bit compared to some of the other designs,

which I think probably speaks to this is my reading of it. But, I mean, it probably speaks to why the course is like 97% the same as it was when it opened, right? I mean, this wasn't one that they've had to tinker with quite as much. Yeah. Yeah, another thing that I will join Pete on is going back to this more rustic, rustic, rugged look, if you will. The bones of the course are 97% the same, I think was a quote from Bob Patton, the director of golf there now. But when the course first went up, similar to sawgrass, it was so natural and alive looking. And to be fair, there was no housing initially.

And so the housing that surrounds it now changes the overall tapestry of what you're looking at. But it's become a much more perfectly manicured style of golf course along with this, like, I don't want to say, paint too broad of a brush that everybody's chasing Augusta, but there's an element of that that a lot of people have talked to me about. And, you know, some people have different feelings about like, should we, yeah, should we like rough up the edges? It's like, it just like Pete Beck and Urbana. He wants it to look greens, right? Exactly.

much like Alice die, a microversion here. If we're going to mention Longcove, we need to talk about Lahanta Stovall, I think. Charlie, who is LaHonda Stovall? Lhonda Stovall, by all accounts, was a menace. She was the woman who hit the first T-shot on number 10. It's one of the early members at Longcove, and I've got some tape from Bob Patton, the director of golf there, talking about La Hanta. And Alice was out here every day.

I mean, Alice was another one who really, deserves some credit for this golf course. She would come out at the end of the day and look at something that Pete had done, and she'd say, now, how are the ladies going to play this? Or how are the high-end, you know, I mean, she would make points that it hit home with Pete. To that point, can you tell me who La Hanta Stovall was? Lohanna-Stovall, exactly. So two of our first members were Louis and Lahana Stovall.

In fact, they built the first house in Long Cove. And Lahana was a good player. She had an interesting background. She was a ball of fire. She had kind of a gruff voice. She had one of those kind of, but she loved golf. She was a golf nut.

I mean, she was a single-digit handicapper, I think, in those early years. And of course, Alice was a very good player, an accomplished player. And Alice and Lahuna kind of hit it off. And when they were out reviewing Pete's work at the end of the day or whatever, Alice would say,

Pete, how was Lahana going to play this? And that was kind of where that came from. We actually have a tournament at the club every year named after Lahana Stovall. Just circling back to our first episode, I think, of just, you know, good players, but learn to have the average player in mind at all turns. I love it. I'll also need to do a deeper dive on Lahana Stovall based on some of the maybe off-the-record stories that were in there. The, I think moving on, this is another one, you know, we're landing the plane here on. on Long Cove, but I'm not even going to set it up.

I think just play the Bob Patton story about the top 100 rankings and the committee and what happens when the committee gets involved. We had a kind of a funny situation where we were top 100 golf course for years. And at some point, we fell out of the top golf digest, top 100, you know, course rankings are a source of frustration. It's, you know, it's an interesting thing. And it's, but some people take it way too seriously. And we dropped out of the top 100 at some point.

And, of course, like a lot of clubs do, you know, when you have a problem, what do you do? You form a committee. Because we have a lot of experts here, of course, on these things. And we formed a committee. And there were a couple of type A strong personalities on the committee. And they created a list of things that they felt like we needed to do in order to get ourselves back into the top 100. You know, we need to put a bunker on the left side of the first fairway. It's wide open over there, and there's no, you know, there's no need to be straight or just different things that they came up with.

And I kept saying, you know, guys, you know, this is fine. You can do this, but you got to remember, it's Pete's golf course. It's not yours. We're not doing anything without Pete's blessing. So they create this list. And then they asked me to get Pete, so I had to call Pete. and he happened to be, it was sometime soon after that, he happened

to be in the area and he said, okay, I'll come by. That morning I went and picked him up at the hotel and I said, Pete, okay, we're going to meet with this group of guys and they're going to want to tell you that they want to do this or they want to do that. And he goes, okay, that's fine, that's fine, no problem. And we were going to meet him out on the putting

ground right by the first tee and we got out there and he says, go to the first tee, don't go to them. He says, I want them to come to me. I'm not going to them. So we go to the first tee. and they walk over as five or six guys. And the first thing out of his mouth as they come up was, guys,

I've seen more great golf courses screwed up by committees than you can shake a stick at. Now, what do you want to talk to me about? I mean, he set the tone immediately. And to his credit, you know, he then said,

you know, he basically took the list and he kind of explained to him why he didn't. think you would want to bunker down the left side of the first hole because, you know, he had his rationale and he explained it. And he was good, you know, he, he just wanted to know right off the bat that he was the architect. And he was not going to let somebody fool with, with his design. Just an all-time kind of alpha stuff in there. But home setting.

I think it speaks to a couple different things, as we've mentioned, the push and pull between the living document and the, uh, let's leave the good stuff. alone. You know, I think that's a, that's an important editing knife, right? To have that eye and have that, that sharp kind of vision to, you know, Bob Patton was great. There's a bunch more stories. I think maybe we'll put into a Ness podcast or something, but he talks about, you know, Pete coming back in his 80s and crawling through bushes and, you know, he was still like trying to improve the golf course later and later in life. He wasn't closed to improvements. He's case by case. Yeah, it's truly case by case. And again, we talked about it. You know, he talked about it with Eric as well.

There's more good tape that we'll put in that nest pot about, you know, what Donald Ross thought on Pinehurst. We talked about that in the first episode. And, yeah, it's just, there's a lot of good stuff from Longcove. That was one I did not know much about. And that certainly made me want to get down there. Folks, quick break in the action. This is maybe our first on location ad read here to talk about our friends at Club Glove. Season 10 of Tour Sauce is underway here in the beautiful Upper, the beautiful Highlands of Scotland. We're here in Rhode Ornick. And of course, the way that we got here is with our Club Glove Travel Kit.

Club Glove number one travel case in golf built with ballistic nylon on the outside. I'm told this was originally developed to be used in military flat jackets. That's the level of protection that the golf clubs are going to deserve. When you've come to a place like this, you've got to make sure they get there one piece. Club Glove number one travel case in golf is going to help out with that. Use code NLU if you want to get a free valuables pouch with your purchase over on clubglove.com. And if you like this one, a little no laying up custom job we got going on, maybe wait till the fall. Maybe wait till the fall.

It might have something dialed up very similar to this. Clubglove.com. Use code NLU if you want to get a free valuables pouch. Thank you to them for the support. And now let's get on with the program. All right, Neil, we're going to Tennessee. We're going to Uduah, Tennessee, I believe, is how you pronounce it. We're going to be talking about the honors course.

Udua, I think. The pronunciation boys don't want to get involved. Song concept, you know, this one's a little, you know, a little bit of a tough one for reasons we'll get into. But a harder, you know, it's got to hold a strong ideological commitment, you know, to the creative concept. It's hard. It's inaccessible. it's meant for a very specific audience. No commercial consideration whatsoever.

I, Charlie, I don't know if you guys know this one. I threw out Murder Most Foul, that weird 17-minute Bob Dylan song about JFK. I think that's a pretty fair. I've never been to the honors course, but I think that's a pretty fair, you know, pickup of the assignment there. I've never been either, but I was thinking a tool. That's a good one. God, I love tool.

Just like, it's hard. You know, I mean, maybe honors feels a little more polished than tool, but no commercial. No considerations. That's true. Right. If we're, yeah, if we're making a playlist of these 10 songs, so you get to track seven and this is the 17 minute JFK breakdowns. It's like, what the hell happened? Well, a lot of good stuff about the ethos of this golf course.

I did not know a lot about this. Neil, do you know why it's called the honors course? I had no idea. No, no clue. So the developer of the golf course, guy named Jack Leptin, said to Pete, quote, frankly, I am sick and tired of professionalism and it's commercialism. Shout to Randy. I think Randy, Randy, be big on this concept. He said, I want a course dedicated solely to the amateur golfer, molded in the tradition of Charles Blair McDonald, Donald Ross, and Alistair McKenzie.

This golf course was built to be in honor of the amateur game, never to host a professional tournament. It's been a great friend to the Amder game, hosted a bunch of NCAAs, which we'll get into. And yeah, I had no idea that that was the concept. Pete said that Jack Lupton, quote, rather commanded me to build a golf course for him. I think he was very strong-willed guy. He didn't really elaborate on that exchange, but I think you can read into it a little bit. Neil, good one for your Atlanta connection here. Lepton was he was an heir to the Coca-Cola bottling fortune.

his grandpa was the founder of Coke's largest bottler. Jack. Yeah. Jack. The other side of the business, the independence. Exactly. Jack was a, he served in the Navy during World War II, spending a year in the Pacific. Him and Pete were about the same, the same age. He inherited the family bottling business in 1977, quadrupled it by acquiring a bunch of other bottlers around the country. In 1986, he sold the company to Coca-Cola Enterprises for 1.4 billion.

$4.2 billion in $26. Sheesh. Yeah. Did a ton of philanthropy. Obviously built the golf course. He was an Augusta member, a lifelong friend of Bob Jones. Don't call him Bobby.

And I think another one of the things that Lutton was kind of most drawn to in this. You've heard it in the way he talks. You've heard it from his crew. It's kind of this personal touch that comes with working with Pete and Alice. There was a sense of the amateur game in the way that,

Pete and Alice ran their business operation. They had when people like Jack call Pete and Alice to try and get a hold of them to talk business, when Pete and Alice were not physically at the home themselves to answer the phone, they would forward the calls to Pete's mom. So, you know, anybody who called might just get Mrs. Dye, Mrs. die coming out of the bath or something, you know, when they're out of town. So I listen, the Zarr appreciates this.

I still see all the NLE customer support email. Okay. Small shop stuff, Dee. That's right. Cuts both ways. You know how to get, you know how to get in touch. It sure does. Yeah, there's good stuff. I mean, he was talking about how, you know, we barely worked on more than one or two courses at a time.

