Routings

[Tom MacWood (Guest)]

Assuming an architect is given a fairly interesting piece of ground - which may be an unreasonable assumption - how do one evaluate a routing. I think most golf architects attempt to create some kind of ballance between long, short and medium length holes and design holes that change direction - although some are clearly more adept than others. If you make that assumption how do you evaluate a successful routing? I'm thinking if a golf course is stripped of its man-made hazards and interesting green designs and it is still an interesting design doesn't that illustrate an excellent routing?

[Matt_Ward]

Tom:

The best way I can explain how I evaluate a successful routing is does the course always keep me guessing -- does it make me use my mind because there are varied options always present?

Great routings don't just say "play the hole this way and ONLY this way."

You've touched on the key items -- varying holes of different length and direction that clearly are influenced by the topography and prevailing winds. Clearly, solid routings will call for maximum dexterity with the greatest range of clubs throughout a round.

I've never played a course with a great routing where the mind wasn't always tested. There are no easy answers -- you must always gauge the avenues presented by the architect. The "how" in playing any hole is always a dilemma the golfer must reconcile on any shot at any point on the course. Few courses can maintain that type of mental demands for 18 holes -- the ones with great routing have it big time over and over again.

Hope this helps ...

[Jeff_McDowell]

Tom,

I think you answered your own question. If you remove man-made hazards, and the course is still interesting, I think it is an excellent routing.

There has to be something about the course that keeps it interesting, and that's the use of natural features as hazards.

The difficulty in evaluating routing plans is that the plan is a two-dimensional drawing that represents a three-dimensional design. This creates two problems. The first is that not many people know how to read and evaluate a contour map. Second, even if you do know how to read a contour map, it takes a fair amount of time studying the contours to truly understand how a golf hole fits within the landscape.

This is one of the reasons it is so important to spend time on the site early in the design.

All the above assumes you actually care about using natural features in the final design. If you have a multi-million dollar budget and can move heaven and earth, I would guess you could evaluate the routing plan on different criteria. But I wouldn't know anything about this.

[Tom MacWood (Guest)]

Matt
Aren't there courses that always keep you guessing, presenting you with various options that aren't even routed? For example Shadow Creek fits that definition but was more or less plotted on blank sheet and not routed? I'm think more of courses like Cypress Point, Sand Hills and Cape Breton - which meet the univeral criteria of varrying lengths and directions - but would also be great designs without a single man-mad hazard. Ironically they all share a quirkiness in how those varrying length holes fit into the round - all having back to back short par-4s, back to back par-5s, and in the case CPC back to par-3s - perhaps a bi-product of a truely great routing on a truely great property. What are examples of great routings using your criteria? Although they are shortish do you consider Shoreacres, Eastward Ho! or Maidstone a great routing?

[TEPaul]

Tom MacW:

It seems like you asked this same question not long ago. No matter, this time you asked it in a particularly interesting and evocative way! In other words, your few questions are ones that really make one think about what a routing is, what a good one and bad one is, and also what a routing ISN'T.

Jeff MacD, said some interesting things too but he talked a lot about a routing plan. A routing plan is not a routing, just a two dimensional representation of one. There can be an enormous difference between looking at a course routing on a routing plan (a piece of paper) and then going and playing the course!

In a very real sense the two may not relate to you well at all! It works very much the other way too. How many times have you played a particular course and then looked at the routing plan for the first time and said to yourself; "My God is that what the golf course (routing) looks like?" And isn't that somewhat amazing because you'd just walked all over the golf course. That very much happened to me after playing NGLA and also Pacific Dunes! I couldn't believe that the routing looked (from above or on paper) like the progressions that I'd just played! Isn't that amazing, and even on relatively open sites! It's amazing to me!

But as was said on your other thread about routing, you really don't play a routing! You play the golf holes in a routing. On that I would somewhat disgree with what Matt said. In this way it is very much true that you could have the exact same golf holes on a course and if you arranged them differently (the routing) you could have an enormous variation between a good routing and a bad one! This would be with the exact same holes, no less, just arranged differently!

This is why doing a routing can be so complex really. It isn't just the holes (no matter how potential they may individually be) but how they string together and this has everything to do with some necessities of balance and variety of golf! In this way the process really is like doing a jigsaw puzzle with one overriding difference! In the golf routing jigsaw puzzle you can't pick the pieces up and fit them together the way you can in doing an actual jigsaw puzzle! Only if it was so! You just have to keep changing the arrangements of what the land is giving you as the whole thing applies to balance and variety and the necessities of the game of golf.

