A Good Ole Design Fight

The Golf Digest Panelist Summit was this weekend in Pinehurst. It's a 3 day conference that has a bunch of writers, architects, etc, together in one room to talk about what makes a golf course great.

Great American Geoff Shackelford - consistent links to his blog are on this site - was there, along with lots of other renowed architects to speak passionately about their design loves. Geoff spoke vehemently about course restoration and his feeling that restorers should base their work off of the original intent of the course designer and simply introduce modern agronomy and course maintenance technology to the course. No cleaning the lines of the bunkers. No planting of trees to reduce intended options (I'm looking your way, Fazio). No redoing the greens past the point of original recognition.

In their Editor's Blog, Golf Digest details the retort of designers like Rees Jones (he does almost all of the USGA's bastardizations for the US Open) and Tom Fazio (aforementioned Masters nightmare that still has MacKenzie rolling in his grave) tried to defend their work by arguing the opposite.

Jones said, "Every golf course with splashy bunkers should not make the (Golf Digest 100 Greatest) list." He's wrong. It's a part of styling. Golf Digest Architecture Editor Ron Whitten has written something similar, saying literal restoration "is a substitute for imagination."

To prove that they're wrong in being dismissive of literal restoration, I turn to baseball. Let's take the example of Fenway Park - home of the world's most annoying fans and the Boston Red Sox. A few seasons ago, management was considering the possibility of building a new stadium to replace Fenway. It would have been a crime against humanity, even for as much as I hate the Sox.

They thought better, though, and installed a few luxury seats as well as some new seating on top of the world famous Green Monster in left field. The Monster Seats are now the hottest ticket in sports. Who wouldn't want to watch a game perched atop history? The Sox did not chop down the Monster because they needed to modernize the stadium and provide more seating. They did not bring down and in the centerfield wall to create more seating close to the field. They maintained the original intent of the stadium designer who created the Monster. (As a matter of record, Fenway did not originally have the Green Monster in left field, but the stadium sucked before then.) That is a restoration.

Restoration implies that you make minor, modern improvements to an existing structure that is already great. At Augusta, I would argue that merely adding length to the course is the only possible restoration you could do. I would say the same thing of the other hallowed grounds in golf. Restoration is only possible if you do not tinker with the original intent of the designer. MacKenzie's was a fast, testy course that offered the player a lot of options on getting to super tough greens. It is that simple of mission statement that had to be maintained. It was not.

Fazio, therefore, cannot call his work at Augusta an effort of restoration. It would be vulgar to classify it as bastardizing (like I have), so you have to come up with a new label. I think I have the term - technofitting. The work that Rees Jones/the USGA and Tom Fazio do is largely based on the idea that modern technology has made these amazing courses obsolete for today's professional (exactly 0.0000001% of all golfers, remember).

Therefore, Jones and Fazio are trying to gear their changes around not the original designer's mission statement (which would be unique to every course), but rather a singular mission. In their view, they are to redevelop the competitive advantage in relationship to par that the course once had over technology and player capability. This is to be achieved through any means necessary - lengthening, redoing greens, tightening fairways, cutting off the easy (and fun) options that make scoring opportunities. As a result, they are taking a masterpiece and trying to keep it relevant through their lens.

It is a difference of opinion on what restoration means. As I, a wannabe course architect, see it, there must be a distinction in the type of work happening to the American spectacles of golf. Otherwise, one cannot be clear whether the designer is trying to bring the past to the present (restoration) or imposing the present on the past (technofitting).