Tim Liddy, ASGCA, recently visited The Honors Course in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He spent time reviewing this top 100 golf course with a client from Savannah and then spent time with the superintendent David Stone. David, the only superintendent that is a member of the Tennessee Golf Hall of Fame, showed Tim his work with the declining population of song birds. “We all know golf courses, with wetlands and turf, are great filters for urban watersheds but David’s work further illustrates how golf courses can be a great friend to the environment,” Liddy said. ” The Honors Course represents the best in golf on many levels; golf course architecture, the environment, turf science and amateur golf.”

Tim Liddy recently went to Australia with a golf study tour of Alister MacKenzie courses by the ASGCA, SAGCA and EIGCA . They studied New South Wales, Royal Sydney, Metropolitan, Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath. Tim has a good friend (Andy Coogan, who grew up across the street from Carnoustie Golf Course in Scotland -another story) that lives in Melbourne and is a member of Victoria Golf Club, so he took the opportunity to study Victoria and talk to its Director of Grounds Ian Todd.

Above is some of their conversation.

Thanks to Tim for shooting and editing this interview. When I was at Victoria in 2003, I had the pleasure of playing the course with Mike Clayton who has been in charge of restoring and renovating the course. It was one of the most pleasurable rounds of the decade and his thoughts on golf course design made a strong impression on me at the time. The work he has done there is remarkable, and Victoria is not to be missed.

THE FIFTEENTH AT PRINCESS ANNE

I caught up with Tim Liddy in March and we shared an enjoyable round at Chechessee Creek. We sat down for a Guinness afterward and he was nice enough to let me ask him a few questions on video. (After the jump).

I worked with Tim at Princess Anne Country Club in Virgina Beach during the summer of 2007. Tim had won the job of completely overhauling an existing course that wound through an old neighborhood. The old course was generic and frankly not very good. The result of the renovation was a very playable, fun golf course that has many classic elements.

I was impressed by Tim’s willingness to try new things. He has had a good long career as Pete Dye’s righthand man and he could go about cranking out copies of his masters work, but is clear from Princess Anne and also his recent work at the Dukes Course in Scotland that he is eager and even hungry to continue to evolve as an architect. I enjoyed working for him because it allowed me to gleam something about Pete Dye’s way of thinking about design. I hope to work with Tim again in the near future.