This Ocean Course - Such Ambivalence

[Tommy Williamsen]

My wife played with me on our three plays. She is pretty straight but not long. She got around just fine. I found holes 10-14 the most difficult, but I had to manage my game and expectations on those holes. Choose the correct tees. Yet, I would not like a steady diet of it.

[George Pazin]

I haven't posted in awhile. But I will say, watching the play this week, and weekend, quite a bit of it, I thought briefly about starting a thread called "How do you like your hard courses?"


For me, personally, there's hard that is scorecard hard - and The Ocean Course fits that to a t - which basically means, how high of score are you going to shoot? When you have many many opportunities for penalty drops, as TOC does, then you are naturally going to card a higher than normal number.


For me personally, I prefer a course that doesn't emphasize penalties, but instead asks each shot to be exacting, if one seeks to minimize score. I don't see TOC at Kiawah as ranking high in this regard.


But hey, I'm the one person on here who criticises Saint Pete. And maybe that is ok, maybe I'm the heretic and he's the saint. I don't have problem with that.


That's where my ambivalence with TOC lies. I prefer courses that ask special shots and don't require penalty shots to boost their ratings.


But what do I know, I'm a lousy golfer.


I will say, I'm working on that, JK. You correctly observed poor golf is a choice, and I'm finally grasping that and attacking it. So maybe I'll feel differently in a year or two.

[Peter Pallotta]

Good to see you, George.

Maybe VK's ambivalence is exactly what we should expect in 2021, in regards an exemplary championship test like The Ocean Course.

When a great but almost 51 year old pro can bomb one 366 yards straight down the middle, and when 7 irons have the lofts of the old 5 irons but launch & land like yesterday's 9 irons, is there any reason that a custom-built tour level venue designed to challenge precisely that type of player using that type of equipment would/could appeal to the rest of us in any deep or meaningful way?

It was a wonderful tournament, on a course that wasn't tricked up at all, and the best golfer won -- having been tested and proven worthy. That's the positive; that's what we want in major championships. The negative perhaps is the effective bifurcation of the game of golf that TOC both acknowledges and accentuates, in very stark terms. Hence our understandable ambivalence.

Hope you've been well, or at least as well as anyone could be during these stressful and unsettled times.

[JMEvensky]

George P, drop in more often.

[Matt Kardash]

I say the following with a very straight face. I would rather watch the pros play a major at the Ocean course than basically any other course. At least with the Ocean Course nothing is tricked up. It doesn't rely on narrowing fairways or insane rough. The course basically plays as is for everyday resort play. Watching pros play a 6700 yard Merion with 20 yard fairways, insane rough and lightening greens is not my cup of tea for a championship test.
I feel like golf course design enthusiasts are some of the most conservative people around. We often long for how things used to be, instead of accept what currently is. Merion is undoubtedly a great course, a better course than the Ocean Course for 99% of the golfing public, but it has no place in today's modern professional game. For better or worse, the Ocean Course is the perfect professional venue in 2021.

[Mike Sweeney]

Mr. Dye’s courses are having quite a year: the PGA and Ryder Cup plus of course the TPC.

Has he ever hosted the US Open and if not, why? Has to be intentional on someones part.

Name a "great" Pete Dye course near a population base that peaks in June. I am genuinely asking and I am guessing The Golf Club is not going to host anything. Whistling Straights in June? Again, I am asking...

[Kalen Braley]

I say the following with a very straight face. I would rather watch the pros play a major at the Ocean course than basically any other course. At least with the Ocean Course nothing is tricked up. It doesn't rely on narrowing fairways or insane rough. The course basically plays as is for everyday resort play. Watching pros play a 6700 yard Merion with 20 yard fairways, insane rough and lightening greens is not my cup of tea for a championship test.
I feel like golf course design enthusiasts are some of the most conservative people around. We often long for how things used to be, instead of accept what currently is. Merion is undoubtedly a great course, a better course than the Ocean Course for 99% of the golfing public, but it has no place in today's modern professional game. For better or worse, the Ocean Course is the perfect professional venue in 2021.

Matt,

Its all in how you define tricked up I guess.

- 6 par 4s that are near 500 yards or longer, and in day to day play, half of which were playing into the wind.
- 3 par 3s over 210 yards and two of them played to perched-up greens. And 17, if that's not a tricked up hole I don't know what is.  From the distance they played it, i'm guessing more than a few were thinking "where in the hell do I hit it?
- Long and gnarly gunch if you were a fair bit offline, which was also easy to do in those wind conditions, and far worse than any maintained rough I've seen.

