This week we welcome Joshua Pettit to the Top 100 Clubhouse. Josh is an architect with a focus on the work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie. He's the founder and curator of the MacKenzie Institute and editor of the 'MacKenzie Reader: Writing on Golf Architecture and More'. Join us to discover more about one of golf's legendary architects.
Top 100 Clubhouse is brought to you by Eden Mill, St Andrews.
This week we welcome Joshua Pettit to the Top 100 Clubhouse. Josh is an architect with a focus on the work of Dr. Alister MacKenzie. He's the founder and curator of the MacKenzie Institute and editor of the 'MacKenzie Reader: Writing on Golf Architecture and More'. Join us to discover more about one of golf's legendary architects.
Top 100 Clubhouse is brought to you by Eden Mill, St Andrews.
James Henderson
0:00:00
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Top 100 Clubhouse, the ultimate podcast for golf course enthusiasts worldwide. I'm your host, James Henderson, and we're about to embark on a journey through lush fairways and breathtaking landscapes, as well as delving deep into the minds of fascinating individuals from every corner of the golfing universe. Get ready to explore the world's top golf courses through the eyes of those who know them best.
I recently met with Joshua Pettit, a fascinating guy, an architect with a focus on the work of Dr. MacKenzie. He's the founder and curator of MacKenzie Institute, as well as the editor of the MacKenzie Reader. We go into what made him fall in love with Alistair MacKenzie, and also who was Dr. MacKenzie. Thank you and enjoy.
Hello, Josh. How are you?
Josh Pettit
0:01:02
I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me, James. Are you enjoying your trip around Scotland? Couldn't be better. I've really lucked out with playing some of the best golf and having some of the best hosts such as yourself and have gotten the absolute best weather. I've not gotten rained on not a single drop when I've been playing golf for the last eight days. Well there you go. So originally the forecast had called for just non-stop rain for a week straight so I've just absolutely lucked out.
James Henderson
0:01:37
Where have you played?
Josh Pettit
0:01:40
So I started, actually I was in France for a week and a half, so on my way out of France, not a golf trip, but on my way out of France I did play Morfantin, which is a very neat old Tom Morris course outside of Paris.
James Henderson
0:01:54
I didn't realize it was old Tom Morris.
Josh Pettit
0:01:58
Excuse me, Tom Simpson. Tom Simpson. Yeah, I'm thinking we're in East Lothian. So I'm thinking about yeah, I'm more connections Tom Simpson yeah, 1924 and He did some fantastic work here in the UK, but a lot of stuff in continental Europe, too So I played that and they have 27 holes there I played the 18 championship and then they have a nine hole course called the I'm gonna butcher this but it's like the Valery 9, it's like the valley, translates from French, which has some of the coolest greens I've ever seen. And I walked that after I played the 18. I wish I had played that, actually. So then I flew, hopped on a plane, flew to Edinburgh, and then right away drove to St. Andrews. So, tried for a bit, but kind of failed to get on the old, and then said, right, I'm heading northward to, up to the highlands. So went up to the highlands for a couple days, played Dornok and then Brora, and then spent a day hunting for the MacKenzie family graveyard way up in the Northwest Highlands, which was a pretty neat experience. Found that and then came down, visited a course called Blair Gallery, which has nine holes of MacKenzie left. And then went to the West Coast to play Western Gales, which is one of my absolute favorites. Yeah, SNAP, special place. Right, and then came over here to play Muirfield yesterday and then met yourself this morning on the first tee at North Berwick. Played North Berwick and then had a great lunch and followed it up with 18 holes on goal in number one with Hickory Clubs.
James Henderson
0:03:54
How tough was it?
Josh Pettit
0:04:00
It was pretty windy, man. Yeah, it was pretty windy. That was definitely the windiest round I've had this whole week too because not only have I not had any rain, but I've had hardly any wind at all. It's been when I played Dornoch, the members that hosted me said it was the stillest they've ever seen it. Like you coming up 18 in the set of flags that they have, it looked like the flags weren't even on the polls. They were just completely not moving.
James Henderson
0:04:28
What did you think of Dornoch?
Josh Pettit
0:04:30
Dornoch was fabulous. Dornoch was absolutely terrific. I had not previously been there, so it was high, high on my bucket list. And I had very, very high expectations, and it met and or exceeded my expectations definitely.
James Henderson
0:04:51
Right, so people understand who you are. Can we start off with what got you into golf? I know you said you didn't come from a golfing family but how did you originally get into golf?
Josh Pettit
0:05:02
I originally got into golf by watching golf with my grandfather on weekends during major tournaments. And so it was the 1997, really the 97 British Open that I watched. Growing up on the west coast of the States, we were up at 4.30 or 5 in the morning to watch the final round of the British Open, what we refer to as the British Open, you guys call it the Open. And that was just an exciting tournament to watch and it just really intrigued me and got me interested. And then after that round, went down and dug up my grandfather's old clubs from the 1950s that were buried in the basement and hit some balls around his apple orchard that he had. And I was kind of hooked like from that point on. And then two years later, really got into it when I joined my high school golf team. I had played baseball and a lot of other sports growing up, but I gave up baseball in the spring to join the golf team and absolutely just got hooked. And then started working at golf courses that summer just so I could continue to play golf because where I grew up was not very accessible for juniors, not very affordable. I certainly couldn't afford it. My parents weren't golfers, so I thought, great, I'll work at golf courses. So I did that, and that got me into the golf industry, starting at age 15, and I've been doing it ever since.
