Episode 15: John Caven - St. George's Golf and Country Club

This week we welcome John Caven to the Clubhouse. John is the General Manager at St. George's Golf and Country Club in Ontario, Canada. He previously worked at the exclusive Loch Lomond Golf Club, and has a lot to say about life in the golf industry and what it takes to host professional events in the current climate.

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

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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. Get ready to explore the world's top golf courses through the eyes of those who know them best. GM of the 67th best course in the world, St. George's Golf and Country Club in Toronto. I hope you enjoy.
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00:58
Hello John, how are you? Very good James, very good thanks.
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01:01
It's great to have you on. Do you want to give a wee bit of a story of what you are now?
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01:06
Well, I'm General Manager, Chief Operating Officer is my full title at St. George's Golf and Country Club, which is pretty much in Toronto. It's in a place called Etobicoke which is about 20 minutes from downtown Toronto. A very historic old Canadian club that's hosted a number of major championships over the years and been over here for six and a half years now James.
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01:29
Quite amazing. I know it's on our list at 67th in the world which is quite a nice claim to fame. How do you feel about those rankings?
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01:39
You know what, rankings is, you know, your top 10 is probably different from my top 10. I think over the years it's probably slipped a little bit because, you know, every year there seems to be another two or three courses that are just being opened that are almost top 100 courses and quite rightly so. So I think it gives you an idea of whether something fifty seven, seventy seven I think to be listed in the top one hundred just shows that it's a quality facility Well you're regularly top two, top three in Canada every year so it's a lovely place to be Do you want to tell us what made you fall in love with golf, a little bit of history behind you? Well probably typically Scottish, my father played golf and I think it was probably easier for him to get out to the golf course when I was old enough to take me with him. So I was a member of Caldwell Golf Club which is in Renfrewshire, it's on the Renfrewshire to Ayrshire border. My father was a member there since the late 50s and I think I played my first 18 holes where I actually walked round when I was six and a half years of age. I managed to get round, joined the club at eight, played in club competitions from when I was eight and a half, nine, and then really that was me. It was always about, you know, I loved golf, that was my summer holidays of the year, and I got half decent at the game, I could play alright, I was never going to make a living out of playing the game, but I, so when I left high school I became a PG assistant professional, but not with a view to earning a living from hitting a golf ball, more that I wanted to work in the game and things have really progressed from there. Where did you start as a PGA assistant? I worked for a bit of a legendary guy, Billy McCondackie at Hilton Park. Who's Billy? Yeah, Billy took over from his father, Jimmy. Jimmy was the pro from the late twenties till the mid seventies and then Billy took over in the mid-70s. Unfortunately, Billy passed away just a few years ago now, but Billy was an interesting character. You learned the things that you had to do right as a professional, and he gave you some sort of life advice as well, which was great fun.
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03:53
So where did you go after that?
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03:55
So I actually went back to Caldwell. So my junior golf was at Caldwell. I lost in the final to the Remshire Boys but then I won the Remshire Youths the next year. I became an assistant at Hilton, did a couple of years there and then went back to Caldwell because my father told me that I couldn't be a junior golfer at Caldwell one day and the next day be the assistant professional. So he gave me the advice to go away, so I did that for a few years and came back to Caldwell. And then I headed north up to Bankery Golf Club to be the head assistant under Charles D'Erney, who's a well-known, great, fantastic guy to work for, referee, great retailer, and up to the North East. And then in 1995, I became the head professional at a little golf course called Old Meldrum Golf Club, which actually dates back to 1885, but it was only nine holes up until about 1990. And at 25 years of age, I was the head professional there at Malineshop. It was my financial responsibility and took on that side of it. A great, great little club and enjoyed it there. And then from there I went to Meldrum House which was literally as the crow would fly, was maybe like about a mile away but very different. Meldrum House was very private, built on a very old established estate, Meldrum House. And it's got a hotel there now and it's developed. I was there when the golf course opened. I went there in late 98, and in real terms, the golf course opened in early 99. And Meldrum House was really my first experience, I would say, of not being a general manager, but having more responsibility than just being the club pro. Okay. Was that a steep learning curve? Yeah, it probably was, but I had great... There was a gentleman who's still the main shareholder at Melbourne House, Bob Edwards. He was either... He either saw something in me or he was lucky, but he gave me responsibility and let me take on things that I'd never done before. He let me fail, which I think is really important these days, you know, that's how you learn. Sometimes you learn by making great decisions, other times you learn by, you make the wrong ones, but Bob gave me the reins and let me, pretty much I was there for five years, went in there, there was only about 15, 20 memberships sold. Within three or four years, we'd sold all the memberships, sold all the corporate memberships, big oil and gas selling it up in Aberdeen. So it was a great experience for me and probably made me realize that I didn't want to be a club professional. I was more involved, I wanted to be involved in the management of the golf clubs.
