Bill & Ben & 24 Hours

[Mike Hendren]

In his excellent "steeplechase" post, Tom Paul writes:

Do you think Bill Coore (and Ben) designed Sand Hills G.C. in a day or so? Bill Coore spent more than half a year there. Together they scoured that land for months looking for the best routing and came up with potentially 130+ holes before honing it down to 18. There's a big difference between some poor draining field in "inland" England in 1885 and Sand Hills in 1995 and there's a huge difference between laying a course out in a day and what C&C did at Sand Hills.

Did Bill Coore really need half a year, or did he just take half a year?  I'm guessing that any 18 holes combination of the possible 130 holes depicted on the famous constellation map would have yielded one of the top ten modern courses in the United States.  Pretty easy to scrape out a blow-out bunker after the fact if necessary - with mother nature's help it would look "natural" in a few months, fooling even the most erudite internet architect wannabee.  

Equipped in advance with a topo map, and a finite piece of land, I'm guessing Bill and Ben could have routed an outstanding golf course in a day if that was a firm requirement.    

What do you think?

MIke

[Joel_Stewart]

Having been to Sand Hills and knowing Bill by a few phone calls and playing a number of his courses I believe he did take that long.  The man is very slow in making decisions and takes his time.  Furthermore, he doesn't have an advance team such as Nicklaus who can send an army of people out to do advance scouting.

[Tiger_Bernhardt]

I think it could be done in a week during the golden age. I do not think you could walk that property more than once in a day.

[Sean_A]

Did Sand Hills have a long period between the start of the project and the completion?  If so, perhaps C&C had a lot of time to just mull over ideas without the pressure of making a decision.  

Ciao

Sean

[Mike Hendren]

Come on Tiger, TRIANGULATE form high point to high point!

Walk from Ben's Porch to the 2nd green to the 13th green and back to the porch.  

I for one am grateful they took their time.  That reflects professionalism and good stewardship of the fabulous site.  I'm naive but still know there's more to it than meets this uneducated and untrained eye.  Perhaps it's in their nature to study on matters a bit.  Even better.  BUT, they and the site are good enough to produce a great routing in a day with a post hole digger some PVC pipe IF they had to.  No big whoop if they lose a point on the Doak scale.  

People will come, Ray.  People will most definitely come.
-Terrence Mann

[Brad Klein]

No, no no.

Bill Coore has dealt with precisely this point about Sand Hills in detail repeatedly - including a fascinating hour-long walk and talk at Archipalooza II in 2002 (I think it was). There were lots of holes out there, but connecting them was very difficult and many areas that might have made for good holes were not connected to other areas, and the land in between was too rough and too rugged. The idea that this was a simple matter of connecting the dots is false. It took a lot of exercises with pencil and paper and hiking boots to puzzle out the routing and render it playable, contiguous and walkable.

[Bill_McBride]

I think C&C also took a long time to route Friars Head, and the result is one of the most ingenious routing schemes I've ever had the pleasure to see and play.

It starts out in the dunesland above the north shore of Long Island, plays through parkland, then #2 dives off the upper area via a par 5, and the next 5 holes (#2 - #6) are down in the open rumpled area (wouldn't really call it flat) - until a second par 5, #7, takes you back up the hill to the top for #8 and #9.

The back nine does the same.  #10 is a wonderful par 3 with a giant dune obscuring the left half of the green; then #11 echoes #2 as a par 5 down the hill to the open area below.  #14, par 5, takes you back up the hill to the closing holes in the elevated dunes land.  Great stuff.

I think of the par 5s at Friars Head as "the escalators."  Two go down, two go up.  Wonderful transitions.

[A_Clay_Man]

Even with all that land, didnt DY need to get just a small bit more? Namely the 14th green site and 15th teeing ground?

[Ben Cowan-Dewar]

I was dying to ask Bill a question after playing Sand Hills, about the large and awesome blowout bunker in front of the tee on eight. I was pondering what was their favourite hole they gave up on and were they sad not to incorporate a great bunker such as that.

Bill stated they created that bunker getting fill for the tee, shows you what I know.

BCD

[Mike Hendren]

Adam,

Did he really NEED to?

Brad,

Would a couple of lengthy hikes between tee and green significantly diminish Sand Hills?  To the point that it fell off somebody's list?

I greatly admire people who have a passion for getting it right.  I was raised that way but have strayed.  

Mike

[TEPaul]

Bogey:

When it comes to why Coore and Crenshaw only will do two courses in a year and not more it would be wise to not speculate what they could do in a day or even if they'd attempt to do a course in a day like some of those early Scottish linksmen who laid out a course in a day;

Here's what Bill Coore had to say about that:

"Larger firms could obviously undertake more projects, although I believe that no one person can be in charge of more than three or four golf courses and be fulfilling his (her) or the projects’ potential. I object to the perception that any one person no matter how gifted is personally and solely six or more golf courses at one time. Think of it, a hundred or more diverse and interesting holes to conceive simultaneously!!"