James Henderson
0:06:42
So what was the first golf course you worked on?
Josh Pettit
0:06:44
A little course called Marin Country Club, just north of San Francisco, followed by a course that sadly has closed, which is a very sore subject because I tried to help save it for the last five years called San Geronimo Golf Course. That's really where I kind of, that's what I attribute with the place that really sort in the golf business. And then followed by a summer when I was 17, I moved down to Pebble Beach to work at Spyglass with a friend of mine. And then came back and so by the age of 18, and there was a couple other courses, by the age of 18 I'd worked at like five golf courses at that point and thought, wow, the golf industry is really interesting. I want to do something in the golf space Didn't quite know what at that point, but I just knew I wanted to continue within the golf industry which I would say most successful people would tell me would be quite inadvisable to do and Those in the golf industry would probably know what I mean but just being in and around golf was just, it was such a joy for me. And so yeah, stuck with it all these years.
James Henderson
0:08:09
Was the Meadow Club part of that five golf courses? Yeah, so the medal club,
Josh Pettit
0:08:14
by the time I started working at the Meadow Club, I was age 19. And that was probably, yeah, that would have been the fifth golf course that I worked at. So just so people understand, tell us a bit about the Meadow Club and what it's about.
James Henderson
0:08:28
Well the Meadow Club is a very special place.
Josh Pettit
0:08:32
It was Alistair MacKenzie's first course that he designed in America. So he came over in January of 1926 and began construction of the Meadow Club with Robert Hunter, was the guy that sort of brought him over and they partnered together and they did a lot of their California work together. And then when I started working there in 2003, they had just begun a MacKenzie restoration project, an ongoing thing that was a gradual process, to this day, ongoing, but, you know, most of the work was done over a six year stretch. We did about three greens per year over six years. We did greens restoration, which involved expanding the greens to their original sizes. They had shrunken significantly. And restoring the bunkers and then at the same time upgrading the infrastructure, so the irrigation and the drainage and all that sort of stuff. So I was involved with that and to this day I'm somewhat, you know, but heavily involved with that for several years. Also I failed to mention a significant tree removal project. It was called the Meadow Club because the site was a meadow called the Bon Tempe Meadow, which is at the base of Mount Tamalpais, which is the most significant geographical feature in that area. And there was not a single tree on the property originally. And like so many properties in the States, in the 1950s and 60s, they just started lining the fairways with trees. And then you fast forward half a century and those trees are very tall and you've got bowling alleys for your holes. These narrow plain corridors and that have obscured all of the vistas between holes and across the property and looking out to Mount Tamaul Pius. And so a big component to the restoration project was tree removal. Probably the most controversial component I would add.
James Henderson
I'm walking around with you today. It sounds like you wish you could have 13 clubs and a chainsaw in your golf bags
Josh Pettit
0:10:54
That's a good way to put it. Yeah, I mean out here you don't need it no because The courses haven't been we don't have trees. Yeah, exactly for the most part, but in the States. Yeah, generally most of the courses I've been affiliated with, working with, I could do well with even, say, 10 clubs in a chainsaw.
James Henderson
So after that, you went off to university, college. What were you studying?
Josh Pettit
Initially, political science and history, and then changed degrees midway through to pursue landscape architecture.
James Henderson
So between your respect for landscape architecture, you were also a historian?
Josh Pettit
0:11:49
Yes.
James Henderson
0:11:51
So when you arrived at the Valley, how did you get involved at the Valley Club?
Josh Pettit
That's another Alistair MacKenzie design course just south of Santa Barbara in California. And that was built in 1928 and 29, opened December 30th of 1929. So basically 1930, call it. And I had met a few people through the golf industry that were working there and had got word that they were, the club had been considering a restoration program for a number of years. And I thought, so backing up, I had to take a year off of school basically to change majors because I didn't plan it out well. And so in order to switch schools and switch degrees, it made the most sense for me to take a year off of school. And during that year, I managed to get a job at the Valley Club working on the grounds crew and began their historical program, researching the history of the course. And MacKenzie and Hunter's involvement building that course. And put together a program that could be used for a restoration plan, which it eventually was. And formalized sort of a restoration master plan that the membership voted on and approved and then We renovated the greens in 2007 Can I ask you how old were you when you put this plan together? I was 21
James Henderson
And How did you actually get involved with them? I know it's a great story.
