National Treasure - The Journey Begins

[jayraygun]

Hello everyone, JayRayGun, The Atomic Golfer, here with what I hope to be an ongoing series of posts within the thread meant to be both a WIP update regarding my National Treasure Design Contest course as well as a way to organize my thoughts going into the design and ultimately chronicling my very first real attempt at any 18 hole design competition. I will be using this thread as sort of a blog for myself and anyone else who may be interested in my process. Maybe you're also a new designer wondering what it's like to be in one of these competitions. Maybe you're curious as to whether or not I have any tips or insights into the design process. Maybe you're an established designer and you'd like to have a laugh at little old me struggling to grasp concepts that are as intuitive to your designs as blinking or breathing. "Aww, look, he thinks he's people." All are welcome!

Officially, I am part of the 34 designers vying for one of the four coveted Wild Card spots in the main field of competitors. My hope is that my course makes it out of the Wild Card stage to be judged alongside the likes of b101 , Heisenberg , gamesdecent , and the somewhat mediocre but always flashy tpetro . By the way, before anyone take offense on the behalf of ole petro, that happens to be somewhat of an inside joke. Putting myself out there as a newer, underdeveloped, and underexposed designer is certainly a stressful and nerve-wracking mission being that I have just a single 18 hole course published for PGA2K and though it has a fair amount of plays and has received some praise, it ultimately leaves a lot to be desired, both from official reviewers and myself as a designer.

Between publishing in October, 2020 and today, I have dabbled in many course projects trying to use as many different themes as possible to get a feel for how each of them interact with the various elements at our disposal since each of the themes have unique ways in which they show water, rocks, steep inclines, or bare earth underneath trees and bushes. Not to mention that each of the themes also come pre-packaged with their own inherent amount of plant meter already spoken for, sometimes a designer really has to choose between selecting a theme that might help them out aesthetically and offer them a few shortcuts when it comes to filling out their full course, or selecting a theme that may be a little more barren, but allows the designer a greater degree of planting freedom. Alongside my 18 hole course I have published two 9 hole courses, all of which vary greatly in both aesthetic and strategic golf design and give me three published designs using different environments (Arizona desert, Nova Scotia coastline, and the Hill Country of Texas). I hope even this small amount of experience will benefit me in this contest.

I was assigned the country of Chile alongside fellow designer @babybull . I visited Chile in 2009 back when I was the Communications Officer aboard the USS-Kauffman (FFG-59). We pulled into Antofagasta, a smaller city of about 350,000 people. It's situated on Chile's northern coast in the Atacama Desert region. I have pictures from my trip but between changing computers six times since then they're on some hard-drive somewhere and they're probably a lot of sub-par shots of the sea or the softball game we played against the Chilean navy. I do remember the mostly bare landscape and the coarse, pebbly soil; lots of low scrub brush and shorter plants. Through my initial research into Chile, the Atacama desert, while beautiful in its own right, doesn't lend itself well to my style of course design. I really need something more to work with from the landscape in order to gain enough inspiration to make my course look like a part of the natural landscape and not like a course that was just dropped into a geographic location.

So for my course we are going to be moving much farther south down the coastline; approximately 1,150 miles from Antofagasta down to the Lakes District. This region of Chile is defined by its 12 large lakes and numerous smaller lakes, rivers, streams, and waterfalls (that's right, mattyfromcanada , we're going to have at least one waterfall to mark me as a newbie). This area was settled in parts by the Germans and you can see their influence in the architecture and layouts of the many villages that surround this tourist destination. The challenge for me will be to take this area and make it two things: distinctly unique, and distinctly Chilean. What that means I'm not quite sure of just yet but that's the goal. 

I am going to try and incorporate as many different looks into my course design as I can while still maintaining a cohesive look that makes each hole special but ultimately leaves the player feeling like they just read 18 chapters of a great book and not 18 different short stories. My first thought is to start the course in the foothills of the Andes mountains which lie to the east of the Lakes District and are marked by sky-scraping volcanos, rushing waters, and large forested areas and work my way down to the coast which is flatter terrain and more open, but can provide numerous opportunities for strategic holes along the water's edge and perhaps lend itself more to a links style. It will be an ambitious effort to marry not only the two environments but the two types of courses each environment better lends itself to during course creation. 

Welcome to my story. I hope we both enjoy the next two months together. 

