Architecture influence on American players

[JNagle]

While watching The Open this morning then heading out for a run, I began to ponder the thought' "has the majority of American golf architecture (not all) dummied down American Professional Golfers?"  The recent comments of one of the rising stars, Bubba Watson, coupled with the comments of a certain Hall of Famer and Major Champion's agent lead me to believe that it is true.  The agent stated that most people do not comprehend the play of a Tour player.  I don't think it is as much we can't comprehend their play as much as we cannot execute it with the accuracy they can.  Tour players can dial it in with incredible accuracy or simply bomb and gouge their way around many of the Tour stops.  When creativity and shot making is necessary there are a select few that can pull it off. 

[Brent Hutto]

Maybe not most members of this forum (although probably so) but definitely most golfers are not capable of comprehending what matters to a Tour player. Why would they be?

It's like saying most people who go to a surgeon are not capable of really understanding what goes through his mind in preparing for and performing surgery. Surely after a decade of highly specialized training the surgeon is considering things at a level far more subtle and detailed than the guy lying on the table is capable of figuring out with no training.

It's easy to look at an elite golfer and think he's just trying to basically do what you're trying to do when you play golf. Imagining that the only difference is that he pulls off 95% of his shots while you only pull of 50% of yours. But I'm pretty sure if you took the thinking of an arbitrarily selected 6-handicap member of the GCA forum and granted him the "execution" ability of Bubba Watson for a week you would not end up with something that performs remotely like Bubba Watson.

To be successful in 72-hole stroke-play events against fields of the best players in the world, what you're calling "dummied down" is in fact a very well-adapted set of behaviors and thinking patterns. Those player don't tack their way around a course under some kind of "strategic" (in the GCA sense) approach design to utilize all the little options and features we like to gush over. Because they don't need to the vast majority of the time and deliberately trying to play that way would be a distraction from the challenges they actual do have to contend with.

Almost everyone in the field can bomb it right over all those strategic design features, can stop shots from 190 yards onto rock-hard green with spin and trajectory and can recover from missed-green situations in two or three strokes that would cost most of us an "X" on the card. So of course they ignore the angles and the subtleties of bunker placement relative to green contours and all those trade-offs that we make to give up partial stroke here and there in hopes of avoiding disaster. That stuff does not apply to the game that most of the field is playing.

Bubba Watson's task is to be one stroke better a few weeks per season than a couple hundred players bunched extremely closely in ability. None of us has ever done that year in and year out. We can imagine how similar his game ought to be to ours expect for his prodigious talent but in fact it's a different game with different goals and under different constraints than what we face when we step onto a course. And yes in a lot of ways it's a simpler game. And yes it's mostly about execution. But after the "mostly" is accounted for, the residual that separates the guys who win five times in year from the guys with no wins but a bunch of top-tens is in fact the ability to simplify their game and pare it down to almost pure execution. That's not "dumb" it's applying ones smarts to a different problem.

[Jeff_Mingay]

I think your last sentence sums up why links golf - I dare say, real golf - is the greatest test of a true champion, Jim. Along with creativity and shot-making, you could have also included perseverance.

It seems to me that many skilled golfers (including a number of Tour players, of course) expect the golf course to cater to them. Beginning an Open championship at a place like Royal St. George's with this belief will rarely, if ever yield the desired result.