Golf Architecture 101: Template Holes

00:00:00
Speaker 1: What are CB McDonald's template holes, often called ideal holes? Where did they come from? And why do they seem so important to understanding golf architecture. That's what I'm talking about today with PJ Clark in this installment of our Golf Architecture one oh one series. I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf. All right, PJ, how's it going.

00:00:29
Speaker 2: I'm doing good. I'm excited for this one.

00:00:31
Speaker 3: This was this was by my own requests, so I'm really fired up here.

00:00:35
Speaker 1: Yes, we'll talk about why you requested it because I'm curious. But it's good to have It's good to have class back in session. It's been a while since we've done one of these.

00:00:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I'm excited and this is this is uh probably the number one topic I would assume I needed to learn based on what we do here and when we started this.

00:00:53
Speaker 2: So I'm happy to be I'm happy to be here.

00:00:56
Speaker 1: That's that's interesting. So hopefully I'll inform you in the way that you want to be informed. But I guess you've heard plenty of references to C. B. MacDonald and SETH Rayner and their and their template holes and our goal here is to kind of demystify that. First, though, I want to quickly clarify something that we covered in our last Golf Architecture one oh one episode, and that was the topic of the episode. Was Alistair Mackenzie's thirteen essential Features of an Ideal golf Course or his thirteen principles. The confusion in that podcast, I think came with principal number six, the principle that said there should be a minimum of blindness for approach shots. Now, what mackenzie means here is that there should not be many blind approach shots. I believe you thought he was saying that approach shots should be at the minimum blind.

00:01:54
Speaker 2: Yes, that is exactly how I read that.

00:01:57
Speaker 1: I did not pick up on this during the podcast. I wasn't I was I was failing in my job as a teacher. I wasn't listening properly, and so I was just kind of proceeding with my understanding of it without really noticing that you have interpreted it different.

00:02:11
Speaker 3: Now I'm I'm pro number six instead of very anti number six. I want to make that clear for now that I've learned the flip side.

00:02:21
Speaker 1: That was a whoops. These things happened these things. I mean, jeez, looking back on my teaching career, the things that I would just like give lectures on and then discover afterwards that my students had some basic misunderstanding that rendered my entire lecture irrelevant. That happened over and over again. And this is an example of that very understandable that you would interpret the text in that way. Really Like, when I looked at it, I was like, oh, yeah, I can totally see how he got there. And I should have clarified that Mackenzie meant not many blind approach shots. Pleased he did.

00:02:57
Speaker 3: Not like the doctor was something about something. I should have realized that if I was so confused that it was me who was wrong and not the doctor.

00:03:08
Speaker 1: Now that makes that's right. Trust the doctor.

00:03:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, blindly, that makes sense.

00:03:12
Speaker 1: It would have if we had read more of Mackenzie's writing than just the thirteen Principles, I think it would have been clear because elsewhere he kind of elaborates on this principle and talks about why he doesn't want many blind approach shots and all that kind of stuff. It was just more common in Mackenzie's day that approach shots would be blind because of course earth moving equipment wasn't what it is today, and so they kind of dealt with the lay of the land.

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Speaker 3: That makes sense that I could I could see how you know, if you just dealt the hand on the side of a hill, then it's kind of kind of what you have to work with there.

00:03:45
Speaker 1: Now, the funny thing is, blind approach shots have come back into fashion. I mean, it's it's some it's a feature of ancient architecture that people now find charming because it's somewhat rare. Blind approachots really fell out of fashion in the middle of the twentieth century, and and so because they became rare, I think people have started to gain a kind of affection for them. But in any case, I just wanted to wrap that up, and there we got a couple of comments and I was like, yeah, yeah, I missed this one. Sorry, So let's get to our topic for the day. Charles Blair McDonald's. Charles Blair McDonald's McDonald's. That would be another that'd be maybe a more Scottish version. Okay, yeah, who knows. Maybe there is a Charles Blair McDonald out there, his ideal holes or template holes. And this is I think actually very related to our discussion of Mackenzie's thirteen Principles, and that's because McKenzie and McDonald were essentially asking the same question, how do you design the ideal golf course. McKenzie's answer to that question was this list of principles. McDonald's answer was his notion of ideal holes. So the ideal holes are whole designs or concepts that you see used over and over on the courses of C. B. McDonald and his collaborator slash protege Seth Rayner McDonald and or Rayner sometimes together, right, they collaborated a lot, but sometimes just Rayner As a solo architect. They were responsible for many of the best regarded golf courses built during the Golden Age of golf architecture in America, which stretched from approximately nineteen ten to the late nineteen thirties. McDonald's best known designs include National Golf Links of America, The Ledo, Piping Rock, Sleepy Hollow, the Creek mid Ocean in Bermuda, and Saint Louis Country Club. Seth Rayner had a much bigger portfolio, right, McDonald's body of work is fairly small, so some of Rayner's highlights would include Fisher's Island, Chicago Golf Club, Shore Acres, Camargo, Yamen's Hall, et cetera, et cetera. And Rayner also served as the associate what we would now call the lead associate or construction manager or whatever on all of McDonald's major projects. A distinctive feature of McDonald and Rayner's courses is the presence of the so called template holes. These particular design concepts usually based on models from famous British links courses and adapted to whatever piece of ground McDonald and Rayner we're working with. Some of the better known template holes include the Radan, the road hole, the Eden, the Cape, the Beertz, the short, the Alps, so on and so forth. I'm sure you've heard these referred to casually in podcasts and been like, Okay, what are we talking about here?