You know, the home is scattered with all these routing plans. You know, there's not a room that isn't full of maps and correspondence and emails and photos. I mean, they're true sickos, man. They were, they were into it. This might be the spot to talk about rental cars. He said they, please. They did not own a car. just rented cars wherever they were. And they had a contentious relationship with the rental car

folks, Charlie. Pete was a ritual destroyer of rental cars. Just took him on site, you know, roughed him up. Somebody told me that he'd knocked a door off on a tree at one point. Eventually, I believe it was national rental car. It was his company of choice, according to Bobby Weed. They decided that they just needed to keep the car that Pete rented for him the next time that he came to town in a given city and just write that car off. Don't give Mr. Die a fresh rental car. Just leave this junker on the lot and that's what we're sending him with next time. But they kept giving him the cars. They would give it to him like he would, you know, like when he'd come to Jacksonville to work on the stadium court. Yeah. He'd pick up the rental car. He would trash it. He would trash it.

He'd drive it back and they'd just kind of move it off to the side. Leave it. Leave it as just a hell. I'm surprised. I just didn't ban them. I know. It's it's kind of wild, right? But there's there's really, really good stuff.

Good stories about about the rental car game. That's a sick block, man. One less thing you got to worry about. Yeah. That and like building your house out of trash. It's like, this is good stuff, guys. Utilitarian. That's right.

Back to the honors course. Located on 400. 160 acres, the base of White Oak Mountain north of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Jack got to the site with Pete. We kind of talked about this in the Dean Beeman section a little bit. I think he expected to kind of like, hey, man, let's go walk the land together. And he was quickly dispatched of that idea, sent away. Pete went for a big solo walk for five or six hours by himself. I think this is kind of part of his process, I would have to imagine, which again, we're talking about artwork. We're talking about creativity. I understand that. And I would have to pause on that for just. just a second because I go to some of these courses, not Pete, any, any of these golf courses, famous. And I just think about like hacking it. I'm like, where, why? How did you decide to put the green there?

I mean, we said this at San Hills. Do you just like, why there? I'd be so paralyzed with like these big plots of land and you chose to build in this top left corner because what one green site. It almost must like, it must just flow from I love this green site and I have to route it. that's the start of the maze. I don't know. I've just always found that the most fascinating part of walking around the land before any dirt's been moved. There's a wonderful quote from Pete in the book where he says,

in the initial stages of construction, I sometimes sit for hours on a certain fairway and just gaze up and down a particular hole. What I'm doing is visualizing every potential shot a golfer may hit. I take into account potential wind conditions, varying yardages, the angle of the shot, the obstacles to be overcome, in the intended route I foresee to the green. And since Pete said, I'm only 5 foot 8, I make certain that golfers my height or less can see green side bunkers

in portions of the green from various locations in the fairway and rough. Which to that point, it's like, you know, I can imagine that would be very hard to do with an owner kind of chirping in your ear about like, oh, come over, you got to see this over here. Like, that's got to be. And I was thinking that this would be a great spot. You know, you just picture the southern accent. And this would be just a great spot for a short three.

right here. Which Pete, like, he talks about this too. He's like, you know, these, you know, obviously the honors course, Chattanooga, beautiful city located in the mountains, like great scenery. He's like designing a golf course on a site like that comes with its own challenges because the owners get very, very attached to the landscape and they're not used to seeing massive changes. They can't really picture like, what do you mean? You're going to take down all those trees can be like a really weird thing, which I think is why he pushed, you know, again, artist comp. I think he pushed for a lot of. creative control. On that note, one of the unforeseen things that ended up happening, they took a bunch of trees out to clear some corridors for the golf holes. And they started to, they would always burn the trees kind of when they, they would take them out. And so they started burning the first pile of, of cleared trees. And they ended up triggering a massive allergic reaction from a neighbor, which led to like a revocation of their burn permit. So they had to figure out other ways to get rid of the trees. This was a one that Peabee was the,

the project manager on. And so he got to, yeah, so he got to flexes, his bulldozer chops on this one. No, no idea whether he was, you know,

mountainside chasing, driving people off the sides of mountains with those, with those bulldozers at all. But, uh, big time rain, uh, that during this,

during construction, Pete, Pete gets, gets, you know, bad joky, you know, says they consider drawing up plans for an arc.

The downside of this site was the soil. There's this nasty red Tennessee dirt called chert, I believe, C-H-E-R-T, a glue-like substance that pizza still makes him shudder when I think about it. It doesn't drain. So apparently the only way to deal with it is you just kind of spread it over the top of everything and just hope for the best. Or spread sand over the top of the shirt and then hope for the best. Yeah.

Alice, you know, of course, hanging around. She strikes again on this one when they're looking at the tent hole and the place that they've kind of cleared out. And they're all really loving. She blurtes out. So this isn't going to do at all. The fairway needs to be lowered at least 10 feet, which they're kind of like rolling their eyes and like, oh, my God, do we really need to dig this fairway out 10 feet? It gets worse. They agree that it's the right call.

They're like, all right, great. Let's do it. The problem was they dig down two feet. And they hit this bedrock of limestone. and it cost 300 grand to blast all the limestone out of there. Jack jokingly told Alice, thank you for the idea. Please leave the premises and never come back,

which was good. At least we know, Neil, Jack was good for the 300K with his Coke bottle fortune. That's true. He was liquid. It sounded like they actually, they used the rock for, I've never been in honors either,

but it sounded like they used the rock in a productive way. Yeah, PB took the limestone and, bulkhead of the lake by the ninth green with it and Leptin loved it and I believe they applied it in other parts of the course. I think it was like, oh, that actually looks great. Let's do that in a bunch of other spots. Eating every, every bit of the buffalo. I love to see it. Let's talk a little grass, Neil, because Lepton was firm with Pete. He was calling shots. He said he wanted the fairways at the honors to be a blend of Bermuda with a relatively unified. form texture. Pete and Peeby were trying to convince him to use Zoya, but they ended up getting

overruled by the guy, you know, writing the checks. Peeb with a little bit of dye subversion here, he ended up planting a little patch of Zoya on the approach area to the six green. Kind of a let's just, let's just see. Love to notice it. He did not sneak it past him. He was pissed when he, when he saw it. However, the winter kind of came through, took its toll. on the Bermuda. The Bermuda did not look great. The Zoya just kept growing and Leptin called back and said, you know what? I was wrong. I love the Zoya.

I wanted on the rest of the golf course. Pete told him, no problem. We'll be great. We'll redo it. We'll have the fairways playable in about two years. You should be good to go. And Jack, again, Liquid. So, no, I don't think you understand. Like, I want Zoya on my golf course. I want

it now to quote the great Varucosol. Pete writes about this. He says, I think the owners of every nursery between Cincinnati and Tulsa must have thought they had died and gone to heaven when we called bought every single yard of Zoya they had. Trucks were blazing the interstates towards

Chattanooga. Within a week, Jack had his fairways sodded with Zoya. Just buy up all the Zoya and plant a whole golf course of sod. It's just pretty unfathed wild, man. Yeah, it is. So obviously, if you know Zoya grass, like ball sits up,

creates this kind of you had a great quote in here, Charlie, from Judy Rankin, calls it boringly perfect lies that you get off of Zoisia. But the good thing is, I mean, it's on a mountain, right? It's, it's, it's, or near the mountains. It's, it's got enough friction for balls to come to rest on uneven lies, which I think adds some, some challenge. A couple notable tournaments at the honors, the 99, the 99, the 1991 US AM, which was

notable for a couple different things. A good one, Justin Leonard, had an awesome shot at this one. The, the, the ninth holes is like 300. 65 yard par four and justin leonard and his playing competitor both missed the green like just right like four yards right of the green and his his opponent's kind of chopping it up and he ends up chipping it across the green there was a lake on the other side of the green and he ends up chipping it across the green straight into the water and the the shot was like so demanding that leonard actually wedged 90 yards back to the fairway he was green side and he wedged 90 yards back to the fairway so he could hit a full wedge uh into into the hole uh yeah hit it on the green two butted and ended up winning the whole true true match play uh situations good stuff good stuff that 1991 us am also notable because tiger woods played in his first us am there at the uh the old course tiger had his half brother uh caddying for him didn't don't know a ton about the the the half siblings of tiger woods i think they're uh pretty estranged uh at this point

but i think earle had three kids from uh his first marriage ear that's right Earl Jr. is like 20 years older than Tiger and Kevin was another one's 18 years older than Tiger. I think it was Kevin that was caddying for him. Just kind of a notable thing. If you want to read about his half siblings, again, kind of like the teeth of the dog situation. It's not a great read, but you can dive into that on your own time. I think Earl Woods Jr. was arrested in 2013 for calling it a bomb threat to his place where he worked.

Just kind of, yeah, kind of a bummer story. There's Rick Riley story about kind of the falling out between him and his half-siblings. So some additional research for those that are, are into it. But Tiger, when he got to the US AM, when he was 16 at the honors course, he said, I was telling my caddy, who's his brother, there's half-brother, I hope the gallery gets bigger. And it didn't. I'm not really that famous yet. If I can get on tour and do well, then I'll probably open some eyes.

Tiger ended up missing the cut for matchplay that year. But he came back five years later for the NCAA championships in 1996. And they set a spectator record for the four days. Tiger, of course, would go on to win. He shot 69 on day one, broke the course record with a 67 on day two. 69 again on day three. Course was kind of known as being a ballbuster. So they really turned it up to 11 on the last day.

Tiger shot 80. It's still won by four. over over 17. Tiger was the only player under par, which is very, very, very sick. But it's kind of a quick, abbreviated spin through, through the honors course.

Next up, guys, we are, we're going back to South Carolina, the honey hole. And we are, we're talking about Kiowa. This is a, course.

This is a big one. I mean, song-wise, I think Charlie nailed it with this one. We're looking for a song that's like, um, commissioned essentially right like something that is you know maybe composed for a feature film produced under extreme stress and deadline pressure uh completed barely in time ultimately a big brawny success uh i think this is i of the tiger uh by by survivor charlie i'll let you you drive home why i'll take

credit for for that one that was maybe my my one actual uh song submission for for the catalog Stallone asked Survivor to write this song for Rocky 3 after Queen denied him permission to use another one bites the dust. So we have shades of PGA West was the original course that was supposed to host the 1991 Rider Cup for reasons that we'll get into. It was moved to Kiowa. So that's kind of the synchronicity today that I went with on Eye the Tiger. Let me open with this quote, Neil.