8.6.1

8.6.1

8.6.1

[Deleted]

[jayraygun]

Here are a few pictures of the Lakes District that I will be using as inspiration:

8.6.1

[playgroundhoo]

Very nice - I'm right there with you on just trying to get through it okay for the first time! And I continue to use your tree scaling post, btw...

That said, I have never ridden a Naval vessel into Andorra. In part because I have not ridden a Naval vessel. In part because Andorra has no ocean. And in part because I have never been there at all.

If you were to bring a part of northern Chile where you were into the course, the old fascinating saltpeter regions in the Atacama desert that formed the impetus for the Chilean Nitrate wars in the late 1800's and ultimately drove the invention of synthetic nitrogen for fertilizer (and explosives) could be interesting. But I'm geeking out a bit, and you've got some great stuff to work with. Good luck!

[tpetro]

Looks pretty mediocre. On brand at least. 

[theclv24]

Mar 18, 2021 9:42:26 GMT -5 jayraygun said:

Here are a few pictures of the Lakes District that I will be using as inspiration:

8.6.1

Be right back, moving to... *checks notes*.... the Lake District of Chile.

[jayraygun]

Mar 18, 2021 10:30:43 GMT -5 tpetro said:

Looks pretty mediocre. On brand at least. 

Welcome to el Curso Ordinario

8.6.1

[jayraygun]

A quick look at my rough draft layout of my course. 




The picture runs north to south with the foothills of the Andes to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. My plan is the start the course up, in, and around the foothills and then down to the lower land near the coast. There will be plenty of water on the course in the form of ribbons of streams cutting through, but my plan isn't to use it too much as a way to affect shot selection. I want the course itself to do that. Individual hole lengths are approximate and will change +/- as I develop each hole. The shapes of each hole won't be as straight as they are here either. The routing is also approximate as I want it to be fairly tight to take advantage of planting throughout as well as lines of sight. Though the lengths are drawn to scale, I didn't bother measuring much between the holes as that will be affected by how wide I make each fairway and things like rough, planting, hazards, etc. I will probably be adding in a few smalls lakes to dot the empty areas and help a bit more on the planting side. 

I want the city/village to be visible as holes play towards it so I may need to move that coastline in a bit. I'll have to see when I get in game how it looks when it's that far away. My next step from here will be laying out the individual holes on paper. This will help me decide things like green sizes and shaping, bunker shapes/styles, and how I want to incorporate planting and water. Then I will come back to the rough draft and tighten up the routing based on the sizes of the holes. 

8.6.1

[coursedesignHQ]

Hey man I am also working on trying to get 1 of 4 wild card spots. I have Cuba so I am going for a dramatic tropical look.

[jayraygun]

So I ran into my first issue and I haven't even opened the designer. 

Before I laid out my course on paper, I had ideas for some holes. I knew the rough lengths I wanted and how I wanted them to play. But then when I routed and started sketching the holes themselves, I realized that how I had envisioned some holes was not going to work where they were located in my design. For instance, holes playing west to east will naturally play uphill because they are going from the coast to the mountains. Well, I can't have a hole that I designed to be played with a downhill approach located on an uphill elevation without making some major sculpting changes which probably won't look good not will that make sense.

The other problem I had with my original design was the scale. While the hole lengths were to scale, the scale wasn't large enough to really mark the green sites and fairways with a general width to allow me to correctly place holes near each other. So I ended up with some neighboring tee boxes being 100 yards from the previous green.

So I had to go back to the literal drawing board. 

I upped the scale from 1"= 200 yds to 1" - 100 yds. This allowed me to use a 25 yard radius circle to mark my green sites and it made my generic fairway width go from 25 yards at the tees to 50 yards at the green. That way, even if I have two green sites next to each other, I know they are 50 yards apart centerline to centerline. I also limited the area of my course to 1500 x 1000 yards.

I started by sketching out the coastline first and where I wanted the beach. Then I picked a site for my clubhouse and started my routing from there. I followed the general lengths from my first design but made changes along the way since I wasn't beholden to any ideas I had for their individual designs. After I was satisfied with the routing, I went back and chose areas for lakes and river. The river will naturally flow from the mountains to the ocean and so using this as my guide, I went back in and marked elevation in places that made sense. This will give me a better idea of elevation changes to make when I go into designing the holes. It does restrict the design process somewhat, but it also means that when it all comes together, the elevation changes from one hole to the next will make logical sense. 