00:06:42
Speaker 2: That's exactly how we got here.

00:06:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so that's our subject for this episode. Now we won't cover a lot of particular template holes. That may come as a disappointment, but that I mean, we're mostly in an audio medium here. We'll also publish this on YouTube with some visual and for an audio medium, I figured that just talking about specific template holes might be a little tough because we just have to talk their features out. But what I hope we can do here is kind of establish a basis for understanding all template holes, and then we can dig into whatever particular ones you're curious about. Now, as you mentioned, PJ, you actually requested that we talk about this subject. Why were you interested in it?

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Speaker 3: I feel like it comes up a lot just in random podcasts here or there, or you know, we did the rain or Man merch collection and cameras talking about how he had to draw all the template holes, and I was like, I know, that's the thing I'm supposed to know at some point, but I have no idea what you're talking about. So I got to a point I forget what entirely prompted me. But he got to a point where I was like, I have no idea what we're talking about anymore. So I needed to humbly request to get taught what every year about to teach me?

00:08:01
Speaker 1: Right now, let's go back to square one.

00:08:03
Speaker 2: It is.

00:08:04
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of like a code language. And this is one thing that can make golf architecture an intimidating subject is that you're dropped into it, and people are speaking a different language that includes words like radan and Eden and shorthole and alps, and it's if you don't understand the language, then it can feel a bit alienating. And hopefully that's that's what we're breaking down a bit here in the Golf Architecture one oh one series. I want to assure you there's nothing complicated about understanding these template holes. Most of them are are pretty simple to understand, and a lot of people who casually refer to them in conversation don't don't actually know the design concepts. That that's good. That makes me feel bad.

00:08:55
Speaker 2: That's great.

00:08:56
Speaker 1: In order to really have mastery of the subject, and yeah, you do need to dig a little bit deeper, but in order to have just a framework for the conversation, I think we can do that pretty quickly. So let's start with some background, a little bit of history. Who McDonald was, how he came up with this idea. This is actually I love this story. This is one of my one of my favorite stories to tell about golf architecture. I think it it represents so much of what the early development of golf course design as a discipline and a field of study was and so I just I just really like going through this As part of the reason I was excited about this episode. So C B McDonald, wealthy Chicago kid who ended up attending the University of Saint Andrew's in the early eighteen seventies. Saint Andrews, Scotland was and is the international home of golf. So no surprise, Yeah, it's pretty good. I often mention this, I wish I went to the University of Saint Andrews. Speaking of being a teacher, one of my one of my advises when when I was a high school teacher went to the University of Saint Andrews and I sat down with him before he accepted the offer of admission, and I was like, listen, do you play golf? And he said no, And I said, you had better learn golf.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: How do you kill?

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Speaker 3: How do you even end up in that situation? Like what prompts you to go to the University of St Andrews.

00:10:31
Speaker 1: If you're not, you know, it's a great university, Like, first of all, really really wonderful university. If you're if you're in Great Britain, it's it's it's like going to I guess an Ivy League university. So they have great academics. But I think if you go to the University of St. Andrews and don't play golf that oh.

00:10:51
Speaker 3: Man, Yeah, it's still combination.

00:10:54
Speaker 2: Sure.

00:10:55
Speaker 1: Yeah. In any case, McDonald did it right. He he really learned a game while he was there. He met and played with old Tom Morris and young Tom Morris. A good time to be there in the eighteen seventies, and he became a very capable player, ultimately one of the better players in the US when he returned. So he got back to the US in the mid eighteen seventies and he was disappointed to find that the game basically didn't exist in the country at that time. So he didn't play much golf for the next fifteen years or so, and whatever golf courses appeared during this period were, in his mind, a very low quality. They just didn't get anywhere close to what he saw in Saint Andrews. At the time. Saint Andrews was basically what it is today, a great, great golf course. You can imagine going from there to the kind of rudimentary golf courses that we had in America at the time, and it was a big difference. So when MacDonald caught the golf bug again in the late eighteen eighties, one of his primary goals became to create the first truly great American golf course. During this period, he established Chicago Golf Club, but the early versions of that course were not on the level of today's Chicago Golf Club, which was primarily designed by Seth Rayner in the nineteen twenties. Nonetheless, Chicago Golf Club was a major early American club, and McDonald became a major figure in the development of American golf.

00:12:19
Speaker 3: So is this is this just like you know, everybody makes a joke like I'm gonna go write the Great American novel like this, this is somebody just decided to go build a golf course one.

00:12:29
Speaker 1: Day, That's right. So he wanted to write the great American novel, that's right. He had that ambition, make make the great American movie, make the great American album. That I mean, yeah, this ambition is cross disciplinary for sure, goes across art forms, and this was McDonald's version of it. And so yeah, he had this desire. There's a lot of biography here that I won't get into, but McDonald did become instrumental in the founding of the USGA and the origins of the us and so there's interesting stuff there too, but I'll skip forward to the golf course design story. In nineteen oh one, McDonald was reading Golf Illustrated, probably the most popular golf only publication of the time published in the UK, and he came across a debate in the pages of Golf Illustrated between some leading golfers of the time about what the greatest holes in the world were, and by world, I mean great Britain was essentially their frame of reference and where most of the best golf courses were. So to my knowledge, this is the first time a discussion of this type happened in print, which is really saying something because this is a very common thing now right people talking about the best courses and the best holes. So try to imagine a world in which this hadn't happened before.

