Episode 90: Benjamin Warren
Benjamin Warren is a golf course designer and shaper from Scotland. We works all over the U.S., Japan and Europe, and he joins the Feed the Ball golf podcast to discuss building courses.
Feed the Ball Salon 28, ft. Lee Schmidt
Lee Schmidt’s lengthy golf architecture career began in the early 1970s working for Pete Dye and took many different detours through the decades. He worked closely with Landmark Land Company on numerous Dye projects in the 70s and 80s before taking a job with Jack Nicklaus’ design firm. In the late 1990s he created his…
Feed the Ball Salon Vol. 27, ft. Ben Crenshaw
Two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw joins golf course builder Jim Urbina and Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan to discuss his long time partnership with architect Bill Coore and the beliefs and impulses that define the many courses they’ve built, from Sand Hills to Friar’s Head to Bandon Trails, all the way through to their…
Episode 86: Blake Conant
In less than 10 years in the profession, Blake Conant has risen from crew member to shaper to the co-designer of Old Barnwell, a stunning new course near Aiken, S.C. Conant has primarily shaped greens and bunkers for Tom Doak at projects like Houston’s Memorial Park, Bel Air, The National’s Gunnamatta Course in Australia and…
Episode 84: Don Placek
Don Placek began working for Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design in 1997 after being in Perry Dye’s Denver office for several years. It was a significant jump, going from the types of technical builds Dye was coordinating in the western U.S. and Asia to Doak’s more intuitive, organic way of designing and constructing courses. Placek…
Episode 83: Stephen Kay
Architect Stephen Kay has been involved in the building, remodeling or renovation of over 300 courses during his design career spanning back to the mid-1980s. He was one of the pioneering voices in the late 80s for looking at the historical record of a course during renovation to attempt to honor the original architecture. He…
Episode 82: Allan MacCurrach
Golf course builder Allan MacCurrach began working on crews for Pete Dye in the late 1970s and opened his own golf course contracting company in 1987. He’s been involved in building or remodeling over 20 courses for Dye, who passed away in early 2020, as well as architects like Tom Fazio, Bobby Weed and Rees…
Feed the Ball Salon Vol. 25, ft. Josh Pettit
Designer and historian Josh Pettit began collecting the writings of Alister MacKenzie for his new compendium of essays, “The MacKenzie Reader,” years ago, and was ready to publish in 2020 when the pandemic postponed printing until the summer of 2022. The wait was worth it–the Reader is a gorgeous volume of Pettit’s selections of the…
Feed the Ball Salon Vol. 24, ft. Rob Collins
Landmand Golf Club in northeast Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, is one of the largest and most expansive golf courses ever built, with the largest total square footage of greens of any course in the U.S. That it was designed by Rob Collins and Tad King, creators or the equally audacious…
Episode 81: Jim Nagle
Jim Nagle began working with golf course renovation and historical restoration legend Ron Forse in 1998, in what might be considered the field’s pioneering days. Golf course restoration is an attempt to reestablish a course’s first principles–placing it back in a specific point in time, usually in accordance with the way the original architect designed…