DECADE vs. Golf Course Architecture

[BCrosby]

The more I think about this, we are discussing the difference between an amateur golfer and a professional.


An amateur can afford to be vain.  He wants to believe hitting it stiff on a par-3 is all talent and not just aiming four yards left of the target and leaking it four yards right.


If you make your living by playing golf, then you have to be realistic about your own ability and what makes sense for you to get around in the lowest number.

Yep. If you are playing golf to feed your family, you have to make cuts to get a check. In that context it makes sense to play conservatively by the numbers. Unless you are a generational talent with ambitions to leave your mark in the history books.


Playing golf to win a $5 bet in a match with your buddies is about fun. It is also happens to be the way 99% of golfers play the game.


Bob

[Steve Lang]

   Yep Old Man Par is alive and well for the club amateur, and let's not forget the course's agent has already taken your greens fees before you step out to the first tee... the banker almost always wins!


... and as far as a course being a catalyst, in industrial chemistry applications catalysts get de-activated as their active sites or pores leading to them get blinded or bound to bad actors or poisons... if all you do is play one course, it's challenges or beautiful views, though still there, may fade into the background.   

[Padraig Dooley]

Isn’t basically the entire point of this board to discuss the contest between player and architect? The architect attempts to confuse, challenge, inspire the golfer and the golfer attempts to beat the architect - as represented by the course. I’m with Thomas.


When I lived in England I played by myself a fair bit. I viewed myself as in a battle then. If not the course then with whom was I battling?

Michael, were you not competing against yourself? And using the course as the benchmark for yourself?

[Sean_A]

Isn’t basically the entire point of this board to discuss the contest between player and architect? The architect attempts to confuse, challenge, inspire the golfer and the golfer attempts to beat the architect - as represented by the course. I’m with Thomas.


When I lived in England I played by myself a fair bit. I viewed myself as in a battle then. If not the course then with whom was I battling?

Michael, were you not competing against yourself? And using the course as the benchmark for yourself?

Of course he is, or practicing. I think some folks need to look up the definition of competitor. It seems some like to alter definitions to suit their opinion.

Ciao

[BCrosby]

A player's immediate and and most direct competitor is the golf course (played under the rules). That is his first order challenge. Other players are second order challenges, in the sense that all competitions with them are mediated by our comparative performances on the same golf hole/course played at the same time.


That is what it means to say there is no common ball in golf. We compete with other players in parallel. After everyone has finished a hole/course, you compare scores. 


I suspect that is what lies behind the notion that a golf hole can be 'unfair'. We match our games directly against the features of a hole. When we get unhappy outcomes after a well executed shot, we feel the hole treated us unfairly. I'd guess that is also why you rarely hear golfers calling a human opponent 'unfair'. A human opponent is not who you are competing with most directly.


Yet another reason why golf architecture matters.


Bob






 

[JESII]

Jim:


I have thought about your topic the past couple of days, while spending time on my new course in Ireland, which by the way is a very beautiful walk   


The part of your argument that concerns me is trying to take the logic to its conclusion.  If my ethical obligation is to try and shoot my lowest score, does that mean you're going to make me carry fourteen clubs, even though I only want to carry seven?  Do the people who are no good have to quit the game so they won't hold you up?


I am on Adam's page here, that the golf course is the venue for the game, it's not the examination.  As a venue, or a catalyst [n.  A substance, usually used in small amounts relative to the reactants, that modifies and increases the rate of a reaction without being consumed in the process], the other charms of the course can factor into its desirability as a venue one would choose. 


For example, Cruden Bay is compelling because its routing explores a beautiful property so thoroughly.  That doesn't make it as testing as Balmedie, but it could be the reason you want to play against your friends at Cruden Bay instead.

I can assure you that none of that is on my mind…and I’m not trying to determine which course is best through this exercise.


My point could be boiled down to as simple as, you and I airlift into the middle of St Patrick’s to play one hole.


If I decide to do something other than attempt to hit a good and useful tee shot, approach, putt etc…I am short changing the hole and therefor the effort you’ve put in to present an interesting hole. If it’s 500 yards and I decide to hit 4 pitching wedges I’ve undercut your efforts (even if your not offended…).


Your challenge is to make a hole that’s interesting to me and the player that can only hit it 125. If you only make it interesting for one of us, you haven’t done your job very well.

[Tom_Doak]

Your challenge is to make a hole that’s interesting to me and the player that can only hit it 125. If you only make it interesting for one of us, you haven’t done your job very well.

Yes, I agree, and yet the way you describe that seems as though you’re begging for me to do too much, and to differentiate every shot on every hole.  Whereas I can be much more effective sometimes just doing something small around the green, and leaving the rest alone.  Good play generally sorts itself out, if you don’t over complicate the design.


I did have a long chat today with a 3x major winner, and thought to ask him at the end if Fawcett’s stuff has changed how he approaches certain holes and he said yes, absolutely.  But then he said that the level of competition is also a factor.  Now that there are 40-50 long hitters out there, instead of just Davis Love, you have to assume that 20 of them are going to hit it well, and ten of those guys will putt well enough to get inside the top twenty.  So playing conservative now means you’ll be lucky to make the top twenty and you’ll almost never win.  You’ve got to hit driver because everyone else does.

