"Relative Merits"

[Peter Pallotta]

Tom mentioned in the "Last Ten" thread taking some time to assess the relative merits of the 10 courses he'd most recently played.  Ian suggests in his "Greens Committee" thread that our internet/information age has engendered a culture in which many who don't know think they do. Sven's excellent "Retro Look" threads reminds us of how the great courses/holes were described in the past.  Those three threads together brought this question to mind:

Do we today, consciously or not, use "relative merit" to rate the courses (and individual golf holes) we play more so than did our predecessors in the golden age? If so, do you think there are advantages/disadvantages to this trend? Has it impacted golf course design?

Peter

[Benjamin Litman]

Peter,

Your posts are always a breath of fresh air. Thank you for another.

Your first question is the easiest to answer. I think we inescapably use "relative merit" to rate courses more than our predecessors. That's nothing more than a function of time; as it elapses, the number of comparators increases. (This is especially true in modern golf, as the number of multi-course complexes has spiked significantly.) Humans fear novelty and cherish frames of reference, so having more comparators--especially, as you note, in an age when they can be "experienced" in other ways than in person--virtually guarantees that humans will use them in assessing their experiences. This phenomenon plays out in almost every aspect of life.

Your second and third questions are harder to answer. As for the second, yes, there are both advantages and disadvantages to this phenomenon--the comfort provided by existing frames of references being an example of the former, the (seeming) loss of complete appreciation being an example of the latter (I say "seeming" because comparing a present experience to a past one can in many ways make the appreciation of the former richer). As for the third, I imagine that the answer again is yes, as architects inevitably build courses with existing courses and templates in mind, choosing either to incorporate past designs or to rebel against them.

I hope you're doing well, and thanks again for the thought-provoking post,

Benjamin

[Tom_Doak]

Peter:


I would agree that the modern proclivity to compare and rank golf courses [even brand new ones that are being played in "preview" rounds] has had an impact in how many people think about and discuss new courses.


I'm not as sure it has had much impact on how they are designed.  I suppose some architects or some clients feel the need not to stray too far from orthodoxy for fear their work will not be well received.


I probably had the term on my mind because I have spent a lot of time this spring thinking about the "relative merits" of my two-in-one design for Forest Dunes.  For that project, different than any other I've done, it's essential that one direction of play not be seen as much superior to the reverse option, so I've been doing my best to balance the two.

[Sean_A]

Pietro


I think its human nature to use comparative analysis as a tool to study a subject.  I think the kicker for something such as gca is that in reality nearly all of the courses mentioned in these excercises are in effect in a bubble of good to excellent...meaning most are comfortably worth playing give or take the odd opinion. 


I don't know if comparative analysis in and of itself has impacted design, but what people think certainly does and CA is just a tool to help people clarify their thoughts. 


Regardless, I am very uneasy about ranking courses (using any system or tools) in terms of quality because for most a game of golf is about more than simply playing the 18 holes.  For the courses we discuss there is a degree of emotional attachment and a reaction level as to how a course "interacts" with golfers.  These sort of reactions/feelings about a course cannot be ranked no matter how we approach the matter and they cannot be compartmentalized for purposes of ranking.  Bottom line, I am ALWAYS skeptical of rankings supposedly based solely on quality....no matter whose list it is. Everybody has their own ideas of what architectural elements are ok, good or great and how they should be balanced.


Ciao

[Niall C]

In my business the term "relative merit" is commonly used and indeed I think it a common enough phrase in general terms. Whether people use the phrase or not they are always comparing and measuring and estimating, using their own knowledge and personal experience. That holds true whether they are considering a golf course, a car, or their friends ability to stand up after too many drinks. Whatever it is it is measured in comparison to something else.


So when someone says something is good, what they really mean is it is better than something else. Likewsie when they say it is bad the mean it is worse than something else. Otherwise good or bad have no meaning.


Sean


How can you be uneasy about ranking courses, you're a rater !! Not only a rater but a man with his own rating system. Sure, you're wrong about a lot of things    but don't let that stop you.


Niall

[BCrosby]

Peter -


Interesting about golf course commentary during the Golden Age is that people made lots of comparisons. It was usually informal and in a narrative form. A few compared the relative merits of courses. But most were about specific holes, not courses. 


Other than the rankings by Joshua Crane (which were very controversial), I can't think of any course rankings in the Golden Age that were anything like as formal as those we have today in golf magazines.


As a comment on ranking methodology, I think using specific holes rather than a golf course as the unit of comparison is a much sounder basis for judging "relative merits". It is less sexy, but I think ultimately conveys more information. 


Bob   

[Ken Moum]

Well, I have to ask, "How the heck would we RANK courses without thinking about the relative merit of their features?"


I admit that formalizing the criteria might be different than what was being done 100 years ago, but maybe not.  The people who were doing back then certainly were comparing SOMETHING about the courses to decide which ones were "better."


I just read Mike Nuzzo's article on pretty, challenging, or fun (http://mnuzzo.com/pdf/GAV5.pdf) and it's pretty much what I've believed for some time without actually putting it in those terms.  And near as I can tell, all the formalized ranking systems are really just trying to be specific about those three things.


