Should we shorten more courses?
THERE’S been a lot of debate recently about technology and how far tour pros are hitting it, with rolling back the ball the most common suggestion to counteracting the distance explosion.
To date a golf course’s only defence has been to lengthen holes, but I’ve never been a fan of that solution. In every sport, athletes continually get fitter, faster and stronger. That’s just a given with all the resources and knowledge at hand. Its hardly surprising golfers are improving technically, swinging at faster speeds, and thus hitting the ball enormous distances. When Jack Nicklaus first came on the scene, the late, great Bobby Jones said, “He plays a game with which I am not familiar,” referring to Nicklaus’ freakish power.
Jack changed the game and influenced countless golfers, including our own Greg Norman. Then Tiger Woods entered the fray and had a similar effect on many current players, inspiring an endless stream of golfers that seemingly get better as each year passes. Couple that with advances in equipment, and the ball is being sent astronomical distances. When Tiger made Augusta look like a pitch-and-putt in 1997, the men at the Masters’ first reaction was to lengthen their golf course, which just played more into the hands of longer hitters and actually shrunk the number of possible contenders.
At my first Masters, in 2005, certain holes I’d grown up watching played completely different to how I thought they would. The fifth, ninth and 11th were ridiculously tough two-shot holes that required more length than skill. I typically never saw the green for my second shot into the 11th because I couldn’t hit the ball far enough from the tee. Try hitting into that green blind with a fairway wood or long iron… good luck!
They’ve continued to add length to the course over the years, but for me, the best holes at Augusta (and many others around the world) are of the shorter variety. The third, 12th, 13th and 15th holes always produce huge momentum swings as the tournament unfolds and they are easily the shortest relative to their par.
The recent Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne provided the perfect template of how a golf course doesn’t need length to defend itself. It’s an 18-hole chess match with the first hole of the Composite (the third on the West course) the perfect introduction to a course that constantly asks you questions. At about 330 metres, it was certainly reachable for many of the players given the firm conditions and it was intriguing to see how each player approached the hole as the event progressed. ‘Attack or be conservative’ is the continual theme around Royal Melbourne and, depending on your strategy, you had to be prepared for what lay in store if you did get out of position. I’m sure Dr Alister MacKenzie would have been delighted in the knowledge that he continues to make the best players in the world think their way around the property.
There are a variety of other factors regarding a course’s defence, but that’s for another article. So, for now, rather than lengthening holes why not look at enhancing existing ones through strategic adjustments and perhaps even shorten a few to dangle the carrot to those bigger hitters? And let’s be honest, we’re only talking about the pros here, so do we need to make all these drastic changes as I’m all for amateurs and club golfers benefitting from technology. The one resonating argument is to roll back the ball for the pros, which leads us into a whole new debate: bifurcation. To be continued…
