Episode 14: David Davis: International Golf Course Rater & Co-Founder of The Lockhart Travel Club

This week we welcome David Davis to the Clubhouse. David is a Partner at Top100golfcourses.com and Co-Founder of The Lockhart Travel Club. The 43rd person to finish playing the World Top 100 (November 2018). A true golf travel and golf course architecture enthusiast who has been a golf course panelist and international course rater for over 15 years. A father of 3 kids and a lifetime expat, originally from Oregon, having now lived overseas (in The Netherlands) for the better part of 30 years.


Top 100 Clubhouse is brought to you by Eden Mill, St Andrews. 

Transcript

• 00:00
• The Top 100 Clubhouse podcast is brought to you by Eden Mill. Bring the tradition of distilling whiskey and gin back to St Andrews, the home of golf. 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.
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• 00:45
• Get ready to explore the world's top golf courses through the eyes of those who know
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• 00:49
• them best. David Davis is one of the few people to have completed the Top 100 Golf Courses in the world. He's also part owner of the Top100GolfCourses.com and is in charge of our Lockhart Travel Club. Enjoy. Hello, David.
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• 01:04
• How are you? James, thanks.
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• 01:06
• I'm very good, thank you.
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• 01:07
• It's great to have you on as a fellow Top 100 Golf Courses employee or owner, part owner.
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• 01:17
• Definitely, yeah. Interesting to follow the trend and the theme of all these great guests that you've been having on and yeah, try to talk about interesting stuff, right?
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• 01:32
• Well you've got plenty of interesting things to say, I know that for a fact. So how did you actually get the golf bug?
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• 01:38
• What drove you into it? So I've told the story a number of times. I was really late to golf. I was coming out of an intense – I have an intense tennis background where I had dreams of being a professional tennis player, played through Division I in the US. I avoided golf for a long time because I said golf is for old people and one day I'll be old and then I'll join in and you know, and I thought like I hear a lot of young people say and I laugh at it when they say things like, I mean how tough could the sport be? The ball doesn't move, it's sitting there, you don't run around, you know, there's no like physical exercise in it and look at these heavy guys that are so good at the sport. I mean, you know, make them go out and run or chase a ball around and see how that works. But anyway, I was wrong, just like all those young people are and naive and didn't know and eventually what happened was that I was going through in the early 2000s, I was going through a divorce, living overseas in a foreign country, living in the Netherlands where I currently live and I found myself all of a sudden having a lot of time on my hands, time that I had been spending with my two daughters who were really young and I didn't know what to do with myself and I wanted to fill up that time and finally through business, I ran into a buddy of mine in Luxembourg, actually an old tennis guy and he went over to the dark side or the light side, however you want to look at it in the gulf and he finally dragged me. He didn't even give me a choice because I told him no several times and he said, okay, come on, let's go and I jumped in the car with him after we had a business meeting and he drove straight to a driving range, put a driver in my hand and he said, okay, here you go. Hit a couple of home runs and I did just that and I was like, damn, this is going to be the next thing that I will not be able to get out of my hands and here we are 23 years later, whatever, yeah, 23 years later and he was right and my first thought was exactly that.
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• 03:40
• So it was serving a lot of purposes for me in that moment. Well, it does come naturally to tennis players, doesn't it? There seems to be a similarity in the movement. I know a lot of very good tennis players or golfers.
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• 03:54
• Some guys make the transition better than others, absolutely. And I would agree with some of those comments and I think it can get you to like a single handicap pretty quickly if you are a pretty good level tennis player and you put in the time because it is time and repetition and practice obviously as everybody would know. Well that is when you lack like a lot of talent which I do of course. But so I think that so getting to single digit handicap seems great, but actually in the grand scheme of things it's kind of nothing. So that hand-eye coordination and knowing how to get into something and practice a lot and do the repetition and learn how to do something consistently, I think that's what helps tennis players to be good at it because they've been through it with a different sport. But getting to be really good at it, like some of the guys get down to scratch or better, that's totally different. I think that tennis may not help you to do that. I think it helps you get a good start and the rest of it is how much can you adapt to golf literally.
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• 05:04
• Well, how did you come, become, so how did you go from playing on a, in a, essentially hitting a couple of drives with your first few swings to playing all the top 100 golf courses in the world.
