Design Notebook: Royal Liverpool’s “Little Eye” Reenters Dr. Ebert’s Operating Room

Hello and welcome back to Design Notebook, where we’re relieved to have made it through Farmers week without getting tagged in one of those “actually, Torrey Pines is good because it always produces a great leaderboard” tweets. It was a little hard to make that argument on Saturday!

(To be fair, the Pavon-Hojgaard finish was fun to watch, especially for the DP World Tour followers among us who know those guys’ backstories.)

In today’s edition of DN, Garrett Morrison digs into the news that Royal Liverpool plans to revise its Martin Ebert-designed 17th hole just four years after building it and wonders whether the proposed lipstick will improve this particular pig.

Royal Liverpool’s “Little Eye” to Undergo Surgery (Again)

By Garrett Morrison

Alister MacKenzie often talked about the importance of “finality” in golf construction. To achieve finality, MacKenzie explained, one needed to construct a course well enough that it wouldn’t have to be altered at a later date. “The more one sees of golf courses,” he wrote in his 1920 book Golf Architecture, “the more one realizes the importance of doing construction work really well, so that it is likely to be of a permanent character.” This was his primary argument for hiring a capable golf architect; not doing so meant that a club would likely have to make changes—and incur further costs—in the future.

I wonder what MacKenzie would have thought about Royal Liverpool’s recent revisions to its championship 17th hole. In 2020, the club brought in Martin Ebert, the R&A’s preferred golf architect, to redesign the par 3. Six months ago, the new hole debuted to mixed reviews at the 151st Open Championship. Last week, Fried Egg Golf obtained a letter written by greens chairman Matt Way to the club’s members stating that “Little Eye” would undergo additional “refinements.”

Evidently Ebert’s first effort fell short of finality. Nonetheless, he will oversee the upcoming changes, which have been approved by Royal Liverpool and the R&A, and will start going into the ground next month.

Before getting into the specifics of the plan, let’s review how we got here.

Between the mid-1920s and Ebert’s redesign, the par 3 played as No. 13 for members. It faced away from the Dee Estuary, starting from a tee in the dunes and finishing at an inland green originally established by Harry Colt. As part of his work in 2020, Ebert reversed the direction of the hole. Now it fits into the routing differently, playing as the member 15th and the championship 17th, and travels toward the water, creating an attractive tableau for drone photographers. For additional visual pop (and ecological friendliness, supposedly), Ebert installed a few of his signature “sand scrapes” between tee and green. The green itself is small and surrounded by bunkers and run-offs—a somewhat less exacting version of Royal Troon’s Postage Stamp.

A high view of "Little Eye" (credit: Royal Liverpool)

My concerns about this redesign fall into two broad categories: issues of execution and issues of conception. The changes that Ebert will begin to implement next month appear intended to address the former. The aims of the project, as stated in Matt Way’s letter, are as follows:

• To improve the playability and enjoyment for all standards of golfer and enhance the challenge for elite players.
• To be able to control and stabilize all playing surfaces and ensure long-term sustainability.
• To maintain the spectacular nature and global acclaim of the hole developed through our PR and the Open Championship.

The first bullet point above is the key one. The main fault of Ebert’s work was that the small, pushed-up green proved too punishing for many members yet fairly easy for high-level competitors to negotiate. When the winds stood down during the final two rounds of last year’s Open, the hole became a stress-free exercise in wedge play. As Andy Johnson wrote at the time, “[P]layers were free to bail out to the safe side of a pin without any challenge from the ensuing lag putt. This led to a lot of pars and birdies but not the threat of big numbers that the architect had hoped for.”

For golfers of average ability, the hole was a different beast. The two skills that it emphasizes most—hitting a 55×80-foot target from 100 to 135 yards and recovering from a deep bunker to a plateau green—are common among pros but rare among amateurs. That’s why “Little Eye” failed to raise Brian Harman’s pulse during his march to victory last July but, according to knowledgeable people I’ve spoken with, causes traffic jams during regular play. Some of the club’s seniors and women have gotten in the habit of simply walking from the 14th green to the 16th tee.

Correcting the errors in architectural execution that led to this state of affairs is the focus of Ebert’s new proposal. The middle tee—used by members but not by pros—will be moved to the right and raised in order to give players a better view of the putting surface. The vicious bunker guarding the right side of the green will be replaced by a short-grass run-off; as a result, Way’s letter contends, “Missing the green on the right will still be penal but not disproportionately so.” Behind the green, a more gradual, turfed slope will provide forgiveness for long misses, and a back-left bunker will be added to “prevent balls [from] kicking into the far open sand area.”

The current design of the green surrounds on No. 17 at Royal Liverpool

These alterations seem sensible enough and probably will make the hole more playable for amateurs while not substantially lessening the challenge for pros. Still, it would be fair for members to ask why Ebert’s initial attempt sailed so wide of the mark, and whether it’s wise to hire one architect to redesign the same hole twice in four years. Way’s letter maintains that “the intention was always to review how the hole had performed after the Open Championship.” Surely, though, the club would have preferred for Ebert to get it right the first time.

