Australian course architect MICHAEL COCKING dishes the dirt on becoming the country’s busiest restoration man, the famous course he’d love to get his hands on and how Ogilvy Cocking Mead plans to revive one of the most iconic Major-championship venues in golf ahead of the 2026 Presidents Cup.
Michael Cocking still recalls the moment golf sucked him in. It was 1988, and a young Cocking was channel surfing early on a Monday morning before school when his eyes locked on a golf tournament coming down to the wire. America’s Curtis Strange and Englishman Nick Faldo were duking it out in the US Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, and with ‘Sir Nick’ bearing a passing resemblance to Hollywood icon Harrison Ford, he was the obvious choice for a first-time viewer and self-confessed Indiana Jones fanatic to cheer on.
“I couldn’t believe my luck when they tied and I got to do it all over again the next day,” Cocking recalls. “From that moment on, I was pretty much hooked.”
After catching the bug, Cocking took a deep dive into everything golf. Books, magazines, videos, 3am wake-up calls for the Majors… you name it. But he became particularly obsessed with the history of the game, past players and, naturally, the great courses.
“When I was about 15 years old my boss at the time happened to have a copy of Tom Doak’s Confidential Guide. That was really my foray into golf-course design as to that point I hadn’t read anything that really looked critically at the design of golf courses,” he says. “Not long after, I was playing representative golf and pretty much on every overseas trip I would seek out what other courses were in the area that Tom recommended. I would write away and try to walk or play them as part of my travels.”
Cocking would become a very good golfer himself but, like all good students, he finished an engineering degree and, by chance, Michael Clayton’s design firm was doing some work at his home club, Peninsula Golf Club. “I approached them for a job and fortunately was in the right place at the right time,” Cocking says. “For a few years I wore two hats … trying to play competitively as well as working in design, before I saw the light and dedicated myself totally to design.”
It was a decision that would not only benefit Cocking’s long-term prospects, but the future of golf clubs the world over.
Somehow, some way, Australian Golf Digest found a window in Cocking’s bursting calendar to pick the brain of one of golf’s most humble and artistic minds. From his favourite course and hole, to the iconic courses he’d love to get his hands on, ‘Magic Mike’ reveals more than we imagined. – Brad Clifton
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AUSTRALIAN GOLF DIGEST: A self-confessed golf geek who grew up in Melbourne playing Alister MacKenzie courses and reading Tom Doak books. It’s no surprise you do this design caper for a living, is it?
MIKE COCKING: [Laughs] I guess not. Growing up in Melbourne, at heart you tend to develop strong ties to MacKenzie, no question. He is my favourite architect but Tom, particularly his approach to design, has been instrumental in what we do today. I was really lucky in the early 2000s to work on a project at St Andrews Beach. My design partner Ashley Mead was also involved down at Barnbougle Dunes, so both of us got to work closely with Tom and his team very early in our careers, which was a priceless experience. What’s really great about Tom, apart from being a fantastic architect obviously, was watching how he approached the design and then the build process. He was unique to us that he and his team always built their own work. Here in Australia, traditionally architects would do detailed plans and hand them over to a contractor and then the contractor would build it. So, this was sort of an eye-opener for us, and we quickly realised that it made so much sense because you retained all the intellectual property and with the same team building your designs they would soon develop an intimate understanding of what you’re after. When you give the plans to a contractor, you never know what you’re going to get. You might be working with someone who’s never set foot on a golf course before. When we started Ogilvy Cocking Mead (OCM), we had that very much in mind.
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If you could go back in time and ask Alister MacKenzie anything, what would it be?
That’s a really good question. I think I wouldn’t so much be asking him questions; I’d love to be a fly on the wall and just be able to observe how he approached everything. He was so clever at routing a golf course. It would have been amazing to just watch him process all the various options and see how he navigates his way around the property and what he starts looking at first. Was he drawn to particularly interesting parts of property? Everyone has their own method for laying out holes – some people will be drawn to the more dramatic sections of the property first or they might focus on green sites or landing zones. Sometimes, a particular hole might just pop out. I think that would have been really interesting with MacKenzie, particularly his work at Royal Melbourne because it’s a course that we all know so well, right? That little loop of holes from Nos.2-6 on the West course, which was a really clever way he used that bit of ground… that would have been fascinating to just see how he landed upon that particular routing. He also worked at such a fast pace. I mean, he was here 10 weeks and consulted to, like, 20-25 golf courses. It’s unbelievable when you think about it.
