More than once now, Thad Layton has seen the extremes that the global economy throws at golf course development. A quarter-century ago, Layton began his career on the construction crew at a casino golf course on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, during the golf construction boom of the 1990s. Now, as senior golf course architect of the Arnold Palmer Design Company, Layton — a Gulf Coast native, a Mississippi State alumnus, and newly a resident of Denver, Colorado — is helping his company navigate the second economic catastrophe of the past 15 years by applying lessons that he’s learned during the game’s shift toward playability and financial feasibility. “We’re going back and remodeling our golf courses, and … we’re going from 100 bunkers to 40 or 50, reducing the overall square footage of bunkers by 60 to 70 percent in some cases,” Layton said, “and really making a better golf course on top of the one that we did 20 years ago.”
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LYING FOUR: So, after decades and decades without any global economic meltdowns, we’ve now had two within 15 years of each other — and right in the middle of your career. Have you had a moment where you shake your head and wonder whether you born under a bad star?
THAD LAYTON: Funny you should say that. I’ve had that discussion with my wife before. I’ve wanted to become a golf course architect since I was 13, and I certainly feel fortunate to have worked for Mr. Palmer and to still be able to design golf courses for a living. But, man. September 11th changed the world, and our firm went from 26 people to two people in a matter of about seven or eight years. I’m certainly grateful to still be around after all of that. Mr. Palmer passed away, so that’s created a bit of an uphill challenge for us, as far as marketing our golf courses and not having him available to go hit that first tee shot and be involved on the front end of the design. And then this happens. We had two projects, one that was about to break ground in Uruguay and a big renovation at one of the courses out in Carlsbad, at Aviara. And both of them pulled the plug, basically on the same day. So it’s left us with not a whole lot to do this summer, construction-wise. The silver lining is that we’ve gotten three calls in the past 30 days for three new golf courses, so that’s a plus out of all this. You try to keep your eyes on the positives; you have to, because for every golf course that goes, there’s probably 20 of them that don’t.
LYING FOUR: Are there any lessons you learned in the last recession that you can fall back on this time around, either in terms of business practices or how you build golf courses?
THAD LAYTON: If you look at a lot of the golf courses that either have closed or are struggling and have had to restructure, they overbuilt. Ever since 2006 or ’07, we’ve made a conscientious effort not only to be constructed in a way that’s financially feasible, but also maintenance-wise. Something as simple as reducing the average square footage on your bunkers — pound-for-pound, that’s the most maintenance-intensive part of a golf course, outside of the green complexes. Anytime that you can eliminate a bunker, you’re lowering maintenance costs. But we’ve found you’re also increasing the strategic interest of the golf course. It’s almost like addition by subtraction. Even though we’re saving our clients money, the golf course and the golf experience aren’t suffering because of that — and in a lot of cases, it’s even better. I think we’re doing some of the best work we’ve ever done right now. And not only is that due to working on a smaller quantity of projects, but it’s learning those lessons from the past: that it’s harder to make money on a golf course when you put $20 million into construction.
LYING FOUR: This phenomenon that we’ve seen over the past couple of months — courses remaining open, but not raking their bunkers — has excited a lot of people because it increases the hazard value of a sand trap. Do you think that’s something that might stick around, if for no other reason than to cut down on maintenance costs?
THAD LAYTON: That’s a good question. I know Mr. Palmer was a big fan of bunkers being a hazard. Even Nicklaus, at one point, experimented at his tournaments with furrowed rakes similar to Oakmont. It kind of comes down to the bifurcation between the amateur game and the pro game, and how they’re two completely different games. I don’t think the pros would ever go for that. In the pro game, I’d be surprised if that’s where we end up on the other side of this. And the amateur game tends to follow that, for better or for worse. My personal opinion is that I doubt unraked bunkers are gonna stick around after this crisis, but you never know.
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LYING FOUR: What’s an average day like for you when there’s not a nationwide quarantine in effect?
