[Peter Pallotta]

I was looking at Jim Sherma's thread about his first trip to Ballyneal (one of only 3-4 courses that I really feel I must play one day). Posters generously offered many suggestions -- e.g. play from different sets of tees, during a single round and/or over the course of several rounds; embrace match play and forget about your score; use hickories; play the whiskey circuit etc. And while all these suggestions come from posters who know and love the course, and all are well meant, I found myself thinking "Screw all that. On my first visit to Ballyneal, I'm going to pick ONE SET of tees, say the whites [edit: one set of "teeing grounds", say the middle-ish] and play those for a full 18 holes; and I'm going to bring a scorecard and pencil; and I'm going to play with the best equipment I have and try to shoot the best possible score I can; and I'm going to play the course just the way the score card says, from 1 through 18, in that order -- and then on my second round I'm going to do exactly the same thing, i.e. I will GOLF on a wonderful golf COURSE in the way it was DESIGNED to play.

I'm sure Tom and the team have created a place of freedom and fun there, and that they'd be open to (and maybe anticipated) all these variations mentioned above. But I'm also sure that they took time and great effort find the best possible ROUTING for 18 sequential golf holes over that terrain so as to create a great journey and field of play, and that they factored in the WIND and  established tee boxes and placed HAZARDS/FEATURES with great care and assuming that golfers would be playing appropriate (for them) sets of tees and trying to score as well as they could -- which is, after all, a primary if not main goal of the game.

In short, Tom and the team wrote a novel/book, and wrote it in a way that assumes that (and is best understood and appreciated by) people starting on PAGE ONE, with their glasses on (if they need glasses to read properly), and continuing PAGE by PAGE to the end, where the conclusion/culmination of the story is satisfying because the writer's skill was used to make it that way, to build from the beginning to the end.  

Why in goodness name would I start a book on page 116? What lack of generosity and respect could possibly possess me so that I said to myself "I don't give a damn what the writer was doing or thought he was doing with all his planning and care and concern, and I don't care how much talent he might have -- I'm gonna read this book the way I want to, and get out of it what I want to get out of it, not what the writer tells me to or hopes that i do....because I know better!"

In short, why the heck wouldn't I play Ballyneal the way Tom designed it? What use and value is all his talent and thought and time if I'd be perfectly prepared to get there for the first time and start on the 3rd tee and play to the 6th green? If THAT'S the way golfers are gonna play it, they could've hired ME (or a MONKEY) to design it.

[JESII]

Thank you. I'll elaborate when I get out of the car...

[Tim Bert]

Peter - Best of luck with your approach. Unless it is a new edition at the course, there have never been tee markers.

On to chapter 2.

[Steve Lang]

  The golf course as novel...  no, as textbook yes

[Adam Clayman]

Peter, Is it possible you misread the subtext? Most of those suggestions to start on page 116, likely assume you'll have already read the book in proper order. It also illustrates how keeping score for the full 18 holes is the game not the sport. A quality medium inspires creative thought.

Besides, there are no white tees in Holydoak.

[Brent Hutto]

The golf course as novel...  no, as textbook yes

This comment seems to sum up what I have found so very depressing about this forum, of late.

[Peter Pallotta]

Tim, Adam - you guys know the place very well and you know i respect your views, but five quick points just to be clearer: 1. are there no "teeing grounds" at Ballyneal --some further back/furthest back and some more up-front? Let's let "teeing grounds" serve as a metaphor for actual tees. 2. There's the trees and then there's the forest -- the principle of playing a great course as designed is the main thing/forest I'm interested in. 3. If i read a great book from start to finish in the order intended, it still give me scope for my own personal 'participation' in the narrative and for my own creative/emotional thought -- indeed, that's what makes it a great book. 4. I'll easily grant that many around here have played golf for decades more than me and are much better players, and so have 'gotten past' the need/desire to score well....but to me that kind of 'sophistication' seems to diminish that totality of the experience, not enhance it. 5. Last but not least -- I'm not sure of my 'position', nowhere close to that....it's opposing points of view (expansively articulated) that I'm looking for.  I can't abide even one more rating thread....

