[Ian Andrew]

I'm a little lost on what constitutes a "transition" hole.

Pat,

The holes we look for in a routing usually have very little need for manipulation and most often would still hold up very well without any architectural additions. I don’t know about you but I’m hard pressed to come up with a course with 18 holes in a row over excellent terrain. So following that we know we will have to develop some holes over lesser ground.

The holes that connect between the areas of more interesting terrain are often referred to as the transition holes or connector holes. Many great ones are unrecognizable because that while the bulk of the hole is over the dull land they use brilliant features or a fantastic backdrop to hide what they are accomplishing. Sometimes the land is dull but the architecture is so clever that one of these holes can become the high point of the course despite the fact that they lay over dull terrain.

Consider that the 10th at Riviera is over a fairly wide and dull piece of ground and you can see how an architect can make something brilliant out of an ordinary piece of land.

Stanley Thompson for example tried to run the longest fours and fives over dull land, so that he could maximize the use of the best terrain with shorter holes. He reasoned that he could get more interesting holes this way and that the shortest holes should be over the best terrain. Most of his connectors are the fives.

Unless you find a clever way to make these holes interesting, people will feel the let down in the routing. These are the holes where the architect’s creativity needs to come through.

p.s. from my observations I find that long threes are the most obvious and usually lead to the worst holes

[archie_struthers]

 


Ed ...Ian your explanations make good sense and define transition holes as to routing / architecture......it doesn't address Tom's second point as a hole that connects two great ones....I slipped down that road also when talking about flow....

Ian   Pine Valley might have no transition holes by  your definition....I'd argue eleven and twelve are obvious ones ....and perhaps fourteen as well....didn't Crump agonize over how to link thirteen and fifteen  ...this being said fourteen might has the most elevation change is is hardly boring land     

[Peter Pallotta]

Stanley Thompson for example tried to run the longest fours and fives over dull land, so that he could maximize the use of the best terrain with shorter holes. He reasoned that he could get more interesting holes this way and that the shortest holes should be over the best terrain. Most of his connectors are the fives.

Ian - what do you think of Stanley's reasoning/approach there?

For me, I think it may have been sound enough back in his day, but today -- so many courses with so many Par 5s -- I find myself wishing he'd never established that approach/rule of thumb.  You take my least favourite kind of golf hole (a Par 5) and then lay it across the least interesting bit of land on the site....well, not an inspiring combination to say the least. But I'm surely missing a lot there, and I'd be very interested in your views. Btw, the best Par 5 I've ever played, and one of the very few I've ever liked, is the 8th at Crystal Downs.  Just wonderful how the land is used there.

Peter  

[Tom_Doak]

Ian:

Thanks for your post.  Never thought much about Stanley Thompson's approach [my experience is still no match for yours there], but I guess we share the same philosophy there ... why settle for a great par 5 on the best ground, when you could get two great holes for one?

[Peter Pallotta]

But if you did 'settle', Tom, you'd at least have that rarest of commodities, a great Par 5 -- and maybe even one of the best ever! Not a bad trade-off maybe for losing a second great hole. Who needs another dramatic Par 3 with a great green site? That's stuff for 'signature' courses

Peter

[Ian Andrew]

Peter and Tom,

I would argue that at Cape Breton Highlands Links he choose 4 great sites for the par fives and got the best set of fives that I know. The 11th was a four and for my money still is. Interesting that (in my opinion) the transition holes are the 11th (four) and 12th (long three) on that course.

At Jasper and Banff he definitely employed that technique and talked about it in particular reference to the 7th (the five that approaches the Devil’s Cauldron).

[BCrosby]

Ian -

Thinking about this thread, it struck me that many transition holes are par 3's. They quickly get you from one elevation level to another.

Take ANGC. The 4th gets you to the higher level of the 5th (which I suspect Mack very much wanted to use as a long par 4), then 6th gets you back down the hill

Or take PVGC. The 5th gets you quickly up the hill to the elevation used for the 6th, 7th and so forth. The 14th then gets you back down off that level for the rest of the course.

I can think of lots of Ross courses where par 3's are used similarly.

On the other hand, though these par 3's might serve important routing functions in transitioning between elevations, I hesistate to call them merely transition holes. The ones I cited above are too good for that slightly derogatory designation.

