Feel the Change

Every morning when I wake up, one of the first things I do is splash some cold water on my face. The jolting effect not only refreshes the skin but also mentally brings me into the day and out of the foggy dream state. At night, I may go through the same ritual despite seeking the opposite goal of exiting the day and entering a quieter state of mind. Same action, opposite goals.

But are the goals truly opposite? Upon further reflection, the core of the goal is neither to wake up nor to fall asleep; it is to change state. 

This got me thinking about all aspects of life and led me to a conclusion: humans crave change—the feeling of something new, something different from before. The coming of autumn and break from the summer heat is about as welcome as the return of that same summer heat after a long, cold winter. A trip to the busy city is an exciting disruption from the quiet country life; a trip to the country is a much-needed respite from the sounds and chaos of the city. A vacation can’t come soon enough after a busy stretch at the office, yet how many of us are eager to get back to work after an extended time away (see: 2020-2021)?

Change feels good. Change feels fresh. Think about food. Our omnivorous diets have us eating burgers one night, Chinese the next, tacos on Tuesday, and a fresh salad after all that to cleanse and reset. Movies and TV shows? Sometimes you need to engage the mind with a drama or documentary, other times you need to zone out with some mindless dreck, and still others you just need a good laugh. Music? The best albums know how to pace their songs both in terms of intensity and speed, and I contend that the best songs are the ones that do the same, balancing pleasing changes of chord, volume, and meter.

And that brings us to golf.

Donald Ross once said, “Variety is the spice of golf, just as it is of life.” Variety itself, though, is not the key here. Rather, it is the necessary base ingredient for the experience of change.

The changes we crave in golf come at all levels and stretches of time. At the macro end, we may go through a phase of craving links golf, but after a few weeks in the whipping winds and rain, a return to warmer, calmer parkland golf might be welcome. The beauty of golf and the nature (literally) of our playing fields is such that we can satisfy our ever-changing appetites. 

What I really want to focus on here, though, are the elements of change experienced within a single round. These elements take on many forms, most of which can be related to a course’s routing. One might naturally first consider changes such as hole lengths, shot angles, and strategy types. But the changes I find to be most notable and impactful are those of space/landscape, hole drama/severity, and overall hole difficulty.  

With all of these elements, it is common for us to desire, or even need, change. A course with no drama and challenge whatsoever is boring and a waste of our time. On the contrary, a course with nonstop drama and challenge can be exhausting and disorienting. At a course played over a singular landscape—even a beautiful one—it can be difficult to remember the holes. At one that moves in and out of different spaces and settings, you can better remember what you did on the course and when. The changing of these characteristics is what keeps the golf experience fresh and memorable.

When it comes to difficulty, golfers love the chance to score and conquer a course, but after enough bland or easy holes, they will inevitably crave more challenge. On the opposite end, who doesn’t love a good breather hole after a particularly difficult stretch of golf?  The shorter, downhill fourth at Pasatiempo is always a relief after the long first, tricky second, and the notoriously tough par-3 third.

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Hole drama can mean a number of things—challenge, land severity, and variance of outcome (i.e. “risk/reward”). The most dramatic holes likely contain at least some element of each. The 18th at Kapalua’s Plantation Course is a fine example, as would be a number of holes at tumbling links courses like Lahinch, Ballybunion, or Cruden Bay. Flatter courses that weave through lakes and ponds, such as TPC Sawgrass or Bay Hill, can also provide drama through the fear of penalty strokes if the player takes on the heroic line of play and fails.  

Nos. 9 and 10 at St. Andrews are the opposite of dramatic, but they are brilliant for that very reason. These holes not only provide a chance to make some birdies with their shorter length and big greens but also offer respite—visually and mentally—from the world’s best and most consistently undulating small-scale links contours, relentlessly encountered on Nos. 2 through 8 and then again from the 11th green inward. The change is one of relief and recovery before heading into the mind-melting finishing stretch.

The most powerful types of change, though—both consciously and subconsciously—are those of landscape setting and space. By “space,” I mean the physical area in which people find themselves, ranging from an unencumbered ocean view to an intimate enclosure of redwoods. The reason I believe this is the most powerful form of change is that it’s something that all golfers—regardless of ability—can notice, feel, and enjoy. It goes beyond our golfing senses; it instead hits on our human senses. 

As humans who have historically spent most of our time wandering the undeveloped earth, we acutely feel when we’ve transitioned from a woodland to a prairie, from an exposed plateau to a protected dell, from the desert to an oasis. It’s in our DNA as past hunter-gatherers. So, when a golf course includes these transitions, it perks up our senses, making the overall experience, and the holes themselves, more memorable. A change in landscape marks a place in time, an opportunity to recall after the round the cross bunker on that one hole in the trees, or the dip before the green on that hole up on the ridgetop.