00:13:55
Speaker 3: This is kind of kind of crazy, just trying to, you know, starting the take industry, for lack of a better term, from nothing. That's really it's an interesting concept to think about.

00:14:08
Speaker 1: God, it's fascinating to read because that's exactly it. The first hot takes about golf architecture. It's like nobody had ever done it before. And these guys, you know, Harry Varden, Jage Taylor, James Braid, Willie Park Junior, John Lowe, Horace Hutchinson, these were the first, you know, take.

00:14:26
Speaker 2: Masters sitting there like, what have I done?

00:14:30
Speaker 1: Yeah? If they if they now.

00:14:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the end of Oppenheimer just staring blankly into the camera. It's a tough scene for those guys.

00:14:41
Speaker 1: So the golfers who participated in this debate were the heavies of the game at the time, very impressive names. The ones that I mentioned these were, you know, Open championship winners and just significant figures, and so their word carried weight and McDonald was fascinated by what they were writing. And it turned out that a certain number of holes kind of rose to the top. It got mentioned by a lot of different people as being the best of their kind. They talked about the best one shotters, two shotters, and three shotters. So par three's, par four's, par five's. The best one shotters, according to this panel, turned out to be the Eden, the eleventh hole at Saint Andrews, The were Dan, the fifteenth hole at North Barrick, the Alps, the seventeenth hole at Prestwick, the road hole seventeen at Saint Andrews, the long hole fourteen at Saint Andrews. I ended up going through the two shotters and three shotters. They're actually without mentioning it, but the road hole at the time now considered a par four, right, it's categorized as a par four. At the time it was considered more of a par five. They didn't call it a par five, but it was it was thought that you would spend three shots in getting to that green. And so those are the holes that came up, and these remain some of the most as holes in the UK. Prestwick is on the west coast of Scotland and that was that was an early old Tom Morris course. You've probably heard Andy mentioned North Barrack, Great Scottish Links Course, and then of course the old course at St Andrew's still very much on the open rota and at the top of everybody's minds. All of these holes, the ones that were mentioned in this debate in this magazine in nineteen oh one, eventually became template holes. There were more template holes than those, but this was kind of the starting point. This was the first, you know, body of whole designs that McDonald started working with. So this whole discussion and Golf illustrated it. It kind of prompted a brain wave for McDonald. He said to himself, surely if you build a course with eighteen of these ideal holes, then you would have an ideal golf course.

00:16:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a guy with good take or it.

00:17:00
Speaker 3: There.

00:17:02
Speaker 2: That's that's pretty good. I like that a lot.

00:17:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I like I like how his mind works. He's like, nobody's ever thought of this.

00:17:11
Speaker 3: And nobody could get mad because everybody agrees to the best. So that's right, that's it.

00:17:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna kind of replicate these designs and then everybody will have to acknowledge, Oh my god, you have a red dan, you have an alps, you have a road hole.

00:17:28
Speaker 3: That's that great American novel way of thinking. Right there, I'm just gonna copy everybody else. Nobody's gonna get mad.

00:17:34
Speaker 1: Right, I'll just borrow a character from Melville and you know, a little bit of pros from Fitzgerald, and there you go. In any case, he spent the next decade or so researching the best holes of Great Britain. So he took multiple trips. He sent friends on trips to do research for him and to take measurements and to really nail these down. And he quickly discovered that replicating the holes with any real precision would be impossible because of course you would be working with a different piece of land, and many of these holes were just lay of the land holes. They were not manufactured. They derived their features from the topography, and so McDonald said, well, if I don't have this topography, then then I guess I can't exactly replicate them. So ultimately he decided to go for looser interpretations, basically extracting the strategic essence of these holes, boiling them down to their basic features, rather than copying them. And I think that it was in this process that McDonald came to understand golf course design on as deep and sophisticated a level as any architect of the Golden Age. It was when he started to try to interpret these holes and actually find out why they were great instead of just replicating them, that he became a great golf architecture mind, because you know, he essentially discovered for himself the strategic school of golf architecture, which we talked about in the in the first one oh one episode. So while he was doing this, he was also searching far and wide for a piece of land for his great American golf course. He looked at Maine, he looked, he was looking up and down the East coast, and he eventually settled on a piece of land right next to Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Long Island, in Pj's domain. So eventually found found his found.

00:19:36
Speaker 2: A lot of people find things in Southampton, so it makes.

00:19:40
Speaker 1: Sense, Yeah, find their summer house, you know. So uh, this would ultimately become, of course, the National Golf Links of America, which opened in nineteen eleven and received immediate rapturous praise. People went and played this course and were blown away by it. It was it was like nothing else that had been created in the States at the time. It was a next level golf course in every way. That's a very surface level account of the creation of National Golf Links that I just gave. I've done a deeper dive into that history with Chris Millard, who wrote the most recent historical book on National Golf Links. This is a Friday Podcast episode from about a year and a half ago called Great Courses National Golf Links, So check that out if you want more detail. But it wasn't just the ideal holes that made National Golf Links different. It was also the construction, the agronomy like in every way, and the amount of money that went into it like nothing. I don't think anything close to this amount of money had ever been spent on constructing a golf course before he got all the basically the richest people on the East Coast to pitch in for his great American golf course. He was a remarkable, remarkable mover and shaker McDonald and so National Golf Links turned out really well well, And of course it did represent the debut of McDonald's ideal holes. The National had great renditions of the Radan, the Alps, the road Hole, the Eden. It was all there. It was a fully formed statement of a golf course. And McDonald meant NGLA to be his one true master work, right, his example for all of American golf. He didn't really intend to build other golf courses. He was kind of like, I'm done.

