Feed The Ball

Mike Davis was the CEO and executive director for the USGA for over 30 years and was responsible for awarding U.S. Opens and Amateurs to host courses and helping to set them up for those tournaments. Over the course of his career he got to know intricately virtually every great golf course in the U.S. He now takes that knowledge into a new chapter of his life as a golf course designer, working wit...

Scottish golf course architect Benjamin Warren joins the Feed the Ball podcast with Derek Duncan to discuss building The Loop at Chaska in Minnesota, a course designed for adaptive golfers, working extensively in Japan, why recent architecture outshines that of the 80s and 90s, the challenge of building true links in the U.S. and shaping courses for architects like Bill Coore , James Duncan , Kye...

Nick Schaan works side by side with architect David McLay Kidd out of their offices in Bend, Ore. Kidd is one of the most esteemed and decorated designers in the business over the last 25 years, and since 2006 Schaan has been instrumental in bringing to life acclaimed courses like Tributary , Mammoth Dunes and the new GrayBull course in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Schaan joins Golf Digest architec...

Mike Cocking is the “C” in the Australian golf design firm OCM . His partners are former tour player and 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy and Ashley Mead . The trio have built courses in Australia and Asia and consult with some of the top historic clubs Down Under including Victoria and Kingston Heath . Over the last five years they’ve gained a foothold in the U.S. as well, b...

Lee Schmidt’s lengthy golf architecture career began in the early 1970s working for Pete Dye and took many different detours through the decades. He worked closely with Landmark Land Company on numerous Dye projects in the 70s and 80s before taking a job with Jack Nicklaus’ design firm. In the late 1990s he created his own firm with Brian Curley , and the two built courses across the U...

If might seem like golf course architect Scott Hoffman came out of nowhere with his design at Lost Rail , opened in 2022 outside of Omaha. However, he’d previously worked for over a decade with Tom Fazio, designing courses in the western U.S. He then worked with Tim Jackson and David Kahn for a number of years. Hoffman wasn’t pursuing new work when he was approached about looking at la...

Two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw joins golf course builder Jim Urbina and Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan to discuss his long time partnership with architect Bill Coore and the beliefs and impulses that define the many courses they’ve built, from Sand Hills to Friar’s Head to Bandon Trails , all the way through to their newest courses including Point Hardy at Cabot S...

Golf course architect Greg Letsche , lead designer for Ernie Els Design , joins Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan and golf course builder Jim Urbina to discuss his early years working for Pete Dye , how running projects for Jack Nicklaus differed from his experience with Dye, the design similarities between Dye and Nicklaus, the sometimes absurd challenges and hiccups working internatio...

In less than 10 years in the profession, Blake Conant has risen from crew member to shaper to the co-designer of Old Barnwell , a stunning new course near Aiken, S.C. Conant has primarily shaped greens and bunkers for Tom Doak at projects like Houston’s Memorial Park, Bel Air, The National’s Gunnamatta Course in Australia and St. Patrick’s in Ireland while working closely with Do...

Shortly after Tom Weiskopf broke with design partner Jay Morrish in the late 1990s he turned to architect Phil Smith . Smith had been working with Nicklaus Design in Arizona, but the opportunity to partner one-on-one with Weiskopf was too good an opportunity to pass up. Over the next 24 years, Smith and Weiskopf designed courses in numerous countries with most of their best work occurring at gorge...

Don Placek began working for Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design in 1997 after being in Perry Dye’s Denver office for several years. It was a significant jump, going from the types of technical builds Dye was coordinating in the western U.S. and Asia to Doak’s more intuitive, organic way of designing and constructing courses. Placek began producing plans and blueprints for Doak&#8...

Architect Stephen Kay has been involved in the building, remodeling or renovation of over 300 courses during his design career spanning back to the mid-1980s. He was one of the pioneering voices in the late 80s for looking at the historical record of a course during renovation to attempt to honor the original architecture. He built numerous new courses in the 1990s and early 2000s, many public, in...

