In this installment of our Golf Architecture 101 series, Garrett introduces his Fried Egg Golf colleague PJ Clark to C.B. Macdonald’s “ideal holes.” They discuss how Macdonald came up with the notion of “templates” based on famous British golf holes, and they dig into the history and characteristics of the Redan, Alps, and Road designs. Garrett and PJ wrap up by talking about whether the ideal holes have outlived their usefulness.

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what are CB McDonald’s template holes often called ideal holes where did they come from and why do they seem so important to understanding golf architecture that’s what I’m talking about today with PJ Clark in this installment of our golf architecture 101 series i’m Garrett Morrison and this is Designing [Music] Golf all right PJ how’s it going i’m doing good i’m I’m excited for this one this was this was by my own request so I’m really fired up here yes we’ll talk about why you requested it because I’m I’m curious but it’s good to have uh it’s good to have class back in session it’s been a while since we’ve done one of these yeah I know i’m I’m excited and this is this is uh probably the number one topic I would assume I I needed to learn based on uh what what we do here and when we started this so I’m I’m happy to be I’m happy to be here that’s that’s interesting so hopefully I’ll I’ll inform you in the ways that you want to be informed but I guess you’ve heard plenty of references to CB McDonald and Seth Rener and their and their template holes and and uh our our goal here is to kind of demystify that um first though I want to quickly clarify something that we covered in our last Golf Architecture 101 okay episode and that was that the topic of the episode was Alistair McKenzie’s 13 essential features of an ideal golf course or his 13 principles the confusion in that podcast I think came with principle number six the principle that said there should be a minimum of blindness for approach shots now what McKenzie means here is that there should not be many blind approach shots i believe you thought he was saying that approach shots should be at the minimum blind yes that is exactly how I read that i did not pick up on this during the podcast i wasn’t I I was I was failing in my job as a teacher i wasn’t listening properly and so I was just kind of proceeding with my understanding of it without really noticing that you had interpreted it differently now I’m I’m pro number six instead of very anti number six i want to make that clear for everybody now that I have I’ve learned the flip side that was a whoops these things happen these things I mean gez looking back on my teaching career that the things that I would just like give lectures on and then discover afterwards that my students had some basic misunderstanding that rendered my entire lecture irrelevant i that happened over and over again and this is an example of that very understandable that you would interpret the text in that way really like when I looked at it I was like oh yeah I can totally see how he got there and I should have clarified that McKenzie meant not many blind approach shots please he did not like this is why he’s the doctor he knows something about something i I I should have realized that if I was so confused that it was me who was wrong and not the doctor no that makes That’s right trust the doctor yeah blindly that makes sense it would have if we had read more of McKenzie’s uh writing than just the 13 principles I think it would have been clearer because elsewhere he kind of elaborates on this principle and talks about why he doesn’t want many blind approach shots and and all that kind of stuff it was just more common in Mackenzie’s day that approach shots would be blind because of course earth moving equipment wasn’t what it is today and so they kind of dealt with the lay of the land that makes sense that I could I could see how uh you know if you’re just dealt a hand on the side of a hill then uh it’s kind of kind of what you have to work with there now the funny thing is blind approach shots have come back into fashion i mean it’s it’s some it’s a feature of ancient architecture that people now find charming because it’s somewhat rare blind approach shots really fell out of fashion in in the middle of the 20th century and and so because they became rare I think people have started to gain a kind of affection for them but in any case I just wanted to uh wrap that up and then we got a couple of comments and I was like “Yeah yeah I I missed this one sorry.” Um so let’s get to our topic for the day charles Blair McDonald’s charles Blair McDonald’s mcdonald’s that would be another That would be maybe a more Scottish version yeah who who knows maybe there is a Charles Blair McDonald out there uh his ideal holes uh or template holes and this is I think actually very related to our discussion of McKenzie McKenzie’s 13 principles and that’s because McKenzie and McDonald were essentially asking the same question how do you design the ideal golf course’s answer to that question was this list of principles McDonald’s answer was his notion of ideal holes so the ideal holes are hole designs or concepts that you see used over and over on the courses of CB McDonald and his collaborator/prog Seth Rener mcdonald and or Rener sometimes together right they collaborated a lot but sometimes just Rener as a solo architect they were responsible for many of the best regarded golf courses built during the golden age of golf architecture in America which stretched from approximately 1910 to the late 1930s mcdonald’s best known designs include National Golf Links of America The Leo Piping Rock Sleepy Hollow The Creek Mid Ocean in Bermuda and St louis Country Club seth Rener had a much bigger portfolio right mcdonald’s body of work is is fairly small so some of Rainer’s highlights would include Fischer Island Chicago Golf Club Shoreacres Kamargo Yammen’s Hall etc et etc and Rainer also served as the lead associate what we would now call the lead associate or construction manager or whatever on all of McDonald’s major projects a distinctive feature of McDonald and Rainer’s courses is the presence of the so-called template holes these particular design concepts usually based on models from famous British links courses and adapted to whatever piece of ground and Rener were working with some of the better known template holes include the Redan the Road Hole the Eden the Cape the Barretts the Short the Alps so on and so forth i’m sure you’ve heard these referred to casually in podcasts and been like “Okay what what are we talking about here?” That’s exactly how we got here yeah okay so that’s our subject uh for this episode now we won’t cover a lot of particular template holes that may come as a disappointment but that I mean we’re mostly in an audio medium here we’ll also publish this on YouTube with some visuals and for an audio medium I figured that uh just talking about specific template holes might be a little tough because we just have to talk their features