Can quirky come back into courses?
IN: Golf Architecture | by Tony Cashmore | 14 Sep 2004
In the earliest days of golf, the courses were adventurous, grossly unfair, deliberately so; the idea was to have fun, and I think there might have been ribald shiacking, one shepherd boy to another, rather more than the decorous "good shot" which punctuates our play today. The courses, by today's usually staid formulaic standards were, quirky.
The "fairway" (there was only one) for The Old Course stretched out sometimes to nearly 12 yards wide between dense thickets of intolerably prickly gorse and whins, the land bumpy, sandy, rutted, so that your light feathery ball found its way into bushes very easily. So you beat around with your iron-head clubs to find it, and gradually the bush was pushed back and back until the way out and way in became a combined open land tract nearly 90 yards across; it still staggers the first-time visitor to find that shared fairway width, out and back at The Old Course, St Andrews is pretty consistently only some 80-100 yards across, never more than that, and the open land fraught with 213 bunkers, many of them hidden unless you're playing the course in reverse (as it is, every year, for 2 days, to rest the intensely divotted sections of fairways).
A quirky golf terrain? Yes, certainly, but do we think of that extraordinary golf course as quirky today? No, it is a beloved and wonderful place which, when the fairways and greens are hard and running, with the wind up and flexing, tests all the shots of all the golfers.
Or take North Berwick. A stone wall, waist high, sometimes shoulder high, built about 600 years after Christ was baptizing John, defines and utterly limits the drive on Hole 2 at about 250 yards. Better be back from it a little! That same wall creates the most wonderful but quirky strategy demand on a later hole - the line of fairway right side, drive as far as you like, the ocean left side of it, but the green set tight along the ocean side of the wall on a little promontory, a slender slip of a thing too, for your approach shot, with oblivion staring you in the face on its left flank - cliffs tumbling down to the sea in front and behind.
There's a green late in the round there too, which is really 2 greens separated by a closely mown trench some 9-10 feet deep, 6 yards across! Quirky? Yes. Great fun with your mates when the bets start meaning something? You bet!
Take Mackenzie's hugely deep rolls, ridges and dips, on a least seven greens in his early work - at Sitwell Park, and certainly also on the Eden Course at St Andrews (Harry Colt's design but Mackenzie's greens on at least 5 holes), which he readily admitted were "unusual, but formed to determine how the hole is to be played even from the tee." Quirky greens, even today: what is Hole 1 on the Eden Course today is still as "unfair" now as it was in 1909-1910, when its twisted high intersecting ridges were even higher, and its "thumbprint" hollow back right even more severe.
Or take the good doctor's advice to Levendous, who was constructing the Alwoodley revisions: "...(should) be 18 'nips' in the neck between The Heather and The Wall," i.e. 18 bunkers setting the interface between the two carry corners between the drive lines: not the minimalist Mackenzie bunker statement therefore so admired and pointed to by some, and one can still see the 18 deepish hollows marching across the land there - what a quirky architectural statement they would have originally presented as sand faces.
And think too of Mackenzie's quirky two-pronged green statements; with putting areas each side of a central deep ravine-like bunker: imagine how to play from one side to the other on greens designed for example for Pasatiempo, and at Sacramento (now the Haggin Oaks Complex) etc.: why, we nearly see it (toned down) on 16 East Royal Melbourne, where Russell must have been in mind of things Mackenzie sketched for him and discussed with him.
Why this talk of quirky things achieved and advocated by a great master, who studied the oldest venues, and found ideas for letting us poor golfers have some fun in our challenge? Because most reviewers today, most commentators, most designers criticize anything which doesn't respect or exemplify the sanitised formulaic course architectural statements which apparently have become the norm, the hallmark, the criterion. Judge everything on this standard.
Can you wear having your drive truncated on a couple of holes by some natural feature? Certainly not! An old wall? Knock the bloody thing down! What's a huge round dip like that doing in the green? Fill it in! Why have two tiers, or three tiers in the green anyway? And why six foot ones for heavens' sake, like Barwon Heads Hole 4 or Yarra Yarra's 15th? Why have a host of bunkers all together like that, when one pristine bunker set in tangled rough would do the trick? What the hell do you do if your ball's here on the green, the flag's there, and that damn bunker intervenes. Hit a flop wedge and fix the divot?
And what's bad with this short par 4 is it's a blind shot over the ridge, or a too-far carry for me to the visible green. That's just wrong! Blind shots anyway to such self respecting experts are to be rigorously avoided and not just for safety reasons. Please don't ever go play Preswick - leave it to those of us who don't mind hitting over big hills occasionally as the old shepherds did - hit and ran and chuckled. Even Mackenzie, let's note, was stopped from changing the Dell Hole at Lahinch - the most glorious blind par 3 outside Preswick.
This is, therefore, perhaps a plea that there's room still in modern golf course architecture for a little whimsy, for the occasionally unusual; that perhaps we dwell too much on the sanitised, the safe way of presenting golf holes, with inevitable untrammeled drivelines, hole after exemplary hole, nothing visual to quicken the eye and pulse, ask the perplexing question, or wrap a dilemma in a riddle.
The thing is, nobody has the inalienable right to tell us that the staid, the "normal" approach to this wonderfully subjective art/science of golf architecture is always and exclusively correct. Talk to the myriads of men and women, even very fine players, who perhaps don't concentrate exclusively on what is said are the fine points of course strategy and presentation, but, as in the happiest times of their lives, are stimulated occasionally by the unfathomable, the different, the quirky.
