Tom Doak Interview - Part II

In Part II of my recent interview with American architect Tom Doak, Doak discusses his new projects in China, working with developer Mike Keiser and the problems with modern design worldwide. For those unfamiliar with Doak’s work, it’s worth noting that Golfweek Magazine recently ranked 5 of his golf courses among the Top 15 modern courses in America.

 

Planet Golf - You’ve perhaps been more successful than any other modern architect at changing perceptions. Now you’ve got a project here in China,  what do you hope to achieve with that course, in terms of altering opinions and the way golf is perceived in this country.

Tom Doak - I’d have to have a pretty big ego to think I was going to change the direction of golf in China. I know it’s possible; Alister MacKenzie went to Australia for six weeks once, and pretty much changed the direction of golf in Australia. But there are so many things happening here, and so fast, that it’s very hard to say you’ll have that much impact.

I was always interested in working in Asia someday, but I didn’t want to work in Asia until I found a client who understood golf the same way I do. We’ve had many calls in the last five years from developers in Asia, they call us and ask if we are interested in doing a project here or there, but I don’t take those approaches very seriously unless the client says to me they’ve played one of my courses, or they are talking to me because somebody I know, and who knows my work really well, recommended me. Otherwise I think they are probably more interested in selling houses, than building a great golf course. So it took quite a while before I stumbled onto a client that really loved golf, and clearly wanted to do something cool. And then it was easy to say yes.

 

PG - Speaking of doing something cool, could you describe the project for us?

TD - Well we’ve got two projects here. One is in Haikou, almost downtown. There’s a river that comes around the city and feeds out into the ocean, and there’s an island on the river that’s about 300 acres, so just big enough for a golf course and a little more. And that’s the property that I came to see here. Interestingly, being from New York City when I saw this island it reminded me of Roosevelt Island in New York in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, and I thought ‘God if somebody had built a golf course on Roosevelt Island 50 years ago that would be pretty spectacular’. So right away I thought that could be a really interesting project.

It’s sort of evolved and is going to be more private now than we first talked about two years ago. But the interesting thing is while I was here that first time, Mr. Han (the client) grew up in Hainan province, and we talked about some of the other courses I’d built that they were near the ocean and sand. And he wanted to take me to an area that he knew from growing up here, that he used to paint.  And we sort of got lost, the next thing we knew we came over a hill and we were at land’s end, the northeastern tip of the island and there was a big lighthouse that dropped dramatically down both sides into the ocean. And I was like ‘Whoa, where are we’, I mean we were off the grid on the GPS, it just showed us going through blank land. And he said ‘Is this really good’ and I said ‘let’s get out and walk around a little but yeah that’s the kind of land you want to work for’. So when I came back 3 months later, he said ‘I’m negotiating to buy that piece of land’. That project will certainly be open to the public, and the idea behind it is that everyone will come here to see that one. There will probably be three or four golf courses and hotels and everything thing else, but because of the nature of that project the nature of the island project here in Haikou changed a little bit. We don’t want to build two things that are going to compete with each other, so this one’s changed now.

 

PG - So in terms of what you hope to achieve with these two projects, is it more important to have another couple of courses that are well ranked and well received internationally, or is this something you would like Chinese people to embrace and perhaps lead to more work here?

TD - It’s going to sound strange, but I don’t really worry about trying to control how my career will go next, because I’ve learned I have no control over it. You just have to sort of ride the wave of where it’s going. So there’s no telling where these two projects will lead, but they’re two really interesting projects to build for the next year and a half or two years. My experience is that they will lead to more things and whether that leads to more things here or someplace else, there’s no telling.

 

PG - Is there one place in the world you haven’t worked that you would really like to work?

TD - South America really doesn’t have any courses that are thought of as great, and there’s got to be spectacular land there. But actually the one type of golf course that I’ve never built anything like, that I would love to have the opportunity to someday. All the courses around London, the Heathland courses that are just southwest of London, and there are a few north of Paris as well. That sort of genre of golf course nobody’s built for a long time because that sort of land is so rare as is that ground cover, and if you don’t have that setting you can’t do that sort of golf course. There are some sites in other places in Europe (Netherlands, Germany, Poland) that are in Heathland settings, and I’d love to do something like Sunningdale or Swinley Forest or St George’s Hill or those places that I think are really special.

