Varying Green Speed: NOT FROM GREEN TO GREEN!!

[Craig Sweet]

AFC...first of all, you have to have the budget in order to do certain things to your greens....for a pro tourney they would not be a problem. For a muni like mine, we have limited resources and have one shot at getting our greens at the level of condition we want for the Montana Open....

Like I said, we start getting them ready a good 30 days in advance. The fert program they are on is timed to peak fertility right before the tournament so we are on the downside...this allows us to increase greens speed from our everyday 9.5/10 up to 11.5 or better for the tournament.  The tournament begins on Friday and we begin double mowing on Wednesday. We roll Wed. and Thursday...if it remains dry and the wind blows, our greens start the day around 11 for the tourney but probably become faster as the day goes on.

I am not an agronomist but I do not believe you can have green speeds at 8 shooting up to 12 over 4 days without doing serious damage to your greens. I believe you have to shoot for a much narrower range...such as 10.5-11.5 or 8-9...whatever....and manage your turf for that range of speed.

[Adam_F_Collins]

Why don't we see more use of [size=4x]varying green speeds in defense of par[/size]?

Why do clubs spend so many millions narrowing, reshaping and lengthening, when they could create so much challenge through [size=4x]more variation of green speed ?[/size]

Weekend hacks have to deal with [size=4x]green speed variation from one day/course to the next, and sometimes it varies a LOT.[/size]

Why can't this be more of the case with the pros?

Why not throw an 8 on the stimp once in a while?

Is this some kind of taboo? Why is this not a viable option?



Here's what you wrote.
I read it correctly.
Perhaps you forgot what you wrote.[/color]

Excellent. So you read the first post. I got that much.

"Who decides on the pace of EACH GREEN ?"

"Will you have dedicated machines for EACH GREEN ?"
At what cost"

And:

"Because you can't go from 10 to 8 to 12 to 9 over four days."

These are the words you wrote, and they refer to varying speeds from green to green within one course, and to varying speed from fast to slow to fast to slow over four days. I've done my best to repeat (in subsequent posts) that I'm not asking about either of those possibilities. So keep reading, or quit writing.

[Adam_F_Collins]

So agronomically it's probably possible to vary speed during a four day tournament by 3 feet or so but I just don't think doing something like that would be endorsed by anyone. What's the point of doing that? Is it to make it more difficult by attempting to confuse players more? Supers and set-up people could also do that be attempting to make greens more bumpy, or maybe culivate grain back in them to make them more complex to read and putt.

There's probably a number of things that could be done to make putting and chipping harder but I doubt any of that would be acceptable to golfers.

Maybe I'm wrong, and only I feel that way. If somebody ran a tournament like that I'd view it as a dumb gimmick, and I'd wonder what their purpose was.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I ask such hypothetical questions for the purpose of turning over the idea in theory and trying to deduce if there are any possibilities which might be useful to the game. Despite the fact that it may seem to be a bad idea, you and others are doing your best to humor me, and I appreciate that.

To continue:

My point is this: Altering golf courses to the point of taking away options, lines of play, etc., altering green conditions to the point where it's nearly impossible to keep a ball on them, growing rough so high that you have to punch out of it, ridiculous lengths– From what we've seen, these ARE acceptable. Some of these things cost a lot of money, and some conditions nearly kill the greens for the sake of one tournament.

So why is more variation of green speed so unthinkable? It would amount to a condition (and that condition does not have to be "STUPID" slow, or fast) but another earthly, agronomic variation which all players would have to adjust to. It's what we hackers do all the time. If I go play the muni in Centerville right now, the greens are going to be far different in speed/holding/grain etc. than my own club.

My question revolves around the idea that I don't think pro-level tournament play varies nearly as much. And couldn't more variation be exploited in a way that wasn't "STUPID", but just far more challenging? We often lament the idea that the pros are not playing the same game that we are, and I'm suggesting that this might be one way which serves both to increase challenge at the professional level, as well as to bring their game closer to ours.