"Designing the future of the game"

[Joe Bausch]

That is the topic of an article by architect Cameron MacKellar that will likely resonate with many, if not most, of the participants here.  Here is the beginning of the article:

The industry continues to expand the playing field with more extravagant and elaborate “signature” designs, plaguing the industry and the health of the game around the globe.

International experience proves that, especially when combined with real estate and/or tourism, a golf course can offer an investment opportunity that generates significant premiums. This benefit, if designed considerately, also offers a much needed lifeline to the dwindling participation of our game.

However, the modern golf course design now extends well past 7,000 yards in length, to the detriment of new-player acquisitions and inevitably the budget-conscious superintendent charged with ensuring the facility is maintained at its optimum level.

Excessive technology-based precedents, such as heavy earthmoving, large-scale clearing and the promotion of unnatural aesthetically immaculate environments, serve to increase the bottom-line figures of golfing communities throughout emerging nations gripped by the emerging international industry. The problem is propagated with the fact these additional costs are relayed to the player who engages the facility.

Commonly, player architects tend to employ similar stylistic qualities on each famed course, often using aesthetic qualities and lengthening of golf holes to promote a “championship” design for real estate marketing teams to embellish. The trend continues with many courses in the U.S. as they adopt the “bigger is better” attitude when remodeling their classic designs.

You can read the rest of the article here:

http://www.golfcourseindustry.com/news/news.asp?ID=4765

[Rich Goodale]

Let's talk about 7000 yard courses.

The "average" player is an 18 handicap, and if he or she can't hit the green or near as dammit in one shot over "par" he or she really isn't as good as an 18. So.... an 18 ought to be able to shoot 90 on a reasonably good day.  Compared to a lower handicap player, rather than hitting driver and mid-iron you hit driver, 5-wood and some sort of wedge.  Then both of you putt.

What's the problem?

[TEPaul]

Richard the Immaculate Unobserver:

The PROBLEM seems to ultimately be excessive cost that is somewhat deleterious to the bottom line and the sustaining of these types of courses around the Globe! 

Another problem might be some of these project creators, their lenders and their marketing people need a refresher course in Economics 101 and a little old fundamental economic principle of it known as "supply and demand." Some of those people apparently felt they are so smart (probably mostly the lenders) they can somehow finese something like that. They can't and that old fundamental economic principle is showing them why they can't.

[Rich Goodale]

Tom, Tom the Piper's Son.....

If length were a good proxy for cost you would be on a winner, but it is not.

Recent fact-based threads show clearly that cost is discretionary rather than length based.  In golf economics, at least, size really does not matter.

Richard the Still Immaculate

[Kirk Gill]

It seems like additional length would mean additional land, which is costly. But I don't see how longer courses necessarily impact the beginning player, as long as they play from the proper tees.

What do you think is the prime motivator in the "promotion of unnatural aesthetically immaculate environments?" Is it golfer expectations due to watching golf on television? Keeping up with the Joneses?

[TEPaul]

"If length were a good proxy for cost you would be on a winner, but it is not."


And you're the guy who claims Max Behr was a confusing writer? What would be the best relationship between length and cost, a good condum?

[Rich Goodale]

"If length were a good proxy for cost you would be on a winner, but it is not."


And you're the guy who claims Max Behr was a confusing writer? What would be the best relationship between length and cost, a good condum?

What's a "condum," Tom?  A condominium without the "omini"?

PS--you are lucky that pigs can't fly.  Otherwise they would not be heritable property.

Ricardo

[RJ_Daley]

Thoughtful integration of design elements, interesting green complexes and reasonable length without the need to protect par is necessary to broaden the appeal of this great game and encourage players to return to the true nature of the sport. The reduction of convoluted feature design strategies are married directly to the successful decline of rising golf course costs in modern maintenance techniques.

Answers to questions about design, difficulty, challenge and playability will be difficult to find without understanding and reflecting upon the simple beauty of the game first … that playability and challenge aren’t linked to yardage, slope, ratings or par.
Golf was devised as a match play game, a game in which player enjoyment and social interaction was the pinnacle of a successful establishment. That simple truth will allow architects to generate fabulously satisfying and wonderfully strategic challenges for decades to come.

The rest of the article is well worth the reading time.  And, it sums up as above...

I am in agreement with everything Mr. MacKellar has written in his essay. 

I would take the future or forward looking guestimations and pontifications a step further and say that golf is reflecting the results of the same sort of 'irrational exhuberance' that all financial and economic sectors are displaying and must now go through.   That is painful contraction.  As Mr. MacKellar points out the hyper-marketted signature golf design with associated high life real estate projects integrally attached to these costly courses; all that must contract as a matter of rational market corrections.  Golf will contract and die IMHO in many sectors or strata where it has been overbuilt and overmarketted now.  Only the very well heeled and insulated ultra wealthy and paid up clubs, or meek or lean will survive to service whatever masses of golfers will stick with the game, if the world economic mess plays out for a lengthy time.  Many CCFAD and high end RE projects may be toast.  That is no different than what happened to golf in the depression era of 1930s.

I think a lot of designer/players who are involved with high ticket marketed course like Mr. MacKellar speaks will go away.  They may even go away if purses on their player side of the equations shrink, and for sure will go away from design if only the smartest and most clever, environmentally sensitive and minimalist real architects hang on by a thread, via perhaps the small market of remodelling work, and very few new works that may result in much harder financial times, should the economy sink lower. 

I honestly don't think most people in the golf industry really have a significant and future/forward looking vision, and are still dellusional about what may be coming.  The mega projects like Dubai stuff, or that Tiger design in Baja California-Mexico are the last contractions of what may be a dying industry overall for a long time to come.  And, these off-shore enclaves may be the last refuge of scoundrels fleeing what they wrought in our institutions with this goofy extravagant activity here as they bail out to safe harbors.  But, all the safe harbors and retreat enclaves won't keep many of the multitudes of archies employed.  Only the lucky, and cleaver will survive, IMHO. 

[Greg Chambers]

"What do you think is the prime motivator in the "promotion of unnatural aesthetically immaculate environments?" Is it golfer expectations due to watching golf on television?"

yes, without a doubt, and until the PGA and USGA can figure that out, our game and courses will suffer for it

[TEPaul]

"What's a "condum," Tom?  A condominium without the "omini"?


Ricardo:

It's a profig...prahphig...la...laaah, prophylag....ta, tah, tic, tic; oh never mind----a condum is a dumb rubber!

[Rob Rigg]

These massive earth moving projects should be dead for some time because of the economic environment.

They have been the status quo for many years, but they will go the way of the dinosaur because the environmental preservation aspects of design are not going away and the courses built between now and when the economy is truly rolling again will have embraced a more "minimalistic" design.

Since that will become the status quo, the big money wasting uglies will probably not come back and some of them will be plowed under.

More power to the pure/natural routers and traditionalists - that's tip top stuff.