This is good stuff for my guy Larry Guest at the Orchiaw. Orlando Sentinel in 1991. This is how he summed up Kiowa. Quote, this latest of man's intrusion to wildlife is the most ridiculous creation to date by Pete Dye, a man who somehow came to design golf courses instead of gas chambers and thumb screws. I don't, I don't know what he has against golf, but all those tricked up TPC courses he begat were only a tune up for what is destined to become the most controversial land use, this side of three mile island, end quote. We used to have takes, man. We used to have an opinion section in these newspapers. God, that's good. I had such a good time going through the old newspapers that they have out at the Ocean

Course Clubhouse. I talked to a few wonderful folks there, Roger Warren. I mentioned, I think in episode one, president of Kiowa, talked to Jeff Stone, the current superintendent who knew Pete, Brian Gerard, director of golf, George and Mack Fry, original superintendent and his son. So I got lots of on the ground Kiowa perspectives and they have these big, just laminated newspaper. clippings from 91 rider cup with all these all these hot takes from various outlets yeah i think i think we're starting there we're starting with the 91 rider cup because that is the the straw that stirs the drink here uh if you want to hear charlie mentioned it uh i think it's episode 425 of the no laying up podcast sallie did an epic deep dive into that rider cup great on the ground voices talks to people

who played and it's it's really really good uh so go listen to that if you want more on I probably led to a few grays for sally too for sure he was for some just for men usage of soli he worked his balls off on that episode I texted him about that and he said it almost broken yeah yes it's a really good one uh but I think kind of even winding back from where soli starts that episode peak out a call in 1988 with the news that the 91 rider cup had been moved like charlie said it was originally supposed to be at the stadium course that he designed at pGA west out in the California desert to the proposed course at Kiowa, I think heavy emphasis on that word proposed.

Because for the first time, the event had been awarded to a course that did not exist. A heady concept, especially in 1991, because at the time of the phone call, there were less than two years to build this golf course, which again is like when you do see something like this happen with, you know, PJ Frisco or something like that, I mean, we're 10 years out.

where, you know, whatever it is. It's a big time, time window. Two years is crazy. I mean, Charlie, like, how did this happen? What are we doing? Yeah. So this story, in addition to the people that I talked to that I just mentioned, comes from both Solly's pod and an excellent pod about the construction of Kiowa from,

from Fridayg that Garrett, Morrison, and Andy Johnson produced. They got a lot of firsthand tape from some folks who built the course and who are no longer with us as well Jason McCoy the project supervisor so that's like a whole hour plus story on this which try to burn through in a little bit less less time here but the the PJ had a contract with landmark which is a development company behind oak tree and mission hills and they also had the PJ West was one of their their properties but there were a few reasons why they decided to move the tournament from course one of the reasons uh potentially was that pga west was dislike to put it mildly by the tour it was too hard way too hard way too uh ray's put some piece of shit putty contest uh ray floyd called it uh spiteful

and hateful tom watson called it awful artificial burnhard longer said it was it was silly i mean the players were were not into it they went as far as uh making a petition to dean b demanding that PJ West not be used again. So do we want to send our homegrown players to this course that they all hate for the Ryder Cup? Maybe not the best idea. Also, do we want to play in the desert in September? You know, average temperatures there in September in Lakinta is over 100 degrees.

We've got the TV window to consider with afternoon matches in California. People are asleep in Europe when those are happening. there a few factors swirling. Yeah, it was also going to be, I mean, to the TV point, it was like the first year that NBC was going to be broadcasting the event. It was not as big of a deal as it is now, but, you know, you had the close call in 83, and then you had Europe winning in 85 and 87,

and all of a sudden it's a contest. And so by the time 91 comes around, they're expecting it to be a pretty big, you know, TV event. And so kind of prioritizing the right windows made a ton of sense. And so Jim Autry, who you mentioned, he had this close. personal connection with the guys at Landmark. And he was asking, you know, can we get out of this agreement with, with Landmark?

And he said, no, definitely not. Like, we're having the event. But how about we could move it to this course that we're thinking about building a Kiowa. Like, we can, we can, you know, kill two birds with one stone. The idea is kind of, you know, we've got this new course that we're going to need to publicize. You guys need a new course. It's kind of a, you know, it's kind of a good, you scratch our back.

We'll scratch yours sort of situation. And how did that work out? Pretty freaking well, I think. Yeah. He's had a few of these, these bonanzas just right out of the gate, big event, boom. Well-worn territory here. Of course, is 21 miles south of Charleston. Kewa gets his name from the Kiowa Indians.

Another, another tough land deal here, according to historians, the Kewa Indians first befriended to settlers in 1670. And in 1675, they were convinced to sell the land of Kewa Island for nothing more than, quote, cloth hatchets, beads, and other goods, probably less than they would have got today, I would assume. Because of the environmental restrictions, a term that we're probably going to use a lot here in the next few minutes,

there was no land that they, or I'm sorry, there was no housing that they could build on the land. So it was pretty much just for a golf course, which meant that Pete was like a kid with a lollipop. He was ready to rock on this site. He immediately fell in love with it. He joked he might have traded in Alice for the opportunity

to design a course on such a magnificent property. I think some other people took a little bit, a little bit more convincing, Charlie. Here's some tape from Jeff Stone, the current Ocean Course Superintendent, talking about walking the center lines of this site in 1989 with Jason McCoy, Pete's project manager. In 89, I was doing an internship up here,

and I think that's when I remember walking the center lines with Jason McCoy, and it was just, you know, wild marshlands and wax myrtle snakes. And it was nothing but just a barrier island out here. Jason McCoy was noted for scaring Pete half to death on multiple occasions by shooting rattlesnakes at point Blake range that were two to three feet away from from Pete and nearly giving him a heart attack. I can't get over the snakes. I don't think I could get used to that.

Yeah. Just like it, you know, I got I got this wetlands in my backyard. And I'm like, I don't know if I want to walk in there. I can't see where I'm stepping. Who knows. Who knows what's in there? This part we can kind of breeze to. I think this story is pretty well-worn territory here as well.

But, you know, we talked about the environmental restrictions. Hurricane Hugo famously wreaked havoc on the South Carolina coastline in 1989, right as they're getting getting going, building this golf course, 130 mile an hour winds, 20-foot storm surges, massive flooding, $6 billion worth of damage. this, there was a big massive, like one big massive dune that was protecting the golf course from the ocean. And it kind of got chopped up into all these, these, you know, broken apart choppy dunes after the storm. And it also just blew away all of the crew's marking stakes or a bunch of trees that got ripped out. The whole place was wind swept.

There was suddenly there's saltwater all over the golf course. Pete, the only way he could get around was in this little rowboat with an electric motor trying to figure out what the hell they're going to do. And now, again, this is a year and a half before the Rider Cup. They're trying to deal with all of this stuff. So a massive, massive setback for construction, obviously. However, came, you know, Hugo brought with it kind of a silver lining from the golf course perspective, Charlie. Yeah, the big takeaway was that they managed to use the chaos to their advantage. the environmental regulators were, had their hands full dealing with this enormous cleanup effort

all along the coast in South Carolina. And so the crew kind of did some sneaky shit, according to folks who were on the crew. Well, that's for forgiveness, not permission situation. There was some of that. I have tape from Roger Warren here, president of Kiowa, talking about Pete groveling in front of some environmental. The story of when Pete was beginning to do the ocean course and they were working on it, and then Hugo came through, it is a true story that as all of the clouds went away and everything was going on, Pete was out on a bulldozer on his site trying to move dirt around and probably

shouldn't have been there. Didn't ask for permission, but he certainly, he was called in for, I don't know all the details, He was called in to an agency who wanted to challenge what he was doing and why he was doing it. And he walked in and when he told me the story, it was so funny. He said, I walked in, I got down on my knees and I said, I'm sorry, I did what I did. You got me. I'll never do it again. Please don't make me change it or something to that effect.

And so, and he's laughing and I'm laughing. And I think that at the Ocean Course, particularly, the impression was that he was doing things that people who are, conservationists today would look at and say that he was not honoring what should be done out there. And I think that's exactly the opposite. Because when it rains, freshwater will sit on top of saltwater. And Pete created a system whereby they could pump the freshwater off of it and use it for irrigation and collect it. And there's a whole system there of the ponds that interconnect.

Yeah, which is good stuff. There was another one, too, that kind of came from some of the storm stuff, too, this idea of furtigation that I really like. There was a essentially having the storm came through and, you know, what stabilizes these dunes is all the vegetation that's on there and the roots grow down and kind of hold the dunes in place, right? And when the storm comes through, it rips all this vegetation out and they have no idea what they're going to do and how they're going to replace all this. So explain what furtigation is a little bit. Yeah, so essentially what they're doing is they're introducing liquid first. fertilizer into the irrigation system that can be directed to these sandy dunes where they transplanted sea oats to stabilize them. And this this works, as Roger told me, like they,

it would be oversimplifying to say that they were just like bad, evil guys who, you know, crushed all these protected wetlands, which they did some of that for sure. But their, their intentions were not like strictly evil. They were, they were trying to get this course done and they came up with some interesting ways to, to maintain ecosystems as well. let's tear them apart. We mentioned in the first episode, I think, but the idea to raise the fairways up. That came from Alice.

You're building a golf course right next to the ocean. Golfers can't see the ocean. We need to lift these things up. That was great. She was a great example of kind of not being on site all day, every day. So when she did swoop in, it was a little bit of like,

well, why did you miss that spot over there? I think she could kind of see the, see things with a little bit of clarity that the people who were very zoomed in probably, couldn't. And you call this an ocean course? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that again is one of those things that it makes the views that much better, but it also makes it that much more difficult to to play because your your ball gets beat up out there. I think in that spirit, it probably makes

sense to go down to talk about the wind. There's not really a prevailing wind at Kiowa. It kind of, it kind of goes from both the east and the west. And that leads to some fun variability in the golf course. But it also. makes you know p it forces p to like think about this uh in a very meaningful way right he's got to design tea positions he's got to make the greens bigger and more you know receptive in different ways and that's why you end up seeing like massive massive greens out there because he's he's kind of designing two courses almost like simultaneously to play for for two different wins so big long teas big long greens uh some of them like as deep as like 40 or 50 yards uh uh

It's just a, it's a very thought. It's so hard. It is very hard. It is very hard. Charlie, I know you had some remarks on this. A big, big, and Neil, I'm preaching the choir here, but play the right T's type of golf course. Yeah, I learned from you and Sally, Neil, just I just have the image burned in my mind. If you guys in the clubhouse after your match, just looking like war-torn soldiers having played the tips.

