Donald Ross

[cary lichtenstein]

Do you think that Donald Ross would design his greens the same way today with the false fronts and run off areas considering the new grasses and todays greens speeds?

[Mark_F]

Quassi:

In US Golf Digest's US Open preview edition for the 1999 Open at Pinehurst, someone (and I'm sorry I can't remember who) well versed with Ross thought that he would have made the greens more severe than they are now, had he known what today's platers and equipment are capable of.

[Brad Klein]

Mark, if they were "well versed" then they were hardly speaking out of knowledge of those greens - or of Ross. Average greens at Pinehurst are 5,500-6,000 sq.ft, but only 35% of those surfaces are sloped at less than 3%, which means that two-thirds of the green is unpinnable at modern speeds. That's why the ball doesn't come to rest when you play there. Interestingly, when Ross finished grassing the greens (for the first time, finally!) in 1935, they had less slope than they do today.

The greens are more severe than they were then owing to: topdressing, some inadvertent construction steps taken in the name of "restoration;" and years of sand build up from bunkers as players splashed sand on the greens.

[TEPaul]

Brad:

As to how and why those Pinehurst #2 greens came to be so crowned I do buy 'construction mistakes in the name of restoration', but I don't know that I buy the topdressing and the sand slash out of bunkers.

How is topdressing going to create greens that're crowned in the middle unless maintenance dedicatedly dumps far more topdressing sand in the middle of the greens over quite a period of time? And how is sand splash out of bunkers going to increase the height of the middle of the green creating a crown in the middle? If anything sand splash out of bunkers is going to raise the height of the sides of the greens (where the sand splash lands) in relation to the height of the middles.

[Brad Klein]

TEP, as usual, you raise some good issues. In fact, in the 1950s at Pinehurst, they piled sand on top of the place, and it managed to build up something of a crown - gradually.

You are right, that sand splashed from bunkers won't get to the middle of greens, but it does raise a kind of wedge between that bunker and, say, 10-15 into the green. That's the kind of build-up, by the way, that led to signifianrt changes in Riviera's contours, enough so that when Crenshaw & Coore "restored" them in the mid-1990s they opted to leave about half of the accumlated elevation that had built up rather than go bakl radically to the lower, original contours built by Thomas & Bell.

[Dan Herrmann]

Bump - this is a great question posted in 2003 that I think deserves some more discussion.    I'd add something, but I don't know enough about Ross to have an opinion, so I thought I'd sit back and read what folks more knowledgeable than I have to say.

[Craig Disher]

I'll offer something. I'm not sure that the greens at #2 are more sloped internally than they were when Ross designed them. This photograph of the 2nd green taken during the 1936 PGA shows what I think is a much more severe slope on the front right of the green than exists now. Other photos show steeper contours on other greens - #4, e.g. Obviously this green is much more built up now and the slopes generally follow what was originally intended but are they more severe now? I'm not sure.