A Defiant Man

Tom Fazio launched his golf course design career at just 17 years old. His uncle George Fazio, who’d won the 1946 Canadian Open and the 1947 Bing Crosby Pro-Am (now the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am), was transitioning into the business, and in 1963 Tom dug in. In the decades since, he has become perhaps the most accomplished and controversial designer in the game.

His number of renovations and original designs is north of 200, a figure topped only by Donald Ross. His portfolio of originals includes Shadow Creek in Las Vegas; Congaree Golf Club in South Carolina; Victoria National Golf Club in Newburgh, Indiana; the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina; and Karsten Creek in Stillwater, Oklahoma. His renovation résumé is even brighter, with Kiawah Island, Congressional, Southern Hills, Winged Foot, Oak Hill and Inverness among the courses having called for his services. He has been a leading design consultant at Pine Valley and Augusta National for decades.

Yet his critics have lined up nearly as fast as the course credits, especially over the past 10 years. As design in general has trended toward natural settings, fewer trees and minimalism, Fazio, perhaps more than any other architect, is known for the opposite: shaping a property into a golf course, which often means elaborate earthmoving.

Now 79, Fazio is a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Old Tom Morris Award, the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America’s highest honor. And he shows no signs of either slowing or backing down from what has taken him to his lofty perch.

Using the word “minimalism” to describe modern design has become popular, and it’s seen as representative of the more desirable style. You, on the other hand, are known as an earthmover. What’s your view on this?

I’m used to hearing that same thing all the time. It’s redundant. This minimalism thing started back in the ’90s. It didn’t start now. That’s nothing new. First, there’s nothing new in golf design anyway, in my opinion. It’s all been done before. You go in cycles and trends.

You also get tagged with a certain label. I’ve been tagged with a label that I move too much earth. But it doesn’t matter whether you move a little bit of earth or a lot of earth. Nobody ever asks about how much earth was moved or what was the cost of building a golf course in earlier times, especially the famous ones. It doesn’t matter.

If you go to some of the old golf courses and you look at them, critique them—a person like me, who’s not trying to get a job, can give you my opinion that maybe they should have moved more earth. If they had the money, the resources and the equipment, maybe that would have been done. In the early stages of golf, for example, blind shots were very acceptable. A lot of great golf courses have blind golf holes. If you build new golf courses today with blind holes, nobody will like that. It’s a failure.

So, do the math. You’re the owner. You’re the developer. Forget the architect. You’re the owner. What do you want?

Do you want a golf course that’s accepted in the marketplace, that people are going to come ooh and aah about? You’re investing money. You have a major commitment. You want recognition. You want to compare your course on opening day to the best courses we’ve ever played.

To what extent do budgets drive the styles that become popular?

When I started in the industry with my uncle, we had a budget somewhere in the area of $10,000 a hole to build. Did Donald Ross have a budget? Probably some kind, but maybe they didn’t, or they’d go find a good piece of land for golf.

Let’s call the 1920s the golden age of architecture, as it’s often said it was. The owner would instruct the architect to find a good piece of land for golf. Many courses didn’t have trees. They were planted. And now, 50 to 100 years later, we’re knocking trees. The industry is removing trees because they weren’t there to begin with.

One of the reasons they weren’t there to begin with is because most places didn’t want to build a golf course where there were trees because it was expensive to take trees down. It was much easier to build on land without trees. It’s logical. Also, not many golf courses were built with real estate around them.

You have to look at the era when a course was built and the way things were built. You can’t divorce style from the era in which a course was built.

How does this play into rankings of top-100 courses?

Everybody wants to rate the top 100, and there are lots of top 100s. Most of the courses in the rankings are older because of tradition and reputation. People are programmed to like them. Yet they were done for a different reason. But let’s jump a little bit—jump to Inverness and Oak Hill. Donald Ross designed each, and they were built in the same era. [Inverness in Toledo, Ohio, opened in 1919 and hosted the 1920 U.S. Open. Oak Hill in Rochester, New York, opened in the mid-’20s. Both courses have hosted multiple major championships. —Ed.] We renovated Oak Hill for the 1980 PGA Championship. 

