I saw that Tom Doak was just there end of last week for a quick visit (h/t Instagram). I don't intend this to be solely directed at Tom, but a few observations / questions and excited to get his insights.
1) Compared to my last visit, many of the template holes were vastly different and improved. Perhaps I was more of a GCA novice, but a ton of improvements were easy to identify:
- Wider fairways and playing corridors, providing really neat angles into greens and having to challenge bunkers- Fewer trees and brush, making for more recovery options as well as the visual of open vistas, not to mention a few skyline holes.
- Really improved & effective bunkering (similar to Murifield in Scotland or Royal Melbourne, where shots off line tend to feed toward and into bunkers- MacDonald template holes really stood out this time, where before you had to look closely to identify some of the less well known templates
2) Back in the 50's, RTJ Sr. got his hands on the course. I can't imagine that was a positive. How much did the club have to 'un-do' from the RTJ changes?
3) At 6500 yards, I felt that the course played much longer than the scorecard (not just due to wind). The angles and elevation changes contributed to the added distance. How does the club look at distance, in the 21st century for big hitting scratch golfers?
4) I love the Biarritz hole; any thought to make the front portion and the valley into an actual green instead of fairway turf?
I'll probably think of a few more topics; thanks for humoring me.
Hi Chip:
I've been consulting at Mid Ocean for about 20 years now. It's a lovely place to be called back to, even though we are to the point where there is not much to tell them.
One topic of discussion this trip was how their guest play has fallen off, along with golf tourism to Bermuda in general. So I had intended to make a post here this week reminding everyone that Mid Ocean welcomes guest play during the week, making it one of only two C.B. Macdonald designs you can play, and by far the best of the two in my opinion. [Old White at The Greenbrier is the other.]
Plus, if you look at the hole in one boards, you'll find the name of the founder of this web site.
To your questions:
1. We really have not done nearly as much to the golf course, physically, as you think you remember. The biggest change was converting the greens from common bermudagrass to TifEagle in the early 2000's. The contours on a couple of greens [4 and 8] had to be softened so they could handle "normal" green speeds. A hurricane also took out a bunch of trees between #1 and #17, and on a few other holes, but the club have always been reluctant to cut trees otherwise; still, that may have made the fairways appear wider to you.
1a. If you were just there, you played this time in droughty summer conditions, so you would have seen a lot more effect to the ground contours than if you were there in winter before. Mid Ocean [like all of Bermuda] has very limited irrigation reserves, and they do not irrigate fairways at all, so the conditions vary with the weather. I have only played it a couple of times when it's really droughty and fast, but that is when the course is at its most challenging and fun.
2. Mr. Jones broke up long bunkers into chains of smaller ones to minimize wind erosion, and to reduce the quantity of sand required, which is important because sand costs a FORTUNE when barged from the USA to Bermuda. We have changed back a few of these bunkers, but I have left most of them alone, for practical reasons.
3. Like all clubs, they tell stories and express concern about how the young and long-hitting members bomb it around the course, but it's still a tough place to score, and there's no more real estate available to lengthen it. One such player commented to me that there are lots of holes where he can't see the green surface from where his tee shot winds up, so it's hard to dial in the distance to get close enough to make birdies. It also helps that the greens have some big sweeping slopes that make it hard to hole sidehill putts.
4. As Jon noted, the club did ask us to "restore" the front half of the Biarritz green as putting surface 5 years ago, even though it had never been green originally. The idea was suggested / pushed by a couple of magazine panelists, and taken seriously by a committee who would very much like their course to be in the rankings. I was not a great fan of the idea, but told them I'd do it if they wanted . . . so we did. But the members quickly decided they HATED trying to putt 200 feet from a short tee shot, uphill, through a six-foot swale, so after a year or two they gave up and reintroduced fairway turf there. I was relieved to see it gone, and grateful that they didn't push me out for having gone along with a bad idea; but it is a good lesson to stick to my gut in any future consulting work, because there are always members pushing for some change or another at every club where we work, and most of the time the correct answer is "NO".
4.