THAD LAYTON: There’s a lot of travel involved. I’m probably on the road 150-200 days a year, traveling domestically and internationally. I’ve got two boys who are a little bit older — a 12-year-old and a 17-year-old. So the older I get, the less I like to travel; I like to be around a little more. But a typical day, if I’m on location, would be to get up at 7 a.m. and go right out to the site with a cup of coffee, and just walk the property without anyone else around — and just see what they’ve been able to accomplish in that 7-10 days that perhaps I’ve been gone from that project, and just gather my thoughts. I see what the contractor has done, see what our team has put together on site, and then convene with the team probably after lunch to do a walkthrough and talk about things that we want to change, things we want to improve, opportunities, ideas to implement in the field to make the golf course better. That’s a typical day on site. And I typically try to spend 10 days a month or more. Sometimes I’ll move to a particular location, if it’s one of the only projects that we’re working on. In fact, we were working down in Naples and hired Tad [King] and Rob [Collins] to come in and do the finish work for us; this was about four or five years ago. So I got to work with Rob, and I’d known him from Mississippi State and had been tracking his progress at Sweetens Cove — but I moved my family down to Naples from Orlando, and we were on-site in Naples for about four months. I was getting on a bulldozer myself; we had an extra dozer on-site, so I was taking the opportunity to learn the construction side of things — learned how to run a dozer. And that’s certainly benefitted me well. On those high-profile projects, where you can devote more time, I like to relocate to those if possible so that you’re on site everyday. On a typical day in the office, if I’ve got some drawings to do, I like to work uninterrupted if I can; that may mean putting on some headphones and just drawing something up — sketching, freewheeling, throwing as many design ideas as I can down on paper. But one of the things that I think I’ve learned since I started, when we were plan-intensive, is that we’re less plan-oriented and we’re more in the field. To quote one of the guys we worked with in Scotland, sometimes you can become a prisoner of your own mind if you put too much on paper; you can’t be too locked into some things that you’ve drawn on paper, because it limits your creativity in the field. On the other hand, some of our projects require a lot of construction drawings to either get permits or to stoke interest in the project for potential investors, homebuyers, or things of that nature. But my time in the office is largely spent either drawing or on the communications side, reaching out to our clients. We do everything from selling the project to the construction drawings to construction oversight — so we wear a lot of hats to get a project across the finish line.
LYING FOUR: Right now, with travel not being much of an option, how much of that are you able to do from day to day?
THAD LAYTON: We moved to Denver, Colorado, about six months ago from our home office in Orlando. We had a number of opportunities out west, and over the past seven or eight years, our family vacationed out here a lot and thought that if there were ever an opportunity to move out here, we’d do it. And that opportunity came up. So I’ve been working from home for the last six months. Obviously the travel has been curtailed, but I’m not that much different — just traveling from a different airport than I was in Orlando.
LYING FOUR: You mentioned your old boss earlier in the conversation, and I want to ask you a couple of questions about him. But before I ask the question that I’ve got written down — you still hear people call him “Mr. Palmer,” even now that he’s been gone for a few years. What do you think it is about Arnold Palmer that still commands that kind of reverence?
THAD LAYTON: He was old-school, from the way he dressed to his insistence that gentlemen take their hats off before entering a building. It was made pretty clear to me before I started working for him. My immediate boss, Ed Seay, who ran Arnold Palmer Design Company for 35 years out of our office in Ponte Vedra Beach, kind of gave me the rules of the road for working with Mr. Palmer. And once I was around him, it wasn’t something I felt like I had to do out of obligation — it was something I wanted to do out of respect for the man. He treated everyone — every person that I’ve ever seen interact with him, no matter how nice or rude they could have been, maybe asking for an autograph — he treated everyone with respect. It didn’t matter whether you worked with him or you were a complete stranger. He had a magnetism about him. It didn’t matter if the camera was on or off, he was the same person. There was a consistency about him; there was an integrity about him. And everyone who worked with him and for him called him “Mr. Palmer,” and I had no urge to call him anything else.
LYING FOUR: What did his involvement look like at APDC?
THAD LAYTON: When we were in Ponte Vedra, the only time we ever saw him when we were on site — but we had a lot of site visits. One of the first years I was there, we had to open 16 golf courses — so we not only had the grand openings, but we also saw him at site visits. It wasn’t until 2006 that we relocated the office to his headquarters in Orlando. That’s when I started to see him a lot more and got to know him a lot better.
LYING FOUR: When was the first time you met him?
THAD LAYTON: I met Mr. Palmer at the Bridges, which is in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. That was where I cut my teeth on golf course construction.
LYING FOUR: What’s the story there?
THAD LAYTON: I was going to school on a scholarship at the University of Mobile, in Alabama. I was playing on the golf team. I knew I wanted to get into golf course architecture, and my dad was in the construction business in Gulfport. The project at the Bridges — we knew it was gonna happen, we just didn’t know when. After my first semester at Mobile, they announced that they were gonna kick that project off — which was going to be the spring of ’95, I believe. So I left Mobile and enrolled in junior college, and got a job on the construction crew at the Bridges. And that was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. It was hard work, because I was still going to school: I was doing 18 credit hours in school, and I was working 40 or 50 hours a week. The triangle between my house to college to the job site — I was traveling about 90 miles a day. Anyway, that was kind of how I got my foot in the door in golf course construction. I eventually met the lead architect there, Harrison Minchew; I met Ed Seay. And I met Mr. Palmer on site when he did his grand opening. That was really cool for me, to meet Mr. Palmer. I remember there was a golf magazine, and on the cover, it said, “The Top 100 Things Every True Golfers Has to Do.” And the first thing to do was to shake Mr. Palmer’s hand. And I was like, “Well, I’m out. I’ll never meet him.” But funny enough, three or four years later I’m working on one of his jobs, and was lucky enough to meet him and have a conversation with him.
