Can We Discuss Routing?

[Rich Goodale (Guest)]

Forrest

Great post and welcome to the site.  Your thoughts are refreshing and challenging.  You have raised the bar on this site.  In terms of posting your (or Dr, Sadalla's) thoughts, do what you wish--it's your (and his) intellectual "property", not GCA's or mine or Pat Mucci's.

All the best

Rich

[RJ_Daley]

Mr. Richardson, I also thank you and welcome you to this discussion group.  Some years ago, John Strawn in his book, "Driving the Green" described these primal or innate feelings we seem to have regarding the allure to the expansive 'fields'.   Whether it was as the hunter-gatherer or the field games humans developed to sharpen those hunter-gather skills, the sense of travelling through those fields seems to live deep down in us.  Navigating the fields seems to be an integral part of the process, marking our progress by landmarks as your Dr Sadalla describes.  It brings to mind the ability of other species of animals such as birds and squirrels that hide nuts all over, in a seemingly willy-nilly fashion, yet can apparently use a landmarking memory retention to find them, even under snow cover.  

That is what makes routings of a course so unique to every property.  I know I personally feel two different ways when I make my way through the typical woodland course routing, and the vast expansive courses of treeless plains like the Sand Hills or yet another feeling next to the ocean.  (And, perhaps that ocean triggers yet another innate welling up of primative instinct or memory).  

LIke the animal with those homing or navigational skills used to mark out their territory or find their hidden treasures, I think we golfers, as you allude to, are constantly using those landmarkers or lack of them requiring invention of a substitute imaging technique for them to stimulate our brains.  Add, strategy of the skills of the ball and stick game through the labyrinth of landmarks or images, and you have something that challenges and pleases us over and over.  The bird dog never gets tired of chasing and fetching, as we never get tired of similar hitting, chasing and targeting our little round white obsessions.  

When the routing is really good, all those senses, including the aethetic of what pleases our eyes are at work.  The talented archie can recognise a vista and strategy for the game amongst the landmarks that appeals to what is deep within us, to not only give us pleasure at doing it once, but variety and enough stimulation to make us come back time and again, like the dog never tiring of chasing and fetching the ball.  

Some folks are even better at seek, in the skill of finding the little round white ball in the nest of rough.

[Tim Weiman]

Forrest:

I share Rich Goodale's view that posting a few excerpts will both raise the bar of our discussion and, probably, encourage sales of your book.

As I've said, the subject of routing is so darn important, but really something we have not addressed very much or very well. It's the biggest gap in our discussion at GCA, in my opinion. If you can help address that, I'm sure many will be grateful.

FYI, I also agree with Tom Doak that discussions about routing really need to include site specific comments. That really helps people visualize the points being made.

[TEPaul]

Forrest Richardson:

Are you familiar with Max Behr and particularly his thoughts and writings regarding how golfers respond in various ways to what they perceive to be natural and what they perceive to be man-made in golf and its designs?

His conclusions, as far as I can tell, were that golfers are more inclined, subliminally or otherwise, to face and deal with the challenges and unfairnesses of what they perceive to be nature than they are to do the same with what they perceive to be created to challenge them by man!

If one really think about it that certainly makes sense to me! But maybe the perceptions he wrote about in 1927 are too far gone now with the modern golfer. Maybe the ensuing years of what's been given to the golfer (so much clearly man-made architecture) has altered that somehow. Maybe the golfer has even been desensitized to even feel the distinctions!

[Jim_Kennedy]

Patrick,
Without shot variety how could a rythm be established?
Additionally, having no variety between holes would get boring, especially on back-to-back par 3s & 5's.
I would think that once some green and tee sites are found these elements(V&R) would be right there in the forefront.

Forrest,
Thank you for sharing with us. Your excerpts not only add knowledge to the discussion, they have a side effect of stirring interest in your book.  

[Brian Phillips]

Forrest,

Please do post some passages, I own the book but would really enjoy the passages with your reasoning behind the writing.

In the 2nd edition you are going to have to put golf club atlas on your website list which you didn't include in your book!!

Brian

[TEPaul]

I think balance and variety are always on your mind when doing a routing. That in and of itself makes things far more complex sometimes.

I think a good analogy would be to visualize creating a randomly directed fence line with posts placed at various distances (tees and green sites) and always moving from one to the other in various directions.

After that you have to consider the rails (the entire bodies of the holes themselves to be conceived of and created in one way or another) but always how they fit into those posts!

Sometimes they don't fit and you have to then move those posts or reform or reconceive those rails, maybe going back, maybe forward until all the rails can be fitted in well. That would be the old style close connected walking routing to me! Sort of like making the fence line connect all around.

