Dirty Deeds

[Ed Oden]

Does more earthwork occur on a good site with nice natural contours than we sometimes suspect?  On flat/uninspiring sites the engineering is usually obvious.  Do natural sites just hide the dirty deeds better and deceive us into thinking a minimalist approach was taken when that may not be the case?

[Kalen Braley]

Does more earthwork occur on a good site with nice natural contours than we sometimes suspect?  On flat/uninspiring sites the engineering is usually obvious.  Do natural sites just hide the dirty deeds better and deceive us into thinking a minimalist approach was taken when that may not be the case?

Ed,

I don't equate dirty deeds with dirt moving per se.  If a ton of earth is moved and the end result is very natural looking and fits in well with its surroundings....I have no issue with it at all.  To my understanding, its the fundamental difference between minimalism and naturalism.

Addditionally.... IMO not all minimalism = good golf course...but a naturalistic looking golf course will almost always be a winner to me!!

[Ally Mcintosh]

Does more earthwork occur on a good site with nice natural contours than we sometimes suspect?  On flat/uninspiring sites the engineering is usually obvious.  Do natural sites just hide the dirty deeds better and deceive us into thinking a minimalist approach was taken when that may not be the case?

Yes... (with exceptions)

[Jerry Kluger]

Ed: Sorry for interrupting,  I thought this thread concerned some AC/DC lyrics.

[Melvyn Morrow]

Ed

Dirty Deeds it certainly is if you are talking about The Castle Course St Andrews.

Rather than talk about moving the earth lets just look at the rape of the Scottish landscape and what was done to it, regrettable not in the name of golf IMHO but to make money.

Farmland into a helter skelter course, was it right and did it deserve to have millions spent to create such a fake. Each to his own, but this is one of the things that I consider is wrong with golf today, land just not fit for purpose. Was it really worth spending all that money on a course well outside St Andrews? Judge for yourselves   

     





To the architects I ask you to look at the before and after, would you have been proud to have designed this course?

 Melvyn

[Ed Oden]

Ed: Sorry for interrupting,  I thought this thread concerned some AC/DC lyrics.

...only if it was done dirt cheap.

[Steve Salmen]

Melvyn,

I have not played the Castle because it seems 7-8 of every 10 that has, has negative thoughts about it.  I've driven by it several times and it looks OK.

Which brings me to my point.  I've played two courses in Scotland (that I know of) that were more like farmland than linksland before becoming golf coruses: Craighead at Crail (which I prefer to Kingsbarns) and Durness.  Both play similar to links couses in the absence of rain, but not quite as firm.  The divot is just not as tough, more likely to be larger, softer, and liable to scatter about.

I don't know what the turf is like at the Castle, probably similar to Craighead.  I'll play it in a few years with an open mind.  After the course matures with time, I think you should do the same.  It could turn out to be really good, espeically if something is done about the greens.

BTW, though Durness is not pure links golf, the spirit of the game is very much alive and well there.

Steve

[Bart Bradley]

Ed:

Are you okay?  A deep thinker's question?

I agree with your general premise....I find that the more movement present on the site, the less I can tell what the architect did and did not do....While I am certain little dirt was moved at Sand Hills, I could not begin to identify the areas where there actually was some shaping...Ballyneal comes to mind as well but THESE ARE EXAMPLES OF TRUE MINIMALISM...

I think your point is that if someone had started with these properties AND moved a lot of dirt in an effective and natural way, I would have a hard time identifying it....I agree.  BUT the question is, if the site is that great why would you move so much dirt anyway?

Bart

[Ian Larson]

If I had not seen the Kings Course site before construction I would have thought that it was just another golf course built on links land. Especially from the pictures that New Tom Morris provided.

Is it better to take the virgin natural land and farm it so much over centuries that it turns into a nice and evenly flat piece of land from the plowing? Is creating a course that looks like links land not returning the land to what it may have been before it was farmed and plowed? Both are changing the canvas of the land and I cant say one is better than the other.

To stay on topic....I would agree with the statement that I would just prefer it to look natural, and do whatever it takes to do that. Move dirt, dont move dirt.

[Niall C]

Steve S

You've actually played at least one more than you think. Kingsbarns was basically a field before they started. Next time you're playing it, have a look over the fence to the right of the 4th tee and you will see what they had before.

The Castle Course was farmland, as were both of the courses at the nearby St Andrews Bay and of course the Duke's Course as well. Then there are the three or four new holes on the Eden which were all built on farmland. The only out and out true links at St Andrews might just be the Old, the New and the Jubilee.

Should those courses have not been built ? I don't particularly see why not. 

Ian

Of the farmland courses above, all bar the new holes on the Eden were built on clay soil and any lack of character would be down to the fact that clay soil is more stable than sand based soil and therefore you don't get any of the windblown character that you get on links, which doesn't mean you can't try and recreate it.

Niall

[Norbert P]

 Was it really worth spending all that money on a course well outside St Andrews?

 

Was it really worth spending all that money on a course well outside St Andrews?

   Melvin, nobody can answer the question you posit above but the bookkeepers.

   Regarding The Castle Course, it seems that you didn't have to come to America - it came to you. 
  Sardonic how a beautiful game like golf can emigrate to America, get homogenized, perfected, glamourized, cement-mixered, and motorized, only to return to its motherland a strange and unrecognizable expatriot.

  I guess the adage is right; you can never really go home.

[Melvyn Morrow]

Slag

Would you be looking to buy the Castle Course, go on, please you need it, we don't.

Melvyn

[jim_lewis]

A few years ago I played an excellent new course built on an excellent, natural site. I was playing with the pro who had been on site during construction. I commented on one hole that I really admired how natually it seemed to lay on the land. I added that it certainly did not require a lot of earth moving. The pro corrected me by saying; "Actually we moved a lot of dirt in order to make it look like little had been moved." I now think that the only guy who needs to worry about how much earth is moved is the guy paying the bill. All I really care about is the finished product. If it looks and feels natural, that's good enough for me.

Jim Lewis

[Ed Oden]

Jim, thanks for getting things back on track.  I'm guessing that a good site can sometimes lend itself to more engineering rather than less.  That's somewhat counter-intuitive to me.

Ed

[Tom_Doak]

Ed:

Probably the part of design that took me the longest to get good at was learning how to hide our work ... or to put it another way, learning what kinds of construction work we would be able to hide, and what kinds we wouldn't, so that I don't get myself into a corner where I have to do something that isn't going to work.

While my goal is always to lay the course on the ground in the most natural way possible, it is seldom that everything fits neatly into a solution with 18 holes and four par-3's and four par-5's and 7000 yards from the back tees.  The more flexible you are on those items, the less you'll have to fix.  But it is nearly always the case that we have to do SOME earthwork, the only question is how much?  As you gain more confidence over what you can control, you do take more opportunities to improve the playing character of individual holes through minor surgery.

We did way bigger things at Ballyneal and Cape Kidnappers and even Pacific Dunes than I did at High Pointe -- because I was confident that we could get away with it.

I don't know if they will show all 18 holes of Cape Kidnappers for the Kiwi Challenge this weekend, but if they do, I will tell you that we did some MAJOR earthmoving on holes 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9.  But nobody ever notices.  Meanwhile the back nine is about as natural as you could ever find, with the exception of the approach to #12 green, which had to be altered because the approach and green were falling away at 5% and we had to reduce that to 2%, which meant not only lowering the front of the green but lowering 75 yards of the approach, too.

[BCrosby]

What Crusty Jim said.

It doen't matter if a hole is natural. What matters is that it looks natural.

BTW, strictly speaking isn't the phrase "natural golf hole" oxymoronic?

Bob