Fall away greens--one solution to the distance problem?

[ForkaB]

One aspect of Painswick that intrigued me (and others) was the number of greens which were oritented front to back rather than back to front.  2, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14 and 16 all have at least some of this characteristic.  They make the positioning of the tee shot as important as it's length, as a full shot from the proper angle is often preferable to a pitch or chip from the wrong one.

Fall away greens force the player to think, regardless of how close he or she is for the approach shot.  Is this not not bad?

Any reason--other than the boilerplate "The Clients (or their lawyers... ...) won't like it!" one--for this generic evidence of lack of imagination amongst most of today's designs?

[Mark_F]

Richard,

Absolutely.  The 3rd West at Royal Melb; has a fallaway green, and at this year's Heiniken, it was noticeable how many players could drive, or almost drive, its 350-odd yards, but still take four to get down if they were in the wrong place.

What about the fourth hole at Dornoch?  I found that the most mystifying hole there, with that dip in front of the green causing real doubt as to exactly how far away the green was.  I know it isn't a fallaway green, but this sort of deception/thinking is something that makes golf more fascinating.

Surely a lot of the problem has to do with the level of selling needed today?  They need good pictures etc to sell expensive land and/or memberships these days, and such subtleties don't all in itself make a great picture, not when compared to a sky blue lake with pirouetting trout.

Have a look at the ads, for instance, for The London Golf Club you see in some of the UK magazines.  The Best.  The entire sell rests on the notion of Nicklaus being the best, and therefore the course is The Best.  Even though it clearly isn't.  But I'm sure a lot of people want to be part of it for that reason.  

[ForkaB]

Mark

You know how to push my hot buttons!

Even though I did not have it in mind in composing this thread, to me the 4th at Dornoch is the best green complex in the world.  One of the reasons is that it has two "fall aways"--one after the big dip in front, and another after the ridge 2/3 of the way into the green.  Of course, it also falls away sharply to the right......

Hope to play Royal Melbourne some day.

[Mark_F]

Richard,

Enough with that pornographic talk.  Liquids near computer keyboards are hazardous to internal components.

The fourth at Dornoch is brilliant.  Unfortunately, so to are the 2nd, 3rd, 6th, 10th, 14th and 17th, at least.  The first hole was quite subtly difficult too, I thought. I was also quite partial to the deception of the 15th hole from the tee. I refused to believe either my yardage book, the member I was playing with, or my own eyes, and wound up in all sorts of bother for not trusting one of them.  

[Patrick_Mucci]

Rich Goodale,

I think the resistance to these greens comes from today's golfers, especially since the advent of the aerial game.

At my home club in New Jersey, we have a wonderful fall away green on the 7th hole.  The entire hole falls away from you with the green seemlessly transitioning out of the fairway.

For approximately 40 years, almost every year, people on the green committee want to reconfigure the green to
"accept" approach shots hit off of a fairway that falls toward the green.  Explaining, and getting people to understand how the hole was meant to be played was a difficult task.
Most of them wanted to rebuild the green with a back to front slope so that it would become akin to a dart board.

A few years ago, to stop balls from running beyond the green, a rocket scientist green chairman inserted a series of mini-mounds behind the green.  While the mounds slow down and stop "hot" or long approaches, they are beyond the capability of the member's ability to recover from.

For years, part of the problem with the hole was a superintendent who kept the area from the green to 40 yards out, WET.

Remember too, the advent of the hard or distance ball, and how golfers gravitated to it in order to gain more distance.
Those same golfers were whining that they couldn't stop the ball on the green with a well struck approach shot, but that was the trade off in using the hard ball.

I think you hit the nail on the head, that a key element in their play is that they make you think.  But, remember, the modern day golfer doesn't want to think.  He wants colored flags or markers to tell him where the pin is and sprinkler cap markers to tell him how far he is.  And these indicators lull him into a false sense of security because they distract his focus from that all important factor, how do I "PLAY" the approach shot ?  The brain takes a vacation because the auto-pilot of hole location and distance are the only factors that most modern day golfers relate to.

Few golfers think, in advance.
It's only after a dire consequence borne of laziness or stupidity that some become introspective and analyze the consequence of their decision.

I think that the modern day golfer's aversion to these greens, to the thought process involved in playing them, is communicated to the architect vis a vis general dissatisfaction with the hole type,  and he then becomes reluctant to build them.