out but what I hope we can do here is kind of establish a basis for understanding all template holes and then we can dig into whatever particular ones you’re you’re curious about um now as you mentioned PJ you actually requested that we talk about this subject why were you interested in it i feel like it comes up a lot uh just just in random podcasts here or there or uh you know we did the Rainer Man merch collection and Cameron was talking about how he had to draw all the template holes and I was like I know that’s a thing I’m supposed to know at some point but I have no idea what you’re talking about uh so I I it got to a point I forget what ex entirely prompted me but it got to a point where I was like I have no idea what we’re talking about anymore so I needed to uh humbly request to get taught whatever you’re about to teach me right now let’s go back to square one it it is I mean it’s kind of like a code language and this is one thing that can make golf architecture an intimidating subject is that you’re dropped into it and people are speaking a different language that includes words like Redan and Eden and short hole and Alps and it’s if you don’t understand the language then it can feel a bit alienating and hopefully that’s that’s what we’re breaking down a bit here in in the Golf Architecture 101 series um I want to assure you there’s nothing complicated about understanding these uh template holes most of them are are pretty simple to understand and a lot of people who casually refer to them in conversation don’t don’t actually know the design concepts that they’re referring that’s that’s good that already makes me feel better that’s great in order to really have mastery of the subject then uh yeah you do need to dig a little bit deeper but in order to have just a framework for the conversation I think we can do that pretty quickly um so let’s start with some background a little bit of history who McDonald was how he came up with this idea this is actually I I love this story this is one of my one of my favorite stories to tell about golf architecture i think it it represents so much of what the early development of golf course design as a discipline and a field of study was and so I I just I just really like going through this is part of the reason I was excited about this episode so CB McDonald wealthy Chicago kid who ended up attending the University of St andrews in the early 1870s st andrews Scotland was and is the international home of golf so no surprise McDonald yeah it’s pretty good i I often mention this i wish I went to the University of St andrews speaking of being a teacher one of my um one of my adisees when when I was a high school teacher went to the University of St andrews and I sat down with him before he uh accepted the the offer of admission and I was like “Listen do you play golf?” And he said “No.” and I said “You had better learn golf.” How do you even end up How do you even end up in that situation like what prompts you to go to the University of St andrews if you’re not you know it’s a great university like first of all really really wonderful university if you’re if you’re in Great Britain it’s it’s it’s like going to I guess an Ivy League university so they have great academics but I think if you go to the University of St andrews and don’t play golf that Oh man yeah that’s like an odd combination sure yeah in any case McDonald did it right he he really learned the game while he was there he met and played with old Tom Morris and young Tom Morris good time to be there in the 1870s and he became a very capable player ultimately one of the better players in in the US when he returned so he got back to the US uh in the mid 1870s and he was disappointed to find that the game basically didn’t exist in the country at that time uh so he he didn’t play much golf for the next 15 years or so and whatever golf courses appeared during this period were in his mind very low quality they just didn’t get anywhere close to to what he saw in St andrews at the time st andrews was basically what it is today a great great golf course you can imagine going from there to the kind of rudimentary golf courses that we had uh in in America at the time and and it was a big difference so when McDonald caught the golf bug again in the late 1880s one of his primary goals became to create the first truly great American golf course during this period he established Chicago Golf Club but the early versions of that course were not on the level of today’s Chicago Golf Club which was primarily designed by Seth Rener in the 1920s nonetheless Chicago Golf Club was a major early American club and McDonald became a major figure in the development of American golf so is this is this just like you know everybody makes a joke like “Oh I’m going to go write the great American novel.” Like this is this is somebody just decided to go build a golf course one day that’s right he wanted to write the great American novel that’s right he had that ambition make the make the great American movie make the great American album that I mean yeah this ambition is uh is cross-disciplinary for sure it goes across art forms and this was McDonald’s version of it and so yeah he had this he had this desire um there’s a lot of biography here that I won’t get into but McDonald did become instrumental in the founding of the USGA and the the origins of the US Open so there’s interesting stuff there too but I’ll skip forward to the golf course design story in 1901 One Macdonald was reading Golf Illustrated probably the most popular golf only publication of the time published in the UK and he came across a debate in the pages of Golf Illustrated between some leading golfers of the time about what the greatest holes in the world were and by world I mean Great Britain that was essentially their frame of reference and where most of the best golf courses were so to my knowledge this is the first time a discussion of this type happened in print which is really saying something because this is a very common thing now mhm right people talking about the best courses and the best holes so try to imagine a world in which this hadn’t happened before this is This is kind of kind of crazy just trying to uh you know starting the take industry for lack of a better term from nothing that’s right it’s really it’s an interesting concept to think about god it’s fascinating to read because that’s exactly it the first hot takes about golf architecture it’s like nobody had ever done it before and these guys you know Harry Varden JH Taylor James Brad Willie Park Jr John Lowe Horus Hutchinson these were the first you know take masters sitting there like “What have I done?” looking at created yeah if they if they end up looking down now yeah it’s the end of Oenheimer just staring blankly into the camera it’s it’s the tough scene for those guys so um the golfers who participated in this debate were were the heavies of the game at the time very impressive names the ones that I mentioned these were you know open championship winners and just significant