Golf Club Atlas
GolfClubAtlas.com => Golf Course Architecture Discussion Group => Topic started by: Jason Thurman on March 13, 2017, 08:03:06 PM
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I'm not looking for a time when the risk/reward equation happened to work out in your favor, or about how you "played strategically" and conveniently hit a great shot. And I'm not looking for a situation where course knowledge helped you out, unless it's knowledge you would never have discovered without studying architecture. Not that boring stuff. I just want to hear your heroic stories about how knowledge of architecture once helped you win a hole.
I'm concerned by the fact that the only examples I can think of are from night putting contests.
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2003-2004. Westview-Par 3, 2nd Hole. 220 yards. Pin back right.
I'm a near-beginner, a hack, playing with a 4, a 10, and a 14.
"A Reverse Redan, of sorts", I say.
No one comments; incomprehension on their part, perhaps mixed with a measure of friendly contempt.
The 4 'capper (a good athlete once, now older with bad knees from rugby) takes a 3 wood and fires at the pin, and goes long.
The 10 takes a 5 wood and puts it in the front bunker. The 14 takes a 5 wood and flares/slices it out to the right.
I take a 2 iron, aim left, hit it solidly and watch it fade towards the opening, left front -- landing short of the green and rolling up and on.
Bogey for the 4. Bogey for the 10. Double for the 14.
Par for the Hack.
I keep score; I'm basically/at heart a card and pencil type, and I'm out of shape and warm up with a cup of coffee. And I'm still an average golfer at best. But I'm not so out of shape nor so much a card-and-pencil type nor so much of a hack to even consider ever swapping out my 2 iron for a modern hybrid or a 5 wood.
The exhilaration of hitting a blade purely, when it counts, and when you know *why* and *where* you're hitting it (because you've read the text/the architecture correctly), is worth much more than the few extra strokes the 2 iron might cost me during a round.
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There is a blizzard named Stella on the way to Boston and I might as well bite on this one. Here is my story about how I won a hole because of my knowledge of gca, without being boring/subject to your host of other disqualifications:
I'm on number 2 on Talking Stick North.
Number 2 is a somewhat well known hole, but here is the gist: long par five with OB left the entirety of it. Biggest fairway in Arizona courtesy of ownership's lack of watering restrictions. Looks like three football fields tacked onto one another. Mr. Coore and Gentle Ben reward the player for hugging the OB left in order to earn the only opening to the green. The player choosing to play it safe off the tee will need some divine intervention to stop their ball on the green in two after flying two deadly greenside bunkers. Even a conservative second shot lay up gives you a knee-knocker of an approach whereby one must accurately judge distance to fly the bunkers yet not go too long and OB. The green might as well have the boundary fence running through the left apron. They shoe horned the green in there real tight.
Here is an overhead for you visual learners: [size=78%]https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7a7fec01blysna/Screenshot%202017-03-13%2020.16.04.png?dl=0 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7a7fec01blysna/Screenshot%202017-03-13%2020.16.04.png?dl=0)[/size]
[/size]It is 6:40am and about 104 degrees with that "just turned the sprinklers off" oppressive humidity. I'm playing $1 a point fourball with my normal group. Now, I've read a book or two on the GCA subject, briefly considered naming my dog Doak Macdonald, and I've seen Caddyshack over seven times so I clearly know the right play here. The architecturally adroit player plays it safe off the tee then hits a quasi-risky lay up in the direction of the white stakes to reveal an open an inviting wedge for their third. What the player assumes in risk on his second is substantially less than saving it for his third.
I stepped up to the tee, prepared my grip and hips for a fade, aimed about 10 yards left of center, had swing thoughts of outside-to-in running though my head and proceeded to double cross it dead left out of bounds. I turned to my playing partner, explained to him my strategy and watched him execute it perfectly over the next 10 minutes or so. We won the hole. Heroic in tutelage.
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Not architecture, but working for 7+ years on a maintenance crew helped me a lot.
I was usually tasked with checking the greens and setting pins in the mornings our supt was not there. Look for disease, make sure the irrigation worked, look for anything.
When I was playing, it became second nature to notice drier or what looked to be wetter greens. Picking up dry spots was very important to keep me from having shots rebound too long.