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06:26
That's amazing that gave you that drive. Where did you go from there?
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06:30
So then I had a very interesting experience. Paul Lorry became the touring professional after he won in 1999 at Carnoustie. In early 2000, Meldrum House signed him as the touring professional. I knew Paul anyway. So that was in early 2000 and by late 2003 I left and I went to work for Paul for four years. That was to look at helping him set up the Junior Foundation. It had just about started but we really got it going at that point. There was a corporate element, you know, there was looking after corporate days, the front of the bag, the right side of the sleeve for sponsorship. We set up a corporate merchandise business. I looked after his online presence, so all these diaries that all the press would quote from directly. And just looked after Paul in general for four years, which was great fun. Again, opened my eyes to maybe a slightly different more of a corporate market, being more aware of presence and being very careful when you're representing someone like that to represent them properly.
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07:30
So Paul Lorry is an interesting one. He's done a huge amount of work with junior golfers in Scotland.
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07:37
Yeah, and it's predominantly golf, but he looks after other things as well. It's not just golf through his foundation, he'll look after some individuals in other sports that he can help with. But golf, yeah, I mean, he's, you know, over the years, it's not just financially what he's been able to bring to the table, but putting his own time and effort into that. His wife, Marion, does a fantastic job. Michael and Craig, his boys, they help out with it now as well. He's got a big team round about him but he still very much takes a day to day interest in that which I think is fantastic.
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08:08
Yeah, I'll look it up and find out but the number of golfers, the young Scottish golfers in the European Tour now that have been affected by Paul Laurie is unbelievable. Quite amazing. So where was next after Paul Laurie?
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08:23
Well it's interesting, I worked for Paul for four years and then if I was going to get back into the club industry, I got a phone call that it was a new general manager that was going in at Loch Lomond Golf Club. One of the first things that they decided to do was that Dun Donald, which is now not owned by Loch Lomond, it was owned at that point, it had been a very similar set up to Loch Lomond, it was private, they wanted to open that up to the public. They wanted to put somebody in there as a sort of an operations director, and I got the opportunity to go and work at McDonald's. And then at the end of that first season, there was a bit of a shakeup at Loch Lomond. There was some changes getting made to the senior management team, and I was invited if I wanted to be the director of golf at Loch Lomond, which is fantastic. I mean, that's really cool. Did that cover both golf courses? In real terms it did. I think on paper it did, but being honest about it, the focus predominantly was Loch Lomond. But I would probably go down to Dundonald maybe once a week, maybe not quite as much as that. In the height of the season, Loch Lomond is actually very busy and that's where the main focus has to be.
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09:35
You must be the only, that must have been a weird time because that would be the only GM job, or not GM job, but director of golf job, that's hosted, both courses have hosted a Scots showpin now. So you're in charge of two Scots showpin courses, which is quite a cool thing.
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09:53
Yeah, I mean, obviously when I was there, Donald hadn't hosted anything. We did European Tour event or a women's event at that point. But obviously the Scottish Open was up at Loch Lomond. In 2007 I was officially at Dundonald when that was happening, although I was up the whole week to be part of that. Then 2008, 2009 and 2010, which was the three last Scottish Opens held at Loch Lomond, I was part of the management team.
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10:22
You probably got a good badge on the first one when you were at Don Donald's. I thought you'd...
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10:28
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's an amazing experience and I've got to say I learned a huge amount because the first event had been hit, I think it was the World Invitational, originally it was called before it was officially opened, was there in 96. So by the time I got there, I think at Loch Lomond they'd hosted maybe 11 or 10, 11 events, so it was a pretty well-oiled machine, although it doesn't mean that you can't look for ways every year to make it better, and changing scenery as well, and sponsors and players. But it was a great experience to go through that.
