Saunton GC from the inside

I was driven past it often enough when holidaying in Devon as a child but I never got to see much more than a passing blur of Saunton Golf Club in south-west England, so this video of a somewhat fresh day's golf on its East Course was a welcome discovery, even if you have to sit through one of the all-time ghastly swings to enjoy it...



The English Dornoch, insofar as its remote location has always effectively ruled it out of consideration as an Open venue, Saunton's site was commandeered for military training purposes during WWII, American tanks rumbling amid the dunes. Both East and West Courses were designed by Herbert Fowler but the latter course was redesigned by Frank Pennink in the 1970s.
.........................................................

Pic of the Day

Nearmap - have Aussie golf courses ever looked better?

It's not often I see Google trumped but the aerial views of Australian golf courses offered by Nearmap.com are superb, even if the website seems to focus on Australian urban areas.

Click on the orange panel on the homepage and then key in the course name in the search panel. Not only can you view a hole from several different angles (albeit with inferior quality photos in some cases) but you can also see them pictured at different times of year.
...................................................

Pic of the Day - proof that the golden age of golf course design wasn't echoed in the postcard industry.

Schmidt-Curley win the award but we get the prize

But for this ASGCA announcement hailing the firm's Best Architect award at the 2011 Asia Pacific Golf Summit, I wouldn't have even known Schmidt-Curley Design had a Flickr photostream of project images.

It could be some time before you need go anywhere else for your golf porn wallpaper.
......................................................................................

Pic of the Day - how very a propos: Brian Curley jamming at Mission Hills, according to the caption. There's a series in this, I'm sure. I now await Tom Doak swimming with dolphins or Ben Crenshaw doing great things with salad...

"Jam session" to put the 'swing' in Swinkelsche

Not a term I've heard used in a golf course design context before but I rather like it - Dutch architect Frank Pont on teaming up with Jeff Mingay and shaper Conor Walshe on the De Swinkelsche project in the Netherlands:

"I've always wanted to sort of do the equivalent of a jam session in building a golf course...being joined by Jeff and Conor...comes very close to that idea." 

Just one reservation: please don't let it be one of those 'free jazz'-style jam sessions, otherwise the De Swinkelsche patrons can look forward to 18 heavily tricked-up holes and a course that doesn't actually go anywhere.
..............................................................

Pic of the Day - New York's Dryden Lake GC

La Costa changes - I'm all ears

Hopefully, the resort's website will soon show the precise changes involved in the revamp of both courses at California's La Costa, bcause at present, I'm inclined to share the view that the venue's tournament lore rather outstrips the Dick Wilson / Joe Lee designs when it comes to charisma.

I wouldn't expect to get a full handle on any course from a study of flyover footage but the facility does at least provide a taster of a good course's appeal. In the case of La Costa's North and South courses, however (and I'm assuming the flyovers are of the original layouts) I see precious little that floats my boat.

Pascuzzo & Pate are the architects who'll hopefully make me eat my words.
..................................................

Pic of the Day - Musselburgh GC

Bringing golf course design home

Key 'golf course' into your news search engine and you're usually led towards some fairly predictable themes.

Every once in a while, however, you find yourself 'off road' by some margin, as with the tale of the Equatorial Guinea Forestry Minister who has his very own four-hole golf course in the place where most of us are happy just to have rhododendrons and a bird bath.

Yes, let's hear it for Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue (I'm thinking 'Teddy' to his mates) and the fabulous world of the DIMBYs, or 'Definitely In My Back Yard'.

Flagging up the little matter of $100m allegedly extorted from his homeland by Mr Nguema, the New Zealand Herald kindly includes the full address of the Malibu home at which he ponders the state of Equatorial Guinea's woodlands. Or did, before the bailiffs moved in.

This leaves us just a Google Maps visit away from discovering what par 3 delights await at 3620 Sweetwater Mesa Rd.


View Larger Map

All right, so the bunkering isn't particularly imaginative and the Google Earth rendition shows it to be a bit penal for anything left but we'll dole out a few kudos points for the water hazard.

No news of the architect as yet.

