As you might have noticed, I was more than a tad lazy this week. Only as far as blogging goes, I can assure you, as I had the necessary energy level to cancel my ski trip.
It so happens I have a couple of open browser tabs on golf architecture that I've been meaning to blog for ages. As luck would have it, complementary articles, videos and blog posts have popped in the last couple of days. so shall we make a weekend of it?
I'll just start pecking away at my keyboard and I'll post....well, whenever.
Cookie Jar Down - Or something like that.... Have you ever crossed paths with the Cookie Jar gang? They're Brits, so perhaps not, but here's how they describe themselves:
Established in 2020 by a few golfing tragics, Cookie Jar Golf aims to share the most interesting and often less well told stories from across the game through our film series’, weekly podcast, editorial and social media content.
Golfing tragics? I like that, which is convenient because I quite obvious fit the profile...
They do podcasts and conventional blogging, but they're perhaps best known for their videos, which are always far more ambitious than the prototypical flyovers. Via Shack, enjoy this 5-minute feature on Royal Country Down. Stop arguing and just watch the damn thing, already:
County Down is one of the most visually dramatic courses on this here planet (at least the opening nine), and it's even more so under that foreboding sky. I'll throw in a couple of my own photos from 2008 to demonstrate that it holds up adequately under sun as well:
The golden age of golf course renovation and restoration
Jason Lusk explains:
The early 20th century has been dubbed by many to be the golden age of course design in the United States, as 94 of the top 100 layouts on Golfweek’s Best Classic Courses list were built inthe four decades through the 1930s as cars proliferated and airplanes took off. The 1990s and early 2000s also were boom times, but nothing compared to that previous stretch in which famed designers – artists, really – produced so many masterpieces.And just like famous paintings, these courses sometimes show their age. Throw in the effects of benign neglect or, even worse, well-intended alterations that abandon key characteristics, and many of the best golf courses have slowly lost much of their original designers’ intentions, even without considering the greater distances that modern golf balls travel.Greens shrink and their internal contours are often subdued. Bunkers migrate, changing shapes, depths and sizes. Fairway widths are altered. Trees grow to block ideal lines of play. Golf courses are living, breathing creations that are subject to ever-changing budgets, growth patterns and whims of membership committees – nothing remains static.
OK, there's a lot here and I recommend reading it in full, but shall we define some terms? Well, someone will define terms:
The terms thrown about can muddle things. What exactly is a restoration? And what is arenovation? Do those terms ever cross, and how many shades of gray are present between them?“The easiest way for us to describe it, for Jim Wagner and myself, is that a restoration is when the original architect’s thoughts, style and design are the driving force behind every decision on the site,” Hanse said. “A renovation is when we’re interjecting our original design thoughts into an existing golf course, allowing our prejudices, thoughts, skills, etcetera, to influence what we think would make for a better golf course.”
To me, the biggest surprise in this article is that Lusk almost entirely ignores the external factors surrounding this great age of restoration, the two most significant being the distance issue and the almost complete lack of new course projects. On the former, I'd be interested in knowing how Gil Hanse and C&C accommodated that at places like Pinehurst and Winged Foot (both pictured above), especially since those projects preceded U.S. Opens.
With few new courses to be built, it's fortuitous that those great architects just happened to have time on their hands to devote to exhuming period photographs and drawings to restore the work of long dead white men. But I'm kind of curious as to whether Bill Coore, just to name one individual, would have put his heart and soul into restoring Donald Ross' masterpiece if he could be off building his own putative masterpiece to anchor a new housing development? I'm also unclear on which I think to be the higher calling.... Food for thought, eh?
I'll include this one excerpt from the C&C restoration of No. 2 to give you a feel for the homework involved in a true restoration:
Coore and Crenshaw got a major boost when local resident Craig Disher presented them with aerial photos of Pinehurst No. 2 taken on Christmas Day in 1943. The design duo receivedanother break when Pinehurst agronomist Bob Farren told them the current irrigation system had been laid in the same trenches as the water pipes installed during Ross’s time, allowing them to figure out the previous center lines of the fairways while projecting their width based on how far water would have been sprinkled.“I said, ‘Bob, if that’s the case, we have not only a road map, we have the center of the road,’ ” Coore said of the old irrigation system.Such sleuthing can be crucial to a true restoration. At Pinehurst, those kinds of efforts allowed Coore and Crenshaw, with a fairly high degree of certainty, to present the course as it looked in 1943, with wider fairways surrounded by native grasses and no traditional rough.
