Back tees blind to the fairway

[Doug Siebert]

One somewhat odd feature I find on older courses that have been lengthened is that often the back tees are set back in such a way that on a downhill tee shot the fairway is not visible from the tee, you just see the nearer tee boxes.

My home course has several tees like this, and even though I've played the course many times and there's no real blindness there for me, I still find that when I have occasion to play the next set up I feel much more comfortable on the tee and have greater success hitting the fairway.

Might this not be an underrated source of additional difficulty on these older courses, versus newer courses that had the tips designed in from the beginning -- typically sitting on a higher plateau and more often than not offering the best fairway view of all?

[JohnV]

I was reading Brad Klein's review of the new Pete Dye course in Florida (Southern Hills) and he said that Pete likes to build the back tees lower than the next ones up "on the presumption that strong golfers need to have less comfort, not more."

[Doug Siebert]

Interesting to see that it is deliberately being done by at least some architects.  Old Head did this in places, though in that case I don't believe it was done to make tee shots more blind from the tips but rather where possible to allow the best views from the middle of the five sets of tees, especially for the holes with tee boxes on a cliff edge.  That's one good way to keep less accompished golfers off the tips -- I doubt there would be as many people wishing to play the tips at Turnberry if it weren't for the fact that those tee shots are so much more dramatic than from the regular tees!

I suppose on a really windy site such as coastal Ireland the more typical "tee shot from up on high" (which Old Head certainly has some of as well) is more difficult than a more blind shot that is less exposed to the wind compared to most places in the US where winds rarely exceed 30-40 mph during play.

Any comments from the resident architects on GCA?  Do you think about this when determining tee positions or does worry about owner and/or rater bias against blindness in newer designs discourage this in favor of other strategies for making the player from the tips less comfortable, such as placing them at a bad angle in relation to the fairway or desired line?

[TEPaul]

Doug:

That is very bad--very bad. Very, VERY bad form.

An architectural "no-no", in fact. Any architect or person responsible for that type of thing is an idiotic troglydyte like Tom MacWood and should be shunned from intelligent and polite society and sent to bed without supper for a full two years.

The only possible excuse for that kind of very VERY BAD architectural form and mistake is if you happen to be about 6'6" tall as Gil Hanse is and simply forgot to get down on your hands and knees which is the height most of us see things from.

Looking directly at the end of a tee box in front of you is not quite as bad as kneeling down and looking squarely at the enormous ass of a 427 lbs women in front of you in the order line of a Macdonald's hamburger joint, but it's close.

[Mike_Cirba]

Looking directly at the end of a tee box in front of you is not quite as bad as kneeling down and looking squarely at the enormous ass of a 427 lbs women in front of you in the order line of a Macdonald's hamburger joint, but it's close.

Tom,

Have you been hangin' out with Huge "Puffy" Wilson in the 'Hood again?