00:21:30
Speaker 3: I mean, if if you build something in it immediately gets you know rapturous praise. As you said, I could. I could see how you want to just go out on top.

00:21:39
Speaker 2: I get that absolutely.

00:21:41
Speaker 1: And you know, he has this in common with a lot of great artists too, who want to create their one great thing and then it's like, Okay, that's what I devoted my life to and I'm done. But it didn't really turn out that way, because, of course people kept asking him to design more golf courses for them. All of his rich friend were like, Hey, this looks cool, I'd like one, and so he did design a few others, but for the most part, he passed off his commissions or his potential commissions to Seth Rayner, and Rayner was really the one who spread the idea of ideal holes broadly. Rayner became the Johnny Appleseed of this approach to golf course design and a big reason why why we know template holes today. And so that's the background of the ideal holes. Before we get into some examples of templates, and before we have maybe a little bit of discussion about the virtues of ideal holes as an approach to golf course design, I'd like to talk a bit about the USGA Green Section the USGA Green Section is a supporter of the Designing Golf podcast in its early days here, so thank you so much to the Green Section. Understanding the performance of your greens has never been easy year thanks to the GS three ball from the USGA Green Section. The GS three seamlessly connects to the Deacon management system, instantly telling you how fast, smooth, true, and firm your greens are. Now you can make data driven decisions, better manage resources, communicate to course personnel, and most importantly, create a playing experience for your golfers like never before. To learn more, visit the USGA Green Sections shop at GS shop dot USGA dot org. I've actually seen the GS three ball in action. We've been doing some documentaries lately about various turf operations throughout the country. I have seen the GS three ball in use and it is pretty cool. So check out that offering from the USGA Green Section. All right, let's talk about a couple examples of templates. PJ. I'm gonna have to have you put on your sort of visualizing hat now if we can. I know this can sometimes be tricky. For the YouTube version of this episode will maybe incorporate a couple of images of these holes to help out people who consume the podcast that way. But the first one I want to talk about is the redan. Where else would be.

00:24:15
Speaker 3: Like this is the number one, This is the number one that I gets mentioned by you guys all the time.

00:24:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's a very common type of hole. It is. It's spread like wildfire. Everybody, everybody has a radan. So this is based on the fifteenth hole at North Barrick. The key elements one. The green is kind of oriented on a forty five degree angle on a diagonal in relation to the t usually from short right to long left right. Okay, so it's set on a diagonal where if you're a right hander you kind of want to work a draw into there. The green is tilted from front to back okay, so from the front right to the back left section it's tilted away from the tee. A deep, often flashed up bunker guards the front left side of the green, so kind of in front of the green, sitting on that same diagonal as the green. Sometimes there's another bunker, even deeper one perhaps guarding the back right side of the green, so if you go over you'll end up there. Now, the original version at North Barrick has a pair of bunkers cut into a rise about fifty yards short of the green. This is I think actually where the name or Dan came from. Because Dan, and I'm sure people will correct me if I'm wrong. I didn't actually confirm this before I came on the podcast. But Dan, I believe, is a term for a military fortification. And my sense is that this feature at North Barrick, this like kind of dune like rise, that these bunkers are cut into fifty yards short of the green, kind of blocking the view of the green to an extent, is where that idea of a fortification came from, and where the notion of her Dan came from. But MacDonald and Rayner's dance often did not have this feature. Sometimes they did, often they didn't didn't because again, it would require some topography to do that, you would need a rise. So the essential elements of a modern radan tend to be that orientation of the green on a diagonal, and the fact that it runs front to back, and that often there's like a kicker slope, what's called a kicker slope, a little kind of backboard at the front right portion of the green where you can hit your ball into it and it kind of deflects the ball filters it back to the back left portion of the green, so it's like a ramp, right. I think this hole is at its most strategically interesting when the pin is in the back, and that's because you can choose between going straight at the pin over that big bunker in front of the green, or you can play it along the ground through the opening to the green on the right, maybe kind of sling a low draw in there, go through the opening to the green and let the ball release along that downslope, the front to back slope back to the pin. That's the kind of clever way to play the hole. You don't have to make the big carry and you can kind of work it around. So you have options here, right, which is the soul of strategic golf options and the attendant risks and rewards. So the reason you've heard this term is that this is like the most replicated par three design in the history of golf. It is often done poorly or just partially right. The most commonly missing feature is that front to back slope because people don't usually like building holes where the green runs away from the player. But the problem is when you don't have that, you kind of lose the ability to work the ball to a back pin through that kind of clever, low running shot that I talked about. And so often people will just refer to any hole with a diagonally set green as a re dan, But personally, I don't think it's a dan at all unless you have that element of a kicker slope and a front to back slope to get the ball to a backpin through other methods than just going straight at it. I think if you don't have that, you really don't have her a dan. Reverse or dance became common as well. When people say reverse ra dan, they just mean the exact same design, but the green is set on a diagonal that would seem to accept a fade from a right handed player. This maybe isn't as common because when you know most people are right hand. Not to disrespect the lefties out there, sorry that ra dans aren't as fun for you, but uh, when you're hitting a fade, your ball stops quicker if you're a right hander and if you're a left hander, but your fing goes the other direction right hand or hitting a draw to a traditional radan, the ball is going to have less spin and it's going to have that element of being able to run along the ground, and that's why right to left radans are more common. Does that all make sense? Were you able to visualize that and stay with me any questions?

