Now, if you move on to Joe’s actual point in the original post, should the position that scoring IS the game change the way he designs or builds? I say no because you score over whatever is laid in front of you, whether it is hard, challenging, easy or just goofy. So keep on building interesting golf holes for interesting golf shots regardless….
…However Tim seems to indicate - and I know where he’s coming from - that if designers keep on getting fixated on building courses for “fun” and start to forget the sport / game (I.e. scoring), there is a risk that the focus will turn to more and more outlandish features that are designed just to make people smile and laugh. A move to Disneyland golf as some detractors like to call it…. I’ve commented on this a lot before. It seems easy to wow a lot of one time visitors / raters with relatable touchstones to the past (e.g. templates), or even with just a plethora of “fun” shots in and around the greens, or maybe with width for width’s sake so the visitor doesn’t feel overly-challenged. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, as long as the “fun” shots aren’t just enjoyed as some kind of mini-golf beer laugh with the lads, and actually contribute to how good the course is from a scoring / plotting / competitive viewpoint as well.
P.S. Tim, please let us know if I am misrepresenting what you said or are taking it out of context…. I dislike when that happens to me and am really just projecting my own thoughts above.
Ally, yes, you've nailed what I was getting at, and what I thought Joe's OP was about (the semantic "Is golf a game?/Is golf a sport?" argument that has broken out is not of much interest to me, and in any case is off-topic). Thank you for expanding on it.
The bottom line is that someone who has not set out to compete - be it against opponents or just the golf course - is bound to evaluate a golf course fundamentally differently than someone who plays golf as a game/sport. It follows, then, that certain features and holes and courses will resonate differently with the casual/recreational golfer than they will with a competitive one.
I adore Tobacco Road, Tralee, Landmand, Old Toccoa Farm and The Creek Club at Reynolds Lake Oconee (I'd like to see if I put Mammoth Dunes and Gamble Sands into this group once I play them), particularly as golf-flavored land-art projects. However, because they sometimes trade away strong shot values for wild and unusual features, they don't always have a great answer to a question I increasingly find myself asking after I play:
Did this golf course make me want to be a better golfer when I play it next?This question seems less much important to a lot of golfers than it is to me, especially here in the U.S., where golf is (regrettably, IMO) far more recreational than it is in the UK and Australia, where people are practically never teeing it up without something on the line, be it a match with friends or a weekly medal comp.
Contemporary architecture seems to be moving more toward "Disneyland golf" than before. I am mostly okay with it, but at a certain point it may threaten to pull golf farther away from its game/sporting nature, rather than closer to it.
Could it also make maintenance more expensive? Because they're not concerned with a match result or stroke-play score, recreational golfers need wilder/weirder features to entertain them than competitive golfers might (cf. "The pros would play in a parking lot if the purse was big enough."). Wilder/weirder golf features often seem to be more expensive to build and maintain than more on-menu features. I would be cautious about going too far to cater to this crowd, as opposed to encouraging them to clear the low bar of playing competitive golf.
P.S. For what little it's worth, I am often shocked at how relatively uncompetitive the other golf writers I encounter are. There are exceptions, but if I'm on some junket or at some event, playing an interesting course, it is like pulling teeth to try to play even something like a $1 Nassau with most of them. That makes me feel a little uneasy because I can't help but wonder what effects that casual/recreational approach can have on what they write and, consequently, the influence their perspective has on the golfing public and course architecture.