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So much is said of American courses and how they compare to our great courses. Do you have a favourite portion of the PGA Tour calendar?
I’m a sucker for the Masters, to be honest. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved watching that event at that course. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Augusta National a few times and I still look forward to April from January onwards. Outside of that, I like watching a little bit of the West Coast Swing. It’s always nice to see courses like Riviera and Pebble Beach as a build-up to the Masters.
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Are there any architectural features that are strictly no-go zones for you when designing courses?
Not really, because you can usually think of an example of a course or a great hole that defies convention and features something a bit quirky. As a company, we love quirks. Playing courses like Arrowtown in New Zealand or North Berwick or Prestwick in Scotland are some of the most enjoyable days you will ever have on a course. The advent of short courses and courses that break the pattern of that perception that a true golf course has to be 6,000 metres long or a par of 72 has changed how we look at design. That’s not to say we don’t have rules on what we like and don’t like. For example, a tree in the middle of the fairway is not something we’d encourage, and we generally don’t like really tight fairways. There will always be architectural features that we typically try to avoid.
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But if the client’s happy, you’re happy, right?
Yeah, I guess so. Look, we’d happily build consecutive par 3s or position bunkers in the middle of fairways, blind shots… you name it. I think there’s a place for all those things, it’s just finding the right site and the right client and, ultimately, the right business model in knowing what the course is going to be. We work on different sites in different parts of the world and we definitely like building sportier holes. We love building short par 4s and reachable par 5s. We like shot options, and typically build wider fairways to create different angles and different shots for the golfer. You won’t find a lot of holes we build where there’s no thought required before the shot is played. Execution golf is the antithesis of what we like to build.
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You’ve won the tender to redesign Medinah No.3, one of the most famous courses in America. How did this come about?
Well, it was a roller-coaster of emotions because I was in America finishing the Shady Oaks project, about February 2020, when we received an e-mail from Medinah’s superintendent. He wanted to see if we were interested in having a chat, so I called him and had a chat and OCM was put on a shortlist. When that happens you are naturally up and about because we were excited to be considered, really. Our plan from that point was, OK, Ashley [Mead] and Geoff [Ogilvy] will be coming over to America at some point for Shady and then all three of us will travel up to Medinah in March or April. Then, of course, the world went pear-shaped with COVID-19 in March 2020. Things suddenly changed and I just assumed that’s probably our chance [to redesign Medinah] gone. The thinking was, we’re probably not going to be considered anymore because we’re on the other side of the world. So, for the next year, we managed to put together a lot of thoughts and ideas on the golf course. Geoff had obviously played there quite a lot. I have a good friend in Chicago who was able to do quite a lot of video work on site. He did some drone flyovers and took a lot of photos. I spoke with him a lot to get particular angles that we were interested in. The club had some amazing historical archives and – despite not being able to be there on-site ourselves – we were still able to get enough information where we could at least put together a pitch to the club to show them our thoughts on what improvements should be made, and the direction we felt the course needed to go if we were to be appointed.
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What was the winning pitch in a nutshell?