Josh Pettit
I, so I'd heard this rumor, I had previously visited them the year before and I had met and become friends with a guy who was their agronomic intern. Now a lot of courses they referred him as like an assistant in training but if you're doing like if you're trying to become a superintendent a high-end club. And this lad, who's sadly since passed away, was one of my close friends, passed away this year. He was working there at the time as an agronomic intern, living in a cottage behind the clubhouse at the Valley Club in Montecito, right down the road from where your favorite Royals live now. And Oprah and a number of celebrities, a very, very posh, beautiful, beautiful community. And so the way I got involved was I contacted the assistant superintendent who I had met and said, hey, do you need any help on your staff? I'll move down here essentially. And even though I wasn't really planning on it, I was just trying to like force the issue. And I'll work on your crew a couple of days a week or whatever I can just to get my foot in the door so that I could maybe start pursuing this MacKenzie restoration angle. Well, sure enough, the intern who had left who was a good friend of mine, they had an opening and they offered for me to become that intern. Even though I wasn't pursuing turf grass science as a educational discipline, I wasn't trying to become a superintendent of a golf course, they knew that I was intent on pursuing golf course design. They thought, oh, this might be a great fit. So they offered me a gig to work on the grounds crew and to live in the cottage behind the clubhouse, which is one of the most fun experiences of my life. And so I did that, moved down there, worked on the crew, and then in my free time in the evenings began this whole research process. And just curating all this material and digging through boxes in the basement of the clubhouse that hadn't been looked at for a long time and put all this stuff together and said, hey, look, we've got a pretty good amount of materials that we could use should the club ever want to pursue some sort of a restoration program. And they said, well, that's a great idea. Why don't you kind of formalize it all into a master plan? I said, okay, I'd love to. And so I did that. And of course at this time, Tom Doak had been the club's consulting architect. And this was a pretty busy period still in golf development because this was 2005, pre-recession. And so Tom was quite busy building a lot of projects and so I sort of took the lead initially by doing this restoration master plan which was used for the club to sort of guide the project and then Tom came in when we actually did the construction and his at the time associate Jim Urbina and we all sort of worked in concert to to do this plan.
James Henderson
And you were still an intern?
Josh Pettit
At that point I had, I mean, I don't know. I don't really think much of titles. They're thrown around like whatever, but at that time, technically no. I had left during the following year to start my first year in my landscape architecture program on the East Coast in Amherst, Massachusetts, of all places. And then the following summer is when we had scheduled to break ground for the project, so I came back for that. So we broke ground in June, right when I had come back from school. And we had another intern at that time now, a guy who's actually one of my really close friends, a Kiwi from New Zealand, who's now a very, very great superintendent down in Mexico. So he was technically the intern and I was basically the project manager.
James Henderson
So it's mental to think that at 21 you managed to, without the research Google provides you nowadays, it was a lot more basic back then, right? You were able to put together a full proposal, went over the membership, through just by going through the archives. And you'd been part of a MacKenzie course before. To be able to, I just shocked about how you can do that at that age with so little knowledge and basis to win over all these obviously top professionals.
Josh Pettit
I suppose it was one of those instances of like youth and naivete and thinking you're kind of invincible and can do anything because you don't know any better. So maybe that was part of it.
James Henderson
0:18:56
But it built an amazing career for you. You've gone on to do your MacKenzie Reader and you've done a few other restorations. What were the other restorations you've done?
Josh Pettit
0:19:04
Well I've worked, so backing up to Meadow Club, when I started working at Meadow Club, our architect there for that project is Mike DeVries who's a great friend become a mentor to me and he sort of showed me that there's a path to becoming a golf course architect professionally outside of being a former say famous tour player with a very marketable name, let's say and so when I got out of school, graduated with my landscape architecture degree, I worked for Mike for several years and helped him with a lot of restoration and renovation work, including the University of Michigan, which is a MacKenzie course Ann Arbor, which we did a restoration master plan for this has been years ago now, and it's still they've they've done a few things But they have not done very much of it. I believe now it's sort of being looked at again and considered you know more seriously at this point.
James Henderson
You're telling me that on the weekend it's a car park though.
Josh Pettit
In the fall during football season. If you talk to people in Michigan, you know, the university of Michigan football is everything. And they have this stadium, the big house, which I think seats 120,000 or something. Mike could probably correct me. I think it's about right. But yeah, they park the cars on the golf course.
James Henderson
That's what they think of it, this brilliant MacKenzie course. And I can see the disappointment in your eyes.
Josh Pettit
You know, it doesn't disappoint me that much, to be honest. It's just I understand it's purely a practical thing and there's probably considerate ways you could do it. That's just fine. I would be really happy though if they actually took the plan that Mike and I put together and really took it more seriously and implemented it and expanded those greens back to their perimeters and lost a lot of the trees that have accumulated and fixed a lot of the mowing lines and then rebuilt the bunkers. That would just be the cherry on the top.
James Henderson
Do you find when you're doing restoration work on MacKenzie stuff, the main thing is green size enlargement, bunker rebuilds and tree loss? Are those the three things?