Golf course builder Allan MacCurrach began working on crews for Pete Dye in the late 1970s and opened his own golf course contracting company in 1987. He’s been involved in building or remodeling over 20 courses for Dye, who passed away in early 2020, as well as architects like Tom Fazio , Bobby Weed and Rees Jones . MacCurrach is also responsible for constructing–and designing, throug...

Designer and historian Josh Pettit began collecting the writings of Alister MacKenzie for his new compendium of essays, “The MacKenzie Reader,” years ago, and was ready to publish in 2020 when the pandemic postponed printing until the summer of 2022. The wait was worth it–the Reader is a gorgeous volume of Pettit’s selections of the architect’s best and most important...

Landmand Golf Club in northeast Nebraska, just across the Missouri River from Sioux City, is one of the largest and most expansive golf courses ever built, with the largest total square footage of greens of any course in the U.S. That it was designed by Rob Collins and Tad King , creators or the equally audacious though much smaller Sweetens Cove outside Chattanooga, should come as no surprise&#82...

Jim Nagle began working with golf course renovation and historical restoration legend Ron Forse in 1998, in what might be considered the field’s pioneering days. Golf course restoration is an attempt to reestablish a course’s first principles–placing it back in a specific point in time, usually in accordance with the way the original architect designed it–using documentatio...

Jason Straka has been a principle in Fry/Straka Global Golf Design since joining with partner Dana Fry in 2012. Previously he was the senior architect for Hurdzan-Fry Golf Design, helping that company build landmark courses like Calusa Pines , Erin Hills and Shelter Harbor . Fry/Straka is one of the hottest design firms in the world right now, coming off major new builds including the South Course...

Andy Staples positioned himself as one of the profession’s most creative architects with his throwback renovation of Meadowbrook Country Club near Detroit with its Willie Park, Jr. inspired early-1900s shaping. He moved into the 1920s with his green designs and shot strategies at The Match Course at PGA National Resort , opened in 2021, that pull from Macdonald/Raynor templates. He’s c...

Chris Cochran began his career building golf courses for Jack Nicklaus in the mid-1980s. With over 100 international projects completed, he is Nicklaus Design’s longest tenured senior design associate, and since the early 90s has arguably been the most significant mover behind Nicklaus Design’s global operation. Cochran sits down with Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan and go...

Joe Jemsek grew up with Dick Wilson . At least figuratively. In the early 1960s, Wilson, one of golf architecture’s most interesting and possibly misunderstood figures, designed the former America’s 100 Greatest Course Cog Hill No. 4 in Chicago, known as Dubsdread, for Jemsek’s grandfather. Few people knew Wilson or his former partner Joe Lee as well as the Jemseks, and the famil...

Tim Liddy and Dave Axland have worked together on a number of projects including, most recently, Harrison Lake in Indiana, a remodel that included the addition of several new holes and a re-routing of the course. Liddy, the primary designer, was a longtime collaborator with the late Pete Dye and knows his mentor’s work and beliefs as well as anyone. Axland is the longtime associate of Bill C...

In just the last several years, designer Andrew Green has played a prominent role in guiding back to their founding architectural spirit a number of prominent major championship courses, including America’s 100 Greatest Courses fixtures Inverness Club , Oak Hill East and Congressional Blue . He’s also brought back to life the most interesting features that had faded from over a dozen o...

The topic is bunkers: should they be placed scientifically or randomly? Should there be more or less, or any at all? Has the naturalistic look become ubiquitous and overused? What about proper bunker depth? Are liners a waste of money? And are bunker still the hazards they once were, have they lost their importance, and have they become too expensive to maintain? To discuss all of this, as well as...

Like most architects, Steve Smyers has a deep reverence for the classical era and the strategic brilliance of Harry Colt, Alister MacKenzie, George Thomas and others. However, as an elite player as well as a veteran designer, he realized the basic strategic precepts that have existed since the early 1900s and have guided much of his own work might no longer apply to golf at the highest levels. Smy...

In this Feed the Ball podcast, we get deep into some Wisconsin golf talk with golf course architect Craig Haltom . Haltom joins Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan to discuss recreating C.B. Macdonald’s The Lido at Sand Valley , how GPS technology has the potential to change the way courses are preserved and finished, how he located the Sand Valley property over a decade ago and bro...