Peter

[Bill_McBride]

One of the things you won't find at Ballyneal is defined tee markers.  Like Wolf Point, there are flattish areas everywhere that provide teeing locations.   A fun way to play there is winner of the previous hole picks the next tee.  You can do a lot of mix and match to provide the challenge you want.  It's great to set off from the first tee and play 18, but you can play great loops like 10, 11, 12 and 9 and see some great holes.  Since there are no weak holes at Ballyneal, it's really not necessary to play them all in order.   It's just a great golf experience, one of the best.   

[RJ_Daley]

TD will likely speak to your desire to stick to the plot from front page to back, regarding the designed in concept of variable teeing grounds of no set distance or set-up.  Peter, you can select a sort of medium, front or back portion of the teeing grounds to represent a shorter distance, middle average distance or way back playing distance, and be held to that rigid parameter if you like.  If you do that, you will experience the wind conditions (if there are windy conditions when you play, where you should be appropriately aided or restricted as you wind your way around the course).  And, of course the wind may change directions as you play.  

But, as you know, even where there are designated tee marker distances at various courses out there in the chop hill-prairie courses, people that go out there and play often tend to 'make up' the teeing distances as they go.  One game that is played is the winner of previous hole gets to select the tee blocks for the next hole.  

One way to look at it as not such a rigid requirement is that the fellow that mows and sets up the tee blocks each morning, varying the distances on the various teeing pads, from front of pad to middle to back, and sometimes putting blue tees up with the whites and vice versa, is that is often just the guy that is mowing the course, whim.  He may be following the direction of the pro or super, but usually it is his whim or need to allow a portion of the tee block to heal from previous play.  It has nothing to do with the architect's intent and how he wants you to read his book.  The archie wants you to be challenged and use your imagination and golf accumen to shoot the best score you can, but I don't think he necessarily wants to dictate to you which tee block you must stick to.   I may be wrong, and likely some of the archies here may chime in.  But for my two cents, I love to have the variable selection of where to put the peg in the ground whilst reading the conditions, firm and fast, or soft, windy/calm, cold/warm, feeling like playing a more crafty short game from forward tees or feeling like a brute.

It is like improvisation in one of your favorite forms of art and entertainment, jazz.  

[Ally Mcintosh]

Peter,

Ever read Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar?.... or Lanark by Alasdair Gray?

[JESII]

RJ,

Even with jazz, I'd expect the musician must be at least proficient with the chosen instrument. For a first trip to Ballyneal, my understanding is that one would have no idea what they're looking at nor what may or may not make sense.

I would consider it a good thing that the course needs several rounds played before I would have a good idea of the options and risks.

[BCrosby]

I'm with Peter and Jim.  To borrow Peter's novel analogy, even among the novels I know best, I'm not sure why I would want read them out of order. Faulkner had his reasons for how he structured his plots. Why would I gainsay him?

Same with golf courses. Architects give considerable thought to the lengths and order of their holes. They have a number of things in mind when they make the design choices they make. The better the architect, the better those 'choices' tend to be. I want to play their courses precisely because of their choices. Not because I might make better choices.

The absence of tees is a cool idea. But, as Jim notes, I would have no idea how to exercise that choice unless I had played the hole often and knew it intimately.

Bob     

 

[John Kirk]

Hi Peter,

The scorecard used to identify three or four separate tees for each hole; now they list a range.  It's easy to devise a short/medium/long tee setup.  There is value in selecting a stock course arrangement, playing a first/second/third set of tees, to get a sense of the general difficulties and strategies of each hole, especially those playing into the wind.  Often, players will play downwind holes long and upwind holes short.

[Jason Thurman]

Was Ballyneal designed with Renaissance conceiving the idea that it would not have set tees, or was that a choice made by the club?

