What does a "weak" hole mean to you?

[TEPaul]

Shivas:

Did you know that many of the old designers and architectural thinkers and philosophers recommended, in writing and otherwise, that there was no need, so consequently no reason to actually design things for poor golfers, thereby creating interesting problems and solutions for them simply because they felt their own games were problems and solutions and challenge enough for them?

But having said that--what is the one area of design and architecture that can be considered the one true area of democracy for golf? The green and green-end, of course--it takes very little strength and depends more on imagination, clear thinking and just good fortune!

[Jonathan Cummings]

A weak hole is simply a hole that does not require a player to think to play it.  JC

[BCrosby]

A weak hole is one where different playing choices don't have different consequences.

Bob

[Doug Siebert]

Very simply, to me, a weak hole is a hole where a full spectrum of golfers, from very good to downright lousy, do not have to "earn" whatever score happens to be a good score for them, whether it be birdie or double or something in between.  An "earned" score, to me, is a score where the player has to play somewhere pretty close to his general abilities (with the concept of "play", including his course management).  

In other words, it's a hole that virtually no challenges of any sort to anyone.        

Shivas,

To me, that'd say that a straight flat 300 yard hole with an 80 yard wide fairway, etc., etc. is a weak hole because it doesn't demand much of anyone from Tiger Woods on down to a player who has broken 100 only once in his life.

Stick a big pond right off the tee that requires a 120 yard carry and it is still as easy for Tiger (as well as pretty much everyone on GCA) but it sure makes things interesting for the 100 shooters out there, at least in my experience watching guys like that saving their worst mishits off the tee for holes with the "scenic" pond off the tee that most of us don't pay attention to.

Of course, stick that same pond there right up against the front of the green and it gets somewhat interesting for everyone, at least interesting enough people won't be complaining so loudly it is "too easy".

[guesst]

In order to make clear what a weak hole is, I think it might be helpful to define a strong one.  

A strong hole (according to the redhead) offers every golfer at least a few options.  

It rewards each well-executed and appropriate choice.  

It offers new options on each swing, even when the prior stroke or its execution was poor.  

It offers the highest reward to those who have thought out and executed the best long-range planning from tee to green.  

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it does all this while at the same time being aesthetically pleasing, interesting to play repeatedly, and with no incongruent details to call one's mind away from the moment.  

When I watch a movie or play, I enjoy the suspension of disbelief . . . the feeling that I am experiencing what is happening on stage or on the screen, the sense that it is possible.  Those are the entertainments that make me cry, or laugh, or think.  

That experience is ruined when I am jerked out of my mental and emotional participation by something that doesn't fit . . . a piece of music that hadn't been written yet being used in a period piece, for example.  Henry the VIII never heard Bach, and synthesizers are as out of place in "Titus Andronicus" as a '69 corvette is in a movie set in the '50's.  Shudder.

I feel the same way about a golf hole.  No matter how intelligent the choices, how interesting the architecture, how clever the green, I cannot like it if there are discordant notes that jerk me out of the golfer's reverie.

A beautiful and enormous tree I saw recently right in the middle of a narrow fairway 50 yards out from the tee comes to mind.  A drainage ditch made up to look like a creek running diagonally across a fairway to follow the cart track and parallel the next fairway was another example.  As I said in an earlier post, it didn't look like a hazard, it looked like an accident.  If I pause to think, "Why in the world would they put that there?" my golf is interrupted, my peace is destroyed, and I'm irritated for the rest of the time spent on that hole.

So, to me, a weak hole is more than one that simply doesn't interest, challenge, make think, etceteras.  It can do all those things well, but still be weak if it is not perfectly in tune with itself.

[TEPaul]

"When I watch a movie or play, I enjoy the suspension of disbelief . . . the feeling that I am experiencing what is happening on stage or on the screen,"

guesst:

Funny you should say that. I like that term 'suspension of disbelief', particularly involving movies.

When I was a little guy in Daytona Beach, a bunch of us used to go to horror movies on Saturday night and generally get scared sh...less. But I had my own unique way of recreating what you call 'disbelief' at that time when the suspension of it seemed to get the most intensely hairraising for the others who might have been screaming and diving under the seats.

I'd simply imagined (very hard I might add) during those frightening scenes the cameras rolling right next to that scene!!

Do you think that inclination back then might have something to do with why today I get great pleasure sniffing around some of the best and most natural looking of great old greens, for instance, to determine exactly where, how and how well the arcihtect tied his construction into natural grade?

[guesst]

It does sound as though you have had a critic's and a technician's mind since you were a young lad.  Perhaps you should be made to give them back?  

I'm not saying one never looks deeper than the surface when everything adds up to perfection.  Admiring and dissecting the best is where a lot of the joy of architectural revelation lives.  But I want to do it because I'm overwhelmed, not because I'm appalled.

There's all the difference in the world between, "Wow . . . how did they do this?" and "Yikes!  Why did they do that?"

[guesst]

Shivas, if I understand you right, you're saying that a hole is weak if neither the choices any player makes nor his execution of those options matters in the outcome.

Do you think that the only thing that matters in judging a hole weak is how it plays?  If so, we can extrapolate that architecture's first purpose is to make a hole challenging both physically and intellectually.  

Why, then, do we discuss aesthetics?