Part two.
Tell me more about your affection for Pinehurst #2, and the influence it had upon you. PD: Yes, it’s always been my biggest influence in the United States. Of course they have modified it a lot since I played there, but I really liked the old course when I played it in the 1940s and 50s. It is all on sandhills. It’s an unusual area for the United States—the sand goes down for 50 or 100 feet. All the little rolls and contours are able to drain. You can shape so much easier with sand and get so many variations. You know, I have always thought that the great golf courses in the world are built primarily on a sand base.
I remember after the war, I was stationed back at Fort Bragg, which is just north of Pinehurst. When I had the time, I would do some work on the golf course. And every day some of the officers wanted to play golf. They thought I could play a little, so we played Pinehurst. I played it just about every day for six months until I was discharged in 1946. We were probably four of the better golfers in the area, so as a buck-private, working at the course, I got to know Donald Ross a little bit. He would follow us around for five or six holes, always accompanied by this old fellow named J.C. Penney. Now, we all knew who J.C. Penney was, but at that time, none of the other three guys had any idea who Mr. Ross was—and that was right at the height of his career. Anyway, his legacy has certainly grown since that time. When I played there in the 40s there was nothing subtle about it. We were playing with the old Spalding Dot or Crowflight and the clubs were made before the war. It was a bearcat of a golf course. Well, equipment has changed and they’ve gone on to revamp the thing three or four times now. They’ve gone back and forth from bent to Bermuda. I’ve always maintained that if Donald Ross could crawl out of his grave and watch someone hit a drive and a nine iron to the first green, he would move the tee back into the parking lot. When he finished Pinehurst in the 1930s, he had no thought of building a subtle golf course. So the subtleties have come after his death. Then again, he lived there and there aren’t enough fingers on your hand to count the times he modified the greens himself after watching people play.
How was he able to be so profilic in that era? PD: It is interesting that there were four brothers who worked for him, the Baxter boys. And the youngest brother ended up working for me on the construction of Teeth of the Dog. I’ve never seen it written anyplace—but on every one of the famous courses that Mr. Ross built, one of the Baxters showed up to supervise the construction. It took them a few years to do each course, so they couldn’t do all 600, or however many courses Mr. Ross designed. He did many routings on courses that he never saw—it would have been impossible for him to see all of them from the back of a train. But the courses where the Baxter boys showed up were his best. They were good players, Scottish professionals. They did Oakland Hills, Oak Hill, Salem, and others. You don’t hear about the other 200 or 300 courses.
I’ve got to imagine when they built courses in The Golden Era the issues of playability for average golfers never factored into their discussions. PD: Probably not. I recently returned to the Des Moines Golf & Country Club where I built one of their two courses 40 years ago. The club hosted what was probably the most successful U.S. Senior Open Championship ever, in 1999. I believe they had over 150,000 spectators throughout the week. Anyway, these 40-year-old greens were so severe I nearly fainted. Yet, at the time I built them, greens never rolled faster than six or seven on the Stimpmeter. I had no idea that greens would someday evolve to become as quick as they do now. I’m sure those designers had no idea that their greens would someday be cut at one-eighth of an inch.
It's amazing the extent to which the game has changed in your lifetime. PD: The game of golf has changed dramatically. I understand it has always been changing from the days of the gutta percha ball, but it’s done so more dramatically—or at least I think it has—in the last 10 or 12 years. It hasn’t been just the golf ball or the equipment, but maintenance. Ten years ago, I never heard of a green over nine on the Stimpmeter. Nowadays, at most country clubs, people think the course isn’t in good shape if the greens don’t roll 10 or 11. And now the fairways are cut shorter than ever. I’ve gone back to the Tournament Players Club at Sawgrass to revamp the course three times now and all I do is to keep softening the greens. Where they once pitched two inches every 10 feet, now I’ve reduced it to an inch and-a-half—or more like an inch and-a-quarter. Where I used shape a large contour through a green, which would drop off a foot in 10 feet, now it’s down to five inches in 10 feet. I have to do it, because I know they are going to cut the greens as fast as they do. Otherwise, the ball wouldn’t stay on the green.
