Design Notebook: When Golf Course Geeks Abandon Their Principles

Welcome back to Design Notebook, where our tryptophan-induced haze was rudely punctured by this Design Disasters video from our colleagues Joseph LaMagna and Brendan Porath. The placement of those two bunkers may haunt us for years. Like, why?

Why?

Anyway, this edition of DN explores why golf course aficionados are such goddamn hypocrites. I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. Read on…

→ Before rounding up a few bits of late-November news from the golf course industry, I’d like to take on this thought-provoking question from Club TFE member Adam Tomasiello: “How come some golf courses that do not follow generally accepted (and/or Fried Egg Golf) principles of ‘good architecture’ tend to be beloved by GCAers anyway?”

First, some background. Adam initially posed a different version of this question for last month’s Club TFE Virtual Hangout. He also provided some context for why he has been thinking about the issue:

“In my study of golf architecture,” Adam wrote, “‘good’ design should incorporate strategic options, and strategic options almost always require variety and width…. Yet, despite these principles being generally well accepted in all of the golf architecture books I have read and media I have consumed, there are courses that are loved by GCAers that do not follow the norms. Mid Pines falls in this bucket for me. Don’t get me wrong—I love the course, and I think the land movement/routing is exceptional. But, when I personally compare it from a ‘strategy/variety/interest’ standpoint to, say, neighboring Pine Needles, there is no question that Pine Needles is better across the board.”

I told Adam that I disagreed with some aspects of his characterization of Mid Pines, one of the three outstanding Donald Ross courses in Southern Pines, North Carolina. Since Adam is a smart guy who knows how to avoid tedious debates about specific courses, he revised his question to address a broader phenomenon:

Why do golf architecture enthusiasts sometimes seem to forget their stated convictions when talking about certain beloved courses?

My simplest answer: because there are many ways for a golf course to be great.

Maybe that’s obvious. In practice, though, I don’t think it always is. Adam is right, for instance, that disciples of the “strategic school” of golf course design can sound dogmatic when they advocate for width, angles, and risk-reward dilemmas. But the truth is that not all great golf courses obey the dictates of the strategic school, and not all great golf architects prioritize lateral risk-reward concepts (i.e., hole designs where playing to the more dangerous side of the fairway earns you a better angle into the green).

Take Donald Ross. It’s safe to say that he understood strategic golf architecture. Otherwise, how could he have built holes like the fourth and 12th at Mid Pines, where angled greens open up with precise intentionality to the better-protected sides of the fairways? And how could he have imagined the intricate diagonals of Pinehurst No. 2, or the invitations to heroism that make the South Course at Oakland Hills so exciting to play?

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Yet I doubt that Ross was as preoccupied with width and angles as, say, Alister MacKenzie, C.B. Macdonald, and George Thomas were. In Ross’s relatively paltry published commentary on golf architecture, he rarely discussed strategy in the sense we’re familiar with today. (A notable exception is his brief article “Each Course Must Have Strategies,” which appears in the collection Golf Has Never Failed Me. I’ll include an excerpt in the last section of this post.) Ross was more likely to extoll the virtues of well-selected land, hole-to-hole variety, challenge balanced with playability, and routings that maximize natural features. Consider his much-quoted distillation of his architectural philosophy:

These are my standards to laying out a golf course:

Make each hole present a different problem.

So arrange it that every stroke must be made with full concentration and attention necessary to good golf.

Build each hole in such a manner that it wastes none of the ground at my disposal, and takes advantage of every possibility I can see.

No mention of strategy there. (If you really wanted to, you could interpret the word “problem” as a reference to risk-reward dilemmas. But that feels like a stretch.)

Does this mean that Ross’s work is missing something, or that his courses are self-evidently inferior to those with more sophisticated strategic designs? I don’t believe so—because, again, there are many ways for a golf course to be great.

Last week, I wrote about George Wright, a stellar Ross-designed municipal course in Boston. I highlighted the par-4 sixth hole, which lends itself to a traditional analysis of lateral options, risks, and rewards. On the whole, though, George Wright would not be anyone’s go-to example of strategic golf. Sure, several holes offer shorter approaches to those who club up and cut the corners of the doglegs. But only a few of the greens are oriented to receive or reject shots from particular angles. And while the hole corridors aren’t suffocatingly narrow, most of them are not quite wide enough to accommodate side-to-side strategic play.

