Willie Dow: Kye has worked in both Montana and Scotland this summer, but I don't think he's dug a single bunker in either place. He's a man of many talents, and so are the rest of the crew.
Patrick: Visibility has always been important in American golf architecture, but I didn't just learn that. When you are trying to lay out holes without moving earth it quickly becomes apparent that there are often little things which prevent you from seeing something you thought you would see, and you have to decide how you want to deal with them.
Since I'm sure they won't publish my whole long article, here are the excerpts about visibility decisions, just so you know where I'm coming from. It isn't always about making things more visible, as Jack's associates seem compelled to do; sometimes we decide to hide something deliberately, too. But you can't just not decide, you are always paying attention to what you can see or not see and deciding if that's okay. From my text:
6. While on this side of the stream, we also glance at the site for the second tees which have yet to be built. This tee shot plays up and over a ridge with bunkers cut into the left side … you can’t see the green from the tee but you might see the flag on the green. It’s hard to tell right now with a pile of rocks in the way, so we’ll wait to decide on the elevation of the tee until we clean up those rocks.
10. (Ninth hole) Kye asks about the shapes of the left-hand fairway bunkers (note to Willie: these two were shaped by Brian Schneider) and do we see enough of them from the tee? These are gathering bunkers as a lot of the landing area tilts over in that direction, so we want them to sneak up on players a bit. There is also a distant scar in that direction where some work was done for the irrigation pond, and big flashy bunkers would draw people’s attention that way. We all agree the bunkers are fine as they are.
11. (Ninth hole) We have done some work to lower the crown of the fairway landing area to make it easier for short hitters to see the green on their second shots, but we haven’t gone far enough yet … we’ll have to lower a small portion of the fairway another two feet or so.
12. (Ninth hole) The visibility of the green from past the trouble spot is better than expected now that we’ve ripped out a small line of rocks which was in the way. No more earthwork needed there.
17. (10th hole) We are burying gigantic boulders collected from other fairways at the bottom of this hill so that a second shot short of the green won’t face quite such an uphill third shot. It looks like we will raise the fairway five or six feet when finished over a pretty broad area. I remind Eric to make sure we don’t trap any drainage at the base of the hill.
18. (10th hole) The approach back up to the green had a big knobby contour right in the way so it blinded any approach shot from below; this has been removed since my last visit, but the work wasn’t tapered back far enough, so the fairway leading to the green is really narrow and lots of players will likely fade their shots over the edge of the bluff on the right of the green. I say we need to cut the approach back a lot on the left to make it wider and more inviting; Kye smiles because Eric has already anticipated this.
21. (11th hole) There is a small hump about 6-8 feet high just before the start of the fairway which will make it really hard for forward-tee players to see where they are going. Again, we’ll wait until the rest of the fairway is graded before we decide whether to remove the hump. [In the end, we moved the tee on this one, and left the hump alone.]
38. I ask Eric to stop in the fifth fairway so I can see how the green looks from the left side. This is one of my favorite holes so far, a short par-4. If you play safely away from a nest of bunkers in the shoulder of a hill on the right, there’s plenty of fairway, but then you have to play over native grass and bunkers to a green that’s just barely visible from the left. The greens mix is now in and I’m pleased with what you can’t see from that side.