Latest / Designing Golf / Alister MacKenzie, Augusta National, and the 1930s in America
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: What was Alistair McKenzie up to in the nineteen thirties.
- 0:04Speaker 1: For one thing, he was building Augusta National, But more generally,
- 0:08Speaker 1: mackenzie was exploring new forms of golf architecture during this period.
- 0:13Speaker 1: In many ways, he was at his most experimental and
- 0:17Speaker 1: even radical in the time between the stock market crash
- 0:20Speaker 1: of nineteen twenty nine and his death in nineteen thirty four.
- 0:25Speaker 1: That's what I'm talking about today with Josh Pettit. Josh
- 0:28Speaker 1: is a golf architect, an associate with the firm Clayton,
- 0:31Speaker 1: Devrees and Pont, and the founder of the Alistair McKenzie Institute.
- 0:36Speaker 1: And in this episode, Josh and I will focus on
- 0:39Speaker 1: what we can learn from Alistair McKenzie's wild nineteen thirties,
- 0:44Speaker 1: how this era of McKenzie's career influenced the design of
- 0:48Speaker 1: Augusta National, and how it might light the way forward
- 0:51Speaker 1: for golf architecture in the twenty first century. I'm Garrett Morrison,
- 0:56Speaker 1: and this is designing golf, Okay, Josh, I want to
- 1:06Speaker 1: just set the scene a little bit here. It's late
- 1:09Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine. Where is Alistair McKenzie in his golf
- 1:13Speaker 1: architecture career at this point.
- 1:16Speaker 2: In late nineteen nineteen twenty nine, he was had just
- 1:20Speaker 2: opened Pasta Tampo in September September eighth, nineteen twenty nine.
- 1:24Speaker 2: The Valley Club of Montecito would shortly open after that,
- 1:28Speaker 2: in December thirtieth, nineteen twenty nine. So you know, keep
- 1:33Speaker 2: in mind historically the crash of nineteen twenty nine was September,
- 1:38Speaker 2: and that influenced a lot of things going forward. But yeah,
- 1:45Speaker 2: as far as McKenzie's career, he had just finished Past
- 1:48Speaker 2: Tempo Valley Club was just getting ready to open.
- 1:51Speaker 1: Yeah, so I find this to be a really poignant
- 1:55Speaker 1: moment in history. Pasa Teampo opens in September nineteen twenty nine.
- 2:00Speaker 1: This is kind of mackenzie at the height of his powers.
- 2:03Speaker 1: That first group out at Pasa Tiempo is Marion Hollins,
- 2:07Speaker 1: Bobby Jones, Cyril Tolly, Glenna Colette. There are these beautiful
- 2:11Speaker 1: photos from that day from Julian Graham, some of the
- 2:15Speaker 1: best golf photos of the nineteen twenties taken of that day.
- 2:18Speaker 1: It looked like it was great weather. This is kind
- 2:21Speaker 1: of the height of the Roaring twenties. And then almost
- 2:24Speaker 1: immediately after that, the stock market crashes, the world changes,
- 2:28Speaker 1: and we're into a new period of Mackenzie's career. So
- 2:33Speaker 1: just to give people a general notion of kind of
- 2:37Speaker 1: why we're talking about this subject, You've told me before
- 2:42Speaker 1: in the emails that we exchanged about this conversation prior
- 2:46Speaker 1: to this, you told me that you find this kind
- 2:49Speaker 1: of three and a half year period between the stock
- 2:54Speaker 1: market crash and Mackenzie's death in January nineteen thirty four
- 2:59Speaker 1: to be the most interesting period of his career. Why
- 3:03Speaker 1: is that in general?
- 3:05Speaker 2: Well, I think there are several reasons. You know, first
- 3:10Speaker 2: of all, he was getting he was just I think,
- 3:12Speaker 2: starting to get really comfortable working outside the box. You know,
- 3:16Speaker 2: he was in this very experimental phase. And you know,
- 3:22Speaker 2: as far as the economization is concerned, or the effects
- 3:25Speaker 2: of the depression. Leading up to that, he had been
- 3:28Speaker 2: thinking more and more in terms of economization, economization of construction,
- 3:33Speaker 2: economization of design, economization of maintenance. And it was at
- 3:39Speaker 2: this point where he started feeling comfortable doing less conventional
- 3:46Speaker 2: type of work, like we would say, is maybe a
- 3:49Speaker 2: lot fewer bunkers, a lot more short grass, a lot
- 3:52Speaker 2: more extreme landforms, big wild undulating greens with wild internal
- 3:58Speaker 2: contours and also like wild tongues sticking out on sides
- 4:02Speaker 2: and fronts and backs. So he was really pushing the bounds.
- 4:05Speaker 2: And if you compare this work to the stuff he
- 4:08Speaker 2: was doing just a few years earlier, which was also fantastic,
- 4:14Speaker 2: you know that prior work that he had been doing
- 4:16Speaker 2: was much more toned down by comparison, and so, you know,
- 4:22Speaker 2: I think, first of all, just to sort of set
- 4:24Speaker 2: the stage just more broadly, you know, looking at his career,
- 4:30Speaker 2: I kind of think of his career his golf architecture career,
- 4:33Speaker 2: because that was actually his third career. First career was
- 4:37Speaker 2: of medicine, second career was a military and there's a
- 4:40Speaker 2: lot that could be talked about with both of those,
- 4:42Speaker 2: but his third career was really golf course architecture, and
- 4:45Speaker 2: of that career I kind of break that down into
- 4:48Speaker 2: three phases. The first phase was pre World War One,
- 4:52Speaker 2: pre Great War, and where he was just doing stuff
- 4:56Speaker 2: in the UK and a little bit in Ireland. Then
- 4:59Speaker 2: the war interrupt did that. The second phase was after
- 5:03Speaker 2: the war, which consisted of actually like rebuilding a lot
- 5:07Speaker 2: of courses that had been repurposed for military use, a
- 5:11Speaker 2: lot of stuff all in the UK, and that was
- 5:13Speaker 2: from really like nineteen eighteen, because he was discharged even
- 5:18Speaker 2: before the ward ended, you know, the Treaty of Versailles
- 5:21Speaker 2: was until nineteen nineteen. But starting nineteen eighteen he started
- 5:24Speaker 2: working again and all the way through until the end
- 5:29Speaker 2: of nineteen twenty five, that's kind of his second phase.
- 5:34Speaker 2: Beginning of nineteen twenty six, he departs for America and
- 5:37Speaker 2: starts what I call is like international phase of his career,
- 5:40Speaker 2: and that's extended from you know, January of nineteen twenty
- 5:46Speaker 2: six until he died in January of nineteen thirty four.
- 5:49Speaker 2: But of that last phase, I think I also conceptualized
- 5:54Speaker 2: it as breaking that down into like two sub phases,
- 5:56Speaker 2: call it phase three A and three B. Three A
- 5:59Speaker 2: would have been all the stuff he was doing pre depression,
- 6:04Speaker 2: so like January nineteen twenty six through what we were
- 6:07Speaker 2: just talking about, which is like end of nineteen twenty nine,
- 6:10Speaker 2: and then the second phase would be like post depression,
- 6:13Speaker 2: basically end of nineteen twenty nine through the time he
- 6:16Speaker 2: died in January of nineteen thirty four. And then you
- 6:19Speaker 2: could also extend a little beyond because for instance, the
- 6:23Speaker 2: plan he did for the Ohio State golf course, which
- 6:27Speaker 2: was two golf courses. They actually used his plan, but
- 6:29Speaker 2: they didn't start building it until nineteen thirty eight for
- 6:33Speaker 2: the Scarlet, in the nineteen forty for the Gray. So
- 6:36Speaker 2: that second part of his third phase of his career,
- 6:41Speaker 2: I think is when he really started getting comfortable, like
- 6:45Speaker 2: I said, experimenting with wilder greens, much fewer bunkers. And
- 6:50Speaker 2: we'll come back to that, I think, because I think
- 6:52Speaker 2: that's really important, creating interest with landforms, short grass, using
- 6:58Speaker 2: natural features more like creeks or whatever he could use
- 7:02Speaker 2: on a property. And there was another component there too,
- 7:05Speaker 2: where he was starting to get sites to work on
- 7:10Speaker 2: that weren't as good, so he was getting more mundane,
- 7:14Speaker 2: kind of flatter sites with less interesting features, and that
- 7:19Speaker 2: gave him license to start experimenting with actually just entirely
- 7:24Speaker 2: manufacturing stuff as opposed to using stuff like dunes in
- 7:31Speaker 2: the case of Cyprus Point or other cool features. He
- 7:34Speaker 2: had to really manufacture a lot of interest. And you know,
- 7:37Speaker 2: the Jockey Pub is a fantastic example of this, and
- 7:39Speaker 2: we can come back to that as well. But again,
- 7:42Speaker 2: this combination of his approach to economization given the depression
- 7:49Speaker 2: and having not as interesting sites to work on and
- 7:53Speaker 2: having to really manufacture that interest build a golf course
- 7:57Speaker 2: that was going to be economical to construct, an economical
- 7:59Speaker 2: to maintain and operate.
- 8:02Speaker 1: You would think that economization and needing to manufacture stuff
- 8:07Speaker 1: would be at odds with each other. Does seem to
- 8:10Speaker 1: be kind of countervailing impulses or would seem to work
- 8:16Speaker 1: against each other.