The answer to that question may well determine the validity of Pete's book analogy, which I think is generally a good one. If Tom intended for the holes to be played in a conventional sequence with a variety of shot demands ensured by how he laid out the holes as a whole, then certainly the best way to experience that routing would be to play it in order, as designed, from a fairly consistent set of tees.

However, if Tom intended for course to have the tremendous fluidity that its lack of tee markers and numerous loops of less than 18 holes would suggest, then perhaps a more apt comparison is a collection of short stories. While one can certainly read Dubliners or How we are Hungry from start to finish, there is also value in reading and re-reading individual stories from those works and looking for themes that run throughout a series of separate plots that nonetheless form a coherent overall theme to the collection. Without having been there, it seems reasonable to believe that the spirit of a course like Ballyneal might only be truly captured by fully embracing its fluidity and elasticity.

The one thing that Pete posted that I would almost certainly agree with regardless of course is the need to keep score or play some kind of match. If you play a course without stakes, then I think it becomes extremely hard to understand the real challenge and character it presents. So much of golf course evaluation is already subjective and hypothetical that it's important, in my mind, to experience the concrete pursuit of your best possible score if you are to truly understand the pressures, demands, and challenges presented by the playing field.

[Tom_Doak]

Peter:

The funny thing about your title is that I do, in fact, often start reading a book on page 116.  It drives my wife bananas.  But, my feeling is that a good book ought to be engaging no matter where you start, and I would rather peek randomly into the middle to see whether I find the work engaging, than start at the beginning where the author is consciously trying to hook me.

So, what does that mean for my design work?

I would prefer you play Ballyneal from 1 to 18, as that's how it was laid out.  I designed the course in a specific sequence, and skipping from #15 tee to #16 green is only for people who are bored or short on time.  It works for that stuff better than 99% of golf courses, because of what I'll say in the next paragraph, but that's not the intention.

It is NOT essential for you to play the same set of tee markers all the way around [if they had any] to experience the "real" design.  We provided a variety of tees for people, and I'm not the sort of architect who insists that the green on #6 is designed for an 8-iron approach shot -- it's designed for whatever club you are hitting into it.  This is partly a practical consideration; it's a windy place and I don't control how it blows.  But it's also a backbone of my designs:  there will always be some guy or gal looking at those greens with a 4-wood in their hands, and I want to give them a way to get a good result with the 4-wood.  So it doesn't matter to me where you play from.  I'm confident it will be fun no matter what lengths of approach shots you are hitting.

I don't remember exactly at what point we committed to the concept of having no tee markers.  We certainly discussed the possibility before the course was finished ... but we'd discussed it with other clients, too, and none of them ever followed through.  So it was a bit of a surprise to me when Ballyneal did!

The one downside of having no tee markers is that members seldom make a choice that is uncomfortable for themselves.  If there's a big carry to be made, they inch up a few yards to have confidence they can get over.  When I was building Stonewall many years ago, I asked Jay Sigel how far he was comfortable carrying the ball, and then built a couple of carries that were 10-15 yards FARTHER than that.  I didn't want him to be comfortable all the time.

P.S.  I don't care if you keep score or not.  You will enjoy it either way.

[Carl Rogers]

I thought that Ballyneal having no tee markers, could have no slope or stroke rating, thus the score you shot could not be recorded for handicapping purposes, right?

[Rich Goodale]

I was looking at Jim Sherma's thread about his first trip to Ballyneal (one of only 3-4 courses that I really feel I must play one day). Posters generously offered many suggestions -- e.g. play from different sets of tees, during a single round and/or over the course of several rounds; embrace match play and forget about your score; use hickories; play the whiskey circuit etc. And while all these suggestions come from posters who know and love the course, and all are well meant, I found myself thinking "Screw all that. On my first visit to Ballyneal, I'm going to pick ONE SET of tees, say the whites [edit: one set of "teeing grounds", say the middle-ish] and play those for a full 18 holes; and I'm going to bring a scorecard and pencil; and I'm going to play with the best equipment I have and try to shoot the best possible score I can; and I'm going to play the course just the way the score card says, from 1 through 18, in that order -- and then on my second round I'm going to do exactly the same thing, i.e. I will GOLF on a wonderful golf COURSE in the way it was DESIGNED to play.

