Golf Courses Don’t Need To Be Harder To Be Better with Course Architect | Mulligans

0:00 Hey there everyone. It's Friday, which means a special Bulligan's episode, but first on Tuesday, writer Tom Coin joins me on correct the mistakes. If you love The Golfers Journal or any of Tom's books, you won't want to miss that conversation. And today we have Golf Courses Don't need to be Harder to be better with course architect David McLay kid. See you on Tuesday. Here's the episode, Golf Smarter Premium number five hundred and six, published on September fifteenth, twenty fifteen. Golf Courses Don't need to be Harder to be better with designer of Bandon Dune's David McLay Kidd. This is Golf Smarter Premium. Here's your host, Fred Green. Welcome to the Golf Smarter Podcast.

0:43 David, thanks very much. Fred, it's great to be here. It is great to have you here. We had an interesting introduction to one another out at TPC Stonebray, which is one of your courses. It is yep. It was opened back in two thousand and eight, I believe, and the timing was a little challenging. For the real estate market. They were maybe a year or two late, but they seem to be doing great now, the projects really thriving, the clubhouse is open and the real estate selling. And I hadn't played it in a couple of years, and I went back, and you know, I think self doubt is one of the things all designers suffer from, So having not played it in a couple of years, I went back and was thrilled. You know, the course is great fun to play and is in great condition, and everyone seemed to have a good time and I loved it.

1:32 It was great to be back after having missed it for a couple of years. Actually, I had played it when it first opened as well, in a press event, and it is definitely a more mature course. That was it a public course when it first opened. I don't believe so. Well, it wasn't as part of the TPC network. So if you're a TPC member, I think there's something like twenty seven or so golf courses in that network, you can play it. But I'm not sure you can play it if you're a member of the public and you just call up and book a tea time. I think you have to either get a referral through your own club or be part of the TPC network.

2:14 Yeah, yeah, I think you do. But it's a fascinating course. It's not your normal golf course that runs back and forth and back and forth. You've got a lot of work to do to get through that golf. Course, you do. I mean, the average golf course probably covers you know, one hundred and fifty acres. Maybe that golf course covers three times that. I mean, it really rolls across those Hayward Hills in all sorts of unusual and unpredictable directions. Thankfully, the owner, a Hong Kong Chinese family, had many thousands of acres from which to choose from, and they allowed me to wander across those Hayward Hills pretty much much in any direction I wanted. The real challenge was getting all the permits together and then building it.

3:04 Why was that the challenge because just politics in the area. I probably politics. You know, there was a red legged frog and the Alameda whipsnake are both inhabitants of that area, so we probably rightly so had to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure that we protected both those species, and of course the wetlands and waterways of the Great State of California. So the developer spent many extra millions making sure that all of those things were protected, and I think that shows and the results the golf course blends in very naturally into its surroundings. Wow, those are two words that I've not heard associated with California in a long time. Wetlands and waterways.

3:50 Yeah. Yeah, well even back then in two thousand and six and seven when we were building it, I would scratch my head and say, this is a wetland where a thousand feet above the bay on a slope I could probably ski on in Oregon, And this is a waterway wetland. But the definition is definitely conservative. Put it that way, Yeah, say the least. So when you're approached by I get you said you were approached by the owners? Did they know at that point it's a TPC course. How did TPC get involved? The owners hired a developer called Mike Lettinger, And Mike Lettinger is a guy from Washington, DC and he had spent the early part of his career developing the TPC courses with Dean Beeman and the PGA Tour, and so Mike had an existing strong relationship with the TPC network, and so once the course opened, or before it opened, Mike brought in the tour and asked them if this course was of a caliber that they would consider adding it to their network, and they quickly did. It was part of the network long before opening. Very interesting, So that was for me, that was that was a really cool thing. You know, there aren't, as I say, there's less than thirty I believe TPC courses in the United States.

