Sunningdale

Yeah, at the time I wrote, I mean, I hadn't played the Valley and Dunluce together, so I've only played the Valley for the first time this year, but at the time I wrote that it was certainly up there with the best 36 holes you could play in a day in GB and Ireland.

I'd say now Sunningdale and Portrush are better.

Saunton is a fair comparison, I think, the East and West there.

So I think as a duo together, I think they complement each other brilliantly.

but it is special and it's i've known i've known ian it was like three before you when i was at wentworth so it was 92 to 95 and i was you know privileged to be able to come over and play then yeah and then Stuart Yule took over.

And I knew Stuart when he was at Sunningdale.

Stuart's a really lovely man.

Really, really nice man.

With Americans.

It's kind of St. George's Hill.

Down here, St. George's Hill, Royal St. George's probably, Sunningdale, Walton Heath, and now you guys, I think.

And we have to manage that because the demand, again, is way more than we can satisfy.

This will be a bit of a unique podcast.

It comes in combination with the film Why Sunningdale Changed the New Course.

During that filming of that film, we sat down with three people.

Bruce Critchley, whose podcast we released previously.

And I just knew a few people here who were happy to put me up.

And because my father had been involved in the RNA, and I'd spent a lot of my teenage years operating scoreboards at the Open, I got to know quite a few people who were involved in the RNA setup, members of RNA committees, championship committee, all that sort of thing.

And a fair number of them were Sunningdale members.

And so I knew a few Sunningdale members, you know, before I joined, who were also RNA members.

I think it's always interesting to go back and seeing tying that thread back from golf here in North America and what Willie Park did over here.

to his work in the Heathlands of England, which essentially, you know, Sunningdale Old and Huntercombe were Hunter Coombs, like a time capsule, Sunningdale old was modified and became an entirely different avenue for golf architecture.

But, uh, that could all be traced back to, to Musselboro and the efforts of, uh, Willie Park senior and how that affected every, this entire family tree and how that would eventually affect golf architecture.

So it's, uh, you know, it's neat to kind of follow those threads all the way back.

What a golf course that is.

You play all these links holes and then all of a sudden you're in the middle of, you could be in the middle of Sunningdale or Walton Heath.

It just changes as it goes inland and then comes back to the sea.

Amazing.

Her mum had died and her marriage to Archie was falling apart.

And on the 3rd of December 1926, Agatha Christie went missing from the house she shared with Archie in Sunningdale.

Her car was found abandoned the next day.

And Laura, the media was onto this straight away.

Royal County Down, I played with a member, so got that quite cheap.

And Sunningdale, old, I played recently.

You went in a raffle or something?

Yeah.

People are all valuing different things.

So there's a few other parts to it as well.

So the courses you're talking about there, so Sunningdale, They don't want people there much, do they? So the members are obviously paying a premium and the people who are members there are people that we can't relate to.

Samuel L. Jackson,

So I was like, right, let's look at the wealthiest place near my uni.

And it just so happened to be a lovely place called Sunningdale, which is in Berkshire, just near Ascot, literally around the corner from the races.

And I was like, this is nice.

I'm going to focus on this location.

I mean, I was using my student finance money and the money I'd earned on placement to send out like 100 letters a day.

Hands down.

off my own back because I was like how else am I going to get listings like no one knows me and you know Nestle is great in America but they were still finding feet in the UK so what were we doing different compared to the local agents in Sunningdale the agents in Sunningdale were extremely lazy because I took all of their stock through these letters and this one very special client who I'll never forget.

I still speak to them today.