57 and fairway contours. And then, he had an awakening. “I can almost remember the moment,” he says. “Golf magazine had an ‘Architect of the Year’ award, and I won it in 2008. By any measure, I was crushing it. But I would sit at the bar at Tetherow, and I would hear people come in, beaten up, no golf balls left, and saying, ‘I’m not good enough to play this course’. I thought ‘I don’t hear that at Bandon. What has happened in the 10 years between the two?’ I had a lot of time to reflect then, because business was so poor, but I was able to say to Nick [Schaan] and Casey [Krahenbuhl], who were the only people working for me at the time, ‘Let’s go to Bandon for a week, and spend it deconstructing what makes those courses work’. I had to figure out what my instincts had been at the time and how I had changed.” Through this process, Kidd became a born-again advocate for courses that make golfers smile. This insight has not been without criticism – some of his courses built since, notably the appropriately named Mammoth Dunes, the second course at the Sand Valley resort in Wisconsin, and Gamble Sands in Washington, have been accused of taking the doctrine of width to excess, and pandering to golfers who just want to stand on the tee and whale away, with no concern about where the ball might go, but in general, it has been a great success. “Architecture post-Pete Dye has created green complexes where recovery from missing the green is much harder than it needs to be,” says Kidd. “If you look at the first course at Gamble Sands, it is maybe a little bit easier than it should be. I don’t want to hand you double bogey if you miss a green, but at the same time I don’t want you always to make par either. It needs to be a challenge. How much punishment does a player deserve? “My team and I are finding incremental ways to make golf courses more fun. Width is just the beginning. If I were teaching a class on golf design, width would be in the first lesson. We’re now looking at things like the challenge of recovery. PGA Tour players hit greens 62 per cent of the time, and now we have data from Arcos that shows amateurs do so about half as often – less than one in three. That means that the recovery game is far more important than greens in regulation. We’re spending vastly more time figuring out what happens when “ If I were teaching a class on golf design, width would be in the first lesson” DAVID MCLAY KIDD Photo: Evan Schiller Kidd’s Bone Valley layout at the Streamsong resort in Florida will open for preview play in October 2026
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=