The marriage worked, but then, one of the partners changed

[Patrick_Mucci]

The marriage partners ?

"Quirk and "match play"

Quirk made for interesting, challenging, fun golf and match play was the ideal partner.

It, "quirk", got along fine with it's partner until that partner began changing, changing to medal play, and as the emphasis shifted to score and the quest to lower handicap, "quirk" found itself being ostracized and eventually divorced from it's old partner, a partner  that went through a metamorphosis and changed them to an incompatible couple.

To a degree, "quirk" is manifested in greens with pronounced contour and slope.

Would the greens at Merion, WFW and other course be softened if match play and "quirk" were still a great partnership ?

On modern course what are some great examples of extreme quirk ?

Great quirk ?

Good quirk ?

[V. Kmetz]

PM,

I've sort of nurtured this thesis that says:

a.  there's a difference between a "match play" course and a "medal play" course.

b.  that the essential difference between them is marked by "the match play course's" holdings in 1) outrageous contours and topography features...2) a competing mix of "unfair" things (eg pot bunkers) and "easy" things. 4) traditionally non-golf accents (eg roads, rocks, monuments, windmills) that factor into play.  the medal play course dampens these items by comparisons.

c.  that the medal play course more measures and rewards "skill" and that the match play course measures "fortune."

Those generalities point somewhat to the questions you were asking, which I think are quite important to the "knowing" of how Golf has progressed, what its actual history is in this regard and certainly what paths remain and/or point toward in our focused concern of GCA issues.

BTW:  I first started thinking about this on my first experience of Apawamis in the late 1990s, a few years before the Hanse renovations...Hilton's Rock, the sunken quarry green on the 3rd (outrageous!), Eleanor's Teeth, the most unheralded punchbowl green of the 7th, back-to back 5s on #9 and #10, the crazy drop into the approach on the last par 5 17.  apawamis is pound-for-pound the most difficult, frustrating and at the same time rewarding course of quirk that's had a national reputation.  (Hogan called it the hardest "short course" in America.

cheers

vk

[Patrick_Mucci]

VK,

I was thinking about what you said and what sprung to mind is the following.

When I play NGLA, PV or Seminole under tournament conditions in medal play those rounds are incredibly intense, often not fun, with tremendous relief when the round is over.

Yet, the same courses under the exact same conditions, at match play, are a lot more fun.

Why is that ?

[Nigel Islam]

Because a double doesn't ruin your round just that hole

[V. Kmetz]

Pat,

Sorry for the lag of response, I've been shoveling this blizzard for the last couple hours.

I really don't know the answer to that question...about why when you turn the purpose slightly, the experience of even a great course changes.  But I know you're right because I have witnessed and participated in dozens of Golf events where that which you report is so very true

My first considerations though, are telling me its fundamental to the "enjoyment" of the game and how that enjoyment is served by GCA ideas.  I think about those pre-Allain Robertson days (up to 1830?) and what the game was like when it was very basic, very primitive to what we do today.

I've got to figure that with wild lands and rabbit paths and sheep making escarpments and indefinite rough-hewn conditions, the game was almost entirely fortune.  How could the quality of your swing, your stroke matter when any little imperfect hiccup could alter the result of play? This is to say nothing of the equipment, hickories and first iterations of the feathery - which changed from half hour to half hour.  Technique was just about inconsequential then...so what were they doing?  How ridiculous would it have been to say someone is the Champion Golfer, when their ball survived a little better than their opponents or hit fewer grains of grass on the way to the hole?

But to address the medal side of it, and those well-understood feelings of the difference between a match at Pine Valley or a medal score at Pine Valley...there is the "finality" of score which Nigel was referencing.  To go further than his brief post, I say that in some ways the medal score is anti-Golf on a fundamental level.  Not only can the entire day be summed up by a big number...make a 9 on one of the first three holes and your medal purposes are shot to hell...but the day, the Golf is, for its purpose, over.  You're not winning and though grill room sympathies are an adjunct of the culture we love, in the end...no one else really cares that you fashioned a 4th place 81 with that horrid 9 on #3...you're the only one who can really get something out of it.

