Design Notebook: Do We Like a Bunker in the Middle of a Green?

Howdy and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’re all in on lava. Got a bunker that the pros are using as an easy bail-out option? Make it a lava outcropping! Got a 375-yard par 4 that top players are suddenly reaching from the tee because of their improved weight-lifting and nutritional regimens? Just blanket that thing in prehistoric pumice!

Wait, what were we talking about? Right, Design Notebook.

This week, Andy Johnson discusses how to take the concept of a bunker in the middle of a green and really run with it. Plus, Garrett Morrison weighs in on a recent Golf Club Atlas discussion of social media’s effects on golf architecture content and discourse. He also provides an update on a potential sixth 18 at (or… near?) Bandon Dunes.

Let’s get into it.

More Mid-Green Bunkers?

By Andy Johnson

At this past week’s PGA Tour event, the Tom Weiskopf-designed course at Black Desert Resort won this author over with its stunning views and stern defenses against bomb and gouge. Now we just need to install black lava at TPC courses around the country, and maybe then the Tour’s Trackman all-stars will think twice about wailing away. (I’m only partly joking.)

Black Desert also features a few “templates,” including one—the par-3 third—modeled on the sixth at Riviera Country Club. Playing 196 yards and featuring a bunker in the middle of the green, Weiskopf’s version of the original George Thomas design feels very much like a copycat rather than an adaptation. What made C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor’s templates work is that the concepts of each “ideal hole” were adapted in distinctive ways to each property. In the case of the third hole at Black Desert, nothing feels particularly unique about it. The bunker is positioned similarly; the green contours function in about the same way; and the length of the hole is within three yards of Riviera’s from the tournament tees.

Another tour course, TPC San Antonio [ed. note: Joseph LaMagna’s favorite!], features its own uncreative Riviera copycat, the par-3 16th hole. This one is 183 yards long, with the familiar arrangement of bunkers and green contours.

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The notion of a bunker in the middle of a green deserves more exploration in golf architecture. Just like a center-line fairway bunker, a center-green bunker can wreak havoc on players’ minds. It effectively divides the green into small segments, making for fascinating possibilities for angles and approach play. Using this idea only on par 3s does a disservice to its potential.

I’d particularly like to see this type of green used on a drive-and-pitch par 4. The center-green bunker makes targets small and spin control paramount. If you were to use one on a hole that gives players the option to hit their drives up into 40- to 50-yard range or to lay back farther than that, you could see an interesting dichotomy: the aggressive players might end up with half wedges across the central bunker to small targets, while the more conservative players would have the spin control provided by a full wedge. Maybe I should submit this idea to the Lido contest this year. Too bad I can’t draw.

Concept #1 (illustration by Andy Johnson)

Another way to experiment with the template is to shift the placement of the bunker. If the bunker isn’t smack dab in the middle of the green, the hole has a better chance of not seeming like a crappy knockoff of the sixth at Riviera. For example, on a reachable par 5, you could move the bunker toward the side of the green where a shot can run in. Then you could contour the green in such a way that assertive shots can either funnel to the right area, catch the bunker, or hang up on the left side.

Concept #2 (illustration by Andy Johnson)

All in all, I’d like to see more holes with mid-green bunkers. I would just push golf architects to put their own unique spin on the concept.

The State We’re In

By Garrett Morrison

“Did social media kill GCA.com?” Like any good thread title on a message board, this one is based on a false premise. Golf Club Atlas—the influential, quarter-century-old website focused on golf course design—is still very much alive. Granted, its content pages are not as lively as they once were (which is understandable, given that the site’s co-founder and main author, Ran Morrissett, now has a full-time gig with Golf Magazine/Golf.com), but its “discussion group” remains an important locus of golf architecture opinion, debate, and research. I visit it almost every day.

Yet the thread itself, started by Ben Sims last Thursday, raised a couple of intriguing secondary issues:

1. Has Golf Club Atlas’s evangelism of golf architecture literacy and classic design principles become so widely digested across the golf world that the site’s purpose is now moot?

2. Has modern social media dumbed down the discourse around golf architecture, drawing attention away from the knowledgeable insiders of Golf Club Atlas and toward the glib “influencers” of X, Instagram, and TikTok?

I find the first question easy to answer. Enthusiasm for golf course design may be more widespread and democratized than ever, but it’s still a niche phenomenon. I’ve spoken with many green-committee members at well-regarded clubs over the past few years, and I’ve found that while some put effort into learning about golf architecture, many don’t, preferring to rely on general “golf IQ” and familiarity with their home course. This ratio may be shifting, but we’re far from hanging a “Mission Accomplished” banner on the SS MacRaynor.

The second question—about social media’s influence on the overall discussion of golf course design—is a bit more complicated.

