Doing More With Less

[thomaslaffont]

I had a recent conversation with a friend about holes that "do more with less" by which we meant holes that are still a lot of fun to play despite having no distinguishing topographical features, views, or differentiated terrain.


San Francisco Golf Club's 5th hole comes to mind in this context. It plays slightly uphill and is dead straight with a tee box inline with the green. Yet terrific bunkering and fairway design make the hole feel anything but straight. Most first-time players would guess it snakes around from tee to green. A good tee shot requires a forced carry over right-side bunkers to have the best shot into the green. A misplaced tee shot will most likely bring into play two difficult and large green-side bunkers.


This fun is a lot of fun to play, strategic off the tee and camouflages its bland DNA creating a powerful package.


What other such holes come to mind?


Are these types of holes a truer reflection of an architect's skill?

[Tom Dunne]

I don't know if they're a truer reflection of an architect's skill, but I love seeing these kinds of holes and the different purposes they serve. The way plain ground is used can sometimes give a hint of how an architect is trying to balance other elements of the course.


I find the 1st at Garden City to be an unsettling tee shot. The way that it's folded into its native grass surroundings, it uses flat ground to its advantage by giving just enough visual information regarding the landing area, and no more. It's also great fun to start the day with a 300-yard hole--this one wouldn't be nearly as charming at 430.


I haven't dug into Ran's review yet, but the par-5 2nd at Talking Stick North makes brilliant use of a ruler-straight OB left. The angle of the green forces the golfer to deal with the threat of the desert sooner or later, and it gets harder the longer you postpone it.


I'm even fine with stuff like the 9th at the Old Course, given its place in the routing. I've made a kick-in birdie there to right the ship at the end of a bad nine, and I've ruined a good one on a sunny and near-windless day by getting overconfident and blowing it into the gorse en route to triple.


Wethered and Simpson were good guides in this area. They cite Ruskin in saying that "the demand for perfection was 'a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.'" I love these lines in particular: "We must be allowed to ease the tension at occasional intervals for our sanity, so that our brains may cool and our hearts expand with renewed life and freedom. We must count on at the very least one indifferent hole in a round..." It would seem that plain terrain is fertile ground for the kind of "indifferent" hole that adds charm to the day.

[Ira Fishman]

Ross seems to have accomplished a lot building dog legs on undistinguished topography. Numbers 8 and 14 at Pine Needles, Number 3 at Hope Valley, and Numbers 7 and 17 at Mid Pines are all great examples.


For a dead straight, flat hole though, kind of hard to top Woking #4.


Ira

[Tom_Doak]

I'm a big fan of doing more with less, but these examples strike me as funny.  Yes, the land is very flat, but the hole at SFGC counters that with five huge bunkers, and the 1st at Garden City has all kinds of hazards, large and small.


One of the things I got out of visiting with Brooks Koepka for a couple of days last week is that his ideas of what makes a course challenging are really subtle.  For example, he noted that a ball below or above your feet in the rough presents control problems for even great players, much more than bunkers do.  If you can compound that by building a green site that exaggerates the trouble for a hook or a fade, then there is a premium for hitting the ball in the fairway after all.


We've got a pretty flat site down there in Houston, I am looking forward to trying to implement some of these ideas.  We don't want to put in a lot of bunkers since they just get washed out from the regular rainstorms, and because they don't affect the pros' thinking much anyway.  Some people will probably dismiss it as boring, but that shows what they know   

[Peter Pallotta]

From the 'you've never heard of it' file:

Westview, on the northeast side of the GTA (greater Toronto area), owned and operated and in-part laid out by 'Pop' Nisbet, who in his 60s bought some land next to his greenhouse operation and eventually built 27 holes on intermittently (but always gently) rolling terrain:

The 2nd hole on the original 9 (opened in 1958): a 234 yard Par 3, dead flat, maybe just a titch uphill -- and at the end, a perched reverse Redan green (sort of). 

Simplicity itself, and one heck of a golf hole.

You know that Donald Ross line, i.e. 'here's the golf hole, play it any way you like'? Well, that's this hole (but probably not in the way DR meant it or the way most of us imagine it): play it with a driver, play it with a 3 wood, try getting it to roll up and on with a 2 hybrid, play it with a 5 or 6 or 7 iron to a great spot and then pitch on for a par putt etc. 