And what I mean by "anti-Golf" is that Golf's most fundamental feature in my eyes is that no matter how bad you f*** up a particular shot, there is an outside chance that you can redeem it and erase it with the next shot.  You can make something "perfect" or beautiful from the ruins.  It's at this juncture in the GCA discussion that I am so against penal architecture, out of bounds, forced carries over water, haystack rough...they all conspire to make you stop playing...to dampen that enduring sense that, "I can recover from this."  such features, especially when they are larded in a particular course, just kill the very reason you might play.

No less an authority than Bobby Jones said, "The worst thing about golf is looking for Golf balls."  My take on the wisdom of that is that Jones sensed that when you're looking for a golf ball, not only is the spirit perturbed, not only is time being wasted, not only do you have to be humiliated to go back to a tee or a previous spot, not only is the Golf (medal or match) consequence heightened, but...most fundamentally...you're not playing Golf anymore and neither is the party(ies) who are helping with the search.  No one is playing Golf.

I don't know if this advances the discussion in the way(s) you might have hoped it to be framed, but there is "something" there...i n that idea of, fundamentally, what pleases us about Golf and a chance to make a better reality out of imperfection...and how medal has a finality to it, a historical report, that seems to suspend it in time.  A match ends too, but in another poignant sense, the wise and happy golfers know another match is still to come, one where fortune may be on their side.

Medal and playing against a whole field of golfers (for 99% of us - and that's who we care about, I hope) has a pre-determined result.  I am better than my friend Joe and neither of us are as good as Tiger Woods; there is always someone who can lick you.  In match play and the measures of fortune AND the courses that receive this and mollify this (match play courses) a different spirit and sense emerge from the enterprise.

If you take what I reported about TEP's thought that Golf is only ball and stick game where the ball itself is not competitively vied for, and look at what medal play does (competitively determine the most skilled) it can be seen that there is somethign about THAT measure (the most skilled) and the courses that reward the most skilled (medal courses, if I'm right at all) that is anti-Golf, that Golf is more about allowing its players to do something else, recreate, make a new reality of what it empirically not true.  To solve a problem. Whether you or I get strokes or not, we've got a better chance (infinitesimal, but apparent) to match Tiger at NGLA than we do at Firestone or Bay Hill.

And there's something very great about that.  And to serve that essence is what one characteristic that makes for great GCA.

cheers

vk

[Jud_T]

Pat,

Kingsley is the poster child for this thesis.  Holes like 2, 6, 8, 9, 13 and 15 will drive you to stiff drink in medal play but couldn't be more fun in a match.

[C. Sturges]

Patrick,
As soon as I read this I thought of Rye.  The course is a blast, and great fun playing against someone.  But as soon as you want to post a low number it gets very hard.  The first time I played was in a two ball match and my partner was 86 years old!  We had a blast, and after lunch I went back out and almost lost my mind.  Great shot after great shot=bogey after bogey.  Nothing better than hitting a driver on a par three in a light wind and still having forty yards.  Great match play course, and very hard medal play course.
chris

[JESII]

While much of what's been said is ultimately true...I've come to the conclusion that the negative aspect of medal play golf is purely up to the player's attitude.

The overriding objective of golf is to get your ball into the hole. Match play and medal play are simply subsets of that; two different ways to compete within the overall context of golf.

Why does one triple bogey need to make the round a throw away?

[Peter Pallotta]

Jim - I think it's because most of us aren't being completely honest with ourselves. We all want to post a score, and ideally the lowest score possible. In match play, we give ourselves a break from that -- we choose to forget/ignore (or, like temporary Buddhas, transcend) that over-riding goal, and focus instead on winning the hole or going one up against a better player, or managing to turn a 6 into a five to halve the hole. And when we come back from those times of (semi) self-forgetfulness, the triple bogie in medal play brings us crashing back to earth -- back to the perennial desire/curse to keep score, to measure ourselves against the standard, to post our best number; back to the reality of how good (or bad) we actually are as golfers; and back, most painfully, to the reality that we are not Buddhas, and have not -- as we briefly convinced ourselves in match play -- transcended our socially-conditioned wants and desires.  Personally, golf is one area where I don't have any desire to transcend the social conditioning; I've very happy trying to post as good a score as possible -- it gives meaning to the architecture -- and it's comforting to me know that shooting a 72 is a clear goal (as of yet unachieved) and a gold standard.