Yeah, so I played it from 64, 65. and had a delightful time, super fun. Yeah, if you play the right spot, there's a lot of room, right? That's the concept anyways. On the subject of those greens DJ, there's a quote that I really like from Jeff Stone, the current super who talked about watching Pete shape contours on the sand pro. He was just a character. He was such a fun person to be around.

I mean, gosh, I forget how old he was when we were doing some work out here late. I mean, it might have been one of our last changes, and Pete was out on a sand pro, you know, doing a little bit of shaping and stuff. And I'm like this, just watching him work by himself, you could just see that he was in paradise. You know, he truly loved what he did. And it was just like he would do it for free. He really would. I had a similar feeling watching Bill Corr on a sand pro not long ago just for four, five hours straight,

just in concentric circles shaping half an inch or quarter inch by it. quarter inch on one green complex. And he would say, he goes, look, you know, and I talked to him a little bit about it. And he says, you know, it's all in feel. You can feel it in your seat as you're going around and driving the contours and stuff. And it was, and then after the golf course was done and mature, you would then come out late in the evenings where you see the shadows and you talk about the contours and things like he was talking about. You know, that's, that was really, I mean, it's just artistry.

at the end of the day. It's just artistry of what he did. But he would also, he painted a picture that was both, you know, pleasing to the eye, to the everyday golfer to come out and play, yet challenging and brutal to the tour player, you know, where he really had a vision where he was putting T's back, where nobody even knew we had T's, but he had the foresight to see that the game of golf was evolving and the players were changing.

that the golf courses were going to get shorter unless, you know, you had this land and tease, you know, to where you couldn't lengthen it, you know, wherever possible. So, but he was already doing that well ahead of everybody else. All right, a quick break in the research here to bring you a word from our friends at Lagoon. The difference between good and great in golf usually comes down to the details, having everything dialed and more and more for the guys on tour. That means how they sleep.

That's why we have partnered with Lagoon because the idea is simple. if you custom fit your clubs, why would you custom fit your pillow? Go to lagoon sleep.com slash NLU. Take a two minute quiz, maybe less than two minutes. It's a very easy quiz. They're going to match you to the exact pillow that fits how you sleep. And each pillow is adjustable so you can dial it in exactly how you want it. Stop spending the first five holes trying to loosen up.

If you're serious about those marginal gains, start with the eight hours before your round. Go to lagoon sleep.com slash NLU and use code NLU. for 15% off. That's lagoon sleep.com slash NLU. Code NLU. This is a great reminder. I got to go pack my lagoon travel pillow. Those are the margins.

We're going to win tourist awesome this week, baby. Let's go. Back to the show. We're at the part of the program where we're hearing colors. That's right. You can feel it in your seat. I love that. That's right.

You can feel in your seat right now, Neil. We're however many hours into this. Speaking of the tour players, I mean, he kind of got his kudos for this one. for all the chaos, for all the, you know, the problems with the construction, for all the turned up, for all the wind. I mean, people, me, the shuttles. Yeah, people other than our guy from, you know, Larry at the Orlando Sentinel.

I think people were pretty, we're pretty into it. Payne Stewart was talking about how it's, it's much more fair than PGA West, demanding if you don't hit the greens. Ron Whitten was talking about how it's so much greater than the sum of its, it's, I'm sorry, the sum of the ocean course is greater than its individual holes. American Rider Cup captain Dave Stockton talked about if I didn't have to worry about the rider cup this would be the greatest golf course in the world. Love that quote.

It's just there's a lot of really good positives. There was a guy we're going to meet in the next chapter, Jimmy LaRosa, who was invited by Pete to come join him at the war by the shore. And according to Jimmy, when Pete walked alongside the rope line, people were chanting Pete die, Pete die. They love you, big man, you know. it's it's good stuff but I think before we close it this one doesn't fit anywhere else Charlie we got to talk about the raccoon the reason that I put the raccoon in in this chapter was there's a

reason so Pete mentions in in the book that he's he's a friend of the airlines he bought so many one-way tickets but he occasionally was known to to cause problems on flights there was a rotten banana at one point that like he imports a whole bunch of bugs onto a a flight and everybody was swatting the bugs out of their faces. Separately, he wrote in the book that he, quote, found a baby raccoon and decided I would take it back to Indianapolis for Peebe. I hit it in my heavy jacket and none of the flight attendants noticed. So during the flight, Pete dozes off and this raccoon sneaks out of his jacket,

allegedly crawls along the seats and ends up in the buffin hairdo of the woman sitting beside him. Don't know about that last part. That sounds a little fantastical to be true. all of this did, except I asked Jeff Stone about it because I heard in another interview that Jeff had visual confirmation of this. And sure enough, he had a photo of Pete with a raccoon at some gathering. And he asked Pete, you know, I asked Jeff, like, what was the deal? Why did, why was this raccoon hanging around? And Pete said it was the only one who would listen to him.

I need you to try that next time you're hopping a plane, Neil. Just squirrel away a little raccoon. I don't know if that's going to fly these days. Yeah, I think it might have been a little different time on the airlines. Yeah. We got two courses left, guys. We're round and third here. We are going to go next to West Virginia golf course.

I knew absolutely nothing about the namesake. Pete Dye Golf Club in Bridgeport, West Virginia. This opens in 1995, which might seem like a big jump, but that's because it took a hell of a long time to build this place. we are we're going to get into that song comps a little bit of a later you know big swing later in the career a big love hate relationship between kind of an artist and a producer took ages to complete i'm i'm thinking like i'm thinking the wall i'm thinking tusk the the fleet with mac tusk does it for me that trauma i think that chris gains yeah i think it's a big swing definitely big swing emphasis on the on just the time here that this one takes a couple sources that that will come up top 100 golf courses is great golf digest but jimmy la rosa the the son of the founder of this golf course has a substack that you found charlie that like detailed the whole history was really really great gosh yeah just dozens of entries just telling this whole it you know multi-generational saga i like i i would sign on to work on a documentary about the creation of this course alone

All right, let's get into it. Ironically, Pete died not the first call to design what would become the Pete Die golf club. The developers, the Larosas aforementioned at the war by the shore, first reached out to the somewhat fledgling at the time firm of Mr. Gary player to design the golf course. They had gone so far as to sign an agreement with players people. But at this time, Pete was, you know, he's kind of the guy. He's the most famous designer in the States. when they convince him to sign on

when it, you know, like holy shit he might do it, they need to find a way to get out of their contract with Gary. And so the father and the son, James Senior and James Jr., they fly from West Virginia to Charlotte for meeting with Ron Kirby player's design partner to break the news that they're going to go in a different direction. Very surprised to find that Mr. Player himself is sitting at the table when they get there. And James Senior kind of clams up. Morning, James.

James Sr. kind of clams up. up at the time. And so Junior, you know, he's in his mid-20s at this point. He has has to take the lead. He kind of just, you know, he kind of front streets it. Gives it to a Billy Bean style. You know, we're going in a different direction. Sounds like Gary responded with with a ton of grace, you know, understood the dilemma. Can't say I blame you. Pete, you know, Pete Dye is a hell of a hell of an architect. We're early in our design business. Yada, yada, yada. I get it. I get it. But what could have been Gary Player designing on a coal mine could have been, could have been electric stuff. stuff. The course is a tribute and a reflection of coal country, Neil.

Okay. People said it's the connection with coal that makes the Pete Dye Club so special. It's dedicated to the millions of coal miners who've given their lives to that industry. Charlie, that hit pretty close to home as they were building it as they kind of almost lost some people themselves. Yeah, the Lerrosas were coal miners as we'll hear about. And during construction, a bulldozer collapsed into the roof. of an old mine shaft on what is now the 13th hole. James Sr. went into inspect this collapsed shaft. You know, let's go check out what's going on down in here and apparently forgot the

first rule of coal mining or so I'm told, you know, don't go into a dark hole without ventilation. So in Jimmy Sr. his son's substack says the shaft was filled with black, damp air, stripped of oxygen. He, Jimmy's dad, collapsed almost instantly. The operator pulled him out, but he was unconscious for 10 minutes before coming around. By the time the ambulance arrived, he was breathing again, but most miners never survived such a thing. A little bit of background on Jim Sr., who you're looking at if you're watching the video here.

With PB die there on the left. That's right. He grew up shining shoes at a bus station. He was, you know, he would collect and sell junk. He'd carry luggage for trained passengers, whatever he needed to do to get ahead. His parents were Italian immigrants. His father worked as a laborer for a local construction company. After serving in World War I, he purchased 1,600 acres of land at a coal sale.

This did not prove immediately successful. But he later, you know, he doubled down. He risked every cent he had to purchase almost 50,000 acres of coal country. Shortly after this, the market turns upwards and life is good. He, Jim, Jim Sr. was not a golfer, barely acknowledged the existence of the game prior to his son Jimmy Joe's interest, according to Pete. But he was interested in moving shit around, moving earth around. He was, he was a big fan of a big fan of that, which is, which is kind of great.

Yeah, Jimmy, the son Jimmy gets, gets poetic with, with some of the history of the land and the property where the course ended up. He said, when golfers talk about course architecture, they usually point to green contours and bunker shapes. Yet every ounce of soil lifted in 1978 moved more. more than dirt, it displaced centuries of frontier skirmishes, immigrants sweat, and coal camp camaraderie. Understanding that lineage lets you see each fairway, not just as playable ground, but as a living timeline, one you're literally walking across with every round.

