The Shape Of Courses To Come

Recycling Big Mac is nothing new. Pete Dye did it 40 years ago, the team of Coore and Crenshaw 20 years ago. What is new are the new angles given the old saws. Texas architect Jeff Brauer designed a "sideways Biarritz" green at Sand Creek Station Golf Club in Newton, Kan., as well as a par 3 that's "sort of a Redan" and a 16th green patterned after the Road Hole of St. Andrews, another Macdonald favorite. (Brauer has a Macdonald tribute 18 sitting on his drafting board, although it's uncertain whether it will ever get built.)

Virginia designer Tom Clark has a modern-day National Golf Links planned for Cutalong overlooking Lake Anna in his home state, with ideas appropriated from the National, Pine Valley, Wentworth and Harbour Town. It, too, has a Biarritz green perpendicular to the line of play. (A disclosure: This writer has been collaborating with Clark on that design. The project is on indefinite hold.)

In his latest work, Brian Silva has embraced Big Mac down to the crisp edges, stark angles and geometric shapes of platform greens and strip bunkers that characterized the old man's architecture. Silva insists his inspiration for his "kind of Redans" at Black Creek in Chattanooga and Black Rock near Boston were the designs of Seth Raynor and Charles Banks, but that just makes it Macdonald once-removed. Raynor and Banks were Macdonald associates at the outset and were merely the first and second designers to copy Macdonald's ideas.

The most ambitious ode to C.B. is the fourth 18 being built at Bandon Dunes Resort in Oregon. Dubbed Old Macdonald, it's the brainchild of owner Mike Keiser (who once seriously considered reproducing, bump for bump, Macdonald's famed Lido Golf Club, a Long Island masterpiece abandoned at the start of World War II and then converted to housing). Tom Doak and his senior associate, Jim Urbina, are handling the design, the first for which Urbina is being given co-design credit. (They're being assisted by a cadre of consultants, including Karl Olson, former superintendent at National Golf Links, and George Bahto, a New Jersey dry cleaner who wrote a definitive biography on Macdonald and dabbles in Macdonald-esque designs with the aid of golf architect Gil Hanse.)

Urbina promises Old Macdonald won't be a cookie-cutter version of C.B.'s Greatest Hits.

"You're gonna say, 'Well, that kind of looks like a Redan, but I'm not sure.' Or, 'That kind of looks like the Sahara.' And I'm sure some will say, 'That's not what Macdonald would have done. It's too long,' and they'll be absolutely right. It's an original. It's different."

A hundred years ago, C.B. used steam shovels to pile up dirt to build greens and bunkers. The near-vertical slopes that resulted weren't routinely watered and were simply steep hillsides of dry, patchy fescue, perfectly acceptable as hazards in those days. Today, architects struggle, even with modern equipment, to achieve similar dramatic, abrupt changes that can still be maintainable.

We're thinking that sometime in the future small, robotic bulldozers directed by GPS systems will be able to create steeper and deeper features than even the best human shaper is willing to attempt. Likewise, small robotic mowers directed by GPS coordinates will mow slopes too steep for equipment operated by man. Who knows? Maybe nanotechnology will infiltrate golf maintenance, and someday steep bunker slopes will contain subterranean meshes of nano-growth regulators. Or workers can walk along the top edge of bunkers and mow the banks with the pass of a laser beam, which won't just cut the grass but disintegrate it so no clippings slide onto the sand.

However they'll be maintained, courses of the future are going to look like Macdonald's of the distant past, but with flashier bunkers in unusual spots.

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ABSTRACT DISTRACTIONS

"American golf isn't exciting for people these days," says Jim Engh, whose art-deco style has resulted in four Best New course awards from Golf Digest since 1997. "That's why we're losing golfers. It doesn't touch people's creative spirits. Figuring out how to play a golf hole is one way to generate compelling interest.

"Toss a rock into a mud puddle," Engh says. "The patterns that result, that's Dadaism, the art of randomness. That's what we should be doing, creating interesting landforms, have wide corridors, and let people figure out how to play the hole. That's how the game began. This whole idea of diagramming shots, dictating how a hole should be played, that's a bunch of hooey. Just do an interesting hole; let golfers figure it out. That's the most fun. Golfers will be back 30 times, until they find a way to successfully play the hole. Or another way to play the hole. Or a different way than the way they played it last week.

"Width is good," Engh adds. "You can do all kinds of things with width—more angles you can play. If you go narrow, you have one element, and that's it. Width keeps people in play, makes the game a little more enjoyable."

Engh carried the philosophy of randomness to an extreme at The Creek Club on Lake Oconee in Georgia, where his zigzag, par-5 18th concludes with a trio of separate greens tucked into hillside settings, each with a hole location and flag, leaving it to each foursome to debate what the target should be that day.

Tom Doak, who pioneered the random-bunkering style in America that designers like Engh cherish, thinks that maybe we'll see fewer bunkers on new courses in coming years.

"It wouldn't hurt to have a lot fewer bunkers," Doak says. "Not that they cost that much to build. Bunkers cost so much mainly because golfers want them perfectly maintained. A lot of what is being done now is because they look pretty and photograph well for magazines."