In order to consider the relevancy of Hunter's book, it seems to me you have to define what is relevant or irrelevant today.
1. Links land available for development is exceedingly rare. What he cherishes is just not available. Even nonlinks, better land for golf courses is in limited supply, especially near population centers.
2. Equipment development has made a great disparity between what the top golfers can do, and what the average golfer can. The best equipment is mostly taken advantage of by the best players. Even among average golfers the disparity is growing.
3. Golf carts let 90 year olds continue to play the game.
4. There is a strong desire or need to get more women playing the game.
5. IMO building the trend of building many sets of tees to accommodate a large disparity in players is a losing strategy.
You may ask, who is addressing this? Perhaps Mike Nuzzo is.
Tom
I thought you had seen a course with that approach?
See below
Jason
I wrote an essay about ideal yardages in the soon to be released Golf Architecture Volume 6 compiled by Paul Daley
Here is a sneak peek:
Wolf Point:
*these yardages are theoretical - you still play from where you want
Let us consider how the yardages at Wolf Point would translate to par for the USGA scratch and bogey golfers.
Scratch Male Par/Approach Scratch Female Par/Approach Bogey Male Par/Approach Bogey Female Par/Approach
139 3/139 3/139 3/139 3/139
168 3 /168 3 /168 3 /168 4/18
192 3/192 3 /192 3 /192 4/42
220 3/220 4/10 4/20 4/70
271 4/21 4/61 4/71 4/121
282 4/32 4/72 4/82 5/2
331 4/81 4/121 4/131 5/51
341 4/91 4/131 4/141 5/61
359 4/109 4/149 4/159 5/79
384 4/134 4/174 5/14 5/104
399 4/149 4/189 5/29 5/119
423 4/173 5/23 5/53 6/13
434 4/184 5/34 5/64 6/24
444 4/194 5/44 5/74 6/34
485 5/15 5/85 5/115 6/75
521 5/51 5/121 5/151 6/111
541 5/71 5/141 6/1 7/1
584 5/114 5/184 6/44 7/44
72 76 80 93
Let us suggest that birdie holes could be holes that have an approach shot of 1/2 of the maximum approach shot achievable by the individual type of player. That is for male scratch golfers 220/2=110, for female scratch golfers 190/2=95, for male bogey golfers 170/2=135, and for female bogey golfers 130/2=65. This determines that for male scratch golfers there are 8 birdie holes, for female scratch golfers there are 7 birdie holes, for male bogey golfers there are 12 birdies holes, and for female bogey golfers there are 7 birdie holes.
The spike at 12 birdie holes for the male bogey golfer originates in the length of the holes being skewed a little from uniform to be more standard in relation to the building of golf holes.
Tom Doak has made a proposal that would not have such skewing.
Jason:
For the Rio project I proposed building holes in 30-meter increments, starting from 140m as follows:
Par-3's at 130, 160, 190, 220, 250 m
Par-4's at 280, 310, 340, 370, 400, 430, 460, and 490 m
Par-5's at 520, 550, 580, 610 and 640 m
I think that added up to 7290 m. The numbers on the par-5's seem shockingly long, but, those are what it would take to stop Tour pros from playing them all like par-4 holes.
However, we did not intend to have the course be that long all the time. The other part of our proposal was to move the tees around in 10m increments each day, including having one day where the men played the women's yardage, and one day where the women played the men's. The purpose of that would be to determine how much difference the total length really makes. I'm not convinced it makes all that much difference. For example, if you move up everything 30m from the numbers above, all you've done is exchanged the 640m hole for a 100m hole at the other end of the spectrum ... so you have taken 540m off the total yardage, and reduced par by two shots, exchanging a par-5 for a par-3. Looked at in that light, all these silly renovations of courses for major championships are probably adding less than 0.5 strokes to the overall difficulty of the course.
I would refer you to the thread at
http://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,55136.msg1276937.html#msg1276937to learn where I am coming from.
I will be back with more commentary on Hunter's book.