[Sean_A]

On a recent thread it was my impression that width was being treated rather one-dimensionally.  That is, width helps to create more strategic play in the right conditions.  I can buy this with one condition.  Width can make it harder for good players to score really well if the course is keen and well designed.  However, width also makes it harder to rack up a high score.  My question, do folks think width is important just for finding balls quickly?  In other words, regardless of the strategic implications, does width help to eliminate annoying aspects of the game like looking for balls?  This has always been an important criteria for me, but I get the impression that many don't really consider the relative difficulty of losing a balls as a positive design trait.  One of the few examples that gets mentioned on a championship level is Pinehurst and even that course has been narrowed in recent years.  Though to be fair the only complaints I have heard about this have been in the reduction of strategy rather than hunting of balls.  It seems the older I get, the less tolerant I am of ball searching.  Do folks think it is worth archies sacrificing some strategic merits to keep ball hunting down?     

Ciao

[Dan Herrmann]

Sean,
My course has quite wide fairways, but they sure don't make it harder to rack up a high score.  You put yourself in a bad spot in the fairway and you could end up with a 120 yard "short sided" play.

[Mark_Rowlinson]

Sean,

In my case lost balls are a result of rank bad shots. They end up where nobody is supposed to hit the ball and no architect could be expected to design for my frailties. I don't mind fairways being narrow as long as I can find my ball twenty yards off the short grass, but how do you narrow a fairway other than by using trees, long grass, gorse, heather, water, rocks....?

[Sean_A]

Sean,
My course has quite wide fairways, but they sure don't make it harder to rack up a high score.  You put yourself in a bad spot in the fairway and you could end up with a 120 yard "short sided" play.

Dan

What I mean by easier to rack up a high score is finding the ball is almost always better than not finding it.  In truth, I would nearly always rather have the short sided shot rather than look for a ball, then hack it out.  At least with the wide fairway I have thew choice not to play the dangerous shot.  Isn't that what designing for strategy is, giving even the wayward hitter a choice?  

Mark

I am not really talking about shots 50 yards off line (assuming the middle is the line and fairways are 40 yards wide with 20 yards of grace, this 50 yard off line shot is really 20 yards wide of what is reasonable) though sometimes a course should accommodate even that sort of shot.  I am more on about the 14 yard wide shots of either side of the fairway which we all see loads of everytime we step onto a course.  Anytime a fairway is narrowed the chances of losing a ball are increased. 

But my question is more about the sacrificing of some strategy to accommodate what many people would say are wild shots - say 35 yards of the centre of the fairway.

Ciao

[Mark Pearce]

One of the things that is making me seriously consider leaving The Northumberland and joining somewhere else is the way the course is being set up.  There is one particular idiot on the Green Committee who fancies himself as something of an expert and believes golf should be not just difficult but painful.  As a result we are "treated" to increasingly narrow fairways (on what should be a strategic test AND deeper, impenetrable rough.  Merely missing the fairway at all is reason to put a provisional in play and in my last round there (a match where I beat a 3 handicap who played to his handicap, so I was playing well) I lost 5 balls.  Not fun.  At all.

My view is that width is important both for allowing startegy to be a factor and for playability and I wouldn't want to say which was more important.

[Scott Warren]

Sean, I agree completely. And I think you're 100% right. If a good golfer can be made to work for his score while a hacker is punished for a bad shot without losing his ball, that's as close to perfect as I can dream of.

That sort of design also rewards great recovery shots, which are often the most memorable and exciting for players and spectators alike, IMO.

It's the reason I enjoy Deal - the acute, score-wrecking punishment on most holes (unless in an example like Mark's where you hit it 50m sideways) is felt within 100m of the pin, rather than through the course stealing your ball when it toddles 5m off the cut stuff.

Having measured the width of the zone where you'd find your ball on the holes at Deal using Google Maps, all bar the 7th on the front nine are 60-65m wide in the broader driving area (210-240m) and on the back nine it's between 40m and 55m as a general rule. On the front nine, the likes of the 2nd, 3rd and 5th have even more friendly land to the right thanks to dog walkers keeping it downtrodden.

Prince's and St Enodoc both felt much narrower than that, and now having measured the hole widths, St Enodoc was consistently 40-45m from lost ball left to lost ball right, while Princes measured about 50m-wide on almost every two- or three-shotter

[Brent Hutto]

I think as a game to be played for ones enjoyment, substantial fairway width is a good thing for the reasons Sean has outlined even if it had no "strategic" significance. The year I watched the Amateur being played at Sandwich there was a bit of a breeze each day and with the long fescue everywhere the R&A couldn't possibly have enough marshals to locate each ball's landing position and the result was constant playing of provisionals, lost balls and time spent tramping about in the weeds. Admittedly that was no a fun outing but rather serious high-level competition but even at that the effect of the rough was excruciating.

I think for variety of strategic challenge and a modest reduction in maintenance expense it is possible to combine reasonably wide fairways with ample margins of low-cut semi-rough. Anything below an inch-plus of rough makes finding balls almost as reliably simple as a low fairway cut while stopping a rolling ball from ending up miles offline. So the architect or person doing a course setup can put firm and tight fairways to allow balls to roll well off-line where that is desirable (strategy-wise) and put short rough cuts in places where a ball rolling another 20-30 yards would not fit the design intent or add a desirable challenge. And surely keeping grass heights between half an inch and an inch and a quarter requires less labor and expense than keeping it at fairway height.

[Tags:]

Tags:

[Tags:]

Tags:

Call to undefined function theme_linktree()