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• 05:19
• That's a big transition. And obviously, there's a story behind that. Right in the beginning, with golf, I went out and bought my first clubs, all that stuff, just jumped right into it. I have this, as a lot of these guys that play a lot of courses or play a lot of golf or whatever, a lot of us have this kind of obsessive compulsive personality where you start to do something and you can't be satisfied with it unless you do it more and more and more and you think, I got to get good at this, I don't want to do it, it's not fun if I can't be good at it. I'm the same way, I was like that with every sport. So I started with golf and I had all this time, these gaps of time when I was used to seeing my kids and I couldn't do that so I'd fill that in with something else. I filled that in with golf practice and I love practicing and playing both. So I started doing that and then very quick in the beginning I asked myself, well, wait a second, I can see this going the route of being very competitive because by nature I'm quite competitive and wanting to play tournaments and just make it all about winning, which tennis was, whether that's good or bad, it was all about winning. If it wasn't winning, it wasn't fun basically. I look back at tennis and I said, I kind of ruined it like that. You ruin it as a kid when you're going through and the only fun thing is when you win and I think golfers can get into that same kind of like mindset and I teetered on the fence of falling on one side or the other in the beginning and then I just literally stopped myself and said, wait a second, I'm putting a lot of time into this, do I want to ruin this and make it only about winning and that's it. That's when it kind of hit me that golf is a lot different than tennis. First of all, you can go out and play on your own, you play against the course, it doesn't have to be always against somebody else. And then there are so many different aspects of it and I was traveling a lot for business and I thought, I'm going to start taking my clubs with me. And then very quickly, well in fact I made my first ever golf trip, first international golf trip I should say and that was like in 2000, I want to say it's like 2005, and I'd have to look up the exact dates because that's a while ago. But the first trip was, you know, Old Course St. Andrews, Muirfield, North Berwick, Golden Number One, Carnoustie, Kings Barnes, and then the Fairmont, the Devlin, the Sturtevant Course at the Fairmont. So imagine that that's the first exposure that you have to like real golf, like really good golf, right? And so then I was just completely blown away. And I think it took me months to try to realize what just happened because there was no appreciation going into that prior. Like, okay, so big deal. I was arranging it for a buddy of mine's father who'd retired in the US. He'd been in golf his whole life and never took a trip overseas. And I offered to arrange that trip for him. When it happened, we were in Chicago, and he asked his wife, he said, �Hey, Pat, David just invited me to come overseas and go on this trip,� and I was living in the Netherlands at the time, and she didn't believe it. She just said, �Okay, sure, Tom, whatever, do what you want.� Then I called him, and I don't know if he believed it either, but I called him six months later and I had to arrange this trip without knowing anything. I just went at it. That was back in the day when you could arrange tea times at Muirfield. They didn't have to be five years in advance or whatever. You could do that online at the beginning. I was able to get all these tea times. We went on this trip and I was completely blown away. I even managed to arrange a lunch for us at the R&A, which is – that's on the first golf I ever took. So, if that doesn't get you into the game, I don't know what's going to get into the game basically, right? No, nothing would.
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• 09:25
• Exactly.
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• 09:26
• So, I went away from that and mind blown, taking the next couple of months and saying like that is so addictive. I just love that and I couldn't get over how different all the golf courses were to what I was seeing here in the Netherlands and I was not playing great courses at the time either, just the local track that's close by. Then I realized, hey, this is kind of like any kind of passion that somebody gets into, there are varying levels of this and there's a connoisseur level where you can combine things like travel and architecture and all the stuff that was so different and that's what got me going in this direction basically. So without even thinking logically, thinking about it outside of that, I just said I'm going to start bringing my clubs and try to play the best courses I can find wherever I'm going. Then I got into the late 2000s, I met the guys from Top 100 and talked to them about doing it. They asked me, you're traveling all around doing this stuff, would you be interested to do this first in the Netherlands to look at courses and help us write up the reviews on the courses and see how you like it and see how that goes. I started doing that and then really quickly started doing all the things you do, reading all the books. At the time, I was looking at Golf Club Atlas a lot as well. A lot of people go there to get their fill of that real nerdy section of golf course architecture basically. I did that as well and spent a lot of time reading other people's thoughts and reviews and reading stuff from architects and connecting with architects and meeting them and spending time on site when they were building or renovating and all that type of stuff. I love doing that and I did that for many, many years and had a lot of cool opportunities to do that. So that drives that initial passion forward.
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• 11:30
• Out of interest, did you have any artistic background at all? You tend to find a lot of architects, golf architects, have an artistic background. Do you have an art, are you an artistic man or?
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• 11:43
• I'm gonna say no.
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• 11:45
• I'm gonna say no with like, you know, I grew up with music and there was some art in there but at a certain point in the school system I was in, the US school system, literally I had to choose between you can play baseball or basketball or you can do music or do art and I chose sports. So I was always into sports basically after that. So the worlds collide in golf course architecture though, doesn't it? It does.
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• 12:18
• There's no doubt about it. So you have been with Top 100 for quite a while and you've been working around and you've kind of put the Netherlands on the map in terms of golf course architecture. When you first started, what was the world thinking of Holland Golf?
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• 12:39
• They weren't.
