accustomed to?
Could they ever get used to Young Tom Morris’
winning scores of 58, 57 and 53 in the 1872 Open
at Prestwick?
Does the game need to go back to go forward?
One of golf’s great spaces is the Ladies Putting
Course next to the 2nd tee on the Old Course
where caddies putted around and waited for their
men to arrive and head out onto the links.
Alister MacKenzie described it as “The most
interesting putting course I have ever seen.”
“Even first-class golfers consider it a privilege
to be invited there and are to be found putting
with the greatest enthusiasm from early in the
morning until late at night,” MacKenzie wrote.
“There are undulations of the boldest possible
type – large sweeping hollows rising abruptly four
to five feet or more to small plateaus. A modern
architect who dared to reproduce the boldness of
these St Andrews undulations could hardly hope
to escape hostile criticism.”
Mini-golf is one version of golf (a modern
equivalent of the Himalayas even) one I’ve never
understood the attraction of because to me it just
looks like silly golf played with bad clubs. But it’swildly popular and a money-earner for courses
using them to entertain and to induce more
people to visit.
Golf is hard. It’s hard to learn to hold the club
properly. It’s hard to get the ball into the air and
harder again to hit it with any power.
The one thing that is easy is to knock a ball
along the ground and towards a hole. On flat
greens it’s not particularly interesting but
introduce the concept of a Himalayas-type green
with all its undulations and options and the
opportunity to hit a putt up to a hundred metres
and its wild fun and a way to fall in love with the
concept of the game and inspire beginners to
move to the practice fairway or the 1st tee.
At North Berwick, the Scottish town devoted
to golf, there is a nine-hole, par-3 ‘Children’s
Course’ where the only rule is adults can only
play in the company of children. Next to the 15th
and 16th holes on the ‘big course’ it was founded
in 1888 when there were obviously golfers who
understood the concept of ‘small golf.’
Mike Keiser, the extraordinarily successful
developer of multi-course resorts in the United
States, had Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw designa 13-hole par-3 course at Bandon Dunes in
Oregon and then a few years later a 17-hole par-3
course at Sand Valley in Wisconsin.
Is there any precedent for 13-hole or 17-hole,
par-3 golf?
There is now and, more importantly, it’s
successful. Wildly successful.
American architect Gil Hanse built ‘The
Cradle’, at Pinehurst, an almost 800-yard short
course Hanse calls ‘the most fun 10 acres in all of
golf’ and a 10-hole ‘Horse Course’ at the Prairie
Club in Nebraska, which plays from 450 meters
all the way to 1000.
Alister MacKenzie, a man whose talents
and inspiration transformed golf in Australia,
understood the possibilities of limited space
golf in the 1920s when he wrote: “The right
sort of approach and putt courses present
tremendous possibilities in golf course
construction in the future.”
Aside from a small four-hole par-3 course
added to the main 18 holes at RACV Healesville
in Victoria’s Yarra Valley (itself a 5,000-metre
ode to small golf) there seems to be more will
to get rid of golf in Australia than there is to90 AUGUST 2019 | golf australia