Davis On TPC Architecture

When Davis Love sat down with the meager gathering of scribblers for a pre Target World Challenge press conference, he didn't even screw off the top of his Gatorade before someone asked him about...Phil Mickelson. Being a kind soul, Love went along with it and answered admirably (I of course would have said, next question).

A few minutes into the cart barn conference, I asked him this, which I think elicited some pretty frank talk:

Q.  On the subject of architecture, right now a lot of TPC golf courses are being renovated and changed.  Do you think this is a product of changes in the game or perhaps a statement about the quality of the architecture that a lot of these TPCs have had and is it a new direction for the Tour?

DAVIS LOVE III:  Well, it's obvious that some of them weren't successful financially and we're trying to sell them. And some of them weren't popular with the players, like Boston. I talked to Brad Faxon about Boston a couple nights ago, and they're just beside themselves how nice it is.

Unfortunately, you get a little aggressive and you just let a guy go and you don't get what you want, just like building a house. Sometimes you build a house and the kitchen doesn't work and you've got to fix it. Boston just didn't work for the tournament, and they're making it very, very nice.

TPC Jacksonville, it was just like the stuff that Augusta does all the time; we finally went and did it. We got excellent drainage, we got subair systems under the greens. We can play if there's a flood.  We can play. And then we re-did the mounds.  But there are a lot of courses built with the stadium concept that it hurt the architecture trying to build the stadium concept, so we learned.  We're evolving. I think David Pillsbury is doing a great job of while we need to rebuild a 20 year old set of greens, let's fix the rest of it and make it work.

I mean, Scottsdale and Jacksonville have made the Tour a lot of money, the players a lot of money. We've just got to get the rest of them to where they carry their weight. We've got a lot of good golf courses but we don't have a lot of great golf courses, and that's where we're trying to get.  Our level of service, running clubs, every facet of our business except for our architecture is at the top of its class, so we're just trying to update that.