- 8:21Speaker 2: Not necessarily. I mean, there's a number of ways you
- 8:24Speaker 2: can look at this. There's you know, in one instance,
- 8:28Speaker 2: you can think of it as manufacturing or augmenting a
- 8:32Speaker 2: site in the construction phase in order to set it
- 8:36Speaker 2: up so that it's easier to maintain during the operations
- 8:40Speaker 2: phase once it's actually playable. So this could be thought
- 8:44Speaker 2: of as like, say, if you have some heavy soils,
- 8:47Speaker 2: amending the soils, well, yeah, there's an expense to that,
- 8:52Speaker 2: but if you admortize that expense over the lifespan of
- 8:56Speaker 2: the golf course, you're going to save a ton of
- 8:58Speaker 2: money in the maintenance phase. So it's doing these things
- 9:00Speaker 2: on the front end to save on the back end,
- 9:03Speaker 2: likewise constructing landforms, moving earth around. And we'll come back
- 9:09Speaker 2: to the advance and equipment, which was also coinciding with
- 9:13Speaker 2: his timeframe where initially he was building stuff with horses
- 9:18Speaker 2: and scrapers and plows and manual labor to create these landforms,
- 9:22Speaker 2: and then he started using bulldozers and excavators right around
- 9:28Speaker 2: that same time nineteen twenty eight, nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty,
- 9:32Speaker 2: and so it became cheaper to move earth he could
- 9:35Speaker 2: build landforms. And yeah, there's an expense to that, but
- 9:39Speaker 2: if you create an interesting landform that has some strategic
- 9:43Speaker 2: value to it and it's all just short grass, well,
- 9:48Speaker 2: going forward in the future, once the course is open,
- 9:50Speaker 2: it's operational, you're maintaining it. It's so much less expensive
- 9:54Speaker 2: to maintain short grass that could just be mode with
- 9:57Speaker 2: mechanical mower than it is to have five bunkers right
- 10:01Speaker 2: there that have drainage implications that have to be raked,
- 10:06Speaker 2: all the things that we know, you know, the meanings
- 10:08Speaker 2: that goes into bunkers. Bunkers are very maintenance intensive. So
- 10:13Speaker 2: this is this idea of doing things during the construction phase,
- 10:17Speaker 2: and there's also a way to value engineer a lot
- 10:19Speaker 2: of that stuff in order to make a course operational
- 10:23Speaker 2: and really economies economized the maintenance and operations of the course.
- 10:27Speaker 2: Once it's open.
- 10:28Speaker 1: Okay. So this idea of economization, which was a big
- 10:31Speaker 1: theme for McKenzie throughout his career, not just during the depression,
- 10:35Speaker 1: but the depression kind of raised the stakes of economization.
- 10:39Speaker 1: I guess you could say, what did economization mean to
- 10:43Speaker 1: Mackenzie when it came to golf course design. You've talked
- 10:47Speaker 1: a little bit about what the implications of economization might
- 10:51Speaker 1: be for maintaining a golf course going forward, but what
- 10:55Speaker 1: about that initial design phase can be economized from Kenzie's
- 11:00Speaker 1: perspective during this period.
- 11:03Speaker 2: Well, let me just start by saying his you know,
- 11:07Speaker 2: he was really a student of economics, and I always
- 11:12Speaker 2: like to say, you know, Mackenzie had the heart of
- 11:16Speaker 2: a doctor, the mind of an engineer and or economists,
- 11:20Speaker 2: and the soul of an artist. And you know, so
- 11:24Speaker 2: he really approached things in the construction and this goes
- 11:29Speaker 2: back to building military trenches during the war. He really
- 11:32Speaker 2: thought of engineering and how to economize things. He was
- 11:36Speaker 2: always very interested in economics and a student of economics,
- 11:39Speaker 2: and he was talking about the importance of economizing golf construction,
- 11:44Speaker 2: golf maintenance long before the depression hit. So, you know,
- 11:49Speaker 2: like as early as nineteen fourteen, he was giving lectures
- 11:52Speaker 2: on economy and golf course construction and greenkeeping over in
- 11:55Speaker 2: the UK to greenkeepers. By nineteen twenty, when he published
- 12:01Speaker 2: his seminal book Golf Architecture, the subtitle was Economy and
- 12:06Speaker 2: Golf Course Construction and Greenkeeping.
- 12:08Speaker 1: Yeah right, he was.
- 12:09Speaker 2: Nineteen twenty, So it wasn't just the depression, you know,
- 12:13Speaker 2: he was not late to the game. He was thinking,
- 12:16Speaker 2: well in advance. Sorry, do you want to interject there?
- 12:22Speaker 1: No, not at all. I like that you pointed out
- 12:25Speaker 1: the subtitle of that book because it is kind of
- 12:28Speaker 1: an odd subtitle from our perspective. Why talk about economy
- 12:32Speaker 1: right there? And basically the title of the book. But
- 12:36Speaker 1: it was a big theme for Mackenzie. He wrote on
- 12:39Speaker 1: this and spoke on this many times during the nineteen twenties,
- 12:44Speaker 1: not just the nineteen thirties. But please yet, yeah continue, Yeah, well.
- 12:47Speaker 2: And so I think the way I can sceptualize it
- 12:51Speaker 2: is Mackenzie thought in terms of the economization consisted of
- 12:56Speaker 2: three verticals, the economization of design, commonization of construction, in
- 13:01Speaker 2: the economization conomization of maintenance or operations, however you want
- 13:06Speaker 2: to characterize it, and those three verticals were inextricably linked.
- 13:12Speaker 2: So in other words, the way you design something is
- 13:15Speaker 2: going to affect the way you're going to build it,
- 13:17Speaker 2: and the way you're going to buld it is going
- 13:18Speaker 2: to affect the way you're going to maintain it. And
- 13:20Speaker 2: so you have to really think through the entire process
- 13:22Speaker 2: from beginning to end and not really has separation. Whereas
- 13:28Speaker 2: you know, a lot of other architects in those days,
- 13:30Speaker 2: and then especially after World War Two, they thought of things,
- 13:35Speaker 2: you know, largely two dimensionally. Draw it on a piece
- 13:38Speaker 2: of paper, give it to a contractor. Contractor would have
- 13:42Speaker 2: to worry about figuring out how to build it. And
- 13:44Speaker 2: then once it was built, then it was handed over
- 13:46Speaker 2: to a superintendent and the superintendent would have to figure
- 13:48Speaker 2: out how to maintain it. Well, you know, because Mackenzie was,
- 13:52Speaker 2: first of all, he was an engineer by trade in
- 13:55Speaker 2: the military, he thought of you know, when you was
- 14:00Speaker 2: designing something, he was really thinking in terms of how
- 14:02Speaker 2: is it going to actually build it? And then also
- 14:05Speaker 2: he was a student of agonomics, and he wrote a
- 14:08Speaker 2: lot about turf grass agonomics, and he was very astute
- 14:12Speaker 2: and studied a lot of the best turf grass experts
- 14:15Speaker 2: in those days. And so he had a really really
- 14:17Speaker 2: good understanding of the maintenance phase of a golf course
- 14:23Speaker 2: once it was already built. And so from beginning to end,
- 14:26Speaker 2: when he was starting with a raw site, thinking of,
- 14:30Speaker 2: you know, how he was going to route the holes
- 14:32Speaker 2: around it, how he was going to place features, how
- 14:35Speaker 2: he's going to play off some natural features, and then
- 14:38Speaker 2: he was thinking of how he was going to build it,
- 14:42Speaker 2: and then how it would be maintained in the future.
- 14:44Speaker 2: So he had all three of those perspectives.
- 14:47Speaker 1: Okay, great, that gives us a nice little organization of
- 14:51Speaker 1: this idea of economization. Were there any other ideas aside
- 14:57Speaker 1: from economization and those kind of three pillars that you
- 15:00Speaker 1: see Mackenzie as experimenting with or exploring more deeply in
- 15:05Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties that we should know about.
- 15:08Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think you know, he was he was
- 15:16Speaker 2: entering a phase where he became more comfortable, for lack
- 15:19Speaker 2: of a better term, building template holes. So this was where,
- 15:24Speaker 2: you know, again going back to the idea of he
- 15:27Speaker 2: didn't have his interesting sites. Starting at the Jockey Club,
- 15:30Speaker 2: which is basically just a flat, pretty pretty dead flat
- 15:33Speaker 2: piece of land, and he had to manufacture stuff or
- 15:37Speaker 2: the planning laid out for Club Nautico Santa Sedro in Argentina,
- 15:41Speaker 2: which never got built, that was literally going to be
- 15:45Speaker 2: one hundred percent manufacturer built from dredgings, similar to the
- 15:49Speaker 2: way that the Lada was built, and so, and those
- 15:52Speaker 2: gave him opportunities. And then going forward to Bayside in
- 15:55Speaker 2: New York and then Augusta National, he had all these
- 15:59Speaker 2: opportunities where he was starting to think more in terms
- 16:02Speaker 2: of pulling inspiration from his favorite holes in the UK
- 16:06Speaker 2: and Ireland, a lot from Saint Andrews and some elsewhere,
- 16:11Speaker 2: and so he was he was taking the design con
- 16:13Speaker 2: sensorrom these holes. He was purposely not trying to copy them.
- 16:19Speaker 2: And he writes about this, He's like, I'm not trying
- 16:21Speaker 2: to copy these holes. I'm trying to take inspiration from
- 16:24Speaker 2: the concept of these holes and apply them to a
- 16:26Speaker 2: different site and in some cases improve them. And so
- 16:30Speaker 2: he became much more comfortable doing this template phase of design,
- 16:36Speaker 2: and he was doing that more and more where like
- 16:38Speaker 2: in the case of Nadico San Casedro, in the case
- 16:41Speaker 2: of Bayside, in the case of Augusta. Also at charp Park,
- 16:45Speaker 2: he was using a lot of these same templates and
- 16:48Speaker 2: building different versions of those holes. So I think that
- 16:51Speaker 2: was that was a key differentiation where he was doing
- 16:53Speaker 2: that a little bit before, but not much much less frequently.
- 16:58Speaker 1: Yeah, sort of a delayed convert to this idea, considering
- 17:03Speaker 1: that it reached the height of its fashion in the
- 17:06Speaker 1: tens and twenties with MacDonald and Rainer.
- 17:08Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm hesitant to use them because I don't think
- 17:11Speaker 2: he would classify them as templates. I'm not a McDonald
- 17:15Speaker 2: or Rainer expert, but I don't think they would necessarily
- 17:17Speaker 2: even call him templates. But that's the nomenclature I think
- 17:20Speaker 2: that we nowadays think of.
