Mike Young

Mike Young has always been a little ahead of his time: even in the late 1980s, a full decade before Sand Hills Golf Club revolutionized architecture, Young championed minimalism. His philosophy is finally having its day in the sun, and now, so is his first design: the Fields Golf Club in La Grange, Ga. After years of managing the course on a lease that began in 2012, Young bought the course and now runs it as a family business. The Fields has flown under the radar — and that’s been intentional, as Young has avoided advertising until he gets the course just the way he wants it. But secrets don’t stay secret forever in the Internet age — and like the minimalism philosophy behind the Fields, the course seems destined to enjoy its own moment in the sun soon.

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LYING FOUR: You not only designed the Fields, but now you also own the course. How did that happen?
MIKE YOUNG: That’s the first course I ever designed. And that was back in 1988. I’d always liked it and piddled with it. The guys that I built it for sold it to a young man there in town that was in a trust — his family had a lot of money and owned a mill there in town. And he came in and thought he wanted to be a golf pro, but ran off all the members — you know, he said, “When I come in, everybody move to the side.” He was in a dream world and just sort of ran it into the ground. And the trustee that ran the family foundation was a CPA, and he called me and said, “Mike, something has gotta happen here. We need some help.” So I went down and said, “Look, if I’m gonna buy it for what he wants to sell it for, then we’ve gotta do this, this, this, and this.” So I made a deal with him and started leasing it, and then about six months ago, we bought it. We’ve been operating it now for five years. I’ve never really been able to do what I want to do with the bunkers and all, but now I’ve got a guy coming in to re-do all the bunkers with me. We’ll have that place where it’s really good in another 18 months. We’re getting ready to put a little money in it. But it’s one of my favorite little stops: it’s unspoken. You never hear much about it, because I didn’t want try to push it until I had it right, but we’re starting to get our grasses the way we want them — we’ve got one height of cut. My son runs it, and we keep my office upstairs. It sort of works for us right now.

The Fields’ terrific 18th hole, with spectacle bunkers guarding the line in the fairway between tee and green.

LYING FOUR: So, take me back to the beginning. How did you get into golf course architecture, and how did you get hooked up with this project?
MIKE YOUNG: When I was in high school, I worked at a golf course and I watched a golf pro build a golf course. So then I said, “OK, this is what I want to do.” Robert Trent Jones, Jr., was building a course in 1967 outside of Atlanta, and that summer I worked picking up rocks there. So then I went to school, and everybody said, “You can’t get into that business unless you get into turf grass.” I said, “Bullshit.” So I went away from it until I was 28 years old, and I said, “I gotta get in it.” I went to a Toro distributor and said, “Look, I want to sell stuff and call on golf courses. I don’t want to work for a golf architect. I want to go out, meet the superintendents, be able to go out and walk these courses, see the classics.” So I started doing that and took a lot of pictures and studied everything I could. I’d call on different architects, but I had a gut feeling. And Tom, who’s a friend of mine — Doak — we started about the same time, and he’s been more prominent in terms of his designs. He’s gone after the right pieces of land and all that, but my thought process was about the same. I kept seeing all these architects, and I kept calling bullshit. I’d go in their offices, and I’d watch this stuff — and here I am, just a smartass kid selling equipment, but I kept saying to myself, “There’s something that doesn’t make sense here.” I knew that none of the plans really got followed when it came down to the real shaping. So I fooled around with that for seven years. And during that time, I would go to all the trade shows, did everything in that industry, and I’d meet people. And I was a nut. All I thought about was design, design. And one of the guys that I met through all that was a seed salesman who sold a lot of the ryegrass around town, and he said, “I’m gonna build a golf course.” I said, “Who’s gonna build it?” He said, “I’m gonna do it myself.” So I said, “Well let me do it.” And he said, “Well, you can do it, I don’t give a damn who does it.” So I started messing with it, and for a year I’d just sketch out holes, and finally we were ready to go. I got a shaper that I knew who was trying to learn how to build bunkers, and I said, “Let’s go do this thing.” So I started doing it in the afternoons, while I was working for Toro. My wife’s father was a prominent golf superintendent in south Florida — he was at Everglades Club and a place called Indian Creek and a place called Gulf Stream — and her uncle was the head at Robert Trent Jones. Her family had grown up in that. She was a John Deere salesman when I met her, and when we moved here, she started doing the Georgia superintendents magazine and grew it into something. So I’ve always looked at it very holistically and vertically: we own the golf course, and we operate golf courses, but our main bread and butter has always been design-build. And we’ve had design-build on about 60 golf courses.