Maybe it's because I know Bill Coore and have spoken to him about this kind of thing a number of times but he says he feels it's hard enough for him to design 36 good holes in a year and he feels it would be virtually impossible to ask him to design 100 to 200 holes in a year.

We don't need to speculate on these things as far as he's concerned (unlike a Ross or MacKenzie who're gone now)---all we need to do is ask him and in my opinion it would be best for any of us to take the man at his own word about these things.  

There is no question in my mind now that other than a few notable exceptions the time spent by an architect on site is just HUGE to the quality of the product. All I really need to do to prove that is to cite a number of course's whose architects literally spent years on the site.

[TEPaul]

"Come on Tiger, TRIANGULATE form high point to high point!

Walk from Ben's Porch to the 2nd green to the 13th green and back to the porch."

Bogey:

Have you ever actually tried to route and design a golf course on raw land? And if you have, did you actually draw anything and how long did it all take you?  

[Mike Hendren]

Tom,

It is a credit to Bill Coore that he FULLY devotes his time, energy and talent to any one project.  There is undoubtedly a great correlation between time spent on site and quality of the finished product, Donald J. Ross excepted (funny how all these Ross hidden gems keep popping up on this site, one after the other).  

Is it possible that Mr. Coore is selling himself short.  Do you really think he would supplant Tom Fazio as King Of The Sixes if he pursued a larger book of business?  

My initial post has as an underlying theme the premise that routing remains an underappreciated discipline.  A one day routing of Sand Hills might have been good enough for most folks, including some who compile lists.  

Mike

[RJ_Daley]

Mike, there is nothing quite like the activity of going out on a piece of sand hill property with a topo in hand, and begin the process.  I have done this a couple of times.  The 800 acres I was interested in south of North Platte is actually less severe than most of what I saw in and around SHGC.  It actually seems to be able to yield more routing possibilities because you don't have such high sand ridges and such deep troughs that you find up in the real sand hills.  Yet, when you begin to study the topo for days on the table, then go out for more days walking and charting out the actual on the ground, walking and looking, you can see the multitude of possibilities, which must then be sifted down into a logical routing rather than a collection of holes.  

In a several thousand acre property like SHGC that DY owned or had control over it, I think it is hard to find between 250 and 300 contiguous acres in a patch among the vast sea where everything comes together in a routing with the best green and LZ sites.  

In a way, it seems easier to have a flat piece of land, figure out how you want to drain it directionally and so forth, figure out where you want to dig ponds to most effieciently move dirt to features by shaping along the route, and just jam the routing together at your convienience than find one great route winding though natural features.

[Mike Hendren]

Bogey:
Have you ever actually tried to route and design a golf course on raw land? And if you have, did you actually draw anything and how long did it all take you?  

Tom,

I'm surprisingly good in two dimensions with no topo lines.

BTW, your "steeplechase" thread is the best one started on this site in ages.

Mike

[Mike Hendren]

In a way, it seems easier to have a flat piece of land, figure out how you want to drain it directionally and so forth, figure out where you want to dig ponds to most effieciently move dirt to features by shaping along the route, and just jam the routing together at your convienience than find one great route winding though natural features.

Dick,

That's the issue I'm struggling with.  Is there such a thing as "one great route."  That's different from "a" great route.

Mike

[TEPaul]

Bogey:

I really do believe that some architects are just incredibly quick studies in some aspects of architecture and others aren't and I don't think it has all that much to do with the finished products. The guys that're good and were good just get into doing things as they work best and feel most comfortable to them. After all these people can be classified as "artists".

I think Mackenzie was a real quick study, and Fowler too. I think Doak is too. Bill Coore just isn't---I've watched him work. Could he do something good in a day? Maybe, but that's never going to happen so why even consider it?

I think a guy like Flynn was another super quick study particularly in the art of really routing fast and well. He obviously just had that kind of instant vision---maybe it's something like the Rain Man looking at a whole bunch of matches on the floor and going---zip and having them all counted in about two seconds.

But for any architect either today or in the past I'm totally convinced they could produce a golf course far better if given the time rather than in a day the way those old Scottish linksmen sometimes "layed out" courses.

Furthermore, any of us should realize that all they were doing was producing a basic stick routing. There wasn't much of any "designing" involved in what they did to the holes. How could there have been----they weren't there long enough for anything to even start to get built? How quickly some of us seem to overlook that simple fact.

