My driver broke last week, and I'm waiting for a replacement shaft to arrive. I've beat my handicap on each of the four full nine-hole sides I've played without it, tying my best nine of the year on Sunday. I think that says something about my golfing IQ, and it's not good.
On the subject of Ross, 27 of those last 36 holes were on Ross courses, including a round at his course at French Lick. Before going out, the pro told me one key to the course was taking plenty of club on approaches, as most are uphill and the recoveries are often easier from behind the greens than in front. There are some holes where that's decidedly not the case, but if nothing else, it seems clear that Ross put great thought into how recoveries from short of greens should work. There are fewer features behind the greens at French Lick to make recoveries difficult, and the difficulty is generally just a function of your lie and the slope of the green. Shots that come up short, on the other hand, are subject to a far greater variation in types of lies and hazards that could affect the ball.
It strikes me that when Ross built French Lick, with all its uphill approaches and I&B and conditions that resulted in lower shots that ran more, perhaps he put all the thought he did into the areas short of greens because those areas affected the final 20 or 30 yards of everyone's shots, whether high IQ golfers or low. Approaches of the day had to navigate the pitfalls that Ross placed in front of the target, while today most of us just fly our good shots over them without a second thought. Still, the effort that Ross put into those final 30 yards of a hole keeps recoveries interesting even today given that so many shots come up short. It's just a shame in some ways to know that features that once would have gotten players' full attention even on well-struck approaches are rendered essentially irrelevant today until a player misjudges his distance or mishits his shot. Features that once provided excitement on both the approach and the recovery are now, for many players, really only exciting on the latter.