It was some of the things we were talking about before: trying to balance that line of having a course that was fun and interesting for the average golfer but still challenging for the tour player. Whereas what had occurred there is the complete opposite. It was an incredibly difficult golf course for the average golfer. The fairways were narrow and there was a lot of rough. The bunkers down the fairway and around the greens were often well off the line of play. There weren’t many decisions to be made. It was really a test of execution, but as a result, average golfers were finding it too hard, while the tour pros were shooting 25-under in tournaments so they weren’t finding it challenging at all. It had gone in the opposite direction of the original intention of the design. They have a wonderful natural feature in Lake Kadijah running through the course and it comes into play on four or five holes. Famously, the par 3s – holes two, 13 and 17 – all play similarly over water. The 14th tee shot goes back over water, while on the 15th there is water to the right of the hole. Yet all that water was in play for the average golfer but was never a consideration for a good golfer. They were missing out on the opportunity to use it to more dramatic effect, like many of the more famous water holes in world golf – cape holes like the 18th at Pebble Beach and the 17th at Cypress Point – force the very best players in the world have to really think hard about the line that want to take on. So, the original pitch was based on some of those fairly simple concepts around strategy and interest. We did quite a lot of research and found that the course had changed a lot over time and, like a lot of golden-age courses, it was a much wider golf course back in the 1930s. Of particular interest was the fact we came across some old correspondence from the ’30s that indicated A.W. Tillinghast had some role there. We still don’t know to what extent he was involved, but there were a couple of great aerial photos that showed a bunker style that was incredible and had that Tillinghast look about them. It showed some really interesting strategies and some fantastic bunkering but obviously over the years it’s moved away from that and been redesigned a bunch of times. I think that resonated with the club. They liked this idea that there were elements that we thought should and could be restored. I think they liked our approach, too. I think we’re very hands on. We spent a lot of time there. They liked the idea that it was a real team dynamic here at OCM. It’s something we often try to put across, that our work is truly a team effort that creates great courses. It’s not just the three of us. It’s all the guys that work with us. We like them to share the spoils as well. The three-heads-are-better-than-one mentality appealed to them.
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What are the key changes people will be immediately drawn to?
The big change will be the last six holes. As we touched on earlier, we just felt the lake is such a fantastic feature and is one of the things that helps give the course its feel. It’s such a unique look but it doesn’t really come into play. Every time we’d stand on the 17th hole, our eyes would immediately be drawn to the right because you’d see the lake edge continuing on this really cool diagonal off into the distance and it just kept looking like, Wow, there’s a great short par 4 over the edge of the water. That was the start of this idea that the last six holes needed changing. It then went from there to the par 3s being very similar, particularly 13 and 17, which are next to each other with the same shot over the water. So there’s opportunity to improve that as well as a chance to build a truly great world-class par 4, which we didn’t really feel they had, and create all this drama at the finish around the lake. We want to still champion the beautiful old oaks, but it’s such a big property and there’s a lot of mown rough and we thought there was a chance to try to break up that wall-to-wall, cut-grass look by having some pockets of feature rough. The bunkers will be a little more artistically shaped, liked the old photos we found and these will be positioned so they are more in play and without the band of rough which currently separates them from the fairways and greens. The green complexes themselves will need to be elevated so that there is more of a demand to position yourself correctly back in the fairway. Plus, there’ll be some greens that have a little bit more interest, contour and generally more character to them. That Melbourne Sandbelt look where the putting surface flares up into the surrounding bunkers is something you’ll see more of there too. So if you short-side yourself, it will be a much more difficult recovery shot and if you’re on the wrong side of the fairway, you’ll not only have to play over a bunker but the green might be falling away from you too.
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How exciting is it to showcase one of your restorations to the world in a tournament like the 2026 Presidents Cup?
That was an added bonus. When we were awarded the project, we heard that there was a chance the Presidents Cup was going there. It’s added pressure, but it’s also such an amazing opportunity for us. I can’t think of too many occasions where you’re going into a redesign project at a course that already has a major tournament lined up at the completion of the renovation. It’s always weighing on your mind throughout the whole process, but the idea is we should be finished by mid-2024 and should be able to start the ball rolling in November this year. With the first rounds of golf planned for July 2024, the new course will get two good seasons before the Presidents Cup comes to town.
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Do you think the golf architecture fan community is bigger than it has ever been with more exposure through podcasts and magazines?
Yes, absolutely. I think podcasts have been a big part in that because there’s a lot of people out there that I’m not sure would have been hunting around on Amazon to find Robert Hunter’s The Links or one of MacKenzie’s books or anything like that. It’s very easy to just click ‘play’ on your iPad and listen to a podcast and get your fix on architecture and get people interested in it. Then, as their interest develops, they might go and get that book, but it’s been a great pathway into architecture.