I’m reminded of another Alister MacKenzie line: “Every golfer knows examples of courses which have been constructed and rearranged over and over again, and the fact that in every country millions of dollars are frittered away doing bad work which will ultimately have to be scrapped is particularly distressful to a true economist.”

My guess is that this next round of alterations to Royal Liverpool’s showpiece par 3 won’t be the last. That’s because the hole’s problems go deeper than a clumsily built green or an overly punitive bunker. The fundamental ideas behind “Little Eye” were faulty from the beginning, so there will always seem to be something missing from the hole. These are the “issues of conception” I mentioned earlier.

The tee-to-green sand scrapes will never feel completely at home in the landscape for two reasons. One, if left to their own devices, Royal Liverpool’s dunes would not develop large swaths of exposed sand. They would instead grow in with natural, linksy grasses. Two, all but one of the course’s other sand scrapes are blended into out-of-play areas in the large landforms of the property’s coastal dune ridge. The visual obtrusiveness of the sand features on the 17th hole makes them feel contrived and showy. They betray a preference for form over function, which runs counter to the humble spirit of British links golf.

The deeper flaw in the conception of “Little Eye,” however, is that it simply travels in the wrong direction. While orienting the hole toward the Dee Estuary made for an impressive photo, it scrambled the course’s routing. In order to get to the next tee, golfers must retrace their steps along the full length of the par 3—and then some. Those who play the middle and front tees face a walk of 200-250 yards from green to tee. This is another reason why some members favor skipping the hole.

So by the time the Open Championship returns to Hoylake, “Little Eye” may look a bit different, but I doubt it will be much better.

In the meantime, unfortunately, I expect more head-scratching changes to other Open venues. With the R&A’s endorsement, Ebert and his design partner Tom Mackenzie have become the architects of record at every Open-rota course aside from Muirfield and the Old Course at St. Andrews. Right now, Mackenzie is in the midst of redesigning several holes at 2026 host Royal Birkdale, and his plans include the creation of naturalized sandy areas and a “spectacular new par 3.” Sound familiar?

The R&A could put a stop to this cycle. By the end of this year, Martin Slumbers will step down from his position as R&A CEO. Slumbers has accomplished many admirable things over the past decade, and I believe history will look particularly kindly on his advocacy for the Distance Insights project.

To my mind, however, he has not been a great steward of the Open rota. On his watch, the world’s oldest and best championship venues began to prioritize commercial and infrastructural considerations over tradition and architectural best practices. I hope that Slumbers’s successor wields the R&A’s influence to halt this trend. After all, why bother rolling back the ball if we’re just going to keep digging up the game’s most historic courses every few years?

Chocolate Drops

By Garrett Morrison

Is Cabot Citrus Farms ready? Social media is full of golfers who have just visited Cabot Citrus Farms or plan to do so in the next few weeks. Three of the resort’s redesigned courses—Karoo, an 18-hole regulation design; The Squeeze, a 10-hole par-38 layout; and The Wedge, an 11-hole par-3 course—are open for preview play, while The Roost, another 18-holer, is under construction. Kyle Franz’s Karoo in particular appears to be very much in the midst of growing in, with many areas of unrooted sod. In response to a Twitter comment that the course “doesn’t look ready,” Golf Digest architecture editor Derek Duncan said, “It really isn’t. They would benefit from slowing down and letting the grounds come together.” Since I haven’t been to the facility myself, I don’t have an opinion on whether Cabot is rushing things at Citrus Farms, but I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts.

Chain chain chain. On my list of U.S. course openings I’m looking forward to in 2024, I missed a fairly big one: The Chain, a new 19-hole short course designed by Coore & Crenshaw at Streamsong Resort in Florida. I’ve been aware of this project for a while; in fact, I thought the course was already open! Its official debut is actually scheduled for April this year. The Chain consists of two sequences of holes: a six-hole loop with holes ranging from 110 to 153 yards, and a 13-hole loop with holes measuring up to 293 yards. The scorecard makes no mention of par, and instead of tee markers, there are dragline chains (hence the name of the course) marking the extent of each teeing area. Players will choose which link in each chain to tee off from.

The Match/The Park. As announced last Wednesday, the ninth edition of The Match—contested between Rory McIlroy, Max Homa, Lexi Thompson, and Rose Zhang—will be held at The Park, Gil Hanse’s new municipal design in West Palm Beach, Florida, on February 26. This will be the first time the Capital One-sponsored exhibition series has gone to a public course. It also represents a substantial upgrade in architectural interest for the franchise. The past venues of The Match, ranked in approximate order of how much their designs excited me, were 1) Medalist Golf Club, 2) Shadow Creek, 3) Pelican Golf Club, 4) Stone Canyon, 5) Wynn Golf Club, and 6) The Reserve at Moonlight Basin. Enjoy some fresh photos of The Park below.

A Course We Photographed Recently

The Park (West Palm Beach, FL)—designed by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, opened in 2023

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Quotable

“When I am playing St. Andrews, I feel like I’m back visiting an old grandmother. She’s crotchety and eccentric but also elegant. Anyone who doesn’t fall in love with her has no imagination.” -Tony Lema