Is it about resistance to scoring, or just the members' egos?

[David_Tepper]

Ron Whitten's column in the new issue (April 7) of Golf World has some very interesting comments from Jim Awtrey, outgoing CEO of the PGA of America.

'Awtrey spoke of the resistance he encountered when he sought to take the PGA Championship to grand old courses such as Winged Foot, Baltusrol and Medinah, clubs that had hosted many a US Open but never a PGA. Members of those clubs, he quickly found out, were worried the the PGA of America would embarrass them.  

"They were afraid players would shoot 20 under," Awtrey said.'

I have long suspected that golfers are, as a group, fairly shallow. I never realized we are THAT shallow!

Is this binge of course lengthening going on an attempt to protect the game of golf or just the egos of the members at courses that host high profile tournaments?

 
       

[BCrosby]

This is one of the biggest issues in golf architecture. It has been since the Golden Age. How big is it? No other issue has spawned more bad golf designs. (Second place is awarded to Fazio's and Rees's thing with "framing", a topic that has already come up a couple of times at GCA. )

There seem to me to be three reasons why people care about low tournament winning scores.

The first is a juvenile (think boys at junior high recess) mentality that says you can't come in here and beat up my golf course. I have nothing interesting to say about that attitude. It's embarrassing; grown men shouldn't care about stuff like that.

World class players, when playing at the top of their games with the best modern technology, will (and probably should) overwhelm even the best courses. If they aren't beating up a course when playing well, I (along with Mack, Jones, Behr, Thomas and others) think there is probably something wrong with the design of the course.

The second reason given is the Joe Dey reason. Only really tough courses that yield winning scores at or around par identify the best players.

The Dey hypotheis has a certain surface appeal. The problem is that there is no evidence that it is true. The dominant players of an era dominant tournaments played on hard courses, middling courses and easy courses. There is no evidence I've ever seen to indicate that dominant players in an era dominate more often on hard courses than on easy courses. They dominate on both.

The third reason given is that people don't enjoy watching birdie fests. Well, I do. I suspect others do too. TV audience levels do not vary with the number of shots the winner is under par. People want to see great golfers playing great golf. More importantly, consider the alternative: a US Open type course where shots are dictated, where the greatest players are discouraged from taking the risks that display the full range of their talents and the biggest thrill is whether or not players can save par.

Great courses need to be interesting and challenging. But great players can and will dominate great courses. Courses where great players never go low, where par is a triumph, is a sign that something is terribly wrong architecturally.

Bob

[John Kavanaugh]

This is interesting because I have found as a member of one of the toughest courses in the country that you need to check your ego at the door to play the course on a regular basis.  I know people who can not handle shooting five or six strokes above their comfort zone...Those guys are the ones with a soft ego..

[Brent Hutto]

There are two reasons for that mentality. On the one hand, I think good players have always found that the most enjoyable and challenging courses are the ones that require somewhere around 66-70 strokes for the players who are really on their game. The occasional major championship round where anything under 74 is "a good score" and the field averages 78 or so feels more like an endurance test than a fun challenge. Setups where they shoot 68 and feel like they've lost ground are also not perceived as nearly as much fun. So if you want to offer an attractive course to the best players in the world, figuring out a way to have the leaders shoot high-60's and the middle of pack shoot low-70's is the optimum way to do it.

Then there's the simple conflation of difficulty with quality. That's just part of the golfer's mentality that seems programmed in from birth. A great many people can't take seriously a course than someone can play in 63 or 64 strokes more than once every decade or so. If we all examine our own hearts, most of us will find some remnent of that attitude lurking. And this crowd here is about as enlightened to the joys of quirk and match-play sportiness as any group you'll find.

Put those two things together and there's an undeniable incentive to keep big-time "serious" courses long enough and penal enough (there, I've said it) to make sure Tiger doesn't walk away after a 67 shaking his head in disappointment.