- 17:23Speaker 1: I want to come back to this when we talk
- 17:24Speaker 1: about Augusta National because I think the way that he
- 17:27Speaker 1: used template quote unquote ideas was pretty interesting there where
- 17:32Speaker 1: he was kind of choosing sort of off brand aspects
- 17:36Speaker 1: of certain holes to emulate as opposed to the most
- 17:40Speaker 1: notable aspects of those holes. The fifth hole at Augusta
- 17:45Speaker 1: National will be a perfect example of this, where he
- 17:47Speaker 1: just kind of imitated odd aspects of the road hole
- 17:51Speaker 1: as opposed to the ones that you would you would
- 17:53Speaker 1: usually think of incorporating into a road hole template. But
- 17:58Speaker 1: just for a quick digress here and then we'll get
- 18:01Speaker 1: back to the architecture. I wanted to note I'm not
- 18:05Speaker 1: sure how much research you've done into this yourself, or
- 18:08Speaker 1: if there's if this is just something i'll talk about,
- 18:11Speaker 1: but Mackenzie had some personal financial struggles during the nineteen
- 18:15Speaker 1: thirties that that I think are worth noting because this
- 18:20Speaker 1: was this did seem to really affect his life. You know,
- 18:24Speaker 1: like many people, he sort of just ran out of
- 18:27Speaker 1: money and ran out of sources of income during this period.
- 18:31Speaker 1: What what are what were some of those those difficulties
- 18:35Speaker 1: that he had.
- 18:37Speaker 2: Yeah, No, you're right, you know, he was really affected
- 18:40Speaker 2: by the depression. He was having a hard time getting
- 18:42Speaker 2: clients to pay him for work he'd already done.
- 18:44Speaker 1: Or specifically having a hard time getting AUGUSTA National to
- 18:47Speaker 1: pay him and Clifford Roberts to puny up.
- 18:50Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, but they weren't the only ones, and I
- 18:53Speaker 2: think this was common probably, I mean for people in
- 18:59Speaker 2: pretty much every industry. It's like you you were on
- 19:02Speaker 2: you know, you were in a project, you had contractors
- 19:04Speaker 2: that were, you know, not getting paid entirely. You had
- 19:07Speaker 2: architects not getting paid entirely. So yeah, he you know,
- 19:11Speaker 2: he was really struggling, and you know, he there's letters
- 19:14Speaker 2: of him writing from Pasa Tampa like you know, my power,
- 19:17Speaker 2: my electricity, my power is about to get turned off.
- 19:20Speaker 2: Really yeah. Yeah, but you know, I think you know,
- 19:28Speaker 2: he did a lot, He did everything he could. He
- 19:30Speaker 2: was still he was still really active, working a lot.
- 19:33Speaker 2: He was writing a ton in those days. So he
- 19:37Speaker 2: you know, this was kind of the you know I
- 19:39Speaker 2: mentioned earlier, you kind of had three careers, you know, medicine, military,
- 19:43Speaker 2: and golf architecture. You could say his fourth career was
- 19:45Speaker 2: really as a writer because he wrote so much, you know,
- 19:51Speaker 2: going back before his golf career, wrote about medicine a lot,
- 19:54Speaker 2: you know, all throughout his military career and even beyond
- 19:57Speaker 2: you wrote about camouflage and military and then in the
- 20:02Speaker 2: golf space, you know, he wrote a ton about golf.
- 20:04Speaker 2: And so he was in those years from like nineteen
- 20:06Speaker 2: twenty nine, thirty thirty three up until he died, he
- 20:10Speaker 2: was writing a ton of articles, getting them published in
- 20:14Speaker 2: different golf publications. And there's I don't know exactly the
- 20:18Speaker 2: details of that. I've never founding on that, but I'm
- 20:20Speaker 2: sure he was getting paid like a little bit, you know,
- 20:23Speaker 2: to publish different articles, and he had that's also in
- 20:26Speaker 2: the phase when he was you know, had finished compiling
- 20:30Speaker 2: what would become The Spirit of Saint Andrews and trying
- 20:32Speaker 2: to get that published. And to your point, like he
- 20:36Speaker 2: had this finish manuscript and he couldn't get it published,
- 20:39Speaker 2: and like, you know, that's something he'd been working on
- 20:41Speaker 2: for years, but no publisher wanted to underwrite it in
- 20:46Speaker 2: those days, and so he was just doing everything he
- 20:48Speaker 2: could to you know, to make ends meet.
- 20:52Speaker 1: So let's talk about some of Mackenzie's specific projects during
- 20:58Speaker 1: this period. I've organized these into kind of three buckets,
- 21:02Speaker 1: and you can tell me if these buckets don't work
- 21:05Speaker 1: very well or if there's a better way of organizing them.
- 21:09Speaker 1: But I have first of all his South American projects,
- 21:13Speaker 1: which include the Jockey Club and the never built you know,
- 21:18Speaker 1: just laid out El Bocrone, which has recently bubbled back
- 21:22Speaker 1: up into the to the golf world's consciousness. I have
- 21:26Speaker 1: another bucket of his public course projects in the United States.
- 21:31Speaker 1: These would include Sharp Park outside of San Francisco, hagen
- 21:36Speaker 1: Oaks in Sacramento, and Bayside Links in New York or
- 21:43Speaker 1: what is now a heavily developed part of Queens as
- 21:46Speaker 1: I understand it. And then we have Augusta National, which
- 21:51Speaker 1: was sort of the major project of the period. It
- 21:53Speaker 1: stood out in its complexity from the others, and it
- 21:59Speaker 1: stood out in terms of the amount of money that
- 22:01Speaker 1: he was promised or that he expected to earn from
- 22:05Speaker 1: the Commission. And so that was kind of its own bucket,
- 22:08Speaker 1: his his Augusta project with Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts.
- 22:12Speaker 1: So what don't we start with, Well, first of all,
- 22:15Speaker 1: tell me if those buckets work for you, if there
- 22:17Speaker 1: are any additional buckets.
- 22:19Speaker 2: No, I think that's actually that's that's pretty well organized.
- 22:22Speaker 1: Okay, cool South.
- 22:25Speaker 2: Into the public stuff. You could throw in the Ohio
- 22:26Speaker 2: State project.
- 22:27Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, yeah, there's the university projects. I guess the
- 22:30Speaker 1: University of Michigan course was completed during this period, but
- 22:34Speaker 1: perhaps designed earlier, and so there are these kind of
- 22:39Speaker 1: twenty yeah designed it. So that was that was kind
- 22:41Speaker 1: of in this period. So maybe that's its own bucket.
- 22:43Speaker 1: The university courses of the Midwest that Perry Maxwell was
- 22:48Speaker 1: involved with as his associate, and then Perry Maxwell himself
- 22:52Speaker 1: went on to design the course for Iowa State that
- 22:55Speaker 1: those are Those are kind of a collection onto themselves.
- 22:59Speaker 1: But what don't we wh do we talk about South America.
- 23:01Speaker 1: He went to South America in early nineteen thirty. This
- 23:05Speaker 1: is kind of like leftover momentum from the Roaring twenties.
- 23:08Speaker 1: I suppose the depression hadn't fully hit at this point.
- 23:14Speaker 1: Eventually it ended up affecting many of these projects. But
- 23:19Speaker 1: he goes to South America, he does a bunch of
- 23:21Speaker 1: design work. It's sort of similar in some ways to
- 23:24Speaker 1: his trip to Australia in nineteen twenty six nineteen twenty seven,
- 23:29Speaker 1: where he kind of acts as a Johnny Appleseed, has
- 23:32Speaker 1: a major project or two, but also sprinkles his influence
- 23:36Speaker 1: throughout some other courses. But of course, many of these
- 23:40Speaker 1: courses didn't end up really getting completed or built in
- 23:43Speaker 1: the way that he would have imagined. That's the big
- 23:46Speaker 1: contrast between his South American trip and his Australian trip.
- 23:50Speaker 1: In Australia, many of those courses did come to be
- 23:53Speaker 1: in a really kind of complete way. But South America,
- 23:58Speaker 1: why don't we start with the Jockey Club. Tell me
- 24:00Speaker 1: about this project and what was unique about it?
- 24:05Speaker 2: Sure? We really quick, I think it's interesting that you
- 24:09Speaker 2: got to keep in mind the historical context of what
- 24:13Speaker 2: was happening in the world in this timeframe, and there
- 24:15Speaker 2: was so much change happening in the world with a
- 24:18Speaker 2: global depression combined with the advance in the advance in
- 24:27Speaker 2: manufacturing heavy equipment and including airplanes. So I just think
- 24:34Speaker 2: it's kind of interesting that the first time mackenzie and
- 24:36Speaker 2: maybe the only time he flew on an airplane was
- 24:39Speaker 2: at the beginning of his journey to Argentina. So he
- 24:42Speaker 2: flew from la to Chicago and what they referred to
- 24:45Speaker 2: as an aeroplane and then took a train to New
- 24:50Speaker 2: York and then a boat down to Buenos Aires.
- 24:53Speaker 1: Yeah, boat travel was really his thing. Before that. He
- 24:57Speaker 1: took a boat to Australia, which was quite.
- 25:00Speaker 2: All over the world. Multiple times, he like circumnavigated the globe. Yeah.
- 25:07Speaker 2: So yeah, when you get to you know, Jockey Club,
- 25:10Speaker 2: that was the commission that brought him there, similar to
- 25:14Speaker 2: as you mentioned, Royal Melbourne was the commission that brought
- 25:16Speaker 2: him to Australia. But he thought, ah, this is a
- 25:19Speaker 2: long journey and maybe there's opportunity here. And you know,
- 25:22Speaker 2: historically Argentina had been a wealthy, a very wealthy country.