To me the modern cart style routing is sort of like lengths of fencing (the two posts and the rails) here and there not really connecting the line.

But with the fenceline analogy you never have to consider what everything else around it looks like exactly as you do with individual golf holes. Something else that makes routing golf holes additionally complicated.

And with all this, like the planting of the posts and the fitting in of the rails you always have to be considering the ease or difficulty of the ground, the topography and other obstacles on it.

That to me is the set of circumstances encountered with a very natural routing maybe almost minimal routing!

Then enter the whole world of machinery that can alter things and make things fit better here and there or anywhere. Or does it?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Jim Kennedy,

Lots of good courses have back to back par 3's and par 5's.
Cypress Point and Seminole come to mind.

I would think that the design of any individual shot occurs after the general routing is layed out, and after each hole is identified.
I wouldn't imagine that shot variety enters into the process as early as you seem to feel it does, unless there was a very unique feature or two on the property.

It would seem that your process would put the cart before the horse, micro before macro.  Perhaps it is done, but it would seem awkward and difficult at best.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Patrick,
Basically I asked two questions:
1.How important is sequencing to you when doing a routing?
2.Are rythm and shot variety of equal importance?  
Their timing wasn't initially important to me, only their influence on a routing.


I didn't say back-to-back holes weren't good, only that they would need variety to become something other than boring.
You may not agree and it may not be the way it's done but I would think that one of the prerequisites to a good layout is a variety of shots so I might have this thought in mind before I even set foot on a property.

[GeoffreyChilds]

I just got to this excellent discussion.  It's a topic thats really hard to comprehend since we as players are all to focused on the hole or the shot we are currently playing. Its certainly the hardest topic for me to comprehend.  Single holes or groups of holes are much easier to study.

I always thought the aerial of the day was a great opportunity to discuss routing and I've been (apparently one of the few) disappointed that it is IMO just a silly guessing game of clues.  I'd love to hear from those who know something about routing or details about the course whose aerial is posted what was done with the routing; where are the high and low points on the property; what hills were routed towards, over around, etc. I think that could be educational an fun for all of us.

[Tim Weiman]

Geoffrey:

I agree that the aerial of the day has been a disappointment with the guessing game silly compared to what we might have used such photos for. That said, a serious routing discussion would need far more than just posting the aerial, of course.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Tim Weiman,

On the old format, this subject came up, but perhaps not in the same context.

Some of the discussion centered on quassi-accepted maxims, such as the first hole shouldn't head due east and the 18th hole shouldn't head due west.  One nine should be clockwise and the other counter clockwise.  Clubhouse location in relationship to the routing (returning or non-returning) etc., etc..  I wish it was easier to bring those threads unto this system.

I think Donald Ross got into some of this in "Golf has never failed me."

I'm still intriqued by the creativity of the routing process, especially on flat land, such as south Florida.

Tom Doak's response was informative, and I would appreciate hearing from others, how they go about the process.

[Forrest Richardson]

Thanks for the encouragement to post a few excerpts. Please note that I did this to add some science behind our discussion -- Dr. Sadalla really needs to weigh in on this himself, which I'll try to arrange.

I recall having dinner with Ed at which it was nearly impossible to contain our excitement for discussion. The fish became cold and the wine glasses had holes in them. We both share a passion for golf and the field of environmental psychology is ideal for exploring golf.

But well past all our discussion and ideals -- there are no damn rules! Each designer goes about routing differently. Each site, client, need, climate and era will bring with it an entirely new set of priorities, approaches and styles. I believe this is literally at the heart of what makes golf so unique among our games and sports.

Let us not forget that among some of the most wonderfully entertaining places to visit are those with no apparent rhyme or reason to their make up. The pyrimids. A quirky house built with collected junk. Too much planning in a routing, especially when it obvious to the player, can seem like the worst of shopping malls with their "standard" array of amenities. One of the greatest attributes a course can have is a routing that looks as if it simply happened.

[Tom Doak]

Tom P:  I do think I'm near the top of the class at reading topos, and I do think people underestimate how important it is.  On a good topo map you can see most of those little twists and turns in the foreground you speak of, if they're more than a foot high.

I don't know where I got that skill from, since Pete and Perry Dye never spent much of any time with me on it.  Part of it comes from my landscape architecture school days -- one of the very few things there which I apply to my everyday work now.  But a lot of it comes from working on High Pointe, walking a relatively open site every day for two years with a good topo map, by which time I understood what every wiggly line meant.

