Matt:
A friend told me this was out there somewhere ... interesting, since when it was taped, YouTube technology did not exist and I didn't imagine more than 75 people would ever see it. Hope I looked okay (I am not going to waste my time watching myself speak).
I didn't really understand your question, though. Cypress Point was pretty late in Dr. MacKenzie's career (six years before he passed away).
Kalen:
High Pointe's are still some of the best greens I've ever built. I'm happy to admit that I have a certain bias there because I actually built them all myself, as opposed to collaborating with a shaper or an associate. But, they reward position in the fairway more than nearly any greens I've built.
Mark:
I was making nice in that presentation because my original client, Mr. Hayden, was putting on the party, and without his willingness to take a chance on a rookie architect, I might be just another GCA fanatic without any idea what I'm talking about
. Mr. Hayden passed away a year ago.
I am glad we tried fescue fairways at High Pointe. Without having done it, we might never have learned our lessons about what we did right and wrong, and places like Sand Hills and Whistling Straits (where Tom Mead consulted) and Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes and Barnbougle and Ballyneal might not have the great surfaces they do today.
High Pointe was a great place for fescue. The soils for most of the property were very sandy and very acidic, and the climate mild, but the main reason we chose fescue was that Tom Mead and I both believed that for the green fee proposed in our early discussions about the project -- 45 dollars -- the superintendent would not be able to afford too much of a chemical budget, and a lean fescue maintenance program would produce better fairways than bentgrass without chemicals. Of course, when they decided to try to get 80 dollar green fees out of the box, that decision was seen in a different light.
The reason the fescue failed was simply that the subsequent management of the course didn't try to keep the fescue intact. They didn't topdress or aerify the fairways much at all, and they wound up thatchy, so they started watering more heavily. The fairways on the back forty acres are spongy today ... it takes a lot of effort to dig through the thatch to get to the soil. It's really remarkable that they managed to create such conditions on such perfect sandy soils.
As for bunker construction, the learning curve is not painfully long ... recently we've had some guys who learned how to build great bunkers after 3-4 months on a trackhoe. But we didn't have time to do that, while Tom and I were also filling the duties of architect, shapers, project manager, owner's rep, and grow-in superintendent. Even so, the bunkers at High Pointe weren't so bad, considering they have only been edged twice in nineteen years.