So without further ado, I present my National Treasure course layout 2.0

8.6.2

[coggin66]

What are you doing with the other half of the plot?

[jayraygun]

Mar 21, 2021 3:16:40 GMT -5 coggin66 said:

What are you doing with the other half of the plot?

Arable farmland.

8.7.1

[jayraygun]

As I start in on putting pen(cil) to paper to design my first hole¹ I am gaining inspiration from a fairly standard source, the golden age golf architects and Dr. Alister Mackenzie specifically. Many course designers, both real and virtual, have used Dr. Mackenzie as a source of inspiration in their designs to various effect; some seeking to channel his spirit of golf course design, some simply looking to emulate some of the more aesthetic elements of his courses. For my course I want to take it a step further and attempt to do both.

I am a big fan of fantasy and sci-fi. I love Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Marvel, Dune, Steven Erikson, and Dungeons and Dragons. What does this have to do with golf course design? Well, I love a good story. I find it's easier to stay engaged with my golf courses throughout the design process if there is a story behind the creation of the course itself. For Crooked Arrow, my Arizona desert course, while there wasn't much backstory, the overall goal was to create a course in an oasis type area of the Mazatzal Mountains, previously untouched by human development. And though a golf course can be very intrusive to nature, I wanted to create something that added to the environment and tried not to disturb nature any more than necessary. 

For Doghead Ranch, though my backstory can seem a bit silly the way I actually wrote it out, my idea was that a wealthy owner of THE Doghead Ranch², a horse ranch in the Hill Country of southwest Texas, had decided he wanted to try his own hand at golf course design and designated an area of land to build his own personal nine-hole course. He was from Scottish decent and wanted to marry the idea of coastal Scottish golf with the ruggedly beautiful terrain of the Hill Country. His course was meant for private play between himself and a small collection of friends and family, designed mostly to test and improve his own golf skills, requiring accuracy off the tee not to land in the fairway, but to provide the best angle into the green. And then, once you have achieved that goal, you must also choose the correct shot into the undulating greens. The course provides many avenues across the ground and through the air to get you close to the pin so it is up to the player to decide based on their strengths.

For my National Treasure course (henceforth referred to as NTC until it has a name), I am venturing into a bit of alternate reality. In this world, the year is 1955 and Dr. Alister Mackenzie is alive and well at the ripe old age of 85.³ In this alternate reality, the Great Depression has been avoided and instead of living in poverty near the end of his real life, Alister Mackenzie is enjoying the level of fame and recognition that his real-life counterpart would only reach in later generations. He was on hand to witness his co-designer, Bobby Jones, tee off at the inaugural Masters Tournament at Augusta National in 1934 and remarked "I have achieved perfection. To attempt anything greater would be the act of a self-serving and unsatisfied man." He received his full fee of $10,000⁴ and having never divorced his wife, decided to join Bobby Jones in retirement and moved to California. However, his fame from Augusta had brought him much national attention and he could not escape the many entrepreneurs looking to extract one last golden egg from the good doctor who simply wanted to enjoy his peace and quiet. So not soon after arriving in California, Dr. Mackenzie decided to head a bit farther south. He and his wife packed their bags and caught the next steam ship headed down the pacific ocean where they landed in La Pasada, Chile. 

For a few years at least, Dr. Mackenzie found the peace and quiet he had searched for. In 1955 rural Chile, no one knew his name and there wasn't a golf course within a thousand miles. However, like most artistic geniuses, Alister's mind never strayed far from design. When his wife passed in 1950, for the first time since retirement, Dr. Mackenzie began to feel restless. Without his life companion to share in his "solitude", Alister began to feel the design itch more and more. When news reached Chile that the members of Augusta National had implemented numerous changes to his original masterpiece beginning not long after the first Masters,⁵ Alister took it as a personal affront that those with no experience in course design would attempt to perfect perfection when Alister himself recognized such folly. So Dr. Mackenzie decided that if the world could not recognize perfection the first go round, he would simply have to create a new masterpiece.

So Alister set about finding a parcel of land fit for his crowning achievement. He settled on a 300 acre piece of unused farmland between the Pacific coast and the foothill of the Andes mountains in what is now referred to as the Lakes District. This course would be his lasting legacy, as he thought Augusta would be, however, this time there would be no founders, no members, no board of directors to enact changes as they saw fit. Alister would own 100% of the course and he would ensure upon his death that ownership of the course would go to the neighboring village and remain a public course on the one condition that the course remain untouched and unchanged in perpetuity. 

