TD, rubbed out? Ouch!
You are correct about the slope system and in fact Kite went to 4 wedges (according to Pelz) after Pelz research showed specifically that he couldn't dial in distances on the short game from 60-120 yards.
The funny thing about the width of greens is that the average lateral miss for average players isn't a lot more statistically than it is for good players, maybe 10% more. As you say, greens that are longer are a must for average players. I think Golf Magazine had a good graphic on wear players miss a few years back. Naturally, short and right was a big red zone for average players, and long left was more of a miss area for better ones.
I recently played golf with a gca who is currently collaborating with a tour pro and he was saying that they were working to do more "bow tie" greens at slight angles to make things more difficult for the top players. I listened, I learned, but I have to say, I would never sit around figuring out ways to make the course tougher for good players if I thought the guys paying the bills would suffer, as they do with bow tie greens!
Jeff M,
The thing is, whether sand wedges, square grooves, 4 pitching wedges, you name it, the history of golf has been to make the swing more standardized because it works better for score. So, it appears to me that golf may have been concieved one way, but starting, oh, say five minutes after the start of the first round, the tech wars began! And, Pete also said he designs for what is going to be, not what he hopes it would be, so I am not sure he would agree or disagree.
Jack N once summed up his design philosophy as "the course shouldn't hurt the player, only the player should hurt the player with a bad shot." Good players don't like a shot that hits the middle of the green and gets propelled off. Of course, they do understand the Redan concept, where the effective middle of the target may be somewhere else, as long as the contour helps get the ball to the hole. I once heard Jack opine about designing the 6th at MV so that the shot would hit the front of the greena and "chase up to the pin." As noted somewhere else, I doubt JN EVER thinks about playing one to bounce on in the last 100 yards, although in his prime, he would do whatever he thought it would take to win.
The whole idea of designing to suggest shots that "they really oughta play" (in the words of Steve Smyers) vs designing to punish good shots sometimes gets lost. For me, its a concept that I get in fleeting moments, but then it leaves my brain.....I don't think its new to this generation though. If the GA guys wrote that bunkers were to force a strategic decision and not penalize, they were really saying about the same thing in many ways.
With the reduction in emphasis on carry bunkers - which is logical now that the ball flies more reliably - lateral bunkers started to make more sense, as did bunkers that set up shot patterns (i.e. short left, long right to suggest a hook, esp. if the wind goes left and ground goes gently left for more roll) The miss goes into the bunker if you go straight, and the short left bunker if you over cook the hook.
As I have maintained here often, a good mix of different fw bunker patterns like that might just be better and more varied design that a repetition of "carry it close to the bunker, get a better frontal opening".
But, I digress! The main topic is again, do we make good golfers comfortable by strongly setting up certain shots and asking them to execute, providing the discomfort over the course of the round by suggesting a balance of hooks and fades (like Pete does with his alternating shot patterns) or do we set up uncomfortable shots where there are no good options as described by TD?
Are no good options a good strategic design, or does strategy require at least one good option for any shot? Most good players would say that being left with no good options is not good design. The would also say (as many here do) that having no chance to recover isn't as good as a design as having a chance to recover, meaning sand is better than water as a hazard, and sand shallow enough to get out of is better than deep sand.
More later.