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• 12:41
• It wasn't. Well, a couple of corrections there. I think I played a role. Look, I don't want to take credit for that because Harry Colt and Charles H. Allison put the Netherlands on the map, let's hope, right? It's just that then they sealed that package and hid it away so that nobody else would know about it and very happily so I think for a long time. I would say that it wasn't on anybody's radar. that we're trying to slowly promote it. I'll throw the architect Frank Pondt into that mix because I believe that that served two purposes for him. One is to help promote his career as an architect because he helped work on some of those courses. And two, because that helps recognition as well when you let people know that there's great courses in your backyard. So I would say that from the beginning for me, when I played those courses and started playing more great courses around the world, especially like UK and Ireland, whatever, and I realized, wow, the level is astonishing for this little country. And we were very fortunate to have some very unique sand-based ground and turf here to work with. Somebody noticed us somewhere along the way, way back when, and said, hey, let's get some people over here that know what they're talking about. The Harry Colts and the Charles H. Allison's got them over here along the way, so there's a lot of insight in that just to invite them over to work with these amazing landscapes that the Netherlands was fortunate enough to have. I think that's the biggest part. My part has been easy because all I did was in the beginning volunteer my time to people that were coming and say, ìListen, you should come and I'll be happy to take you around and host you.î I had such a love of this stuff and golf course architecture didn't really need to say much. So it wasn't a biased thing, it's just take people out there and then watch their draw job and go like, holy cow, I can't believe we're here. So that stuff speaks for itself and plus the other thing is that I think the country slowly has gone through a bit of a transition into realizing more, appreciating more what they have and that's a big part of it because they started taking a different level of care of these courses, a little bit more removal of trees and stuff like that and opening up, forming up fairways, those type of things and bringing it back to the way it probably was back in the late 30s and early 40s and stuff like that. I think there is obviously like everything, there is a combination of things, but I am also an American over here and a lot of these people that were really into rankings and ratings, it is easier to reach out to somebody who has got their hand up and saying, I will happily help you and then other people saying, oh, you know what, go talk to David because he is in this country and he is speaking our language and he is into the same stuff we are. So I became kind of like the go-to guy here, much as you guys do in Scotland or whatever, and stuff like that.
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• 16:11
• Very good.
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• 16:12
• Very good. And so how, since they've come on the scene, places like Royal Hague, Japan have all risen up to top epsilons of brackets and to top 100 lists. Has that been a long time coming or has it been a process that's only recently evolved?
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• 16:36
• Yeah, I think that I would say it's both of those. It's definitely been a long time coming, but it just has to do with things going from almost being like hidden gems because nobody bothered You know if you think about it in there in the grand scheme of things a lot of the a lot of the ranking Organizations are very us-centric. You know and then I'll then I'll say like a gulf magazine or a gulf digest for example well Do you think anybody in the u.s.. Is sitting there thinking? Let's go back 15 years are they sitting there thinking well look let's look at the map. There's England and Scotland and Ireland. Wow, those places are amazing. And I've always dreamt of going there. Nobody looks over at this little dot on the map next to, across the pond and says, oh, you know what, what's that place? Oh, I'd love to go to the Netherlands. Well, now the people that are switched on and really into it, they do that. But nobody ever did that. I mean, let's face it, nobody did that. They would come here if they wanted to, you know, that's not fair to say this but I'll say go to Amsterdam and do the things you do in Amsterdam.
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• 17:50
• Yeah, fair enough.
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• 17:53
• On that note, is there any part of the world you think is underrated, underexplored, underappreciated like Holland was, look, the most underrated golf country in the world and I'll say this over and over like until the end of days probably is England.
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• Yeah, fair.
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• 18:13
• There's some fantastic golf there. There is such an incredible depth of golf in England that most like 99.9% of the people have no idea. I know that even myself, for example, it's highest on my list to do extensive travel in England because I just know that all the great classic architects were coming from there and that was their playground and they have left their imprint and there's a lot more depth than what the average tourist from abroad, then to be fair, right? Let's say US, Canada, Australia, whatever, there's a lot more depth than what we hear about or what we'd like to go see. Even living over here in the Netherlands right next door, you think about the big names while just in the whole London and Heathland belt or links courses or whatever you name it, arguably the best types of golf that exist, there's a ton to offer there.
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• 19:19
• Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, that goes on to the point where how do we define these courses? How do we approach them and rate them and understand how do we, as a company, would approach them? You've talked about it a wee bit before we started. If you were to turn up at a golf course, how would you process it?
