Do larger greens allow for more architectural freedom and diversity ?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Not long ago I was having a discussion with a superintendent about greens, slopes, contours, false fronts, fall offs, etc., etc..

Not long after I began thinking about the 1st green at Yale and a discussion I had previously engaged in with George Bahto.
In that discussion George had indicated that the green was intended to be a combination of other greens.

So, my question is, do large greens provide the architect with a far broader canvas on which to craft greater diversity within the putting surface ?

Diversity which has a substantive influence on the approach shot, which in turn can influence the drive, while at the same time greatly influencing putting and recovery.

Understanding that large greens can have the "greens within green" feature, why wouldn't larger greens with a good deal of diversity be a prefered design feature ?

Didn't Donald Ross do this on occassion ?

Charles Blair Macdonald ?

Seth Raynor ?

Charles Banks ?

Tom Doak,

Did you craft large greens at Old Macdonald ?

[Jaeger Kovich]

Patrick - I think your questions about large greens, is really an issue of scale. You mention Yale #1. Is great! I love it! The whole course.... but what makes that green, and the rest of that course work, at least for me, is the scale of the place. ITS FREAKIN HUGE!!! and that is part of the CBM Raynor style. If you put postage stamp greens on a course with greenside bunkers that are over 20 ft deep, it wouldn't look right, and it wouldn't be as fun (to hard).

For most courses, I feel the ability to have a few very large greens is great. It provides the chance for more wildly contoured area, and a chance to do some different things. If you could have huge greens that match the scale of the rest of the course, I say go for it, especially since 1/2 the game is played with the flatstick, but remember bigger greens are also more expensive, and if all 18 are huge, then its going to lose some of the feeling... remember scale and diversity, they all cant be enormous.

[Adrian_Stiff]

I think Jaeger makes the main point, its was about the run costs in the older days, now we would think of the construction costs too. As for your question it is a clear YES, you can do far more with a larger canvas and the problem with greens within greens on smaller greens is simply an amount of pinnable areas that can lead to health problems for the turf.

Its good to have a variety of size in your 18 greens, but you never really want to go under 300 sq metres of pinnable area.

[Tom_Doak]

Tom Doak,

Did you craft large greens at Old Macdonald ?

Pat:

Old Macdonald has 6.2 acres of greens.  I'm told it is the largest total outside of St. Andrews.

We were not aiming for that distinction.  However, everyone on our design committee (apart from me) insisted that the course be BIG and BOLD, and one thing led to another.  My only real concern was whether making the greens so large would reward sloppy approach play, or over-emphasize lag putting.  The deciding factor was that on the fescue, it is common to putt from 20+ yards off the green anyway.  So in some cases we incorporated areas that we weren't originally thinking about as being part of the green to allow a hole location there, too. 

Some people have criticized us here for building greens which will cost so much to maintain.  [They cost nothing extra to build in the sand, so maintenance costs are the only issue.]  But, it would be easy to make them smaller in years to come if the added interest is not paying for itself, and the greens won't require any more water as green than they would as fairway.  And, who knows, they might add something to the design.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Adrian and Jaeger,

I classified the size of the greens as "large", Jaeger increased the size to "huge/enormous"

I'm not talking about "huge or enormous" greens, I'm talking about large greens

Tom Doak,

That's 15,004 square feet per green.  That's huge.

I was referencing greens of about 7,500-8,000 per green.

Do you know what the incremental additional maintainance cost is per sq/ft or per 1,000 sq/ft when you go from 8,000 to 15,000 ?

Out of curiosity, whom is criticizing your building rather expansive greens ?

How can the size of the greens be criticized without examining and relating them in comparison to the rest of the golf course ? 

[George_Bahto]

Jaeger K: You mention Yale #1. Is great! I love it! The whole course.... but what makes that green, and the rest of that course work, at least for me, is the scale of the place.

I think the scale at Old Macdonald is even more dramatic than at Yale - may be hard to believe before you see it


Also, Old Macdonald is wide open, not hemmed in by the woods at Yale.

[George_Bahto]

Tom D, said " However, everyone on our design committee (apart from me) insisted that the course be BIG and BOLD, and one thing led to another."


we "worked" him a bit ... he didn't fight too much except early on on the Short hole, that I know of

the transition areas in the greens are really dramatic

[Tom_Doak]

Tom Doak,

That's 15,004 square feet per green.  That's huge.

Pat:  Most courses could not afford such excess.  The critics have been those who are jealous they don't have such latitude to work in.

The greens are indeed huge, though there are a couple (#10 and #12) that I would still classify as "hard to hit".

[Jim_Kennedy]

Patrick,
You better be good at constructing greens if you're going to make them big. I was recently in SW Virginia and played a course called Wytheville CC which has smallish but devilish greens. It was built in the '30s by Fred Findlay and had nine added, seamlessly, by Raymond "Buddy" Loving Jr. some time later.

Just up the road a piece I played a relatively new course that had large greens, and I finished the trip by playing a round in a northern West Virginia state park that has a very new course built by the same 'family', and it too had large greens. These two places were OK, but there wasn't much imagination shown in the construction of the greens. The one feature I remember most was the creation of deflection mounds, mowed at green height, that flanked the entrance to the putting surfaces. That gets old quick. There was little challenge in reading the greens at either of these places. I had no three putts because there just wasn't anything hidden.