figures and so their word carried weight and McDonald was fascinated by what they were writing and it it turned out that a certain number of holes kind of rose to the top it got mentioned by a lot of different people as as being the best of their kind they talked about the best one-shoters twos and threeshotterters so par threes par fours par fives the best oneshotterters according to this panel turned out to be the Eden the 11th hole at St andrews the Redan the 15th hole at North Barrack the Alps the 17th hole at Preswick the Road Hole 17 at St andrews the long hole 14 at St andrews i ended up going through the the twoers and three shooters there actually without mentioning it but the road hole at the time now considered a par4 right it’s it’s categorized as a par4 at the time it was considered more of a par five they didn’t call it a par five but it was it was thought that you would spend three shots in getting to that green and so those were the holes that came up and these remain some of the most famous holes in the UK you know Press Wake is on the west coast of Scotland and that was that was an early old Tom Morris course you’ve probably heard Andy mention North Bareric great Scottish links course and then of course the old course at St andrews still uh very much on the open roa and uh at the top of everybody’s minds all of these holes the ones that were mentioned in this debate in this magazine in 1901 eventually became template holes there were more template holes than those but this was kind of the starting point this was the first you know body of hole designs that McDonald started working with so this whole discussion in Golf Illustrated it it kind of prompted a brainwave for McDonald he said to himself “Surely if you build a course with 18 of these ideal holes then you would have an ideal golf course.” Yeah that’s a guy with a good take right there that’s That’s pretty good i like that a lot yeah I like I like how his mind works he’s like “Nobody’s ever thought of this before.” And nobody can get mad because everybody agrees they’re the best so that’s right that’s it yeah i’m just gonna I’m just gonna kind of replicate these designs and then everybody will have to acknowledge oh my god you have a Red Roan you have an Alps you have a Road Hole that’s that great American novel way of thinking right there i’m just gonna copy everybody else and nobody’s gonna get mad right i’ll just uh borrow a a character from Melville and you know a little bit of pros from Fitzgerald and and there you go um in any case he he spent the next decade or so researching the best holes of Great Britain uh so he took multiple trips he sent friends on trips to do research for him and to take measurements and to really nail these down and he quickly discovered that replicating these holes with any real precision would be impossible because of course you would be working with a different piece of land and many of these holes were just layof the land holes they they were not manufactured they derived their features from the topography and so McDonald said “Well if I don’t have this topography then then I guess I can’t exactly replicate them.” So ultimately he decided to go for looser interpretations basically extracting the strategic essence of these holes boiling them down to their basic features rather than copying them and I think that it was in this process that McDonald came to understand golf course design on as deep and sophisticated a level as any architect of the golden age it was when he started to try to interpret these holes and actually find out why there were why they were great instead of just replicating them that he became a great golf architecture mind uh because you know he essentially discovered for himself the strategic school of golf architecture which we talked about in the in the first 101 episode so um while he was doing this he was also searching far and wide for a piece of land for his great American golf course he looked at Maine he looked he was looking up and down the East Coast and he eventually settled on a piece of land right next to Shinikok Hills Golf Club in Long Island in in PJ’s domain so eventually found found his found A lot of people find things in Southampton so it makes sense yeah find their summer house you know so uh this would ultimately become of course the National Golf Links of America which opened in 1911 and received immediate rapturous praise people went and played this course and were blown away by it it was it was like nothing else that had been created in the States uh at the time it was a next level golf course in every way that’s a very surface level account of the creation of National Golf Links that I just gave i I’ve done a deeper dive into that history with Chris Mard who wrote uh the most recent uh historical book on on National Golf Links this is a Friday Egg podcast episode from about a year and a half ago called Great Courses National Golf Links so check that out if you want more detail but it wasn’t just the ideal holes that made National Golf Links different it was also the construction the aronomy like in every way and and the amount of money that went into it like no nothing I don’t think anything close to this amount of money had ever been spent on constructing a golf course before he he got all the basically the richest people on the east coast to to pitch in for for his great American golf course um he was a remarkable remarkable mover and shaker uh McDonald and so National Golf Links turned out really well and of course it did represent the debut of McDonald’s ideal holes the National had great renditions of the Redan the Alps the Road Hole the Eden it was all there it was a fully formed statement of a golf course and McDonald meant NGLA to be his his one true masterwork right his example for all of American golf he didn’t really intend to build other golf courses he was kind of like I’m done i mean if it if if you build something and it immediately gets you know rapturous praise as you said I could I could see how you ought to just go out on top i get that absolutely and you know he he he has this in common with a lot of great artists too who who want to create their one great thing and then it’s like okay that’s what I devoted my life to and I’m done but it didn’t really turn out that way because of course people kept asking him to design more golf courses for them all of his rich friends were like “Hey this looks cool i’d like one.” And uh and so he did design a few others but for the most part he passed off his commissions or his potential commissions to Seth Rener and and Rener was really the one who spread the idea of ideal holes broadly rainer became the Johnny Apples Seed of this approach to golf course design and and a big reason why why we know template holes today and uh and so that’s the that’s the background of the ideal holes before we get into some examples of templates and before we have maybe a little bit of discussion about the virtues of ideal holes as an approach to golf course design I’d like to talk a bit about