69 guys who I have a lot of respect for and are incredibly talented, and that made it easy for me. John Sloan said to put good people around you. That’s how the first business worked and it worked really well for a long time. I’ve always been lucky to have good people around me, so this is a continuation of that good luck.” So no thoughts about that retirement? “I feel like I’m young. I don’t know how long I want to work for, but I see myself doing it for ten years at least. I’ve always enjoyed it. When people are winding down their business lives at 65, I feel like I’m starting again, which is not in any way daunting. It’s challenging and fun and I’m looking forward to it.” For CDP to build on its initial success, “the real trick is to not take on too much work,” says Clayton. “The last thing any of the partners would want is to be running ten projects at once, because you inevitably don’t do any of them very well. The trick is to pick the right projects and not take on too much work and time it right. That’s the tricky part of the business, how you give the right amount of time and effort and application to a limited number of projects, without running out of work in two years because you haven’t signed enough up. It’s such a difficult balancing act. “The best architects – we all know who they are – can afford to say ‘I can do your project in 2027’ and the club’s happy to wait. If we can get into that position, that would be nice. But there aren’t many guys that are in that position, where you’re sought after and the clubs have the patience to wait for a couple of years.” Clayton looks back on the last 25 years as having been an incredibly positive time for golf. “The era of the famous golf pro dominating the business is certainly over for the foreseeable future, and I think that’s a good thing,” he says. “Coore, Doak, Hanse, Kidd, DeVries and guys like that really restored the reputation of, not ‘proper architects’ but, a much different model from what dominated the 80s and 90s, which was famous golf pros building golf courses and, in truth, not spending that much time on site. They were big conglomerates of teams with a famous name at the top and if the last 20 years has shown anything, it’s that there’s another way to do it and it’s been great for golf. “People will look back in 50 years on these years as being incredibly productive. A lot of that has been because of guys like Julian Robertson and Richard Sattler and Mike Keiser and owners who have gone down different paths, which has been a good thing. It started with Dick Youngscap at Sand Hills. So much of what’s happened, the genesis of all of it, was at Sand Hills. Mike Keiser went out and saw what had happened there. If Bandon Dunes hadn’t been built, Barnbougle Dunes wouldn’t have been built. And if Barnbougle Dunes hadn’t been built, then Seven Mile Beach probably wouldn’t have been built.” GCA For more of Mike Clayton’s views on golf design,visitwww.golfcoursearchitecture.net to read the series of articles he wrote for GCA during the lockdown of 2020 Clayton, DeVries & Pont’s first US project was the renovation of Bloomfield Hills in Michigan Photo: Lukas Michel
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