- 25:26Speaker 2: You know. By eighteen eighty eighteen ninety timeframe, I think
- 25:31Speaker 2: Argentina was still per capital of the wealthiest country in
- 25:34Speaker 2: the world until the United States overtook it. And so
- 25:38Speaker 2: there was a history of wealth there and because of
- 25:40Speaker 2: the British influence, there was a real interesting golf and
- 25:43Speaker 2: that had been really percolating in the nineteen twenties, and
- 25:48Speaker 2: so the founders of the Jockey Club were really keen
- 25:52Speaker 2: to have what they called a Britisher, someone who was
- 25:55Speaker 2: like expert in the ideas of golf course architecture come
- 25:58Speaker 2: and design that course. And they got in contact with
- 26:02Speaker 2: the United States Golf Association actually, who recommended this Britisher
- 26:08Speaker 2: living in California named Alistair McKenzie. That was the connection there.
- 26:12Speaker 2: So he went to Buenos Aires. Initially the site it
- 26:17Speaker 2: was going to be twenty seven holes, it was going
- 26:21Speaker 2: to be an eighteen hole course and a nine hole course,
- 26:23Speaker 2: and then he figured out there was like enough land
- 26:26Speaker 2: to build two thirty six hole courses, which is now
- 26:29Speaker 2: the Red and the Blue. Yeah, and that was his
- 26:33Speaker 2: gateway into South America, where he landed a number of
- 26:37Speaker 2: other design commissions, including the Club Nauico Santa Cedro, which
- 26:44Speaker 2: I think we should come back to that because that's
- 26:46Speaker 2: a really fascinating project. The marta Plata Club, which was
- 26:52Speaker 2: at the time like the only really considered good golf
- 26:55Speaker 2: course in Argentina, and McKenzie wrote about it and he
- 26:58Speaker 2: said he was very impressed. It was kind of like
- 27:01Speaker 2: a seaside links course. It was their best course. He
- 27:04Speaker 2: did some consulting work for them and put together a
- 27:06Speaker 2: plan of improvements which they didn't actually use. And then
- 27:10Speaker 2: there was a separate club called marta Plata Parque Camet,
- 27:15Speaker 2: not the same marta Plata, different group of guys, and
- 27:18Speaker 2: he designed a twenty seven whole course for them, which
- 27:21Speaker 2: never got built. Also, and then there was as you mentioned, Elboquerone,
- 27:27Speaker 2: which was going to be a private estate course, and
- 27:32Speaker 2: we should come back to that also. But then there
- 27:34Speaker 2: was in Montevideo, Uruguay. It was the Gulf of the Uruguay
- 27:39Speaker 2: Club that he designed an eighteen whole course for. And
- 27:45Speaker 2: also at the same time he wrote about how he
- 27:49Speaker 2: got hired by several including El Bouqueron, but other people
- 27:53Speaker 2: to build private estate courses, and so Elbouqarone was like
- 27:57Speaker 2: actually like a full on eighteen whole course, but he
- 28:00Speaker 2: designed other smaller estate courses for people in and around
- 28:04Speaker 2: Buenos series of like six holes with eighteen tea boxes,
- 28:08Speaker 2: criss crossing little short courses, pitch and putt courses. He
- 28:12Speaker 2: did a bunch of that stuff, and it's not well
- 28:14Speaker 2: documented and I've had a hard time actually like tracking
- 28:17Speaker 2: down what of that stuff ever got built. But he
- 28:21Speaker 2: had like actually like a fair amount of design commissions
- 28:24Speaker 2: for a two month stretch when he was in South America.
- 28:29Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, good amount of work. Again, similar in a
- 28:33Speaker 1: lot of ways to what he did in Argentina. Why
- 28:36Speaker 1: don't we focus in then, on three of those commissions.
- 28:39Speaker 1: We've got the Jockey Club. We've got the Club Nottaco
- 28:43Speaker 1: Santa Cidro, which you've mentioned a couple of times and
- 28:46Speaker 1: I'm curious to find out more about that because i
- 28:48Speaker 1: know nothing about it, and then Elbo Corone. So the
- 28:53Speaker 1: Jockey Club. This was not a particularly gifted piece of land,
- 29:00Speaker 1: and so how then did McKenzie react to it?
- 29:04Speaker 2: Yeah, And we sort of touched on this a little earlier.
- 29:07Speaker 2: This was when he started becoming much more comfortable manufacturing
- 29:12Speaker 2: features and because it was a flat site, there's a
- 29:16Speaker 2: couple of things he needed to accomplish. One he needed
- 29:20Speaker 2: to create strategic interest. Two, on a flat site, you
- 29:24Speaker 2: have drainage problems. You need to figureut how to move water.
- 29:28Speaker 2: And so he devised this really clever scheme where he
- 29:33Speaker 2: cut this network of swales that zigzagged through the whole property,
- 29:38Speaker 2: and that network of swales facilitated the drainage. And then
- 29:43Speaker 2: with all of that material that was cut from those swales,
- 29:45Speaker 2: he used that material to actually build up all these landforms,
- 29:49Speaker 2: mostly around green complexes, and so it was like this
- 29:52Speaker 2: balancing act where he didn't have to import material, he
- 29:56Speaker 2: didn't have to export material. He cut these swales on
- 29:59Speaker 2: site that created the drainage network, and then with that
- 30:02Speaker 2: materially created these very eccentric mounds, you know, and this
- 30:07Speaker 2: was I think a foreshadowing of what would come at Augusta,
- 30:12Speaker 2: because you know, there's sort of like some famous green
- 30:15Speaker 2: complexes like the sixteenth at the Red Course you've probably
- 30:18Speaker 2: seen with these just gynamic, monstrous mounds. And there's another
- 30:24Speaker 2: thing too where this is the first time he built
- 30:27Speaker 2: a double green, a shared green, which I think we'll
- 30:30Speaker 2: come back to that in a second. You know, the
- 30:32Speaker 2: ninth and eighteenth greens of the blue course were one
- 30:34Speaker 2: double green. So that was for him, that was a
- 30:40Speaker 2: wildly different approach to designing and building a golf course
- 30:43Speaker 2: than he had ever done before anywhere else.
- 30:46Speaker 1: Okay, tell me about the Club Nautico Santa Cedra. What
- 30:49Speaker 1: are the basics of this project.
- 30:52Speaker 2: So the club, the Natica Santasedrol Club was right on
- 30:59Speaker 2: the River Platte, and the river Platte at that point
- 31:01Speaker 2: is like sixty miles wide. It's massive. But they needed
- 31:06Speaker 2: to deepen the river the base of it for like
- 31:10Speaker 2: steamships to go through. And so the founders of the
- 31:15Speaker 2: club Nauco Santa Sedro, they actually previously had It was
- 31:20Speaker 2: a casino and apparently gambling had been outlawed, had just
- 31:25Speaker 2: been outlawed in Argentina, so they needed to figure out
- 31:27Speaker 2: another way to like bring in revenue and keep themselves relevant,
- 31:31Speaker 2: and so they thought, oh, I'll build a golf course.
- 31:34Speaker 2: So they had this piece of land on the river
- 31:37Speaker 2: Platte that was literally underwater. It was like Mackenzie described
- 31:41Speaker 2: seeing the site, and he didn't walk the site. He
- 31:45Speaker 2: in a little motor boat, drove a motorboat all around
- 31:48Speaker 2: the site in this area that was like two to
- 31:51Speaker 2: five feet deep in water, and he's like, ah, there's
- 31:54Speaker 2: not much to look at here, it's just it's all underwater.
- 31:58Speaker 2: But like you know, so and so, the plan was
- 32:02Speaker 2: they were going to be given all these dredgings from
- 32:04Speaker 2: the river, and the company that was doing that or
- 32:07Speaker 2: the government, I guess who's funding it, they were going
- 32:09Speaker 2: to pay for that to happen. So essentially the club
- 32:13Speaker 2: was going to get you know, like it was going
- 32:14Speaker 2: to be a pretty cheap build them to build this
- 32:17Speaker 2: golf course. And this was Mackenzie's version. I think it's
- 32:21Speaker 2: fair to say of what Cebe McDonald did at the Lido, right. Yeah,
- 32:26Speaker 2: this was like, first of all, a gigantic feet of
- 32:30Speaker 2: engineering just to take these dredgings from the river, put
- 32:35Speaker 2: them onto a site that was essentially reclaimed land, and
- 32:39Speaker 2: then shape them into features and build a golf course
- 32:42Speaker 2: on it. There was a massive feet of engineering, but
- 32:45Speaker 2: it gave Mackenzie again license to think completely outside the box,
- 32:49Speaker 2: like there's no natural features here to work with, so
- 32:53Speaker 2: we've got to build everything like one hundred percent. Every
- 32:56Speaker 2: square inch of the site had to be completely manufactured
- 33:00Speaker 2: and That's where he started thinking of, well, hey, if
- 33:03Speaker 2: I've got the ability to just manufacture everything, then why
- 33:07Speaker 2: not look to some of my favorite holes at Saint
- 33:10Speaker 2: Andrews and elsewhere in the UK and again not copy
- 33:14Speaker 2: those holes, but use them as inspiration. So like, for instance,
- 33:21Speaker 2: you know, and he writes about this, like the four
- 33:24Speaker 2: part threes at Nautico Santa Sedro were all modeled after
- 33:28Speaker 2: some of his favorite part three's or what he would
- 33:30Speaker 2: say is like, arguably the best part three is in
- 33:32Speaker 2: the world, and the fourth hole was modeled after the
- 33:35Speaker 2: sixteenth at Cyprus Point. The eighth hole, Part three was
- 33:39Speaker 2: modeled after the Eden, the eleventh at Saint Andrews, the
- 33:43Speaker 2: eleventh hole Part three was modeled after the Badan, and
- 33:46Speaker 2: the fifteenth hole, Part three was modeled after the Gibraltar
- 33:50Speaker 2: hole that he built. That was the eighth holl at
- 33:52Speaker 2: Moretown and now it is the tenth hole because of
- 33:55Speaker 2: the routing change. And then on other holes, you know,
- 33:59Speaker 2: the seventh was his reproduction of the Liedo hole, So
- 34:04Speaker 2: the Leedle hole that he built at Theledo that he
- 34:07Speaker 2: you know, famous for the design competition that he won
- 34:10Speaker 2: in nineteen fourteen, which was really his introduction to golf
- 34:13Speaker 2: in America. That was kind of the first time anybody
- 34:16Speaker 2: in America heard of who he was. He built a
- 34:21Speaker 2: version of the Liedo. It's like almost identical if you
- 34:24Speaker 2: if you look at the plan, which was the seventh
- 34:26Speaker 2: hole or it didn't get built, but it would have been.