the USGA green section the USGA green section is a supporter of the designing golf podcast in its early days here so thank you so much to the green section understanding the performance of your greens has never been easier thanks to the GS3 ball from the USGA green section the GS3 seamlessly connects to the Deacon management system instantly telling you how fast smooth true and firm your greens are now you can make datadriven decisions better manage resources communicate to course personnel and most importantly create a playing experience for your golfers like never before to learn more visit the USGA Green Sections shop at [Music] gsshop.usga.org i’ve actually seen the GS3 ball in action we’ve been doing some documentaries lately about uh various turf operations throughout the country i have seen the GS3 ball in use and and it is pretty cool so uh check out that offering from the USGAA green section all right let’s talk about a couple examples of templates PJ i’m going to have to have you put on your sort of visualizing hat right now if we can i know I know this can sometimes be tricky for the YouTube version of this episode we’ll maybe incorporate a couple of images of these holes to to help out people who consume the podcast that way but the first one I want to talk about is the Redan where else would you I feel like this is this is the number one yeah this is the number one that I get gets mentioned by you guys all the time yeah because it’s a very common type of hole it has it’s spread like wildfire everybody Everybody has a Redan so this is based on the 15th hole at North Barrack the key elements one the green is kind of oriented on a 45 degree angle on a diagonal in relation to the tea usually from short right to long left right okay so it’s set on a diagonal where if you’re a right-hander you kind of want to work a draw into there the green is tilted from front to back okay okay so from the front right to the back left section it’s tilted away from the tea a deep often flashed up bunker guards the front left side of the green so kind of in front of the green sitting on that same diagonal as the green sometimes there’s another bunker even deeper one perhaps guarding the back right side of the green so if you go over you’ll end up there now the original version at North Barrack has a pair of bunkers cut into a rise about 50 yards short of the green this is I think actually where the name Roan came from because Rodan and I’m sure people will correct me if I’m wrong i didn’t actually confirm this before I came on the podcast but Rodan I believe is a a term for a military fortification okay and my sense is that this feature at North Bareric this like kind of dunelike rise that these bunkers are cut into 50 yards short of the green kind of blocking the view of the green to an extent is where that idea of a fortification came from and where the notion of a red came from but McDonald and Rainer’s Redans often did not have this feature sometimes they did often they didn’t didn’t because again it it would require some topography to to do that you would need a rise so um the essential elements of a modern redan tend to be that orientation of the green on a diagonal and the fact that it runs front to back okay and that often there’s like a kicker slope what’s called a kicker slope a little kind of backboard at the at the front right portion of the green where you can hit your ball into it and it kind of deflects the ball filters it back to the back left portion of the green so it’s like a ramp right i think this hole is at its most strategically interesting when the pin is in the back and that’s because sense yeah you can choose between going straight at the pin over that big bunker in front of the green or you can play it along the ground through the opening to the green on the right maybe maybe kind of sling a low draw in there go through the opening to the green and let the ball release along that down slope the front to back slope yep back to the pin that’s the kind of clever way to play the hole you don’t have to make the big carry and you can you can kind of work it around so you have options here right which is the the soul of strategic golf options and and the attendant risks and rewards so the reason uh you’ve heard this term is that this is like the most replicated par three design in the history of golf it is often done poorly or just partially right the the most commonly missing feature is that front to back slope because people don’t usually like building holes where the green runs away from the player but the problem is when you don’t have that you kind of lose the ability to work the ball to a back pin through that kind of clever low running shot that I talked about and so often people will just refer to any hole with a diagonally set green as a redan but personally I don’t think it’s a redan at all unless you have that element of a kicker slope and a front to back slope to get the ball to a back pin through other methods than just going straight at it i think if you don’t have that you really don’t have a redan um reverse orans became common as well when people say reverse Rodan they just mean the exact same design but the green is set on a diagonal that would seem to accept a fade from a right-handed player this maybe isn’t as common because when you know most people are right-handed not to disrespect the lefties out there sorry that redans aren’t as fun for you but uh when you’re hitting a fade your ball stops quicker if you’re a right-hander and if you’re a left-hander but your fade goes the other direction right-hander hitting a draw to a traditional redan the ball is going to have less spin and it’s going to have that element of being able to run along the ground and that’s why right to leftans are more common does that all make sense were you able to visualize that stay with me any questions yeah so a I think it makes sense i’m now trying to like cuz it’s pretty common think of like holes that I might have seen at some point that would that would fit this m I think I mean I I I it definitely makes sense and I actually appreciate the idea of I get why maybe a a modern-day architect if you’re building a hole like now with the you know incessant need for a hole in one or give people a chance that you want to have people see it roll in back towards you versus a feeder pin away but I actually I like the idea of the feeder pit away and and having it kind of slope downward to me as a player I feel like that would be more fun than having having it run further and kind of work the ball versus just you know hit it straight up in the air and have it roll back down towards you kind of thing that’s where the fun comes from seeing the ball go along the ground it’s the most fun thing to do in golf and the most fun thing to watch in golf is is what the ball does after it hits the ground and when you have a green going away from you it behaves a lot like firmness because it accelerates the ball as it goes along the ground and you really have to consider what to do are you going to try to stop