Think of the time. No courses were being built in the United States because we had a crash of the real estate market in 1974. Courses were financially bust. They changed hands with different ownerships. The game was struggling. No new courses were being built. The industry was in a deadsville time. Nothing was happening. We were very fortunate to get a new project. Our first new project in that era was Pinehurst No. 6. We were given the project because we committed to build it for $750,000, a turnkey design and build. It was all about the money at that time. Fortunately, it was Pinehurst, so it had nice terrain, but it also was a real estate deal. 

At Oak Hill, a member group called us, either the greens committee or the golf committee. There was controversy because Robert Trent Jones was involved in an Oak Hill renovation back in the ’50s. Then [Lee] Trevino shot four rounds in the 60s when he won the ’68 U.S. Open. That was the first time someone shot four rounds in the 60s at a U.S. Open.

How did members respond? Typically, members don’t like it when pros go low at their course.

The reputation after Trevino won was that Oak Hill was not strong enough for a U.S. Open venue. The word was that the USGA would not be going back. The club wanted advice on how to strengthen the course. We looked at it and made some recommendations. Again, you can’t divorce the considerations from what was happening in the financial world. That had a lot to do with it. The economics always play a part in the decision. 

I imagine the circumstances and discussions can get complicated.

To begin, you have to be site-specific. How do you strengthen this course? Well, you come up with a concept and plan. These need the approval of committees and boards. You’re not working in a vacuum. You don’t just go do it. Your proposal must be approved.

So you look at it. How can you strengthen some of the golf holes? For example, the 18th hole at Oak Hill. The 18th green was built in a very flat area directly behind the clubhouse. With the new modern era of golf coming and more gallery space needed because of the Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer era that grew the game, the first logical option was to take the 18th green and move it forward  to the edge of the brow. Moving the green to the edge of the hill would put strength  and challenge into the approach shot.

It would also give you room for lots of stands and people to put around the 18th green. I think the 18th hole’s still in that place.

“Restoration” and “renovation” are buzzwords and have been for some time. “Minimalism” might be the word of the modern era for courses built since Sand Hills in the ’90s, but restoration and renovation have been around for many decades and constitute a significant part of your portfolio. What’s your view on these today?

Renovation and restoration mean going back to what a course was, say, in the Donald Ross era. We didn’t want to do that at Oak Hill. We were going to leave some elements the way they are because they worked, but we were also going to make some changes.

We moved the tee back at 18 and renovated the bunkers and the fairway. We had to move the fairway bunkers. This sort of work generates a lot of opinion. 

If you go to some of the old golf courses and you look at them, critique them—a person like me, who’s not trying to get a job, can give you my opinion that maybe they should have moved more earth.

Let’s turn to Inverness, where you did extensive work in advance of the ’79 U.S. Open. This was more of a renovation than a restoration, with three new holes. They came in for a lot of criticism. [These holes were removed from the course in a 2018 renovation by Andrew Green. —Ed.] 

P.J. Boatright [the USGA’s executive director of rules and competitions at the time] was in charge, working with the committee at Inverness. The first thing that was going to happen was that the USGA was going to limit the gallery to 25,000 spectators because there wasn’t enough room. Inverness is on a small property. In our plan, we showed you could do a renovation if you took three holes out of the interior of the golf course and used some adjacent land to expand the site by 30%.

When you expand the site by 30%, what does that do?

It gives you so much more room for spectators, for parking, for whatever you need. They were able to increase the ticket sales to pay for the cost. It was all part of the plan. The golf course was built back in the 1920s on farmland, which was kind of flattish terrain—not very exciting in terms of elevation change. Steep slopes were built because when you move dirt with a horse and scoop, you scoop dirt out and you pile it up to build a green, so the slopes of the green on the edges were very steep. These slopes had to be cut with a hand mower or a push mower. My uncle and I built three new holes there, and we were thinking about the future, to where you can use a riding machine, which takes fewer hours and manpower. 

