{"id":871,"date":"2012-04-21T21:35:59","date_gmt":"2012-04-22T02:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=871"},"modified":"2012-04-21T21:35:59","modified_gmt":"2012-04-22T02:35:59","slug":"bambi-and-the-art-of-golf-course-design-an-appreciation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/golf\/871\/bambi-and-the-art-of-golf-course-design-an-appreciation","title":{"rendered":"Bambi and the Art of Golf Course Design: An Appreciation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Bill Coore\u00a0spends weeks tramping around a work site.\u00a0 On a new project, his first task is to identify the easiest, most natural ways to move around the land, often guided by the paths that deer and other native animals have created.”
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 John Paul Newport, The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, \u201cZen and the Art of Golf Course Design,\u201d April 7, 2012.\u00a0\u00a0<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

When we hired him, Bambi knew nothing about golf.\u00a0 Like a lot of child actors, he\u2019d knocked around a bit after his adolescent success.\u00a0 He\u2019d been recommended to us as someone who could find his way through the woods, even if the forest was on fire.\u00a0 We suspected that this ability would translate into a kind of instinctive grasp of what makes a good golf hole.\u00a0\u00a0 That suspicion proved correct.\u00a0 Bambi was an incredibly quick learner.\u00a0\u00a0 The first site we visited, he went crashing into the underbrush, leaving broken branches and a trail of surprisingly small and delicate hoof prints for us to follow.\u00a0\u00a0 Within minutes, we realized that we had found the design equivalent to Hogan\u2019s secret, an entirely new way to analyze a site.\u00a0\u00a0 Within that first hour, Bambi had discovered two incredible par fours and a par five we were sure would soon be featured in a Ron Whitten column.<\/p>\n

But we also discovered that he was weak to the point of utter futility on par 3s.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe it was the speed at which he attacked his work.\u00a0\u00a0 Maybe his overall grasp of the route plan concept itself was feeble.\u00a0 The places for short holes would just pass underfoot for Bambi as transition zones between the par fours and par fives, which he loved.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea of the dogleg had made him very nervous at first, too, until we explained that the expression was metaphorical.\u00a0 Actual dogs were not part of the design process.\u00a0 Dogs did not play golf, although we did admit that many canines lived on golf courses once they were built to help the green keepers chase ducks and geese away.\u00a0 Bambi was horrified, frankly, and for a while we were afraid that we\u2019d lost him.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But we convinced him to visit another site, along a secluded lake in northern Saskatchewan that Mike Keiser was looking into developing, shrewdly calculating the long-term impact of global warming on golf.\u00a0 Once his feet hit the ground, Bambi was back to his old self.<\/p>\n

We still struggled for a while over what to do about Bambi\u2019s inability to comprehend not just the importance of the par 3, but the very idea of the short hole.\u00a0 Over beers one night, tired but happy after tromping across sixty acres and finding more natural holes in an afternoon than exist in the entire portfolios of most members of the ASGCA, we had a heart-to-heart with him about this par 3 issue.\u00a0 \u201cShort,\u201d we said, holding our hands about a trout apart.\u00a0 \u201cNot long,\u201d we remonstrated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He just stared in his glass.\u00a0 Around midnight, just before we poured single malt for a rather discouraging and gloomy nightcap, convinced that he would never understand how important the punctuation of short holes was to completing the exuberant collection of par 4s and 5s that was clearly his signature contribution, his eyes suddenly opened wide.\u00a0\u00a0 He lifted my shot glass and put it on the edge of the table.\u00a0 He set his own below it on the arm rest of his chair, looking from one to the other, and then up at us with a hopeful expression.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cYes!\u201d we said, \u201cYes!\u201d<\/p>\n

Moments later, in a ecstasy of comprehension, he uttered the name that would make our team incomparable: Thumper.<\/p>\n