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11:01
For people who don't understand, Loch Lomond's a pretty special place. It was a private ownership and then moved to members' ownership. It's a beautiful house on the Loch with a fantastic golf course, a very
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11:16
well kept golf course. Was it a difficult place to manage the golf side? Not really, I would suggest. The one thing, and I'm not trying to be funny here, is that the biggest challenge you had was the weather. It's interesting, the way the course sits on the west side of Loch Lomond. If you go five miles across the Loch to the other side, they would get 30 to 40% less rainfall, five miles away. The topography of the ground, west of the Loch is Loch Lomond Golf, but then you go west again, and you've got the, I think it's Glenfrew and it's the hills, and all the rain clouds come down the Atlantic, cut across into the west of Scotland and hit the uptraps and we could get well over 2,000 millimetres of rain every year. And that was probably the biggest challenge and also setting the expectation with the members that that's what they're going to come to. You don't join Lothloman because you want to get a suntan and enjoy the weather. You join it because it is an unbelievable golf course, it's fantastic. I feel extremely grateful and very appreciative that I managed to walk the golf course twice with Tom Weiskopf, who was the course architect, and we talked about what he did and how he did it. When you heard what he put into this and the little idiosyncrasies and little things that you'd maybe not noticed before, or you probably did notice them, but maybe subconsciously, it made you understand the way the golf course flowed, the house that had been there that dated back to the late 18th century, the work that Lyle Anderson, the owner that took it on and took it to where it got to, his vision of music. It was very impressive. It's world class. I mean, there's not many places you can talk about world class. And it's interesting, we might touch on this later, James, but once you've been somewhere that's world class, it's fantastic, but it also sets the bar. And sometimes you go and visit places that you've been told are oh, this is amazing This is world-class and you go it's very good But it's maybe not quite to the standard that I was expecting so and that can be that's not trying to say Narrowing it but I can change your your mindset around when you're visiting places
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13:30
And I might get this cut out, but I'll tell you a story and so my dad's okay He was looking to buy an old secondhand aga for his farmhouse. He saw this advert in the paper and it was at the house. I forgot what the house's name is but it was an advert that said, a red aga for sale, Landed owner. Oh no, sorry, it wasn't that. It was one titled owner. Oh, titled owner, that was it. That was it. One titled owner, which I thought was brilliant. Anyway, they went through and it was an absolute, it was rubbish, it was awful. Yeah, anyway, but that was back when Lyle was just about to buy it. So, you host a few opens, which probably built up a lot of experience for you. What was your main takeaways from your side of hosting these events? I think the one thing it teaches you is
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14:40
focus on the stuff that you're in control of, be aware of the stuff that you're not in control of, but don't beat yourself up. You know, as in, and I'll often go back to the weather. We, you know, when I was there for four years, I think three out of the four years, we had very good weather. There was one year that the weather was poor and made it a real difficult situation. The crowds were, you could see them walking about, it was getting muddy. Occasionally the players may be slightly, not so much critical, but there would be lots of comments about the weather. But I think the thing that you had to concentrate on was that, you know, if you take the European tour, they would host, I don't know if it's 40 weeks a year, it might be more than that, they do. They know how to set up what they need to do, they're in control of that. The Greens crew, David Cole is the superintendent, still to this day at Loughborough, and he knows how to get the golf course in the correct condition with a little bit of help to get the exact playing conditions that the players want. Let everyone else do their jobs and then focus on what we can do and make sure the experience that we provide, whether that's our members, whether it's the hospitality guests we're looking after, whether it's the players, to a certain point. Look after what you can do and the stuff that you can't look after, let somebody else do that. And the chances are, they're probably very professionally experienced at doing that.
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16:00
I heard recently that they picked up the whole golf course by two feet with sand.
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16:07
Yeah, they went back and looked at probably what should have been done right at the beginning which was sand capping the golf course. So you basically lift the solid, the turf where you can, in some cases you can't, you've just got to lift it and it's gone. Make sure the drainage network's all nice and free and open. And then basically put anywhere between 18 inches or more of sand across the whole golf course. Put the sod back down. Re-seed it where you can as well. And basically what you've now got is you've got the first 18 inches or so is free draining. And then over the coming years to come, then you're just every year, every time you're breaking the surface, you're maybe verticoring or you know, you're tining even the fairways, the approaches, the rough, you're just making sure that you keep all that open so that that 2000 plus millimeters of rain of the year that's gonna fall can get to the drains, which over years becomes more and more challenging. So they spent, and I mean millions, to get that done. But that's then trying to create the better consistent plain surfaces for the members.
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17:12
Well, you kind of have to do it when you have so much rain you need some sort of and so where was next after that Well, I went to an interesting fantastic facility that
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17:18
Has probably there's a lot of discussion out there or maybe there's not I'm not sure is G West which is You know, it was originally G West because it was Gleneagles West. It was just west of the Neos It was the the Alta's your family the only highland spring and they had developed a golf course. They had it built, they had planning permission for housing to go around it. And to this day, the project is still sitting there really waiting to go. That's for a number of reasons, but all I can say is the golf course was very good. The family were fantastic to work for. And although I was only there for a couple of years, because it just didn't get going with it, it actually was another interesting experience for me and my career, you know, you're looking at the setup, starting something completely from scratch, even the legal side of it, the membership, how would that work, really having to consider everything right from the beginning which is very interesting to do that because you don't always do that. Now, a lot of time you come into somewhere that's already established and even if it's reasonably new, it's maybe already going in such some way, whereas G. West was right in its infancy.
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18:31
Interestingly, you must be one of the few people that's actually played it.
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18:37
Probably, yeah. There can't be many. I've played it quite a lot, actually.
