49 Naturally this has influenced Smyers’ approach to golf design. “What I try to do now is to make the player make a mental mistake – pick the wrong target, hit the wrong club, hit the wrong shot,” he says. “Light rough is the designer’s ally. When they changed the groove rule in 2010, it totally changed elite players’ approach to playing. Controlling spin is the most important thing for them, and you cannot do that consistently from light rough. You have to anticipate how the ball is going to fly out of the rough, and how it is going to roll and then you have to pick your proper target. “We are currently building a new course at the University of Florida. There, the coaches take the players out and use TrackMan, and they’re looking not only at distance and height, but also dispersion. They’re looking at what will give them the best result.” Keith Cutten of Whitman, Axland & Cutten says: “I think the conclusions being drawn from the work of Broadie and Fawcett are important for architects to understand. But I am less convinced that they invalidate traditional strategic architecture. If anything, I think they force us to be more precise about what we mean by strategy. “There has probably always been a slight mythology surrounding the idea of the ‘preferred angle’. We architects like the notion that a golfer should challenge a bunker, water hazard or edge of a fairway in order to earn a materially better approach. Broadie and Fawcett have demonstrated that, for a golfer concerned exclusively with minimising score, proximity to the hole, dispersion and the severity of a potential miss frequently matter more than obtaining an architect’s theoretically ideal angle. A very good golfer is often better served hitting driver into a broad area and accepting a supposedly inferior angle than laying back or bringing a severe hazard unnecessarily into play. “But I do not think that means strategy is dead. I think it means that strategy cannot depend upon the architect simply declaring that one side of a fairway is the ‘correct’ side. To me, strategy exists whenever the architecture causes a golfer to make a meaningful decision. Choosing not to challenge a hazard is still a strategic decision. In fact, if the hazard causes a knowledgeable player to alter their target because the statistical penalty of entering it outweighs the potential reward, the hazard is very much influencing play. The player and architect may simply disagree about whether accepting that risk is worthwhile. “That distinction is important. The purpose of strategic architecture should not be to trick a golfer into making a statistically poor decision. It should be to create competing advantages and disadvantages that change according to the golfer, conditions, hole location, wind and, importantly, the golfer’s appetite for risk. Something Rod Whitman impressed upon me very early in my career is that truly great golf architecture relies first upon routing, contour and great greens, rather than simply using hazards as a defence. I think that distinction becomes even more important in light of what Broadie and Fawcett have demonstrated. If the strategy of a golf hole disappears once a golfer realises they should simply avoid a bunker, perhaps there was not much strategy there in the first place. A great hole should continue asking questions even after the golfer has decided where they do not want to go. “That is one reason the great links of Scotland, Ireland and England remain such important study grounds for golf course architects. Their enduring interest is not simply the result of strategically positioned bunkers. It comes from routing, natural contour, firmness, irregular lies, ground movement, wind and the wonderful randomness of the land itself. Those elements interact so that different golfers confront different problems, and the same golfer can confront an entirely different problem from one day to the next. Change the wind and the preferred side of a fairway may change. Change its strength and a feature that was irrelevant yesterday suddenly becomes central to the hole. Change the firmness of the ground and a contour that helped a ball towards the green may begin carrying it away. The golf course never quite plays the same way twice. That variability is incredibly difficult to reduce to a single mathematical solution, and I think “ Strategy exists whenever the architecture causes a golfer to make a meaningful decision” STRATEGY
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