Episode 42: Jay Blasi
Jay Blasi founded his own design company in 2012 after working for Robert Trent Jones II for over a decade. He gained notoriety as the lead associate on two high profile Jones courses: The Patriot Golf Club in Oklahoma, and Washington State’s Chambers Bay, host of the 2015 U.S. Open, where Blasi was instrumental in infusing the design with its sandy, tumbling avant garde character. He recently completed a total reroute and rebuild of Santa Ana Country Club near Los Angeles and continues to work with officials at Sharp Park outside San Francisco in an ongoing effort to restore its lost Alister Mackenzie features.
Jay talks with Derek about the game’s golf cart conundrum, getting the PGA TOUR and USGA to truly contribute to public golf, the plan for Sharp Park and how it can once again become one of the country’s great municipal courses, winning the Santa Ana job as a last minute interviewee, the awful decor at RTJ II office, how only a few active architects have extensive routing experience, if collaborations are the future of design, if there’s a need to break from neoclassical naturalism, his thoughts on Wisconsin becoming an international golf destination and “peaking” to soon with Chambers Bay.
Cover Photo: Santa Ana Country Club (photo: Brett Hochstein, hochsteindesign.com)
Outro: Dawes, “Hey Lover”
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2 Replies to “Episode 42: Jay Blasi”
This was a great discussion and touched on a lot of interesting topics. One of the things that was really refreshing to hear was to appreciate rather than outright dismiss any era of golf course architecture. While there are many that are vocal in their crusade against the work of the Joneses, I have never understood it, along with the blanket glorification of Golden Age design. Not all Golden Age course was minimalist and strategic and not every course built after WWII is formulaic and artificial. Appreciate/study it all and what can be learned from it and above all else, play what you like!
Your podcasts are insightful and for anyone interested in learning more about golf course design and related issues, I’d highly recommend a listen.
Thank you Chris. You’ve summarized my feelings as well. I often wonder how many courses critics of Jones and his contemporaries have really played or seen.
Thanks for listening!