[BCrosby]

Brent says:

"A great many people can't take seriously a course than someone can play in 63 or 64 strokes more than once every decade or so. If we all examine our own hearts, most of us will find some remnent of that attitude lurking."

Agreed. It lurks in everyone's heart.

Which is why it's important to distinguish two very different scenarios.

The first is where everyone shoots low numbers. If substantially all the field is posting mid-60's scores, it'snot unreasonable to conclude that the dseign is not up to the task. Why? Because a whole field will not be playing at the top its game. The course is not challenging enough to filter out weaker players from stronger players.

The other scenario - the one I had in mind - is the one that obtained in '97 at the Masters and other Masters. There you had the dominant players winning with very low numbers, while the rest of the field posted relatively high numbers.

Great courses (properly set up) played by great players under common tournament conditions tend to result in a wide range of scores, both low and high. They spread the field. But part of that spreading is accepting that some players will go low. Maybe really, really low.

That's where you want things. You want a wide scoring spectrum; lots of birdies (even if posted by only a limited number of players) and lots of bogies. You don't want all scores bunched at 67 any more than you want all scores bunched around par. You don't want scores bunched at all.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what Fazio's and Hootie's changes aim to do at ANGC. They want to bunch scores around par. The USGA thing. That's the heart of the problem with their changes.

Bob

[tlavin]

I have long suspected that golfers are, as a group, fairly shallow. I never realized we are THAT shallow!
       

Oh, we're pretty shallow.  I'll speak from experience.  I was the Grounds Chairman at Olympia Fields during the 2003 US Open.  For a few weeks before we closed the course, we (per USGA instructions) let the rough grow as we continued to play the course.  We had a wet spring.  The rough was lush and nasty.  We started fantasizing about twisted clubfaces and bent hosels.  Over adult beverages, we speculated about over-par scores by the dozens.  We ruminated about the pros hitting three-woods into our 249 yard par-3.

Then the USGA cut the rough, the weather stayed soft and the championship opened up with two days of record low scoring.  And Johnny Miller and the print media beat us up like golf's version of a red headed stepchild.  I woke up on Saturday morning and the headline of the Chicago Tribune read, "Olympia Yields".  Yikes.

The course toughened up when the sun and wind appeared on Saturday afternoon, and only four players broke par, but the damage to our psyche was done.

I think most members of clubs where the pros might play want their courses to have back tees that will accomodate the PGA tour and their marvelous equipment that made our members tees irrelevant to their games.  We want to see the pros suffer, if possible, but mostly, we don't want to be embarassed by scads of low scores.  If a few guys go low, so be it, but we definitely don't want to see some guy named Moe go low all four days.

[JESII]

It's resistance to scoring to support the members egos.

Does anyone not care when their kid's team gets trounced by every team they play?

[David Lott]

This is all part of the lack of understanding that the first rate touring pros play a different game than the rest of us. You can have an outstanding golf course--a interesting challenge for top level amateurs--and the pros will tear it up. Whether the pros will go low just isn't a test of whether a golf course is a first rate challenge. For example, Scotland is full of outstanding courses that today's pros would rip to shreds.

[Jim Sweeney]

Don't call it the members' egos- instead call it pride. We all take pride in our home courses, even if they are, like mine, muni tracks.

I'm sure the egos of the members at the clubs mentioned get pretty beat up by their courses on a regular basis.

Most of those members probably have never played their courses from the tees they use in the championships, so how would they know what to expect from major championship quality players? Very few members, even the best players in the club, understand how good the tour players really are. If they think they do, then they may have an ego problem.

It also seems that most often changes made to these courses are made at the request of the organizations administering the championships, and are not initiated by the members. One exception would be Crooked Stick, which made its changes prior to Daly's PGA victory on its own; several of its new teeing grounds, however, were not used in the tournament.

[Andrew Thomson]

If you let them loose on the West Course of Royal Melbourne in calm conditions -20 wouldn't win it.