Defending with a score in mind is ridiculous to me. You either defend parts of the golf course or you don’t.
Build em with the mind set that a power player and finesse player can have an even match and you might come up with a good golf course. But this approach of hard par, easy bogey, or now politically correct hard birdie, easy par is just absurd IMO.
Agreed - and I am sure maybe even DMK would likely agree. But it's an easy way to say that it is challenging for the scratch golfer but still playable for the masses. I would very much doubt that he specifically sets out to make birdies hard on holes and par easy, or so on. I would hope that they any architect would focus on sticking to why and who they are building the course for, and make it interesting, not in relation to a score, but in relation to shots faced no matter where they are played from.
I'm not sure David would agree. I spent quite a bit of time talking to him at the GOLFWEEK event, and he genuinely believes he's onto something new.
I'm not so sure. One of the big differences between Pacific Dunes and Bandon Dunes was that I didn't put in "black" tees ... we maxed out at 6700 yards, where David's course was at 7200 and the second set of tees was 6700, which as he says, was still too long for most people. Everyone played it from one tee too far back, until they threw away the black tee markers and stopped using a lot of those tees.
But, what I've seen at Gamble Sands and Mammoth Dunes is not quite that. David's not building shorter courses and keeping the interest around the greens ... Gamble Sands is 7100 yards and has big, flattish greens. [It is at altitude, so it plays somewhat shorter than that.] I'm not sure of the yardage for Mammoth Dunes but I'd be very VERY surprised if it's a 6400 yard course.
I would much rather build a shorter course with more interesting features along the way. But I do agree with David, generally, that I'm more worried about defending birdie than defending par. I'm just more inclined to include a few really tough holes along the way so that the good player can't cruise to 18 pars. I still don't know anyone who enjoys golf because it's easy.