I don’t actually know whether Davis Love III is a good golf architect or not. I’ve only played one of his courses, and am mixed on his renovation of Angus Glen North. Maybe my take has something to do with the distasteful way in which he was hired, while original architect Doug Carrick was left to read about it in the newspaper.
Anyway, my Score Golf architecture column that appeared today follows my musings on perhaps the biggest issue facing the Royal Canadian Golf Association (aside from the sponsorship matter): Can three Canadian Opens, held at Angus Glen North, Glen Abbey and an unknown course, actually do permanent damage to the event? I don’t actually know the answer — but as far as the Open goes, I’m concerned we all might not like where we stand in three years time.
The column has already garnered a couple of responses from readers, including this one from Paul:
Having recently played the re-vamped Agus Glen North Course, the best word to describe it is “boring”. Face it, if the Pros aced the Angus South course 3 (?) years ago, they will utterly destroy this one in 2007, assuming of course they don’t fall asleep while they’re doing so.
Ouch. That’s harsh. Angus Glen North certainly isn’t that bad — it just isn’t of the quality of the likes of Hamilton. But given all of the other considerations around the event (corporate tents, parking, logistics), the RCGA actually feels Angus Glen is a fine venue. The only way their take will change is if none of the PGA Tour’s best shows up — then the corporate tents and other factors won’t matter.
Speaking of DLIII, Geoff Shackelford posted this hysterical Love quote that was apparently uttered last week (note the crazy language and spelling comes from the transcriber….):
And, you know, I think we knew what the golf course looked like, we knew the old style and, you know, we liked the kind of the Chicago golf club, that kind of style green and we thought it would fit very well here and give the members a chance to get the ball to run up on to the greens.
You can kind of tell the downhill balls the ball runs on to the green, uphill holes little bit of false fronts. Very, very traditional.
Somebody like Lee Jantzen who is studying old golf courses comes up and talks to me about them all the time. If you appreciate some of the old Master kind of things, there’s like that goofy No. 2 green, there’s some designers that put a green like that on every course they built and, you know, we didn’t do a punch bowl and didn’t do a “Rhodan” but we did really old style greens and I think the members like it especially if the rough is a little bit lower than it is right now, they have a lot of fun playing it.
Now I don’t think DLIII did much Old School work on Angus Glen North, at least not that I saw…. Love the “Rhodan” bit — sounds like a Godzilla movie.
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