The Experience of Siwanoy's Design: Routing and Distance
This Grill Room placemat makes an accurate depiction of the multiple directions the holes travel across the layout. Note the artist’s voluminous depiction of trees, which unfortunately was also accurate for more than 50 seasons With no routing changes, bestial lengthening or basic green complex alteration over its nearly 100 years of existence, the Siwanoy Country Club course stands as something of a marvel for how it has retained challenge and interest while the game of golf has experienced sea changes around it. Beyond its puny back tee distance and absence of principal alterations, this retention of strategic merit is made more noteworthy by the fact that the course is not, and never has been, larded with white stakes, water hazards, fairway bunkers or other such gimmicks.
Siwanoy is laid out on a fan-shaped parcel of gently rolling dales and the old racetrack flats measuring just under 100 acres. In his collected gospel of course design,
Golf Has Never Failed Me, Ross documents this fan shape as ideal for layout, owing to its ability to configure holes that follow different directions and wind conditions. Given that Siwanoy follows this template to the letter, it should be no great surprise to know that Ross specifically advised for this parcel’s purchase in preference to a competitor a few miles away in Mount Vernon.
Though eight holes of the course are played up, over and back across a central hill in the middle of the property, the course is not a rigorous hike in the least. Unlike many Westchester County courses carved in and out of near-alpine locales, it is a pleasant walk where tee boxes are generally within 10-15 yards of the previous green and fairway flats abound. The author’s experience of Siwanoy is that of a course where foursomes rarely take four hours to complete a round and smaller groups can get around in three or less.
When the ground game was king and carry distances were 30-50% shorter, a Siwanoy player needed more power to tackle what was then a comparatively long course. Playing width was generous and erratic drives were not disproportionately punished beyond capricious lies in the rough and ambivalent angles to the target. If you were off-line, recovery was possible but compelled exact play to keep par.
As the game changed to an aerial aesthetic, concurrent with longer ball flight and the first popular era of the steel shaft, the 2000 trees (!!!) the club purchased from a foundering local nursery in the early 1930s began to grow - removing latitude from (what were now becoming) shorter holes. It still dictated those same locations from where Donald Ross conceived the 2 and 3-shot holes are best approached, but it did so with a more penal hand to punish error.
We now exist in the mega-distance, long ball, specialty wedge, hybrid club era that would mostly be alien to Ross, but a reborn Siwanoy remains humorously obstinate to those advances despite the recent (and judicious) removal of 90% of those plantings and other overgrowth, and still playing less than 6490 from its absolute tips. The challenge offered to the longer straighter tool box with which the modern golfer is now equipped is that going too far can be as much of a burden to a sound approach shot as is loss of distance.
This strategic problem reveals itself to players of every stripe when they realize that though they can drive within 120 yards of a green in regulation on 11 of the 14 non-par 3s, this shorter distance often does not represent the optimum position from which to play.
When you drive too far at Siwanoy you are confronted with blind shots from uphill stances, nettlesome partial wedges from downhill lies, poor angles from balls above your feet and sometimes elements of all three problems. Of course this is in addition to rough that is kept lush and gnarly, producing plenty of "bird's nest-" type of lies that act like emerald Brillo - even on short irons and wedges.
The course now resists "speeding," as it were, unless you really enjoy 87 yard semi-blind wedge shots off uneven slope. Part of Siwanoy’s charm is that these types of short shots seem to suggest birdie but more often than not, induce a double-bogey. These features of mutability across the modern evolutions of golf could be accurately ascribed to the brilliance of the Ross routing on this miniscule piece of property (96 acres). But the true father of Siwanoy's virtue is the greens, which Ross cunningly crafted to be both dramatic and understated at the same time
In Part III, I hope to cover Siwanoy's greens in more specific detail, but to summate Part II I offer this comparison of three B/W photos: These photos look at the 4th hole from the right rough. The first is from conduct of the first PGA in 1916, the second is from a similar, but fairway angle in 1993 when the 1932 plantings dominated the property, the third is from 2008 (still more trees have been removed in the interim 30 months to this writing. I ask the reader to judge for him or herself whether the Kay renovation and the club's aggressive tree removal program have restored a visual sense of the Ross layout from what it had become:
Lastly, and thanks to Joe Bausch hosting magic for all, here is the monument to the first PGA. Like Siwanoy itself, this simple understated plaque - now on the 18th tee (it used to stand by the hazard bridge within 100 yards of the green) - reminds all of the history of the game in America:
Part III - the greens... later tonight or tomorrow. We'll start the Course Tour in Part IV later this week.
cheers
vk