No Laying Up - Golf Podcast - NLU Podcast, Episode 243: Tom Doak and Eric Iverson LIVE from the NLU Summit

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

In our first ever LIVE podcast from the NLU Summit, Tom Doak and Eric Iverson join us to discuss CommonGround golf course, and their work from around the world. We discuss what makes a great golf hole, how to make golf architecture more accessible, public golf courses, working with Brooks Koepka at Memorial Park in Houston, and so much more. We could have spent a lot more time with these guys, and hopefully will have them back soon.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alright guys welcome back to the No Lang Up Podcast. We have a little different episode for you today. This episode was our interview recorded with Tom Doak and Eric Iverson. We recorded this live at the summit. This was the first ever event we've hosted. It was held at Common Ground Golf Course last week in Denver, Tom and Eric were nice enough to come join us for the Peak Party on Thursday night and come talk about a golf course. They design Common Ground and we're going to talk about a golf course they designed common ground and we're going to talk about it a lot I think you know even if you haven't been to a common ground before I think hopefully you can resonate with some of the things that made they resonated with us I think for a public area public golf course in a major city every major city should have one of these

is what I'm trying to say it was really cool to see the impact it's had on the junior programs there the the caddy program there the the solo was really cool to see the impact it's had on the junior programs there, the Cadi program there, the Solish Cadi and Leadership Program. And it's just cool to hear them talk about it, golf course that means a lot to them and means a lot to the city of Denver. So thanks to both of them. I never did get around to introducing Eric Iverson's

background. He's worked with Tom with the Renaissance Design Company for almost 20 years. He's been with Tom. Some of Tom's biggest projects, Terry Edie, Cape kidnappers, all over the globe in Korea, and just you can pull up his list of golf courses. It's remarkable, his experience,

and of course, at all, Tom's resume is well known, but Eric might not be as well known, but he has done so much in the game of golf, and has a great resource of knowledge. So before we do get started, a quick word from our friends at Callaway. The number one, Iearns in golf for four straight years and counting. This incredible feat is driven by Apex Iearns, the ultimate in forage performance featuring industry leading 360 face cup technology for explosive distance and urethane micros fears

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irons and golf, and without further delay let's get to our podcast interview with Tom Doke and Eric Iverson. Be the right club today. That is better than most. That is better than most. Better than most. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show.

I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to be a fan of the show. I'm going to cheer that loud before we started recording. But thank you Tom and Eric for being here.

This is one of your golf courses you guys designed. I'm curious, first, this course opened I believe about 10 years ago. What's it like coming back to a golf course that you built? What do you typically see has changed since the moment you left when you built it? Oh, a lot of things change over time. I mean, it's really nice to come back at this point. Like the first two or three years, I come back to a course I've done.

It's like there are a hundred questions for me. The superintendent wants to know, what about this, what about that? The client wants to know, well, people aren't liking the fourth hole so much. What can we do about that? And you can't just go out and enjoy the golf course for yourself and watch other people play it.

And that's what we really want. We want feedback and we want to see it for ourselves that it works the way we thought it worked. But it's hard to get over that the first couple of years. So now Eric lives in Denver, so he gets the play out here quite a bit. I've only played it three or four times, so I'm still kind of finding out for myself.

Eric, do you ever like hit it in bunkers that you help shape or things you put in your own way? Like, damn, what, I put that there. Absolutely. I mean, you can't unsee something that is meant to kind of be in your head in the first place. So there's a lot of that. There's a lot of, you know of mowing lines in the beginning,

tend to kind of mow off around and find their way, find their ballots to where they really ought to be for day to day play. And I think after you've played a golf course about a hundred times, that's about the equivalent of how well we know a golf course. So there's plenty of people here now that have played the golf course way more than 100 times,

and know the golf course better than we do. So you kind of transition into or out of having it kind of be your baby and then all of a sudden, a lot of people know more about it than you do, which is kind of interesting. And it's cool. Usually we only get that feedback from like the private member courses where people have paid to be there over and over and over again.

You know, the resort courses, like not many people have played Pacific Doons a hundred times. Even if they've got the money, they just, they go out there for three or four days a year, they play the other courses too. So you never get feedback on those that you didn't expect. What does it like to play your own golf courses? No one, I don't think anybody in this room is ever gonna have that experience. Is it any, do you enjoy it more or less?

Like do you start critiquing yourself when you're playing it? What's it like? Well, I mean, hopefully if you've done a good job, you just enjoy it. I mean, you've been visualizing how it's gonna be for so long that it's really, I mean, the first couple times I play, generally I play really well because it's easier.

I have no bad history of this. I've just been visualizing what are the right shots to play in it for two or three years, and I'll do OK. And then, years ago, I walked a golf course with Peter Jacobs and when he was doing a practice round before a tournament. And he just walked it. He had never played there before. It was for the US Open.

And he said, I don't want any bad shots in my head. If I go play a practice round right now, and I hit a bad shot, I'm going to have trouble with that whole all week. So I don't want to put that in my head yet. I want to get a positive view of it first. What is the story, I guess, where does it start for you guys for Common Ground?

I mean, I think I find I almost always enjoy golf courses more the more I know about them, the more I know the story, and just hearing about what was here, what you guys did it, how the budget you guys did it on, how you received your fee for doing it, and all that made me appreciate this place even more. So I don't know where the story starts for you, but what is the story on Common Ground for you?

Well, I'm going to turn this over to Eric, because his history goes back way farther than mine. But both Eric and Don Placik, who runs my office, looked at this project many years ago when it first got handed over to the CGA from Larry Air Force Base, when they closed the Air Force Base golf course. You know, they were trying to figure out what they could do with it back then, which was 10 years before we built it, or something like that, maybe in the past. Early 90s, yeah.

