Designing Golf

For a long time, we’ve wanted to do an in-depth exploration of the Sand Hills Golf Club, Coore & Crenshaw’s masterpiece in Mullen, Nebraska. The day has finally arrived: this episode’s guest, David Normoyle, has just released an excellent book on the history of Sand Hills called “Lonely Beauty.” David takes Garrett through both the fine details and the overarching meanings of the Sand Hills story: the initial leap of faith by the club’s founder, Dick Youngscap; the sneaky-bold design innovations of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw; and the lessons that today’s developers and architects should — but maybe haven’t yet — learned from this pathbreaking yet humble project. To purchase your own copy of “Lonely Beauty,” visit Sand Hills’ online shop here.
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Short courses are having a moment right now. They’re being built at a breakneck pace and enjoying a kind of cultural relevancy that would have been hard to predict 30 years ago. Many exciting, up-and-coming architects are getting their first big breaks on short-course projects. One of those architects is Benjamin Warren, my guest for this episode. A North Berwick native and current resident of Japan, Benjamin recently designed the Loop at Chaska, an innovative short course in Minnesota, and is currently building the Half Mile at Terra Cotta in Illinois. In this episode, he talks with Garrett about those projects, the unique characteristics of short course architecture, and some of his favorite “wee links.”

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Ten years ago today, Winter Park — a nine-hole municipal golf course in a suburban town outside of Orlando, Florida — underwent one of the most important renovations of the 21st century. On a budget of just over a million dollars, Keith Rhebb and Riley Johns, a pair of Coore & Crenshaw associates, transformed WP9 into an excellent, fun, community-focused golf facility. It’s a model for what the municipal game can and should look like. So, in this episode, Garrett chats with Keith Rhebb about the Winter Park project and what we can learn from it. They also discuss some tune-up work Rhebb and Johns did after a recent greenkeeping incident.
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Many golfers don’t like seeing out-of-bounds stakes anywhere near a playing corridor; they object on principle. Yet some of the most famous, revered holes in golf use out-of-bounds as a strategic hazard — so there must be something to it. In this installment of our Golf Architecture 101 series, Garrett takes his Fried Egg Golf colleague PJ Clark through the ways OB has been, and should be, deployed in golf course design. Garrett also brings in Craig Winter, the USGA’s Senior Director of the Rules of Golf and Amateur Status, for a quick lesson on the history of the OB penalty. Toward the end of the episode, Garrett and PJ discuss several famous, OB-centric holes, including Nos. 16 and 17 at St. Andrews and the sixth hole at upcoming Presidents Cup venue Medinah No. 3.
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On September 1, East Potomac Golf Links, a popular municipal golf facility in Washington, D.C., was supposed to shut down for a massive renovation led by the Trump administration and architect Tom Fazio. But then... it didn’t. So what’s going on here? And what’s the backstory? Garrett is joined by his Fried Egg Golf colleague (and DMV resident) Brendan Porath to go through the full history of East Potomac, from its beginnings as an innovative reversible golf course to its current status as a political football.
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