Golf course designer Dave Zinkand joins Derek Duncan on the Feed the Ball podcast to talk about his work at Bandon Trails and Bandon Preserve with Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, what “sympathetic restoration” looks like to him, what Harry Colt and Tom Simpson taught him about using the ground surrounding hazards, establishing name recognition…
Jim Urbina returns to the podcast, this time back in the guest chair, for a free-flowing discussion about the proliferation of bunkers in contemporary design, the sameness of courses now, whether designers and developers are pushing a vision or emulating others, and how much William Watson he feels he needs to bring back to his…
Golf designer Jay Blasi comes on the Feed the Ball podcast to talk about the challenges and importance of good public golf, comparing building new holes on top of existing holes versus working new land, the expectations versus outcome of Chambers Bay, the challenge of having to deal with cart paths, the challenge of making…
Golf course designer and builder Jaeger Kovich, who has shaped projects for Gil Hanse and Tom Doak and now is establishing himself as one of the busiest remodel specialists in the business, joins Golf Digest’s Derek Duncan to answer 24 questions about his views on architecture. Photos: Cover page, The Cradle (Pinehurst Resort). Above, Laurel…
Martin Ebert is one of the founding partners, along with Tom Mackenzie, of Mackenzie & Ebert, arguably the top golf design firm in Europe. Ebert has been the lead consulting architect, with Mackenzie, for most of the Open Championship courses as well as dozens of clubs in the U.K., Ireland and Europe. They also have…
You may have read or heard someone talk about good or bad “tie-ins” on a golf course. It loosely has to do with how the architecture is connected to the land during construction, but the topic is much larger and more nuanced than that. Derek Duncan and Jim Urbina define and discuss tie-ins, what they…
Looking ahead to The Players Championship, former PGA Tour player Richard Zokol and designer Jeff Mingay drop in from Canada to break down everything there is to know about The Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass (Zokol actually competed on Sawgrass in the 1980s). We get into the history and creation of the course, how…
Writer Michael Croley, author of the book Any Other Place: Stories, veered into the world of golf with a revelatory profile on Tom Doak in 2017 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, hardly the place you’d expect to find an expose on a golf course architect. Now fully entrenched in the golf writing world while teaching…
Texas-based architect Chet Williams joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss designing the 2024 Golf Digest Best New Private Course, The Covey at Big Easy Ranch near Houston. He talks about what made the land special, the ideal of creating as much hole-to-hole variety as possible, working with owner Billy Brown and how 25…