I'm sure Tom and the team have created a place of freedom and fun there, and that they'd be open to (and maybe anticipated) all these variations mentioned above. But I'm also sure that they took time and great effort find the best possible ROUTING for 18 sequential golf holes over that terrain so as to create a great journey and field of play, and that they factored in the WIND and  established tee boxes and placed HAZARDS/FEATURES with great care and assuming that golfers would be playing appropriate (for them) sets of tees and trying to score as well as they could -- which is, after all, a primary if not main goal of the game.

In short, Tom and the team wrote a novel/book, and wrote it in a way that assumes that (and is best understood and appreciated by) people starting on PAGE ONE, with their glasses on (if they need glasses to read properly), and continuing PAGE by PAGE to the end, where the conclusion/culmination of the story is satisfying because the writer's skill was used to make it that way, to build from the beginning to the end.  

Why in goodness name would I start a book on page 116? What lack of generosity and respect could possibly possess me so that I said to myself "I don't give a damn what the writer was doing or thought he was doing with all his planning and care and concern, and I don't care how much talent he might have -- I'm gonna read this book the way I want to, and get out of it what I want to get out of it, not what the writer tells me to or hopes that i do....because I know better!"

In short, why the heck wouldn't I play Ballyneal the way Tom designed it? What use and value is all his talent and thought and time if I'd be perfectly prepared to get there for the first time and start on the 3rd tee and play to the 6th green? If THAT'S the way golfers are gonna play it, they could've hired ME (or a MONKEY) to design it.

Peter

I wrote my honours thesis at University largely discussing the premise that any great novel could be picked up and read from any starting place, focusing on Catch-22, Gulliver's Travels and Ulysses.  I think it was Nomran Mailer from whom I stole this idea, but is was the 60's and who remembers anything from the 60's.....

[Steve Lang]

  5 years ago, almost to the day.. still remember having a great amount of fun at Ballyneal in 30 mph gusting winds with one of the Colton Gangs.. tried to learn the course ahead of time, textbook style, discussed things with a member, but after a while the notes went into the bag and it was golf your ball as best you can and take it all in.. 

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom - thanks, especially for the details on your design philosophy. But I still can't quite understand the love for this particular kind of "freedom", either from an architect's perspective or from a golfer's.

There are indeed tees at Ballyneal (back, middle and front, despite the lack of "markers"); and, because of the thought that went into the original design, any one set of tees played consistently thoughout a round would, on any given day and depending on the wind, surely make for more than enough variety and challenge to satisfy any golfer, even after years of play.  

But those espousing the "freedom" of variable tees seem want to forgo that naturally-occuring variety and that (perhaps) too great a challenge and instead opt for a "variety" of their own making and a "challenge" they feel sure they can meet. In other words, they want THEIR brand of variety and challenge instead of YOUR brand of variety and challenge.

As a golfer, that's not the kind of "freedom" I want -- as I am almost certain that, despite my rhetoric and protests, I'd be ensuring LESS variety and challenge by that approach and not more. (Plus, that's precisely the kind of "freedom" I'm often trying, succesfully or not, to have in my own life and with my own work -- and the golf course is one of the few places where I can escape in peace from that "responsibility" for a little while.) And if I were an architect, sure, I'd want golfers to be happy, but I'd feel that all my years of training and experience and hard work were for naught if, as i said in the opening, my teeing grounds could've been slapped down by a monkey for all anyone seemed to care.

Peter

PS Rich - ha ha -- well, it just may be that your thesis was absolutely correct/valid, but ONLY for the 1960s...

