Name Change
Thursday the Tweflth day’s are numbered as the name for this page. I incorrectly figured the title would add a clever undertone to the page but I now feel limited by it. Soon I will publish a “style guide” to define the meaning of some of the phrasing used in past and future articles, by this point I want to have the new name in place.
While I don’t give too much credence to identifying with a strong brand, I became disappointed with the page name after a Google search earlier today. “Thursday the Twelfth” combined with “Tobacco Road” did not immediately scream “golf” or “golf architecture.” To those that suggested I change the name very early on in this project, I apologize for my stubborn refusal. Your suggestion was not in vain and I now see your point.
Possible new webpage names with a rules of golf theme:
- “The Nearest Point of Relief”
- “Within Two Club Lengths”
- “Through The Green”
I like the idea of taking a commonly heard phrase from the rules of golf for the name. Please comment any other suggestions or likes and dislikes.
An Opening Hole: Tobacco Road Golf Club
In which first holes are examined. Today’s is Tobacco Road Golf Club’s 558-yard opener.
Tobacco Road Golf Club is perhaps the crown jewel in the late Mike Stranz’s design portfolio. Located in Sanford, NC, the course is a strategic masterpiece with some of the most ideal golf service in the country. Roughly half an hour drive from the Pinehurst area, Tobacco Road gets much golf vacation traffic in addition to local play. Tobacco Road will see a lot of press in subsequent posts and discussions here and the opener is a worthy feature for this series.
Tobacco Road's Intimidating First Hole
Hole Description
The dramatic features obscure much of the hole from first look. The guardian mounds covered with Lovegrass dominate the view. The peek of fairway through the mounds suggest the hole turns to the left. The narrow pass is achievable with a modest 180-yard shot, and once through, the fairway expands to a comfort forty yard corridor at 230-yards from the tee. A well-struck, longer tee shot will trundle through the fairway if not played toward the left side. A distance of similar length from the tee to the first pinch point must be overcome to carry a second more modest ridge. However, the first-time golfer is left to guess as to what lay beyond. A cut in this ridge serves as a guide setting up the approach to a back-to-front pitched putting green heavily guarded on the right side by three bunkers. Plenty of fairway cut left of the hole allows for aggressive play.
The putting green itself allows for some margin of error and will funnel shots landing in the approach toward the hole. Two simple putts will find the bottom of the hole on most days.
The second ridge in as many shots (hopefully!)
The putting green - finally!
Strategy and Tactical
Strategy in golf rarely diverts from a series of well-known and accepted rules. As discussed in an earlier post, many so-called strategic features simply emphasize or change the tactical requirements of executing the shot. It is for this reason that these hole profiles include the word “tactical” in the heading. Very few singular holes meld the concepts of tactics and strategy like the first at Tobacco Road. Each strategic choice opens up several tactical decisions. The proper execution of which leads to more strategic choices. While this is a common thread of every hole, the hazards present on this hole demand a great divergence between these strategies.
Divergent strategy is achieved by placing the first pinch point 180-yards from the tee and the next one another 200-yards slightly to the left. The features creating the pinch points and the hazards complementing the pinch points create the strategic decisions instead of complementing the strategy already present. The golfer must first choose to take on the pinch point from the tee and attempt to reach the fairway beyond or lay well back with an opening tee shot of 160-170 yards. For most golfers, this places club selection between a mid-iron and a 3wood/Driver. Choosing the latter forces the line off the tee further left because the fairway ends right of center.
The putting green is reachable in two shots for the golfer that is able to get beyond all the visual intimidation. A 240-yard tee shot will land in a fairway forty yards wide and only 170-yards from the second ridge. From here, carrying a shot 200 yards and favoring the left side (just left of the cut in the second ridge) will cause the ball to trundle down the slope toward the putting green.
The lay-up route is similarly straight-forward. Bunting a mid-iron short of the first pinch point leaves the golfer with a slightly longer second shot than the first. From here, a shot traveling 180-yards leaves a completely blind, but reasonable, 150-yard shot into the green. The second ridge, with more sand than Lovegrass, presents a more tempting target to attempt from any distance than the first ridge. Though the lay-up leaves a 230+ carry for the second ridge, it’s not out of the question for a boldly struck fairway wood.
Regardless of the strategy employed, the putting green favors shots from the left side, and every effort should be made to attack from this angle. The bunkers defending the putting green at the right, while presenting a relatively benign hazard, should never really enter into the equation after solving the first two problems presented by the hole.
Concluding Remarks
A good friend likes to discuss a golfer’s emotions as they encounter a golf course. For many, the first hole is filled with anticipation for the round ahead with any real “work” saved for subsequent holes. This ethos regards the first hole as a tune up with gentle problems from the golfer to overcome. On paper, and after a few plays, the first hole at Tobacco Road fits nicely into this category of opener. However, Mike Stranz managed to inject moments of sheer terror and excitement into actually gentle opener, so much so that a 160-yard lay-up on an opening 550-yard hole can feel exhilarating! This hole is both truly unique and superb for this reason alone.
