A Treatsie: An Interesting process, that of changing old golf courses.
(12 October, 2007)
Yesterday I had the pleasure of playing the Alex Findlay-designed Llanarch course with Stephen Kay the architect involved with the renovation process for the club. He was on site for a further consultation in the process and played the second nine in its entirety with a trio of us. He showed us a few things and talked about many, Stephen is not afraid to bend your ear or even provoke you in conversation so he and I get along pretty well. He is not afraid of criticism and of commenting on other’s work in this arena often known as restoration, renovation, modernization or even wholesale slaughter (outright re-do or just plain building new course where the old one was before).
I also had the pleasure to go around my own home course Lehigh Country Club last Tuesday with our architect Ron Forse. That visit grew out of our grounds committee wrestling the bull and deciding that we would protect our golf course from the whims of green committee chairpersons, amateur architects and well-intentioned but wholly mis-guided “Memorial Tree Planting” and other insidious and to date unrecognized threats. I should mention that Ron did our original master plan in 1994 and it needed an updating as we commenced to re-build bunkers that weren’t draining very well. We brought him back as we decided to consider adding length to accommodate the new equipment, to maintain design integrity as we did so and to improve turf conditions.
What are good reasons for such an undertaking? What are good solutions? How does it work? I’d like to address some of these. One of the other fellows in the Llanarch group yesterday relayed to me that he had recently attended an outing at the little Ross gem known as LuLu in suburban Philadelphia. The outing was for superintendents and media types and featured the work done by Forse but also interpreted by the superintendent. Some vague rumblings of wanting to put some teeth into the course, toughen it up and the like was mentioned by someone that day. The visitors decided that the super’s presentation was perhaps a bit over-the-top that day. Green speeds were perhaps exceeding twelve and rough was six inches according to my source who will remain unnamed. I did not attend that day so take some of that with a grain of salt.
Who are these changes being made to accommodate: The top 1000 golfers in the world? The top 1% or 25% of a particular club’s membership? The best amateur and professional players in a regional or state golf association at tournament time (and the occasional pleasure of the S & M crowd at your own club)? These are questions to be looked at long and hard as the answer is different in every case. Certainly some goals of consulting an architect and changing your course are always the same. The #1 goal is always healthier turf.
Work to be done on old courses:
Trees:
Removing trees, especially conifers and willows that are near lines of play, especially greens, tees and key fairway areas has to be the number one consideration in any undertaking of any changes. Trees that members might believe are antediluvian are probably only 20-40 years old and fast growing, surface rooting, shedding trees which have no place at all near playing areas. The myth of isolation and protection of closely located tees and greens near landing areas is a dangerous myth. Open visualization of these areas not only helps the turf but protects the players by making them visible to the mis-hitting player to allow a timely “Fore” rather than one too late if well-intentioned one.
Trees are nothing but big weeds and competing ecosystems for turfgrass. Don't be afraid to let them go. Any tree that needs "limbing up" really needs total removal. So-called limbing-up may improve air circulation, but does nothing for sunlight. Just crawl under a pine or especially spruce tree sometime and notice how nothing else can grow there. That's the extreme, of course, but educational. Pine trees and pine needles are nice on sandy soil because that's what grows in pine barrens. You don't want this on your clay-based course unless you really enjoy makeing your superintendent suffer..
Trees might be helpful in reducing so-called greenhouse gasses but so is healthy grass which is less susceptible to disease, needs less applications and/or water and in the end provides precious open space for urban areas. Want some trees? Then plant them on the periphery of your course and especially don’t line your fairways. You are not “Toughening your course” you are destroying it, so get those weeds out. Sunlight, air circulation and drainage will improve and you will have great turf, providing you have not chosen to force a cultivar into an area where it will not grow well. Apropos the Tour Championship in 2007: Bent Grass in Atlanta, GA is just plain stupid with the new small blade Bermuda strains available.
Greens:
Expansions and recoveries of previous green areas that were intentionally or otherwise eliminated is a great and important part of the changing of old courses. Some of that is relatively easy, some of it very complicated because when green speeds were slower day to day slopes were greater and may be too severe today. A very competent architect must be the one to oversee the green changes. Slopes often need a little softening to accommodate today’s higher green speeds and it must be done right.
Green reclamation or expansion was recently done at Llanarch and was a key part of the first master plan at Lehigh. I should also mention the work Gil Hanse and crew at Ross’s Plainfield CC in New Jersey and Fenway in Westchester, NY as well as Forse’s LuLu green work as choice examples of this process. Nearly every competent updating includes work in this area. Walking around the peripheries of old greens built before 1930 will often reveal squared-off pads on which the greens were pushed up and built upon. These greens originally extended right to the peripheries as original architects drawings and old aerial photographs have taught us.
