...... all these "championship remodelings" occur EXCLUSIVELY because of the winning score total.
It would be more appropriate to say that many 'championship' remodelings occur when a course is hopeful of hosting a championship of any sort, including THE professional match play event.
Well, many (most) of the US venues were ‘improved' just for match play.
As briefly mentioned earlier, consider East Lake CC.
" In preparation for the matches, East Lake went through a face lifting for three years, during which most of the course was rebuilt and many of the holes changed to provide the quality of championship layout the tournament merited for this event.
All the greens were enlarged to ‘championship size' and sodded with bent grass. Most bunkers were enlarged and 30 more added to tighten up the course. "
So, East Lake was ‘improved' quite a bit, just for the matches of the 1963 Ryder Cup.
The East Lake matches also marked the arrival of three days of play rather than two days. There were 8 foursome matches on Friday, 8 better ball matches on Saturday, and 8 singles matches on Sunday.
Anthony,
The UK Ryder Cup courses were definitively a more interesting lot until they started on the parkland course 'Belfry' in 1985 and have now gone full tilt on parkland 'resort' through 2014.
Perhaps they were inspired by US taking the matches to Thunderbird and Eldorado.