Stevens Park - sometimes, the line of charm is rectangular

You can never lay your hands on the damn thing when you need it, of course, but in my mind's eye, I still see the photograph that brought home to me exactly why the world needed Alister MacKenzie, Donald Ross & Co.

It was of an early English golf course, if I remember rightly; very much pre-Golden Age and providing an all-too-vivid echo of the military fortifications that shaped the early thoughts of architects when it came to defending a golf hole.

Aesthetically, the great designers moved on, of course, leaving this monstrosity as a jolting reminder of what came before all the sensual curves and undulations that delight us today. Ridged bunker lips jutted out from the flat, uninspiring terrain, as self-consciously as drill sergeants on a dance floor, their lines ramrod-straight.

Such patches of sand as I could make out were similarly angular and awkward. The notion that a good golf course should look like it'd evolved from the land of its own accord was still some way off.

Virtually none of this would be acceptable nowadays. So mentally scarred was I by the experience, indeed, that I probably view even Oakmont's Church Pew bunker with slightly less affection than many. I say 'virtually', however, because there remains one throwback to those geometric times that you can still get away with.

I thought it was just a case of the illustrator being lazy when my eye was caught by several unusual green shapes - rectangles, triangles and even a chevron - on the revamped Stevens Park Golf Course in Dallas.

It turns out, however, that these are no mistake. In transforming the early 20th century Jack Burke snr layout, (illustrated here) Colligan Golf Design decided that the course, otherwise outgrown by modern golf equipment, would retain one blast from the past.

"During Kemp's research, a 1930 aerial of the course was located and he noticed the variety of shapes each green on the course had back in the day. Square, rectangular, diamond, triangular and round. These same shapes were re-introduced into the classic green complexes for a more authentic retro appearance." - World Golf

(Somewhere, Jack Burke is breathing a sigh of relief, for little else seems to have survived a revamp that saw Colligan reverse the direction of play on several holes as well as converting a par-four to a par three in order to lengthen the 9th. With some great vistas of downtown Dallas now available, however, the end result looks as enhanced visually as it does strategically).

This much, we can live with. Angular greens are like Payne Stewart's plus fours once were; their eccentricity softened by the nostalgia they bring with them. Everything else from those rudimentary times, however, should stay firmly in history's closet.

Come to think of it, being unable to find that photograph probably isn't the worse thing that will happen to me today.
.........................................................

Pic of the Day - Patterson GC, location unknown

Golfer to architect - Ogilvy sounds like one who'll really make the jump

Image via Wikipedia

Augusta's open spaces. How can you miss, eh, Rory?

At the end of a week in which I heard of yet another 'signature' course travesty - a track that bears a Major champion's name in its subtitle without ever once being honoured with the great man's presence - Jay Flemma's excellent interview with Geoff Ogilvy and design partner Mike Clayton came as a breath of fresh air.

Ogilvy, I think we can say, is a player who gets it where course design is concerned: a man who sees golf architecture as a means of making a mark rather than simply making a living. His comment on Royal Melbourne - "Like most great courses, there's nothing narrow about it" - should go straight onto the shortlist of anyone collecting such architectural axioms for a book.

Great holes aren't pinched, bitter, grudging affairs, like some Victorian dowager. They are open, inviting Jezebels that play fast and loose with your powers of self-delusion. "Look at all this space," the 10th at Riviera, or 18th at the Old Course whisper breathlessly in your ear. "What can possibly go wrong...?"

Interesting, too, that when pressed for examples of good risk-and-reward holes, Ogilvy plumps for two numbers not normally among the usual suspects when the Old Course and Cypress Point are being held up as flagships of their genre - St Andrew's 4th and the Monterey classic's 9th.

Rather like recently-retired star footballers being rushed into team management, the transition from golfer to architect is sometimes based on the false assumption that excellence on one side of the divide will always migrate effortlessly to the other. On the strength of this interview, Ogilvy is shaping up nicely to be an exception. I bet he even shows up at the courses he's working on.

