The Reversible Golf Course | The Loop | The Land as it Lies Ep.1

The Loop at Forest Dunes is a Tom Doak Design in Roscommon, Michigan. Built in 2016 and winning Golf Digest’s “Best New Course” as well as being in the “100 Greatest Public Courses”. There is nothing on this planet like The Loop. Fast, Firm, Fun and F*&king Genius are what comes to mind.

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0:00-2:45 Introduction
2:45-6:17 The Vision
6:17-9:30 The Land
9:30-17:15 The Design
17:15-22:12 Outro

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Saw the original design you know looks good but some of the bunkers just don’t make sense to me and he goes well what do you mean and I go well I just don’t understand why there’s a bunker like here and he goes well what way is the

Whole plan I went oh my goodness you can play it in reverse they are two completely different golf courses so it’s built on the same land so it’s 18 holes that place 36 because of the different way it’s routed you have different Horizon Lines you have different tree lines different sunsets

You have different wind directions it’s it’s a completely different golf Portion a lot of courses are manufactured and we’ve got them with waterfalls and what you know fountains and and all this kind of stuff now and they didn’t have all the powerful Machinery to move all that Earth and do all those things back in those days this

Is kind of a a a throwback to the Origin I want to do things that are different I don’t want to keep building the same Golf Course every time you know that was just like a super challenging Idea when our owner at the time Lou Thompson was was talking to Architects to to build us a second course he wanted something that would wow people uh something that would get people to stay multiple nights and then also he wanted something totally different than Forest Dunes when I accepted the head pro

Position here at Forest Dunes the GM at the time had had let me know that there was a possibility of a second course it was spoken of but we weren’t really sure it was going to happen I was actually down in Detroit at a gathering and and I

Said there that you know I’ve been doing a bunch of projects like all over the planet I hadn’t built a golf course in Michigan in 25 years and I you know I’ve lived in Michigan the whole time two of the guys that I was talking

To the next day they were in advant for a students and they heard them talking about that they might be doing another course and they’re like you need to talk to Tom so blou Thompson called me I mean compared to some of the dramatic pieces

Of land I had worked on in the last 10 years this property wasn’t all that it was it was nice and gentle rolling ground some of the trees had been logged off over the years so there was some trees left but you know not like giant specimen oats or anything like that Tom

Came over to to meet with Lou we we had heard he had something up his sleeve off the charts different you know I’d had this idea for years do building a golf course that you could play forwards and backwards you know the idea came from a

Book I read when I was like 15 years old that one of the old Architects that worked in Europe Tom Simpson in the back of his book he had a little like six page thing about doing a reversible course he would build a a private course for the roths Childs on their estate

They so they build like three holes and of course that would get really boring if you just played the same three holes over and over again so he did it that it was reversible but he drew a very simple diagram of it in his book just and you

Could tell how different that would be just playing the other way around so it just always stuck in my mind as like that would be really cool if you could actually pull that off and do a good job with it on top of that Lou was not

Really a guy who’ been in the golf business forever and I thought maybe he’s just different enough to think this is a cool idea instead of like telling me 10 reasons why it won’t work we already had a top 100 public course uh in the country uh with the wise call

Forest dun’s course so he’s he’s going to want to bring something that uh you know stands up against that at at least I honestly didn’t think I would ever find a client that wanted to do it but I did have an idea of what kind of site

You needed to have to do it and it had to be fair it has to be fairly flat because otherwise you know when you’re playing like over a valley to a ridge and over a valley to another Ridge you have to get those distances right and they don’t work so well Backwards had to be kind of flat had to have not too many Big Trees cuz you can work around at the one way but it’s right in the way for the other way you know it just for some reason I didn’t really have that on my mind at the start

But as soon as I started walking the ground I’m like okay it’s not spectacular ground but it actually might work forcon they’ve been playing off on Sandy ground in Scotland for 3 or 400 years this whole the whole Western half of Michigan is Sandy so it’s a great

