Were the old dead guys just better at routing?

[Tim_Weiman]

Yesterday I played Manakiki, a well known Donald Ross muni that is part of the Cleveland (OH) Metroparks system.


I haven’t played the course for about forty years and some holes felt different because back then, even with persimmon and balata, I could hit the ball far longer.


Anyway, while some parts of the course aren’t to my liking, I was amazed by the routing, including:


how Ross used the topography
the location of greens
how closely tees are to the previous green
how compact the property/course is
how a few obvious flaws were left in place
how the elevation changes influenced club selection on approaches
Etc.


In short, Manakiki made a powerful impression and as the round went on I couldn’t help wonder if the lack of earth moving equipment was in some respect an advantage: did it encourage more creativity in the routing process?


Put another way: how did these guys accomplish what they did with routing? How important was accepting a few imperfect holes?


Tim

[Ronald Montesano]

When given zero land constraints, it's a bit easier to route a golf course, right?

Less land today equals fit it in how you may.

[Niall C]

Tim


The ODG were working to different standards particularly with regards to safety. I could show you some of Dr MacKenzie's work where wearing a hard hat might be advisable.


Niall

[Tom_Doak]

Tim:


I think our predecessors generally were better at routing, because


(a) they didn't have the fallback of cart paths or earthmoving, and
(b) they had more practice at it -- not many architects today have done 100 routings, much less 400+


Ronald's point is wrong, because in fact modern courses use bigger plots of land than the old courses did.  They have to.  Safety constraints generally push holes further apart and make everything more homogenous, as Niall alludes.

[Thomas Dai]

Regularly amazed by some of the places yee olde era folks routed courses and how they constructed them too, frequently it would seem with little money spent. And often over totally bonkers terrain.
Mind back in the day less severe terrain, valley floors etc, would have been more at a premium for local agriculture with food production being more important than sporting pastimes.
Sporting expectations would have been very different in times gone way bye too with golf being more a simple ball, hole and a few sticks seasonal game where conditioning and all the malarkey and cost that goes with it these days wasn’t much of an issue.
Plenty of rural and rustic courses akin to this are still out there although some travelling is usually involved to experience them.

Atb

[Jeff_Brauer]

I'll go ahead and say no.  First, there are too many routings out there to generalize about.  Yes, there are a few turds in the punch bowl, but probably just as many in any era on a percentage basis.  We will never know, because most of the older bad routings are no longer in existence.


All generations merely deal with the task in front of them the best they can.  As TD notes, if greens and tees aren't as close, it is for safety, or following the developers mandate to find more lots.  I remember marveling at the narrow roads in Boston when I visited as a kid.  Just like the narrow two lane road has gone the way of the dodo bird, so have tightly spaced holes.  Experience showed that more room was beneficial.


There are many old construction photos showing blasting of rock.  We can't be sure the reason behind these, but it was available to them, at least on higher budget projects.  As I noted on another thread, most of my routings since 1977 followed the land and required very little earthmoving for fair and visible holes.  Most decisions to move dirt were voluntary, as in the Quirk thread, but the routing usually didn't require it to be moved to meet basic design objectives.


In other words, the best and even mid level architects in any generation had a skill for routing.  The worst never do.