5:11 So and all of those, there aren't thirty architects, there are many of them have done more than one. So there are may be twenty on golf course designers who have that on the resume. And I get to be one of them. Well, there's a couple of things on your resume that make you stand out, going, oh, he's the guy that did that. This is not only to say. Yeah, this is not the only golf course that you have that on your resume. And we'll get to that in a minute. But I want to I want to start, Well, we've already started, so I want to continue this point by talking about how you became a golf course architect. That was it in your blood? Was it in your head? Where? How did this start?

5:52 Well? I was literally conceived and born on a golf course, or very close to My father is a golf course superintendent or a head greenkeeper as it would be called back in the old Country where I'm from. And so my father worked on a golf course from fourteen years old and married his childhood's sweetheart, and he became the youngest head greenkeeper in a generation at least, if not longer. He was the head greenkeeper at Glasgow Golf Club in his early twenties, which is the ninth oldest golf course on earth, and he lived with his family on the side of one of the golf holes in a house owned by the golf club from the seventeen hundreds. And I was born and raised there.

6:40 Are you okay? Yeah? I tripped over the phone? You get silent? I was like, are you okay? Yeah? Yeah, tripped over the phone. Okay. So did you tag along with your dad the whole time? Did you? Like know, from the beginning, it's like I want to just be here with my daddy. Yeah, that's pretty much it. I wanted to, you know, I from an early age, my dad's getting up at four in the morning to go out on the golf course. And working all the daylight hours in the summertime and wintertime, although there a lot less and very often he's taking me with him. So from and that was appealing to you, I mean, really well, hanging out.

7:23 With my dad was not as a teenager, I can't I don't. Think I was up at I don't think I was up at that time in the morning. But from a very young age I was out raking bunkers and flyme mowing banks and edging bunkers and mowing greens. As I was older, and even as a teenager, you know that work ethic was burned into me. I mean, I don't think I got the luxury of lane in bed till noon. I was told from maybe about twelve years old, if I wanted to buy something, then I had to earn the money to go buy it, and earning the money meant helping my dad on the golf course. So I was out there doing it, and I did I love it?

8:03 I'm not sure. I sort of said, oh my goodness, I'm desperate to get up before the dawn and go great bunkers. I just saw as that this was what we did, This is what my father earned his living at and I saw it as a rewarding thing that was that he enjoyed and I could enjoy with him, and I loved spending time with him. Then and now as I grew older, I realized that the maintenance of golf courses. Was only one part of it. There were other parts to the. The process that created a golf course, design and construction being the other two main ones. So when I explored those two it my father's behest, I discovered that I absolutely loved the creative part of it even more than I loved the maintenance part of it. And so that's what took me down that path.

8:56 Do you remember times as a kid at night at home, the family after dinner all together, sitting around, whether you were sitting by the fire and reading, you were watching TV, whatever the family activity at night was. Did you pick your dad's brain about groundskeeping or did you talk about golf design both? You know, my. Mother has never played golf, and my sister barely played, and she's three and a half years younger. So as a kid quite a bit younger, where I heard it all was the frequent family journeys to other golf courses because my dad's closest friends were other greenkeepers. It was George Brown at Turnbury, or Walter Woods, s and Andrews, or Chris Kennedy at Hag's Castle. It was these guys are legends in that world, and you know, my dad is one of them. So as a kid, I would spend the weekend staying at somebody else's house and I'd be listening to these adults debate their profession that they are incredibly passionate about, and they would argue till the early hours with a bottle of whiskey about poe control or how to make the greens faster or truer, or whether the stimpmeter was a useful application in their profession, or whether a committee should be structured this way or that way, or a million different things, none of which I at the time understood what I was learning until

10:28 I was in the profession myself, and I could recall back to these conversations that had gone on, and recall back to the arguments for and against any particular course of action. And it wasn't until ten fifteen, twenty years later that I thought, Wow, that was quite the education I was getting. Oh, well, it's nice that you did appreciate it eventually. Eventually, yeah, But even at the time I just loved hanging out with these guys and absorbing their passion for golf and golf courses, and of course, to them, as with many golfers, the history and traditions of the game were paramount. So each of these people, these men appreciated that old Tom Morris had designed the course one hundred years before, or James Braid in the Great Triumvirate had designed Glen Eagle's seventy years before, which is where my father had been. So I heard all about the course of time and golf and architecture and tradition and the different styles of architecture, and so all of this was being bled into me slowly over the course of a childhood.

