Great post Andrew I agree completely. Muirfield Village wouldn't play well if it were F&F. The Arch has to match for F&F. F&F is basically throwing out the yardage book and playing by feel anticipating run out with drives and approaches short of greens. Lawsonia looks great and i can't wait to play there.
This is funny. I have a friend at work who played both Pinehurst No. 2 and Muirfield Village this year. He's a very accomplished player and also a former superintendent. I asked him which he preferred, and he said he really loved Pinehurst but preferred Muirfield because it played so much firmer. I raised an eyebrow, and he told me that he couldn't believe Muirfield was the firmer of the two either but that he had to bounce balls into a lot of the greens and got over 60 yards of roll on a few drives. I'm sure someone who dislikes the course and hasn't visited in 5 years or so will try to tell me his observations aren't correct, but I tend to believe the firsthand account of a scratch player who spent 15 years working as a superintendent, even if he caught the course on an unusually springy day.
Of course, I've played Lawsonia a half dozen times or so and in every season and never found it remotely "fast and firm" by my definition. I'm encouraged by the reports that its maintenance presentation may have changed, and I haven't played it in two years, but in the 5 or 6 times I played it between 2009 and 2011 it was never remotely as firm and fast as Valhalla was when I played there this summer. I wouldn't describe either course as truly firm and fast, but there's no question which one would've won in a bounciness contest.
Pat, I definitely understand what you're saying about how a course needs more than just firm and fast turf to be interesting, but needs to combine that turf with architectural elements that make that firm and fast turf a real factor in decision making and shotmaking. Fast and firm conditions make some courses much more interesting, but for other courses they simply reveal that there's nothing interesting about the course at all. The sad thing for me is that it's often the lowest budget designs that use their terrain best to create ground game options and really interesting shots, particularly among courses from the Golden Age. And yet, those courses generally make the stupid mistake of trying to compete with their neighbors on "lushness" rather than maintaining conditions that highlight their superior fun factor. It's a bummer.