Too Many Tees

My home course recently finished a massive construction project. With brand-new holes, a bunch of new greens and bunkers, and even a new waterfall (gasp!) behind the 18th green, it’s quicker to point out what hasn’t changed than to list off the new features. The goal of all this work? You’ve heard it before… adding length to accommodate the modern game.

The course now stretches a little over 7,300 yards, and a large chunk of the extra yardage comes from new tee boxes. Watching tees spring up during construction reminded me of an old Yolk with Doak episode in which Tom Doak talked about the challenges of designing courses during the distance boom.

https://thefriedegg.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Tom-Doak-on-Tees.mp3

Clearly distance gains have have created many headaches for golf architects, especially on projects that will see both professional and amateur play. And adding back tees isn’t a magic bullet, either. It’s a huge challenge to find space for five, sometimes six tee boxes while keeping the routing intact and making sure that different types of golfers have a similar quality of experience. As Doak puts it, “Most architects have always kind of nodded and accepted that you’re never going to make the course play for women exactly the same as you’re gonna make it play for men, but now you can’t even do that for men and pros because the gap is just that big on the other side.”

Doak illustrates this point by recalling how, once upon a time, he could occasionally keep up with Ben Crenshaw off the tee using persimmons. Today, even if he were still in his prime, he’d get left in the dust by a pro who has been trained to leverage 21st-century driver technology.

Faced with the riddle of designing courses that challenge such a wide spectrum of players, Doak is understandably nostalgic for simpler times. “When I built High Pointe [his first course], I thought if I built four or five holes with an extra back tee, that would be what a scratch or tour pro would want the hole to be. That was about all I needed. Now, like I said, you pretty much need 18 tees for that.”

Lucky for us, Tom Doak and others have proven themselves up to the challenge of designing great courses during the distance era. But I wonder how the past 25 years of golf course development would have looked if equipment technology had been reined in around the turn of the century. Would a simpler game have allowed for better designs from Doak, Coore & Crenshaw, and Gil Hanse? Or have technological advances actually forced architects to be more creative?

I’ll keep those questions in mind every time I pass the old tee boxes at my home course during my trek back to the new ones.