And on a personal note, I'm grateful to him for finally easing my guilt. Having had my rear fittingly kicked by some of the great courses whenever I've tackled them on computer simulations, it's always perturbed me that Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath (Tiger Woods 2003 for pc) were plundered with comparative ease.

Now I know why.

"Ernie Els once shot 60 [at Royal Melbourne] but that was on a perfect day and perfect conditions during the Heineken," Ogilvy explains.;"But if the wind its blowing 10 mph, like it almost always does, and it's firm and fast, and the pins are tough, that's not gonna happen. A couple under par will be great."

I've just tweaked the course settings accordingly on TW2003. My days of plundering appear to be over. Alister MacKenzie is a genius once more and God is in his heaven.

Course designer makes pact with the past - you listening, ball makers?

How odd to meet such polarised opinions within the same context: while golf equipment makers press on relentlessly for more distance, oblivious to the great courses that are neutered by their blinkered fetish, here's course designer John Fought with an interesting aside while discussing his creation at Glaze Meadow Golf Course...

"I learnt quickly that some of the things we were doing were too modern. Yes, we had modern implements but we wanted it to look more natural...As we get back to that...the designs are better, the golf holes are better; they turn naturally with the land...That's the difference [in] that Golden Age - they didn't force anything; they couldn't. They didn't have big earth movers...

"I tell shapers all the time...I'll go, 'Do you think a horse could have built that?' and they get very quickly what I'm saying..."

In an age where politicians and business people bandy around the phrase "going forward" as much as we once did "please" and "thank you", something initially jars about such an emphatic covenant being made with the past as opposed to the future, particularly when it comes from a man with a living to make.

Yet when your raw material is a planet that tends to look best in its untouched form, what other philosophy is there? I remember being struck last year by the breathtaking work plastic surgeons performed on a casualty of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks, leaving merely the tiniest, faint scarring as the sole reminder of what their patient had been through.

What struck me was the contrast between the near-miracles achieved by doctors who work with Nature, merely seeking to restore it and the grotesque parodies of beauty that frequently result when their cosmetic brethren fight Nature, in their bid to turn the ageing process on its head.

Maybe the stakes aren't so high when you're designing a golf course but the parallel is nevertheless there. Golf architecture could be one of the few trades where sounding like a Luddite is the mark of a progressive.
...................................................................

Pic of the Day - 11th at Kingsbarns Golf Links  

No place in Olympics for beginner's luck

I know that our ever more legalistic planet means that every possible 'i' had to be dotted when candidates to design the venue for golf's Olympian return were formally sought but one point, surely, we all took as an absolute given.


"Applicants must have prior course design experience..."

Oh please.

Let's think this through. What kind of professional death wish would prompt anyone looking to install the foundations of a fruitful career in golf architecture to put his credibility on the line from Day 1 with the one course that everybody in his peer group - and even some beyond it - will be scrutinising ad infinitum?

And, more pertinently, what kind of maniac would give him the chance?

[Image via Wikipedia]
...................................................................

Pic of the Day - Sanibel Island, Florida

Too much risk at Engh's True North?

I'm a big fan of Jim Engh's work and a peek at the layout of his design at Michigan's True North Golf Club only reminds me why.The sparing use of sand in cunningly-positioned pot bunkers is a welcome change from the splash-it-on variety and I like the low road, high road routes on the 18th.

I have my reservations about the par 5 7th, though. The minimalist in me likes to see a green guarded by one form of defence rather than two and while either pond or sand alone could have done the job, I just wonder whether an alliance of the two tips the risk-reward scales too much towards the risk end.

This is particularly so when you consider the type of bunker Engh has gone for, as he describes at 4:38 in the accompanying video. Sand is only part of the deal in this fissure bunker; even if you avoid it by a couple of feet, you still have a grim shot from sloping rough.

I just wonder if such an intense fortification might deter more people than the designer would wish from trying for the green with their second shot. I'd be interested to know what others think.

Interesting but gratifying, incidentally, that the observation "Typically, architects and engineers don't function well together" should survive the video edit...
......................................................................................

Pic of the Day - Bath Approach pitch and putt, England