Design Notebook: The Rest of Your Mailbag Questions, Answered

Welcome back to Design Notebook, where we were disappointed to learn that, even in the digital realm, some golf architects refuse to make proper use of a natural hazard.

In this week’s DN, Garrett Morrison tackles some mailbag questions that he and Andy Johnson didn’t get to in last week’s episode of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast. Also included: a photo set from our recent visit to Gil Hanse-designed Boston Golf Club.

Tossing Some Mailbag Leftovers in the Microwave

By Garrett Morrison

On last Thursday’s edition of the Fried Egg Golf Podcast, Andy and I discussed a few golf architecture-related questions asked by Club TFE members. There were several other questions we didn’t get to, so I figured I’d devote this week’s Design Notebook to answering them. Here goes…

It seems that great Golden Age courses, even with less earthmoving technology, produce more with less. Are there courses in the post-Sand Hills era that live up to the standard of a Blue Mound or Chicago Golf on a similar non-descript piece of property? (Andrew Mays)

Andrew clarified in an additional comment that he’s “specifically not talking about a course that is almost completely manufactured like Whistling Straits.” Rather, he’s asking about fairly natural courses that occupy functional but unexceptional land.

It’s an excellent question. A distinctive feature of 21st-century golf architecture is an evolved attitude toward site selection. Rather than selecting a conveniently located property and spending money to transform it, top developers have been seeking out the best land and spending money to get golfers to it. (This trend may be turning back on itself in the Hobe Sound area right now, but that’s a subject for another mailbag.) The result is that today’s most talented golf architects have not worked on as many less-than-outstanding sites as their predecessors did.

Still, if you look deep into the CVs of the Big Three of post-Sand Hills golf architecture, you’ll find good courses on average properties as well as great courses on merely good properties: Coore & Crenshaw at Cuscowilla, Chechessee Creek, Warren, and Austin; Tom Doak at CommonGround, Medinah Course 1, and The Loop; Gil Hanse at Rustic Canyon and Soule Park. C&C and Doak have also proven adept at carrying out reclamation jobs without utterly annihilating the land’s preexisting character (e.g., Talking Stick O’odham, The Rawls Course).

The delightful eighth hole at CommonGround (Fried Egg Golf)

Do you have any concern that modern golf course design is becoming overly singular in its principles, aesthetics, and style, particularly at the most elite courses and clubs in the U.S.? (Andrew Choi)

If you’re talking about renovation work at top American clubs, sure. There has been some “monkey see, monkey do” behavior among highly ranked U.S. private courses over the past 15 years.

If you’re talking about new builds, I believe modern golf architecture contains a great deal more variety than many critics recognize. Yes, the three leading golf architects of the day—Bill Coore, Tom Doak, and Gil Hanse—emerged from the same general design tree, the one rooted in Pete Dye’s design-build method and the neoclassical revival of the 1980s and 90s. Yet I find their approaches and styles easy enough to distinguish. Doak in particular has made a point of varying his attack from project to project, and indeed taking on projects that force him to innovate.

Further down the power ranking of current golf architects, there’s even more variety. How similar are David McLay Kidd, King-Collins, OCM, Kyle Franz, Beau Welling, Kyle Phillips, Fry/Straka, Tripp Davis, Love Golf Design, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo, Brian Curley, and Tom Fazio? Not very, I don’t think.

How do architects design for different types and skill levels of players? Are there any examples of courses that are as fun for a plus handicap as they are for someone trying to break 100? (Matthew Schoolfield)

Oof, I might have to semi-punt on this one. How to design a course that appeals to golfers of all abilities is too big a subject to cover fully in a mailbag answer. But I’ll start with the observation that weaker players tend to appreciate forgiveness while stronger players often look for challenge. Here are four traits of a golf course (of many, I’d imagine) that provide both:

1. Firmness. Rollout helps players of lesser skill by giving them more distance while challenging players of greater skill by forcing them to account for more variables.

2. Lots of short grass, especially around the greens. “Professional golfers very commonly don’t love chipping off short grass,” Geoff Ogilvy said with a wry smile in our Pinehurst No. 2 video. “We’re so used to chipping out of the rough.” Average hackers, on the other hand, benefit from the option to putt.

3. Open green fronts. High-handicap golfers tend to hit a lower ball, so they need at least some greens to allow for run-up play. Low-handicap golfers don’t really care what’s in front of the green—they’re just going for the pin.

4. Biggish greens with smallish pinnable sections. You can let players hit a lot of greens, but with internal contouring, you can simultaneously force them to hit particular parts of the green if they want to make birdies.

Which high-profile courses fit these criteria best? The usual suspects, I suppose: The Old Course, Pinehurst No. 2, Augusta National, Royal Melbourne, etc.