Likewise, I only spent a little time with Gil working on routings together -- he picked up a lot of it on his own.  And for whatever reason, none of the guys in my office see the same things I see on a topo map, although some of them do contribute ideas I wouldn't have had.

Jim Kennedy:  First and foremost I'm looking for really good golf holes.  I'll go for the "better holes" over the "better rhythm" in making my final choices, unless the sequence is really odd ... and if I'm willing to put four par-3's on the back nine at Pacific Dunes, you know I have a high tolerance for "odd."  On the other hand, we only agreed to lay out Pacific Dunes that way because everyone agreed it flowed so well out to the ocean and then away and then back.  But variety is also important ... I certainly wouldn't build the same shot twice in one round.

[George Pazin]

It would seem to me that reading topos would be more important in wooded areas or areas with a lot of native vegetation.

I remember seeing a short show on The Golf Channel called Birth of a Course (30 minutes on the construction of a Nicklaus course & a Palmer course - boy, you can really get a lot of detail in a 30 minute show we encompasses start to finish on 2 golf courses ). Anyway, I remember seeing Ed Seay slashing his way through swampland down in Louisiana or Mississippi, thinking, how the heck could anyone find a golf hole in all that crap? I would think you'd almost need topos in an instance like this.

Wasn't TPC Sawgrass built in a swamp area? Did Pete Dye use topos at all?

[Jim_Kennedy]

Tom Doak,
Thanks.

[Jeff_Brauer]

I actually diagree with Forrest, and according to his book, Forrest disagrees with Forrest! He has a section called the "Rules of Routing".  This may be semantics, but there are rules, whether we admit it or not.  It's just that, unlike the "Golden Rule" which should never be broken, there are few real consequences, and occaisionally some real benefits.

I have only one set rule for routing - If a routing works well on first try; it probably has  17 or 19 holes.  

Its hard to talk about routing, because it seems intuitive, but its not!  Its a process, and the process itself is not site specific, or only rarely so.  It goes in three phases/steps:

·      Analysis.
·      Concept Routings
·      Refinement - plan and field

Analysis.

I carefully study of site features, including Parcel Shape and Dimensions, soils, drainage, geology trees, views, surrounding land uses, and utility easements, etc.  This is the equivalent of "Don't shoot first, and ask questions later" and Forrest covers the basics well in his book.

Concept Routings

I walk the property, route a few schemes on topo maps and, then walk the property and route some more, making sure I cover every possibility. Nothing helps a routing like seeing the property again, with ideas in hand, unless its taking a break for a week and looking at it with fresh eyes.

In the concept phase it is important to do many quickly, and not “fall in love” with any scheme, or any particular hole too early.  Often, others suffer.  It also helps to break up this initial brainstorming with a weekend, or another project.  It is surprising how often a few days break will change your perspective, as in “ Why did I work so hard to get that hole?”

I usually start by locating a few potential places for the clubhouse.  If we can’t find a suitable way to get started, we usually need to find a better clubhouse location.  Usually, one or two sites fit our criteria, and quick test routings see which one has the most overall potential to fit returning nines (in most cases!  All but two  of my courses – Cowboys and Wild Wing Avocet – have them.

We often find permiter and "nook and cranny" holes next, and then fill in the interior.

Usually, a few patterns showing generally the best way to fit in holes emerges.  Another site walk often reveals the validity of the initial proposal.  We always see things we did not see the first time around the site, and make many, many trips around before settling on one.  The routing process resembles putting together a jigsaw puzzle, constantly testing options.

Refinement

I can only think about a few things at a time, so routing must be concerned first with fitting in desired facilities, and then finding natural golf holes.  Later, after some good general patterns emerge, we  think about which one provides good shot values and variety, playability, low construction costs, and lowest future operational costs, to name a few.

After changing them on the drawing board, and settling on one, we do so again many times in the field to save specimen trees, provide better vistas, or for other field conditions to improve it from the paper version.  And, we do this all through construction!

[Tim Weiman]

Jeff:

Thanks for jumping in. I'm interested in your comment that routing is not "site specific". Do you really mean that the process of routing is applied to every site, but the final choices you make ARE site specific? In other words, there are some "rules" but the site itself determines how closely they are followed?

[Forrest Richardson]

I enjoy disagreeing with myself. That way I'm always right.

Jeff accurately points out that in my book I list rules -- in fact, I devote an entire chapter's worth and admit many are worthless. But the most important rule of all, and in fact the climax of the rules chapter, is as follows: "REMEMBER: RULES ARE MEANT TO BE BROKEN!"