That would also cost less—an important factor in a time when costs were going up. The cost factor was considered in all that work. That will change the look, the playability and the style. But should you change the style?

Which you did. 

That seemed the logical thing to do at the time. Now, 20, 30 years later, we get to a point where we don’t worry about cost. Cost means nothing anymore. Look where we are now. Nobody is bad at this. But if you look at today’s maintenance budgets, we’re evolving into something new.

How so?

The desire for perfection. 

The Augusta National Syndrome, or whatever one chooses to call it. 

Well, that’s a bad term. I don’t believe in taking a shot at Augusta National. It’s a bad term because it’s not fair. It’s like saying rich people are bad because they have too much money. That’s not the problem. Most rich people are contributing, creating jobs and opportunity and doing good things for charities. That’s the capitalist system. Now if you want to go to some other system of government, where everybody shares equally, you can do that. But my point when it comes to golf is this: Maintenance costs are going so high.

We’re into what I call a sand era of golf. Look at The Park West Palm. You look at all the sand—and not just there, every place. Almost every place, sand, sand, sand. You look at a photograph of a course that has more sand in it, it looks better than if there were no sand. If it’s all grass, it doesn’t look very good.

You stand on the tee, and what’s the wow factor? There is none. When there’s sand, though, there’s a wow factor. Think of the No. 1 course in the world, as ranked by most. That’s Pine Valley. You go to Pine Valley, what do you see when you get to every tee? Sand. You say, “Wow!” Every hole is the best hole you’ve ever seen. Then you go to Augusta National; what do you feel, what do you see? Wow again, because you have hilly terrain, great, perfect grass, big, tall trees—wow. Or Pebble Beach, wow.

Now Cypress Point, you only have a wow on a few holes, but you still have the wow. So, jumping back to Oak Hill and Inverness, back to the ’70s, for two different reasons. Oak Hill was renovated to create strength and challenge for the U.S. Open that was coming up. Oh, and what happened? Nicklaus, the greatest player in the world, won. He shot 6 under and won by six.

Was it a success? It was a huge success. Now on the architectural side, you have people criticizing and saying our renovation was wrong. They wanted me to restore it back to what it was. I’m not against that. That’s just another way.

Can you speak about your work with the late Mike Strantz, beginning at Inverness?

Mike was on a grounds crew there. He was an artist; he liked to draw. Andy Banfield, one of my staff people, who has been with me 51 years, talked me into hiring Mike. Andy said this guy on the maintenance crew wanted a job. I found a place for him. He wanted to get into golf course construction.

What was it like to work with Strantz?

Mike died young, of course. He liked to be on a bulldozer, shaping. Mike had a family, and he didn’t like traveling much. Mike had some health issues when he was younger. He never told me about it because, like most guys, he was private and didn’t want that to affect his job.

Then we had a downturn in the economy in the 1980s, when the interest rates and economy were in trouble. I was doing some renovation work and building the second course at Wild Dunes [Resort in South Carolina]. I love that place. Mike lived there and decided he wanted to stay because his wife and family liked it there. We didn’t have much work for him, though. Still, he stayed there. We’d done a course in Myrtle Beach called Wachesaw Plantation. He got to know the owner. The owner liked him, said he was going to do another golf course and asked Mike to do it for him. Mike stayed and worked there on other projects.

Mike worked for me on several projects. He was a shaper and a very talented and good guy who would also design and build. We wouldn’t be the total contractor because we had a hard time getting people to build greens and bunkers where we wanted. But Mike was one of those people—very talented.

The only issue that I ever had with Mike was that he liked steep slopes and steep hills. I’d have to tone him down when he was on the bulldozer because of the steepness of those slopes and hills. That’s not what I wanted, and obviously I was in charge.

As we’re talking, the words “artistry” and “artist” have come up quite a bit. Your wife is an artist. Do you view your courses as works of art?

I’m not sure for me it is. But I think it’s true in golf design. 

Stanley Thompson once wrote that golf course architects should have an eye to the beautiful. 

