[Garland Bayley]

Garland,

I'm still waiting for a response to the following question, and I will make it my question, so you don't try to deflect to Mark: 

"How would two players of varying ability play heads up on a course they've never played before without Handicaps?"

Well you size them up by what they say, invite them to Wine Valley, play them straight up, and close them out on the 18th hole even though they have claimed a handicap 6 strokes lower than your official USGA handicap.

[Pete_Pittock]

Probably the way they did it a hundred years ago.  Or watch the other warm up. Negotiate on the 1st tee. Play a short match, either 3 or six hole, renegotiate ad infinitum. Usually the best negotiator wins. You can decide if you want to again play with them.

[Garland Bayley]

...
"How would two players of varying ability play heads up on a course they've never played before without Handicaps?"

Seriously Kalen, your question doesn't make a lot of sense. No one has been saying people should play heads up. At least my understanding is that means no handicap is applied. The only mention of heads up was of our match at Wine Valley. Please rephrase.

[Garland Bayley]

Probably the way they did it a hundred years ago.  Or watch the other warm up. Negotiate on the 1st tee. Play a short match, either 3 or six hole, renegotiate ad infinitum. Usually the best negotiator wins. You can decide if you want to again play with them.

You know your average score at your home course, you ask your opponent their average score at their home course. You ask what the length they play at. You find the difference in lengths, and adjust scores accordingly. Say perhaps one stroke per 150 yards. In match play as scoring averages go up holes are won sometimes by more than one stroke. So for low average scores, you might give a stroke for every stroke difference between effective averages, for higher handicaps, you might give 2/3 stroke for every stroke difference between effective averages. Like I wrote earlier, you negotiate. It has been going on for ages.

As I noted earlier, Mark was saying he didn't know how to handicap without par. The negotiation described above doesn't use par. The USGA doesn't use par. My primary motive was to dis-spell the notion that par is necessary for handicaps.

[Garland Bayley]

Mike B,
The other point I want to make (I am sure you already get this) is that you should consider setting up your golf course so more golfers get to experience what a "one shot" hole is and what a "two shot" hole is and so on.  If you don't want to call for example the one shot holes par threes, so be it.  I really don't care.  Golfers will call them what they want (you can figure out handicaps on your own)     


Mark

One shot holes, two shot holes, ...  Now you are letting silly washed up academics like John Low influence your thinking. Don't you know that academics like him will be the death of golf? Don't you know that good players laughed at guys like MacKenzie when he espoused such nonsense while making his fifth stroke from short of the green on what he was calling a two shot hole?

[Garland Bayley]

... Correct me if I'm wrong about this but isn't a course based on the length of the course and difficulty of the obstacles, hazards, etc. 
That is my understanding.

Is a course rating derived from adding up the adjusted 'pars' for the eighteen separate holes? 
I assumed they had a rating for each hole. I talked to the Oregon Golf Association head rater about this last year when we were deciding stroke allocation indexes for our course. They have no individual hole ratings. All their factors are plugged into their formula that gives the course rating, without giving individual hole ratings.
...

[Mike Baillie]

Re: Mark F's comment of one shot holes, two shot holes, etc.

The original architect Rene M did a lot of target golf, in effect each shot in regulation tee to green to a specific area.  While both Ian Andrew and Doug Carrick minimized some at our course, what I think about for a novice like my wife is to get her tee shot to a given area then a better chance to advance the next one some where else decent.  If she gets on a par 4 in four and par 5 in five she is happy.  Too easy for her now to get trapped in a spot where basically she has no real play.  The design can minimize or avoid 'trouble' yet still be cost effective - construction & maintenance

In the end there are several methods to achieve that as I think about St Andrew's East:
- forward tee and / or on a favorable line of play to more easily avoid the hazards
- address the valid Confidential Guide critique of 'lots of extraneous bunkers' which we are doing
- our hilly terrain can enable a 'speed slot' so tee shots can run out further in cases where a forward tee not as possible

What I have learned from the posts the last ten days is to not get hung up on the distance per se.  Rather, whether it is older gentlemen, ladies or forward tees, how can the hole be designed from the starting spot to make it reasonable that they get their tee shot to a reasonable place to play from.  Then they have a decent chance to play the hole from there.

 There is a par 4 where the second shot is virtually impossible for the novice.  It will be a while until we get to that hole.

[Mark_Fine]

Mike B,
Those are all good goals to strive for.  Hopefully what also happens in the future is your wife can get to some of those holes in a lot fewer shots.  The game gets long and tiresome hitting that many balls.  It is why many only play nine holes as they are hitting as many shots as some of us do playing 18. 

[Kalen Braley]

Garland,

I'm still waiting for a response to the following question, and I will make it my question, so you don't try to deflect to Mark: 

"How would two players of varying ability play heads up on a course they've never played before without Handicaps?"