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LYING FOUR: How do you carry forward the design principles of a firm’s founder after he’s gone? It seems like it would be easy to devolve into a rudderless ship.
THAD LAYTON: I think it’s unique working for Mr. Palmer, in that he had some overarching principles that freed up his architects that worked for him: he wanted his golf courses to be fun, playable, and beautiful. And within that philosophy, you could do just about anything that you wanted to do. That was part of his wisdom, because everyone that worked for him was really into what they were doing; they felt like as long as they were under that umbrella, implementing those overarching principles, they were gonna be OK. And I’ve talked to other architects that work for other big names, and it’s not like that for them. As far as carrying his design philosophy forward, it’s hard to argue with those three things. And our design principles within that philosophy continue to evolve as the game continues to change. We’re going back and remodeling our golf courses, and back again to the bunkers — we’re going from 100 bunkers to 40 or 50, reducing the overall square footage of bunkers by 60 to 70 percent in some cases, and really making a better golf course on top of the one that we did 20 years ago. And that’s still within the framework of Mr. Palmer’s philosophy.
LYING FOUR: I read that you played a lot of golf around Gulfport when you were a kid, but that the design lightbulb didn’t come on until you played a round in Tennessee with your grandfather. What do you think about golf in Mississippi nowadays? It’s funny that you started out at the Bridges, because when I think of golf in Mississippi, I think of the mid-90s as when golf took a big step forward. I guess you could trace it back even further to Old Waverly in the 1980s, but especially on the Gulf Coast, it was happening in the mid-1990s.
THAD LAYTON: It’s hard to decouple that from the boating and dockside gambling, because that was a huge cash infusion that the Coast had never seen before. That was a catalyst for a lot of the courses there, and certainly the Bridges was one of those. It wouldn’t exist without a casino. As far as the quality of golf courses, one of my favorite courses is Timberton. My dad was great about taking me to see different courses, but that was my favorite.
LYING FOUR: I really like that golf course.
THAD LAYTON: It’s certainly on the higher end of greens fees in that spectrum, but it was a public golf course. Windance was another nice one, but that was a private club. The only way I had access to that was that I was on the high school team at Harrison Central. And then Fallen Oak — that’s just a marvel, that a golf course could be built on the Coast that cost that much money. The quality of the courses there has certainly improved. Shell Landing is another one. Jerry Pate’s course in Pascagoula, the Preserve, is a very good golf course. The late 1990s and early 2000s were certainly good for golf in Mississippi. And then up further north, Old Waverly and Mossy Oak turned out pretty good.
LYING FOUR: If I’m doing the math right, you’ve been out doing this for 20 or 25 years. What do you think golf courses that are getting built 20-25 years from now will look like?
THAD LAYTON: I think we’ve proven that the old model of development golf — where you’re trying to line golf holes with as much real estate as you can, and you’ve got these long green-to-tee walks and a compromised golf course — I think we’ve proven that’s a busted model that we don’t want to repeat. That’s something we’re starting to see with our developers. There’s a better way to do development golf: having the ability to influence that routing and have more of a core golf course that’s a cohesive golf experience, from green to tee and tee to green. You may have less homes on the golf course because of that approach, but the quality of the golf course is exponentially higher. And for the entire development, a rising tide lifts all boats: if the golf course is perceived to be better, then having a home inside the gates or next to the golf course is going to have more value. I’d certainly like to see more walking. We were talking about the COVID-19 shutdown and some of the lessons that are being learned from that, and people are walking more because carts aren’t available. Hopefully this will lead to a renaissance in the game and get us closer to our roots. People talk about the health benefits of golf — well, you negate a lot of that if you do it in the golf cart. Maybe more walking is one of the silver linings from this whole ordeal.
LYING FOUR: What about the design business? What do you think it’ll look like? Will there be more golf course architects or less? Will firms be smaller? Will there be more design-build firms, or do you think construction still will be mostly contracted out?
THAD LAYTON: It’s hard to say. I think we’re all subject to recency bias, and we all tend to think that you can just take whatever’s been going on for the past three or four years and just project that into the future. But I do think the design-build model is really working. I think it’s yielding better golf courses. As far as there being more or less golf courses, I think there will be less golf courses to build, but that work may be spread over more design firms that are taking that design-build approach. I think work might be a little more regional than it’s been in the past. We’re looking at a job here in Denver that I don’t know if we’d be in contention for if we weren’t local; I think that’s a large consideration for the client. His pool of architects has shrunk because he doesn’t know if they can make it on a regular basis because of the shutdown. And there’s talk down the road of rebounds and a second and third wave of the virus — the world changed. It’s hard to imagine things going back to normal after this. As far as names like Palmer and Nicklaus and Player, it’s hard to imagine that there’s gonna be another player that comes along and starts signing 20 or 30 projects like we used to do in the 1990s. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
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