Josh Pettit
Yeah, that's pretty much it. Those are the main things because, keep in mind, MacKenzie was building most of his courses, at least in the States, starting in the mid late 20s and then into the early 30s. And so once the depression hit in the early 30s, there was really an effort amongst greenkeepers to economize the maintenance operation. And this often meant, okay, well, we're going to shrink this green to half the size and basically make it a circle. And, um, oftentimes fill in bunkers and do things so that you could really maintain a golf course with like one or two people and then World War II hit. And that didn't help. So like in the case of the Valley Club, actually, for World War II, they closed half the golf course and just let it go fallow. And then, so after World War II in 1946, they had to restore that half the golf course and bring it back. So between the Depression and World War II, you had this trend of sort of economizing the maintenance operation. And then post-World War II, you have this trend of, in the 50s and 60s, of planting trees in abundance. And they didn't think much about what species of trees they were planting and the spacing, how they were laying them out. They would just plant them in these rows. And they didn't quite think about how much it would cost to manage those trees over the span and that they would grow to be these giant monstrosities that 50 years later or more would cost in US dollars, you know, $4,000 or $5,000 a tree to cut down…Out in California is massive business these days, especially with…all the wildfires we've had, for the last few, it hasn't been that bad this last year, so, but for about five years, we've had some pretty bad wildfire seasons. And so, the electric utility company where I'm at is called Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E. They have these electrical lines all over the place with trees very close by. And so there's been just like probably hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars allocated for tree removal to protect these electrical lines. And so all the tree companies get those contracts. And so if you're a private entity trying to hire a tree contractor, you're competing against essentially subsidized contracts. And so it's just driven the cost up significantly of tree work. And the other thing they want to think about too is from an agronomic component that you plant these little trees that often times they would get for free. A lot of times they were donated by local nurses or they would get them for, say, 50 cents per tree. But once they grow, they're competing with the turf grass for resources, for water, for nutrients, for sunlight, for air. And so, if you're a greenkeeper, an agronomist, you're battling these trees that have deeper root zones. And so, when you're irrigating a fairway, let's say, or fertilizing a fairway, that's subsidizing the tree. And these trees would grow faster than normal because they're subsidized by these nutrients and irrigation, water, and then they block the sunlight and the air movement and make it really difficult to grow turf. I don't think anybody in the 1950s and 60s on these golf courses were thinking in those terms at all. And so, yeah, I think that's setting aside the strategic implications of taking these interesting holes and just narrowing them down to a very narrow playing court or like a bowling alley. Setting all that aside, just purely from a, like a economic and an ecological responsibility standpoint we're trying to grow turf grass. You got to choose one or the other. You can't be growing turf grass with trees right next to it because you're just wasting money and resources.
James Henderson
So I get it, you hate trees.
Josh Pettit
I actually love trees. That's that's the dichotomy here is is Like I absolutely love trees off of golf courses and very very fond I've served myself a bit of a naturalist in the, say, like the John Muir mold.
James Henderson
0:26:54
He was born not far away from where we're recording.
Josh Pettit
0:26:57
That's right. Brilliant guy.
Josh Pettit
0:27:00
But, you know, like the Sequoia Sempervirens, you know, the redwoods, which right near me actually is a place called Muir Woods, named after him.
James Henderson
0:27:06
Oh, wow.
Josh Pettit
0:27:07
It's a beautiful redwood forest, old-growth redwood. Or my other favorite tree is the California Coastal Live Oaks, the Corcus agrifolias, or the Monterey cypress. Those are, I absolutely adore these trees.
James Henderson
0:27:19
You obviously do adore trees. You even know the Latin names for them. Should we move on to getting an understanding of who Mackenzie was as a man? Sure. Because you've written a book, Mackenzie Reader.
Josh Pettit
0:27:39
Well, I didn't write it. Oh, no, sorry I edited you as I wrote a couple bits about it. You know and there's like a but it's it's a it's essentially a Collection of all the things that you've researched and found about Mackenzie, right? Right some of the stuff. Yeah, it's essentially it's a compendium of His lost writings. So he was a pretty prolific writer. Published a book in 1920, a little book called Gulf Architecture. And then in the early 30s was writing another book called The Spirit of St. Andrews that was not published. The manuscript was finished, edited, revised. There's three versions of it that I've seen. And it was ready for publication and did not get published. When he died in 1934, it had not been published. And then in 1992, the step-grandson of Alistair MacKenzie, he and his wife, Joan, who's a close friend of mine now, they found the manuscript and published it posthumously in 1995. But aside from that, he wrote a lot of articles for all these different golf publications in Australia, a lot in the States, a lot here in the UK. He was just a prolific writer. And so I've collected all of these articles that I've been sourcing for, you know, at that point it had been like 15 years when I was putting this book together, compiled them all together, and then with a lot of those articles were a lot of these great photographs and then I sort of added in additional photographs and a lot of routing plans of different courses he designed. And so this is pretty like, you know, there's a lot of rich historical material all compiled together and then in the back of the book is another small section where I invited mostly contemporary authors to write short little essays from their perspective. These are other folks that I would classify as MacKenzie files. And so, like I wrote a bit for that and folks like Mike Clayton in Australia wrote a bit about his time in Australia and Mike DeRese wrote a bit, and Bo Links wrote a bit about Shark Park, and Jeff Shackelford wrote a bit about MacKenzie's time in Southern California, and my friend Pedro Casio wrote a bit about his time in South America. Pedro lives in Buenos Aires. And I invited all these folks to just write a little short essay from their perspective about MacKenzie and his time. And it sort of broke down by geographic regions, which was actually sort of, it worked out well. So that's the second part of the book in the back. So I'll compile it together into the MacKenzie reader and I was fortunate to have Ben Crenshaw write the forward and yeah, I think it turned out well. It's a fun project.
James Henderson
0:30:48
And I'm right in saying that you've got a third edition coming out?
Josh Pettit
0:30:54
Yeah, so in an author publisher lingo, this is all stuff that I've learned. I don't know. It's referred to as a printing, not an edition. So there's still no, no, no, I'm just sorry. It's just fun.
James Henderson
0:31:08
Don't mean to offend.
