Whistling Straits
understand. The real elements of a great course have to do with a distinct sense of place, the memorability of scenes and imagery along the way, and the joy of the walk in the park that a round of golf really represents. And that is meant literally. Golfers
who try to experience a course from the vantage point of a cart are missing out on the pace, perspective and sense of unfolding that a great golf course offers. A round of golf is not an amusement park ride. It’s a stroll through a series of garden-like landscape rooms (called golf holes) that collectively form an impres- sion about scenes visited, which are assessed from multiple points of view. There are several misconceptions
about ratings that distort the process— and that have wildly inflated the cost of golf. One is the sense that you have to spend a lot of money to create a great golf course. This is “the Shadow Creek Effect,” named after the $38 million golf course in Las Vegas that casino magnate Steve Wynn developed in 1990 with Tom Fazio in North Las Vegas. To be sure, it’s a spectacular place—a
theatrical creation on what was a dead flat site that got shaped, watered, planted and pampered into a lush, rolling oasis of a micro-environment. It had less to do with golf than with brash showmanship, and given the setting, it worked. But the industry subsequently went bankrupt chasing the illusion that good golf re- quired the creation of a faux forest, along with waterfalls and a menagerie. Another mythology equated great- ness with length and toughness—as if a 7,400-yard golf course with a 76.0 rating and a 150 slope rating was a numerical indicator of worldly achieve-
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Pacific Grove Golf Links
ment. The mistake here, equating hard with good, was compounded by owners and developers who propagated the ac- companying view that you had to “play it all the way back,” as if an average 18-handicap golfer would appreciate a course played from about three sets of tees too many. It’s taken more than a decade of insistence by critics to get people to start playing from the correct tees so that they can appreciate the design intent and strat- egy of a golf course suited for their skill set. Far too many golfers today still think that the test of greatness is only to be had from the back tees. Hence, the launch of the USGA’s and PGA of America’s “Tee it Forward” campaign.
nature hole out there, it means I didn’t pay enough attention to the other 17.” Thankfully, golfers now can play places like Bandon Dunes, where four 18-hole courses and the 13-hole par-3 wind their way through native dunes and offer varying glimpses of the Pacific Ocean. The experience there varies from course to course, with each layout of- fering golfers a sense that their engage- ment is with elements that fit. It’s a skill anchored in the most important of all design elements, routing the golf course through landscapes that transition eas- ily. Bill Coore, half of the design team that includes two-time Masters cham- pion Ben Crenshaw, says that some of his best routings come by observing
What’s going on with these criteria is the effort of arriving at a quantification of subjective feeling—the law of averages.
There was a phase in golf design—
we can be thankful it’s behind us now—when owners seemed to convince golfers that if a course didn’t have 18 emotionally over-the top spectacular holes, it at least sported a designated “signature hole.” Often this meant an island green par-3, most famously, the 17th at TPC Sawgrass-Stadium Course in Ponte Vedra, Fla., or the floating-in- the-middle of-the-lake par-3 13th hole at Coeur d’Alene Resort in northern Idaho. But too often, such holes were created for drama or their cover-girl ap- peal, without fitting in with the rest of the course. And as Jack Nicklaus started saying in the mid-1990s after being asked one time too many about which was the signature hole on the course he was opening that day, “If I have one sig-
how native animals (particularly deer) walk the land. “They chose the path of least resistance,” says Coore, “and that tells me something about how golfers will feel most comfortable.” It all starts with a good piece of
land, preferably one with long views, whether of the sea, the inland site itself, or distant identifying markers such as mountains. At an affordable daily-fee municipal layout like Pacific Grove Golf Links just outside the gates of Pebble Beach, the charm comes not from the densely wooded, narrow front nine, but from a back nine that seems to frolic amidst rolling dunes land, with the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop. Golf, after all, is about playing a
game. It should therefore be fun as well as visually interesting. Routing a
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