45 two, he would make at worst a five, while going over the wall into the hotel would end his challenge. The severity of the hazard – water at Augusta, OB at St Andrews – made the reward simply not worth the risk. In the last 10 or 15 years, though, this tiny element of anecdotal evidence (I shouldn’t use that phrase to be honest; I cannot count the number of times I have told people, ‘anecdotes are not evidence!’) has been taken up by some numbers guys, and what they have revealed has changed the ways that elite golfers are taught to play the game, and has massive potential implications for golf architecture. Mark Broadie, a statistician and a professor at Columbia Business School (and a golfer), had been thinking about how to apply the tools of his trade to golf for some time. He created the concept of ‘strokes gained’, which the PGA Tour adopted in 2011, and wrote the book Every Shot Counts in 2014. Strokes gained essentially measures how much better or worse than the average of the field a particular shot was. To take a very simple example: at Tour level Broadie calculates that a holed eight-foot putt gains half a shot on the field, because Tour pros sink half of their eight-footers. The concept – and the numbers – apply to all parts of the game: at Tour level, Broadie calculates, a drive in the rough costs about a quarter of a shot, compared to one of equal length in the fairway. Mathematician and former professional golfer Scott Fawcett took Broadie’s work and expanded it into an entire system for course management called Decade Golf. Fawcett’s system is used by a large number of PGA Tour pros and most of the top US college golf programmes. Fawcett can be seen as the progenitor of the ‘bomb and gouge’ philosophy that now seems so prevalent in professional golf. He advocates hitting driver off the tee unless there is a very, very strong reason not to, because the extra distance it brings makes the approach shot easier, even if the angle of approach, or even the lie, is not optimal. And, most critically, he has made players very interested in their Photo: Jason Livy Photography The fourth at Woking, where John Low and Stuart Paton put in the central bunkers and essentially gave birth to strategic design
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