The Golf Industry’s Adolescence
My best friend of well over a decade allows me to indulge in conversation about golf and the golf industry frequently and I very much respect and consider his insight. He does not play or even enjoy the game but our desire to have lively discussion tends to trump those seeming shortcomings. I convinced him to tag along during a recent round while he tried some photography and enjoyed the walk. I felt the need to ensure his comfort and enjoyment during this time which took me from the box created by playing the game. I did not play particularly well but the chance to observe and discuss the things happening on the golf course provided very fertile ground for discussion.
More than ever, I consider the thoughts and opinions of intelligent non-golfers to be valid and worthy. Too often, golfers lean on the things about the game that appeal in order to cope with many of the issues inhibiting healthy growth and public perception of the game. With this in mind, I would like to present a few thoughts after my round with an intelligent non-golfer.
Identify Bad Customers
Many specialized goods and service businesses have customers that demand more of the company than is profitable. Golfers who consider the availability of alcohol on course, the attractiveness of the service staff and availability of golf carts above the quality of the strictly-golf experience, for example, place demands on the business that deviates from the chief goal of operating a golf course. In a general view, these customers seek to fill the downtime in golf with another activity or distraction as opposed to minimizing the downtime.
The issue as I see it is two-fold. First, the golf facility seeks to fill the downtime with a service that barely breaks even or is categorically expensive to cover the cost of the convenience. Second, the services or distractions offered for the downtime bloat the actual expanse of the downtime causing an even longer round. This increases the cost in time and money of golf to unsustainable levels in many cases.
A golf business must identify and refuse to serve its bad customers outside of the standard expectation for service set by the scope of the facility. In considering this point, one must remember that a reasonable pace of play is an expectation set by the golfer and not the golf course. The ability of a facility to guarantee a distraction free round played in under four hours for a reasonable cost is, by far, the most competitive trait.
Eliminate Scope Creep
Along the same trail as the above point lies the actual services offered by the golf facility. Is the facility in the golf business or the restaurant and bar business? In the former, every customer arrives to play golf. Not every customer arrives to play golf and have a drink or meal after (or during!) the round. Golf facilities with anything more than a modest refreshment stand with a bare minimum menu suffer from major scope creep. The food and beverage element is ultimately subsidized by the golf revenue, placing the cost of a less-used service on every golfer in some form. The restaurant and bar business is tough enough as a stand alone.
Eliminate Discrete Tee Times
This one may raise a few eyebrows. Most every frequent golfer realizes that golf courses typically operate on tee times spaced by either 8- or 10-minutes, with a few facilities even operating on 7-minute times! Each time has four spots. However, the tee time system glosses over what is essentially a capacity and flow issue. For simplicity let’s say a golf facility uses a 10-minute spacing therefore offering six times per hour with a maximum capacity of twenty-four golfers. Instead of asking the golfer(s) to reserve a discrete time like 9:10 AM, et al. ask the golfer(s) to reserve one or several of the dozen available spots between 9:00-9:30 or whenever the case may be.
The advantages to this system are numerous. Foremost, it prevents the feeling of ownership a golfer or group of golfers may have over a particular spot. Nothing will bog down a golf course more than a series of twosomes stacked up one behind the other that absolutely refuse to join into foursomes (On the day with my non-golfer friend, we encountered four twosomes stacked, two of whom got into a heated exchange on the fifteenth tee about playing through the other – at no point did either group consider the mutual benefits of forming a foursome for the remainder of the round, the height of selfishness). This systems allows the golf facility to better manage the flow of groups from the first tee by adjusting and pairing groups according to capacity based in a range of times and not particular times in a series. During busy times, individuals and pairs will join to form foursomes and during down times, the starter can effectively space groups of less than four to help promote a better rhythm and pace.
The system also prevents the backlog caused by a late group or an influx of walkers as the managers can assign late or extra groups to time blocks that are less busy. Furthermore, the system encourages positive social interactions between golf facility staff and golfers while encouraging/requiring golfers to form groups themselves.
Summation
While these are by no means comprehensive nor complete ideas, I believe the thoughts are worth discussion and have significant merit for implementation. The golf industry should assess streamlining individual golf facility operations to provide better management of both time and money spent by golfers to enjoy the game. The goal should be to minimize downtime on the golf course and not to distract or fill that downtime with non-golf activities.
Update and Moving Forward
While over a month has passed since my last update, this site continues to see some traffic and I hope those checking in see the current content as worthwhile. I have accepted an internship with Renaissance Golf Design (Tom Doak’s company) on the Streamsong project in Florida. The Streamsong Resort is owned by the Mosaic Company and will be a 36-hole facility with the Tom Doak golf course alongside a Coore/Crenshaw design. I am extremely excited to be a part of the project.
My cup of coffee as Second Assistant at Lookaway Golf Club ends on May 15 and I will start at Streamsong on May 22. I’m leaving Lookaway on good terms and everyone involved understands the Streamsong internship is an opportunity that cannot pass.
I am presently working on new posts for the Opening Hole series, another several Know Your Turf pieces and an opinion piece on the future of the golf industry. The changeover and relocation to Florida should not hamper these updates at all and will open new opportunities for posts.
