Clayton, DeVries & Pont
In 2019, Mike joined forces with golf architects Mike Clayton and Frank Pont to form the truly global partnership Clayton, DeVries & Pont (CDP). Mike Clayton is a former golfer on the European and Australasian PGA tours and is based in Melbourne, Australia. Frank Pont has backgrounds in civil engineering and mergers & acquisitions and is based in The Netherlands.
All three CDP principals have been in the golf business over two decades and, combined, they have 80+ years of diverse experiences in golf: playing, maintaining, building, restoring, and renovating golf courses of various pedigrees. Their original designs are ranked in the top 100 courses in the world and regionally, while their efforts on Golden Age courses have garnered awards and risen in the rankings.
CDP has a collective knowledge base that assesses projects on many levels and its principals collaborate to make each course they work on the best that it can possibly be for its owner, members, and players. See www.cdpgolf.com for more information.
Mike Clayton
Australian Partner
Mike Clayton is, first and foremost, a golfer. Although retired from the professional tours, “Clayts” still plays, primarily for the companionship of friends both young and old, the beauty of a wonderful golf course and the thrill of a nice swing and finding the middle of the club.
Mike has been fortunate to find other lives in golf, as a writer, a designer of courses and occasionally all the way back to the beginning as a young boy caddying at Eastern Golf Club by carrying the clubs of much younger friends aspiring to be great players. Giving Su Oh, the first Australian woman to hit a shot in the Olympic games, the wrong club off the first tee in Rio wasn’t exactly the high point of a brilliant week.
Clayts’ love for golf courses, his eloquence in describing various aspects of the sport, and his desire to make new and old courses enduringly interesting to play, as well as beautiful places to both walk and play the best game of them all lends a poet’s mind to our work.
FRANK PONT
EUROPEAN PARTNER
Following a successful career in consulting and investment banking, Pont has spent the last 15 years becoming one of Europe's leading course designers and experts on restorations. In addition to his work on Colt, Alison, Simpson, Arana, and Pennink designs, he has also created several highly acclaimed new course designs in his home country of the Netherlands, including De Swinkelsche, which is ranked in the top 10.
He is currently working with more than 15 classic golf clubs listed on Golf World's English and European Top 100. The clubs where he has been working on extensive restorations, such as De Pan (#26 to #3), Hardelot (#98 to #27), Royal Hague (#19 to #6), and Eindhoven (#81 to #33), have all made spectacular improvements in the course rankings in recent years. No other architectural firm in Europe has delivered similar results in such a consistent manner.