talking points Buried Lies

Longer or shorter? The debate about 7,000-yard golf courses continues at Planet Golf, where Tom Doak weighed in on the issue with these philosophical musings.

Anything that becomes a big business, like golf, tends to get away from its roots in the process. From one step to the next isn’t necessarily irrational, but 50 years later you wind up so far from where you started [that] it makes no sense. It’s true of a lot of things in life. Things just get more and more standardized over time.

Look at the food business in the United States. Fifty years ago, people were growing stuff on farms, and [the stuff] went to market. Now it’s being shipped in from all over the world, and the food is less and less natural and less and less healthy. And yet, nobody can stop it. It’s just been an evolution.

It’s the same in the golf business. Developers only insist on golf courses being 7,200 yards long because they think the people [who] are going to pay to play insist on [them] being 7,200 yards long. And the really crazy thing is [that] most of those people have no intention of playing from 7,200 yards. It may say that’s what it is from the back tees on the scorecard, but 2 percent of golfers will play from there. Even though most golfers play most courses from 6,300 to 6,500 yards, if it doesn’t say 7,200 yards from the back tees on the scorecard, it’s wrong.

Pete Dye said to me once when I worked for him, “You make a 7,000-yard course for the great players, and the only way to make it playable for the average guy is to build it at 5,800 yards and lie and say it’s 6,300 yards.”