I have been thinking lately about different features on golf courses and how they all work together to produce the final product. Ideally, the features should come together and produce something of high quality, often times they do not, but that is another matter. Of the times when the combination of features turns out to be of high quality, the course in question can be something like Heaven on Earth. However, this led me to ask why that is the case? And not only that, how many times does a person go into a course that has that other-worldly feel without some previously formed opinion on what they will think?
One course that comes immediately to mind is Pacific Dunes. I went there with the notion that this course would be pretty much perfect with no imperfections and that everything would be like playing golf in a fantasy land. After playing, after initial review, I agreed with that, I even had it down as a 10 on my course ranking page for quite a while. But upon further review, I am not sure if that is the case. The reason being, I don't feel like the entire product comes together as well as it should, or could. Places like the routing error from 11 to 12 and from 12 to 13 where the player has to walk a rather substantial distance to get to the next tee, in the case from 11 to 12 the player actually has to walk through the teeing ground of the 5th hole. Add this to the fact that the player has to walk roughly 75 yards directly back into the line of play on 13 upon leaving the green in order to begin the journey to the 14th tee and the routing comes off as a bit lacking. I have discovered some other things I felt lacking in the course as well, and this prompted me to downgrade it to a 9, rather than a 10. I do hope to make it back to Bandon reasonably soon (like within 2-3 years) and take another look.
But the course that prompted this thinking of how often do courses turn out to be great "because they were supposed to be great" was Sahalee in Washington. I have not played this course but an acquaintance of mine who has wrote a very detailed review about it and openly questioned how this course was rated among Golf Digest's Top 50 courses in the United States. My response to that was that I think most golfers are very susceptible to following their "conditioning" and saying that a course is great or very good simply because that was what they thought before and simply forced themselves to see the course that way. I also feel that many people might feel that Sahalee is a great course simply because it is said to be the finest course in the region (and in truth, probably is since the Pacific NW is not exactly known as a golf hotbed) and that, coupled with the fact that the vast majority of golfers play the vast majority of their golf in the same general area, can lead to possible skewing in the rating numbers. I know in my personal play, I have gone into courses with a biased opinion on what I was "supposed" to think and that has led to both good and bad things. But a previously formed opinion can most certainly cause a person to skew his "real" opinion of a course.
This, I think, is what happened to me at Pacific Dunes. I thought coming in that it would be straight out of a fantasy world and just looked past the small things. And in that way, how often do we look past small things when we play a golf course that is "supposed" to be great? How often does the golfer look past the routing oddities at Pacific Dunes, or the lack of (apparent) green contouring at Congressional, or the (apparent) lack of width and recover options at Sahalee simply because these courses are supposed to be great and that makes it all good? I am as guilty of this as anyone...but does that make it OK?
Overall, I think it is difficult to look past our previously formed opinions and come up with a true, unbiased opinion on a golf course that we have recently played. Sometimes this takes quite a bit of review and thought. In my case, with Pacific Dunes, it took a year of thought and playing about 40 more golf courses, some very poorly routed, for me to really think about how much the course routing meant to me and whether or not it was enough to bump Pacific Dunes from 10 down to 9. Perhaps in the case of Sahalee, the raters would be well served taking a step back and having a hard look at what, exactly, they feel makes a course great, perhaps not though.
In the end though, the only thing we can do as people, if we are to be in the "business" of rating courses on some particular scale, is to play as much golf as partical in as many different places such that we might have a better idea of what is good and what is bad and at the same time be able to get past our previous opinions based on supposition and form real, true opinions based on the facts as best we are able to see them.
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