Music plays.
A golf bag full of clubs leans against a shelf. Andy sits before a computer working, and then is out on a golf course. Throughout, Andy will be out on a course, walking or playing; sitting in an office, often in front of a computer; or aerial shots will show various golf courses.
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Charles Schwab Presents
Andy Johnson: [Laughing] At this point in my life, golf is my life. I am either talking about it, I'm writing about it, I'm thinking about it at, at all hours of the day.
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The Challengers.
A series about people who
Question. Engage. Succeed.
Andy Johnson
Andy: I'm Andy Johnson, and I'm the founder of Fried Egg Golf. I grew up playing golf. I was playing competitively as a Mid-Am into my late twenties. And I was the person that watched golf on the weekends, played golf on the weekends, read about golf during the week, and just absolutely nuts about golf.
The things that I was interested in weren't always the things that were covered in mainstream golf. And understanding golf-course architecture really brings another dimension to the game. I have this theory that if somebody's interested in something that means there's thousands of other people that interested in that too.
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What if we made golf architecture approachable?
Andy: I thought, “What if we made golf architecture approachable and simple and easy to access?” So, I started with Fried Egg Golf. Obviously, you want a golf course that makes you make decisions and makes you think. I thought I should play over here, and I ended up in a terrible place. But then, you know, what's beautiful about golf architecture is the art of it. If you hired ten different architects to look at a piece of land, all ten would come back with a different design.
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Meadow Club
Fairfax, CA
Andy: Were at Meadow Club, which is in Fairfax, California. It is an Alister MacKenzie design. Back in the 1920s, they didn't have the ability to move a lot of earth, so what they had to do was they had to use the natural features of the ground. And one of the things you notice at Alister MacKenzie's golf courses is he was excellent at picking out the most interesting parts of a property and jamming as many holes as possible on those parts.
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8th Green
10th Green
11th Green
Andy: So here in this just small vicinity you have the 8th green right behind me. You've got the 10th green just to the left. We're on the 11th tee, and the 11th green plays right on the ridge. The 7th hole comes right back on the back side of this ridge, and then the 8th tee comes from on top of the . . . It's probably, maybe one of the most dramatic parts of the whole golf course.
Everybody knows the Masters, those roars on Sunday.
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Augusta National
August, GA
10th Green
17TH Green
7TH Green
2ND Green
15TH Green
Andy: One of the reasons they echo through the golf course is that the holes are so close together because the greens, the tees are all placed on these really interesting ridges. So they're just kinda packed together, if that makes sense. A lot of his courses feel so intimate because you visit a place, you go away from it, and then you come back to it. And it creates this sense of familiarity, but you're coming at these really cool features from different angles.
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Pasatiempo
Santa Cruz, CA
Andy: So when you start to kinda take a step back and look at the entire golf course wholistically, it gives you another thing out on the course that brings enjoyment other than how you play. You can look around and say, "Oh, what a cool bunker that is." Cuz it's amazing how this hole goes over this piece of land. And it kind of takes away the pressure of, "I need to make a par to break 90 for the first time.” That's still part of your golf life but it gives this other thing that brings enjoyment other than how I played today.
A buck stands on a golf course, casting a long shadow from the low sun.
Andy pulls a camera from his golf back and takes pictures of the course. Pages from his Fried Egg Golf website flash by, each featuring a photo of a different golf course.
So I thought one of the biggest gaps in golf coverage was golf course architecture. And that's when we started to dive in and really focus on taking great photos of great golf architecture and explaining it in really simple terms. When I started doing that, I was not good at it.
Kaley Johnson [off-screen]: Yes, he’s colorblind, but he is a photographer. He couldn't write, but he taught himself how to write. He teaches himself whatever he wants to learn.
Kaley: My name is Kaley Johnson, but most people know me as Mrs. Fried Egg. I'm Andy's wife.
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We put out at least one piece of content every single day.
Andy: We put out at least one piece of content every single day on The Fried Egg.
Kaley: He is a writer now, the great podcaster. He's such a natural.
Andy: Excited to chat with Tom Doak today on the latest episode of The Yolk with Doak.
Andy sits in front of a microphone, recording a podcast. Then he’s in a rocky area with tall grass, send a drone into the air.
Kaley: Everything just continues to evolve and expand. And it's cool to see the audience continue to grow.
Andy: One of the coolest things that happened a couple years ago was Rory Mcllroy in a press conference before Southern Hills PGA talked about how he got ready for the tournament by watching one of our videos.
More pages from Andy’s website flash by.
Professional golfer Rory McIlroy stands before a microphone at a press conference.
Speaker 1: Rory, on knowing the golf course, what did you do to know and to work on once you got here?
Rory McIlroy: So The Fried Egg did a little video with Gill. So I watched that.
Andy: That was really cool. [Laughing] At eight years in, I feel like The Fried Egg's working. [Speaking to a fellow golfer] “I was trying to hole it, so we don't have to hit another one. “
And I think the thing that probably I feel the best about when people talk to me is when the say things like, "I've played golf for 20 years, and I loved it. I never thought I could love this thing more than I used to. And now because of paying attention to golf courses and the architecture of them, I love the game of golf even more than I did before."
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Tens of thousands of golfers watch, read and listen to Andy’s work every week.
Fried Egg Golf’s architecture videos have been viewed more than 1,000,000 times.
Ask questions. Be engaged.
[Charles Schwab logo]
Own your tomorrow®
Andy: All of my friends send me pictures every time they get Fried Egg lies. And when I get a Fried Egg lie in the bunker, I do feel a little bit of pressure.
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Thanks to
Meadow Golf Club
Jim O’Neal
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