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18:43
So as a golf course for us mere mortals that never had the joy of playing it. What's it like?
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18:51
It's very good. It's excellent. I would say would I put it in my top 20, 25 courses that I've played. I've played some or big-headed, I've played a number of really, really good golf courses all over the world. I would probably say it might be in the top 25 of what I've played. I know that once a golf course opens and you start to get feedback, little changes would have happened anyway, which has still not happened here. But some of the land that flows and moves and the shapes that David MacLeod created are fantastic and it is a shame that it's not getting played by the, whether that's members, general public, visitors, it is a shame, but I'm sure one day it will and I'm sure when it does open it will be given the applause that it deserves. Well that'll be exciting. So from there where did you go? Glasgow Golf Club. Glasgow Golf Club, which I know there's all these different you know, is it the 9th oldest, is it the 10th, is it the 8th, I'm not sure. There's some documents that seem to appear every now and again from other courses to see how old they all are. You've got Killermint in the city, which is a fantastic inland golf course, 6,000 yards, maximum off the back small greens up tunnel saucers, greens get quite a great challenge and then you've got what was known as Glasgow Gales is now known as Gales Links
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20:12
yeah again you're on a golf club with a inland course and a links course
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20:17
yeah yeah you would, exactly and and similar as well is that Killermont was very private, there was no real guest play apart from members guests whereas Gales had, you know, there was not a huge amount but there was an encouragement for visitors to come. It hosted, I think, I did three final open qualifyings when I was there. I think a very underrated Links golf course. It probably doesn't have any views of the sea, it's just across the train tracks from Western which I know is a great course.
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20:48
Fantastic golf course.
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20:49
You know, all the unbelievable fantastic links golf courses there, but Gales is probably a little bit in the shadow of some of them but they are and we certainly recognised it with the Scottish Amateur and a lot of different events that were hosted there and as I say, final open qualifying for a number of years. It's a very fair test to golf. It's right next to Don Donald's isn't it? Yeah, I mean you could literally, probably from the first tee at Gales to the, whatever it would be, maybe the second, green, third tee of Dundon, it's probably a good 5 iron
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21:22
or something. Someone was talking about playing from Western to Presswick Clubhouse the other day. I don't think people realise that there's so many golf courses down that little coast stretch that you could actually play onto each one. Something like 7 or 8, which is quite wild. So what was your experience at Glasgow, what was it like?
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21:44
Loved it. I mean great people, very golf centric, very into their golf. I would say a pretty high golfing IQ and by the way that's got nothing to do with ability. You can get a a 20 handicapper who is just as understands whether it's the etiquette, the history, you know, what something should be, feel like as well. And so Glasgow had a, and does have a huge history, gives a lot back to golf, you know, probably behind the scenes and really, really enjoyed it. There are a lot of great staff there that have been long tenured that I, you know, I learned a lot from as well. So, you know, really, really good place to work.
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22:27
So from Glasgow, you decided you're going to skip over the water.
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22:31
Yes, it's a slightly strange story because back in 2000, I actually can't remember the year, if it was 10 or 11, there was actually a job in Naples in Florida that I, and I can't even remember the name of the club, I made an inquiry to the recruiter about, and the recruiter asked me this simple question, why do you want to come to the States? Why do you want to go to Florida? And why would it be Naples? And apparently, because I can't remember this, one of my opening statements was, well, my wife has an aunt and uncle that live in Toronto, but they've got a house in Naples. And we've got a key to the house. We've been there a number of times. We would, it would be an easier transition for us to move over there, because there's a house there, there's a car, we know the area. Job didn't even get to first base. There was, they decided to look at the visa implications, it was like this is too much trouble. Fast forward till probably late 2016, the recruiter, the same recruiter reached out to me and said John we've got a private members club in Toronto, they have specifically said they want to look in the usual way locally, nationally but they said they want to look international as well. He said and we have it on file that you've got family in Toronto. And at that point, I was like, well, he's either got a great memory or he's got a good CRM system. But at that point, it was like, would you be interested in looking at this? And you're like, well, I'll have a look. Why not? My wife was interested to look at it. Our kids at the time were 15 and 11, which is not the best age maybe, but they were both seemed quite intrigued by it. And then you go through two interviews, and they flew me out for the first interview, they flew my wife out with me for the second interview. She actually had to go to the interview, they wanted to make sure that she was keen on the move.
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24:20
That's nice of them.
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24:21
Yeah, and then before you know it, by the summer of 2017, I'm the general manager COO at Oakdale Golf and Country Club which is quite interesting because they actually had the Canadian Open this year. I was part of the management team that was part of the thing when I went out for the interview. Their 100 year anniversary is in 26 and they wanted to look at hosting something whether it be they actually thought maybe a Canadian amateur or a women's event or something. I spoke to Golf Canada, brought them out, showed them the facilities and before you know it, it's like, the logistics and the size of the course and the clubhouse and they said would you be interested in holding a Canadian Open and obviously it came to fruition because the Canadian Open was actually there this year.
