Post WWII course with the shortest green to tee walks?

[ForkaB]

This may be cheating a bit, but both Turnberry (Ailsa) and Southerness have the admirable tee to green to tee to green..... links quality.

BTW, both were designed by McKenzie Ross, and this is a pretty good pair of tracks to have done in a 2 year period (I recognize that a lot of Turnberry may have already been there, or previously there).  Why don't we hear more about him?

[Mark_Fine]

Secession in SC!  Can't recall all the walks but know several of the tees are extensions of the greens.  Pretty cool!

[Bob_Huntley]

I believe MPCC Shore Course would win the marbles here, although you cross three narrow roads in the course of the round.

[THuckaby2]

Reading the name of the Ailsa / Southerness designer reminds me that I need to go file the name change I had planned:  Tillinghast Macdonald.

I swear when I first saw the namem of the designer when I played Ailsa years ago, I thought it was a misprint.

I'm sure Tommy N.'s first son will be Fazio Robinson Naccarato.  Right?

TH

[Oat]

Machrihanish deserves an award for short green-to-tee distances.  All 18 of them are 10 yards or less.

[Paul Turner]

All 3 courses at Woburn(England)have generally short tee to green walks.  Each course has one or two 40 yard walks but the rest are minimal.

Of the 3, the least well known course there, The Duchess, has the best routing.

[TEPaul]

BY;

Actually it's three words!

You are wrong!

[BY]

Tom, pardon my ignorance but I don't understand your point.

There are many ways and tricks to get the tee close to the preceding green, but the last thing I'm going to do is get into a liability issue. I've violated many rules but I'm not going to put anybody at risk if I can avoid it.  

This isn't to say that you need a great deal of space between green and tee, you just need to be practial about it.

Hardly a month goes by when I'm not approached to provide expert testimony in a golf design/safety lawsuit.  I rarely say yes.

My insurance is too expensive and my deductible to high to risk putting a tee on top of a green. I'll make you walk the extra 50 feet before I put you in jeopardy. That being said, if someone hits that horrible shot, and someone gets it in the eye, it's still going to come back to my insurance.

[TEPaul]

BY:

Well, I guess I hear you on that liability issue. I'm glad to see others doing some real short green to tee walks again though.

You're right that an architect has to be pracitical about this and every situation should be analyzed on its own.

You say the older courses really shouldn't be looked at as an example because noone is going to sue a dead architect. That's true enough although as I'm sure you're aware the golf club now shares potential liability with the hitter (and the architect if he happens to be alive enough to sue).

I've followed a lot of cases through the NCA and the basic legal thinking is people are going to get hit on golf courses and although that's a given and not a liability situation in and of itself, the real test is if they could reasonably do something about it or that they haven't done something flagrant when there might have been a logical way to prevent it. The underlying legal logic though is it's not possible to make a golf course completely safe--nor then do you have to.

Clearly the world is more litigious today but I'm sure the older architects were not oblivious to safety issues. There were liability lawsuits in the last century too!