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What do people like Geoff Ogilvy do for the design industry as a whole? Does having high-profile players taking an interest in architecture after they’ve finished playing naturally raise its profile?
The more times pro golfers talk golf architecture, it raises the profile of the subject. I think what a pro says or thinks holds a lot of weight with members. Now, that can work to your advantage or in the opposite direction sometimes [laughs], but there’s definitely an assumption that because they’re professional they know what they’re talking about, and it doesn’t matter whether it relates to agronomy, design or whatever. At OCM, we’re just fortunate that Geoff does know what he’s talking about when it comes to architecture. It’s certainly a good fit with our company that we each have different backgrounds and bring different things to the party. We’re stronger and we produce better work when we’re all involved. For example, I might be the lead on a project but I’m relying on the other guys coming in and editing my work and throwing up different ideas that I might not have thought of, or even toning something down if it doesn’t quite work. The same way if Ashley [Mead] is leading a project and Geoff and I might come in and do the same thing. It’s like we’re rounding off the sharp edges, and operating this way not only helps minimise the risks but, ultimately, leads to better work.
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Do you have to be a good golfer to be a good course architect?
It’s an interesting one. I’ve always felt that it’s helpful to be a decent golfer as an architect because if you’re not, it’s hard to stand there and see a hole that you’re building and understand if it’s too easy or too hard, or, if it perfectly balances that knife edge. So many of the great holes around the world straddle that line between fair and too difficult. I think if you’re not a golfer, it’s hard to look at a particular shot as you’re building it and critically make that assessment. If you don’t know what it’s like to be able to hit a high-lofted 8-iron that stops quickly, for instance, it makes it tricky. So there are definite advantages in it, but you often hear architects that aren’t necessarily good golfers say that you don’t need to be a golfer to be an architect. And there are lots of examples of great architects that weren’t great golfers, so I don’t think it’s imperative that you are a good player. If you’re not, you need to be able to understand how different golfers play, but it works both ways. If you’re not a very good golfer, you need to have seen and been around enough good golfers to understand what they’re capable of. And at the other end of the spectrum, if you’re a good golfer, you need to understand what the average golfer does because that’s just as big a challenge.
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How difficult is it to control your own bias on any given design project?
It’s funny – I’ve stood on a hole before and, naturally, you do have your own bias but golfers that hit the ball very straight will quite often, as architects, like the idea of narrow fairways because it plays to their strengths. For years Jack Nicklaus was criticised for building greens that favoured a big, high fade because that was his stock shot. I’ve stood on tees before where there’s a limb overhanging one side of the tee – on the left, for instance – and the person I was playing with favoured a draw and I favoured a cut. I would look at the tree and think, That’s in the way, and they would look at it and think, It’s not.We all have our own little biases but its important to try and avoid them as much as possible. You to be able to look through a whole range of lenses, from the very good golfer to the average player.
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It’s a great segue into Sandy Golf Links, one of your recent projects here in Australia that’s receiving rave reviews on the Melbourne Sandbelt. What was the inspiration?
It was a great project. In some ways it was an example of necessity being the mother of invention. The various Australian golf bodies [Golf Australia, PGA of Australia and WPGA] were looking for a home of golf and Sandringham ticked a lot of boxes. As a result of their plans, however, there were two holes that were going to be lost and turned into practice facilities and a driving range for the high-performance team. It was already a fairly small footprint and then we were left with 16 holes, so a decision had to be made: do we make it 18 short holes or do we have fewer holes but keep their length? In the end, the client was keen to retain 18 holes so that meant splitting some of them. But that’s where the idea of a short course came from because the more we thought about it, the more we thought one of the great features of Sandbelt golf are the par 3s and short par 4s. So it wouldn’t be a terrible thing to have a golf course that’s made up almost entirely of sub-340-metre par 4s and par 3s because they appeal to everyone. You wouldn’t be upset playing the third hole at Kingston Heath or 10 West at Royal Melbourne every day of the week, because they’re engaging and interesting and always pose lots of different decisions for the golfer to make. So we thought if we can have good variety with the par 3s, have some good variety with the short par 4s and build greens consistent with its Sandbelt neighbours, we could create this scenario that allowed public golfers to experience the beauty of Sandbelt golf, which is not always easy for them to do. For $50, you can go to Sandy and get an authentic Sandbelt experience.