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BTW - the above example is, for me, a rare one, even very rare that combination of good gca understanding coupled with a good shot. But to Jason's point: if you want to disprove the theory that understanding gca is meaningless in terms of winning a golf hole, you don't have to show that such understanding *always* matters; you just have to show that it mattered *once*.
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I was piecing together a nice round at last year's Mid-Am at Stonewall on the Old Course. My final hole of the day was the par 3 9th, while not a full redan hole (because of the top right part of the green goes up) The front half of the green plays like one and the pin was over the water. It was playing about 210 right into the wind, wisely I played a 4-iron to the front right corner of the green got the kick you'd expect and the ball funneled down to about 8', a nice birdie close and an opening 74.
This good round set me up to vomit all over myself the next day and miss the cut, but undoubtedly my understanding of architecture helped me play that hole correctly under pressure.
(http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/923/pUHhbP.jpg)
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Knowledge of architecture....?
No, it has never helped me win a hole.
It has, however, sometimes caused me to think too much or get distracted or betray my course management instincts.
Sure, it's heightened overall course awareness, but that needs to be channeled appropriately and at the right time. Course management, perhaps influenced by GCA, helps strategic understanding.
Shot execution and nerve control wins holes.
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Knowledge of architecture....?
No, it has never helped me win a hole.
It has, however, sometimes caused me to think too much or get distracted or betray my course management instincts.
Sure, it's heightened overall course awareness, but that needs to be channeled appropriately and at the right time. Course management, perhaps influenced by GCA, helps strategic understanding.
Shot execution and nerve control wins holes.
Shot execution and nerve control are necessary to win holes.
A greater architectural understanding should help you have an advantage over a player without one. It's the reason a player's rookie year on the PGA Tour is their toughest. They are playing courses and learning them while the vets already know them and understand the nuance and strategy.
At the end of the day you have to hit the shots but there is no way you can convince me that understanding architecture hasn't helped you win a match or two at GVC ;) .
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Also I would vehemently argue that if you understand architecture you have much more likely chance to play well the first time around a golf course by being able to look at a hole and understand the strategy.
While you have to hit the shots, there is no way that having a strong architectural understanding could hurt you.
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This has happened to me a couple of times but my favorite was when a family friend and I went to play the New course in St. Andrews.
The first is a short 4 of 299 yards from the members tee. With a unshaven patch of broken earth some 200 yards off the tee that holds the optimal position in the middle of the fairway. Knowing this I pulled my trusty 2 hybrid and laced a shot up the left hand side of the fairway leaving me a short 60 yard pitch over the mound to the green flanked on the right by gorse. My friend pulled his driver hoping to gain an early advantage in the match. He hit a great ball straight down the middle of the fairway into the middle of the unmown hazard.
The game behind us quietly cringed as they knew as well as I did that making 4 is a heroic effort from the uneven lie and shaggy fescue. As we walked up the fairway he asked me why they would allow such a feature on a golf course of this caliber. As it stops a person who hits a good straight drive and further more its a par 4 so he felt he need to hit driver. I told him if he looked to the left he had more than enough room to hit his driver but would have a further approach and that the best play was to try to get even with the start of the hazard then play at the green.
Once we got to his ball it became apparent the true power of this hazard as the ball had entered on the fly it had ended up buried in the matted fescue. He successfully advanced the ball to the front of the green. But I hit a dandy chasing pitch to 8 feet. All but wrapping up the hole. Needless to the rest of the round he treated his caddie book as scripture and we had a wonderful match that day.
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I am not sure knowledge of architecture ever helped me out because to have true knowledge you need to learn the course...which is learning architecture. I have guessed how holes will play out based on previous experience and knowledge of archies...sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
Ciao
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There's a fine line somewhere between understanding architecture and course management....identifying sucker pins, best spots to miss, bail-outs etc....although where it lies is difficult to tell, but if I'm playing a simple, easyish even, looking hole by a Colt or a MacKenzie or a Fowler or their like I usually think to myself "Where's the catch?". "What have they hidden". Puzzles and mind games and chess-on-grass and all that.
atb
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Jason methinks you compromised the question but how about knowing an architect allows you to miss short but not long. Happens all the time at our home course , but is this course knowledge ?