Just a reminder, like that, that quote right there is like all of these courses are these very rich influential people's Taj Mahal. Yeah. And, and, you know, some, Pete, has to navigate all of all of that as well as like hey yeah we don't have any roads either i got to build you know like the actual work and then also just like the emotional stuff like this i like that that this is like more of a an american dream style story with the developers the larrosis though you know italian immigrants pulling up from bootstraps collecting junk like scrimping and saving to buy a bunch of land so it's interesting in that regard to me a little bit of a uh cost of compo situation they looked at a couple different

sites. The first one, they had this like four mile hike out to where the golf course, where they were going to look at it. I think during that, that time, they had to go through this old railroad tunnel and a train came through. And so Pete and, and Jimmy had to like pin themselves against the wall to let the train go through. He called it an ordeal that bonded us for decades. The site was, was no good. Pete said they were going to have to call it Miracle Mountain golf course because nobody would ever finish it, be a miracle if they did. But Jim got, got back to work. He got a bunch of topo maps and survey maps and he started looking for other land and ended up, you know, Pete was like, yeah, call me back if you find

something else. And he did. He found, found another piece and they, they ended up, you know, Pete came back and he said, I'll be happy to build a golf course. You give me the keys and you stay out of my way. And Jim did one of those things. He did not do the other. Pete would go on and say that the toughest, most tenacious, never give up son of a gun I've ever worked for is James D. La Rosa. According to his son's substack Pete's nickname for him was the crazy Italian hillbilly coal miner, which just, you know, rolls, rolled right off the tongue. Charlie, what was kind of, what was the issue? So you said that James Sr. stuck with with one of those two conditions. And you also said that James, senior, love to move dirt around. Well, he had a habit.

of fiddling with the enterprise when Pete would go out of town. You know, he had, he had some ideas, and he may not have been as much of a ball knower as Dean Beeman was, for example. There is story after story of this course, Neal, where Pete goes out of town, for example, and there is a, let me make sure I, there's a body of water, a huge lake near, near the clubhouse that they had dug out. Somebody told Jim, hey, you know, if you want to host a big event here, you want to host a U.S. Open or something, going to need parking. So Jim went looking for it for parking space and Jim just, he just fills in the lake. He said, let's put the lot there by the by the clubhouse. Pete comes back into town.

Where the hell did the lake go that that we dug out? And people at multiple times over multiple issues like this, Pete would say, I'm not coming back until you put dig the lake back again. Like dig it back out, undo everything that you did, start from scratch. You know, there was an old... Come on, Pete, don't like it. Over and over. There was an old railroad tipple, like a big structure that's used to load mine coal into railroad cars that wound around the 10th hole.

Pete loved this. And he wanted to kind of lean into some of those details. There's some, like, you have to drive your cart through a mine shaft. I believe between the sixth and seventh hole somewhere on the course. So Pete says, let's preserve these details. He leaves Clarksburg. Tiple's gone when he comes back. So he threatens to disappear again unless Jim rebuilds it.

So Jim rebuilt it. Yeah, it was just kind of that on on repeat. He just wants to be on the crew. One of the wrecking. He just want to be part of your crew, man. He had a lot of suggestions. We mentioned this in the first episode that Pete didn't always do so good with suggestions. He was not a quitter, though.

He just kept getting shots up. He urged apparently Jim, Jim urged Pete. He said, you know, I, think on the 17th hole we should build the smallest green in the world that would be that would be awesome we should build the smallest green in the world and uh pete said oh interesting okay and he went ahead to build a 17000 square foot green allegedly one of the largest greens in the world uh at the time for for comparison uh i think that greens at old mac are some of the biggest in the world they're like 14 000 square feet this was this was 17 000 uh on the the site that uh he wanted to

build the smallest one ever to be fair it's apparently a very small puddable area on that 17,000 square foot green. I'm not sure exactly how that works, but even still, Pete's like, nah, no, contrarianism.com. Yeah. So anyways, all of this and a couple other things led to quite a timeline on this project. By the early 1980s, Pete was on site more and progress started moving along, but it wasn't unusual for Jim Senior, Jim Jr. to be on the... Sorry, 1990s.

No, this is the early 1980s. Oh, okay, so we're going back. We're going back. Yeah, to when we didn't, we didn't tell you, we're bearing the lead. We didn't tell you how long this course took. I think DJ's saving, saving up, but it took a long time. Yeah, we can say it took like 17 years to. Okay, so it was because you said it was open in 95.

Yeah, it took, it took 17 years to, to build the golf course. But Jim Jr., Jim senior, they're on the phone with Pete like nightly, giving him updates, giving him instructions. And Pete sent one of his lieutenants, Max Robertson, to lead the operations on site. And it was around this time James started reading, some architecture books, you know, about McKenzie and Ross, so he could quote, assist Pete in any way, i.e., you know, kind of learn enough to become dangerous. There's a big disagreement upon trees. We're going to see this pop up, you know, again one more time before we're done,

specifically the oak trees on the second hole. I think these, you know, Jim really wanted to keep these, Charlie, and Pete was, Pete was not having them. Spoiler alert, they did not keep the trees. Jim showed up one day to find smoke rising from the direction of the second hole. He was sick to his stomach, stopped work until he could talk to Pete fearing some kind of terrible mistake. And Pete said, Jim, Billy Bean style had to get it done sooner rather than later. Yeah, we're doing it. I don't know what to tell you. Which is, again, such a weird dynamic where it's just there's one guy, you know, writing all the checks. And Pete's now at this point where it's just like, you can't tell me what to do. I'm going to be telling you what to do,

which is, which is great. One of the things they had to do was they had to lay, uh, over two miles of six inch pipe because of an irrigation problem. They had to run all this irrigation pipe because the water source wasn't, wasn't quite right. I mean, there's just all kinds of things that they kept popping up. Project obviously turned out to just, you know, a wildly expensive, expensive situation. They ended up irrigating a ton of a ton of land.

Charlie, I know this kind of dovetailed with some of the Coppalu and stuff. Yeah, so Coppilua is this massive. property, 112 irrigated acres. They're working on getting it down to 100. This is at the heart of a lot of these water disagreements that we reported on earlier in the year. 112-ish for giant, giant property. Neil, how many acres do you think the Pete Dygolf Club irrigates? Oh, 150.

240. Okay. Well, lots of water, lots of cost. Lots of costs just kind of across the board. And I don't think there was no home sites. They weren't turning it into a development. Like there was no delusions that this was going to be some huge moneymaker, which was okay, right? Like they had the money to build the golf course and they were down with it.

Jim agreed to build a 235 acre buffer around the course, kind of like we saw at the golf club, which, you know, he was just going to continue to keep purchasing land around it to keep the sanctuary nice and secure. and then comes the economic turbulence of the 1980s. If you got any project this long, I mean, it's going to have a, it's going to have a recession or two, probably. Caught up of the junk bond. Yeah, the recession, inflation, energy markets. I mean, the Leroses are tied up in commercial real estate ventures that start falling apart.

It's just, it's tough to the point where they have to refinance the project a bunch of different times throughout the 80s, came close to foreclosure at least three times. And as we learned, I mean, it's not like Pete's doing this on the on the cheap. This isn't really like he's not really finding the most inexpensive way to build this, this golf course. But he said in his book, he introduced Jimmy to friends who quietly helped navigate those financial challenges. Don't know what that means.

Interesting. But yeah, we can read into whatever, whatever we think that means. There's a day in the 80s that's very notable because Pete stops by the construction trailer. He was famous for, you know, one of his diisms that we talked about in the first episode. He never really, he kind of just operated on like a handshake,

didn't really have a contract. It didn't seem like they really worked out a lot of specifics on the fee or anything like that beforehand. It was just kind of, you know, I'm going to find people who are going to pay their bills and it's all going to work out type of, type of job.

And so he stops by the construction trailer for coffee and he shows Jimmy the son who's kind of running things. Copy of the newspaper. And there's an article in there that says Jack Nicholas, just charged the first ever million dollar course design fee at the time you know roughly like four million dollars adjusted for inflation ton of money uh and jimmy's very worried about money at this point his stomach is like starting to twist into knots like oh my god Pete's about to ask me for you know essentially four million dollars and he asked him he's like jimmy i'm going to need a little money

uh and jimmy's like oh my god Pete it's going to take a few days i got to try to see where we're at with some account balances and he starts laughing i think he probably knew he was twisting the knife a little bit uh he said no no no sorry i just need a couple hundred bucks so i can get back to florida uh which you know another one of his his one-way tickets uh but they kind of just keep going fits and starts fits and starts uh for the next like five or 10 years kind of kind of chipping away until that's this i this the first time i ever heard of this course hand up saying this is like the sagrata Amelia. I'm way, way in. Neil, oh my God, that's, that's what I wrote at the top of this doc.

This is the sagrada familia of the catalog. Oh, I love it. Thank you. And I mean, I'm kind of skipping ahead, but it's like pretty much everybody who was like part of the design team because they're, it's, you know, everybody's touched this place. Right. I mean, it was it was under construction for so long. That's like any of Pete's disciples have, you know, had some sort of a hand. Uh, in this.

I have a pilgrimage. Like, all right. Send them up to West Virginia first. and then we'll figure it out. Exactly. There was, of course, an Alice aspect to this golf course. When she first, she first came to visit, she was, you know, suggesting moving mounds around.

She needed, you know, needed to make things more playable. A lot of the, a lot of the standard stuff, she kind of noticed there wasn't enough, like, forward tease. And she was asking, not so subtly, like, do you have plans for this to be a men's club? And Jimmy admitted, like, the idea had been kind of tossed around. it was pretty unlikely, but, you know, we were thinking about what we should do. And she spun around to Pete and said, Pete, if this is going to be a men's club,

you're not going to finish this golf course. And he said, okay, sounds good, which again, going back to the golf club, I think that was kind of like throwing up a flag there that, like, I think that this is the point where they got the juice. They can, they can call shot. And he was like, yeah, you heard the word. Yeah, exactly. Which who knows if he's, you know, from a financial aspect,

who knows if he's making good on this deal or if he's, you know, If he's getting blood dry or if he's bleeding them dry, what's going on? I have no idea if he's like, yeah, let's just keep wailing away on this thing or if he's like, get me the hell out of here. Yeah. But yeah, interesting, interesting stuff. Yeah, I've asked some folks about his fees and haven't been able to pry any good information out of people. I did talk to Lucas Crow means the pro at Pete Diegolf Club.

And he was wonderful. I had some good backstory as well in addition to the substack. Let's do it about the membership and stuff. We'll skip ahead a little bit to the name. The name is kind of the, you know, that's kind of the first question you got Pete Dike Golf Club. It threw around a couple other names, obviously, the Coal Club, which would be kind of a sick name now that I hear it.

Burning Embers, Cook's Mine Club, Chapel Point, Coal Ridge, I'm sure a number of other coal puns, but Pete and Jimmy were walking the sixth hole one day during construction, and Pete asked if they had figured out a name for the course yet. Jimmy said they hadn't. The process was becoming frustrating. And apparently Pete said to hell with it. Let's make a decision.

