What is Target Golf

People often wonder how to define target golf. Many will define it as golf that is played from point to point, hitting only high shots to a given yardage to a specific target.
This hole, the 15th at Mike Strantz's Tot Hill Farm in Asheboro, NC is a prime example of this definition.

There are no options or various plays to be had here. Of course the player could hit a draw or fade, possible higher or lower than usual, but this can be said for every shot on every golf course in the world. What does not exist on this hole is the ability to land a ball short of the green and have it roll onto the putting surface, such as on a biarritz hole, or hit a nice draw and have it kick off a slope and roll to the right down to the flag, such as seen on a redan hole. This hole really is a perfect example of the standard idea as to define Target Golf.

However, I tend to take a different view on Target Golf. I consider all golf to be Target Golf. Allow me to use a picture of a biarritz hole to illustrate what I mean.

On this hole, for those not familiar with the hole, allow us to assume the pin is in the position marked by the RED dot. The green is then broken into three distinctive segments, the front and rear portions are relatively flat, while the middle section, marked by a rough rectangle formed with the four GREEN points, will have a significant dip, very much resembling a half-pipe like that used by skaters and snow boarders. If the front run-up area is firm and maintained at fairway height, which it should be, the player has multiple options. He can aim some 60-70 yards short of the pin, by the PINK dot, and hit the shot with some speed, allowing it to roll all the way back, through the dip, to the pin. If he wants to get the ball in the air a bit more, but still run is a significant distance, he can aim at the front of the green, for the YELLOW dot, and once again, allow it to roll to the back. He can also play it to the BLUE dot or, if feeling very adventurous, can carry the ball all the way onto the back section, landing his shot where the ORANGE dot is located.

These shots all have one thing in common: in each case, the golfer must select a yardage to carry the ball, then pick a TARGET and hit the shot. As such, even though it has an abundance of options, the hole still amounts to picking a target and hitting the ball to that target, just like the hole at Tot Hill Farm.

I have a rare view of this situation, I know. But the truth is, with every shot in golf, the player has to pick a yardage and a target and hit the ball to that target in order for the shot to work out, or so he hopes. Therefore, I do break with the common definition of Target Golf and just go about saying that all golf is Target Golf. So, have fun, pick your targets, and go play golf.

Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail at Oxmoor Valley- Ridge course

This course, like all on the Trail that I have played finds way to get very picturesque holes while coming up with a very compromised routing and nothing of great interest. It's quite sad, really. This course really amounts to target golf, as most would define target golf that is, (I'll make a post one day about my take on "target" golf) in that the player is basically forced to hit it to specific spots in order to be given a flat lie to the green, most typically this is around the 150 yard marker. Anywhere much closer to the green than that and the player is likely to be faced with a very uneven lie. Another negative here is that the course requires aerial shots into all 18 holes (actually all 54 holes at the club require aerial shots) and that just gets repetitive after about the 6th or 7th hole. But this course isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, it just isn't anything of real goodness.

Holes to note:
Hole #3: Par 5, 539 yards
This hole is noted not because it's good or great, but because it is a photogenic train wreck. This hole plays significantly downhill off the tee to a tongue of a fairway sticking out into a clown's mouth pond. Any shot hit longer than 255 yards will go into the pond if not hit directly down the center. From there the margin of error gets lower and the fairway runs out at 305 off the tee.

From here the player is left with a forced lay-up to roughly the 150 yard post, as is the same for most holes, or to the upper fairway that is visible in the picture below. The forced lay-up is due to the green being perched up about 10 feet above the fairway level on a giant pile of shale stone; it is unknown if this pile was on the site when Jones/Rulewich first saw the site or if they took time to pile it up.
The view from the fairway, near the 250 pole:

The shot to the green is then as boring and one dimensional as the other 18 approaches: know yardage, pick club, hit. No chance for anything else here.

And finally a look at the clown's mouth from the green looking backwards.

Hole #5: Par 3, 179 yards
Fair par 3 hole. Not much going on here, certainly not much going on with the green, but I really like the crater bunker in front of the green. Sadly, given they have done away with some of these crater bunkers at other trail sites, I wonder how long it will remain?

Hole #6: Par 4, 447 yards
Nice cape hole from the tee. The fairway runs parallel to a deep ravine (which is horrible to walk through, by the way) and the player must choose how much of the angle he wants to take off. The carry to the fairway taking a ball right towards the edge of the trees in the ravine is about 290 yards, the carry if one plays to the far right edge of the fairway is about 215 yards.

From the fairway, the player who took the more aggressive line off the tee will be rewarded with the shorter club into the green and this is of major benefit on this hole because the green is significantly elevated and any shot will have to carry the entire distance to the green, a green that is not incredibly deep.

Hole 12: Par 5, 483 yards
This reachable par 5 offers multiple options off the tee and is probably the most strategic hole this writer has played on the Trail thus far. The safe play from the tee, down the righthand fairway will give the player a better angle to the green from a flat lie, but a much longer shot.

But the player who tries a play down the lefthand fairway will be rewarded, IF he can pull off the shot, with a much shorter play into the green, possibly with as little as a wedge.

From the left hand of the fairway, it is apparent that the angle to the green is not as good, having to play over bunkers and possibly around the trees the right, but as you can see by the significant slope of the fairway, shots can run out quite a long way.

Overall, I think the course falls short of what it could have been. The routing, specifically, green to tee distances, is rather substandard. The holes themselves are, as is pretty standard of Roger Rulewich, quite picturesque is many cases, but lacking a lot of substance. And the greens are lacking in the way of both very bold and subtle contouring. And of course, the green surrounds have virtually no features which the player can use to manipulate a shot. But as a whole the course is not bad and is certainly better than much of the public golf in Alabama, and elsewhere, within it's price range. Overall 4 out of 10, above average.

The Good and The Bad...

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.