Sometimes I ask people online, random people, ‘where have you seen something that you think would make a cool golf course’, so I’ve got this odd little list in the back of my head of places people have told me. If somebody called me and said, politically it would be impossible, but if they said ‘we want to do a golf course in Iran near the Caspian Sea’, I know that there’s some good land there. But I think we’re a while away from being able to go explore that one.

 

PG – Can you pick a couple of hidden gems, personal favorites that you think are under-appreciated?

TD - It’s easy to start in Britain and just keep picking courses there. The first that comes to mind is Swinley Forest, it’s not as famous as its neighbors Sunningdale and Wentworth which host tournaments. Swinley Forest is a private club. It’s 6,001 yards from the championship tees and only par 67 or 68. That’s the sort of course no one in America or no one in China would let me build, it’s so far off what the standard is of what everybody thinks of as a great golf course. That’s one of the 50 best courses I’ve ever seen. And not only is it really interesting and not only does it break people’s conventions of what a great golf course is, but because it’s so short and so compacted, it takes two hours to play. And it’s really fun to go out, whizz around and be done. One of the problems golf has is it takes too much time. In the United States our lifestyles are changing, we’re spending more time with our kids than people did 30 years ago so it’s hard to justify joining a private club and going to play on Saturday or Sunday every week. And if you’re not going to do that then it’s hard to justify the expense of belonging to the damn thing. So we need more golf courses that look different, and that are short and quick to play. The other one I thought of was North Berwick. Same sort of thing, 6,300 yards right at the edge of town. Maybe the most beautiful golf course I’ve ever played, you know not in terms of raw scenery and nature but the way it’s integrated with the town, and the coastline, and some iconic features of that town.

 

PG - Speaking of quirky golf, has there ever been anything you’ve built, be it a feature or a hole, that you thought was really cool but that people just didn’t get?

TD - Oh sure, I try never to focus too much on one hole in particular. It’s always about the best total solution for 18 holes and my style, if there’s anything really different about what I do than most architects do, it’s that I build greens that are different and have more contour and dictate play more. If you’re trying to approach this green from the wrong angle, it’s almost impossible to hit a good shot. Some people think that’s unfair. In the back of their minds, especially if they don’t play the course much, they think ‘well I was in this position in the fairway and I hit a great shot and I couldn’t get it anywhere near the hole’. They don’t even know they were in the wrong position in the fairway and they should’ve tried to avoid there. They just think ‘well its in the fairway I should have been able to do it.’ But if you take that mentality for every golf course and for every hole, the game would be too easy for the good players. If you and I from that position in that fairway had a chance to hit it close to the hole, then the tour pros would just eat the golf course up, there would be nothing to it for them. The only way to make it interesting for a really good player is to have certain places where it is almost impossible, even for the best player in the world, to hit it up there and make a birdie.

 

PG - So width is the key ingredient to interesting, strategic golf then?

TD - Width, combined with enough contour in the fairway or on the green or enough hazard around the green. You need the width so the average player can find his ball and make four and progress but width is silly if it doesn’t matter where you hit it off the tee. If I can hit it anywhere and still get it really close to the hole, then width gets people around and makes it play a little faster but it’s pointless unless there is something balancing it at the other end.

 

PG - Would you dare suggest a par three, four or five that you like more than any other - or is that like asking a parent which child they love best?

TD - Golf course architects always use that as an excuse to not offend all their other clients. We have favorites; even parents have favorites if they have enough kids. But it’s not just as politically correct. If you’ve got 30 clients and they all want to think they’re the guy. No I have favorite holes, a couple of my very favorite holes that I’ve built are at Barnbougle Dunes and Ballyneal in the USA, which is less well known because it’s a private club and not many people get to see it. They’re the only two clients I’ve had that didn’t really have any background in golf, but they were interesting people, they really trusted me and they just told me to go make something fun and they weren’t going to second guess what I was going to do.

Most golf course architects would tell you that’s the ideal client, but usually it’s not. I learned on the first golf course I did on my own. That client was a little like that, he liked golf but he didn’t want to put himself in the process and interfere. He trusted me to do the golf course so he wasn’t very involved when we were building it, and he didn’t come out very often when we were doing the construction. Then when we got done, he was still a golfer so he didn’t understand why I’d done some of the things I’d done. So not having been involved in the process all the way through, when something conflicts with your owners sense of what’s right, and he hasn’t been through the process, you sound like you’re defending it afterwards and you don’t have the same approach.