11:39 And were you playing golf at all too? Are you just cleaning up? You know? I wasn't playing that much golf. Here's a strange rule. Many golf courses in Scotland do not allow the greenkeeper even to play the golf course, certainly back then, and they certainly don't allow the family of the greenkeeper to be out there playing on a member on a private member's course. So early in my childhood. No, I did not get to play the very golf course that my father was in charge of. He did, but there are plenty of other superintendents even today that are not allowed to play the course without special permission, which is a hang up to the class system of the United Kingdom, one of the reasons I prefer it here in the United States.

12:25 So I guess. It wasn't until my early teenage years that my father left a private club and he moved to a commercial project, the Glen Eagles Resort in the middle of Scotland, and there was little class hang up. So there he was in charge of all the golf courses and with his permission, I could play wherever and whenever I wanted. So from about thirteen or fourteen years old, I could play a lot more, and myself and my best friend would play, you know, thirty six holes after school in the summertime, which for those of you that have been to Scotland in midsummer, I know that that's possible. It doesn't get dark till eleven o'clock at night, and you can play golf in two and a.

13:09 Half hours, two and a half hours easily. Really, really, what's the difference. Well, you're not dilly dallying, you're not in a cart, you're not hitting. It in the in the weeds. You know, you're playing golf and you're playing quickly. I mean, it amazes me when people even a four hour round. When I got a little older, I thought four hours to play golf. That's forever. The thought of playing in five hours just kills you. Yeah, you know, four hours is what it takes to play the old course on the busiest day. So if you're going out at four or five o'clock in the evening on the Prince's Course at Glen Eagle's which no longer exists, which from the teas we played was you know, fivey eight hundred yards, we could easily play that in two and a half hour.

14:01 Wow, wait, are you inferring that rounds take longer here because people are spending time looking for their balls. And they can do or they just have this pre shot routine that takes five minutes on every shot. And they don't do that in Scotland. Not so much. Not so much now you're. Being Now you're being the elitist that you're doing. Well. I'm definitely a golfing elitist. We have a charity event here in Bend, Oregon, where I live, where they do a golf marathon. You have to play a hundred holes in a single day. You'd be amazed how many people. Almost everyone says the same thing, because they're playing one hundred golf holes, which is what five and a half rounds of golf in a single day. There's no pre shot routine, there's no worrying about exactly where to hit it.

14:51 There's just run up to the ball, take a stance, hit the ball. Everybody says, you know, I played much better than I expected. Interesting, that's because you aren't thinking about it and you just hit it. And after two or three rounds like that in a single day, the last couple of rounds could be the best golf you've ever played because you stop worrying, just hit it. Your body already knows what to do. Just get your mind out of the way. I had a friend who did one of those charity events, and he was in the high eighties as far as how many holes that he had played that day, and there were people that were finished, and he was like, how did you finish that much far ahead of me? And he says, because I played multiple balls on the par threes. It's like, you're kidding, you can do that.

15:36 Oh so they've played three balls and said, well, that's three holes out of the way. Yeah, exactly. I'm not sure that counts. They told him it did. He was frustrated. He was like, no, I'm going to play one ball every hole. I'll be here until I can't play anymore. Yeah, and he couldn't think one bar. You can take a bucket of balls with you and if you hit one in the crap, just retee it and hit it again. I'll give you that. But you can't play three balls out and say well I just played three holes. I don't think that counts. That's against it. Is your dad still around? Oh yeah, oh not only is he still around, He's still very much involved in my business. Oh yeah, only only today. He spent the day at a course where finishing up in London and was working with the superintendent and the owner and helping them with the growing. They had their first little preview event at the weekend. My father was over there at five in the morning with the superintendents, helping them set the course up and set pin placements and do all of that stuff. So he absolutely loves it as much today as he did twenty or forty years ago.