[Matt Kardash]

I say the following with a very straight face. I would rather watch the pros play a major at the Ocean course than basically any other course. At least with the Ocean Course nothing is tricked up. It doesn't rely on narrowing fairways or insane rough. The course basically plays as is for everyday resort play. Watching pros play a 6700 yard Merion with 20 yard fairways, insane rough and lightening greens is not my cup of tea for a championship test.
I feel like golf course design enthusiasts are some of the most conservative people around. We often long for how things used to be, instead of accept what currently is. Merion is undoubtedly a great course, a better course than the Ocean Course for 99% of the golfing public, but it has no place in today's modern professional game. For better or worse, the Ocean Course is the perfect professional venue in 2021.

Matt,

Its all in how you define tricked up I guess.

- 6 par 4s that are near 500 yards or longer, and in day to day play, half of which were playing into the wind.
- 3 par 3s over 210 yards and two of them played to perched-up greens. And 17, if that's not a tricked up hole I don't know what is.  From the distance they played it, i'm guessing more than a few were thinking "where in the hell do I hit it?
- Long and gnarly gunch if you were a fair bit offline, which was also easy to do in those wind conditions, and far worse than any maintained rough I've seen.

On a windy site the yardage is just a number.

To begin with, let's get this straight, 500 yards is not even a long par 4 anymore to the pro. In a vacuum it is a driver and a 6 iron to the average tour pro. So you can get that out of your head right away.
Just to prove my point, even when those 500 yard holes were played into a 20 mph wind, the players still were hitting the greens with 3 or 4 irons. I don't see anything extreme about that. The other half of those 500 yard holes were playing downwind and could be hit with a short iron.

I watched the coverage all week and would not say hitting any of the par 3 greens was unfair. The PGA did a good job of matching the tee with the wind, keeping the yardage appropriate. It wasn't gimmicky or over the top.
Are Pacific Dunes and Sand Hills also "tricked up" because there is gnarly gunch when you go offline? The playing corrdiors at the Ocean Course are very wide. I  just used Google Earth to find out. They are anywhere between 65 and 90 yards "gunch to gunch". Width is not the issue.

[Jason Thurman]

Kalen, you're either underrating the pros' games, or asking for a test unbefitting of a major championship.


500 yard par 4s are the norm for high level golf now. You and I probably both find that a little bit ridiculous, but we can't deny that those holes have become a staple of major championships for obvious reasons, (e.g., the fact that today's ball speeds are really high).


Likewise, 200-240 for the pros is basically like 150-190 for you and me - in other words, a pretty good blend of par 3 yardages. I saw long irons, middle irons, and 8 irons.


And there's nobody on Tour who gets defeatist at seeing a water-laden par 3 like 17 at The Ocean. That's exclusively the domain of GCA dorks like us.


As for the gunch, these guys get spotters. The gunch gave us a great moment of consternation followed by catharsis down the stretch just yesterday. Did you even watch? Were you not entertained?


Matt makes a good point. Merion's presentation a few years back was absolutely ridiculous. I would not have wanted to play it, even from 6000 yards, in those US Open conditions with stupidly narrowed fairways, stupidly high rough, and stupidly fast greens to compensate for its lack of professionally-challenging tee-to-green difficulty. But I think I could've done pretty well from those 6200 yard tees at The Ocean in yesterday's conditions.


To be clear, I played well yesterday. Damn near well enough to get kicked out of my regular foursome. It would've been a good day to go toe-to-toe (from 6200 yards, getting my strokes) with a major championship venue set up like a golf course, rather than set up like a test.

[Erik J. Barzeski]

I don't know where it ranks on the big lists, the Guide or your own, but there's got to be at least 200 courses you genuinely want to play and/or see for yourself before this one, no?  I mean that's still pretty high, given the number of fun memorable courses and the stretch to say that you'll play even 100 of your favorites, but a Top 50/100 course?  How?

Have you played it?

I'd rank it relatively highly. Good challenge, typical Pete Dye - he tempts you into taking on shots you shouldn't, but if you pull it off, you're rewarded. If you don't, you can play safe. And sometimes, if you take the easier first shot, you face a more difficult second shot.

I've enjoyed thinking my way around both times I've played it.

[Peter Pallotta]

The always insightful Padraig Harrington said an interesting thing is his post- round interview, ie that he thought the course & set up one of the very best he'd ever seen, and that he wished they played a course like TOC every week, because he plays them much better than he does a regular-run of the mill Tour stop/venue. Then today, in an article in Golf Digest, it was noted that KH Lee shot 25 under to win the Nelson at TPC Craig Ranch, and then shot 78-77 at Kiawah to miss the cut by six; whereas Koepka missed the cut at the Nelson and then never left the leaderboard at the PGA. There does seem to be something to be said for top-flight courses producing top-flight winners.