Josh Pettit
0:31:09
Still considered the first first edition third printing. OK, meaning that it's it hasn't changed and I haven't revised it at all Yeah, typically an edition implies that you're making some revisions or additions that sort of thing So I and I do have plans for a second edition down the road that will be You know expanded a bit and add some other things But this will be the third printing of the first edition just because you know I had no idea what the demand would be like and it was quite an expensive production so I started small and I've just sort of gradually scaled up the production in accordance with the demand.
James Henderson
While doing your research for the book, what's the really interesting things that you found out about MacKenzie? Well, I guess I wasn't doing the research.
Josh Pettit
I didn't set out doing the research specifically to do this book. It was more that I had been doing this research for years and years and then at some point I thought, all right, I should do something with this material, at least some of it, and tried to, you know, present it somewhere. And so then I thought about different concepts for books. So it wasn't like I said, okay, right, I'm gonna do a book and let's start doing some research for a book. It was more the other way around. And so the research was really spread out over like say 15 years. And so it's kind of hard for me to say like, you know, there's so many, so many things, but I could I could just pick any number. So for instance, there's quite a bit of material in there about Augusta National, but I didn't want to put too much in because of all of MacKenzie's projects, there are three that we have, that I have like by far the most amount of material for, way more than any other project, like orders of magnitude more material. And those projects are Augusta National, Cypress Point, and Pasatiempo. And Augusta would be first on the list. So there's just an abundance of Augusta materials.
James Henderson
0:33:27
Why is that? Why do you think that happened?
Josh Pettit
0:33:30
Well, I think a couple of reasons. First of all, it was probably because he worked with Bobby Jones on that project. So it was...
James Henderson
0:33:41
Well documented.
Josh Pettit
0:33:42
It was well, I would say, sort of like well hyped right out of the gate.
Josh Pettit
0:33:47
Yeah. You know, it was pretty well known. It wasn't just like an ordinary development. It was kind of like, wow, Bobby Jones is building a golf course and he's partnered with Alistair MacKenzie, the great architect to do this. So right out of the gate, it had a lot of publicity in golf circles. The other component there I would say is that the land plan, we talked about this earlier, the land planning group was the Olmsted Brothers firm, which were the two sons of Frederick Law Olmsted. They run their landscape architecture firm at the time out of Brookline, Massachusetts, and they were extremely organized and diligent with all of their records. And so to this day, they have a fantastic archive of material for all their projects, but specifically for Augusta, in this case, where they have drawings, like just an immense amount of architectural drawings, correspondence, documents, articles, all of this stuff has been collected in this archive at the Obstead Brothers which is now run by the National Park Service. That's another reason. So I think you combine those two and then somewhere along the lines, the Library of Congress which is I think the biggest library in the world They acquired a whole lot of those materials as well, and they're very organized and preserved so I think for all those factors it was just very well documented and They did for the most part a pretty good job of Collecting all that stuff So anyway, so going back to the book I had to be careful not to put too much stuff about Augusta in the book because it had to be more broad about all of MacKenzie's projects in his whole career, but there's a fair amount in there. And there will be eventually a follow-up book hint. So that was one of the really, I guess throughout this whole process, to answer your previous question, was going super in depth on the history of the Augusta project, from its impetus to the early parts of it, how it got built, everything from the investors and the founding members and all this sort of information, and just pouring through all that material, I would say that was one of the most interesting things for me, because previous to that, I hadn't spent a ton of time focused on Augusta. I thought it had been pretty well covered, but in hindsight, I don't think it really has. I mean, there's been loads of books about Augusta, but none really that go into depth about the golf course itself. And then the other thing too there that was, I would say, really interesting to find through this whole process was MacKenzie's plan that he drew for a par three course at Augusta. An 18 hole par three course with nine double greens inspired by St. Andrews that did not get built. But to find that plan, that was quite exciting. And that was one of the most exciting moments, I'd say, throughout this whole process. And that's in the book as well. There's an article in the back of the book that I wrote specifically about that plan. I haven't read that. I don't know if that answered the question.
James Henderson
That did answer, imagine, come on, coming across the double green 18-hole par 3 must have been pretty damn exciting.
Josh Pettit
It was incredibly exciting. Yeah, I mean for us, you know, architecture history nerds, it was like, you know, I liken it to sort of like an Indiana Jones experience. And then seeing it, initially when I first found it, it was a black and white reproduction of it. But then finding the actual original color plan and seeing it in person, when I went to actually see it in person, it's housed in this archive. And they let me spend some time with it, put some gloves on and handled it. That was pretty special.
James Henderson
0:38:22
Who was the man that was Alistair MacKenzie? What was he like as a person?
