Chocolate Drop: Gil Hanse Debuts a TGL Hole Design

Yesterday, as FEGC member Pearce Barringer noted in his own forum post, TGL announced that architect Gil Hanse had joined the screen-golf league's 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. I'd love to hear the instructions the director of this piece of content gave him before hitting record.

TGL also unveiled one of Hanse's designs, a 590-yard par 5 called "Stone & Steeple." The hole features a few recognizable Hanse motifs: a threatening boundary wall, a lone bunker guarding the second-shot layup zone, and a rambling "Sahara" bunker, strewn with turf islands, cutting across the fairway. The neighboring graveyard even 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 so that it abutted a 19th-century cemetery.

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 more to the right they will end up, and the worse their angle into the green will be. On the other hand, 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 think I'd 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 chilly. There seems to be an emerging consensus among TGL viewers that the virtual-hole designs, unconstrained as they are 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 hole registers as a bit unimaginative.

But I have a hard time getting worked up about it 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. When you strip away nature — the outdoors, the elements, the land — I lose most of my interest.

But what I'd like to hear Hanse address at some point is why he 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.