it or are you going to just accept that the slope is going to do what it does to your ball and use that and that’s the central question of a proper redan now you’ll see a lot of as I said before diagonally set greens out there in the world of golf and somebody might refer to them as a redan but it’s it’s it’s not really unless unless you can work the ball along the ground i recommend that you don’t correct people when when they Not that you would do this that’s not really your personality no I feel like I’d just nod along and and continue but in my head when I get up to that green I’m going to be like “Oh there’s no slope here.” Yeah that’s can’t count it doesn’t doesn’t count doesn’t not going to check that off my list yeah so really like true radans are a little more rare than than people think you know diagonal greens with a bunker in front you know you’ll see that all the time but a real redan with like a kicker slope and the ability to to work the ball in that way you know that’s uh that’s it’s fairly rare because you know front to back sloping greens are are fairly rare these days okay so that’s the that’s the Redan template that’s all it is that was very helpful i feel like I needed that one if I was leaving here with something I I think I’ve checked that box that wasn’t essential i’ll talk to you about one other and then if there’s if there’s another one that you want to talk about we can we can kind of improvise that as well but the next one I want to talk to you about is the Alps okay i like this name first of all this is based on the 17th hole at Prewick this is not a course that people are super familiar with these days unless they’ve actually played it because it’s not a course that shows up on TV but this was the original open championship course back when the open was 36 holes Presswick was 12 holes and and they would play the course three times yeah that was the open uh well eventually Preswick got uh expanded to 18 holes and the Alps became the 17th hole on that course but some version of the Alps was always was always there on the course the key element of this hole and I know this is going to challenge you because of what we’ve discussed with regard to blind holes there’s a huge dune directly in front of the green great and then typically there’s a bunker between the bottom of the far side of that dune and the green so you not only are hitting over a dune to get to the green but there’s a bunker on the other side of it yeah you got to get over you got to really make the carry this is uh you know this is not what I’d call the strategic school of golf architecture this is pretty penal at least in its original essence you know just this feature of the hole it’s fairly penal because you got to bake a big aerial carry the fun of it is hitting your shot and then getting up and seeing the result if you you know if you have if you have a fun attitude about it then you’re like “All right am I in the bunker am I in the dune am I on the green?” You never know until you get there so completely blind approach and often the green will be sitting in a hollow a kind of punch bowl often what we refer to as a punch you may hear that term a lot too a punch bowl green this is this is an example of it’s not always a pure punch bowl green but it’s sitting in in a hollow there and so if you that means if you get over the dune and get over the bunker then the green is kind of friendly to you because if you’re on the right side of it well it’s going to slope down to the middle if you’re on the left side it’s going to slope down to the middle if you’re long it’s going to you just don’t want to be short and so if you make the carry then your hole your your ball is probably going to end up close to the hole the key wrinkle that McDonald and Rener introduced to many of their versions that I think is brilliant is that they they would have this dune or this rise in front of the grain they would have the kind of low set green and a hollow but then they would offer you an option from the tea to get a view of the green potentially if you hit a long risky drive up a particular side of the hole then from that position you might be able to see around the dune to the green if you hit your T-shot especially well and positioned it you know perhaps there are some bunkers guarding this position in the fairway but if you take that risk now we’re back to angles angles is going to be a whole different episode but now we’re back to angles we’re back to angles okay I get this angle is vision related because if you take the risk then you can see the green on your approach and that’s nice cuz the whole thing about that blind approach is that it’s uncomfortable you don’t know maybe where to aim you don’t know you don’t really have a true intuitive sense of how far to hit your ball but McDonald and Rener in their versions of the Alps often did give you this option to see the green if you took a risk so that’s the Alps hole reactions to that i like the idea of the punch bowl green i I I I think I I I was going to that was that was one of my follow-up questions so that a punch bowl is not a template or is a template or is that just like a design characteristic rather it’s a good question i think I would consider it yeah it’s sort of in between okay there are certain templates so-called templates that are just green designs mhm and those would include maybe the double plateau hole really what the double plateau is is a green with two plateaus and then a channel between them and then a lower section like a three section green where you have these two high sections where you can put pins and then one low section where you can put a pin and then a and then a little trough between the plateaus that’s a double plateau green but it’s not really specific as to what the other features of a hole of the hole would be you know often a double plateau green is paired with a principal’s nose bunker complex which is based on a bunker complex on the 16th hole of St andrews where you have kind of a couple of bunkers cut into a small mound or dune okay and if you look at it from above it looks like a nose with two nostrils right the bunkers are the two nostrils it’s kind of silly but you don’t really see it that way from the from the ground if you look at it from the air then um in any case uh so these these some of these motifs like the double plateau green and the principal’s nose bunker complex are kind of free floating so it’s not like a whole integrated hole design and I guess I would consider the punch bowl one of those but there are holes on courses designed by McDonald and Rainer with the name Punch Bowl and so it can get a little bit confusing that way i think the best way to understand templates though is that they’re not always strict the par 3 templates the typical par 3 templates the redan the beretss the short hole and the Eden hole you’ll see those over and over and over in in kind of similar configurations the topography will be different and the length will be a lot on a par three right it’s kind of it is what it is exactly