68 would otherwise be really easy shots, made difficult because they’re in a terrible lie. “I don’t think the principles of great architecture changed among all the great architects over the years. MacKenzie’s thirteen principles are pretty close to what a good golf course is. Different length holes – there’s a place for great, long par threes, for the short par three, the Melbourne Sandbelt has got the world’s best collection of holes around 300 yards that are vexing and perplexing to play.” “I adored watching Seve play golf. He was the only guy ever to win at St Andrews, Augusta and Royal Melbourne. They were the courses that brought out his genius. He had space off the tee to play and if he hit the ball to the wrong part of the hole, he could hit shots that were great enough to recover. He could play to a tight pin from a bad angle, hit that big three iron up over a bunker and stop it and he was genius around the greens. Those places gave him room and space to express his genius. He played some decent US Opens – he played well at Oakmont the year that Larry Nelson won, hitting irons off the tees. That wasn’t the way MacKenzie wanted people to play golf. It wasn’t the way Seve played his best golf. And it wasn’t the way he wanted to play golf. “The fact that Seve was the master of playing golf like that tells me a lot about the best philosophy for building golf courses, which is build something that Seve would enjoy and Seve would play well, because he was the best player to watch.” The most successful modern golf architects have earned their reputations by creating designs that mimic nature. Does Clayton see any place for courses that have a more man-made appearance, like a TPC Sawgrass, for example? “I thought Pete Dye did a miraculous job in a swamp,” he says. “There are a lot of things there that I really think constitute good architecture. “You look at the original photos when it was much sandier, it was much more difficult and they calmed the greens down, but the original photos of that course look amazing. So I think it’s a brilliant golf course, although I don’t love the seventeeth hole. There is space off the tee. If you drive it down one side of a hole, you get a different shot than if you drive it down the other side. And if you drive it down the side that’s protected by a hazard, the second shot’s likely to be easier. “Great architects can man-make something, but it doesn’t look manmade. If it obviously looks man-made then it probably doesn’t look that good. But if you can’t tell which part of it was man-made, how the dirt was moved, then that’s the genius in making a hole look good on a piece of land that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to make something look good.” Since CDP was established in 2019, the firm has enjoyed an explosive start, with three newbuilds signed (Seven Mile Beach, plus two courses at Ha Long Bay in Vietnam for developer Vingroup) and more on the cards, plus a rapidly growing client list of existing clubs (recent additions including three ‘Royals’ – Dublin, Perth and Ostend – plus a first Scottish client, Monifieth). “When I started with John Sloan and Bruce Grant in 1995, I was still playing in Europe,” says Clayton. “They asked if I wanted to get involved in a design business. I was 38 and still playing some decent golf, but thought it sounded like fun. It was something I was always interested in but never would have done it on my own instigation.” In that first foray into the design business Clayton says they got lucky with a high-profile first client, Victoria Golf Club, and the work snowballed from there. “You’re never quite sure how it’s going to go. Mike and Frank are two INTERV I EW “ The last thing any of the partners would want is to be running ten projects at once, because you inevitably don’t do any of them very well”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=