Golf architect Todd Eckenrode has built and re-built golf courses up and down California and knows the work of historic architects like Alister MacKenzie, George Thomas, William Watson and Max Behr as well as anyone. He joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss working at and learning to play at Pasatiempo, when to try to “restore” original architecture and when to make alterations, how his outlook on design has changed through time, if public courses can close the conditioning gap on private courses and how the early courses of California evolved into what they’ve become today.

Photos: Cover page, Sharon Heights Golf & Country Club (Channing Benjamin). Above, Diablo Country Club.

Music: “Los Angeles,” Phosphorescent.

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 16th hole at Cypress Point.

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Golf course designer and builder Jaeger Kovich, who has shaped projects for Gil Hanse and Tom Doak and now is establishing himself as one of the busiest remodel specialists in the business, joins Golf Digest’s Derek Duncan to answer 24 questions about his views on architecture.

Photos: Cover page, The Cradle (Pinehurst Resort). Above, Laurel Links (propergolf.com).

Music: “24 Frames,” Jason Isbell.

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 16th hole at Cypress Point.

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Architect Tyler Rae is part of the next wave of major golf course designers. He joins Derek Duncan in the hot seat to answer 24 questions about golf, his career and his outlook on design.

Photos: Cover page, Old Sawmill (Tyler Rae). Above, Lookout Mountain, 11th hole.

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 16th hole at Cypress Point.

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Martin Ebert is one of the founding partners, along with Tom Mackenzie, of Mackenzie & Ebert, arguably the top golf design firm in Europe. Ebert has been the lead consulting architect, with Mackenzie, for most of the Open Championship courses as well as dozens of clubs in the U.K., Ireland and Europe. They also have several new courses currently under construction around the world.

Ebert joins Derek Duncan to discuss the company’s rise to the upper stratosphere of golf design, his impressions of golf in the U.S., how the cost of building and renovating courses in the U.K. compares to the U.S., the way Mackenzie and Ebert use advanced technology to produce plans, his insistence that green surfaces be constructed down to the most minute details of those plans and the trend of architects build too much contour into their greens.

Photos: Cover page, Royal Portrush (mackenzieandebert.com). Above, The Island (mackenzieandebert.com).

Outro song: Brendan Benson, “Metairie.”

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 16th hole at Cypress Point.

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Jerry Pate burst into the golf world when he won the 1976 U.S. Open at Atlanta Athletic Club in just his second year on tour. From 1976 through 1982 when he won the first Players Championship held at the new Pete Dye-designed TPC Sawgrass he was one of the best players in the world, contending in other majors and earning a spot on the 1981 Ryder Cup team. Injuries forced him off the Tour and into other ventures including golf course design, pairing up with luminaries like Bob Cupp and Tom Fazio. He recently completed a major renovation of the Pete Dye masterpiece Teeth of the Dog at Casa de Campo in the D.R.

Pate joins the Feed the Ball podcast to talk about the work he’s done at Teeth of the Dog and his longtime connection to the resort, what Dye told him about architecture in 1974, the challenges of building Teeth, the penal aspects of the original TPC course, his short but illustrious television career and his real thoughts about National Golf Links of America.

Photos: Cover page, Teeth of the Dog (Enrique Berardi). Above, Kiva Dunes (Kiva Dunes).

Outro song: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “Alabama Pines.”

Watch Derek Duncan break down the original Redan hole at North Berwick.

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Trey Kemp has been one of the most active and influential figures in public and municipal golf design in Texas for over 15 years. He spent much of that time working with John Colligan and now has his own firm, continuing to improve public courses while also pursuing new course commissions. He joins the Feed the Ball podcast to discuss the challenges and opportunities working in the public sphere, what courses have guided his design aesthetic, the value of Tom Fazio, if the Raynor resurgence is played out, the secret sauce to making public golf profitable and what it takes to break into the architectural elite.

Photos: Main page, Rockwood Golf Course (credit: fortworthgolf.org); Above, Texas Rangers Golf Club (courtesy of the club).

Outro song: Wilco, “How to Fight Loneliness.”

Watch Derek Duncan break down the original Redan hole at North Berwick.

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Bill Kubly is one of the OG’s in golf course architecture. He’s the founder Landscapes Unlimited, of one of golf’s most prominent course construction companies (opened in 1976), and has had a hands-on, up front view of the profession for 50 years.

Kubly joins the Feed the Ball podcast to share stories from a long career building golf courses for virtually all of the industry’s architects going back two generations. He talks to Derek Duncan about being a founding investor in Sand Hills Golf Club with Dick Youngscap, the architectural impact of golf in the Sandhills, what firms delivered the cleanest set of blueprints, the difference between contractor bids and design/build, working special projects like Lost Rail with Scott Hoffman and his involvement in the development of Sutton Bay, one of the great sleeper destination clubs in the U.S.

Photos: Main page, Sutton Bay (credit: Gary Kellner); Above, Lost Rail (courtesy of the club).

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 3rd hole a Oakmont Country Club.

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Ron Whitten, historian and former Golf Digest architecture editor, and Mike Davis, former USGA CEO and executive director, delve deep into the origins, evolution and architecture of Oakmont Country Club. We discuss how and why Oakmont developed the way it has, what makes it arguably the greatest championship venue in American golf, what makes the greens so unique and so fast, whether it’s a purely penal design, how Whitten shamed the club into reclaiming their treeless identity in the 1990s and the course’s specific strengths and weaknesses.

Photos: Main page, Oakmont CC, First hole; Above, Oakmont’s second hole.

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 13th hole at Augusta National.

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Golf course designer Riley Johns joins Derek and Jim from his home in Canada to fill us in on his latest thoughts on course building and artistry. Johns has been splitting time between his own growing business with partner Keith Rhebb, leading projects for Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, and even working with Jim on the renovation of St. Charles in Winnipeg, a club with nines by both Alister MacKenzie and Donald Ross. We talk about the influence of Stanley Thompson and Thompson’s similarities to MacKenzie, the benefits of unconditional constraints in artistic design, the luxury of improvising in the field, the downside of following recipes and the value of collaborative input vs. intense auteurism.

Photos: Main page, Te Arai South, 5th hole (Ricky Robinson); Above, Winter Park 9

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 13th hole at Augusta National.

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Augusta National is complicated. It’s the most famous course in the world and has been an architectural and maintenance ideal for decades, even though the design is in a continuing state of flux and the turf and bunker conditions have been far from perfect over its life. If it isn’t what we think it is, and perhaps never was, and if it has passed through numerous very different versions of itself, how can it perennially and for most of its history be considered essentially one thing: arguably the best or second best course in the U.S. and number one on every golfer’s bucket list?

Designer, historian and Golf Digest architecture emeritus Ron Whitten, and prolific author David Owen (who wrote the seminal book on the Masters called “The Making of the Masters“) sit with Derek Duncan to hash out all of this and explore the depths of Augusta.

The Comprehensive Guide to Every Change at Augusta National.

Watch Derek Duncan break down the 18th hole at TPC Sawgrass.

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