Golf Course Architecture in the NGF survey comes in long after the Carts, GPS, green grass and quality of beverage cart service in importance to many golfers. Golf architecture appreciation is like wine appreciation; it does not have to be scary to the uninitiated or inexperienced. Most simply broken down you get just three categories:
1 - I'll play it again (Or drink it if it's wine!)
2 - I won't play it again
3 - I'll play it if someone else pays for me (lots of category 3 wines! and for courses there are some resorts that just make it hard to simultaneously travel lots of places and to many places without Ross Perot's checquebook in my hip pocket, so they just get played once or twice or so)
Beyond that, it becomes personal tastes, experience and sophistication. I will also at times give you my completely biased opinion but will warn you that I am doing so.
I have been a golfer for over 45 years and have been passionate about golf course architecture since being introduced to the game. I have refined my interest in architecture by first by playing as many courses as I could as a boy. As a student at the University of Florida, I learned first hand from top calibre players about playing the game at the elite level. I have played with fellow Gators who later became Tour and Club Professionals, Major Winners, Network Announcers, Golf Course Architects and even a President of the USGA.
As I have gotten older, continued course exposure, copius book collecting, reading, writing and voting for a national magazine panel has only raised my interest to higher and higher levels. I continue to study nearly every single day. I some days would just like to live long enough to read every golf course architecture book that I own, I'll never play all the courses I want to. I aspire to know what I don't know. As part of the old Persian saying which loosely goes "Find the man who knows what he doesn't know as he is a wise man and will learn. Follow him and you will surely learn as well."
Why the redanman? Blame the fourth hole at The National Golf Links of America - to some the finest golf course ever built. It was created by a modest man - Charles Blair MacDonald. He merely wanted to expose America to Scotland's Greatest Gift - Golf. Redan to me epitomizes golf course architecture - an insider's nod to tradition if you will. Not even my favorite hole on the course (It is Alps, by the way) its name to me evokes architecture of the playing field of golf as whole paragraphs. Interestingly the original Redan is at the North Berwick West Links, one of my most holy sites in golf. There too, the Redan takes second seat to another hole - The Pit - but I was redanman for quite a while before I got there to the NBWL, and Pitman doesn't have much cachet.
I hope that you enjoy my site. And I was just kidding about Old Charlie's modesty - another "inside" if you will. The site is dedicated to my wife and daughter - one who loves the game and one who "hates" it (at least for now)- fitting for this afflicion called golf.
Pace Kindly Requested:
Written as the 2008 version of the Masters approaches:
I have evolved to the point that the professional game of golf has virtually no relevance for me personally. I've also never really felt that Tiger Woods, acclaimed as the greatest golfer in the world and perhaps the greatest ever (And I do recognize him as such) - is not relevant to the average golfer and has never been a role model, not that athletes are indeed role models. The US PGA Tour is in my opinion bad for recreational golfers and for the game of golf in general. Just as the NBA has ruined the game of basketball, the US PGA Tour will likely one day destroy the original spirit of golf in hte mind of the sportsman. Golf is inherently unfair, it is meant to be. You are supposed to deal with imperfections as well as possible be it in yourself, the golf course or the things that happen to you. Greatness is not what you do but how you deal with what happens to you. Golf can certainly build character, but the PGA Tour has built an entertainment venue that encourages whining, complaints and cries of unfair from the most pampered set of athletes in the world. NO character building there.
Week in and week out the entertainment venue of the PGA Tour presents as consistent a set up of the course for its players as is humanly possible - no quirkiness, similar green speeds, similar sand, similar "Tests of golf". Pace of play is glacial. Every putt is holed out, hystrionics are carried out whenever the circumstances are not to a players liking, it gets so tiresome.
So look here for opinions and reporting of the world's playing fields; occasionally some great places to stay, eat, drink and generally cavort as relates to the other hours of the day when we head to and from the course, but never anything about the professional game of golf. It's just not any longer interesting except for the Open Championship as hosted by the R & A. Perhaps if the Australian Open replaces the PGA Championship as a "Major" we might have something else to watch, but having the Masters and USGA Open Championship hosted by the same old Frankenstein of a course and a rotating Frankenstein respetively as venues I shall continue to find only a little interest in US Professional golf and you'll see none of that here.
Golf is a game best played in groups of three, two, one and if absolutely mandatory four players. (The professionals have found a way to take a funereal five hours plus for two and three ball games now!) Club golf is a painful affair wherein one encounters the idea that four hours and fifteen minutes for 18 holes of golf is OK. This with reasonably skilled golfers as the average man holding a USGA handicap at a private club in the USA is holding a 15.something index. Sadly it is even worse at public courses. In many cases it is the lower one-third of the handicap holders that are the slowest.
If I can make just one passionate plea - get the lead out of your ass and play. Remember that your place on the golf course is behind those ahead of you and not just ahead of those behind you. You selfish bastards!