You won't make out much in that inset photo, but I can confirm from personal experience that all vestiges of the sand hills had been removed, and it was a sea of green from each tee box. This historic photo of Donald Ross playing that iconic ninth hole was not included in the article, though it's been credited with spurring the drive to restore it to its original look:
Even in black and white it looks more interesting than wall-to-wall grass.
So, is the golden age of restoration over? Not according to Andy Johnson of The Fried Egg:
A sweet 16 of courses we'd love to see restored to their original glory
Not all sixteen will be known to you, but there's certainly some surprises to be found at the top of the list. What do I mean by surprises? Well, how about this one:
1. Augusta National Golf Club (Augusta, Georgia)Original architect: Alister MacKenzie, 1933Let’s get this out of the way: Augusta National will never be restored to its 1933 form. While that version of the course would be delightful to see, it would play too short for today’s top male players. So the best-case scenario for the Masters host is to turn the clock back to its pre-2000, pre-“Tiger-proofing” style, with treelines pushed back out and wide fairways transitioning gracefully into pine straw. As an added touch, how about bringing back a tiny bit of MacKenzie’s jaggedness to the bunkers? We can dream, at least.
2. Riviera Country Club (Pacific Palisades, California)Original architect: George C. Thomas Jr., 1927The longtime host of the L.A. Open Genesis Invitational was one of the most ambitious projects George Thomas and his construction man Billy Bell ever took on. Built in a narrow canyon, Riviera was Thomas and Bell’s costliest course, and it opened to immediate acclaim. The path to a successful restoration is fairly obvious here. Of the top three courses on this list, Riviera has held up best to modern equipment advances, so the club could simply restore the original barrancas, bunker styles, and green dimensions without monkeying around with hole lengths or fairway widths. Riviera is currently one of the best golf courses on the West Coast, but it could be one of the best in the country.
Geoff blogged this list as well, and I'll include his thoughts on Riviera:
I can’t find a thing to quibble with most of Andy Johnson’s list of great restoration opportunities, though I have no idea how World Woods got in there. But setting aside an unnecessary rejuvenation of yet another overrated Fazio, Johnson’s top ten includes the last three courses the aforementioned salesman is consulting at and making worse, along with other gems. Sadly, my man George Thomas lands three in the top 15 and southern California remains a hotbed for necessary restorations.
What, you thought we'd get through an architectural post without trashing Tom Fazio? Not on my watch, baby!
Geoff also includes this before and after version of the 6th green:
 |
| A SPLIT SCREEN OF RIVIERA’S 6TH WITH TOMMY NACCARATO’S PROPOSED RESTORATION OF BUNKERS AND BARRANCA NEXT TO TODAY’S LAMENTABLE ECLAIR BUNKER TONGUE AND PERMANENT TEMPORARY GREEN. |
That's Geoff's all-cap caption, in case you were in doubt.
My fave from the list is TPC Sawgrass, which I've not excerpted mostly because Andy hasn't included any old-time photos, and my own Google search didn't help. Geoff has long referred to the original Sawgrass as Pirates of the Caribbean look, with all sorts of scrub and sand to be seen. In many ways it parallels Pinehurst No. 2, where all the natural vegetation was converted to planted grass, rendering the venues antiseptic. But, since I haven't come up with any of those photos, you'll just have to take my word on it.
A Dissenting Opinion - Unlike today's woke kids, we promote the expression of all opinions here at Unplayable Lies, regardless of how noxious or misguided they may be. The usually reasonable George Pepper has such an outlier for us today, one I'm sure he knew would provoke incoming ordinance:
A Rant Against Golden Age Golf Architects
George, are you off your meds again?
Actually, he's being deliberately provocative....or at least I hope so:
Curmudgeon alert: I’m about to go on a major rant about something that likely will be of onlymarginal interest to you and may actually cause you some annoyance. So this might be a good time to click on something else. We did have some very fine pieces in our Fall 2021 issue, one of which happened to be the very impetus for my currently elevated hackles: “Who Redoes Whom?” by Joe Passov.It’s not Joe’s fault. He did a terrific job of research and writing, as always. No, what has me riled is the fact that this piece needed to be written, the fact that in recent years an entire mini-industry has sprouted around the business of resuscitating and deifying dead designers.I’m talking about the architects of the so-called Golden Age, roughly the first third of the 20th century—Donald Ross, Alister MacKenzie, H.S. Colt, A.W. Tillinghast, Seth Raynor, et al—whose names are linked to dozens of the world’s most highly regarded courses.My question is, why have we become so obsessed with those guys? Were they really that surpassingly brilliant? Were they any better than—or even as good as—the top golf architects today? I doubt it. Certainly, they were neither as well educated nor as comprehensively trained as our modern designers. Basically, these guys were neophytes, dabbling in a brand-new profession after having chosen other careers. (In the case of the quintet above, Ross was a golf pro, MacKenzie a doctor, Colt a lawyer, Tillinghast a magazine editor, Raynor an engineer.)