Strategic Hazards: Why Every Dogleg Doesn’t Need a Bunker
I am currently in a discussion on Golf Club Atlas about the strategic nature of a bunker on the fourth hole at Galloway National. Elements of the discussion highlight some of the differences in perception of strategy in golf, as well as what features introduce strategic thinking. No single authority exists which define the nuances of strategy completely and this post will make no attempt to provide an all-encompassing definition. Within the discussion, I presented a scheme for evaluating strategic hazards and their place on the golf course. This post will cover the topic in greater detail. Even further detail can be found in Bob Crosby’s wonderful essay, “Joshua Crane in the Golden Age”, on Golf Club Atlas. Mr. Crosby’s essay explores some vital rhetorical foundations for much of the discussion on strategy in golf.
What is Strategy in Golf?
The manner in which shots are employed on the golf course is the broadest definition of strategy. Since golf inherently requires the golfer to act by playing shots, strategy is inherent to every golf hole in existence. This compulsion to play a shot is an axiomatic part of golf strategy as the shot is the currency in the game. In essence, one spends a shot in order to position the golf ball in a manner which increases the odds of holing out subsequent shots and success is measured by the efficiency of these successive shots to that end. Strategy is the evaluation of those possibilities.
Golf architecture, therefore, can be defined as the manner in which golf features are positioned which emphasize, punish, and negate certain strategies. For example, playing directly toward the hole is the most efficient manner to employ shots as it minimizes the fundamental hazard of the game; namely that the hole is located a distance away from the tee. However, a hole which places some hazard along that path (long turf, water, trees, sand, etc.) may impede or heighten the difficulty of employing this strategy forcing the golfer to weigh the potential risks of the direct route with the cost in distance of avoiding those risks.
With the above two paragraphs fertile ground for discussion all their own let us work with the assumption that, all things being equal, the best initial strategy for any given hole is the one that reduces the distance required in playing from tee to green in the most efficient manner. Max Behr’s concept of the line of instinct/charm derives itself from this basic assumption. The golfer will always seek to shorten the route to the hole. The line of charm concept suggests that hazards are placed strategically if they are placed along the direct route to the hole (the line of instinct) in such manner that the golfer must develop a method of overcoming or avoiding the hazard.
The Lack of Sophistication
Behr’s conceptualization drew common threads on several of the best holes in golf at the time while also laying the groundwork for design work to come. As with any attempt to draw common threads, a scheme develops that overuses the basic concept without building upon the idea. What golfers today consider to be strategic architecture lacks real sophistication on the concept of strategy as the effects of strategic hazard in question are only felt “at the shot.” Furthermore, the common occurrence of one bunker on the side off the tee, one bunker on the other side into the green as “strategy” does not particularly challenge a golfer’s strategic vision for the hole.
Much of this lost complexity traces itself to an era when tee-to-green maintenance varied widely and very few standards or expectations for this area existed. A simple look at any older golf course aerial (Pre-World War II especially) will show mowing patterns suggesting that fairways extended well beyond the corridors bounded by “through the green” bunkering. Indeed, the very name “fairway bunker” indicates a bunker in the fairway. With the advent of automatic irrigation and more precise mowing technology came the actual true differentiation between rough and fairway – and the fairway’s subsequent use as a “corridor.” (To this day, rightly so, the rules of golf make no distinction between fairway and rough).
Modernization
This evolution clouded two major aspects of hazard placement. Foremost is the idea of a hazard as something that could be confronted if the golfer so chooses to employ that route. The concept of risk/reward implies that in confronting a hazard the golfer should reap some form of reward. In the case of Behr’s line of charm, this reward could be as simple as being able to manuever the hole along the straight line from tee to green which we assume above is the best strategy for a given hole.
The second aspect clouded by this maintenance evolution is more cerebral. One thing that trips up many is that golf strategy is not a set of discrete paths around hazards to the hole. The question posed is not one of A OR B, but rather one of A THROUGH B (How many numbers exist between 1 and 2? How far from A can a golfer stray before he gets to B?) Therefore, the nature of a strategic hazard lies in how the hazard influences play between the A and B options, not how the hazard influences the risk of employing that option. Risk viewed in the sense of the singular shot is a tactical issue and the fact is, failure to execute a shot or to employ a route with little risk can always be made up with good tactical execution later. A golfer with a keen short game can almost categorically employ a different strategy on any hole than a skilled driver of the ball regardless of hazard placement.
Conclusion
In general, width is likely the sole determiner of a hole’s strategic complexity. In general, the more hazards which exist for the hole, the wider the hole must play in order to allow for complex strategies. Hazards which differentiate between the different routes are more rightly called strategic than those which emphasize risk of the various routes. This is especially apparent on narrow dogleg holes with bunkers inside the turn. While it is fact that cutting the corner/carrying the hazard/playing as near the hazard as possible will yield the reward of a shorter next shot to the green, the hazard’s placement only changes the risk of executing this shot and not the actual strategic complexity of the hole. Take away the hazard and the golfer is still attempting to cut the corner, just with less risk. The strategy remains unchanged, just the possible tactical outcomes change.
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