Oak Hill--Chocolate Drops

[John Foley]

Some of the best buried stone / chocolate drops you'll find are at Kittansett

[mike_malone]

Some of the best buried stone / chocolate drops you'll find are at Kittansett

Would be interesting to know if those predate Flynn involvement

[Dan_Callahan]

Kittansett was the first place that popped into my mind when I was reading this thread. I had no idea there were so many different terms to describe mounds. but whatever the verbiage, they work great at Kittansett. The series of mounds that cut across the 10th fairway don't look natural at all, but they are such a cool and integral feature that they were moved back a ways during recent changes to bring them back into play off the tee.

[Cal Carlisle]

I have always loved this illustration of Scioto Country Club circa 1926. By this time the golf course was already 10 years old.  Are some of the elements of this drawing exaggerated? I think, most definitely, they are. Some artistic license was certainly taken with seemingly every tee beeing grossly elevated. Some of the hummocks may have been a little more pronounced than they actually were, but I have to believe the artist was working off of some sort of plan or aerial photo, or both.


The fairway contours are very much what I knew back twenty years ago when I worked there. The general lay of the land was very much what you see in this drawing. There's a hump on the left side of eight that is sizeable and is part of the generally topography. This is graphically represented as it actually looks, not as a mound, but as a gradual slope. My point being that it didn't look like a 'chocolate drop' or whatever you call it, we know that slopes are slopes and mounds are mounds.


Call them chocolate drops, mounds, hummocks, whatever - I think those things had been long erased even before the 1962 renovation. I'd be curious if Jack Nicklaus ever remembers them being there. Could they have been a casualty of the aggressive tree planting program that ensued in the '30's? I don't know, but judging by the way the natural topography is drawn, these mounds were definitely pronounced and unnatural looking. It would appear this was Donald Ross's "thing" way before Andrew Green was ever born.

The bunkers also look very much like what we saw at Oak Hill (see hole 15). Did Ross do the same thing OHCC as he did at Scioto? I have no clue, but from what I was told a lot of Andrew's design decisions were often backed up with some type of photographic evidence. Some holes had more photos than others and made things much easier to argue.


When Mark mentions "sympathetic restoration" I think that rings true. There is some things in this drawing that weren't brought back, that wine cellar of a bunker in the middle of number one (perhaps a "firm kick in gonads" for the golfer that struggles to get the ball in the air), the cross bunker spanning the width of 13 is another that jumps out.


I walked away impressed with what they've done out at Scioto. It looks like a very fun round of golf that would have an appeal to a very wide range of abilities and ages. Does it look as "natural" as MacKenzie or Flynn? No, but it seems to me this is the way it may well have been designed - like it or not.

[Tyler Kearns]

FWIW on SKY tv in the UK one of the commentators said with a degree of confidence that the chocolate drop mounding was a favourite trick of Andrew Green.

Niall

I was under the impression these were added by Green. They look terrible covered in monochromatic green same height rough.

Ciao

Sean


That is what I think as well but I think what the commentator was suggesting was that they were added by Green, not because Ross had originally designed them but because Green was a fan of them. I might have misconstrued that but that is what I think he was saying.


I do agree with you that they don't look very good although they are a pretty effective hazard.


Niall

I watched an interview with Andrew Green, and they had an oblique sketch of the original course, and the areas where he "reintroduced" the chocolate drop mounds were where they were shown on the drawing.


Tyler

[Carl Johnson]

I have not played even 10% of Ross courses, but among the several that I have played, I do not remember chocolate drop mounds like those at Oak Hill. Are they original to the design?

I don't remember chocolate drops on the 1980's version of the course, but it's possible Tom Fazio wiped them out.


Chocolate drops were an entirely practical thing . . . they used them on courses where there were a lot of stones during the clean-up operation, as a way to get rid of the stones without carting them off to a dump.  So you'd only find them on courses where the soil was kind of stony . . . typically in the Northeast, but not in the Carolinas.

Although on our Ross course in Charlotte (Carolinas for those who don't know where it is) we added "chocolate drops',. which we call mounds, in our 2006-2008 restoration.  One of them covers a pump, so it has a lid on top, and serves a practical purpose.  The others are purely for effect, to mimic a Ross look.  So you do find non-original chocolate drops on our Ross course in the Carolinas.

[Rich Milligan]

Pinehurst used to have chocolate drop mounds.