The Easiest Great Course in the World

[James_Livingston]

In reality, RM West is a par 68 or 69. It may be, for some, an easy par 72, but its a pretty tough test against a realistic par of the lower number.

Shane, correct, RM West is a very tough 6600yd par 68 course.  The sentiment expressed is similar to that of Jack Nicklaus a few years back, who described it as a "good members course", causing similar howls of outrage.

Darren
You initial post begs an inevitable question.  If it was so easy, what did you shoot?

[Matthew Delahunty]

One of the hallmarks of RM, and even KH, is that it allows the golfer to play to their handicap if they play percentages and play within themselves. If you take on the course then you do so at your peril, because it'll eat you up pretty quickly. I experienced the same sort of design feature when I played at Royal Dornoch earlier this year. That's part of what makes these courses so great. You can enjoy your round and play to your level, or you'll score badly but know why you did. That's what brings you back and makes you want to improve on what you've just scored.

[NAF]

I've played Royal Mel West and the Composite Course (in a stableford) back last year.  My first round there I drove the ball reasonably well and took advantage of the par 5s the best I could.  I would say the course was probably playing about 6500 yards and even shorter with pitch and roll.  I probably hit more greens in regulation (how can you not with how big they are) that round than in any one I've played.  Did I mention the 80 degree day cobalt blue sky and no wind that greeted my round?  Still, I could muster no better than an 81 for the round and that was because the greens were devilishly fast and furthermore filled with undulations I could not discern.  I couldnt see some of the vortexs and subtleties.  We had no caddy but it reminded me of TOC (ex the bold contours) for putting in that I couldnt read a lot correctly.  Furthermore, the pin positions were not prohibitive when we played.

The stableford I played in on the comp course was a different kettle of fish.  They moved the tees back a bit and tucked in the pin placements.  Despite the width off the tee, my playing partner and I were approximately 14 shots worse on that day.  I four putted like a champ!  So I guess it all depends on when you play Royal Mel.  In perfect weather and docile pin placements, you can knock the ball around and put up a good score.  But the course can also bear its teeth when set up correctly.  It reminds me the most of NGLA though for playing conditions.  Or at least NGLA in the 2003 version.. Firm, fast, fair and furious.

[Darren_Kilfara]

Darren
You initial post begs an inevitable question.  If it was so easy, what did you shoot?

James, not that I feel my score is hugely relevant to the discussion...but I shot an 80. I am a three-handicapper; on the day in question, I hit the ball rather poorly by my usual standards, putted quite horribly (I had no touch to speak of and didn't make a putt longer than four feet, although I only had one three-putt - for par, on #15 - because I can't really say I saw a difficult two-putt on those greens all day), and didn't make a birdie. Chris Kane can vouch for how I played, if he wants to; I feel that the worst I could have possibly shot given the conditions, and the possible range of swings and putting strokes I might have brought to the golf course, was 82 or 83. I don't feel the course was playing any more difficult relative to par than, say, Machrihanish or the Old Course or Royal Dornoch on a windless day.

Does that answer your question?

Cheers,
Darren

[David_Tepper]

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Augusta National so far.  I have not played it, but I am guessing that from the Member's Tees, under non-Masters conditions (no "second cut"), the course is just not that tough.  After all, the average age of the members who play on any given day is 65+, so that can't make it too hard for the old boys.

But seriously, the course is wide open and the bunkers are relatively few.  Putting the greens is really the only challenge.  

[stovepipe]

The first course, chocolate pudding, with hot custard!              yummy  ;D

[Chris Kane]

Darren,
The day you played RM was among the easiest days of golf I've ever seen there - primarily because of the severe storm which passed over Melbourne the day before.  The greens were soft and slow.  In "median conditions", almost every green features numerous difficult two putts.

What you saw wasn't even close to "median conditions".  You saw it at its most timid, which was a shame - you'd have better appreciated the architecture with firm and fast greens.  The way you were swinging that day, you'd have struggled to break 85 in "median conditions", and 100 in tournament conditions.

[Brian_Gracely]

But seriously, the course is wide open and the bunkers are relatively few.  Putting the greens is really the only challenge.  

David -

Ahh...the simplicity of "putting the greens".  Your description could probably be applied to Pinehurst #2 as well, but I wouldn't consider it an easy course.

[Matthew Schulte]

That reminds me of a that saying about Pinehurst that the higher handicapper walks off Pinehurst saying "it wasn't that hard, and I never lost a ball" while his low handicap playing partner is still frustrated and confused by the complexities of the green complexes.  For the low handicapper knows that the scoring happens on and around the greens.