Resistance to scoring, walk in the park, even things like "interest and variety of par XXs, are all related in some way to the things we all judge courses by.


To relate it to this question, I think it's pretty easy to rank courses by those three criteria, so all we have to do is decide which is more important to us personally.  I'm firmly in the fun camp, which explains my love of Brora, Southern Dunes, Albuquerque CC, etc.


Hard is overrated.

[paul cowley]

Ken...I'm with you. Challenging and fun are my main criterion in design and are important components in the courses I enjoy playing.


When the balance between challenging becomes overly hard I tend to dislike the course. I never tire of the fun aspect. Hard to imagine coming off a course and feeling I had too much fun.


Hence my preference for North Berwick over Muirfield.


I have never understood the 'walk in the park' ranking criterion...it makes me chuckle when I imagine myself whistling or skipping or listening for bird sounds because I'm so infused with the joy of my setting. Maybe instead something like "How well does the course integrate with its setting". Peter?

[Tom_Doak]

Maybe instead something like "How well does the course integrate with its setting".

Paul:


That's well worded.  It explains a lot of what I like and don't like in design. 


Very few courses, even manufactured ones, have "no" setting; there is always something to integrate into, if you are trying.

[Ken Moum]

Paul,


I figure that Golfweek's "walk in the park," which asks if the course is "worth spending half a day on as a compelling outdoor experience," is mostly about Nuzzo's  "Pretty."

Even though the judgement of attractiveness of a course will vary from person to person, we all know what we like.  And we can fit it into our preferences for GOLF, which is more important than anything.

For instance, as pretty at the trees are at some courses, when they were planted too close to the line of play and too close together I don't see their beauty.  My view was also changed when I moved to Pierre SD in the 70s.

I grew up in northern Minn, hunting in the dense woods, so it took a while for me to see the beauty of open prairie.  But I spent a lot of time out there following a bird dog, and soon came to love it.

One of my friends and co-workers, a botanist, was at a meeting in Washington DC with a bunch Nature Conservancy folks and one of them asked, "How can you stand it out there?  There's nothing to rest your eyes on."

His reply was classic..... "There's nothing to block your view."

[paul cowley]

Maybe instead something like "How well does the course integrate with its setting".

Paul:


That's well worded.  It explains a lot of what I like and don't like in design. 


Very few courses, even manufactured ones, have "no" setting; there is always something to integrate into, if you are trying.

Tom I agree, and to bring it further there is always a setting...good, bad or mediocre.


Good you bond with...mediocre you try to improve or create (probably similar to your experience at Rawls)...bad you disguise and work around or just do whatever you can.


 I like the last as much as the first (if there is any money)...but I like the 2nd too!

[Benjamin Litman]

I read Macdonald's "Scotland's Gift" this weekend, and thought the below passage, in which he quotes a 1797 book on landscape architecture, tied in well with this thread:

To my mind every aspirant who wishes to excel in golf architecture should learn by heart and endeavor to absorb the spirit of the following lines, copied from "The Art of Landscape Architecture," written by the great Humphrey Repton in 1797:

If it should appear that, instead of displaying new doctrines or furnishing novel ideas, this volume serves rather by a new method to elucidate old established principles, and to conform long received opinions, I can only plead in my excuse that true taste, in every art, consists more in adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances than in that inordinate thirst after novelty, the characteristic of uncultivated minds, which from the facility of inventing wild theories, without experience, are apt to suppose that taste is displayed by novelty, genius by innovation, and that every change must necessarily tend to improvement.

[Ken Moum]

I read Macdonald's "Scotland's Gift" this weekend, and thought the below passage, in which he quotes a 1797 book on landscape architecture, tied in well with this thread:

To my mind every aspirant who wishes to excel in golf architecture should learn by heart and endeavor to absorb the spirit of the following lines, copied from "The Art of Landscape Architecture," written by the great Humphrey Repton in 1797:

If it should appear that, instead of displaying new doctrines or furnishing novel ideas, this volume serves rather by a new method to elucidate old established principles, and to conform long received opinions, I can only plead in my excuse that true taste, in every art, consists more in adapting tried expedients to peculiar circumstances than in that inordinate thirst after novelty, the characteristic of uncultivated minds, which from the facility of inventing wild theories, without experience, are apt to suppose that taste is displayed by novelty, genius by innovation, and that every change must necessarily tend to improvement.

Change ISN"T good???


Heresy.    Or not.


"...uncultivated minds... are apt to suppose that taste is displayed by novelty, genius by innovation, and that every change must necessarily tend to improvement."


You think he was talking about Dawson?


K

[Benjamin Litman]

I think Repton's point--and Macdonald's in adopting it as his own--is that unmeasured, uninformed, rash change is bad. Not that change is bad.

[MCirba]

Comparing courses is nearly as Auld as the game itself.

In 1628, Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonston recorded the existence of the links 'off Montrois', when he compared them (and those of St Andrews) unfavourably to Dornoch.  http://www.scottishgolfhistory.org/oldest-golf-sites/1562-montrose/

It is deeply embedded in human nature to compare, contrast, rate, and rank.   You may as well ask folks to turn off their senses than ask them to refrain from comparisons as comparisons are how we communicate in many respects.

