I think you'll find his comments on how he does his restorations interesting. You'll also find interesting the story about how one timew in his career he didn't fight hard enough for tree removal and lost a job later down the road because that club's officials wanted trees removed. Now he's tougher on the issue.
http://www.golfobserver.com/blog/blognews/buzz/2009/10/14/stephenkayjayFrom the interview:
JF: What mistake would you like to have over again?
S. Kay: What? Like that girl I dated in college?
[Laughter]
Well let’s see…get everything in writing!
[More laughter]
Okay, besides that, trees are a big issue. If I could have a dollar every time someone said, “the tree makes the hole,” my wife and I could go to on some nice vacations! People fall in love with trees. Thank goodness for Oakmont and Winged Foot that in the last seven years! Those golf course have done intense tree clearing, which has made it easier to cut down trees at courses around the country.
So at plenty of courses, I’ve had arguments and difficulty to convince clubs to cut down trees, and so its easier now to get clubs to cut down trees than it was twenty years ago. Well about 15 – 17 years ago, I was at a course which put out proposals to renovate the course. They got 15 proposals, and I got one of 5 interviews. After the interview, the Greens Chair called me and said that the members and the chairman liked you, and they wanted to go see what you renovated recently. Well one job had a couple key trees on a couple holes that the club fought to not cut down. They didn’t allow me to remove them, and they were just stupid trees. Well the chairman of the course of the job I wanted visited this course and asked about my work.
Two weeks go by, I hear nothing. So I called them and they had decided on someone else, but the green chair said the fact that I didn’t get the stupid trees down, they couldn’t use me. He said that their course had a lot of stupid trees that needed to come down, and he needed a strong personality to get some of their trees down. He told me I needed to get stronger and tougher. He said I should have been tougher on getting the trees cut down at the other club, or walked away. Because I wasn’t more forceful at the smaller course earlier in my career, it cost me a nicer renovation job at a more prestigious club because I didn’t have the chutzpah to stand up and insist stupid trees come down.
JF: How do you deal with the dilemma of restoring a course to its old design, but with technology advances, still making it challenging to the best golfers?
S. Kay: Is the old style from someone famous and is it worth preserving? Next, was the architect actually on the site or did he mail the work in? As an example, let’s look at the character of the bunkers. Tillie in his drawings just did simple egg-shaped ovals to tell the builder on site where to put the bunker, but he didn’t draw shapes on his plans…but he did more ornate work when he went into the field. But his foremen just did what they saw in the drawing…but when Tillie was on-site a lot the bunkers had more ornate details. But when he wasn’t on the site, you could tell because the bunker shapes were much more simple. So when I restored Lakewood, for instance, we made them more ornate because we wanted to create what Tillie would have done if he were on site during construction.
Next, I sometimes need to move something to get more yardage for the course, and get the bunkers into back into play for who they were intended to be in play. First I try to move tees, then move the bunkers if I can’t move the tees back. It’s a very conscious thought. If Tillie, Ross, or Mackenzie could come back today, the first thing I thing I think they would do is examine the game for three months if not a year. They’d play the courses, try the new clubs, and then see the pros and watch the speed of the greens and how the ball flies. After that, how would they renovate their course? That’s how I try to think