Holes with multiple fairways guarantee options, and should thus be among the most strategically interesting in golf. But, according to many architects, this isn’t always the case. Adam Lawrence finds out why.

Since the early part of the twentieth century, the so-called strategic school has held sway as the dominant philosophy of golf design. Formulated by thinkers such as John Laing Low of Woking GC and the R&A, and expounded in words and work by architects like Harry Colt, CB Macdonald and Alister MacKenzie, the central idea of the strategic school is a view of golf as a contest of risks and rewards. Take a risk with one shot, the idea goes, perhaps by challenging a hazard, and you should reap the reward of an easier shot next, eventually giving you the best chance of making a low score on the hole.

Strategy at its most simple might be a hole whose green is bunkered at the front right and a fairway bunkered to the left side. The closer you dare to place your tee shot to the bunker, the better your angle in to the green, especially if the flag is tucked close to the greenside bunker.

But subtle strategy of this kind is not always accessible to every golfer, primarily because favouring a particular side of a fairway is beyond the driving skills of most. Creating strategic choices that are within the reach of most players requires extreme width. Providing this width, without committing courses to maintaining huge amounts of fairway, led architects to build holes with multiple fairway areas, separated by hazards such as bunkers, water or rough grass.

“It is very possible to build a bad split fairway hole,” says American architect Jeff Brauer. “In fact, for most, the second fairway becomes an appendage that is rarely used. As noted, tree growth, fairway width and other details often make the difference, so it is important to monitor the hole to see how it works overtime. There are two basic types – the dogleg where the inside fairway offers a huge shortcut and the straight, where pin position dictates play left of right. The issue on the dogleg holes is whether you should reward the shortcut with the frontal opening or guard it twice. I have seen some abominations, where the short route is so much easier than the long one that there is absolutely no reason to consider the long way around. Generally, the shortcut ought to be much harder than the dogleg one, but that doesn’t always happen.”

In some ways the split fairway hole can be seen as a response to the wide open, pick your own route nature of the Old course at St Andrews. Golf writer Henry Longhurst said that, at St Andrews more than any other course, the player had to stand on the tee, faced with not a defined fairway but a wide expanse of golfing ground, and ask himself, ‘Now, what exactly is it that I am trying to do?’ This, over time, led to several holes having multiple accepted ways to play them; famously, for the player who cannot carry Hell bunker with his second shot on the Long hole, the course’s fourteenth, a perfectly sensible option is to play left, onto what is effectively the fifth fairway.

Before too long, architects of the Golden Age started to deploy these ideas in their courses. Perhaps the most famous was MacKenzie’s design for a pre-WW1 competition in Country Life magazine, suggested to golf writer Horace Hutchinson by CB Macdonald. The competition called for entrants to design a two shot hole of up to 460 yards. MacKenzie’s winning entry included five different routes to the hole that could be chosen by golfers depending on their skill and appetite for risk, and featured, among its many other quirks, an island of fairway that he envisaged as being surrounded by water or marsh.

After the war, Macdonald eventually built a modified version of MacKenzie’s hole on the Lido course at Long Beach, outside New York City. The hole – and indeed the course – doesn’t survive in the form that Macdonald built, but the seeds had been sown.

Other Golden Age designers built split fairways too. At Riviera in Los Angeles, architect George Thomas’ eighth hole made use of a barranca, or dry river bed, to provide two separate landing areas for the tee shot. “Holes with double or triple, or even more fairways or landing places, present unlimited possibilities to our golf course development. Such are feasible, but can only be considered where each hole is separate and apart from the rest of the course,” Thomas wrote. Thomas’ hole still survives – and is played every year by PGA Tour golfers – but it has been tweaked on several occasions.

The tweaks to the eighth at Riviera illustrate one of the key challenges with split fairway holes. It is very difficult to create a hole that makes both routes almost equally desirable, or even better, leaves the decision so finely balanced that the right choice depends on the conditions of the day, position of the flag and so on. “They are very difficult to make work,” says Dutch golf architect Frank Pont, who has created a number of split fairway holes on his new build projects. “It’s all about balancing risk and reward. People first have to think and to digest the options. Then they have to decide – how much risk do I want to take? Your choices should be driven by location of the flag for the day, wind direction and the status of your match. The hardest thing is to make a balance. It’s like a scale – if you are out of balance it doesn’t work.”