Place to build Golf Course the sand is 99% of what you’re looking for right that’s why everybody looks for these sand sites to do all to do the building on it it it makes it makes it so much easier if you got heavy soil that doesn’t want to drain you know it’s it’s

Hard to manage when when mother nature drops rain on you and and things like that when you have a Sandy site that drains really well and yeah it has its frustrations because it drains so well and things you know get hot and and you got to constantly be on your toes but I

Have the ability to to add the water a lot easier I can’t take it away when when when mother nature puts too much out there so the sand really really helps when I work for p ey the idea in the business he’d spoiled it for everybody it was like you could

Give him a swamp and he could turn out the TPC at s so he kind of De incentivized clients to go find a good piece of land to work on and you know and there are a lot of bad golf courses built back then under that

Premise you know to to do what he did at the TPC that’s like a one in a million thing and and you know but even if you look at the rest of the golf courses Pete D did TPC is great but his very best golf courses were built on the

Better pieces of land that somebody gave him it’s just a huge Head Start you know if you’ve got a really attractive piece of land and it’s got some cool natural Contours that’s you know figuring out how to use those things is a lot easier than trying to create it offer he and

His team did not really have to move a lot of Earth the natural land and the shape of it the few elevation changes and the way the ball runs out the way the design materialized is from what has been given Tom is very much a Minimalist the business had gone so far in the other direction at that point that I just thought when I started it if I’m going to miss miss on the side of doing too little to the land instead of too much because everybody else was doing too much that forced me to do what

I thought was the most important part which is focus on the greens first and the bunker second and let most of the rest of it just kind of follow the natural flow of the Land The routing didn’t take a lot longer than normal because you can’t really route things two ways at the same time you’re finding holes one way and then trying to figure out how to make them playable the other way so during construction the way that I routed the

Golf course I sort of handed off those holes to Brian slonik who’s running the job for me and said you think about the holes how the Hol play this one and you know we would we would sort of compare notes about like okay where do you know where are you thinking a

Fairway bunker would be interesting and it’s like no that’s that’ be right in the way going my way to make it work both ways you actually had to simplify things and strip things out you know if you I mean just the idea of bunkers in

General you know the the more you try to make the bunker visible from One Direction the less visible it is from the other you know if you build up a mound and cut cut the bunker into the face of the M you only see the back side

Of the mount from the other direction unless you build another bunker into the other side and I you know I think that’s one of the reasons it works so well is we knew to not over complicate things the loop has more of the little like LLY undulations in the fairways than than

The Renaissance Club does [Applause] I mean our Fairways are more like some other Scottish courses that do have that kind of land wal wall that was the inspiration for them but um but you you don’t really generally you don’t find that kind of land much in America but

That wound up being one of the main challenges of the golf course is that you don’t you know there’s not a lot of Fairway bunkers there but you don’t have very many level lies for your second shots and there’s that kind of Contour on the approach to the green too so you

Know since you have since you can’t just fly it on the green and make it stay you have to account for some of that in your approach shots too which very few courses in America really does it matter what the undulations are on the approach people are trying to fly That you may have a derivable par 4 which seems you know know getable but the green is the defense uh and in the same way you may have a reachable par five with a very difficult green the green is the defense so it may be an

Easy par but it’s not an easy birdie uh I think a lot of average golfers um even those who appreciate appreciate architecture maybe don’t understand what the designer had in mind in each particular one for to be interesting golf has to be somewhat challenging to people but everybody’s at a different

Level the one place where that kind of all comes together is when you get to the green you know you have to build a whole of like a 300 yard carry now and make a tour pro think twice about what they’re doing and for most people obviously that’s impossible they can

Never you so you know you you put te’s in all kinds of different places but really you just try to not have very many Do or Die Force cars so the one place you can challenge everybody kind of at the same level is around the greens and and there’s

