GOUGE: Every so often, we have to remind ourselves that the game has almost nothing to do with titanium, perimeter weighting and the relative cis content (that’s right, cis content, look it up) of the latest multilayer urethane-covered golf balls. Thankfully, we got that opportunity the other day when in a moment of clarity, we found ourselves walking and carrying our own bags and playing a delightful round of golf at an underappreciated Canadian gem just the other side of the Niagara Escarpment. Devil’s Paintbrush, a throwback jersey of a design from the team of Dr. Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry, provided evidence enough that the gordita-sized intellectual appetites of the best golf R&D technicians and club designers in the world cannot even remotely begin to overcome the challenge presented by a wily architect’s vision, a great piece of property and the assertiveness of a stiff breeze. Opened in 1992, Devil’s Paintbrush is links golf so true you expect caddies with no teeth and an honesty box just inside the gate on the gravel road that leads into the property. But let’s remember that even though it’s only celebrating its 15th birthday, it came to be at a time before titanium drivers and multilayer urethane-covered golf balls, before COR and CT, before drivers with inverted cone face technology, square shapes and high MOI were standard. And while it will never be the kind of course that will challenge the very best players in the world, it will wear out just about everyone else, even if he’s got a bag full of the latest equipment technology. How refreshing. Even though there is ample room to do so, they’ve added no length to the course. Add length to keep up? Please.
BOMB: What made it even more of a revelation is that this little adventure was a side trip from a couple of days spent noodling physics and engineering in golf. John McPhee, professor of systems design engineering at the University of Waterloo, the top engineering school in Canada, guided the two of us high school math and science dropouts through the theories of Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler and a handful of other eggheads who crap smarter than we are. Those theories and the advanced calculations that grow from them are what has turned equipment design from art to science. Clubs are incredibly smartly designed today, but they don’t make the game easy. Your 95, pardsy, is about all the proof we need of that. And I can tell you that for sure there is no club designer who could concoct any piece of equipment that might make the 13th at Devil’s Paintbrush a can of corn. In fact, instead of carping about the onslaught of equipment technology, maybe it’s time we ask architects to think outside the box or at least cogitate inside the same box in which Hurdzan and Fry operate. It's not about just moving tee boxes and making a course 7,800 yards long. Devil’s Paintbrush was 6,714 yards from the tips, and despite growing up in an era when equipment technology has been developing at supersonic speed, it has not added a single yard to its layout. Does a great course need to be 7,000 yards to be the kind of challenge that will keep you talking long after the round has finished? Hardly. Sure, the wind was a big part of the challenge at Devil’s Paintbrush, but it’s designed that way, and it helped as much as it hurt anyway. Even more impressive, the design was flexible enough to bring to light different but equal difficulties whether you were a bomber or a gouger. So let’s think long and hard before we get wrapped up in arguing about whether we should be rolling back this or that. At its best, whether it be in the U.S. Open or an open field in Canada, the game always wins.
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