So many of the earliest courses in the US that opened were said to be "equal to the best in the country such as Garden City and Myopia".   

When NGLA was built it was compared not only to the best in the US but also the best abroad and set a new standard.

A few years later, Pine Valley did the same.

[Peter Pallotta]

Nice thread, thanks gents.
 
If the game is characterized by a wonderful melding/engagement of mind, body, and spirit, then a field of play that doesn't engage one or more these aspects is simply not as supportive of the game as one that engages all three. A golf course that is mindless test of brute strength in an ugly setting strikes me, as a matter of principle, as less appropriate to the nature and ethos of the game than one which also asks the golfer questions and that inspires and calms his soul. Let me were describe several golf holes (and you imagine the rest of the 18 described similarly):
 
# 1. A long two-shotter, with a drive that flirts with the ocean on the right leaving the best angle for a mid-to-long iron approach into a sloping, green perched seemlessly atop one of the many grassy dunes that characterize the site, and flanked on the left by a massive sand blowout.
#2. A 155 yard Par 3 playing over a field of native grasses and heather to a narrow tableland-green, tilted from right to left and back to front, and approached diagonally from the tee, and featuring a large deep bunker on the front side.   
#3. A gently right-to-left curving and steadily rising short Par 5, reachable in two (with the prevailing wind) from the left side of a rumpled fairway that cants steeply from left to right, to a small sky-line green that drops steeply off into the heather on the right.
 
As I say, imagine 15 more holes described that way and manifesting such sound architectural principles and choices, tests of skill, and natural settings (i.e. engaging mind, body and spirit).  My question: what is "relative" about any of that? Don't those holes clearly have "merit" -- and merit not compared to anything else but in the context of the game's own unique nature. Now, as some have suggested (and as i probably would have to agree to) we are by nature "comparative beings" -- but does that mean we have to indulge this tendency to its fullest extent? And what happens to gca when we do indulge it, as we do today more than ever before? What happens to gca when, for whatever reasons, we are no longer satisfied with describing and experiencing and thinking about gca as in the examples above, i.e. where golf holes are simply described, and purposely not compared to anything else.
 
Peter   

[Ken Moum]

Don't those holes clearly have "merit" -- and merit not compared to anything else but in the context of the game's own unique nature.


 What happens to gca when, for whatever reasons, we are no longer satisfied with describing and experiencing and thinking about gca as in the examples above, i.e. where golf holes are simply described, and purposely not compared to anything else.
 
Peter

First, the only thing really enticing about those holes is the evocative language you used with such eloquence.


Why not "A 495-yard par four. If you hit it close to the ocean your second will be easier because the green is stuck on top of a sandhill covered with tall grass and left side is protected by a big bunker."

Because those words a descriptive, not evocative. They evoke warm feelings, is only among the kind of folks who hang out on GCA.com

Furthermore, a big part of why your words evoke those feelings is because they call up memories of other places that we can compare them to... favorably.

I will say one thing, if I ever buy a golf course, I'm hiring you to write the membership sales brochure.

Ken

[Peter Pallotta]

Ken - there's another of those technical glitches going on here, so all your text has shrunk to like "1" font size; I'll wait to comment further until later.
 
But in general, I was trying to describe three holes (and 15 more like it -- so in short, an entire course) based on time tested architectural principles -- principles that have been proven to engage mind and body both and, in certain settings, the spirit as well. If we had such a course, wouldn't it stand on its own?
 
P

[Ken Moum]

But in general, I was trying to describe three holes (and 15 more like it -- so in short, an entire course) based on time tested architectural principles -- principles that have been proven to engage mind and body both and, in certain settings, the spirit as well.

Sure.  But how did they get to be time-tested?




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If we had such a course, wouldn't it stand on its own?
 
P[/size]

Of course, unless golf was invented on flat ground where the game was based on equity of results and fairness. FWIW, I know more than a few golfers who would HATE the course you have in your head.

K

[MCirba]

Peter,

I think what I'm saying is that I think it's impossible to enjoy/evaluate/experience any particular golf course or golf hole out of context and comparison with one's larger body of golf course experiences.   Trying to appreciate a golf course in a vacuum is impossible once you've played others.   

Even by the second course I've ever played back in 1971 I was intrigued by the differences and similarities of the two ramshackle farmland nine-hole courses I had played by that time and captivated by the seeming endless variability of the playing fields when all that was required for the game was a defined area to tee it up and a hole in the ground some distance away surrounded by land especially prepared for the purpose of putting a ball into it.

[Sean_A]

Niall


Rankings set me uneasy simply because its all relative based on opinion and yes, to Pietro's point, requires a constant hammering of comparison.  I get that comparison is part of being human, but much of the time it can be done simply as a tool to learn about holes.  There doesn't necessarly need to be an end game of which is better/best.   


Ken


I think time tested is just that...a hole which has proven to be engaging for golfers over many years.


Ciao