Alternate Shot: Surprise Courses of the Year

I love the simplicity of this design. You can blast it down the right, but you will be faced with a very difficult, delicate shot over the green side bunker. I hit an aggressive tee shot down the right and faced a treacherous second shot. My buddy nuked a tee shot to about 20 feet, but that’s not really a shot that’s in your best interest to attempt given the narrowness of the green and the penalties associated with missing either right or left.

Often the risk-reward profile of short par 4s tilts too far in the direction of reward, which turns Sending It into the obvious optimal decision. Partially due to modern technology but also in part due to the historically misguided notion that laying back is the “smart play,” many short 4s are nowhere near as strategic as they are described. Over the past couple of years, I’ve gained an appreciation for what I’ll call “the shot that is not within your best interest,” like ripping driver at a narrow-necked green with big penalties on both sides.

The high-reward shot that is not within your best interest creates far more temptation and strategic intrigue than the shot that is both optimal and aggressive.

Garrett: Wait, are you saying that golfers don’t always robotically choose the optimal play, and that therefore golf architects have a reason to provide tempting, if unwise, options? This is scandalous.

Joseph: Ha, yes! And I would argue that, more often than not, the unwiser, the better! What we used to think was unwise is generally wise – and that has significant implications for design.

All right, how about you? Which course surprised you the most this year?

Garrett: Olde Salem Greens, a public nine-holer designed by Wayne Stiles and John Van Kleek. But I discussed that course in a recent golf architecture mailbag podcast with Andy, and I’m planning to write a Club TFE course profile about it soon, so right now I’d like to talk about the O’odham Course at Talking Stick Resort.

This Coore & Crenshaw design in Scottsdale, Arizona, is much better than I had been led to believe it would be. Most of the chatter I had heard about the O’odham Course went something like, “It’s good, but a lot of holes kind of blend together because the land is so flat.” I didn’t find this to be the case at all. Yes, the site is basically a featureless swath of the Sonoran desert. But Coore & Crenshaw did such a savvy job of 1) using the few strengths that the property does possess and 2) constructing interesting golf features that feel at home in the landscape that each hole strikes me as immediately and obviously distinct.

The fifth hole, for instance, occupies an ultra-boring piece of land, but the position of the bunkers and the design of the green create so many fun options and possibilities. The instinctive play from the tee is to the right of the center-line fairway bunker—that portion of the fairway is perfectly visible and on a direct line to the green. However, it’s easier, especially for low-trajectory players, to hit and hold the right-to-left-tilting green from the left portion of the fairway, which is mostly blind from the tee.

Now, since I’m talking to you, Joseph, I’ll hasten to add that analytics tend to favor finding the shortest approach possible, no matter the angle. But playing right of the bunker on the fifth hole at the O’odham Course is tougher than it looks, partly because the fairway begins to narrow at about 240 yards from the back tee markers. Of course, the longest hitters will just smash it directly over the bunker, confident in their ability to make the 260-yard carry. And hey, good for them.

A last question for you, Joseph: is there any big lesson you learned or perspective you gained about golf course design in 2024?

Joseph: In 2024 I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for scale and how the effective playing dimensions of a golf course change as the scale of the game changes. For instance, as players hit the ball farther and farther, simply moving tee boxes back does not resolve the changes in scale and how they align with a hole’s intended playing dimensions. You can move back tee boxes to accommodate longer driving distances, but now the effective width of the fairway is narrower and mismatched from how the hole was designed to play.

The more interesting use case involves discussions around green speeds. When I hear people denounce fast green speeds, I disagree with that premise at face value. Given the control and spin the modern golfer—especially the professional—can exert over the golf ball, I do believe fast green speeds are essential to testing golfers. At a minimum, short-sidedness must incur a penalty, and it’s difficult to achieve that without fast greens.

The real problem arises when greens originally built to stimp at 9 are cranked up to 13+. Now, you’ve created a mismatch between the hole’s effective dimensions and how it was intended to play. If you’re sacrificing hole locations and the playability of a hole for the sake of having fast green speeds, you’ve completely lost the plot. However, fast greens in and of themselves are not inherently problematic and are often necessary within the context of pro golf.

So that’s a big lesson for me from this year: the focus should be on scale, dimensions, and playability, not complaints about 25-yard wide fairways or blanket statements about fast greens.

Garrett: I won’t lie to you, I might still make a blanket statement or two about narrow fairways and fast greens, but I take your point about how the mismatch between design and turf presentation is the problem, not necessarily narrowness and fastness in and of themselves.

Joseph: Your turn! Biggest lesson from the 2024 golf season?

Garrett: Over the course of this golf season, I’ve found myself developing a greater appreciation for simplicity in golf architecture. And I hope “simplicity” doesn’t imply dullness or uninventiveness. I don’t yearn for flat, circular greens or object to the baroque shaping styles that golf architects like King-Collins and Kyle Franz have explored recently. I’m talking about something closer to selectiveness.

During my trip to Maine in September, I saw a lot of golf courses that are, by today’s standards, extremely simple. Kebo Valley, Northeast Harbor, Grindstone Neck, North Haven, and other courses in the region all have relatively few built features. For the most part, the golf holes just sit on the natural terrain. But whenever you encounter a constructed element, you can see its function and significance right away. The architects made each bit of artificiality count. The result is that these courses feel selectively bold: they have fewer constituent parts than most modern courses—fewer bunkers, fewer manufactured contours—but each architectural idea stands out. Nothing gets lost in the mix.

This is a type of “minimalism” I’d like to see some of today’s golf architects explore—not necessarily a minimalism of earthmoving, but a minimalism of features. How few bunkers can this hole have and still be strategically sound? How simple can the contouring of this green be and still provide a compelling challenge?

A lot of modern golf course designs strike me as quite busy. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I enjoy intricate courses when they’re well executed. But I think we’ve reached a point in the trend cycle where golf architects might be able to differentiate themselves by subtracting instead of adding. Who wants to be 21st-century golf architecture’s answer to Ernest Hemingway or Maya Lin?

Look, I’ve got a long, rainy fall and winter ahead of me here in Oregon. I need something to think about.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.