The Cookie Jar Golf Podcast · Cookie Jar Golf

356 - Course Diaries: West Sussex w/ Tom Mackenzie

·58 min·3 clips

Tom McKenzie says greenkeepers are often “broken men” because members ignore budget and weather realities.

Tom McKenzie makes his first appearance on the show. Tom Mills and Sam Williams sit down with the McKenzie and Ebert architect at West Sussex and let him talk through how he got into golf course architecture, starting with Donald Steele and moving on to the partnership with Martin Ebert. The setting matters. The clubhouse, the committee room, and the heather outside give the conversation a real sense of place rather than another anonymous microphone chat. The hosts spend plenty of time on West Sussex itself. McKenzie talks about the holes there that have stayed with him and shaped his own way of thinking about design. There is also the familiar, useful argument about who did what. The discussion comes back to Blackwell and the long-running suspicion that the course carries more Tom Simpson than Fowler in its bones. Old plans and photographs enter the picture. An aerial image of the 13th green, with the original position still visible and the later green set slightly ahead of it, gives the talk something solid to hold onto. That detail pushes the conversation toward Simpson again. McKenzie is clear that Simpson's influence fits the way the hole now plays and looks. The hosts do not leave it neatly boxed up. They keep circling back to the archival clue and to the way a course's history is often messier than the tidy version in the brochure. There is a bit of banter about the heather too. The three types of heather question turns into exactly the sort of side road this podcast likes, where a small botanical point becomes part of the mood of the place. The conversation also touches on how much of McKenzie's understanding has come from being a member at West Sussex. That membership seems to have given him a practical, lived relationship with the course rather than a purely professional one. The back half widens out to the broader life of the club. By the close, the talk has reached the inaugural barter bowl, the appeal of foursomes, and the familiar notion that the people around golf clubs, and the partners who put up with them, deserve as much credit as anyone.

As heard by us

A West Sussex clubhouse conversation that follows Tom McKenzie through golf course architecture and the details of West Sussex.

This episode is a clubhouse sit down with Tom McKenzie at West Sussex, and it stays strongest when it talks about golf course architecture in concrete terms.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a clubhouse sit-down that turns course architecture into a proper back-and-forth.

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