[Ira Fishman]

I'm a big fan of doing more with less, but these examples strike me as funny.  Yes, the land is very flat, but the hole at SFGC counters that with five huge bunkers, and the 1st at Garden City has all kinds of hazards, large and small.


One of the things I got out of visiting with Brooks Koepka for a couple of days last week is that his ideas of what makes a course challenging are really subtle.  For example, he noted that a ball below or above your feet in the rough presents control problems for even great players, much more than bunkers do.  If you can compound that by building a green site that exaggerates the trouble for a hook or a fade, then there is a premium for hitting the ball in the fairway after all.


We've got a pretty flat site down there in Houston, I am looking forward to trying to implement some of these ideas.  We don't want to put in a lot of bunkers since they just get washed out from the regular rainstorms, and because they don't affect the pros' thinking much anyway.  Some people will probably dismiss it as boring, but that shows what they know   

Well, knock me over with a feather. Hundreds of posts from Tom D about PGA Pros not knowing about good design and/or being irrelevant for good design. Guess situational perspective is everything. Where is Zac Blair when we need him?


Ira

[Erik J. Barzeski]

One of the things I got out of visiting with Brooks Koepka for a couple of days last week is that his ideas of what makes a course challenging are really subtle.  For example, he noted that a ball below or above your feet in the rough presents control problems for even great players, much more than bunkers do.  If you can compound that by building a green site that exaggerates the trouble for a hook or a fade, then there is a premium for hitting the ball in the fairway after all.

FWIW rough presents a 0.3 shot penalty for PGA Tour players. Or another way of looking at it is that they average the same as they do from the fairway… 70 yards further back.

I'm sure you knew that, but there's already a premium for putting the ball in the fairway. Unless by "premium" you mean more than about a third of a shot.

Tom, bunkers can look good, but wouldn't replacing a lot of greenside bunkers with typical green side rough do "more with less" in the sense that PGA Tour players would be punished for missing the green more and average golfers would be punished less?

[Peter Pallotta]

Erik - You probably make a good & valid point (I simply don't know enough to know for sure), but I took something different from Tom's post, i.e. the "building a green that exaggerates the trouble for a hook or a fade" part.

I've often read (from, for example, Jeff B, who's worked with a number of tour pros) that while all pros can/like to believe they can 'hit every kind of shot' (draws, fades, high, low etc), they themselves admit that they'll play their stock shot almost always, unless a) they are really at the very top of their games that day and/or b) they are coming down the stretch on Sunday and absolutely have to make birdie.   

So, greens that exaggerate the trouble for a hook or a fade seem to me the perfect thing to make tour pros *uncomfortable*, whether coming in from the rough or not.  To ask the 'stock fader' (or 'stock drawer') to hit a shot he doesn't want to or otherwise run the risk of getting into excessive trouble is to make him uncomfortable -- which is just about the only thing that can take the modern pro outside his hermetically sealed (and psychologist-approved and statistician-tested) comfort zone.   

And meanwhile, such a green would make not a whit of difference for the vast majority of average golfers.

P

[Erik J. Barzeski]

So, greens that exaggerate the trouble for a hook or a fade seem to me the perfect thing to make tour pros *uncomfortable*, whether coming in from the rough or not.  To ask the 'stock fader' (or 'stock drawer') to hit a shot he doesn't want to or otherwise run the risk of getting into excessive trouble is to make him uncomfortable -- which is just about the only thing that can take the modern pro outside his hermetically sealed (and psychologist-approved and statistician-tested) comfort zone.

Most PGA Tour players curve the ball very little. Their "fade" is a few yards, as is the draw of those who hit draws. A lot of golfers would describe most of their shots as "straight" and "falling" one way or the other. From the rough, they're even a little straighter.

I also agree with you that most Tour guys hit their stock shot almost all the time. It's how they play best.

So I'm not sure what a little tilt in the rough does, other than presenting a little more lack of comfort, but you also need a site with elevation changes and slope to do that, too, otherwise you're manufacturing that, and that seems against the "more with less" idea.

[Thomas Dai]

See the Rez golf thread and video - http://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,66686.0.html
Atb

[Tom_Doak]

Well, knock me over with a feather. Hundreds of posts from Tom D about PGA Pros not knowing about good design and/or being irrelevant for good design. Guess situational perspective is everything. Where is Zac Blair when we need him?

Ira:  I don't think you will find as many posts from me like that in the archives as you think you will. 