So, you know, they had spent time trying to think through it a bit way back. And one of the main reasons I was interested in being involved with it was because they had so much history there. I knew it would mean a lot to Eric live in here to work on something in his own backyard, not just because he can play it, but also because it's a home game,

and you don't have to fly halfway around the world a bit to work. I just got that at the loop. It was only an hour from my house, which was tremendously more fun. And you just go over for a day instead of having to plan a trip a month in advance. And Don grew up out here, so he and still had family connections out here, so he really wanted to be involved too. And I was like, sure,

go ahead. In the beginning, I thought, well, I'm just going to let them bid on it, I'm not even going to be involved. They'll do great. And that's not how I worked out, but I'll let Eric talk about that. It is true that we had a look at it many years prior, but things do tend to work out for a reason. And, you know, Don and I, as enthusiastic as we were, we were probably not fully prepared to do something on a par with how this turned out. So we had discussed just between us how grateful we were that things kind of worked out the way that they did. Yeah, being local was a huge component of it, but also, you know, the ethos of the place was also huge.

Both actually everybody that works for our company, not just Don and I, but everybody grew up playing public golf. And, you know, having been in the business a little while, we really came to appreciate how easy it should be to provide really high quality golf for not any more than sometimes less than what people pay for inferior, you know, not as good, certainly not as good value for money. So from that standpoint, it was just a home run. It was dear to our hearts, it's our hometown, and it just fit in the whole narrative of what we were all about.

The whole time we were playing today, I was looking around trying to find the reasoning why it was $48 for locals to play. I kept being like, oh, we'll see eventually, there's gotta be something wrong with it. It doesn't really add up. I'm curious, I mean, you guys, you may have more to add on what the process is

for how you end up choosing jobs. But being Premier Architects, I would imagine you pretty much have the pick of the litter. What, and I don't know if responsibility is the right word, but I'll try that one. What responsibility do you guys have to kind of be involved in the public golf scene? How do you guys view your role in that regard?

Well, it's weird because, you know, like Eric, I grew up playing a public course in Stanford, Connecticut, called Sterling Farms. They had a great junior program. When I was a kid, you could play in the afternoon for a dollar around. In Stanford, Connecticut, which is a pretty rich suburb of New York City, they just believed in doing that.

And when the CGA came to us, I said, well, what do you want to do? And they said their mission was they'd saved $4 million. They've been saving money off handicapped fees, turning them in entry fees, all that for years. We saved up $4 million. We want to spend this money and make this a much better golf course for $4 million. But we still want it to be a $40 golf course.

We don't want to, you know, we're not doing this to raise the price, we're just spending this money to make it better. I was like, that's cool. You do not hear that from very many people. We both worked for Pete Dye for a while, and I know Pete got into a couple of deals that he was trying to give back to golf,

and he told a guy, I'll design the golf course for a dollar, just to give back to golf. And he told a guy, I'll design the golf course for a dollar just to give back to golf. And then one of the guys turned around and sold the golf course for a profit as soon as he was done. So yeah, I mean, you know, it's a very competitive world. And some of my clients that pay me top dollar to design a golf course don't really want to hear that I'm going to do another project for a fraction of the cost, or defer my fee over the long term like I did here. So it's a balancing act. But, you know, we kind of tell the clients, we're like a law firm, we're

going to do some work because we feel like it's a good thing to do. How often do you refer your fee, like you did for here? Not very often. I don't think very many people in the golf business know what that deal was. Yeah. So I imagine, you know, with each course you design and build, there's varying circumstances and goals. If somebody comes to you and says, I want a championship golf course,

you kind of have something in mind of what you want to build. You're going to build longer golf holes potentially. But for like a public place like Common Ground, what are the first principles that come to mind? Is it walkability? Is it width? Is it being able to find your golf ball? What are the goals in building a course that everyone can play compared to maybe a private golf course?

Well, I think they're pretty much the same for all of the projects we do. Walkability is really big to me, you know. I mean, yeah, I've worked on a couple of pieces of terrain that were way more hilly and severe and stretched out, but if I didn't think I could walk it when we finished, I've worked on a couple of pieces of terrain that were way more hilly and severe and stretched out, but if I didn't think I could walk it when we finished, I probably would just decline the job. Where does that come from? I mean, where does the walkability,

why is that rank so high? Oh, well, that year I spent in the UK after I got out of college on a scholarship from Cornell, does it spend a year traveling around the UK in Ireland and seeing all the best golf courses. And, you know, the ethos, I thought that was about going to see all the best golf holes and see, get these cool ideas that I could build somewhere. But in the end, it was all about the ethos of, this is why golf exists and this is how they

do it over here. And to them, its golf is outdoor recreation and it over here. And to them, it's golf is outdoor recreation, and it is exercise. They walk their dog with them while they play golf sometimes. And it's such a different attitude than here. And, you know, it really impressed me, and I just thought, why can't it be more like that in the States? And there are certainly a lot of places that it is like that. But, you know, again, the pressures of the golf business are, oh, we can make a lot of money off golf carts. So, we should do that because we want to make as much money as we can. You know, it takes a client like the CGA to say, we're not trying to make as much money

as we can here. We're trying to do the right thing. So with common ground specifically, I'm always really curious and it drives me crazy, just like thinking about how you would go about beginning routing a golf course. It's just like a puzzle. I don't know where you put the first pieces. For a lot of people here have either played this golf course or were good to play at tomorrow. I want to know specifically for this place, when you go look at this site, what's the first thing you try to do? Do you try to find the best spot and the best thing that you're gonna work off of?

Is it different for every site? How does it matter? It's different for different sites. I mean, obviously, if you're on a hilly ground, you need to find the flatter places that you can build a golf hole and the ball just won't roll right out of the fairway because it's too steep. If you're on a really flat piece of ground,

you're looking for any little feature that you can go, yeah, I could build a cool green with that bump right there. There was a golf course here already. Is that easier or harder? It's harder because you sort of, if nothing else, this was where the clubhouse was. Almost on this spot, actually, where this tent is now. And it's got a parking lot there, and it's easy access off the main road,

so that's where it's gonna be. And that really, I mean, that's 80% of the options for how you route the golf course off the table, because that means you're gonna have to have four holes coming back to the spot in a safe room for a practice range too. And I would rather not have that at the beginning. Obviously, there's a lot of sites that you're gonna,

you know, even if there's not a golf course there, you're close to the main road, you don't wanna build a driveway two miles to get into the thing if you could just park right here. So when cost is a factor, yeah. I mean, sometimes the clubhouse is kind of like one of the first things you figure out. But I would rather go try to find golf holes first. And you know some of those things that attract us and I just think well that

would be a cool hole or you know just little things on the ground. I'm trying to think of a couple here. Actually the one here as much as anything were the trees that were here. Because it was, you know, they planted around some of the golf halls, but way too tight, way too tight. And there's a place out there by number four. It's in between, it's by three and four and which hall is it that comes back there? Fifteen. If 15. If I took you out there and put you in the right spot, it's like the trees to the right of four and the trees to the right of the hole on the other side.