[Daryl David]

Tom - thanks, especially for the details on your design philosophy. But I still can't quite understand the love for this particular kind of "freedom", either from an architect's perspective or from a golfer's.

There are indeed tees at Ballyneal (back, middle and front, despite the lack of "markers"); and, because of the thought that went into the original design, any one set of tees played consistently thoughout a round would, on any given day and depending on the wind, surely make for more than enough variety and challenge to satisfy any golfer, even after years of play.   

But those espousing the "freedom" of variable tees seem want to forgo that naturally-occuring variety and that (perhaps) too great a challenge and instead opt for a "variety" of their own making and a "challenge" they feel sure they can meet. In other words, they want THEIR brand of variety and challenge instead of YOUR brand of variety and challenge.

As a golfer, that's not the kind of "freedom" I want -- as I am almost certain that, despite my rhetoric and protests, I'd be ensuring LESS variety and challenge by that approach and not more. And if I were an architect, sure, I'd want golfers to be happy, but I'd feel that all my years of training and experience and hard work were for naught if, as i said in the opening, my teeing grounds could've been slapped down by a monkey for all anyone seemed to care.

Peter

PS Rich - ha ha -- well, it just may be that your thesis was absolutely correct/valid, but ONLY for the 1960s...

You sound like the kind of person that always orders the Chef's tasting menu or the Omakase when dining out in a great restaurant.  No personal decision making required. Eat dishes someone else has decided you should eat and in the order they decide you should eat them.  Not that there is anything wrong with that.   

[Peter Pallotta]

 

You might be right, David -- but there's also a great freedom in not being enslaved by the need to always be the 'master of one's fate'.  

Peter

[Brent Hutto]

Incidentally, among human beings people all too often are deceived by freedom. And since freedom is reckoned among the most sublime feelings, the corresponding disappointment is also among the most sublime. In the variety shows, before my entrance, I ahve often watched a pair of artists busy on trapezes high up in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked back and forth, they jumped, they hung in each others arms, one held the other by clenching the hair with his teeth. "That, too, is human freedom," I thought, "self-controlled movement." What a mockery of sacred nature! At such a sight, no structure would stand up to the laughter of the apes.

--Franz Kafka, "A Report for an Academy"

[Peter Pallotta]

 

When Max Behr woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed into Franz Kafka, who, strangely, had himself dreamt that he was a young Joshua Crane, playing from the 15th tee to the 16th green at Ballyneal, in a fourball match with John Kavanaugh, Penelope Cruz and Prince Andrew. 

[Chris Shaida]

...
I wrote my honours thesis at University largely discussing the premise that any great novel could be picked up and read from any starting place, focusing on Catch-22, Gulliver's Travels and Ulysses.  I think it was Nomran Mailer from whom I stole this idea, but is was the 60's and who remembers anything from the 60's.....

Rich, well, if you did steal it from Mailer he stole it from Kierkegaard who went on at some length and with some frequency on the the topic of not starting at the start...

Peter, I think you are exactly right that the freedom to NOT make certain kinds of choices is both sweet and wise...

[Rich Goodale]

...
I wrote my honours thesis at University largely discussing the premise that any great novel could be picked up and read from any starting place, focusing on Catch-22, Gulliver's Travels and Ulysses.  I think it was Nomran Mailer from whom I stole this idea, but is was the 60's and who remembers anything from the 60's.....

Rich, well, if you did steal it from Mailer he stole it from Kierkegaard who went on at some length and with some frequency on the the topic of not starting at the start...

Peter, I think you are exactly right that the freedom to NOT make certain kinds of choices is both sweet and wise...

Kierkegaard/Schmeerkegaard

Anything worthy of thought, whether it be epistomology, literature or golf course architecture requires some kind of leap of faith to confirm its beauty.  Any analysis that only goes from point A to point Z misses the quality of all the points in between.  Somewhere, along all of those paths there is a long carry that seems impossible, but can be conquered with guile and courage.

Rich

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