I think that is probably also true of Augusta.  Room off the tee, but very complex greens.

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

There is no way RM can be called the easiest great course.  Are you sure you didn't play from the far forward tees?  Even under ideal conditions, the course requires quite a few good shots to post a decent round.  Els might have shot it up this year, but what was the average score?  Not so low--it is a championship course.                                                                                                                                                                        Easiest---Maidstone                                                                     Fisher's Island                                Shoreacres                                                                    Cruden Bay                                   Sunningdale                                

[James_Livingston]

James, not that I feel my score is hugely relevant to the discussion...but I shot an 80.

Darren
Sometimes I find the score can be of some use to these types of discussions.  It sounds like you have played the course off the front pegs, with moderate green speed and easy pin positions.  It probably played no longer than about 6300 yards, and with no hole longer than 445 yds, which in this day and age is a mid length par four.  So as a three marker you have shot 12 over.  All I can really say to that is that if that was an easy course, I'd hate to see what you might shoot on a hard one.

One reason why I asked the score is that there are plenty of courses which may appear easy, but when you come to the end of the round and add up your score, you find you haven't shot as low as you might expect.  That always seems to happen to me at RMW, where the shots just seem to slip away, especially around the middle of the round and on the final three holes.  You think you are on track to shoot a 74, and before you know it, you're signing for a 78 and wondering where the shots have gone.

its greens are huge and hardly over-contoured

I sort of understand where you are coming from here, but it is the fact that they are not often "over contoured" that actually makes them so beguiling and difficult to read.  "overcontoured" greens are usually both boring and obvious.  Although having said that, there are plenty of very large breaking putts to be had, and Chris is correct that you don't want to get above the hole on a lot of them.  They must have been very slow and friendly when you visited, which is a shame.

[Darren_Kilfara]

James, I feel as though I know enough about architecture to be able to tell you what a difficult course looks like and plays like, so let me ask you to trust me when I say that my 80 at RM had everything to do with a terrible golf swing and putting stroke and very little to do with the architecture. If I go back and think about my round, there wasn't a single instance where I was "had" by the golf course, to the detriment of my card; I did find the fairway bunker on the right at six, but a) that had more to do with a pushed drive than me trying to bite off more than I could chew, and b) I managed to find the front edge of the green from the bunker and make par regardless.

Having blamed my swing and not the architecture for my score, I'll take your (and everyone else's) word that I saw RM in its kindest, most forgiving light, and that it plays more difficult 99% of the time. Of course, even if you're right, I still doubt that I'd find it a "difficult" course relative to other courses with similar hard-and-fast conditions, be they in the Sand Belt or elsewhere...

Cheers,
Darren

[Doug Siebert]

The three that come to my mind have already been mentioned:

Royal Dornoch
Turnberry
North Berwick

I think that RD and NB might show more teeth with a bigger wind, it wasn't all that windy when I played RD, and it was uncommonly calm when I played NB.  But I played Turnberry twice in about a 20-25 mph wind and still found it quite easy, I shot a 76 the last time without making anything over four feet.  I'm sure it'd be a bit tougher from the Open tees, but on most of the holes increased length wouldn't have changed much.

TOC on the other hand must have my number, I still have yet to break 80 there, or manage to take less than 40 putts.  The last time despite driving three par 4s (and almost a fourth) and hitting both par 5s in two.  I seemed to lose most of my strokes on the easier holes like 3 and 16, rather than on places like the Road or Long.

A course like Turnberry probably just fits my game better than TOC, and for others it is the other way around.  We all have different strengths, and different things will fit our eye better, etc.

[Robert Mercer Deruntz]

How in the world can Royal Dornack, Turnberry, North Berwick, and Royal Melbourne be considered easy great courses.  Maybe they are easier for the 100 shooter to shoot 100.  No doubt that is the case at Shinnecock and Augusta--I know a couple players who do conisistently beat their handicap at the above mentioned, and usually get killed at National  and Garden City Golf.  For a player who can hit the ball, Maidstone and Fishers Island are birdiefests.  In July and August, Garden City can yield low scores if you can drive the ball in the fairway.  Conditions do have a lot to do with scoring opotunities--Round 4 of q-school finals is a great example when compared to Round 3.

[Brian Phillips]

Darren,

I am a little surprised that someone like yourself that understands architecture so well that you feel you can make a statement about a course on one visit.