- 34:29Speaker 2: It would have been, you know, the seventh hole at
- 34:30Speaker 2: Club Nautico, Santasedro. And the thirteenth hole was modeled after
- 34:35Speaker 2: the first at St. Andrews with the burn cutting in
- 34:38Speaker 2: front of it. And let's see, yeah, the fourteenth was
- 34:45Speaker 2: modeled after the road hole St. Andrews, the fifteenth was
- 34:49Speaker 2: modeled after the fourteenth at Saint Andrews, and the seventheenth,
- 34:52Speaker 2: I think was modeled after the second hole at Saint Andrews.
- 34:55Speaker 2: So on so many of these holes. He was just
- 34:58Speaker 2: basically like, hey, I and manufacture this out of nothing,
- 35:03Speaker 2: and let's just look to some of my favorite holes
- 35:05Speaker 2: and put them together into a really interesting routing. And
- 35:08Speaker 2: so I maintain that this is the most interesting, this
- 35:16Speaker 2: is the most interesting design golf course that has never
- 35:18Speaker 2: been built.
- 35:20Speaker 1: Very cool. This is new information to me. So I'm
- 35:24Speaker 1: fascinated and it is kind of an answer to the
- 35:29Speaker 1: question of if you're not inspired by the land, if
- 35:33Speaker 1: you're Mackenzie and you're not inspired by the land, what
- 35:36Speaker 1: are you inspired by? Well, you maybe start to be
- 35:39Speaker 1: more influenced by the courses that you've seen and you
- 35:43Speaker 1: use that as a starting point as opposed to the terrain.
- 35:47Speaker 1: So fascinating project there, let's talk about it.
- 35:51Speaker 2: I would kind of refer to that as I mean, again,
- 35:54Speaker 2: this is me trying to get inside of his head.
- 35:56Speaker 2: But I think the way he was thinking of this
- 35:58Speaker 2: was minimals over naturalism, or minimalism beyond naturalism, you know,
- 36:05Speaker 2: whereas if you have like a really gifted site, it's
- 36:08Speaker 2: trying to use the natural features as best as you
- 36:10Speaker 2: could if you have no sight at all. He's still
- 36:13Speaker 2: building what I think he would consider a minimalist design
- 36:18Speaker 2: with minimalist features, although he wouldn't probably refer to them
- 36:21Speaker 2: as that. But it was all manufactured.
- 36:23Speaker 1: Yeah, still doing as little as possible to produce interest
- 36:28Speaker 1: in golf. But you have to do more to produce
- 36:31Speaker 1: interest in golf.
- 36:32Speaker 2: And then if it does do that, if you do
- 36:34Speaker 2: that again, you can build a course in a way.
- 36:37Speaker 2: Because he learned a lot over the previous twenty years
- 36:39Speaker 2: of building courses, you could build a course in a
- 36:42Speaker 2: way that would lead it to being really easy to maintain.
- 36:47Speaker 2: And more importantly, this concept that he would always refer
- 36:50Speaker 2: to time and time again, this concept of finality, and
- 36:54Speaker 2: what he meant by finality was the true acid test
- 36:58Speaker 2: of a golf course is if you can build a
- 37:01Speaker 2: golf course and then it never has to be renovated. Yeah,
- 37:05Speaker 2: if you can build a golf course and fifty years later,
- 37:07Speaker 2: one hundred years later, like at St. Andrew's, basically it's
- 37:11Speaker 2: still the same and it's still great, and it doesn't
- 37:13Speaker 2: have to be constantly renovated with you know, every ten
- 37:16Speaker 2: years by a green committee saying like oh let's redo
- 37:18Speaker 2: our bunkers and oh let's redo our greens. He was
- 37:22Speaker 2: always trying to build something in a way both from
- 37:25Speaker 2: an infrastructure standpoint, in the engineering of how the construction
- 37:29Speaker 2: would happen, and then from a design standpoint, in a
- 37:31Speaker 2: way that would be interesting and you would endure. And
- 37:34Speaker 2: if you could accomplish finality, that was really the acid
- 37:37Speaker 2: test of a good golf course.
- 37:40Speaker 1: So tell me about you author, Oh no, no, it's okay.
- 37:43Speaker 1: Tell me about Elbow Corone let's move on to that one.
- 37:48Speaker 2: So Elbo Corone was an estate course. Senior an k
- 37:53Speaker 2: Arena had a massive piece of land, I think it
- 37:55Speaker 2: was like ten thousand acres and he allocated this little
- 38:01Speaker 2: parcel that he thought he had previously built a nine
- 38:05Speaker 2: hole course. So when mackenzie got there and surveyed the land,
- 38:09Speaker 2: there was like a very rudimentary, amateurish nine hole golf
- 38:15Speaker 2: course there. And McKenzie came over the plan to basically
- 38:20Speaker 2: just demo that completely build eighteen holes. And the idea
- 38:27Speaker 2: is that it was going to be nine double greens
- 38:29Speaker 2: that he'd hit into from opposite directions. And he got
- 38:33Speaker 2: this inspiration again going back to the old course. You know,
- 38:36Speaker 2: there's a steam that keeps coming up on again, which
- 38:38Speaker 2: is he had this great reverence for the old course.
- 38:41Speaker 2: He held it in the highest of the steam. He
- 38:44Speaker 2: and Bobby Jones both thought it was the gold standard.
- 38:47Speaker 2: And at St Andrew's, you know, seven of those green
- 38:51Speaker 2: complexes are played into for fourteen holes. They're massive, twenty
- 38:57Speaker 2: twenty five thousand square foot greens that you're hitting into
- 38:59Speaker 2: from opposite directions. And so at el book Rome he thought, well,
- 39:05Speaker 2: let's do all eighteen holes. That way, build nine massive
- 39:08Speaker 2: double greens. The routing would set it up so that
- 39:13Speaker 2: you hit into these from opposing almost opposing directions, not
- 39:16Speaker 2: always exactly opposing, but from different angles and very very
- 39:21Speaker 2: few bunkers. So I think another interesting thing to think
- 39:24Speaker 2: of is like the progression of the amount of bunkers
- 39:29Speaker 2: he was building on a golf course, you know, pre
- 39:32Speaker 2: nineteen pre crash in nineteen twenty nine, a lot of
- 39:35Speaker 2: his courses have like over one hundred bunkers, and then
- 39:40Speaker 2: he got to a point where there was like, you know,
- 39:42Speaker 2: maybe eighty bunkers at Union League, which is now Green Hills,
- 39:46Speaker 2: And then you fast forward a little bit and at
- 39:49Speaker 2: El book Rome fourteen bunkers. And in the case of
- 39:55Speaker 2: nat A Custanta Cidro, I think it was like seventeen bunkers.
- 39:58Speaker 2: Case of Bayside it was nineteen bunkers. Augusta was like
- 40:01Speaker 2: twenty two bunkers. So there's this huge shift from building
- 40:06Speaker 2: you know, one hundred or more bunkers on a course
- 40:09Speaker 2: to like twenty or fewer bunkers. And Elbookrone again it
- 40:14Speaker 2: was nine double greens, fourteen bunkers, and it was really tight,
- 40:19Speaker 2: compact routing that would lend itself to this like kind
- 40:23Speaker 2: of just intimate experience. But again this was built for
- 40:27Speaker 2: an estate court, or it was going to be built
- 40:29Speaker 2: for an estate course, so it was just a private owner.
- 40:32Speaker 2: Well it never got built.
- 40:39Speaker 1: This episode of Designing Golf is brought to you by
- 40:42Speaker 1: the USGA Green Section. Meet the smartest ball in golf,
- 40:46Speaker 1: the GS three from the USGA Green Section. The GS
- 40:50Speaker 1: three ball collects over fifteen thousand data points that instantly
- 40:54Speaker 1: measure your green's firmness, speed, smoothness, and trueness just drop
- 40:59Speaker 1: and roll. Integrated with the Deacon management system, the GS
- 41:03Speaker 1: three ball provides quicker role tests, precise measurements, automatic data upload,
- 41:09Speaker 1: and eliminates operator bias. You can now make data driven decisions,
- 41:13Speaker 1: better manage resources, communicate to course personnel, and most importantly,
- 41:18Speaker 1: create a playing experience for your golfers like never before.
- 41:23Speaker 1: Start your data collection journey today with the GS three
- 41:26Speaker 1: ball and Deacon. Visit gsshop dot USGA dot org for more.
- 41:32Speaker 1: Thank you to the USGA Green Section for supporting Designing Golf.
- 41:36Speaker 1: Let's get back to the episode. So let's move on
- 41:45Speaker 1: to McKenzie's public course projects and maybe we could just
- 41:49Speaker 1: touch on. I mean, they're all fascinating, but I'd like
- 41:53Speaker 1: to just touch on one of them that I see
- 41:56Speaker 1: as really being out of the box projects again were
- 42:01Speaker 1: Sharp Park, which Geez has its own history and deserves
- 42:05Speaker 1: its own deep dive, its own episode, and at some
- 42:08Speaker 1: point I'll do that on this podcast. But this is, uh,
- 42:12Speaker 1: you know, this is a course that's haunted my dreams
- 42:14Speaker 1: for for a long time. It still exists, just not
- 42:18Speaker 1: in the form that it was originally built, and it's
- 42:21Speaker 1: a it's a it's a distressed municipal property at this point.