Once you have what you think is a good routing which has much to do with some necessary balance and variety requirments of golf then the features of the holes come into play and how you arrange them (make them, place them, find them, choose those arrangements) is very much of a separate process.

If you happen to have a property where you find yourself what you know is a great routing and the individual landforms (the holes) that you strung together have natural elements all over them that fit in beautifully with the necessary balance and variety requirments of golf, then you have yourself one helluva great piece of property for golf!!

Use it as is and don't change it except where absolutely necessary for some reason. I can't imagine that happens often though. Maybe at Sand Hills or even Merion or Pine Valley, but I bet all those designers had to be out there for a long time figuring out how to string all that good stuff together into the necessary requirments for the game.

Many times the old designer (since they couldn't move things that well) probably said; "Aw the hell with it, I can't rearrange this any better so let's just give them some quirk!! Routing quirk or actual hole quirk!! And somehow that became acceptable and even cool--and thank God it did!

I do love Coore's description of routing as "taking a golf walk"! The "walk" part is basically the routing (landform and hole landform arrangements) always with those balance and variety things in the back of your mind! The "golf" part of the "golf walk" though is all the other little things you have to do for the necessary requirments of the game and how it should be best played on the individual holes alone.

I may be losing my mind though--one of these days I'm going to go off the deep end! Maybe I already have!

[Tim_Weiman]

Tom MacWood:

I share Jeff's feeling that you may have answered your own question.  How well the architect utilitized the natural features of the property to create interesting shots that you want to play over and over again may be the single most important point.  Like you, I'm also a fan of minimizing walks from greens to the next tee.  I love what Tom doak did at Stonewall on the transition from #2 to #3.

[Jeff_McDowell]

TEPaul,

I have a quick story about a "golf walk" I took for a project.

The site is 250 acres of dense forest. Sometimes you can't see more than 30 feet.

The owner and I started our "golf walk" on the west side of the site with our contour map hoping to walk the general location of the preliminary routing.

We were in the forest for 3 hours, and were convinced we walked the holes, which would have put us over 2,000 feet to the east. Well, we came out of the woods exactly 15 feet from where we started.

[TEPaul]

Jeff:

Uh Huh, back to the drawing board--your "golf walk" routing and course was a bit too small and too tight!

I took a "golf walk" like that with Coore one time! Actually he'd already routed the place (it was Hidden Creek) but we were walking around in the dense woods, no topo, no nothing, staring at a myriad of trees and I said; "What the hell are we supposed to be looking at out here?"

And so he told me what we were supposed to be looking at out there!

[Jeff_McDowell]

Yeah, our routing didn't work. The next time I walked the site, I brought a GPS unit. That worked great!!

[TEPaul]

Jeff:

Did you ever run across any of those cute little Wherthafuckawee indians when trying to route a site?

[Jeff_McDowell]

No, but I did see a Whatthefuckisthat lurking about. Not to mention very fresh wolf markings.

[TEPaul]

Rich:

Yes they are related--directly actually--just with vastly different dialects--sort of like the Scots and some Americans.

[Tom MacWood (Guest)]

Does a more interesting and varried property make the routing process easier or more difficult?

[Jeff_McDowell]

Tom,

I have never found the routing process to be easy whether I have had a bland or spectacular piece of property, but I would prefer spectacular every time.

Routing a golf course for me has always been a frustrating and exciting process. There is always a point where things aren’t working, and you become discouraged. However, there is always a breakthrough that is energizing.

One thing I have noticed with my routings is that I can develop a "sellable" routing on my second or third draft. This means there are enough good golf holes that I can make a convincing sales pitch to the owner on how great the course will be, but I know there are a couple awkward holes that just don’t seem right. I have always worked past this point until I am convinced the routing has reached its potential.

I think this is why there are so many courses with a couple odd holes. My opinion is that the designer got to the sellable stage and felt that was good enough.

[TEPaul]

Very good question! This is just the routing process now, not the design elements that will follow, but a really interesting property that may be wonderful but has some things like Ardrossan Farm, some complex topography, some historic buildings, meandering creeks and such is actually much harder to route, particularly as you want to use as many of them as you can somehow!

In the routing process they're actually obstacles that you have to work around and try to work in! But if you can work them in well it will be so gratifying in the end, I'm sure, and certainly best for the enduring interest of the course when it's all done!