[Dave McCollum]

Shit, just wrote a long post about how "golfy" and fantastic it looked on TV.  Then this crappy software ate it.  Did that the last time I tried too.   I can't remember seeing a golf broadcast that conveyed such an ideal landscape to while away a day playing a game, at least to a non golfer.  Wedged in between the sea and salt marshes full of gators, flights of pelicans overhead, a pallet of colors moving in the breeze, McMansions far away across the marshes, sunlight shifting over the dunes throughout the day, on and on.  Beautiful.


Different story for a golfer plopping down $465 for green fees.  I do think it would be fun with the right guys playing match play for money.  Lots of laughs and stories to tell afterwards in the bar.  Start with 6 marked balls and see who can finish without reaching for the Sharpie.  Or watch a match between a wily old golfer who knows his game and limitations against a long hitting low capper who plays with pencil and card on easy courses and brags about how much he's lowered his cap.  Sounds like a bucket list item to me.


For me, I wouldn't remember how much I paid, how many balls I lost, or what I shot.  I sure as hell wouldn't play stroke play.  I don't think I'd forget that stunning strip of land and the laughs we had seeing somebody's 8 nip his opponent's 9.  It looked like the kind of course where, if I were out of the hole, I would be happy to pick up and stroll on enjoying the views.  If my golf pals asked me to go and I could, why not?


Like Augusta, we don't need many of these masterpiece designs, these Sistine Chapels of golf.  We clearly don't need courses so frigging hard that the best players on the planet are getting beat up and very good club pros are shooting in the 80's and 90's.  But I found it immensely enjoyable watching these guys play this over-the-top course winding through alligator infested swamps and blowing dunes.               

[John Nixon]

Name a "great" Pete Dye course near a population base that peaks in June. I am genuinely asking and I am guessing The Golf Club is not going to host anything. Whistling Straights in June? Again, I am asking...

Crooked Stick

[Matt Kardash]

Name a "great" Pete Dye course near a population base that peaks in June. I am genuinely asking and I am guessing The Golf Club is not going to host anything. Whistling Straights in June? Again, I am asking...

Crooked Stick

Oak Tree National.

[Jerry Kluger]

What I saw was a course which challenges the golfer to make a decision of how to play a hole or shot and then do it. Pete Dye gave them all types of shots and angles to deal with and the holes are mostly raised up so falling off the fairly into the sandy areas can make approach shots really difficult.  13 is a tough hole and the mistakes were made to the wrong side - water - which surprised me quite a bit.

[Joel Zuckerman]

Mr. Dye’s courses are having quite a year: the PGA and Ryder Cup plus of course the TPC.

Has he ever hosted the US Open and if not, why? Has to be intentional on someones part.

My understanding is that Pete and the bluecoats at the USGA Always had something of a contentious relationship. Pete was disdainful of their stuffy and autocratic manner, and would tweak them on a regular basis, both publicly and privately.
Of course, he was too significant a figure to be shut out entirely, which is why his courses have hosted Senior Opens, Women’s Opens and US Amateurs.  But the powers that be never wanted to reward him with the Big Enchilada.

[Jeff_Brauer]

I hope it wasn't that petty, but I could see Mr. Dye rubbing the USGA the wrong way.


I think more of it is that many prefer to see big tourneys on old classic courses.  The USGA has only recently changed its way due to the bruhaha over private clubs, and has begun to use public access courses like Chambers Bay.  Even Bethpage was more anticipated because it was an old Tilly, even if public.


The PGA, always in need of an identity after scotching match play, seems to have taken a chance on more modern courses, which I thought was at least partially to differentiate themselves.  If they use old courses, they are viewed by many as the US Open light, perhaps.


Not to mention, perhaps their players (some PGA, some PGA Tour) probably didn't want "their" championship set up according to traditional USGA standards, which they don't care for due to higher scoring.


All of the above just my guess.

[Lou_Duran]

George Pazin and Joel Zuckerman brought out of the woodwork by TOC!  That says a lot.


Jay Mickle and I played TOC on the same day, but apparently at different times.  We had wind and a rain/lightening delay.  The course actually was rather friendly that day.


On another occasion some 20 years ago, a number of us played TOC in an outing under rather difficult conditions.  Three of us played an extra round at Turtle Point and around the 15th or 16th hole, Pete Dye comes up from behind us and walks the rest of the way in with us (this caused quite a commotion for one of our players).  Pete fished my Hogan Apex irons out of my bag and made some small swings with them, remarking what great clubs they were (he later told me he owned a set and had been playing Hogan irons much of his life).


