Peter:
Thinking about "what is" instead of "what should be" is an even harder step for those of us in the business. It is very easy to think that the way we would have done it, is the same as the way it should be done.
A story from my Pete Dye days that I think I've mentioned here once or twice concerns the 18th hole at the TPC of Connecticut [now the TPC at River Highlands, where they play the Hartford event]. It was a renovation of a public course into a tournament venue, and Mr. Dye had recommended the site to the tournament sponsors because the hills provided natural amphitheaters for large galleries.
The 18th hole comes up the biggest natural amphitheater, and the only problem, which arose during construction, was that there was no good place to put a cart path for the non-tournament golfers. There were steep hills on both sides of the fairway, and only one good place to get down to fairway level with the path and then back out up on the side of the hill -- and that one place was where it might be in play for the longer-hitting pros.
Mr. Dye struggled with the decision, but there had to be a path, and ultimately there was only one place to put it. What bothered him was knowing that the players would find fault with the design. "If I was playing for half a million dollars, and there was a chance my drive would hit that path and bounce into trouble and it would cost me the tournament, I would think twice about hitting a driver on the hole," he told me. "But those players will swing away with driver and if they hit the path, they will say it's all my fault."
Or, in other words, the players would not accept what is, as long as they could explain it away.