If you’re going to be stuck in a car for a two-plus-hour drive, you’d be hard-pressed to enjoy better company than Australian golfer Geoff Ogilvy.
In August, on the drive from Minneapolis to the western corner of the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where he and his design partners Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead are preparing to build Tepetonka, Minnesota’s first private golf destination on 228 acres of gorgeous rolling land with Shakopee Creek cutting through a quarter of the property, Ogilvy and I (and PR man/wheelman Matthew Gibb) talked at length about his shift into the golf-course design business among other things.
I’m probably not the first to say this, and admittedly it’s early days for his venture into the architecture space, but Ogilvy could be his generation’s Ben Crenshaw, who made a smooth transition from Masters champion to one of the most coveted designers in golf. OCM as the next Coore-Crenshaw? We can only hope to be so lucky.
Ogilvy turned pro in 1998, just as Tiger Woods was beginning to rule the game, and Ogilvy did well to win eight times on the PGA Tour (plus another four times on the DP World Tour), including the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. He was a member of the International Team for the Presidents Cup three times and has been a vice captain on the last three teams. It seems inevitable that he will get his turn at the captaincy (and when he does the U.S. may finally have met its match in that event).
Ogilvy, 46, has reduced his play in recent years, including moving back to his native Australia for a time, and is starting to make a name for himself in the design world with work done at Shady Oaks Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, back home in Melbourne at Peninsula-Kingswood and is in the process of completing a significant re-do of Medinah No. 3 near Chicago, which will host the 2026 Presidents Cup. (He also mentioned a course the firm is building in Georgia but wouldn’t disclose the name.)
A couple hours in the car flew by and the discussion continued over lunch and in between his site visit. Here are some of the highlights.
GWK: Nowadays, do you think of yourself as a tour pro or a golf course architect?
GO: I’m a tour a pro, yeah. I couldn’t do this without Michael and Ashley. There’s a lot of skills. I mean, I can see good holes and I think I can come up with some pretty good stuff. They get on machines, they can work with maps, and they understand all the macro drainage stuff and all that. I don’t understand any of that. But I’m learning along the way. So, I see myself as a golfer, and my education in this area is by visiting and playing all the golf courses around the world.
Michael comes from an engineering background. He was an elite golfer, too. He nearly won the Australian Masters as an amateur. So he was really, really good. And then decided he was too smart to be a pro and got an engineering degree and sort of fell straight into working for a company from the beginning and the ground up. So he’s been doing this since basically he finished university.
Ashley was a nice golfer, too, in Melbourne and he went down the superintendent route. He started raking bunkers and then ended up getting to become a superintendent. He understands the construction side, Michael’s sort of the artistic guy, and I’m sort of the golf guy. I think to have two or three minds, it’s better than one. We all see golf in a similar way but from a different perspective, I guess. Once I’m done playing golf, I’d love to think I could do this, but I wouldn’t want to do this without them.
When I go home at night, I’m regularly thinking about golf and my golf swing. They go home and think about getting on the bunker rake and finishing the green off. I think it helps to have that blend. We’re really a good complement to each other. Two eyes are better than one. If you start staring at it on your own forever, you almost can’t see anything anymore. If you have someone else come along they’ll ask why would you do that? And suddenly I didn’t see that.
Bill (Coore) and Ben (Crenshaw) work that way, too, they are massively better, the sum of the parts is greater than the individuals. I still look at golf holes as how I would play them.
Why have your projects in the U.S. so far been at private facilities?
GO: You’re right, we haven’t built a brand-new course that is public. The trouble that golf has is the maintenance expectation that golfers has is going to cost $3 million a year, there’s just no way around it. In a public model with no real estate, that’s almost impossible to overcome. We’re just not the type of people you hire if you’re going to build houses. If the houses are taking precedent that’s not really what we want to do.
It’s a tough model. You’re going to have $15 million for building your course plus $3 million for maintenance on a $100 a head. Which is a shame because golf needs more public-access golf. The maintenance expectation has to go down.
GWK: Is there a current PGA Tour pro who you think could be a good golf course designer?
GO: Zac Blair is one of the only ones who shows true, genuine interest. This has nothing against my peers, but most Tour players view golf courses from a self-interest position, which makes sense because that’s how you get paid and it’s difficult to stay objective. It’s rare the guy and I don’t know why I did because I’ve clearly self-interest in it too, but growing up next to Royal Melbourne and then in the Sandbelt and then when you start traveling and realizing that it’s actually true what they say in Australia, our courses are really, really great. Zac Blair (who built The Tree Farm in South Carolina) is the obvious one.
It’s the best thing and the worst thing at the same time that pros and tour golfers never go to a lot of the great courses. It’s a good thing that we don’t because we’d ruin them but great golf courses would be appreciated more if we played them every week.
GWK: Who is the most underrated dead golf course architect?
GO: Harry Colt. If you’ve ever been to Morfontaine in France or St. George’s and Swinley Forest in England, they feel like little Pine Valleys.
GWK: Has the TrackMan fad gone away on Tour?