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• 19:45
• So, that's a probably multifaceted question that we could talk all night about, I suppose. One of the things we did in the beginning when we first, let's say, took over Top 100 and restarted is that we went through and kind of, you know, slightly redefined our ranking criteria and what we find important. One of the things that I would say is that, you know, it depends on who you're talking to. So if somebody has never done any ranking and they're really interested in that stuff and they're looking at it, I think that it's good to kind of start with a very firm structure to and literally it's almost like having a script when you're trying to learn about things you know like oh there's all these points and I have to check this box and I have to go through all these things and that doesn't mean you're going to get it right or that you ever get it but but what that does mean at least is that it focuses your attention on key aspects of golf courses and what golf course architects have to go through in order to design things. Unfortunately, even those lists leave out the unknown which is all the demands that are put on them by developers and owners and housing development and nature organizations and environment and all that stuff is unknown to most people if they are not involved in a project and that greatly complicates a course and it is very easy for us when we are examining something to look at it and say, oh, well, they should have done this or they should have done that or that pond there is ridiculous and all those type of things, but in fact most of the times is they did not have a choice. Yeah, that plays a big role in it, but looking at that, being more specific, looking at the criteria, we broke down the criteria into a couple of different areas, and this is what we give our new panelists, and we say, look, in the beginning, it's really good to look at these criteria and really keep that stuff in mind, and even try to give it a number in the beginning, if you're just starting. Let's say a zero out of 10, 10 being the best, just to try to get your mind thinking in that direction. Then we break it down between architecture, which is routing, green complexes, bunkering, strategic use of hazards and stuff like that. Then we say strategic challenge. Well, strategic challenge could mean many things, we're defining that into, look, what type of course is it? Is it a Parkland course where the fairways are a little bit narrower, like, I won't say like a US Open, but that exaggerates the point, right? Rough on the sides, pretty defined area, or is it one of these minimalistic type of things where courses, which is obviously the trend and has been for many years now that there is so much width that you kind of have to play the whole backwards and work back from the green and maybe where the pin position is and stuff like that. There are things like that that they like to say, what is the best angle to attack and you have the best chance of making a birdie or a par or better. So, there is that type of stuff. There is variety and memorability. I think those are huge aspects of evaluating courses. If you walk off a course and you don't remember any of the holes, but you had a good day, then it's probably a pretty good course. But if you don't remember any of it, either that's on you and you just have a terrible memory or there's really not much to remember out there. I can give examples of courses that fortunately have now been renovated just quickly that I visited once and then I thought, and I'll give you one that's always ranked really high and not by me and I'm not going to pick on that course but it's just an example. So Woodhull Spa, I went to see Woodhull Spa, it's ranked probably top 60 in the world. I went out and played it and it's probably the best example of what for me was like Groundhog Day as in the Bill Murray movie of reliving the same thing over and over and over for like – well, excluding the par threes, let's say – sorry, what would it be? Fourteen holes basically. That's what it felt like when I walked off the course. That's before Doak went through and renovated it and I've not seen it since then because because they removed a million trees, but what it felt like was long par 4 lined by trees after long par 4 lined by trees and at the end of the day one was a dog leg left and one was a dog leg right and that's what I remember from it. So that's an example of what I mean by memorable basically, or not memorable or how that affects something. Variety is another thing, do you play a course and does it actually challenge you to really think about it from the tee, you know, or do you take out driver every time? I mean, I know people that take out driver every time with exception of par 3s no matter what because they're more comfortable and they feel like they can shape the driver or bunt it or do all these things with it. Fine, that's fine, that's not my game so it's more fun if I am made to kind of think, well wait a second, you know, this is only a 300-yard par 4, if I take out driver, I need to be driving the green or it's insane that I'm trying to do that. So anyway, that's a completely different situation, but that's one of the ways that I look at it. Then there's consistency. This is again more a question of land. You and I spoke a little bit earlier about St. Patrick's Lynx and we were talking about that. If I talk about land consistency, to me St. Patrick's Lynx is an amazing example of a very consistent wild dune landscape and one of the most consistently wild dune landscapes that I have ever seen. Even if I go to some of the other courses that you know, Doke or Corn and Crenshaw or any of these people have designed, you know, they're not quite at that level. So if I go to Barm Boogle, you know, I'll use that as an example because a lot of people say, oh, that's one of Doke's best. If I look at Barm Boogle, then the first hole and the 10th hole, or and maybe the first and the second and maybe even the third hole, or a little bit like connecting holes. So those connecting holes are inconsistency in land, or you wouldn't need to put a connecting hole in there basically or what they'd call a connecting hole and of course he might argue with that, but he did the best with the land that he had and an amazing job, right? So I'm not knocking on the architecture, I'm talking about the land. So that's what consistency refers to.
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• 26:42
• I know you went to somewhere recently that I was kind of blown away by, I didn't even realize existed, was the island.
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• 26:49
• Yeah, right, right.
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• 26:52
• It's got an unbelievable parcel of land.
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• 26:54
• Unbelievable.
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• 26:55
• It does have, yeah, sorry.