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LYING FOUR: One of the things that I loved about the Fields is how fitting that name is. It looks like somebody went out and cleared some huge swaths out of a field and just started playing golf. What did that site look like when you got there?
MIKE YOUNG: You saw those little rock walls? I tried to accentuate those and put in more of those, but that was a cotton field for a long time. All those rocks had been picked up out of the ground and put into walls for over 100 years when we got there. So we just did that some more: we’d pick up the rocks and put them into the walls, and try to create that look to remain indigenous to what was there. We really didn’t move much dirt, because we didn’t have much equipment to move dirt. We just had a small little dozer, some skid-steer loaders and tractors. We just were out there messing with stuff we knew nothing about.

The fifth green at the Fields.

LYING FOUR: It doesn’t look like the sort of courses that were being built in 1988 and 1989.
MIKE YOUNG: You’re exactly right, and that’s what I was talking about with Tom: we both saw the minimalism thing at the same time. His vision of it took off, and he was more prominent in the magazines, but I was sitting there doing it. And I’d call up all these guys, and they would never do it. They’d build up all this stuff and move all this dirt. These guys were very — I guess “angry” would be the right word. “Well, that guy doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not moving the dirt, and he’s not building his greens up in the air, and that’s not the way we do it.” And I’m sitting there thinking, “What am I missing? Because these guys are full of shit on some of this stuff.” It’s one reason I’m not in this ASGCA thing, because it just pissed them off that I was getting jobs when they thought I didn’t know what I was doing. And I’m sitting there thinking, “Guys, we’re not talking about rocket science.” So you’re exactly right: it doesn’t look like what was being built then. We never really pushed it like that. Now, people are trying to build that kind of stuff, and we’ve been doing this for a while. Where do you live?

LYING FOUR: I live in Jackson, Mississippi. And one of the first courses I thought of when I first saw the Fields was Mossy Oak, in West Point — which is basically Gil Hanse doing what you did, he just did it 30 years later.
MIKE YOUNG: And I built another one not far from you that I didn’t move much dirt on. It’s called Beau Pre, out in Natchez. We built Beau Pre the same way. Mossy Oak is like that. Now, that’s the common thing. At some point, some writer needs to go back and start researching around 1945, 1946 — the so-called Dark Ages of golf architecture. Have you read the Robert Trent Jones biography that Jim Hansen wrote, A Difficult Par?

A rock wall at the foot of the slope leading up to the 17th green at the Fields.

LYING FOUR: No, I haven’t.
MIKE YOUNG: It’s a great book. It has about four pages dedicated to how these guys came together to form the American Society of Golf Course Architects. And they wanted to restrict trade: they wanted to tell you what you had to charge for nine holes, tell you what states you could practice in. They went through all this stuff to lock it all up. And he dug it up, and it pissed them all off, because Trent Jones was one of the guys who tried to start it. What they were trying to do was to take a craft — and I consider golf course design to be a craft — and make it into a profession, so that they could hype it up. So now you’ve come back to where all these guys — the Gil Hanses, the Doaks, the Kyle Franzes, me — do design-build. Well, that was shunned. “You can’t represent the client well if you build what you design.” That’s like telling Michelangelo that he can’t build the statute of David. The whole field has changed from where it used to be. The profession of golf course design — you’d build all these plans, get a general contractor, he’d bid all this out, and there you are. And I think that’s the biggest thing that’s changed in the past 10 years. All the good stuff you see that’s being built — it’s a design-build, and I think it’s gonna continue that way.

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LYING FOUR: Were there any courses that you had in mind when you were building the Fields? Anything that you were trying to emulate? It’s got kind of a heathland feel to it.
MIKE YOUNG: By then I’d had about six years of traveling, and I knew what I wanted. I knew that I just mainly wanted to find it and not have to create it, and refine it from there. And that’s what I did. I can’t think of any one particular place; it was just a mixture of everything I’d seen. I just hoped it would work.

The 18th green at the Fields.

LYING FOUR: Did you get any pushback on this concept? I think a lot developers, even now, might freak out about the blind shots.
MIKE YOUNG: Most of my courses don’t have that many blind shots. If you think back to when we did it, a lot of the shots weren’t blind, given where the ball was landing back then because of the distance of the ball. But I just quit worrying about it. Doak and I have talked about this: just do the routing and quit worrying about it. That’s what they do overseas. The most pushback I’ve gotten is one of my favorite holes out there, the uphill par-3. They say, “Why did you do that?” I said, “Well, there’s about four good ones in Scotland and Ireland. Just hit the ball. It’ll be fine.”