- 42:24Speaker 1: It's it's been threatened by closure, and there there's a
- 42:27Speaker 1: group of people that has fought very hard, valiantly to
- 42:31Speaker 1: keep it open, and there have been some indications that
- 42:34Speaker 1: they might be able to do some work there, some
- 42:36Speaker 1: renovation to try to bring back some of the aspects
- 42:40Speaker 1: of this original design, but but we're not sure what
- 42:43Speaker 1: the outcome of that is going to be at this point.
- 42:45Speaker 1: So we can just leave that there with with Sharp Park,
- 42:48Speaker 1: hagen Oaks is currently being looked at by Brett Hachstein,
- 42:53Speaker 1: and I hope that they're able to do something interesting there.
- 42:57Speaker 1: But the one that I really want to dig into
- 43:00Speaker 1: is bay Side Lenks the New York course. This is
- 43:02Speaker 1: a lost course, now mL E. What was Bayside Lenks?
- 43:08Speaker 1: Why was it interesting?
- 43:10Speaker 2: Actually, you know, interestingly enough. You know, I have the
- 43:15Speaker 2: old aerial for Bayside and I pitched this to a developer.
- 43:19Speaker 2: I did a plan for this in Florida, I think
- 43:22Speaker 2: in twenty seventeen or eighteen, to recreate the bay Side course.
- 43:27Speaker 2: Actually in Florida. This was before the Kaisers, who I
- 43:31Speaker 2: love ever, you know, had started talking about Liedo at
- 43:35Speaker 2: least at Sand Valley, and I had always been so
- 43:38Speaker 2: fascinated with this course. I thought it would be, you know,
- 43:42Speaker 2: a great public golf course. And so I had a
- 43:46Speaker 2: really good site that was a city owned property in Florida.
- 43:50Speaker 2: It had been a municipal property and something that would
- 43:53Speaker 2: have been really affordable to build, really affordable to maintain,
- 43:57Speaker 2: and really fun and interesting to play. So yeah, you know,
- 44:00Speaker 2: it was. There's some interesting things here that tie into Augusta.
- 44:05Speaker 2: You know. The timeframe was he started building this in
- 44:07Speaker 2: nineteen thirty one, just before he started the construction for Augusta.
- 44:12Speaker 2: And it was the same architect or it was the
- 44:14Speaker 2: same contract that he was working with Wendell Miller, and
- 44:19Speaker 2: they had just started kind of experimenting with heavy equipment bulldozers,
- 44:27Speaker 2: namely and excavators. Going back, Mackenzie had used a bulldozer
- 44:33Speaker 2: once before that, which was at the Valley Club. But
- 44:36Speaker 2: the only thing they used the bulldozer for the Valley
- 44:39Speaker 2: Club was to move boulders around and then to bury boulders,
- 44:44Speaker 2: to cover boulders with material because they were too big
- 44:47Speaker 2: to move. So like on the east side of the property,
- 44:51Speaker 2: they did that a lot. They didn't use a bulldozer
- 44:53Speaker 2: to actually shape any of the golf features. It was
- 44:57Speaker 2: just a function of like, oh, we could use these
- 44:59Speaker 2: like really rudimentary I mean, if you look at what
- 45:01Speaker 2: these bulldozers looked like, very rudimentary bulldozers to just push
- 45:06Speaker 2: boulders around. Well, you fast forward three years at Bayside
- 45:10Speaker 2: and the advent of dozers had becoming you know, they'd
- 45:16Speaker 2: improved and they were becoming more used on construction projects.
- 45:19Speaker 2: And so they experimented at Bayside and that's the first
- 45:22Speaker 2: time he used a dozer to really shape features greens
- 45:26Speaker 2: and you know, and also in the case of Bayside,
- 45:29Speaker 2: that was also a flat property that he had to
- 45:30Speaker 2: create some interest. So he was building landforms, and you know,
- 45:35Speaker 2: he did things like he buried a stone wall that
- 45:39Speaker 2: went through the property, and so he was cutting material
- 45:43Speaker 2: from a flat site filling it in other parts of
- 45:46Speaker 2: the site to cover old stone walls and to create shape.
- 45:50Speaker 2: And that was important because that really informed the way
- 45:55Speaker 2: they built Augusta. And he talks about this, he writes
- 45:57Speaker 2: about this, how the experimental phase they went through at
- 46:03Speaker 2: Bayside was very, very informative and very useful a year
- 46:07Speaker 2: later when they started building Augusta. So that was again
- 46:11Speaker 2: that was going to be a daily fee course. It
- 46:13Speaker 2: was like really really inexpensive to play, and and there
- 46:18Speaker 2: weren't there were very few daily feed courses in those days.
- 46:21Speaker 2: I mean that was like kind of outside the box.
- 46:23Speaker 2: Like if you're a developer, you would never think to
- 46:25Speaker 2: build a daily feed golf course. But you know, he
- 46:31Speaker 2: he took this flat site, manufactured a lot of really
- 46:34Speaker 2: interesting landforms and really interesting greens. They had nineteen bunkers,
- 46:38Speaker 2: so again this economy of bunkering, and and then that
- 46:42Speaker 2: led into the following year building.
- 46:44Speaker 1: Augusta Bayside was very well received. What eventually happened to it?
- 46:51Speaker 1: Why does it no longer exist.
- 46:53Speaker 2: Yeah, even through the depression, like in the early thirties,
- 46:56Speaker 2: you know it it was extremely popular and it was
- 47:00Speaker 2: doing well financially, and it was just packed. It got
- 47:03Speaker 2: a ton of usage. What ended up happening is, I
- 47:07Speaker 2: believe like starting fifty four, early mid fifties, fifty four
- 47:11Speaker 2: fifty five, a developer bought the golf course and they
- 47:16Speaker 2: determined because of just the demand for housing. You know,
- 47:23Speaker 2: everything outside of New York City was expanding in those days,
- 47:26Speaker 2: and there was such a demand for housing that the
- 47:28Speaker 2: land itself was just way more valuable as a housing
- 47:31Speaker 2: development than it was as a golf course. And a
- 47:35Speaker 2: tale is all this time exactly exactly, and I'm kind
- 47:39Speaker 2: of taking an educated guest here that there weren't, you know,
- 47:43Speaker 2: zoning restrictions that prevented them from doing that. It wasn't like, oh,
- 47:47Speaker 2: this has to be zone recreational or whatever. It was
- 47:50Speaker 2: just like, yeah, they bought it, Oh yeah, we could
- 47:52Speaker 2: build a bunch of houses on it. And actually what
- 47:57Speaker 2: had happened is prior to that, houses had been built
- 47:59Speaker 2: kind of like all around it, and there's a school
- 48:02Speaker 2: bayside schools around it. So if you look at the
- 48:04Speaker 2: old Aerial. There's like the golf course is just a
- 48:07Speaker 2: rectangle and it's surrounded by development and then and that
- 48:11Speaker 2: just tells the story of you know, that rectangle that
- 48:16Speaker 2: like one hundred and eighty acres or whatever it was,
- 48:20Speaker 2: would end up being so much more valuable as a
- 48:22Speaker 2: housing development than as a golf course. Sadly.
- 48:26Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. When people ask what would be the most
- 48:31Speaker 1: interesting course to revive in the way that the Leado
- 48:35Speaker 1: was revived in Wisconsin, my answer has always been Bayside.
- 48:39Speaker 1: And so it's interesting to hear you say that that
- 48:43Speaker 1: there there may have been an effort in this direction
- 48:45Speaker 1: at one point. Perhaps that will come back around.
- 48:48Speaker 2: But still working on it, Yeah, still working on it. Yeah, no,
- 48:51Speaker 2: I agree with you.
- 48:53Speaker 1: Yeah. Well that brings us to Augusta National. How do
- 48:58Speaker 1: all of these themes of Mackenzie's nineteen thirties converge on
- 49:04Speaker 1: Augusta National, The things that he's thinking about, the new
- 49:07Speaker 1: stuff that he's trying at golf courses. How do you
- 49:10Speaker 1: see those those threads emerging in the design of Augusta National.
- 49:18Speaker 2: Yeah. So at Augusta the goal was to build the
- 49:23Speaker 2: world's best inland course. You know, they set the marker
- 49:27Speaker 2: high and they made no bones about it. I mean
- 49:30Speaker 2: that's they said that explicitly, like we're going to build
- 49:33Speaker 2: the world's best inland golf course. Meaning at that time
- 49:38Speaker 2: all the best courses were mostly in the British Isles,
- 49:42Speaker 2: seaside courses in and around Dune's Land, or places like
- 49:46Speaker 2: Cyprus Point in California or you know National Golf Links,
- 49:52Speaker 2: which he revered places like that, and so at Augusta
- 49:58Speaker 2: they thought like, well, you know, I'm going to use
- 50:01Speaker 2: Mackenzie thought, I'm gonna use all my knowledge that I've gained,
- 50:04Speaker 2: all of my earned insight from the last twenty five
- 50:07Speaker 2: years of building golf courses and apply that to building
- 50:12Speaker 2: on this inland site, a site that was actually like
- 50:14Speaker 2: pretty severe, you know, not a beautiful, picturesque piece of land,
- 50:21Speaker 2: but not an easy piece of land to build a
- 50:23Speaker 2: golf course on.
- 50:24Speaker 1: But he's not really that well suited to golf, Like
- 50:26Speaker 1: it's the elevation change is too big to be considered
- 50:30Speaker 1: well suited.
- 50:30Speaker 2: To golf exactly exactly. And this really showcases Mackenzie's brilliance
- 50:39Speaker 2: in routing a golf course. You know, a lot of
- 50:43Speaker 2: think people think of Mackenzie for his wild greens or
- 50:46Speaker 2: bunkers or but I think actually his true genius, beyond
- 50:50Speaker 2: any of that, was his ability to rout a golf
- 50:52Speaker 2: course in the most interesting and efficient way as possible.