And then there's just this little space in between. That was one of the golf holes here originally. They'd routed the golf course kind of randomly across a big open space. And then they planted trees really close to the cart paths or the fairways. And they wound up with narrow spaces for golf holes and wide spaces in between and we were like that seems backwards

So a couple of the golf holes here are just in between where the other holes used to be But I don't we we moved a few trees picked them up and moved yeah, yeah How often do you do something like that? Is that a normal thing? Pretty rare. We actually got a great deal. There was some we didn't want. And I think it was Eric or the Super 10, I don't know which worked out a deal with a landscape guy.

For every tree you move for us, you can take one or two and use them on a landscape project somewhere for free. So it didn't cost anything to do that to the CGA. We had to come up with a lot of deals like that in order to do as much as we could for $4 million. This might be a really broad question, but I'm just curious in how both of you would phrase this.

But you just mentioned there, when you go out looking for routing, you're looking for cool golf holes. What's a cool golf hole? You've built so many golf holes. What are you always looking to do something different or just something that you find unique or what is a cool golf hole to you?

Start with Eric. I know you should kick that one to me. Please. I got a thing about it. I think it goes back to the routing process and the choices that you make early on. You know, you're not only looking for good holes and places that kind of serve a purpose,

but you're also just looking for cool parts of the property where you just naturally kind of want to be in our drawn to. When you identify one, two, three of those, a lot of times, you start to think about, you know, how many times can I kind of approach this same area from a different angle? What are some of those spots out here if you don't mind? Well the spot right around the carry from 18 to the fairway as it works across 17 and then you know it kind of becomes the corner of the dog leg for 16.

I guess the put it in the nutshell, that's really the convergence of a lot of really good topography in one spot. And it's just like, yeah, there's a lot of different directions you could go working out of this area. So let's make sure we make the most of this. And in terms of what makes it cool, I think. One factor has to be that it has to make you think about where you want to be on each shot

and kind of a sequential set of ramifications for either making poor choices or hitting poor shots. Some of it's less tangible than that. And it's more just kind of a sense of, yeah, this was a special spot. And they didn't screw it up by building a crummy hole. A lot of times it's as simple as that. You don't have to really understand architecture

to kind of be someplace on a golf course. And it's just like, wow, this is a really special part of the property, but this hole seems stupid. And, you know, that can happen. So, I think that's a big part. That can happen. For me, not us. Hopefully not.

You know, what he was saying about, you know, there wasn't a lot of topography I heard to work with. I mean this clubhouse, this old clubhouse area sits up on a hill about 25 or 30 feet higher in the rest of the golf course. And after that, it's just gradually all down into the far corner. So there will, you know, there is that big like drainage control berm around two sides of the golf course, which did fill up a few years ago, not long after we built the golf course. But it's like, when is there ever going to be that much water, and there was.

But so, again, on something like this, you're looking for, okay, here's one cool corner. How many holes can I get in there? You know, he mentioned 16, 17, and 8, but also like number two green is backed up the other side of that, looking toward the mountains, tiny little hole, just kind of wedged in the middle in a place you probably wouldn't have thought to build a golf hole if you weren't trying to make more out of that space.

For me, a cool golf hole is just usually it's about you stand on the tee and it excites you, and then whenever you stand on the tee on a golf hole, you are drawn toward the flag. And that's the fail point of a lot of golfers is if you've got a dog leg hole, say a dog leg right where you can see the flag from the tee. The last thing you do before you hit the ball is you look up and instead of looking at where you should be going, you look at the flag. And what are you going to do? You're going to hit it dead right on that hole. So to me, a cool golf hole is one that has that tension in it that, you know, boy, that looks cool. I want to go there. And then that's really not the best way to go.

And that could give you in trouble if you try to do it. It might work, but it might get you in a lot of trouble. I'm thinking of, I think it's 15 at Barn Bougal Dooms, the short par four. Is that my, I have that right? With a big bunker right in the middle right? Standing on that team, there's tons of fairway to the left for people that can't picture this.

Tons of fairway to the left with this bunker that's right in line with the green. I remember thinking like, oh, it's just go left. This looks so easy. And I was like, wait a second, doke is up to something here. This is not that easy. So I put it in front of that bunker

and then you get a perfect look. And if you do go left, you're completely blind. There's a dude in the process. And I thought you were gonna say, you know, there's about 20 yards of fairway to the right of that bunker over it. And that that's like the sucker play. Do not go there. But a lot of people go there.

It's like, oh, there's fair way there. I could sneak that in there. And in the wind there, that is a bad idea. So what are some of the coolest golf holes that you guys feel like you've built all around the world? What are the first holes you think of? Obviously, the holes that sit right on the cliff of the ocean, both the 11th, the part of three

of Pacific dunes and the 13th hole after it and the fourth hole that's in between them coming back the other way. It's just, you know, 450 yards of ocean front real estate is a pretty good deal. And, you know, those are, you know, one of them has just a 50 foot sand dune blown out bunker on the other side of it.

It's spectacular. And the first time I saw that, I was like, well, bunker on the other side of it. It's spectacular. And the first time I saw that, I was like, well, there's a golf hole. You know, I don't even really feel that proud of something like that because that was there. All we had to do is decide, okay, where does the grass stop here? And the topography pretty much had that set, too. You know, Cape Kidnappers is one of the most spectacular places we've worked.

It was a fun place to get you. You had to go a good 30, 40 minutes up this twisty windy road to get up there just to go to work every day. And then you're up there. You're like four or 500 feet above the ocean looking down at it. Couple of places just kind of hanging, scary looking out over the edge of the cliff,

but I'm afraid to get too close to it. 12 green. 12 green to Cape Kittenappers. Well, I was going to never seen anything like it before or since. It just looks like you're getting into space. Well, tell it. I want to hear. I hope you're able to picture this.