Do you think any courses built in the past 30 years (Sand Hills era) will get the Lido/LiDAR treatment and be reconstructed in a new location? (Nate Carr)

A related thought: the longer I reflect on Tom Doak and Brian Schneider’s LiDAR-assisted re-creation of The Lido, the more I see it as a one-off, unicorn-type project. Which other golf courses, extant or not, antique or modern, 1) have the notoriety and mystique of C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor’s Lido, 2) are flat enough to be rebuilt on a neutral piece of land, and 3) no longer exist, providing a rationale for resuscitation? I mean, zero. Just the Lido.

But to answer your question, Nate, I guess someone could get cheeky and use LiDAR tech and GPS bulldozers to build a public Ohoopee Match Club or something. But is Ohoopee even well-known enough to give the project enough buzz to justify the expense?

Ohoopee Match Club's terrain may be subtle enough to be reconstructed elsewhere—but who's asking for that? (Fried Egg Golf)

Garrett, a while ago you mentioned in a comment thread that you felt Old Barnwell might have a lasting impact as an influence on golf architecture in the future. What features about that design (or other new courses) do you think will be the most characteristic of the “next” wave of architecture? (Mark Harbeson)

As I mentioned in last week’s member video, I could see Old Barnwell‘s mixture of tied-in naturalism and overt artificiality becoming fashionable in the coming years. Relatedly, Brian Schneider and Blake Conant’s absorption and interpretation of “alternative” Golden Age influences (Travis, Leeds, Langford & Moreau, and early Macdonald & Raynor as opposed to the naturalists—Colt, MacKenzie, Maxwell—who so influenced Coore & Crenshaw) could be highly influential.

I’m interested to hear how you guys would go about creating a golf course that would truly challenge the pros. (Dale Miller)

This may come as a surprise, given my usual proclivities: I think it would be cool to build a 21st-century version of a Pete Dye championship test.

I’m envisioning a course with variable corridor width; landing zones that slant and tumble in unpredictable ways; a mixture of bunkers, mounds, trees, and water providing strategic stakes and complexity; smallish greens that punish certain misses savagely; and visual intimidation galore—all executed in the rough-edged, tied-in style that Dye himself never fully embraced but that his protégés (Coore, Doak, Whitman) mastered.

Dye’s tournament courses aren’t my favorite to play (nor are they my least favorite), but they provide a clever framework for challenging elite players and producing exciting competitions.

If Pebble Beach were going to do a complete overhaul, what would you want it to look like? (Matthew Petersen)

First off, I’m not sure I want Pebble Beach to do a “complete overhaul.” Fun as it is to imagine and debate wholesale changes to Jack Neville and Douglas Grant’s routing, it’s not a serious exercise, in my opinion. Realistically speaking, many of the course’s weaknesses can be addressed in simple, low-impact ways. These would be my top three:

1. Green expansions. Pebble Beach has completed a few of these in recent years—notably on 6, 8, and 14—but in my opinion, the work hasn’t gone far enough. I believe the course would look and play its best if the greens were restored to their late-1920s dimensions.

2. Fairway expansions. The mowing lines at Pebble have been creeping inward in recent years. Holes 6 and 8 in particular urgently need to be reconnected with the coastline. And how about restoring that cliffside alternate fairway on No. 9?

3. Renaturalization of off-corridor areas. Intensive maintenance and irrigation have given Pebble a refined, parkland-style appearance, depriving the property of its former ruggedness. Reintroducing native vegetation outside of the hole corridors—particularly in the barrancas that crisscross holes 2, 3, 15, and 16—would recapture some of the site’s original beauty.

A section of Pebble Beach's property formerly defined by gnarly barrancas (Fried Egg Golf)

Will climate change force courses to do “preparations” instead of restorations? (Nate Carr)

This is already happening. As Andy reported in Design Notebook earlier this year, Seminole Golf Club in South Florida has embarked on a three-year project that will involve raising portions of the property in order to combat rising sea levels. In addition, many courses across the world, especially in California, are re-grassing with drought-resistant turf types in response to a shrinking water supply. Similarly, the turfgrass “transition zone”—that is, the latitudinal band where both warm-season and cool-season turfgrasses can work—seems to be moving north. Expect a lot of courses in coastal California, the Southwest, the lower Midwest, and the upper South to switch to various forms of cool-season Bermudagrass in the coming decades.

That said, I hope courses don’t feel they must choose between “preparation” and “restoration.” Why not a little of both? After all, for decades, clubs have sold restoration plans to their memberships by saying, essentially, “Well, we have to replace our drainage and irrigation systems anyway—we might as well restore some greens and bunkers and mowing lines while we’re at it.” Every golf course project is powered by a mixture of motives.

Those of us that live in the arid West (especially non-golfers) absolutely cringe when we see golf courses like Black Desert that ostentatiously use water. Shadow Creek is the obvious precedent. Where I live in southern Idaho, we get 10 inches of rain annually; in St. George they get 8.25 inches annually. St. George is a rapidly growing retirement area. Where is the water going to come from? (Henry Whiting)

This is an existential problem for golf in the American West, and it’s certainly not a great look for desert courses to cloak themselves in verdant green. At the same time, water is a hyper-local issue. Not all lush desert courses are environmentally irresponsible, just as not every shaggy muni is Audubon-worthy. I’d want to learn more about St. George’s specific circumstances and Black Desert Resort’s water management before passing judgment on this case.