And Pat - that is also why, to answer your question, "the same courses under the exact same conditions, at match play, are a lot more fun". They are more fun because our self image and self regard as golfers is not at risk; we are relaxed and having more fun because the tyranny of the measuring stick/posting a score has been (temporarily) overturned. 

Peter    

[Sean_A]

I am in Jim's camp.  Its  not the course which causes a change in attitude, its the playing format which does.  A course is a course.  Its good, bad or indifferent regardless of the format of the game. 

Ciao

[V. Kmetz]

No doubt a lot of truth in that Sean and what Jim said.

I guess my contribution to this (and PMs musings) is going back to whether or not enduring architectural values (and our evaluations and experience of it) are somehow born from the humble "matching" form of the game, before skill and score was a reasonable measure of it.

cheers

vk

[Sean_A]

No doubt a lot of truth in that Sean and what Jim said.

I guess my contribution to this (and PMs musings) is going back to whether or not enduring architectural values (and our evaluations and experience of it) are somehow born from the humble "matching" form of the game, before skill and score was a reasonable measure of it.

cheers

vk

I am not sure why folks think matchplay is less skilled format.  The course has to be played in any case and the best score still wins.  I will grant the formats are necessarily treated differently by most golfers, but again that has to do with nature of the competition, not the course.  The one thing very odd about medal play is every player more often than not eventually finds himself playing in any given event not to win, but to place - as it were.  That sort of scenario never happens in matchplay.  Just this simple difference must result in very different attitudes while competing.

Ciao

[Peter Pallotta]

Indeed. If there are in fact enduring architectural values and principles, then by definition they endure independently of us, or, more to the point, independently of how we experience them. Play a great course sober, and play it the next day with a hangover and an aching back -- the course's values remain the same; it is we who have changed.

Peter

[V. Kmetz]

I'm not convinced of that first point Peter; in that (especially the organic development of early courses including TOC) human beings put the activity on the land...nature did not design the OC, it's just that multiple people voted with their feet (as it were) and there is no one traceable designer.  Like a trail in the woods followed by more and more people until it is worn.

I do think that is the key however...in the case of Golf...do the values exist independently of us?  I do not think they do.  I think this is born out by the fact that many early courses were 6...9...12 holes.  the growth and stabilization to 18 holes is NOT independent of us, and what could be more fundamental to design...how many shall it be?

My take is that if there is any enduring architectural values and principles (hard to say) the first one might be is that you can keep going...keep playing...like rolls of the die, a principle of Golf commands "outcomes," not empirical results.  Extrapolated to a hard and fast "design" principle...one that emerges is "width," and another is that whenever a designed feature stops play...lost ball, OB, water hazard...the game is less than it is when you have solvable problems or obstacles.

To transition to Sean's last post...about skill

In 'Scotland's gift; Golf" CBM recounts matches by the Morrises and Kidd and the Parks and the Dunns played by moonlight...while I understand at that latitude on a generally open plain, it is not "blindness" in the perfect sense, but nearly "blind" in the common sense.

Yet today -- at the elite level -- you're right, it isn't necessarily understood at as a less skilled format.  But for the 99.99% of us, there is a handicap, an acknowledgement of lesser or greater skill..."flights" for various large grouped skill sets...evrything about the the thing is levelness. eg:  "I know you're better than me...the empirical formula of totaled rounds says so...but if we level that difference, then it's just the fortune of today that will be measured."

There's a lot to say on the subject...especially if there is something useful to be found for contempiorary GCA issues

cheers

vk

[Peter Pallotta]

VK -you've morphed this into a more interesting question/thread than the original - which I do think is well answered by Jim and Sean. I have to go out and shovel snow, but for now would 'counter' (not the right word) the examples you give of golf and golf matches pre 1900 by noting the great courses that, n medal play, hosted US Opens for the likes of Jones and Hogan.

Peter

[Patrick_Mucci]

And Pat - that is also why, to answer your question, "the same courses under the exact same conditions, at match play, are a lot more fun".

They are more fun because our self image and self regard as golfers is not at risk; we are relaxed and having more fun because the tyranny of the measuring stick/posting a score has been (temporarily) overturned. 

Peter,

I've played a lot of golf and tournament golf with a lot of good and great and really great players,  and I never perceived that any of them had their self image or self regard as golfers tarnished by a round marred by a bad hole or two.