LYING FOUR: I remember that hole, No. 8. I turned the corner, saw that green way up on top of that hill, and said “Holy shit” and just started laughing.
MIKE YOUNG: Gleneagles has got a hole like that. That’s what I needed right there, so I said, “Hell, we’re making this as natural as we can, so we’re just gonna build this par-3 right here.”

LYING FOUR: You mentioned the fairway grasses. Are those native?
MIKE YOUNG: No, it’s 419 Bermuda, but we keep it fairly brown this time of year, depending on the rain. We’re gonna change some of that out to some of the new drought-tolerant grasses. The one thing I’m trying to get everybody used to is we’re trying to mow wall-to-wall to our tall grasses at one height. It’s so funny to have so many guys say, “Hey, can you give us a fairway line so we can know where we can move the ball?” I’m like, “No. No, we’re not gonna give you that.” They say, “But we like to roll the ball around!” Well, the end of the fairway is where that tall grass is, dude. We’re getting ready to take the Fields up a notch or two, because they never have. I know we can clean it up and put the right bunkers in, put some more bunker depth in, might adjust some of the greens a little and we’ll see where we go with it. A lot of the kids, they’re like, “Give me some wood-shafted clubs and a leather golf bag and a craft beer, and let me go roll the ball around out there and talk about my ground game.” So we’re gonna see what we can do with it.

LYING FOUR: I really like it the way it is right now. It’s brown, it’s firm as hell —
MIKE YOUNG: Oh we’re not changing that. But my bunkers need tweaking.

LYING FOUR: I even like the bunkers.
MIKE YOUNG: Well, I do too, but I can’t get the regular customer to like them. They give us hell over the bunkers. So we’re gonna work on some of that.

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LYING FOUR: Talk to me about the routing. Those first few holes, the course just reveals itself to you one shot at a time. Then you get to No. 5, and the whole thing opens up in front of you, with the full scale of the property right in your face.
MIKE YOUNG: The best way for me to discuss the routing is that I didn’t know enough to know what I was doing. If I had, I probably would’ve messed it up more. We were just trying to make it flow with the land. What I was really trying to do was just find green sites and places where I could find tees, and just fit it in between there. That was my main theory then: if I could just get tees here and greens here, then I could fit holes in.

On the fifth tee at the Fields, the routing emerges from a series of intimate, wooded holes and introduces the player to the full, enormous scale of the course.

LYING FOUR: Are there any specific holes out there that are your favorites?
MIKE YOUNG: I like 15 a lot. It’s a slight dogleg right, after the hole with a pond in front that’s drivable. It’s got a chimney in the fairway. I like that hole a lot. I like 16, my par-3 with a little Redan to it. I like No. 2. It’s just one of those courses where everybody can play it, and you can learn to play golf there. You’re not gonna hold a U.S. Open on it, but we can make it as hard as we want to. We’ve got one guy who plays there every day who’s got four major championships to his name.

LYING FOUR: Who’s that?
MIKE YOUNG: Remember the name Allen Doyle? He plays every day. He won four senior majors after the age of 48. He was an amateur until he was 48 years old. He’s a good friend of ours. We’ve got some good players out there. It’s a fun golf course.

LYING FOUR: If somebody were playing for the first time, how should they approach it?
MIKE YOUNG: I would just tell them to keep the ball in front of themselves. I give them a pretty wide berth, as far as hitting driver. On doglegs, you can try to play close to the corner, or if you want to flare it out, you can do that and play a longer shot into the green. But what I tried to do was to use greens that fall away from you, instead of using a lot of other complications — so the longer the shot, the tougher it is to land it on those holes.

LYING FOUR: Maybe this is the million-dollar question, but how do more people not know about this golf course? It is obscenely good, and it’s only an hour from Atlanta.
MIKE YOUNG: We’ve had it now for six years, and I’ve intentionally not advertised because I didn’t want to start until — I mean, we’re just getting the grasses the way we want them. It took us three years to get all the weeds out of the golden grasses that you saw out there. It’s taken us a long time to get all that stuff together. We’ve got honeybees on some holes where we’ve set up certain flowers to get a certain type of honey. We’ve got a lot of stuff like that going on. My son kind of runs it and takes care of it. We take care of that golf course with two people. I try to keep it as much like overseas. What I want to do is convey what golf can be, and we’re just getting ready to start doing that. We’re getting ready to clean out the clubhouse and simplify it, and I think we’re gonna go with barbecue and craft beers, to get all the millennials over.

LYING FOUR: I’m not exactly a millennial, but that sounds like fun to me.
MIKE YOUNG: It’ll be good.