Bill Coore’s “Little Men”

[Tommy Williamsen]

I am rereading Mike Keiser’s fine book, The Nature of the Game. On page 232, Bill Coore describes his “method for working on a routing at home or in a hotel room.” He has “templates, cut to scale, a short par three, a long par five, a dogleg par four, and so on.” His wife calls the cutouts “Bill’s little men.” He lays them out on a table or bed so he can see the general layout. “A good routing will form a pattern that has balance and coherence.” He will show the little men routing to his wife, Sue. “One glance at the little men and Sue can tell whether or not a routing is coming together.”

I had not heard this before. I love it. It is brilliantly simple and effective. I know that Ross and MacDonald had plasticine models, but they were built to show clients after the routing had been finalized.

[Mike Hendren]

Tommy, see my thread on Old School Routing Aids.  Closet luddites live!


All the best,


Mike

[Ally Mcintosh]

Plenty of architects use this method. I don’t. I just use centrelines with a pencil and tracing paper, preferring to visualise and measure separation between holes…. This and site analysis of course.


But it is manual. There is no programming that can sort out routing for you.

[Don Mahaffey]

Yes, my understanding is this is a common practice, to take 18 holes whether cut outs like BC uses or even on CAD, using spatial tools to line up a routing is pretty standard. But BC does seem to be pretty good at it.  To me another example of it's not the tool, it's the mechanic.

[Tom_Doak]

I was surprised to see this a year ago from a client in Texas, because I had no idea Bill has always been doing it this way [which is exactly how George Thomas suggested in his 1927 book].  He must have done it for Streamsong, too, because I recognized a couple of his "templates" in Texas from the Streamsong plan, but he was hiding them in his hotel room and not showing me!


I do it the way Ally does, except I often draw my centerlines in pencil right onto a copy of the map, instead of on tracing paper like we were taught.  That's because I'm not expecting to perfect it right away, and I like having my original thoughts still on the map when I'm walking out there and trying to sort out potential changes to an early version of the routing.