These transitions can take many forms. Trees into open land (and vice versa) is an obvious one and most common. Some courses do this overtly: Bandon Trails starts in the open sand dunes before venturing into the coastal forest and back out. On the same property a bit north, Old Macdonald takes the opposite tack, starting and finishing in the woods, with a long foray into the open links in between. To heighten the effect of the changing of space, the reveal of the linksland as you crest the Ghost Tree ridge on the third hole is grand and breathtaking. Less binary with its treed settings and more mixed throughout the round is Rock Creek Cattle Company in Montana, a hiking trail of a routing that dances beautifully between intimate moments in the woods and vast open views typical of Big Sky Country.

Other courses accomplish changes of tree-influenced space more subtly. Lots of Golden Age courses in the American Northeast and Midwest come to mind. Specifically, Chicago Golf Club’s few copses of trees provide little moments of spatial intimacy during an otherwise wide-open walk through the prairie.

Similarly, changes in vegetative texture and color can provide a noticeable freshness to a golf round. This could be a transition from a wildflower-laden meadow to a cattailed wetland in the Upper Midwest, or from open golden grasses to a more colorful dry creek in the American West, or in and out of heathland, links, and parkland in Great Britain.  

Land movement alone can also provide feelings of change. Playing in a valley in between two hilltops is a very different spatial experience from playing along the tops of those same hills. One is enclosed and intimate, the other open and vast. The effect is similar when the land itself changes from hillier to flatter. At Crystal Downs, even if you were to take away all of the trees on the property, the tumbling front nine and plateaued back nine would still feel sharply different from one another.  

Linksland, despite lacking trees and sometimes being texturally monotonous, often still provides a variety of experiential changes, just through shifts in topography. How many links courses start and finish in subdued land while exploring the wild stuff in between? Hoylake is a prime example. Panmure, Askernish, and Fraserburgh are others. The long-ago-expanded Prestwick does the opposite by starting and finishing in the crazy stuff, but the effect of change is still there, the more subtle middle holes offering a break from some of the wildest and most original holes anywhere, which helps you appreciate both. Most subtly of all, Muirfield elegantly mixes holes in and off of the most interesting natural features of an otherwise simple plain.

Some links will still mix in the occasional grouping of trees. Many will find this wrong or blasphemous, but I happen to find natural spots like the far western corner of Carnoustie to be beautiful and powerful moments in a round, moments that make you really “feel” the open linksland as you return to it. Mark Parsinen—developer of Kingsbarns and Castle Stuart, and ever the deep thinker—picked up on this effect. At Kingsbarns, his first course, his team worked to help the player see the sea from every hole. However, at his second course, Castle Stuart, Parsinen and architect Gil Hanse made a point of going away from the sea and then returning to it in visually stunning ways. They used the changing of views and space to make the water’s presence more powerful.

Not far from Castle Stuart is Tain, a more natural, lesser-known links that has one of my favorite routings in the world. What I love about Tain is not so much the way the individual golf holes are draped over the land, but rather the way those holes journey through the landscape. The golfer encounters rustic and tumbling linksland, an arena-like bowl through which the burn-sized River Tain meanders, open flat land hard against the bleating sounds of sheep farms, more intimate-feeling links rumple through gorse and broom, a dalliance with a Scots pine forest that almost feels heathland-like, and a crescendo of a links experience with an Alps-type green hard against the sea—all before venturing back through some of those same varied elements again. At Tain, there are changes of terrain (undulating vs. flat), space (open vs. contained by trees, gorse, and broom), and texture/color (open links grasses set against the dark greens and bright yellows of gorse and broom, as well as the distinguished orange bark of the pines set against the black of their own shadows). This is the type of natural, adventurous walk through an ever-changing landscape that anyone can enjoy.  

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Which brings me to my final example and the greatest of all when it comes to change: Cypress Point. While the coastal, cliff-edge holes late on Cypress’s back nine get the most attention, the preceding journey is loaded with changes of dramatic, beautiful landscapes. The first three quarters of the round are a seamless journey in and out of gnarled forests of pine and cypress, some of the world’s most ingenious and striking bunkering, and sugary white dunes covered in all manner of colorful, textured vegetation. And this is all before you even make that first heart-pumping walk along the clifftops to the 15th tee and play the three world-class seaside holes that await. Neighboring Pebble Beach may have a greater number of stunning coastal holes, but Cypress Point’s diversity of changing landscapes gives the course a magic unmatched in our golfing universe.

I’ve touched on some reasoning for the human attraction to change—the feeling of “keeping it fresh,” our deep past as hunter-gatherers, and our taste for variety. At its core, though, change is appealing because it hits our senses. It makes us feel. It makes us think. It makes us aware. It makes us present. Change reminds us, both consciously and subconsciously, that we are alive. I, for one, favor golf courses that do the same.

‍This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.