Chocolate Drops: Gil Hanse Reveals His First TGL Hole Design

→ Last week, screen-golf league TGL announced that architect Gil Hanse had joined its roster of hole designers. Accompanying the announcement was an awkward, faintly surreal video of a bemused Hanse making a WWE-like entrance into an empty SoFi Center.

TGL also unveiled one of Hanse's designs, a 590-yard par 5 called "Stone & Steeple." The hole contains a few of the architect’s favored motifs: a threatening boundary wall, a lone bunker intruding on the second-shot layup zone, and a huge "Sahara"-style waste area, strewn with turf islands. Even the graveyard along the left side of the hole has precedent in Hanse's body of work: in his renovation of Waverley Country Club in Portland, Oregon, he moved the second green about 50 yards back, bringing a 19th-century cemetery into play.

To me, the most striking aspect of Hanse's design is the double diagonal formed by the two sections of fairway on either side of the Sahara bunker. The basic idea, I gather, is that the farther players hit their drives without carrying the bunker, the worse their angle into the green will become. But if they want to make the long carry over the bunker on the left side and earn a shorter second shot from a better angle, they will need to bring the wall into play.

Classic strategic-school stuff, in other words. I would enjoy playing this hole, if it were real. And you know what? It basically looks real. And that might be a problem.

So far, the reception of Stone & Steeple on social media has been somewhat chilly. Many fans seem to feel that TGL holes, since they’re not constrained by physical and economic realities, should be crazier, more video game-like, more purely inventive. As my colleague Joseph LaMagna put it on X, "TGL's biggest whiff is designing realistic holes. It makes zero sense to play holes like [Hanse's] in the one arena that's free from practical constraints."

That's probably right. The realism of Hanse's effort registers as a bit unimaginative.

But I have a hard time feeling too disappointed because — confession time — I don't really care about TGL. I could barely make it through a single match in the first season. And this is not to say that the product is bad or that the people who enjoy it are rubes; it's just not for me. A huge part of what I love about golf is the relationship between the player, the course, and nature. So when you remove the variables of nature — land and weather — I tend to lose interest.

Clearly, though, Hanse was interested in TGL. In a press release from the league, he said, "Starting with a relatively blank slate for TGL has been liberating. Designing holes for TGL has given us an opportunity to step out of our comfort zone and step into other aspects of golf course design in the virtual world."

As an architect who typically likes to derive inspiration from physical terrain, why was he compelled by the prospect of a "blank slate"? And in what sense did he stretch beyond his "comfort zone" here?

These are not passive-aggressive questions. I'd genuinely like to hear his answers.

Also, since Philadelphia doesn’t have a TGL franchise, who’s he rooting for?

→ Pinehurst Resort posted some photos of Coore & Crenshaw's in-progress design at Pinehurst No. 11, next door to Tom Doak's No. 10 course. The property — which contains remnants of an old sand mine as well as a few abandoned hole corridors from the Pit Golf Links — looks gnarly, knobbly, and unpredictable.

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Will this be the most unconventional-looking course Coore & Crenshaw have designed since... I don't know, Talking Stick? We'll see.

One constant, though, is C&C's architectural philosophy. "We don't plan to move a lot of material," Ben Crenshaw said in an interview posted by the resort. "We very much like to let the holes and the land speak for themselves, and do little things."

→ Social roundup:

• Tom Doak checked in from Punta Brava Golf Club in Baja California, where he is making his final construction visit. "The goal is to grass it before Christmas!" he wrote. "I took tons of photos yesterday — the place is spectacular — but photos can't really do justice to the scale of the mountain and the rocks offshore.... So, no more photos here. Honestly, I don't think you are ready for them."
• Incidentally, longtime Renaissance Golf Design associate Brian Schneider appears to be at Punta Brava, too.
• Clayton, DeVries & Pont have been hired to consult at Appleby Golf Club, an 1883 moorland course designed by Willie Fernie in Cumbria, England.
• Architect Thad Layton posted a very cool time-lapse reel of himself painting the fifth hole at English heathland gem West Sussex Golf Club. This type of talent/skill baffles me. It's like magic.
• Speaking of Layton, he recently wrapped up a bunker restoration at Lakewood Country Club outside of Boulder, Colorado.