Does a failure to imagine the vertical dimension cause too many bunkers?

[Garland Bayley]

It's hard for me to imagine a course with over 54 bunkers as being on a tight budget.

[Tom_Doak]

Garland:

Most of the bunkers at Common Ground are pretty small and easily hand-raked.  Plus the CGA seems to be on the same page as we are about not over-maintaining the bunkers.  So I don't think the bunkers will break the bank there.

[Ronald Montesano]

Nugent,

I think that they pull 3 rather than D for more reasons than just bunkers.  Rough comes to mind first and foremost, followed by trees and OB at least as highly ranked as bunkers.  I don't have any stats to back it up, but I don't find sand to be at all feared by proficient players.  Remember that they prefer sand to rough in many instances.

[Matt Day]

as a novice in the appreciation of the many subtleties of architecture, is their any merit in this simplistic theory that for the average joe golfer

the number of bunkers is directly linked to how difficult a course is viewed
the more difficult a course is viewed the better the course must be

therefore lots of bunkers = difficult and difficult = good

[Jeff_Brauer]

Matt,

I have actually had a few interesting conversations with course owners about that.  Golfers have many reasons for picking the course they choose and some (no more than 15% according to those I listen to) choose to play hard ones.  Most pick a course that fits their game, by some combination of length and difficulty, plus aesthetics. 

Most want to shoot about their average score most of the time and avoid courses that are too hard.  If they struggle with sand, I imagine that they mentally count the number of bunkers in play for them in making their decisions.

Sometimes, players will avoid a course that doesn't play to a good yardage for them - like seniors avoiding courses without tee sets under 6000 yards, but also many players when the back tees are too long but the mid tees are too short.

Sort of OT but what I am hearing is that for actually driving golfers to your course, being too difficult isn't really a good way to go, even if the initial awards and publicity still tends to go to the hardest courses.  And of course, all golfers will try a new course once to see what it is like for themselves.  But most settle in to where they are comfortable in both play and of course, price point.

[John Mayhugh]

Edward Tufte begins his masterpiece Envisioning Information by stating the general problem -

"All communication between the readers of an image and the makers of an image must now take place on a two-dimensionsal surface. Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information - for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imagary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature."

Frankly, my yardage books have done poor job of this (we are getting into some hand-drawn books this summer with contour indications), and this problem has captured my imagination since I first read about it.

Thoughts?

Now I'm fascinated by thinking about how ET might design a yardage book.  All of his books are simply brilliant.

[Garland Bayley]

To a lesser extent than the ridiculous examples of courses like Shinnecock Hills and Oakmont. Clearly those courses are overbunkered and don't belong in anyones but the masochists top 100.

[Bradley Anderson]

I may have totally misunderstood this from my reading of Anatomy Of A Golf Hole, but I think Doak was suggesting that the contour lines surrounding summits need to be studied carefully.

I think he was saying that if you have chosen a summit to use as a green site, you now have to look at the contours on all four sides of the summit to determine which ones provide the most interesting angle of approach to the green.

I'm guessing that that way of studying contours will yield the best possibilities that a site offers, and that that kind of routing will make the hazards more potent and alluring, because the natural contours can be used to feed the hazards; you don't need as many hazards with this way.

I think this is why the greatest architects generally had more hazards when they were working with flat sites where the contours that were there could not be used to feed hazards. And so they had to build more bunkers on those sites.

[Garland Bayley]

...
I'm guessing that that way of studying contours will yield the best possibilities that a site offers, and that that kind of routing will make the hazards more potent and alluring, because the natural contours can be used to feed the hazards; you don't need as many hazards with this way.
...

Of course then there is Tilly who wrote an essay that boils down to fairway bunkers are secondary and you primarily need at most one green side bunker.