Pissed ?  Yes.
Annoyed at themselves if a bad decision led to the high score ?  Yes

But, I never witnessed or spoke to a golfer who hit a bad shot (physically) who had their self image or self regard diminished by that shot.

If golfers were that fragile, no one would play the game.

Peter    

[Peter Pallotta]

Pat - I defer to your experience with top flight competition; but the examples you yourself give -- and the great courses you specify -- seem to indicate that, while self-regard might've been stretching the point, even very good golfers have more fun when they are not required to tally up the final score in the traditional way, but instead can allow match play to 'let them off the hook'.

Peter

[Ken Moum]

I play with too many people who let a number in a little square on the scorecard determine what kind of day they had.  I am as likely as anyone to let myself slide into that way of thinking when I play a course I know well, but I have been able to give myself a break when playing "road golf."

Just yesterday i played Albuquerque CC with my wife and my brother(his handicap is ~12 shots lower than my 13) and when we finished he said, something like "There was a lot a bloodshed out there today."

Technically, he was right, I had to put down 7x at least four times and had something like a 91 with those included.  But the fact is that I thought I played pretty well and enjoyed the round immensely. (perhaps due to the duck fart in hot chocolate I had at the halfway house.)

If I played that way at home, I'd have been royally pissed at myself.

I feel the same way about quirky courses that my friends all call "goofy golf."  Black Mesa and Cottonwood Hillls are examples you'd be familiar with. They are dead wrong, of course, but their distaste is almost entirely due to the fact that a big number is lurking on every hole.

K

[Patrick_Mucci]

Peter,

I think one of the errors people make when discussing match play is the concept that you're playing your opponent and not the golf course.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The best match play golfers play the course, with situational consideration to their opponent.

TV has had an enormous influence on golf and architecture.

The producers don't want to see a match go 8-6 or 7 extra holes.
If the tournament can all come down to the last few holes with several players jockeying for the win, that's the drama and theatre they want.

They don't want a "quirky" feature upsetting their Applecart.
They don't want a contender taking a triple on # 15, thus ruining the drama, the theatre.

The tour today isn't about a guy making a triple or double coming down the stretch, it's about birdies and pars coming down the stretch

One only has to look at the disfiguration and flattening of greens at Merion and WFW to see that unique or troublesome features will continue to be eradicated

[V. Kmetz]

Pat,

I am in agreement with all of your last post, and more's the shame if that last portion is true...I can see my precious few rounds being devoted to those places that either A: resist such encroachment or B. are so generically crappy that people don't care to change such features (my beloved Sunset Hill is one such place).

cheers

vk

[Mark Chaplin]

Yet, the same courses under the exact same conditions, at match play, are a lot more fun.

Why is that ?

Because match play is proper golf and the card and pencil stuff is a foreign imposter. I played in and lunched with four new membership applicants today and the first thing we remind them is two ball golf is what we are about and if that doesn't suit then it's not the right club to join. Put a card and pencil with four ball and you've a day out not a round of golf.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Mark,

One of biggest problems is the mandate to post all scores.

Just yesterday I received a flyer in the mail from a club highlighting the upcoming season"s events.
In the flyer was a reminder that all scores must be posted.

So what's a golfer to do ?

Some clubs post a golfer's lowest score or par if a score isn't posted.

It's clearly a dilema.

[Sean_A]

I don't believe the golfer ever plays the course.  He always competes against golfers.  So called "playing the course" is a tactic to help compete against a golfer, its not a goal in and of itself.  The goal, at least in match play is to win.

Ciao 

[Patrick_Mucci]

I don't believe the golfer ever plays the course.  He always competes against golfers.  So called "playing the course" is a tactic to help compete against a golfer, its not a goal in and of itself.  The goal, at least in match play is to win.

Sean,

What's your experience in playing in match play tournaments ?

Not local or home club events, but regional or national events.

In addition, what's your handicap ?

I'm trying to understand how you can claim that the golfer never plays the course, but against other golfers.

[V. Kmetz]

Sean,

We might risk drifting into semantics, but I disagree that "we play the other golfer."  How exactly is that achieved?  You can not touch an opponents ball, interfere or inhibit his play and he cannot with you and yours?

His play has no bearing on yours (and vice versa) except in your design of play and that is based on a perception until one of you has holed out.

cheers

vk