I've said this before and I've been to Bandon and have zero interest in seeing the Sheep Ranch. I am delighted to hear that it has become an overpriced tourist trap and take comfort that I will never go...The thought of playing a routing off the top of the head of some amateur architect pukens me . . .
I never tire of John hitting the nail on the head.
It is interesting, isn't it? We praise the talent of the great designers, golden age and modern, and we revere their classic and top 100 courses, and we discuss constantly the genius of the routings and use of natural features, and we complain that professionals like Fazio don't honour/restore the original architect's intentions, and we celebrate the fun and challenge and options that top-flight architects/courses provide us, and we argue that in assessing the merits of a golf course qualities like flow and pace are as important as shot-values, and we debate the use of multiple tees and decry how modern technology is making great old courses obsolete -- and then after all of that the most well travelled amateurs amongst us seem just thrilled to bits to throw it all the window in a heartbeat, as if we don't really mean a single word we said about any of the above, and instead to hit golf shots from anywhere to anyplace and from any tee we choose, thus creating/inventing/improvising a golf course all on our own that we're apparently as happy to play as we are a carefully realized golf course designed by an acknowledged master.
I've never been there, to Bandon, but it does seem very strange to me. (It's something like playing a game a chess but deciding on the spot that pawns can move backwards and rooks diagonally and that knights can be queens whenever they feel like it; sure, it's still a game of some kind, but it isn't the game of chess.) Then again, so too does choosing different sets of tees for different holes during the same round of golf, which I'm told many do here -- as if our own sense of variety and challenge and options is superior to/preferred over that of the architect who designed the course and placed the blue or white or red tees at specific places for a specific purpose. To me, believing that while at the same time being here on this site filling the electronic ether with palaver about the skills of the great architects seems wholly inconsistent. It also seems that we should all simply admit that "We want what we want when we want it" is the underlying premise/value judgement of all our critiques.
Oh, needless to say, to each his own of course. How a man (or woman) plays a golf course is his/her own business, not mine. I'm only speaking theoretically, as a matter of principle as it were....
Peter