So generally speaking it’s better to have a client that is involved in the process, where you’re not going to get to the end and they’re going to say ‘I don’t like that’. My clients, at least most of them, love golf and only a few of them have developed a golf course before. They’re doing it because they love golf, because they’ve been successful enough in business to be able to afford to do it. So it’s a hobby and they want to have fun doing it, so they want to be involved and it would be crazy for them not to be involved as they won’t be happy with the project if they aren’t involved. But there are two ways you can be involved. You can be involved to the standpoint where you are walking around finding out why somebody’s doing something the way they are, or you can say ‘I don’t like that, change that.’ If the client is really trying to dictate to the architect that’s probably not going to turn out very well. For the architect to say at the beginning, ‘this is the kind of thing I like’, that helps a lot. There are a lot of different ways you can build a great golf course. You look at the great golf courses in the world, St Andrews, Pine Valley, Augusta etc. Those aren’t very much alike; one of them is super hard and one of them your grandma can get around. So there are different models for success, and you’ve got to find a model where you and the client are on the same page in terms of what you’re trying to do.

But back to the question, and Barnbougle and Ballyneal are the only two projects I’ve had where the client lived right there, so they would come out and see what we were doing but because they didn’t know much about golf they wouldn’t offer any feedback, other than to make it fun. They both play a little now, because they could see the fun in it. Nearly every great golf course I’ve seen, even the person who doesn’t play golf can appreciate that’s a beautiful place, that looks like it would be fun. I used to take my son when he was little and by the time he was two, he’d been to Augusta and Cypress Point and some pretty cool places. His idea of fun at Crystal Downs was rolling down the hill on the 8^th fairway, but a golf course having features like that, those are really the things that make it fun for the golfers too.

 

PG - You mentioned some holes at Barnbougle standout as your favorites?

TD - Yeah there are three holes at Barnbougle (4, 7, 13) that I think are among the best holes I’ve ever built. They aren’t overlooked, you know in Australia they are pretty well known holes but in the rest of the world nobody really knows much about the golf course. It’s never on TV so you don’t hear about them generally and when you’re discussing great holes nobody thinks to bring them up. The first one is number 4, a short par four. I think short par 4s are the most overlooked part of design. They are the difference between the courses I really love, most of which are older, and the sort of modern approach to golf where you are trying to get to a 7,200 yard course and don’t really have room for many 330 yard par fours. Cypress Point and Pine Valley and St Andrews have four or five or six great holes of that length, and you have modern designers saying ‘oh you can’t have a hole that short anymore.’ So you wonder about the disconnect there, they apparently just aren’t familiar enough with some of those courses to go, ‘oh yeah I guess that’s right that does have a lot of good short par fours.’

The 4^th at Barnbougle is actually funny, it took me a long time in the routing to figure out that hole was there. It’s kind of the end of the usable piece of ground at one end of the golf course because the strip of dunes gets so narrow there that you can’t go any farther and have room for a hole coming back the other way. So there was a green site there, a little pocket up high in the dunes that I thought was a cool place for a green, but originally I was thinking it was going to be a much longer hole to get there and that was a really severe green site for a longer hole, especially as it plays into the wind. Originally what are now the 3^rd and 4^th holes, I thought was one long hole. The tees wouldn’t have been as far back but it was a par five.

We built the holes on the other side (back nine) of the golf course first and by the time we’d gotten around to building the front nine I’d realized it was so windy there, and that was into the wind 90% of the time, that a hole like that wasn’t going to work. So we broke it up into two holes, a 350-yard par four and a par four that is under 300 yards. Because we were working in metres, I didn’t even think at the time but its 260 something metres, or 295 yards.  If you built that in the United States and said the back tee was 295 yards they’d say ‘you can’t do that, people will drive the green all the time, it’s got to be 330 or 340 yards.’ So right there, one of the reasons I love that hole is probably most clients wouldn’t let me build something like that. And being a little shorter is a huge difference, because it gives you a chance to hit it over a huge bunker and try to drive the green. It’s a big gamble for most players, especially with the wind in your face. You can try to do that, or you can try to hit sort of a long tee shot to the left and play from there, or you can just hit an iron down to the bottom of the fairway and play half blind up over, you know hit a 180 yard shot and still have a fairly short approach shot. There’s not just one way to play the hole, and there is no right way to play the hole. What’s right for you might not be right for me. Not only that, what’s right for me might be different depending on which way the winds blowing. Those are the best holes, unfortunately most players think that an architect has a right way to play the hole in mind and that should always work. It’s one of the main things I learned living in Britain for a year, holes didn’t play the same way from one day to the next and they make no concessions for that, to them that’s part of golf. The Road Hole at St Andrews, there are days where the best players in the world can’t get there in two, but they don’t move the tee marker around to the corner of the wall, they just say ‘well that hole is into the wind you can’t get there in two’. But number 5 will be a driver, 8-iron the same day so it balances out.

