Okay, I guess I wasn't very clear with my opening remarks.
I wasn't trying to say greens look like faces. The old quote was to imply, I believe, the relative importance of greens to golf courses - i.e. they are as important to a golf course as the face is to a portrait.
When I thought about the license photo, I tried to think of some distinguishing feature of the photo. This also came up the other day when I was talking to my sister about a caricature she had drawn of her daughter. It didn't really look like her at all, not even a caricature of her. I came to the conclusion that it was because she didn't have a particularly distinguishing feature that an artist could seize on.
Sometimes you look at someone and think, man, that guy's got a big nose, or that girl has huge eyes. A friend of mine who I worked with in NYC looked like Howdy Doody with gigantic eyelashes.
So that's kind of what I mean - can you sum up a green with a few short sentences or thoughts?
Pete Dye summed up a redan as follows: You take a table, turn it horizontally on a 45 degree, and then tilt it away from you.
I have short thoughts on all 18 greens at Oakmont: first green is a dramatic fallaway green. Second green is angled and slopes dramatically toward the golfer. Third green is like shaving the top off of a hill.
So can you summarize a famous green thusly? Is it a good thing if you can?
My own humble opinion is that many of the courses I've played have such undistinguished greens that I can't even remember them, let alone summarize them.
Then you have greens that are primarily bumpy, such as the famed Maxwell rolls. Do they defy summarizing completely?
And do certain multiple features tend to work well together? Maybe a big interior bump doesn't work so well on a really pitched green, or maybe a back bump defeats the whole purpose of a fallaway green - or maybe it saves it!
I don't know, just seemed kinda interesting - and yeah, maybe a little weird, too, Joe!