Josh Pettit
0:38:42
He was an eccentric, I would say. He was a renaissance man. He was, I would say, brilliant. And of course, I'm kind of biased, but I really think he was. And he was one of these unique characters that was sort of both right brain and left brain. So he had this sort of scientific, mathematical components. And then he was also very, very artistic and creative. And most people have kind of like one or the other, or one more than the other. And I think he had a fair bit of both and and managed to intertwine those all throughout his life in his career but he grew up the son of a doctor and he became a doctor it was a physician and then went to South Africa for the Boer War and was a surgeon there and that's when he started observing the Boers who really fought like guerrilla warfare. And the British weren't really prepared for that, hadn't really seen it. And he quite admired, actually, their camouflage techniques. And that's when he started thinking about camouflage, like manipulating the landscape, doing all these things to hide, you know, troops. He goes very in depth he wrote actually a wealth of material all about camouflage and some of that is in the MacKenzie Reader so it's the MacKenzie Reader isn't just golf stuff, I mean it's predominantly golf but there's other stuff like military stuff, there's economics in there uh... there's some medical stuff in there talking about his time as being a doctor and that sort of tied into golf because you would sort of prescribe golf as a prescription to people, say get out, get some exercise, some fresh air, mental stimulation by trying to navigate around a golf course. But what happened was he essentially, after the Boer War he came back to England and was a physician still, and he just couldn't get out of his head these ideas of how he could apply these camouflage techniques and manipulate the landscape to building golf courses. And so he started in 1906, was a founding member of Allwoodley, just outside of Leeds, and said, right, well, I can design this course. And the membership thought, well, you've got some really interesting ideas. Why don't we consult with a guy named Harry Colt also? And so Harry Colt came in and kind of, I think, broadly gave his stamp of approval to MacKenzie's ideas. And that was his first go at building a golf course. And then right after that in 1907, Moortown, which is basically right next door to Allwoodley. That's across the road almost. Yeah, that was a club that had been organized and they thought, wow, Allwoodley is very good. We'd like you, Dr. MacKenzie, to design our course. The only problem is they didn't have any money to build it. So the solution he came up with was, right, I might get this wrong, but I think they had like 25 pounds or something in 1907. And he said, right, okay, for 25 pounds, I'll build you one hole. And then you could use that hole as sort of a marketing ploy to be able to acquire other investors and founding members to raise the capital to build the whole golf course. So he did that. The hole he built was the famous par three, the Gibraltar. And they absolutely loved it. And it was considered one of the best inland par threes in England. And then shortly after that, they raised all the capital to build the rest of the course. So that, at that point, so his one hole was now a template hole. I'm sorry?
James Henderson
0:42:51
Gibraltar is a template hole, right?
Josh Pettit
0:42:54
I don't know if you would consider Gibraltar a template.
James Henderson
0:42:57
Well, I guess maybe not.
Josh Pettit
0:42:59
Gibraltar was actually sort of basically inspired by the Redan.
James Henderson
0:43:03
Yeah, yeah.
Josh Pettit
0:43:04
Sort of a modified Redan.
James Henderson
0:43:05
But did he not argue that it was not the Redan because it kind of, he argued there was nothing to do with the Redan or am I wrong there?
Josh Pettit
I don't know about that. I don't know what you're referring to. I have not.
James Henderson
0:43:18
Well, I'm probably wrong then because you'll know more than I do.
Josh Pettit
0:43:22
I'm not a Moortown expert. There is a historian there, but I don't know that. I don't know that to be the case one way or the other, but I think it's pretty well considered that it's basically inspired by the Redan's modified Redan. And he builds a lot of Redans.
James Henderson
0:43:41
Yeah, I knew.
Josh Pettit
0:43:42
Throughout his career, I mean, he was quite fond of the Redan. And others like the Eden, he built a lot of Eden greens, a lot of Eden part three holes.
James Henderson
0:43:50
But that was back in the days where all these designers were all using template holes a lot. Like McDonald's and Ross.
Josh Pettit
0:43:59
Yeah, McDonald's was, I think, kind of just getting going hadn't really you know it was this is before like say National Golf Links yeah or Lido or any of those but he so anyways going back to who Mackenzie the man was essentially at one point and I don't I don't know the actual year. It's a great question. It was pre-World War I. So this probably was like in and around 1910, 1911. I'm sort of guessing here. He decided to stop practicing as a physician and pursue golf course design full-time as a career. And he did that. And he had quite a few contracts here in the British Isles. And then World War I hit. And during World War I, he was, he ran what was called the British School of Camouflage. And as you probably know, World War I was, you know, very, very tragic in a lot of ways. But it was like militarily, it was a trench, you know, referred to as trench warfare. And they were just digging these trenches and it was just like basically stalemate. It was just people dying, people dying, but they're digging these trenches and they were very, very artificial trenches. And MacKenzie's idea was, wow, we could really actually build much more, you know, camouflage type trenches and landforms and employ all these techniques that he learned observing the boars and and then he sort of like expounded on those ideas and he wrote a ton of material about all of these ideas around camouflage and warfare and You know he implored People within the British military to sort of like buy into his ideas, and I don't think he didn't really have much luck. But there's an interesting story in the book where he talks about having the, like the cousin, I want to say it was like the cousin of the Queen, come look at his test camouflage bunker fields that he built and showing them to, this is why we need to use this technology, these techniques in warfare and that sort of thing. Never gained much traction, but anyways, that's what he did during World War I for those years, during the Great War years. And then after the Great War, went back to building golf courses and refurbishing golf courses and did a lot of that. And then, as I said earlier, 1926 is when he, you know, set out to come to the States. And that's when he sort of started traveling. And then from that point on, from those years, the last eight years of his life, because he died in early 1934, he basically was a vagabond. You know, he was a, I referred him in the introduction as a golf expeditionary and he just sort of like was all over the place from the states back and forth to England to Australia, New Zealand back to the states down to South America up and back you know he eventually settled down in Santa Cruz just south of San Francisco at Pasatiempo. But for those years you know it was mostly traveling and it's actually really incredible if you look at the, his rate of travel around all these places, the time frames, if you look at the timeline and the amount of projects he was able to do in a pretty short time span. It's amazing given the technology, given he was, you know, taking these ships across sea and trains and, you know, it's pretty incredible. Yeah, it's the amount of ground he was able to cover. And I think that that's one of the things about MacKenzie that, you know, aside from just stylistically, how, you know, all of these features he would build, these very, very elegant bunkers and that kind of stuff that he was known for. But I think he really was influential on spreading golf in a lot of places around the globe that had, you know, some history of golf, but in those days was very rudimentary and he sort of took things to the next level. And I think the best examples of that are say Australia. There was golf in Australia before he came, but there was not any good golf. And he had a massive influence on golf development in Australia, which then influences golf more broadly. And I think you can make an argument that, I think Mike Clayton would make this argument without putting words in his mouth, that that's really influenced generations of golfers that have grown up playing those great sandbelt courses. And then also places like, say, South America, where there had been golf in Argentina previously, but no good golf of any kind and sort of put golf on the map there. And so I think that's one of the things that differentiates MacKenzie from a lot of his other, you know, his peers in the field is that most of those other guys were sort of a much more narrow geographic range of places where they were doing work. Whereas MacKenzie was all over the place. You know, it was the West Coast of California, the East Coast, the upper Midwest, all over the British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, South America, covered a lot of ground, you know, more than any other architect.