In the States when an architect is planning a golf course, a lot of people think we’re supposed to make allowances for all those things so it will be the same all the time. The whole idea that the golf course should be maintained the same every day, 365 days a year, that’s not natural. It makes no sense and costs far too much more to try to keep the greens fast all the time. In the old days the club championships were in the Fall, because the temperatures were cooling down and you could cut the greens lower and not worry about them dying. Now everybody wants that in the middle of summer when it’s hot and humid and you have to put way more chemicals down to keep the grass alive. Fundamentally, a lot of people don’t understand that golf is an outdoor game, that the conditions are going to change from one day to the next and that’s part of it. They think it’s a video game and it should always work out exactly the same.

 

PG - So the game risks becoming too vanilla. Is part of the problem with modern design that golf has become too rational, that we design golf courses to a set of criteria that is inflexible? And who’s to blame – the architects, the media, the owners…?

TD - Everyone. Anything that becomes a big business like golf tends to get away from its roots in the process. From one step to the next isn’t necessarily irrational but 50 years later you wind up so far from where you started it makes no sense. It’s true of a lot of things in life, things just get more and more standardized over time.

You look at the food business in the United States. 50 years ago people were growing stuff on farms, and that went to market and now it’s being shipped in from all over the world and the food is less and less natural and less and less healthy and yet nobody can stop it, it’s just been an evolution. It’s the same in the golf business. Developers only insist on golf courses being 7,200 yards long because they think the people that are going to pay to play insist on it being 7,200 yards long. And the really crazy thing about that, is most of those people have no intention of playing it from 7,200 yards. It may say that’s what it is from the back tees on the scorecard, but 2% of golfers will play from there and yet if even though most golfers play most courses from 6,300 to 6,500 yards if it doesn’t say 7,200 yards from the back tees on the scorecard it’s wrong. Pete Dye said to me once when I worked for him, ‘you make a 7,000 yard course for the great players and the only way to make it playable for the average guy is to build it at 5,800 yards and lie and say it’s 6,300 yards.’

 

PG – It’s funny, because clearly your approach to golf is the right one but it would probably be better for the game if you became a factory, if you became a Robert Trent Jones II or a Nicklaus Design and built more courses. Sure the quality of the product would be diluted but there would be more ‘right’ courses built.

TD - I don’t know if that’s true, but certainly Trent Jones and Dick Wilson and even Donald Ross rationalized that it was better for them to put more good product on the market than a little great. And you know, in Ross’s period I’d have to agree with that, but in Jones’s period, maybe not.

 

PG - Do you sometimes think that your peers perhaps don’t push hard enough for golf to escape this mindset of design being by formula?

TD - Once you take the step in your career, that I’m building what the client wants instead of what I really think I ought to build because that’s the path of least resistance, it’s very hard to go back. And you tend to wind up with clients that are more and more demanding and more and more insistent that you do it their way. I got a reputation when I was young for being a temperamental architect, because I stuck by my opinions of stuff.

You know I saw Pete Dye argue with his clients a lot in the time that I worked for him, but it was kind of a friendly jousting match but with a serious edge to it. The first summer I worked at Long Cove I had lunch one day with the two developers, they were interested why a 20-year old kid going to an Ivy League school would be down there in a T-shirt and jeans raking out bunkers. And they said ‘we’re doing two golf courses and we’re doing a course over here with Rees Jones and it’s all very professional, and he does plans and he’ll build it that way’. But they said ‘we thought this was a really special piece of property and one of the two partners had worked with Mr. Dye before and he thought he was the right guy and he said to his partner this will be a crazy process, you won’t believe it but you have to do something like this once in your life to see how this guy works’. So they had Pete do the other golf course, which was Long Cove.

