George,
I agree that Mark's post is a good one. At the very best courses, enjoyment and challenge should walk hand in hand. And it seems to me that some (but not all) of the supposedly great but hard courses would be great fun to play. What surprises me is that some of those claiming that lesser golfers can't enjoy the challenge of a course like Oakmont seem to have actually played the place!
Are these guys just plain wrong, or are they simply reacting to what Tom Doak describes as that club's revelry "in breaking the back of the golfer and NOT letting him enjoy each shot?" I know that my reaction to Bethpage Black has much more to do the back (or at least wrist) breaking nature of the set up and changes rather than anything to do with the original architecture.
And if clubs and courses like Oakmont and Bethpage are setting out to break the back of the golfer then shouldn't we be condemning them rather than celebrating them? After all, what could be worse for golf than destroying the elusive balance between challenge and enjoyability at those few places it actually exists?
I've seen a number of quality courses on the low end of golf drop in esteem when those in charge couldn't manage to take care of what they had. Shouldn't the courses on the high end of golf receive comparable treatment? Why aren't we panning clubs which fail to protect and preserve the delicate balance between challenge and enjoyability?
What good is great architecture if a club insists on negating it in the quest the difficult, relevance, and a Championship Test?
These are all excellent questions. I can't really answer almost any of them, as they require speculation about many courses I've never seen and courses of which I'm certainly not privy to member intentions regarding setup, etc.
But when has that ever stopped any of us on here?
I personally question Tom D's premise that Oakmont is out to break anyone's back. While I personally would prefer less rough (or even no rough, as an experiment), I believe the members at Oakmont believe they are in fact
highlighting the architecture of the course by presenting it in its full difficulty. It's interesting to me to look at the demands of Oakmont relative to the demands of other championship-testing courses. Oakmont is not brutally long - many of the longer holes are significantly downhill, and conditions are kept universally fast, so there is maximum roll on drives (frequently seen as a good thing on here for many different reasons). Oakmont does not generally have brutally long carries to reach the fairways or greens, as some courses do. Oakmont does not rely on water hazards and other penalty strewn hazards (which other courses rely upon far too heavily, imho). Most of the holes actually allow run up approach shots, if one so desires.
Oakmont combines 3 principal elements to create its challenge - brutal bunkering, heavy rough, and the best green complexes in the country (come on, let's stop kidding ourselves that Augusta's or #2's are even close....
). Of these, I personally only see heavy rough as back breaking; I'll leave it up to others to determine if that element of Oakmont's presentation is too much. The other two elements are primary components of top notch architecture, imho. Can't see where the lesser golfer isn't capable of handling these,
as long as he is not overly obsessed with score. I'd sure hate to see someone argue for dumbing down Oakmont to help lesser golfers feel better about themselves - I'd rather see golfers accept the challenges presented and forget about their score.
Should we criticise clubs for not maintaining what they have? I don't know, I take each case as individual examples, and I know very little about the specifics of each to say with any sort of authority that clubs are not doing their job as protectors. Heck, I'd lay a lot more blame on the USGA & R&A for that.
I know you and Tom P have big problems, but I think he is right on the money with his question to Sean Arble about Fun Factor and scoring.