With the Players Championship now upon us, somebody is going to drop the g-word when talking about the 17th at TPC Sawgrass, the infamous island green. All golfers have opinions about gimmick holes, so I thought I’d go ahead and put mine out there: Most of the time, I like ‘em. Sometimes I love ‘em.
If that doesn’t make you navigate away from this page, here’s another warning: A lot of what follows is semantic, a word almost as dirty as gimmick. It’s a consideration of the kinds of holes that get labelled as gimmicks, and why they get that label. It reaches that maddening non-conclusion that gimmicks are a matter of degree and intention. The gimmick is often in the eye of the beholder.
Secretly, or not-so-secretly, I believe most golfers would agree with me that there are good gimmicks, even great gimmicks.. Why else are the biggest crowds at the Players Championship always gathered around the 17th? Why else are we fascinated the Road Hole, the 17th at St. Andrews, the grand-daddy of gimmick holes. The Road hole has not just one but FOUR classic “gimmick” features (see taxonomy, below). When the Open Championship is played at St. Andrews, the bleachers behind the Road Hole always seem to be the first to fill. The gimmicks set the hole apart and make for high drama as the players try to solve the puzzle of the hole. Even when they can’t avoid the gimmicks — the wall off the tee, the road, the stone wall behind the green, the deadly bunker — the effort to get out of trouble can be either grisly or marvelous. Grisly: David Duval taking several whacks to get out of the bunker. Marvelous: Jimenez, his back to the hole, smacking a ricochet off the stone wall that sails up in a high parabola and lands in the center of the green.
Answer honestly: If you play TPC Sawgrass, what hole are most looking forward to playing? If you play St. Andrews, what hole is in the back of your mind as you go through the round? And if you avoid all the gimmicks at the Road Hole — answer honestly! — aren’t you just a wee bit disappointed that you didn’t get to play out of the bunker, or off the road, or off the wall?
Playing out sideways from Road Hole bunker
Maybe I’m masochistic, or just plain wrong, but I think most golfers relish the challenge of what is usually called a “gimmick” hole. The word, in just about every dictionary, is defined as a “ruse” or “trick,” a definition that doesn’t really apply to many holes that get tagged as gimmicks. There’s no trick or ruse or deceit of any kind at the the 17th at Sawgrass — the island green sits there, plain as the nose on your face. It’s just a scary shot. Ditto the Road Hole Bunker. It’s there in plain sight, and might as well have a sign on it: HIT IT HERE AND YOU WILL BE SORRY. Still, we hit it there, flawed mortals that we are.
In any discussion of gimmick holes, people quickly start making distinctions and relative judgments, and these often have to do with intent. When the Road Hole took shape, there was no way to get around it — there was a shed jutting into the corner of the land available for golf, and a road and a wall behind the green location. These structures were simply incorporated into the hole. Today, no architect could build such structures without being tagged a gimmick-maker.
Provisional definition: “Gimmick hole: golf hole dominated by a feature deliberately contrived by the architect to present exceptional interest or challenge.”
Even that definition has gaping holes and provides plenty of room for distinctions and relative judgments. The discussion is always slippery. After Tiger Woods called the 17th at Sawgrass “too gimmicky,” he went on to say that the hole didn’t work as the 17th hole in an important tournament, but it would make a great 8th hole. OK, but may I ask a follow-up question: Does a gimmick hole turn into a non-gimmick according to its place in the routing? Wouldn’t a great 8th hole be even greater as the 17th, when the chips are down? If the hole was just “gimmicky” but not “too gimmicky,” would it be acceptable?
Maybe the only thing to which all parties would agree is that a gimmick hole is “unfair” — and that goes to the heart of the matter. For golf architects, and for golfers, “fairness” is a concept of philosophical and moral dimensions. On one side, there are the architects who try to build courses where “everything is right there in front of you” — the kind of course where all problems are in plain sight, and the execution of correct shots results in a predictable outcome. A ball hit down the fairway draws a level lie, greens are shaped to hold an approach shot, and even if a player ends up in a bunker, he expects to be able to advance the ball toward the hole.
On the other side, there are architects like Tom Doak, who said, “In our office, ‘fair’ is the f-word.” Doak’s company is called Renaissance Golf Design, and his philosophy derives from the old masters. The first builders of golf courses didn’t have the means to shape entire landscapes, and they recognized the capricious or random bounce as an inevitable part of the game, the “rub of the green.” They accepted all kinds of situations — e. g., a road and a stone wall — as simply parts of the golfing landscape. Fair? Maybe not, but there they were, and the fellow laying out the golf course had to deal with them. So did the golfer playing the course.
Blind tee shot at #3, Old Macdonald. That dune is higher than it appears.
For designers like Doak, whose courses take their shape from the lay of the land, “fair” isn’t the governing principle. At Old Macdonald, the newest track at Bandon Dunes Resort, Doak and co-designer Jim Urbina built a course where the interest and excitement is compounded by many “gimmicky” features — blind shots, hidden bunkers, bunkers in the middle of fairways, and greens that defy any number of orthodox expectations about what is “fair.” In and of itself, Old Macdonald could provide a case study in why gimmicks make for fun, fascinating golf.