We'll just call it Pete die. And Jimmy was stunned by this, by this suggestion, this honor, basically. You know, you got the biggest architect of the world willing to, to call, name the course after himself. They shook hands. Jimmy said he became emotional. And they're out there looking at holes and Jimmy gave him a wedge or Pete gave Jimmy a wedge to hit a shot into like, hey, we're going to have a green over there. hit a shot over there jimmy shank the ball he was just you know nervous and and and all overcome and peaches took the wedge right back uh which is which is good but kind of some again guy contains

multitudes not really an aw shucks oh man i'm just a i'm just a guy who moves dirt around like those guys are not usually calling things like naming things after themselves i guess another good kind of uh you know a little ego kind of in in this in this direction Well, maybe late in the career. He's thinking about legacy. Who among us, you know? Yeah. We mentioned this with the golf club, but Pete was pretty forceful, I think, that he didn't want this to be so restrictive that nobody was going to see it.

Which, again, it's kind of interesting because it's a little bit the tail wagging the dog, right? It's the, it's the architect telling the owner how to run their membership program. And I think that's kind of an interesting element. I mean, they ended up settling on kind of this hybrid, you know, hybrid national. club limited residential members but limited corporate members unlimited national members so kind of people could come from all over to uh to see it which again just kind of stands in a little bit of contrast to some of the uh the early work and i think i think shows he's he's probably getting a little more juice out of people seeing the places um but uh opening day was july 4th 1993 uh that was opening day

for the front nine the back nine was not ready till another year later And Pete urged them. He said, don't do the grand opening until another year after that, which was 1995. Got to give it another full season. Let it settle. Let the bunkers, you know, age. We've been working on this thing for long enough. We don't want these critics coming in and rip in this place before it's exactly ready.

So again, like we said, it's imagine starting a golf course in 1978 and opening it in 1995. As Charlie points out, the Brooklyn Bridge took 15 years. To build Taj Mahal took 17 years, Neil. There's a pretty good analogy for you there. But by the time the course was ready to rock, there wasn't enough money. We hear this with a couple other golf courses, not enough money to build a proper clubhouse. So they had a double wide trailer, you know, put in a kitchen, locker rooms, refurbish the interior. Later, they would finally build a permanent solution.

I mean, who among us hasn't gotten out over their skis on a backyard project? It sounds like having the Bobroza voice. Exactly right. Kind of a bummer on the ownership, Charlie. What ended up happening here? Sadly, in a way, the LaRosa's no longer own the club. Jimmy is still around, but is no longer a member. They sold it in 2008, presumably during a period of financial difficulties.

I'm told that some things happened in 2008. They sold it to a management company that manages a global network, of course, is Pacific Links. And I don't think that went terribly well. Um, they've got a new owner now who's apparently, uh, really well intention and is kind of resurrecting the original spirit of the course. So that's the, the bittersweet part. It's like trending back upward again.

But I was, I was bummed after going through that whole whole saga to learn that, you know, they ultimately spent more time constructing the, the course the Lerosis did than they did owning it. And I'm looking at a couple pictures here. It just looks like a really hard property to take care of too. Yeah. This is a kind of view during construction here. It's, uh, yeah, it's striking beautiful, beautiful place.

But yeah, it's got to, I got to imagine it's a, it's a difficult one to run for sure. Guys, that brings us to the end. That brings us to, uh, to our last one here. Uh, we are, you know, I think a fitting ending for me, certainly will open with a quote from Pete. The word ardent does not adequately describe the enthusiasm that Wisconsin golfers have for the game we are going to be talking about a golf course that was the vision the vision of this man uh herb coaler we're of course talking about whistling straits and the adjoining uh courses that

the accompanying courses that go with it charlie you were looking for a strong-minded producer and artists uh people budding heads but becoming close friends against all odds uh i love i love what you went with here i got no notes of your suggestion i went with kiss from a rose just ridiculously big swing of a seal sorry sorry yeah seal it's just just a ridiculously big swing of a track you know super elaborate in terms of its instrumentation but you know if you're in the mood for it's like slaps like it's pretty amazing the harpsichords and flutes maybe not strictly irish origins and in the the sense of whistling straits was requested by by herb to make it look like Alabunian, but, you know, this was kind of a strange one for, for Seal as well, like,

not exactly in, in line with the, the rest of his, his catalog, but became super popular after getting synced in a Batman film. And, you know, there's some, some big tournaments. Well, that helped launch, launch the popularity of this. So that's what I'm going with. This is absolutely bulletproof, Charlie. I was thinking, I'll take, I'll take seal. I was thinking something, that picture just had me thinking. Rick Rubin. Oh, God. For those not watching on YouTube, you know, just outrageous. Flash in a picture of herb modeling in something called the Habitat, which is a Kohler, was a Kohler product. I'm not sure I know how to describe it. Is it a sauna? Is it a,

I don't know, he's shirtless and he's looking. He's suit. The king of the bathroom. He's a legend. Big Herb Kohler appreciators on this podcast. I think we, I think we start there, right? I mean, I think to, to, to understand the scale, the audacity of this big-ass golf course. We got to start with the larger-than-life personality of the man who commissioned Pete to design it. Shane Ryan, friend of the program, made a terrific podcast. He called the Iron Will of Pete Die that goes into depth on the history. So good.

History of the Kohler family great series to go listen to and Herb's relationship with Pete. I'm going to borrow some historical notes from that episode in addition to some of your chats with Ron Witten, some stuff in the and then you were just there a couple weeks ago, or last week, I guess. Yeah, last week, cramming for the test. Yeah, I love it. So this is our guy that we're talking about. And I think a lot of people picture him, at least myself, you know, kind of that citizen Kane, towards the end of his life, you know, just very polished, put together guy,

the elder statesman of the golf world. You always see him in the front row of press conferences and looking dapper, crazy cool suits. how does one get there, right? How does one become the titan of the kitchen and bath industry? In Herb's case, the answer is one, inherit it from your family, right? Sure. He took over the Kohler Company in 1972 when he was 33 to run it with tremendous zeal and competence for 43 years. Spent 61 years total working at the company.

helped grow it into an absolute behemoth. Truly, I can speak from firsthand experience, both living nearby and coming from a long line of plumbers. Your favorite plumbers, favorite plumbers in the pie house. That's right. I love this stat, right? It's like, think about how many golf pros there are in the country. There's 30,000 people or so, you know, PJ of American professionals.

It's about the same amount of people working at the Kohler Company. And it's just, it's a big, it's a big operation. And so in the 80s, Kohler's kind of just getting into the hospitality business. They would obviously get much deeper into this later when they purchased the old course hotel and some of the other kind of big name golf properties. But Herb played a huge part in that diversification.

He decided to take an old building up near Sheboygan where it used to house factory workers and they ended up renovating it into a five-star hotel called the American Club. I've only stayed there one time. It was before our chaotic dream loop video that we did. I think I slept for about two and a half hours before I had to get up. But it was very nice.

Great toilets, great showers, as you would imagine. Guests who stayed at the Kohler compound initially provided pretty basic feedback, right? Like this is great. And Shiboygan and Kohler and Haven and all these towns are great, but it's like, I'd be good if there was a golf course here. It's not a lot to do. And so, you know, took. bat to heart and in

1982 he wanted to oblige them he went looking for golf course designers he ended up hiring Roger Packard from Chicago that employment only lasted about three days I think living on the leading edge of design was Herb's mantra Neil we need you coming up with a mantra

but apparently Packard was not not creative enough to meet that mantra he wasn't seen his lines and that's not Larry Packard the double dog like that. This is a different guy Roger Packard. And he thought that the approach from every hole should look down on the greens,

uh, apparently. And Herb thought that was, that was not it. That was too basic. He was, look at him. That's stupid.

He was looking at it. He was looking to host majors. He's out there trying to harvest majors, which I should accomplish. It feels like a perfect fit with Pete. Right. Herb is very intrigued by the, by the hoop law, right?

The spectacle. Think about the spectacles we've got under our belt at this point, right? You've got sawgrass. You've got the honors course and all of the lore that goes into that. Also the land, like not that dissimilar from some of the stuff in the Sheboygan River Valley there. Twisting landscapes, changes in elevation, things like that. So he ends up calling Pete die. Hey, come take a look at this land.

And when Pete drove by the Kohler headquarters, he was very impressed. You know, kind of a, I guess you could pay your bills type of green light that he saw. And the first of four courses that Pete would end up designing for Kohler was about 15 minutes south of what is now whistling straits. I was on land that, you know, was punctuated by the beautiful Sheboygan River called Black Wolf Run. David Kohler said that both Herb and Pete were irascible characters. Great, great word. Erascible. I love that because they were they were both really, really good at what they did. There was mutual admiration, game, respect game kind of situation,

but also like neither of them was really willing to to budge. I think that brings us to probably the famous elm trees, Charlie, of Black Wolf Run. Yeah, Shane in his Iron Will of Pete Die podcast, tells the story of this grove of elm trees that was in Pete's way. Let's just, you know, let's just look at it from Pete's perspective. It was right in line with the 17th hole at Black Wolf Run. And Herb did not want him to get rid of these trees, shades of the honors course as well, shades of Pete die golf club.

Pete called Herb one afternoon because he wanted to iron out some of the details and hash this out. He asked Herb to come out at 5 p.m. to Black Wolf to discuss it on site. Herb, busy man, couldn't make it right away. He said he'd be there as soon as he could. Time kind of got away from Herb. And at 6.30 p.m. or so, he drove his old Jaguar out to the site. He couldn't find Pete, but what did he find? A giant pile of smoking timber containing the grove of elm trees that Pete had ripped out with a bulldozer and burned.

These were apparently significant trees because they were the last of their kind in the entire state. An elm beetle had killed so many of them. They were 80 feet tall. Her was pissed. Pete had skipped town. Pete, I don't know where he went if he got on a plane, but he was not present. Grabbed his raccoon, got the fuck out of there. Come on, 60, we got to get the fuck out of it.

You know 60 was there. 60 number 12. Let's go. Come on. Herb was inches away from firing Pete. To Pete's credit, he came back, faced the music. They had a big argument, but somehow they got over it. They became great friends.