That’s great writing. I think it’s a great thing to say. As for me, I was always a practical guy. But I was always into beauty. It’s only logical you’re going to have beauty. I grew up in an era when even though I get accused of working only for wealthy clients with unlimited budgets, that’s not quite true. It evolved to that, but I grew up in the business when you had to be practical because you had very little financial resources to work with. How do you get beauty and drama and excitement and not have a great piece of property or a big budget? That didn’t happen. You’d have to figure it out and make it work.

Are you still involved with Augusta National?

Yes, we have a long-range plan. They look 20 years out, in that range. Similar with Pine Valley. I’m on my fifth chairman or president at Pine Valley. We’re doing tweaking and renovation there.

Are you a member at Pine Valley?

Yes. I grew up near there, in Philadelphia. My uncle was the playing pro from Pine Valley. We have roots there. 

Where do you think golf course architecture is headed? 

I think it’s headed where it’s always gone. It’s always been a passion for the people who play golf, for writers, for people who like to get involved in design. I think that’s going to continue, and then there are just variations of that. For now, we’re into this era of renovation and restoration.

But it’s headed where it’s always been. In [the early 1970s], 350 courses a year were built in North America. A year. And then, in ’74, we had a crash, and no new golf courses were built from, like, 1975 to 1977. Then the golf era starts to come back during that Oak hill/Inverness period of renovation. People were trying to find a job, trying to keep a job.

Then Wild Dunes comes along, with the Links Course opening in 1980. The economy started to recover, and golf followed. My point is that golf growth always relates to the economy. Where are we today? Why is golf booming in America? COVID helped the game because people couldn’t do anything, and they’d want to be outside. They could play golf, and the people who used to play once or twice a week were playing three and four and five times a week.

Look at [South Florida]. [Fazio has a home in Jupiter and is a member at Jupiter Hills, where his uncle designed both courses. —Ed.] It’s like a lot of places. We haven’t had many new golf courses in Palm Beach County. For 20 years, we didn’t have a new golf course built except The Park West Palm. But that doesn’t count as a new course—it replaced the municipal course on the same property, with a different style.

Now you have Panther National that Nicklaus has designed [with input from Justin Thomas]. It’s another real estate deal. We also have Apogee—three courses, each with different designers—Atlantic Fields that I’m doing for Discovery Land, and some others. These are going to catch up with what didn’t happen for 20-some years. These clubs all have waiting lists. In 2008, when Lehman Brothers went in the tank and we had a financial crash and the banks went broke, clubs lost waiting lists that were 40 and 50 deep, then lost 10 to 30% of their members. It’s taken a decade or more to return to this growth. 

Are the people who came to the game during COVID staying with it? 

They’re staying. But we still don’t have that many courses being built. Look at the prices. Look at the entry fees to get into clubs now. Down here, it’s gone crazy, with initiation fees at many clubs [approaching $500,000]. And there are waiting lists.

What do you think it is about golf that draws people in so much? Why has it become such a passion? Nobody’s good at it except for the Tour pros.

In terms of the game, I think it’s what it’s always been. First, it’s a challenge. It’s a mental thing. It gets into your brain. Why can’t you do it? In some cases, especially for young people, the game might be easier for them because they’re more agile and athletic. But you also have celebrities picking up the game.

Celebrities help, especially sports celebrities. Steph Curry is a scratch player, and it’s still not good enough for him. He couldn’t come close in a tournament, and he wants to get better. He doesn’t want to be scratch; he wants to be plus 1, plus 2. Not many people can be Steph Curry and succeed at a high level in basketball. But in golf, everybody can do it. You just do it at different levels. 

You’ve said your goal as a golfer is to get to the forward tees. What do you mean?

I move up, but so many guys don’t. They take too long to get there. They think they’re giving up something, but really they’re gaining. Just go play where you can hit an iron into the green. A friend of mine at Jupiter Hills, a Boston guy around 86 years old, moved up and breaks his age almost every time he plays. He’s broken his age almost 300 times. Last week, he broke his age by 10 shots. He shot 76 on a hard golf course. Moving up should be part of the deal.

I played with a gentleman in England once who was president of his club in perpetuity. He was 100 years old, still pulling his clubs on a trolley, still walking.