To be clear, I’m speaking only for myself here, certainly not for Mssrs. Doak and Urbina, who might not embrace the word gimmick as readily as I do. But when I think about holes that stick in the memory, holes that I’d like to play again, I come up with a list that is loaded with gimmick holes. The 17th at Sawgrass and the Road Hole are on that list, along with the 3d at Old Macdonald, the 18th at my home course, Whiskey Creek, and any number of holes from North Berwick, a course that’s in my Top 5 in the world.
So I tried to come up with a “taxonomy”, a modest effort to name the kinds of features that are most often singled out as the elements of gimmick holes. I put the word in quotation marks because this “taxonomy” is far from scientific. On the contrary, it is highly subjective. All comments are welcome — additions, corrections, and flat out rebuttals.
GIMMICK HOLES — A TAXONOMY
A. The Blind Shot. I’d be willing to bet that the blind shot is most often singled out as the feature that makes a hole gimmicky. Take a look reviews of courses by Mike Strantz, and you run into a buzzsaw of complaints about gimmicky holes — nearly all of them holes with blind shots. I would agree that Strantz might have been overfond of them, but he created many a memorable hole by requiring a blind shot. C. B. Macdonald, the first to call himself a golf architect, allowed that three blind shots per round was probably the outer limit; he set up a couple of doozies on holes #2 and #3 at his masterpiece, National Golf Links.
It is useful to bear in mind, however, that not all blind shots are gimmicky. On hilly courses, they are unavoidable, and on many older courses there are plenty of holes that require blind shots. They are simply part of the mix. To qualify as a gimmick, a blind shot has to be deliberately incorporated into the strategy of the hole, usually the central element of the strategy.
Subcategories:
1. Blind tee shots. Since this is a subjective taxonomy, I can say that I much prefer the REALLY blind tee shot, like the one at the Road Hole or at #3 Old Macdonald, the Doak-Urbina version of the Sahara. There the golfer is confronted with towering dune that runs diagonal to the line of play (the same kind of challenge exists at #9 Pacific Dunes). To send the ball whistling over such an obstacle puts a spring in a golfer’s step — you can’t wait to see where your majestic shot has finished! These blind shots — these gimmicks — are far more satisfying that the far more common, run-of-the-mill blind tee shot were a the contour of the fairway hides the landing area, where the blindness does nothing except prevent you from seeing the ball finish.
#16 Old Macdonald. The "Alps" is the hill on the left. Most players will have to play right over it.
2. Blind approach shots. Macdonald opined that the blind approach should be played with a long iron, and it is true that it’s a thrill to see a long shot sail over a hill. He liked these shots so much that he built an Alps hole wherever he could. I even like the old-fashioned practice of setting a target on a pole, or up in a tree, to serve an aiming point for such an approach. The 14th at North Berwick, called Perfection, calls for an approach to completely hidden green that backs up to the Firth of Forth; you know the sea is back there, and you have the eerie feeling that you ball is going to drop into oblivion. Then you crest the hill, and the white pellet is safely aboard the green — happiness. Is this hole gimmicky? Yes, with thanks to whoever had the imagination to dream it up.
3. Blind par 3. The original, I believe, is The Dell at Lahinch, where the green is completely hidden behind a three story mound. The line of play is indicated by a white rock high on the side on the dune, and the rock is moved as the pin position is changed. Mike Strantz was blown away by this hole, and did homage by building a splendid blind par 3 at Royal New Kent. When young Tom Doak built his second course, Heathlands, in Myrtle Beach, he designed a hole of 150 yards where the pin can be tucked out of sight. Both these modern holes, however, have many pin positions that are not blind.
B. Gimmicky Greens. Green features that seem gimmicky can drive a golfer up wall. Maybe I’m speaking for myself here, but I think I’ve heard cries of outrage — Unfair! Unfair! — on greens more often than anywhere else on the course. Here are the top subcategories of green gimmicks.
#16 North Berwick. Take a close look at the depth of the chasm in this Biarritz green.
1. Slope. Obviously, this is a matter of degree. The slope that is acceptable in May may be called a gimmick at June when the speed has increased and balls are rolling off the green, down the hill, and into the bunker or the water hazard. The USGA has been charged with making several greens on U. S. Open courses too severe, and the words “unplayable” and “gimmicky” are used interchangeably. Think of the 7th at Shinnecock Hills, the 18th at Olympic, and the 18th at Southern Hills. The best players in the world couldn’t stop short putts within 10 feet of the hole. Or consider the 16th at Augusta National. When Fred Couples misses a four-foot putt and has to follow it 40 feet down the slope, does that mean the green is gimmicky? Maybe not for Couples, since we expect a top pro to manage these conditions. But if it happened to us in a close match at our home course .. . somebody would hear about it.
