Who's responsible for that actual quote in the first post is interesting. As BobC said the idea or theory that quote tries to encapsulate began on this website a few years ago as I was trying of figure out if there was some score-based barometer of testing the effective strategic or multi-optional quality of golf holes.
It seemed to me the wider the scoring spectrum over a certain amount of time on a particular golf hole indicated a higher degree of interest of the hole due to truly effective multi-optional strategies. The whole idea began to occur to me from the inverse--eg a narrow scoring spectrum over time indicated some real lack of strategic or multi-optional effectiveness and therefore lack of interest within the golf hole.
This wasn't something that just came to me out of the blue. It came to me over a period of time on one of the holes of my own course that had devolved over the years into one where the play of the hole (for most everyone) became very one-dimensional---in other words everyone seemed to be playing it their own same way day after day.
Then through research I found out that this particular hole had been redesigned by Perry Maxwell in the 1930s to mimic the shot values or "strategic concept" of ANGC's great "go-no go" short par 5 #13!.
But for reasons of simple neglect and misunderstanding of the strategic makeup of the hole most all its multi-optional strategies had been shut down to almost total non-function so the hole basically had to be played one-dimensionally day after day by most everyone. To me, anyway, this created a situation over time were the scoring spectrum became really narrow and the hole just became boring in my mind.
When we looked at Maxwell's "concept copy" of ANGC's #13 and what had happened to shut down some of the multi-options over the years we fixed it and, BOOM, the next year the hole was back to multi-dimensional in its effective strategies and its "scoring spectrum" dramatically widened to more eagles and birdies but also more bogies and "others".
So to me that was proof of the theory of the "scoring spectrum" as a barometer for the quality of a golf hole as to its effective multi-optional strategies and diverse temptations in function and in play.
Bob Crosby picked up on that and created a mathematical or statistical model to test the theory on certain holes and it seemed to match or reflect their perceived quality, or lack of it.
So then BobC did that calender and he asked me to submit a quote to encapsulate this "scoring spectrum" idea. Of course, being me, I completely exceeded the word limit for the calender so the actual wording of that quote is much more Bob Crosby's than mine. But the idea is the same.