Not if you know it's the architects MO.
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A fews years back we were playing in Lexington at the course UK practices. It was a textbook course in that fairway bunker left meant green side bunkers right. Since that is generally hill country we couldn't always see the green from the tee thus giving me an advantage since we were all first time/last time players. My advantage being, I knew exactly what the green approach strategies were by only seeing the fairway bunkers.
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There's a fine line somewhere between understanding architecture and course management....identifying sucker pins, best spots to miss, bail-outs etc....although where it lies is difficult to tell, but if I'm playing a simple, easyish even, looking hole by a Colt or a MacKenzie or a Fowler or their like I usually think to myself "Where's the catch?". "What have they hidden". Puzzles and mind games and chess-on-grass and all that.
atb
Don't they go hand in glove? Seems to me the more sophisticated the architecture,the more course management is rewarded.
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A fews years back we were playing in Lexington at the course UK practices. It was a textbook course in that fairway bunker left meant green side bunkers right. Since that is generally hill country we couldn't always see the green from the tee thus giving me an advantage since we were all first time/last time players. My advantage being, I knew exactly what the green approach strategies were by only seeing the fairway bunkers.
This is the only example I've read on this thread that actually fits the bill, based on my understanding of the question.
I feel some sort of unknown or blindness factor is necessary.
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And yet, Kyle, methinks JK meant that example to show not that one needs to know architecture but only that it helps to recognize cliches. The fact that he can travel anywhere and find precisely the same bunkering schemes he always finds at home is the key to his argument, ie that there is no 'there' there, when it comes to golf course design. There are only places to play, and gamble.
Peter
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And yet, Kyle, methinks JK meant that example to show not that one needs to know architecture but only that it helps to recognize cliches. The fact that he can travel anywhere and find precisely the same bunkering schemes he always finds at home is the key to his argument, ie that there is no 'there' there, when it comes to golf course design. There are only places to play, and gamble.
Peter
Peter,
I don't find that crap at home, I found it in Tom Doak's book on architecture.
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This might be very basic, but after hanging around while knowledgable folks designed and built greens, spending so much time focusing on surface drainage and moving water out of greens and out of play, I changed how I approach putting. It used to be line of play studying only. Now with a 360 degree glance around the green before I focus on line of play, I can get a pretty good feeling about how the water flows across a green and have become a much better putter.
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2003-2004. Westview-Par 3, 2nd Hole. 220 yards. Pin back right.
I'm a near-beginner, a hack, playing with a 4, a 10, and a 14.
"A Reverse Redan, of sorts", I say.
No one comments; incomprehension on their part, perhaps mixed with a measure of friendly contempt.
The 4 'capper (a good athlete once, now older with bad knees from rugby) takes a 3 wood and fires at the pin, and goes long.
The 10 takes a 5 wood and puts it in the front bunker. The 14 takes a 5 wood and flares/slices it out to the right.
I take a 2 iron, aim left, hit it solidly and watch it fade towards the opening, left front -- landing short of the green and rolling up and on.
Bogey for the 4. Bogey for the 10. Double for the 14.
Par for the Hack.
I keep score; I'm basically/at heart a card and pencil type, and I'm out of shape and warm up with a cup of coffee. And I'm still an average golfer at best. But I'm not so out of shape nor so much a card-and-pencil type nor so much of a hack to even consider ever swapping out my 2 iron for a modern hybrid or a 5 wood.
The exhilaration of hitting a blade purely, when it counts, and when you know *why* and *where* you're hitting it (because you've read the text/the architecture correctly), is worth much more than the few extra strokes the 2 iron might cost me during a round.
Peter,
Excellent story. In fact in two of my most recent rounds friends of mine keep giving my the needle for still using a 2 iron. I can't hit a hybrid. Anyway each time they gave me shit, I was the one on the green and or closest to the pin. Each time I won. Nothing like hitting a 2 iron on the button, as Sir Nick says. Here is a reminder.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_ewFMLSOA
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I'm sad to say my best example is of beating guys who were better than me on a course that lacks any strategic interest whatever. Meadow Hills in Aurora CO was basically my home course growing up--a short course, heavily treed. Nonetheless, youngness like to hit the long ball and so very good players would show up and hit driver into trouble all day long (they'd hit some good ones, ave wedges in, too), but I'd hit 3-wood or 2-iron down the middle all day and just simply outlast them.