2. Turtleback. This kind of green goes by many names — hogback, crown, humpback. We all know and fear it as a green where, if you miss just a little to one side, you are likely to be playing the next shot from the other side. Even from ten feet away, this green is hard to hold. To get a ball to stop on the putting surface can seem like a magical balancing act. Some golfers rise up in wrath when confronted with these greens; writer Jerry Tarde dubbed the 14th at Bandon Trails “Crenshaw’s Folly” because the sliver of a green requires such a precise shot. It’s a short par 4, and an architect might be forgiven for requiring precision when the approach is played with a wedge. Or he might not be.
3. Biarritz. The Biarritz green has had a comeback lately, appearing in courses designed by Doak-Urbina, Jeff Brauer, Eric Bergstol, and Mike Strantz. For purposes of this taxonomy, the Biarritz may be considered a generic term that covers any significant internal feature on a green — a wildly dramatic ridge, say, or an internal bunker. From a design point of view, the rationale is to add variety and interest, and a touch of severity (or just plain whimsy) seems more permissible when the golfer has to overcome the problem with a putter in hand. Here again we wander into the realm of the subjective, since some extreme features seem to elicit nothing but praise even when they wreck scorecards. Others draw near-universal criticism. All I can say is that the day I arrived at North Berwick, I spent a lot of the afternoon in the bay window of the Marine Hotel, watching group after group trying to solve the problems of the green at #16, the prototype of the Biarritz. Take a close look at the photograph. I don’t think any of the modern designers have built a Biarritz that comes close to this one in terms of severity.
C. Gimmicky Bunkers. When is a bunker gimmicky? I’m tempted to answer, When it takes Jack Nicklaus four shots to get out. That would mean that the Hell Bunker on the 14th at St. Andrews is a gimmicky bunker . . . sacrilege! I know I have already committed sacrilege by applying the g-word to the Road Hole bunker, but a great many bunkers on classic courses fly in the face of an idea that has acquired the status of orthodoxy for some contemporary designers — namely, a bunker must NOT prevent a golfer from playing toward the hole. These architects would never build revetted, or sod-faced bunkers, nor the sort of steep-faced fairway bunkers at Carnoustie, where the only way to exit is sideways or backwards.
Special citation: bunkers that merit the name Devil’s Asshole. The prototype is Pine Valley #10, and it seems to have been the fashion to build one of these bad boys during the 1920′s (I’ve played some older, ordinary courses in the NE where the most memorable feature of the whole layout was the DA). Nowadays, the name gets attached to any deep bunker where it’s likely to take 2 or more whacks just to get out (the 15th at Bandon Dunes, for instance), but the originals tend to be circular pits, equipped with ladders for the poor sod who has to make the descent into those nether regions.
The 13th at North Berwick, with the green tucked behind a stone wall
D. Gimmicky obstructions. The list could be long, but it would includes stone walls, roads, and manmade structures such as sheds or old ruins. One of the earliest and most violent protests of unfairness came from C. B. Macdonald, who in 1894 lost a tournament billed as the national amateur championship because, he claimed, his ball had come to rest against a stone wall, and no self-respecting championship course would tolerate a wall that interfered with play. Coming from one who was familiar with North Berwick, where stone walls bisect several fairways, this was an odd complaint.
Finishing hole at Whiskey Creek
Nowadays, when ideas of orthodox design are firmly entrenched in some minds, it is simply assumed that man-made structures have no place on a course. To use one to define the strategy of a hole — heresy. At my home course, Whiskey Creek in Ijamsville, MD, the finishing hole has the stone ruins of a farm house in the landing area of the fairway. The first two architects who took a crack at designing the course insisted that the ruins had to be torn down. Then the design team of Ernie Els and JMP came in and built the hole, using the ruins to divide the fairway. Play left, into a narrow slot, and you have a good chance to reach the green in two. Play right, and you have a three-shotter. Are the ruins a gimmick? I don’t know, but I do know that people who play the course love this hole and that it has often been singled out as one of the top finishing holes in the Mid-Atlantic.
. . . . . .
Here endeth my taxonomy. I realize that I haven’t addressed several kinds of situations that come under the heading of gimmicky — the drop shot, for instance, or trees in the fairway. Haven’t said a word about features that exist purely for show, visual gimmicks — waterfalls, anyone? Haven’t even gotten around to defining a category for the island green, which is where this started. But that’s easy enough: the 17th at Sawgrass gets knocked as a gimmick because there’s no margin for error, and it runs afoul of some folks’ idea of “fairness.” If Pete Dye had built the same island green with a nice bailout area to one side, it wouldn’t be a gimmick hole . . . and no one would pay much mind.
As I said at the top, I love a lot of gimmick holes. I think they’re the same holes that rate high on many lists, but most golfers don’t like to call them gimmicks. It’s just an ugly word. I wish I could come up with a better one and make it stick. Since I can’t, I’ve written the above in the hope that it might take some of the curse off the word. One man’s gimmick can be another man’s grail.