16:43 Well, of course he does because he's doing it for and with his son. Yeah, I'll say with not for, he wouldn't appreciate that. Definitely with sorry Pop. But he's got to be very proud of you. I think he gets a kick out the fact that, you know, he started working on a golf course in the early sixties and you know it wasn't allowed and to play the courses that he was maintaining, and you know was a how can I put it if you can imagine the class system a snooty club in the United Kingdom, And now I get invited to go play those places, and you know, the whole thing has flipped on its head in a single generation. I certainly love the fact that he gets to see that.

17:32 Well, it sounds like he hasn't told you he's proud of you. We're proud of you, David. We're doing a great job. Well, I keep trying. Let's talk about your design philosophy. You told a wonderful story at the dinner, a TPC stone break that I want to try to get you to repeat about what you see. Oh, you have to give me more of a hint than that. I can't remember what I said. What do you see when you're looking out there? Right? You're telling a story about the mission. I can't exactly remember the story, but you mean you made it that night? Yeah, I probably. I don't think I made it up, but I definitely was on a roll.

18:13 You know, I. See a golf course as an opportunity for grown men to go explore the way they did when they were children, and that seems to be something that is lost in the modern world we live in. You know, the middle. Aged man is responsible and I keep saying man, but it could be women. But we know what a male dominated sport this is. You know, they're working hard, they're you know, providing for their family. They're worrying about today, They're worrying about tomorrow and the market and their pension and this and that and a million other things. And they don't get to be children anymore. And golf is one of the pursuits where they can kind of regress for a few hours and be more childlike. And part of that experience allows me to allow them to explore again, to go across a piece of land and crest a hill or around a pond, or disappear behind a tree and see what's there and be at one with nature and to explore. And if golf loses that, then it loses its core. That loses something absolutely essential to the sport.

19:23 It's not just about standing on a tea and aiming at a flag away in the distance. It's more than that, and that exploration of the landscape is key to it. You know, eighteen. Wonderful individual golf holes that play up and down like soldiers is not a golf experience. You want it to be something like abandoned June's or Stonebray, where the golf course meanders and is in some respects you can see it in front of you, and then in another turn you don't know where you're going. You're lost. You're having to scratch your head and decipher some clues ahead of you to try and figure out what's coming next. And that's all part of the wonderful experience of golf that exist in no other sport. There's nothing else in the world of sport like it, and we can't lose it.

20:10 So true, it's an interesting perspective on that do you have a design strategy that you carry with you from project to project or is it unique to each project? Hi, I'll give you that in two answers. I guess I don't have. A design style, which sometimes people mistake the word strategy and style. I wouldn't like to think that I have an absolute, definitive style where I'm going to go to each project and I'm going to build bunkers that look like X, and no matter where I am, they're going to look like X. That's what I'm going to do. And there are plenty of architects who do do that, and they make a very great, good career out of it.

20:55 They build one style of golf course and they replicate that style wherever they find themselves. I choose not to do that for numerous reasons, the greatest of which is the fact that I want the land to dictate the style. The particular circumstance of that project needs to dictate the style, rather than just me as a brand name, saying well, my style is this and this is what I create. So there's one answer to that question. On the second part, is there a strategic style if you like or what was your question? A strategy that. I yes, I think there probably is. As a strategist on the golf course, I try not to defend against a player who is attempting to make let's say, bogie. I try not to punish a player who already made a tactical error in his strategic attack on a golf hole. So I rarely will position bunkers in a spot that punish a bad shot, because the bad shot, virtually every single time, is punishment in itself. I don't know if you top the ball one hundred yards off the tee, I don't really need to put you in a bunker because you topped the ball one hundred yards off the tee. So if you're playing one of my golf courses and you see a