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25:08
Interestingly going into what you just said, what boxes do you have to tick to host a Canadian Open?
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25:17
Well, it's probably, James, when you get to the decent sized events, the golf course has to be good enough. Whether that's to do with length or whether it's just a good enough golf course, it has to be. But then you look at the, you know, you could have upwards of 30,000, 35,000 people a day need to get on the golf course and also if there's an emergency whether that's with weather security you have to get them off the golf course. You're going to have to have car parking reasonably close that can handle that. You're going to have to provide an area for a media centre. Nowadays at the big tournaments, the Canadian Open is one of the biggest ones. You have to have a closing hole that you can accommodate all with some sort of amphitheatre, a little bit like the Open does now, but it's more designed around hospitality, not just seating. You have to have a practice ground that they can hit at 350 yards round. There's a number of things that you've got to show that you can do, and that doesn't mean to say that the golf course goes down the list, but actually there's no point in looking at the golf course until you know you can meet those demands from the other areas. Which Oakdale has got a fantastic footprint, but yet interestingly enough where I am now, St. George's, where I've been now, it's just a bang on two years now at St. George's.
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26:36
Oh wow, congratulations.
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26:38
Thank you. So St. George's is actually different because the golf course at St. George's is genuinely world class. As you've both said, it's ranked inside the top 100 in the world, it's normally in the top two or three in the whole of Canada. The golf course is fantastic, it is an unbelievable golf course. All the other things that need to be provided, it struggles with. We have to, there's a local golf course about, about just over a mile down the road that provides the practice ground. There's a main north to south road that's got four lanes that for about just over a mile of it from two junctions they actually shut for 19 days of the Canadian Open which the City of Toronto is prepared to do. We've just got enough area to provide the hospitality for the last three or four holes but it's pretty much on the edge. We're just over 7,000 yards which you would imagine is a little bit short these days, but we can let the rough come up and we change some pin placements We don't do that. We do that in conjunction with the tour. So so quite a tight golf course, you know Yes, not big wide open fairways Not really. It's all about keeping it in the short stuff and it's a very strategic golf course It's not really although Michael Rory McIlroy won it last year. It's not a bombers golf course It's not the guys that had it the furthest really It's about who can keep it in the short stuff and you need a really good short game, you miss the greens here and it can be pretty penal. So it's a real test.
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28:08
On that note of the Canadian Open and St George's, Rory McIlroy won it last year but it was meant to be held there for the last two years before that. Obviously with Covid it was pushed back. But how did Covid affect the whole situation? It must have been very hard building up to hosting something like Canadian Open and then having to almost freeze the whole process or change the dates or develop that plan. How did it sit with the club?
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28:42
Fortunately, the club here and the membership are committed to Championship Golf. There's a history over here. There was five women's Canadian Opens in the late 70s into the 80s. Last year's event was the sixth playing of the men's Canadian Open. So the membership, there's 22 committees that get set up for the Canadian Open. 16 of them are actually chaired by St George's members and the other six we provide the vice-chairs. So there's a buy-in from the membership here, that's the first thing. I think there's not really a positive in the fact that it gets postponed. The only thing I would say is that it gives you the chance to really go over everything again and again. Are we ready for this? Have we considered this? Have we, you know, on the staffing side of it, are we ready to go? The challenge was that in 2019 Rory won at Hamilton, 2020 was postponed, 21 was postponed. And believe it or not, in January of 22 here, there was a three week lockdown for COVID. I think it was the Omicron version or variant that came
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29:47
along.