whereas on the par fours and par fives often elements will be remixed rearranged different different things will be used in different places and so I think I would consider the term punch bowl to be part of that network of of motifs that are sometimes used in some places and sometimes in other places okay that makes sense i mean I mean back to back to the the the template itself then I like the idea of the reward of carrying this this dune you get a feeder green i that that makes sense to me in my binary yes or no one ones and zeros if I carry this I deserve to be rewarded and I also I like the I like the idea of taking an angle and getting to see past the the bunker so I I I I think I’m visualizing it correctly and I I like the idea of it on paper a lot okay that’s good but you’re uncomfortable with blind approach shots which is understandable yeah no I I think I would be infuriated like standing in the fairway looking at it but if you told me like “Hey all you have to do is hit this number and it’s going to feed down.” I’d be like “Oh okay at least I’ll try that.” Like that that makes sense i deserve to be rewarded in some some circumstance there yeah yeah absolutely so you would you would be frustrated by um the maiden hole which is a hole was a hole at Royal St george’s where you where it was a par three but basically an Alps hole because you were standing on the tea and just hitting over a dune to a semi kind of punch bowl green on the other side that was the maiden hole now confusingly enough McDonald and Rainer developed on some of their courses a maiden template okay that didn’t really have anything to it was more of a green design than a replica of the uh St george’s maiden hole and so um that that kind of introduces a key idea of of Rainer and McDonald’s templates that sometimes the holes sometimes the ideal holes are based on models that are either unknown or are so different from what McDonald and Rainer ended up creating that it’s hard to see the connection identifiable yeah so when people talk about template holes it’s really not a strict onetoone relationship between the model and what ultimately got built on many of McDonald and Rainer’s courses sometimes there was some real interpretation uh reinterpretation going on and sometimes there was just a complete departure from the original model and you just like it’s a mystery what was going through their minds and nobody really knows how they came up with what they came up with and so there was there was there was a lot of creativity in this process of developing ideal holes and we’re still coming to terms with what exactly they did there are some unknowns here basically are there any other template holes terms that you would that you’re curious to have identified yeah I I have I have two ways I want to take this so on the are there any other holes how does a road hole work when it’s not the road hole cuz I understand what it looks like there but I how do you take that out of that context and there’s no hotel and you’re not you know you’re removing all circumstantial you know outside influences keep in mind first of all that when McDonald first hole there was no old course hotel yeah it was it was something different but uh but yes that that’s a great question because the road hole uses certain unique features of the St andrews cityscape to create its strategy one of which is that little corner with u you know that now the old course hotel but there’s always been some amount of building or human settlement there that players are kind of hitting over and then there’s the road of course on that back side of the green this is an example of where McDonald may have looked at the original version of the hole said “Clearly this needs to be one of the ideal holes because everybody agrees that it’s the greatest threeshot hole or twoot hole or whatever you wanted to consider it in the world we’ve got to have some version of this but we can’t replicate exactly the features that it has in its landscape.” And so I think what McDonald and Rener ended up doing in their versions was boiling the hole down to its strategic fundamentals its angles essentially if you think about what the road hole really is beyond just the particularities of the uh hotel and the road it is a sharply doglegging right hole with an intimidating hazard on the inside of the dog leg and plenty of room to play on the outside of the dog leg but then a green oriented from right to left along that Redan diagonal but designed completely differently from a ran with a super deep terrifying bunker embedded into that green on its left side and then a hazard a kind of straight line line hazard on the outside on the other side and so the conundrum you find is that if you bail out away from the hazard on the inside of the dog leg then you’re facing approach in approach where you’re hitting over that terrifying pop bunker and toward the road on the other side you are going to end up either in the pop bunker or on the road neither of which is good and maybe you’ll maybe have some space to bail out on one side or the other you could play short of the green some people even provocatively play long of the green on the road hole but that is the strategic essence of the hole unless you challenge the inside of the dog leg you’re going to face an enormously difficult second shot and that is what what McDonald and Rener extracted from the road hole so ultimately what they did was instead of the road they often just put a bunker on the other side there to stand in for the road kind of a linear bunker basically in the same position and in the same orientation as the road and then maybe they’d find something else for the inside of the dog lake maybe some trees maybe maybe some water you know things varied or maybe just some bunkers to again stand in for that hazard that you would want to avoid on the inside of the dog lake so that was that was my follow-up question was does it need to be like a boundary like do you have to have a a like a literal like road or out of play or whatever like does this have to be pushed up against the edge of a property or could like what are you throwing on that side to that end there you could definitely argue that in order to recreate the tension of the road hole you need a boundary because you really need those hazards on that outside of the green and the inside of the dog leg to be absolutely just things that you know you need to avoid at all costs so I think some people would argue that yes it needs to be an outofbounds kind of situation but the fact is that if you look at McDonald and Rainer’s versions of the road hole they usually didn’t have that because they didn’t usually have a boundary line with the right dimensions to create that so they needed to create it in another way but yeah I think that um in general the Road Hole to my mind this is just my opinion is not always the most successful McDonald and Rainer template i think precisely because of this reason because usually it’s not a boundary and some of the character of the hole is is lost as as a