Golf Course Design
I joined Club TFE for insight to stuff like this.
I recently joined Club TFE, which is a membership to help support The Fried Egg, and it comes with articles and such only for those members. While honoring that, I wanted to highlight part of a discussion about the Kapalua Plantation Course (played last week as the first PGA Tour event of the year), and how much it resonated with me.
Most PGA Tour pros could aim left on No. 5 without regret because they knew they would still have nothing more than a mid-iron into the green. The benefit of chancing a penalty on the right side had become marginal at best. The hole had lost its strategic integrity, and Coore knew it.
He marked the spot, and the next morning he went out with Ben, who agreed the tee shot on 5 had become ‘mindless.’ They discussed placing a bunker in the center of the patch of divots, to force players to position their drives. Crenshaw suggested that some may choose to aim at the bunker and fade it into the right side of the fairway, which would still be some 40 yards wide, but edged by that ravine. They flagged out the proposed bunker [at about 300 yards].
This is a time-honored trope of strategic golf course design: find where the best players’ drives end up and build a hazard in that exact spot.
This is one of the things I LOVE when I am playing a new course - you hit a shot and then you watch and think, “Oh my god, that bunker is in play?” or “Wait…is there a hazard over there?” My favorite is when someone who is in a bunker asks, “Why is there even a bunker here?” Well, it’s because people like you hit it here.
Hazards suck but they’re part of golf. Without them, almost every course would only be different because of trees and elevation. And a hazard that is completely out of play is just silly.
Guess what? PGA Tour players didn’t like it because it made it impossible to go for the green in two. Bear in mind this is a 650-yard hole, it’s not supposed to be easy to get there in two. But, because the Tour caters to its players (no matter what Greg Norman says) they flattened out the bunker so it’s not really a hazard in the real sense.
Patrick Cantlay, one of my least favorite top golfers, got caught on air muttering about his fellow golfers as “pampered fucks” a few years ago, at this very course. He was spot on, which is a bummer. How better to show off that you are truly the best in the world than dealing with - or learning how to avoid - the hazards on the course?
The Fried Egg had a year-end podcast where they also talked a little about things they were excited about, etc., and in doing so also talked about what they like about courses and so much of it resonated to me.
Smart hazards are one - even when I find myself in one, it’s a lesson and a “you got me” kind of a scenario.
It’s possible I wasn’t just thinking “you got me” here in regards to Old Tom Morris, but … he got me. Interesting contours in the land. I recently started a fairly silly project, ranking every course I’ve played - too many of them I don’t remember well enough to rank very well, but it’s about the effort, not the result. But a few of the lowest ranked courses can only be described as utterly flat. And when I think of my favorite courses - links courses in Scotland or at Bandon Dunes, courses like Whistling Straits that are modeled after Irish links, and courses like Pasatiempo, Pinehurst or Chambers Bay, the land is what makes it interesting. Nothing is more thrilling than knowing the correct shot is not directly at where you want the ball to finish, but instead using a slope of a hill or the green to move the ball where you want it to go - and then executing that shot.
Look at the picture below from Erin Hills - if you hit a drive to where the caddie is walking, it will bounce left and roll. If you hit it onto the flatter, left side, it might stay there…but of course if you don’t hit it exactly where you want, you’re probably in the rough. And the huge downhill slope of this fairway, which only partially comes across in the photo, makes everything run downhill in a way that’s thrilling and often a bit scary if you aren’t sure where the ball is going to end up.
And yeah, not to be too basic, scenery matters. Many people try to argue that if it wasn’t on the coast, Pebble Beach wouldn’t be that special. That’s both ludicrous and irrelevant. It is on the coast, and walking down those fairways or standing on the tee is super special. (It’s also a really interesting course!) Summing this up better than me is Andy Johnson:
There are plenty of cliff-side properties in golf, but none as perfectly scaled for the game as Pebble’s, and none as varied, with landforms ranging from the cove alongside the fourth and sixth holes, to the high promontory housing Nos. 6-8, to the handsome bluffs along Carmel Beach, to the sea-level crescent where the 18th hole sits. It’s a miraculous mile and a half. So whenever I hear someone say, “Pebble Beach wouldn’t be as famous if it weren’t next to the ocean,” my response is, “But look at how it’s next to the ocean.”
Walking through the Redwood trees at Northwood, or the hills at Erin Hills, or along the seaside at a links course is simply special, and a big part of why I love golf.
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