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• 26:57
• Yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right. And I was, you know, that's been a long time coming for me and I probably overlooked it for a long time. And there's plenty that I overlooked, right? You know, I'm not claiming to have seen everything or I've skimmed the surface like a lot of people do in a lot of places. I played the island, had a wonderful day out there. That's a course that's been recently improved and renovated by Martin Ebert and McKenzie. I think Martin was there. He put in a couple of new holes to improve the rooting and then changed some things. I didn't have the benefit of seeing what it was like before, but I love what I see now. There's a couple of holes that I thought, wow, that's pretty narrow, like almost too much on the back nine, but they were short par fours and if you want to hit a seven iron off the tee because you can hit it straight, then you can play it. To me, that's fine if that's the case, but great property, great piece of land. You're right, absolutely. And unsung, you know, people would laugh at me if I said hidden gem, but to me it was a hidden gem, even though people would say, oh, you've got to get here. You know, I have people telling me I've got to get there to hundreds of courses all over the world all the time. So, anyway, sometimes it's true.
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• 28:17
• A consistency of land against the club would be somewhere like Port Stewart where your back nine is just starting to flatten out at the end. So just to give an example to people.
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• 28:27
• Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And the thing is, to me, that's one of the reasons that, and I'll talk about St. Patrick's again because it's just such a good example and fresh example in my mind, but that's one of the reasons it's so great because the rooting that Dope and his team, you know, Renaissance Golf, sorry he's not alone, but the rooting that Renaissance Golf created there, to me, is fabulous. Of course I have a least favorite hole and stuff like that like everybody else would and one, a couple that I think, okay, do I love that? Probably not, but it doesn't matter. Some people love that, will love that hole as well, but if I just look at that one, I say it never lets down. You don't have like a lull or a moment where they put in some 600-yard par 5 in order to get over the other side of the train tracks or whatever.
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• 29:18
• So what's next after consistency of ground?
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• 29:22
• The last one that we have on there is conditioning. Conditioning is one that's always directly related to money, membership and money. So I take that one to a large extent with a grain of salt. If I had to put a percentage of where would I, what percentage would I allocate to that? It's probably between, for me personally, and this is a guess, right? So don't hold me to it, 5 and 10%. If we go to the US and we go to the private club, the sector of the US, conditioning is like, you might as well put that as the main core focus of everything because all the courses have a lot of money. Of course, people pay healthy sums to be members and for annual dues or monthly dues or whatever. And so they expect perfection. And I think they get to a large extent from a maintenance perspective, perfections that us in Europe or even the UK are not used to. So when we go there, that's a big impact. You can get blown away just by the fact that there's not a blade of grass out of place. Call that the Augusta effect probably. One of the things that were created by Augusta being this perfect garden and I think that's something that has been maintained. And plus, sorry to go on and on, but the other part of that is probably because those guys own the course, so if you own it and you're paying a healthy sum for it, then you want it to be impressive. You're going to spend your time there and your energy and your money. If you're an owner, it's just like your home. You probably keep it in tip-top shape and that's what they expect of the courses that they own as well.
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• 31:07
• There was someone who told me that National, they spend about $2-3 million just in added maintenance every year on the golf course. Yeah, I wouldn't even bat an eyelash at that. So is there anything else that you'd add or is that the last one?
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• 31:27
• So that's the last one. I mean the way I'd fill that in is that if you have somebody who's really kind of like been trying to study this stuff and reading books and has a keen interest in it, and maybe a keen eye as well, which helps. And I'll add good memory, because it does help to be able to remember things or take a lot of photos or whatever it is, right? I think that generally people transition from this be able to tick the box and assign a number to things, to being able to, if you've seen a lot, you can go through and kind of take some notes after you've been to a course and you have a feeling for the whole picture as opposed to all the little parts of it. And of course if you really want to compare 10 great courses, that's a little bit different. Then you have to sit down and really think about it and compare your notes and then I tend to, because you're picking at straws, right? So I tend to look at something and go, okay, so how many world class holes, what I define as world class holes, right, and that would be a hole that if I take from that course and I put it on another one, it's going to be one of the best holes in that course or the best hole in that course. And I could do that to any course in the world and it's going to be like one of the best holes in that course. So how many world class holes are on any of these courses, right? And that's an interesting way to me to look at it because if you look at a Cypress Point or a Pine Valley or whatever, then you're gonna see, well, why is, you know, why is Pine Valley often considered the number one course in the world, even though we rank at number two, but a lot of people rank at number one, right? So why is that considered the number one course in the world? Well, it has 10 holes that are, you know, all world, world class, however you wanna call it, holes. You take any one of those and you put them on another course and people play that and they get to that hole and they go like, oh my God, that's amazing. It's just when you get to Pine Valley, they're all like that. And so you play through it, it's amazing, it's overwhelming, it's intimidating, it's all these things when you see it the first time that you might not even realize it until you've had a chance to sit back and kind of So, to me, that's a big thing. Also things we already mentioned, variety and memorability, can I walk off the course? People have said to me often, I have a sick memory for little features on golf courses, so like bumps and humps and all these little things and I can't remember what the third hole was like and I can say, well, I can actually picture it and go, oh, you mean the one with the little bumps on the right side doesn't have any bunkering, whatever, that type of stuff. And people go, yeah, whatever, you've lost your mind, type of response. And I think that's just because I found that very interesting and interesting talking points to share with other people that are really into golf courses and golf course architecture and stuff like
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• 34:29
• that. How much of your ratings are pragmatic then? Because you've spoken very pragmatically about it there, but how much of it is controlled by your emotion when you arrive at these places like Pine Valley and Cyprus, which are so – there must be a wave of – a different wave that you haven't felt when you turn up at these places.
