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Interviewer: Ask David McLay Kidd how one becomes a golf course designer and he says:
>> McLay Kidd: Well, the flippant answer to how do you become a golf course designer is you just call yourself one. This was obviously the high point.
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Interviewer: But all joking aside it's quite difficult, and today he's arguably the best at it in the world. McLay Kidd was born and raised near Glasgow, Scotland into a golf family.
>> McLay Kidd: My father was a golf course superintendent, and I loved everything about the business of golf.
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Interviewer: He got his big break in the late 90s, when he was hired to design and build Bandon Dunes on the Oregon coast. I handcrafted that golf course out of the sand dunes and the beach grass and the fescue that grows there. I got to build a great golf course on an amazing site, and that shot me to prominence.
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Interviewer: From Bandon Dunes, McLay Kidd turned out hit after hit, whether it was Queenswood in London, England, or Nanea on the Big Island in Hawaii. Then, in 2003, he was chosen to design the Castle Course in St. Andrews, Scotland.
>> McLay Kidd: Golf's been played there for 600 years, and in effect they've been building a new championship golf course about once every hundred years, and I got to build the last one. So to say it happens once in a generation is an overstatement.
>> Interviewer : And it's his homeland, the birthplace of golf, where McLay Kidd draws his inspiration.
>> McLay Kidd: Golf is a Scottish sport until the Americans stole it. And so I've taken it as a kind of mission to re-introduce America to what golf is from my homeland.
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Interviewer: Which he says is to focus on sustainability and preserving the natural environment.
>> McLay Kidd: Nature kind of takes the lead role and the objective is to work with nature or overcome nature and get that little white ball from one spot into the cup, rather than the golf designer having an idea, not caring about what piece of landscape he's got, and just bulldozing his way through it to create his vision.
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Interviewer: We met up with McLay Kidd at TPC Stonebrae in the East Bay Hills of Northern California. He designed the course which opened in 2007. He showed us around some of the holes and explained to us how he thinks about golf course design. First, we visited 13.
>> McLay Kidd: I figured that this spot was so beautiful and intimate with the big oaks all around it that I didn't want to over-design down here, so it's a simple soft green that ties into the natural slopes and one simple bunker here in the front that just sets the green up.
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Interviewer: We also looked at 14.
>> McLay Kidd: In my business it's like sometimes the holes just design themselves, and other times you've got to work a little harder for the money, and the 14th right here was the one that we had to sweat buckets on. What we ended up with is a relatively short par 4 with a diagonal fairway that players have fun in trying to dare themselves as to far they can carry it into play.
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Interviewer: While McLay Kidd uses a lot of technology to design his courses, his primary tools are his hands.
>> McLay Kidd: There's a lot of, you know, this and waving and moving around. There's no point, for me at least, using the best software and hardware to model a golf green to the tiniest degree. Because all of the artistic flair has gone. So those tiny details, a green, a bunker, a tee edge, we do all of that in the field. And that's where there's a lot of arm waving and standing back and looking at it from different angles. And me and my crew figuring stuff out.
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Interviewer: As for the future, McLay Kidd hopes to continue designing courses for the rest of his life, as long as he's able to bring his vision to the courses he builds.
>> McLay Kidd: I don't really want to build bright green county club golf courses with drifts of azaleas and daffodils in the spring time. It's just not my deal. I want to build golf courses that maybe get a little brown in the summer time. The overriding thing for me is the way a golfer plays one of my golf courses. They come off saying, that was a great experience.
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Interviewer: For b net, I'm Simi Das.
==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====
