Designer Bill Coore comes into the salon to discuss greens and putting surfaces with Jim Urbina and Derek Duncan. Topics include the importance of shaping greens and surrounds in relation to single holes or the entire golf course, the 14th and 2nd greens at Sand Hills, building “floating” greens and finding natural landforms, looking vs.…
George Waters began his design career after spending a summer living and doing course maintenance in Dornoch, then getting an internship with Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design. He worked construction projects for a variety of designers, including Doak, then wrote the seminal book on sand based courses, Sand and Golf: How Terrain Shapes the Game.…
Rees Jones has spent nearly 35 years preparing, modifying and remodeling golf courses for major championship events. In addition to the 100 original courses and dozens of renovations he’s orchestrated, he’s infused his vision into such venerable American tournament courses as Pinehurst No. 2, Oakland Hills, Medinah No. 3 and The Country Club for the…
Richard Mandell’s golf design practice has taken off over the last 10 years. He entered the business in the early 1990’s and paid his dues for over a decade working singular jobs while learning how to build and renovate courses with a minimal amount of of unnecessary inputs or accessorization. As a result he gained a…
Trying to describe the essentials of good golf course routing calls to mind Justice Potter Stewart’s old brief about classifying porn — I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Bad golf course routings can be spotted miles away but truly great ones can be sublime. You often don’t realize they’re…
The first project Kyle Franz ever worked on was Tom Doak’s masterpiece, Pacific Dunes, a course now recognized as one of the best in the world. That fortuitous turn launched his design/build career where he amassed one of the business’s strongest pedigrees shaping courses for Bill Coore, Tim Liddy, Gil Hanse and others. His big solo break came…
Do you love Donald Ross and the idea of experiencing accurate expressions of his designs? Then this podcast is for you. Architect Kris Spence made the jump from golf superintendent to the design and build world when a club in North Carolina hired him to help restore the lost features of its Donald Ross course. 20…
In this episode of Feed the Ball, Derek Duncan speaks to Bill Coore, who along with design partner Ben Crenshaw and their team of shapers has built a collection of what are considered to be some of the greatest golf courses of the last 60 or 70 years. Bill shares his thoughts on life and…
It’s impossible to talk about Pinehurst No. 2 without talking about the big convex greens. And it’s hard to talk about the greens without recalling Pete Dye’s old yarn about how they got the way they are. Dye played the No. 2 course weekly while stationed at Fort Bragg in the 1940’s. The greens then were not particularly crowned…