Golf’s corner of the Internet probably has no one more responsible for the rise in attention to golf course architecture than Andy Johnson. Since launching The Fried Egg in 2015 — first as a newsletter, then as a website, and followed by a podcast in 2016 — Johnson has educated intro-level architecture newbies and interviewed the profession’s leading thinkers. Over the past year, Johnson has begun co-hosting a second podcast — the more current events-driven Shotgun Start, with SB Nation golf writer Brendan Porath — and has begun convening small events for fellow architecture devotees at noteworthy courses. His second such event, the Thoroughbred, will take place at Aiken Golf Club in Aiken, S.C., in October.
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LYING FOUR: So what is your favorite fruit?
ANDY JOHNSON: I’d say my favorite fruit is mango.
LYING FOUR: Yes! Team Mango!
ANDY JOHNSON: Love mango. The thing is that it takes a long time for the mango to be ripe, you know? But there’s nothing better than a good mango.
LYING FOUR: Exactly. As long as it’s ripe, you’re not gonna be disappointed.
ANDY JOHNSON: I was at Whole Foods the other day, just picking up something small for dinner, and I saw this big thing of cut-up mango. And you know how you can look at it and see that it’s the best mango ever? It was this giant container of cut mango, and it was like $25. Twenty-five dollars of mango! I got home, and my wife was like, “What the fuck? Did you just spend $25 on mango?” I’m like, “But look at it! It is perfect!”
LYING FOUR: That’s the danger of mango: if you buy it whole, you’re rolling the dice a little bit. If you saw that it was perfect, then you had to do it.
ANDY JOHNSON: Oh yeah. I looked at it, flipped it over and looked at the price — and I was like, “Ugh — but you don’t get this opportunity every day.” Mango is rarely exactly right. It’s hard to get it perfect. You know what also is underrated? Pears. Pears are an underrated fruit.
LYING FOUR: You’re on an island on this one. Pears suck.
ANDY JOHNSON: You probably haven’t had a good pear. You’ve gotta wait, like, two weeks for the pear to be good.
LYING FOUR: It’s a fact that I have never had a good pear.
ANDY JOHNSON: That’s sad. See? You could talk about fruit forever. There are probably people who would love a fruit podcast.
LYING FOUR: Maybe that’s the direction that this Q&A takes, and we just talk about fruit instead of golf course architecture.
ANDY JOHNSON: That’s fine with me. I like bananas, too.
LYING FOUR: Bananas are a solid go-to. I can’t dispute that.
ANDY JOHNSON: Bananas are a good everyday fruit.
LYING FOUR: Totally. You can tell easily whether it’s gonna be any good. It’s a good fall-back option.
ANDY JOHNSON: An amazing thing is to see the range of bananas that people like. Some people like them really well done; some people like them really green. They’re kind of like steaks, in a way.
LYING FOUR: I’m a banana traditionalist. I want the grocery-store, generic yellow. Once you get too much brown on the outside, I start to get scared.
ANDY JOHNSON: I agree. That’s when it’s time for it to be a smoothie banana.
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The 16th and 15th holes at Aiken Golf Club in Aiken, S.C. Photo credit: Andy Johnson.
LYING FOUR: Let me ask you about the Thoroughbred. The fact that you’re going to Aiken Golf Club for only the second one of these events speaks pretty highly of your opinion of Aiken. What do you like about that golf course?
ANDY JOHNSON: I like golf courses that have a soul, and that place has a very good feel to it. I really like promoting golf courses that make a considered effort to provide a world-class golf experience at a price everybody can afford. It’s the same thing with Lawsonia: you can always walk at Lawsonia for under $100, and I want to expose people to really quality architecture at a price that everybody can afford. Jim McNair and the McNair family run a great business there. It’s a family-owned spot, which is really rare. It’s an incredible story: he didn’t know how to do golf construction until the day the bulldozer arrived. He reshaped all 18 greens, and they’re incredible.
