Greens with different pin positions

[John_McMillan]

In a post over the summer, I gave some impressions of a new course in Michigan - Champion Hill.  One hole in particular was interesting to me - both because of a great green, and a very badly placed tree.  (With the hole's main features illustrated with a little graphics help from Paint Shop Pro) -



The hole plays about 320 yards, and has two prevailing winds - from the North (so the hole plays directly downwind) and from the South (so the hole plays directly into the wind).  The green has two sections - deeper on the right, and narrower on the left, with the left section on a shelf about 2 or 3 feet below the right section.  

The way I've played the hole when the pin is set on the right of the green is to drive down the left side, and attempt to use the hill on the right as a "backboard" to play a low chip to the green.  With pins on the left of the green, the strategy becomes very different - try to drive up the right, and play a low chip just to the front of the green which will fall over the shelf and stop on the lower portion.  Club selection on the tee is also determined for me by the combination of wind and pins.  If it's downwind / pin on right, I can try to drive the green with a 3-wood.  Downwind / pin on left, the penalties of missing short and left are too great, so I play a 3-iron towards the bunker on the right.  Upwind is a different set of options - I probably can't reach the green with any club, and a 3-wood would balloon too much into the wind (particularly from the top of a 50 foot hill) - so I try to play a 1-iron to the side of the fairway that opens up the green best.  

The tree is one of the worst placed I've seen on a golf course, presumably to emphasize to the dull-witted the difficulty of playing a high approach to the left side of the green. I think the same strategies can be accomplished with contouring the green - which is very near to doing that anyway.  

What interests me about the hole (other than a desire to sneak on during winter and "improve" the hole with a chainsaw) - is the different ways the hole can play with different selections for pin positions.  Are the holes others have played this year which also have different characters depending on their pins?

[Tim_Weiman]

John,

As a concept, I'm a big fan of greens with significantly different pin positions.  This feature strikes me as one of the best ways to offer variety.

I do believe Tom Doak built several greens at Pacific Dunes that fit the category you describe.  One example is number three.  The green is well elevated and bunkered on the right side.  I can imagine a pine position well to the right would play much different than the left side, especially playing in to the wind which is likely to make the front right bunker all the more intimidating.  I suppose a good player might just hit more club, but I'd be preoccupied with how aggressive a line I wanted to take, weighing the risk of a three putt verses a bunker recovery shot.

[TEPaul]

Hopefully not to stray fromt the subject but I too believe that Pacific Dunes is designed with strategies involving different and interesting pin positions but not in that recognizable a way. Designs that have very recognizable pin postions sometimes offer them in sort of a side to side way. Anybody can pick those up on very wide side to side greens if a pin is way over on the right, for instance!

Pacific Dunes seems to me to have some very deep greens and that can fake out a lot of golfers because it's not that  recognizable. I've noticed much of the same thing on some of the greens at Applebrook, Friar's and Hidden Creek. Not exclusively, of course, but it's a great architectural design application and very sophisticated--makes a golfer pay attention or pay!

[Patrick_Mucci]

John McMillan,

I don't want to bore everyone with my favorite golf course,
but, NGLA has such great variety, created simply by moving the pin.

Holes # 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, and 18,
have many personalities and methods of play when the pins are in a variety of locations.  What is neat about it, are the different shots available/required to get to certain pins on the above greens.

And, it isn't just the distance factor, it's risk reward, variety of shot, a test of your nerves, even on the chips and pitches.

I think this is one of the facets that make NGLA so special.

[Jeff Mingay]

Donald Ross seems to have been very, very good at separating his greens into different "cupping areas"; each of which necessitates a completely different way of playing the tee shot in order to approach the day's hole location from a favourable angle.

We have several of these types of greens -- with the "cupping areas" separated by gentle terraces and swales -- at Essex. The problem is that the fairways have become so narrow and the greens have shrunken so significantly that what was once a multi-dimensional layout has become very one-dimensional: drive down the centre of a narrow fairway lined with trees and then play to a circular green.