I like Jeff's three step approach, especially the "concept" phase.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Back from hockey!  You NY folks will be glad to know you outplayed my Stars, but we managed a tie.

Tim,

You're right - I don't consider the process specific, but I do consider the results specific.

[Neal_Meagher]

Mr. Forrest,

Aside from $37.00 lattes and holes in your head, I've a further series of questions for you.  I've always been intrigued by the relative differences in routing on land fit only for a camel with a bad sense of direction (an-ex-Mississippian's explanation of "Flat") , and the laying out of holes on "real" property.  "apologies to JakaB for the egregious use of "  ".

You mention a recent course on miles of just flat terrain where you worked off of other more distant and dreamy motivations.  I, too, have had the real "pleasure" of working on such sites in places such as Bakersfield, which isn't the end of the world but you certainly can see it from there.  With an added component of housing, one can literally create a routing to flow with whatever ideals one wishes to flow with.  But...........

it is also somewhat difficult in that no natural features present themselves to work against or with.  What of, for instance, utility lines.  At least they provide a framework that one must respect in some regard.  

I guess what I am hypothesizing, and I've yet to read your book, but it is fascinating to delve into all types of sites and the relative pros and cons they present.  Yet, I would imagine that anyone if given the chance would much rather be presented with a site with something, anything, to react against or with instead of miles of nothingness.  Yes, in many respects a wild range of ideas can be fleshed out, but in what framework?  

Comprende monsieur?  By the way, I think your book should be sold at a steep discount to anyone who knows that your wife's name starts with a "V".  Damn it, there I go with those " ".

[Patrick_Mucci]

Why don't we start a routing exercise.

Take a 12' by 12' piece of paper, let north be the top, south the bottom, east the right and west the left sides of the paper.  Create a clubhouse site, range and 18 hole golf course.

Assume the land is perfectly flat, no prevailing wind, no features (water, etc., etc..) and lets see how creative this bunch of armchair architects can be.

Scan your creation and send it to someone who knows how to get it onto this thread.

Good or bad idea ?

[redanman]

An interesting point about routing vs. discussing a particular hole, its strategy and its use of a particular part of the land is a far cry from devising a routing.  It is several orders of magnitude difference.  

Sort of like a beginning chess player with a few months experience (GCA devotees)vs a Grand Master (name an architect) or even Deep Blue (Name another architect! ).  Think of the needs of a flat parcel vs. that of a set of nine hole development "links" and their bookends of needs as to "Routing".

It is a rare thing that those here that I know and play with and have played with discuss more than a few aspects of  routing.  (Although I can think of one of those rare episodes this summer!) Most routing are fairly thoughtful on good pieces of land, but not always, but usually are so far out of the amateurs realm that it is like a chaos or even game theory for someone with only arithmetic skills to even ponder.

Routing is I would think, beyond most here.  Even on a perfectly flat square piece of ground-which may not be the simplest.  I think the housing routing leaves the most leeway if you have enough bulldozers!  But I could be wrong.  This is a great subject to sit back, shut up and learn.  Thanks Tom, Jeff, Forrest, et. al..

What a difference between a Plainfield or Lehigh piece of ground (Two I  have really thought about) vs. a flat plat and vs. a FL or Palm Desert housing routing!  I can add that being a member of Lehigh has taught me how hard it is to route or even to consider to route.

[Forrest Richardson]

Neal: Great hearing from you across the room. I was getting some of those shrimp things when I heard your voice pop up. I failed to mention the power lines -- had lots of them on another site, but we moved 1.6 million cubic yards to help take the golfer's eye off them. In that routing, which did go through a housing development (Or was it the other way around, did the housing go through the golf course?) we had fun with the holes by puling all sorts of topo tricks with our pile of sand. Holes that move left, but slant slightly right. Short playing holes followed by the converse. Also, sand does not come into play until the 5th and, in fact, there are a whole of 21 bunkers on the entire 18. We tried to do the opposite of what might be expected on former cotton field through housing. It's very links-ish, although I hesitate to use that term in this party. Whitten recently reviewed the course (Coldwater) I speak of at golfdigest.com. Not great photos, but a pleasant review for a low budget course in a former cotton field. I believe there are still some photos on my website, too.

Jeff: Who let you out to go to a hockey game? We really must get a handle on your keepers.

Patrick: That's a really swell idea. Perhaps the challengers might assume a 3,000-foot by 3,000-foot parcel, which at 1-inch = 300-feet scale would be just over 200-acres -- the actual useable area will be 10-inches by 10-inches. This is your call, but I thought I'd suggest it.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Forrest,

Sounds reasonable to me.