Hi Patrick,
I’m quite familiar with the actual set-up to the golf course, so I very much appreciate the empirical, or real-world, problem that the physical site of the hole presents. That’s irrelevant to the real issue to my mind however. What’s interesting to me is not the brute fact of mowing the grass or not mowing the grass, or whatever. It wouldn’t particularly matter to the issue that’s of interest to me whether the hole was on Mars.
What’s fascinating to me is the actual question Sean raised, which was a matter of interpretation, or judgment. As I understand what Sean was saying, the question was, first, whether can someone even get an “unfair” lie on a Tom Doak course, given that it’s possible to argue that his intention is to maximize volatility, as it were, whereas the previous generation of architects might said to have the intention of minimizing volatility, and secondly whether it was possible, given that overall intention, that the maintenance staff could be said to be enforcing that intention to a degree even Mr. Doak found excessive—and in that case, which interpretation, the maintenance staff’s or Mr. Doak’s, should have priority. I’d be willing to stipulate to everything you’ve said, in other words. I’d just say that it doesn’t address what’s interesting about Sean’s question.
The real question that Sean’s question brings up, in other words, is a philosophical one: Mr. Doak could be said to be proposing a theory about golf course design—viz., that it is a more enjoyable game with higher variability in scoring. That’s a solid proposition—it describes a position that’s clearly distinguishable from any other position— but one that cannot really be measured empirically: even if we could just take a survey of every golfer who played courses who played courses designed according to that theory and those courses designed according to the other sort, it isn’t clear that said evidence would settle the question. (The numbers could change over time.) Now, Mr. Doak, or yourself, could simply refuse to engage in the question at all by just saying that all golf courses are sui generis, but to my mind that’s begging the question. Of course, it’s entirely understandable that Mr. Doak would wish to be vague on the point—he does have further assignments to pursue—but it seems to me that even prior to the above, the real point is that Mr. Doak, among other people, is raising the bar for golf architecture because he is revealing it to be on a par with other sorts of architecture: that is, capable of bearing sustained mental investigation. Anyway, that’s what I find interesting about Mr. Doak’s work: that it raises questions that rise to the level of art.
Maybe you feel differently.
Joe