If might seem like golf course architect Scott Hoffman came out of nowhere with his design at Lost Rail, opened in 2022 outside of Omaha. However, he’d previously worked for over a decade with Tom Fazio, designing courses in the western U.S. He then worked with Tim Jackson and David Kahn for a number of years. Hoffman wasn’t pursuing new work when he was approached about looking at land for a club near Omaha, where he’s from, and those interests turned into Lost Rail, Golf Digest’s runner up for Best New Private Course for 2023. He’s now busy constructing Mapleton, another new stand-alone club near Sioux Falls, Idaho.

Hoffman joins Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan on the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss finding the land for Lost Rail, his instinct for routing golf courses, the insomnia-inducing puzzle of routing Lost Rail, the freedom of working for Fazio versus being his own business, how to water a 20,000 square-foot green, whether classical architecture influences his designs, the futility of properly evaluating a course after just one round and how he compares and contrasts Shinnecock Hills with National Golf Links of America.

Photos: Cover page, Lost Rail (Lost Rail Golf Club); Above, the par-3 11th at Scottsdale National.

Watch and listen to Bill Coore narrate the latest Golf Digest Every Hole at Cabot Saint Lucia (script by Derek Duncan).

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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 newest courses including Point Hardy at Cabot Saint Lucia.

Crenshaw talks about meeting Urbina for the first time, Coore grooming green contours down to the quarter inch, how his roots playing dry and windy courses influenced his preference for designing toward the ground game, the importance of matching turf conditions to the architecture, the influence of Perry Maxwell in his green building and the intuitive and enduring chemistry between he and Coore.

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Watch and listen to Bill Coore narrate the latest Golf Digest Every Hole at Cabot Saint Lucia (script by Derek Duncan).

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Photos: Opening page, Sand Hills #4; Above, Sand Hills #2

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Golf course architect Greg Letsche, lead designer for Ernie Els Design, joins Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan and golf course builder Jim Urbina to discuss his early years working for Pete Dye, how running projects for Jack Nicklaus differed from his experience with Dye, the design similarities between Dye and Nicklaus, the sometimes absurd challenges and hiccups working internationally in different cultures, how Els’ sympathy for poor golfers manifests in his designs, reuniting with Nicklaus at The Bear’s Club and transitioning into renovating older courses like the Scarlet Course at Ohio State (MacKenzie) and Wentworth (Colt) near London.

PHOTOS: Cover image: Albany, Bahamas (albanybahamas.com); Above: Anahita Mauritius (ernieels.com)

Watch Derek Duncan discuss Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course, host of the 2023 U.S. Open.

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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 St. Patrick’s in Ireland while working closely with Doak’s associates Eric Iverson, Don Placek, Brian Slawnik and Brian Schneider, who is his co-designer at Old Barnwell.

Conant joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss the difference between being a shaper for someone else and having final edit responsibility at Old Barnwell, how the search for creative opportunities stokes his passion for golf design, whether he and Schneider began with an initial vision for Old Barnwell, originality vs. derivation, drawing inspiration from other forms of art and nature and if designers of his generation need to be more ethically aware of golf development’s impacts on sustainability, social connections and the economy.

PHOTOS: Cover image: Old Barnwell, 13th hole; Above: Old Barnwell’s 6th and 7th holes.

Watch Derek Duncan discuss Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course, host of the 2023 U.S. Open.

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Shortly after Tom Weiskopf broke with design partner Jay Morrish in the late 1990s he turned to architect Phil Smith. Smith had been working with Nicklaus Design in Arizona, but the opportunity to partner one-on-one with Weiskopf was too good an opportunity to pass up. Over the next 24 years, Smith and Weiskopf designed courses in numerous countries with most of their best work occurring at gorgeous sites in the U.S. west, in Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Their latest work, completed after Weiskopf succumbed to cancer in 2022, is at Black Desert Resort in southern Utah, a dazzling course blasted from a landscape of black lava outcroppings.

Smith joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss the potentially contradictory transition from Weiskopf the elite professional golfer to professional architect, the importance of playability and aesthetic appeal (versus “championship-style” designs), the evolution of the “Weiskopf bunker,” the almost guilty feeling of building golf in many of the pristine environments they’ve worked, designing good drivable par 4s and the courses they’ve built that best represent the Smith-Weiskopf design philosophy.

PHOTOS: Cover image: Black Desert, Utah (courtesy of Brian Oar); Above: Spanish Peaks in Montana (philsmithdesign.net).

Watch Derek Duncan discuss Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course, host of the 2023 U.S. Open.

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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 began producing plans and blueprints for Doak’s projects and eventually migrated to the field where he helped shape and oversee numerous Renaissance projects, including The Renaissance Club in Scotland and CommonGround in Denver while consulting with venerable clubs like Shoreacres and Camargo. One of the profession’s great graphic artists, Placek has run the day-to-day operations at Renaissance Golf for 25 years and is often the point-person prospective clients first speak to regarding hiring Doak and the firm. Along with fellow associates Eric Iverson, Brian Slawnik and Brian Schneider, he’s now an owner and partner at Renaissance.