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Another restoration you oversaw that’s achieved worldwide notoriety is Peninsula Kingswood. Did you anticipate the hype that would garner?
Well, I was a member of the club – I joined in 1992 as a 15-year-old – and both Ashley and I had been involved with previous design work there so we knew how good the site was but for some reason it never realised its full potential. We always knew it could be a pretty special course and I distinctly remember some of the members asked us, during one of our presentations, where it could rank and I said it’s all based on the quality of the land. If you look at the land Peninsula Kingswood sits on, it’s really one of the top three or four bits of property around the Sandbelt so I told the members: if we do our job [the North course] should certainly be in the top 10 in the country and hopefully higher. I mean, privately, you’ve always got aspirations that it’s going to rank even higher but as the pieces started coming together, we could see where it was heading. It was a long process – about a four-year construction period for both courses – but as we progressed, we started riding this wave that built in momentum and anticipation. So it was an incredibly exciting project. The North course, at least initially, received most of the fanfare but I always feel sorry for the South course because I think it’s a much better course than it has been rated already. I can see it sitting closer to 10 than 20 in future rankings but irrespective of that, we’re proud of what we’ve achieved and, overall, it’s a pretty impressive 36-hole facility.
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Is it your favourite project to date?
Because I’ve got such a strong connection there and because I played pretty much all my golf there, it obviously means a lot to me, personally, but it also means a lot to the whole company because of the effort everyone put in ans for the fact we’re still heavily involved at the club. It’s a passion, really, just seeing how we can continually refine and improve it to make it the best facility it can be. I hope and I feel confident that at some point it’ll sneak into that world Top-100 Course list. So, it’s not just any old project to us. Shady Oaks is another favourite. We’re such good friends with everyone involved at Shady and that was our first project in America… the Ben Hogan connection too… I mean, I just love going back there. Plus, it turned out really, really well. So that’s special in its own way. Way back when I first got into golf-course design I was lucky enough to be the lead on the project at Healesville in Victoria. I still remember working on that project when both my kids were born and it was three years of my life up there. So, you know, that’s special in its own way, too. Different jobs mean different things.
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How much do golf-course rankings factor into design and what do they mean to the architect’s ego?
Usually, you can find fault or argue over the little individual rankings but as a broad brush, if you remove the actual number and start looking at the top-10 and then 10-to-20 and 20-to-30, I think the rankings are a pretty good measure of where the courses sit. I think you can worry too much about it, but there’s no doubt it’s fantastic for clubs that have been outside that Top-100 barrier and then manage to break into it. A course like Rosebud down on the Mornington Peninsula, for example – which for some reason over the past few years has been outside the top 100 but now they’re really flying and are constantly improving their course. So, for a course like them, it means so much that if they see that they’ve suddenly ranked 70 and they’re on this upward projection and then they might get up to 50 or perhaps to 40, it’s a huge boost for their future. So, it’s definitely helpful but you shouldn’t put too much focus on the actual number, you know, whether the course drops down two points or three points or goes up two points. I tend not to worry too much about that.
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Moving forward, how do think further advancements in equipment and political issues like environmental sustainability will impact your work?
It’s a good question. Both are important factors to consider. The environmental issue seems to vary depending on which part of the world you’re in. Here in Australia, we’re really concerned about water usage, for instance, because we’re just seemingly in never-ending drought conditions. But then it’s interesting when you do some work overseas, places like Texas – among a few other projects we’re doing – water is not really an issue at all, because they’ve got an abundance of it. Technology has obviously been a massive factor and it’s become so difficult to find that balance of being playable for everyone but challenging for the tour pro. It’s becoming harder and harder to achieve that with the advances in technology. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years because it seems like things are a bit fluid at the moment and that could change, which will probably be a good thing. For the time being, technology is more challenging than the environmental factors.
