Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Peninsula North

quicny

It would be about 420 meters - and would be a tiger tee.Unless you count 5 as a par 4 (which it really is) it would be the first long 4 to that point in the round and the only other long 4 is 10.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Peninsula North

Liz,

There are a lot if right to left tee shots but there are more than a few greens favouring a left to right approach -2,3,5,9,15,16.
Draw greens are 4,10,14 and 18.

It would help 9 to move the tee back 40 meters - it would make for a much better dogleg hole for longer hitters.Of the doglegs 5 is a good two-shotter (as opposed to a real par 5) 8 is a good hole as are 17 and 18.
The other holes like 3,4,6,10,11,12,13 are hardly doglegs - they turn pretty gently around ground hazards.
6 can play as a straight hole,a dogelg right or a dogleg left depending on the driving line.

The new South is probably more evenly balanced - and if you think the North has a lot of doglegs you should have seen it 20 years ago!

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Peninsula North

Pat Malone

Which holes are the dinky little doglegs at Peninsula North?

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

St Andrews,

Crenshaw played the Victorian Open at Metropolitan in 1980 and the World Cup a Royal Melbourne in 1988.
He played a PGA at Royal Melbourne as well but I have no memory of the year.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

spooky,

Crenshaw was not prepared to travel this far so Coore is on his own.

Jeffrey

It would be well worth trying to get him to Melbourne - but they did that work at Riviera for the '95 PGA and I think that experiece kept them away from doing much working at old courses.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

Andrew,

Barnbougle has a fantastic super from Victoria and the staff are mostly locals who grew up with the course from the beginning - some from the beginning of construction.
I assume Barnbougle will stay with a single super but it is a good question.
Even Sand Hills in Nebrska - the best modern course in the world and done by Coore and Crenshaw - has a tough time keeping staff because its so remote.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

Full time population of 12 - but the cheapest beachfront houses in Australia

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

Musselroe is another 50 minutes past the Barnbougle driveway.
It is right in the north-east corner of the island
Hopefully both will start within a year.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

marcel

I would not say so given that Doak co-designed Barnbougle and Clayton design is doing Musselroe - which is a fantastic site.
Great courses also raise the bar for others - courses in the top 10 a decade ago are inevitably going to fall out.

It is also great thing for Tasmania.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

JJJ,

Not at all - maybe Doak and Coore would not have matched Norman and Thomson.
I was just posing the question.

National Moonah is in my top 10 and may well have made the top 100 if more raters had seen it.There have been a couple of courses done since Moonah National that have surpassed it in my opinion but it is still a very significant course.
Obviously Doak has more influence with the raters than Norman.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

Jack,

That point would be the far end of the course - or the start and finishing point depending where they put the clubhouse.
They say the land is fantastic and in the hands of the best it should be amazing.

Moe,

National and Moonah - four courses there.
Doak has done St Andrews Beach there but we must be tired of debating that one by now !! - IMO it's the best course down there and Fingal should be a fine addition to the Peninsula

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Bill Coore at Barnbougle

News that Bill Coore was down at Barnbougle for a couple of weeks routing the new course.
Mike Keiser is involved which is terrific given his experience and sucess with the same concept at Bandon.
With the course at Musselroe Bay looking promising could it be possible to have three of the very best courses in Australia in North East Tasmania? Three of the top 5 or 6???
Is it reasonable to suggest Tasmania might achieve what the Mornington Peninsula did not quite manage - world top 100 courses.
How different would the MP have been with Coore and Doak v Norman and Thomson?
Is it the same question as, How different would the sandbelt have been if Colt had come and not MacKenzie?

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Portsea

'The incumbent firm has been extremely vocal in its disagreement to the change and so therefore the Club would see that they are at odds with its future plans. How could the Club reinstate them on that basis? It would be very difficult at best.'

James,

That is not strictly true.
Bruce Grant as a member was/is against the plan but the design company was well aware of its role as the course architects and that was how best to manage any decision the club made - no matter if they agreed with what the club were doing or not.
Mike Clayton was not 'extremly vocal in his disagreement with the plans' - quite the contrary.
It was a tricky situation with one of the company being a member but Bruce was speaking as a member as he is entitled to do and not as part of the design business - something completely different.
The reality is the design company were not prepared to get involved in the tender process given just how good a job they had done at Portsea over the years.

Nor has any of the work Clayton Design did at Portsea been remotely close to 'restoration'
They restored nothing - they significantly reworked 1,6,9,11,13,15,16,17 and 18.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / St Andrews Beach

Dingo,

There are many holes during The Open where the pin barely moves at all.
1 is often close to the burn,4 is always behind the left bunker,12 on the small ledge,17 behind the bunker and at 18 they use less than a third of that green for pins.
I never saw the pin at the 2nd in the right two-thirds of the green - although week to week it's over there a lot - AndyA would be able to give a better answer to that question.
Having said that the course does change quite a bit when the pins move.

