Tom,
I have no doubt that the "sameness" of the existing putting surfaces on Raynor and Banks Biarritz holes would be very troubling to you.
As a fan of both MacRaynors AND Tom Doak, I imagine that this was one of the most difficult templates for you and the team to agree upon. I would LOVE to have been privy to the design conversations that you had with Bahto, Klein, Whitten, Urbina and perhaps Keisers. Has that been written about?
The Biarritz green at Old Macdonald is unlike any other that I have played. It is Biarritz-inspired by not a copy by any means.There are so many more internal green contours than one would find elsewhere, yet the depth of the swale is much shallower than most. OM's certainly has the required runup element that CBM envisioned, more so than most current Biarritz holes on parkland courses, where it is nearly impossible to stop big hitters from simply flying the ball to the pin.
Bill:
No, I don't think the conversation has been discussed a lot, but I'm happy to provide my memories of it.
Yes, I was personally very wary of how to include the Biarritz at Old Macdonald, but I assumed from the beginning that we would need to do so, and I know that George and Jim and Brad were all looking forward to it. I do not remember Mr. Keiser saying much about the Biarritz specifically early in the process, but he really didn't have too much to say about what we should do with any particular hole until we were building them.
Originally the routing was a bit different. The 7th green was going to be sited where the 8th green is today, and what is now the 16th was going to be two holes ... after a shorter par-4, you'd have backed up to the right up the hill to play a Biarritz, to a green about where the 17th tee is today. That was Jim Urbina's location for it [he had suggested 15-17 from my original plan], and I was very concerned that we didn't have enough space to do the hole right ... that we were going to be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
The day we started construction, I was walking with Mr. Keiser and we discovered the location for the present 7th green up on the dune ridge [which was then about 15-20 feet higher]. I asked him if he wanted to go up on top and get a better view of the ocean -- he did -- and whether there were any permitting issues in our way [there weren't]. Then he asked me if the 7th green was moved up there, how would we get back into the rest of the course?, and I said maybe we could build a par-3 back down the hill to where the 8th tee was going to be ... and we both looked at the ridge where the green is today and pointed and said "right there".
When I went down and looked at the green site more closely, I thought it had the makings of a cool and unusual Biarritz, downhill with the front of the green much higher than the back so that you might play a running approach even from the elevated tee ... and best of all NOT symmetrical. Jim came and looked at it and we decided to build up the back of the green with fill to enhance the swale, and how to use the existing contours as hazards to the side of the green instead of the symmetrical bunkers, and Jim went ahead and built the hole you know. It all happened rather quickly, and I don't remember the rest of the committee being too involved, because they weren't on site the day Mike voted to change the routing.
For me, the 9th at Yale was an inspiration, because it is much more complex than most Biarritz holes and the front part of the green is very much in play as a potential hole location. This may or may not be the "true intent" of the Biarritz ... I don't know Willie Dunn or C.B. Macdonald or Pat Mucci well enough to ask them
... but the Yale hole is certainly part of Macdonald's legacy, so I didn't think it out of character, and neither did George Bahto when we asked him about it. The only disappointment for me is that they almost never use the front parts of the 8th green for hole locations, when a lot of the appeal to me was that there were some days you'd want to land the ball on the front and run it through the swale, and other days when you'd want to land in front and make it STAY. That's certainly a feature of the 9th at Yale [and Bill Coore's hole at Streamsong Red], and why I like them better than the others.