You're listening at home. But what you almost did with the 14th green at Cape Kittennappers, the short part three, who told you that story. You did. Okay. That's inside the stage. I was saving that for my book. We have to wait for your book for that one. Yeah.

Okay. What about you? I'll pick it up. Yeah. I consider it really a set of holes. I think, you know, when we're kind of getting our head around what routing we're going with and Tom's kind of worked out, you know, this is what we're doing. We always kind of gravitate to the short par for us. I think especially now when people, you know, people are hitting the ball so far, the long par four is kind

of kind of pass-a, no. It doesn't exist. Because it really doesn't exist. The long par four is a 550 yard par five, and only it's a par four for the best players. But the short fours are where you can really still keep everybody on their toes. They're usually in great parts of the property. And the two that come to mind, seven at Balaniel

is one of the most unique greens anybody's built in the last 20 years. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I absolutely love it. I think it's incredible. You had mentioned Bard Bougal. The fourth at Bard Bougal is kind of on an epic scale. So that kind of fits that sense of place bit.

But a lot of people around here might be more familiar with this little eight hole, a common ground. Is it confounding little short for that he built with Brian Schneider. It's a chance to make three. It's a chance to make five. And, you know, every day is a little bit different. It's amazing.

You're just never going to, you're just, just based on where the hole's cut. You're just not going to hit it in the same place. What, one little bunker can do like that hole. Well, just, in the contour in the front. Yeah. Just that super abrupt front edge. Yeah. It's just, it really just, you know,

makes you figure out what you're going to do. That was the plan as part of this site. It was just dead flat. There was nothing going on. We had a drawn on the plan. Like it'd be a dog like left. And then it's like, well, why would we do that? Because then we're going to have to walk way

the hell back over here to get to the tee for nine. So let's try to get the dog like left. And then it's like, well, why would we do that? Because then we're going to have to walk way the hell back over here to get to the tee for nine. So let's try to get the green in here. But that's the one I spent by far the most time on. Most of the other holes, they're kind of sitting in a good place. These guys are building cool greens. It's like, OK, that's fine. And that one, really, nobody had any time

idea what we were going to do. So we just stared at it and stared at it and stared at it until, and then thought about, okay, what have I seen? I'm just dev fly ground that makes a green cool. And there's a green at St Andrews that's a little like that. That there's just this little shelf

that's really hard to get on and stay on. The pins not always there. But it's funny, like when the pins on the shelf is really hard to get on and you go over into the little trough and back pretty easily. Next day, the pins back there and it's like all you have to really do is just hit up shot into the middle of the greener and wind up in that back trough. But when you're trying to get to the backdrop, it's like, there's not much space there. How am I going to do that? I'm curious.

I'm sure all your experience in the UK has helped shape your design philosophies, but I'm curious how that has progressed throughout your career. You've seen, I don't even want to know how many golf courses. Do you still see new stuff that inspires you guys? Yes. Yes. I've walked 1,600 golf courses. And because I'm working on the update to the Confidential

Guide, I've seen like 30 or 40 new courses a year. The last four or five years. After I admit, one of the reasons I'm doing the book is I kind of stop doing that so much. We were busy and doing a bunch of cool stuff and it's like, I've already seen all the famous courses and nearly all the top 100 courses, anything I wanted to go see. So now I'm like, I'm making golf trips to India and Sri Lanka and Nepal and places honestly wasn't sure I would ever go. And it's been great. You know the golf architecture and especially the maintenance of the golf courses

is completely iffy. I mean you never know what you're going to get. My favorite course in India was there was barely any grass out there at all and there were kind of like stones every once in a while marked the edge of the fairway. And if you're ball stayed in the fairway, you could kind of set it up on grass. You could improve your lie. And if it didn't, you couldn't. And you were basically hitting off dirt. But there were some holes that were like there was so much slope in the fairway that trying

to stay in the fairway, you would no grass to hold it was pretty hard. But I get a kick out of seeing those places and seeing what other people can enjoy golf without. You know, in America, it's like, we've got to spend $8 million to build a golf course and we have to have all these fancy bunker liners and we have to do this and that. And the other thing is like, no, I mean golf courses were never like that when I was a kid and it was fun. You don't need all that stuff to have a golf course. It's interesting to play and that people want to go back and play

again. And that's something that I wanted to ask you guys about and I feel like I've kind of struggled with because the more and more I've learned about golf architecture, the more it unlocks, the ways that I enjoy the game. The way I think about it, I used to think that golf courses just need to be there for me to be able to take advantage of and make birdies. And I've found more joy in making really dumb double bogies sometimes because now I understood what traps I've fallen into.

And we try to talk, we get kind of some pushback from some listeners and not caring about architecture stuff. But I just try to keep pounded in because I think there's so much to unlock there. So I'm curious to ask you guys, for somebody that doesn't really know a ton about architecture, what would you say to them that you think would help them enjoy the game even more than maybe they already do?

Well, you kind of just said it. You have fun making double bogies sometimes. You know, most people, their entire view of whether golf course is any good or not is based on how they played. If I made birdie on that hole, I really like that hole. If I made double bogie on that hole, that's a crap hole. And, you know, that's natural. We do it too.

But if you can just delay that just a little bit and when you mess up a hole instead of just saying that's a crap hole, ask yourself why did you mess up that hole? What was out there that did that to you? And if you sliced it in the trees, that's just you. But if you didn't, then there's other things going on there. If you actually understood them a little, you would wind up playing a lot better. I, I caddyed only briefly, but my only caddy experience really was when I went overseas, the first thing I was going to do, I lived in

St. Andrews the first two months I was there. I was going to work on the maintenance crew for the golf course, but they were in a terrible recession. It's a town golf course. The greenkeeper said, I can't hire an American kid. People are out of work here. I've got to hire the locals, but I talk to the caddy master. You can caddy every day and see the golf course that way and you can hang around me all you want. Perfect. I did that for two months. And a lot of what I learned, I learned the old course really well because I had to learn it not for my game,

but for everybody's. I mean, you know, back then they would like people, I can't even for one or two guys from Asia, I don't think they'd ever played 18 holes on grass before. They could hit the ball. They'd like hit balls at a driving range of bunch, and that was a big thing in Japan 30 years ago.

