Product Guide

SITE

SEARCH

GOLF COURSE SEARCH:

GOLF CALENDAR

submit your event here
May 2012
SuMoTuWeThFrSa
293012345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
272829303112
3456789

Founders' Note

Untitled Page

Course of action

Great layouts and course designs are in the eye of the beholder, but the best way to judge a venue is whether golfers enjoy the experience and return for more.

BY ROB LYON AND ERIC MARSONPublished: August, 2009

Virginia Country Club is a classic William P. Bell/A.W. Tillinghast design (PHOTO: Eddie Meeks)
One of our features this month is on golf course design. We interviewed some notable designers of Southland courses to get their take on what makes a good layout stand out from the crowd. We augmented the interviews of contemporary designers such as Clive Clark and Casey O’Callaghan with words written by masters of the craft, such as William P. Bell and A.W. Tillinghast.

While there were varying opinions on what makes a course great, all seemed to settle on a few traits: strategy and beauty, a great natural setting, and an X factor that stirs emotions.

Talk about great golf courses usually centers on venues that have hosted major championships, such as Pinehurst, Winged Foot, Pebble Beach and Riviera.

Our panel agrees that those courses deserve special recognition, but it was something that Los Angeles native Damian Pascuzzo said that got us thinking. Pascuzzo, who learned the craft from Robert Muir Graves, told us any course making money is great, because that means people like playing it enough to keep coming back.

We’ll stretch the definition even further and say that any golf course, in any corner of the world, is capable of being great, as long as the golfers who are playing it enjoy the experience.

Maybe it was the first time you finally beat your dad while playing Dad Miller in Anaheim. Or the first time you broke par at Long Beach’s Recreation Park. Or the times you got together with old friends and enjoyed yourself at Brea’s Birch Hills Golf Course.

No famous odes have been written about these layouts, which aren’t going to make anyone forget about St. Andrews or Cypress Point any time soon.

But these tracks are still capable of providing a great experience, because a course is only as great as the people who play it, love it and replay their moments on it deep into the future.

So while there are only a handful of layouts in Southern California that have garnered world-class recognition, we’d like to take this moment to tip our caps to every course that possesses the greatest quality of all: it’s being played.

One other thing that stuck with us was something Tillinghast wrote: “The majority of golfers are aiming to reduce their previous best performances … and if any one of them arrives at the home teeing ground with this possibility in reach, he is not caring two hoots whether he is driving off from nearby an ancient oak of majestic size or a dead sassafras. If his round ends happily it is one beautiful course.”

We couldn’t agree more.