They went on vacations together. But, you know, Shane kind of paints this in his pot as, you know, Pete must have been, as I think you said this earlier as well, Neil, like how charismatic must this guy have been to still get her back on his side after this, you know, I want to call it a lie, but just like an outright, you know, disobeying of, of these orders. Well, he was probably like, hey, may he didn't show up. So, sorry. You know, it's, yeah.

There's a quote from, from Herb Kohler, I think, again, maybe the best quote in the, in this whole thing. he called Pete, quote, a great liar, a constant storyteller, but there's no one I respect more. I think that's like as good as it gets. And I think that's, that's great. He had, you know, Shane Ryan talks about this in his podcast too, but he has this kind of like, it's kind of slippery quality, right? Like he's not, he's not lying. He's not telling you the whole truth.

It's a little bit of like, let me just, by any means necessary. I got to kind of get what, uh, like you can't trust me. but I need you to trust me. Exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. There was another one. And it works.

Yeah. And it's just funny that they ended up getting along so well together. Or maybe it's not funny. Maybe it makes perfect sense, right? That they ended up getting along so well together. But Herb ended up passing away in September of 2022 at 83 years old, but would live long enough to see the Rider Cup come to his course. There's, I know it's in here, Charlie.

There's another story that, like, is so weird that I don't even know. I don't even know how to bring it up. It's like he writes about how Herb learned that Pete had once provided and there's no context here. Just quote a special irrigation service to a house of ill repute in La Ramana, the Dominican Republic. And so they're down there vacationing one time and Herb invites, again, Pete's writing about this, three colorful ladies of the evening to Pete's birthday lunch. And in addition to gifting him a god-awful squawking parrot, he paraded the women over to Pete where they plastered his forehead with kisses.

I don't know what's good. I don't know if you have any more context on this or if this is just what's in the book, but just another one that's kind of like, what the fuck? What are we talking about here? What is those? I have no more context on it, but it's very better call Saul, Jimmy McGill and Kim Waxler setting up Howard Hamlin through some elaborate series of events than I don't understand. but I love it.

I don't know that I would have liked to party with her, but maybe I do. It's tough to say. I don't know about you, Neil. Go to Toro's game and then hang out the ladies of the night. Sounds like that's what Herb's into. Seems like it, yeah. So he builds a river course later, the Meadow Valley course. They combine those two.

They take nine holes from each one and kind of make a 36-hole property over there at Black Wolf Run. U.S. women's open, Say, Say, Rie Pock, a whole lineage we can we could get into on another. episode over there. But eventually they want to keep going. Herb finds this, this acreage along Lake Michigan, very picturesque land that he wants Pete to come take a look at.

Pete's absolutely gleeful when he, when he's invited to come check this out. He's got a total blank canvas to create what Herb wants, which is a link style course on Lake Michigan, with these big giant 70 foot bluffs down to the lake. if you've not been it is almost impossible unless you're like a local

or you haven't done a lot of other golf travel like everybody somebody there every day refers to it as the ocean right like they are constantly just like oh yeah you gotta start this one out over the ocean oh watch out for the ocean over there because that's what it it does look like that right I mean it's it's very very very striking it always looks different

it's a different color of blue depending on the sun it can look like the Caribbean it can look like Ireland it's it's just a very cool striking piece of land uh great lakes are on the list of things that are so sick so sick it's uh it's also i mean like this is kind of one of the criticisms of of the place too but it is it is not how the land originally looked right i mean it was a pretty flat pretty flat site originally yeah dead flat yeah and interestingly they had coler had owned 300 acres of dunes or farmland along the shore but their controller donated most of that land to the state for a park, quote, to settle some dispute, unquote. I'm not sure about

the context there. I asked the archivist and some folks at Kohler, and they didn't know what that dispute might have been, but now there's a state park, some sort of Kohler donated state park. So Herb had to negotiate with the Wisconsin Electric Power Company for the land that became whistling straits. And he gave him a bunch of cash, convinced them to take some land that he would buy across the highway. and really what stands out to me driving in there is this Disney world imaginering effect of it, as Ron Witten put it to me, like the suspension of disbelief. You are engulfed, enveloped by these artificially created dunes as soon as you get down the driveway. And you don't think about the road or anything else except for the lake and the golf course for the rest of the time that you're there.

Yeah, I mean, that was the directive, right? It was like make it look like Bally Bunyan. And I mean, Pete was, Pete was good at building stuff. It's, that's, that's kind of how it looks when you, when you get out there.

It's, it's pretty easy to convince yourself. Uh, and you can quibble about whether that's good or bad or, you know, sustainable or not or too expensive or what, what it's place in, uh,

in the golf world is, but, you know, you got to, you got to admit it's electric, uh, when you, when you get out there,

that wind starts whipping and, and it, it's, it, uh, it feels like the real thing. And you get out there on the right day. I can definitely attest to that. I also want to say you know that Kohler threw in some, you know,

I'll redo the bathrooms for the union to that electric company too. You know there are some faucets involved. I think that's probably right. Crew on this job ended up working through the winter. Another thing I can attest would be unfund. Heavy equipment operators. Pete says they could maneuver on frozen Lake Michigan. I don't really know how far out on Lake Michigan they needed to push any bulldozers.

I might throw up a flag on that. one, but we'll see. Maybe you met the lakes around the golf. He said they could. Yeah, I don't know. They did. Let's get into the bunkers here because, you know, the PGA championship famously comes to Whistling Straits a couple times, 2004, I believe, and then 2010 again when we've got the famous Dustin Johnson incident. Martin Kimer wins. But before the PGA, Ron Witten, who we've referenced a million times, took it upon himself to go out there. and count the bunkers. He said this is absolutely outrageous.

I'm going to go count them so I can get a number. He said it took 11 hours over two days to go count the bunkers. You want to make a guess, Neil, or do you want me to tell you? I'm going to say, God, I'm going to say if it took that long, I mean, it can't be more than like 250. 967 was the final number that he came up with. So in 2015, the PGA comes back to Whistling Straits. again, Ron decides to redo his count because he's convinced that there's been a couple more added.

He's right. There's now a thousand and 12 bunkers in 2015. An average of an average of 56 bunkers per hole. The par 4 eighth is where you're going to find the most. There's 109 bunkers on the eighth hole. The par 312th has the fewest with only quote 18. I must be just have been staring at the lake during the whole rider. cup because I'm just like I'm not visualizing that many I'm maybe I'm just seeing waste areas I don't

know there are bunkers that are two 300 yards out of play just like part of this imaginering like you know luring your eye into all these these weird places like there are some strange strange spots just in nowhere land if you're if you're curious how many truckloads of sand were needed to to create this dune scape create these bunkers create all this this entire playground uh the answer is 13,126 truckloads from a nearby farm apparently that's right just for context Davis loves quote was basically like he was asking him about it and peach said oh it's like they're they're meaningless like they're just there to distract you they're they're just there to get your head uh which is which is

great let's talk about the 17th part three you probably you know probably got that vision of Jordan Speath running down the hill towards the lake would be, would be the immediate visual, at least for me, that that pops into my head. The famous hole for its optical illusion from the championship tea. There's a bunker on the far right that kind of obscures a pretty big portion of the green, which is bigger than it appears from the tea. Of course, there's always more room than you think. You just got to not be a coward.

But there was another pretty big disagreement here between Herb and Pete and Alice and what to do here. Alice wanted to put a pond in. Herb wanted to do something else that Pete doesn't specify in the book. And Pete wanted to do his own thing, which is where we ended up, the spoiler alert. So to commemorate Pete going his own way as he was occasionally prone to do. Alice made a card for Herb and she sketched three boxes on it. And one box said, Herb said. Another box said Alice said. And the last box said Pete did.

There you go. They were, yeah, I think they leaned into the to the push and pull a pretty good bit. But you've mentioned Abe Wilson a couple times. Who is he? Abe Wilson worked on Pete's crews as a shaper for quite a few projects, including a number of revisions at Strait. He built French Lick with Pete. He started when he was young and impressionable, 22, I think. And we've got a lot of good, good tape.

from him, he actually lived with Pete and Alice for eight months at one point. He was a lovely, very humble guy who had some good and different stories about what those experiences were like. So finished up Virginia Tech, and I was still young. I didn't know what I wanted to do, go back to school, you know, wasn't sure, and Pete reached out, said he had a project in South Florida and asked if I was interested in it. Like I did the rest of my career, I just said, yes, sir. And he had me write down an address, and I packed up everything I owned in a U-Haul trailer

and drove to South Florida. I got there, and I pulled in his little circle drive, and he walked out, and he asked me, what the hell was in the trailer? And I said, everything I own. And he shook his head, and he says, well, you're living here. You don't need anything. So the first day there, I spent getting a storage unit to put all my stuff in. And I lived in their house for about eight months.

They were there at the beginning, and then they were up at crooked sticks. It was in the summer. But he came back and forth, but yeah. So it was news to you when you arrived that you would be living with them at their house? I had no idea. And that was pretty common. I lived there a couple different times. I stayed with them at crooked stick, a couple different times.

And it was nice. We were always working later than dinner hours, but we could come in, sit down, and chat with them about the day. Yeah, it was times of not going to get back that you cherish, you know. What is your insight into how Pete thought about renovating or making changes to whistling straits before some of those big tournaments? So that started in 08 for the 2010 PGA, and I don't think Mr. Kohler was too happy with the scores, the prior championship. Pete didn't like that some of the holes weren't getting any TV time. And we started with number three and number six.

We thought we should make three a little more visual, a little more intimidating. So we did the bunker work on the left and made it feel like it was hanging over the water or the ocean, as he would call it, a little more. And then I put that bunker in the middle of six green out there. and when we flew up from French Lake to look at this project, and it was the first time I had ever been here, landed, get to the golf course, and it was so foggy. You couldn't see 10 feet in front of you. So we're out there, and at the time, Dave Swift was a superintendent.

He's taking us around. Standing on 3T, I didn't know which direction the green was. Then we went up, looked at a few things, and then we go over to number six, and he kind of drags his foot in a due line where I should cut this six, seven foot deep bunker in the middle of the screen. We look at a few other things,

and we get on the plane and we leave. And I drive back up the next day, and I come out, and it's beautiful, sunny. I'm like, oh, this is what this place looks like. And I get out to number six, and it didn't really get marked out very well from his due line. And I thought, well, we'll figure this out.