This is a strange rant for sure, especially given Pepper's longstanding reputation in the golf world, the former editor of Golf Magazine and writer of some twenty golf books, many focused on great golf courses. But the fact that they were "neophytes", trained in widely disparate fields, makes me only that much more impressed with what they created.
Much of this seems profoundly silly and a bit bitter as well:
If, as one of today’s leading designers Tom Doak has astutely observed, “the best architects are the ones who get the best clients,” then maybe the individuals we should be venerating are not the Golden Age designers but the Golden Age owner/developers, the gentlemen golfers with deep pockets and a simple, steadfast vision that began and ended with the creation of an outstanding golf course: Dick Tufts (Pinehurst No. 2) rather than Ross; Clifford Roberts (Augusta National) rather than MacKenzie; George Crump (Pine Valley) rather than Colt; Robert Moses (Bethpage Black) rather than Tillinghast.The truth is, the early golf architects were not particularly revered or famous during their own lifetimes or for decades thereafter. Indeed, as recently as 50 years ago, if you had asked a member of just about any club in the world who the designer of his golf course was, he would have been hard pressed to tell you.
Not to mention factually challenged.... Tillie most notably was a rock star in his day, as was Donald Ross. As for his deliberate misuse of that Tom Doak quote, Geoff counters with this Clifford Roberts story:
In Roberts’ case, he attempted to redo MacKenzie’s 8th green and turned it into a flying saucer that was rebuilt a short time later. If not for Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie, the Augusta National would not have been the success it was.
Back to Pepper:
What’s more, they were winging it, feeling their way through what was literally new terrain. Prior to the 20th century, golf had been played mostly along the coast of the British Isles on fl at, barren, windblown, fast-running links. The Golden Agers were helping to bring the game inland and adapt it to playgrounds that were hilly, tree-clad, and spongy.Some of their efforts were more successful than others, but their best courses, fitting neatly and naturally into their parkland settings, have been extolled in some quarters as the inspiration for the current minimalist movement in golf architecture. That’s another misconception. Those guys weren’t minimalists. Their focus was not on preserving the land, protecting the environment, or creating a sustainable course. They just didn’t have bulldozers!
Winging it? C.B. Macdonald, the father of American golf architecture, went on an extended tour of the great golf courses of GB&I, and wrote extensively about what he considered the nest golf holes and, more importantly, why they were great. He then distilled these into core design principals or template holes, and looked for opportunities to employ these tried and true strategic concepts on the courses he built. So, winging it? Sure, George!
Of course there's overkill in this reverence:
Suddenly, belonging to a club with a course designed by an A-list Golden Ager became a badge of honor. More than one layout of 6,500 theretofore nondescript yards rebranded itself overnight as “a great old Donald Ross course” and a coterie of insufferable poseurs arose, boasting of their familiarity with MacKenzie bunkers, Macdonald templates, and Raynor greens. I know this because I did some of that boasting. Let this be my mea culpa: “I’m George and I’m an archaholic.”
I plead guilty to being one of those insufferable poseurs, an occupational hazard to those who are interested in the nature of the courses we play and how they came to be. But is that really such a sin, Georg? Of course not all courses touched by Tillie or Ross were genius, but it's really quite a substantial body of first-rate work, as even George would have to admit.
And now, perhaps sensing what his inbox will look like, George starts to walk it back:
LINKS Magazine has, admittedly, bolstered this bandwagon of breathless beatification. In fact, no publication has fanned the flames of architect idolatry more feverishly than we have. A few years back, as part of the celebration of our silver anniversary, we actually compiled a ranking of the top 25 golf architects of all time: 15 of them, including the top four, were Golden Agers.Listen, before you start throwing brickbats my way, know that I realize these guys from a century ago did some remarkable work. They deserve much of the delayed recognition they’re getting. And surely no harm has been done. Many clubs have found new life, their members’ breasts have swelled with pride, and it’s all been good for the golf industry.I also realize that the golf industry is not the most critically important one in the world. As an old mentor of mine Herb Graffis used to say, “We work in the toy department.” Maybe that’s why I now feel myself calming down a bit. I guess what got me riled about this Golden Age regurgitation is the pretentiousness it’s fostered in some circles. But honestly, that doesn’t deserve much more than a chuckle. I think Tillie and his cohorts might be chuckling too.