Thumper had been retired for some years and living off residuals when we contacted him.\u00a0 \u201cCall my agent,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cLet me talk to him,\u201d said Bambi.\u00a0 He went over to a quiet spot and was on the phone for nearly an hour.\u00a0 A smile crossed his lips as he pranced back toward us.\u00a0 \u201cHe\u2019s in.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thumper, like Bambi, was a natural.\u00a0\u00a0 His hopping technique worked the site in a kind of zig-zag pattern, which turned out to be the perfect mechanism for discovering par 3s hidden in, around and near nooks and crannies.\u00a0\u00a0 Thumper was always weary and looking for a place to bail in case he heard a hawk\u2019s cry or the yodel of a coyote, so he was tremendously attuned to the fine print of a site.\u00a0 His technique was simple and ingenious.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He would ease into a clearing, hop to the high point, lift himself to his full height on his hind legs and survey the surrounding terrain in every direction, his nose twitching with anticipation.\u00a0 Then he was off, hopping with surprising vigor given his age, and we would wait quietly for as much as twenty minutes until he would reappear, thumping his long right foot into the ground.\u00a0 We would rush over, plant a marker, and marvel at how precisely his instincts had taken him to a perfect green site.\u00a0\u00a0 And while that skill impressed us, what made Thumper unique among the creatures prospecting for golf holes hidden around the planet by Nature\u2019s mysterious means, was how he knew to look for a short par 3, say, and then a long one, and then a medium one\u2014this intuition had to be divine, it could not be random.\u00a0 So that\u2019s how we came to refer to him as Saint Thumper.<\/p>\n

But something was still missing.\u00a0 We were discovering individual holes without equal, interrogating the sites through the agency of our colleagues\u2019 perfectly tuned natural intelligences, the genetic wisdom of the ages\u2014but how could these discoveries be melded into a whole?\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t enough to establish the motifs with the brilliance of individual passages\u2014we needed to segue through the site, to link the movements into a single symphonic whole.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bambi was drinking more, tired of all the travel and constant requests for interviews.\u00a0 He also knew that his repertoire of skills had limits, and that he was starting to repeat himself.\u00a0 That\u2019s what instincts do\u2014they run down the same paths over and over.\u00a0 It was a troubling insight to such a proud deer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And while Bambi\u2019s feet felt the contours of the land, absorbing the terrain with every foot fall, he was also starting to understand that the actual game, as opposed to the course, was played mostly through the air.\u00a0 To understand golf\u2019s Aeolian aspect, we needed an aerial specialist.\u00a0\u00a0 Thumper remembered another old pal, who he hadn\u2019t seen in decades: Friend Owl.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat guy could spot a mole diving underground at 400 yards,\u201d said Bambi.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWe need him for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sadly to say, Friend Owl had passed away some years before.\u00a0 His eye-sight failing, he flew into the broad side of a barn.\u00a0 But he left behind a large extended family, and Thumper knew a grandson, Stanley Owlsey, who\u2019d had a difficult youth but had been going straight since getting out of prison.\u00a0 \u2018His vision was so acute he could see into the future,\u201d said Thumper, \u201cso he was always getting ahead of himself.\u00a0\u00a0 But he\u2019s got the peepers we need, no question.\u201d<\/p>\n

We had Owlsey drug-tested, of course, and he passed with flying colors, so to speak.\u00a0 From day one, he understood our mission to create only pure, natural, all-species approved courses, whose character was implicit in the attributes of the mother sites.\u00a0 Our triumvirate revolutionized golf design, leading it back to the 18th century, where it so rightly belonged.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We lost Thumper first, then Bambi, who never seemed to recover from the loss of his old friend.\u00a0 (They all thought Flower, who of course had died during his famous humanitarian mission to Canada during the normality crisis of 1966, would have made fundamental contributions to golf design, elaborating on native landscape themes and devising a unique plant palette. But that sweet little skunk never got a chance.)\u00a0 Owlsey is retired, but still cruises over a site for us now and then, reminding us of what we once had: the perfect, natural alliance of animal spirits devoted to discovering the inner golf hidden deep in Gaia\u2019s soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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