Two of the prominent figures in the restoration of East Lake Golf Club spoke of the changes to the course ahead of this week’s Tour Championship – course architect Andrew Green and East Lake general manager Chad Parker.
Q. Now that you’re here and there are players on it, what are your thoughts?
AG: I’m super excited. Obviously, it’s a brand new experience for the players, so there’s going to be a little bit of trying to figure it out, but I couldn’t be more thrilled with the product. I think it’s very thoughtful.
So, there might be some verbiage about par, but I think it’s more that players have to pick a shot and execute, and I think for the Tour Championship, for East Lake, and for the history of this place, that was something that we really needed.
Q. Is there some anxiety?
AG: Oh, there’s absolutely anxiety, for sure. But I think it just comes with the territory. You don’t know what you have until you tee it up. The golf course has matured amazingly since June 15, when the last piece of sod went down. But at the same time, it’s going to need to mature to see the full effect.
Q. The greens are new greens; they’re going to be significantly firmer than they will be in the future, regardless of conditions?
AG: Absolutely. Yeah, the greens are probably as firm as they’ll ever be, but that’s also OK. Firmness – we’ve seen golf played at this level with firm greens. It maximizes the players’ intention. Augusta this year played really different because of how firm the greens were. So, I think you’ll see something similar here.
Q. Have you heard from the TV partners as to how this is going to show up on TV different from the past?
CP: Yeah, I think I remember NBC’s first visit back in June. First thing they said when they got out of the car was “the bunkers look cool.” It was in the morning and the sun, the way it was hitting the bunker faces, was completely different than it used to be, and that was literally the first response that we got.
Q. When you start moving earth and it’s all ripped up, are you tinkering at that point?
AG: Yeah, it’s a lot easier to study distances and angles and all of that when you’re sitting at, in my case, at my computer. I have multiple monitors up, and I can have different imagery plus measuring devices and everything as I’m drawing. So, the plan was drawn with a lot of intention.
But when we got on the ground, obviously we had to make sure everything fit. A good example of that would be the bunkers down the right side of 3, trying to make sure they stack where they feel like they’re a little closer together than they truly are. We massaged on that.
Then all the greens, we had kind of a big idea of what they were going to be, and then I personally worked on each one of them to get it the way you wanted.
Q. What was the biggest challenge you faced over the past 12 months?
AG: Time. We only had a certain amount of time. I think something that the East Lake team should be really put on a huge pedestal is that they were here last year, and the maintenance team was preparing the golf course for this championship last year, and the day after this was done, we were trying to kill grass and start construction.
Well, there’s still all of this stuff here we had to get out of the way. Then we grassed the greens on Memorial Day-ish, end of May. We were already building out the structures before we grassed the greens. So the maintenance team here has had 400-plus days of intensity, and they’ve done an amazing job. But at every step, we knew we had to be ready Thursday. So that was the biggest challenge.
Q. Have you run into the sentiment factor? Guys come here and say, we liked East Lake the way it was, and change is sometimes hard.
AG: Oh, absolutely. That comes with the territory. If you think about any golf-course renovation or restoration, you have a group of people that have made memories on their golf course, and overcoming that, playing with your dad, your kids, whatever, there’s memories, and that’s hard.
But it’s still, the right thing to do for the future is the right thing to do for the future. So here I’m sure there will be some sentiment of the shots they played before. The greens are way more interesting now than they were previously, and there will be some – yeah, I’m sure there will be some comments like that. But at some point you have to embrace the integrity of what this place means in order to kind of reset that, remind us to the past and push us to the future. This is what we needed to do.
Q. Chad, what was the last year like for you? You’re here watching it all, and there’s got to be nerves and – it’s got to be quite an experience to be on the ground.
CP: Well, it was a learning experience for me. Project management basically and making sure that Andrew had what he needed, and we weren’t holding things up, but also supporting our agronomy team, as Andrew mentioned earlier. Charlie Aubry, our director of agronomy and his team, they have worked their butts off, and they really are the heroes of this.
But for me personally, it was just trying to keep things moving. We knew the deadline. We knew when we had to finish. To have the team in place, I thought, was critical. The decisions being made in a timely manner, not holding people up, and then dealing with the challenges that came along. That’s just all part of the normal Tuesday 9 a.m. meeting we had every single week for 217 days or whatever it was.
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