Golf Course Patina

[Mike Hendren]

If we're honest "the look" of a golf course predisposes us to love, like to dislike it. 

A brand new leather chair in the den is a thing of beauty, but initially not quite as comfortable as the old tattered, off-color, cracked version the Mrs. insisted on sending to Goodwill. 

If I've learned anything from Antique Roadshow and American Pickers it's that a well-worn patina enhances an item's value.  Is there anything analogous in golf architecture?

A related question is whether pristine conditioning is preferable to a "weathered" look that evolves over time.  For example, I have no doubt Oakmont (I dare not bring up Chicago Golf Club)
is a genuinely "great" golf course, but on television (admittedly, the absolutely worst way to assess a golf course) it looked a little too pretty to my tastes. 

Just thinking.

Mike

[Ken Moum]

I think you're right. For me anyway.


But I love linksland and at age 70 have never been a member at a course that had the money to make it "pretty."

[Peter Pallotta]

Patina is a great word for it, Mike.

I'd like to say: "but it must be earned -- genuinely, with a life fully lived, and authentically, with the long passage of time".

But from what I can tell, that's not actually true.

We have, it seems from photos, some masters about who (logically, technically) know their crafts so well that (emotionally, spiritually) they can create brand new courses permeated with the feeling of a 400 year old beech tree, standing sentinel by a swift running stream in the English Cotswolds.


P 

[Sean_A]

Bogey

I agree, it takes time (and perhaps alack of funds) to create a weathered look.  For me, the weathered look is best achieved by

1. Earthworks faded into the ground over decades

2. A minimal maintenance regime, greatly helped by grazing animals

3. Greens that sit on the landscape rather than in it

I know what Pietro is saying about the new breed archies creating old look style, but to my eye these courses still have an inkling of modernism about them which can't be shaken.

Ciao

[Tom_Doak]

To Sean's list I would add


4.  Naturalized grasses.  All of the old courses were seeded with a mixture of different grasses allowing nature to take its course.  Different species or cultivars thrive in different places on the property (shadier, wetter, drier) but there is usually some intermingling that's a sure sign of age and a different patina.


Too many new courses are planted by guys who want the same cloned plant from edge to edge, and sharp unnatural "definition" from green to fairway to rough.


Worst of all are the renovations where pure, ugly bluegrass sod is brought in to carpet all the new work.  It sticks out like a sore thumb and calls attention to everything new.  But of course club members are too impatient to seed things and let them evolve naturally.

[Peter Pallotta]

Yes, to use Bogey's analogy of the leather chair, I suppose it's the 'texture' (and probably more importantly, the *relationship* between the textures) that gives the chair or the golf course that appealing 'patina'.  That old leather chair was likely worn down & less brown and smooth in certain places (eg the arm rests) than in others, and a little cracked and bent out of shape in the seat but not at all on the sides -- but those differences in textures and the relationship between them are completely 'understandable', i.e. the eye immediately intuits/makes sense of all the reasons why. But again, from photos it does seem that some of our talents today like Tom & his team do a remarkably good job of creating an aesthetic that 'makes sense' to our eyes; and, more importantly, they somehow manage to do it not *at the expense* of playability but the very opposite, i.e. the lack of definition they create both supports and reflects the greater freedom & choice & decision-making the golfer has because of it. (Or so it seems from far away).
P