Is anyone else getting a little tired of blind shots in Golden Age designs/restorations? (Jeffrey Ober)

I typically find blind shots fun rather than annoying, though I agree that repetitive blindness—like repetitive… well, anything—is a fault. It’s worth remembering, though, that while many Golden Age golf architects, including Alister MacKenzie, advised against blind approaches, they often used blind tee shots to manage severe sections of a property. They didn’t have access to the earthmoving technology that would have allowed them to make every landing zone visible.

With aerial [photos] dominating social media, rankings, and magazines, has this shifted the priorities of course design more towards creative eye-catching aerial views rather than enhancing the player’s experience on the ground? (Andrew Choi)

I see this critique of modern golf architecture a fair amount. I understand the logic of it: drone photography has become a key cog in the golf course marketing machine, so perhaps owners and developers have begun to pressure architects to prioritized bird’s-eye aesthetics. I just can’t put my finger on specific projects where I feel aerial views were emphasized in a way that harmed the course’s ground-level playing characteristics.

After all, a golf course can both look good in drone photos and provide interesting strategy and topography for earthbound golfers. See: anything designed by Seth Raynor.

The front nine at Chicago Golf Club from above (Fried Egg Golf)

I’ll acknowledge my own bias: Fried Egg Golf operates a fleet of camera drones. But I do find a lot of the criticism of aerial golf photography overblown and under-reasoned.

I think all of us in Club TFE are aware of and interested in playing “classic” courses from well-regarded architects, but problems arise in specifically the United States when it comes to being able to actually play these courses…. Does the United States need to make [great Golden Age golf courses] more accessible? Or should modern architects such as Coore & Crenshaw and Doak focus on providing the public with more publicly available courses for the average golfer to understand architecture? (Ronan Lahiff)

I would love for more great Golden Age golf courses in the U.S. to be accessible to the average golfer, and for Coore & Crenshaw and Tom Doak to build more public courses. But the important question is how these things can be done. We can’t force American golf clubs to open their doors to the general public, nor could they even if they wanted, given the strictures of non-profit status in the U.S. Plus, C&C and Doak—who have designed their share of public courses, to be fair—can’t simply decide to build more. They need governments and developers to initiate and fund those projects.

But if Ronan will forgive me for changing the subject slightly, I sense an underlying frustration in his question that I’d like to address. A lot of youngish or newish golf architecture enthusiasts have asked me what to do if they don’t have any connections at American private clubs. I have two thoughts on that issue:

First, before letting a lack of access deter you from learning about golf course design, explore the country’s bounty of architecturally important public courses. You can learn a lot about Donald Ross’s architecture from George Wright in Boston, Triggs Memorial in Providence, and Penobscot Valley in Maine, all open to anyone with $50.

Second, the more people you meet in the golf community, the more opportunities you’ll get to play courses you previously thought inaccessible. If you’re passionate about architecture and not just chasing bagtags and handouts—and, critically, if you make yourself easy to be around—people will want to invite you to their clubs and share their courses with you. I’ve discovered this myself. I grew up playing solely public golf courses, and for a long time I believed I would never see Cypress Point or Sand Hills in person. I was wrong.

I’m not saying any of this to justify the public/private divide in American golf, and I do wish things were different. But I also think club culture in the U.S. is not quite as closed and elitist as some golfers (understandably) believe.

Why does every bunker need white sand? (Cameron Hurdus)

Stop trolling, Hurdus.

[Note: There has been some mild confusion about this answer in the comments section, so I should clarify that Cameron and I agree that not every bunker needs white sand. Darker-colored sand, preferably from an indigenous source, tends to give a golf course a more seamless, natural appearance. Cameron knows that bright-white bunker sand is a pet peeve of mine—hence my facetiously testy response.]

A Course We Photographed Recently

Boston Golf Club (Hingham, MA)—designed by Gil Hanse in 2004

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Quotable

“The best golf courses blend into their surrounding environments to give golfers the feeling that they’re battling nature. It’s like the thrill people speak of when on fishing or hunting expeditions. It’s just you vs. Mother Nature and her elements. In other words, the best-looking layouts don’t have brown waste areas contrasting with blinding white bunkers, like all too many new courses create for intentional ‘effect.’

“Incorporating blinding white bunker sand into environments where it didn’t exist before merely takes golf one more level away from that enchanting feeling of playing the game in a natural setting. Worse, the bright stuff provides another item of evidence that golf doesn’t care about fitting in—all because some golfers or courses want layouts to stand out and make a statement or be like Augusta.” –Geoff Shackelford