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Yeah? So A, I think it makes sense.

00:29:34
Speaker 3: I'm now trying to like because it's pretty common, think of like holes that I might have seen at some point that would that would fit this. I think, I mean, I I it definitely makes sense, and I actually appreciate the idea of I get why maybe a modern day architect, if you're building a hole like now with the you know, incessant need for a whole in one or give people a chance that you want to have people see it roll in back towards you versus a feeder pin away. But I actually I like the idea of the feeter pin away and having it kind of slope downward to me as a player, I feel like that would be more fun than having it run further and kind of work the ball versus just you know, hit it straight up in the air and have it roll back down towards you kind of thing.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: That's where the fun comes from seeing the ball go along the ground. It's the most fun thing to do in golf, and the most fun thing to watch in golf is what the ball does after it hits the ground. And when you have a green going away from you, it behaves a lot like firmness because it accelerates the ball as it goes along the ground, and you really have to consider what to do. Are you going to try to stop it or are you going to just accept that the slope is going to do what it does to your ball and use that. And that's the central question of a proper radan. Now you'll see a lot of as I said before, or diagonally set greens out there in the world of golf, and somebody might refer to them as a radan, but it's it's it's not really unless unless you can work the ball along the ground. I recommend that you don't correct people when when they not that you would do this. It's not really your personality.

00:31:17
Speaker 3: Now I feel like I just not along and yeah, right, but in my head, but I get up to that green, I'm gonna be like, oh, is there slope here?

00:31:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I can't count. It doesn't doesn't count.

00:31:27
Speaker 1: That doesn't I'm not going to check that off my list. Yeah, so, really like true radans are a little more rare than than people think. You know, diagonal greens with a bunker in front, you know, you'll see that all the time. But a real radan with like a kicker slope and the ability to to work the ball in that way, you know, that's that's it's fairly rare because you know, front to back sloping greens are are fairly rare these days. Okay, So that's the that's the radan template. That's always very helpful.

00:31:56
Speaker 3: I feel like I needed that one. If I was leaving here with something I think I've checked that buy.

00:32:01
Speaker 1: That wasn't essential. I'll talk to you about one other, and then if there's if there's another one that you want to talk about, we can we can kind of improvise that as well. But the next one I want to talk to you about is the Alps. Okay, I like this name. First of all, this is based on the seventeenth hole at Prestwick, So it's not a course that people are super familiar with these days unless they've actually played it. Because it's not a course that shows up on TV. But this was the original Open Championship course back when the Open was thirty six holes. Prestwick was twelve holes and they would play the course three times. Yeah, yeah, that was the Open.

00:32:46
Speaker 2: Well.

00:32:46
Speaker 1: Eventually Prestwick got expanded to eighteen holes and the Alps became the seventeenth hole on that course. But some version of the Alps was always was always there on the course. The key element of this hole, and I know this is going to challenge you because of what we've discussed with regard to blind holes. There's a huge dune directly in front of the green, and then typically there's a bunker between the bottom of the far side of that dune and the green. So you not only are hitting over a dune to get to the green, but there's a bunker on the other side of it. Yeah, you got to get over. You got to really make the carry. This is you know, this is not what i'd call the strategic school of golf architecture. This is pretty penal, at least in its original essence. You know, just this feature of the hole, it's fairly penal because you've got to bake a big aerial carry. The fun of it is hitting your shot and then getting up and seeing the result. You know, if you have a fun attitude about it, then you're like, all right, my in the bunker, My in the dune, My on the green. You never know until you get there, so completely blind approach, and often the green will be sitting in a hollow, a kind of punch bowl often what we refer to as a punch You may hear that term a lot too, a punch bowl green. This is an example of it's not always a pure punch bowl green, but it's sitting in a hollow there. And so if that means if you get over the dune and get over the bunker, then the green is kind of friendly to you because if you're on the right side of it, well, it's going to slope down to the middle. If you're on the left side, it's going to slip down the middle. If you're long, it's going to you just don't want to be short, and so if you make the carry, then your hole, you your ball is probably going to end up close to the hole. The key wrinkle that McDonald and Rayner introduced to many of their versions that I think is brilliant is that they would have this dune or this rise in front of the green, they would have the kind of low set green in a hollow, But then they would offer you an option from the tee to get a view of the green. Potentially, if you hit a long, risky drive up a particular side of the hole, then from that position you might be able to see around the dune to the green. If you hit your t shop especially well and positioned it. You know, perhaps there are some bunkers guarding this position in the fairway. But if you take that.

00:35:19
Speaker 3: Ask, now we're back to angles. Angles is gonna be a whole different episode. But now we're back to angles.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: Or back to angles. This angle is vision related because if you take the risk, then you can see the green on your approach. And that's nice because the whole thing about that blind approach is that it's uncomfortable. You don't know maybe where to aim, You don't know, you don't really have a true intuitive sense of how far to hit your ball. But McDonald and Rayner, in their versions of the Alps often did give you this option to see the green if you took a risk. So that's the Alps hole reactions to that.