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29:48
I've collected them like Pokemon cards. So we were shut for three weeks at the end of January. And even at that point, it's like, is this going to happen in early June 22? But they made a commitment by the March that the Canadian government had agreed that people were at the borders, we can open up again, which was really the big thing. That was the biggest challenge that we were going to have. So in some ways, it's difficult, is this going to happen? Is this going to happen? In other ways, it's a case of, right, well, we've definitely crossed the T's and dotted the I's here. We know what's going to happen. We're ready to go. The biggest challenge that we found was that by the beginning of May, when it was all systems go, PGA tours flying again, full crowds turning up, all of a sudden it became very apparent that because it had been, this was the first thing that had been played for three years, there was a massive appetite. Tickets were sold out for the Thursday, the Friday and the Saturday, Sunday eventually sold out. We did two concerts at the local high school, because we couldn't provide the space here, the local high school got there. We had Flo Rida, who didn't mean much to me. On the Saturday night we had Maroon 5, and the only way you could get a ticket for the concert was you had to have a golf ticket. Your golf ticket got you into the concert. Oh, wow. That's amazing. Yeah, RBC are an unbelievable ambassador supporter of not just Canadian golf, but PGA Tour, and they sponsor a lot of players. They wanted to up how many visitors they could bring every day which was our responsibility to look after them in our clubhouse and all of a sudden it was like this event was always a big event but because it's not been played for three years it's massive. And then the week of the tournament it was like almost in three, four weeks before somebody said by the way, there's this Liverpool thing. Their first event is the same week as us. And then all of a sudden, the week before, Dustin Johnson, who is RBC's biggest ambassador at that time, he pulls out of the Cairnryan Open. Doesn't really pull out of the PGA Tour at that point, but in real terms, he did and committed to live. And all of a sudden, you think, is this going to be, is this disastrous for the tournament? It's not great for the tournament long term maybe or the PGA tour what happened but actually for that one week St George's was completely under the spotlight because every press wanted to speak to everyone, they wanted their opinions on it, how is this affecting what's happening over at the Centurion Club I think it was and you know comparing it all the time and what's happening so it's all of a sudden you know we always knew the tournament was under the spotlight but it was under an even brighter spotlight, I
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32:27
think. Was that quite a stressful period for you, building up, not knowing whether the Live Golf would have been taking the spotlight, the main spotlight on the international stage?
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32:35
Do you know something, James? It was, but maybe it's because I'm getting older now, and I've been involved in Scottish Opens and Final Open qualifying and things, but it goes back to what I said at the beginning, or we talked about, is that, what do you learn when you're getting involved in these terms? Look after the stuff you can look after and don't worry. It's easier said than done, but try not to worry about the stuff that we're not. I'm certainly never mind St George's is not under any control whether, you know, who's coming, who's not coming, what press are turning up. Jay Monaghan turned up and was live with, you know, Jim Vance and Nick Fowler on Saturday afternoon talking about it. That went global with click bait, all these things that are happening. We're not in control of that. We just try to provide the best experience. And I think we did it. We got a world-class champion playing against Justin Thomas and Tony Finau, the last three ball of the day. And I think the highest score out of the three was 66, four under. It was a shootout in the last day. The ratings were through the roof.
2
33:36
I remember that. Tony Finau was playing some serious stuff and Rory managed to... Right, going back to, moving on from the tour, let's start talking about the club.
1
33:51
What's the history behind St George's? The club opened in 1929, so we're only, whatever that is, now six years away from a hundred year anniversary. It's a Stanley Thompson design who's pretty much regarded as the legendary designer of so many of these fantastic golf courses, predominantly in Canada but also across the border a little bit, you know, North North America, you would say, Northern States. I think the piece of ground that you've got to work on here, and I've heard this, you know, I am not a designer, I've never professed to even pretend to be a golf course designer, but hearing designers talk about it, there's almost 14 holes here where there's a little bit of elevation from the tee shot and that's what he was renowned for trying to find. So you could see everything in front of you. Sometimes it's just that in the front of the tee, the ground goes away from you, then comes back up to the fairway. Some of them you're maybe only hitting down a yard or two, some of them a little bit more, but you see everything in front of you, which means the fairway bunkering is looking at you. The green side bunkers on the parts of these is looking at you. It's almost inviting you to play the golf course. And that's one thing, bearing in mind that you go back to the 1920s, they could move some earth, but not a huge amount of earth to create that. So you did start off with a fantastic piece of ground to work with. And in real terms over the years, the golf course has not changed an awful lot. You know, the routing of it has not changed. Maybe they found some lines here and there, they pushed that green back, they pulled a tee back. But in real terms, the golf course has not actually changed much in nearly a hundred years. And I think that's testament to the original design that was done.
2
35:30
I've heard a lot of people talk about the quality of that piece of property. Also, the green placements are meant to be fantastic. What makes it so good, the green placements?
1
35:45
Yeah, I mean, that's maybe where unfortunately Mr. Thomson can't answer that question, but I think we've got a club archivist here who looks after everything, he's a member of the club and he does a fantastic job and he treats it like it's, well he should do, it's his own job, he loves doing it here and he puts everything together and you look back at the original things and apparently the way Thompson did it was he would look for green sites, that was his first thing he looked for and then he worked his way back and then he tried to see if he could create a routing, routing as they say over here, a routing for that and green sites were his most important thing. I mean I think the t-shots that they're all of course are fantastic tee shots, but in real terms it's 180, 150 yards in that the golf course comes to life. And that's because he found the best sites for the greens. And they're not particularly big, but we'll get 105 bunkers on the golf course, which is quite a lot for small greens. So length's not that important. It's about trying to get the ball on the fairway, probably at the right angle as well to be able to hit the ball onto the green. We tend to have very fast, firm conditions here. That's the way the golf course was designed to be played. You can run the ball onto the front of the green. What were you saying about green speeds for this year?