22:26 hazard ahead of you, whether it's a topographical hazard, a bunker, a different height of cut, an area that's visually guarded, you know there's a mound in the way that's blocking your view a little bit. Chances are that my defense of that. Particular spot is because that particular spot is the a position to make birdie. So you have to get close to that spot in order to make birdie. I once had a tour pro tell me I played one of your golf courses. I didn't like it. I was like, why didn't you like it? He said, Well, I was playing great, and I was in bunkers all day long, and I was playing with a guy who was playing terrible, and he never was in a single bunker. How is that a good golf course? Well, he answered his own question. He wasn't playing great, he was playing almost great. If he had been playing great, he'd been right next to all those bunkers and his buddy was playing terrible.

23:22 Exactly, he was playing terrible. Why did him in a bunker? So that would be my strategic style, I guess would be the defense of the aggressive line. M hmm. I think what Robert Trent Jones Senior called it? A difficult par easy bogie, difficult par. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've you know, every golf course designer has the same rhetoric. They all talk about, you know, defending par and how natural their golf course design is. You know, there isn't a golf course architect in the modern era at least who doesn't say both those things.

24:03 And yet I. Go play many golf courses by my peers and think, well, I heard them say it but sure as hell don't see it. Now, let's talk about let's say a part three. Do you try to create some sort of the word deception or a distraction? You know what, my theory on this has changed dramatically over the last ten years. You know, I don't think. I don't know how much of a scoop it is. It's certainly something that I've been promoting as much as I can over the last ten years. Golf course architects have been living a lie. You know, I think that's basically it. You know, we take our inspiration from the very best pseudo golf courses that have ever existed, the Pine Valleys, the Cyprus Points, the Oakmonts, the Marians, and we hold them up as the perfect golf courses, and yet they're not. They're not even close to the perfect golf courses for the average player. For the average player, they couldn't get around those golf courses day and day out, and under one hundred maybe ninety Is that really what we want to go building as golf course architects. Why is it that.

25:29 Bandon June's is so successful? Why do people flop to it year after year after year because they're playable because they're fun, because they don't feel intimidated, because they don't feel humiliated. That is such a key important point that took me so long to re understand. I absolutely intuitively knew it in my twenties, coming from Scotland, unaffected by the golf that exists in America, and then for the next ten or fifteen years I was seduced by the thought that golf to be better has to be harder, and it absolutely does not need to be harder to be better.

26:09 You just came up with the title of this show. It doesn't have to be harder to be better. It doesn't. It absolutely does not. And so. If you take that logic and you really start to think it through, you really start to examine it. What are the reasons that people play bad? But we said earlier in this conversation that your body already knows what to do, it's your mind it screws it up. So why does your mind screw it up? Well, consciously, it's because you're thinking about all these tips that you read in every damn magazine with a thousand different tips, and then every time you turn the golf channel on, there's some guy telling you to hold it this way, tweak it that way, push your hips out, do this, do that.

26:52 So your mind consciously goes there. But where does this subconsciously go. It subconsciously goes to all the things that are going to go wrong, all the reasons why you are going to fail, even before you take that club back. Every one of us plays. Our home golf course and we go out and we get to a hole, and we pull the tea out of our pocket and we put it in the ground, and we already know as we bend down to put that ball on the tea peg, I'm going to lose this ball. Why are you going to lose it? Because you lose it every time you play this hole. Why are you not going to make par or even bogie because you never make You know, this is your double hole. You always make double here. But why you look at it? It's not that hard. It's because it's all in your head.