James Henderson
I've got a few questions still I want to ask you is what defines a MacKenzie course versus any other? What's the things you need to look out for apart from the MacKenzie logo that everyone, not logo, but name that everyone wants?
Josh Pettit
0:50:14
There's a range of factors there and every property was a bit different. I would say, so first and foremost, his paramount inspiration was always the old course. I mean, he held the old course in the highest of esteem and sought to essentially, not copy, but pay homage to the old course with all of his projects. And the really, I would say, the novel idea there was, at that time when he first started getting going. All of the best courses were on Links-land, where we are. They were in sand dunes, in sandy dunescapes on the coast of the British Isles. That's where all the best courses, turn of the century in 1900, all the best courses, you could plot them all on a map, they're all in sandy terrain along the coasts. And his, I think, novel idea was, well, because golf was expanding at such a rapid pace in those days, and it became to the point where they were building a lot of inland courses. Why can we not replicate a lot of those features on inland heavier soil sites, which are harder to work with, but if you can get creative, you can do it. And so that's why, so you combine that idea with we're building really good golf inland, and then with the camouflage techniques that he picked up from the boers. That's, I think, the combination of those two ideas ended up where he was taking a lot of these properties he worked on, especially early on in his career, were not very interesting pieces of land. You know, relatively flat, not a lot of interesting geography going on. But he would try to manipulate the landscape with, in those days, horses and scrapers, and create these landforms that sort of replicated Links land. That's what he sought out to do. And so, starting at Aldley and then Mooretown.
And then, peaking with Augusta. And that was always the way that he and Bobby Jones always referred to Augusta was, this is going to be the world's best inland golf course.
James Henderson
Um, cause obviously he, he did Cyprus point and everyone considers Cyprus as being probably the great golf course of the world right now in Royal Melbourne. Cyprus is currently number one in our list.
Josh Pettit
Oh, is it? Yeah. And um, since when? This, this, just this year?
James Henderson
0:53:17
No, the last few years.
Josh Pettit
0:53:18
Oh, okay.
James Henderson
Yeah, it's been considered number one on our list for a while.
Josh Pettit
It's quite good. Oh, no, just on Cypress Point. There's a great article actually in the book. He writes about Cypress Point often. There's a lot of material in the book relating to Cypress Point. The title for the article is something like, Cypress Point, almost as good as St. Andrews, but infinitely more spectacular. He was saying essentially, I'm trying to build a St. Andrews the coast of California. And it's probably as good a golf course, but visually much more spectacular. Yeah, that was the gist of it.
Yeah, fair. That makes a lot of sense. I always ask this question towards the end of an interview and it's your five. I've had people say 13, five favorite golf courses. Doesn't have to be the five best five favorite Five favorites of MacKenzie or just all of course all I'd be interested in how many MacKenzie are in there
Josh Pettit
So, courses that I've experienced, old course, for sure. Cypress Point, North Barrack, where we played this morning, is in the list. Then I get down to probably Pine Valley and Royal County down, Valley Bunion, that's six right there. Well, there you go. Those would be mine.
James Henderson
And is there, have you got a favorite hole, one hole that you just stood at and went, I want to hit a golf ball at this for the rest of the afternoon?
Josh Pettit
0:55:39
For me, it would be standing on 15 at Cypress Point and either hitting balls or not hitting balls because the shot itself isn't that spectacular. It's more the visual component. You are just absolutely immersed in the most incredible landscape you've probably ever seen. So standing on the 15th tee at Cypress Point would probably be that. I mean, I could sit there for hours and it's just absolutely incredible. If you're talking about actually more strategically like playing, hitting golf shots, well, there's a lot because there's a lot of like great greens. I could spend hours and hours on the Himalayas green, for instance, with the San Andres, which was MacKenzie's favorite green. But for a golf hole, one that really sticks out to me as like strategically of great, great interest.
