Tom,
With all respect, I don't think the "Bias" really is toward "Big" courses. I think the modern day ho hum big courses are a result of a very slippery slope that, in its best cases, is founded in the classically strategic hole heavy courses, which mandated vast acreage to facilitate their design. Over the years I believe courses of immense scale, which offered moderate levels of strategic play, started the downward death spiral of design.
Your mentioning of Augusta seals it. Before the rough was added, before the trees were added, that giant mass of manicured space allowed for a myriad of strategic routes to those thinking man's, decision forcing green complexes. Let's not forget Augusta only has 44 bunkers and Bobby thought some of them were unnecessary. Courses / holes have become tests of specific skills as mandated by designers, rather than sacred grounds where people who are forced to make decisions of seemingly great import in their daily lives are allowed to make choices for which only they will bear consequence. This is the root of the recreational premise of golf.
The long views, grand vistas, and solitary tree lined routings are, in my opinion, the smoke and mirrors used to hide the morbid rapidity of essentially penal and freeway hole designs. The Chief up in your neck of the woods is a good example. Its pretty, but not much of a thinkers course. I know 20 handicaps who love it, but I've left unfulfilled every time I've played it. I feel most modern big courses use what I call the “view” and the expression of “landscape architecture” to compensate for average golf. This is the cause of the Big Bias. How often do you see a client get all tingly over a split or alternate fairway? As a golfer, I would much rather play strategic courses, in undefined visually listless and open fields on one hundred percent poa fairways than the most manicured and dramatic of landscape courses. I would rather choose my line and method of play than have it defined for me by 70+ bunkers. In addition, I find the “target bunker” to be a direct sign of a failure to move sufficient volumes of earth. I’d rather play The Old Course, Muirfield, or Shinnecock than Augusta in its current state, hands down.
It’s not about blame. The finger can be pointed across the board from the added cost of maintaining fine grasses, to the twenty handicappers who think they should shoot 80 and hit wedge into every hole – ‘cause that’s what we see on TV, to the technology that causes the gratuitous lengthening of great holes. How many holes which were truly heroic or strategic in the days of persimmon woods and hickory shafts are now just driver wedge holes? I got out for the first time today. Played with my regular group when, in what was a true epiphany brought on by reading this site all winter, I realized we were all trying to hit almost every shot on almost every hole into the same 5 yd square area. I also realized that if we cut down 70 percent of the trees on our 165 acre 6,600 yd course, we could play different holes from alternate fairways. That would be awesome!
Maybe the definition of a “big” course should be based on the surface area of its fairways rather than its external boundary lines. I’d be willing to bet the “modern courses they really liked” squeezed as much character filled / undulating fairway into the site as possible. Just a thought.
Cheers!
JT
I officially step down from the soapbox.