But you didn't have access to golf there. So they'd take a vacation to Scotland and try to play golf and not know what to do, chipping and putting and going to the next tee and all those little details. But a lot of what I learned was about how important it is for players to be confident in what they're doing. Like when you watch on TV at a tournament,

the caddies are Mike now, or they're just picking up the conversation with a caddy from a boom mic. It's almost funny to the point of embarrassing how the caddy no matter what, even if he's trying to talk the player out of something, you know, the last message is always, that's the perfect club, that's the perfect yardage. Hit that. Because saying anything else is a recipe for a designer.

If you put some doubt in somebody's mind, there's one whole at St Andrews that there's bunkers in the middle of fairway and you cannot see them. It's a simple hole, it's a really short 320-yard per four. In fact, it's the hole that we use some pieces of for the 8th common ground. It's a number 9 or 10, 12. And, you know, the bunkers are in the Fairway face in the other way because they used to play the golf course backwards some of the times.

And they were more for that. But anyway, you stand on the tee and and it's like there's gorse left, and there's out of bounds, right? And then there's these bunkers that are just out there like landmines that nobody can see. And the first three or four times I can't eat, I tried to explain that to the players, and they just top it off the tee,

or hit a terrible shot, or whatever. And I always think, I don't want them to wind up in the bunker and blame me. But after, it didn't take me very long to figure out, you cannot do that to people. You just have to tell them, aim at that church fire, away they held down there. And silently, we'll cross our fingers

and hope you don't pop it up and wind up in this pop bunker. Eric, do you have any answer to that question as well? I think any place that you play, if you just care to think about why things worked out the way they did, and were there choices that you had from the TE or was it just kind of your only option, which is harder these days because the number one option is to just whale on the driver. So that's kind of changed a little bit in terms of not so much club selection,

but as much as directionally, do you want to be close to something or do you want to steer clear of something? And identifying whether or not after you've played course A five times and course B five times, why do you like one over the other? Typically it's because or the reason is because one of them is less boring and more

interesting than the other. It doesn't really apply to everybody, you know, but I think any avid golfer will get something out of it even if it's no more than to help their own game, which is, frankly, that's the main reason most people give a crap in the first place, that's the kernel, that's the seed that it grows from. Once you're, you kind of dabble in understanding why things are where they are, that kind of sparks the interest and the interest grows. And then you kind of apply that to someplace, whether it's new or that you played before,

but hadn't been thinking along, thinking in the same terms. And you go back and you're just like, well, I think I can carry that bunker. What are the ramifications? And then that's thinking about architecture. It's really that simple. And I think it's easy to get caught up into some of the, it's easy to kind of get

in the weeds on it. And it caught up in some big discussion. When really it's as simple as do this, don't do that. Try to make four, try to make five from where you are, whatever. That's the start. And then it's really just for people to take it as far as they like and One more thing on that topic. I mean to me the most important thing is a really good golf hall

You should think about it backwards, you know like there's the green there's the whole Okay, where do I want to miss? You know if I can't if I don't hit my approach shot in the hole, do I want to be left of the pin or right of the pin or short of the pin or where? Because I've built some fairly severe greens on a few courses in my life, so. No.

Yes. So the number one thing I'm at, you know, the number one piece of negative feedback I get is, I hit it, you know, I hit this par 5 and 2 and I had an impossible pot over this contour down to the hole, I couldn't get it closer than 8 feet. So you do get my email. Okay, thank you. Not many people email me with those things, but if I see them in person, it comes out,

it just comes comes out. It just comes still and out. But, you know, I always look at him and like, okay, well, you know, that contour that you had to put over, that is really severe, and it's really hard to put, if you have to put over that on purpose, that's the whole point of the whole. It's like, in every contour like that, if you're on the right side of it, it's a backstop. It is not a problem. But people don't think like that. You know, people think if I can reach the green on a par 5 and 2, that's good. And they don't think if I was just short of the green and

shipping at the whole from there, I'd make four every single time. Why would I take a forward and try to get there if I don't have control over it and it might wind up in this place where I can't put anywhere near the hole? I think I read this on the common ground website. I think you wrote it, but it made me, it was, I found it very enlightening and you know a good thrill for a golfer is when the line between birdie and bogey is very close. Is that sound like something you said it might be? Could you explain that? Well, you know, some like pro golfers think that the penalties should be proportionate to the miss. And if you're really, really good, that makes all the sense in the world. But if we did that,

then most of the people sitting in this tent right now would give up because we all miss shots all the time much worse than Brooks Keppga and Rory McElroy miss shots. So you can't do that. I mean if you if you did if you made every yard off line worse most people would just give up the game and hurt. You kind of have to do it the other way around. You have to make it where you can miss by a lot and it doesn't necessarily cost you too much, but it's really hard to get close and make burden. But it's not really hard to move the ball forward

and make par or bogey and get on to the next hole. I'm curious how, you know, you mentioned kind of technology and how the long par four doesn't exist anymore. And you know, like this golf course is going to host the stroke play rounds, the US mid-AM, the US AM has been here, there's some back-back T-boxes here. How, I can't imagine what that's like, we played altitude here, so there's not,

that if real estate really, to put put teas where they need to be. How do you possibly, and if you guys started to get, or try to get more creative on how you combat technology for the longest hitters? Again, you're making this golf course for that every day 15 handicap, that's who it's for, but it's also the top level golf played there, but it's not as simple, I would imagine,

just moving T-Boxes back. How do you combat it? What do you do? One of the things that's really been striking was just the result of Medina this last weekend. I mean, we did a little work on one of the other golf courses there. That was the only time I'd been there.

I mean, they were still taking down the stands for the Ryder Cup when it was there. It's a hard golf course. And to see, you know, just what happened this last weekend. And to some extent, you know, our golf course, Tom's golf course in Scotland earlier in the summer, it really kind of drove home the point of just how important the elements are, you know, and how important just having some breeze and some heat and being able to bake it out a little bit. I really wish that the people, you know, club owners that really are the most upset about, you know, when the

scores go low, you know, the guy's selling advertisement don't care. They're just assumed everybody should 25 under every week. You know, the club owners get more upset about it than anybody. I think if more people just appreciate it, the vagaries of weather weekend and week out. And the tour avoids that by manipulating the schedule, so they try not to get in that situation. But if it's wet and guys are getting their hands on it, there's not a lot you can do.