27:35 You're so intimidated by that particular hole you just can't get past it. Flip that one. It's head. There's another hole. You pull the tea out, you stick it in the ground. You say, this is my BIRDI hole. I make birdie here. All the time. This is a great hole. I love this hole. Is it because it's easier? I don't think it's easier. I mean any hole if it's you know, three hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty yards long with a cup at one end, It's not. Easier for the average guy. It still requires two reasonably good shots and a couple of putts to make par So what was the real difference? It was what your mind told you. It was the sense of peace, the sense of hope that you have in your head when you step up to that ball. So, as a golf course designer, can I go out and build eighteen holes that give you a sense of hope, that give you encouragement, that don't intimidate you that you could feel I got a chance here. Now, if I could do that eighteen times, would that course be loved or derided? Would people think this course was too easy or a blast? I would make the position that Bandon June's is the former, not the latter. You stand on every hole at Bandon and you think to yourself, I got a chance here, and even when you hit a bad one, I got a chance to get back here.

28:56 Because it's full of hope and recovery. There's no intimidate, very very little, and so that becomes much more appealing than a golf course that has eighteen holes of like climbing everest, one tiny mistake, I'm going to die. And for me, that's where I want my career to go forward. I want to build golf courses. Sure, you've got to play well to make birdies, but you don't have to play that well to make bogies. In fact, I'm going to do everything in my power, everything as a golf course designer, to help you make bogie. I'm going to make sure you don't lose that ball. I'm going to make sure that green doesn't throw you away. I'm going to make sure that that bunker does have some opportunity for recovery because you're already in it. Because once you're in trouble, I don't have to make it harder. In fact, I'm going to do the opposite of that and try and make it a little easier on you so that you can get back in the game.

29:51 Thank you, We appreciate that. I wish it were so true. I mean, you've mentioned now Bandon Dunes a couple of times and We teased it early on that you are the Now did you design all the courses at Bandon Dunes? Oh? I wish I could say yes. I wish, I wish, I wish I could say yes, But unfortunately no, I did the first one. And I love the fact that I did the first one. Which was the first one, and Jin's okay. Yeah. Without the first one, the others obviously wouldn't have had a chance to exist. Sure, and it set the course by which all the others followed. And as I said, the band and Junes covers a great amount of land.

30:34 You know, the fairways are vast, the greens are huge, But fundamentally the golf course is still the same length as any other golf course, and the cup is still four and a quarter inches, So it's no for the average guy to get it from tea to cup is just as hard. They still have to hit it a couple of times and put so. So much of this game is about, in the average golfer's eyes, what happens when I screw up? Because I know I'm going to, And if as a golf course designer, I can not punish screw ups, I can actually aid screw ups. Then the golf course becomes so much more fun. And to self promote just a tiny bit if I can. The last two or three courses that me and my small team have done, we've taken this theory that we've discussed ad nauseum and we've put it into practice to see what their reaction is. And the latest incarnation of that is a course up in central Washington called Gamble Sands, and we built that course with the logic that I've been mentioning. People absolutely love it.

31:45 I have been. The last time I had reactions like this was twenty years ago building Bend Engines. The average player absolutely loves it, but so do the pros. They go around it, they think they can shoot fifty nine sixty two sixty four. They think that they can absolutely kill it. But of course, the more aggressive they get, and as I said earlier, the hazards are next to those aggressive lines, the more quickly that they can end up punished, the more the tie to the margin of error becomes between a perfect shot and a recovery shot. But for the average golfer who's just trying to keep it in play and make pars, they're not aiming at those super tight lines so that they get to shoot good scores and then everything else is about keeping them in play. So in every tee they have that sense of, oh, this is a green lighthole, this isn't a danger whole. I'm not going to lose this ball. I can go after this, I can be aggressive. And because they can, they do, and because they do, they succeed. So because the danger isn't quite so terminal, they have a more fluid, more comfortable swing and they hit the ball straighter, longer, better, higher, you know, everything gets better.