Does that bode well for course architecture? PD: This trend reflects the championship standards put forth by the governing bodies, particularly the United States Golf Association. When the USGA publicizes that its greens will run at 10, 11 or 12 for their championships, the greens chairman at every country club decides his club must have greens at the same standard. All they have done, as far as I’m concerned, is escalate the maintenance costs dramatically. And the problem manifests itself in other ways. With the greens so fast, pace of play has become slower, since most ordinary golfers can’t putt them. But if a client comes to me with the intention of building a course for a pro tournament, I have to take into consideration the realities on the ground and the demand for green speed from the PGA Tour and the USGA. Even Harbor Town hasn’t gone untouched. I’ve gone back three times to slow them down, and those greens weren’t very severe to start with, so I didn’t need to slow them down much. Now I have to use laser levels to get green contours right. I used to eyeball everything in, but I can’t do that anymore because the difference is so subtle.
What would be your suggestions? PD: Well, here’s something that the USGA may have never taken into consideration, or perhaps they have forgotten. Ben Hogan won the US Open at Merion in 1950 and they claim those were the fastest greens in the world. But I’ve studied the pictures from that tournament and calculated that they rolled about six. One of my last conversations with Sam Snead was about just that, even though he didn’t believe me. The Open greens in those days only rolled six or seven. They were cut at a quarter of an inch. I know that as a fact because I was always interested in the agronomics of a golf course, even then. After they were cut, the greens were rolled and the blade would fall, so they looked smooth, much like a green today. But it wasn’t an eighth of an inch; it was a quarter. At that length, it’s easier to grow grass and the roots go down better. But after rolling them, downhill putts rolled faster than any green played today. Downhill and down grain, they were very, very fast. But coming back into the grain, and uphill was as slow as molasses. That was a part of the game. Hogan always used to leave the ball on the low side of the hole, so he was always putting into the grain. That was part of his strategy and his ability as a shotmaker. And all the other players would try to do the same because they knew that any putts downhill and downgrain were almost impossible to get close. It required the player to have more ability to putt then than they do today.
Hasn’t an old element of the game been lost when bunkers were unpredictable—why are the pros so concerned with having the venues be identical from week to week? PD: Anyone who watches golf on television knows these professionals can play out of the bunkers better than they can out of the rough. It has come to the point where every bunker is maintained identically from week to week. The same sand, the same texture, the same feel, and so forth. I think Jack Nicklaus did a good thing by introducing the furrows to the bunkers at the Memorial a few years ago. The experiment lasted only one year, of course. The slight furrowing caused a complete consternation from the tour players, and Nicklaus backed down. The USGA could furrow the bunkers for a professional tournament and the day after the pros leave, return them to normal. The bunkers would then become true hazards. Right now, bunkers are only a hazard to the higher handicap player.
What other changes in courses have you seen over the years? PD: The main thing is the maintenance of golf courses. I can speak as an expert, because I got into this business from a maintenance point of view. Anyway, the way we cut fairways, the way we cut greens, everything has changed tremendously. The way they cut the fairways now at under a half-inch, you have to contour your fairways and drain them almost like a putting green. And physics says that unless you put linoleum down, there’s no way to make the greens any faster. When we played golf at the country club in Annapolis, it had bluegrass and fescues and buck corn and dandelions out there, and that was an accepted thing for a very high quality club in 1950. Now, the clubs will manicure and maintain the courses to compete with the Muirfields, just to stay alive. That’s the way it is. As a result, I think we’ve lost a great deal of the game—not with the club players but with the great players. You can’t seprate the great players anymore, because the golf shots required on the courses today are too much alike. All of the golf courses they play today are par 68, because of the ability to reach the par 5’s in two. They’re hitting to the par 5’s the same way Hogan, Nelson and the other great players of the past hit to the par 4’s. I can remember very distinctly when Ben Hogan played an exhibition in Indianapolis in the early 1950s. He was talking about the great par 5’s in golf, and he mentioned the 10th hole at Pinehurst #2. He said he had to hit a drive on a certain side of the fairway and really hit a three wood to be able to hit soft eight or nine iron shot to the green. And that’s what he considered a good par 5. Today, the pros talk about a great par 5 because they can hit a good drive into the fairway and go for the green with a four or five iron. Now that’s the change of time.