But if you get a little wind, and you can dry the place out and get it firm, then we like to think places like this will fare pretty well because there are those places in the greens that have some contour and you can get on the right side of them or be on the wrong side of them fairly easy. If it's soft, it's a lot harder for those, you know, to get those players out of position. And we're at kind of a crossroads design-wise with that, and it's a hot topic right now. So after college, after that little trip overseas,

I worked for Pete Dye for four years. And when I worked for Mr. Dye, pretty much every course he was building with one exception, well, too, because one of them was Riverdale Dunes up here, 20 miles northeast of Denver. You know, most of his projects were going to host tour events. And he really thought a lot about what can I do to challenge these guys. And for him, it was like like get in their heads as much as you can get in their heads, because that's the one thing that you can actually affect them more

than the average guy. The average guy's already got that problem to some degree. You're not going to do any more to get to take down his confidence. But for a good player, if you can get them uncomfortable, that makes it a lot harder for them. So simple things like, you know, like the green is kind of hanging in space and you can't see the back edge of it clearly and what's behind it. It's like, when we were working on Sivanic in New York with Jack Nicholas, he said that

we were building the 11th green and he's like, don't you want to put some mounds behind that green? I'm like, no, he's like, we can't see whatth green, and he's like, don't you want to put some mounds behind that green? I'm like, no. He's like, we can't see what's down there. I was like, I was going for that, but I didn't think it would bother you. You. You.

Then I started designing courses on my own. And my first course was a public golf course in Traverse City, where I live now. And the client said something about, well, you know, I mean, it was a beautiful piece of land. He don't it for years. He always thought it'd be a great piece of land to build a golf course on. So he's finally doing it. And in the back of his mind, he's like, well, wouldn't it be cool to have a tournament here someday? And I just laughed at that right off. I was like, yeah, you could have a tournament if you're going to put up $5 million for those guys to show up. Mr. Dye used to say when somebody would compliment

him on building a course at a tour event, you would say, those boys would play in a parking lot for $5 million. It would take more than $5 million now. But so for the longest time in my career, I'm like, okay, those aren't the projects that people hire me to do. I don't have to worry about that so much. I can just worry about me and you and Eric and everybody in this room and making it interesting for them. And yes, I know some really good players, and I want them to come out and see at least three or four shots where they're like, uh-oh, I have to work on this one a little bit.

But I don't care if they shoot 66 when they do it. Only in the last couple of years, you know, we are course in Scotland, the Renaissance Club, which is next door to Mirfield, just hosted the Scottish Open this summer. Actually the men's and the women's Scottish Open's. And we're working on it, we've been working on a project in Houston this year, a public course in the city called Memorial Park. Shades of common ground in some ways. It's been a muni since the 30s.

Run downs, not a fair word, but it was a fairly flat golf course and not much pizzazz to it. And the Jim Crane, the owner of the Houston Astros stepped in when Shell dropped out as the sponsor there and said, well, we'll round up the sponsors to do this. But on one condition, we want to put money into the golf course here and move the tournament back downtown

because we're all interested in doing a bunch of corporate hospitality that weekend. We don't want to be way up in the suburbs. We want to come right to the golf course downtown. So in addition to pledging the money to support the tournament for five years, he also raised $25 million to renovate the golf course, the clubhouse, move the tennis courts away from it. I mean, it's an amazing project for somebody to jump into like that. And, you know, when we're all done, he just turns the keys back over to the city and says, okay, it's yours again. So is there anything more challenging than designing and working on a golf course that

is a municipal course that everyone's going to play, but also PGA tour players are going to play a competitive event on us. And how do you do it? Well, we've sort of just gave land. B, they're really good. C, Houston, you could get a couple of dry weeks before the tournament, but it's a pretty wet place most of the year around just getting the golf course built has been a struggle. So the odds that we're going to get dry weather and really be able to dry out the golf course

and make it tough are probably pretty low. And yes, this is a public course. It does 60,000 rounds a year. So you can't do the one thing that all the pros would be OK with that would make it harder for them is build small greens. You know, really, the two things you can do to make it hard for them is build small greens and build greens with tilt

and contour in them. The tour tries to handcuff you on doing too much tilt and contour, and the fact that you're going to place 60,000 rounds a year there means you cannot make the greens really small. Our smallest green will be 5,000 square feet in the biggest. There's a couple that are fairly big, but even a 5,000 square foot green, which is average or for most golf courses, was kind of like the minimum size that the green keeper was comfortable with, even if it was pretty flat and there was room around it, you didn't funnel all the traffic off the same place.

What we're doing is going to be really different. We don't have a lot of bunkers. We have like 19 bunkers for an 18-hog off course. We have water way more in play on four or five holes than we normally do. We have a little contour in the on four or five holes than we normally do. We have a little contour in the greens here and there. Some places you don't want to miss. We've tried to, basically, all the holes, except for one of the part three, is all the holes are pretty much in the same quarters that they were before. But we've tried to shift the tee left or right and bring the big trees that are there

more in to play You know, that's the other thing that gets pros attention is trees Even they can't go through a tree, you know, they can hit it over a tree if it's far enough ahead of them But if you get it if the trees say 50 yards pass where they're gonna drive it Then it's a problem for them because getting up over it is no sure thing My in this happens so infrequently I'm struggling to even think of like a regular PGA tour stop where this happens.

But I find the most interesting professional golf to watch is when there's short grass around the greens. I'm curious as to, and watching the USM at Pinehurst this past week was green, so maybe a bit too dialed up. But it was about the best example of watching competitive golf. I think that's as bad as good as it gets. The best way to combat how far this golf ball is going is like, okay, use that against people, try to get them to make it stop when it doesn't really spend anymore. Yes and no. Yes, that works great at Pinehurst, that works great if you can keep

the green small enough. We have a bunch of short grass around the greens. We did it the Renaissance Club too, but if you give the pros a big enough target, they're going to start in the middle of the green and work out from there, so they're not going to miss off the edge that often. They always hedge toward the center. Actually, what we tried to do, and hopefully not too many of them are listening to your podcast right now, so they'll take more than a day to figure it out.