[JESII]

Tom, I spent my first 10, or whatever, posts on this thread (and a couple dozen through the years with the same sentiment) talking solely about the golfer, not the architect or their product.


I only mentioned you (and implying all architects) in that last post because I wanted to reinforce that the course does matter to the overall enjoyment of the day.


I’d be very curious to hear if Harrington thinks he would have won those three majors if today’s players (and their data driven strategies) had played. I suspect he would have.

[Tom_Doak]

I’d be very curious to hear if Harrington thinks he would have won those three majors if today’s players (and their data driven strategies) had played. I suspect he would have.

I didn’t ask him that but generally all great players believe in themselves.  He did say that he would have attacked them a bit differently if he’d understood the data, and strongly implied that it is just tougher to win now because of the sheer number of players who are long enough to take the course apart when they are on form.

[Philip Hensley]

From Twitter:


Jon Rahm said he was "firing at flags" on Sunday. Here are his proximity numbers for the day, & down the stretch (courtesy
[/size][size=inherit]@LouStagner[/size][/size]). The #1 player in the world, "firing at flags," averaged 26.6' proximity (31.6' down the stretch).

[Peter Flory]

He sure didn't fire at the flag on 18 out of the trap. 

[Kyle Harris]

Does the course pay its bets if you beat it?

This question is at the heart of the idea that golf is both sport and game.


The mountain isn’t the competitor for the mountain climber, either.


Yet………..

[Jeff_Brauer]

He sure didn't fire at the flag on 18 out of the trap.

Well, I am sure that is part of the average.  But, it goes to show that the statistics bear out that these guys are good, but in reality, not as good as we sometimes think they are by watching highlight shot after highlight shot in TV coverage, where the best dozen players that week combine to nearly hole out dozens of times.....


As to gca and the Decade system, our first reaction is to lament that it makes golfers more conservative.  The gca's in this group, or some other young whippersnapper gca, ought to start figuring out how to design to challenge this new thinking.  It's sort of like crooks always coming up with something new to combat improved techniques or weaponry of law enforcement, or is it the other way around?

[Michael Felton]

He sure didn't fire at the flag on 18 out of the trap.

Well, I am sure that is part of the average.  But, it goes to show that the statistics bear out that these guys are good, but in reality, not as good as we sometimes think they are by watching highlight shot after highlight shot in TV coverage, where the best dozen players that week combine to nearly hole out dozens of times.....


As to gca and the Decade system, our first reaction is to lament that it makes golfers more conservative.  The gca's in this group, or some other young whippersnapper gca, ought to start figuring out how to design to challenge this new thinking.  It's sort of like crooks always coming up with something new to combat improved techniques or weaponry of law enforcement, or is it the other way around?

That's an interesting point. Decade can make people be more conservative, but it can also be a quite aggressive strategy too. It has you hit a lot of drivers. Rarely laying back by much. When it does make you lay back, it's only really to 3 wood (assuming the playing width of the hole is decently wide or the hole is not really short). Where I think you could confound it a little is by changing the math in not obvious ways.


For example, the driver decision tree says is it 65 yards between penalty hazards (if the answer to this is no then all bets are off). If yes, is it 40 yards between bunkers. If yes, driver. If not, does 3 wood stop short of them. If so, then 3 wood, otherwise probably driver. The math says it's not worth taking on the bunkers if they're less than 40 yards apart if you're only giving up distance to go back to 3 wood. But what if you could create a way that you gain more with driver. So if it's 35 yards apart, but you have a funnel that carries the ball down another 50 yards if you hit driver between the bunkers. That would change the math and probably make driver the optimal choice, but the decision tree would have you hit 3 wood and miss out on that.

[Tom_Doak]

Michael:


I was just talking to Richie Ramsay this morning, and he was reminiscing about the 2013 Open next door.  He said he hit 8-iron off the tee at the 12th, because it was running so fast that anything more might have gone in the left bunker at 265; it was either that, or try to reach the green, and take the chance of missing it and going over and back from there.


Links courses play very short, bringing more guys into contention and more options into play for the long hitters.  So I think the answer might be to build shorter courses where a bad miss with the driver is very penal.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Tom,


I think your first instinct or lessons from Pete to not take the driver out of the hands of golfers is probably a better idea, even if focused on tournament play as your main design goal. 


I mean, nobody likes being forced to lay up, and conceptually it's stronger to give them the choice to lay up, no?  I'm not comparing golfers to little children, but as any parent knows, tell them no and they throw a tantrum, give them a choice of ice cream now or later, and they happily start to think about the decision.


In terms of DECADE, I'm not sure if that means make the tree to tree landing zones perhaps just a few yards less than the 68 yards wide recommended, perhaps 62-64 yards, lulling them into a "well, it's pretty safe" attitude to take chances, or just what. If we narrow that too much, the disciplined golfer will simply go down to 3 wood.  That said, I saw Jim Colbert get really upset with his grandson for playing a full 3 wood for a second shot on the 7th at Colbert Hills, because there was just no reason to challenge the bracketing fw bunkers in the second LZ, and he should have laid up.  I mean, if you are going to take something out of play, be sure you take it out of play by laying up, especially, if the resulting shot will still be less than 160 or so.




I think wide landing zones with more severe hazards might work, but then again, I doubt any specific idea should be repeated so many times because no theory works as intended all the time.