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• 34:46
• So I think in the beginning when you first do, when you first see something like that you know like if I go way back and say like the first time I went to St. Andrews old course or you know like I said that first trip I wasn't even thinking about ranking or whatever you know and I I played St. Andrews old course and I just thought it was a flat open field basically so you know and I've heard other people say that as well but look I'll admit that that's what I thought. And I think I played it probably at least three or four times over the course of 15 years before I kind of started to like it. And then, so I was slow to like it. Another one like that, which people can start throwing beer bottles and stuff, was Mirfield. I played Mirfield on that trip, but it was like April. There was no rough. It was just like this big open kind of field and we played it. I like North Berwick better. I like even Carnoustie. I like all the courses better than I did Kingsbarns or whatever. Not knowing anything from that trip, I came away and my favorite course that I played on the trip was Kingsbarns. That's a first impression from somebody who doesn't know anything. Kings Barnes is like, I think it's a great course, right? But I describe it as Link's Disneyland for American tourists. I don't mean anything negative by that. It's just designed for that. You have sea views in every hole. It's set up like that. There's these kind of quirky risk reward holes where, hey, if I hit my drive 150 or whatever, 170 yards, it will roll down to the green on a par-4 so I can actually pretend like I reached the par-4 in one.
• 
  2
• 36:32
• Yeah, well going back to the stories.
• 
  1
• 36:36
• Well exactly, I mean that's the kind of things that impact you but you're talking about emotional stuff. I think it plays a huge aspect for almost everybody. I'm sure that it does to a certain extent for me as well, but I have been mindful of that for 15 years. Of course, you're going to have good days and bad days or whatever. One of the things I did that at a very young stage in my golf life. Rather I said something really corny and I said, look my goal is to be the best playing partner I can be to the people I'm with. So if everybody has fun, it's going to be amazing, right? And so that's actually the first goal that I set for myself. There wasn't anything else. It was like, okay, rather than trying to win and going back to what we said earlier, right? Rather than trying to win, I want to have fun. And so I want to be the best playing partner I can possibly be for all these people. And even, like, you know, I put on my Instagram account, and this is true, like, another guy just had a hole-in-one I was playing with, and I've had more hole-in-ones, not me, but the people I was playing with, have had more hole-in-ones than anybody I know in the last five years. So I'm at seven. And that's, to me, incredible. So that makes me kind of feel good. Like, oh, I ticked this box. I really was able to, you know.
• 
  2
• 38:08
• Good luck.
• 
  1
• 38:09
• Yeah, good luck. I was able to prove to myself that I can be a fun playing partner if I have to be.
• 
  2
• 38:15
• Well, it's a great thing to aspire to be because at the end of the day, a game of golf finishes on the 18th, right?
• 
  1
• 38:22
• It finishes on the 19th.
• 
  5
• 38:27
• Or 19th, sorry.
• 
  2
• 38:28
• It finishes in the bar after.
• 
  1
• 38:30
• So in motion, I've been trying to take it out of the reviewing process forever, as well as all these other things that I, you know, that there's rankings out there that take those things into consideration. So, for example, exclusivity is a big one, right? People think, okay, I finally got to go here, so I can't cut it down because it's impossible to get to. If I cut it down, I'll never get to go again. So exclusivity always plays a role, right, to people. Amenities, I don't know how many times I've heard people say, it's the most amazing clubhouse I've ever seen, and that's fair. I mean, that's a fine comment, but it has no place in rating golf courses unless that's a criteria like how's the clubhouse? Oh, incredible, the best thing I've ever seen. Halfway houses, I've heard people bragging and bragging and bragging about the sausage at the halfway station at Sunningdale or the burger dog at the Olympic Club or the sushi at Brohoft Slot in Sweden or I don't know, whatever, the three-course meal that you have at every Japanese course when you stop. We can go on and on and on about that type of stuff. Nothing to do with evaluating a golf course unless of course you're evaluating only the experience or something else. And there's other things, shower pressure, like how many times have we heard people say, ah, you know, Friar's Head had the best shower pressure of any place I've ever been, right? Like okay, so what? If you want to drown, you go to Friar's Head, big deal.
• 
  2
• 40:10
• There's a – I've got a friend who rates benches in golf courses which I think is quite
• 
  4
• 40:17
• obscure.
• 
  1
• 40:18
• Yeah, and that's quite – it's all fun and those are their own individual rankings but I don't consider those things unless that's part of the criteria, right? For the regular criteria, you know, look, and again, it's not a science as we know, it's subjective. So in my subjective mind, I'm trying to eliminate those things. Do I succeed with it all the time? I don't know, probably not, but whatever.