There’s so much to that. I don’t want to say I’m alarmist, but we have to look at this. Many of the courses that are being renovated need a renovation because they’re old, and it’s the right time to do it.

It’s a good economic time to do it because our great old golf courses went maybe for 100 years and, for example, you never rebuilt a bunker. You played a golf course where the top of the bunker was all sand. There’s no grass because all the sand was going on top, going on top. Now you can go to the American Society of Golf Course Architects and the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America and get information as to when you need to restore your course or redo your irrigation system.

Most courses are redoing their irrigation systems that were built 30 to 40 years or more ago. New systems that use less water and last longer are being installed. However, you have to talk yourself into it if you’re in charge at a club.

These things need to be done, and they’re very expensive. An irrigation system costs from a low of $2 million up to $4.5 [million]. We never had a $4 million budget to build an entire golf course until 2000.

This brings us to what you do in design to deal with distance. 

We’re building some courses with extra tees because, marketing-wise and programming-wise, it makes sense. But the only thing that worries me a little bit is that all young people hit it so far. All of them, including beginners. You take a young person who’s a beginner, they go to Drive Shack or Topgolf and stand there and hit it as hard as they can. That’s the way people are programmed and taught today: to hit it hard, hit it far and then figure out how to make it go straighter. Meanwhile, the clubs and the golf ball are helping it go straighter.

Still, you need to choose the proper tees for your game and age. I’m not playing 6,700 yards. I’m not even playing 6,400. I like 6,000. That’s a great number. If you can drive the ball only 200 yards, what are you doing at 6,400?

These things need to be done, and they’re very expensive. An irrigation system costs from a low of $2 million up to $4.5 [million]. We never had a $4 million budget to build an entire golf course until 2000.

You like to keep busy. When do you take time off for your family?

We play golf or go to a park with our kids and grandkids. We have six kids and 16 grandkids. I’ve always put my family first, which is why I’ve not done many courses internationally. I’m not a world guy. That didn’t fit me, and there’s nothing wrong with it. 

But I’m always thinking about golf. I’m driving down the road and I’m thinking, “How did this road get built? Look at that cut that they had to blow up, that hill over there, and they had to knock this down to get this, and fill that ravine and do that.” We build golf holes like that, just at a different scale.

For me, it was the accomplishment of getting that built. It was a great feeling. One of the things I learned from Steve Wynn [the developer and then-owner of Shadow Creek in Las Vegas, which opened in 1990 at a reported cost of $47 million] came from when he asked me a question nobody had ever asked me before: “What makes a golf course great?”

That’s a basic, simple question with endless possibilities as to the answers. My brain was moving. I’d checked Wynn out, and he was an English major at the University of Pennsylvania. I wanted to sound smart. I knew this guy’s IQ was 100 points higher than mine, so that’s the baggage I brought to this conversation. I started throwing things out there. We talked about Pine Valley and some other famous courses.

If you take Pine Valley, what does it have? It has hills and elevation and all that sand. It has trees that frame the golf hole. If you go to Pebble Beach, they have the ocean. You look at Augusta National’s big, tall trees. Creeks meander, and there are hillsides. The common denominator is there’s some kind of environment.

There was no environment in Vegas where Steve wanted to put this golf course. It’s flat. It’s boring. It’s ugly. Steve said, “Why don’t we build an environment and put a golf course in it? You’ll have a frame, and then you build a golf course inside.” I went back to my roots and said, “Do you know how much that’s going to cost?” He said, “Tom, that’s not your job. It doesn’t matter what it costs. It’s my job. I have to pay for it. You have to think. You have to be the artist. You control it. You make it. Let’s think, then. Let’s never talk about money.”

I learned a lot from him because of that. Now if you go to sandy sites, like the natural, rolling sites in the middle part of the U.S. or in the upper lakes of Michigan or Wisconsin or anywhere where there’s sandy terrain, it’s easy to build a golf course. Somebody who has never done it will have a lot of fun because it’s easy.