At Long Cove, the golf course was laid out, but there weren’t very detailed plans for the holes. We were out there shaping greens, P.B Dye, Pete’s youngest son, was doing a lot of the shaping and he’d just come up with an idea one morning and go out and build it that way. Pete lived there all summer, and he’d come out and say ‘I want to put a tee further out to the left’, right where somebody’s home lot was going to be. So he’d be like ‘it’s going to be a better hole if a put a tee back there’ and the owners were like ‘well there’s a lot there’ and Pete would be like ‘I’ll buy the lot, I want to put a tee there’ and the developer would say, ‘we’ve already got you down for seven.’ So they went back and forth, but if Pete was very serious about it he got his way most of the time. They were afraid underneath it all that he would walk off the job and never come back. He could do that because he was Pete Dye that was his reputation. Hardly anyone who hired him didn’t understand what they were dealing with. He made no bones about it, and he wouldn’t take a job until someone had pursued him for long enough or talked to other people to understand what he’s all about.

Now when you’re 25 it’s pretty hard to establish that reputation, to have the leeway from the client to do those sorts of things, and it took me a while to really understand that. I was just telling them my honest, true opinion – ‘this is why I was trying to do it, and this is why you are wrong’. But that is not the way to go about it, and it took me a few years to figure that out.

 

PG - You’ve no doubt won more arguments as your career’s progressed then?

TD - I’ve won a fair number of arguments but for a while competitor’s trying to get the same job would say, ‘oh he’s hard to deal with, you don’t want to hire him’. But at the same time, because I stuck up for what I thought, some other people thought ‘well he’s got a different viewpoint and in the end it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to get that reputation. In the early days it was but overall, certainly today, it’s a good thing that I was that way. And I’ve learned to be more diplomatic about it, and I’ve learned to sort out my clients in the beginning so we don’t have the arguments like that very much.

I learned a lot from Pacific Dunes, which was one of the only jobs in my career that I actively pursued. Mr. Keiser bought the land in something like 1995, and it was obviously going to take quite a while to get the environmental approvals. I knew two or three people who knew him through golf in one way or another, they told me he just bought this piece of land that is pretty spectacular, let us introduce you.  So they did, and I went out and looked at the property in 1995. By then David Kidd had already been there. Four or five other architects had been there too, but I just went out and spent a day walking around the property. Spectacular place. So I pursued Mr. Keiser and told him this would be a great opportunity for me, but I really think I’m the right guy to do a golf course on that kind of ground, because it’s going to be a linksy golf course and I’ve spent so much time in Britain. He knew a little bit who I was and the people that referred me to him, he really respected their opinion. He’d already kind of made an agreement with David to do the first golf course so even from like 1995 or 1996 I was sort of unofficially the first in line to do the second golf course there. But because it was four years before we did it, I had time to really get to know him. And we didn’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on every single design issue. If you had the two of us together and we were talking about green designs, Mike would say ‘I like flatter greens’ and of course that is the dead opposite to what I’m known for. Because I’d gotten to know him for four years I’d sort of gotten to understand what exactly he meant by that, and how I could work around that and have him be happy with it and me be happy with it.

If I had built the greens at Ballyneal or Barnbougle at Pacific Dunes we’d have argued about it a lot, and he and David argued about some greens (at Bandon Dunes) and redid them two or three times. I’d heard about that and I said to Jim Urbina, who was running the project for me, we are never going to get to that point on this job. We are not going to argue with him, we’re going to start out building things that are pretty gentle and we’re going to work our way into doing things that are a little less gentle once we have his confidence. And that worked perfectly. You know for a year or more everything went exactly right, nobody had a bad day, we had a crew working together that all got along and had fun, and we all knew we were doing something special and nobody messed it up. And it’s so hard for something like that to come together, just like anything else in life.  To have an endeavor that big, that takes that long and to have everything go that smoothly. I didn’t know if that would ever happen again.

 

PG - So moving onto Old Macdonald, what changed in your relationship with Mike Keiser to allow you to build those greens at Old Macdonald. Did he mellow or did you become more forceful and more demanding?