You yourself have told me many times that I still don't know TOC even though I have now played 3 times including backwards.

Now you say that you had a bad day with your swing and putting and shot 80...a bad day...that is an awful day for you.

So you shot 80 on a very easy day, easy greens no wind...and you shot 80..any bells ringing.  You also say you were never 'had' by the course.  But you were...you shot 80 and I know how proud you are about you scores.

Looks to me like you were 'had' by the course without knowing it as others have implied.  Is that not the beauty of the course that it gets you without you knowing because the course is so subtle?

Can't wait to get out there next November...

Brian

[Darren_Kilfara]

Brian,

There's a difference between considering yourself an expert about a course after only one playing, and being able to make an informed statement about a course after only one playing. I believe RM is the type of course which, while subtle, can be analyzed after one playing. I'm not saying that I know everything about the course, and I'm willing to accept that the conditions I played it in were particularly extreme on the soft/slow side. But I can definitively say the following:

a) I shot 80 because I played awfully, not because the course "had" me in ANY way. If you charted my mistakes and misses, they were almost entirely due to poor execution and not poor shot selection. Indeed, you can take what happened on the par-4 third hole as the exact opposite: I yanked my drive into the woods and pitched out to the fairway, leaving me a short approach. Chris told me that the green sloped hugely from front to back beyond a false front, and that it would be just about impossible to hold the ball on the green. So I babied my approach, left it short of the green, and subsequently took three to get down (for a double-bogey). When I reached the green, I realised that in the soft conditions, I had plenty of room to stop the ball (about 35 yards of green, I'd have thought) and that Chris's entirely mistaken advice - for the conditions - meant I'd been "had" because I THOUGHT I could be "had", if you follow me, in that I'd been led to believe that the course was more subtle and difficult than it was.

b) In different conditions, I reckon it is possible that I could be "had" by RM. Hard/fast conditions might make it possible to fail through mistaken shot selection, leaving yourself poor angles into greens, and so on. That was not the case when I played it - there seemed to be no premium on one's angles of approach, especially to some of the pin placements I faced. I think I'm intelligent enough to know the difference between how the course COULD play and how it DID play, and to know that I therefore wasn't "had". You seem to think that if I were to shoot 80, I must have somehow been "had", which is quite an extraordinary statement to make given that you weren't there to see me play, and that I was playing a course you've also never seen.

c) TOC really is a unique case. You just can't compare RM to TOC like you have; you can't compare any course to TOC, in terms of the steepness of its learning curve. That is not just my own opinion, but the opinion of many well-traveled golfers who have played TOC enough times to get beyond its learning curve. From what I understand, RM has a learning curve of its own, but it is nothing like as steep.

Why is TOC's learning curve so steep? It has more bunkers than most courses in the world. Many of those bunkers are hidden, and it takes time to discover where they are. It has many weird and unwieldy contours in its fairways. Its greens are huge, and hugely sloped. Now, there are two ways for one to think that TOC is easy: 1) you get to know the course intimately, to know where to go, and to play intelligently and with solid execution; under those conditions, you should be able to steer away from most of the trouble. Or, 2) you get lucky, not finding any of the bunkers and not getting messed with by the contours of the fairways and greens. The course is wide enough and big enough that the latter can easily enough happen, within the sample size of an individual round. I think many, if not most, of the people who think TOC to be architecturally uninspiring have probably had the latter experience.

Cheers,
Darren

[Tom_Doak]

Darren,

I've played Royal Melbourne three or four times under the soft conditions you describe, and it IS pretty easy if all you're trying to make is pars and bogeys.  The very short par-5 holes certainly help in that regard.  But I still think it's a great course.

You may remember just before Pacific Dunes opened I wondered aloud if some would consider it too short or too easy to be a truly great course.  Most people see it in the wind and that question flies out the window, but I've also talked to several people who played in calm conditions (everyone from club professionals to 20-handicap ladies) who have had their career low score at Pacific Dunes.

And remember the Argentine doctor who shot 64 at Muirfield in the Open of 1980?

I think a truly great course should sometimes look easy.  If it didn't, it wouldn't be sufficiently frustrating the rest of the time.

[Tom_Doak]

Oops, I forgot to add that the last time I played Royal Melbourne, with Mike Clayton and my two interns, the wind was blowing and the greens were hard and fast.  Wow, was it fun ... and very difficult to post a score.