One of the things, one of the concepts I came up with in the beginning was let's try to do something kind of in the middle of this green to make them not want to aim there. Like you know that's the place where it divides from a high side to a low side or there's a little crown right there or just something. So you know if I play it toward the middle, it might catch this little feature and turn and go further, even further away than I expect. So now you're making me aim at half the green instead of the whole thing. How much of a role does Brooks Kevka? I know you guys are working together on this Houston course.

What is he consult on? Have you been pleasantly surprised, frustrated at all, with his understanding of golf? What, I can't picture how that relationship works. I'm just curious. Well, obviously he's busy playing golf, and he doesn't have a ton of time to work on it. Jim Crane, the client, in addition to all his activities

and used in the owns of Club in Florida called the Floridian, which a bunch of the tour players play out of. Ricky Fowler plays their Dust of Johnson plays, their Keppka plays, their Six or Eight pros or members there and play when they're home. And then a bunch of guys get out there from time to time. So they knew all these guys pretty well and said,

well, I said to them in the beginning, well, why don't we just sit a bunch of those guys down at a once and say, what would be the middle ground between, it's just too easy and it's just a putt, it's just who puts best that week is going to win. And it's too tricked up and we don't like it because of that. What's the course that you guys would all like to play? But the tour wants one player to kind of be the consultant and not be open season. I admit

that having five different guys given input would have been pretty hard. I like to have one client that I'm dealing with instead of 200 members is a lot harder to answer to because they don't agree. Of those guys, and this is just before he won four of the last eight majors or 10 majors, they said, well, you like Brooks a lot. You know, let's talk to him. So, you know, I met him in Florida last winter and I said, well, what do you like? And he said, I said, what's your favorite car? So you said, far away, the old course is St. Andrews.

I'm like, okay, it's good. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. We can agree on a lot there. And that's funny, because that's when we were doing Subonic Jack Nicklis and I, that's the first course we could talk about. If we were like, loggerheads trying to figure out what to do,

what could we do from there? What kind of, it's just a different vocabulary of stuff that you can work on. But Brooks really thinks that he's so good at the majors because they're about the only tournaments on the tour that it really matters which side of the whole year on. You know, the Greens have more slope and they've got them just a little extra fast. The regular every week tour event, they don't do that. They put the pins in general or locations.

They don't get the greens quite that fast, because they don't want to embarrass the players weekend and week out. And they want the setup to be pretty similar from one week to the next. So when you go to Milwaukee, whether you played the week before you didn't, it doesn't take you two days to figure out how do I have to play this golf course.

I think that kind of makes it more boring at the same time, but that's what the players want, that's what they get. And Brooks thinks as a result of that, there's a lot of players that just don't pay much attention to where you'd want to miss around the green. Because most of the year, most weeks, they don't have to worry that much. And at the majors, it makes a lot of difference.

And it makes a difference from one day to the next. You can't just say I'm going to always drive it left on 12. Because there's going to be at least one whole location that that is not the best place to be. You know, he thinks about architecture a lot. And from that basis we've gotten on really well. And some of the suggestions he's made to me are really subtle things. Being in a fairway bunker is not that hard, because I'm still going to have a nine or a wedge to the green.

So I'm not worried about whether I hit into that or not. So why have one? It costs more money to build. Every time it rains, the sand walks to wash down the face, and they have to fix it up, which is an alternative. It is a real problem. The tour was thrilled to hear we're not going to have so many bunkers for you to clean up when it rains here. But then in place of that, we're trying to just do little things like just out there in the edge of the rough, just have like little mounds where if I miss it out there, I'm on a side hill line, the rough.

That's hard to control. That ball sometimes, and not every time, is just going to come out high and turn over. So now I have to think about, okay, is there's some backstop out there that I can aim for to stop it from getting away from me. At the same time, I'm not just trying to hit it at the whole all day. So I've learned quite a bit about that little stuff just from the few days He's gotten the spend out there and and obviously we couldn't have done it at a better time I mean you turn on the TV and a major channel for the guys right there every time

It's hard not to root for him once you know it. Yeah, lots of lots of impact there one It's nuts to hear for somebody that you you says pays a lot of attention to architecture Somebody had also says when I'm on the PGA tour I just pound drive or go find it and hit it because they don't test them very much Strategically, but also on that note you said the old courses is favorite golf course What's the only thing you think of when you're hitting t-shirts out there is I got to avoid that bunker I got to avoid that one. I got to avoid that one So and unfortunately you can't build bunkers like that and Houston on a really flat clay site.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I promise, I swear this was in like my top five to get to your background more Eric. We haven't even gotten that because you guys haven't been so much on fire. But we've been talking about the old course a lot.

I'm curious what you guys, let's say non-road hole division, what your favorite hole out there is and why. It could be most inspiring hole, it could be just most fun to play, but what are some of your favorite holes out there? For me, it changes pretty much every time I've played it, so. I've always like 16. I don't have near the experience that Tom has there. I've probably been around it four or five times now. Just recently with my wife, who birdied the road hole incidentally. 16 is just such a cool hole because you really want to try to slip it between the boundary and are those spectacles there?

The principal is nozzles. Are the principals nozzles? Yeah. You just want to slip it. Are the principals does, yeah. You just want to slip it right down the boundary if you can. And it really just matters what way the wind is blowing that day, how you've been, you know, how you've been hitting it.

Just there's just a lot of, it's not one of the more noteworthy holes, but I just always have liked the ramifications of taking on that challenge and having my opponent kind of bail out and go left and did I pull it off or didn't I and I've always liked that. That whole in particular for me it kind of opened my eyes because when I played a one day the wind was off the left and my caddy looks at his book and he looks at where the pin is and he goes all right we're going where the pros go because when the wind's coming off the left,

that OB comes right in play. And we went down the second fairway. And I always thought, I was like, I know the fairways are connected, but I never thought of the strategic advantage, depending where the pin is, of like, we want to be there rather than try to fit it in there today. And I was just like, oh my God,

that's what this place is all about. So that whole holds a special place in my heart. I know there a whole like that at St. Andrews is 14, the long hole, which you've got out of bounds, right? Hell bunker in the middle of, you know, interrupts the fairway on the second shot. You can try to get over it, but if you don't, you're in hell.