33:02 I personally, Bandon beat me up. I was out there on a beautiful but incredibly windy weekend and the four courses that we played, including Bandon, just devastated me. I came home. It wasn't until I started looking at all my photographs that I realized how much fun I had. But when I left there, I was crying. I mean, well, it felt like I can take no. Blame nor credit for the weather. No nor my golf, and even have. The wind isn't blowing, you know, it's a completely different game. I mean, how you close is the golf that most people are playing in America, where they're hitting it off bermuda grass or bluegrass to a bank grass green that's running at twelve to then flipping that on its head and going to Bandon Guns where you're hitting it off a fair way that's tighter than your parking lot and a green that's pitching and rolling and as slow as the t's at many clubs, you know, this is links golf.

34:09 It's a completely different game. So for a lot of people it's a re education. They have to learn that little chip shot. They understand or they come to understand that they've been playing golf their whole entire lives hitting it slightly fat, and if you hit the ball a little bit fat at Bandon June's, you're going to get sore wrists and the ball's not going to do what you think it's going to do. You have to be able to hit the ball first. You have to be able to try and hit right behind that ball and press it down into the turf. And so that takes Even for the best of golfers, that can be a learning process where they have to understand that it's not about this giant divot that they take that's a fraction of an inch behind the ball, and they still get a good result. It's not how it works on links golf got to hit the ball first.

34:59 Because you know, I do audio and video production, and I like doing that because I can continue to manipulate my project until I feel it's ready. And then when I feel like it's ready, before I present it to my client, my customer, I sit on it for a few minutes a day just in case, I, you know, see it with different eyes the next day, going, you know what, I want to tweak that. I want to change that a little bit. At what point do you are you comfortable with handing over the project to your client saying it's done?

35:39 I mean never is the real pass. I mean, you know, we're we're constantly tweaking and adjusting. You know, I explain to every client that, you know, if these golf courses are loved and successful, they're going to be tweaked and adjusted, hopefully by the original architect through at least his life span. That's inevitability with that when we're building it. Once we start to put drainage and irrigation in, my ability to flip flop and change my mind gets greatly reduced. So that's usually it. But I could shape a hole once and say to the guys, okay, let's put the undergrounds in. Or I could shape it ten times in three days. I mean, when you're pushing dirt around, making bunkers, taking them out, putting them back in, shaping the green one way, shaping it another, and moving it over to the left, pitching it another direct. We can do that in a few hours.

36:36 So the time it takes to adjust and readjust prior to the undergrounds going in is very small on the average project. So I do get the chance to futz around quite a bit, and quite often we will conceptualize a hole on paper, get out in the field, totally, change our minds, shape something in from tea to green, walk it half of the times, really like it, go to lunch, sit and have lunch, maybe the guys have a beer, change our minds, come back, blow it up again, change. You know. It can be that kind of process. It really can be dramatic to end up with something else, And it's all about that process. I'm not saying the first idea wasn't great, but I'm hoping the last idea is ten times better. And so that that process that morphing from A through Z is an essential part of the creative steps that you're taking. It's much more like sculpture than it is like conventional architecture.

37:37 Do you design from the front dees or do you design from the back teas? And I know obviously the t's aren't there, but in your mind when you're when you're you know, looking down a fair way, or do you feel like this is this is for the better hitters, or this is for the people. We're gonna give them a little break. Oh you're going to like this answer. Okay, you are one hundred and eighty degrees wrong. Now, we never ever design it on the tees. We always design it from the green. Always start at the green, then you work your way back. You're always conceptualizing where this is a good green site. I like this location for whatever reason. How would a green best sit into this piece of ground?

38:18 Is it going to sit in as a kidney bean left to right? Is it going to sit in falling front to back? Is it going to pitch from left to right or right to left? Where would the bunkers naturally want to sit? So you're designing the green in its environs in a way that is sympathetic to the surrounds that it has to blend back into. And once you have that concept in your head of how that green wants to sit into its environment, you can then step back down the fairway until you're all the way to the back tee conceptualizing how the player will be asked to attack that green location and shape. Oh boy, it's completely turned aroun That mess with.