Personally, I’ve always had difficult sites and liked them. For example, one of the first bizarre golf courses that I was involved with was Black Diamond in Lecanto, Florida, on the Gulf Coast. Stan Olsen, the developer, didn’t show me the bad part of that land until he said he wanted to show me some other parts. He said he didn’t know if it was any good, and that he figured we probably couldn’t use it but wanted my thoughts anyway. I said, “Wait a minute. This is awesome.”

I had no idea where the golf holes would go, but I wanted to figure it out. I said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m not going to draw anything on paper yet, but we’re going to hire two bulldozers for two months and put them out there and start pushing earth and pushing all this rubbish and all these spoils from the excavation of the phosphate on the site, and we’ll shape some greens in it.”

My mind was going, “I think we can put two par 3s here, maybe a par 5 on this area, a par 4 here, and we can start it within two months.” It started to look like a golf course, and I asked Stan whether we could rent those bulldozers for two more months because I think we’ll have this golf course shaped. So, within four months, with a very little amount of money, we took an ugly, bad piece of land and put in some of the most dramatic holes we’ve ever built. We shaped it into the place. We created the golf environment.

Do you think other people might have looked at the property and said you can’t do a golf course here?

As I’ve said, the easy parts are the sandy sites with rolling terrain. Go find some golf holes, place a green here, place a green there, put a tee here. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s wonderful, but what are you going to do the rest of the day? What are you going to do with your brain? You’ll feel you accomplished something, sure. You have a good golf hole. That’s fine. You go to Scotland or Ireland and see all those nice golf holes in those dune areas on linksland, and there is a tendency for them to look alike. I could take photographs of golf holes and ask people to name them, and they wouldn’t be able to name where they are because they look alike. That doesn’t work for me. My goal is to create unique, one-of-a-kind holes that have never been done before.

You’ve got people who have never designed a golf course before, and the first thing that’s going to come to their mind is, “Let’s build a Biarritz green. Let’s build a Redan green. Let’s build a punchbowl green.” The same old thing. How many times have you heard that? If I started talking about them, you’d be bored to death.

So are you saying your courses differ one to the other because of the land around them or because of what you’ve done with the land around them?

It’s a different model for design. Let’s go to some bad lands, to places like the course we built on St. Simons Island in Georgia, called Frederica. The land was boring, nothing. But then you see the end result of that golf course. [Seven million cubic yards of sand soil were moved to create the highest ridge in the county, and more than 1,000 live oaks were transplanted onto the property. —Ed.] Or a restoration like the Seaside Course on Sea Island, where we blew up an existing 1929 course that Harry Colt and Charles Alison designed. 

We built some lakes to get earth to create dunes. We put in sandscapes and made it into a sandy, linksy course. It’s called Seaside; why wouldn’t it have dunes on it? The PGA Tour’s RSM Classic is played there now. Or the Dunes Course on the Monterey Peninsula that we renovated and rebuilt. It had no dunes on it, but why wouldn’t you have them? Why wouldn’t you have dunes on a golf course that’s called the Dunes? 

Do you enjoy playing all kinds of different golf courses?

I generally play my own courses because I’ve done so many. It’s great right here [in South Florida]. I go to Emerald Dunes, Jupiter Hills, McArthur or the Floridian.

Thinking about these subjects and my work, I want to emphasize there’s always more to the story of a course. Imagine you had the great old architects in this room and could take them back to the courses they did. Ask what they would do today. I can’t imagine the courses would all look the same after they worked on them. If you said they could do whatever it takes, at whatever cost, what would they do? Remember, they didn’t have unlimited financial resources. 

I would say it costs between $10 [million] and $15 million to do a renovation of a course. Part of that, as I said, is irrigation, and then you’re going to improve drainage because of changes in elevations and groundwater and maybe even county regulations as to where the outfall, the pipe, goes—the drainage. These are all part of  the work. There’s all that technical engineering stuff that goes in with that that’s all part of the system. But I’ll bet [the great old architects] didn’t spend $5 million to build the course to start with. We’re in this era now where people who can afford it want in, and they almost don’t care what it costs. They just want it where it is, and they’ll spend it.