LYING FOUR: Wow.
ANDY JOHNSON: He might be this era’s greatest one-hit wonder: he only did one golf course architecture project, and it’s just unbelievable. You get on those greens, and you’re like, “I can’t believe this guy built these himself with no experience.” I think he said on my podcast, “The bulldozer got delivered, and I got on it, and by the end of the day I knew how to build a green.” You’ve just gotta love that. Places where you have that deep connection, that’s what I want to do. One place where I want to do an event next year is Diamond Springs. Similar to Aiken, you play the golf course and you’re like, “Holy cow, this place could be a top-50, top-75 course in the country if it had a country club maintenance budget.” But when you think about it, it’s probably more special now, because it’s $35 for anybody to play. Same with Aiken: that place is spectacular; and sure, if it had the budget of an exclusive country club, then it could be even better, but it’s more special than any country club. It’s great golf at an affordable price.
LYING FOUR: You always seems to be the guy who knows about these obscure, really terrific golf courses. How do they come across your radar?
ANDY JOHNSON: You talk to people. You’ve just gotta know how to find them. You go to a lot of courses, and a lot of them are bad. There’s not a high success rate. I can’t tell you how many courses you go to and get depressed. One thing I do is go out and walk courses. People think I play golf all the time, but I walk courses a lot because you can walk courses so much faster than you can play them. There are so many places in the country that could be great, given the opportunity to be great. That’s something I’ve learned a lot over the past three years: which places have a chance, versus places that are more a case of what could be.
LYING FOUR: How did you get interested in golf course architecture?
ANDY JOHNSON: All the cool kids were interested in architecture growing up. I wanted to be like them. So I was the kid reading Golf Club Atlas when I was like 18.
The ninth and 18th holes at Shoreacres in Lake Bluff, Ill. Photo credit: Andy Johnson.
LYING FOUR: Your high school sounds a lot different than mine.
ANDY JOHNSON: No, I grew up in the northern suburbs of Lake Bluff. I caddied at a really nice club, Knollwood, which is a Charles Alison design. And then I got to play Shoreacres some. But I grew up playing the muni, and I think the juxtaposition of playing Lake Bluff Golf Club — which was the muni, and just a nothing design — and then going to the places I caddied at, and then Shoreacres — there was something different about the really good places and the nothings. I think that’s the way a lot of people get interested. I hear it so much around Chicago. The lightbulb moment is when they’re at Shoreacres or Chicago Golf, and they realize there’s something more to the course than just being a place to play golf. And you learn so much about architecture from caddying. Tom Doak talked about it on my podcast: caddies would make the best architects, because your job as a caddie is to figure out how all these different players can get around the golf course. And that’s a big thing: so many golfers see the golf course strictly through the lens of their own play, but I grew up caddying for 80-year-old women who were trying to get around this golf course, and you figure out that there are certain places where they’re hopeless. And maybe that’s not good architecture when it’s completely unachievable, versus a golf course that gives those ladies avenues of play. To give you an example: from what I understand, Shinnecock is an extraordinarily playable course for ladies. I’ve never watched a woman play at Shinnecock, but it makes sense: all the avenues into the greens are open. It’s devastatingly hard for a pro, but a low-trajectory player has a chance because they aren’t asked to do something that’s unachievable. When you’re caddying, you see all the different ways that people play, and you navigate them around. That probably had a huge impact.
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LYING FOUR: What’d you do before you started The Fried Egg?
ANDY JOHNSON: I worked for some tech startups. I worked for a company called Belly, which was like your Silicon Valley spoof — we had an epic rise and were the talk of the town, and then failed to continue to iterate. Then I went over to a company called Built In, which was a tech media site and recruiting site. That’s where I learned a lot about media and how people consumed it. I was working there when I started The Fried Egg.
LYING FOUR: Did working at startups make you more comfortable with the idea of leaving and effectively running a startup of your own?