Placek joins the podcast to discuss some lean years partnering with Iverson, getting started with Doak and the impact of showing that large sums of money aren’t required to build great golf, Renaissance Design’s “Hippocratic oath” to do no more than is necessary to a site, what golfers like versus what they want, restoring Seth Raynor greens, the future of Renaissance design and the importance of short courses.

PHOTOS: Cover image: Placek’s map of Cabot Highlands in Inverness, Scotland (courtesy of Cabot); Above: The “Short” 11th hole at Camargo.

Watch Derek Duncan discuss Los Angeles Country Club’s North Course, host of the 2023 U.S. Open.

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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 built numerous new courses in the 1990s and early 2000s, many public, including The Architects Golf Club in New Jersey (in collaboration with Ron Whitten), where each hole was based on the style of a different architect. He continues to be busy with major remodels, consultations and a new municipal course, and is always one of the most entertaining voices in the room.

Kay joins Derek Duncan on the podcast to share story after story about what the business was like in the late 70s and 80s, the myth of green speeds, the impact of turf technology on golf course design, building the minimalist Links of North Dakota at the same time Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw were building the minimalist Sand Hills and a host of other intriguing topics.

Photos: Cover page, The Architects Golf Club (thearchitectsclub.com); Above, The Links of North Dakota (thelinksofnorthdakota.com).

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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 Jones. MacCurrach is also responsible for constructing–and designing, through interpretation of the numerous conversations and planning sessions he had with Dye —The Dye Course at White Oak, Golf Digest’s Best New Private Course of 2022. White Oak, located near Jacksonville on the Florida/Georgia border, is extremely private and is played only occasionally by its billionaire owner, his few guests and select Golf Digest panelists.

MacCurrach joins the Feed the Ball podcast to talk about his involvement in the White Oak project, creating something distinctive on a non-distinctive site, the opportunity and challenge of attempting to carry out Dye’s design directives after Dye could no longer participate in the construction, the evolution of Dye’s green contours as a reaction to higher green speeds, how the golf course building business has changed to a renovation business and the artistic and engineering genius of the original TPC Sawgrass design.

Photos: Cover page–The 16th hole at The Dye Course at White Oak (Brian Oar); Above–White Oak’s par 3 17th (Brian Oar).

See more White Oak photos and flyovers here.

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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 architect’s best and most important writings, presented with sketches, prints and routing maps. The volume will soon be in its third edition.

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Pettit visits the Salon to speak with hosts Derek Duncan and golf course builder Jim Urbina about a variety of topics, from his research into the archives at The Valley Club of Montecito that helped inform Urbina and Tom Doak’s greens renovation, the horse-trading that goes on with memberships when attempting to recreate what was originally designed, the romanticism of early-internet archival research and what’s still undiscovered, MacKenzie’s process for identifying local talent to construct his courses, the necessary discrepancy between the green elevations MacKenzie drew and what was originally built (and the problem that presents to preservationists), and why there isn’t a contemporary voice advocating for design ideals comparable to MacKenzie.

Get “The MacKenzie Reader” here.

Photos: Above, The Valley Club of Montecito (LC Lambrecht); Opening page, “Thirteenth at Cypress Point” (J.P. Graham Photos)

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The post Feed the Ball Salon Vol. 25, ft. Josh Pettit appeared first on Feed The Ball.

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 though much smaller Sweetens Cove outside Chattanooga, should come as no surprise–both courses (Landmand is their first 18-hole course) are courageous pieces of architecture that push the boundaries of the genre.

Collins comes back to the Feed the Ball podcast to talk about Landmand and his design outlook with Derek Duncan and golf course builder Jim Urbina. Topics include the new King-Collins short course at Palmetto Bluff, seeing the Landmand property for the first time, whether he doubted if he and King could pull of such a major build, if Landmand is a “maximalist” course, routing a course on 550 acres but only coming up with 16 holes, the reasoning behind the size and extremity of the greens, the thought behind the Sitwell green and figuring out the blank slate that was Red Feather in Lubbock.

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Photos: Cover photo–Landmand’s 12th hole; Above–Ground level view of Landmand’s 17 green.

The post Feed the Ball Salon Vol. 24, ft. Rob Collins appeared first on Feed The Ball.

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 it–using documentation and photography as resources. In the last few decades Nagle and Forse have helped dozens of clubs reconnect with their past, from Lancaster Country Club (PA) to Country Club of Buffalo, to Kirtland in Cleveland to Lawsonia Links to Broadmoor East. If there was a Hall of Fame for restoration and consulting work, Nagle and Forse would be first ballot admissions.

Nagle joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss how the desire to host top tournaments can skew a club’s architecture, the fine line of following the a previous architect’s design “intent,” how fast green speeds kill interesting contour, the early days of restoration, dealing with a new type of historical ignorance (or at least agnosticism) and the unending revolving door of the renovation profession.

View Derek’s latest narration in the Golf Digest Every Hole at series with “Every Hole at The Country Club“

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Derek Duncan discusses the breakdown of Golf Digest America’s 100 Greatest Courses list with Aaron Abrahms and Jimmie James on the Golf Nuts Podcast, Episode 15.

Photos: Above, Country Club of Orlando (Vaughn Halyard/StoryLounge Films); Title page, Philadelphia Country Club (Vaughn Halyard/StoryLounge Filmss).

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