Ogilvy's column: My foray into course design

By Geoff Ogilvy

Tour News

14 January 2011 11:03

When I was a youngster starting out in the game, I thought all golf courses were wonderful. Growing up on the terrific Sandbelt in Melbourne surely didn’t hurt in that respect. I was lucky that my early years were spent on perhaps the best training ground in the world.

  It was only after I began to travel that I realised just how fortunate I had been. When I was exposed to many of the courses I had seen only on television, it didn’t take long for disillusionment to set in. A great number of those places were, quite simply, rubbish.

  “Rubbish” is, at least in my opinion, more than poor greens, or hazards in all the wrong spots, or trees in the wrong places, or silly rough – although it’s all of those things. It’s simply a course that is no fun to play.

  A course that is no fun wears you down, especially when the fairways are too narrow and the rough is too long. If these last two elements are present then the risky recovery – the most fun shot in golf is almost entirely eliminated. And let’s not even get into awful “cookie-cutter” bunkers placed on both sides of fairways, the ones that leave you with the middle of the fairway as your only option from the tee.

  That’s a point so many courses miss. The middle of the fairway should be the ideal spot only occasionally. I learned that growing up without even knowing I was doing so. There are so many holes in Melbourne where I would drive miles left or right, so as to leave the best angle into the flag. I did that naturally at first, without really understanding the genius of what was in front of me.

  Whatever, it didn’t take me long to discover there was little of that on many of the courses I was playing as a professional. Especially in America, I was constantly being asked to hit the middle of the fairway. No matter where the pin was on the invariably over-watered green, my “strategy” from the tee would be the same. So often it would be a simple black-and-white thing: if I was on short grass I was good; if my drive finished anywhere else, that was bad. All the shades of grey I grew up with were gone.

  My appreciation for all of the above accelerated rapidly once I was exposed to Mike Clayton, with whom I have just gone into business as Ogilvy/Clayton course design. Mike played on the European Tour for almost 20 years and is still active on the Seniors Tour, but it is as a course architect that he has become most famous. And it was him who first got me thinking about what is good and bad in golf courses.

  I recall playing with Mike in a tournament at Royal Queensland, not too long after I turned professional. He missed the green at a par-3 and had what should have been a relatively straightforward chip. It wasn’t though, because of the lie he had. Anyway, after two duffed chips, he was seriously annoyed and went on what turned into a long rant about what was wrong with that hole and golf as a whole. He did stop to let me putt, but as soon as I holed out he was off again.

  The gist of his (loud) argument was that, having missed the green he was left with an easy shot from a horrible lie. This was, according to Mike, exactly the opposite of what it should have been. Instead, he should have had a difficult shot from a good lie. In his mind, a challenging shot from a good lie had to be more interesting than a non-challenging shot from a bad lie.

  I soon realised that he is right. In Melbourne I grew up playing from bunkers where, although I never had a bad lie, I nearly always had a hard shot. So the difficulty was the shot, not the lie, because the green was firm and well designed. And so on.

  America gets much of the blame for what is wrong with architecture and set up, but I see it happening in the UK too, especially in newer courses. Everything seems to be either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with nothing in between. Every miss means a tough lie in a deep bunker or deep grass. There’s no subtlety or imagination.

  Anyway, getting into the course design business is exciting for me. It was always going to be a part of my post-golf career. So, while my primary focus remains playing the game, my role and involvement in the business will increase as time goes by. It’s going to be fun – both for me and hopefully for everyone who gets the chance to play our courses.