[Sean_A]

It is my impression that far too much keyboard time on this site is used for the advocation of making courses more difficult rather than promoting challenge.  For sure, the two concepts are strongly linked, but I believe the game should be heading more toward the direction of providing challenge.  Is this not the reason most enjoyed watching Tiger take Hoylake apart this past summer?  Is this not the reason so many lament the many recent changes to Augusta?  The crux of the matter to me seems to be the club is making the course more difficult at the expense of challenge.  

Golf on tv and for the masses is maent to be entertaining first and foremost.  The focus should be on what do the pros, tours and folks building/maintaining courses need to do in order to make the game entertaining to watch and play.  Difficulty is one piece of the puzzle, but the concept seems to take on massive proportions when top level golf is discussed.  I dare say this is the same mentality which encourages classic courses to be "modernized" and allows raters/pundits to kick aside courses on the grounds that they are too short or "unsophisticated" - unless of course they get a free pass because they are historic.  

It seems to be a nasty cycle which needs more considered decision making.  There is still a preponderance of 7000+ courses built in the name of challenge when we all know that what these developers really mean is difficulty.  Very few golfers have any business stepping back to 6700 yard tees and the vast majority have all they can handle on a 6200 yarder!  Despite current dogma, length is an issue that has been around for 100 years and it has never been an adequate way to make courses tougher.  The best can smash-mouth their way around the very longest of courses with little difficulty.  So wise men such as the USGA and the Masters boys turn to rough as the answer, but at what price for challenge?

In an effort to challenge all golfers architects build 5 sets of tees and try to calculate the placement of hazards based on "average" stats for handicap ranges.  This is becoming increasing difficult.  Or, archies cover the lansdscape in a sea of sand and/or water with very mixed results.  Would it not be best to go back to bread and butter golf by focusing on challenge and de-emphasizing the difficulty aspect?  I was most impressed with how the R&A reacted to Tiger going very low at Hoylake.  They seem to understand that challenge and not difficulty is what the game needs today.

Ciao

[TEPaul]

Sean:

Interesting thread but I'm not too sure what the distinctions are, even in your mind, between challenge and difficutly on any particular golf course.

You mentioned Tiger Woods and his performance at Hoylake.

I don't know enough about Hoylake to wax on about what distinctions there may be on that course (particularly during the British Open) between challenge and difficulty but I did watch every round of Tiger's victory there and I think it was pretty obvious what he was doing and doing differently than just about all the rest of his competitors.

It looked to me like he simply stuck to a "whole tournament" game plan or course management plan of simply not accepting any risk off the tee by going with an iron everywhere, and no one else in the field did that or even thought of it for some reason.

Why did he do that off the tee?

Obviously, he wanted to hit a ton of fairways and keep his tee shots out of dangerous rough or whatever or bunkers farther down the fairway (you may know Hoylake so you tell me why you think he hit only irons on all the par 4s and par 5s).

Woods obviously felt comfortable enough in the quality of his mid irons to match them against shorter irons into greens by the rest of the competitors who hit fairways off the tees with drivers etc, not to mention that the missed fairways of the rest of the competitors using drivers would even out the rest of the holes with him, or cast them into his overall favor.

Could any of the rest of the British Open competitors have competed with him better if they used his "whole tournament" game plan of just irons off the tees?

That's a good question and we'll never know because no one else even thought of it, other than Tiger.

And that fact alone may be most of the reason his victory at Hoylake was so remarkable.

But I'm not too sure what that says about the distinction between "challenge" and "difficulty" at Hoylake, or any other golf course, other than the fact that apparently at Hoylake Woods felt he couldn't bomb his driver with impunity as he seems to feel on other golf courses.

But why that was different at Hoylake, I can't say.

Maybe we need a close analysis of Hoylake in the British Open compared to other courses to see what it is about Hoylakes challenges and difficulty that's distinct or different from other golf courses.

[Tom_Doak]

Tom:

I hadn't thought about it until now but perhaps Tiger got his idea about how to attack the course partly from looking back at recent winners.  Guys like Justin Leonard and Todd Hamilton haven't won by employing the "bomb and gouge" approach; maybe that made Tiger ask himself why?

[RT]

TomPaul,

One of the things I understood from very close and reliable sources was that Tiger and Steve Williams (his caddy) carefully surveyed each and every green for differences in water content, specifiying areas on each green as to its ball holding capacity with a shot coming in, to help determine how he would play the hole, based on the day's pin position.

[TEPaul]

TomD:

After Woods unveiled that unique and highly successful "whole tournament" strategy (unique in that no one else tried it) at Hoylake, it took me about five minutes to begin to wonder what he will do at Oakmont in the US Open.

I feel if Oakmont is firm and fast for the US Open (by that I mean the ball would be capable of running 50+ yards on fairways) we will see that Hoylake "whole tournament" strategy again from Woods or a very good imitation of it. And to me that will be very remarkable and impressive as some of the long holes at Oakmont will be really long for the Open.

But if it rains and the course isn't firm I think he will adjust and go for much more carry distance in his over-all strategy.

[TEPaul]

RT:

It certainly wouldn't surprise me. I've never heard anyone accuse Woods/Williams of not completely doing their "homework", particularly on a major course.

Frankly, some day I would love to know what kind of "homework" Woods did himself when he went about switching from Fluff to Williams some years ago. Woods and Williams seem to be some remarkable combo.