I am bemused with the argument that there is not much strategy at St Andrews Beach.
There are so many tee shot options each giving a diferent second shot and at holes like 1,2,3,7,13,14,15 and 17 the pin is blind from some places but not others - it all depends on the quality of the drive.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Portsea

Andrew,

It depends on whether the new par 3 is better than the 3rd - which is a decent hole but nothing more or less than that.

The issue is that the place they should be building the hole is being sold and the place where they are probably going to build it is a difficult site - probably between 18 and 1.

The other question is whether the new architects understand the course as well as the old ones - who know it and understand it like the backs of their hands.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Portsea

Hux,
A new clubhouse by 6 means that is the start and 5 is the finishing hole - which is a good one. 6 is a good hole now and changing it will be difficult.

Probably they finish on 18 followed by a new 3 then 1 as 15,2 as 16 3 and 4 combined as 17 and 5 as 18.
The finished result depends on how well the new holes are done.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Portsea

Hux,

Clayton/Grant and Sloan declined the club's invitation to tender - guess they thought they had enough runs on the board since Grant took over maintaining the course in the early nineties and the company took over the design in the mid nineties.
It is a dangerous course to mess with given that it is about as good as it can be now.
The point is that 'minor'changes to a course like Portsea are all major changes.
Shortening 1,removing 3,moving the 6th tee and adding a par 3 somewhere are not ' minor' changes in any sense of the word.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / Best Golf Course Near Eltham

Rosanna - a decent course getting better every year

Topic: Golf Talk / Masters Coverage

This is a sorry excuse for a golf tournament.
We should be exhaulting in the fact Appleby is leading but here was a tournament that was all about exciting,daring golf and all we have is a distorted version of the US Open.

The Masters was all about Jones and MacKenzie and their interpretation of the way the game should be played - and they surely would be horrified at this effort to find the best players in the game.
Woods will no doubt win and they will use the excuse that they identified the best player in the world - which they will have but they did not identify his best game or anything close to it.
The real problem is that Wally Titleist has no regard for the game and all he is concerned about is how far he can make the ball fly.
He has done a fine job of that but the golf this week is the result.
Hands up who would rather watch Nicklaus v Miller and Weiskopf in '75 or Nicklaus v Watson in '77 or Seve in 1980 or Nicklaus v the world in '86 or Faldo v Norman in'96(ok we don't want to watch that again)

This is a horrible version of the second best event - The Open is the best - in golf.It's put itself way behind the USPGA with this effort.

Topic: Golf Talk / Masters Coverage

Jerry,
Good omen - they didn't show him on Saturday at The US Open either.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / New 1st at Victoria GC

marcel

The back of the 16th green running onto the 17th tee was always a messy area.
There is a new back tee at 17 and the whole area was regrassed.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / New 1st at Victoria GC

N@GA

8 is a distance - about 445m - that is now a par 4 for good players and good players have always been the measure of par for a hole - not 16 handicappers.
The hole would be a lot better if the fairway was widened to the right - a width relevent to the hole as a par 4 - and obviously the fairway bunker needs to be moved further along the hole.
Peter Thomson said of this hole a few years ago ' Of course when I was a boy you could see the green and the bunkers from the tee!'

It would be a better hole if that view was restored.
I think 5 would be improved with a new green - given that then present one is not an original.
12 is a really good hole but it should be one of the best dozen holes in Melbourne and it's not quite there.
17 would also be a much improved hole if the green was bought forward 30 meters so it was more visible from the fairway and not stuck to far around behind the right trees - and it could then be bunkered without the handicap of the houses in the back.

Kingston Heath started their restoration/alteration program in 1982 and Victoria started in 1995.Victoria is not that far behind KH and the next few years should be small but significant improvement.
It is amazing how much has gone on at Victoria in that time - most of it unnoticed by members and observers.
There have been significant changes to 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17 and 18.
Some have been small changes and some have been on a greater scale.

Topic: Your Favourite Golf Courses / New 1st at Victoria GC

N@GA

Heathland plants all the way down the right of 2 and 3 would be perfect.The right of 13 at Kingston Heath would be an ideal model to replicate.
There is some good stuff coming up in the new sandy waste on the first hole and the same sort of plants might work - however being under the cypress trees is not ideal for growing anything.

3 is an odd drive.The mounds on the left do not help and it's important to keep balls away from the road - something all the trees that were removed from the right of 2 and 3 had failed to do.All they did was ruin the holes as they continued to grow up and out.
It is amazing how much better the holes look now.

You can drive it quite a long way up the right to open up the back left pin - there is a corner of fairway short of the bunker about 210 ?? meters from the back tee.
Not too many would try that but its an option - for most it would be 3 wood, 4 iron.

I played the course yesterday - the rain has been terrific - the course is in great shape and the greens are as good as anything in Melbourne.

Topic: Golf Talk / Australia's top 100

St Andrews,

That list is a bit better but not much.

Port Fairy behind Arundel Hills just about says it all.
Bonville in and no Ranfurlie!!

They want these lists to be credible but they come up with this.

Topic: Golf Talk / Australia's top 100

I have played 84 of them
That is not a serious list is it???

That might be just about as bad a list as I have ever seen - although it is very out-dated now.