ANDY JOHNSON: Totally. I had an intense entrepreneurial itch when I started The Fried Egg. I met a lot of other founders and saw a lot of different concepts, and one day I thought, “I think I could do this myself.” And I was talking about it with a buddy of mine who’s a great golfer, and he’s a fellow entrepreneur — and I told him this idea, and he said, “The best thing you could do is just do one, and see what happens.” So that night I wrote something, and people like it, so I wrote another one. And then it was going.
The second green at Diamond Springs Golf Course in Hamilton, Mich. Photo credit: Andy Johnson.
LYING FOUR: Did the reception surprise you? Did you know there was that big a potential audience out there?
ANDY JOHNSON: The newsletter was the first thing. I sent that newsletter to 10 people — 10 friends and families that really liked golf. I was a horrible writer when I started it, and I’m still not a great writer. Everybody liked it, so then for my next newsletter — which was just Monday-Wednesday then — I scoured my inbox, and I found 200 people that I’d played golf with. And I sent them a note telling them what I was doing, and I said, “If you like it, share it. If you don’t like it, just unsubscribe. And if you have feedback, let me know.” And it was really positive. Every time I sent a new newsletter, more people were on the list than the last time. That was a big thing. Early on, I didn’t think it was gonna be a golf course architecture thing. That’s one of the things with starting something: I was always interested in it, and when I wrote my first thing on architecture, it just kinda took off. Nobody else was really doing it that much, outside Golf Club Atlas. I heard this talk once with Ben Horowitz — he’s a big tech investor, and he invested in Belly — and I’ll never forget something that he said in this talk: “We don’t ever invest in a company unless one of our partners thinks that it’s the worst idea of all time.” Because if everybody thinks it’s an unbelievably great idea, then somebody has probably tried it and it didn’t work.
LYING FOUR: That’s brilliant.
ANDY JOHNSON: Yeah. And at the time, if I’d said to people, “Hey, I’m gonna write this blog about golf architecture,” everybody would’ve been like, “That’s so dumb. There are 200 people on the Internet who care about that.” Now, it’s become a central point of the conversation on the Internet about golf. Golf Club Atlas was an unbelievable resource, and I knew how to use the website, but for a beginner it’s a very daunting website. A lot of the early stuff I wrote — as I would learn stuff, I would just write it. I don’t do as much of that anymore, and maybe I should do more. Making it approachable and easy to understand was the key.
LYING FOUR: I count myself among the people who didn’t know they were interested in golf course architecture before I ran across your work. I could play a $150 course and walk off thinking, “That sucked,” and then walk off a $15 golf course thinking, “That was a blast.” But I couldn’t articulate why the cheap course was better than the expensive course. The Fried Egg helped me put my finger on why I enjoyed one more than the other.
ANDY JOHNSON: I was guilty of this before I started exploring and going to $15 places. A lot of times, those $15 courses are the best places in town. But there’s this thing — and it’s not just golf-specific — essentially, it’s the idea that price means quality; you just assume that the $100 one is better than the $50 one, and that the $50 one is better than the $25 one. But that’s not true at all. And I think that’s one of golf’s biggest problems: there aren’t enough critical voices, in my opinion. And this is just my opinion. But there’s this thing with golf, where if you say something negative, then all of a sudden you’re not “growing the game” — which is the term I hate the most. But what good would a food critic be if he never said that a place wasn’t good?
LYING FOUR: It’s funny you say that, because this is something I’ve been wondering about recently. When you get invited somewhere, or it’s suggested that you go somewhere, and the course just doesn’t do it for you, how do navigate what you write about that? Because on the one hand, you don't want to hurt anybody’s feelings — and on the other hand, if it sucks, it sucks.