result i don’t think I’ve ever seen a version of the Road Hole that exceeds the original yeah whereas whereas some other templates in in many cases the uh the renditions by McDonald and Rainer were were better and I don’t think that’s the case with the Road Hole because the original is so good yeah I feel like it would be hard to beat that actually having the road and and the bunker you know how you can put a you know a a penal bunker in that position but are you getting it to be that exact bunker and how bad that is in that slope i I you know I feel like it’s hard to replicate anywhere this is always the problem with influences in art because if you’re just trying to replicate something that you really love a really great work of art you’re always going to fall a little short because it’s not the original and even if you try to tweak or improve some elements of it the original is going to have something about it that is just better and so in order to exceed your influences or be as great as your influences you need to transform them in the process of making new art and I think that’s why the McDonald and Rener templates that are really different from their models tend to be the better ones so that that’s that that’s kind of the second half of my two ways that I wanted to take this i wanted to figure out what the road hole was when you remove all context of the actual road hole now my question to you is do you think in your opinion however you want to take this like are the template holes good like this was a question I had for you as well even obviously they are to some extent that they’re still be being used 120 years after this all started but like would you prefer to have these continually be used into the future or is it time to kind of move on and figure out something new wonderful question let me throw it back at you briefly before I give my thoughts on it do you think the template holes are unoriginal that’s the first question do you think their lack of originality is a problem i don’t think it’s a problem because like you said like you’re never getting the same land and it’s not going to be kind of cookie cutter like every single time you build it is going to be the exact same thing i like having aspects of recurring motifs like you said throughout an architect’s kind of portfolio i think that makes sense that’s kind of like any kind of art that you’re going to have kind of recurring themes or identifiable characteristics but you know I I think especially when you’re talking about the you know amount of land that now some of these courses are taking up like if you have the opportunity to get creative I wouldn’t necessarily be against that either yeah yeah no I think you’ve thought through that really well for me what you said at the beginning that the land differentiates template holes from each other is the key thing to understand about McDonald and Rainer’s own courses i think when you look at these courses from a Google Earth view you might say “Well they’re just doing the same holes over and over again.” Mhm but when you play them that kind of flies out of your mind because each McDonald and Rainer especially their best ones especially National Golf Links or the Leo as recreated in Sand Valley or Rainer’s best courses like the course at Yale or Yammen’s Hall or Chicago Golf Club when you actually play these courses they feel so specific and original to their piece of land i think especially Rainer’s genius because he designed so many more courses than McDonald but Rainer’s genius was finding different ways to adapt these template ideas to different pieces of land it was really an interesting exercise and he managed to come up with courses that just feel totally original time after time totally unique and that was something that goes beyond just theorizing the ideal holes it drew on the skills of routing and uh you know just finding opportunities in the land that that you know were were field skills they were on the ground skills that McDonald and Rener had in in doing this so their genius goes way way beyond just coming up with the ideal holes now I think it’s true that occasionally I wish that Rainer would have used different par three ideas that’s really where this kind of starts to become a bit repetitive and whenever Rainer incorporates a new kind of par three into his set of par 3s on a particular course I get really excited yeah it kind of like hits you in the face right it’s like whoa I haven’t seen this before that’s where it becomes exciting and also something to to bear in mind is that on every McDonald and Rainer course there are holes that they didn’t replicate elsewhere it’s not 100% template holes on any McDonald and Rainer course there are always kind of oneofone holes and sometimes it’s those ones that really jump out at you for for a variety of reasons and and maybe that does indicate a a new direction for golf architecture after McDonald and Rener that that pursuing these original ideas moving beyond the templates was the way to go at the same time I do appreciate the way that the ideal holes were adapted to each landscape of each course and I don’t necessarily wish that they did that they did things differently now I think it’s a separate question should modern architects use template holes what’s your thought about that i think there’s probably a line a really fickle line between use and overuse i wouldn’t say don’t do it but I would caution against overdoing it i don’t know exactly where that line is like like you said like the Redan comes up a lot if you want to do one of those like cool but maybe don’t like put all of them out there you know what I mean right and there are some modern courses that that use all template holes old McDonald at Bandon Dunes is is an example and uh Gil Hance recently did one in Florida called Kinsale and these courses are good old McDonald I love but what Old McDonald did is that it took the template holes and did something new with them that course doesn’t look like a McDonald and Rainer course the aesthetics are totally different the way the bunkers and greens are built is totally different it looks much more like St andrews than it does like National Golf Links and that was the new idea that Tom Duck introduced so in my opinion I’m with you don’t overdo it first of all because they’ve already been done really well and if you’re going to do it find a new spin find a new slant find a new slant these are perfectly normal collars find find a new slant perfectly normal template holes yeah find find your new slant and and do it in that way but to an extent the purpose of McDonald and Rener’s template holes has has gone because their original purpose was to introduce great design ideas to America they did that and now that they’ve done that I guess it’s time for us all to move on and then besides that another question that’s raised by McDonald and Rainer’s project here recreating the ideal holes a bigger question about the entire idea of it is whether a course with the 18 best holes is necessarily the best golf course that was