BLEDGE OF REASON

Tell us about yourself

I’m 42 years old and from Dumfries. My first ever golf club was Dumfries and Galloway. I was there for eight years and cut my teeth. I was 16 when I started, but when I left I really wanted to get to know more about myself and the world, so I went to Norway and worked at Miklagard, a beautiful course near the airport at Oslo.

Then I came back and did my first links job at Gullane Number One, and then Kingbarns, the first time I really fell in love with high end golf and realising that’s where I wanted to be. There was the buzz about the Dunhill Cup, a good budget, a great golf course, it’s outrageous.

After that I helped build a golf course in Sweden for Kingsbarns designer Kyle Phliips, a pure fescue course, and then came back and helped build gWest, though sadly that’s not opened because of recession and then COVID, so it’s pretty devastating to have spent four years of my life creating something only for it to be more or less grown over just now. Potentially it’s one of the most beautiful courses you could set your eyes on.

How did you come to be at Hoylake?

After gWest it was off to Deal where I was two years as deputy, and then seven as Course Manager. And now here, where there are many similarities to Cinque Ports. The members are fantastic, the course is obviously world class, and I have a great team, and my predecessor Craig Gilholm left Hoylake in a great place just as I had left Cinque Ports.

It was funny how the job came about. Every year, Sean, the Course Manager from Princes Golf Club, and I go on a golf tour together, and we thought, right, let’s do Merseyside, we can play Royal Liverpool and Birkdale, so I texted Craig saying, ‘Can you get us a tee time, pal?’ And he replied, ‘You’d better get your CV ready because I’m leaving at Christmas.’ And right then there was something inside me saying, ‘Sounds like a great opportunity.’

Then again, I’d never set foot in the place, so we came up in October and the Club said I could have an interview seeing as how you’ll be here. Sean and I walked the first six holes in the morning and we’re saying, ‘It’s immaculate.’ Craig’s greens were special, the course flowed, I’d researched the history and really love the cop that’s a legacy of the links’ horse racing days and surrounds the internal out of bounds which is also the practice area. Even the look of the clubhouse from the car park was special, and I remember phoning my wife Jenny and saying, ‘This is great.’ And I did well at that first interview and afterwards went for it big time.

My second interview involved a two hour presentation. First I had to answer ‘what would you do in your first three months?’ To which my response was, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do before my first three months. From the moment I get the job I’ll come here to really get to know the links and the team, feed off Craig’s knowledge and absorb it all because once he’s gone he’s gone and will have taken it all with him, which is dangerous.’

The next question was, ‘How will you deliver a successful Open?’ - which in a nutshell I answered by saying I’d bend over backwards to make sure The R&A get what they want smoothly and without any stress. I’m not a yes man by any means, but I like to please people, and of course The Open is so important to the Club, the last thing anyone wants is someone somehow standing in the way.

At Deal it sometimes felt like always the bridesmaid, never the bride - we were promised all these important tournaments, like the Women’s Open, Senior Open, Walker Cup, whatever, but they never happened even though I was convinced we could have hosted them brilliantly. But with this job, a nailed on Open championship, and you can’t ask for a much more exciting challenge than that.

And some of the stuff that’s the most important is stuff no one sees, because it’s all about the planning. What skill sets you need for each job, where they’re going to stay, how you’re going to feed them, how are you going to keep them occupied outside of work time. You can’t have 40 people just hanging about here.

Right now we have roads to go in, a lot of gorse is being cleared, there’s work to be done on trees, and we have to think now about making sure that the rough next year is just how The R&A wants it - which is tough. The rough is Hoylake’s defence, so we’ll make sure that it pays off to hit the ball pretty much straight.

Then, come The Open, there’s the speed of the greens. It’ll be ten and a half feet, so then you have to have in the back of your mind the kind of heatwave that hit the UK in 2006 and turned the links brown and in some places almost white. If the green speed starts creeping up beyond that ten and a half and then the wind starts blowing you could have the ball moving on the green - which simply can’t happen.

Take the new members 15th or championship 17th with its elevated and exposed green. If you’ve got that too fast and someone like local hero Tommy Fleetwood is leading the Open, the wind’s coming off the Dee Estuary, he’s hit a decent 8-iron pin high to a few feet and everyone’s cheering…and the ball starts rolling and ends up in the front bunker…and then he does a Bledge and thins his next into the back scrape…well, we can’t put Tommy and the rest of the world’s greatest players in that sort of a situation, so I reckon we’ll err on the side of caution.

How are you settling in?

The Club has very kindly made me a member here, which makes me feel very much part of the place and is very inspiring, but I do find that I struggle to play well because I’m always looking at the course. We could do this or do that, so I take a wee notepad out with me because when you play you see things differently, so the upside of not improving your own game is you can spot little things that will improve the links.

I’ve got a game of golf in me though; when I was young I was off four and even thought about aiming to be professional. I’m off nine now, but the joy of the job is that I love playing different golf courses because that’s how I get my best ideas. There were other reasons why I wanted to relocate here. My parents are in Dumfries and not getting any younger, so being three hours away from them instead of eight is very handy.

Jenny and the kids have adapted really well and instantly. The children, Fletcher who’s seven and Jesse who’s four, go to school in West Kirby, just minutes away, and Jesse already has a bit of an accent. He calls it ‘West Kairby’. It has to be said, Wirral’s a nice part of the world for children, beaches, green spaces, and good schools.

What might you bring from Royal Cinque Ports to Royal Liverpool?

A big part of my last job at Deal was to help the members have an understanding of what was going on on the golf course, so questions were answered before they had a chance to ask them. If they saw things happening on the course, they were already explained by posting on twitter, or my blog, and a very successful youtube channel.

Nowadays people don’t want to necessarily read pages and pages of stuff - I mean, I pick up a magazine and tend to look at the pictures. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit simple! I’d often shoot video clips on my phone and cut them together so it was easy to explain what we were doing, and I intend to do that here, too.

The views and feedback were great and you get a bit of a kick out of it - validation, I suppose - and communicating like this works really well.

Course managers aren’t just grass cutters any more, and I feel that over my nine years at Deal we really moved Royal Cinque Ports out of the dark ages. It’s on the tip of people’s tongues now, and people started to take much more interest in greenkeeping.

We ended up in a lot more magazines and TV programmes, so word spread and a lot more golfers started to visit and play the golf course. Green fees went up and I got to buy better machinery, better products, I could kit out the team in better gear and it all had a great knock-on effect.

Does The Open of next year weigh heavily on you?

It could do, but I think you get out of life what you put into it, so if I work my backside off and plan everything well then, in the end, it shouldn’t. I’m fairly calm about it. If you surround yourself with a fantastic team and keep the backing of everyone at the Club and The R&A then I’ll be fine. We’ll get through it, though I won’t deny that even now I’m looking forward to that Sunday night on the 23rd of July 2023.

And after that, it’s time to start thinking about what the future holds for the course, and getting back to making sure that, once all traces of The Open have disappeared, it’s the very best it can be, day in, day out, for members and visitors alike.