That's not the way Ross designed his courses. Sadly, Essex is not alone in its evoled state  

[TEPaul]

Interesting to me what Jeff Mingay says about the cupping positions that Donald Ross created at Essex that require setting up a drive or approach shot to approach them properly.

We certainly have many of these cupping positions at our Ross course (Gulph Mills) that require setting up the drive and the angle of the drive to approach properly from the fairway. Actually Ross came back to GMGC ten years after opening and created more meaning into some of the greens by creating and enhancing a number of "cupping areas".

I'm struck though how well Ross seemed to mix up the variety of the progressive nature of how a drive might relate to a particular cupping position or not. On some holes the meaning is quite clear and on other holes the meaning isn't clear at all and may not even exist!! In the latter example there might not even be any progressive shot connection as to strategy of a drive placement where he may have gone simply with isolated shot (in a vacuum) demand!

On the latter example (no particular best angle) the greens and their cupping positions are very interesting, going say with quite a dramatic perpindicular tier and such where shot angle placement might not really matter but the distance choices you hit the ball certainly do! And other greens and pin positions it might not matter much where you put the ball on the fairway but it's clear that you have plenty of shot demand on how you get the ball (from anywhere on the fairway) into the green dealing with something like an inline center ridge on the green or maybe a center swale with tiers on either side.

I guess holes like those might have some real meaning as to whether you're personally comfortable with a fade or a draw as your approach.

On holes like those, particularly when I'm fooling around, I find myself trying high risk shot types that really are going against the grain and logic of what might seem to be called for strategically!! I wonder if he might not have thrown some pin and particularly distance considerations into those holes and the strategic equation with this in mind!! In other words I can draw a six iron and fade a four iron to about the same distance!! And for some reason I tend to go with the six iron draw even if it's riskier!!

Ross seemed very good at offering the golfer holes that appeared to have very definite strategic meaning and just when you think you're figuring it out he might offer a hole or two where the meaning seems lacking and it's all just the players choice to do something that might not be connected to the previous shot. And then of course he was one of the greatest at the raised or imperceptively raised green site for club selection decisions. Ross probably found as many raised green sites on each of his project's properties as any designer ever!!

Some might say he didn't think everything through but to me it seems to be a wide variety!

[John_McMillan]

Tim -

There are many examples of different pin positions (on a 2-shot hole) allowing different strategies on the approach.  What I had in mind were examples where they also suggested different strategies for the tee shot setting up different approaches.

Patrick -

We should take it as a given that your view is that NGLA has illustrations of all that is good in golf.  Can you give us some specific examples of how a hole or two sets up different strategies based on the pin locations?

TEP and Jeff -

That's an interesting twist to the discussion - that this feature is more in Ross's design than in other archecticts.  I tried to think of some Mackenzie examples, and couldn't come up with any off the top of my head.  Are there other architects whose design style contains different "cupping areas?"

[BillV]

This is the type of strategy that I generally refer to as  Strategic Flexibility.  Pete Dye seems to have been the best at this of the modern archies, no?

Ideally created, there are pin placements that are best approached from certain often table-top sized (So it seems!) areas of fairways.  But then again, this is what The Old Course (BDAW) is all about.

[Jeff Mingay]

I seem to recall Robert Hunter advising against separating greens into distinct sections using terraces in The Links. If I recall correctly, he described such greens as appearing unnatural. An ideal green, as described by Hunter, brings thoughts of the 6th at Crystal Downs to my mind.

In theory, I agree with Hunter. But Donald Ross was so good at using diaginal terraces and separating his greens into distinct "cupping areas" that he contradicts Hunter's good advice.

Hunter visited Pinehurst regularly in his life. I'm trying to think of a green on the No. 2 course that is "compartmentalized"?