So many TV broadcasters perpetuate the myth that the old pre-war course had small greens when they were often very large. These greens also had rectangular shapes and often largely unpinnable sloping areas for drainage and maintenance of quality turfgrass. These areas were rather often eliminated in modified mowing patterns during WWII to save precious gasoline.
Softening of green slopes is even more tricky. It requires as was done at Llanarch elevation of certain parts of some greens by a few inches to sometimes over a foot to allow playability at faster speeds while preserving design intent.
Fairways:
Blame the USGA with their USGA Open setups?
Blame them for having the average golfer think that narrow fairways are good for toughness?
Perhaps, but recovered and largely expanded green complexes demand wider fairways to restore the proper angles of play to strategic golf holes. That’s why some of those greens you might play have the seemingly unfair contours that they do. Problem is that your best angle of play is now from the woods over there to the left of the fairway because zealous tree-planting and fairway narrowing have eliminated some of the great character of your course. This can be the hardest sell of all changes. Cries of “The hole (Course) is too easy now” reverberate across the land, but once again all the changes need to work together. If you widen your fairways and expand your greens but shade trees keep your greens the consistency of chocolate pudding (In addition to the greens not surviving) you will indeed have made some playing aspects a little easier. Wide fairways need to be firm to allow balls to run to bad (as well as good) places. The greens receiving these shots from wide angles need to be firm so as to require some skill rather than just hit and plug greens. Then you also deal with creating literally unrepairable ballmarks.
Fairway width does not exist in a vacuum. It must be part of an entire golf hole plan or it indeed devolves into banal simplicity. Stephen Kay related to me that on the eighth hole at McCullough’s Emerald Links in the Atlantic City, NJ area, the fairway measures 161 yards wide, but this is not exactly an easy hole. When I can post a photo, I’ll elaborate, suffice it to say, strategy is heavily involved. Fairway widths must be related appropriately to green contours.
Bunkers:
A bit of a pet peeve of mine as appearance seems more important to some golf course architectural students than placement and utility. Bunkers can be aesthetic, but they must somehow fit the site. Some bunkers nowadays do exist in a vacuum seemingly just to be au courant, but architectural styles, shapes, depths and placement all need a balance. Whether or not to move or add bunkers, move tees or both is where the architect must have a hand and after careful study and interpretation of all information available. Who the changes are intended to affect again is paramount.
I recently toured the South Course at Oakland Hills in 78 strokes from the approximate length that Ben Hogan declared the course a monster in 1953 – 600 or so yards of golf course went unused by me that day (And 1,000 in front of me was not used by some players that day). How can an architect possibly restore Ross’s design intent for all those golfers? Badly some might say by flanking each landing area left AND right with serial bunkering. Added to seemingly single-file fairways and it is not a driving test but a survival mission. What is “good” for the best players in the world at a USGA Open, PGA Championship or Ryder Cup is not for the other 9,999 in 10,000. That is certainly a plan, but not one I’d sign off on. Luckily Oakland Hills South is so magnificently routed and the greens are so good that even that bunkering scheme diminishes it just a little. Father and son Jones have each “modernized” the course 50 years apart. Before his death Ross himself prepared some changes for OHS, but Father Jones did it his way, fortunately leaving the greens alone. Those intactgreens are much of the character of that great course. They remain pretty much intact from Ross to this day.
Tees:
Adding tees just to add length can be a hideous affair - not for the eyes of impressionable little children. An unnamed famous course near my home recently hired the man some consider “The Greatest Architect Living” to toughen their course for the USGA. Several tees were added which are virtual pop-up orphans that add hundreds of yards to the card. Unfortunately they place 60-100 yards between individual tees such that one feels like Lewis & Clark trying to locate these eyesores. Building up 20-30 foot elevated runway tees to maintain visibility and that awful concept of “fairness” is no answer either. Lower-lying tees more in the character of the original design add much more in a sensitive fashion to the aesthetics. Add to this a monotonously similar bunker again and again. Then flatten interesting green contours in the interest of attaining high speed and the testing of only one type of player leads to incongruity. Soon - one of America’s great early architects has one less of his courses in existence. We're talking about an architect who built "Strong" courses with bold features - there are precious little remnants of his best work remaining.
Modifying the teeing ground without thought of strategic angle creation, maintenance or functional restoration of the bunkers should be discouraged. Restoring previously eliminated bunkers that punish only weaker players already struggling to get along is part of intelligent renovation rather than a strict restoration. It is not so easy as just building a pad and mowing a patch of grass. As part of a professional master plan these parts should seamlessly fit into the landscape in the ideal.
I shall add more to this treatise.
But to at least partially close:
Above all else, every course of merit built in the classic age needs to retain an architect that first recognizes and respects the architects of the Golden Age. A knowledgeable and informed club committee can help the membership understand how and where these kinds of changes will fit in at your club. These gentlemen and ladies should aid the architect in determining who the changes are intended to challenge.
I hope to constantly champion and lend support to that cause here at redanman.com.