And the point of your essay was? Sure, not everything they touched is golden (it's widely know, for example, that all of Tillie's work performed while he was off the drink is utterly forgettable) and there's no question that his comment on the pretentiousness of it all has us nodding, but what really is his point?
Is Tom Doak a better architect than Donald Ross? It would be pretty sad if he weren't, given that he has the ability to learn from Ross, while Ross himself didn't have the same advantage. But seems to forget that golf moved on from The Good Doctor and Macdonald and for decades has been dominated by Trent Jones and Tom Fazio, much to our collective regret. In fact, perhaps the biggets compliment you can pay the current generation of great architects, and here I'\m thinking Gil Hanse, Tom Doak and Coore & Crenshaw, is that they themselves revere the work of Tillie, Ross and MacKenzie.
A Requiem - This is one I've needed to blog for quite some time, I just haven't had the heart to do so until now. It's another piece by Andy Johnson, but not neerly as cheerful or upbeat as his prior offering:
What the 13th hole at the Masters used to be, and what it is now
Well, it used to be the fourth hole, though I'm guessing that's not what he means...
Okay, that headline is a little overdramatic. The 13th hole at Augusta National Golf Club is not dead. But over the past 50 years, it has evolved, and the best golfers in the world have started to play it in a fundamentally different way. Not everyone has liked these changes. For those who think the professional game is headed the wrong direction, No. 13 at Augusta National has become, if not Exhibit A, at least Exhibit C or D.Last week, after going through the annual ritual of downloading the Masters app, I decided to figure out whether I agreed.Why focus on Augusta’s 13th? If any golf hole deserves to be scrutinized, picked apart, and worried about, it’s this one. Among long holes in championship golf, only No. 18 at Pebble Beach and the Road Hole at the Old Course have anything like its iconic status, or its reputation for strategic soundness.
Please tell me he's kidding about the 18th at Pebble? It's as beautiful as a golf hole can be, and simultaneously the most boring hole in golf. In fact, it's ironically one of the few holes actually helped by the distance explosion, but that's not important now.
The concept
Alister MacKenzie’s description of No. 13, published in The American Golfer in 1932 andreprinted in the first Augusta National Invitation program in 1934, is matter-of-fact: “This is played along the course of a brook with the final shot finishing to a green over the stream with a background of a hill slope covered with magnificent pine trees.”
MacKenzie goes on to say that 13th, then the 4th, “has some of the best golfing features of the Seventeenth Hole at Cypress Point, California, and the ideal hole depicted in C.B. Macdonald’s book.” What he calls the “ideal hole” here is apparently the design that won him first prize in a golf architecture competition sponsored by the magazine Country Life in 1914.
It’s hard to see many specific similarities between No. 13 at Augusta National and either the Country Life hole or the 17th at Cypress Point. But all three have roughly the same strategic concept: a superb natural hazard along one side of the fairway, and a design that maximizes this hazard by offering an advantage—in the form of a shorter, more inviting shot into the green—to the player who flirts with disaster off the tee.
If you watched that St. Andrews video above you should note the similarity to the Old Course, whereby the line closest to the trouble (the right side on virtually every hole on the Old Course) offers the more favorable line into the green.
On Augusta’s 13th, Jones and MacKenzie wanted to reward those who had the nerve to work their tee shots right to left, toward the tributary of Rae’s Creek.This is a risky play, and individual players may decide that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But the rewards are clear. “The player is first tempted to dare the creek on his tee shot by playing in close to the corner,” Bobby Jones wrote in his 1960 book Golf Is My Game, “because if he attains his position he has not only shortened the hole, but obtained a more level lie for his second shot. Driving out to the right not only increases the length of the second, but encounters an annoying side-hill lie.”Jones makes a key point here. The main challenge of No. 13 at Augusta National is not the dogleg, and it’s not the water. It’s the right-to-left slope of the fairway, which becomes less severe as it gets closer to danger. If you bail out right, you’ll have to play your second shot from the side of the hill; if you keep tight to the corner, you’ll get more of a driving-range lie.