00:35:59
Speaker 2: I like the idea of the punch bowl green.

00:36:01
Speaker 3: I think I I was gonna add that that was one of my follow up questions, so that a punch bowl is not a template or is a template or is that just like a design characteristic rather.

00:36:15
Speaker 1: It's a good question. I think I would consider it. Yeah, it's sort of in between. There are certain templates, so called templates, that are just green designs, and those would include maybe the double plateau hole. Really, what the double plateau is is a green with two plateaus and then a channel between them, and then a lower section like a three section green, where you have these two high sections where you can put pins, and then one low section where you can put a pin, and then a little trough between the plateaus. That's a double plateau green, but it's not really specific as to what the other features of a whole of the hole would be. You know, often a double plateau green is paired with a principal's nose bunker complex, which is based on a bunker complex on the sixteenth Hole at Saint Andrew's where you have kind of a couple of bunkers cut into a small mound or dune, and if you look at it from above, it looks like a nose with two nostrils, right, the bunkers the two nostrils. Silly, but you don't really see it that way from the from the ground. If you look at it from the air then in any case, so these these some of these motifs, like the double plateau green and the Principal's nose bunker complex are kind of free floating, so it's not like a whole integrated hole design. And I guess I would consider the punch bowl one of those, but there are holes on courses designed by MacDonald and Rayner with the name punch bowl, and and so it can get a little bit confusing that way. I think the best way to understand templates, though, is that they're not always strict. The par three templates, the typical par three templates, the radan, the beerz, the short hole, and the edenhole. You'll see those over and over and over in kind of similar configurations. The topography will be different and the layer it will be.

00:38:19
Speaker 2: On a par three, right, it's kind of it is what it is.

00:38:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, Whereas on the par four's and par fives often elements will be remixed, rearranged, different, different things will be used in different places, and so I think I would consider the term punch bowl to be part of that network of motifs that are sometimes used in some places and sometimes in other places.

00:38:48
Speaker 3: Okay, that makes sense, I mean, I mean back to back to the template itself. Then I like the idea of the reward of carrying this this dune you get a feeder green. That that makes sense to me in my binary yes or no one ones and zeros. If I carry this, I deserve to be rewarded. And I also I like the I like the idea of taking an angle and getting to see past the bunker. So I I I think I'm visualizing it correctly, and I I like the idea of it on paper a lot.

00:39:24
Speaker 1: Okay, that's good, but you're uncomfortable with blind approach shots, yeah, which is understandable.

00:39:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:39:30
Speaker 3: No, I I think I would be infuriated, like standing in the fair way looking at it. But if you told me, like, hey, all you have to do is hit this number and it's going to feed down, I'd be like, Okay, at least I'll try that. Like that, that makes sense. I deserve to be rewarded in some some circumstance there.

00:39:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely so you would. You would be frustrated by the Maiden hole, which as a whole was a hole at Royal Saint George's where you where it was a par three but basically an Alps whole because you are standing on the tee and just hitting over a dune to a semi kind of punch bowl green on the other side. That was the Maiden hole. Now, confusingly enough, McDonald and Rayner developed on some of their courses a maiden template. It didn't really have anything. It was more of a green design than a replica of the Saint George's Maiden hole. And so that that kind of introduces a key idea of Rainer and McDonald's templates that sometimes the hole, sometimes the ideal holes are based on models that are either unknown or are so different from what McDonald and Rayner ended up creating that it's hard to see the connection. I yeah, So when people talk about template hole, it's really not a strict one to one relationship between the model and what ultimately got built. On many of McDonald and Rayner's courses, sometimes there was some real interpretation reinterpretation going on, and sometimes there was just a complete departure from the original model, and you just like, it's a mystery what was going through their minds And nobody really knows how they came up with what they came up with, and so there was there was, there was a lot of creativity in this process of developing ideal holes, and we're still coming to terms with what exactly they did. There are some unknowns here. Basically, are there any other template holes terms that you would that you're curious to have identified?

00:41:48
Speaker 2: Yeah? I have.

00:41:48
Speaker 3: I have two ways I want to take this. So on the are there any other holes? How does a road hole work when it's.

00:41:55
Speaker 2: Not the road hole?

00:41:56
Speaker 3: Because I understand what it looks like there, but I how do you take that out of that context and there's no hotel and you're not you know, you're removing all circumstantial, you know, outside influences.