- 50:56Speaker 2: And I don't think there's anybody on the planet that
- 50:59Speaker 2: could to devise a better routing scheme for that property
- 51:03Speaker 2: at Augusta than Mackenzie. But again, this is when he
- 51:07Speaker 2: was starting to get experimental. And then this was also
- 51:10Speaker 2: we're well into the depression at this point, and so
- 51:14Speaker 2: there was this huge, you know cloud, this this cloud
- 51:18Speaker 2: of economics, the economic climate overhanging this, and there's all
- 51:22Speaker 2: sorts of stories we could we could go into about,
- 51:25Speaker 2: you know, the financials of the development and how it
- 51:29Speaker 2: almost didn't happen, and then once it did happen, it
- 51:31Speaker 2: almost went bankrupt, and the club was restructured four times
- 51:35Speaker 2: all the way through the fifties, and it's just it's
- 51:36Speaker 2: miraculous that it even existed to begin with, and then
- 51:39Speaker 2: it actually survived and it is what it is today.
- 51:43Speaker 2: But you know, he was trying to economize again, economize
- 51:47Speaker 2: the design, economized the construction and using again his experience
- 51:53Speaker 2: of using heavy machinery at Bayside. He used bulldozers at Augusta,
- 51:58Speaker 2: which sign efficantly reduced the labor costs as opposed to
- 52:02Speaker 2: doing things with just large crews of manual labor. And
- 52:06Speaker 2: then there was this there is this component of paying
- 52:11Speaker 2: homage to his favorite holes, you know, the template, the
- 52:17Speaker 2: template exercise, so to speak. And you know, so we
- 52:25Speaker 2: talked about this Garrett last year on the podcast which
- 52:28Speaker 2: did specifically about Augusta. But so many of these holes
- 52:31Speaker 2: at Augusta were really based off of the design concept
- 52:37Speaker 2: was taken from many of his and Bobby Jones' favorite
- 52:40Speaker 2: holes in the UK, and they both they both equally
- 52:46Speaker 2: revered St Andrew's. To them, that was both the gold standards.
- 52:48Speaker 2: So they were essentially trying to build a Saint Andrews
- 52:51Speaker 2: like course on an inland property. But that wasn't flat
- 52:55Speaker 2: the way that Sat Andrews was flat. It's very steep
- 52:58Speaker 2: as you as you mentioned, and so we could go
- 53:00Speaker 2: through it. But like many of those holes were you know,
- 53:03Speaker 2: based off of some of the great the great holes
- 53:05Speaker 2: at Saint Andrews and then throughout the British islds.
- 53:08Speaker 1: What are a couple of your favorite examples of template
- 53:12Speaker 1: concepts at Augusta National and I would I would consider
- 53:15Speaker 1: them to be very much remixed template concepts. But just
- 53:19Speaker 1: to give people an idea of how Mackenzie and Jones
- 53:23Speaker 1: were working with influence in this design, what are a
- 53:26Speaker 1: couple of specific examples that people should look to.
- 53:30Speaker 2: Well, you know, the fourth was built after the Eden,
- 53:34Speaker 2: which you know, most people, I think, including Mackenzie, would
- 53:36Speaker 2: have considered the Eden at Saint Andrews the premier one
- 53:39Speaker 2: shot hole in the world. And that was really really
- 53:43Speaker 2: interesting because that was a very different take on what
- 53:46Speaker 2: the Eden was. You know, the fifth was based after
- 53:51Speaker 2: the Road Hole. We talked about that. The sixth was
- 53:53Speaker 2: really his version of the Verdan. But to me, what's
- 53:56Speaker 2: really interesting, there's a couple answers that you did, this
- 54:00Speaker 2: one which sadly no longer exists, which was the seventh hole.
- 54:05Speaker 2: The seventh hole had no bunkers. The green was built
- 54:10Speaker 2: was the concept was derived from the eighteenth at Saint
- 54:13Speaker 2: Andrew's the value of Sin, and it was you know,
- 54:18Speaker 2: going back to this idea that Mackenzie was experimenting with
- 54:20Speaker 2: these wild tongues sticking out in different directions on different greens.
- 54:24Speaker 2: He had this front right section that came way down
- 54:28Speaker 2: and then it wrapped around to the back left. It
- 54:31Speaker 2: created this giant almost like a horseshoe green, but like
- 54:35Speaker 2: a horseshoe at an angle really severe. And then in
- 54:41Speaker 2: between those two giant sections of the green was the
- 54:44Speaker 2: value of Sin. And again no bunkers, and that hole
- 54:50Speaker 2: does not exist at the seventh that Augusta now is
- 54:53Speaker 2: completely different. They pushed the green back. The green's totally different.
- 54:57Speaker 2: It's surrounded by bunkers. And then they narrowed the fairway
- 55:00Speaker 2: over the years by planting trees, so that hole basically
- 55:03Speaker 2: is just gone. But if you look at the old
- 55:05Speaker 2: photos of that hole, you'll see how wild that green was.
- 55:08Speaker 1: Yeah, and.
- 55:11Speaker 2: Depending on where the flag location would be on a
- 55:13Speaker 2: certain day, if it was back left or front right,
- 55:16Speaker 2: that would dictate like what side of the fairway you'd
- 55:19Speaker 2: want to land your t shot on, which would give
- 55:22Speaker 2: you the best angle of approach into that green. And
- 55:24Speaker 2: so just that strategy I think is really interesting. You know,
- 55:28Speaker 2: I love the Valley of Sin just as at Saint
- 55:31Speaker 2: Andrews's as a concept and the fact that he applied
- 55:33Speaker 2: it in a super unique way there. And then the
- 55:36Speaker 2: other ants I give you is actually the eighth the
- 55:39Speaker 2: eighth pole is a great example of where he started
- 55:43Speaker 2: doing these real, really wild, giant landforms, which had really
- 55:49Speaker 2: started at the jockey Club previously. If you look at
- 55:52Speaker 2: like a photo of the sixteenth pole on the Red
- 55:54Speaker 2: Course at the Jockey Club and you see these giant
- 55:57Speaker 2: manufactured landforms, and then you look at the eighth hold
- 56:00Speaker 2: augustin National, you'd say, oh, yeah, there's this, there's this
- 56:04Speaker 2: connection there and just you know, the eighth is a
- 56:08Speaker 2: par five uphill. But the green he was trying to
- 56:11Speaker 2: build it was what he considered his take on a
- 56:15Speaker 2: punch bowl green, although if you looked at it you
- 56:17Speaker 2: would probably not think of it as a punch bowl,
- 56:20Speaker 2: but just the way he built all these landforms to
- 56:23Speaker 2: feed shots into different portions of the green, that was
- 56:26Speaker 2: like a quasi punch bowl. And I thought that was
- 56:28Speaker 2: really interesting. Yeah, I'm glad we have that back because
- 56:31Speaker 2: we lost that at one point. Now it's back.
- 56:34Speaker 1: Yeah, I think everybody's seen that picture at this point
- 56:37Speaker 1: of the pancake green that was installed there because I
- 56:41Speaker 1: guess Clifford Roberts wanted to create a more visibility for
- 56:47Speaker 1: the gallery, but that that version of the hole was
- 56:50Speaker 1: was short lived and eventually restored by Byron Nelson. I
- 56:56Speaker 1: think Byron Nelson at least contributed to the restoration of it.
- 56:59Speaker 1: And they did a pretty good job. They If you
- 57:01Speaker 1: look at the original picture and you look at the
- 57:03Speaker 1: current version, hey, kudos, nice, nicely done. Maybe one of
- 57:08Speaker 1: the very earliest instances of Golden Age golf course.
- 57:12Speaker 2: Restoration, maybe the first, maybe the first think of it.
- 57:16Speaker 1: Yeah, and they did. They did a damn good job,
- 57:18Speaker 1: and that hole is just great. It's it's I think
- 57:21Speaker 1: on some days, many days it's my favorite existing hole
- 57:25Speaker 1: at Augusta National. And yep, my understanding is that the
- 57:28Speaker 1: model there was the seventeenth at Mirfield.
- 57:32Speaker 2: Yeah, but you're right, the whole was sort of model
- 57:36Speaker 2: up in seventeenth, but then the green was his version
- 57:40Speaker 2: of a punch bowl.
- 57:42Speaker 1: Okay, okay, so there are some similarities. Yeah, I mean
- 57:45Speaker 1: the Mierfield hole also has some some of that surrounding.
- 57:48Speaker 1: It is kind of like a bit of a punch
- 57:51Speaker 1: bowl like that, but but Augusta's version is way more pronounced.
- 57:57Speaker 2: Yea, for what I can see, you wouldn't really think
- 57:59Speaker 2: of it as punch bowl. But like, conceptually he was
- 58:03Speaker 2: thinking of how the ball would feed in different pins
- 58:05Speaker 2: and sort of called a quasi punch ble.
- 58:08Speaker 1: Yeah, and then if you miss on the wrong side
- 58:11Speaker 1: of the mounds, then then things get really hairy. And
- 58:14Speaker 1: that might be the main distinction between the eighth Augusta
- 58:17Speaker 1: National and your usual punch bowl where everything kind of
- 58:21Speaker 1: feeds in. There's a rejecting portion of the green complex
- 58:26Speaker 1: on eight and we see that affect players in the
- 58:28Speaker 1: Masters all the time. If they have to hit that
- 58:31Speaker 1: shot from down low on the left side of the
- 58:34Speaker 1: eighth green complex, that is a gnarly, very difficult shot.
- 58:38Speaker 1: And the chip is pretty dicey from the right side
- 58:41Speaker 1: of the green complex as well, and it's all short
- 58:45Speaker 1: grass exactly.
- 58:47Speaker 2: Yeah, you just nailed it, which is think about interesting
- 58:50Speaker 2: those recovery shots are and you're not playing out of bunkers. Yeah,
- 58:54Speaker 2: you know, it's arguably harder if the turf is maintained correctly,
- 58:58Speaker 2: if you have the correct economical regiment and it's firm
- 59:00Speaker 2: and fast. That's a harder recovery shot for those guys
- 59:04Speaker 2: than hitting out of bunkers is. And guess what, it's
- 59:07Speaker 2: also an easier recovery shot for high handicappers.
