Kirk Bohls reports that Jordan Spieth has entered the design world as a consultant to Roy Bechtol on a par-3 course for UT Golf Club in Austin.
The course will be called The Spieth Lower 40.
“I’m excited about it,” Spieth said. “It’s going to be a cool little par-3 golf course that will be demanding visually but still fair for really solid wedge and short game work. I was definitely very hands on. I looked at the blueprints, the mapping, the scale. It’s cool being part of the design process with Roy because I’m interested in doing that later in life.”
The 4.5 acre course is under construction with a goal to open in September according to coach John Fields.
In the coming months I'm going to start rolling out "Eye On Design" videos focusing on various design elements in golf that either interest me or need to be reconsidered. While it's not sexy to kick off with the "variable distance" ball topic, we might as well try to wrap our heads around what I anticipate will be a lively debate centered around golf course design.
To set this complicated topic up, here are my thoughts presented in digital video form. I flesh a few more thoughts out to (hopefully) better inform your votes...
For us technophobic, distance RIPer's, things have come a long way over the last decade. Just look at your reaction to the WGC Dell Match Play last week where we saw epic driving distances on fairways playing at a nice, normal firmness.
A consensus of serious golfers see that distance increases for elite players have altered the brilliance and safety of our best-designed courses. This combination of improved technology, blatant outsmarting by manufacturers and a host of other elements like Trackman and instruction, have forced the governing bodies to defend expensive and offensive alterations to works of art.
No other sport pats itself on the back more than golf for upholding its traditions and integrity. Yet no the other sport has sold its soul to protect a relationship between participation and the equipment professionals play. A relationship, which I might add, will continue even after a bifurcation of the rules.
Fast forward 22 years and the amazing synergy of athleticism, fitting, instruction and technology has produced super-human driving distances for decent golfers on up to the best. No other sport on the planet has tolerated such a dramatic change in short time, so should we see 10% taken off the modern driving distance average of an elite golfer--at certain courses and events--the sky will not fall. The players who use such a ball would restore the strategy and intrigue of most golf courses built before 1995. (That was the year, not coincidentally, when things started to change.)
Several solutions that do not fundamentally alter the sport have been offered endlessly. They've also been resisted even as the game has not grown during a technology boom that has seen golfers offered the best made and engineered equipment in the game's history. Solutions such as reducing the size of the driver head for professionals and tournament-specific golf balls have not been welcomed or even tried.
The growing sense that a first step solution is on the way arrived when the USGA’s Mike Davis suggested at the recent Innovation Symposium that a “variable distance” ball could be an alternative for select courses and select social situations.
“We don’t foresee any need to do a mandatory rollback of distance. We just don’t see it. But that’s different than saying if somebody comes to us and says I want an experience that doesn’t take as long or use as much land, can we allow for equipment to do that?”
As we know, the proposed rules of golf re-write emphasizes speeding up the game and everyone knows adding new back tees has never helped on this front. For the first time, elite golfers are suggesting they see the correlation between distance and new tees, but are also tired of walking back to such tees on golf courses where the flow of the round is fundamentally altered.
Beyond the pace and silliness of it all, all indications suggest the USGA and R&A have also developed ways for the handicap system to address a variable distance ball that could be used in select circumstances.
Perhaps it's a club championship and is employed in lieu of extra rough or greens Stimping 13 feet. Or it's an invitational tournament played from tees other than the back. Or maybe there are golf courses experiencing pace of safety issues that will require golfers use such a ball?
On the social side, I expect the case to be made for golfers of different levels playing the same tees thanks to the variable distance ball, Since Davis’s remarks, I have been surprised how many golfers have told me this would make their Saturday foursomes a more cohesive affair, with everyone playing the same tees and the short hitters not frightened by getting fewer shots from a scratch golfer using a shorter flying ball.
Most of all, such a ball on certain courses would return certain skills (hitting a long iron approach?) and end decades of pretending golf does not have an integrity problem.
I point all of this out because Davis’s remarks were no accident. Whether anyone likes it or not, this ball is coming. The variable ball will not be forced, just another way to play the game. The British ball did not break the sport and neither will this option. Because that's all it is, an option. Given that The Masters arrives next week featuring long fairway grain mown toward the tee to prevent roll, I believe the variable distance ball will again be on the minds of all watching.
Even in the age of Google, I've recently gotten this question about a few courses--usually Torrey, Pebble and the Old Course--so it's nice to see Jason Scott Deegan put together a list of the tough tee time gets, and how to get them.
Bookmark this for yourself or your friends who ask!
I hope The Knockdown's Alan Shipnuck lands a membership for declaring Monterey Peninsula's Dunes course America's "next great golf course" and the "best 36-hole club in America," nudging out Winged Foot, Baltusrol and, uh, Whisper Rock?
Shipnuck, resident of nearby Salinas and now eligible for Chamber of Commerce HOF status, writes:
Winged Foot and Baltusrol each have two courses with championship pedigrees but at both properties the tracks look and play pretty much the same. Whisper Rock is a cool scene and enjoys the starpower of various Tour players as members, but the outskirts of Scottsdale can’t compete with the grandeur of Pebble Beach.
No, the best 36-hole club in America is now Monterey Peninsula, with two very different courses that are every bit as good as those that share the same famous coastline.
The piece also features links to a slideshow of the Dunes, which is likely to host the AT&T National Pro-Am in 2018. It's sister Shore Course is currently hosting along with Spyglass Hill and Pebble Beach.
Some of this year's suggested gifts are personal items (here and here) that Santa will never leave under the tree. Others in the non-Santa category support worthwhile golf causes (here and here) while also making a great gift.
So while the new Simpson & Co. biography published by Rhod McEwan is one that you can proudly gift, I'm fairly certain that golf architecture aficionados will be placing this stunning production alongside their collection of classics. Scoop up a copy while they last!
Written by the late Fred Hawtree, the book is embellished by Donald Steel's foreword and afterword along with a long list of contributors featured in the Acknowledgements. The resulting sense of finding a fun visual or factual surprise on every page is befitting of Simpson's rich-but-mysterious life.
McEwan has put together a sturdy volume which, as with his other golf publications over the years, will age gracefully. Best of all, we have a highly readable, visually engaging tribute one of golf architecture's least understood characters.
The book is £28.00. Shipping is £4 in the UK, £10 in Europe and £15 for the rest of the world. Simpson & Co. is a limited printing of 750 copies, each numbered.
Isn't this about how it looked during the 2015U.S. Open?
Heads up to all the brave winter golfers out there. Chambers Bay, Lake Spanaway, and Fort Steilacoom Golf Courses are all closed today. pic.twitter.com/gtaN89moc7
Architect Gil Hanse and Pinehurst's Tom Pashley were on Morning Drive today to discuss the exciting overhaul of Pinehurst No. 4. And while someone will surely be sad to see the eradication of Tom Fazio's pot bunker phase, the layout desperately deserves to look more like a Pinehurst course.
Welcome the busy and talented design firm of Ebert and Mackenzie to Instagram by following and checking out the first glimpse of their Royal Portrush renovation.
The firm is adding two holes to a course currently ranked 13th by Golf Magazine's esteemed panel.
We saw a preview of the planned changes here. While many of us feared tinkering with a classic to create a tent city on the current 17th and 18th, adding two holes was the only way for The Open to cone to Northern Ireland. Furthermore, losing the 17th hole's massive fairway bunker was a shame but it seems "Big Nellie" has surfaced at the new 572-yard 7th:
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning Drive, is co-host of The Ringer's ShackHouse is the author of eleven books.
The course will be called The Spieth Lower 40.