James Henderson
0:56:30
Sorry, going back to the green stuff, talking about MacKenzie's green complexes, obviously greens are sped up a lot. Do you think that as a restorer of greens for MacKenzie, there's any point where you have to dumb down what the original green would have to be because of the green speeding up.
Josh Pettit
Oh, well, you're really going to get me some hot water with this question. Okay, right.
James Henderson
0:56:51
We can come back.
Josh Pettit
0:56:52
No, no, no, no, it's fair. I'll answer it. I can be diplomatic.
Well, all right. This gets to be quite a nuanced conversation, which I'm happy to have. My answer is generally speaking, no. I don't think I think that really the solution and believe me, there are several clubs that are at this sort of crossroads, trying to figure out what to do in this regard. But I think generally the solution is in the agronomics and the way that the greens are managed. And so what I mean by that, for example, in California, where MacKenzie did a lot of these great courses in the latter stages of his career. The greens now, for the most part, have all become poeannua, which is essentially a weed. It's an annual meadow grass. And poeannua is not a good turf grass. That's what the Lynx courses try and get rid of it. Yeah, exactly. So and what happens is when you have poeannua, you have to do a lot to it to keep it good and smooth and consistent. And so what a lot of these clubs do is they spend a fortune and they you know, they expend a lot of resources and put a lot of inputs into watering, mowing, verticutting, top dressing, aerifying, all of these things to these greens to keep them good. In the summer and in the growing season, you could mow a green, a poa green in the morning and it could be pretty good and by the afternoon it's really bumpy. And when you, like if you were to say roll a putt on a green and videotape it and then you look at it in slow motion, you'll see the ball just wiggling back and forth the whole way down to the hole. And that's just the nature of poa annua as a turf grass. It's a broad belated grass. It doesn't grow consistently. So it grows like the heights of the turf grass grow inconsistently. And so it makes for a very inconsistent plain surface that requires a lot of work to keep it good. This becomes an economic implication for a lot of clubs, but then there's also many clubs that that can afford it, and so it's less economical and it's more of a playability issue. And so, what happens is, in the growing season, if you're say mowing a green twice a day and rolling it maybe every day or at least a few times a week, by the nature of doing that, you get these really fast greens. And they're not necessarily firm either because poa is not a drought tolerant turf grass. It has to be babied with a considerable amount of water. And so you can get these really fast greens that don't play very firm. And I would rather have it the other way around. I'd rather have really firm greens that aren't maybe as fast. And so essentially the simple answer to your question is by growing the finer bladed turf grasses such as bank grasses, predominantly where I am, or fescues, you can manage the surfaces quite a bit differently to the point where they are, they can play very firm like this table. And you don't have to have them rolling super fast. You can have them rolling, let's say, 10, 10.5 on a stimp, which is plenty fast enough. For many of the courses around here that we've played and that I've been playing this last week, 10 and a half is plenty fast enough, especially if it's really windy out. You wouldn't even really want much more than that, given the contouring of the greens. And so a lot of these MacKenzie greens, I would say fall into that category where if you were able to grow bent grass or fescue, keep them firm, but not that fast, then that allows you to keep the green the way that he contoured it originally without having to do what you mentioned which is like modify them to tone them down let's say to account for these fast speeds. But once you have these greens that were built in the late 20s or early 30s and you have them rolling at say 12, 12 1 1 on a stint meter, then it becomes untenable and that's when these clubs start thinking, alright we need to soften these slopes and raise approaches and do all these things to counteract that and to be able to gain more pin locations because you start losing pin locations when you increase the speeds that much. So that's kind of a long answer to that question. But I guess the answer is really, I think in almost every case, I could show you where Mackenzie built a green. You could keep it original if you had an agronomic program that was in line to account for it.
James Henderson
1:01:56
Well, that's a very good answer. And I think maybe on that note, we might end it. So thank you very much.
Josh Pettit
1:02:02
Josh, it's been great fun.
James Henderson
1:02:03
Thanks for the games today. And I'm sure another time we'll get you back on the pod because that was really interesting.
Josh Pettit
1:02:10
We'd love to.
James Henderson
1:02:11
But thank you.
Josh Pettit
1:02:12
Thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun.
James Henderson
1:02:14
I had a wonderful day with Josh, playing about 50 holes with a collection of both new and old Hickory golf clubs. The podcast could have gone on for hours, so we both decided that we'll find out more about the brilliant Dr. MacKenzie further down the line. You can visit the MacKenzie Institute on Instagram or AlistairMacKenzie.org for more information
Excitingly Top 100 Golf Courses and Top 100 Clubhouse are partnering up with Eden Mill ‘bringing the tradition of distilling back to St. Andrews’.
Next week, we'll be recording live from the Walker Cup, which is being staged at The Old Course. We'll be sitting down with a panel of experts to give you an inside scoop on the historic tournament.
So head over to our Top 100 Facebook group to submit questions and stand a chance to win exclusive merchandise. If you have any further queries you can contact us on Instagram or by emailing me at james@top100golfcourses.com
Josh Pettit
1:03:09
And remember, play fast, lunch slow. And remember, play fast, lunch slow.