Pat Mucci said;
"Perhaps you're viewing the issue in a different aspect.
It's been my limited experience that new greens "play" hard for the first few years.
With approach shots, balls bounce hard, high and long for 2-3 years and gradually reach their normal ability to be receptive after that initial, interim period."
Patrick:
That's been my experience with new courses too. The ones I remember best that way were Stone Harbor in New Jersey and Pete's course out to the west of North Palm Beach (the name escapes me at the moment).
Stone Harbor was so rock hard in the first few years it was hard to keep a ball on it and Pete's course in Florida was too even though chips and pitches and stuff had a real low sort of dead bounce to them (a whole lot of sand base in the greens I expect).
Not to sound critical in any way, because I sure am not trying to be but it really is interesting to see a bunch of supers on here disagree so dramatically on the same subjects!
It makes one wonder how much supers get into the finer points of playability.
I think this type of thing is a super fascinating subject and I love to see these dialogues on these threads between superintendents. It's so interesting. Unfortunately, it does remind and inform us laymen that if supers can't or don't agree on these things how in the holy hell are us laymen ever going to?