44 Is strategy dead? STRATEGY Written by Adam Lawrence FEATURE Statistical analysis is changing the way elite golfers are taught to manage their way to lower scores, and a key result is a rather different approach to course strategy than has been accepted for over a hundred years. Adam Lawrence asks if that means the philosophy of course design has to change. The philosophy of strategic golf course design emerged around the turn of the 20th century, and was developed by a number of thinkers, but the most important of them was John Laing Low. Low was a classic Victorian figure. Born into an extremely wealthy family of Dundee jute manufacturers, he never did a day’s paid work in his life. He was golf captain of Cambridge University for two years in the early 1890s, was principally responsible for founding the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, and led it on its tour of the United States in 1903. Over a period of time around the turn of the 20th century, principally in his column in the Athletic News, Low changed the way golf courses were laid out. His philosophy of ‘strategic’ design held that hazards should be placed in exactly the spot the golfer would ideally like to put their shot, so that the closer they were prepared to play to the hazard, the better the angle of approach they would have. Though Low himself never designed a course, his idea of balancing risk and reward to have the best chance to score well became the dominant philosophy of golf course architecture throughout the Golden Age. Colt, Ross, MacKenzie, Tillinghast, et al, all essentially adhered to it. On a few occasions during the Strategic Age, leading golfers made it clear that they did not always adhere to the ‘challenge a hazard for a better line’ approach. Ben Hogan, for example, famously said that if he was seen on Augusta’s eleventh green in two, he had mishit his shot. And in a similar vein, Jack Nicklaus was quoted as saying that the seemingly strategically optimal line on the sixteenth at St Andrews – between the out of bounds and the Principal’s Nose bunkers – ‘was strictly for amateurs’. Another St Andrews example: when Seve Ballesteros won the Open in 1984, he hit his drive way left on the Road Hole – away from the OB and the apparent best line of approach – and then hit the shot of a lifetime into the middle of the green. He had calculated that, even if he missed the green in
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