Bob 

 

[archie_struthers]

Wouldn't both 5 and 14 be transition holes at Pine Valley?   Yet they certainly aren't bad ground so do they fit the sniff test.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Truthfully, I can't think of a hole that I ever considered a transition hole in my own work.  Perhaps the closest is the 17th at Cowboys, going up the hill, but I thnk it works okay.  Basically, I keep jiggling holes around until I come up with18 good ones.....I think if you accept one bad one as a given, you have given up too easily.

[Ian Andrew]

Jeff,

I’ve never seen a transition hole to mean a bad hole or reluctantly accepting something you don’t want. I see them as holes that connect very desirable holes together. Some courses have almost none, some involve half holes, and others are incredibly well hidden by the architect. The bad ones are obvious.

[archie_struthers]

 


Jeff , don't think anyone thinks transition holes need to be bad, but we do have some issues with pinning down an exact definition of same !

[John Moore II]

Truthfully, I can't think of a hole that I ever considered a transition hole in my own work.  Perhaps the closest is the 17th at Cowboys, going up the hill, but I thnk it works okay.  Basically, I keep jiggling holes around until I come up with18 good ones.....I think if you accept one bad one as a given, you have given up too easily.

I don't think anyone is saying a 'bad' hole is a given. However, if you have two world class awesome holes, but 400 yards between them, how do you bridge the gap? So you give one or both of them up, or do you find a way to put a still good hole in between them? I don't think anyone is saying you should put a real stinker in between two really good holes, but sometimes you might have to settle on that one hole, having it be a '5' or something in order to get the two '9's' in, no? Or would you really give up the 9's and make up three 7's?

In that situation, the in between hole is a transition hole, but its still good. Is that bad?

[Peter Pallotta]

John - You know, i find this hard to disucss in real and practical terms because it seems so inherently 'relative'. What I mean is, in the context of an individual golf course, the one we're playing on any given day, is a golf hole a "9" in comparison to all the golf holes on all the golf courses we've ever played in our lives? or is it a "9" in comparison to the 17 other holes on that particular golf course? If the former, I'd find it hard to imagine we'd be running into a whole bunch of "9s" to transition from; if the latter, then some holes automatically become 'transition' holes, if only because the alternative is to rank ALL the holes "9"s, which kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise. Which is to say, the trend/ethos not to want any 'transition' or 'breather' holes (and to have instead 18 "great" holes) seems crazy to me -- I don't understand how it's possible...and being crazy/impossible, trying it (and trying to market a golf course like that) seems to me bad for golf course architecture

Peter

[John Moore II]

Peter-what you are saying is what I am looking at as well. I think it is impossible to design a golf course with no compromises or anything else. At some point, the designer is going to have to get from one good piece of land to another. There will need to be a hole in there. It may be a very good hole, the holes Tom Doak and I discussed from Riverfront are not bad holes, but it may be necessary in order to get the best routing possible to go across a less than great piece of the property. After all, not every part of the property can be great, well, unless you have made cash like Tom Fazio did at Shadow Creek.

[Ian Andrew]

Is there a chance that this is something that only architects are interested in analysing and to everyone else this isn't really that interesting?

Through looking at examples I have learnt the value of a backdrop as an anchor when there is nothing else to draw upon. It's got me thinking more outside the hole than I would have before.

[Ed Oden]

Is there a chance that this is something that only architects are interested in analysing and to everyone else this isn't really that interesting?

Through looking at examples I have learnt the value of a backdrop as an anchor when there is nothing else to draw upon. It's got me thinking more outside the hole than I would have before.

Ian, you may be right.  Although I'd heard of transition holes before, I never really gave them much thought until playing amateur architect on Charlie's contest.  That process made it clear to me that transition holes are critical to quality design.

Ed

[Matthew Petersen]

From the reading I've done, I'd say transition holes are of huge importance and are one thing that really sets better GCAs apart. Most anyone can find a nice natural hole that works with the land. It's the ability to take a more mundane piece of land and craft a good hole out of it that can make a course really special. I know I have read Mr. Doak talk about how many of the most interesting holes he's designed are essentially transition holes (ie, not holes that were readily apparent from natural forms).

[Mike Hendren]

Ian -

Thinking about this thread, it struck me that many transition holes are par 3's.

Bob, I had the same thought with the 11th at Crystal Downs and 11th at Kingsley Club coming immediately to mind. 

Mike

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