And if you do, you've got a really awkward little shot left with a big false front on the green and the green going away from you, so it's no bargain. It's very hard. The locals all just play over into number five on their second shot and go around the bunker and take it out of play and then hit back kind of where they can hit into the slip of the green more. You would never, ever, think of that if you didn't have a caddy or you didn't know the

golf course really well I mean even when you're cadding for people Telling them to do it. They're like you can't over there and there's like you know There's people playing over there But one of the rules of the old course is homework players have the right of waste So when you're on number five you're supposed to be watching if somebody wants to come on 14. You better get out of their way because they're going to do it. To me, the famous halls at St. Andrews are 11, the part three with the deep bunker front right.

That's right out, backs up to the river. 14, the long part five, 16 that he talked about, the road hall. And then I don't think most people think it's a great hall, but it's an incomparable setting to play the ATV haul anyway. And there's a little trick to it. It's not as easy as it looks when it's just a big field, but there's that one contour just in front of the green. A lot of people play in there for the first time.

It's a very disorienting golf course. It doesn't look like most other golf courses. You can't pick out the bunkers very well. And those early holes, after you hit across the burn on the first hole, they kind of blend in. Players don't remember two from three from four very well at all. Two and four are two of my favorite holes there.

Two's just got some wrinkly contours in front of the green on the left. That if you're hitting a forward into the green, it just rolls up over those things like they're not there. If you're hitting an eight iron on the green, you better not land on the backside of one of those contours, or you're going through the green into a bunker in deep trouble. And then number four has just got this little four-foot high pimply mound kind of right in front of it. And as firm as the ground is there most of the time, if you fly it over that,

you're probably gonna wind up at the back of the green. So now it's in your way. Do I drive it really tight to the right side to try to come into the right of it? Do I drive way out to the left so I can try to get around it to the left side? But if you just hit a ball straight down the middle of that, thinking about it, it's right in your way.

Having just played there for the first time in about, must have been seven or eight years. And Tom touched on it earlier. What makes the old course so special is that it exemplifies in all of golf, playing the old course is about having faith and trust in what you're going because you can't see where you want to go all day long. I think the better the player you are, the bigger the test it is of your faith and your trust in hitting it where you're going, where you think you're going to hit it. And it applies to, I always think of places that have a lot of trees. Those are kind of guideposts.

There's just, every hole, there's an instinctive line that's just trouble left, trouble right, split the difference. That's the instinctive line for most people. And you strip all that away. And the possibilities of how wide you can miss are magnified. It's just hard to have the discipline all day long to hit it where you want to hit it. And of course, you only have to hit it 220 yards.

I mean, you can pretty well tack your way around there without any wooden clubs if you chose to and do great. If you can just hit it where the caddy tells you to hit it. And even after four or five goes, I still wouldn't say I know it at all. You need guidance. Yeah. Well, I got about two pages of notes that we're probably not going to get to, but it's hour and a half until last call. So I'm going to wrap it at this.

And again, I know we talked a lot about Common Ground, but I want to emphasize, and we haven't even talked about all the practice facilities that are around here, and just how unbelievable of a public space this is. So twofold question. I want to know what are the best comparables to Common Ground? You've seen anywhere in your travels around big cities, maybe. I don't know if that exists, but, and, just what can local public places or any places do to replicate the special thing they have going here at Common Ground? Well, I mean a lot of the difference at Common Ground is it's not a municourse, it's run by the CGA.

The mission is totally different. I mean, municipal golf courses are great from this standpoint that they provide low-cost golf to people that would never play if there wasn't low-cost golf. They're probably also one of the, I'm a pretty liberal person for the golf business. They're probably one of the best arguments against government run facilities because most of them are pretty horribly run and the golf courses aren't in very good shape. They have a hard time running a business because they don't. There's a bunch of different factions that are wrestling over who gets priority and you know what the mission is. In the CGA they have a pretty clear mission of what they want to do and

it's not about trying to make as much money as they can. And it's not about trying to keep the price this for the seniors and to heck with everybody else, to have more facilities that were either run, you know, even if a town would just put its golf courses in trust. I mean, you think about St. Andrews, the golf course is owned by the Lynx Trust, which is now a massive corporation because St. Andrews, the golf course is owned by the Lynx Trust, which is now a massive corporation

because St. Andrews brings so much money in, but the town itself doesn't run it day-to-day like a muni. They gave it to another body which has its own principles. They're in charge of making sure it doesn't stray from that, and that's a tremendously better model for doing things. I don't think there aren't enough of them to point to that are kind of doing a similar thing to what Comma Graham is doing.

I mean specifically, as a golf course, I really enjoyed getting to know and playing Rustic Canyon in the last couple of years. One of the connections I think you could draw is the CGA had very clear priorities when we set out. When you set out for a set amount of money, you just have to rank the things that are important to you. They were in line with what we thought the priorities ought to be. There's only within the last couple of, that there's proper hard surface card paths out here, which is entirely due to how much rain they get,

and it's kind of flat. But in the beginning, we're like, if we can go without paving a bunch of card paths out there, we could just put that money back into the golf course and just make the holes better and the golf better. And they were all about that. The best compliment I ever heard about this course was that every town should have one.

Because it doesn't take, you know, it's not the world-beater piece of land, although it's quite good, it's big, and it's open. Beautiful vistas didn't cost a ton of money. It's like, there's no reason that every decent sized city should have something just like this. We got people from the Jacksonville Beach Golf Association here this week to see that as

well. So, we got a big round of applause for our guests this evening. Eric Iber said in Tom Doke, that was, we could do this for several hours, but this was absolutely tremendous. So thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you for all you've done for golf in this area and all around the world. And hopefully we can do this again sometime. Cheers. Thank you for all you've done for golf in this area and all around the world and hopefully we can do this again sometime. Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. Better than most. How about in? That is better than most.

Better than most. Expect anything different?