David Hill

In this episode we discuss a bit of a Sandhills Unicorn: a relatively new golf course, by Pinehurst area standards. I mean, of course, the Dormie Club, the 2010 Coore + Crenshaw masterwork located just 10 minutes from the heart of Pinehurst. Even in the pre-Covid-19 days, we usually spent our evenings around the poker tables of our rental house rather than chasing last call at the local taverns. However, we have enjoyed a handful of culinary and evening fare establishments worthy of your consideration, should you venture down that way.

That means I’m going for jogs on as many evenings as evenings as Kentucky weather and this 42 year-old body will allow. On Sundays, I do my “long run” for the week, a predetermined distance that changes each week that I use to build up my endurance towards the 26.2 miles I hope to run on race day. I can be disappointed that I couldn’t run the full distance, and just deal with the attendant disappointment and anxiety that I won’t be prepared on race day. I play enough tournament golf that I’ve been cured of my vanity handicap, and I’m far too competitive and want to be a “good golfer” to ever sandbag my buddies or the league in which I play.

In Episode 26, Scott Laffin and I bounce around ideas golf and golf course businesses. He has carved out a non-traditional role for himself in golf course design and construction through is firm, Feature Golf Consulting, as the guy behind the guy. A professional landscape architect by training, he’s enjoyed backdoor access and hands-on experience to some of the most exciting projects of the last decade, including the original Sand Valley Course in Wisconsin, and the newly announced Lido Course re-creation to be built adjacent to that same Sand Valley resort There were significant storms around Lexington and Cincinnati on the evening we recorded, so the sound quality is as good as I could engineer it, with a few unnatural breaks where we simply lost audio quality,

This version is a special treat, as I have a wide-ranging discussion with one of the smartest, most intriguingly credentialed people working in golf, Mike McCartin, co-founder of the National Links Trust. With a bachelor’s degree in economics from that esteemed school in Durham, North Carolina, and a masters of landscape architecture from Georgia, experience as a working golf course designer and builder with Renaissance golf, and most importantly, being a lifelong golf tragic, Mike possesses the ability to think about golf in romantic, technical, financial and political terms, a rare combination even among the golf architecture crowd. We discuss the National Links Trust, and what that organization is doing and plans to do with the public golf courses in Washington D. C., and what role nostalgia and the ability to tell a story play in making a case to decision makers that may lack an emotional investment in what Mike would describe as community assets, not just golf courses. Some of the ground we cover is exclusive to our nation’s capital and its unique political structures, but there are also plenty of thoughts that may scale up and extrapolate out to municipalities across the nation.