That's knowing and using the architecture to my advantage, but obviously it's only the most rudimentary of strategy. On the other hand, it was being aware of that advantage at that course that, in part, led me to my interest in architecture overall.
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BTW - the above example is, for me, a rare one, even very rare that combination of good gca understanding coupled with a good shot.
Peter, I'm impressed that a near-beginner, "a hack," could hit a solid 2-iron to reach the green of a 220 yard hole. Way to go!
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Ben - thanks, that brought back memories. What I didn't remember, however, was how *slow* they were back then! (But Faldo was a machine, wasn't he? He hit that long iron the same way, and as easily, as he'd hit a PW)
Jim - thank you, but there is a reason why I can remember so vividly a single golf shot that happened more than 12 year ago. Can you guess the reason? Hint: the memory of that golf shot has almost no competition!
Peter
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Roughly 10 years ago in club scratch championship match play, 3rd round, 20th hole, 170 yard par 3 over the water, pin at the back of the green, hill behind the green, hitting first, took an extra club, flew over the flag, hit the hill and rolled back onto the green and then into the hole. Strategery at its best. Last hole-in-one, however..... :'(
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Roughly 10 years ago in club scratch championship match play, 3rd round, 20th hole, 170 yard par 3 over the water, pin at the back of the green, hill behind the green, hitting first, took an extra club, flew over the flag, hit the hill and rolled back onto the green and then into the hole. Strategery at its best. Last hole-in-one, however..... :'(
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Also I would vehemently argue that if you understand architecture you have much more likely chance to play well the first time around a golf course by being able to look at a hole and understand the strategy.
I think this would be my answer… I cannot think of a specific time (I rarely play "matches"), but I know I've stood on the tee of a new hole and used what I know of gca to sort of "figure out" what the strategy was: what the architect was trying to goad me into doing, what the safe play was, what types of shots might be required… what bunkers were more for show than strategic/penal/etc.
More, though, what little understanding of gca that I have makes me appreciate the holes I play more so, and thus appreciate and enjoy my golf more.
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While caddying for a friend at mount Bruno near Montréal...
My understanding of architecture, angle, grades and slopes.. i guided my friend through the course, switching club selection, defining landing spots on approaches...
Gave him 4-5 shots that allowed him to tie the match. Had he not bogeyed the last three holes in a row from inside 100 yards (poor wedges) would have been easy win
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Playing 15 and North Berwick (for the second time and much more informed) with the wind over my right shoulder from 178 yards, I hit a flat out 150 yard shot knowing how much it would release. Hit it to a foot. Probably my best example of using knowledge in that way.
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I certainly can tell when lack of knowledge caused great disappointment. I played PH2 back in 2005 right after the U S Open and well before I had any real appreciation of architecture. On number 10 playing from the regular tees, I hit a 3 iron that rolled over the back. I was pretty pumped because reaching even a short Par 5 in two was not a regular occurrence. The caddy immediately said, "You are dead." Yep, made a double even after hitting a good chip and good bunker shot. And this was not just a failure of not knowing the hole; it was a failure of not understanding Ross.
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Ira, that reminds me of one example I had on the same hole. After missing long on 10 at No. 2, my read of the architecture of the green enabled me to flip a 60 degree wedge up in the air, land it softly, let it trickle just to the right, and into the hole for a birdie to win the hole and move to red numbers for the day.
When I tell people about how I walked to the 11th tee at No. 2 sitting at 1-under on the round, they're usually impressed. I don't mention what happened to my score over the remaining 17 holes.
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Jason, LOL re the other 17. But first, I would take -1 anytime during a round. And second, I have come to learn the hard way that understanding a Ross course and executing are far different. I know that bailing short right on Number 9 at Pine Needles is plain stupid just as is bailing left at Number 12 at Mid Pines, but alas I do both all of the time.
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Like John's example, I think it helps most on a mediocre new course. You can usually guess what a hole will do even if you cannot see it.
Hitting good shots is much more helpful to winning golf holes.