McDonald’s theory at the beginning if I create 18 ideal holes I will have the ideal golf course for a variety of reasons I don’t think I agree no I feel like you need what’s making the holes great i’ve never been to San Andrew but I I think part of what makes the road hole great for example is the context of it and having it be you know late in the round where it’s positioned in the routing having the road having the now hotel like all of that is what makes the whole legendary and if you remove literally all of that then it’s just like a nice golf hole i think you’re exactly right the wonder of St andrews is the journey out to the estuary and back to town that’s what’s so great about I mean that’s one of the things that’s so great about that golf course that that accounts for a lot of its emotional impact on players that you kind of you kind of go on an adventure away from town and then for the last several holes the town gets bigger and bigger in in your uh frame of view until you’re finally right in it and part of the magic of the road hole is that it directly engages with the town the town is like part of that the town is the hole yeah that’s right and this is what you’ve been building toward throughout the whole round you went away from it now you’re coming back to it and so that is that is a big part of of why the road hole is so cool and and when you take it out of context and you and you make it the fourth hole on a golf course and you and you don’t have those elements of the town there then what you have is the strategy which is really cool but it is different and that’s why that’s why responding to the particular piece of land that you have in designing a golf course is probably always the best method now if you don’t have anything in that piece of land that’s interesting then you can consider what to do from there but if you have a piece of land with great features in it then the first job is to use those features well and that’s what that’s what the old course does and by the way that’s what so many of McDonald and Rainer’s best courses do as well in addition to having these template holes they also use the land extremely well they don’t miss any opportunities does that make you feel more comfortable with the template holes now PJ there are many more specific instances to talk about but I but I hope that that’s gotten you to to a point where at least the discussion as a whole makes sense yeah well again I wanted to leave here with knowing whatever Dan was i think I’m hammered i’ve I got that one locked down so mission accomplished all of this other historical context is great Gravy but I I’m leaving it here with something i love it PJ always a pleasure to talk to you about golf architecture 101 we’ll do it again soon and and please let me know if there’s another topic that you want to dig into yeah I I’ll have to think about it but uh I don’t know give me a couple weeks of hearing you guys talk about something and something will pop into my brain I’m sure exactly [Music] this episode of Designing Golf was produced by our guest PJ Clark thank you PJ for everything you do online now if you’ve been enjoying designing golf leave us a rating and review where wherever you happen to be listening to us we we like to hear feedback and also consider joining Friday Egg Golf Club recently renamed as we relaunched our website we’re building a great community in there where we talk about things like Redans and uh so if you like talking about that kind of stuff then come join us in Friday golf club go to the fried egg.com/membership enjoy our upcoming golf here we’re you know we just finished the PGA Championship and the US Open is quickly approaching so we’re going to do some fun things on designing golf that are related to the major championship venues so make sure to stick with us for that thank you for listening and we’ll be back again soon with another episode [Music]

8 Comments

  1. This was amazing, I have been looking for something like this to visually explain the template holes but it is really hard to find. I would love a follow up to this which goes over more of the template hole concepts, implementations elsewhere, and variations.

  2. Macdonald had wealth from other sources – a combination of family money and his career as a stockbroker. Raynor worked for a living, so he had to be more concerned about accepting projects – and fees.

    Raynor was also trained as a civil engineer. That background in planning and developing projects and fitting a project into a landscape probably served him well.

    And for examples of others using these hole ideas, the 4th hole at Riviera plays a lot like a Redan, with a fairway landing area on the right that feeds the ball into the green. But you wouldn't think of Macdonald when looking at that hole.

  3. I’ve honestly never thought much about golf course architecture but I feel like this may have just sparked an interest for me. Very cool hearing about the strategies built into the courses and journey they are meant to take you on.

  4. I love this series! One suggestion for the YouTube video, if you don’t mind. When you are talking about a specific template, course, or hole, it would be incredibly helpful to throw in pictures if/where you can in the video. I realize it adds more work to the editing process but I think it’d take these videos to the next level. Much love you guys keep up the great work.

  5. Greetings, — The way that you have used the word "Redan" is miss applied and confusing. A Redan is a fortification feature that is a Steep Slope [ Usually of Earth / Dirt ], that is constructed on a sharply angular plan form [ like a "V" shape ]. The function is to make approach more difficult. Traditionally, the term Redan Greens means that it is an Elevated Green, which requires the ball be sent into the air to reach the putting surface. What is constructed on top of the Elevated Green Base can widely vary. The sloping away from the front of putting surface to the rear is a secondary design feature, like a topping on a pizza. The Redan is like a deep dish pizza. It is a very specific crust form base that is not like anything else in the land of Pizza. — The Redan configuration is still used today in military and security design to prevent vehicles from ramming structures and breaching security perimeters. However, it is often disguised to blend with the landscaping for a softer look. Vehicle traps with the Redan Strategy are highly effective. — Best regards, — John
    PS – Watch the Fried Egg presentation of North Berwick – West and the 15th Hole, which is the Redan at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tgimApgv4 Please note the description provide is accurate and from playing experience.

  6. Love this. The 101 idea is fantastic. Really helping me with an entry point to understanding what makes holes and courses interesting as opposed to just a course.

    I think doing a pass for YouTube with more visual aids would be really additive, but great info nonetheless.

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