Faldo in 'Nam - tell me he didn't say that...

Some of you are going to be questioning my membership of the Sir Nick Faldo Fan Club at this rate.

Little over a month after his appearance in a Glenmorangie commercial had me wincing the way you do when your kid goes rogue in the school Nativity play, I am tensing up once more, as I read of the Telegraph's visit to Faldo's new course in Laguna Lang Co in Vietnam.

“The first thing that strikes me is how easy it is,” Faldo replies, to a chorus of groans from an audience of golfers who spent the previous afternoon sweating and swearing their way around his course, hitting balls into paddy fields and palm trees, watching respectable chips and putts roll back down the slope past their feet."

All right, he was commenting on the access now available to this once forbidding jungle area but come on; that last bit doesn't bode well. If your "respectable" efforts are rejected so forcefully, what kind of short-game effort is the architect looking for, exactly?

"The man himself is no mere figurehead. 'I’ve been interested in design since I redrew my home course at Welwyn on a piece of paper to show the committee how they could improve it,' Faldo says. At Lang Co he left his team in no doubt about what he wanted: green here, tee there, don’t touch those rocks. That fairway is too wide: add bunkers for visual impact."

Now there are no quotation marks around those last 10 words, so it could be that the author is merely paraphrasing what he believed Sir Nick said. If they are intended to be a straight quote, however, then I must confess that my spirits drop somewhat, at the prospect that Sir Nick Faldo, golf architect, believes that bunkers should be installed for something other than strategic purposes and that he apparently shies away from fairways that are too wide. Presumably because if there's one thing golf needs more of right now, it's fairways pinched tighter than Kate Moss' waist.

As to this next bit, words momentarily failed me.

"Faldo enjoys the role of landscape artist, and as a signature quirk insisted on three “chocolate drop” mounds by the green at the short fifth, to remind us of his three Opens and three Masters titles. In time they may look a little less quirky."

I could argue that six mounds would surely be more logical but to do so, I fear I, would make me equally guilty of embracing the madness. You get three green jackets, three claret jugs and enough photos to fill the Tate Modern and you are seriously telling me that your soul can't rest until you've moulded three hummocks in some corner of Vietnam??!!

As I have said more than once to my older son, Sir Nick; I love you to bits but I'm worried about you...
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Pic of the Day - Turnberry, Scotland

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Golf course design's ongoing foray into daytime TV...

Forest Richardson gets a rather more empathetic "interview experience" than some of his peers of late, although I am struck by his inquisitor's bizarre response when introduced to the Church Pews at Oakmont.

"Yeah, that's...good for them."

Whether this means, "Been there, got the eight to show for it," "Church pews? You're pulling my leg," or is simply his platitude of choice when confronted by something about which he knows precisely nothing, I have no idea.

Gil Hanse in 'Men's Journal'

Just a short interview but when it comes to great quotes, you are spoilt for choice. What a relief it is to hear that Rio is finally moving: watching one of the industry's poster boys being jerked around by the kind of tawdry controversy that dogs the Olympics had become really annoying:

"On a course designed for walking, you appreciate the land underfoot – feel its ups and downs, its ebbs and flows," Hanse says. "It allows you to appreciate the beauty of the environment you're in."

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• Work begins on 2016 Olympic golf course in Rio

Democracy inaction - apathy paves way for Norman's Croatian project

Looks like Greg Norman may soon have a new home for his plastic shark, after a local poll on whether the Golf Park Dubrovnik development in Croatia should go ahead failed to produce the required 50% turnout.

Business being business, of course, such indifference has been spun into approval, clearing the project's first hurdle, although opponents are now talking courts.

Interestingly, amid all the rhetoric against the scheme, I hear no specific mention of Zaha Hadid's architectural plans for buildings on the site, seized upon by this blog in the past with something less than relish.

Come to mention it, I'm struggling to find any sight of Ms Hadid's 'concept villas' on the project's own website. Could it be that her plans have themselves met with democracy's less favourable side? Not that I'm gleefully rubbing my hands together of course: a girl has to make a living.

 

No hedging - Piping Rock a standout 'buy'

Whatever you might feel about the way Wall Street sometimes operates, you can't fault its residents' taste. Of the tracks mentioned in The 12 Golf Courses Where Wall Street Big Shots Love To Play, Charles Blair Macdonald (pictured) gets three mentions, with The National Golf Links of America, Blind Brook (co-designed with Seth Raynor) and Piping Rock.