Conversely, at WCC I had a few three putts on greens that were half the size of the other two courses. It wasn't a course that would cause anyone too much trouble off the tee, but unseen tilt, bold breaks, little rolls here and there, mottled grass, all conspired to make putting a very important part of the challenge.

So I'll take small and challenging over large and dull unless the architect has the talent to build large and interesting greens, like those found at a place like Yale.
 

[Patrick_Mucci]

Tom Doak,

At a physical size of an average of 15,004 sq/ft/gn, how much smaller do the greens play due to the wind ?

[Patrick_Mucci]

Jim Kennedy,

It seems that your disappointment is directed toward the lack of character/diversity/interest in the large greens rather than just their size.

You said,
"So I'll take small and challenging over large and dull unless the architect has the talent to build large and interesting greens, like those found at a place like Yale."

And the qualifying language you used really predisposes the answer.

Would you take large and challenging over small and dull ? 

You can't predetermine the answer by tainting the question, that's dirty pool.

Chances are, a talented architect can do more with larger greens.

Quantity has a quality all of its own.

[Jaeger Kovich]

Patrick - I was more using the words "huge/enormous" for emphasis and word choice, so I didn't have to write the word large 15 times in 2 paragraphs, but now that you have put a sf into the mix, I now see more of what you are talking about... In my opinion, my statements still apply.

George - I have seen played old mac and walked the rest of the holes which were still in dirt/sand at the time and the scale of the place was my favorite part about it! Actually I think we had dinner afterwards with tom d., jim urbina, bill coore, some of the other renaissance guys and a few other hopefuls for the summer work program... Was that you in the sleepy hollow wind breaker? I'm pretty sure it was.... I tend to like courses that feel really big like OM and Yale. Bethpage Black, Kiawah Ocean and the Stranz courses all do it in their own way as well and are some of my favorites.

[Tom_Doak]

Jaeger:

"Huge scale" has been the prerequisite for Best New course winners for the past 15-20 years.  I would guess that 75% of the time, the biggest course has won, which is one reason I was surprised that Rock Creek came up short.

I'm not saying "bigger is better" is necessarily a good thing at all.  But, I think most panelist types, coming from parkland courses as their home, are impressed by scale.  It is not a new phenomenon, either.  Three of the earliest courses to benefit from their large scale were National, Pine Valley, and Augusta.

[Jim_Kennedy]

Jim Kennedy,

Chances are, a talented architect can do more with larger greens.

Pat,
I think I was saying the same thing. 

[John Moore II]

Pat-Is this really a question you are asking? Of course larger greens give the architect more freedom and diversity. Just the same as you can have a more diverse golf course (most likely) if given 1,000 acres of land to work with as opposed to 200 acres. Larger greens have the capacity for more large, bold contours and more small, subtle contours. Small greens are left with really only having small contours or they risk becoming either unplayable due to severity or unmaintainable due to lack of different pin placements. Large greens do not really have to worry about that, though really severe slopes are hard to maintain.

[Tom_Doak]

John:

I don't really agree with your line of reasoning above.

The biggest pitfall of large greens is that if the architect is not careful, they can seem very repetitive.  Players who are not good putters will three-putt from 50-60 feet all day, and there is not much variety or fun in that.  It can also be harder to reward a player for taking a good line, if the green is so big he will always be able to hit it anyway.  There were a lot of courses built in the 1950's and 60's with really big greens that nobody likes much anymore.  (Meadow Brook on Long Island is the first that comes to mind.)

To overcome this, big greens have to be really bold, so there are some hole locations where even the good player is scared to go for the flag, and can leave himself in a really bad spot if he misses on the wrong side of it.  Old Macdonald is full of those sorts of greens, right from the Double Plateau #1 to the Punchbowl #18.  Those greens aren't hard to hit in regulation if you are satisfied with a 3-putt bogey, but if you want to make par, you will need to hit a good approach and/or be coming in from a good angle.

[Niall C]

Jim Kennedy,

Chances are, a talented architect can do more with larger greens.

Pat,
I think I was saying the same thing. 

Is this another way of saying that the bigger the green the harder it is to make it really interesting ? If so I would tend to agree, and the same thing could possibly be said about wide fairways IMHO.

Niall

[John Moore II]

John:

I don't really agree with your line of reasoning above.

The biggest pitfall of large greens is that if the architect is not careful, they can seem very repetitive.  Players who are not good putters will three-putt from 50-60 feet all day, and there is not much variety or fun in that.  It can also be harder to reward a player for taking a good line, if the green is so big he will always be able to hit it anyway.  There were a lot of courses built in the 1950's and 60's with really big greens that nobody likes much anymore.  (Meadow Brook on Long Island is the first that comes to mind.)

To overcome this, big greens have to be really bold, so there are some hole locations where even the good player is scared to go for the flag, and can leave himself in a really bad spot if he misses on the wrong side of it.  Old Macdonald is full of those sorts of greens, right from the Double Plateau #1 to the Punchbowl #18.  Those greens aren't hard to hit in regulation if you are satisfied with a 3-putt bogey, but if you want to make par, you will need to hit a good approach and/or be coming in from a good angle.

But don't you have more room for variety with larger greens? Its hard to do much with a Postage Stamp green with +/- 2500 sqft, no? And I agree with you that it can become repetitive if not designed correctly. But aren't most statements made on this site made with the assumption that the architect and design is high quality? From Pat's first post, I have a strong feeling he was talking about large greens on very high class courses, as the 5 names he mentioned, including yourself, aren't generally associated with low quality golf course designs.