I believe for anyone to really understand what this is REALLY all about they do need to route and design something on raw land even if it is on paper and a whole lot more than just a stick routing. They need to totally develop all the details of the individual holes too that's a ton more than just a stick routing, or basic "lay-out"

Even I could take some stick routing and without changing a thing about it make it look like up to a dozen different golf courses just in the "designing up" phase alone.

[TEPaul]

"Tom,

I'm surprisingly good in two dimensions with no topo lines. "

Mike:

I'm sure anyone on this site would be.

It's a lot harder with a good topographical site than a flattish one anyway. But with a topo routing most people could do length and width just fine, I'm sure, but when you get out there and have to deal with height or the vertical dimension on a pretty topographical site---WHOA---big difference!  

[TEPaul]

"Dick,
That's the issue I'm struggling with.  Is there such a thing as "one great route."  That's different from "a" great route."

Mike;

Sure there is and most of it depends on the site---generally the configuration of the site. I mean on a site like Merion's if you have a clubhouse site fixed as they did the routing sort of dictates itself the overall site is so narrow. Of course they could've gone the other way or something but the basic landforms for holes lay out as they are. There's no part of that site that's more than about 300 yards wide and I'm sure you can imagine what that means in a routing context.

[Kirk Gill]

Per Mr. Morrissett's Sand Hills course profile, after looking for the course on the 8,000 acres available to them, Ben Crenshaw found that it was necessary to obtain additional land for a portion of the course. It is a testament to the way they wanted to go about creating this course that they took no "long-cuts," didn't resort to more invasive methods, but absolutely were dedicated to both finding the best course possible and finding it on the ground.

[Tom_Doak]

There is no way anyone can process 8000 acres in 24 hours.
,
I have done a couple of routings for courses which only took me a weekend -- St. Andrews Beach and Sebonack.  Both were tweaked slightly afterward, but not much.

However, when we had 1000 acres of dunes to work with at Ballyneal, it took me four trips over two years to figure out what was the best routing, and even then we changed stuff around a bit during construction.

The more land you've got, the more options you have to sort out.  You might be able to do a decent routing on the first day if you weren't afraid to move some earth around to make it work, but you could never be confident you'd really nailed it.

I do remember Bill telling me that at one point they thought they had the routing finished, and Ben left, and Bill went out the next morning to walk it one more time ... and realized that the second and third holes were directly into the bright morning sky and that just would not do.  This was using the current first hole; I don't know where #2 and #3 went from there.

[TEPaul]

"I do remember Bill telling me that at one point they thought they had the routing finished, and Ben left, and Bill went out the next morning to walk it one more time ... and realized that the second and third holes were directly into the bright morning sky and that just would not do.  This was using the current first hole; I don't know where #2 and #3 went from there."

Tom:

I do because I made a copy of the "Constellation Map" and many of the holes not used are numbered nonetheless.

[Gene Greco]

I do remember Bill telling me that at one point they thought they had the routing finished, and Ben left, and Bill went out the next morning to walk it one more time ... and realized that the second and third holes were directly into the bright morning sky and that just would not do.  This was using the current first hole; I don't know where #2 and #3 went from there.

Well, of course, #2 would have been towards that giant gully with tall grass to the right of the current landing area where my drive goes much more often than not - Bill should have left the routing alone!

[RJ_Daley]

That's the issue I'm struggling with.  Is there such a thing as "one great route."  That's different from "a" great route.

Mike, how would you ever know an answer to that?  At the end of the day, one route gets built over one land.  If one of the alternate routes looked great on paper, but didn't get built, how would you know after it was built if it was "as" great, greater, or less great, and still be just great?  

But, I'll try not to sound like a lawyer and parse the meaning of "a" and "as" and "one" and say that in my own mind, from great land I've seen, there are great routes and not just one great, and they would all appeal to different people in different ways, and even with different game skills.  

In a way, perhaps this whole constellation map thing is a bit of legend and lore (not saying it doesn't exist cause I too saw it) but that the legend of how it is the result of winnowing and sifting down to the one and only greatest route is well... sizzle.  We all like to tell how we were there and saw the legendary map, as if it were the map to the treasure of the Sierra Madre.

If there is one thing I think we on GCA.com are prone to do (I very much included) is to add our own provanance (I think that is what it is called) or to insert our own personal involvement or touch to the legend.  It is sort of like groupies hanging around so they can say that they touched or got close to the legend.  

[Patrick_Mucci]

Mike Hendren,

I think Brad Klein hit the nail on the head.

It's one thing to come up with 130 quality holes, it's quite another to connect them so that they flow with continuity.

Seperating individual holes further, as you suggest, would have made Sand Hills like so many resort communities, only instead of houses and swimming pools, areas of scrub would have filled the voids.

TEPaul is familiar with the "Constellation" map, having studied it, and having spent the day in the field in the back of a white pick-up truck harrassing other golfers while he examined each of the non-completed holes.