What about Gary Player's ARCHITECTURE? Costa Baja?

[Jay Flemma]

The Player interview discussion is timely for me because one of his golf courses popped up on my radar recently.  I'm playing with golf course flyover apps on my new Droid app and one that  downloaded was Costa Baja.

I noticed two things about the course (as seen on the app): Forst, there isn't a single dog-leg right on the entire course.  It's totally NASCAR architecture - left turn left turn left turn straightaway left turn. Now an architect friend of mine said that in Player's defense, it was a really hard piece of property to work, but black Mesa and Lakota Canyon are murderously tough sites and they aren't all one way. Anyone played it, anyone have any ideas? I also notices that 8 is a copy of 12 at Augusta...I think.

Moreover, what are the typical hallmarks of a Player design? Who were his architectural influences? What are his best courses?

[Jay Flemma]

Am I to understand that none of us knows anything about Player's architecture? Buehler? Buehler?

[Rick Baril]

Jay,

Since you haven't gotten any bites...

We were invited to see the site and make a pitch.  The site was REALLY tough.  Beautiful - but tough.  There was a (higher) section of the property which, it seemed, could accommodate some very good holes.  (my recollection is, this area overlooked a power plant or something...)  The area near the resort possessed tough topography, existing roads/elements, shorter dimensions - which certainly required creativity, and undoubtedly caused difficulty with the routing and connected the holes.  If this wasn't enough, there was plenty of rock and rocky soil...

Again, my recollection is; we were able to route 18 holes but there were some long distances between holes.  And, I seem to remember our solution was "creative" - but I can't remember the details - sorry.

Honestly, I haven't seen the course that was built. 

Your architect friend was right - designing and building that course couldn't have been a cake-walk.

ATB

[Randy Thompson]

WHO???
Jay,
If you had a piece of land that the holes just naturally jumped out at you and when put on paper you noticed that most or all were doglegs one way or another or straight, would you go back in and take that natural routing and tear it up and move a bunch of earth and create artificial setting and spend more money to get,dogleg right, dogleg left straight, dogleg right ect?? To me we need more of, It is what is! If I have three holes together, that are short par fours and all doglegs left but natural, so be it,,why try to force something that in a natural state is a winner. Not saying that is the case with the Player course but I find lots of folks like to criticize these small details when you have to look at things on a more global scale and understand what was there from day one. Same holds true for distances...did you notice all the par fours are relatively short and not one that really challenges the good player...who cares if that if that is what the natural land dictates! The critics will always find something to criticize, so I think its better and cheaper to listen to the land.

[Aidan Bradley]

Hole #3/4



Hole #6



Hole #7



Hole #8



Hole #9



Hole #10



Hole #14



Hole #15



Hole #17



Hole #17

[Randy Thompson]

Looks good to me!

[Niall C]

Randy

It certainly does to me. I like the look of the green on no. 10 in particular with what looks like a left to right slope inviting a shot over the bunkers to take advantage of the feed down to the hole. Or at least thats what it looks like to me.

Niall

[Ronald Montesano]

Is that the tee box view on hole #6? If so, it seems that it fades right (and that's not a 4/20 reference.)

[Jay Flemma]

Randy if I were designing a golf course, and I noticed it had all one shot pattern, I would go back to the drawing board and try again to get a little more balance in there. I'm not saying there is some magical formula that you have to have, but it's also not ZERO...

That picture of 10 is looking back down the fairway, I think.

I agree the course looks great, and I'm not saying "don't play it because there are no dog legs right."  But can we call a course truly reat that omits that shot all day long?

[Randy Thompson]

Jay,
You really need to have a topo and walk the property and understand the property to determine if something could have been done better to correct the problem of to many dog legs left. There seems to always be trade offs, you correct one problem and another one pops up, like Rick mentioned, some long walks betweens holes for examples. Sometimes we can come up with better alternative routing in our eyes but those alternatives requires significant more expenses which the owner is not willing to support. In a perfect world, we are hired to find and delivier the best possbile golf course and it is the owners problem on how he finds the funds and the business plan to implement our best golf routing and design, but that reality happens rarely! Great is rarely achieved and when it does happen itīs because of a ton of factors. Correcting a pattern that seems to repeats itselfs by forcing holes into a specific terrain and creating something artifical has little chance of moving the needle in the Great catagory direction imo anyways.

[Aidan Bradley]

This will help.

http://www.costabajagolf.com/courseflyover.html

[Jay Flemma]

Randy, there's 18 holes on a golf course.  He couldn't get ONE to turn to the right?

PS - that look IS down ten, but the hole is straight away down the side of the mountain.

Well I'll be playing there later this year, so we'll get a chance to look more closely at it for sure:)

[Jay Flemma]

Aiden, great pics!

[Greg Tallman]

Randy, there's 18 holes on a golf course.  He couldn't get ONE to turn to the right?

PS - that look IS down ten, but the hole is straight away down the side of the mountain.

Well I'll be playing there later this year, so we'll get a chance to look more closely at it for sure:)

Closer inspection will only yield more "questions"... similar but not quite as "good" as Puerto Los Cabos. See Jason's comment in the Cabo thread and you pretty much have it.