[Patrick_Mucci]

Darren Kilfara,

The answer is:

The golf course that best suits your game

[Darren_Kilfara]

Tom, when I started this thread, I wasn't viewing "easy" as a perjorative term (and I'm still not). "Great" and "easy" can comfortably coexist in architecture, as far as I'm concerned. I have my doubts about whether or not RM is a 10 on my personal Doak scale, but they don't have much to do with its ease or difficulty.

Cheers,
Darren

[Jeff Goldman]

Don't know why I didn't think of this before, but Jasper Park has to be a contender.  Terrifically fun, strategic course with tons of options, and VERY scorable (I took four from just off the green on 18--should have putted it dammit-- to make an 81, which for me is very very good).  Love the par-5 second hole that's like 490 yards downhill with a 100 yard wide fairway, so you can pick your line of attack.

Jeff Goldman

[ChipOat]

Tom Doak:

Far be it from me to ever argue too strenuously with YOU regarding golf architecture, BUT:

I've never liked the few "great" courses I know to ever be "easy" - there's a disconnect there that just doesn't fit for me.  This, of course, is a BIAS of mine - I admit it.

Never in my life have I ever found Pine Valley or Shinnecock to be anything other than difficult - even on my best day there under the most benign conditions for scoring.

Also (and possibly since my short game is pretty suspect), I've never found Merion or National to be "easy" although both courses have several holes that aren't very challenging.  Every good round I've had at either course, I played my ass off that day.

Every good score I've ever posted on the 5 (or so) truly wonderful/"great" courses I've played in my life (out of 300+) was a well-played round for me.  In all cases, I hit a bunch of very good shots and had less than 31 putts.

To me, a "great" course is never easy - at least for my sorry game.

[Chris Kane]

I think I'm intelligent enough to know the difference between how the course COULD play and how it DID play

Clearly not it would seem.  You've started this thread with a clear contention, that Royal Melbourne is the easiest great course in the world, yet you didn't take into account how the course would play under different conditions.

You have also misrepresented the advice I gave to you on the third tee - from the wrong angle (ie. approaching a rhs hole location from the rhs of the fairway), holding the green is almost impossible downwind.

What a great shame that you saw Royal Melbourne in benign conditions following a storm the previous day, and that you appear to lack the lateral thinking skills to understand (for yourself, without people telling you so) how it might play in normal conditions with wind about and hard/fast turf.

I believe RM is the type of course which, while subtle, can be analyzed after one playing

Not a comment you're qualified to make.  Until you've seen the course multiple times, you cannot say whether it can be understood after one game, or whether it needs to be seen multiple times for a fair analysis.

[Brian Phillips]

Indeed, you can take what happened on the par-4 third hole as the exact opposite: I yanked my drive into the woods and pitched out to the fairway, leaving me a short approach. Chris told me that the green sloped hugely from front to back beyond a false front, and that it would be just about impossible to hold the ball on the green. So I babied my approach, left it short of the green, and subsequently took three to get down (for a double-bogey). When I reached the green, I realised that in the soft conditions, I had plenty of room to stop the ball (about 35 yards of green, I'd have thought) and that Chris's entirely mistaken advice - for the conditions - meant I'd been "had" because I THOUGHT I could be "had", if you follow me, in that I'd been led to believe that the course was more subtle and difficult than it was.

Keep digging Darren and you will end up in Australia again where they will banish you to Ayers Rock forever.

The advice you got from Chris was that he thought that it would be impossible to stop the ball. It was not wrong, he just gave you an opinion and YOU decided to listen to it.  Now, you knew the green sloped away from you, right? So why the hell didn't you go a little long and chip back up the slope? No wonder you took three to get down...if I had your game and my brains...we would be world beaters...

You had short shot to the green and you had already played two greens so you knew what type of conditions you had.  If it was a short iron, then even if you did roll off the back even in a bunker you wouldn't be far away...no?

That you took three to get down is not Chris' fault it is yours...oh..by the way YOU pulled your drive in the first place..

Brian

[Chris Kane]

The advice you got from Chris was that he thought that it would be impossible to stop the ball. It was not wrong, he just gave you an opinion and YOU decided to listen to it.

Absolutely right Brian - and while we're dishing out the recriminations   I might mention that Darren gave me an incorrect yardage on the 18th hole (RM has no distance markers at all; Darren had a yardage book) which meant that my perfectly struck 6-iron ended up in the front bunker.  I took four to get down from a fried-egg lie, so the double-bogey is all Darren's fault    Not that I could care less about my score!