Pacific Dunes area between 4 & 11

[Matt Schulte]

Mr. Doak / GCA Members:

Like everyone, I enjoyed Pacific Dunes immensely.  I am just curious about not using the land between the 11th and 4th greens.  Was there just insufficient land to add another greensite there?  Would it have overcrowded all three greens?  

The result was an awkward walk from 11 green to 12 tee crossing over the 5th hole.  Was there no way to use that land to have another par 3 playing toward the ocean?

[Tim_Weiman]

Matts:

With most properties, you can probably find many more green sites.  So, answering why a particular potential site didn't make the final cut could be fairly complicated, I would imagine.

One of the cool things about Pacific Dunes is the variety of par 3's.  Indeed, it might be a textbook example of why one shouldn't place too much emphasis on things like getting another par 3 on the water.

In contrast to Pacific Dunes, Pete Dye put all four par 3s on the water at Whistling Straits.  Wouldn't it have been better to mix things up like Tom did at PD?

[TEPaul]

Matts;

You should understand that you probably could put another green site on the water where you mentioned at PD--but another green site isn't always a good golf hole. And there is so much more to consider in design. Even with a bunch of good golf holes anywhere, there is still so much more to consider. You have to string them together into a routing that has what you want to ultimately achieve into the whole--a whole 18 hole course with the kind of balance and variety you think best for that site and all the factors and aspects of it. "Connecting the dots" (keeping greens and tees near) is very important but there are many other things to consider.

More golf courses have been screwed up, I'm sure, by designers who get stuck in spots in a routing and just force things to max out something like areas on the water or particular views or whatever. It's better to just take the walk occasionally and go on to the next good hole that makes the whole thing hang together better. Forcing things into the progression of a routing is dangerous--just as dangerous as finding something you really love and hanging onto it and refusing to let it go to the detriment of the whole--the rest of the course.

Routing is a complex art, in my opinion, sometimes far removed from the individual holes, although the routing brings the pieces together, or not. When you find a long walk like #4 to #11 it's always interesting to try to analyze why that is! It's helpful to look at an aerial or a routing scheme and you might find that the reason it was done is for reasons you might never suspect--and for good reasons involving the whole!

One of the best routers, In my opinion, was William Flynn! He did a number of inside/outside routings and it's sometimes interesting to see how he did it. The most interesting one to me is Lehigh C.C. There's a long walk downhill from the first green to the second tee and many people, I'm sure, remark that that is bothersome and some kind of mistake. But with that one walk he got almost the entire front nine outside the interior back nine. Why would he have done that? There are numerous reasons and very positive ones!

[TEPaul]

At Pacific Dunes I meant the 11th green to the 12th tee.

[Rich_Goodale]

My memory is that Tom Doak has already answered this question on a previous thread last year.  The question related to the fact that the routing diagram on the Bandon Dunes website was (and still is!) very different from the current reality, and shows the 12th tee to be in very close proximity to the 11th green and 5th tee, using much of that land that Matts was talking about.  Can't remember Tom's answer then, through!  Hope he chips in.  

[Tom Doak]

The eleventh green is on the south side of a small dune right up against the clifftop; the fourth green is at the base of the north side.  Back-to-back between them is only about 150 feet, so trying to put another green in that space would be dangerous to both other holes.

In fact, it took a bit of time to convince Mike Keiser that we shouldn't walk around the site of the 11th hole to avoid back-to-back par-3's.  [The tenth hole was obvious on the ground, but we had to carve out par of the eleventh green site from the dune, so it wasn't as obvious in the dirt.]  The tee site was what convinced him we were right to do it, not the green site.

[ed_getka]

Matts,
I imagine there wasn't much wind blowing when you played Pac Dunes. With a 3-4 club wind it is easy to see why another green couldn't be squeezed in since in a summer wind it would be a crosswind if you were playing to the water and would require a lot of width. Assuming another hole would be played to the water in that area between 4 and 11 how would you get out of there to the next hole without a long walk.

I remember when I first saw the routing on the Bandon website and saw the pars of the holes I thought it would be strange, but it is a credit to Tom that the course flows so seamlessly that after playing the course it doesn't occur to one that the sequence of par is so unusual. IMHO

There is also a pretty good walk from 6 green to 7 tee, but in a setting that glorious I don't mind at all.

[Tom Doak]

I should mention here that all of the long walks mentioned were put in so that we could change the direction of the routing more often.  

On one old version of the routing, you would have walked from 2 green to 7 tee, from 6 green to 3 tee, and from 11 green to play backwards up what is now the fourth hole.  But Mike Keiser thought it was really important to have one of the coastal holes playing to the south, and to do that we had to make two crossovers [3-4 / 12-13 and 4-5 / 11-12] with longer walks.  In the end, I think it's a better way to wander the property, and I'm glad we changed it around.  Those walks aren't really that long, either -- and you get to watch the ocean the whole time!