I started on three first, but he didn't come back for a slate visit before I went to six. And I was really nervous, painting that out and taking that hole in the middle of that green. It was either going to be a hit or I wasn't coming back. So what happened? How did it go? He liked it and went from there. I ended up having to leave to go finish up in French Lake. And they invited me back many times after that. So I guess it worked out okay.

Interesting. Well, I'll be thinking about that when I get out there. Don't go in there. I mean, go and stand in it, but don't hit your ball in there. That's such a great example of the manner through which he conveyed an instruction. Anything else straits or otherwise come to mind when you think about him sketching in the dirt? Yeah, he liked dragging his foot. But one of the things I always got a kick out of in our walking back and forth, whoever was around, to get visuals, you know, he'd tell somebody, stand right there.

And he'd tell him. there and then we'd walk a couple hundred yards that way and over here and he'd tell him to hold their hat up and down and he'd yell back stay there and sometimes he forgot about that person and they'd be there a while and I can't say it didn't happen to me before but you told you to stay there you stay there and you kind of know you you crept up the ladder a little bit once you were walking with him and looking and not just the guy standing there that's always kind of been a joke between me and Chris Zougall who's out here is uh because I think he had he had Chris

dancing where one time and Chris thought he was forgotten about but we came back and got him how long did you remain in place when that happened to you till he told you to move and so like I said sometimes I think he would forget talking to almost days it might have been on purpose it was usually you know 20 minutes depending but but if you move before he you know he didn't get mad mad but he'd bust your balls a little bit. Why don't we tell the sheep story, Charlie? I think that's a good place to close. We talked goats.

We talked old prunes down at sawgrass. We had some similar wildlife situations going on at the straits. Yeah, so Herb had some prized sheep on property who were roaming the dunes, doing their thing, milling around 60. I'm not sure which iteration of 60, which breed of dog was with Pete at this point in his life. But 60 got a little hot for the sheep and started chasing him around. And Pete wasn't looking one day on sight. And he looks and 60 is off in the distance just hauling ass after the sheep. Sheep runs right off a cliff into the lake.

60 jumps in after the sheep, you know, starts swimming out into the water. And Pete's running out there and manages to. to haul the dog out of the water, but the sheep is just upside down in the lake, sadly. It turns out that a reporter witnessed this scene while on the golf course, and Pete was mortified because, yeah, you know, the herd was very serious about these sheep, and Pete goes up to the reporter, starts kind of trying to sweet-talk him. I think it was, I forget which paper it was, but he's sweet talking this guy and the guy's not not saying much and finally peaches lays his cards out and says look like please don't publish a story about this herb is going to shoot me if you do and the guy just kind of laughed at pete's predicament and published a little little story anyway but pete says he was 2,000 miles away by the time it showed up in the paper so live to tell the tale yeah god shout to 60 at least that 60 specifically yeah that's 60 good version exactly Uh, Whistling Straits, obviously well publicized, uh, you know, we had all the PJ championships that I mentioned.

We had the Ryder Cup in in 2020. We've got, uh, or 2021 got pushed to 2021. Uh, the Jordan Speeth moment. The, you know, the cigars afterwards, of course, Bryson driving the first green walking off like a gladiator. Uh, just the, the site of some, some all time, uh, all time moments, uh, in, in the world of golf. But I think that's going to do it for our, our 10 course. guys, that was a that was a mouthful. That was a lot of, uh, there's a lot of info crammed in there by Charlie and his, his research. Pete ended up living until the age of 94 died at January of 2020. He had been fighting Alzheimer's and dementia. Ron Witten ended up writing a beautiful and sad article about visiting Pete in 2018 when he was, he was not doing so well at that point at a

couple years, you know, towards the end of his life when he was not, not out in the dirt, but he did, I mean, he pushed it to the limit, man. He was, he was doing stuff well into his 80s, still still in the dirt, designing courses, crawling through bushes, uh, tweaking stuff. I mean, just a true golf life, uh, lived to the fullest as, as you can tell from this five hours of, of, uh, conversation here, but, uh, I got a question for you. Any courses, you guys that were, you know number 11 number 12 that you felt it should be getting honorable mention here there were a couple of honorable mentions french lick for me was was one of them which is just a tremendously strange property perched on top of a mountain that had a lot of dirt moved i don't know about you dj if you had

some others linger yeah pj west is a is a famous one but it's it's a lot of pretty similar stuff to the sawgrass uh the sawgrass stuff you know conversations about technology and but the story about digging out the bunker on 16 and all that is like is pretty good stuff but those are probably the main the main ones that spring to mind but because it's got a lot of it's it's it's great oak tree and old marsh I didn't realize he did uh river highlands yeah up it where they put travelers yeah yeah exactly oak tree's another one that's yeah like you said is another great one gasperilla maybe that's not the same no they play that at palm yeah uh I think that the the the kind of lasting or, you know, final thing, I think you asked a really good question in our

prep, Charlie, it's just like, are we going to see this again? You know, are we going to see another, another Pete die? I mean, I think there's a lot of, a lot of reasons probably why not, but I'm curious, Charlie, kind of at the end of the line, your take on that. Yeah, I was thinking about, you know, the extent to which he was a man of action and the time in which he operated. We talked about some of these environmental restrictions or lack thereof that he was able to do some of the maximalist kind of things that he did that just are not necessarily possible anymore for a number of reasons. And yeah, I'm just curious. Like we're in this era, Neil, you've referred to it of these incredible minimalistic designers and architects letting

the land tell courses where they want to go. But I'm just, I'm curious, like, was he a once in a generation or once in several generations type of, type of creative force? There are, you know, Mike Strance is a name that gets thrown around or by, by, by, by, by Ron and in that creativity sort of lane, but someone who passed away too soon. I'm, yeah, it's just something that I've, that I've been riffing on. I feel like a couple things that will make it hard. I think you need another, like, big golf's booming. So I don't think you get one now. It has to go through a little bit of a dark age.

And these guys now are just working on better land. And that's because people, the secrets out that people will travel for golf. I mean, we will go to, I mean, the middle of Nebraska, above the Arctic Circle. And I think there's a, like, that's, I remember the first time I heard about Bannon Dunes. I was like, man, you go all the way to Oregon for that. And then you go, you're like, yeah, okay, I'm going back as much as I possibly can. And I just, other than Casa de Campo, and now he's got 100 courses. so this could be a faulty take, but most of them are built near a resort area, like tough land.

It's almost like the scraps of a development or as part of a development. So he wasn't getting, he had to build near populations. And I just don't know if that lands around. I think these guys don't have to do as much as he did is maybe what I'm getting at there. Yeah. And I think it's harder than ever to do stuff like you're alluding to as well, Charlie, right? Like there's more restrictions on stuff. Water is becoming, you know, a bigger.

bigger issue. There's there's a lot of the good land has has been taken. It's, it's, uh, there's a lot of the deck is kind of stacked against it a little bit. But I do, this is just me. I mean, I think we're coming out of this like second golden age. You know, you hear a lot of people talk about that with, uh, the, the current crop that we have. I feel like you hear just enough whispers from people and, and I love all of those places as much as anybody, but you hear just enough whispers of like, okay, I've seen this, you know, I've, what else you got? I've seen, yeah, width and angles. I got it. Okay. Yeah, minimalist. I got it. I almost

wonder if you do have everything's so cyclical. I almost wonder if you do have a little bit of an urge, a little bit of an itch for somebody to come in and do something really bold. It's just really hard for somebody to break through, get the capital to do that, get the crew to do

that, get the expertise to do that and kind of be turned loose. I mean, you could give Rob Collins Ted King a little bit of that, right? Like with Landman and I think they're probably in that string a little bit. Yeah, it's, it's, well, it's also like he was able to some of it too, he's able to do it just because nobody was paying attention. So there wasn't any, I don't want to say there was no competition.

It was like the stakes didn't feel as high. Yeah, the OG guys. And it was like, I'm just doing my own thing over here. But like, I'm, you know, I don't even really, didn't seem like early on. He really cared about making money. right it's uh he's a fascinating character charlie did a great job uh bringing him to life yeah man good good stuff let's end let's end with this quote from from tom doke he said pete was the most creative seat of the pants style engineer i've ever known one thing i admired about him is that he was happy just to be out there

working in the dirt really didn't matter what the site was like as long as he had something to do i think that i think that sums it up i think that's an aspirational north star uh to uh you know incorporate into whatever your your building golf courses is. You know, just just get out there and do something. I think that's, I think that's my takeaway from reading about Pete Dye. Amen.

That's going to do it. Charlie, great work. Neil, great job, sticking with us, asking great questions. And guys, I don't know what we're going to do for the next one.

We've got to figure out a next topic, a next golf course, the next, next frontier. We're going to, we'll think about it and we'll get back to everybody. But enjoy the rest of your, your guys's evenings and we will catch everybody next time. Cheers. Cheers.

CvK here just chiming in to thank everyone who spoke with us and helped make this whole epic production possible. In no particular order, starting with a few of the guys who work with Pete directly on his cruise, Bobby Weed, Bill Corp and Abe Wilson. Also to Dean Beeman, Davis Love the third, who I spoke to at Sawgrass, to Ron Whitten, the former architecture editor at Golf Digest. Thanks to Carrie Corbett and John Farrell at Harboretown, the former and current directors of golf, respectively. Also to Karen Moorhan there on the media and PR side, and to Bryce Trout, Caddy extraordinaire. At Kiowa, to George and Mack Fry, father and son duo, George was the original Ocean Corps superintendent. And to Jeff Stone, the current superintendent there,

to Roger Warren, the president of Kiowa, Brian Gerard, the director of golf and Brian Hunter on the media PR front. Thanks to Bob Pact. at Long Cove to Lucas Cromines, the pro at Pete Die Golf Club in West Virginia and at Whistling Straits. Thanks to Chris Zougall, the director of agronomy there, to Amanda Liskie, one of the archivists at Kohler and to Nick Doctor, the media PR person at Straits. Thank you so much to all of those folks. And if you're still hungry from more Pete Die info, DJ mentioned we're going to put out a

Nest podcast featuring a medley of some of the extra firsthand tape from all of those chats. Believe it or not, we got through almost six hours of recording and there's still tons of good stuff that got left on the cutting room floor. So check out that Nest podcast if you are so inclined.