TD - It wasn’t that I was more forceful or demanding, there were two or three things involved. One, if Old Macdonald had my name on it, Mr. Keiser would not have hired me to do the golf course. As brilliant as he is at what he does, he still takes the modern view that most developers do that I want a different golf course architect to promote for each project. I think he appreciates that he’s worked with some great architects and it gets harder and harder every time to pick somebody new and hope they’re are going to turn out as well as it’s been going so far. And yet, he still would have resisted me doing the fourth golf course, but once he got the idea that instead of hiring another golf course architect he’d like to hire Charles Blair Macdonald then it was a pretty easy step for him. ‘Who could do that? Tom and Jim could do that, because they’ve worked on a lot of Macdonald golf courses’. And then he called me up and said ‘could you do something like that?’ and I said ‘yeah we could do something like that, we’d probably have fun doing something like that, as long as we’re not just strictly bound to building boiler-plate versions of holes. As long as we take that style and all the holes that Macdonald loved, but we build them the way we know how to build them. You look at Macdonald golf courses, and what he built in the 1910s and 1920s, nobody knew much about golf course construction back then. His golf courses look the way they look, not necessarily because that’s exactly how he wanted them to look, but because that’s all he knew what to do. So we weren’t tied into that at all, that gave us enough leeway to think we could still do cool things.

 

PG - Was there ever a point in the project where Mr. Keiser asked you to soften a green, or perhaps step back from something that was too radical, or was he completely open to what you had in mind?

TD - I don’t remember anything where he asked us to go soften something. He’s a very involved client, and at least every other time I was there he’d come walk around with me for a day and he’d look at all the things that I was looking at the time. And he’s not shy about asking questions, like ‘what are you doing over there and how’s that going to work?’ And the biggest difference about him, as opposed to most people, is where 95% people would suggest ‘what about adding something,’ Mike is one of the 5% who suggest taking something out. ‘Is that really necessary?’ ‘You don’t need a bunker over there, if your ball goes rolling down that hollow you’re not going to make par anyway so why do you need a bunker down there.’

He thinks more about the average golfer, because although he’s better than average he realizes that most of his customers aren’t better than average. So he was involved at that level the whole way through, but surprisingly we took the opposite tack at Old Macdonald than we did at Pacific Dunes. The first green we built was the 5^th green, the little par three with huge contours in it. If that had been the first green we’d built at Pacific Dunes Mike would have fired us - but at Old Macdonald, he loved it. I think partly we got away with those things, because we could blame it on Macdonald. You could say, the 6^th green at National is wild and radical like that and that’s what you want us to do. We didn’t even have to have that discussion with him, he already understood that and completely embraced it to the level that we didn’t argue about all the wild stuff we were doing at all.

 

PG - Finally, Alister MacKenzie is one of your hero’s and I wonder if you pinch yourself now that you’re mentioned in the same breath as him?

TD - No I can’t make myself think about it that way. It’s easy to get a big ego in the golf course business, and I’m not saying I don’t have one, but you are only as good as your next project. I’ve always tried to live by the ideals, that what’s important is the project and not the designer, and it really is. If I did have an influence on the direction of the business in the last 10 or 15 years, I think the biggest influence I might have had would have been something I was writing about when I wrote for GOLF Magazine 25 years ago - that great courses are not just the product of a great designer, but they’re the product of a great piece of land and a great client. It’s when all three come together.

I used to be involved in the rankings of the best golf courses in the world for GOLF Magazine, and the business when I started in the 1980s was - take a really flat, dumpy piece of land and hire Pete Dye to go create something extravagant and brilliant. And he was probably the best guy there ever was at doing that, but when you went to the best golf course Pete Dye ever built, there was no question, at least back then, that it was Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic. That course has seven holes along the sea and he didn’t really move any dirt around at all to build it. Is that golf course great because it was Pete Dye, or great because it was great piece of land to start with?

I think I might have helped convince a few people that the first thing they needed to look for was not an architect, but a really good site. I don’t know that I had anything to do with convincing them of it, but that’s certainly Mike Keiser’s approach to what he does, and Mark Parsinen’s and Herb Kohler’s now, it wasn’t when I knew Herb when we were building Blackwolf Run for him 30 years ago, but when he went to do Whistling Straits he looked for a special piece of ground to do something. Even if he had to move a lot of earth to make it work, he went to the lakeshore to find something good. And that’s not anything new, that’s not my idea, that’s just my observation and the business had gotten so far away from that, that it was a radical idea. MacKenzie certainly had that idea, and the people that hired him to do golf courses certainly had that idea. That’s been the biggest reason there have been a lot of great courses built in the last 10 or 15 years, there have been some clients where that was their goal, that was the only reason they were doing it, to do something special and they understood it well enough to say, ‘let’s not just go out and do it anywhere, let’s put the right project together.’

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