But, that's just my opinion, TEPaul is still wrong.

Now I know some will say that the land must be conducive to their creation, but, with all of the modern day earth moving techniques, if there's a will, there's a way.

Come on over and play GCGC and tell me what you think.

[TEPaul]

Rich:

I agree with you about fallaway or front to back sloping greens (or portions of them) and their interest strategically and otherwise. It's unfortunate more architects don't do them but obviously most of the reason is they don't think they're acceptable or popular with today's golfers. This isn't a feeling that's exclusive to modern architects either---anyone can produce writing that intimates some of the Golden Age's best said the same thing or at least advocated that greens should most generally be pitched back to front---eg Donald Ross primarily.

It's interesting how a few design characteristics of some of the very old European and American courses have a few features that were once actually "prized" generally but are no longer. This would include front to back sloping greens and also blind greens and blind shots that once were extremely "prized" but certainly are no longer. Max Behr actually once did a short essay on the beauty of "blindness" and George Crump struggled for quite some time to get his 12th green to be of the proper fallaway that he was looking for in the rear. It's said with that hole he was trying to imitate the concept of a hole he admired at Myopia (very old American course). Certainly another very old American course, Oakmont, has two of the very best front to back sloping or fallaway greens--#1 and #10. It's said Hogan's unique strategy on those two was responsible for him winnng the 1947 US Open there.

[Tom_Doak]

Rich:

I would have said that the public doesn't like them, but the one place I used a lot of them was at Beechtree, and I don't really remember anyone commenting negatively on them there.  Maybe no one noticed, and just thought the greens were especially firm!

I think the reason you don't see more of them is that architects tend not to look for them on the topo map when routing a course.  We've all generally been taught to look for green sites which pitch back toward the fairway, so we're locked into that pattern when doing routings.  And you can't put a front-to-back sloping green on the opposite kind of slope without building something hideous.

The reason Beechtree has so many fallaways is that the routing was especially complicated by wetlands and other factors and I got "stuck" with building several greens on land which was falling away.

[TEPaul]

However, I can see why sometimes these types of slopes and contours on greens do get criticized by players--like professionals. There are two such fallaway slopes on Shinnecock that with today's greenspeeds have been criticized before and probably will be again in a few weeks. I'm speaking, of course, of #7 and #11.

If the only way to logically play #7 is to actually try to hit the ball to the rear and probably off the putting surface and chip back up the slope is that really the type of hole golf is looking for? I don't really have that much of a problem with something like that although I must admit it's a little one dimensional but on the other hand with greenspeeds and green firmness really up so is the redan at NGLA---one must basically just play "the redan shot" which apparently was the intention of the designers.

More than we know, in that day and age, many of those great old architects were into a concept they called "shot testing". Basically, we today, might have a philosophical problem with that because in a real way it does fly in the face of what we consider almost essential---eg multi-options and multi-strategies to the same basic end! Back then they may have understood and considered multi-options and multi-strategies but not to the same end we do today---eg GIRs, something they probably never considered or even heard of!!

Far more than we do today the net effect of multi-options and multi-strategies to those old architects included the very real possiblility of dropping a shot (or recooping it through a great recovery)---something that we today, for some reason, find to be a concept and philosophy that's not particularly acceptable!

[A_Clay_Man]

I fail to see the corellation between the pro's benefitting from technology, and what a green committee does, or thinks about, for it's membership.

Why should the squeaky wheel, get the grease, in golf? SCROOM!

Anything to increase shot-making demands on the better player is a good thing, in moderaation of course.

[Doug Siebert]

TEP,

What was Hogan's unique strategy on those holes?

[TEPaul]

Doug:

Hogan's strategy on those two holes was to intentionally hit his approach shots over both greens every time. When they asked him why he did that he simply said;

"Because I'd rather be over those greens with my second shot rather than my third shot!"

Honestly!

[Doug Siebert]

Sometimes I like to think I am pretty creative in the way I play holes after I've had some experience with them, doing things that wouldn't occur to most people like intentionally playing into the rough to take the spin off my approach on greens with hard to reach back plateaus, that sort of thing.  But then I see something like that from Hogan and realize that I would have to think much further outside the box to reach the genius level of a guy like Hogan!