No doubt some functions of Golf Club Atlas have been supplanted by the seamless publishing capacities of next-gen social media platforms. If you want to see photos of highly ranked Golden Age golf courses, you no longer need to hunt through Golf Club Atlas’s course reviews or message-board archives. You can just go to Jon Cavalier’s Instagram page, or (as is more likely the case) sit back and have Cavalier’s work served up to you via Instagram’s hyper-intelligent algorithm.

I do miss the days when the internet was more like a library than the spaceship in Wall-E, but that’s probably just because I, like most members of the Golf Club Atlas discussion group, am a geek.

Still, I disagree with the notion that the current era of the internet—late Web 2.0, early Web3, whatever you want to call it—has abandoned complex, long-form content and discussion. Recent years have seen the rise of newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube, all of which accommodate (even if they don’t require) a tremendous amount of depth in the exploration of a topic like golf architecture.

Now, I have a bias here. I work for a company that started as a newsletter and built its voice through a pair of podcasts and a YouTube channel. But I hope our commitment to serious, in-depth content is clear. A major motive behind launching Club TFE was to create a funding model for our long-form writing. Thanks to member support, we’ve been able to publish a great deal of golf architecture analysis and opinion over the past two years. We’ve also been impressed and delighted by the quality of members’ contributions in the comments sections.

I would also point to Geoff Shackelford’s Quadrilateral newsletter, Derek Duncan’s Feed the Ball podcast, Henry Shimp and Walker Simas’s Tie podcast, Cookie Jar Golf’s YouTube channel, and No Laying Up’s travel videos and course vlogs as examples of the continued vitality of golf architecture discourse on the modern web.

Yes, the internet is getting bigger and more chaotic every day. Certain sectors of it have come to feel pretty dystopian. But if you’re someone with a passion for golf course design, the online world has as much to offer you as ever.

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

The mailbag cometh. Thanks to everyone who put a question in the golf architecture mailbag last week. Andy and I will address several of them in this Thursday’s Fried Egg Golf Podcast. If we don’t get to your question, I’ll make sure to answer it soon—perhaps in next week’s Design Notebook.

A prospective 18-hole Bandon course makes its way through red tape. Mike Keiser’s effort to build New River Dunes Golf Course—a David McLay Kidd design to be located well south of the main resort, near the town of Bandon—continues to face opposition from an Oregon environmental group. According to an article published this past Saturday in the Bandon Western World, a Coos County planning commission approved a New River Dunes proposal in August, a decision that the Oregon Coast Alliance (ORCA) immediately appealed and elevated to the Coos County Board of Commissioners. County commissioners plan to conduct a public hearing about the project on October 23.

David McLay Kidd's plan for New River Dunes

The Bandon Western World’s headline for this piece appears to be inaccurate, by the way. Coos County commissioners have not, in fact, approved the course.

In any case, here’s what I found to be the most illuminating part of the article:

“In an interview, [Oregon Coast Alliance head Cameron] La Follette said Keiser has been trying to build a golf course in this area for a decade. He originally tried to acquire neighboring state land for the project, she said, but ORCA strongly opposed that effort and Keiser dropped the proposal.

“In 2022, she said, Keiser applied to build the golf course on his own land. The planning commission approved the project, but ORCA appealed because it was proposed on land zoned for exclusive farm use. Keiser withdrew the application last year, La Follette said.

“This year, Keiser created Ocean River LLC in a renewed effort to build the New River Dunes Golf Course.”

In the past, Keiser has dealt adroitly with Oregon’s various environmental regulators and litigants. Getting New River Dunes approved seems to have taxed even his abilities, however.

Some golf courses in the Southeast take a harder hit than others. As residents of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas come to grips with the destruction caused by Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene, a number of golf courses have bounced back quickly, while others face a long road to recovery. Cabot Citrus Farms and Streamsong Resort, both of which were in the path of Milton, have reported no substantial damage and will reopen after brief closures. Many courses in Georgia and South Carolina, on the other hand, have sustained major tree losses. Helene’s impact on Augusta National in particular seems to have been heavy, if manageable for a club of ANGC’s resources.

A Course We Photographed Recently

Megunticook Golf Club (Rockport, ME)—original course designed by greenkeeper Thomas Grant in 1902, current course designed by landscape architects Warren H. Manning and A.D. Taylor in 1914

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Quotable

“A golf hole, humanly speaking, is like life, in as much as one cannot judge justly of any person’s character the first time one meets him. Sometimes it takes years to discover and appreciate hidden qualities which only time discloses, and he usually discloses them on the links. No real lover of golf with artistic understanding would undertake to measure the quality or fascination of a golf hole by yard-stick, any more than a critic of poetry would attempt to measure the supreme sentiment expressed in a poem by the same method. One can understand the meter, but one cannot measure the soul expressed. It is absolutely inconceivable.” -C.B. Macdonald