• 
  2
• 40:41
• So moving on to your travel. So you've obviously traveled the world and played every Top 100 golf course and so many more. You now have a business called Lockhart Travel Club. Can you tell us a wee bit about it?
• 
  1
• 40:59
• Absolutely. We do.
• 
  2
• 41:01
• Yeah, we do. It's Top 100.
• 
  1
• 41:03
• Yeah. So that's a really fun and unique project that we're working very hard on and that is very inspiring and amazing and many different things that, you know, many different things that I could call it at the moment. So, very rewarding as well. So, we, the Lockhart Travel Club, little back story on that just quickly on the name and of course people could read this but most people won't have heard that name. So, why Lockhart? In the late 1800s, a gentleman, a Scottish linen merchant by the name of Robert Lockhart had moved to New York and he was traveling back and forth importing linen into the New World. On one fateful journey in late 1877, he brought a couple of crates of these funny looking sticks that his buddy, old Tom Morris had created. He introduced his friends in New York to these funny looking sticks and they started knocking these little balls around in apple orchards, eventually coining themselves the Apple Tree Gang. This Apple Tree Gang later went on to form the St. Andrews Golf Club and that essentially made Robert Lockhart the first ever golf traveler or golf explorer let's say. It's the people that don't know, St. Andrews is the oldest golf club in America. Exactly, yeah. It was the first one so that's very well said. And so anyway, it's in his spirit and honor that we are undertaking this amazing journey of global golf exploration. We go around the world, I think in 2024, we're going to see like 19 different countries, so there's opportunities to play some of the best is because you know America, US is a pretty big country and we're not going to play all the best courses in America but we have opportunity to play some of the very best ones. So that's really exciting. So you know we will take trips to places like South Africa and Japan and even China you know to see some places that would prefer not to be mentioned let's say, so I can't just openly talk about them, but those are opportunities that you know that we are so fortunate to have as a private travel club that we just love to share with people. We've been so fortunate with all the traveling around the world and met a lot of people and it's just amazing that we have the opportunity to share some of the best adventures with this group and that's Lockhart. Let's put it like this, it's an invitation only private high end golf travel club very specifically. It's not a golf society, it's nothing like that, you don't manage your handicap there. It is for probably a niche of people that they have time, all the trips they last about usually about a week long, so you have to have a fair bit of time or be prioritizing golf and golf travel like that and then a fair bit of resources as well because anytime you are traveling around the world, there is cost associated with that and especially if you are going to play the best courses in the world. So if you look as everybody would know, if you look at the US and you go to the US and you have invitations and you go to play some really amazing private clubs there, that's always going to be – there's always cost associated with that trip and that's a lot different than what we see in like Europe or the UK or whatever, a lot of other areas and that's just the nature – kind of the nature of those situations. Accommodation wise, we stay in amazing places and we have amazing non-golf experiences. That is the best thing I can say about it. People came, so we had a trip to the Netherlands to give you an example this last year, obviously very close to my heart. We started everybody off with on the first day when they arrived that evening with just I will say an all world canal tour that ended in an amazing Michelin star restaurant in that case. They're not all Michelin star, don't worry about that, but an amazing Michelin star restaurant with an idyllic boat tour, a couple of hour private boat tour. Sorry, that's a little bit different. So, it's an old classic Salon boat. That would be the equivalent of going to play Sunningdale or something, right? In terms of boating. Amazing. So, and that's the kind of stuff that we're doing. We went to Japan, visiting the best courses in the country, which are extremely difficult to have an opportunity to go see. And then ate in some of the most amazing places as well. So it's a combination of, it's not just the golf and the golf travel, but it's really for people that they're into their travel, like passionate about it basically. So it's a perfect combination of things.
• 
  4
• 46:29
• Superb.
• 
  2
• 46:30
• You must have a lot of fun taking people around.
• 
  1
• 46:35
• It's not the worst job in the world, let's put it that way.
• 
  2
• 46:38
• Yeah, it can't be. But that's absolutely superb. And how would people, if you wanted to get in contact, how would they just through, is there a website?
• 
  1
• 46:51
• This is since just very, very recently, but one of the things that people can do is they can look on top100golfcourses.com. It's in the slider that goes across. There's a mention of it. It's also in the navigation on top as well, so you can find something about it. And if you're interested, you can fill in a very short form there and then our team, perhaps myself, will get back to you and have a chat about it.
• 
  4
• 47:25
• Superb.
• 
  2
• 47:26
• Right. I'm going to move on to three questions. Well, one question I like to ask everyone, but we're going to get a bit nerdy now, okay? So top five golf courses, favorite, not top five best?
