Dan Kelly,
Thanks for coming to my defense. Usually, the line "You have a keen grasp of the obvious" is an insult, but on this board, it puts you in truly elite company. People are so ready to go off the handle, they don't even read a post before disagreeing with it.
Tommy,
I was in SoCal earlier this month. They have plenty of pharmacies. Find one and get some laxatives.
I would respond in more detail to your post, but I it is too far forward in this screen to be viewable in the response screen. OH, and it doesn't really deserve it anyway. I don't need a lesson from old books. Believe it or not, I have read them, too, and not just looked at the "purty pictures."
Now, having dispensed with the seemingly obligatory deragatory statements (I really to need to reread the GCA misson statement.....they must be required.....
back to gca commentary.......
RJ, (and others)
If anyone built a green based on those photos it would have some severe scalping problems! Ditto with any built to simulate erosion. The Old Course greens were built on natural (I presume, no one knows for sure) which in fact were the uneroded areas of the land, no?
Bill McBride,
Call it what you want, and expand top 100 to top 1000 if you want. Of all the 17,000 golf courses built in the US, if you assume the bell curve theory, less than 10% were ever intended to be great architecture. Another 10% were probably built to be learning courses or golf factories with no architectural merit intended or sought. The other 80% have some blend of practical considerations and arcitectural merit. Which is precisely why this web site has such spirited discussions.
Just so you get the idea of my visions when the words "internal contours" were mentioned I picture little bumps in the green, vs. long slopes tying in from the edges, which could be considered external contours coming into the green. (semantics, I know, and its possible that some of the disagreements here stem from each of our own personal visions of that phrase)
For example, while Maxwell did include buried elephants completely in the green, some other midwestern descendants and/or those influenced by his work, generally kept the true high point off the green, and the longer flowing contours - while not flat by any stretch - simply died out one third to one half the way across the green.
IMHO, all are good greens, but just a different style.
In modern times, the idea of an internal mound, bump )Did William Diddell call those diddel bumps?) has gone largely by the wayside because of the loss of cup spaces it causes (I expounded on this earlier this year - You could look it up, but a one foot mound takes out over 300 sf of cup space, which equates to about 5% of the typical green) and the fact that in USGA type greens, the tops tend to dry out and get scalped by mowers.
Thus, when you are responsible for either designing or paying for a course to be designed and then maintained for ever, you just might have a few questions as to whether this type of feature is for you. If on a budget, adding 5% (or if there are multiple mounds in the green design 15-20% to the size of your greens may incur $70-100K in construction costs. If it were your money, you might think differently. At least, most owners trying to provide the sacred cow of "affordable golf" would question it when very few golfers would notice it, there are many great greens without diddle bumps, and a lot of players (for green reading reasons listed above) don't even like them that much.
I come here to share real world perspective for those who care. That is a very real world perspective.
Going back to Kelly's statement about my "formulas" I was merely pointing out that greens really aren't natural anyway. They are built on fill pads, or on pads leveled off in hillsides, or whatever. The actual contouring is usually a result of drainage, following natural slopes, flattening enough area to set a pin, providing back flare ups or false fronts on uphlll holes for better vision, etc. There are very few times in the real world other than on exceptional sites, where we give a lot of consideration to wind erosion, or the overall character of the ground the green sits on in creating the actual contours.
As to Tommy's example of a wildly contour green that some love, some don't. From your description, its easy to see it might not be strategic, although I have no qualms about a highly contoured green which in and of itself is the primary feature of the hole. I don't know how many golf holes I have built, but doing one of those every few years is a nice variety for a designer, and I suspect that is exactly why Bell did it - he did so much work in one area he was simply trying to do something different.
Now let's ask the other question about various bumps regarding strategy. The long slopes coming in from the outside of the green can influence strategy - players can use them to feed the ball to the hole. Similarly, a long more or less continuous up slope one direction or another can make the approach from the side of the fw facing that most directly the best angle. In fact, any long more or less continuous slope (think Redan style holes) ir reliable in how a ball reacts, and thus opens up the basic green strategy to a wider range of players who have mere mortal accuracy.
Can a green with a series of small bumps in the middle be strategic in the same way? Only a few golfers in the world have the distance and directional control to get it between a few random contours to a pin location. In most cases, a pretty good shot may be deflected by those internal bumps and ridges away from the pin. Golfers don't generally like that! In truth, small doses of that go a long way.
Aesthetically, tying in the slopes from the edges ususally works well on gently rolling land. Ideally, after flattening the contours enough to be practical, its usually good to grade the green surface and the surrounds to look as if they are one. Sometimes, adding those little bumps and what not just because you are inside the green can look a little articficial, if not present elsewhere on that green site. Granted, there are too many greens that are too flat in relation to the surrounding contours.
Thus, a well thought out rational for why I and most other modern GCA types prefer long flowing contours as opposed to some busy little (or in the case of Maxwell, busy big) contours in the middle of the greens.
Given the length of this post, I guess I will have to say its just my $0.04 worth.....