Well you size them up by what they say, invite them to Wine Valley, play them straight up, and close them out on the 18th hole even though they have claimed a handicap 6 strokes lower than your official USGA handicap.

 

Garland,

I didn't bring it up before, but now that's it been over a decade... I was still recovering from tweaking my back a week earlier.  Given I could barely get out of bed those first couple of days, it was a minor miracle I could swing a club much less play 18 at Wine Valley.

But I made up for it with a proper thrashing in Canada a couple years later at SageBrush.  How bad did I beat you again?  7 and 6? 

[Garland Bayley]

Kalen,
Don't expect a response because he doesn't have a good answer.

The only reason you would arrogantly state that I don't have a good answer is because you are so myopic that you can't imagine a good answer so your ego  convinces you that no one else could have a good answer. I have a good answer, which is not the answer I gave above. You will not get my good answer. I was hoping you were creative enough to at least suggest something like I suggested above. You failed that test miserably.

[Pete_Pittock]

BTW, when we wanted to set the stroke index numbers for our course, I thought it would be an easy task. I suggested we just ask the Oregon Golf Association for the stroke rating for each hole. Turns out they cannot provide that. Their rating system (USGA's) does not break a course down into individual holes. Their factors just go into calculating the 18 hole numbers.

I guess that is why they did not use such a method to designate how to do it in their handicap reference manual.

Garland,
    When my course visited handicapping holes at the beginning of last year we received printouts from the Oregon Golf Association.
    One column was "difficulty value" defined as a calculated value based on the recommended formula within Appendix E of the Rules of handicapping. This value represents the combined strokes over par for scratch and bogey players. It also ranked them and gave a suggested even/odd distribution.
    These were provided for every recognized tee combination/course rated by the OGA, so we got 16 (3 women, 5 men on both North and South). The challenge was trying to hybridize them so that people playing from different tees would have the same alllocation.

[Mark_Fine]

As I stated Kalen, you won't get an answer to "your" question.   

[Garland Bayley]

BTW, when we wanted to set the stroke index numbers for our course, I thought it would be an easy task. I suggested we just ask the Oregon Golf Association for the stroke rating for each hole. Turns out they cannot provide that. Their rating system (USGA's) does not break a course down into individual holes. Their factors just go into calculating the 18 hole numbers.

I guess that is why they did not use such a method to designate how to do it in their handicap reference manual.

Garland,
    When my course visited handicapping holes at the beginning of last year we received printouts from the Oregon Golf Association.
    One column was "difficulty value" defined as a calculated value based on the recommended formula within Appendix E of the Rules of handicapping. This value represents the combined strokes over par for scratch and bogey players. It also ranked them and gave a suggested even/odd distribution.
    These were provided for every recognized tee combination/course rated by the OGA, so we got 16 (3 women, 5 men on both North and South). The challenge was trying to hybridize them so that people playing from different tees would have the same alllocation.

Thanks Pete,

I see that now. I see we got that data from OGA, but we ignored it, because it didn't look like it was based in realty. Our 219 yard button hook par 4 was rated one of the most difficult. Obviously it is the most eagled hole on our course (6 iron, flip wedge for me), but yet they had it rated more difficult than the hole that became #1 handicap after calculating difficulty from actual scores collected by the pro shop. In providing that, they did not provide the rating numbers (scratch and bogey) used in that formula. When I queried OGA about it, Ms. Yoder said they didn't have hole by hole rating numbers. Perhaps she didn't understand my question.

[Steve Wilson]

So Pete,


Having read your response to Garland, it seems likely you can answer this question.
Is a course rating is the sum of difficulty of the individual holes?


Thanks in advance.

[Garland Bayley]

Garland,
I stand corrected.  You found one course out of 35,000 
...

In response to:

Like it or not no course is designed today without the concept of par in mind. 
Oh, Really?!?!
https://thegolfersjournal.libsyn.com/episode-45-the-war-on-par-ft-gil-hanse

...

It seems to me that the following design proposal in the quote below was done with little regard to par. Tom would have to chime in on his opinion on that. Par was applied after the hole lengths were chosen. There have been at least two other amateur (one from Jason) suggestions for this same method on the website. One goal being to stop the proliferation of tees. Each person will play the hole for how it matches their game, not to reach the holes in one, two, or three shots.

Another goal would be to find the best golf holes on the property regardless of any par designations.

I would further suggest that there may be more architects designing without much regard for par than Mark would suggest. It the architects goal is to find the best holes possible, then wouldn't he find the holes and then apply par designations after settling on the holes. It seems to me that if everyone were demanding the best match play courses, then they would get courses with the best holes, not courses that matched a certain par profile. Haven't we been discussing the designers that have a goal of producing two par 36 nines with 2 par 5s and two par 3s on each, as being designers from the dark ages?

Was Tom Doak designing for par when he came up with the highly unusual par sequence for Pacific Dunes?

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.

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