For example, several people here tried to exaggerate my post with the faux outrage so common to the Internet, but I believe my first post on the subject was that golf pros should not believe they can just roll out of bed and design a great course.  Of course, you could say the same about Golf Club Atlas participants.  It is hard for even someone with years of experience to do great work, without a lot of talented help getting it built.  [Which Zac has now sought out.  Still, I don't think anyone should compare what they haven't built yet to a "10" on the Doak Scale.]


I've also posted many times that one of the secrets to my success has been to not think very much about what the pros will do, and just design for the average golfer's enjoyment.  Those that design for TOUR courses tend to be very conservative, because they don't want to look stupid on TV if the set-up is wrong and the greens are too fast, and the players might complain about anything out of the ordinary.  I didn't have to worry about that at High Pointe or Lost Dunes or even Pacific Dunes, so I could build greens and hazards that others would not.  That is one definition of "irrelevant" but probably not the same one you were implying.


I did get to visit with six or eight pros in Florida last month, and mostly they told me not to try to reinvent the wheel for our project in Houston -- that the sort of holes we have been building ARE relevant for them, that angles can still matter, and that shorter holes are more interesting for them than those 490-yard par-4's we have to include.


I do have a different attitude for this project than I might have had five or ten years ago.  I learned from Pete Dye to listen to the players and find out what makes them uncomfortable, because Mr. Dye was looking for things that might affect the pros more than the average player, and he believed most of those things had to be psychological in nature.  But, the goal is different here.  Our client is the sponsor of the tournament, and the goal is to build a course that the players like and respect, so they want to come back and play it every year.  Which is not to say we are going to make it a pushover.  Every golfer likes a challenge, or the game becomes boring. 


So, I hope the City Council approves the project today, and we can get going on it.  But once it starts, I don't plan to be here regularly talking about it.  If you want to know what we are up to, come see for yourself.

[Ira Fishman]

Tom,


I appreciate the full and thoughtful response.  And my apologies if I exaggerated the number of posts a bit.  I may have been influenced by a phenomenon not  uncommon in my world where experts can change their perspective--at least temporarily--when in the presence of star athletes.


Good luck with the Council vote.


Ira

[Erik J. Barzeski]

So, I hope the City Council approves the project today, and we can get going on it.  But once it starts, I don't plan to be here regularly talking about it.  If you want to know what we are up to, come see for yourself.

Is that an open invitation? If only I lived anywhere near Houston… 

Good luck with the vote.

[Tom_Doak]

So, I hope the City Council approves the project today, and we can get going on it.  But once it starts, I don't plan to be here regularly talking about it.  If you want to know what we are up to, come see for yourself.

Is that an open invitation?

Yes, we enjoy having friends come out and give us feedback on our work in progress. 


The hard part is timing it when I will be in town, because my schedule has to be in flux with the weather -- I go for a few days each month in order to maximize my time on the ground, not every Tuesday.  But, Mike Nuzzo and/or one of my associates will probably be there even when I'm not.

[Jeff_Brauer]

One of the best examples of doing more with less came when I was renovating Tucker's Pioneer Park in Lincoln, NE.  On the 7th, a slight dogleg right, the left edge of the fw rides (rode? Haven't been there in a while) the top of a small ridge.  Hit the fw, and your ball kicked gently to the middle of the fw.  Miss just left, and the ball kicked harder towards OB.


Other examples, built or natural include many examples of small mounds right in front of greens to guard them and natural angled ridges crossing fairways that influence the line of the tee shot without resorting to hazards.

[Peter Pallotta]

Am I always to be the bridesmaid and never the bride? Am I always to be the last one to know?   

Tom casually drops in the name Mike Nuzzo after he'd already casually dropped in a reference to the Houston project, and no one says even a peep about it, not a single word or a question  -- as if everyone but me already knew the surprising and very pleasant news that the lovely and talented Mike N is involved in the Houston project too!

And, btw, since when did Tom become Mr. Casual? I think he's been hanging around with Brooks too much, getting into that laid back Florida sensibility. Okay, fine -- but for god's sake, Tom, don't hit the gym!

So, does anyone -- ahem, Tom, Mike -- want to jump in and provide more details about this? 

[Paul Rudovsky]

I think the creative process gets a jump start when the available quality and/or quantity of land is not all that might be wanted.  Makes the creator (architect here) think more and develop unique solutions.  If there is tons of land available it is easy to get sloppy and lazy.  And if the land is not that interesting, also forces more thought


Absolutely believe the above is true in all creative efforts whether they be artistic or quantitative...