2
37:09
You had some...
1
37:10
So interestingly enough, the Canadian Open back in 2010, and the only, I wouldn't call it criticism, but the green, the slopes on the greens were just a little touch severe, not mounds, just the general slopes and it really meant that as soon as you got the greens above maybe 10 and a half getting close to 11 that you were very limited with the pin placements that you could put and if you went higher than that there was some greens you just couldn't put them at that speed so it created inconsistency. So unfortunately but fortunately in the winter of 2014-15 there was a very, very bad ice storm that affected a lot of golf courses locally. Quite a few greens were killed effectively. At that point, the golf club made the decision that they were going to redo the greens. Around the original design of Stanley Thompson, they brought in Tom Doak, did Ian Andrews, a local Canadian guy, just looked to maintain the shapes, but just take the gradients down a little bit. And that meant that, you know, certainly, forget the Canadian Open last year, this year from late May to probably even just a few weeks ago, late September, we were running the Greens at anywhere. They were always above 11, 11.5 to even 12. And then for the Canadian Open we could sit them at around 12 to 12.5 every day. Again, for that level of golfer, it just gives a little bit of protection for the golf course because it doesn't quite have the lengths. We let the rough come up and we make the greens a little bit quicker, firm them up, dry them out a little bit more and you've got a pretty challenging golf course. You couldn't get much better than Tom Doak coming in to do the work for you as well. No, and that's what's important. I think the key thing is if you're going to let anybody touch that golf course, you've got to have 100% confidence that they're going to maintain the integrity of why the original design was done that way. And for the membership experience, you know, you could go in there and probably, you know, make greens that are 50% bigger and create a lot more pin placements, which I would say would be lazy architecture. I think that would be the easy thing to do. You're trying to maintain what was originally designed and take that forward. And yeah, things have to change. Green speeds are different. Bunker depths are a little bit different. Quality of fairways is different. Approaches are maybe a little bit different, but the original design is what you're trying to maintain and look after.
2
39:30
You said you moved, you changed grass types.
1
39:34
Yeah, as happens, it's the same in, you know, here in Canada, it's pretty much the same as the UK, but, you know, eventually through time, POA takes over. And then you've got to decide, are you going to stay with POA, are you going to fight it? Now, when they re-laid the greens back in 15, it was, they were seeded, bentgrass greens. And I would say all but two, there's two greens that we struggle a little bit, the POAs come in, but the vast majority of the greens out there are still over 90% bentgrass greens. All our practices are geared up towards that. And that gives us real true green speeds. You can get a little bit higher. You don't get the seed effect of the poas. It tends to be in May that you get the seed head comes up as well. So we've maintained pretty much that. And that's our goal is to keep them as bentgrass as much as we can. So let's move on to a little story that I heard about the clubhouse. Why is it on the wrong side of the road? So, now, there's an element where it's never been 100% confirmed one way or another. We believe it might be a slight myth, but then of course, you know James, you never let the truth get in the way of a good story. So we have the main Islington Avenue, it goes north to south, it's one of the main there's lots of streets in terms of the big city but it goes north to south. The golf course is on the east side of Islington, the clubhouse, and this has always been the case, has been the west side of it, and there's actually a tunnel that you go through, you can walk through, you can drive through with your golf cart to get onto the east side of Islington for the golf course. Now, Islington Avenue, it's not like the golf course was built and then a few years later they decided to put a road in between the two. This was done at the time. So the myth, which we're not 100% sure is true or not, is that the reason they did that is because on one side of the road fell under one jurisdiction and the other side of the road fell on the other. On one side of the road east of Islington, you would never have got an alcohol or liquor licence. So on the west side of it you could, which is why the clubhouse is on one side, so you can definitely have a libation after your round, which is important of course. So that's the, I'm not sure if it's a myth or not. I'm going to go and see if I can get to the bottom of that, but then sometimes it's good not to dispel stories. Why not let just that run, because I think it's a good story.