[Brent Hutto]

What Tiger seemed to demonstrate at Hoylake was that the course presented a challenge that could be overcome by a combination of certain specific skills (most importantly hitting amazingly accurate long iron shots) and a very crafty plan of attack (Tom's "whole tournament" strategy). I don't think the Open at Hoylake presented the highest degree of difficulty of any recent Open but it certainly presented a challenge in the sense of providing an opportunity for one great player to produce results that nobody else in the field could duplicate.

There are some pretty obvious ways to introduce difficulty into a course's setup and design. Length is the most obvious since by any meaningful measure playing a course at 7,500 yards is more difficult than playing the same course at 6,500 yards. Penal features also increase difficulty whether they are hazards (OB and water), thick trees near the line of play or simply horrific long rough bordering super-narrow fairways. Then there's the use of contour, firmness and speed at the green to increase approach-shot and putting difficulty without being penal per se.

The stereotypical USGA championship setup would be to take the course that members play every day and increase difficulty by adding a thousand yards (if possible), growing the rough to make it penal, narrowing the fairways as much as practical (or more) and speeding up the greens until they are borderline pinnable. The R&A used a similar approach at windy Carnoustie a few years back to no good effect. Making an otherwise solid championship-caliber course more difficult is no great accomplishment if you have the budget for a few months of intensive course preparation in the "USGA style".

I think Sean's concept of challenge has an element of novelty or inventiveness that is beyond and separate from these kinds of difficulty that are trivial to apply. And unlike simple difficulty which works pretty much the same for anyone from the bogey golfer to the Tour professional, providing challenge requires different approaches for weaker and stronger players. For instance, offering the option of laying back off the tee and hitting approach shots from 180-200 yards to firm greens in the wind is a cool alternative for Tiger Woods but for a 60-year-old club golfer with a 15 handicap that option doesn't exist and so the "challenge" would devolve into mere difficulty (and BTW there may be other elements of challenge at Hoylake that are valid for the 15-capper, I simply mean that offering the "Tiger Strategy" doesn't translate downward).

[TEPaul]

Brent:

That's a very fine and thoughtful post.

"For instance, offering the option of laying back off the tee and hitting approach shots from 180-200 yards to firm greens in the wind is a cool alternative for Tiger Woods but for a 60-year-old club golfer with a 15 handicap that option doesn't exist and so the "challenge" would devolve into mere difficulty (and BTW there may be other elements of challenge at Hoylake that are valid for the 15-capper, I simply mean that offering the "Tiger Strategy" doesn't translate downward)."

On this remark, however, I think you're right (the Tiger strategy doesn't translate downward) and we all need to remember that it is not necessrily a good idea when estimating and discussing "strategies"  of a Tiger Woods laying back 200 yards on some hole and comparing that to what a 15 handicapper can do to achieve the same goal or target in two shots.

The 15 handicapper ought to realize that it is probably best, if not the only possible thing to do, to look for the best way (strategy) to play to the green safely in three shots, not two. In that vein the 15 handicapper should strategically apply Tommy Armour's remark to always try to hit a shot that makes the next shot easiest.

In effect, this is nothing more than the old fashioned "Tortoise and Hare" analogy that for some reason modern golfers have somewhat forgotten about.

[Brent Hutto]

Tom P,

It works the other way, too. If you have a hole that's designed to offer a challenge to that middle-aged 80's shooter it may well be impossible to translate that upward to the stronger, very good player.

There's a hole at my club that plays very differently for most of us depending on whether the pin is to the right (behind a bunker, falling away to the right and back of the green) or to the left (runup shot, slight backstop behind the hole). The strategy of the hole is enforced by a bunker on the left side of the fairway about 175 yards from the green (anywhere from 170 to 220 yards off the various tee choices). I think the hole is a challenge when it's on the right, although pretty simple when on the left.

The problem is to offer such a challenge for bombers or even for very accurate ballstrikers with decent power. The position of that fairway bunker is fixed and its location has different implications for different players. For me, if I could get past the bunker I could go at a right pin with impunity but from behind it no way. The sweet spot is the narrow part of the fairway even with the bunker and to its right. But for someone who can approach with a wedge by carrying the bunker off the tee or a 7-iron by playing short of it there's no need to even consider that narrow-fairway option that brings the bunker into play.

So my contention is that difficulty for various levels of golfer skill can be provided in most cases with multiple tees and so forth but challenge often requires different design thinking from scratch. Just adding or subtracting length or tucking/untucking pins won't always serve to translate the element of challenge.

[W.H. Cosgrove]

Length has always bothered me as a solution to difficulty or 'resistance' to scoring.  Length simply eliminates power.  While the game of golf is based on disimilar players competing over eighteen holes based on a variety of skills.  Power isn't a skill it is a god given talent.  

A good example is John Daly, ignoring his present malaise, at his best he not only was long but his touch and skill shots were fantastic.  No wonder, when you hit it that far you must find some awful lies!

I like the egalitarian nature of the game.  Where disimilar players can compete ver 18 holes.  Tiger vs Corey, David Vs Goliath.  Overall length simply does not serve that purpose.

[TEPaul]

Sean:

I see what you mean. Your analysis of the hole on post #13 of that other thread about various differences between challenge and difficulty is very good----really good.

There is a sometimes saying that if a hole and its strategy is able to revolve around a single basic feature or perhaps a few the best thing to do is to just start removing things that either detract from the overall strategic concept or don't enhance it. I'm talking about a conceptual workup on a golf hole to be built of course. The best idea is to distill it down to that point where the strategic concept is completely intact and functioning well in play with no useless or nonfunctional add-ons.

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Arbs,
I agree with a lot of what you are saying. Way too much time on making things look pretty when not enough time spent on making it fun and challenging.

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