Tom,

Ross used a lot of vertical centre ridges at the backs of greens at Essex too. You're right in that these ridges subtly call for either a fade or a draw depending on which side the hole is cut on any given day. Putting from one side of these ridges to the other is challenging.

The simplicity of it all... and still we find so many dull, boring courses these days  

[Jeff Mingay]

I was just thinking about how neat those back centre vertical ridges are. And you find them a lot on Ross green plans, on paper.

If a fade or draw isn't executed properly, you end up either short siding yourself, leaving a very difficult up-and-down from a deep greenside bunker! Or leaving a long, challenging putt over top of the ridge.

It's brilliant design, using one subtle little feature!

[BCrosby]

John -

I've always thought that No. 3 at ANGC played similarly.  If you are feeling frisky, a long drive down the right side is an option.  A left pin is easier to see and the green surrounds less severe from that angle.

If you are playing into the wind (or a mere mortal off the tee), you lay-up near the old MacK fairway bunkers on the left.  For a back right pin, that is the angle, though it requires a longer approach.

From whatever angle you chose, the putting surface is just brutal.  Though you may be hitting only a PW to the green, the margin of error is essentially zero.

Tom -

I agree.  You can over-think Ross sometimes.  At the Athens CC  there are holes where his original strategy jumps out at you.  On others it's far from clear how he wanted you to play the hole.  Or whether he cared how you played the hole.

To some extent these difference are a function of the length of the hole.  For example, the Ross strategies tend to be more clear on shorter par 4's and less clear on his long par 4's.  At Athens there are some long par 4's where (I think) Ross belived their length alone was plenty of challenge.  The greens are relatively open and have generous recovery areas.

His shorter par 4's tend to dictate a strategy.  Which makes sense to me.

And then there are some medium length par 4's where I'm not sure that a drive hit left or right makes much difference.  

But in thinking about some of these "non-strategic" holes at Athens a couple of month ago, it hit me that for a couple of them there was a lot more going on than I had originally thought.  

As you know, Ross loved foreshortening bunkers.  He loved messing with the player's mind about the true distance to the green.      

Until we found his original drawings for Athens, I thought these bunkers were a just a mildly interesting feature.  Fun, classic Ross features.  Not much more.

But when we found the original drawings for the Ross green complexes, I almost fell out of my chair.   On the two holes where he had designed foreshortening fairway bunkers he had also designed green complexes with severe back bunkers that cut into the green surfaces at asymetrical angles.  Even more striking is that, with one exception, they were the only back bunkers Ross designed for the course.

It wasn't just that Ross wanted to mess with your mind about the distance to the middle of the green.  He wanted the player make some difficult "north-south" strategic decisions.  Especially with back pin locations.  

All of the back bunkers and the asymetrical greens they created were gone by the mid-60's.  By the time I had started playing the course the greens had bcome big ovals with no bunkering at the rear.

Finding the old pictures was one of those "EUREKA" moments.  The holes with their foreshortening bunkers that once seemed to be merely quaint, suddenly became examples of Ross's brilliant strategic variety.

I've strayed a little.  My point is that sometimes, if you dig and you are lucky enough to have a decent historical record, those non-discript (I started to say mediocre) Ross holes turn out to be jewels.    
















    

One thing I have come to appreciate is Ross's used a "north-south" strategy.    

[TEPaul]

There are so many interesting things to do with greens. I was just analyzing some green drawings of Pine Valley and the detail, the construction detail and the text and diagraming that went with them. I was struck be the thought and the use of a bit of a rounded terracing effect coming out of the surrounds creating various cupping areas and ways of getting the ball from here to there on the greens! The designer referred to them as "spurs" and with all the detail there was the notation on each drawing that they were to be considered "preliminary", and that interpretation on the ground would be the final step! It was after the death of Crump and before 1921 committee did their "Crump remembrances" recommendations for the finalization of the course. I'm certain they were the work of Hugh Alison! Fascinating stuff!