- 59:10Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the radical elements of Augusta National's design have
- 59:16Speaker 1: so much in common with the general themes of Mackenzie's
- 59:20Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. The use of short grass everywhere, the minimal
- 59:24Speaker 1: use of bunkers. It was much more minimal when the
- 59:28Speaker 1: course was initially built. There many more bunkers at Augusta
- 59:31Speaker 1: National now, but still compared to a lot of especially
- 59:35Speaker 1: modern golf courses, Augusta Nationals still doesn't have that many bunkers.
- 59:40Speaker 1: And you know, it's just it's funny to think of
- 59:43Speaker 1: Augusta National being an economized design, a course that was
- 59:46Speaker 1: designed to be maintained very affordably, because of course, the
- 59:51Speaker 1: maintenance standards there have gone a different direction and the
- 59:54Speaker 1: maintenance budget has gone a different there. But it was
- 59:59Speaker 1: designed to be maintained affordably, partly because of the period
- 1:00:03Speaker 1: in which it was built and partly because that's just
- 1:00:06Speaker 1: something that Alistair Mackenzie believed. It's something that he believed
- 1:00:10Speaker 1: would give the course permanence, that would allow the course
- 1:00:13Speaker 1: to continue to exist, which was very much a point
- 1:00:17Speaker 1: of emphasis for him.
- 1:00:18Speaker 2: And real quick, I just want to mention on the bunkering,
- 1:00:21Speaker 2: on the the minimalization of bunkering. The economy and bunkering
- 1:00:25Speaker 2: that we've talked about a couple of times. There's a
- 1:00:28Speaker 2: few different components of this. One is like, there's just
- 1:00:30Speaker 2: the economization factor of fewer bunkers to maintain, it's cheaper
- 1:00:35Speaker 2: to maintain. But secondly, he thought of it also in
- 1:00:39Speaker 2: terms of if you could create sufficient strategy with like
- 1:00:45Speaker 2: only one bunker as opposed to three or four or
- 1:00:49Speaker 2: five bunkers, and you design a hole in a way
- 1:00:54Speaker 2: where the strategy value functions the same way, well, that
- 1:00:58Speaker 2: is much more powerful actually then having all these other bunkers.
- 1:01:05Speaker 2: So in the case of Augusta, he started with thirty
- 1:01:08Speaker 2: six holes on the plan, and then he started stop
- 1:01:12Speaker 2: blocking bunkers and got down to twenty two because he
- 1:01:16Speaker 2: thought like, well, there's just redundancy there. I don't necessarily
- 1:01:20Speaker 2: need three bunkers. If I can accomplish the same strategic
- 1:01:23Speaker 2: value with one bunker, that's actually more powerful and there's
- 1:01:28Speaker 2: a minimalization component there. I kind of think of this
- 1:01:30Speaker 2: in terms of writing and writers. I think really good writers,
- 1:01:34Speaker 2: which I.
- 1:01:34Speaker 1: Just think of the same thing. Write a sentence and
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: then take away as many words as possible in revisions.
- 1:01:40Speaker 2: Exactly exactly if you can, if you can express something
- 1:01:45Speaker 2: in a sentence in eight words as opposed to fifteen words,
- 1:01:51Speaker 2: and you're expressing the entirety of the statement, that eight
- 1:01:54Speaker 2: word sentence is much more powerful than the fifteen word sentence.
- 1:01:58Speaker 1: And this gets me into the next subject that I
- 1:02:00Speaker 1: wanted to talk about with you, or the last subject
- 1:02:02Speaker 1: that I wanted to talk about, And that is how
- 1:02:05Speaker 1: this era of McKenzie's career might influence the golf architecture
- 1:02:09Speaker 1: that we do in the twenty first century going forward.
- 1:02:13Speaker 1: And I think part of that. My thought about that
- 1:02:16Speaker 1: is that the nineteen thirties for Alistair mackenzie was true minimalism.
- 1:02:21Speaker 1: He was working toward actual minimalism, which has been in
- 1:02:26Speaker 1: short supply in twenty first century golf architecture. Is I
- 1:02:30Speaker 1: think many architects who have been labeled minimalist would it
- 1:02:34Speaker 1: would freely admit. I think I think many many of
- 1:02:38Speaker 1: the architects we consider minimalists would would say outwardly, yeah,
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: it's I'm that label doesn't really fit me anymore. We've
- 1:02:45Speaker 1: kind of lost the meaning of that word. But McKenzie
- 1:02:49Speaker 1: was working towards something that's truly like minimalism. By which
- 1:02:54Speaker 1: I mean he in the design process was trying to
- 1:02:59Speaker 1: reduce the number of components that would lead to a
- 1:03:02Speaker 1: great hole. He would design a hole, and then he
- 1:03:05Speaker 1: would start to erase and condense until he got to
- 1:03:09Speaker 1: a form that was as concise and simple as possible,
- 1:03:14Speaker 1: but still express the idea and still produce the playing
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: strategy that he was looking for. That is minimalism, to
- 1:03:22Speaker 1: my mind. It's not necessarily moving as little dirt as possible,
- 1:03:26Speaker 1: though that has something to do with it. The true
- 1:03:29Speaker 1: spirit of minimalism in other art forms is trying to
- 1:03:34Speaker 1: whittle down the form of something to its essence, and
- 1:03:38Speaker 1: that's I think what Mackenzie was trying to go for
- 1:03:41Speaker 1: in this portion of his career. So that's my thought
- 1:03:43Speaker 1: about how it could how it could influence us. Now
- 1:03:46Speaker 1: it seems like you agree with that.
- 1:03:48Speaker 2: Thought, completely agree. And you know I've been I tell
- 1:03:53Speaker 2: this to clients all the time, you know, I just
- 1:03:57Speaker 2: I'm also an amateur student of economics, and I love
- 1:04:00Speaker 2: the study of economics, and I don't think enough golf
- 1:04:04Speaker 2: course architects really have the thinking in terms of the
- 1:04:09Speaker 2: true economics of building a golf course and maintaining a
- 1:04:12Speaker 2: golf course and how that would affect the way you
- 1:04:15Speaker 2: would design it, and going back to the three verticals
- 1:04:18Speaker 2: that we mentioned at the outset, I think that that's
- 1:04:20Speaker 2: the future of golf architecture in my mind going forward
- 1:04:24Speaker 2: in the twenty first century, is this idea of minimalism
- 1:04:29Speaker 2: beyond naturalism. It's not just an aesthetic quality. It's as
- 1:04:35Speaker 2: you said, it's trying to get down to the simplest,
- 1:04:37Speaker 2: most powerful form and then tying that into really the
- 1:04:42Speaker 2: financials of golf operation because they have to be viable,
- 1:04:46Speaker 2: and this gets to resources, this gets to inputs, this
- 1:04:49Speaker 2: gets to there's all sorts of rabbit holes we can
- 1:04:51Speaker 2: go down to. But yeah, I really think that that's
- 1:04:56Speaker 2: the future going forward is Yeah, there's plenty of clubs
- 1:04:59Speaker 2: that have the resources to be able to have a
- 1:05:01Speaker 2: crew to maintain one hundred and fifty bunkers or whatever
- 1:05:04Speaker 2: they've got. But you know, there's plenty of opportunities for
- 1:05:09Speaker 2: a really good public course, a municipal course to have
- 1:05:13Speaker 2: ten fifteen bunkers, you know, a really small footprint when
- 1:05:18Speaker 2: it comes to that, and just designed in a way
- 1:05:22Speaker 2: where it's so easy and simplistic to maintain a single
- 1:05:26Speaker 2: height of cut basically one mower where you don't have
- 1:05:31Speaker 2: to have different mowers but different different personnel on different
- 1:05:36Speaker 2: pieces of equipment. You can just mowed all the same
- 1:05:38Speaker 2: piece of equipment. And those days they were using what
- 1:05:40Speaker 2: we call gang mowers, which had like a giant pass,
- 1:05:43Speaker 2: you know, like a nine gang unit and you do
- 1:05:46Speaker 2: like a twenty five foot wide swath of turf, you know.
- 1:05:49Speaker 2: And if you're mowing something, if you mowing a course
- 1:05:52Speaker 2: or something like that, well you have to think about
- 1:05:53Speaker 2: how the way you're building it to be able to
- 1:05:55Speaker 2: ensure that it could be mowed that way. So I
- 1:05:57Speaker 2: think that's the future of in particular public golf, in
- 1:06:00Speaker 2: particular municipal golf is going back to the way Mackenzie
- 1:06:04Speaker 2: was thinking in nineteen early nineteen thirties up until the
- 1:06:07Speaker 2: time he died.
- 1:06:08Speaker 1: All right, well, well, thank you for coming on the podcast, Josh.
- 1:06:11Speaker 1: Always interesting to talk to you.
- 1:06:13Speaker 2: Yeah, always fun talking to you, Garent, thanks for having
- 1:06:15Speaker 2: me on.
- 1:06:15Speaker 1: Of course. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by
- 1:06:25Speaker 1: PJ Clark. Thank you, PJ. If you enjoyed this deep
- 1:06:30Speaker 1: dive into Mackenzie's career in the nineteen thirties, I can
- 1:06:34Speaker 1: guarantee that you would love the content that we're doing
- 1:06:37Speaker 1: in Club TF. Club TFE is Frida Egg Golf's membership.
- 1:06:42Speaker 1: It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and you
- 1:06:44Speaker 1: get a ton with that. So go to the Frida
- 1:06:47Speaker 1: egg dot com slash membership to see what CLUBTF is
- 1:06:51Speaker 1: all about. People are calling it the hottest club in town.
- 1:06:54Speaker 1: I don't know that you know what. I actually agree
- 1:06:57Speaker 1: with that it's the hottest club in town. CLUBTF. Thank
- 1:07:00Speaker 1: you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with
- 1:07:03Speaker 1: another episode.