More on that awkward lie:
On The Fried Egg podcast, Geoff Ogilvy explained the difficulty of this approach shot better than I could: “If it was a flat lie, you’d want to hit a fade into that green, because you could hit a shot that was basically never [at risk] of going in the water. You could start it left of the green, the shortest carry [over the brook]. You could hit a safe one and say, ‘Well, if I hit it straight, I’ll just miss the green left and I can kind of birdie from over there.’ But you have to, with the ball above your feet [for a right-hander], kind of hit a draw. So you’re hanging it over the long carry, and you’re hanging it over the water. You’ve got this shot where all you want to do is hit a high fade and all the stance wants to give you is a low draw.”So what persuades you to lay up on No. 13 is not just the length of the carry; it’s the awkward fit between the right-to-left canted fairway and the left-to-right angled green. This is why the second shot sometimes entails a “momentous decision,” to use Bobby Jones’s famous phrase.
Remember those trees we spoke of above?
Gradually, then suddenly
Every April, I revisit Ron Whitten’s “Comprehensive History of Every Change Made to Augusta National Golf Club” on the Golf Digest website. You should, too. It’s a remarkable feat of research and a useful reminder of how different today’s Augusta National is from its earliest incarnations. What Whitten reveals about No. 13 in particular is illuminating, though not surprising: the hole’s evolution has been all about trees. (As you read the next few paragraphs, I would recommend following along with Golf Digest’s historical maps of the 13th.)In 1934, only a handful of trees were really in play. A few on the inside corner of the dogleg prevented long hitters from taking the shortcut, and a pair in the middle of the corridor served as a starting-line reference and an additional bit of trouble for those who hedged right.
He's got photos of the tee shot from different periods, demonstrating the seeming claustrophobia of the current tee box. here he lays out his conclusions from watching every shot at the 2021 MaSTERS:
The more every-shot coverage I saw, though, the more I realized that the hole isn’t one-dimensional, exactly. Its challenges have just become different.For modern pros, the main trouble is the tight, awkward tee shot. If you hit it on a straight line more than 260 yards—which every realistic contender in the Masters does with every club stronger than a long iron—you will run through the fairway, likely into the trees and pine straw beyond. If you attempt to cut the corner with a straight ball, you will get knocked down by the trees on the left, potentially into the stream. So in order to get within comfortable striking distance of the green (about 225 yards for elite players), you need to shape your tee shot from right to left.This is not the most natural thing for a 21st-century right-handed pro to do. Modern driver heads are not easy to turn over, and modern balls are optimized for low spin off of long clubs, so a lot of current pros simply don’t have a 300-yard hook in their repertoire.Consider the adventures of Gary Woodland and Jon Rahm, both right-handed power faders, on No. 13 in 2021. These guys don’t stink; Woodland is a major champion and Rahm is, by some measures, the best golfer in the world. Yet neither seemed able to produce the required right-to-left ball flight on the 13th. On three of four attempts, both left their drives hanging out to the right. In the third round, Rahm tried to force one over the left corner, and the trees got in the way. “You just can’t do it on this hole, huh?” he muttered to himself.
Well, perhaps that's because you're on the wrong side of the golf ball:
Left-handers had an obvious advantage. Setting up with their feet outside the right-hand tee marker, they could swing freely with a driver and rip a slider down the corridor. On Thursday and Friday, all six lefties in the field birdied the 13th hole both times. Young Robert MacIntyre’s tee shots were particularly strong; you just don’t see many right-handers replicating those lines.
Well, Phil has been gloating for years about the advantage he has in being a southpaw, so perhaps he should spot the field an advantage such a sis done at the Tour Championship these days?
The disappointment in Andy's piece is the absence of any clear sense of what should be done. This is what passes for his cri de coeur:
Here’s another routine, and one that I don’t see stopping anytime soon: Chairman Fred Ridley, at his annual press conference, talking about updating the 13th hole to defend the integrity of its original design. I always wonder what objective he has in mind. Moving the tee back and to the left would likely result in higher scores and fewer greens hit in two. Perhaps we’d see “momentous decisions” from the fairway slightly more often. That would be an improvement.But if the goal is to restore Jones and MacKenzie’s intentions on No. 13, there’s really just one indicator of success: a Sunday tee shot landing on the side slope and rolling down toward the water, risking disaster for a chance at glory.
So, what would he have the Augusta Grand Poobahs do with the hole? Obviously pair back the tree line, one assumes, but would he lengthen the hole? Your humble blogger looks at that near ninety degree angle and would prefer to convert it to a Par-4 rather than pushing the tee thirty yards back onto the old ninth hole of Augusta Country Club.
On that note the curtain descends on our weekend architectural musings. Hope you've enjoyed the trip and that we'll see you again in these parts next week.
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