39:02 Your head, didn't I? Yeah? So, as as a from a golfer's perspective, when we're standing at the tea box, should we be thinking with an architect's mine? Absolutely, you should. You should be thinking what does the green look like? And then where is the pin on that green? And then then decide your logic coming backwards from there, where would I like that approach shot to come from? And then back to the tee. Now where do I have to hit it to get that approach shot? Now, there's so many I My other half is a lady tour player, and there are so many simple things that tour players do that the average player does not. You know, if she can't reach a par five and two, she immediately starts to question whether it's worth hitting driver. Sure, And then if you're not going to be hitting driver?

39:54 What are the hazards in your way on that t shot? Where ninety nine percent of the average golfers, if it's a par four driver, how it comes, and they rarely think about anything else. So I love to mess with golfers that way. I like to try and convince a golfer that I'm never going to meet that they should hit other clubs. Par four's where a six iron might be the best, par three's where a driver might be best even though it's only two hundred yards. All sorts of different things to try and convince someone to think about the trajectory and the potential risk and reward off the tea.

40:36 All right, listen, this has been just such an education for me. I really appreciate your time. This is a blast. We're gonna take a little break here so I can make an announcement or two and talk about this week's sponsor. And when we come back, can I get you to give us another piece of advice? That last one was incredible? Can we get another piece of advice on how the average golfer should be approaching his game with architect's eyes? Sure, of course, thank you? All right? Last week I announced that I injured myself. I tore my right calf muscle and won't be playing golf for a number of weeks. And I appreciate your kind messages, thank you so much, and some of the great suggestions of how we should approach this, But I think I'm going to continue trying to do the podcast over the next few weeks during my recovery. My recovery, I just I just don't have it in my heart to play reruns, not yet at least, But they're a premium They're there there for the premium subscribers, and if you have access to it, why should I play it again?

41:42 So I'm going to try to create new content anyway. Our guest last week, Jim venettis he's captured my attention like few instructors we've had on the show, and based on what you've fed back to me, you liked his teaching style as well. So it just so happens that the day I injured myself, I had been to the range and took video of my swings and sent it to Jim for his analysis and feedback. Well, the comments that he sent back after I injured myself got me just too excited about developing the new swing based on his style of the weight shift and stillness. But I can't do anything about it for a while. So I wrote back to Jim and I told him about my frustration of my predicament, and he suggested that I treat this like it's a winter off. It's the off season.

42:34 I don't have that. Being here in California, we get to play twelve months a year, but so many golf smarter listeners in the northern part of the US, in Europe and the UK have to suffer through this every single year themselves. So yeah, I think it's a great idea. So Jim and I have scheduled a long recording session later this week to record a bunch of episodes covering a number of topics, but especially we're going to folks us on off season work, working indoors, short game mechanics, putting things like that that I hope will not only keep my sanity as I try to recover, but we'll give some helpful insights and advice to you. And you should definitely check out his website. He's so good. Anyway, let's go ahead and get back to our golf course architect guest today, David McLay Kidd with his insights on how amateur golfers can strategize playing a golf hole with a designer's perspective.

43:33 Well, it comes as a surprise to many golfers the hype and design golf holes from tee to green, actually design them from green back to tea. We're always looking for how the green sits into the location that we've selected for the green, and the green might sit in from left to right, right to left, back to front. There's all sorts of ways that we could nastle it into that natural piece of environment. But when we've decided how it sits in there, we then start coming back down. They deciding, well, where would be the best angle into that green? And once we figured that out, how do we defend that spot? And then back to the tees. So when the player stands on the tees and views the hole in the mirror effect, they're looking at it in the opposite way then the way we designed it.

44:18 They have to put themselves in my head, what does the green look like? Where is it best to approach that green? Is the left side of the fairway, the right side, the short, the long Generally, if it's of course I've designed, Chances are are I'll be guarding that spot somewhere in the fairway. So once you've figured all that out, you can then decide what kind of attack you're going to make on that Whole and how you're going to make birdie