We talked a bit about TOC's reputation for being very difficult and while he acknowledged that it could be, he added that every hole had a safe side.  Essentially, the golfer was invited to chew what he could, or play more conservatively.  I told him that I had yet to identify the prudent part of the course and he just laughed.  Mike Cirba was one of the three other players (Mike Vegis was our host) and he can set the record straight if my memory is unclear.


I've played quite a few Pete Dye courses over the years.  TOC is not my favorite, but I hope to play it a few more times before I am done.  Whistling Straight was a great surprise and I look forward to the Ryder Cup there this year.  Crooked Stick and Long Cove IMO do not get the recognition they deserve.  His course at Colleton River Plantation is very good, and Oak Tree is a great challenge that I've yet to play well, but respect a lot.  With the possible exception of Harbour Town, all Dye courses I've played can be nightmares when the wind is blowing much more than 15 mph.     

[Tom_Doak]

Has he ever hosted the US Open and if not, why? Has to be intentional on someones part.

My understanding is that Pete and the bluecoats at the USGA Always had something of a contentious relationship. Pete was disdainful of their stuffy and autocratic manner, and would tweak them on a regular basis, both publicly and privately.
Of course, he was too significant a figure to be shut out entirely, which is why his courses have hosted Senior Opens, Women’s Opens and US Amateurs.  But the powers that be never wanted to reward him with the Big Enchilada.

It was a control battle, pure and simple.  The USGA wants to be in total control of the US Open and they didn't trust Pete to stay out of it.


I've been told by more than one reliable source that there was a meeting at Crooked Stick in the '80s to finalize a deal to host the U.S. Open, but that Pete essentially scuttled it by revealing his plans for everything he wanted to do to get the course ready, which scared them off.  At that point, the USGA backed away, Pete made his changes, and then the PGA committed to going there for 1991.


And it was on the Wednesday of that PGA that Pete stripped the sod off the tee the PGA intended to use on one of the holes, to force them to go back to his new back tee, instead.     But the PGA officials reacted by moving the tee further forward, instead of letting Pete get his way.


Even before that, though, Mr. Dye was not a big fan of the USGA.  He thought the Green Section didn't advise clubs in the best interest of the game, and that they dropped the ball on regulating equipment when they needed to do something.  All of that went back at least as far as my time working for him in 1981-85.

[Tom_Doak]

By the way, I don't get all the talk about how this course is SO LONG. On Golf Channel they did an analysis and they basically acknowledged that 7800 yards today is about the same as 6900 yards in the 1960s. I don't think another would have said in 1968 that 6900 yards was too much golf course from the back tees.

Why don't they ever bring up that graphic when they are talking about whether the golf ball needs to be changed?   

[Matt Kardash]

Has he ever hosted the US Open and if not, why? Has to be intentional on someones part.

My understanding is that Pete and the bluecoats at the USGA Always had something of a contentious relationship. Pete was disdainful of their stuffy and autocratic manner, and would tweak them on a regular basis, both publicly and privately.
Of course, he was too significant a figure to be shut out entirely, which is why his courses have hosted Senior Opens, Women’s Opens and US Amateurs.  But the powers that be never wanted to reward him with the Big Enchilada.

And it was on the Wednesday of that PGA that Pete stripped the sod off the tee the PGA intended to use on one of the holes, to force them to go back to his new back tee, instead.     .

Wow, what a legend! 

[Criss Titschinger]

As usual, I enter a thread that has long since seen its discussion wane. It's been a crazy, largely golf-less spring. what can I say?

As the resident GCA mid-handicap player, my hard course bar will always be Wolf Run; may it rest in peace. On that course, I felt that I needed to focus on every tee shot and approach to avoid a lost ball. Every. Single. One. When I played Kiawah Ocean in 2018, I did not feel that way at all. Is there a lot of danger around Kiawah? Yes. However, most of the fairways are pretty wide, and here is a right place to miss and a wrong place to miss, and it depends on what shot you want to attempt.

Yes, we had a lighter breeze during my round. We were with the wind 1-4, then 15-18; with 6-13 into it. And yes, there were a few shots where you really needed to focus. But at no point did I feel this course was nearly as overbearing as Wolf Run was. And hole for hole, I played much better golf at Wolf Run than I did at Kiawah.

For me, Kiawah Ocean is classic Dye at its best, in an incredible environment. Would I like the course as much if it were in-land? I doubt know, and that ultimately doesn't matter. You ARE by the ocean, and you hear it from every hole. There are plenty of interesting shots. The greens were a bit on the slower side, but that's done with reason; it's a resort course for most of its existence. As my caddie said, "If they were much quicker, we'd by here all day".

Would I plop rack rate again to play it? Probably not. However, seeing it again during the PGA had me really thinking about it. The current state of my game though would suggest I should come back another time.