Long Par 4s - How Many Should a Golf Course Ideally Have?

[Paul Gray]

I am saying 'not good' in the same terms as 'isn't great' in the context of the best courses that are in the top 100 (by Golf World). Only two courses are below 6200 yards.


My main point is that courses get marked down for being on the short side. Somewhere like Boat of Garten to me shows this point off perfectly. It is a beautiful course.

Adrian,

Okay, so not good as in any GCA without a top 100 course under their belt is not good Boat of Garten is not only a beautiful course but also a very good though not great course. You seem to have backed into a corner Adrian.

Jon

Jon you need to get yourself checked out, you are not wired up right. I have not backed up at all. Boat of Garten is a great course in my opinion, it is not in the top 100 though and it can only be because it is too short. The Boat is what it is on a great piece of property routed by Braid, but I suppose if some of those 350 yarders were naturally 70 yards more and it was 6500 yards then it would be right up there with the best (i.e Would be better longer). All I am saying is the shorter courses seem to get marked down by the raters. You and the other idiot are mixing things up and cherry picking things out of context. Personally I like short courses but people building new courses tend to use 7000 yards as the yardstick.

Well I was going to take a step back but 'the other idiot' could only have been an insult intended for me.

You are yet again trying to mix up quality with what raters for a magazine think. You happily stated that you thought short was not good before inevitably moving on to confuse that with how raters at GW ranked short courses, implying that the former was a function of the latter. I didn't ask about other people. I asked about YOUR opinion. I honestly don't know now whether you're just a deluded man who thinks he can trick people on this site with an attempt to merge the two or if your mentality is such that you genuinely struggle to distinguish between maximum business exposure and maximum quality. Any which way, I strongly suggest you don't consider a late career in politics or the legal profession as your struggle with cognitive dissonance might be a severe handicap.

Actually, I'm beginning to think there's a cash register where your soul should be. Of course, you'd abandon your faith in 'industry standards' in a second for a couple of Doak 7's and a seat at the top table. You'll always switch your thinking to whatever best nurses your battered ego at any given time.

Jon should probably feel proud that you're now throwing the same "you're not wired right" crap at him which you've thrown at me in the past, all for daring to suggest that the endless and self serving catalogue of metrics you use to justify a bean counting philosophy might not actually be what the game of golf needs.

I really didn't want to bang this drum but clearly someone needs to lay it out loud and clear for you. You are fooling no one. Well, not here anyway.

[Jon Wiggett]

Adrian,

a very disingenuous post on your part. It appears that you have done a 180 degree about turn by suddenly proclaiming Boat of Garten to be a great course. Boat of Garten is probably not a great course in the sense of being a world beater and this may well be in part due to its lack of length though I do not fully believe that length is a important as the quality of the GCA a course possesses. It is however a very, very good course and is an excellent example of what a good GCA can achieve. It also fulfils its purpose to a standard as good as any course in the world.

[Jon Wiggett]

Paul,

I have certainly do not feel insulted by Adrian's snipe but this is mainly due to his lack of capacity to put together a coherent point of view. Who knows he might completely change his mind about me and my mental state in his next post. It really is difficult to know

Jon

[Ryan Coles]

Does not the answer to this question depend entirely on what sort of course someone wants to build? 


And does it not also depend on how many par-5 holes are included?  If you've got four par-5's you don't need a bunch of long 4's, too ... but there are many fine UK courses which have several long 4's and only one or two par-5's.


People told me years ago that a modern course couldn't be top-100 material unless it was 7000 yards long, so I made a point of keeping Pacific Dunes [and Barnbougle, too] short of that length.  The fact that they're in windy areas mitigates the overall length factor ... sometimes the 400-yard par-4's at each course are unreachable in two!  But, even though both are considered "short" courses, they each have a cadre of long 4's [Pacific:  4th, 7th, 8th, 13th; and Barnbougle:  8th, 10th, 17th, 18th].  Therefore, I guess the answer to your question must be "4".


Also, an interesting discussion point:  I was very surprised to find Cabot Cliffs had ZERO [yes, zero] long par-4's.  Of course, it only has six par-4's total, and the longest, I believe, was only 410 yards.  They must be counting on the wind to make a couple of them play long on any given day, but on the two calm days we had, there were no long par-4's there.  [However, there WERE six par-5's.]

Tom

How many under 6400 have you done?

How many at 7000 +?

[Tom ORourke]

I am going to say 4. It has been many years since I played Old Marsh down in Florida but I remember four long par 4s.
I seem to remember that two ran north to south (6 and 15) and two ran south to north, (9 and 18). This way you would get two into the wind and two downwind, or maybe all four crosswind. This layout made sure you got at least two strong fours but you should get a bit of a break on the other two. That leaves around six fours to make up the other distances. My club has two courses. On one the two longest fours are right next to each other and are 10 and 18 and run out and back. When 10 is downwind my pessimistic side starts thinking that number 18 is going to play long. And there are two strong fours on the front on a 6,250 from the whites course. The other course has three long fours and plays to about the same length. Both courses can go back to 7,000 but not many play from there. I would say that Merion has four long par fours and I think that is enough.