Perhaps these are flaws of George Wright’s design and presentation. Yet the course has such wonderful land, such a deft routing, and such a wide range of memorable holes that I can’t get too worked up about its imperfect adherence to strategic ideals. The course is what it is. Judged on its own terms, it’s terrific. I would say the same of Desert Forest, which penalizes inaccurate driving brutally, and Mid Pines, which, as Adam correctly pointed out, is less roomy than most of the best-regarded courses in the North Carolina Sandhills.

I’ll admit a bias here. Although I’m a thoroughly average player, I’m pretty steady off the tee. I don’t miss many fairways when I’m in decent form. So it’s possible that I have less sensitivity than most golfers to the difference between 35- and 50-yard-wide fairways.

Still, I do think that golf architecture nerds like me and Adam (and probably you, if you’ve read this far) tend to focus too much on strategic matters. Yes, risk-reward optionality is important, but it’s not the only—or even necessarily the most important—component of a golf course. Land, routing, and variety are also critical, and in my experience far less frequently discussed and emphasized.

So I’ll turn it over to the comments section. If a golf course has weaknesses in its strategic design, or if it simply subscribes to a different philosophy of architecture, can it be considered truly great?

→ On November 21, Palmetto Bluff announced that Coore & Crenshaw will build the South Carolina residential development’s third golf course. Palmetto Bluff is already home to May River, an 18-hole Jack Nicklaus design, and Crossroads, a reversible nine-hole layout by King-Collins that opened earlier this year. South Street Partners, the private-equity firm that purchased Palmetto Bluff in 2022, has moved quickly to expand the community’s offerings. The yet-to-be-named Coore & Crenshaw course is situated on 500 acres and will likely open in the winter of 2025-26.

Here’s some informative (if rather purple) material from the press release:

“Located on Palmetto Bluff’s east end—and anchoring what will eventually be the community’s third village, Anson—the new course will embrace a different approach to golf. Unlike most Lowcountry courses which are laid out with residential real estate in mind, South Street requested the Coore & Crenshaw team make their decisions without a land-planning model dictating where the course needed to go. No residential component enabled the team to design a pure golf landscape for a pure golfing experience. Due to the lack of homes on the course, Anson Village will have a powerful sense of arrival, and this sublime trip will continue as golfers follow the game through the course’s four different forest types… into wide-open spaces with dramatic coastal vistas and several holes bordering the picturesque bluffs with expansive marsh views on the New River. Each hole will have a variety of tee boxes providing multiple levels of challenge, distance, and site lines. The land between the holes will be managed areas of native flora and fauna composed of sparkleberry, silky aster, fox tail, goldenrod, and wiry broom sedge. Like the Coore & Crenshaw restoration of Pinehurst No. 2, grass lines will transition directly into the native edges, which will be a blend of dense woodland, open quail woods, sandy brush, freshwater wetlands, and saltwater marsh.”

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Chocolate Drops

Josh Pettit—golf architect, Alister MacKenzie scholar, and two–time Fried Egg Golf Podcast guest—has joined Clayton, DeVries & Pont as an associate.

Proper Golf, the firm headed up by Jaeger Kovich, has secured restoration commissions at Plymouth Country Club and Cohasset Golf Club, both Donald Ross designs in Massachusetts.

Brad Faxon offers a glimpse of High Grove, an under-construction Gil Hanse design in Florida. Sandy soil!

Hazeltine National Golf Club’s new short course, built by Love Golf Design, will open next summer. The timeline for the potential reimagining of Hazeltine’s championship course remains vague.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Davenport Country Club (Davenport, IA)—designed by Charles Hugh Alison in 1924, restoration work by Ron Forse and Jim Nagle since 2012

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Underlined and Starred

“Today, strategy governs the game to a large extent. The golfer can escape the bunkers, but he loses distance thereby. Emphasis today is laid up punishing the proficient player.

“In laying out a course, the cardinal rule is to make the holes so that the man who plays it as he should gets par, and the man who makes a mistake makes one more than par.

“In building my courses, my aim is to lay out an alternate route on practically every hole. That is, in the case of a two-shot hole, the scratch player or long hitter has one way of getting home in two shots—he must place his drive accurately to do so—and the high handicapper or short hitter has another route to reach the green in three.” – Donald Ross