2
41:57
Yeah, who's it harming? We're coming up to the time that we probably should start thinking about wrapping this up. So I'm going to finish on my normal finishing which is your top five favorite golf
1
42:08
courses. Top five? And I think the record is 13 so far so I'm not going to go with that many James I don't think. Yeah Simon Holt with the absolute beauty. Yeah he just kept going and going. I liked it though, it was good the way he described it. I think James for myself you can always take it in areas you know I mean I've been like people here in Canada always say to me, so what's your favorite golf back in Scotland or the UK? I do it in two fronts, I do inland and I do links golf course. I think if I had to play a links golf course for the rest of my life, it's, and here I'm gonna give you two straight away. I can't even say one. I think I would either be playing, I'd be playing at Dornoch, I'd be playing at Royal Aberdeen. Okay. I think the front nine in Royal Aberdeen is fantastic which I think is an unfair statement because I also think the back nine is very good it's just the front nine is exceptional. Dornoch, I played twice at Dornoch in September last year and you're walking towards the first tee and there's something inside you that you can feel and you don't get that everywhere, I get that at Dornoch. Inland golf course it has to be Loch Lomond back in the UK. The golf course is fantastic, the scenery is amazing, you've got the lock on one side, you've got the history of the house, but yeah, a golf course that in real terms only got going in the early 90s, but it's got something about it. I come across to this side of the Atlantic, I've been very fortunate, probably played Oakmont a number of times and that is a challenge, and a fair challenge though, that's as good a golf course as I've played. But then I've also got to say, and it's not just because some of my members might listen to this podcast, but St George's is a fantastic golf course. I don't play it as much as I would like. I might only play it maybe a dozen times this year. But every time I go out, I come off and I go back to Europe and again, probably because it beats me up every time and I listen to the podcast with Javi, is Valderrama.
3
44:11
Yeah, yeah.
1
44:12
Drive it a little bit too long and a little bit right down the first when I kind of hit the green with a pitching wedge, you know. But I know it. It's my own fault. I hit it in the States, I've been very fortunate to play Los Angeles Country Club. I've actually played it before they did the renovation with Coors and Kenshaw, I did it. But you're in the middle of Beverly Hills and you're playing this unbelievable property and a great golf course. So I mean, there's a few courses that I've played and then I could talk for another half an hour about all the ones that I've played that maybe are not that well known that are just as good. So I think we're, I feel very grateful that a career in the industry has allowed me to get to experience some of those courses.
2
44:58
Well, that's the thing, you've done so many different, you have so many different positions in your different sides of the business to get to where you are. It's quite amazing. You have a very whole understanding of the business, which is quite impressive. I think that's probably it. Is there anything you've learned in your time that you think people should learn?
1
45:22
Anything you, parting words of wisdom? No, I think it's, you know, I think, I think there's two sides to the thing. You know, there's working in it, whether it's as a professional golfer, a director of golf or being an operations director, then you become a general manager and you look at it. I think maybe advice to people in the industry is that I always try and sit on the other side of the desk and think, right, if I was a member, what was that experience like? And I do believe that getting to visit other facilities and look at it, you can start to see, what would a member feel like? What did that, how did that communication come across? How did that golf course set up feel? What was the, you know, there's another phrase that I use, which is we can sometimes with members, we can sympathize, we can empathize, but we should only apologize if we did something wrong. If it's something we've not done wrong, let's sympathize and empathize, but try and get the member to understand the things we're in control of. So that's probably a slightly low-winded answer, but I'm always trying to look at it from the golfer's experience, from the point they cross the threshold through the gates, whatever that is, to the point they leave. What was the locker room experience like? What was the first tee experience like? Never mind what was the golf course set up like? Because I think that has a big influence on how we feel. It comes from a very interesting point you said earlier about the fact that you have to experience world class to understand it. And a lot of members in these clubs across the world, there'll be a lot of well-travelled ones, but there is also members that only play at their home course. And being a well-travelled GM and showing them, actually, this can be a wee bit better because we're going to do this. Just to be able to back up with facts by saying, oh, at Loch Lomond we did it this way and it actually worked slightly differently. Yeah, and you've actually raised a very, a really good point there is that the members that do travel, whether it was at Loch Lomond or Oakdale or St George's, very, very high-end facilities, the members that travelled, when they came back, they really appreciated what they had because they did see something else that was probably world class, but they then realised when they came back here, we're up at that level, we're up at that standard. The members that didn't travel an awful lot, sometimes they see the same thing every day and they start to pick up on little things that actually, you know, go and play at Cypress Point, which I had the privilege to play, which was world class. But if I wanted to, I could walk around Cypress Point and still pull up a tiny little thing here and there. So the members that travel and see other facilities, they come back to their home clubs and they start to appreciate where they've actually grown up, which is fantastic.
2
48:15
Yeah, completely, completely agree. Big special thank you to John Caven for coming on. I know you're a very busy man. And also a thank you to all you guys for tuning in to another episode of Top 100 Clubhouse. It really means the world to me. If you enjoy what we're doing, please spread the word. Connect with me directly at james.atop100golfcourses.com or on Instagram at Official Top 100. Connect with me directly at james.atop100golfcourses.com or on Instagram at Official Top 100. And please remember, play fast, lunch slow.

Top 100 Clubhouse - Golf Podcast

Episode 15: John Caven - St. George's Golf and Country Club

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