Matt, Tony's pictures are excellent, yet still don't convey the slope down to the abyss on three sides of the 11th and 15th. Matt, you are telling me (as is 15) that a green approach is fair and good design if a ball can only land on about 1000sq ft of green surface or perhaps a sliver of foregreen 3-5ft on the front right, and if anything else, will one hop off the world to total unrecoverable deep ravine snakeland, Dante inferno time?
Look at the photo of 15. What the photo does not convey is that the trees on the left (which are even thinned out more now) obscure the entire left 1/2 -2/3rds of the green when viewed from fairway height on either the upper or lower terrace garden spot. The only realistic angle you have to the right side of the green from 220-120 out is if you are on the leading edge of the fairway on the right as we look at the photo. If you are not on the fairway off the tee, or you push off too far to the right into the leading edge ravine on a second shot, you are equally dead. Look at the group on the green. If you approach pin high anywhere left of them, you are one-hoped dead. That picture doesn't begin to tell how steep and severe it is just behind and coming around the left side of the green. If you are short, you are lucky to be in the bunker or roll backwards down to a sand blast or pitch up to the narrow table top of the green and pray you hold it. If you are short and left, you are again in an area 15-20 ft below the green but there are dead tree trunks, grunge and poisonous wild life lurking there. In the photo you only see one of the cart paths leading from 15 to 16 or beside 13. There is a second cart path higher near the green, but still 12-15 ft below the green fringe. The picture gives you no clue how steep and treacherous and immediatly adjacent to the green the death plunge is.
As for the picture of 11- it is pretty good, but you have to know what you are looking at. The tee ball comes at the aiming bunker at the foreground from the apex of the down right corner of the photo and across the ravine. It is a bite-off shot too. The carry at the direct line to the aiming bunker is not as difficult as it looks from the tee. The line of bunkers begins to eat up real estate quickly, and anything aggressive to take on that front line of bunkers can lead to some real difficulty, that if you are within the field of bunkers is a perfectly fine penalty to pay, but in the ravine is a re-load. I for one was at about 2 o'clock off the aiming bunker off the tee. If I'd have hit it 10-15 yards further, it would have caught a steeper slope than the photo depicts through the fairway into the grung. The second shot is a bunt down the ever narrowing fairway. Not bad. But, a third shot approach must land short and suffer the vagaries of the two noses fronting the green. It is folly to go for it in two as you will not stop your ball from bounding through the green and into space. If your approach is running on the ground, you may get deflected right or more likely left. Left can make it to the deep grunge easily, right is likely to go down and out if it doesn't catch yet another on the front line of bunkers. Anything pin high on the green is hard to hold the run away front to back sloped green, sloping into a ring of bunkers about 8-10 ft below the promentory green, or may end up skipping over the bunkers to death in the ravine on three sides of the green.
The leading edge bunker work on 11 is exqusite. It was done by a real artist. But, the hole corridor has too much severity of deep sloping to either side as it narrows to the green promentory to keep the play going without a real chance to suffer the death penalty for slightly errant shots.
I think that one should always be able to access and play a ball that was diverted on a one hop off a green, an otherwise good shot, without having to go back to the original place and hit another, or take some sort of local rule relief, when the ball hopped off the world from the green. If you can't even physically walk down there to look for the ball, it isn't a good design.
11 is barely playable. I made par. But, it was a lucky par and I knew that I needed to ginger the ball onto the green bunting it along the ground, even so-getting diverted down left and 4th shot pitching it on to an easy front pin with a one-putt.
BTW, there is supposed to be a lake back there from just beyond the far trees beyond 11 green, to the far shore. That is how bad the drought has been.
As we saw at Pinehurst, bounding off a green to a runaway area, collection area, bunker or rough is OK as a design feature. You pay a price but can go from there. Bounding off a well hit shot landing on a green, near a pin, then going off the world into a time warp worm hole, is not the goal of good golf design, IMHO.
Matt, all the par 5s at Wild Horse are infininty better than the backside of Bayside's par 5s. You must be trying to pull my chain.
But, I'll give you this, 4 of the par 3s at Bayside (of the 5 there) are as good as all 4 if the par 3s at Wild Horse head to head competition. 13 bayside is a dog, if you get beyond the photogenic and consider how it actually plays.