Courses Messed Up by Adding New Practice Facilities

[G Jones]

a little off topic... but since some people were talking about the best practise facilities....

I doubt most people would agree, but the coolest old school practise area I know of is the one at carnoustie (about 100 yards left of the 9th hole). You have to get to it from totally the other end of town, go past Panmure G.C., cross a railway, avoid the army checkpoint and park your car on the edge of the practise ground... but it is an unusual style... basically a huge area of fairway, maybe (if i remember) 400 yards wide and about 800 yards long...  which is a lot bigger than you think!!! it looks like 20 football fields. you could hit 3 drives in a row to get from one end to the other pretty much... there is no area to hit from... you just walk out there with your balls and hit them whereever you like. If other people are there then the etiquette is to hit all of your balls to one particular area, and generally not threaten anyone's life! Often people will hit all their balls, group them together, hit again in the same direction, etc... and after 4 or 5 sets of 6 irons they have made it to the other side.

At one end there is a raised tee (i guess for competition practise) that is pristine and never used, and then there is a little creek next to it, over which is a nice big carnoustie green with bunkers to practise from.

Seriously cool. None of these indoor chipping greens and uber-ranges :-)

[Tyler Kearns]

Here in Winnipeg, three holes have been lost to driving ranges, Elmhurst's (Ross) 9th, Glendale's (Thompson) 10th and Niakwa's (Thompson) 2nd. While none of these holes were architectural masterpieces, the addition of the new holes have changed the continuity of the original design style, although I reserve judgment in the latter case because I have not seen the changes yet.

TK

[JNC Lyon]

The Country Club added a driving range and chipping areas in the 1950s and lost three Ross holes, replaced by three RTJ holes, two of which were VERY awkward par fours before being renovated by Hanse.  One of the three lost holes is still fully intact, albeit without some original bunkering, as a long, uphill par three.  It is doubtful that the other holes would ever be restored, but the course is excellent as it is.

[Craig Disher]

Some won't grieve the loss of a quality hole on an executive 9 but in Arthur Hills' redo of Manor CC, Flynn's 8th, perhaps the best of the 9, was lost in the expansion of the new driving range. The 9th was also changed but Flynn's original had already been modified (although not lost) by an earlier driving range.

[Jeff Goldman]

One of the Architects we brought out to look at the South Course at Olympia Fields suggested converting the present 8th and 9th holes to the driving range, and building two new holes somewhere.  while 8 is lousy, 9 is really good, reminiscent of the old 18th hole at Oak Hill, which, coincidentally, was changed by the same firm that made this suggestion (the joke I was using was that they were probably the only architects who could mess up the same hole twice).  

Luckily, doing this would have used up our entire budget, so it went nowhere.

[Glenn Spencer]

I'm not nearly as traveled as most on here....but the nicest range I've ever seen and practiced on is the one at Bandon.

Are there other courses/resorts that are as nice as that or even nicer?

Haven't seen Bandon. Old Waverly, Muirfield Village and Firestone are the best that I have seen. It is kind of hard to leave them if you like to practice.

[Joshua Pettit]

I would say the most compromising practice facility addition that I have encountered is the driving range built in the late 1940s at The Meadow Club (MacKenzie/Hunter, Fairfax, CA, 1926).  The orientation of the practice fairway affects the intended width of the 10th, 12th, and 18th fairways which were all originally more severe dog-leg-left par 4s.

[Bob_Huntley]

Sidebar:

Why do they charge to play the Himalayas?
Do they need the revenue stream?
So they can keep all the young and old golfers off?
Can you putt on a Sunday?

They charge bcause the demand is there and it pays for the maintenance.

You will probably find more women (of all ages) than men putting there, seven days a week.


Bob

[Darren_Kilfara]

Re: the Himalayas, they charge because *it's not a practice facility* - it's a golf course, with its own golf club (the Ladies Putting Club) and everything. It's an utterly trifling fee to play the course, but it is a course...you can't just go out there, drop a few balls and treat it like your country club practice green. There are other similar putting courses all over Scotland, including at least two others I can think of in St. Andrews, and they all charge a nominal fee, just as most museums, fairground rides and other recreational attractions charge a fee.

Cheers,
Darren

[TEPaul]

TomD:

My course, Guph Mills. And you're right, one and a half holes right next to the clubhouse that precipitated chances to holes elsewhere to compensate. In a way it's not just the penchant to change things on those old courses, it's the fact that almost none of them had practice ranges early-on.

Back in those days practice balls in a club sense didn't even exist. Golfers generally hit their own out onto holes contiguous to the start. Some still do. Bob Crosby and I went to Somerset Hills yesterday and about a quarter of the range is still the beginning of the tenth fairway.

Matter of fact that just may be one of the biggest and most significant changes in all of golf from the Golden Age and back to today-----eg club owned practice balls!

[Tom_Doak]

Tom P:

When I saw Apawamis years ago, they were still hitting orange practice balls from a practice tee into the first fairway, because they didn't have any range at all.  That's the way most clubs did it in the old days, but there weren't nearly so many people hitting balls!

Mike N:

As others expalined, the Ladies' Putting Club is a separate entity.  When I lived there 25 years ago, Walter Woods introduced me to the lady who maintained the green, the same one who collected the fees.

[Mike Nuzzo]

Thank you Bob, Darren & Tom.

That makes a lot more sense.
Actually a pretty cool story.
How long has it been a separate entitity?

I was there on April fools weekend, so it wasn't so busy.
I hope they change the holes, not just for wear, but interest.
The layout was a little bland and needed quite a bit of improvization.

Cheers.

[TEPaul]

TomD:

Here's an interesting old course that you're very familiar with that didn't have a range originally and certainly not one near the clubhouse but they sure do now and it never screwed up the course at all. The reason it happened this way is a pretty interesting evolution.

Piping Rock!

At first, as I'm sure you've heard, Macdonald wanted to use the present range for golf holes but the club wouldn't let him because that mammoth range at Piping was two side by side polo fields and polo back then was definitely not making any polo concessions to Macdonald's golf course.

But many decades later polo ended at Piping Rock and so they could use them for a great practice range right next to the clubhouse and in the entire evolution not a single hole was hurt because of it.

Ironically, #8 could never be lengthened (and I don't think it was designed to be because of the polo but now that it's a range and so far at the other end of the range #8 is a long road hole---too long for that particular green, in my opinion.

These course evolutions really are interesting to make known again, that's for sure.

Piping Rock's architecture definitely dodged a bullet.

[TEPaul]

"TEPaul would be a good respondent since his club lost their property, land that contained their original practice facility, and they had to reconfigure their golf course to accomodate a new range."

Pat:

My course never lost any land and they never sold any. Actually, about twenty years ago they bought a bit and that turned into one royal f...ing disaster for which we had to pay something like a million smackeroos because it turned out to be an EPA disaster. Great due diligence there, huh?

But we never had a range. There was about fourteen acres across the street that we leased for a couple of bucks a year and I think people sometimes practiced over there. I was called the Varian Tract.

Then the Varian's decided to sell it in the 1940s and of course they offered it to us first for not very much. But the idiotic board entered into about a two year price negotiation with the Varians and the price got within about $100 difference and the president of the club claimed that Varian was out to screw GM's out of money and Varian got even more pissed off and said he would never sell the land to GMGC no matter what. So the Varian Tract was developed into housing.

These guys were some really brilliant negotiators and futurists, huh Pat?

The Cascades doesn't have a range. They need one and want one and we think they can put one in above the 2nd hole without messing up that hole, at least we hope they can.