But you hear about clubs, especially older ones, that would prefer not to change, restore, renovate. 

There are clubs that resist changes. I was the longtime advisor at Cypress Point. The only changes they’ve really made are to drainage and restoration of bunkers. But getting them to actually change something, like adding length, is like pulling teeth. They’re going to have the Walker Cup in 2025, and you can’t get them to do that. Of course, the good thing about a Walker Cup is that it’s match play. Length doesn’t matter much.

We had the 2022 Presidents Cup at Quail Hollow [where Fazio is also a member]. We had renovated that course for a PGA Tour event, and then we had the 2017 PGA Championship. We’re going to host the PGA again in 2025. The majority of the money was spent on the last five holes because those would be on TV. Are we getting back to the money game again? Of course we are. That’s life in the Presidents Cup; they changed the numbers of the holes and how they would play them so that the finishing holes would be what were Nos. 14, 15 and 16. Matches generally end there. Maybe some matches would get to 17, but almost never to the 18th hole.

At Pine Valley right now, we just rebuilt Nos. 6, 11, 14, 16 and 17. We’ve done five greens where we took all the sod off. We put it to the side. We put in stone and put in new drainage. If you’re a minimalist and don’t want to change much, well, you’re going to have a bad golf course if you don’t make changes to fix the land.

If you’re the developer or owner, you can decide to find a natural, rolling, perfect piece of sandy terrain. That’s what Mike Keiser does, and that’s what the Cabot group looks for. That’s what they’re into, which is fine. It’s a good business plan, it’s a good model and they make it happen.

You’re not going to do too many golf courses on too many properties, though, because there aren’t that many properties like that, right? They become destination resorts, and now how do you get there? On a private airplane, most of the time.

If you’re a minimalist and don’t want to change much, well, you’re going to have a bad golf course if you don’t make changes to fix the land.

I’ve done a course at Congaree in South Carolina, for example, where they played several pro tournaments. It’s a one-of-a-kind, over-the-top, fabulous place, on originally flat terrain. We mined sand and moved it around. The negative to that golf course would be, labeled as a Tom Fazio, we had to move a lot of earth. But if I told you we moved next to no earth, you’d believe me, because you can’t see what we did. It’s all about perception.

I’m listening to your tone, the intensity in your voice. Your enthusiasm is as strong as when I first met you back in the ’80s, a few years after you’d done the National Golf Club of Canada with your uncle. It’s often ranked the top course in the country.

I haven’t changed. I’m doing the same thing. I love talking about golf. New ideas, for example. New names. People don’t want to hear the same names all the time. My name’s been around forever, so they want new ideas, new stories.

You’ve been at the design game for a long time. Your history with the game is a rich one. Have you kept archives of all your work with clubs and courses? Would you consider turning over archives to universities, that sort of idea?

My youngest son, Gavin, is into that. He works with me. He has everything going back for the last 10 or 15 years. The material is on our computer. I never did that in the ’60s or ’70s, because I was busy working and not thinking about the next phase of life and my history in the game. This was the old days of storage. Things get mildewed. You throw stuff out.

But there’s no mildew on a computer, so we have all this information. I’m re-energized that we’re going to have more of this stuff, and we’re going to have it for the future. We’re doing a project in Dubai for Discovery Land, called Discovery Dunes. I haven’t been there yet, but it’s underway and we’re moving earth. Picture this: One of our staff guys is walking down a fairway there. He has a camera on his hat. We’re looking at 6-foot-tall footage as a golf course is being shaped. I’m here with an iPad, and I’m doing a shape of a bunker on it. I’m seeing the visuals and the whole thing while he’s walking. He’s getting it live, and I’m shaping the bunker while he’s walking.

It’s amazing. And it’s getting easier because of technology. So yes, I’m excited and re-energized. I’m as busy as I’ve ever been. People ask if I’m retired. Retired? Why would I retire? I understand that people do retire. I get it. But I enjoy what I do. If you’re getting paid a lot of money and you enjoy your work, why would I retire from that?