What's Behind the Target?
A green without visual containment (a framework of trees) requires golfers to feel the depth and distance to the hole. This effect can be achieved instead when vast expanses of open space loom beyond the green. Whether the background consists of a broad body of water, a stark span of terrain, or an empty skyline, golfers lack visual orientation and must trust their sense of depth in the approach to the hole.
As flagsticks will typically appear as part of the distant horizon, many golfers will reach for a stronger club. Approach shots consequently may carry the green despite all the available yardage information at hand.
What's in front of Target?
Architectural features in front of a green also challenge a golfer's judgment of distance. Cross-bunkers and carry bunkers, which emerge considerably shy of a green complex, often camouflage the remaining distance to the pin. Golfers ordinarily cannot visualize the actual extent of terrain between the carry bunkers and the green. As flagsticks often appear immediately beyond these bunkers, approach shots will routinely fall short of the hole.
What's beside the Target?
The width and dimension of golf holes can also play optical illusions with the target. A green typically appears much larger than it really is when the perspective is carved through a narrow corridor of trees. Likewise, a green often appears much smaller than it actually is when positioned in an open space.
Pat Ruddy, golf architect, explains that these delusions are enhanced when different presentations are offered in a single round. Ruddy says, "give a variety of enclosed settings in valleys or trees followed quickly by panoramic vistas over miles of countryside or sea, and the eye will fairly quiver sending the wrong information back to the command post."
Like diverse light settings, a golfer’s vision can adjust to any one perspective, even if it's nightfall. However, if golfers move back and forth between bright and dark settings, they may lose their sense of focus.
Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw portray such variations of landscapes at Friar's Head Golf Club in Baiting Hollow, N.Y. The routing swings back and forth from tree-lined dunes off the north shore into windswept meadows closer inland. Ron Whitten, architecture and design editor for Golf Digest, claims that Coore and Crenshaw visually "mix it up better than anyone."
Also, a shot that must be played between two architectural features, (such as between two trees or between two hills) to a distant green creates optical illusions. According to Ruddy, by moving the hills closer together (decreasing the gap) or further away from each other (increasing the gap), or by adjusting the angle in which you must intersect the gap, will in turn lengthen or shrink the perspective of the target.