Pont’s most recent course, De Swinkelsche in the southern Netherlands (reviewed in the January 2014 issue of GCA) was built on a site that, though flat and mostly wide open, was pure sand, and thus gave the architect chance to incorporate some bold strategies. Foremost among these is the short par four eleventh hole, which has a total width of 160m and, like MacKenzie’s Lido design, offers many different ways to attack the green. A large area of exposed sand, which will eventually become at least in part covered in heather, sits in the centre of the multiple fairways. Golfers can go left or right of the sand, try to hit driver over it straight at the green, or play the hole as two short irons.

“The eleven that Swinkelsche was something I decided to do because there was land available in the centre of the course, and I figured I might as well use the whole area,” says Pont. “I think it is the kind of hole that will require continued tinkering before we get it absolutely perfect, but already it has been interesting watching golfers play it. Very few people play two straight shots – say a seven iron and then a wedge – which I think is the easiest way. Most people hit three wood out to the right, but a lot of them end up in the bunkers on that side. What I like about the hole is that the best choice is not obvious, and people will have to work it out for themselves over repeated plays.”

Pont’s other split fairway at Swinkelsche comes at the home hole, a par five where a water hazard in the centre of the playing area creates left and right options. Taking the shorter left hand route requires the second shot to carry the pond, and Pont says this makes the option look harder than it really is. “Everyone thinks the left hand route is harder because of the water carry but there is actually much more room there than it appears. I always go that way unless I have missed my drive so badly I can’t make the carry,” he says.

Modern architects have often used water to create split fairways. Rees Jones’ par five seventeenth at the Oxfordshire course in England is another good example. Jones’ legendary father, the self-styled creator of the heroic school of design, would have approved: taking on the water carry and successfully making it over gives golfers a powerful feeling of achievement. At the Buckinghamshire GC, the home of the Ladies European Tour, also in southern England, the short par four eighth, which wraps around a large lake, will shortly be rebuilt to create fairway on both sides of the water in a similar fashion. “It seemed silly to us that there wasn’t fairway on the left, giving players the choice of which route to take,” says architect Tim Lobb, who is handling the renovation of the course.

Lobb and his former associate, Philip Spogard, built a number of split fairway holes at the Carya development in Belek, Turkey, including, at the third, a good example of another popular solution to the split fairway challenge. The hole’s landing areas are divided by a clump of large pine trees, again creating distinct left and right driving options. Dr MacKenzie was again the pioneer of this option, with his famous seventeenth hole at Cypress Point in California featuring trees in the middle of the playing area and challenging golfers either to go to the right – taking on the Pacific Ocean – or taking the easier option to the left, leaving a longer, harder approach.

Other modern architects too have used the split fairway extensively. Lester George’s highly rated Kinloch club near Richmond, Virginia has three on its front nine alone, and George also used the technique at the newer Ballyhack course, also in Virginia. “Early in my career I studied the golf courses of the master and found an appreciation for multiple teeing options, landing areas and approaches,” says George. “Once I played in Scotland, especially the Old Course, I was convinced that the way to create interest, enjoyment, strategy and intrigue was to build these options into as many holes as practical.”

Similarly, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have never been afraid to split a fairway if the landforms of the property calls for it. Maybe the most dramatic is the uphill par five fourteenth on the Saguaro course at We-ko-pa in Arizona. Here, from the main fairway, the hole plays as a dogleg right, and is basically unreachable – but drive onto the island of fairway to the right, and the golfer has a chance to get home. That fairway is hard to hit, as it ought to be given the potential reward, but how hard can the architect afford to make it? Back to the central problem of the split fairway hole: it is difficult to make the decision close enough to 50/50 to avoid the overwhelming majority of players going one way. 

This article first appeared in Issue 37 of Golf Course Architecture