Jud - a plate of food at a high end restaurant may look wonderful, but I'd be a fool to call the food great before actually eating it myself, and even more a fool if I judged it from 535 yards away (no matter how highly ranked/rated the restaurant was by others). So with a golf hole: on a Par 5, say, the interplay/relationship between the green and the approach and the tee shot and the 2nd shot and the pin placement can't be determined before you even hit your first shot, from 525 yards away, and certainly a green/hole you're playing for the 1st time can't be judged great from back there. It's in the actual playing that we understand and appreciate the green's qualities. So, yes, from the fairway as I settle over my 3rd/approach shot, a good green, with one of its better pin placements, might at that point start making an otherwise ho hum hole more interesting for me as I see its contours and potential options/challenges, and then, depending on the pin placement, I may experience as my final putt approaches the hole, that this "good green" has indeed saved an otherwise so-so Par 5 (and there are a heck of a lot of those around); but I was offering a counter-point to the suggestion that a good green can get a golfer revved up (and saying "oh, lucky the Ross green here is so interesting, because otherwise this hole would suck") while he's still to hit his drive. I raise this because I think some architects miss this point: i.e. they think that if they put a decent green at the end of a banal par 5 golfers will get to the hole already interested in it/liking it; but in fact, since we play golf one shot at a time (just like we eat from a great looking plate of food), what I experience instead is a boring shot and a boring second and then maybe, depending on where i am, an interesting looking green -- which doesn't in itself make me "think backwards" and decide that the golf hole is in fact good instead of boring as I'd originally thought.
Peter
PS - just saw your post, Jeff, thanks -- yes, unless I'm already predisposed to calling a hole great, I won't be experiencing it as such unless there is interest and challenge on every shot, and will only experience how the green might "save it" after I've gotten to the green.