A fascinating topic and a very good thread - I especially liked Don and Tom's last exchange, and Tom's thought that it's the quality of those 4 or 5 awkward holes that determine whether a course is really outstanding or not. (It's like being allowed to look at Hitchcock's story boards for "Rear Window", or listening to a comic explain how a joke is constructed and why it works.) I don't think anyone has used the term "transition hole" yet, and I don't know whether that's a synonym for awkward/connector hole -- but it strikes me that in either case those terms are only applied in retrospect, i.e. after a golfer has played a series of holes or the whole round, and starts thinking about his favourite holes and the ones he thinks best. And, since the golf holes are compared to eachother (and thus we're speaking in relative terms) some holes have to be thought of as better than the rest, and some not as good -- even if in absolute terms all 18 are good golf holes. Which is to say, while the architect knows (or think he knows) what the transition/connector/awkward holes are, the golfer will only experience them that way if, for a range of reasons, he decides that they are indeed not as good, relatively speaking, as the rest. But what if he doesn't judge them less good? Well then we get the interesting result that, at one and the same time, the same golf hole is (in theory, for the architect) a transition/awkward hole and (in practice, for the golfer) one of the most interesting holes on the course. All this reminds me of one of my favourite movies, The Godfather. A stylish and smart movie, right? Yes -- but note how on-the-nose and almost banal these three lines are, each one of them the equivalent of a connector hole, something that links what we've already seen with what we're about to see, and that do so in (what could seem) a very obvious way: very early on, Michael says to Kay "That's my family, Kay, that's not me"; and then at the half way point of the film, after the Don's been shot, Michael holds his hand in the hospital and says "I'm with you now, Pops"; and then, near the end, in the garden, the old Don and his son sit together, and Michael says 'We'll get there, pops". And yet, it all works beautifully, and no one (that I know of) ever winces when the lines are first spoken and when he first hears those lines, because they are made to work -- and because, it is only in retrospect, and after many viewings, that their "obviousness" ever occurs to anyone.
Peter