Really you know there’s all sorts of skill levels of players around the greens too but it’s not you could have an 80-year-old woman who’s a decent putter so it’s not like you know unlike the te green game you’re not ruling out anyone physically by making the greens

More interesting so I’ve always kind of focused on that part and you know let let a lot of the rest of it sort itself out if you take a a low handicap golfer who may be able to drive the ball 300 yard at a at a peak trajectory in a peak

Spin rate and you take the average golfer who maybe can hit at 250 260 270 but at more of a boring trajectory it evens out so even off the te if you hit two straight shots I played with my dad out there quite a bit he’s 75 and he’s a

Good player uh many times we’re in a similar situation because my ball flight may be optimized and his catches the Contour and rolls out so that kind of um evens out the playing field for a lot of amateurs 10 at the 18 greens you play as a part

Three one way or another you know normally you’re thinking about building four part three is on go of course building 10 is a lot different and you know you’re trying to make them different than each other and like I never had to make 10 part 3s that were

All different than each other before but I think we did pretty well with that I you know that’s the main thing I like about them is that they’re very different and you know the funniest one to me is that the way we worked it out

Like the this the shortest of the 10 is the sixth hole on the red course which is just like 12 yards or something like that and you know plays across some native stuff and the green is kind of at the angle you’re playing at the angle you’re playing that while the green is

Wide and shallow and it’s kind of hard to hold and it falls off of that and then the longest is the 10 part 3s is uh 13 on the black high te High green 220 yard you know you have to hit it a long way and then the green mostly

Slopes away from you there’s just a little bit sloping towards you and it kind of goes over the hill and a lot of the green sloping away from you and those two holes are in the they’re they’re the Opposites of each other they’re in the same ground I mean the T

For number six red is at the is at the start of the Fairway going up to the green of the long par three I was fascinated we could build two holes that were that different basically using the same airspace and and the rest of them worked out the Same there’s a lot of people who act like every hole that’s a par four should be kind of the same level of difficulty like if you build a short par 4 you should make a really hard green if you build a long par 4 you should make a

Really big green that’s easy to hit because you’re hit you’re hdden from a farther away and I kind of understand that in terms of fairness but I just you know to me that makes every whole feel more the same and I’m trying to make them feel as different as possible from

One another and one of the best ways to do that is just vary the length have holes that are you know it’s it’s almost short enough to be a part three and in theory that should be easy but then then I’ve got more license to do tricky

Things to make it a little hard and you know those are the holes that the average guy has the best chance to make par or even birdie and the surprising part is they’re also holes that put pressure on a really good player because they think they should make birdie or

They need to make birdie to to stay even with the other guy and if they don’t they get frustrated if they make par on an easy hole they’re mad and you know if if I had toughen the hole up they wouldn’t they wouldn’t get so upset that

And you know it might not you know but they’re more affected playing the next couple holes after something like that and you know I think that’s part of golf I think you you want to get reactions from players like That the biggest feedback I’ve got the best feedback I’ve got is it’s like a totally different course like I wouldn’t have even realized that I was on the same piece of property you know until I missed in the same spot on both both holes it’s like I it just didn’t

Register that it was the same thing at all so other places you go places I’ve worked at you may have the ocean you may have a lake you may have mountains you may have something out in the distance that gives you a visual the course

Itself is the star so there are a couple places on the back side of the golf course where you kind kind of have the horizon line of you know just kind of Northern Michigan trees uh but there are no water hazards um there’s not huge elevation change it’s the design and the

Functionality of a course that plays in Two directions that’s the reason people Come I like it when you’re out a golf course and you get somewhere in the middle and it’s like you know you’ve you’ve been on this journey and you don’t really know where you are what’s coming next I think that’s a good thing in routing a golf

Course it’s hard to do usually it’s like okay I know that whole over there must be 16 going back um but it’s nice when you can when it’s it just feels natural and yet you don’t you wind up not knowing what’s coming [Applause] Next that