"Tom,
Could you give an example..I just don't get how that could happen."
John:
Perhaps the best example I can give you in recent years is my vastly different opinion of NGLA just looking at it vs actually playing it after not having been there for maybe forty years.
I'm glad you asked because I've probably never thought it all the way through. I think, for me anyway, it's probably somewhat of a spatial thing, most particularly with what I consider to be really good and interesting golf architecture, like NGLA. To bridge that gap between what a hole and a course like that one just looks like and what it's like to play I definitely have to be hitting a golf ball.
I think I have pretty good spatial sense, certainly better inside than outside like most people but with the best kind of architecture or the kind I like best that can be thrown off bigtime and sometimes even both ways although generally things tend to look longer to me than they really are.
Just think of NGLA, for instance, there's just such a variety of cool and interesting and often deceiving stuff going on between you and your target, hole after hole. Sometimes long grass, dips, high ridges, big berms, a water carry that's so deceiving, diagonals, convex, concave sloping ground all around, hazards inside the fairway lines, elevation deception, blindness, you name it.
I have a lot of respect for Shinnecock but this is why I like NGLA better, and why I like the actual architecture better.
Even Maidstone, there's just so much interesting stuff between you and your target---not every hole but a whole lot of them.
I like my course and plenty of others but if I have a complaint about it this would be it---from tee to green its visual connection is pretty standard stuff---not as much interesting stuff between you and your target.
And I think most know how deceptive TV can make a hole look compared to being there and certainly hitting a shot on it.
ANGC is probably a little different because so many of us have seen so many golfers playing it year after year it's a bit easier to relate to, at least to what their games are on the course.
But everyone tells me one's opinion of ANGC is so different when you go there for the first time even after seeing it on TV for decades. And then if you actually play it you probably say occassionally "Tiger hit it where? You're kidding me!"
I had a great time playing Old Head one time in about a 30mph wind and the only problem was the caddie I had had caddied in Tiger's group a few days before and he kept telling me on about every shot where Tiger hit it. At the end of the day, though, I managed to break 80 from the tips in that high wind and Tiger lost two balls and I played the entire round with one.