00:42:10
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, first of all, that when McDonald first there's no Old Course hotel. Yeah it was, it was something different. But but yes, that's a great question because the road hole uses certain unique features of the Saint Andrew's city scape to create its strategy, one of which is that little corner with you know that now the Old Course hotel, but there's always been some amount of building or human settlement there that players are kind of hitting over. And then there's the road, of course, on that backside of the green. This is an example of where McDonald may have looked at the original version of the hole said, clearly, this needs to be one of the ideal holes, because everybody agrees that it's the greatest three shot hole or two shot hole or whatever you wanted to consider it in the world. We've got to have some version of this, but we can't replicate exactly the features that it has in its landscape. And so I think what McDonald and Rayner ended up doing in their versions was boiling the hole down to its strategic fundamentals, its angles. Essentially, if you think about what the road Hole really is, beyond just the particularities of the hotel and the road, it is a sharply dog legging right hole with an intimidating hazard on the inside of the dog leg and plenty of room to play on the outside of the dog leg. But then a green oriented from right to left along that redan diagonal, but designed completely differently from a ridan with a super deep, terrifying bunker embedded into that green on its left side, and then a hazard, a kind of straight line hazard on the outside on the other side. And so the conundrum you find is that if you bail out away from the hazard on the inside of the dog leg, then you're facing approach and approach where you're hitting over that terrifying pop punker and toward the road on the other side. You are going to end up either in the pop bunker or on the road, neither of which is good. And maybe you'll maybe you have some space to bail out on one side or the other. You could play short of the green. Some people even provocatively play long of the green on the road hole, but that is the strategic essence of the whole. Unless you challenge the inside of the dog leg, you're going to face an enormously difficult second shot. And that is what McDonald and Rayner extracted from the road hole. So ultimately what they did was in st out of the road, they often just put a bunker on the other side there to stand in for the road, kind of a linear bunker, basically in the same position and in the same orientation as the road, and then maybe they'd find something else for the inside of the dog lake, maybe some trees, maybe maybe some water, you know, things varied, or maybe just some bunkers to again stand in for that hazard that you would want to avoid on the inside of the dog lake.

00:45:29
Speaker 3: So that was my follow up question was does it need to be like a boundary, like do you have to have a like a literal like road or out of play or whatever, like does this have to be pushed up against the edge of a property or like what are you throwing on that side to that end there?

00:45:49
Speaker 1: You could definitely argue that in order to recreate the tension of the road hole, you need a boundary because you really need those hazards on that outside of the green and the inside of the dog leg to be absolutely just the things that you know you need to avoid at all costs. So I think some people would argue that, yes, it needs to be an out of bounds kind of situation. But the fact is that if you look at McDonald and Rainer's versions of the road hole, they usually didn't have that because they didn't usually have a boundary line with the right dimensions to create that, so they needed to create it in another way. But yeah, I think that in general, the road Hole, to my mind, this is just my opinion, is not always the most successful McDonald and Rainer template. I think precisely because of this reason, because usually it's not a boundary and some of the character of the hole is lost as a result. I don't think I've ever seen a version of the road Hole that exceeds the original.

00:47:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, Whereas whereas.

00:47:01
Speaker 1: Some other templates, in many cases the renditions by MacDonald and Rayner were better, and I don't think that's the case with the road Hole. Is the original so good?

00:47:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like it would be hard to beat that actually having the road and the bunker, you know, how you can put you know, a penal bunker in that position, but are you getting it to be that exact bunker? And how bad that is in that slope? I you know, I feel like it's hard to replicate anywhere.

00:47:34
Speaker 1: This is always the problem with influences in art, because if you're just trying to replicate something that you really love, a really great work of art, you're always going to fall a little short because it's not the original. And even if you try to tweak or improve some elements of it, the original is going to have something about it that is just better. And so in order to exceed your influences or be as great as your influences, you need to transform them in the process of making new art. And I think that's why the McDonald and Rainer templates that are really different from their models tend to be the better ones.

00:48:12
Speaker 3: So that's that's kind of the second half of my two ways that I wanted to take this. I wanted to figure out what the road hole was when you remove all context of the actual road hole. Now my question to you is, do you think, in your opinion, however you want to take this, like, are the template holes good?

00:48:34
Speaker 1: Like this is a question I had for you as well.

00:48:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, even obviously they are to some extent that they're still being used one hundred and twenty years after this all started, But like, would you prefer to have these continually be used into the future or is it time to kind of move on and figure out something new?

00:48:55
Speaker 1: Wonderful question? Let me throw it back at you briefly before I give my thoughts on it. Do you think the template holes are unoriginal? That's the first question. Do you think their lack of originality is a problem?

00:49:08
Speaker 3: I don't think it's a problem because, like you said, like you're never getting the same land, and it's not going to be kind of cookie cutter, like every single time you build it is going to be the exact same thing. I like having aspects of recurring motifs, like you said, throughout an architect's kind of portfolio. I think that makes sense. That's kind of like any kind of art, that you're going to have kind of recurring themes or identifiable characteristics. But you know, I think, especially when you're talking about the you know, amount of land that now some of these courses are taking up, like if you have the opportunity to get creative, I wouldn't necessarily be against that either.

00:49:56
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, no, I think you've thought through that really well. For me, what you said at the beginning that the land differentiates template holes from each other is the key thing to understand about McDonald and Rayner's own courses. I think when you look at these courses from a Google Earth view, you might say they're just doing the same holes over and over again. But when you play them, that kind of flies out of your mind. Because each McDonald and Rainer course, especially their best ones, especially National Golf Links or the leado As recreated in the Sand Valley, or Rainer's best courses like the course at Yale or Yamen's Hall or Chicago Golf Club. When you actually play these courses, they feel so specific and original to their piece of land. I think especially Rainer's genius because he designed so many more courses than McDonald, But Rayner's genius was finding different ways to adapt these template ideas to different pieces of land is really an interesting exercise, and he managed to come up with courses that just feel totally original time after time, totally unique. And that was something that goes beyond just theorizing the ideal holes. It drew on the skills of routing and you know, just finding opportunities in the land that you know were field skills. They were on the ground skills that McDonald and Rayner had in doing this. So their genius goes way way beyond just coming up with the ideal holes. Now, I think it's true that occasionally I wish that Rayner would have used different Part three ideas. That's really where this kind of starts to become a bit repetitive. And whenever Rainer incorporates a new kind of par three into his set of part three's on a particular course, I get really exciting. WHOA, yeah, I haven't seen this before. That's where it becomes exciting. And also something to bear in mind is that on every McDonald and Rainer course there are holes that they didn't replicate elsewhere. It's not one hundred percent template holes. On any McDonald and Rayner course, there are always kind of one of one holes, and sometimes it's those ones that really jump out at you for a variety of reasons. And maybe that does indicate a new direction for golf architecture after McDonald and Rayner, that that pursuing these original ideas moving beyond the templates was the way to go. At the same time, I do appreciate the way that the ideal holes were adapted to each landscape of each course, and I don't necessarily wish that they did that. They did things differently. Now. I think it's a separate question should modern architects use template holes. What's your thought about that.

