24 Questions with Clyde Johnson

Oh, here we go.

Knacky.

Knacky? Yeah, kind of just a feel, just kind of just a little unorthodox, quite handy.

Not particularly powerful, that's for sure, but I can, especially from 150 yards in, I can normally get it pretty close and hit some pretty creative shots.

So the other word is creative.

uh definitely like to experiment and hit a bunch of silly and shake shots grew up doing a bunch of that as a kid getting pretty good probably doing things shouldn't have been doing across our own golf course hitting hitting some stupid and low and high and crazy shots around the golf course

of

on summers evenings and then the other word i'd say is carefree So not too fussed or focused, certainly not these days, about how I score or how I play, just interested in hitting the ball and walking quickly between the shots and having some fun.

Knacky, creative, carefree.

Yes.

That's pretty good.

As you were talking and explaining that, it occurs to me that there ought to be some correlation between how someone like you or any designer sees the game and how they would instinctively want to design courses and create their features.

And I'll pull back a second and say, you know, in the United States, and you can tell me if it was similar in the UK, we went through generations where...

The game continually got into this aerial game, right? And we watched the professionals on TV hit these long, high drives, and then they hit these long, high iron shots into greens, and we bunkered the greens in front.

And that's how a lot of the architects of that generation kind of grew up playing, and that was their playing ideal.

And it translated into the new courses that they were building.

Everything was designed for these high shots because that's the way they played.

So if I would have asked... an architect who is, you know, prominent Reese Jones or somebody like that, you know, like describe your game in three words.

I don't think he would have said, you know, Naki creative and carefree.

He would have said something.

I don't know what, and you could see that in his, in his, in his architecture.

I think you did you, the way that you play golf and the way you shape greens, for instance, when you at, at one of the courses we just mentioned, like St. Patrick's, Does that translate into building like really creative slopes around the greens and kind of pushing it into that third dimension to a high degree? Because you know, those are, those are the kind of shots that you enjoy playing and grew up wanting to play.

Yeah, for sure.

I think you take a different, you know, you take a different approach to how features are going to interact.

with how the golf shot's going to interact with the features around the green.