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Is there a golf course out there that in your mind has 18 perfect holes?
That’s also a good question. I would say yes. Pine Valley is typically credited with having 18 perfect holes. I do love St Andrews but it’s kind of a museum piece, really. You tend to look at it through a different lens. As opposed to looking at it critically and perhaps wanting to change a hole. It’s just such an amazing place, the way it’s evolved. I would say there’s probably up to 10 courses where I would almost consider that every hole is close to perfect. I think you’ve only got to look through the top 10 in the world – Shinnecock Hills is a course I love. National Golf Links and Chicago Golf Club are two of my favourites. Obviously Royal Melbourne’s Composite course is in there. With courses like Augusta and Pebble Beach, there are elements that I think I would probably take away from the idea that there are 18 perfect holes. I mean, you can always find somewhere to make a tweak or two but for the most part, there are probably eight courses where I would almost say that they’re a 10 out of 10.
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The Masters is a month away. What’s one change you would make to Augusta National?
I’d say 11 is the hole that I would probably want to see changed the most – mainly the tee shot. It’s become so tight down that right side because they’ve just continually brought the trees further and further out. There are a couple of holes there – including hole 7 – where it’s become very narrow, which is a depature from what Augusta was designed to be, which is a wide, expansive golf course that’s all about angles. It’s particularly frustrating on a hole like 11, which was designed to give an advantage for being down that right side. There’s actually an old plan that shows a central bunker on 11, which I was only aware of in the last year or so. The idea was a narrow section up the right and a wide section down the left side, so if you’re prepared to hit it between the bunker and the right side of the fairway you had the best line in. If you played away from the bunker on the left you had a longer shot and a worse angle into the green.
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Finally, if you could redesign any course in the world right now, what would it be and why?
Pebble Beach. I would just be keen to see it restored, not so much redesigned. Riviera is another. Even though bits and pieces have been done at Riviera over the years, there are a number of areas which are a long way from the original design. It would be great to see Thomas’s (George C. Thomas Jnr) course reborn there. Going back to those 1920s books I mentioned earlier, I just think if you could wave your wand, they’d be the two courses you’d love to restore to their former glory.
My Favourite Hole: No.3 Kingston Heath
As a member of Kingston Heath, as well as their design consultant, I might occasionally look at some holes through rose-coloured glasses. But that aside, I genuinely think the third is one of the world’s great short par 4s. I love it for a whole range of reasons. Firstly, I think it’s one of the most interesting short 4s on the Sandbelt because you can legitimately use anything from a 6-iron to a driver off the tee. The conditions of the day – especially the wind, pin position and how well you’re playing – will all influence the club you play. Angle is everything… especially if the pin is in the back-right corner, which is best approached from way over on the left as every metre to the right sees the shot becomes infinitely harder.
It’s unique, too, in that it’s a slight dogleg right but rather than place the hazards on the inside corner (right), which is the more conventional way to set up a hole like this, the bunkers are on the outside of the dogleg, with the angle to favour play from this side. It makes for a confusing shot from the tee as it’s somewhat counter-intuitive, as your eye is drawn to the green and the shortest route but that’s actually the worst angle. You can see how first-timers get confused as it’s hard to make yourself play 30 metres out to the left.
The other thing I love about the hole is that it’s all down to brilliant design and construction rather than great land and routing. It’s flat, pretty heavy and there isn’t really a natural green site – it really gave them nothing to work with but they built a phenomenal hole.
My Favourite Course: The Old Course, St Andrews
Playing the Old Course is almost a spiritual experience for someone like me. To walk the fairways knowing that everyone, from Mary Queen of Scots to Old Tom, Bobby Jones, Jack and Tiger, has is an incredible feeling. Rather than being designed, the course was more found and then slowly evolved over many centuries. It amazes me to think that this course came to be long before anyone had written about or even thought about the ideal way to design golf holes. The contouring is almost all the product of Mother Nature and the bunkers, if you believe the stories, evolved from sandy scrapes caused by sheep huddling together to protect themselves from storms. And yet it might just be the most interesting and strategic course in the world.