00:53:08
Speaker 3: I think there's probably a line, a really fickle line, between use and overuse. I wouldn't say don't do it, but I would caution against overdoing it. I don't know exactly where that line is. Like you said, like the dan comes up a lot, you want to do one of those like cool, but maybe don't like put all of them out there, you know what I mean?

00:53:32
Speaker 1: Right? And there are some modern courses that use all template holes. Old McDonald at Bandon Dune's is an example, and Gil Hants recently did one in Florida called Kinsale. And these courses are good Old McDonald I love, But what old McDonald did is that it took the template holes and did something new with them. That course doesn't look like a McDonald and Rainer course. The aesthetics are totally different. The way the bunkers greens are built is totally different. It looks much more like Saint Andrew's than it does like National Golf Links. And that was the new idea that Tom Duck introduced. So in my opinion, I'm with you. Don't overdo it, first of all, because they've already been done really well. And if you're gonna do it, find a new spin, find a new slant.

00:54:22
Speaker 2: Find a new slant. These are perfectly normal collers. Find find a new.

00:54:26
Speaker 1: Slat, perfectly normal template holes. Yeah, find find your new slant and do it in that way. But to an extent, the purpose of McDonald and Rayner's template holes has has gone because their original purpose was to introduce great design ideas to America. They did that. Yeah, And now that they've done that, I guess it's time for us all to move on. And then, besides that, another question that's ra by McDonald and Rayner's project here recreating the ideal holes, a bigger question about the entire idea of it is whether a course with the eighteen best holes is necessarily the best golf course. That was McDonald's theory at the beginning. If I create eighteen ideal holes, I will have the ideal golf course for a variety of reasons. I don't think I agree.

00:55:27
Speaker 3: No, I feel like you need what's making the holes great. I've never been to say Andrews, but I think part of what makes the road hole great, for example, is the context of it and having it be, you know, late in the round where it's positioned in the routing, having the road, having the now hotel like, all of that is what makes the whole legendary. And if you remove literally all of that, then it's just like a nice gulfer.

00:56:00
Speaker 1: Think you're exactly right. The wonder of Saint Andrew's is the journey out to the estuary and back to town. That's what's so great about I mean, that's one of the things that's so great about that golf course that that accounts for a lot of its emotional impact on players. That you kind of you kind of go on an adventure away from town and then for the last several holes, the town gets bigger and bigger in your frame of view until you're finally right in it. And part of the magic of the road hole is that it directly engages with the town. The town is like part of that. Yeah, that's right, And this is what you've been building towards throughout the whole round. You went away from it, now you're coming back to it, and so that is that is a big part of why the road hole is so cool. And and when you take it out of context and you and you make it the fourth hole on a golf course and you and you don't have those elements of the town there, then what you have is the strategy, which is really cool, but it is different. And that's why that's why responding to the particular piece of land that you have in designing a golf course is probably always the best method. Now, if you don't have anything in that piece of land that's interesting, then you can consider what to do from there. But if you have a piece of land with great features in it, then the first job is to use those features well. And that's what the old course does, and by the way, that's what so many of McDonald and Rayner's best courses do as well. In addition to having these template holes, they also use the land extremely well. They don't miss any opportunities. Does that make you feel more comfortable with the template holes now, PJ? There are many more specific instances to talk about, but I hope that that's gotten you to a point where at least the discussion as a whole makes sense.

00:57:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well again, I wanted to leave here with knowing whatever Dan was. I think I'm hammered.

00:58:05
Speaker 3: I got that one locked down, so mission accomplished. All of this other historical context is great gravy, but I'm leaving here with something I love it.

00:58:17
Speaker 1: PJ. Always a pleasure to talk to you about golf architecture. One oh one. We'll do it again soon, and please let me know if there's another topic that you want to dig into.

00:58:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll have to think about it, but I don't know. Give me a couple of weeks of hearing you guys talk about something and something will pop it in my brain.

00:58:33
Speaker 1: I'm sure exactly. This episode of Designing Golf was produced by our guest PJ Clark. Thank you PJ for everything you do online. Now, if you've been enjoying Designing Golf, leave us a rating and review wherever you happen to be listening to us. We like to hear feedback, and also consider joining Frida Egg Golf Club recently renamed as we relaunched our website. We're building a great community in there where we talk about things like Dan's and so if you like talking about that kind of stuff, then come join us in Frida Egg Golf Club. Go to the Frida Egg dot com slash membership enjoy our upcoming golf here where you know, we just finished the PGA Championship and the US Open is quickly approaching. So we're going to do some fun things on designing golf that are related to the major championship venues, So make sure to stick with us for that thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.