• 
  1
• 47:41
• Yeah. I throw that one into – I'm going to throw favorite into experiences like it's a little bit bigger type of thing. So my number one, it's funny because this is pretty timely. I think I even made an Instagram post about this recently but my number one is probably this course in Brazil that I just absolutely love and I love going down there. It's called Santo Pacienza. I won't necessarily number these, but let's say these are my favorite experiences, right? Schenken Bay is one of my favorites. That is just such a unique experience. That's one in China. You're always kind of alone there and there's a lot of staff and it's a core Crenshaw course. It's an amazing course as well, very unique. South Cape Owners Club, which is actually a public course in Korea, that is one of my favorite places on the planet to go and the experience of going there is just surreal. When I go, I'd like to stay for a week or longer. It's just unbelievable. It doesn't really get that much attention, but it's, I mean, I, even every golf architecture nut, I don't care, I would send anybody there. It's amazing. And then there's a couple, some a little bit more boring ones, I suppose. So, you know, Cypress, Pine Valley, and Augusta, you can't have a list of favorites if you've played them without having those on the list. So, they're gonna be experience-wise, also course-wise, obviously, they're just amazing, right? So all those, that's my answer, you know, three exciting ones and three kind of boring ones, although not really if you got the opportunity.
• 
  2
• 49:23
• And just on that note, who's your favorite architect? That's a way more complicated answer,
• 
  1
• 49:28
• but I'm going to say that, you know, I'm going to kind of like take the easy way out of that. I'm going to say that my favorite classic architects are McKinsey, Colton Simpson. That's always the same. My favorite modern architects are Dove, Cor Crenshaw, and Fazio. Fazio, that's interesting. Yeah. I'm just going to say this. That's it because a lot of people will be like, ìHow can you say that?î Well, look, you can get really nerdy into minimalism and whatever and you can look at golf architecture also from a perspective of a business and he is by far the most successful businessman ever to tread foot in golf course architecture and you cannot very easily argue that makes him the most successful golf architect in the world as well. In the beginning, I probably was in the masses that maybe didn't love him as much, but I've grown to have a very deep appreciation for what he is able to do. There are certain circumstances where if I had enough money and the right property, which is the wrong property for the other guys, I'd go to Fosu every time I wouldn't even think about it. And unfortunately, he's not that young anymore, so I don't know who fills his shoes once he's gone because what he does, I don't think there's anybody else that can do that. So that's how I'll preface that, but definitely makes him one of my favorites. And then I've got guys that are my favorites in terms of renovations actually, which is a completely different world and I have all the respect for these guys as well and I wish that, well at least the first guys, you know, Martin Ebert and Tom McKenzie, both good friends of mine and they are the best, they've done the best renovations that I've ever experienced, not having played Oakmont pre-renovation, right, which is very, you know, an amazing renovation of course, but Hirono and Turnberry are two of the courses I just absolutely love and the renovations, I played both of them before, I think will go down in history as two of the greatest renovations that have ever happened. I'm just blown away by them basically. So I'd love to see them get more opportunities to design courses on great properties and develop their own style for example.
• 
  2
• 51:59
• of interest and the what makes a great renovation why are why we don't have
• 
  1
• 52:07
• time for that we can get into another time yeah I mean we can go on just like with all the architecture and stuff we kind of go back to square one and start over and start going through it but yeah it's it's the ability to take I'll try to keep it as short as I can. The ability to take something with, let's say, great bones, or the potential to have something great, and then bring that back. Have it be able to mesh well with a modern game, yet be able to hold on to the initial greatness that it had when it was initially designed, I suppose. I don't know. That's just off the cuff for lack of a better way to say it. I think it's pretty tough. I can imagine. Yeah. And actually, in that, so I had some other, you know, like there's some big up and comers in the US that I have a huge amount of respect for, and I think they'll be doing a lot more great work. That's like Andrew Green, who did Oak Hill, Kyle Franz who did Mid Pines, of course the guys from Renaissance Golf, which are doing amazing things, Brian Schneider, Clyde, Angela Moser, I love those guys and the work that they're doing. So, Hans and Wagner are doing a bunch of renovations, universally loved obviously, that's why they're getting those jobs regularly, doing more of their own work and stuff like that as well. So, you know, those are all big names and they're all among my favorites even though I know like I kind of copped out of that question a little bit rather than just saying one.
• 
  2
• 53:56
• It's such a wide-spanning thing, golf course architecture, that having one is more of a cop-out than actually having a range of different people who did different things well, I'd say. Yeah, good saying, thanks. No, don't worry, I've got your back, David. Thank you very much for coming on and hopefully we'll have you on back soon. Okay, sounds great. Thanks so much, James. David, thanks very much for giving me your time. I'm sure we'll have you on the pod again. It's fascinating listening to your outlook on golf. For everyone else, if you need to get in touch, it's James at top100golfcourses.com or get me on the Instagram. And remember, play fast, lunch slow. And remember, play fast, lunch slow.
• 
  3
• 54:51
• Bye.