We all know about the appeal of The National but Piping Rock is a new delight for me. Will you just look at that bunkering. Strip bunkers, angular bunkers, bunkers in shapes you didn't even know were allowed, their angularity in contrast to the seeming randomness with which they have been laid down. Only there's nothing random about it: this looks like a course you have to pick your way around, wondering before nearly every shot what trap is about to be sprung.

I already liked Sebonack and I really like the look of Atlantic Golf Club. Shinnecock, I hear, is none too shabby but I have to tell you, the novelty value would swing it for Piping Rock if only I had the connections. Golf Course Gurus suggest it's not just me.

"Before I picked up golf as a full addiction, I would think to myself, “How can golfers play the same course over and over and not get sick of it?” Well, I’m convinced if my first exposure to a golf course would have been designed by C.B. Macdonald then that thought would have never gone through my head. Macdonald courses are fun and feature hole designs that have lasted the test of time and Piping Rock is no different....While there are certainly more famous Macdonald courses in the country, Piping Rock stands proudly beside them by featuring excellent holes, strong tradition, and all the elements that makes you want to come back and play again."

Not that any of these courses come cheap, mind. Where on earth do these guys get their money from?

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Streamsong - singing a different tune

Streamsong's 19th hole (Photo: shareski)

You can't move in the golf architecture world at present without bumping into yet another column inch devoted to the course at Streamsong, so in the interest of variety, here's what the bricks and mortar archies make of its clubhouse (my own view - like a piece of Main Street, Deadwood Gulch has been airlifted to Florida - not that I don't like it; I'm just saying...)

"For the moment, the clubhouse is the architectural star of the show.  It’s slipped into its site with a one-story limestone plinth at grade, a cedar box sitting atop, and a glass pavilion for meeting space floating off to one side.  Its color palette complements the sand dunes all around it, as well as the spectrum of the Florida sunlight.
'The idea was to create a piece of timeless architecture with the place and the materiality of the building,' he says. 'When you’re there, you can’t see any sign of human construction – it fits there in a nice, calm way.'"

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Augusta National's forgotten inspiration

What with his own Old Course experiences and Alister MacKenzie as his designer, I'm sure no-one would be surprised to hear that Bobby Jones was subject to a few St Andrews influences when envisaging the course he wanted at Augusta National.

What does leap out at me from John Coyne's Augusta National and Doctrine of Deception is a course I've never heard of before.

"Jones also borrowed ideas from Sara Bay in Sarasota, Florida, a course built by Donald Ross with elevated greens that required pinpoint approach shots to the slopes and crowns."

Initially known at Whitfield Country Club, Sara Bay had a remarkable triumvirate of personnel, with Jones as its biggest fan, Ross its designer and Tommy Armour its first professional. That you can have this kind of history and this calibre of course yet not have a hole-by-hole tour on the club website is a glaring omission.

Swing By Swing Golf fills the breach with an annotated aerial picture here (loving the 5th in particular) while Moegolf and Links Magazine explain the appeal of the place, with a selection of photographs that suggest a gentle charm about the course, which was recently worked on by Brian Silva:

"Sara Bay was easy," he says. "The greens - those inverted saucers of Ross - were there. We just jazzed up the surrounds a little bit. They now have more flow to them, and some support. So if you hit over a green, the ball can't just keep going and going."

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Pic of the Day

"I loved it so much, I bought the course..."

Commercial Real Estate

1793 Northville Turnpike

Architect: Robert Trent Jones jnr
Course website

AWARDS
GOLF - Top 20 Course You Can Play in New York
Golf Digest - 4 Star Rating
Golfweek - Top 15 Course You Can Play in New York

Ball rollback - is that the tortured whine of vested interests I hear...?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I may be wrong. I'm no engineer or materials expert, so I could be talking regally through my rear end when professing a certain frustration with the latest example of heels being dug in over the bid to rein in the tournament golf ball.

But you know when your kids come up with all sorts of excuses why their exam results weren't so good and the more they pile it on, the more you can see only someone who needs to get his finger out?

That's what I'm feeling here, as I read John Paul Newport's interview with the experts on the ramifications of endeavouring to keep classic courses in play and inviolate by means of a reduced-distance golf ball.