There's another slight problem too with these kinds of things of interest. If they are large, like the mansion at Ardrossan, or placed in various ways, they can get in the way or they net out available space (that you can't use for golf) but you have to pay for them and their space anyway.

On the other side of the spectrum--a flat "blank canvas" site for instance, obviously you have none of those interesting things I mentioned so there's none of the obstacles/assets but the entire design--routing included--obviously has lots of latitude (without those things) and is probably a good exercise in unfettered imagination, but basically much easier to route! That kind of thing I've had zero experience with.

I would think that the first kind would be much more fun and ultimately more gratifying although possibly much more work requiring more time on the site--at least originally.

[TEPaul]

What Jeff MacD just said there I would think would be so true on most properties that have natural features, whatever, of interest! They can be very potential but can at the same time be real "sticking points" or obstacles in the routing processes.

Just as Jeff said, Bill Coore said most potential properties have those obstacles or "sticking points" and the ultimate success of the course is not really the easy spots to route but those obstacles and "siticking points" and exactly how you overcome them! So it's not the great areas but the tough areas and how they're dealt with in the end that become the success or failure of the course. He said most good properties will have at least one of them sometimes four or five!

[TEPaul]

Tom MacW:

I'll give you by far the best example I know of to make the points cited above; Crump's Pine Valley!

Firstly, Crump found a great piece of property with lots of natural and interesting features and he definitely did identify all of them! We all know Pine Valley was also his first effort at design (last too)!

Obviously never having done it before he somewhat burdened himself by envisioning a very preconceived golf course in a balance and variety context and other things!

He had various requirments for what he wanted before he even went out there! Certain shot requirments in certain places, basically a test through the bag, spaced out into  various areas of the routing, no more than two consecutive holes in one direction, holes routed in such a way as to create width for trees to separate holes and still leave wide hole corridors etc (triangulation!). He very well may have also heeded his friend Tillinghast's basic design recommendation to loop back to the clubhouse after a few holes!!

These are a ton of preconceived expectations to take onto a relatively complex piece of property, albeit fantastic topography ( but also complex)!

He also got the routing and design processes very much overlapping and running into each other and eventually very much "painted himself into a box" that left him with a massive "sticking point"!

Basically Crump did the majority of the routing very quickly although he was on site for months before getting it basically set in overall dimension (from late fall 1912-March 1913).

But then before getting his routing really finalized he constructed 11 holes and opened them for play--in one year. Not long after that he opened three more and had a 14 hole course in play--the following year (1915).

But then he got stuck in the #12-15 stretch routing-wise and it basically took him three more years to work that out in a  confined space or box between the already built and in play #11 and #16!

They say he finally worked out the routing in that last massive "sticking point" but unfortunately died in 1918 and never actually saw those finally routed holes built and in play! Those four holes were completed in 1921!

He surely had all the time in the world to do Pine Valley and took it (five solid years on site--1913 to 1918) but he probably could have shortened things if he'd separated his routing process from his design process and then construction process or finalized one before starting the other, in other words!

He jumbled them all together and got himself stuck in the process but in the end things sure did work out OK, didn't they?

But it's all just more evidence of the complexities of routing!

[Patrick Hitt]

A aside on the smileys - Try a space between the 8 and the parenthesis like 1918 ) instead of 1918)

[Jeff_Brauer]

TEPaul,

Ran has made it easy to use smileys on the new site!  In fact, I thought it was the biggest improvement of the whole deal!  

All you do is click on them above the message box when you reply, and voila!  No need for messy typing any more.  And, are you telling me that you don't use the "preview" feature when posting to make sure you get it right?  Those posts of yours are really just first drafts right out of that genius brain of yours?  

Well, I am impressed.  Of course, I'm just a country boy from Texas.  

[TEPaul]

JeffB:

What preview box? I'm serious! I do type those long posts as first drafts because I type so much I just look at the page as I type and don't need to correct anything. I'm actually not interested in golf course architecture, you know, I've just been doing this for typing practice for the last few years. I've gotten so good at it now it may be time to slow down or get off of here.

I appreciate your instruction on the smileys--I didn't know how to use them. I don't mind them in other people's posts but I don't want them in mine and frankly they really piss me off constantly lined up there grinning, winking, mugging, bussing and sticking their tongue out at me! I wish to hell they'd all go to their room and leave me alone!