So that's where I'm at right now. I recognize that saying things like "I'm designing this course as if I'm Alister Mackenzie" can pigeon-hole me and also create expectations for my course that might allow people to say "Well that looks nothing like what Alister Mackenzie would design." So to that I say, while yes, my backstory is basically written as if I am Alister and this is his course, what I am actually trying to do is emulate more of his design philosophy while attempting to create similar visuals and aesthetics while using my own spin on things as creativity allows. So I will try and follow some of the tenets of Alister Mackenzie's design philosophy:

- "For 30 years I have been advocating that there should be no purely penal bunkers and that the only reason for bunkers is to give players more interest and more fun."

- "All bunkers are eliminated that do not add maturity to the pleasure of my courses."

- "Natural features of the terrain are used to the fullest extent."

- "There is no rough, therefore no lost balls, no weed seeds blowing on the course."

- "Construction work is of such character that all tees, hollows, banks, and everything except a few yards around the hole are closely mowable."

- "The ideal hole is surely one that affords the greatest pleasure to the greatest number, gives the fullest advantage for accurate play, stimulates players to improve their game, and never becomes monotonous."

- "A good golf course grows on one like a painting, good music, or any other artistic creation. It is not necessarily a course which appeals the first time one plays over it, but one that grows on the player the more frequently he visits it."

- Bobby Jones on Alister Mackenzie's courses: "All his courses are pleasurable. In every instance he has placed interest and enjoyment ahead of difficulty."

So with that, I have a direction to go with my course design. I hope in the end to do two things: create a course that is uniquely my own while also having a recognizable influence. 

I'll be updating this post as I have hole designs to share.

---

¹I always start on hole #1 as anything else seems illogical. An argument could be made for starting on hole 18 or perhaps hole 9 but since this is a virtual world of our own making, I like to start at the beginning and work my way to the end, as you would a traditional story.

²Not a real ranch, by the way.

³In real life, Alister Mackenzie died of Angina Pectoris (basically a heart attack) in 1934, two months before the inaugural Masters Tournament, then known as the Augusta National Invitational Tournament.

⁴About $200,000.00 in 2021.

⁵ Beginning in 1937, many architects including Perry Maxwell, Robert Trent Jones Sr., and George Cobb were hired to make changes to Augusta National in order to keep up with the ever changing golf technology allowing for longer, straighter shots. 

8.7.1

8.7.1

[jayraygun]

Here we have the rough draft of my first hole at NTC (National Treasure Course), tentatively named "Alwoodley".

This 372 yard par 4 may seem like an easy opener but looks can be deceiving. Stepping up to Alwoodley the player is confronted with what will become the hallmark of NTC, a choice of where to play the ball. The fairway is a generous 75 yards wide but a bunker splits the landing area. Off the tee the player can choose to aim for the larger area to the left of the fairway bunker. From here they have plenty of room to stay safe and play a short wedge into the green. However, a front bunker protects this avenue to the slightly elevated green and the raised back edge creates a slightly blind second shot.

The more risky player may try to hold the right side of the fairway between the heavy rough (there is no light rough) and the fairway bunker but the prevailing wind will push most balls towards the bunker and any misses right may bring the neighboring water into play. Should the player find the fairway, this area offers them an unobstructed path to most of the green and gives them further options of going right for the pin or trying to bump and run. 

Long hitters wishing to show off for their friends can attempt to carry their drive over the fairway bunker, bypassing the hazard and attempting to land within the 25 yard wide strip of fairway leading to the green. With the right wind, this shot has a high degree of success, however, the player leaves themselves closer to the front bunker's raised rear edge which will further obscure their view to any pins perched behind. 

The green is 30 yards deep and 22 yards at it widest point making accuracy with wedges paramount. The front of the green is relatively flat and begins to fall away from the player as you reach the left side. It slopes away from the player on the backside of the front bunker then raises another foot to the upper tier. Players missing their approach shot and landing short of pins on the second tier risk catching the downslope and running farther away from the pin. For those missing long, the green sports a false back that will carry mishits down a slight hill or into the bunker which protects the back-left pins. On the right, the green slopes down to a large collection area, forcing the player to pitch up to the pin and again risking running down the sloping green.

A par on this hole might be easy to come by but a birdie will require three excellent shots from the player.

8.7.1

[coursedesignHQ]

Jayraygun looking dangerous...