And yes, I readily admit that I might be slightly less cynical were the reservations being expressed by someone other than "engineers from several leading ball manufacturers", whose bosses don't give a flying fig have been somewhat tardy in briefly placing the interests of a game that has made them rich ahead of their lust for absolute profit.

"It would be relatively simple to turn down the distance on a driver by 25 yards," said John Rae, vice president for research and development at Srixon. "The two obvious approaches would be to change the dimple pattern and to change the restitution [the elasticity, or speed] of the core. But once we did that, we wouldn't know, out of the gate, what to expect from the rest of the set."Deepening the dimples, for example, promotes added backspin, lift and drag, all of which reduce distance. "Let's say you make a drive go 25 yards shorter by aerodynamics," said Dean Snell, TaylorMade's vice president for golf-ball research and development. "That same ball hit with a five iron might lose even more distance, since five irons create more spin to start with. It might lose 40 or 50 yards." Starting with the six or seven iron, however, the effect of aerodynamics begins to fade rapidly, since balls hit with shorter clubs move more slowly through the air. The same ball hit with a wedge might lose only a few yards of distance, or none at all."Nothing is cut and dried," said Snell. "When you make a change here, it has an impact there, and it may not be proportional." Srixon's Rae, after patiently walking me through several scenarios and pointing out how interdependent the many variables are—some balls have five layers, each with different properties and thicknesses—finally sighed and said, "The problem with even having this conversation is that it quickly spiderwebs out into a million factors."

This could all be valid. But, because I've had thirty years of seeing how companies work, I have no qualms in suggesting that it could also be fudge, fudge, fudge. Is replicating the ball of two decades ago really so hard? Hell, I still have some in my bag if Bridgestone and TaylorMade are running out of test models.

I said it here - in relative terms, we're looking to keep a handful of venerated courses from being  rendered obsolete or else turned into mutants whenever a Major's in town, in much the same way we're looking to keep electric guitar riffs out of the Moonlight Sonata.

For a small number of tournaments each year, how's about the R&A/USGA produce their own tournament ball, which everyone uses? We get to see the game's cathedrals still in use by the best in the business and for all the other weeks, the pros can go back to crushing the OrbitBuster Manhood 59 down the fairways of HoHum Country Club to their hearts' content.

In a world where everyone was pulling in the right direction, instead of being trapped in the gravitational pull of corporate self-interest, I can't help but wonder if this would happen rather more easily than Messrs Snell and Rae would have you believe.

Perhaps a nudge in the right direction might be to stop hiding this issue behind the safe, neutral label of "ball rollback". Calling it "course vandalism rollback" might at least help concentrate one or two  minds.
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Pic of the Day - sadly doomed, California's Ocean Meadows Golf Club leaves this visual memory, made only more charming by the venue's slightly frayed demeanour.

Twenty-twenty vision not needed to see golf's future

Ridgefield Golf Course's par-three 12th hole. (Wikipedia)

There was something very appropriate about Dana Garmanay's lament for a game crawling to its grave coming out within a matter of days of Ron Whitten's tribute to the short par three.

Granted, it doesn't help matters for clubs that have an orthodox par 72 to deal with but the way to make the game more accessible to time-impoverished citizens of the 21st century is at least clearly illuminated for designers and landowners with a blank canvas in front of them.

'Executive course', anyone? Forget the cheesy overtones that often accompany the label. Imagine a six- or nine-hole track composed of par-threes that pay serious homage to the design strategy that makes Whitten's selections famous: menacing bunkers that play with your perception of how much green you have to work with, undulating putting surfaces that genuinely make putting the game within a game and an open aspect that makes any breeze a key element in the hole's defences.

Simply lose any dense rough, so that the wayward tee shot has a sporty chance of redemption, maybe throw in a solitary driveable par-four and you have preserved most of what is good about golf, within a considerably more hospitable time frame.

Nor are you losing any of the game's dignity, either. Twenty 20 cricket may have been the game's financial salvation in recent years but it is a frequently bastardised version of the real thing that you often feel inclined to watch through your fingers.

What it has taught other sports, however, is that primetime is not merely a TV term. Make your game fit between the hours of 6pm and 10pm in the working week and there is a whole new market out there. Whatever your views on floodlit golf courses, I think we'll have to get used to them.
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Pics of the Day - a small but fine assembly of golf portraits (click on the appropriate tab) from Scottish artist Andrew McIntosh).