Design Notebook: How Do We Evaluate a Ryder Cup Venue?

We love team match play. We don’t love some of the golf courses that have hosted the biggest team-match-play events recently. And guess what: if you didn’t enjoy Finca Cortesin at this past week’s Solheim Cup, you won’t be substantially more impressed by Marco Simone at this week’s Ryder Cup.

But should quality of design be the main yardstick by which we judge a team-match-play venue? We tackle that question in this installment of Design Notebook before serving up some takes on Mackenzie & Ebert’s latest Open Championship-related commission.

The job of a Ryder Cup venue

Dave Sampson, the lead designer of Ryder Cup host Marco Simone Golf and Country Club, made what might have seemed like a startling admission during my interview with him last week. Explaining why Marco Simone has several partially blind approach shots, Sampson said, “When you’re routing the course, it’s not like you’re… trying to find the best 18 holes. We’re trying to factor in the spectators as well, trying to maximize their experience the spectators are going to get.”

I can’t remember a golf architect telling me that finding the best 18 holes on a given site was not his top priority.

In the context of Sampson’s brief at Marco Simone, however, his comments make sense. When he began to redesign the course in 2017, his task was to create a Ryder Cup venue capable of accommodating and entertaining extremely large crowds (and of generating a healthy profit for the European Tour, which partly owns Sampson’s firm, European Golf Design). Golf was a priority, for sure, but not the only one.

Of course, the demands of gallery flow and hospitality do not exempt an architect from creating compelling holes. As Pete Dye proved time and again, a skilled designer can summon great golf out of nearly nothing while also accounting for the needs of championship crowds. If, later this week, Marco Simone fails to produce interesting decisions and shots on the field of play, Sampson and his collaborator Tom Fazio II—along with the setup brain trust at Ryder Cup Europe—deserve criticism.

But (and let me take a deep breath before I say this because it goes against what I usually find most important) the quality of the golf won’t be the only criterion by which I judge Marco Simone.

This is the Ryder Cup. A major part of the venue’s responsibility is to foster an intense, raucous, just-barely-under-control atmosphere. To do this, the course’s spectator infrastructure has to be excellent. Enormous numbers of fans need to get on the grounds, move around the course, see the action clearly, and have enough leftover energy to go nuts. These are non-negotiables—not just for ticket-holders, but for TV viewers. If the Ryder Cup isn’t the loudest golf event on the calendar, what’s it even for?

Harris Kalinka's rendering of the Ryder Cup first-tee buildout at Marco Simone

Not every course can support this kind of controlled chaos. For example, the North Course at Los Angeles Country Club is an architectural marvel and, for pure golf, a fabulous championship venue, but it didn’t turn out to be an ideal U.S. Open host. Great shots were sometimes met with near-silence. The first-tee scene was non-existent.

Some blamed the lack of juice on the USGA’s choices to limit attendance to 22,000 per day (40-50,000 is the usual capacity for both U.S. Opens and Ryder Cups), cordon off large portions of the site for corporate hospitality, and allow L.A. Country Club’s membership to claim a disproportionate share of the tickets. These were certainly contributing factors.

But another, arguably more important reason for the limp atmosphere at the 2023 U.S. Open was that the course is not designed to accommodate a large-scale spectator experience. There’s no safe, practical way to move fans to the 13th green, which is tucked into a corner of the property, or to the 17th fairway, which is bordered on one side by a barranca and on the other by the second hole. Also, while LACC’s green-to-tee transitions work well for golfers, they are tough for big galleries to negotiate. Following a single group from beginning to end is a challenge.

The source of these problems is obvious. When George Thomas redesigned the North Course in 1928, his sole objective was to find the best 18 holes on the property, not to build an arena for a mass spectacle.

Marco Simone is unlikely to impress anyone as a collection of holes. As a setting for golf’s Super Bowl, however, I expect it to do its job. -Garrett Morrison

Stop, get some help

If you’re going to take the Solheim Cup to a bad golf course, it had better at least entertain me. And I’ll tell you what, Finca Cortesin entertained me this past weekend. Between the artificial ponds, poorly shaped bunkering, bizarre trees in the middle of the fairway, or fairways too sloped to hold drives, the course was a total train wreck, but an enjoyable one. Oh, and when the wind kicked up? Borderline unplayable!

What a host venue.

In all seriousness, we are going to continue to pound the drum and demand better Solheim Cup venues. The idea that capitalism must trump on-course entertainment 100% of the time cannot be accepted as a permanent reality for the women’s game. There has to be a happy medium—and that happy medium does not include the Finca Cortesins of the world. -Will Knights

Royal Birkdale to get the Mackenzie & Ebert treatment

Last Friday, Royal Birkdale Golf Club announced that Tom Mackenzie of the firm Mackenzie & Ebert will carry out a “series of course changes” between now and spring 2025, before the club hosts the 2026 Open Championship. The changes will include “the addition of a spectacular new par 3,” a customary feature of many recent renovations performed by Mackenzie and his partner Martin Ebert. Details of Mackenzie’s plan can be found here.

This project further consolidates Mackenzie & Ebert’s position as the R&A’s preferred renovation outfit. On its website, the firm advertises relationships with every current Open-rota course except for Muirfield and the Old Course at St. Andrews. Mackenzie & Ebert’s style of links renovation, already familiar, will dominate golf’s oldest major for years to come.

Some of M&E’s calling cards appear in Tom Mackenzie’s plan for the Royal Birkdale renovation. There’s the installation of frilly-edged, American-resort-style bunkers. There’s the nod toward “sustainable practices.” And most significantly, there’s the photogenic new par 3 toward the end of the routing.

The current par-3 14th (where Jordan Spieth did this in 2017) will be turned into a practice area, while the par-5 15th (where he did this) will be redesigned and become the 14th hole. A Mackenzie-designed par-3 15th hole will then be manufactured on unused land.

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The whole proposal, from the rerouting to the creation of a showpiece par 3, reminds me of Martin Ebert’s work at Royal Liverpool. To Mackenzie’s credit, though, Birkdale’s new 15th doesn’t look quite as out of place as Liverpool’s 17th. We’ll see how it turns out. -GM

Some courses we photographed recently

Pacific Grove Golf Links (Pacific Grove, CA)—inland nine designed by H. Chandler Egan in 1932, dunes nine designed by Jack Neville in 1960

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The Preserve (Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA)—designed by Tom Fazio in 2000

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Quotable

“Standards for laying out a golf course:

• • Make each hole present a different problem.
  • So arrange it that every stroke must be made with a full concentration and attention necessary to good golf.
  • Build each hole in such a manner that it waste none of the ground at my disposal and takes advantage of every possibility I can see.”

–Donald Ross