ANDY JOHNSON: It’s tricky. I have so many places that I need to see, that I try to go only to the places that I really want to see. Where I try to draw the line is that, if it’s like a private country club and I go and don’t like it, then at this point I have enough stuff to write that I don’t need to put it on blast; but when they host events and it’s really bad, then to me, it’s fair game. Because then it’s more than just the membership. A perfect example is Rich Harvest Farms. The NCAA tournament went there because the guy offered it for free, but they shouldn’t host a tournament on a course that’s so contrived. That, to me, is where the line is. And obviously, golf architecture is art. There are food and movie critics that have different tastes than you. And that’s OK. I’m just telling you what I think about places. It’s tough being critical, but you have to be. If you’re not critical, then how can people ever trust you? My core belief, from the start, is that as a media company, your voice is really all you have; the second you don’t have your voice, you don’t have anything.
Lawsonia Links in Green Lake, Wis. Photo credit: Andy Johnson.
LYING FOUR: You mentioned having so many places you still want to see. What are the places that you still haven’t made it but would like to go, whether it’s a region or a specific golf course?
ANDY JOHNSON: Before the Aiken event, I’m gonna go to Old Town. That’s been high on my list. This is a perfect example of how I pick where I go. When I had Bill Coore on my pod, he waxed poetic about Old Town and the influence that it had on him. To me, Old Town is more of a must-see right now than if you just went down the list of the top 100 courses, because I really want to understand what Bill Coore was talking about — and that’s going to give me a lens to look through at all the work of his career. There are a lot of courses like that that I want to see — courses that are the key to unlocking a lot about a lot of other golf courses. Nothing is more the case than the Old Course. That’s a place that I haven’t seen yet, and that unlocks everything, right? And Old Town is a significant place in American architecture, because it’s the course that influenced — between him and Tom Doak — maybe their generation’s two greatest architects. So by going to Old Town, you suddenly understand the work of another great architect. Prairie Dunes, to me, was another must-see place to me, because Prairie Dunes — which was another Perry Maxwell course — is what inspired Sand Hills. And without Sand Hills, you don’t have Bandon Dunes. And who knows where golf course architecture would be right now? The other way I go about figuring out where I want to go is architect-specific. I like to really understand architects, and to do that, you need to see a lot of their work. Part of the reason for going to Old Town is that we’re gonna go to Reynolds Park — it’s right next door, it’s another Maxwell — and then we’re gonna try to see a few other Maxwells in North Carolina on our way.
LYING FOUR: That totally makes sense.
ANDY JOHNSON: And I’ve got places I really want to see, but you also have to weigh public golf heavily. As you get bigger, you get the temptation of losing what made you popular. And one of the things that’s been a core focus of The Fried Egg has been affordable public golf. But as you get more popular, you get more invitations to the private places that not everybody can see. To me, going to see just that stuff would be selfish. You can’t lose your identity, right? This trip we’re doing before the Thoroughbred, we’re going to see Old Town, but every other course we’re going to see is public. People get on me all the time about the places I haven’t been, but what am I gonna say about seeing Scotland and St. Andrews? Granted, it’s really important for my personal understanding of architecture, but there are so many places in America that nobody has ever talked about — and to me, it’s more important for me to talk about those places. A perfect example is the Fields, which you wrote about —
LYING FOUR: Which is incredible, by the way.
ANDY JOHNSON: Exactly. And you’ve never seen anybody write about it. The only reason I found out about it was because I met Mike Young, and he told me to come down. And another architect, Jaeger Kovich, texted me and said, “You should really go see the Fields.” And I had a trip planned to Georgia, so I got off the plane in Atlanta and drove down there at midnight. I played the next morning in 50-degree rain, but I was really glad I saw it, because it’s a perfect example of a great golf course that so many people just drive by. Sweetens Cove is a great golf course; there are probably 30 people in the country who love it more than me. But the Fields is a very, very good golf course — close to the same caliber, and it’s even closer to Atlanta. That’s my kind of thing. Doing the resort and private thing is, at the end of the day, kind of selfish — for me, at least.
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