Oxymoron - Penal School Courses that You Enjoy

[Sean_A]

Sean


I think you'd agree that you get degrees of forced carry. As I referred to in an earlier post having 50 or 60 yds of gunge in front of the mens tee, whether that gunge be gorse, heather, thick rough or water is not going to be a concern for most golfers and I doubt you would right off the hole as being penal. If the carry was 150 yards plus that would be another matter.


Likewise, the positioning and extent of the forced carry. With reference to the 3rd hole at Carnoustie and indeed the first at TOC, where you have a shortish par 4 with a burn bang in front of the green, then do you say that is penal architecture ? Bearing in mind that generally players would be hitting a short to mid iron approach.


Then there is the burn in front of the 18th green at Carnoustie. That's a more dicey approach and for many, maybe not all, asks a serious question of whether to go for it or lay up. Risk reward or strategic, take your pick, but I don't think that in this day and age with modern equipment etc that a reasonably competent golfer who decided to lay up would consider his next shot as being penal just because he had to cross a relatively narrow body of water that was well short of the intended landing area. Obviously if instead of a burn you had a lake that extended 100 yards back from the green there would be no argument that it was penal design, especially or perhaps if there was no room to go round it.


So, I don't think it's entirely black or white in terms of cross hazards making a hole penal.


Niall

Niall


Sure, there are degrees of forced carry, but a forced carry is a penal feature.  Again, you are confusing the nature of the feature with the difficulty of the feature.  I might add that it isn't my definition...it is the definition handed down to us.  You may not like the definition, just as I don't like paying £1.10 for diesel. Thats life.


Ciao

[Jason Thurman]

Sure, there are degrees of forced carry, but a forced carry is a penal feature.

Generally this is correct, but a course like Rustic Canyon really challenges this absolute. The wash at the 1^st requires a forced carry unless a player goes ridiculously far to the left, and yet I would consider it more strategic in nature than penal. I’d say the same for the barrancas at 7 and 14. The key, of course, is that each hazard is placed at an angle so that a player can choose the amount of risk he’d like to take for the reward of making the next shot an easier one, and each hole also features plenty of width to maximize the strategic implications of the angles created by the hazard. Also, even a 90 year old woman can make the carries at 1 and 7 if she positions her ball well, and lesser players aren't asked to make the carry at 14 from the forward tees. The hazards aren't designed to punish bad execution so much as they're designed to give players choices to consider, and that's the fundamental difference between penal and strategic placement for me.

[Tim Leahy]

Olympic Club and Spyglass Hill are penal courses that I still love to play as a middle hdcp player. Olympic has only one fairway trap but forces you to hit it staight off the tee or get eaten up by the trees. Spyglass has sand, iceplant and trees.