Course Design
The exciting brand of FineGolf is a thinking person’s game:
It requires invention and creative shots, on courses that exemplify the ‘risk and reward’ strategic design concept.
Harry Colt and James Braid were the most prolific golf course architects during the ‘Golden Era of 1900 to the 1930s’, and led golf course design to move the traditional in-land course penal hazards away from ramparts across the fairway, designed to catch the foozled, topped ball of the higher handicapper, to the sides of the fairways.
They created a new strategic design style incorporating various ways of playing a hole with different risks and reward. Hazards were placed where the not quite perfect shot by the scratch player would get caught, while giving more latitude for the higher handicapper.
The concept of penal hazards regained popularity within modern target-golf courses built in the 1980/90s, which employ irrigated narrow fairways, frequent lakes and baracades of bunkers in front of greens. This reduces the strategic element of having to drive your ball on to the part of the fairway that most easily gives the opportunity to run ones ball on to a firm green. The softness of target-golf greens gives a receptiveness to the ball. This allows the golfer to fly the ball right to the pin and stop it, without bouncing through to the back of the green. Therefore to create a greater challenge to the better golfer, target-golf course architects, often required by their clients to build a long ‘championship’ course for marketing reasons, have generated this new penal style of design, which is not a success with higher-handicappers.
Penal holes offer only two possible results, success or total failure.
Strategically well designed fine golf courses are challenging but give everybody a chance. Strategic and heroic features ensure the higher the risk, the higher the reward, while the high handicapper is still able to enjoy their round and be challenged at their level. There are a number of ways from tee to green that can be taken dependant on ones ability. Receptive, soft greens reduce the challenge.
“Signature” holes are a modern phenomena:
The marketing gurus of television led commercial interests look for ‘signature’ holes. Modern target courses get remembered for spectacular penal holes which attract easy television fame.
Nevertheless, it is not all downside, as the money that has come into the game via television has given us some advantages in helping develop new equipment for golf course design. For example ‘shaping’ is now much easier and less labour intensive.
The question naturally arises: can modern golf architects design true ‘Fine running-golf courses’ on land that is not naturally draining?
Kingsbarns is one attempt, heralded by many as a great links course. It was built on lush, fertile meadow land sloping down to a rocky shore. This is the opposite of what is needed for a links course which needs infertile sandy soil that drains. The bulldozers and shapers carved out a links design look with delightful revetted pot bunkering while artificial drainage and lots of sand allowed planting of fine grasses and a wonderful product evolved. In my view it must be welcomed by anybody who enjoys FineGolf and it is an example of how modern technology in the hands of people with vision can give us a high “joy to be alive” FineGolf factor. One has to add some fifteen years on that annual meadow grass (Poa annua) has started to invade perhaps because the majority of the land did not have indigenous perennial fine grasses to start with.
Predictability wins: My only disappointment with Kingsbarns is the lack of quirkiness in the fairways. Perhaps it is too expensive to artificially construct such natural features, which on fine courses often just happened to be there already and were used by the architects without need for earth movement. I suspect nevertheless the influence of the Professionals, of whom many prefer flat fairways with their predictable bounce, may also be in the commercial mind of the architects!
Another example of a parkland course not on naturally draining land that provides ‘running-golf’ is Wilmslow.
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