GO: I think it’s more prevalent than ever. I think I’m one of the only guys on the range without a launch monitor. To each his own and, look, the level on Tour is outrageous how good it is so my argument kind of falls flat but I think these kids don’t even watch the ball anymore, they just watch the screen. That’s not how I learned. It’s rote learning. But the trouble is they only ask two questions on Tour: Can you hit it far and can you hole putts? It’s actually helpful to do that on Tour. So just get good at answering those questions. Then you go to the majors, the real golf courses, and the only ones who stand up are the ones who can really play. I just think it is getting further and further away from what golf is really about.
GWK: What’s your opinion on the USGA/R&A potentially rolling back the golf ball?
GO: I think the golf ball goes too far but it’s not it’s fault. It’s everything’s fault. They never should have let the driver head get so big. Titanium was probably a bad decision, shafts got too light. Probably the biggest mistake they made was making golf courses longer. A professional golfer’s job is to answer the question you’re being asked, and if you keep getting asked to hit the ball longer, what are you going to do? You’re just going to go home and try to hit it longer and longer. If Harbour Town was every tour stop, we’d all be working on shaping it. It’s too global an issue to try to fix it temporarily with the ball.
I’d like to see us go back to pre-metal woods and steel shaft equipment for the pros. I think the golf would be better – for everybody to be honest.
I played the John Deere for the first time in 4-5 years this summer and I was hitting 8-iron into par 3s that I used to hit 4-iron into. Par 3s! Like 200 yards. I’ve never hit it this far. Golf is different. So, it’s more complicated than just taking a little bit out of the ball. I’d love to see the skill get put back in the game. The game has been de-skilled and that offends me more than how easy it is to hit it long.
When I got on Tour in the late ‘90s, there were a few guys – Norman, Vijay, Ernie – and they were the only ones who could really bomb it. The whole range would watch them hit it. Now a kid out of college hits it farther than Rory. The driver was the hardest club in the bag when I started and now it’s the easiest.
If I wasn’t playing the Tour, I’d love to play with just old equipment. That’s what I do on the Sand Belt. It’s more fun. They fit better into courses. If anything, it’s more fun.
GWK: How do you create courses that are challenging for the pros but also can be fun for the average golfer?
GO: That’s our challenge. I think back to this time my mate and I were sitting in the Pinehurst Hotel having a beer next to this couple at the next table and we started talking to them. And we asked them, Which is your favorite course at Pinehurst? They said, No. 2. I looked at them with surprise. Really? Stop it, it’s the hardest course. Not for us, they said. It’s the easiest because we can putt it from anywhere. We can run it up on the greens. There’s no thick rough or deep bunkers to chip over. For them it was the easiest course to play and for us it’s clearly one of the hardest courses in the world. For me, it was a bit of a lightbulb moment.
GWK: How are you not doing TV because I think you'd be great at it?
GO: I don’t really want to. Would you like to talk to Brandel? I like Brandel off camera. He came on our podcast (Fire Pit Collective) and he was great. He sounded like a human. He tries too hard to sound smart. His stats and research is over the top. You can’t tell him anything. But I guess that’s what is required from the analyst on a show like that. So, in that case, he probably does a good job. It’s just not really my speed.
GWK: I think you’d be great on a Manning-cast and if I was picking the talking heads I’d pair you with Joe Ogilvie — Ogilvy & Ogilvie — and Paul Goydos. Would you do something like that?
GO: That would be fun. I’d do that during the majors. To me, I think that’s the future for golf on TV. Golf needs to do more of that.
GWK: Is there a particular tournament that still eats you up that you didn't win?
GO: The 2008 U.S. Open. I had a really good opportunity to upset one of the best stories in golf. I played with Rocco (on Sunday). I think I was tied on nine, I think, on Sunday and I was playing really well. I hit it in the bunker, the bunkers were really soft that week, and I plugged it in two bunkers in a row and then sort of lost my way a bit on the back nine. I ended up about seventh or eighth or something [he shot 74 and finished T-9], four back or something. [He finished 4 over and five out of the playoff.] I’m frustrated I didn’t get deeper in that one to try to upset the big story but that worked out how history wanted it to be.
GWK: Have you been named one of Mike Weir’s Vice Captains yet for the 2024 Presidents Cup in Montreal?
GO: They haven’t announced them.
GWK: Is it your ambition to be the captain at Kingston Heath in 2028?
GO: It’s not my ambition to be captain. It would be nice if they wanted me to be. I love it.
GWK: It seems inevitable unless you went off to LIV.
GO: Maybe. It’s my favorite golf tournament. I love being an assistant. If I got to be captain, it would be great. Weirsy is going be a great captain in Canada.
GWK: Or would you want to be captain in ‘26 at Medinah, the course that you helped re-design?
GO: That might make more sense. If you sort of look at prospective future captains, there’s a certain good-looking guy who won the Masters who might be lining up for Kingston Heath (’28), and he’s played like 10 Presidents Cups or something. So that might line up better, but we’ll see.
GWK: What's your level of interest in competing on PGA Tour Champions at age 50?
GO: I’ve still got a few years [four to be exact] but I’m keen to play. I think the Champions tour is on the verge of a resurgence. I fully expect Tiger to play. Taking a cart changes everything for him. Interest both from fans and sponsors is going to be through the roof. I think there’s a good chance that Champions tour ratings can top the PGA Tour when he decides to play. And what else is he going to?
GWK: What celebrity do people say you resemble?
GO: I’ve had Aaron Rodgers before, which I’m not too disappointed. I’m like 50 pounds shy of him. I need to have a hat on.
