JES,
With all due respect, I don't think flat areas on the green lack challenge. A man (or 15 year old girl for that matter) who can make dead straight six footers all day are going to be able to beat a lot of players of otherwise better abilility who are unable to do so. If you have such a putt, and KNOW it is flat, it can work on your mind (well, at least it can work on MY mind) making you feel like there is no way you should miss it, so that if you do, it is much worse than missing a slick little downhill right breaking putt of similar length where if you miss it you may be unhappy, but don't feel quite so much like there is no way in hell you should have missed it!
I have to disagree with those who say that shelves and plateaus should be a thing of the past, however. If anything, they should be more in use today because for many reasons, true shotmaking is more and more of a lost art. If you have a lot of holes these days where better players are approaching with a short iron or wedge, giving them 3 30' deep plateaus versus a 90' deep green of relatively continuous slope from front to back is going to produce a lot of discomfort. A lot of good players today can't skip it up from the lower to upper tiers and thus having to get the distance just right to land and avoid spinning off the correct tier will make their "simple" wedge shot a lot more difficult than a similiar shot might have been for good players 50 years ago.
Now I'm certainly not as good as the "good" players I'm talking about here (plus handicaps to pros) but since I certainly can't play that shot either I can point out that I sometimes play some fairly odd strategies when faced with such a hole. Sometimes I'll play a middle iron off the tee to be left with a longer shot into the green, sometimes I deliberately play into the rough to take the spin off my approach, sometimes I'll play a half shot with a less lofted club as if I was playing into a 40 mph headwind. That's all because of a tiered green where I don't feel like (or know from experience) that I can't reliably hit an approach with the correct distance and proper spin to keep it on the correct tier and being on the wrong tier is a serious enough penalty that I'm inclined to do something out of the ordinary to avoid it.
If a green was, for instance, tiered from right to left obviously this wouldn't affect me the same way because while I might stil want to try to end up on the correct tier, I've got a lot fewer options in my bag to try to "force" hitting it the correct direction than I do trying to control the amount of spin/roll my ball takes after landing.
Doug,
There was a very long thread some 6 or 9 months ago about fast versus slow greens and which one would represent the least difference between really good putters and poor putters. If I'm not mistaken, Tom Huckaby was very strong in that the faster the greens, the greater advantage the better putter has
.
I think the same principles hold true here, when there are more variables to consider the challenge increases and the more accomplished individual has the advantage. With dead straight putts you can almost completely eliminate one
VEERRRY important aspect of putting;
SPEED.
As to Donnie's original point, I am not suggesting that shelves and plateau's are bad, merely that dead flat areas are. He seemed to want less sidehill putts and I simply cannot understand that sentiment.
One of my favorite greens is the 8th at Huntingdon Valley which has four distinct "greens within the green" without being overly large. Each section leaves a fairly-to-very difficult two putt to any of the other sections, but none of them would be considered flat.
All of my posts here are founded in that principal of FLAT AREAS HAVE NO PLACE ON A GREEN!